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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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62. Richard N. Gardner

Professor Richard N. Gardner holds the Henry L. Moses Chair of Law and International Organization at Columbia University in New York.
Mr. Gardner was born in New York City in 1927. He graduated from Harvard College after majoring in economics. In 1951 he attended Yale University Law School. From 1953 to 1954 he taught at Harvard University and later practiced law in New York till 1957. That year he joined the faculty of Columbia University and became in 1960 a full professor. In April, 1961, he left Columbia temporarily to join the John F. Kennedy administration in Washington, D.C. From 1961 till mid-1965 he served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Currently he is also a member of the board of trustees of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). In 1970-71 he served as a member of President Nixon's Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy.
Professor Gardner published Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (1956), In Pursuit of World Order (1964), Blueprint for Peace (1966) and The Global Partnership: International Agencies and Economic Development (1968).

That Limits to Growth is an important first step goes without any question. It is the first time that anyone has been daring enough to confront the future as a whole with the most modern instruments for forecasting and analysis. It is now clear, particularly in the light of some of the criticisms that have appeared in the World Bank study, that some of the methodology and some of the assumptions, particularly in the field of resources, may be legitimately criticized. But even the authors of the Club of Rome study admitted that it was only a crude first step. I think we ought to compare Aurelio Peccei1 and Dennis Meadows to those early mapmakers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who tried to draw maps of the New World. We see now that the maps were not very good, but they were a useful beginning. We may regard the Club of Rome as the pioneers in the geography of the future.

 

Former UN Secretary-General U Thant2 expressed in my interview extreme concern about the way things are going.

 

I think any sensitive, thoughtful, informed human being can only face the future with the deepest anxiety. There is no doubt that if things go on as they are now, we face disasters of unimaginable severity if not in this century, then certainly within the lives of our children and grandchildren.

I myself have launched an initiative in the United Nations, as the US member of the board of trustees of UNITAR, the UN Institute for Training and Research. This initiative is to establish a commission on the future.

The weakness and limitations of the Club of Rome are partly due to the fact that the club was mainly composed of Europeans, Americans and Japanese. It has not been sufficiently broadly based. Therefore, its legitimacy has been called into question, particularly in Latin America and Africa and Asia. My effort in the United Nations is designed first of all to meet this objection by having a commission on the future which would be representative of all the great cultures, religions, ideologies and intellectual traditions of the world. Then no one can say it is biased.

Moreover, our study will not be limited to growth and its limits, but will encompass three other areas in addition: developments in communications and education, technology (direct broadcasting from satellites, computers, information retrieval); developments in the biomedical sci-

ences (birth control, death control, sex selection, genetic engineering) and trends in alienation and participation (the generational gap, attitudes of youth, the worker on the assembly line, the drug culture, boredom, the problem minorities). The ‘wise men’ in this UNITAR commission would maintain a continual review of these four problem clusters. Perhaps one or two others will be added. Hopefully, the commission will bring in a report on the first of January of each year. This report one might call ‘the state of the future.’

 

What have been reactions to this think tank within the United Nations so far from - especially - the socialist countries and the Third World?

 

The only honest answer is that we don't know yet. I should explain that this initiative was only possible because it was taken in UNITAR, which is a very unusual United Nations body. The UNITAR board of trustees consists of persons like myself, who serve in their individual capacities, as individual scholars appointed by the secretary-general. Unfortunately our Soviet board member has not attended the last several meetings, so his views are not known. We have not had a Chinese board member, simply because they have not chosen to appoint one as yet. China has left unfilled many of the places reserved for her on UN councils. As far as the developing countries are concerned, members of the board from those areas have shown considerable enthusiasm for this idea.

Of course the test will come when the first report is issued and we see what the reactions will be. Some governments may initially express reservations about this. There were also people who opposed Columbus' first voyage. There are persons who don't want to know about future problems because they are so hypnotized or fascinated by present issues.

I do not see concern with the future in any sense as an attempt to avoid the problems of the present. Quite the contrary. An analysis of where spaceship earth is going will result in a much more intense concern with the problems of poverty, with the problems of war, with the problems of the arms race, with the problems of environment and with all the other pressing problems now besetting the human race.

 

Would you expect that when this new project starts rolling, which will take probably one or two years before it really gets under way, political influence can be exerted and in follow-up, recommendations will be really pursued?

This, of course, is a very important question. Let me explain briefly the modus operandi. There will be a small expert staff in UNITAR serving this commission of eighteen to thirty-six ‘wise men.’

 

Will they be based in Geneva or at United Nations headquarters?

 

Probably at UNITAR headquarters in New York. This small staff will be in contact with the great centers of research around the world, some of which have already organized themselves into a consortium, called IFIAS, the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Study. Joseph Slater,3 president of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, took that splendid initiative. Approximately twenty institutions have agreed to make regularly available an inventory of what they're doing, and what their conclusions are on all their work. With this material the UNITAR staff will prepare digests and summaries. The commission will meet once or twice a year and perhaps will divide itself into subgroups and committees. In any case, once it gets started, it will issue on the first of January every year a ‘state of man's future’ report.

 

When do you expect the first report?

 

I wish I could say January 1, 1974, but you know well how difficult these things are to organize. I would hope by January 1, '75. My hope is that the leading newspapers of the world, since there is not much else to print on January 1, will devote two or three pages to printing the conclusions of this report.

 

The New York Times will.

 

Yes, I have some indications that they will. One would hope that the Washington Post, Le Monde, Corriera de la Sera, the Times of London -

 

And the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant - Handelsblad.

 

- and I hope Izvestia, or even Pravda, will print summaries of this report. I see this as something that could capture the imaginations not only of insiders, intellectuals and scholars, but also of political leaders and forceful men around the world. It will be printed as a UN document. That is the beauty of this proposal, because the commission members

will be serving in their individual capacities and will not be subject to any form of bureaucratic constraint in the UN. Then it will be translated into the UN languages. It will be placed on the desk of every single government in the world. My hope is that we will use the mass media in a very imaginative way to have transcontinental seminars on satellite television in which some of the splendid people that you are including in your book can regularly debate the conclusions of the ‘wise men’ in a global, intellectual exchange.

One of the tragedies of our present time is that so many experts are often not talking to one another. We are afflicted by a terrible intellectual intolerance. Half of the people in your book probably aren't talking to the other half. If the world is to survive, we must break down these barriers. My hope is that this effort, launched in good faith and done, I hope, in a professional and intellectually acceptable way, will launch a process of global discussion of the global future.

 

How to break these barriers between intellectuals, even within the borders of our affluent, rich world?

 

I think the problem with many intellectuals - I don't say this applies to all or even most of the eminent people you have in your book, but it might apply to some - is that they have spent all of their professional lives wholly involved in the world of ideas without very much life experience and without the necessity to try to come to terms with other people in real human situations.

My own training is as a lawyer and economist, but primarily as a lawyer. We lawyers are engaged in what we like to call ‘eunomics,’ the science of good arrangements. This science of good arrangements requires that one constantly structure institutions and procedures in such a way that human beings with rather different purposes, attitudes and values can somehow reach accommodations and communicate effectively. This is what's lacking in the world today. We have men of extraordinary brilliance as measured by their intelligence quotient, but with very little life experience, often with very little respect for facts. If the facts don't fit the theory, reject the facts. This one finds among the most intelligent people who are supposed to be the leaders of scholarship. If that is their attitude, how can we expect the man in the street to react, if the men in the ivory tower are destroying one another verbally and refusing even to speak to one another because of disagreements. That is hardly an example to set before the world.

What surprised me during the research for my book was that I had always felt politicians were unable to communicate, being glued to their political ideologies, but I found to my utter dismay that the same situation prevails among scientists - or worse.

 

In a way that's undoubtedly true.

 

And the masses are the victims. I mean the real groundswell of humanity is the victim of this immature and uncivilized behavior.

 

I think mankind is afflicted. I am by nature an optimist, but this is what makes me occasionally pessimistic. We are afflicted not only by national but by personal egoism. That is what eventually could destroy us. Many of these eminent people have such big egos that their principal preoccupation in life is to establish a piece of intellectual turf and preserve it against all comers, whatever the consequences. They're prepared to sacrifice truth - perhaps not consciously, but subconsciously - to the pursuit of ideology and to the pursuit of ego. This is wrong. The truly great men in history, the great scientists like Einstein, were modest men, constantly revising their ideas, listening with respect to people with other opinions. What has happened to the tradition of Einstein? What kind of men do we have today?


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