On Growth Two

24. Raghavan N. Iyer

Professor Raghaven N. Iyer was born March 10, 1930, in India. He studied economics at the University of Bombay. In 1950 he entered Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in political science, economics, and philosophy and obtained a doctorate in philosophy. After returning to India he worked with the Indian Institute of World Culture and served as chief research officer to the head of the planning commission of the Indian government. In 1956 he returned to Oxford and taught political philosophy for eight years, after which he became visiting

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professor at the universities of Oslo, Norway, Accra, Ghana, and Chicago. In the United States, he lectured at the Rand Corporation, Harvard, Bowdoin, the University of California (Berkeley), and UCLA. Professor Iyer is president of the Institute of World Culture and a member of the Club of Rome. He now lives permanently in Santa Barbara, California. His publications include The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, The Glass Curtain Between Asia and Europe, and The Future is Tomorrow.

What are your impressions of the Club of Rome symposium here in Tokyo?

The club has made considerable headway in its meeting here in Japan. Members have been forced to see beyond the psychology of doom. I think the club is groping toward a more positive philosophy.

After the ‘limits to growth’ message?

Yes. A positive formulation could truly inspire large numbers of people. As you heard me say at the meeting, I am of the opinion, like Herzen, that we do not change events in the world by rational demonstrations or by syllogisms, but rather by ‘dreaming the dreams of men.’ The Club of Rome is still caught up too much in the false glamor of the social sciences, what Bernard Shaw called ‘the new barbarians,’ mesmerized by systems analysis, computer techniques, and so on. They still seem to possess tremendous faith in the sovereignty of these techniques. In the long run this will not be enough. I have been stressing that we should go beyond our concern with the Limits to Growth; we should study the Limits of Waste and the Limits of Wants. This would be constructive and could catch the imagination of people. As Pythagoras said many centuries ago, unless we have a sense of limit in the mathematical and philosophical sense, we will not be able to maximize our possibilities. Limits are not exactly limitations. Unfortunately, when most people talk about Limits to Growth, they speak the language of limitations. It is my view that although we have to confront scarcity, the emphasis on Hobbesian survival is very inadequate.

We also have to seize on the idea of ontological plenty in spiritual goods and creative potentials. We know from brain research that human beings use only a minute fraction of their total potential of brain power. There is an enormous wastage in the human brain itself, in the human machine. This situation cannot be met without a conceptual breakthrough.

As long as human beings are merely creatures of habit, imitative and

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adaptive, they will always be caught up in an obsession with scarcity, with necessity, with impossibility. They will tend to run around in circles. And what often looks like a new truth about the world is nothing but the precipitation of Karma.¹ A man for whom everything has gone wrong in his individual life and who has to face the cumulative consequences of his past errors may create a theory of the universe which is only a compensation for his acute sense of futility. Something like this is happening to groups, to experts, to societies. They are painfully confronting the Nemesis, the Götterdämmerung, the psychological burden of accumulated Karma. Yet, they want to turn their predicament into a theory about the world. Now, this is understandable, and also somewhat poignant. It is something that any compassionate human being would try to understand sympathetically.

However, many young people today are intuitively aware of the noetic, the creative potential which cannot be measured in terms that belong to the logic of the excluded middle, or to the language of mechanistic systems. They do not have the concepts as yet; they function intuitively, and are not ready to formulate what they feel. The big problem is for those who are well aware of the intellectual history of the world and who are not afraid of anything, who are truly original thinkers, to provide the concepts that can help to underpin the intuitions of large numbers of young people everywhere.

When you work with students in California, being an Indian yourself, do you feel that such a formula, which embraces the intuitive feelings of the young, could encompass all youths, also those in developing lands?

Yes, indeed. The disinherited, the psychologically underprivileged in California have a spontaneous capacity to identify with the uprooted and the dispossessed everywhere. At the same time, they have a Yankee ingenuity in problem solving that could teach much to the alienated young all over the world, and especially in developing countries. Unfortunately, the young Americans who travel abroad in search of thrills are not representative of the finer spirits and the tougher types here. The pseudohippies abroad obscure the deeper import of what is happening here.

I realize you consider all this talk about the Third World a lot of nonsense.

I think many of the representatives of the so-called Third World are still partly paralyzed by obsolete categories, in terms of statistical indices of GNP. However, behind all this there exists an awareness that they do constitute the majority of mankind and that they must also have the right and the effective possibility to create their own new cultural patterns. I especially

1 Karma = the law of moral retribution and ethical causation.

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found this in our professors here from Nigeria. These feelings are very strong and perhaps at times even stronger in the African than in the Asian. The Asian, through a long period of intellectual enslavement, has been deceptively successful in Europeanization. The African, on the other hand, in his efforts to Europeanize, has had to create such an abyss between himself and the great mass of the people that his innate sense of dignity and self-respect forces him now to ask more fundamental questions. If one asks where in thirty years from now will be the real excitement about ideas, about creating a new society, this will take place in what I call the First World - Afro-Asia and Latin America.

I also think that these events will be profoundly affected on the one hand by what is now happening in China, and on the other hand by what takes place in India. These are the two opposite poles. The critical influence on this process could be Japan. The Japanese have now reached the crucial stage where, of course, they do not any longer belong to the First World - in your jargon, the Third World - since they are now in the forefront of the developed nations. At the same time, they are very much aware that they differ profoundly from the people in the United States and Western Europe. Many Japanese would like to swing in one direction or the other, while some worry whether this will lead them into developing a schizoid personality, on the one hand hanging on to the rituals of their old world, while at the same time embracing the rituals of modernization. In other words, in Japan the problem is one of rituals and forms versus a more fundamental regeneration or renaissance. And even a Japanese renaissance must borrow, it must be eclectic, it must be somewhat wild at the same time, be willing to take risks, and to invent an entire world of new ideas.

This is where it seems to me that the old thought-patterns of Europe, especially in political philosophy, have come to a stop. These ideologies are no longer relevant. Unfortunately, a lot of people outside of Europe, in the Afro-Asian world, are likewise limited by these inherited ideological categories. Initially they tried to develop Arab-socialism, Indonesian-socialism, Indian-socialism, but all these efforts turned into clichés and hollow phrases because people did not really know how to find authentic political formulations in relation to the tremendous needs of self-definition. This is what I feel is happening in Japan now, and which will interact with what is happening in China and eventually with what happens in India.

My own impression is that India will eventually be affected by the explosive events both in China and Japan.

For India, the most critical development involves the rethinking of

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Mahatma Gandhi's ideas. Gandhi said that after his death India would totally bypass and betray his ideas, but that thirty years later India would have to come back to them out of pure necessity. This is now beginning to happen, and the trend will accelerate.

One could draw a parallel with the Indian national movement. It was only because the liberals failed, while the terrorists also were not succeeding, that out of necessity the elite - the intellectual - turned to Gandhi, who alone could appeal to the masses. I feel that India will be confronted with a similar situation in regard to its social and economic structure. When India eventually discovers that it cannot conceivably do what Japan has done without harnessing its traditional values and providing new motivations, when India finds out of necessity that it has only played with the symbols of Gandhi, it will be forced to ask much more fundamental questions. Then, I think, the real revolution will take place. No doubt, this can have a strong radical base. It can also borrow from other movements and, indeed, it would not be possible now to predict what form the changes will take, but it will begin in the realm of looking again seriously at what could be called the basic questions that Gandhi raised. These come down to one central Tolstoyan question: How much land does a man need? Or, how much of the goods of the world does a human being need to have a meaningful and fulfilling way of life?

Which brings us to John Platt, member of the Club of Rome and a behaviorist.

I concluded from my private conversations with Platt that he is an interesting example of a man who, although trained as a behavioral psychologist, seems to be very much aware of new spiritual cults and trends. He mentioned his interest in why some three thousand young people would turn up in Michigan to attend a talk on meditation.

The influence of the East.

I discussed with Professor Platt how these symptoms seem to connect with something very old in America itself, the idea of the American nomad, rootless and homeless, who is constantly required to defend himself. There is, no doubt, an authentic pulse behind the American dream, which has nothing to do with the system and which is at work today. Americans, for all their limitations, are unique in history. They possess perhaps the closest connection between theory and practice. An American's theory might not be very good at times. His practices might be wild, but he does take ideas

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seriously. To him, ideas have legs. So, if an idea strikes him, he immediately wants to try it out.

And, as you know very well, in Europe, and of course, for a long time among the Brahmans in India, people merely flirt with ideas. This can become almost a kind of autoeroticism. People indulge in ideas without any reference to changing one's actual patterns of conduct. The close interaction between theory and practice in America, on the contrary, is very, very important as a dimension of the contemporary revolution among the young.

Now, what is this contemporary revolution? I have thought about it a great deal. I think it is a revolution neither in institutions, nor in human nature. I do not see dramatic changes in human nature. This is a subtler revolution. It concerns the very relations between man and his institutions, as well as the more primary relations between human beings. There is a groping toward role flexibility, rule skepticism, and unconditionally in mutual acceptance.

Take the cruelty and absurdity of universities. The moment comes for every student when he has to draw himself apart or conform. Of course, there is a third way, where one learns to handle the grading system for what it is worth and not let it bother him really. The young are discovering how to relate to each other in ways independent of fixed roles. This entire new attitude, a critical distance toward institutions, is psychologically very important.

The Club of Rome consists mostly of older persons, who have great faith in institutionalization. This is the legacy of the aftermath of World War Two, the search for a megalopolis, some form of world government. This faith in institutionalization is a serious mistake. I do not think that the present revolution is going to express itself in new institutions. In fact, if it should express itself prematurely in institutions, it will be aborted and subverted. What is involved is really a revolution in ways of doing things, and these do not always require formalization. To understand this philosophically, we have to give more weight to the informal logic of human communication - all those things that we imply in conversation, with our eyes and gestures, for instance, and which cannot wholly be contained in the true-false dichotomy.

Or be fed into computers. But, returning to this revolution. Where does the deeper involvement of the mind come into all this? Margaret Mead spoke of the seventies as the decade of the brain. As long as no one knows how our brain really works, what to do with the some three billion new arrivals

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within the next thirty years? I mean aside from dropping the present grading systems.

Indeed. We have perhaps accumulated over the past fifty years more facts about the human brain than in all recorded history, yet, we do not have a new theory. We are still caught up in seventeenth-century concepts. Young people are pioneering, in California and all over America and Canada, in new modes of creativity, of heightened awareness. They engage seriously in meditation, are experimenting by making mistakes, but learning the power of thought, of creative imagination, called kriyashakti in the Indian tradition.

What the youth of America is presently doing is very relevant to the secret of Japan's success as well as to the future of all of Asia. The more I reflect on what is happening in Japan, the more I realize that the Japanese have not merely imitated American modes of living and working. The Japanese have always possessed a certain gift in creating images, and are particularly skillful in creating images that release the will. No doubt, many Japanese do not do this self-consciously. They also are caught up in illusions. The critical question arises, Which people will emerge in Asia or elsewhere in the world who will exemplify a very high level of self-consciousness? What this means, intellectually, is the capacity to inhabit simultaneously many different metaphysical perspectives. As Immanuel Kant once intimated in an essay on the future of metaphysics, there could be as many metaphysical frameworks as there are states of mind, even though this conception does not fit into the rest of Kantian philosophy.

I believe that the man of the future, the person of tomorrow, will be able to see the world as a Nietzschan, as a Freudian, as a Marxist, but in many other interpretations, through Zen, through Shankara, and so on. And if the man of the future is able to accomodate different perspectives, he will learn conceptual flexibility and those who actually engage in systematic meditation will be at an advantage. All the emphasis on the social sciences is still on adapting to change. There is no basis in modern behavioral work for understanding continuity. What is the thread of continuity in the life of a man from birth to death? It is here that the ancient East becomes profoundly relevant. Krishna said in the Gita that every man must meditate upon birth, death, sickness, decay, and error. For Plato man is not a philosopher, a true lover of wisdom, until he overcomes the fear of death. This is increasingly a paramount issue in the context of collective psychosis, the weakening of will, an issue that separates the living and the dead. The question will be more and more, Who can self-consciously recover continuity of consciousness amid the ever-escalating pace of change?

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We see this problem most acutely in America, because of the prevailing fragmentation of consciousness, of the mass of sensory images. It becomes almost impossible to remember anything today or tomorrow. Even morality makes little sense, because one does not know anymore what one promised one day or a week later. All this forces people to look for more fundamental solutions to recover a continuity of consciousness. I have the impression that out of sheer necessity these matters are being pioneered in America. But in time, this activity will and must interact with the untapped spiritual wealth in India, Japan, China, and elsewhere. We are going to find some very surprising changes.

This could have a vital influence in bringing the affluent world in true communication with the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

A very great influence indeed. It would also mean that men would possess the capacity to identify the credibility of a human being who has mastered this new consciousness without reference to external signs and claims. There are still a lot of unconscious subtle traces in the human mind. We know today that because a man is an Indian, this does not mean to say that he is also rooted in the culture of India. If someone is Japanese, this does not necessarily mean he knows about Zen. We know this, yet there is the legacy of the old races in fostering subtle forms of racism, in compensatory messianism, looking for instant salvation, vicarious atonement. But these concepts are not being increasingly challenged, because a new kind of self-reliant human being is emerging. He does not want instant salvation. He does not want vicarious atonement. The new man is looking for the continuous thread, or what in the old books was called ‘the line of life's meditation.’ I think that those individuals who can do this while still playing their part in society effectively will be the true pioneers of the society of tomorrow.