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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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29. Edward T. Hall

Professor Edward T. Hall was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, in 1914. He studied anthropology at the University of Denver, the University of Arizona and obtained in 1942 a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
In 1946 he was appointed chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Denver. From 1959 to 1963 he was director of the communications research project at the Washington school of psychiatry, became professor of anthropology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1963, and since 1967 he has been professor of anthropology at the college of arts and sciences and professor of organization theory at the graduate school of management at Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois.
His two best-known books are The Hidden Dimension (1966) and The Silent Language (1969).

You have written in The Silent Language that all living beings have a physical boundary that separates them from the external environment, beginning with the bacteria and ending with man himself. You stressed that every organism has a detectable limit where it begins and where it ends.1 Limits to Growth is an effort to figure out the limits of man's capabilities to explore, to destroy the environment, to deplete resources, in other words an effort to start the management of the globe in a rational way.

 

Certainly, the planet too, has a detectable limit. In The Silent Language, I was thinking about intercultural relations, not about the globe as a whole. Quite clearly one should say that you begin with the bacteria and you end with the earth. My reason for talking about bacteria and man in the same sentence was that people forget that they are first, last and always living biological organisms. That they must ultimately obey the laws of the universe. And if you violate the laws of the universe you do so at your own risk. The problem that man is facing right now

is that he inevitably confuses his extensions with the thing that is being extended, in other words, extensions with reality. So that you have to keep bringing man back to the point where he begins to experience himself as a living thing. We wouldn't do the things that we do to the environment if we had not lost some of our humanness.

In regard to Limits to Growth, quite clearly the idea of establishing what the limits are is not only valid but essential. Unfortunately these studies have been criticized because the number of relationships which are actually involved are more complex than the ones which were taken into account. As far as I know, the people of MIT will be the first ones to admit as much. But you have to start somewhere. Nevertheless, we should also look inside man's head, because it is a much better computer than anything yet designed.

 

Man has developed his territoriality to an almost unbelievable extent. We treat space somewhat as we treat sex: We do not talk about it. While man is fleeing into space, it seems to me that you want him to rediscover himself, his humanness.

 

You have a very good point there. We can escape into space. We can also play with things, big toys. There is nothing wrong with that. But human beings are complex. As you suggested, they sometimes use these toys to evade the basic human issues which are here on the earth. Yet this is not always so. One of the byproducts of going to the moon was that for the first time men saw the earth and realized how small it is. Which brings us again back to the point which we were talking about earlier, that the earth is really limited. It is hard for human beings to realize that the system that we are dealing with is not limitless, that it is delicate and fragile and that we have to treat it with extreme care. In one sense it is like a flower. I mean that it has to be cultivated with care and a great deal of affection. Unfortunately we haven't reached that point as yet. Let's hope that we do before we destroy the earth's ecosystem.

 

You know the famous saying by Thomas Wolfe, ‘The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.’ Nobody would deny this value of being able to be alone, but man has less and less a chance to be alone ever.

 

This is the subject for an entire book. My book, The Hidden Dimension, deals with one comer of this very complicated subject. Quite clearly

people need to be alone at times. However, the way in which people like to be alone varies, a matter which is not widely understood. For an upper-class Englishman, for instance, in order to be alone, all he does is simply stop talking and the people in his household are supposed to know that he does not want to be bothered. If he is a German, on the other hand, he goes behind a door, a very thick door, even a double door and he closes it. The German needs those doors and he needs those walls to screen out the sound.

I have called these two types of people screen-dependent and screen-independent. Some people have to have screens. They are brought up that way. Your own countrymen have the same thing. Which brings up the problem with the new architecture and the buildings being built today. They are too cheap (not solid). The sounds penetrate the walls and people are no longer alone in their own homes. This can be serious and stressful. A countryman of yours, Dr. Fiedeldÿ Dop, has studied children brought up in these new apartments where the parents don't allow them to play with blocks, because when the blocks fall down, the people underneath would be disturbed. They can't roughhouse or make noise. This way the children don't develop. They cannot play the way children should be able to play. It's because of the design of the houses. Does it pay to save a few guilders on the houses but destroy the people in them? How does this happen? Fiedeldÿ Dop has discovered the relationship of learning to use of the muscles is close. If children can't crawl on the floor, can't climb, can't exercise, then these children have trouble learning.

But the being-alone thing is complex. First, it is cultural. For the Arab countries, a man who wants to be alone is thought to be crazy. If an Arab goes to his room and closes the door, other people begin to think about calling a psychiatrist. There is an Arab saying that paradise without people is hell. Once when I was questioning Arabs on their use of space, I would ask, ‘Where do you go to be alone?’ They would reply, ‘Who wants to be alone?’ Or they say, ‘Who wants to be crazy?’ So it depends upon your culture and who you are.

 

I think of something Nietzsche2 once said, ‘We have art in order not to die of the truth.’ You attach great importance to artists. As a matter of fact, you wrote that the history of art is ten times as long as the history of writing.3 You hold there is much to be learned from the way artists perceive the world.

 

Again, this is not a simple idea. The first cave painting is art. Art

dates back at least forty thousand years, while the earliest writing began about four or five thousand years ago. I cannot imagine a world without art. I cannot imagine myself living without art. The reasons I have art is because I enjoy it, and besides, I learned so much from my paintings.

Rembrandt4 was a revolutionary painter in his time. Because perception has to do with a man's experience of space, I studied Rembrandt along with other artists. You can observe the actual way in which the retina sees from studying Rembrandt's paintings. As you undoubtedly know, there are usually one or two or three places in his painting that are very sharp and clear. If you fix your eye on one of those places and then find the right distance from the painting, the sharpness fades at precisely the rate as the sharpness of the eye fades as it leaves the center and approaches the periphery. When the viewer looks at Rembrandt's painting right, they are three dimensional. They look real. To do this, pick the sharp place and then don't move your eye. It is as though the subject was in the room with you. Rembrandt, as you can tell from this, was deeply interested with how man sees. Whereas the painters of his time were much more controlled by convention.

Take Mondriaan.5 You get a very different picture. One would think that a Mondriaan work is just a series of lines, but there is more to it than that. Mondriaan is helping to map the visual part of the brain. We know this because of recent work on the visual cortex. Most of all it sees edges. Imagine what it would be like not to be able to see edges. If you cannot see an edge, you will bump into things, fall over curbs, over cliffs, you couldn't distinguish objects from each other. The visual cortex of the brain structures these edges so that they are magnified as it were so that man can detect the slightest movement in nature. What Mondriaan did without knowing about the brain was to emphasize the edges.

Picasso6 is another of my favorites. He really started something. We now have a cartoon strip in the United States, Miss Peach, that is drawn with the eyes on the side of the face and nobody notices it. It looks so natural. Picasso was just ahead of his time. Just look at his paintings and his drawings, you can tell in many cases how he was feeling when he was working. He is so clear and so natural and so much at ease that he is like a skier who has been skiing all of his life. The skis are not separate from him, they are part of him. He is not doing this consciously anymore. He is doing it just the way we talk, completely naturally.

 

You have written that there are different sensory worlds between races and cultures, Americans and Arabs, different touch, different emotions.7

In organizing this planet like Limits to Growth intends to do, how to improve the model in dealing with entirely different cultures across the globe? How could this be brought into the study of organizing global management?

 

This is the problem which faces the educator today. How do you deal with the child who is different? We've discovered that they are almost all different. That's the question that faces the town planner. People with different sensory needs are beginning to occupy the same towns. The problem that you raise is, How do you design for the different kinds of people?

 

How can the systems-dynamics people bring variables into their model, assisted by anthropologists? As it stands now, professional jealousies of scientists seem to outweigh a combined effort for planetary research.

 

I don't know what can be done about academicians.

 

You should be in the model.

 

We clearly should be in the model. We should be working with these people at MIT.

 

Tinbergen,8 in Holland, is working now on a second model. But you people are the ones that should definitely come in most urgently.

 

Tinbergen, for instance, would be one of the first ones to bring in to the model, because Forrester and the MIT computer people will understand Tinbergen's system. They are simple systems and human systems in the first place, and Tinbergen is a beautiful scientist. His work is impeccable.

 

I was speaking of the economist Tinbergen.

 

No, I mean Nico Tinbergen, the ethologist. He was originally also Dutch, wasn't he? He deals with systems, with living systems. And if we could get the ethologists working with the systems people for us, and then bring in the anthropologists, the sociologists and so on.

 

Is that the way it should be done?

I would suggest that we operate in stages. One always starts with the thing one can do, then you move on to the thing which is a little more complicated, a little more difficult. We need two things: ideas and people. Who can put them together? It is really difficult to say which is more important, because right now the cliché is king. I'll leave it at that.

 

Yes, but the world is ruled by politicians and would-be statesmen. How can the scientists, the knowledgeable people, start to have influence? Because this planet needs management of knowledge, not nonsensical propaganda or flat lies by politicians in order to get votes.

 

Now we are talking about the future and McLuhan's9 extensions of man. The extension is the enemy of comprehensive thinking. Somehow we are going to have to overcome the linear functions of extensions and to get back to the comprehensive sort of thing. This is the basic revolution. We are in the process of moving from a linear type of thinking to a comprehensive type of thinking.

 

It is your opinion that most of the asocial behavior that we see around us does not necessarily spring from malice, but from ignorance. We have to redesign the entire educational system, it needs revolutionary changes.

 

True, the schools need to be revamped and in many cases torn down and rebuilt and furnished with new ideas. That will take time. However, we could begin with those scientists who are building bridges to other disciplines. Maybe they would bring some of the others along with them. I mean, we start with people who are making connections, putting things together, willing to go outside of their field. In my case, I must have dealt at one time or another in my life with almost a dozen different fields.


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