On Growth Two

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49. Aurelio Peccei

Aurelio Peccei was born in Torino, Italy, in 1908. He received his doctorate in economics summa cum laude at the University of Torino. In 1930 he joined the Fiat Company and was sent by them to China prior to World War One. Since 1950, he has been a member of the management of Fiat. He has been head of the Latin American Division and Chairman of the board of Fiat Concord in Argentina. In 1974, Peccei resigned his functions with Fiat in order to devote most of his time to Club of Rome activities. From 1964 to 1967 he was president and chief executive of the Olivetti Company. On completing his mission of reorganization of this company he was retained as vice-chairman from 1967 to 1974, when he voluntarily resigned for the above-mentioned reason. Dr. Peccei is the founder of Adela, an international investment company created to promote development and private initiative in Latin America. He is chairman of the economic committee of the Atlantic Institute in Paris. Dr. Peccei was chairman of the board of Italconsult, one of Europe's most outstanding engineering and consulting firms, with headquarters in Rome. He resigned in 1974 as managing director of Italconsult, to have more time for the Club of Rome. Last but not least, Aurelio Peccei is of course the founder, in 1968, of the world-famous Club of Rome.

The Club of Rome is now entering its sixth year. What do you see as some of its principal achievements?

I think our main achievement was to spread the sense of something we perceived prior to the coming into being of the club: the awareness of the changed condition of man on his planet and the rapid deterioration of certain foundations of modern society. We were among the first to express these warnings coherently and to urge that the search for ways to escape from the situation as we saw it developing was of paramount importance. If one scrutinizes the last few years of man's existence and compares them with the whole of human history, one immediately notices that a great number of spectacular events have occurred in this very short span of time. Probably

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none of us is really able as yet to understand the momentous importance of this wave of events, or to grasp how much, let alone why, the world situation has sharply worsened so suddenly. Many of us are now mesmerized by the extremely disturbing energy crisis which developed suddenly, descending on most people like a bolt from a blue sky. And a worried mankind has seen the ugly specter of famine reappear as a more serious threat than ever in many parts of the world. Its dimensions are so large and growing that a new word has been coined - megafamine. But how and why all this happened?

What the Club of Rome has done is to help prepare world public opinion to look at these phenomena as just different aspects of a single complex and changed global reality - which we have called the predicament of mankind. One of the Club of Rome's teachings - if we can use this word - is that this reality will defy our understanding unless we succeed in obtaining an overall view of the entire world problématique. We have all seen, for instance, the influence of the oil shortage on the stability and reliability of the monetary systems, and of these factors on the European Community's current performance and future prospects. This is only an example, but we may continue our reasoning and realize the kind of void that the lack of any basic European consolidation will create in a world which needs human society to coalesce into something new instead of the present irrational, hopeless fragmentations.

And there is the insulting discrepancy between the 1.4 billion people of the northern half of the globe and the 2.5 billion of the southern half.

This is truly intolerable not only morally, but now also politically. And it aggravates all other situations still further. The serious state of world affairs is beginning to be understood. In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation have launched a huge research on the dynamics and impact of the gigantic population-food-energy complex of problems. Dr. Philip Handler, the president of the Academy of Sciences and the initiator of this project, seems to be more pessimistic in his estimates of what may happen in the world if no drastic steps are taken immediately than the so-called doom-sayers of the Limits to Growth project. Those who ridiculed that study when it was first published have become strangely silent nowadays. No one maintains any more that the Limits to Growth conclusions were merely ‘garbage’ poured out from wrongly instructed computers or bad dreams nurtured in the distorted minds of people who could only see the black side of life.

To sum up, two noteworthy developments characterize the past five or six years. In objective terms, one is this steady degradation of the world

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situation. The other is that large strata of people - even ordinary men and women - have become aware and conscious that all of us are confronted with major, unprecedented problems. The general public seems to understand, furthermore, that we have got to fight back, and that this fight is not to be conducted in the interest of the rich or privileged segments of the world's population, or by one class or another, but that the mass of new world problems is a threat to one and all, and of such magnitude that it compels all people and nations to accept responsibility to do something about it. These are the reasons I feel that, although we are increasingly pressed by formidable problems, there is greater hope today that we will not be altogether swamped by them than five years ago, when most people were still lulling themselves into the belief that mankind was still forging ahead on the crest of the waves.

In April, 1968, when the Club of Rome came into being, you were a small group of concerned scientists and intellectuals from the Western countries. It seems to me that the club over the years has become truly universal.

Nearly so. What can be said is that presently we have members from all cultures and all continents. They come from practically all walks of life, from many different disciplines and varying ideologies. But we still are, and want to remain, a small group of a mere one hundred individuals. Although it is well-nigh impossible to have all shades of human conviction represented in such a small gathering, we do draw our inspiration from the most relevant trends of present-day thinking, awareness, and preoccupation over the human condition and various alternatives.

I noticed during the Club of Rome meetings that Indians, Latin Americans, and also the Poles were persistent in pressing for the acceptance of the fact that the globe consists of a rich northern half and a poor southern half.

That is true. Undeniable, as we have already noted, unacceptable gaps, divisions, and barriers exist between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the highly educated and the illiterate. Small, privileged minorities have all the opportunities while the majority of the population has little or no hope, no appealing future at all.

Still, the world in which they all have to live has now, for the first time, really become one. This explosive contradiction is the irony and tragedy of our time. Only by considering world society as a unitary, integrated system in which every part is basically interested in the well-being of all the others, can we hope to manage our individual and collective lot relatively well, and eventually even bridge the present fatal fractures which cripple our world.

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Yet, these fractures are very real and multiply constantly. The traditional distinction of nations between the developed lands of East and West, and the less developed ones, is to a very great extent misleading. Yet, if we want to categorize, we may consider at least four, still heterogeneous, worlds. The First World is made up by the resource-rich industrialized countries, which means, essentially, the United States and the Soviet Union. Canada and Australia belong, although not fully, to this group. The Second World is made up of the industrialized nations that are poor in natural resources, like Europe and Japan. A wide range of standards and motivations can be detected within this group. Then there is the Third World of nonindustrialized or not yet industrialized countries, which, however, possess oil and other riches in raw materials, such as Venezuela and Kuwait, Ecuador and Nigeria. The Fourth World is that desperate group of lands, the poorest among the poor, which can count on neither industry nor resources. When we exclude for a moment China, they are inhabited by one-third of the world population and actually are the one-third that outbreeds all the others. Let me repeat that within the bodies of each of these groups we can, moreover, draw just as many dividing lines as there are natural, political, or cultural barriers within them.

In all our current projects, the world system is regionalized, namely, is considered as formed by some ten or twelve main regions or subsystems representing different levels of development, dynamics of evolution, and political or ideological orientations. The hard fact of our age, however, in spite of all these obvious divisions and heterogeneities, is that the interlinkages and interdependencies are so dominant, and growing, that all these regions are in reality bound into one single system.

Life on our planet constitutes an immense web of interactions. All problems are interconnected; none can be isolated from the mass and dealt with separately. All activities, all nations, regions, and regimes are interdependent in one single world. What we have got to acquire - and I believe over these past five years many people are beginning to acquire - is the perception that all peoples and nations are partners in this unique, small, and fragile world and that they are ultimately and inescapably bound together by a common destiny.

I know from my own observations that Marxist scholars such as Professor Jermen M. Gvishiani of the USSR and Professor Adam Schaff of Poland take a lively interest in Club of Rome activities. But will Eastern European representatives enter the inner circle of the club as members?

We consider ourselves a cross section of the most advanced portions of

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mankind. We are eager to have more colleagues with a Marxist formation, particularly from socialist countries. So far, there are club members from only two of these countries. But, after all, it is not that important in our Club of Rome philosophy whether someone is a member or not. What counts is that our group as a whole is in tune with the world problématique and I think that this is precisely what socialist countries perceive more and more that we are. In December, 1973, I attended a high-level East-West conference in Prague. It was already clear to me, but I then had the confirmation, that also in Eastern Europe the leadership is increasingly aware and worried over the character, magnitude, and dynamics embodied by world problems. This happens, in my opinion, for two main reasons. One is that up till recently the socialist countries were satisfied that the problems of the West and, more generally, the ills of the world, were a pure consequence of capitalism. They thought that socialist nations would be largely immune to them. Now, they readily admit that, whatever the social system, there are problems we all have in common and others which have become so large and intractable that the joint efforts of all peoples and nations are prerequisite for meeting them with a modicum of success. This may be something new for many people in the West, but it has now become a fact that also in the West it is realized that these overarching problems stand out so formidably that they must be faced collectively, regardless of ideology. And a second reason for this new attitude by socialist countries lies in the fact that they now recognize the need to provide a constant horizontal connection among different groups of disciplines, to match the complex nature of contemporary problems and their organic interlinkages. It is in the tradition of scientific activity in socialist countries to base research in a large number of specialized institutions, separating the one from the other, each dealing in depth with a limited sector or problem. This strict verticalization is going to change or at least is going to be complemented by strong interdisciplinary connections and preparations. Great strides are thus being made in Eastern Europe toward the Club of Rome-type approach to problems of modern society and the future. This will greatly enhance and facilitate our dialogue with them.

Professor Gvishiani also informed me that the USSR is now likewise engaged in MIT-type studies of the future based on methods of systems analysis.

No doubt, they have excellent mathematicians and systems analysts who are capable of applying existing methods or devising new ones to understand, correlate, interpret, and represent complex human systems. East-West communications and collaboration will be made easier by mutual

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exchanges in these matters. But when one moves from formulas and algorithms into plain language, some difficulties arise. Translations are complicated jobs. Take systems analysis, which is a general omnibus concept even with us. In the USSR, there is a different method of grouping knowledge and concepts in this field, putting them under the general umbrella of cybernetics. One of the objectives, and certainly not an easy one, of the newly founded International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna, of which Dr. Gvishiani himself is the chairman, is to systematize and harmonize the glossary across the language barrier.

In Volume I of these conversations, I quoted you as indicating that the Club of Rome was then, in 1972, entering a second generation of projects.

As you well know, after the first study of Limits to Growth we immediately sponsored an entire series of new projects, now well under way. I will refer here to some of them. One of the major problems facing mankind in the remaining decades of this century - and most likely also during the next century - is the tremendous growth of the world population, which among other unfathomable consequences is bringing unprecedented pressure to bear on the limited resources at our disposal. Barring catastrophic calamities, it is practically certain that the world population will double its present size within the next thirty to thirty-five years. In our Problems of Population Doubling Project we want to tackle the simple but primary question of whether it will be possible to provide every citizen on the globe with minimal requirements to live a decent life. For the moment, in our model the question is being considered only as far as food is concerned. But other human needs are no less fundamental. They are the targets of further research.

Perhaps one of our most ambitious world-model studies is what has been tentatively called Strategy for Survival or Declining Options for Mankind, and, finally, Mankind at the Turning Point. These models will show that people are actually at a crossroads not only intellectually but also semantically when they venture to scan the future. This project is based on methodologies and regional or national models within a world context which are the basis of what can be developed to become a planning and options-assessment tool for long-range policy alternative; a tool which, by showing the possible outcome of different policy choices, can implicitly indicate ways and means for conflict prevention as well. This aid to decision makers will increase in importance with the narrowing of the freedom of choice imposed on all world protagonists by conditions of the global system and by a completive interplay among all nations and regional groups. In particular,

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in situations of stress or danger, the current practice of subjective, intuitive, and often emotional evaluation of options, without any rational means of appraising their consequences, may become extremely dangerous.

The world system is represented in this project by interlinked regional models, namely North America, Western Eugope, Eastern Europe, Japan, and other developed countries, South and Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Each model is structured heirarchically, with geophysical, ecological, technical, economic, institutional, sociopolitical, value-cultural and human-biological levels according to the state and culture of each region. Specific simulation models to study the phenomena of demography, of energy production and consumption, and of food production and land use have been developed. The central part of the project is the economic system.

Another particular feature of this project is its recognition of both the adaptiveness of human systems and the purposive aspects of human communities. This will, we hope, eliminate the stigma of being ‘mechanistic’ or ‘technocratic’ generally attributed to computer-based reasoning. Its techniques are in fact conceived as an aid to goal-seeking policymakers and give wide entry to the motivations, values, and norms which inspire our real actor: man. As said, these models should enable those of us who have the heavy responsibility of making policy analyses or decisions to evaluate alternative options at all levels of the decision-making process. A ‘game’ between man and computer will thus, we hope, produce more useful choices and in the long run fruitful experience in the conduct of human affairs in our ever more difficult world.

What is the major conclusion that all these studies and research programs of the present problématique will lead to?

I think that the outcome will lead to the general acceptance of two basic ideas as the imperatives of the present. One is the idea summarized at the Salzburg informal meeting of senior statesmen convened by the Club of Rome¹, namely, that nowadays, whether we are black or white or brown, from East or West, North or South, and whatever our ideologies might be, we must have something in common as a primary, vital priority - a sense of solidarity on a truly world scale. Without it, one day our world will crumble in ruins, dragging us all to disaster with it. So many of us still feel bound by national frontiers, by the allegiance to a certain flag, or by a certain culture. But we are now being forced to expand our views and make the quantum jump that is necessary to shift our allegiance to mankind as a whole and to consider the entire globe as our true fatherland, since no human group can

1 A Club of Rome Conference held in Salzburg, Austria, attended by the Presidents of Mexico and Senegal; the Prime Ministers of Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands; the Chancellor of Austria; and numerous other high officials from other countries.

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any longer expect to have an altogether different destiny from the other. Our individual futures will reflect that of the mass of all of mankind.

This is what Indira Gandhi expressed in Stockholm in 1972 when she challenged mankind to look upon fellow human beings and all living things ‘with the eyes of a friend.’

Indeed, despite the fact that too many of us still say one thing and do something else. But we will be compelled to change, if not by brotherly love, then by sheer self-interest, and to develop a keen solidarity with all humans and with all life generally if we intend to survive.

The second general idea our projects help to propagate is that fundamental changes are needed in the structure and governance of human society. Most people by now agree that the present economic order of the world is unjust and operating very badly. It no longer suits the situation in which mankind finds itself. It must be changed, and the sooner it changes the better, because in order to forge ahead, the world desperately needs an economic order which fulfills the job of assuring the well-being of nearly four thousand million people now and many more in the foreseeable future.

How can one devise a new economic order and get it accepted by some 150 states?

That is what President Houari Boumédiene of Algeria stressed in his opening address at the special session of the United Nations General Assembly last April in New York. He raised the question of what he called the scandal of the present economic order. I totally agree, and hope that we will be able to contribute positively to the search for this new economic order. But at the same time - although I must recognize that this is never explicitly admitted - the political order of the world must also be reformed. The concept of the national sovereign state does not correspond to modern realities. To base a new international economic order on the unstable, irrational, obsolete structure of present-day world society, which upholds as a sacrosanct principle the concept of national sovereignty, is like building a castle on sand. I can fully understand that paladins of the idea of national sovereignty when they stand up in defense of small nations threatened with being gobbled up by the big empires. But their reasoning against the rule that might is right in the international arena is not a good enough justification of the idea of the national state in itself. The contrary is true. Particularly when a national state is itself - as often occurs - a persecutor of minorities. If we are not able to move quickly away from a situation in which world society is fragmented into these 150 some state entities of entirely different sizes and

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power, each one claiming quasidivine rights and ready to impose on the others the rights to lie, cheat, and bribe whenever its parochial ‘supreme national interests’ are questioned, then it will be not only difficult, but wholly impossible, to construct a new economic order for the entire globe. Therefore, I feel that the proposals of President Boumédiene, as well as those of President Echeverría of Mexico for a new charter of rights and duties of states, have to be most seriously studied and accepted as necessary, healthy acts of innovation on the short term, in the spirit that first things come first; but that a deep reform of the very basis of society is needed if mankind is to get out of its present predicament. In a way, this second idea also may be absorbed within the new concept of worldwide solidarity. If you are aboard a sinking ocean-liner, there must be solidarity between crew and passengers, otherwise a riot would develop and all would perish. The new rules or the new order would be those on the lifeboats, and no longer those of the liner. Our forefathers were still living by a solidarity tied to the boundaries of France or Sweden, for example. Today we will have to go beyond these limits. Our fatherland is now the world.

In 1950, the world counted seventy-five cities of over one million inhabitants. In the year 2000, there will be 275 such metropolises. Take Bandung, Indonesia: It will increase within twenty-five years from 1.2 to 4.2 million.

And Calcutta might well swell to thirty million inhabitants by the year 2000. If not strictly regulated, Mexico City and Såo Paulo may well go up to twenty million. The fate of these four cities and that of other megalopolises in which our children will be obliged to live or from which they will try to escape will influence the fate of entire mankind. The seats of power are located in these centers. But this does not change the picture. We can only imagine with horror what will be the psyche or the reactions of the citizens of those monstrous conglomerations. There is, however, some hope. Already, while in all continents, people are discussing essential problems of population, hunger, energy, environment, and so forth, it is generally the city dwellers who first realize that whatever differences they may have with their neighbors, they must find a way of living together. Crammed into small spaces, they grasp that coexistence has become synonymous with survival. The hope is therefore that, similarly, the dire necessity of some sort of global response, organization, and programming is dawning on them.

I am a qualified optimist in this sense. The creative revolutionary potential of the very idea that a new political and economic order in a not too distant future is not utterly utopian is as yet difficult to perceive. Many things may

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be set into motion; the constituent period of a world society may be approaching. The myriad meetings and conferences on world issues we witness today are probably nothing less than the forerunners of what one day will be a world constituent assembly.

Willy-nilly, mankind is being pushed by its knowledge and technology, as well as its problems and difficulties, toward a new kind of society which has got to embrace the entire planet. It therefore behooves our generation to devise the institutions, the instrumentalities, the decision-making processes, and the rules of life which can bring this world society together and transform it into a just and orderly place.

This gestation of a bigger and more viable unit may well be compared with what happened in Germany some 150 years ago at the time of the Zollverein, when a customs union proved to be the only way toward political unification. It may be likened also to the movements that took place in Italy prior to unification. On our peninsula there were many different states - kingdoms, grand duchies, plus regions under alien rule, including the Pope's Vatican. Each had its own potentate. Nevertheless, this untenable fragmentation was done away with and a new political unit, Italy, was formed. A similar movement can be traced back to many other states and is now in the offing in certain vast regions. Is it a pipedream to imagine that in a not too distant future this is bound to happen for the whole of the world?

There is no doubt, in my opinion, that human society is now going through the birth pangs of something that will in many ways supersede the national state. I do not advocate a world government. But there is the need for an entire gamut of new institutions, most of them having a base wider than most of today's nations or coalitions. It would be totally illusory and deceptive to assume that in creating these new organizations we would simply have to amplify the present ill-functioning national organizations. Theoretical efforts and pragmatic insights are urgently required to envisage new models of sociopolitical institutions which could bring and hold society together and make it operate satisfactorily in the interest of all human groups at all necessary levels, including the global level.

Still, what is very much on my mind is the crucial question of how can we - or the Club of Rome with its vital recommendations - put these findings and suggestions into practical action?

We should consider three steps. The first is to grasp the reality of each situation and understand it before acting. No one can act intelligently without knowing approximately the nature and possible evolution of the situations and problems to be dealt with. The second step is, on the basis of

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this newly acquired knowledge, to define what can be done, what are the feasible policies recommendable, and what are their possible outcomes. No less than the first one, this phase will be a continuous affair, because adjustments and corrections are likely to be introduced from time to time into any policy course. And the third step is to move from policy decisions to policy implementations. These three functions continuously overlap and interact, of course. They must also be attuned to cultural and political realities. For instance, it is impossible to devise policies and strategies without considering the qualities and defects of the people for whom they are intended, or to neglect their limitations, their idiosyncrasies, their wishes, or their motivations. Fundamentally, therefore, these are our challenges: first, understand; second, resolve what to do on the basis of our newly acquired knowledge. And third, act accordingly.

The Club of Rome's purpose is to face these three steps in the global long-term context. Of course, being just private citizens from many countries, we have no mandate ourselves to make or suggest decisions. We can act as the conscience of policymakers, or as their advisers, or as catalysts for a more humane and rational course to be followed. In these roles, exercised directly or through the mass media, we are in contact with all kinds of decision makers or policy influencers from all strata of world society, with government leaders, with international organizations, with unions - but, of course, it is not up to us to set action in motion in one way or the other.

The attitude and response of the public at large is, however, of capital importance. I am convinced that there is a large and growing number of people available ready to accept - even at the cost of personal sacrifice - vigorous changes in the world's orientation and organization. If the mass of the people fully understand why these changes have become necessary, it is in this direction that I think our major efforts should be directed.