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Hazel Henderson
We would like to begin now this session where we look at our world today. We hav heard many wise voices in the past two days reminding us of human weakness, follies, barbarism and misdirected knowledge and technologies of domination, conflict and environmental destruction. And yet we must keep faith with our children. And so let us be naive today, and let us look for those examples of refinement of the human spirit, of creativity, of servant leadership as we think of the death of Mother Theresa. And let us also remember that we can encourage our communications media to amplify such exemplary lives as hers. And yet I quote from President Václav Havel who said that a media can disseminate the spirit of understanding, humanity, human solidarity and spirituality or they can stupefy whole nations and continents.
And just as the use of atomic energy depends only on our sense of responsibility, so the proper use of television's power to enter practically every household and every human mind depends on our sense of responsibility as well. So in order to get into this debate about options, possibilities, responsibilities and dilemmas in our quest for a better world, I took the liberty of making a paper so that I don't have to take up the time of the group today. And I just wish to acknowledge the leadership of President Havel not only in convening this Forum 2000 but for exemplifying the kind of integrity and vision that voters all over the world seek in their leaders. So let us now move to discussing the global forces that we have unleashed and that will indeed create greater balance in the 21st century. We have nine brilliant and distinguished speakers this morning to explore these great questions. And so we will begin in the order in which they are enlisted in your programme, starting with President Richard von Weizsäcker. Please, the floor is yours.
Richard von Weizsäcker
Madam Chairperson, thank you very much. You have not made my task easier by your introduction since my background is the very trivial experience of a politician. And I think I ought to stick to my experiences and not go too much further. Permit me to present to you three short observations. Coming from Berlin myself I would like to take up once more the warnings that the fall of the Berlin wall is in danger of succumbing to trivialisation. During the cold war we seemed to know fairly well what to do: we wanted to stand up for freedom against suppression and dictatorship. Nowadays it seems that it was sometimes easier to fight for freedom than to prove ourselves able and worthy to live up to the chances and options of a more or less undisputed freedom. After the end of the east-west confrontation large new parts of the world and Europe are heading for democracy and capitalism.
Both those systems seem to follow the rules of free competition: Competition for votes and majorities in democracies, competition for customers and material gain on the markets. But the spread of capitalism seems to progress more quickly and to dominate the notion of what competition is about. We sometimes fail to notice the differences. And the free market competition makes a choice between success and failure. The stronger ones are rewarded; nobody takes care of the weaker. And in democracy competition decides the mandate of responsible leadership. No free and liberal democracy can survive in the long run without respect for minorities, without care for the weak, without provision for social justice. This is what we have to seek majorities for - to fulfil those goals. We've learned that lesson from the outset by the father of our market economy, Adam Smith from Glasgow.
In the time of open borders, free trade and the flow of information, know-how and capital, we seem to forget such basic insights. The economically powerful and mobile minorities in our societies are able to emigrate while the national political authorities remain back home with the vast majority of people and the social responsibility for them. In Europe we still have to learn the lesson of how to achieve global competitiveness without losing social cohesion at home. This is a special task, for instance, in my own country where the two systems of social welfare - with or without capitalism - have now merged into one common free market. But as far as I can see the same problem will also have to be solved everywhere in this continent.
There are of course positive effects to the rapidly growing global economic relations: the growing number of developing countries which are getting new chances thanks to their skills combined with cheaper prices. And there is the healthy and inevitable process in some of the old industrialised countries, including my own, to reform the welfare state. But there seems to be also a kind of downward competitive pressure at work, for instance most Latin American or south-east Asian nations, let alone Africa, cannot afford to meet American or western European level standards. But more trade with them, more investment in their countries - while it could be good for our economy - is not necessarily good for some of our citizens. There is in our country an increase in wage disparities between skilled and unskilled workers. And the gap seems to widen. There is both a moral and an economic need not to protect our jobs from cheaper goods produced by low-wage workers abroad. But it is in our interest that the workers in the poorer societies do better in the long run than they do today, which may be represented in the shape of stable democratic institutions and the application of principles as to how the human beings should be treated at work. This remains also one of the main responsibilities of those large internationally working companies which are rooted in our old industrialised countries.
Secondly, Madam Chairperson, I would like to refer to your contribution about what you call today's global casino. I would like to underline once more the badly needed function not of a world government but of an effective United Nations organisation. On the occasion of its 50th birthday, a number of proposals for the reform of the organisation have been put forward. Those 50 years have by no means been a sequence of failures. We are progressive in the respect of human rights. International law has been strengthened in its applicability. For instance, in our Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is an affiliated organisation of the United Nations, we have started no longer to strictly respect the old principle of non-interference in domestic affairs. There has been a slow, nevertheless a substantial, influence in cases like the war in Chechnya, a deconstructive interference in the way the Baltic republics treat their large Russian minorities and the like. Of course there are very serious lessons of failures by the United Nations but the main failures are not the guilt of the staff or the general secretary or the affiliated agencies but the responsibility of the member-states unable or unwilling to cooperate. And then, in particular, the permanent members of the Security Council.
The United Nations organisation of today is outmoded. It was legitimately founded on the idea of preventing the outbreak of a Third World War. Its agencies and power have been distributed in a way to achieve that goal. So the main interest of that organisation were questions of military security. But the main dangers for the majority of the world population of today were unknown in 1945. Population growth, emerging new sovereign nations too weak to survive, incredible injustice between south and north on the globe, migrations, civil wars, the protection of nature, pollution and the like. It is not military thinking and actions which will be able to cope with the basic sources of those dangers.
We need institutions inside the United Nations with power comparable to that of the Security Council, including organisations like the IMF and the World Bank, to work outside the United Nations guidelines - but not focusing primarily on military matters. Although in a footnote I would like to add that a rapid deployment force of the United Nations might have been able to prevent some confrontations early enough, in my view it is ridiculous to discuss nothing of the possible squandering of the small amounts of the United Nations budget by the staff, given that the overall budget of the UN is smaller than the budget of my own city of Berlin, let alone the budget of our armaments. Why cannot the United States - that great, magnanimous and idealistic country - finally make up its mind whether it would like seriously to join the UN - yes or no - instead of either instrumentalising or neglecting the UN.
Let me thirdly, Madam Chairperson, make one final observation. I was deeply impressed both by the way Elie Wiesel was characterising history and how President Václav Havel in his introductory remarks was asking for general and very personal spiritual guidelines. I'm profoundly grateful for my invitation to this place to which all of us in Europe look with deep admiration and confidence. I'm grateful for the expression of our hope by the testimonies last night in the Saint Vitus' cathedral. Once more we are aware of the enormous challenges and responsibilities of the religions and churches and temples around the world. Nobody can or wants to deny any religion its specific deep belief of truth. But far too often ideological or theological or even power-based religious disputes have disturbed rather than helped peace.
Even in the case of former Yugoslavia we have witnessed sometimes more confrontations than appeasement by some of the churches involved. No religion will have to give up its basic truths and order if they unite together in their ethical convictions as to a global civilisation. We have been encouraged by the universal declaration of human responsibilities proposed here in this room by the interaction council that is to say by a number of distinguished elderly political leaders from all continents. Why could we not hear from the responsible religious leaders encouragement going beyond the praying for peace? Pledging for a rather concrete catalogue of ethical behaviors by individuals, by market participants, and by nations at the threshold of the next century, with its opportunities and chances. Thank you, Madam Chairperson.
Hazel Henderson
I must say I very much appreciate all of your remarks, but particularly those relating to the United Nations. And, as an American citizen, I feel extremely responsible in terms of supporting this organisation. If it were not there, we would have to invent it. I believe it is one of the great social innovations of the 20th century. And now I would like to call on Dr. Fritjof Capra. He is the director of the Centre for Eco-literacy and he is going to talk about eco-literacy: the challenge for education in the next century.
Fritjof Capra
Thank you, Madam Chairperson. It is a tremendous honour for me to participate in this unique gathering and I would like to thank President Havel and Mr. Wiesel for giving me this tremendous opportunity. Over the past two days we have discussed human rights and responsibilities, democracy, nation states and just now the UN, the role of religion, of the arts, of the human spirit and many other issues, all of which belong to the realm of human consciousness and culture.
I would like now to broaden the focus of our discussion to include a non-human ecological dimension. As our century draws to a close, the great challenge is to create sustainable communities, that is, communities which embody social, cultural and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations. In our attempts to build and nurture sustainable communities we can learn valuable lessons from ecosystems because ecosystems are in fact sustainable communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms. To understand these lessons of nature we need to learn the basic principles of ecology. You could say we need to learn how to speak the language of nature. In other words, we need to become ecologically literate or eco-literate. Now it turns out that to understand the principles of ecology we need a new way of seeing the world and a new way of thinking. Thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness and context. In science this new way of thinking is known as "systems thinking". It emerged during the first half of the century in several disciplines in which scientists explored living systems, be they living organisms, ecosystems or social systems, and recognised that all these living systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts.
"Systems thinking" has been raised to a new level during the past 25 years with the development of the science of complexity, including a whole new mathematical language and a new set of concepts to describe the complexity of living systems. The emerging new theory of living systems is the theoretical foundation of ecological literacy. Instead of seeing the universe as a machine composed of elementary building blocks, scientists have discovered that the material world is ultimately a network of inseparable patterns of relationships, that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. The view of the human body as a machine and of the mind as a separate entity is being replaced by one that sees not only the brain but also the neural system, the bodily tissues and even each cell as a living, cognitive system.
Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence but rather as a co-operative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. This new vision of reality informed by eco-literacy will form the basis of our future technologies, economic systems and social institutions. Either that or there will be no future for humanity. It is obvious that this has profound implications for education in the 21st century. It will require a pedagogy that puts the understanding of life at its very centre, in the experience of learning that overcomes our alienation from the natural world and rekindles a sense of praise, a curriculum that teaches our children the fundamental facts of life: that one species' waste is another species' food; that matter cycles continually through the chain of life; that the energy driving all the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life from its beginning of more than 3 billion years ago did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.
Teaching this new knowledge which is also ancient wisdom will be the most important role of education in the next century. Now because of its intellectual grounding in systems thinking, eco-literacy offers a powerful framework for the systemic approach to school reform that is now widely discussed among educators in the United States and other countries. Systemic school reform is based on essentially two insights: a new understanding of the process of learning and a new understanding of leadership. Recent research in newer science and cognitive development has resulted in a new systemic understanding of the process of learning based on the view of the brain as a complex, highly adaptive, self-organising system. The new understanding recognises the active construction of knowledge in which all new information is related to past experience in a constant search for patterns and meaning. The importance of experiential learning, of diverse learning styles involving multiple intelligences and of the emotional and social context in which learning takes place. This new understanding of the learning process suggests corresponding instructional strategies. In particular, it suggests designing an integrated curriculum emphasising contextual knowledge in which the various subject areas are perceived as resources in service of the central focus.
A great boost to achieving such an integration is the approach called "project based learning", which consists of facilitating learning experiences that engage students in complex, real world projects, for example in elementary schools a school garden or a Greek restoration through which they develop and apply skills and knowledge. Such curriculum integration through ecologically oriented projects is possible only if the school becomes a true learning community in which teachers, students, administrators and parents are all interlinked in the network of relationships, working together to facilitate learning. In such a learning community the teaching does not flow from the top down, but there is a cyclical exchange of information. The focus on learning is on learning and everyone in the system is both a teacher and a learner. Feedback contributes to the learning process and feedback becomes the key purpose of assessment. Systems thinking is crucial to understand the functioning of learning communities. Indeed, the principles of ecology can also be interpreted as principles of community.
And, finally, the systemic understanding of learning, instruction, curriculum design and assessment can only be implemented with a corresponding practice of leadership. This new kind of leadership is inspired by understanding a very important property of living systems which has been identified and explored only recently. Every living system occasionally encounters points of instability at which some of its structures break down and new structures emerge. This is what was mentioned yesterday as bifurcation points. The spontaneous emergence of order, of new structures and new forms of behavior is one of the hallmarks of life. In other words, creativity, the generation of forms that are constantly new is a key property of all living systems. Leadership therefore consists, to a large extent, in continually facilitating the emergence of new structures and incorporating the best of them in the organisation's design. This type of what you could call systemic leadership is not limited to a single individual but can be distributed, and responsibility then becomes a capacity of the whole. In summary, eco-literacy includes three components: understanding the principles of ecology, thinking systematically, and using the principles of ecology and systems thinking as the context and language for systemic school reform. As our century comes to a close and we go toward beginning of the new millennium, the survival of humanity will depend on our ability to understand the principles of ecology, and act and live accordingly. This is an enterprise that transcends all our differences of race, culture or class. The earth is our common home, and creating a sustainable world for our children and for future generations is our common task. Thank you very much.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you very much for those very innovative and interesting concepts. And now I would like to give the floor to Mr. Cornel West, who is a Professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard University and a respected authority in the field of racial and social equality. Doctor West.
Cornel West
Thank you, Madam Chairperson. First I'd like to say that it is a blessing to be here and I'd like to thank my good friend, Elie Wiesel, and my good friend and brother and president of this grand republic for asking me to come and asking my wife to come. I've had a wonderful time. Where there is no vision, the people perish. More than any other issue as we move into the 21st century, it seems to me that we must talk about a new vision especially for a younger generation. Every generation has to find resources and to put forward responses to the problem of evil. How do we account for, understand, and attempt to overcome, the massive undeserved suffering, the pain, the unjustified grief and unnecessary misery in the world? Every generation has its own insights and blindness, every generation has its own virtues and vices.
But the present generation, it seems to me, is more and more overwhelmed by this problem, and is paralysed partly because they do not see a credible vision that would allow us to master the courage to want to sacrifice enough to make the world a better place. If you allow me to use my imagination I would like to think about 100 years ago, 1897, convening in Prague major themes: consolidation of the nation-state, fanned by ferocious nationalisms and Masaryk, our time's only instance of a grand Czech nationalist, the expansion of empire fanned by jingoistic imperialisms inextricably linked to the vicious legacy to white supremacy. What would the conversation sound like, would the French actually wrestle with Dreyfus? Would the Germans actually wrestle with the Berlin conference of 1884? Would the Americans really speak candidly about their new immigrants, and the women's movement? Would the Brits talk about the stirrings of the Boer war and the beginnings of the shakings of their empire in South Africa? What I am trying to say is how do we lovingly and self-critically examine what we overlook in 1997 in the same way that so many of our forefathers and foremothers would overlook what was going on in 1897?
The difference, for me, is that in 1897 you had two visions being articulated and people were willing to fight and willing to die for certain visions. One was the grand enlightenment vision of progress. The second one the romantic vision of Utopia. So that some nationalists were autocratic; some were democratic, but they were fighting. And even in the imperialism sometimes well-intended Christians were intending to Christianise and to civilise others. Those same Christians were subordinating and degrading, but they were willing to die for something. In 1997, where is the vision such that young people could be really full of passion not just for the nativistic and xenophobic forms but for democracy and for the renewal of public life? That for me is the crucial question. And again I'd allude to our audience that of course we can never forget the moment when the enlightenment vision of progress and the romantic notion of Utopia were being articulated.
And Thomas Hardy was saying: "I can see just the little flickerin' candle in the darkness call'd the dartin' thrush, that very frail and gaunt and small as well in the fling of soul upon the glaring gloom." Why? Because he saw darkness looming, a symbol of slow destruction, self-destruction like Chekhov's Seagull and Ibsen's Wild Duck. Deep symbols. The wonderful essay by William James published in the last year of his life called The Moral Equivalent of War. In the essay he speaks directly to the younger generation. How can we find heroic ideals that are not linked to the battlefield, rather wrestling poverty, psychic pain, low levels of self-confidence and self-respect and self-esteem?
In 1997, it seems to me, if we cannot come out with a vision that allows the process to really believe, it is life we are sacrificing, then much of our talk will rebound because the younger generation are being led by two dominant forces at the present moment: the weakening of the nation state, the emptying out of public life, the difficulty of convincing them that public service is itself appealing and attractive. And, of course, market forces, high levels of intensity, the broadening of scope that those market forces are bringing with them, new ways of being in the world, narcissistic, hedonistic, individualistic. We see more and more pessimism, cynicism and nihilism among the younger generation. I'm not talking about the older folk. How can we talk about hope at the end of this century with the younger generation, which is devastated by the erosion of the systems of caring and nurturing, leaving them more and more isolated, lonely and sad, alienated?
In part, that is what Princess Di's death is about: a symbol of some connectedness, some compassion in the world in which we're so unrelated, disconnected. It is especially true for the younger generation, it seems to me. And I deeply appreciate the fact that you allowed me to say a word about hope because it is very difficult to talk about hope and I'm not talking about optimism. Optimism is an anomie, alien more and more to the younger generation. It's not going to be about generating evidence and trying to convince them that things are going to get better. No, not at all. But hope is something else. Hope is fighting against the odds. Hope is following a vision. Because it's right and moral to fight for democracy, because it is the way of being in the world, not just based on utilitarian and consequentialist formulation. That for me is a crucial challenge. And I do think that we have a chance. Hardy reminds us that it depends on what we do, depends on how courageous we are, depends on how broad our vision actually is. Thank you.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you, Dr. West. And for ending on that note that hope indeed is following a moral vision. And now I would like to give the floor to Dr. Claude Jasmin who is going to give us his vision.
Claude Jasmin
The future of health care is one of the responsibilities and duties of man in the 21st century. In the 20th century health care has always been seen as part of certain Utopia, especially since World War Two. The WHO then gave a definition of health which was rather revolutionary: that health is a state of complete social, physical and medical welfare. I think that this definition was revolutionary. And now at the onset of the third millennium we can ask ourselves a question: How are we doing today 50 years after this definition was first formulated?
We can draw on a number of sources, a number of data that help us draw certain conclusions. Not a long time ago the World Bank commissioned a study together with the WHO with the Harvard Public Health School. This study looked at our prospects for the future. The first piece of news, which is rather important, is a good piece of news: we will all have longer life expectancy. This is true of both the economically advanced countries and also developing countries, that is in the poor countries. Everywhere the average life expectancy has been on the increase. For women in economically developed countries life expectancy should go up from 81 to 88 years. While in economically developing countries on average we will see an increase up to 75 years, although there are countries that are faring slightly worse where the average life expectancy in 2020 will be only 66 years. As for men, the prospects are less optimistic. In the rich advanced countries men expect to live to 78 but in the sub-Saharan countries it is less than 57 years.
What are the causes of death today? In the developed countries it is the cardiovascular and brain diseases, that altogether represents 37.8 percent of all death causes. These are followed by pulmonary diseases in 6.5 percent. You can see the enormous difference between the two sets of causes of disease. The third ranks cancer of the lungs and infections of the respiratory tracts - chronic failure of the respiratory system as well as cancer of the digestive tract. This is followed by road accidents and by suicides and, when we look at the causes of death in the developed countries, what we see is that we die of causes that could probably be prevented, that are related directly to our lifestyles and also to our behavior.
On the other hand in the developing countries it is usually the infectious diseases that represent the main scourge, as well as infant mortality, birth-related mortality and so forth. Altogether these account for 60.5 million deaths per year. There is also malnutrition or bad conditions in terms of hygiene, domestic hygiene, public hygiene and so forth. All these are causes of death in these countries and again this could be prevented. But we also have another piece of good news and that is that we can expect that there will be a decrease of 30 percent in death rates in these countries too. In Africa and India the death rates should go down by one-third. So this is a piece of good news and it does generate new expectations for all of us at least in terms of the actual length of our life. In the economically advanced countries some ask themselves: How far can we go? I do not think we can expect to live longer than 120 years. And, on average, I believe that it will not be more than 90 or 95 years and this will probably be the norm.
We will still be dying of cardiovascular diseases, we will still be dying of cancer. The only difference will be in the fact that these will occur later than they do today. Today what we are seeing is that in the conditions we know from advanced countries it is not only the actual number of years but also the quality of our life that is at stake. The problem is that until today we have not been able to measure the quality of life and the study that I have quoted here brings something new in this respect because the data on life expectancy does not tell us anything about the actual quality of our lives and now we have a new index - years of life lost, an index that includes all premature deaths. Premature death is the difference between your life expectancy at the time of birth, in other words the number of years you can expect to live when you are born (at present this is 88 years for the female population in Japan and also in France), and you subtract the actual number of years that person has lived. In other words, for example, a woman who should die at the age of 88, but dies at the age of 40 she is loosing 48 years. But between 15 and 30, 75 and 85, the quality of life is completely different. In other words, we should always remember this aspect of quality of the years of life.
Then we have a new measure called DAL - Disability Adjusted Life, that is the years you lose due to invalidity, due to some handicaps. What this expresses is a certain relative value of different disabilities. For example, a man who has only one leg in fact has lost a certain number of years. Somebody who is completely paralysed is loosing 85 percent of the quality of life. If you suffer from deep depressions then you are losing up to 60 percent of the quality of your life. In other words, we are talking about two different instruments: years of life lost and disability adjusted life year and these two instruments can help us cast new light on these data.
How can we use these instruments? I do not have time to describe this in integrate detail but I can refer you to my written paper. What is interesting here is that we have realised recently how important a role is played also by mental diseases in this context. Mental diseases seem to be of great significance in all these statistics. It seems that the most awful among these is unipolar depression. In the year 2020 we can expect that these mental diseases, together with cardiovascular diseases, will rank first and second among the main causes of death. In terms of the quality of life this is true of every corner of this planet. And this is something that I believe should lead us to certain changes in our health care policy. How could we prevent these mental diseases? How do they effect our lifestyles?
Another thing that is important is the question of violence, be it deliberate or not: that is, violence that you cause yourself or to somebody else. For example, road accidents will in 2020 rank as the third main cause of death taking into account all the indices that I have mentioned here. In the year 2020, this will be one of the three main causes of death.
Another problem is alcoholism. Of course this is something of which you all are aware, but perhaps you do not know that in Russia after 1987 life expectancy for men fell by four years. After 1987, there was a decrease in life expectancy not only among the male population in Russia but also among the female population and this is terrible. Chronic as well as acute alcoholism is pandemic in Russia. This is the main cause of this dramatic decrease in life expectancy in Russia. The same is true of smoking, of course. Lung cancer will soon be the fourth largest cause of death in the world. In some developing countries it is currently the second most frequent cause of death.
What conclusions can be drawn from this? I think that we can say that we are very happy that a child born in India or in sub-Saharan Africa will have a better chance to reach the age of 15 because some years ago this chance was rather small. But what will happen then to this child after he or she has reached the age of 15? Will this child have a place in this society? Will this child not be exploited by the adults? We have been discussing this also with our Indian colleagues and they were saying that it is not enough to save a child's life but it is equally important to create conditions that are favorable for such a child. A small child or a little child should never be targeted by those who design advertisements and commercials for tobacco companies. How can we prevent this child from being run down by a car in a road accident? Are we ready to face all these challenges? Let's make a unique example from smoking. We have known for more than 40 years that smoking is not good for you and what we are seeing today is a trial taking place in Florida where Philip Morris's executive manager is asked: "Do you really believe that one person has died because he or she has smoked?" And he thinks for a while and than he says: "Perhaps".
In the United States we have seen new developments in this respect but we are far from being able to talk about a general or universal policy aimed against smoking. We believe that a policy based on prevention, based on improving the quality of life, should be seen as the objectives of not only our medical science but of our society as a whole. I know that this is not very easy because economists especially, when they hear about the prevention and support for health, will always say: "Well, well, well, but you must realise that this costs a lot of money and the results will not be with us earlier than in 30-40 years." But this is very short-sighted policy. The International Council for Progress in Health is a fairly small group bringing together personalities from all different works of life - doctors, scientists and also people like Elie Wiesel, we are very honoured that Elie Wiesel is one of us.
This council is convinced that it is absolutely essential to have an international, multicultural approach towards health including this aspect of prevention and support for health. We would like to co-operate with politicians, with different associations, economists and so forth. Then we would like to ask them two questions: Do you think that promotion of health is economically sustainable and perhaps even profitable? And to what extent are you politicians ready to act in order to change all these behaviors that are harmful to health? These are the two questions that we would like to discuss at an international forum. We know today that much will depend on what we do rather than on something that is beyond our powers. This is a major challenge both for international organisations and for all individuals. We know that the tobacco industry in fact kills 20 percent of its customers and this is something that is quite legitimate.
Zheluty Zhelev
There is a maxim in the Moscow philosophy which often decorates the title pages of philosophical reviews and books. Life is an ascending spiral and only those who knows the shades of the past can make out the curves of the future. In this maxim we can find both a lesson and much truth. Without serious knowledge of the past one would hardly be convincing talking about the coming days. Because the past and the present give rise to the future. Otherwise any prognosis which omits to take into account contemporary determinations of the future would be rather a fortune-teller's prediction or a kind of conjuration. There is our own idea that the calendar theme coincides with this historical one or even that they are one and the same thing. An idea is suggested that on 31st December 1999 we shall say goodbye to the 20th century and on the 1st January 2000 we shall solemnly step into the 21st century and the third millennium and, if not changed, at least refilled and full of hopes. This makes me recall a joke by a Bulgarian poet from the 1960s named Epigram Written on 31st December 1999.
This month rolled by
This year slipped away
The century is gone
But man still idled not to come.
The epigram could of course be interpreted in various ways and mostly in moral aspects. But I would rather emphasise the lack of coincidence between the historical and the calendar time. Ladies and gentlemen, the historical and the calendar time do not coincide and this made it possible for the 20th century to end in 1989 and if someone doubts this, maybe he simply doesn't understand the time he lives in. The 20th century is the time of the two world wars, the time of political and social mass movements, the time of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles. It is the century of the totalitarian regimes, fascism and communism with concentration camps, gas chambers, mass slaughters, genocide. It is all over! It was over in 1989.
The ideas, the illusions, the dramatic events, ended ten years earlier than the expiration of the calendar time. And vice-versa. The 19th century met its inferences 18 years later because it did not end in December 31st 1899. The 19th century was won with the end of the First World War when all admiration for the ideas of the great France - the French Revolution, liberty, fraternity, equality - had turned out to be practically unattainable. It is interesting to mention that historically the 19th century, which started with the French Revolution and ended with the First World War, was 30 years longer than the calendar period. Well, the 20th century is 30 years shorter then its astronomical time. Probably the lack of coincidence between the historical and the calendar time refers to the other ages as well. And it is rather a rule than exception. This is quite understandable because the events that mark each historical epoch can last either more or less than 100 years.
There are enough facts which suggest that the next millennium will be a cosmic challenge - real space expansion in the framework of the sun's planet system. If that is true, then we may say that the cosmic millennium has already started in the middle of our 20th century with the launching of the first satellite, the first space flight around the earth and to the moon with a man aboard, with the cosmic crews to the faraway planets in the solar system. The earlier scientific roots of the cosmic millennium will take us back to the discoveries of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. And if you find in my words a naive prediction, I will make it more clear.
Mankind will never stop on the way to solve first all its earthly problems like starvation, poverty, unemployment, crime, violence, the big ecological problems etc., and only then start to study the universe and take possession of it. The problems of earth will never end but gradually the cosmic matter will become the major one and the key to the people's problem on earth. Mastering the nearer cosmos should not be treated only as a bottomless abyss. The cosmos is an infinite space of resources, new energies, metals, minerals. The whole of human history shows that the development of new civilisation is impossible without the boom of energy and information. Logically there will be a contradiction between the space aspiration and unsolved earthly problems for years, yet this is understandable too.
Progress has always been conflicting with ups and downs and sometimes the impulses might come from an unexpected side. The first space satellites and flights were made for achieving military goals and for political propaganda and the first space men were military men. Well now they are doctors, engineers, and scientists. But my belief that the next millennium will be the first cosmic one for mankind is based on the vast processes of globalization ongoing on our planet: the political and economical integration of countries on all levels, regional, continental, planetary.
The build-up of a common security system - a guarantee for the national security of each state, a common ecological protection system, the establishment of a common communications system, satellite TV channels, satellite phones, communications and finally the Internet. Of course, there was an integration in past ages as well, but now it is on a planetary level. The 18th century destroyed the barriers for good and paved the way to the nation-state. The 19th century developed industry and trade, and overcame national borders. The contribution of the 20th century is that it realised this process on a planetary scale, a premise for the space expansion, expansion in the coming millennium. A guarantee for the success of globalization and its stability are the lack of pressure and the wide advantages and potentials for each man and each country.
What we see now is a planetary process of integration which is not a threat to the nation-state, its sovereignty and the existence of specific national cultures. For the first time we are eyewitnesses of an integration keeping the differences between us and that is why there is no longer a need or compulsion to use the forces of imperialism. Reverting to the initial words of my short statement, I would say: At midnight on 31st December 1999, when the New Year of 2000 comes, there will not be any miracles; neither the doomsday will come nor the revelation. The last day of the old century will be similar to the first day of the new century except for the celebrations and the festive mood of the people and their hopes for a better future. It is even most likely for those who treat themselves to more wine on the night to miss the instant of the third millennium's coming.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you , Sir, for that beautiful vision of a cosmic millennium. I think as we watched TV today this fragile Mir space craft and two of our fellows humans up there. - it's a metaphor for the dangers and the opportunities. We indeed now do see one home - this beautiful living planet as it is, and I think we understand more that this planet is our school and if we don't learn to live with this planet and with its ways, we will never become interplanetary species. So for me it's a matter of human family is coming up to graduation time. Will we matriculate? Before opening the floor for debate I would like to call to speak Mr. Okamora.
Mr. Okamora
Good morning I am coming directly from Jerusalem now, from the student workshop. Jerusalem now is unfortunately on the pages of the newspapers again but I would like to report on the workshop on the theme of memorial architecture which took place in the city, organised by the Holocaust memorial in co-operation with Bet Sal Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.
There were a lot of lectures by professors from all over the world: architects, historians and even survivors of the Holocaust. The topic was: How to memorise, how to learn from history, how to transfer the personal experience of these cultural crises to the next generation because the generation of survivors is slowly disappearing? It was not only about the past. It was about the future, about the existential questions of society. It was not only about architecture; it was about philosophy, society, sociology.
There were a lot of questions on ethics. There is a lot of discussion nowadays about ethics in medicine, in different occupations and there was the question: Who was able to design the concentration camps? Who were the people, who were the architects who finished the best schools in Germany in Bauhaus? It is not only the question of the past. There was the research in the 1960s, just 15 or 20 years after the war, asking the students of the universities in the United States, Columbia University, if they would design the gas chambers, if they would be paid well. Although 95 or 96 percent of the students refused but after that they asked the professionals - the architects who had been in practice for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in the market economy just working for money and in this last group of 40 years in the practice, 40% were able to do the work.
It was just the tip of the iceberg. Then the research continued proposing tourist resorts in natural areas of the world where it was clear that the native culture would be destroyed, and much more smaller problems, and you can ask yourself what was the result. The result in the workshop was that more questions were raised than answered and the only thing we can conclude is that it is important to remember existence - and the real art is the art of living together. Thank you.
Cornel West
I appreciate the question. For me the democratic vision is precisely about that kind of maturity. By maturity, what I mean is a very deep and settled sense of history, a respect for reality without being captive to reality so you still attempt the change, and also the acknowledgement of mortality. That civilisations come and go, society will come and go, no matter. I think President Silber was talking about this radical contingency yesterday. When we talk about vision it does not have to mean fanciful vision. It's mature vision. It is what a democratic vision is. Improvement, amelioration, possible progress, not guaranteed progress. So I like the sobering up: that is very Chekhovian actually. I think Chekhov is quite sober but oh my God, he is so compassionate, and he confuses that sweetness of temper and the toughness of mind. Good democrats do that.
Serguey Kovalyov
I would just like to make a very small comment on the very interesting comment by President von Weizsäcker and I would very much like to also say how enthusiastic I was when I heard what Mr. Schmidt said, especially about his proposal for collective responsibility. I think that the most important task of this conference should be to prepare the conditions under which it would be possible to seek answers for the ethical challenges of the time. President Havel spoke of those challenges, and Elie Wiesel did too. It would be absolutely useless to discuss global problems without having the tools to effect the solution of these problems in an effective manner. I am very glad that the president's address included words of world government. I myself fantasised a bit on that topic a couple of days ago and what I had in mind of course was a relative interpretation of that concept of world government. What I had in mind was a certain supranational tool that would create conditions for defending rights beyond politics and above politics, some rights that would not depend on some kind of parity of politics. Of course we are being forced to except something else. Law and rights very often depend on politics and are subjected to it. And that is why I am sceptical as far as the United Nations is concerned.
I will not speak about how this organisation could be transformed or improved. I would just like to emphasise that of course it is useful. We do need a forum of representatives of national interests. It is useful but at the same time it is inadequate and, as an assembly of representatives of states, it cannot become effective. I also must say that my friend Andrei Sakharov understood this very well in 1972 and as early as that time he proposed that we approached other supranational organisations. This dictate of politics over law can be documented by two examples. Would other leaders have behaved differently in the case of the Chechnya war? Did you think that this war would last longer than two months? I think it would not. Their political fears and their political preferences cost us tens, hundreds of lives, lives of other people. And I stress the word other. At this conference, and this is the second example, we heard about another bloody tragedy in Jerusalem. A couple of days before this tragedy we could read that Yasser Arafat had refused to arrest terrorists and you can see that there is a certain dependence between these two events. And I can mention another event which also proves the dominance of policy over law. This was not in Jerusalem. This was in Oslo. The Norwegian parliament was holding its session there and also remembered that the terrorist Yasser Arafat is a Nobel Price laureate. And it was the Norwegian Parliament which is building up the authority of people of that kind. Thank you.
Vyaheslav Vsevolodovic Ivanov
I would like to make some comments in connections with two speeches, the very important talk by von Weizsäcker and the talk by Zhelev. I also agree that the remarks made by Weizsäcker in connection with the United Nations are very important. What we need, I think, is not only to support the United Nations in making some corrections to its work but also to add and complement it. What we need, I think, is some flexible way to shape public opinion with the help of intellectuals. Maybe the examples that were given just now by Sergey Kovalyov may serve as an illustration of the necessity of this. I have a suggestion: Can we try to establish a kind of permanent Internet network so that all of us might be connected by the e-mail and we may exchange important data? For instance, in connection with some new military ethnic conflict or with some ecological disaster we may quickly inform each other, not waiting for the slow process connected with different governments even in the Security Council. But intellectuals might react quickly and try to shape public opinion in their countries and in different countries. I think that we may help to participate in this. Of course this will be only a small part of all that is necessary to do but it is better to start and maybe then we will find some other things to do. This is my first remark.
The second remark is in connection with Zhelev's speech. I will try to be very short. I agree completely with what was said about the cosmic age. I might have added a lot about cosmic prehistory in Russia. It is very interesting because it is connected with the whole spirit of the conference started with the speech by President Havel. You know that the Russian cosmic experiment began with the philosophical ideas of some Russian authors of the 19th century. The great Russian philosopher Fjodorov was suggesting at the end of the 19th century that it was necessary to devote some necessary work to science. Otherwise science would have destroyed us. That was written in the time of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, who admired Fjodorov. He was never published in his life and even now he is not published completely. Fjodorov suggested that the resurrection of the dead, the physical resurrection, is a necessary task for science.
To start, we should begin with the cosmic exploration because it is necessary to have space for all the people who might be physically resurrected and that was the idea he told his student Ciolkovski, who was the founder of the Russian cosmic experiment, and the next important person was Koroljov who was the main engineer of the Russian cosmos. Koroljov supposed that it was his religious mission. He suffered much. He was in a camp and he told our first cosmonauts that God helped him to survive in the camp just to start the cosmic age. So I think that the prehistory of the Russian cosmos may be a good illustration of what you have said. Thank You.
Khotso Makhulu
I want to make the following observations. I heard Mr. von Weizsäcker referring to the IMF and the United Nations. From our experience of the Breton Woods institutes as they operated in Africa, I would not agree with my fellow countryman Mr. De Klerk. Botswana is where it is because of the diamonds it has, not because of the money it has received from the IMF. The IMF, the Breton Woods institutes in Africa with their policies and so on, have brought untold misery. And there is no question about it. The goods are maybe there but there is no money to buy them.
Secondly, we are living in a sick world and not just in terms of other maladies that can be treated like cancer and so on. I would like to link up the current violence and the experiences of various holocausts and genocide and ethnic cleansing. Regards the state of mind and mental health, I would ask what programmes have been put in place to bring about a restoration to wholeness and health? So that we do not just see the end result of violence and people killing each other if we are to have a vision. And finally, it seems to me that for the young people who have come back from Jerusalem - and others with the difficulty of unemployment - there is no guarantee that there is going to be employment for many young people. What vision for affirmation of the young do we have into the next millennium?
Frederik Willem De Klerk
Throughout the conference some contributions focused on a need for putting power in the hands of some authority, some global authority able to implement universal laws and to enforce human rights to make the world a better place. I just want to make the point that if power can be misused in a nation-state and if power can be misused in a region such as has happened in the old USSR than we must realise that power can also be misused in such a global authority of whatever nature. While I fully support the idea of reforms of the United Nations to make it more effective and of bringing about mechanisms which can ensure that we attain these goals we are striving for.
I would like to say that we have to bring in at least three guidelines in looking at this. The first is: Whatever is created, or however the United Nations is reformed, we need checks and balances at all levels of authority and government to prevent the misuse of power. Secondly we need to create "one-one situations". The moment that you create a situation where there are winners and losers you sow the seeds for the next confrontation and the next revolution. Thirdly, we need to recognise diversity. The solution for the problem of conflicting identities is not to try to destroy or to repress those identities. We have heard this from Mr Capra this morning. But to recognise that if you interfere with the system and its interrelationships then you really will not have peace. We need unity in diversity and not uniformity. I want to close by posing a question. If de-colonisation was the right thing to do, how do we prevent a new form of colonisation in the whole present process of regionalisation and globalization?
Jostein Gaarder
I just wanted to ask two questions. To Dr. Fitzgerald, who I think really made the very profound analysis, very important analysis and also in a way you gave a prescription. What we need is, as you said, systemic school reform and I agree with you. We are talking about ecological conscientiousness. My question is if it is possible to go a little bit further? Do you have an idea how we can achieve such a systemic school reform? Very often I experience that our conscientiousness and even ecological conscientiousness is very developed. But it does not change anything in practice. How can we make such a school reform?
And than to Professor Cornel West who I think actually asked the most important question so far concerning the old generation. How can we talk about the hope for the old generation? There is a pessimism, real pessimism. I totally agree with your diagnoses. I just want to ask if you yourself have any suggestions to an answer to the question. In the post-modern society, in your country for instance, how can we possibly influence such a hope for the old generation.
Seizaburo Sato
I have a short question to Dr Capra. I do agree with your point about the importance of creating a sustainable community, including non-human beings. As you discussed in the first day of the session, in order to do that we should overcome anthropocentrism. But at the same time during the past two days of discussions the importance of humanistic compassion have been repeatedly insisted. The widening gaps between the wealthy north and the poor south should be crossed, narrowed, not by lowering the living standards of the north but by rising the living standards of the south. But the natural result of that is more rapid population growth and a more massive scale of consumption of natural resources and that lead to the destruction of the ecosystem. How to resolve these two elements is the very important challenge we are facing. Thank you.
Hazel Henderson
In this next session, I hope we can focus on what we can do, both as responsible individuals in our own fields and what we can do together, to change our human ways or to change our lifestyles to address the enormous changes in our circumstances and to address the new conditions for our very survival. We have had some very interesting proposals that embody this kind of change. Helmut Schmidt's declaration of responsibilities, the suggestions about United Nations' reforms. There already is in the United Nations a task for working on creating a people's chamber and other mechanisms for a greater inclusion of civic society and non-governmental organisations and many other useful suggestions: how can we change education, how can we change the ways of relating to each other. So I hope we can focus on these things. Dr Riane Eisler who wants to be our first speaker is sick and unable to come and I am extremely happy that Raimon Panikkar has kindly agreed to read her paper and since he had requested during the last session, he would also like to make an intervention of his own before this.
Raimon Pannikar
Thank you very much for your kind words. The topic of the day is: hopes for the future. I would like to strike not a contradictory note but perhaps a complementary tune to the voices we have heard here. Perhaps the so badly called Third World also has a third voice, which I would like to voice very quickly in three different vestments. The academic jargon without quoting Saint Paul is to said to affirm that hope is not of the future. But hope is of the invisible, of the invisible which exists in our present day reality, not of another world - the danger of escapism and alienation - but to discovering that third they mentioned which gives belief, power and depth to all our political endeavours and philosophical activities. Vision, we have been reminded, is necessary for the life of the people, but real and enlivening vision is not of the future. I have to have the vision now and not the hallucination. We now have too much psychology, and projections of our unfulfilled desires have to be seen and felt just now. That is my reason for being so optimistic that on the two levels I mentioned I can afford to be pessimistic if we do not change radically our way of seeing ourselves and seeing the world. Capra has given us something, West has given us also something and I would like to voice it only regarding this particular topic that hope is not of the future. We shall overcome! Once upon a time, yes. David wins over Goliath. But most of the time Goliath has it. Let's not forget that. The more Indian way of saying it: The mid-1950s, the banks of the Ganges. A woman who could be 40, 50, worn out by life, a small child in her bosom, a little girl of two years in her hands. She was dying, the girl with tuberculoses, and I was supposed to console her. We had what inside India we call the meeting of the eye. She consoled me, she was being so thankful for having been invited to the banquet of life. For those few recent years she had had the experience of motherhood. Perhaps her husband was a drunkard. Nevertheless she was so thankful to have been invited to the banquet of this life for a few hours, for a few months, for a few days. She was not feeling frustrated. She was not asking me for a kind of a superficial consolation. She knew her child was going to die.
We know that today so many thousands are going to die. They die without hope. The danger, the crime is when we exploit this kind of still joy we find in them to carry on business as usual, insensitive to the suffering, and do not change a thing. Because that hope is not otherworldly. It is from this world. We are the ones responsible, perhaps once the conscience when Jesus comes, the eyes are open and discover that they live in an unjust world.
Let me say it in a poetic word, the line of a French poet: the most heavy burden, just to exist without real living. And I think that this forum is to enhance our life, and to enhance our life responsibly and human responsibility on the structures of the three levels of matter, spirit and the soul. Thank you.
Now we are going to have an experience of an Indian Maya in a video. All what you see is wrong. You have to change your spectacles. You see Riane Eisler if you really look through me and not at me. The fact that I have a pedigree of 1,500 years of a matriarchal regime from my father's side is the reason I have been chosen to read you this paper.
Riane Eisler (read by Raimon Pannikar)
We have been talking about how to create a better future. This is what I will be addressing but from a perspective that is different from most of our discussions until now - from the perspective of the new analytical approach (the study of relational dynamics), the new theoretical framework (cultural transformation theory), and the new system of classification (the partnership and dominator models) that I have developed during the past two decades.
The patterns that they have identified of the partnership and dominator models, their configurations, have been there all the time. But they are only visible using an approach which is not used in most political, economic and social analysis. One that is an integrated systemic approach that takes into account both for the so-called public sphere of politics and economics as well as the so-called private sphere of our personal intimate relations.
Now, if we look very quickly at modern history from this perspective of the tension between the partnership and dominator models as two underlying possibilities for structuring human relations, from intimate to international, we begin to see that there has been a strong movement towards partnership. One social movement after another challenging traditions of domination: From the challenge of the so-called divinely ordained right of kings to rule over their subjects to the still ongoing challenge of the so-called divinely ordained right of men to rule over the women and children in their castles of their homes. From the movement to challenge the use of force (the pacifists and then the peace movement) in international relations to the movement that we are seeing today challenging the use of force in intimate relations (the movement against rape, domestic violence, child battering) to most recently the challenge to men's once hallowed conquest of nature by the environmental movement.
These are not random movements. They are connected. They are part of a mounting partnership thrust made possible by the desolation and disequilibrium of technological change during the industrial and now also post-industrial revolution.
But there has also been tremendous dominator resistance and periodic regressions. Sometimes localised, sometimes global. We are going through such a period today. So the question is: How can we build the foundations for sustainable movement towards partnership society, towards a more acquirable, less violent, more ecologically and economically balanced way of living on this earth?
I will briefly touch on four cornerstones of these foundations, that are again not usually taken into account in policy analysis, or in more sociological analyses.
The first cornerstone is early childhood relations. Why? It is in these early relations, relations that involve touch to the body that on a neural, cellular level we acquire mental maps of how relations should be structured. If we grow up in a society with what we today call domestic violence, with what we today call child battering which used to be sanctioned by law, where that is the accepted norm we learn that our relations are normal, this is just the way things are. If we grow up in a more partnership-oriented child-rearing situation, in a society that strongly supports this, we learn that there has to be respect of other people's human rights. If violence is used by the bigger against the smaller, that is what we learn, not just for intimate relations but for international relations.
I have therefore proposed as a primary interventive strategy a global campaign against violence and abuse in intimate relations, particularly early childhood relations. Signs of hope in this direction were awakened by the United Nations' Year of the Family, which spoke of the family as the smallest democracy, which is what it needs to be, as well as the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child. But what is needed now is leadership by progressive leaders, religious leaders, political and educational leaders, and economic leaders to launch and fund such a campaign. Of particular importance here is attention to the girl child, to practices ranging from female infanticide and genital mutilation, to the denial to the girl of the same health care and nutrition that boys receive, a practice that still prevails in many world regions with devastating consequences not only for the children but for their children, both boys and girls, since malnourished and unhealthy women give birth to physically and mentally disadvantaged children.
This leads to the second founding cornerstone, which deals with something that, once articulated, sounds obvious. There are two halves of humanity. They are called women and men. How the society or family, and it is all part of the same interactive system, structures those relations is not just a peripheral, secondary "women's issue". It is strange that issues affecting half of the population should be considered secondary. But that is part of the dominator model. I want here to emphasise, as I always do, that this is not a matter of women against men or men against women or of anything inherent in women or men. It is matter of social structure. This issue affects all of our relations - from the family, whether it is democratic or authoritarian, to our economic system.
The ranking of half of humanity over the other is a basic model for in-group versus out-group mental maps that can then be generalised to racism, antisemitism, all the ugly -isms. So as the second foundation strategy I have called for the policy inactively founded by the progressive leaders for equitable gender relations. There are signs of hope in this direction, but progress has been very slow and much more is needed.
We are not used to thinking of gender relations - the relations between the two halves of humanity - as anything important, because we have been taught to devalue anything associated with the female half of humanity. But it is precisely because we are so used to doing this that we do not see something that, again, once articulated, seems perfectly self-evident. If the people who are associated with the caring work that is essential for the society and the better future, caring for children, for family's health, ensuring a home is a clean and healthy environment. If these people - women - are devalued, are denied real partnership in a social governance, then those activities and values will also be denied social governance. This fundamental imbalance affects everything. But I will focus on economics, because that is the third founding cornerstone.
Marx wrote of the alienation of labour. I write of the alienation of caring labour. We are in a time now where productive work as we have defined it in the industrial world is rapidly disappearing. We have an opportunity - it is a crisis, but it is an opportunity - to redefine what is productive, what is the most important work. The proposals of Freedman and others of a guaranteed income that is not going to do it. This is why, as the third foundation strategy I have called for initiative, for social and economic inventions to give value to caring work in both the market and the non-market economy. If we keep in mind that all economic institutions are human inventions, we can conscientiously develop and test these partnerships of economic inventions that are the foundations to the new post-capitalist, post-communist economic system. We urgently need to give value to the work that maintains our lives. Which takes me to the fourth cornerstone: spirituality.
I use the term spirituality as both transcendent and immanent, not as detached, otherworldly and punitive, but as embedded in our day-to-day lives as the expression of our deeper yearnings and highest potentials. This kind of spirituality requires courage, the spiritual and moral courage of all of us, whatever we are, but particularly from the world's progressive political, educational, religious, and economic leaders to challenge violence, abuse, and discrimination, not only in international relations but also in intimate relations. A call to and by world leaders for this spiritual courage is then the fourth founding strategy.
In our time - when the dominator model and high technology are a potentially lethal mix - building the foundations for a partnership world is a matter of survival. But it is also a matter of realising our highest human potential. We humans are the only species that have been consciously trying to create a more equitable, less violent, more peaceful society. If we do not build the partnership foundations of childhood relations, of gender relations, of economic relations that give value to the important and necessary work, if we and our leaders do not have the spiritual courage to do this, there is little realistic hope for the better society we all here so passionately want for ourselves, our children, and future generations.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you very much, my dear brother, for reading a paper of very remarkable woman, who got sick and could not get here. She does point out very rightly, and this has been also a part of my work, that at least 50 percent of all the productive work in the world is unpaid. I call it the love economy and of course it is not in the economic textbooks but, thanks to the UN development programme, in 1995 for the first time we took a shot and put in some numbers on the love economy. It amounts to approximately 16 trillion dollars annually, which is simply missing from the world's GDP. So this one concrete thing we can do is to at least recognise it in the GNP.
Abdurrahman Wahid
I am not a scholar. That is why you should not expect a systematic paper or a coherent reasoning of things that I would like to present here. Coming from the interaction with millions of people I come to the conclusion that as human beings we are now overwhelmed by our own problems. We are overwhelmed by our own inability to find the right answers to those problems. I cannot talk about the reasons for this, why the human capacity to find answers for the problems we face now is so limited, why the progress from the age of the industrial revolution up to now is so staggering. We have the definite benefits from the world structures, although with so many imbalances. We have been blessed with the ability to communicate instantly now - and for people like myself even to use an international language such as English. In this respect I think we should ask ourselves: Why do we lack this ability? I would like to stress the lack not of expertise. We heard this morning these staggering statistics on health, on expectancy of life for human beings. We heard even the lamentations of how terrorism is still dominating our lives every day.
But I think the accumulation of knowledge, the requirement of expertise does not provide a full understanding of our own situation. But between knowing and understanding we have a very fast gap. We know that without understanding we get only the surfaces. Because of that then we cannot find the right answers to our problems and as such we develop a form of escapism, that is finding easy answers to very complicated, very complex problems. The easy answers can be dressed in a very sophisticated theoretical framework. Such as the Clash of Civilisation. Because, as I see it everyday in my life, I give speeches before at least 100,000 people nearly every day in my country, three to four times, per speech 20-30,000 people coming there. And I get the perception, the understanding that those people would like to seek convergence with western values. As Muslims they do not want to be alienated by western civilisation or from western civilisation.
We now accept the supremacy of western civilisation but we also recognise the limits and limitations of our own acceptation of that civilisation. We try to find meeting points. Every day in incalculable ways - from how to give more rights to our women, how to educate our children, how to develop medical services and those things. And there still will be talk about clash of civilisation, mainly between Islam and western civilisation just based on fiery speeches, a handful of fire brains doing terrorism. This is very superficial. As far as I see it, if we understand the situation, in reality below the surface we will find that life is not so hopeless that human beings have the capacity to develop the right sense and orientation and direction needed to overcome their problems. I do not say that those solutions can be reached easily. It will take generations for answers that will bring with them also new problems. At least the sense of hopelessness is not there.
I will take another case of the Muslims, that the triangle of value conflicts between Islam on the one hand and the secular universal declaration of human rights and the nation state. Muslims devoted to their religion, and the religious laws of their religion, would find it difficult to accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the right to change religion. Because, according to the Islamic law, a Muslim changing religion becomes an apostate and, according to the conventional Islamic law, he or she is liable to the death sentence. It is a medieval law but still very dear to us because it is part of something dear. O.K. We know we have to change that. But that is not the problem. The problem is that although it is not respected by the state any more in the Muslim countries, millions and millions of Muslims are affected in their attitudes by this value. So understanding the situation means that we do not blame lightly Islam or Muslims.
More important is how to educate them to understand the other side. This two-way traffic in communication is absolutely needed. Into this problem between Islamic values and the values of the human rights declaration we add the problem of the nation-state. In different Muslim countries the state takes different positions on that problem. Malaysia out of respect for Islamic law declared that Muslim Malays should not be allowed to change religion - which is abominable even to me, a Muslim. But on the other hand, the Indonesians from the same race of Malayan people with the same religion and actually the same historical background situated at the same geographical territory, have a different view on it: that we have to respect not Islamic law but our own secular constitution and as such that we have to allow our citizens, Muslims or non-Muslims, to change their religion.
People like myself - I lead or I chair this 40 million organisation of course - taking this position means fire attacks from the Middle East from fellow Muslims who do not yet understand the necessity of respecting the constitution, of giving equal status to all citizens, of upholding the rule of law and so forth. So you can see that understanding the situation means we need to go deeper than just to look at the surface. We cannot just equalise Indonesia and Malaysia and moreover Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Why fundamentalism is so rampant in the Middle East. We can look to South-East Asia. In South-East Asia as a region we have a strong tradition of national non-governmental organisations, Islamic organisations outside the state. We can even compete with the state but in the Middle East the government has the last say in religion, so because of that then no strong counter-tradition can survive in the Middle East, and - because of that - when people don't believe any more in the national development plans brought in by the state, they have to go underground and become fundamentalists to pose moralistic answers to, actually or basically, non-moralistic problems. So you can see here that what's needed now is the humbleness to recognise that we need to learn - to go deeper into issues, into problems, not only confine ourselves to the conventional scientific tools we have developed so far. I cannot categorise this attitude or this approach because I am not a scientist anyway, not a philosopher, just a rambler.
We could look further, for example, at how people use different standards for the same situations or problems. Let us go back to Samuel Huntington's theory of the Clash of Civilisations. He bundles two different groups, or two similar groups, into different categories - Muslim fundamentalist and Jewish orthodox extremist. They have the same attitude - the rejection of modern and secular western civilisation. But how could such an eminent person like Huntington say that the fundamentalists are against the West, and Jewish orthodox extremists, or extreme communities, are not against the West? They developed the same attitude and they do the same thing and yet they are put into different categories.
So you can see here that we need to find new frameworks of understanding, of really knowing what happens, not only by estimating or concluding in a superficial way. I don't know whether this is appropriate for this forum because, I was having the luxury of absorbing all you say and, without being able to respond because of my limited mastery of the English language, and my lack of ability to express those grander frameworks of knowledge. Thank you.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you, Mr. Wahid, for your great wisdom and your great courage. I would now like to give the floor to Professor Cornelius Castoriadis.
Cornelius Castoriadis
The very formulation of our theme for today implies that not everything is bound to become better for us in the best of all possible words. More specifically, one has to emphasise again that there is no factor inherent in a mythical human nature guaranteeing an uninterrupted moral political spiritual progress. Even technical progress is known to have gone in history through periods of stagnation or even regression. My talk concerns our choice still existing today, and perhaps not for long, between (and this could be the title for it) a worldwide democratic renaissance or any of various despotic nightmares.
Let's start with the past briefly. The world we have inherited can be defined by the great variety and strong heterogeneity of its points of departure, represented here by various speakers, and by the huge movement toward homogenisation that started with the beginnings of the European expansion after the end of the 15th century and entered a totally new face after The Second World War and especially over the past 20 years. In the previous five centuries, this expansion had been, in the main, a colonial and semi-colonial expansion. There can be forms of either settlement or colonisation accompanied by a more or less thorough extermination of the previous inhabitants, or by direct or indirect domination and often enslavement of the local peoples. But in large this has not been a cultural expansion, save in a few cases and for some elite stratum. The population, the subsisting populations of the subjugated countries, had maintained almost unaltered their ancestral creeds, customs and modes of life - and no value judgment on my part is implied here.
In the last half century, on the other hand, together with the accession of previously colonised peoples to formal independence there has been a wholesale penetration in depth of modes of life and of economic organisation and production originating in Western Europe and the United States, which, however, borrows only a half of the European tradition, essentially the technology and habits of conception. What is being developed and what is exported to the rest of the world is brains but not minds.
On the other hand, more deeply rooted ways of life, especially political arrangements and the corresponding morals and attitudes towards religious power have remained, in many cases, essentially the same. I attach to this fact extreme importance because it is simply not true that the expansion of unbridled capitalism and today's pseudo-markets will automatically bring with them freedom and justice. May I add parenthetically that the paradox here is that the apostles of unbridled capitalism espouse this most vulgar Marxist view: that it is enough to build factories and markets so that freedom and justice follow. On the contrary, I strongly believe that the only hopes for the future of our world rest with the political awareness and activity of its peoples. Of such an awareness and activity there is at present preciously little science.
This is even more true of the regions where the historical project of freedom, equality and justice, that is of individual and collective autonomy, first saw daylight in the so-called western world. This is a point which bears some further elaboration. The European tradition contains an essential antinomy. From the 12th century onward we observe the first seeds of a movement towards freedom and an increasing number of fields in the political sphere as well as in the domain of culture and thought: the European proto-bourgeois demand and obtain various degrees of autonomy from the royal, imperial or ecclesiastical powers; the arts break the inherited stereotype and patterns; then come the renaissance, the enlightenment, the revolutions of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the workers' movement, the great cultural flowering of modernity from 1750 to 1950, the emancipation or movement toward emancipation of women and youth. I call this the social historical project of collective and individual autonomy, this project has been sufficiently implemented up to now but not fully. But the effects of all these movements had been imbedded in partly institutional forms but mostly in an anthropological type, the freethinking democratic individual.
But in Europe another project in antinomy to the first emerges somewhat later: the project of the enlisted expansion of so-called rational mastery embodied in the beginning in the sphere of economic production. Powerfully supported by an unprecedented technological development which entirely fosters and amplifies it, it gives rise to the capitalist system in the broadest sense of the word, and this becomes dominant in Europe and North America and, through the western expansion, more or less in the whole world. The capitalist market as such has no intrinsic affinity for democracy; rather on the contrary. Historical evidence for this is ample and strongly present still today.
And capitalism is not a smoothly self-regulating system. If the prophesies of doom of the 19th century have been up to now proved wrong, this is because of the political and social opposition the unfettered domination of capitalism has met from part of the democratic strata and not only the interests of micro man and the workers' movement. For 150 years this opposition has imposed on capitalism a substantial rise in the standards of living of the workers, and an equally substantial reduction in the length of working time, measures of social protection, and finally with the 1929-33 depression the active intervention of government aiming at regulating the economy through demand management.
But over the last quarter of the century the winds have changed. Social and political conflict is on the way, full employment - despite pious resolutions by the United Nations - has become a dirty word. Engineered unemployment is explicitly presented as a means to tame social resistance. Together with that apathy, privatisation, ideological regression and plain emptiness characterised the political scene. Western countries no longer offer to the rest of the world an example of the struggle for freedom and less and less an example of the anthropological type of free-thinking and acting democratic individual. But also governments have divested themselves of the means of regulating the economy.
An unbridled brutal domination of transnational firms is being extended over the whole planet, the world economy is becoming a "casino" economy - an acknowledgement to Madam Chairperson - but they used this expression at least ten years ago; the industrialisation of the poor countries takes place in conditions worse than the primitive accumulation in Europe in the early days of capitalism; just look at the Nike workers in Indonesia and Vietnam; the environment is rapidly destroyed in scales and degrees hitherto unprecedented.
This, the homogenisation of the workplace, essentially technical and economic homogenisation, or at best a diffusion of higher culture among rare elites but not of the democratic signification with its broad basis among the population. Autocratic or pseudo-democratic regimes are bound everywhere where there is the destruction of traditional cultures without any meaningful alternative to induce the return of religious and ethnic fanaticism with appalling effects. Events prove that a Madonna video clip cannot offer a valid alternative to The Koran. And I don't think that this is just the effect, as previous speakers said, of the incapacity of governments to implement economic growth plans. This had happened also in Iran, for instance, during the Shah's regime. Economic growth was there but there was a void of meaning and people revolted and brought back some sort of middle-ages situation.
The transfer to other cultures of what may claim universal validity among the products of western history - that is freedom in thinking and in political life, popular sovereignty and separation between the religious and the political sphere - is not automatic. These products are not a racial or ethnic privilege, nor even a curse of the western man. They are the outcomes of many centuries of struggle and their flowering engenders democratic politics. In the non-western part of the world there cannot be just a servile imitation but an active reappropriation by the indigenous people, which can only take place within the framework of an original creation, a synthesis of the local and western tradition.
The natural slope of humanity is not toward democracy and tolerance, it is rather towards slavery and fanaticism. Therefore struggle and autonomous activity are needed. The science of such an activity, of a struggle for freedom are apparent in a fragmentary way in various so called developing countries, e.g. in Indonesia, in Hong Kong, in China, in Burma, The Philippines, various places in Latin America and elsewhere. This shows that all peoples of the world have a potential for autonomous political activity whose actualisation is not fatal. We can be certain that the route toward freedom will be arduous, long and uncertain.
Two alternatives seem discernible for the future. Either the Westerners recover their spiritual and political creativity and are capable of decisively influencing a fertile blend of the European political tradition with other cultures - the beginning of such a movement can of course also take place in the non-western world - or the whole world becomes more and more enslaved by the autonomised movement of the technoscience and economic growth for growth's sake. Then despotic nightmares can by no means be ruled out.
What would a democratic renaissance mean in time? It would not just mean constitutional amendments and clauses, but a genuine sovereignty of the collective lives and a future together with the capacity for religious and ethnic tolerance. Democracy is not just about rights, rather rights are a component necessary but certainly not sufficient for democracy. Democracy is the kratos, that is the power of the demos, that is the people. This power is impossible without an education in citizenship and nowhere does this exist today where you have only professional instruction in different guises. To have this participation in an effective way of all people in power and decision and lawmaking, we need not only education but a constant training of the people in exercising their political power. As Lincoln had said, government of the people by the people for the people, this sense can sum up what is the democratic idea. Such a thing does not exist anywhere today. We must stop empty rhetoric about democracy or a benign negligence, or neglect toward fact, and restart the work of an anatomy of actual political society.
Failing that, despotic nightmares include the following: a worldwide unfettered domination of companies freed from any political control and social or political opposition and strongly favoured by the ongoing divestment of national states. And in this respect the co-operation of these companies with criminal elements and mafias is not to be excluded. The continuing destruction of the planet's environment would lead to an irreversible disruption of ecological equilibrium and before, or together with or after that, neo-totalitarian regimes would be made inevitable by the necessity of consuming scarce basic sources.
A paroxysmal intensification of ethnic and religious conflict and an uncontrollable struggle for world domination among continental or transcontinental powers or groupings, including states - again one could mention at least a dozen of the governments in the present world, which are not governments in any sense of the word at all but just instruments for mafias of various types, including drug mafias of course, and any combination of any number of the above. All of these perspectives correspond to a continuation of trends, not only already existing but deeply embedded in the present situation. And of course already known historical catastrophes have resulted as often as not from unforeseen facts and factors.
I am concluding.
To escape these nightmares what is required is a fundamental change in the imaginary significations that have been dominating the modern world. That is the appalling transformation of the economy from a means as it has been to an end for itself and of human life and, intimately linked to this, the expectation of an unlimited expansion of material so-called well-being, which is obviously the most absurd of all Utopias ever formulated by the most sanguine Utopians - Utopianism, in which all these economic managers and political leaders deeply steeped in realpolitik and scornful against Utopians, seem apparently to believe. We must go over to a new type of human life, to a frugal life as the only means to avoid ecological catastrophe and a definitive zombification of human beings endlessly masturbating in front of their television screens. Thank you.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you, Professor Castoriadis, for keeping your vision of the "demos", adding the idea of the frugal demos and new kind of economy, and keeping our feet in touch with today's realities. I now give the floor to Professor Margaret Lederberg, who is at Cornell University. Please, the floor is yours.
Marguerite S. Lederberg
Thank you, Madam Chairperson, I would like to talk about blaming the victim and how we might be able to learn to stop doing it. Human suffering endures long after the end of the ordeal due to distancing, rejection, and those who should be working to heal the victims, are often directing blame. There are many reasons why victims are subversive, dangerous - obviously to the perpetrators of their suffering, to the neighbors, familiars and associates of those perpetrators, certainly to the profiteers whose moral squalor is highlighted.
But of more interest to us here, even more distant bystanders, is the fact that the more decent they are, the more they feel the need to excuse their inaction - sometimes irrationally when indeed it needs no excuse because they were truly powerless. Others, a large group, perhaps the largest, do not feel personally guilty - but they cannot endure their own pain upon hearing the unspeakable spoken. They recoil, they bristle, and they criticise so as to ease their anxiety. This reaction is innate to every human being with a shred of compassion. And it's often acted upon without any awareness on the part of the individual. Honouring victims truly is even more fundamentally destabilising to human societies which all need to believe they're innately just. Thus the kindest citizen has a stake in holding the victim responsible for his suffering as a precondition of keeping the world secure and viable.
Working in a cancer hospital, as I have for 20 years, I have seen the dynamic operate under many guises and I'll give you an example. Cancer is ubiquitous and unpredictable, the treatments are lengthy, rigorous and emblematic of modern man's greatest fears, the fear of toxic chemicals and radiation. The stress of undergoing them added to the fear that they will fail drives many patients to use what have been called alternative treatments, especially those involving mental disciplines of various sorts. They are associated with the sense of impairment and increase well-being. And the best among them have penetrated traditional medicine. Having a positive attitude is one of the most widely touted assets by which a patient may be lent to belief that he will improve his prognosis - and who knows - maybe even cure himself. This is old wine in new bottles.
William James described the mood elevating effects and the possible problems of what he called "manicures" at the turn of the century. Human beings have always wanted to believe that they can be the instrument of their own salvation but it may be yet another way of shifting the responsibility for his disease on to the patient. It plays cruelly on the patient's own magical wishes, leading them to embrace the burden of responsibility as the price of hope. On the plus side of the ledger there is ample evidence that meditation, relaxation techniques and various methods of visualisation can improve patient's well-being significantly. We also know that patients with good social supports do better than those without, that group interventions have shown increased lengths of survival in women with advanced breast cancer in one study and prolonged relapse-free time in melanoma patients in another.
Lastly, it seems that assertive, feisty patients - those with a fighting spirit - live slightly longer than the passive, resigned ones. Add to this the fact that standard psychiatric interventions do help patients feel better, tolerate their treatment better and maintain their human relationships better. There is ample reason to encourage their use. On the other hand, families can soothe very sick patients into having a "better" attitude when all this poor patient can do is live from hour to hour. I was called to the bedside of a 20-year-old boy with leukaemia whose parents wanted him evaluated for a psychological eating problem. I found more out about the young man guilt-laden at letting his family down by not eating and not having a better attitude. His loving parents, desperate with grief at seeing their child becoming more and more wasted, had made him responsible for his inevitable terminal anorexia rather than enduring their irrational guilt and their true helplessness.
Underlining this episode was the belief that if the boy's refusal to eat was psychological rather than physical he could do something to alter it and that failure to do so implied some kind of weakness or insufficiency. And here we are again, face to face with another irrepressible human prejudice, namely the conviction that an individual always has more control over psychologically driven symptoms than over physically driven ones. The correlate of this conviction is that psychological and physical symptoms are radically different from one another. This dichotomy is yet another form of the mind-body dichotomy enshrined by Descartes and updated to include a post-Freudian awareness of what can we loosely call for our purposes " man's emotional minds". In the earlier tradition the mind is the rational mind, the thinking mind, the seed of the will and of self-control. If the psyche has no associated matter, no physicality, then it too belongs to the mind's sphere and must partake volitional attributes. And once that is granted, passing a negative moral judgment on the psychiatric sufferer or the psychological or emotional sufferer of any kind is inevitable. And we are back full force to blaming the victim.
And now as we heard from Professor Lederberg that we are blaming victims of what is the second largest health burden of humanity. To many scientists and biological psychiatrists the body-mental dichotomy is a total fabrication. They don't even bother to disprove it because the evidence for the biological basis of perceptive, cognitive, affective and behavioral phenomena is so compelling. Witness the reproductive ability of complex behavior and feelings by brain stimulation, natural experiments with brain-damaged individuals, the whole field of neurotransmitter research and its extraordinary associated explosion of designer drugs that have been extraordinarily helpful when they are used and used well, which is not always easy. Unfortunately, some of the scientists behave with a condescending and reductive attitude to human psychological symptoms, beliefs and spiritual needs. Not surprisingly, some psychiatrists take the opposite tag with an insistence on psycho-dynamic treatment. That masks an incompletely acknowledged belief that the triumph of the brain will make them superfluous.
The mind-body dichotomy is so ingrained that both groups fail to see how their respected views are equally contradicted by the evidence. After all, we understand the biology of vision rather well but the sunset still takes our breath away. All we know about the biology of sex does not lessen our enslavement to lust or passion. Knowing the architecture of sleep leaves us no less insomniac. We still need other human beings as urgently as we need food and shelter. And above all, all the scientific knowledge in the world does not relieve us of inescapable wonderment about the meaning of existence. It enhances it.
Why are we afraid of the idea that our thoughts and feelings have a biological underpinning? Will we be any less human with the implied compliment of greatness and objectless, of will power and weakness, of valour and cowardice? Are we less unique in the world because our brain might be the seed of our emotions and our intellect? The discontinuity between us and the rest of the nature does not depend on these attributes. It rests with our self-consciousness if indeed we are alone among living creatures in having it. And we willingly and casually relinquish it over and over again, drowning in alcohol and other drugs, consigning ourselves to temporary oblivion under anaesthesia. We are not threatened, we trust that we will return to ourselves and indeed we do, just as human as we were before.
So going into the new millennium, the good news is that the newer sciences have never been so vibrant and exhilarating in their promise of further insight and clinical application to lessen the burden of human kind. The challenge for us then is to use them without lapsing into old and prejudicial syllogisms. We do not live in a mind or body world, a physical or psychological world. We do not live in an either/or world at all. Our claim to a sense of self does not lie there. It lies in our consciousness of ourselves and our need for a meaning. Some may call it our soul, some invoke God, others speak of spirituality. But even the most unbending positivist acknowledges a sense of wonder when he meditates upon human consciousness. He is exercising what Jung aptly called the "psyche's religious function" - that inescapable part of our creature heritage.
The more secure we become in that understanding, the more we realise that it leaves our humanity as rich and bewildering as we know it to be, that it leaves the mystery of creation as profound as it will always be, the less we will force ourselves in our experiences into meaningless procrustean dichotomies and then at last, perhaps, we might be strong enough in ourselves and understanding enough of each other to stop blaming the victim. Thank you.
Hazel Henderson
Thank you for that brilliant critique of our Cartesian paradigms and heritage from this century, and also for pointing a little policy prescription from what you've said. In my own country where we have just undertaken a thing we have called "Welfare Reform", which is very reminiscent of the kind of thing you were talking about, and I have to say my daughter is working as a volunteer in a homeless shelter in Washington DC as part of her training to be a sociologist. Even in this training there is a lot of what you say. And so I thank you very much for that.
Joshua Lederberg
This is addressed to you, Mrs. Henderson and to Dr. Capra.
Capra talked about the need for a sustainable human community, modelled on the equal systems that we have some opportunity to observe in more objective fashion. My question is: Is that possible? Can that sustainable community be achieved consistent with ten billion people and some further growth beyond that on a finite planet? And with the expectation of standards of living of both the affluent and the expectant world and if so, what would that look like?
For 250 years we have relied on some technological deus ex machina to bypass the Malthusian dilemma. We've lurched from one technological fix to another and they have come along. Ecological collapse has occurred with other species and it might be averted if we used what we regard as the intelligence that we point to as a unique aspect of humanity. The collapse, when it happens, will not be a gradual deterioration but may be a very sudden one and manifest either in the form of a great place, which has hardly been mentioned in these ecological discussions - but my remarks yesterday will have given an outline of those circumstances or great wars or both. But my question is: What would a sustainable model look like if indeed it were possible?
Hazel Henderson
I'm going to take the liberty of stepping out of the chair for the moment and putting on my head as a member of the board of The Worldwatch Institute: we have been worried about these issues of the sustainability of human societies since 1975. I think we have heard some of the solutions around this table, clearly the redirecting of economics away from the Utopian visions of progress which we inherited from the economics of the 19th century toward frugality but the other issue is that of the ultimate limit of human population. This is a roaring debate, as we probably all know within the environmental movement. One aspect of it that I'll just throw out for discussion is a new method called "Ecological footprint analysis", which is entering the political debate and, by this method, you can begin to see on a nation state basis, which countries have consumed way beyond their ecological footprint. For example my country, the US, has exceeded its ecological footprint many times over; while China, with 1.2 billion people is still within its ecological footprint in terms of its territory, and similarly is India. So these issues are of the use of resources and of population, both extremely important. And now I'd like to ask my friend, Dr Capra, to comment also.
Fritjof Capra
My comment is an answer to Mr. Sato who asked a very similar question. What I'd like to say is that one of the characteristics of systems thinking is a shift from quantity to quality in our mode of thinking, in our perception. Systems thinking, including the mathematical language that goes with it, is very much a thinking in terms of patterns, in terms of organisation and relationships, which is qualitative thinking, not that quantity becomes irrelevant but there is a different balance between quality and quantity. Now when you look at economics and sustainability, or economics and ecology, then you will see that the tension between those two fields is precisely a tension between quantity and quality. Economics is driven by expansion, competition, by quantitative measurements. Ecology is concerned with conservation, with co-operation, with qualitative patterns, so in addition to asking about the living standard, which certainly needs to be raised, in many countries in the southern hemisphere we should also talk about the quality of life, about the quality of our water, of our air, the quality of our time, the quality of our relationships in our community and, when you do that, you can derive concrete steps. I don't have the time to go into concrete steps but I did edit a book together with a European businessman G. Pauli, and the book is called Steering Business Towards Sustainability. It is an anthology with many contributions and it is published by The UN's press in Tokyo. Since I have the floor I would like to spend just one or two more minutes. Following Professor Margaret Lederberg's fascinating presentation, my feeling is that the mind-body dichotomy exists partly because neuroscientists, and other scientists in the establishment, very often refuse to address the question "what is mind?", and especially consciousness. Research has been a dirty word until very recently. And again there is good news from the systems field. We now have the outlines of the theory which gives a very clear answer to the question "what is the relationship between mind and brain?" Paraphrasing it, I would say that the margin of time given me here is too small to give you the answer.
Hazel Henderson
I would just like to add on the subject of quality of life that it has been a joy for me to meet Dr. Jasmin because he has been looking at the quality of life at the individual level and I have been looking at the quality of life at a city level and a national level, and many cities in the world now have indicators of quality of life. Sometimes they are called "healthy cities' indicators". And also the GNP of every country in the world is undergoing this change towards quality of life, and bringing in all of the non-economic factors, so this social innovation is well on the way. Please, watch for it.
Claude Jasmin
No, it is just a suggestion that the appraisal of the quality of life has some kind of new methods to measure what is sustainable. In this meeting, we might give some light to this concept and make it one of the important bases for the discussion of the next meeting. I think quality of life is a major issue that can respond to quantity, which is something we don't master.
Hazel Henderson
Certainly, I would welcome that.
Cornelius Castoriadis
There is a very important book entitled Economies of Abundance. The fundamental finding of this book would not come as a surprise to an economist, such as myself. The outcome of this is that the quality of life, I mean silent outcome, is very probably higher in many primitive tribes where working hours are two hours a day. The rest is spent in laughing, joking, playing, hunting for nothing and so on and so forth or just lying in the sun. And you obviously have a system of values which is radically different from today's system of values. I don't want to criticise my friend Capra but I think there is still a defect in this concept quality of life in the sense that we measure it by western, so to speak rationalist, capitalistic standards. I am not a reactionary, I appreciate modern science. But sometimes things come to a knot. And I said something in my intervention - I apologise for slightly repeating myself - which I don't think was realised. What should one think of the moral - everybody speaks of the moral - and ethical quality of all today's politicians in all countries and of all businessmen who speak and talk as if an indefinite expansion of material standards of life was going without saying? This is the situation we have to face. It's not just the environmental conventions, conventions which I call the "carnival of real" decisions being taken, decisions which are never being implemented because these decisions just aim at limiting the damages (some damages) from continuing growth and never pose the fundamental question: Is indefinite growth possible, especially when I think that obviously the aim proposed to all Third World economies is life Californian style?
Hazel Henderson
I would like to pose another question. Many of my women friends believe that it is a matter of male psychology - this belief in permanent expansion. I would like to ask Dr. Lederberg.
Marguerite S. Lederberg
I'm not sure I can answer.
Hazel Henderson
So I'll give the floor to Professor Wallerstein.
Imanuel Wallerstein
Just two comments: One on quality of life. Quality of life is certainly not something self-evident. It is a matter of collective debate that has not in fact yet occurred. That is, I refer back to my discussion yesterday of the substance of rationality, which is the result of collective and intelligent discussion. We don't have any agreement worldwide on what constitutes quality of life. And it is an urgent necessity that we discuss it. We cannot simply say we wish to put it forward as our criterion of judgment when we don't have even the beginnings of a collective definition of what would constitute it.
And the second comment I have to make is on Professor Lederberg's extremely useful discussion of the irrelevance or the irrationality of the mind-body distinction. But I think you glided too fast over the issue by talking of blaming the victim, which is a social problem in general, to the issue of therapy. If we have your young man with leukaemia or anyone else in that situation, the question for us is at what point in the cycle of relationships between his mental state, the state of the disease and everything that is going on in the brain and in the body, the intervention might be most efficient or most efficacious. It may well be that the intervention could be most efficacious in terms of his psychic framework and at another point by the introduction of drugs and at a third point by the introduction of something else. I mean it became an open question. If you eliminate the mind-body distinction, it doesn't go, everything doesn't become body; everything would equally become mind.
Hazel Henderson
Just one brief point. I'm sure Professor Wallerstein would agree on the question of quality of life. There is at least substantive agreement now in the Gender 21 concord, signed by 170 countries in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that the Gross National Product is incorrect and it is to be corrected for ecological and social costs, which had formerly been omitted. So I would think you would think that was some kind of progress.
Imanuel Wallerstein
Progress, but it doesn't define what the quality of life is.
Hazel Henderson
Moving us in the right direction, at least.
I think we are going to have to close this session. We are already late. So I am going to ask Reverend Makhulu to make a short statement.
Khotso Makhulu
I would like to thank Dr. Marguerite Lederberg for her fascinating presentation because in a variety of ways she has covered what is sadly lacking in how people conduct themselves in order to have what is good health. As a parish priest, naturally I would be interested in seeing that my people belong to a community, that my people express the compassion that is needed in promoting community and in the affirmation of others. But, finally, I would want to say that the countries from which some of us come may not be able to satisfy Professor Wallerstein's desire for a definition of what is quality of life. But what we do know is what we are lacking - and what we want for our people.

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