Logo DBNL
On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

17. Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1900. In 1933 he came to England, and since 1967 he has been senior research fellow in electronics at Imperial College in London. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for his invention of holography.
In 1964 he published Inventing the Future, in 1970 Innovation: Scientific, Technological and Social, and his latest book is titled: The Mature Society (1972).
Professor Gabor takes an active part in Club of Rome meetings and programs.

You feel Limits to Growth was a publication that was needed?

 

It certainly was a publication that was needed. The most interesting thing about it is the unbelievably violent reaction which this has aroused, especially from economists. Economists just don't know any other means of running our free society than with continual growth. If there are limits to it, then, of course, the dangers are very great. Arnold Toynbee has written: ‘We cannot be sure that even in England parliamentary democracy is going to survive the fearful ordeal of having to revert to the stable way of life, on the material plane.’ You see, this is the danger. Our free society is running into such trouble that some people do not see any other way than totalitarianism.

In my book1 I try to show that there may be a way. Of course, we have to sacrifice certain freedoms. The freedom, for instance, of the stock exchange, to produce a slump at any time, and of the freedom of trade unions, to hold an entire country to ransom. This sort of freedom we cannot retain. But, at the same time, we must retain essential freedoms. I would like to retain the freedom of the entrepreneur to innovate, and the freedom of the author to write what he likes. I wonder if the second can exist without the first. Think of it, that in the USSR, where there is no economic freedom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn cannot publish a single line.

Do you believe in the perfectibility of man?

 

Yes, I do believe in the perfectibility of man.2 Only unfortunately it goes very, very slowly. There is no doubt that there is some progress. We are more advanced, for instance, than the Romans. During the Roman empire or even the Renaissance, murder was considered an inevitable occurrence and a very natural means of getting rid of your enemies.

 

The great question is, of course, how to come to terms with the ‘zero-growth society.’ You write that in our society hope has become synonymous with growth.3 But do you keep hope alive in a ‘zero-growth society,’ or, to use your expression, how can one ‘engineer’ hope?

 

We professional people and intellectuals can rise in status, rise in wisdom, rise in recognition by our peers during our life. It simply does not exist for common man. The workman enters his factory, say, at the age of sixteen or eighteen, and often he has the same standard wages until the day when he leaves. His only hope is that by the growth of society and by the fight of his trade union that he will get a bigger piece of a bigger cake. Nowadays this means only getting a bigger piece of the same cake. In the last years we have had a foretaste of what will happen in a ‘zero-growth society,’ because growth has slowed down somewhat. In the three countries in which I live, the United States, England and Italy, class warfare has intensified. People are taking it away from each other. They cannot take it out of a growing common pool. Economic growth will have to stop sometime. The approach of this will be terribly painful. Our free society possesses absolutely no mechanisms for slowing down.

 

You believe in ‘the perfectibility of man.’ You believe in ‘the growth of man to improve himself,’ but at the same time you quote Freud as having said, ‘mental health is the absence of inner conflicts.’ You even write, ‘we must have respect for this deep pessimism but we must rid ourselves of it.’4 How?

 

Good health is a little more than the absence of inner conflicts. And I believe that hope is more than the absence of despair. Society can be stationary, but the individual can improve with age, improve in knowledge, know the world and be at peace with it. This is not very easy, if you think of all the intellectuals who hate our world so much that they think that first of all one must smash it up.

Somerset Maugham5 wrote in his memoirs: ‘How the Gods must have chuckled, when they added Hope to the evils with which they filled Pandora's box, for they knew very well that this was the cruelest evil of them all, since it is Hope that lures mankind to endure its misery to the end.’6

 

This is really an impressive passage. But I would still prefer a mankind which endures its miseries hopefully to one which despairs.

 

It is too pessimistic for you?

 

It's much too pessimistic. Somerset Maugham was of course a great cynic. I have often wondered that - preacher of hope as I am - I have such a liking for cynics as Maugham, Evelyn Waugh,7 Anatole France8 or the early Aldous Huxley.9

 

You were saying something about how scientists and enlightened industrialists could influence a better outcome for mankind.

 

Yes, this is perhaps the most important point. I rather differ from other futurologists in that I am unashamedly normative. I believe in giving directions, and addressing them to men of action. I have worked myself for twenty-four years in industry. Industry has cornered not only some of the best technological talent in the world, but also some of the best clear-headed and energetic people in the world. This is a force which must be our ally in this great transformation which is coming. I believe in private enterprise but not on the basis of competitive waste.

First of all we must fight pollution. It is not a big problem. Some environmentalists have exaggerated the problem. The example of London shows that one can make the air clear and the water clear without a too costly effort. The second problem is waste. We are wasting the resources of the world in a terrible, irresponsible way. So long as copper is cheap, so long as tin is cheap, we use them regardless of the future shortage. But the most important thing is of course to provide in time for abundant power, by substituting atomic energy for oil and coal and synthetic oil for natural oil. We must do this while oil is still gushing out of the earth. Nature has laid it up for hundreds of millions of years and we are wasting it in something on the order of a century. This is where technology can help, and this is why I would like to mobilize the whole of science and technology to provide inventions, innovations,

which are not at the moment profitable but which will be indispensable if we are ever to approach a reasonable equilibrium.

 

But how can the scientists and the clear-headed minds of this world influence the politicians to take the decisions necessary?

 

Here I am not quite as pessimistic as some people. Of course the politicians are not fiends. The politicians are in a straightjacket. They must please their voters, who are usually much lower intellectually and sometimes also possess a lower ethical standard. Don't be shocked, what I say to you is a simple fact. The British Labour government has put through three laws which in my opinion are ethically progressive against public majority; the laws on homosexuality, abortion and the death penalty. At least eighty percent of public opinion was for retaining the death penalty. It was the same with the Common Market. The Common Market would undoubtedly have failed in a plebiscite.

 

But how to mobilize the scientists to have much greater impact on United Nations or some other form of world management?

 

First of all, the scientists must speak with one voice. At the moment scientists are not a hundred percent agreed regarding the results of Forrester and Meadows. First of all, they must agree and if they were to speak with one voice, I believe that they will be heard.

 

The ingenuity with which the Apollo program10 was organized could be applied by some clear-headed minds in other fields. Do not think of the engineer only as a gadget-maker who works with pieces of metal. There is now developing a considerable science of systems dynamics, in ordinary language called ‘software science.’ We are now dealing with very complicated systems quantitatively, which we knew before only intuitively and imperfectly. Scientists may be listened to especially after some initial successes in organizing social projects. The condition sine qua non is that there shall be basic agreement among themselves.

 

But may I inject here that Skinner11 and Chomsky12 live in the same town, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chomsky hacks Skinner to pieces in the New York Review of Books.13 When I asked Skinner whether he discussed his views with Chomsky, he had not. Chomsky told me later he only reviewed Skinner's book because he was asked to. He would not want to discuss it with Skinner, since ‘it was all nonsense what

Skinner wrote anyway.’ They live in the same town. They disagree violently. Now why don't they get together? If scientists are unable to meet with each other in Cambridge, how to get order in the community of world scientists?

 

Both Chomsky and Skinner are of course ‘soft’ scientists. I have been really talking of the ‘hard’ scientists - of physicists, chemists, biochemists, pharmacologists and the like.

 

But talking about scientists, shouldn't we unite both soft- and hardware scientists?

 

I wish we could, but as you see clearly, it will be very difficult. For us, ‘hard’ scientists, it is of course a little ridiculous that, for instance, any psychologist who has some little idea of his own immediately forms his own school. We haven't got schools or parties in the hard sciences, and perhaps in time we shall be able to penetrate the soft sciences, too. Economics is now a hardening science.

 

Talking about science - science in combination with nationalism has created a situation, you wrote, in which total war could wipe out civilization. We talked earlier about hope. How hopeful are you that with these first planetary models of Meadows and Forrester that kind of nationalism can be wiped out so that there can be hope for a good reason.

 

I am very hopeful in this respect. I am even more hopeful than when I wrote my last book, in which I said that to a nuclear war between America and Russia in this century I would give the probability nil. I was not so hopeful about China, but what I have learned since then about China has made me more optimistic. It's evident that so long as Mao's teachings will prevail, China will not try to annihilate the rest of us. China appears to work towards a sort of intermediate technological level. It does not want to become an industrial superpower and a consumer society. Here I really see something of the ‘wisdom of the East,’ about which I am normally rather doubtful. I honestly don't think we need to reckon with the possibility of biological warfare in this century.

 

Can we really eliminate strife? Is not strife a necessity for man? Is not excitement as much a necessity as daily food?

 

I am afraid this is the case. But the excitement which we now get

from industrial disputes might get into such a serious crisis that the majority of people will ask for a strong government, which of course is just another name for dictatorship.

 

Moving back towards fascism?

 

Indeed, it might move us towards fascism. I have seen that movement in our time in Germany, thirty years ago. I am afraid there are signs also in other countries, for instance, here in Italy, where, as you know, fascism has been growing, though not yet to a dangerous extent. But in a free society some sort of strife must remain, excitement must remain, only let us hope that it can be kept down to a level at which one can live with it.

 

Don't you think television is providing a lot of strife in the worst sense of the word?

 

Indeed, in the worst sense of the word, by presenting violence as a matter of fact. But nevertheless, on the whole, my opinion is this: that television has a sort of cathartic effect on ninety-five percent of the people; about five percent of them try to emulate the violence, in other words, while ninety-five percent are satisfied by vicarious violence.

 

Yes, but it needs only one assassin to kill.

 

I am afraid the five percent are a really serious danger. It is something like five percent on the one end of the intellectual scale who move the world forward and the five percent at the lower end, the moronic criminals (and sometimes not even moronic), who are endangering it.

 

Yet, one bullet could still bring down the world.

 

Yes, it could, indeed.


Vorige Volgende