On Growth

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24. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Born in 1908 in Belgium, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss studied philosophy and law in Paris. In 1949 he became doctor of letters at the University of Paris.
From 1935 to 1938 he taught at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he conducted several ethnological expeditions into central Brazil. During World War II he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and became in 1946 cultural counsellor to the French embassy in Washington, D.C. Since 1950 he has been directeur d'études at l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. In addition to the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, he occupies the chair of comparative religion of nonliterate peoples. He is also director of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France and l'Ecole Pratique.

This is the Collège de France, 21st September, 1972, in the office of Professor Lévi-Strauss.

Professor, you have seen Limits to Growth?

First of all, I must say that I have read the French translation, I am not sure that the French translation is doing full justice to the book. My feeling was an extremely mixed one. Because on the one hand I am in full and complete agreement with the purpose, the aim and the spirit of the report. But the way it is presented seems to me both verbose and rather elementary. Perhaps the word is too strong, but I don't have another one right now. I would have very much preferred that the report should be limited to the figures and to the diagrams which in my opinion are both telling and frightening rather than the length of text (which expression is too diffuse and thought oversimplified) which they have placed around it.

Would you say the philosophy behind it isn't of the highest plateau?

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No, it is not exactly the level of philosophy, because the philosophy is sound. It is rather the way it is expressed.

Critics have said it was presented too much as an Einstein-letter, as a doomsday message.

As far as I understand it, there have been two different kinds of criticism. Some criticism stems from economists or mathematicians, who claim that the models are oversimplified, that not enough variables are taken into account and so on. My personal feeling - of course it is the feeling of a layman, because I am not competent at all in the field of mathematics or economics - but it is that it should not be overlooked that what we have are models. Limits to Growth does not claim at all to represent what is taking place or what will take place. It is a model built in the laboratory, in order to better understand what is taking place in concrete reality. That is for instance exactly the kind of procedure which Karl Marx has followed when he wrote Capital. It is the kind of procedure which we always follow in the social and human sciences. From this point of view I think that the character of the model, the result of the book, should be well understood. I am not at all impressed by this criticism.

On the other hand, there is a second type of criticism you were alluding to a moment ago, the Doomsday message. From that point of view, my own feeling is that the Limits people are only too cautious and too weak. The situation is much more tragic, even much more tragic than the one they are debating. I can say, to be more frank, since it is almost twenty years now since I wrote my book Tristes Tropiques, I tried to express exactly the same kind of ideas, fears and warnings. Although of course Tristes Tropiques was not put in this rigorous shape which the Club of Rome was able to achieve. But having read the report, my only conclusion is that the situation is already a hopeless situation, that the remedies which are sketched by the report belong much more to the region of wishful thinking than to possibilities which can be really applied and really used. My own world view is that the situation is even much darker than this report makes it.

You also wrote in Tristes Tropiques, ‘the world began without the human race and it will end without it.’¹ Now, that was twenty years ago. If this is worse, then what do we tell our children?

We should distinguish two completely different things. When I wrote

1 Tristes Tropiques, an Anthropological Study of the Primitive Societies of Brazil, Atheneum (New York, 1971), p. 397.

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this sentence, I was not thinking particularly of the ordeals and difficulties of the present world, but of the very obvious fact that if there is no eternal living species, that all living species had a start and will have an end and that of course mankind will have an end if only because the earth itself will have an end.

You mean the sun burning the earth -

Well, after some time, a very long time. It should not worry our children more than it should worry ourselves that from, say, I don't know how many billion years from now there will be no earth anymore and no mankind anymore. After all, this is only a philosophical factor which will assist us in thinking about these matters. But this has nothing to do with the fact that the path which is actually followed by the human species can, and most certainly will, lead not to its extinction, but to tragedies and catastrophes of major proportion.

Worse than Hiroshima?²

Well, perhaps not so sudden or not so brutal, but much worse because in a world where the human population becomes more and more numerous - we have only to look at the figures in the report to be convinced of it - life will become - if it is not already in many places - it will become unbearable only because of the sheer number of people. I don't think it is only a problem of human resources, of finding enough food to nourish I don't know how many billions of people. Even if this problem was solved - I doubt very much that it can, but even if it were solved - it would not modify in any way the fact that there is for mankind as for every living species an optimum density. And of course this density should not be too low, because if it is too low, there is no communication, and stagnation will result -

We need equilibrium -

Yes, we need an optimum degree of density and of diversity. What is taking place now, even leaving aside the matter of natural resources, is that we can see in the big urban cities and in underdeveloped countries, the overpopulated areas and so on, that people are getting so close together, if I may express myself simply, that each of them becomes a threat and hindrance to his fellow beings.

2 Destruction of Hiroshima, Japan, by an atomic bomb, ordered by President Harry S Truman (1884-1972).

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Lifton,³ the psychiatrist, says that the old behaviors that society has been reinforcing for centuries, will destroy us if we continue this way; in other words, we have to redesign human behavior. Skinner⁴ said we should redesign the environment in order to make life livable.

But can we? Can we? Isn't it entirely utopian? Is it possible to redesign human behavior? We can certainly hope that through some natural process and a kind of natural need for equilibrium - which works through ways entirely unknown to us and of which we are not conscious, are not aware - we can hope that this will spontaneously take place. But I doubt very much that we can think it beforehand and decide to do it and succeed to do it. It would be necessary to conceive a world with sufficient understanding and goodwill or a kind of supreme authority, able to rule over the entire earth, which of course would all be a wonderful effect or a bad one, I don't know, but in any case which belongs to the realm of dreams rather than to a reality which can be foreseen.

Do you have the impression that Mao Tse-tung succeeded to put some sort of programming into the eight hundred million Chinese, arranged some infrastructural social order into society?

I don't know, because I am not very posted about Chinese affairs. It's quite possible. It's also possible that many of us will not like very much to live the kind of life which is being planned in China.

Alberto Moravia⁵ told me upon his return from China that the poverty was still incredible. The Zeitgeist [spirit of the time (Ger.)] demanded Mao's rigorous mobilization of China's psychic as well as material economy. Strict programming became the only way out.

Maybe China needed it, and probably the world will need it very soon as a whole, but it does not mean that it will make a very pleasant world. It may be a dire necessity. It is certainly not something which is to be hoped for.

Toynbee⁶ said that the Roman emperors sometimes reverted to dictatorship in times of emergency and that a benevolent kind of world-management dictatorship might eventually be necessary.

But it remains that to revert to some kind of dictatorship - which will

3 See conversation no. 23.

4 See conversation no. 7.

5 Italian writer (1907-).

6 See conversation no. 5.

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be dictatorship from the right or from the left, it does not matter, from our present point of view - but this is something we can conceive in traditional countries. But can we conceive it as it would be needed in order to bring a solution to the problem, on a world scale? Because what will probably take place, if many different countries start to be subject to a crisis of the right, if that will revert to dictatorship, that this dictatorship will crush together, with the other dictatorships. I don't see at all that this can be a way toward a general and mutual understanding.

What did you learn most from your studies with the aborigines in Latin America: humility?

Humility? No, I would not choose the word, but modesty probably. In effect, human groups which live happily because they have very limited needs which can be satisfied at the expense of a very limited amount of work, too; and the leisure time is considerable greater than it is in our modern society. Most of all where man or mankind does not consider itself as the master and ruler of the earth, but as having his limited share in a world order, which can be kept only at the cost of respecting the share which belongs to other forms of animal life and to vegetable life and so on. That is a humanism which is moderate, while our own humanism has become immoderate, and out of proportion, because it only considers mankind and sacrifices the interest of mankind, all the other interests of earthly life.

Yes, you have called man his own worst enemy. How is the rest of nature, of creation to survive?

I am afraid it will not. Except for the few vegetable or animal species which we need. We don't need mice, but we need cattle. We need wheat and corn - except if as we are doing with the so-called green revolution, we are selecting limited species which are particularly susceptible to blight and other diseases and which will in the long run cause their extinction.

Will your studies with the extinct societies help us to understand better the human mind? Because we will only survive if we finally learn how to handle the psyche.

I don't know if they will, but it is certainly the only way or the main

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way. There is a great difference between the human and social sciences, on the one hand, and the physical and the natural sciences, on the other. For the latter, it is possible to experiment in the laboratory, while we cannot experiment on human societies. It would be too costly. It would take too long, and there are more reasons which I don't need to dwell upon.

So we have to look for ready-made experiments, which is the only way to approach scientifically human troubles. Ready-made experiments are constituted by these societies, so-called primitive, i.e., completely different from our own, where we can go and test hypotheses. When these societies will have completely disappeared, which is not far from now, we will be limited to only one kind of human experiments, i.e., the one provided by our own societies. It would be impossible to do these comparisons and to measure the full span of human experiences and human abilities.

When you worked with Indians in Brazil, did they feel that you were actually carrying out experiments?

It is difficult to answer because it really depends. I must say that there were groups who were completely indifferent to the aim and purpose of the anthropologist and who just tolerated him as the visitor from whom they expect gifts, some kind of advantage. But I have on several occasions met so-called natives who were perfectly aware of the purpose of the anthropological fieldwork, because they were themselves interested in the life and customs - not only the anthropologist - of their own society. This has also frequently taken place during the late nineteenth century in the United States, among Indians who were perfectly aware that their culture was doomed, that if a record could be saved, if something should be saved, then they should cooperate with the anthropologist in order to save not only the objects but the belief, the customs and so on.

There is the case tested in literature of old priests, realizing that they would be perhaps the very last specimen in their tribes, and they definitely were interested that both their knowledge and the paraphernalia of their cult would be stored in museums and saved for future of their own generation. There is no simple answer to your question.

Professor Lévi-Strauss: in Stockholm⁷ it was said that the way in which the Brazilian government is at present cutting down the Amazon forests is an ecological Hiroshima in itself. Will the Indians in these areas be the very first victims of ecological disaster?

7 At the World Conference on the Human Environment, June 5-16, 1972.

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I am afraid it is only too true even for the few tribes which were still relatively untouched - relatively, because there are no untouched tribes in the present world. The Brazilian Indians are certainly doomed to extinction with the new policy of roads, because these people, who live mostly by shifting cultivation, collecting wild foods and hunting, need a tremendous surface area of land in order to survive. If their freedom to roam around is being restricted, then they will disappear. But the policy is not only dangerous for the Indians. It is dangerous for the whole of mankind because we should not forget that the tropical forest is something which cannot regenerate once it has been destroyed. When it is destroyed, it is once and for all. It will never come back. If I am not mistaken a substantial amount of the oxygen which we have in the atmosphere is being generated by the Amazonian forest, so if the Amazonian forest were destroyed, the supply of oxygen of all mankind would be threatened.

How can scientists influence this situation? Brazil does not want to prejudice its economic growth at the expense of ecology.

I doubt very much that scientists will be able to do anything. It is perfectly understandable that a country like Brazil does not want to remain an underdeveloped country and is trying to take off and reach the development of a fully industrialized nation. This I can very well understand. I cannot even condemn it. It is just the tragedy of the modern world that what is taking place and what is bound to take place brings us to the verge of disaster and catastrophe.

Stendhal⁸ once wrote about Napoleon⁹ that the ladies at the court of Saint-Cloud were of the opinion that a great man is like an eagle: the higher he flies, the less he becomes visible and ‘il est puni de sa grandeur par la solitude de l'âme.’¹⁰ Looking back on your life and your work, your affection for the peoples in the last forests of the planet, how do you feel about mankind and life?

I am just sorry to have been born, to have to live in the century where I was born in. I would have very much preferred to live one century or two centuries ago or to go back to neolithic¹¹ time, but well, that is a biographical accident.

But people were storming the Bastille¹² those days, while Marie-Antoinette¹³ ended up on the guillotine.

8 French novelist and critic (1783-1842).

9 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), emperor of France.

10 De l'Amour, ‘De l'Orgueil Feminin,’ p. 108.

11 Anthropological term for the latter part of the Old World Stone Age.

12 Famous fortress in Paris, built in the fourteenth century and used as a prison until it was besieged by revolutionaries on July 14, 1789, a date now commemorated each year as France's national day.

13 Marie-Antoinette (1755-93), Queen of France, wife of Louis XVI, executed during the Great French Revolution.

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Well, let's say I would have preferred to live just before the French revolution, or just after.