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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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5. Arnold J. Toynbee

British historian Arnold J. Toynbee was born in London in 1889. He studied at Winchester College and graduated from Balliol College at Oxford University.
During World War I, he joined the department of political intelligence of the Foreign Office. From 1919 to 1924 he taught Byzantine and modern Greek language, literature and history at London University. From 1925 until his official retirement in 1955, Professor Toynbee was director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and research professor of international history at the University of London.
A Journey to China was published in 1931. The World and the West (1953), The Economy of the Western Hemisphere (1962),
Man's Concern with Death (1968), and Experiences (1969) are among his best-known works.

I think reaching the moon was a useless expenditure. It was perhaps a valuable demonstration of the simple fact that for practical purposes the habitat of mankind and of all other forms of life, which Teilhard de Chardin1 called the biosphere, is nothing but a thin envelope of air, soil and water round the surface of a single planet, in which we happen to exist. It is strictly limited. Its contents, too, are limited. For this reason, the perpetual, infinite growth of the numbers and the wealth of the human race is an impossibility. This objective is not attainable for the human race.

All human creatures are greedy, but the Western minority has consecrated greed and has made it into a deliberate objective. This first began when the Americas were discovered. That gave the Western peoples a false impression, an impression of infinite space and wealth at Western man's disposal. Then, secondly, at the end of the eighteenth century the mechanization of industry through the harvesting of steam power again gave us an impression that we had opened up an infinite source of production. In our time, the mechanization of man's activities has gone to extraordinary extremes, but now we have suddenly realized that the biosphere is finite and that it sets absolutely insuperable limits to material expansion. These limits will be reached in the near future by increased technical power and by increased population.

As far as human beings recognize this simple fact, Limits to Growth ought to have a revolutionary effect on our attitude to life's objectives and ideals. This will be a very painful and difficult reversal to Western man's attitudes and aims during the last five hundred years of human history. Meanwhile the non-Western majority of the human race has been envying the West and trying to imitate it. It will be very difficult to persuade them to stop their efforts to develop - especially because it is just these poorest and technically most backward peoples that increase in numbers the fastest and are under the greatest pressure to increase their production. As I see it, the question is: Will the human race as a whole be able to reverse its attitudes and aims before we run into a catastrophe.

Limits to Growth is a very able book. It is a very skillful presenting of the necessary mathematical information for people like me, who are

not mathematically inclined. Ordinary people can understand these data. The mathematical expression of facts is necessary in order to understand facts. I hope this book will be widely read and will be taken to heart and acted upon.

 

But, did the MIT report overlook exponential growth in technology?

 

Technology can be used for many different purposes. At present, it is chiefly used for two opposite purposes: destruction in war and maximum production of material wealth. If we were to abolish war, and to concentrate wholly on production of wealth, I think exponential growth of technology might delay a catastrophe for a certain time. I cannot guess for how long. It will only be a question of delay. Inevitably these limits will be reached sooner or later.

 

Dr. Margaret Mead has said to me: ‘We need a new vision but I don't know what vision.’2

 

I think there is an old vision, though it is not very old compared to the age of the human race. I am thinking of the vision of the founders of the great religions. I am thinking of - putting the names in a chronological order - the Buddha3 in India, Lao Tse4 in China, Jesus5 in Palestine and one Westerner, Saint Francis of Assisi.6 Just one Westerner! But Saint Francis is very important for us because he was a Westerner. He is an example that we ought to pay attention to and try to follow.

These religious founders disagreed with each other in their pictures of what is the nature of the universe, the nature of spiritual life, the nature of ultimate spiritual reality. But they all agreed in their ethical precepts. They all agreed that the pursuit of material wealth is a wrong aim. We should aim only at the minimum wealth needed to maintain life; and our main aim should be spiritual. They all said with one voice that if we made material wealth our paramount aim, this would lead to disaster. They all spoke in favor of unselfishness and of love for other people as the key to happiness and to success in human affairs. They all personally renounced material wealth and power. The Buddha was the son of a king of a small kingdom. He gave it up, voluntarily. He didn't have to, he did. Saint Francis was the son of one of the earliest successful Western businessmen. His father was a wholesale cloth merchant.

Forerunner of Aurelio Peccei7

 

Indeed, in point of professional success, but not in point of insight. And Saint Francis's father wanted Saint Francis to take over and inherit the family business, to look after the family business. Saint Francis rejected this. He marries Lady Poverty instead. Unfortunately we fellow Westerns of Saint Francis, we have paid lip service to Saint Francis, we have called him a saint, which indeed he was, but the person we have followed actually is not Saint Francis, but his father, Pietro Bernardone, not Francesco Bemardone. Pietro is the prototype of the modern successful Western businessman, of Dr. Peccei, for instance. Except that Aurelio Peccei has different ideals, very different ideals.

Now, what we have to do, to try to do, is to make a spiritual revolution. This is not something entirely new. It was the vision of Saint Francis of Assisi, the vision of Jesus, the vision of the Buddha, the vision of Lao Tse.

As you know, this Taoist Chinese school of philosophy believed in the minimum development of material wealth and the maximum development of spiritual life. They were the antithesis of the Confucians, who were rather materialistic-minded. I think the people who preached selfdenial and renunciation of material wealth are going to prove to be the most practical of our advisers, because, by following their way of life, you and I could go on living in the biosphere as long as the biosphere is habitable. We should not be using up or contaminating the resources of the biosphere. If we follow Saint Francis's father's advice, we shall destroy the biosphere and destroy ourselves and, with ourselves, all other forms of life which are dependent on ourselves.

 

How do you see chances for children of today, in 1972, with the year 2000 approaching fast?

 

I have two great-granddaughters who, if they live to my age - I am now eighty-three - they could be alive in the year 2050. Now, you and I cannot conceive what the world will be like in 2050, and I feel anxious about these poor little children who have been brought into the world without their permission having been asked. Their parents do not know any more than you and I know what kind of a world they are going to have to live into. I think we have no time to lose. I think my children's generation, my grandchildren's generation, my great-grandchildren's generation have got quickly, at once, without waiting, to change their

aim in life, to think a long way ahead, to think in the disinterested way that the Buddha and Jesus and Saint Francis and Lao Tse all preached. To think in terms of the next two thousand million years, to think in terms of maintaining the human race in existence. This is very difficult for us, not to think of our own immediate advantage but to subordinate that to a more distant future. But we can at least think in terms of children whom we have already brought into the world. We do feel responsibility for them. And if we think in terms of children who will be alive in 2050, like these two great-grandchildren of mine, then we ought at once to follow a very different aim and to take very different action from the present. This will be extremely painful and difficult for us, but surely it is not impossible. It involves really a kind of conversion, as Margaret Mead was saying.

 

Dr. Toynbee, are you familiar with Skinner's theories in Freedom and Dignity, that man is programmed by his milieu?8

 

Yes. I read his book, with respect - he is a very able man - but also with disagreement. I do think that it is quite true that the environment has an enormous influence on us. I think one of the early Jesuit fathers said, give me a child during its first seven years and I shall have conditioned him for life. However, the child who has been conditioned can break away from the conditioning. I think a human being, because he is conscious, self-conscious, has a certain power of choice, a certain degree of freedom. This question of the reality of free will has been disputed ever since the time of Pelagius9 and Saint Augustine.10 I myself believe that while we are partly conditioned, we also partly have free will. So, I don't agree with Skinner. Skinner is an extremist, isn't he?

You know the Hindi doctrine of Karma. Karma, I think, is a Sanskrit11 word. The literal meaning is ‘action.’ The technical meaning of Karma is the cumulative effects of our past actions for good or evil, either in a single life or, if you believe in reincarnation, in a series of lives. According to the theory of Karma, a human being has a kind of moral credit and debit account, he is always adding to each column, the credit column or the debit column. Sometimes he is ‘in the red,’ sometimes his balance is positive, but it is always an open account. I think this is much nearer to the truth than Skinner's theory. We are conditioned by our heritage of Karma, enormously conditioned. We do not enter the world as completely free agents, but we are partly free. We can change our Karma. We can make it worse or we can make it better, to some

degree. And this is the important point: Our freedom to change our Karma to some degree.

 

But Professor, how do we bring into harmony, into equilibrium, your view of an Alexander12 at the helm of the globe and individual freedom for seven billion people? Can we maintain this freedom, and our individual growth? Or do we have to become computerized, puppets of a great Alexander who rules the whole world?

 

I think everything creative, everything good in human life, comes out of individual freedom, individual action, free action. Everything bad comes out of this, too; for this is the source of energy, and for good or for evil. I think, as I have said, that the cooperation of human beings is the most difficult thing in human life. Technology is easy, artistic achievement is easy, social cooperation for good objectives is very difficult. Therefore, I think that as so often happened in the past, when some drastic social change needs to be carried out in a very short time, or the alternative is some supreme disaster, there is a choice of evils. Either we have to run into disaster or we have for a time to have a kind of dictatorship.

The Romans had a very interesting system. They had a constitution with popularly elected magistrates. These temporarily abdicated and appointed a dictator with full powers. When the dictator had dealt with the crisis - if he did deal with it - he abdicated and the magistrates came back. Now, I don't like this at all. I would far rather achieve what is necessary by wholly democratic methods, but I think it is probable that we haven't the time to do this, so we might need a temporary dictatorship. This is extremely dangerous, because the big question is, will it be temporary?

Julius Caesar13 and the Emperor Augustus14 claimed that they were temporarily taking the dictatorial part to deal with a crisis, but these dictatorial powers were never given up by their successors. This is a danger. But all of human life is a choice between evils. This is the lesser evil. I do feel that some minimum of global government to abolish war, to cope with pollution, is absolutely necessary. Here is a very simple point. The world is divided theoretically into about a hundred and forty separate local territorial sovereignties. The air and the water, which in places are polluted, are theoretically divided, but you cannot really divide the ocean or the air into local sovereign patches. To prevent pollution in them you have to have some global worldwide action by what is, in effect, a world

government. If that has to be dictatorial to begin with, this, to my mind, is a lesser evil than destruction, which will be the end of everything. We might have to have a temporary dictatorship, and this could be an evil, but at least the human race would survive, and while there's life there's hope. Within the next two thousand years we might be able to get rid of the dictatorship, whereas if we destroy ourselves, well, everything is gone.

 

Thinking of your great-granddaughter, do you feel education responds sufficiently to the enormous changes in the human environment?

 

Unfortunately the modern response to the great increase in the amount of information, of potential knowledge, has been specialization, cutting up knowledge of the universe into compartments, in the way we have cut up the biosphere into local sovereign states. Education now consists far too much in specialization. I'm afraid that Britain has gone further in this than almost any other country. Further than the United States, where at most universities there is a first year, a freshman's year, in which students are compelled to study widely. Now this compartmentalization of knowledge is very unfavorable to education, unfavorable for fitting people for life, or for saving human life in the world into which we are moving, because for this purpose we need to have a comprehensive view of reality. I have been much criticized by fellow historians, as you know, for refusing to be just a specialist and trying to be a generalist. They say that I am an amateur, not a true historian.

 

That is exactly what Aurelio Peccei says, ‘we need generalists.’ He hammers on this.

 

Yes, the trouble is now that the popular form, the conventional form of education is specialization. Generalization is left to amateurs, even to charlatans. What we want is for our best people to become generalists. I think in France there is a good tradition, what the French rather ironically call oeuvres de vulgarisation. You will notice that the very best French savants put their very best work into these so-called oeuvres de vulgarisation, beginning with people like Renan. Some of his best works are what nowadays the specialists would not consider really serious research at all. They are really very serious research. They are the essence of education for ordinary people. The public we should aim at is the nonspecialized intelligent public. This is the public that can move the world, can change the world. They should not be compelled to find

their education somewhere in specialization, either humanistic or scientific. They should be enabled to have a comprehensive education - an education in understanding the universe as it actually is - the universe in which we have to live.

 

Limits to Growth and its shock effect, do you think it a good thing at this juncture, when something has to be done now? Like Margaret Mead said in Culture and Commitment, her last sentence: ‘The future is now.’15

 

Yes, that is very good, ‘the future is now.’ The chief shock effect will be on people of the middle-aged generation in the United States, people who survived the economic slump of 1929 and of the early thirties and who put their treasure in economic growth and material success and whose children have turned against them. This is very upsetting for these parents. The parents brought up the children in luxury and the children repudiated it all rather in the way as Saint Francis had repudiated his father's wealth. The shock effect is the greatest on them.

On the other hand, on the hippies the shock effect will not be so great. I like to point out that Saint Francis himself was a hippy. When his father objected to his marrying the Lady Poverty at a certain stage, Saint Francis stripped himself naked. This is a hippy gesture. He threw his fine clothes at his father's face, and the bishop who witnessed this scene took Saint Francis and put him underneath the bishop's cloak. This was a marvelous act of the bishop's, because Francis's father was a really important constituent of that bishop, and the bishop defied Francis's father. This was very brave and much to the credit of the bishop.

But my point is that though Saint Francis started as a hippy, he did not end as a hippy. He ended by putting himself under discipline and doing something very constructive. Now, he was not an organizer, not an administrator, and he understood this when suddenly his new order of friars became popular. He abdicated from being the head of it. He put himself, as an ordinary friar, under the discipline of another friar, and a very contentious figure, Brother Elias, really founded the order. He was an administrator; he had the gift. Saint Francis did not have this gift and he knew he did not have it. He was out for his own individual salvation, for the imitation of Christ, like the Netherlander in the fifteenth century, the author of the Imitatio Christi....

 

His name was Thomas à Kempis.16 Perhaps the entire hippy and drug movement is a kind of forerunner to turning back towards Francesco

of Assisi's mentality. The crazy race towards more productivity for profit only must be dropped.

 

Only for profit, yes. Now, this is what we have to get rid of.

 

But in the Soviet Union there seems to develop the same race. The waiter in a Moscow hotel wants to buy my jeans.

 

Unfortunately. You may say that we have to change our objective, change our ideal. Change from Saint Francis's father to Saint Francis.


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