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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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4. Margaret Mead

Dr. Margaret Mead is curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She teaches anthropology at Columbia University.
Mrs. Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1901. She went to Barnard College and graduated from Columbia University in 1929. She became famous for her books on various expeditions to Samoa (1925-26), the Manus Tribe, the Admiralty Islands, and New Guinea (1929), and for her studies of American Indians in 1931 and a lengthy stay on the island of Bali, Indonesia (then the Netherlands East Indies) from 1931-1938. Over the years she revisited the tribes and primitive peoples she had studied in the thirties and published numerous books: Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Growing up in New Guinea (1930), The Changing Culture of the Indian Tribe (1932), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), Male and Female (1949). More recent publications are Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap, Doubleday (1970), and Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, William Morrow (1972).

Dr. Mead, what is your impression of Limits to Growth?

 

I'm very much in favor of simulations, and I think the only way that we can handle these large-scale problems that are too dangerous to experiment with or that are on such a scale we can't make any living experiments is by simulation. I have been advocating for a long time that we make a model of the entire planet and recognize facts in the areas of which we have no knowledge and then try to work on the areas of which we do have knowledge in terms of the inclusion of the unknown, so that from the point of view of using such models, I'm thoroughly sympathic.

I think that without computer models we have very little chance of handling the complexity of the problem that we are going to be facing.

 

Of course you are aware that what a computer states depends on what has been put into it.

 

Of course it does. Obviously the computer doesn't do the thinking, but you can put into a computer a complexity of data that it is impossible for a single human mind to deal with, and I think that if we had reached the degree of technological interdependence in the world that we have reached now without computers - and without television-computers on

the one hand and television on the other - we would have very little chance of handling the crisis that we are in.

The problem is the way in which your simulations are then interpreted and presented to people and the Limits of Growth study has. It has a great many technical difficulties because there are no hard data in it of any kind. It doesn't include, for instance, any human values. It doesn't include in the model the effect of its own existence. Now any adequate model of change has to include the effect of any result that comes out of the model, and I don't think that has been correctly and adequately done; so it includes possible corrective devices, corrective steps of one sort and another and the way they may negate each other.

Nor has it provided adequately for the change in values which would be the result of believing any of the interpretations that are made of it. And I also object to the word growth, as applied to nations and as applied to any economic activities.

 

You mean, you can't say growth is wrong?

 

No, I don't think it ought to be called growth at all. The amplification of the gross national product, I don't call growth. I don't think it is a biological activity, and I don't talk about, and I don't believe in talking about a nation in its youth and in its maturity as if a nation had grown like an organ. A nation gets bigger, but that is not growth in the same sense as when a living organism grows.

 

A tree.

 

A tree... or human being. Now so that using a living organism as a metaphor for either a nation or an economy I think is a mistake. When you say to the American people that we must have limits on growth - Americans feel that growth is good. All people feel that growth is good. They will rebel against the idea. I don't know any people in the world that don't think that growth in the sense of a child is born and grows or a tree is planted and grows, is good.

 

What word should have been used?

 

Limits on expansion. The expansion of technology; limits on unbridled consumption. I mean there are plenty of metaphors for setting limits to materialism.

Society should be geared to social need, not personal greed?

 

That's a perfectly good statement, you see! You have to say different things to people in each country.

 

In each continent?

 

In each country. To Americans one can say: Your ancestors started out as poor people, looking for a little warmth and a little freedom. A little freedom for a religion or politics or a little security and well-being for their children.

And your ancestors came here and they worked very hard and they began to find on earth the kind of security that they thought only existed in heaven. They began to identify material well-being with spiritual well-being and began to identify having a good bathroom with somehow having a better spiritual life. And so we built up this tremendous standard of luxury for every individual. We didn't think it was luxury; we began thinking these things were necessities. When the automobile was invented, it was seen as something that frees the average man. That he could buy a Ford car. It gave to each individual a freedom that they never had before. That's what we thought. And now we realize that the automobile-civilization that we've built is a prison, and it not only endangers the atmosphere of the whole country and endangers our cities and endangers life, but it imprisons people because people without a car can't go anywhere.

So we're beginning to realize that we have built a kind of economy which imprisons us, uses an enormous amount of energy and irreplaceable resources of the world, places a great drain on the rest of the world - as exploiting the people of the rest of the world - and is even making a section of our own population poor, ill-fed and unhappy. We've got a system that isn't working, a system that has got to be changed. The doctrines that everything could be solved by economic growth, which was preached after World War II, and that the disparities between the rich and the poor nations could be corrected by technical assistance are now both proving to be wrong. We have to change them and we have to reorganize our life-style.

To say that we are seeking an equilibrium society is not, I think, the way to say it. It is true that we need to establish a better balance between population and resources and technology and to be certain that we are not: (1) endangering the world through nuclear war and other forms of

scientific warfare; (2) that we are not endangering the planets, atmosphere and oceans; (3) that we are not using up irreplaceable resources; and (4) that we are not exemplifying a life-style that does these things.

The first three deal with survival really, and it isn't any good talking about a good life-style if the human race is not going to be here. But so we deal first with survival, with preventing the fatal and irreversible change and then with a life-style that is human.

 

But Dr. Mead, how do we - how do you bring that about? Who will bring it about? Will we live with a Spanish type of dictatorship? Will we - you know, as Skinner1 says - stop making a fetish out of freedom and dignity?2

 

And let him run the world?

 

Skinner?

 

Well, I think the real question about Skinner is: Who programs Skinner? And if you ask that question, you look at his whole position.

 

But then, when the resources get further depleted, don't you expect a question to arise over who will have the resources and who will decide?

 

Just think yourself back now and suppose you lived in a little Greek city-state of which there were over 250 in Attica. Each one of them sharing resources and spoils. They trade and fight with each other. It raised the question: Who can ever possibly produce any kind of order in which there would not be warfare between those 250 city-states. And yet we've managed to build a society containing 200 million and 400 million people, where one town is not putting down the next town, killing its men and carrying off its women. Go back in history and see yourself standing and looking at what was happening and being certain that nothing could ever come out of it.

This question about who is going to do it we don't know yet, that's what we've got to invent. But the real problem I think is to be very certain what the situation is. I think understanding is endangered by irrelevant arguments - you know, arguments as to whether the population is or is not going to reach 7 billion in the year 2000.

Now, whatever it is going to reach, it is too many, so experts should

stop argumenting about details. These are the arguments between Commoner3 and Ehrlich,4 which is, again, a piece of nonsense, because if we didn't have as much population, we wouldn't have as much trouble. True. And if we did have the population without the technology, we wouldn't have as much trouble. True. And so what! We've got the population, we've got the technology; the technology has broken the chain of the relationship to nature and endangers the planet; the population continually puts pressure on the use of the technology. They are both right.

 

Should there be a moratorium on science?

 

I don't think so. I think what we need is more good science and especially more good social science. Some real understanding of human behavior that isn't based on experimenting on pigeons and rats.

 

But Dr. Mead, do you think - since we are going to have these skylabs around us, with Russians and Americans together on it - will we migrate to other planets?5

 

We cannot migrate to other planets at the present, you know. No, we want to be here. There's not much use about talking about the time when we might migrate to other planets, because the danger is the next twenty-five years. Yes, we have got to change, tip the balance of population, so that we stop this headlong exponential growth of population. And we've got to stop our amplifying consumption. We've got to balance our technologies. But when you say equilibrium, people think of something static. Even if you say dynamic equilibrium, they just think of something that sort of bounces back and forth and back into place. And that is never going to capture the imagination of the human race that they have just to stay where they are.

 

Will that be the new needed vision?

 

That will be no vision. But if you say you're going to be free now from this terrific burden of the search for material things, that we can begin to build cities where people can live again like human beings, that we can stop this separating people up in their artificial little boxes, all built for families with minor children - where there's no place for the old and no place for the adolescents and no place for the unmarried and

no place for the poor - and begin to build communities again, where people can have a joy in each other. All these things are cheap. They don't pollute, they don't put an undue burden on human resources. They don't endanger the atmosphere.

 

But how about Asia? The Third World?

 

Well, we could free them from want right this minute. You know. We have the means to feed people now. Hunger is sheer maldistribution, and it is improving, you know. This recent deal between the U.S. and Russia illustrated this - where Russia needs food, and they are going to buy it from us. And when we had unemployment and hunger in Seattle, it was the Japanese that sent the first ship, you know, which is a fantastic thing. It is a horrible comment on the US, but it is also a comment on the necessary interdependence of the world.

 

How do we get this needed vision within twenty-five years?

 

Well, we have to work on it. The question one asks now, you know, is we've gotten so used to the idea that we need a new motorcar, we get together a team of people and tell them to invent it. We need an atom bomb, we shut up a lot of people in a Manhattan project and say: ‘Invent it.’

Now changes in social organization don't proceed that way. You don't sit down with just a group of bright people and invent the change. Everyone has to take part in it. If social change is going to be really meaningful. You have to have the active enthusiasm of at least a proportion of the population.

 

That is how Mao did it. Whatever he wanted to achieve, he did achieve in China a total reorganization of society.

 

Yes, and that is what we need. We need a total reorganization of society. We can't do it in one country the way it is done in another. And furthermore, Mao6 is the only leader, you know, a great leader who survived, who did not make his changes primarily through the use of mass media. All the other great figures of the 1930s and '40s depended on radio: Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, all of them. Now, what we don't know yet is what the part of television is going to be. We don't know how we can use television. Even with satellites and all the possibilities of television.

That the Russians are afraid of.

 

The fact that the Russians are afraid of [it] is a compliment to television. The fact that India has gone ahead with their special form of satellite is also a compliment to television. All of these things are what is happening next. They are the things that we need to watch very hard. We need to have material, what they called software. For the satellites. When the whole satellite system goes into effect.

We have the technical means, we can take the pictures that will show what is happening to the world. We can build beautiful photographic models of endangering the atmosphere. We can show the picture of the earth seen from the moon and show how small it is and how isolated and how much in need of care and cherishing. The vision of the earth, seen from the moon, I think, was worth every cent we ever put on going to the moon, because it gave us a new sense of proportion. It was a thing that touched us extraordinarily and sparked these things that are happening today, the movement to protect the environment. We have the technical means. If you people who are concerned with the mass media will use them, you see.

I've sat in New Guinea and listened to the children talk, who heard over the radio the details of Glenn's7 flight and knew when the lights were turned out in Perth and know what a sputnik8 is and understand what a sputnik is.

 

In New Guinea?

 

In New Guinea.

 

So you've seen an enormous metamorphosis in the past thirty years?

 

Yes. So I've seen people come from the stone age into the present. I know where we came from and I've seen peoples move so fast, which is one reason I have more faith and hope than most people have that it can be done.

 

And in that respect the Club of Rome did a pioneering thing, because they put the entire planet into one model.

 

That gives us a start. What we had before, was the US making models of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union were making models of the US, and both of them ignoring China, as if it wasn't there; no one was thinking about the whole. At least the Club of Rome has got the whole planet in.


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