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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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67. Richard A. Falk

Professor Richard A. Falk has been Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University, at Princeton, New Jersey, since 1965.
He was born in New York City in 1930. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the Yale Law School and the Harvard Law School.
He is also director of the North American section of the World
Order Models Project, World Law Fund. This project represents a global effort of scholars to develop feasible strategies for improving the quality of world order by the end of this century. He is also vice-president of the American Society of International Law and a member of the advisory board of the Fund for Peace and the board of directors of the Foreign Policy Association.
His latest book, This Endangered Planet (1971), drew considerable attention among a wide public in the US and abroad. Other works are Law, Morality, and War in the Contemporary World (1963), The Stretgy of World Order, four volumes, (1961), Legal Order in a Violent World, The Vietnam War and International Law, two volumes, (1970, 1971), The Status of Law in International Society (1970).

The seventh line of your book This Endangered Planet mentions already the need for limits. Do you look upon The Limits to Growth as a step in the direction of organizing the earth?

 

Yes. I think it was an important effort to crystallize people's awareness about two basic facts: that the world is finite, and that the way in which we're managing the planet at the present time is endangering those finite constraints under which the earth has existed for so many centuries. I believe that part of the success of The Limits to Growth was a consequence of its reliance on computer technology to convey an authoritative status to its conclusions. Of course, this success also constituted the study's principal vulnerability, because it relied somewhat prematurely on this form of quantitative presentation for what remains still essentially a qualitative argument. Quantitatively, we still lack the data necessary to build a computer-reliable argument about the ‘limits to growth’ that could be used as a basis for reorienting the economy and political order of the planet.

 

Hugo Grotius, the seventeenth-century Dutch legal philosopher, was the first individual to suggest some sort of international body to organize and enforce international controls. In the meantime, four centuries have elapsed and where are we now? It is one thing for ninety-one nations to sign an agreement in London1 promising no more oil will be dumped into the oceans, it is quite another to abide by the rule.

My own position is not a law and order position so far as the organization of international society is concerned. It's a strange irony that those who urge law and order for domestic society tend to be the most reactionary forces on international questions. The opposite contradiction often holds too. Those who are the most progressive domestically seem to yearn for a strong structure of order and enforcement on the international level. My own view is that in considering the type of world system that would be most desirable, one has to search for forms of order that have a very strong component of decentralization. A governmental solution is not what we need on a planetary level. What we need is a way of organizing the main functions of human existence around specialized but limited institutions. We need ways to secure a much more just distribution of the world's income and resources. We need ways to make human beings relate independently of the artificial interposition of national boundaries. These things require a new political consciousness, it seems to me, a new human awareness, which has the essential characteristic of moving toward a wider personal identity, eventually built upon the idea of world citizenship and human solidarity.

 

It has always been said that the United Nations as a tool of international diplomacy would be truly representative of mankind when China would come in. The first thing Peking did was vote against the entry of Bangladesh. Again, power politics played by all major powers. How do you establish rules to the game?

 

The basic reality of the United Nations is that it represents an extension of statecraft, not an alternative to it, and that it's very problematic as to whether many governments genuinely represent the peoples they claim to speak for. In many cases governments are primarily concerned with keeping themselves in power domestically, and in achieving as good a position in terms of international, political and economic influence as they can internationally. The game of nations is a competitive game with each society trying to maximize its own power, wealth and prestige. Given the finiteness of the world's space and resources, this inevitably means that the only way that one nation can normally gain is at the expense of the others, unless they can all grow simultaneously. The ideology of growth is intimately tied to stability of the state system, because without growth there would be no means to accommodate the separate imperatives of states to maximize their position in the world. Without growth each state could increase its power/wealth base only at

the expense of the others. Such a neo-Darwinian image of the world system would deprive governments of any illusion that their separate aspirations were, if moderate, at least potentially compatible. The function of indefinite growth is to sustain the view that the state system need not entail a war of each against each, but that all can develop simultaneously. The Limits to Growth undermines the ideology of the state system in this central respect, and this is a notable and progressive contribution.

I don't see any prospect of dealing with the ecological challenge unless at the same time one thinks on a political level about how to reorganize international society in such a way as to displace and moderate the state system. One would not have to eliminate states, but it would be necessary to end their basic organizing relationship to power and wealth, and to dilute or transcend their control over human loyalties and allegiances.

 

But controlling population growth, pollution or any of these problems remains a matter of legislation and government control. We will always be stuck with laws, either on a national or international plane.

 

It is correct that we need norms and we need laws to crystallize those community norms and to assure their effective implementation. At the same time I think it's dangerous to assume that the only way to meet the problems of securing equity and equilibrium for the planet is by instituting some kind of a supergovernment that administers the whole of mankind. It is not at all clear to me that governments have the capacity to control human life and resources in a humane way, and therefore one may be creating a kind of Frankenstein in the process of trying to solve the immediate problems we're faced with.

A society like South Africa has worked out a very stable peace system. It has generally effective laws. Its police prevent a great deal of violence from occurring, and yet it is probably one of the worst societies in the world at the present time in terms of most values we hold important.

 

President Eisenhower held that law was the sole alternative to force in world affairs. Richard Nixon, the brain baby of Eisenhower, walked right into Cambodia which in effect was an illegitimate action in relation to the US Constitution. It looks as if proponents of law and order, whether in Czechoslovakia or in Cambodia, will trample any laws when its fits their purpose.

 

Richard Nixon is an ideal example of a leader who wants law and

order for his own society, in the sense that law and order becomes a code word for police control and for a capacity to resist those groups dissatisfied with the status quo. Internationally, where there is no possibility of law and order of this variant, what Nixon wants is maximum freedom of action to secure the objectives of the United States as he sees them. This has involved a disregard of restraining norms, as for instance, in the case of Cambodia or in the persistent bombing of North Vietnam. Norms that are very well established in the history of international law have no meaning to either the governing group in Washington or, evidently, to governing groups in most parts of the world.

I had an interesting conversation in Hanoi a few weeks ago with the Swedish ambassador, an outstanding man, Jean Christoph Oberg. He was talking about the effects of the bombardments and the effect of European silence in the face of what America was doing in Indochina. He emphasized, properly I thought, the incapacity and indifference of these centers of civilization to the massacre of an innocent people, the willingness to stand aside and let the United States viciously carry on the war and yet conduct business as usual.

 

From the point of view of international law, American aggression in Southeast Asia entails straight war crimes, as Telford Taylor seems to feel. US warfare in Asia encompasses the worst atrocities ever committed by free society in the history of mankind.

 

Telford Taylor's views2 have been changed somewhat by the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers,3 because part of his hesitancy to attribute responsibility to the policy makers for war crimes in Indochina was based on the fact that he did not have documentary evidence comparable to the captured German war-planning documents used at Nuremberg. With the publication of the Pentagon Papers, one now has an adequate knowledge base, even from Taylor's point of view, to say that the leaders who planned this policy were guilty of, as you say, the most serious war crimes ever committed by a free society, and committed in a context where no serious justification in terms of national survival or even fundamental national interest was involved. It represents gratuitous criminality. Those who were planning the crimes in their air-conditioned offices were not aware and did not want to be aware of the lethal human consequences of what they were doing.

 

Professor Lifton4 is publishing articles, for instance in the Saturday Review, on how the war is being replaced by a kind of push-button war.

One of the things that our kind of technology is doing is to permit the most frightful kind of behavior to be undertaken in the most cool, detached, and intellectualized way. At the same time the proliferation of high technology creates a kind of awesome vulnerability, as is illustrated a bit by a recent hijacking in which the hijackers threatened to blow up the Oak Ridge nuclear facility and release the radioactivity stored there, supposedly potentially equivalent to a thousand times the radioactive fallout caused by the Hiroshima bomb. With nine hundred of these facilities expected around the United States by the end of the 1980s, one is confronted with, on the one side, an enormously disassociated, technological kind of government where the distance from human values becomes increasingly great and where the computer becomes in a way the substitute for the mind, the spirit of man. On the other side, one is confronted with desperate men, who feel excluded from any kind of participation in this process, who have no hope of gaining their ends by normal means, and who are likely to possess an extraordinary capacity to disrupt the whole system.

 

Are we moving into the direction of authoritarian rule in order to combat some of the problems you just mentioned?

 

Yes, I think that's why people who are concerned today have such a sense of urgency. The longer we defer a fundamental reorientation of human consciousness, the more likely we become to seek the implementation of these essentially mad schemes to program the future by creating some kind of macro-learning process that conditions man to behave in accordance with the intentions of those that are doing the programming. It is a form of a kind of ultimate intellectual pride, that the human brain can somehow discover the basis for organizing a tolerable relationship between man and history and man and nature. One of the things that is so essentially needed at the present time is a recognition both of the potentialities and limits of technology, and our desperate need for worldwide ethical revolution. So long as we seek to evolve scientifically, technically, and materially, this new ethical revolution has to be based on a link between our social and political forms, and a reinterpretation of the conditions of human survival, and, hence, it needs to be sustained by a real world-order movement.

 

And reality?

 

Such a revolution has to have a kind of biological basis. It has to

grasp the fact (and I think it's a fact that underlies the whole effort of the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth, as well as the effort of many groups around the world that are outside the established structures of power and wealth) that we need a new synthesis of knowledge and action, as well as a new synthesis of knowledge and feeling. We have both kinds of movements occurring at the present time. I think the MIT Limits to Growth effort is one creative response that emphasizes the relationship between knowledge and action, seen in a synthetic frame of mind. The authors have tried to grasp the interrelationship of the whole, because seeing any part is insufficient to understand the whole.

But the other half, which I think someone like William Irwin Thompson5 is concerned with, is the whole relationship between thought and feeling, and the notion that consciousness, to be grounded in reality, has to take account of much more than the rational capacities of man. In certain ways this effort to probe the limits of consciousness, the rediscovery of the relevance of mystical traditions of thought, of the revival of interest in the way in which more primitive societies related to their environment, all this is part of the discovery of a bio-ethical basis for making the human condition not only survivable but tolerable and benevolent.

There are more conceptions of the future than the Skinner vision6 of people programmed not to engage in bad deeds. This is a kindergarten vision of the future. Who could want the whole of mankind socialized into a Skinnerian kindergarten? It's not a world I would want to be part of. It's a world that so entraps the imagination and creative spirit of man that, though it's all in the name of utopia, by so seeking one contributes to the worst kind of annihilation of human destiny. There is nothing left to the individual creativity of man, and in that condition, the spirit dies, with no air to breathe. It's clearly a world in which the distinction between suicide and survival is only marginally discernible.

In contrast to the Skinner vision of the future is the World Order Models Project, an exciting collaboration in the work of bio-ethical revolutions. Groups of scholars in Africa, Latin America, India, Japan, Europe, Soviet Union, and the United States are each developing separate models of how to reform the system of world order by the end of the century. For the first time in human history there exists a self-conscious global enterprise, in which all sectors are projecting distinctive proposals for world order that are both visionary and concerned with the politics of change. We believe that the World Order Models Project will begin to provide men in all parts of the world with a basis for hope in the future and with a direction in which to direct their thoughts, feelings,

and action, a focus, indeed, for the mobilization of all the vital energies of the human spirit. In this regard, we see the first stage in building a new world order to be one of consciousness-raising, the second to involve mobilization for action, and the third to involve the transformation of the secular institutions that now control power and wealth.

 

Efforts of the Club of Rome are aimed at increasing human awareness of the condition of the planet in this late hour. Communication satellites would tremendously add to the increase of human knowledge around the planet if used properly. The Soviets have threatened to shoot satellites down that would bring unacceptable information through its borders. Here we have a further legal problem of ‘visas for ideas.’

 

I think that the underlying objective of trying to make ideas as mobile as possible in the decade or so ahead is one of the progressive forces in the world. Anything that cuts down on mobility is a reactionary impulse. But one has to recognize that a government like the Soviet government which is in a hostile relationship to its own population, cannot tolerate that kind of planetary mobility. It operates a closed society as part of the effort by Soviet rulers to keep control. How else does one maintain the degree of conformity in thought, feeling and action that the leaders in the Soviet Union feel necessary?

For this reason my own sense is that progress toward realizing a vision of the future in which notions like the Limits to Growth and a new world order become meaningful depends on prior changes within the principal domestic societies in the world; these are the critical arenas for world-order change. Progressive social change domestically, whether in the United States or in Europe or the Soviet Union, is the best hope that we have for a positive future. Progressive forces will have to gain access to power in order to reorient the centers of decision that run our planet. It is naive optimism of the most dangerous kind to think that the regressive elites that are in control of the predominant power structures in the world today are going to provide the moral and political leadership to generate a world that we would want our children and grandchildren to live in. Essentially these leaders of today are concerned with sustaining their own positions of power and privilege in relation to people that are poorer and weaker and victimized in different ways. It is these sorts of regressive relationships that tend toward social and political rigidity. It is terribly important that in the next decade or so we try to animate the change-oriented forces within principal societies in the world and hope

that these forces gain enough access to power to reshape the way in which national governments envision their own well-being.

Until that happens I just don't think we can do more than prepare individuals to face unpleasant realities unflinchingly about the prospects of the future. I can see no hope in the present world power structure of securing real changes of the fundamental sort that are predicated on the basis of an analysis like that offered by the Club of Rome, which I agree with. I hope that the Club of Rome will begin to think seriously about tactics and strategies of change and about the politics and ethics of a new equilibrium between man and the capacities of the planet.


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