On Growth Two

44. Romesh Thapar

Romesh Thapar was born in India in 1921 and has worked as a journalist for the past twenty-five years. He is director of the Indian International Centre in New Delhi and publisher and editor of the magazine Seminar, a monthly symposium about international affairs. From 1966 through 1972 he led the Indian delegation to UNESCO meetings. Mr. Thapar is an active member of the Club of Rome.

Some critics of the Club of Rome who come from developing lands accuse the organization of being too much of a rich men's club. From some of your remarks I would conclude that you are among these critics.

I would not like to depreciate the work of the Club of Rome. I feel that

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anybody who is making a sincere attempt to make our world more conscious of the problems that are likely to arise in the future should be encouraged. We all are children of two thousand years of conditioning. We tend to think along the old grooves.

It is against this background that the eilte reads of Limits to Growth. In the part of the world I come from, where two-thirds of mankind actually live, we get a feeling from hearing about this study that a bunch of intellectuals from developed societies would like to stop us right where we are now. We see this attitude as neocolonialist. There is growth and growth. And what would happen to the backward two-thirds if we were to embark on the road to becoming another America?

What is this America? What is this Eruope? What is this affluent world? We find that it is nothing but a world which has on the surface a great deal of comfort and luxury and so forth, but deep down there are layers of crises. There is a constant tension in which this affluent world is living. If this affluence, if this development, is going to lead us to these kinds of problems, reflected, for instance, in the presence of drugs, then we are really all in for serious trouble.

When we look back at the great civilizations of the world, we find that they were healthiest when they were simple, austere, disciplined, creative. They became unhealthy when overelaborate -

A dead-end street.

Yes - vulgar, consuming vast resources for no particular purpose. That is the kind of alarming situation you find when you come from Asia on a visit to the affluent world.

The crux of the problem is that we have turned global. It is no longer possible to live in isolation for long. China had to isolate itself. Mao could not afford to repeat what had happened in the Soviet Union. He could not allow China to ‘bourgeoisify,’ because the socialist experiment in his country would have crashed. It is different for Russia. The Soviet Union is faced with a relatively small population in almost endless territory. Therefore, Russia could afford to talk about some day doing better than the United States.

But this is not what the socialist dream was about. The socialist dream was to create a new man. Not a prisoner of a machine. A man who dominates the machine, who makes the machine work for the common good.

We find there is no real effort on the part of the rich half in this world to understand these problems. ‘Let us now grow more,’ say the affluent all of a sudden. But what about the underdeveloped world? Ruling elites there

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look to the affluent nations and say, ‘We want to be like them. We want cars. We want luxury. We want all of the life as pictured in glossy magazines. We want to embark on this road too.’ You will find elements of this thinking throughout the developing world. Even in China. I was told that when a visitor to Shanghai the other day remarked to a Chinese official, ‘How nice, you have so little automobile traffic in Shanghai,’ the Chinese host remained grimly silent. He, too, probably dreams of the day when Shanghai will have all those cars.

It is my view that we must begin to discipline our society, the world society, in those areas where we are most affluent. Just as in a country, a clan, a family, you first discipline the richer elements, the more wasteful elements, in order to establish a healthy egalitarianism. For the reorganization of the world a similar approach is needed. If the Club of Rome is truly dedicated to the task of helping to organize the future, it must begin to tell the affluent societies that there is a maximum beyond which all is waste. I think this is what the club in fact is saying. But the moment we begin to fix a maximum, people feel they are being pushed down, held within a framework, not allowed to grow more and more. This is nonsense, because within a stabilized society you go on improving the quality of life within that stability. You spend resources. You expend efforts. But all this is to improve quality, not to create quantity.

I believe the new thrust of the Club of Rome should be Limits to Waste. It should, instead of sparking depression, make every person in the affluent world, as well as in the developing societies, conscious of the utter waste which is so inherent in our everyday actions. There is waste of space, waste of food, of water, of clothing. There is even waste in just producing babies, you know? The Club of Rome's new line, Limits to Waste, could well be the next phase of activity for this organization, since such a program cuts across the boundaries of the rich and the poor in the world. This, the Club of Rome must achieve, because otherwise it will end up where it started - with a report and with computers.

The club's greatest problem is to translate findings in laboratories into practical action.

Limits to Waste would be action. It is, interestingly enough, what the Japanese at the Club of Rome symposium in Tokyo have been asking for. The Polish delegates, the South Americans and Africans, they all stressed these points repeatedly. From Limits to Growth we would move to Limits to Waste, to arrive ultimately at Limits to Wants or Desires. At that point we would really become civilized, because we would not encumber ourselves

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with the vast, irrelevant paraphernalia of the present-day affluent superstructure. One leads a life which is satisfying, so that the individual can be really free. He is not chasing more and more every day what he does not really need. We would have to do this in freedom. If we do not to react like this -

The world will have authoritarian solutions to its problems.

India will, for example, not remain an open society in a world full of waste, and, let's not forget, full of affluent talk. India will only succeed in motivating a democratic people if others more affluent see the perspectives and act on them. Otherwise, we in India, will have to close our frontiers sooner or later to insulate us from wasteful standards. How else could we keep our people alive? The combined populations of India and China will have crossed the 2,000 million mark by the year 2000. That is a fact we should always remember.

Yes, and one society is regimented on the basis of strict rule, while the other grew up in almost complete freedom.

You see, each society has its own characteristics. China, for example, has a collective conscience.

Do they?

They have. They have always had it. Their society, I think, is a collective one. They work well together. We Indians have always been individualistically inclined. Always. Hinduism has preached individual salvation, it has never preached collective salvation. Then, one hundred and fifty years of colonial rule underlined this attitude even more, because the British happened to be terribly class-conscious. In other words, on top of the caste system, and its individualistic searching for salvation, the British came to our land with their class consciousness. The Japanese consider us Indians the Englishmen of today's Asia, and in many ways we are!

China is more or less a single nation-society. It is also almost a single culture. Whereas India is a multicultural society. The Communists call it multinational, which I consider quite valid also. It is quite possible that the India federation will grow into many more states in the next decade. The Indian federation is rich, but it needs to grow into a number of units in order to become even more healthy. Few Indians will perhaps agree with me, but this is one of the things I feel strongly about. In a recent issue of our magazine, Seminar, it was proposed that India be a federation of fifty-eight states. We should decentralize. It would lend dignity to man. I think India is

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already experimenting with a political form of federation which is in advance of the experience of other regions. We are already in the midst of the kind of political challenges which will develop for other regions in the future. India is really Europe. It has a single leader, a Prime Minister, with a single Cabinet sitting over the entire area.

In this sense, the experiences of China and India are very different. Nevertheless, I do think we have to apply more discipline, more collective action, in managing our affairs, while China has to assert greater individualism, because her rich traditions will be crushed under the weight of those Red Books.

You said at a UNESCO conference in 1966 that most models studying life and human behavior in the future suffer from the desire to preserve many of the norms we are already accustomed to. Is this not particularly true for the developing nations?

The standards of living prevalent in the affluent pockets of the world have been so widely advertised by the mass media that they have become synonymous with civilized living. In other words, the wasteful life, the perpetual desire for more and more of what we really do not need, has been enthroned as the great god. Elites in the developing world imitate these standards and alienate themselves from their people. Naturally, as a result, the people of the developing world are motivated to demand these standards for which the resources do not exist. We must globally confront and defeat this model of living. I believe the first task is to discipline the affluent. Without such disciplining the false standards which have been enthroned will not be toppled. This is a major undertaking with all manner of psychological complexities. We ignore it at our peril.

You also signaled, some years ahead of the Club of Rome, ‘that the very process of growth was to divide our world into distinct areas.’ You indicated that the gap between rich and poor would widen to an unacceptable degree. You added, ‘I shudder to think of the impact of this realization upon the mind of Asia and Africa, if alternatives are not worked out.’

Well, whatever the manipulations behind the so-called oil crisis, we have certainly become aware of the discriminatory pricing system upon which the affluence of various nations is built. Our world has been sharply divided into rich and poor nations. The poor, as always, are more numerous. Their restlessness grows. Unless we can find a mutually satisfactory system of pricing manufactures and raw materials, the exploitation of two-thirds of human kind will continue in various ways. The oil situation will persuade

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those of the poor nations who command major sources of essential raw materials that the rich and powerful can be humbled. However, if the gap between the rich and poor widens to an unacceptable degree, if international economic imbalances are not corrected, other weapons will naturally be sought. When we enter this area of mass frustration, anything might happen. But, and this is important, the revolution of science and technology has a built-in leap effect. In other words, those who are already scientifically and technologically advanced advance faster and faster. The challenge before our world is to understand this special nature of the gap between the rich and poor nations, and to work intensively to reduce it by purging affluence of its waste.