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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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9. John R. Platt

Professor John R. Platt is professor of physics and research biophysicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I met with him for this interview at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stamford University in California where he was in December, 1972, engaged in research work.
John R. Platt was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1918. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Michigan in 1941. After numerous teaching posts he returned to Ann Arbor as a professor in physics in 1966. Professor Platt also regularly attends meetings of the Club of Rome.
Among some of his best known books are The Excitement of Science (1962), The Step to Man (1966), Perception and Change: Projections for the Future (1970), and On Social Transformation (1972).

Professor Platt, The Limits to Growth, how did it go over with you from a behavioral scientist's point of view?

 

My feeling for many years has been that we have a problem in society which few people have appreciated until very recently. The problem is that we are now passing through a great world transformation. It is unique. It is the first time and the only time in the history of the human race that we are passing through a transformation of this scale. It is such a great transformation that it is far greater than ten industrial revolutions and Protestant reformations all rolled into one and all taking place within a period of twenty years.

 

Do you think the model of Forrester is a step into the direction of learning to manage the planet?

 

Yes, I would agree with that.

From the angle of behavioral science, is it not a model of figures rather than of social interaction?

 

Well, many things are necessary to be done in parallel. We have to do simultaneously: consciousness raising, the education of the world, the industrial development of underdeveloped countries, behavioral studies and forecasting. We have to do in parallel a thousand things. Human society is at least as complicated as an automobile. A typical General Motors automobile has fifteen thousand parts, each of which had to be designed and they had to fit together. Society is at least as complicated. We must have designers and students, architects who work on the fifteen thousand aspects of society in parallel, and they must fit together. From this point of view The Limits to Growth is just a coarse first step in attempting to see the total global structure, and what its consequences are for the future, and how many things we have to adjust if we are going to survive.

 

How to reshape what Marshall McLuhan calls the ground?1

 

This revolution of the last thirty years is already producing enormous changes. It is going to change every human institution out of all recognition. In fact, we now see these changes before our eyes. The changes of the farm, the bank, the industry, the army, the police, the legal system, the nation-state, the international system, the family, the school - every one of these is in the midst of enormous ferment. Did I say the church? That, too. Everything is in enormous ferment.

To give an example, take the changes in the family. One now reads almost every day or every week in paperback books or magazines, how the family must change, how we must find ways of group living, or get away from the limitations of the nuclear family, or find ways of communal living. I'm not sure that all of these articles will actually lead to communal living, but in this area here, around San Francisco, last summer there were estimated to be forty thousand people living in communes. There is no way to count them because they disappear as soon as you try to count them. But it is estimated that they represent about five percent of all the people between age eighteen and age thirty. This is a significant fraction. It is not a majority, but it is a sizable group which is experimenting with new patterns of family living, with new moral values and with new ways of living in harmony with the environment. Some of the experimenters are living on farms, others are living

in the city or in apartment houses simply sharing the rent. Sometimes they have sexual freedom, but other groups are living like early Christians, where they have communal meals and they try to love one another as the early Christians did. The point is that this is experimentation, and it is experimentation by a wide range of groups all the way from hippies or professors to businessmen. If you look at this movement, you'll find it is not limited to the younger people by any means. It is changing our ideas of what a family is and what a family ought to be and of how free and easy people might be in a new society.

 

And Skinner's ‘freedom’ in a new society. How will we reach the ‘step to man’?2

 

I see Skinner's work as making possible new forms of group living, in which we don't punish each other, but rather, as Skinner says, we reinforce each other, reward each other by the glance of the eyes, the affection of the voice. It is the old Christian idea of ‘love your neighbor’ or ‘love your enemy.’ That's the most powerful method of changing your neighbor's behavior or your enemy's behavior.

 

Do you think this ‘reinforcement approach’ is an important contribution to a new way?

 

Oh, yes. We must find new ways in a number of these areas of human relationship, must find new reinforcements, because our old ways will destroy us if we continue past this plateau we are now approaching around the globe. The old ways of economic growth, of expansionism, when new nations are all trying to grow all over the world, will simply make them collide with one another. This leads to destruction. The old ways of unlimited births had great survival value once, because life was hard and disease was everywhere. But now suddenly we have limited disease, have limited death, and now we see that we must limit births also. This means new psychological rewards, new reinforcements for new patterns of personal behavior if we are going to survive.

 

How do you see the role of the individual in the future society? Toynbee spoke of ‘benevolent dictatorship’ to manage the world.

 

I am not a believer in dictatorship, either benevolent or otherwise. Dictatorships were an old pattern that sometimes ‘worked’ for nations

that were each following an expansionist policy; but in a total world society, in a global society, we must think not in terms of central authorities or dictatorships but of networks just as in the human brain. There is no dictator-cell in the human brain.

 

But there is authority.

 

In the human brain?

 

No, but in that network of human living there must be a form of authority.

 

There is no ‘authority’ in the blood supply. There is a chain of feedback loops which regulate the valves, they open and close, they regulate the adrenalin, the blood pressure. There is a whole chain of interacting loops of feedback stabilization of the organism. In our body we have a blood-supply loop, we have a nervous-system loop, we have a lymph-system loop (you know, the lymph nodes, like those in the armpits which supply this necessary fluid). We have many, many chemical loops of enzymes and antibodies and digestive processes.

In the same way I think that in a world which is well organized there will be no single dictator that dictates to the rest. There will be no single professor or group of professors, to do all the planning. There will be no single government in a single city. What we see instead, already, are these networks growing all over the world. One sees a network of science or of nongovernmental organizations. The Club of Rome is an example. This is a group of businessmen and internationalists and scientists who are concerned. They are not dictating to anybody, they're only trying to educate each other and those who are willing to listen. Another network is the network of communication satellites through which we can all watch, say, the Olympic Games. This unifies the whole world emotionally, when we have an event like the terrorist murders, at the games. The whole world has responded to this, just as the US responded to the television network coverage of the death and funeral of John F. Kennedy, or as we responded to the landings on the moon. It becomes a collective human experience. Now, where is the dictator? There is no dictator in this. This is a network - a shared network of pooled communications.

Another network consists of the great international corporations. These corporations are spreading across the world, not only IBM and General Motors, but also Toyota and Volkswagen and Royal Dutch Shell. In some ways they are wicked, because they are bigger than small countries and

so their policies dominate small countries. But in other ways they are the only powers in the world which are strong enough economically to resist the militaristic aims of governments and which have a major concern for peace. The result is that we begin to have a feedback which is now for the first time moving towards establishing a global pattern of international trade, of international agreement, of cooperation rather than international hostility.

 

We should move or we have to move towards a planetary dialogue in all directions.

 

Yes, but what I am emphasizing is that there is no central dictator, there will be no single city. It won't be the United Nations in New York, it won't be Washington or London or Moscow or Tokyo, it will be a network - a network of trade, networks of communications, a network of science, networks of tourism - networks which have their own feedback all around the world, just like the blood system and the nervous system in the human body.

 

And the role of the ‘biofeedback’ revolution, the technique of teaching a person to recognize and then control his own internal body?

 

Well, some aspects of the so-called biofeedback revolution are exaggerated and some of them are faddist, but other components are useful medically and psychologically. It is useful to know that you can control your own blood pressure, let us say, if you wish to. These reinforcement methods permit us to control our own overeating, or permit us to control our smoking. I know dozens, even hundreds of people who have reduced weight or stopped smoking, essentially by new reinforcement methods coupled with publicity and with a little help from their friends. As a result, we now begin to feel that we are not the victims of our own bodies. We are not controlled by some vicious animal within us which is running against our will; but rather we see that we can be a self-controlled unity. Our bodies and minds are not as separate as we have supposed. This is a healthful and hopeful development, I think. The sense of self-management is the beginning of the sense of world management. If the human race is to feel that it is at home on the globe and that it is designing its own destiny and responding to its own creativity, it must start with the individual, so he is designing his own destiny and responding to his own creativity.

Let me say that this comes back to the question you were pressing

on me earlier. What is the role of the individual in this social or world system? Obviously there are many types of society which might develop in the future and probably might be stable; that is, they might learn to manage the threat of war and so on. One type of society might be like ancient Egypt or ancient Sparta - say, a very rigid society, in which the individual is tightly controlled by the group. I think another type of society though, might also become stable, namely a society of maximum diversity in which our technological abundance - even with some limit on our energy consumption or consumption of natural resources - can make possible enormous diversity by comparison with any society in the past. The first reward of technological achievement is a kind of narrow abundance, millions of Volkswagens and nothing else. But the second reward of technological achievement is an easy diversity.

So, once upon a time there were one or two companies that controlled all phonograph records. But now with LP records, there are hundreds. The result is that you can now get on records a diversity of nightclub entertainment, of dirty jokes, along with great songs of the past, great speech and poetry and music of the past, all the way back to Monteverdi.3 All the music of the past is now simultaneously present in phonograph records put out by different companies. The rush of the folksingers with their impact on the young, their contributions to the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement and the antiwar movement, came about through records, because of the diversity which has been made possible by technology.

Today I think that in the US and probably in Western Europe, there is more diversity in clothes - in the length of skirts, for example, or whether women wear skirts at all, pants, shorts or mini - much more diversity in clothes, in types of housing, in styles of life, in vehicles, transportation, in forms of communication, books, music, the arts, in types of architecture, than there has ever been in the world before, more freedom for individual taste and choice. The result is that each man can carve out his own individual niche in this with his own taste in music, clothes, style of life, books, relation to his family, travel and so on. And I see this kind of diversity as being typical of the kind of pluralist society that is now being made possible by the new abundance, and I see it as a desirable type of society for the future.

 

You have said that in order to meet the present crisis, you feel that a large-scale mobilization of scientists would be necessary.4

 

Yes, I think we have to regard this human crisis, this global crisis

of transformation today, as being as serious as a war and as urgent as a war. In wartime, for example, scientists in World War II were able to develop atomic energy, and sonar and radar and antisubmarine warfare, not on a ‘crash’ basis of doing something within a week or within a month, yet at the same time not on a long-term peacetime schedule of doing basic science for thirty years. Rather, they worked on projects that would produce large-scale results within a year, or within three years or so.

In the same way, I think our global crisis today has a time scale of the order of five or ten years in which we must begin to solve some of these problems if they are not to kill us. In order to survive, we must make better peace-keeping stabilization mechanisms. We must begin to limit population. We must control pollution. We must limit our consumption of natural resources. I think scientists need to contribute to solving many of these problems, because they are technical. I do not mean just in the physical and engineering sciences. We need also mobilization of our brains and knowledge in the social sciences including behavioral technology. We need urgent studies on small-group structure, on feedback mechanisms in organizations, on ombudsmen, participatory democracy, new experiments in group living and family living, even new religious and philosophical restructuring. Every field needs the contributions of scientists as well as the contributions of politicians and the businessmen and of every citizen.

 

There you are, the power is with the politicians to bridge the gap.

 

Well, I don't agree on that. I think the politicians have much less power than we suppose. We are too hypnotized by newspaper headlines. The newspapers are somewhat lazy, and because they have their regular journalists in Washington and in London and so forth, they report what government organizations hand them. But the real action may be in Skinner's lab at Harvard, or in dozens of other labs of research and innovation.

 

How much does Nixon know about Skinner?

 

I don't think it makes any difference.

 

But he's the one who goes to Brezhnev5 and Mao.

 

Yes, but as I say, I think that's only a small part of what's happening

with the human race. We are in the midst of a great collective flood of change, a great waterfall, in which Nixon or Washington is only a small ripple on top.

 

But there is not a single scientist in Congress.

 

That's true.

 

So how can you get these congressmen to do the things that are necessary, that the scientists feel are necessary.

 

Well, you write a book like Rachel Carson did, Silent Spring, and within ten years the result is that the public is aroused and Washington has banned DDT6 and we are getting rid of other pollutants. If you write an effective book and if this -

 

- like the Club of Rome -

 

Yes - and if what the book says is congruent with the way things are, that is, if this book describes reality, then people realize, ‘Ah, that's how it is,’ and the people are mobilized and the politicians follow. Paul Ehrlich writes a book, The Population Bomb,7 and organizes a little society called Zero Population Growth. And when this is added to the many other population analysts who are building up the pressure within five years, ten years, the effect is everywhere. Ralph Nader writes a book on automobile manufacturers and auto safety, and within five years you have a total change in outlook and law and action. This initiation of the calalytic steps does not come from Washington; Washington follows. There is a little time delay in these governmental responses, but the time delay is shorter now than it has ever been. The time delay in the United States is in the range of four to ten years.

 

The whole crisis needs a deadline in fact.

 

We probably need to shorten the time delay still more, but the point is that we are now in the most responsive society in history. The problem is that we don't know whether this response will be fast enough. But one must not say there's no change; and one must also not say that the initiative comes from the politicians. Politicians follow.


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