So, all the other sciences too, modelled themselves on this kind of physics. As J. Z. Young has pointed out, the theory of the reflex in biology derives from the same outlook as the physical theory of causation: the reflex is a mechanistic, determined consequence of external stimulation. The organism is a marionette.
Then we move on to psychology. With Freud, there is a completely distorted, irrational, unconscious motivating factor within and reason is reduced to a rationalising kind of role. Then we move on to economics where Adam Smith really smuggles in a philosophy degrading man. He has no business to do that, since he is doing a textbook on economics but he smuggles his reading of man’s nature into it, without any argument and blandly claims that man can work only for self-interest. And that has become the philosophy of the whole world.
Then, politics. We have here a Hobbesian theory, which says that the political relation between man and man is not communion but confrontation, masked by a contract: in the sense that each man is co-operating with the other to control the latter’s mayhem and to ensure for himself as much freedom to indulge in the skulduggery as he can get away with.
This being the philosophy of social cohesion, the Hobbesian contract is side-stepped, dodged and subverted everywhere, all the time. That is why a disenchanted Harold D. Lasswell regards politics as the study of who gets what, how and when. With such an array of disciplines, is it any surprise that the world is going to pieces?
The world-view has got to be re-thought right from the beginning. That was the concern of my 5-volume exercise, the pentalogy on man’s freedom. Perhaps one can criticise Roszak on the same grounds that he criticised Schumacher. We have to go back; but Nietzsche and Kafka are not far back enough. We have to go back to the stabilisation of mechanistic determinism in physics and its subsequent conquest of biology, psychology, sociology and even the philosophy of man’s real nature. That is why the pentalogy had to go over the entire ground afresh.
Quite a few persons have said that it was an acceptable reconstruction but I do not know how long it will take to reach down to the people at large, this reconstructed and integrated thought rehabilitating man. Or could we bring them back by leaving aside this total world-view, saying, instead, “You want to survive, don’t you? If you do, for your own sake do not do this kind of thing. Treat your fellowman as your brother. Go into small-scale production, use technology with a human face. Unless you do this, you’ve had it.”
Will that go down? It does not seem to have been going down for the last many years, even decades. After all, the signals were given as early as Carlyle in his vigorous indictment of the new technology and big industry. He anticipated everyone of its terrible consequences. So we really did have enough time to learn, but we did not learn. What do we do, then? What do we do?
Edward Goldsmith: I think that it is very difficult, often impossible, to make people change their minds by rational arguments of that sort. What is required is a quasi-religious conversion from, in this case, the ‘paradigm of modernism’, with which we, in the West, have all been imbued, to a very different and indeed conflicting paradigm, one which we might refer to as the ‘paradigm of ecology’.
In terms of the paradigm of modernism – and in particular its offshoot, the paradigm of science, as you yourself have so well described – the biosphere is seen as a random arrangement of little particles that are passive, stupid and robot-like and must, therefore, be managed from the outside. The biosphere is also seen as indefinitely malleable, hence the possibility of changing it with total impunity. It is also hostile ‘red in tooth and claw’ hence the need to transform it, which science, technology and industry can combine to do and thereby create for us a materialist is paradise on earth.
In terms of the paradigm of ecology, the world is a hierarchically organised, living entity, made up of a hierarchy of dynamic and creative living entities, all of whom are capable of running themselves. It is totally beneficient, in that it provides us with an environment that admirably satisfies our real needs. Its structure is critical. Indeed the ‘Balance of Nature’ is an essential ecological concept. It can only be disturbed at the cost of reducing its stability, which must give rise to all sorts of discontinuities – such as floods, droughts, epidemics and wars, among others. It is goal-directed and indeed purposeful and its goal is the maintenance of its overall stability – avoidance, in fact, of the sort of changes that ‘progress’ brings about.
Tribal man has always understood this. The more enlightened modern thinkers such as yourself; Jim Lovelock of ‘Gaia’ fame; Lynn Margulis, whose work on symbiosis is at last becoming accepted in academic circles; and a few others, are beginning to understand it.
Academic ecologists at the turn of the century; people like Clements and Shelford, understood much of it. Ecology developed as a reaction to the world-view of modernism and as such, was truly holistic. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, it has been corrupted in order to make it respectable, partly so that departments of ecology could be set up in American Universities. For this reason it has become reductionistic and mechanistic, like other scientific disciplines.
Thus, today no ecologist in academia talks of the ‘Balance of Nature’. This basic ecological concept is seen as no more than an outdated superstition. The same is true of the concept of the ecological ‘community’ or ‘ecosystem’. In 1917, when Gleason proposed his ‘individualistic ecology.’ fellow ecologists simply laughed at him. Today, Gleason is a hero. His ideas are fully accepted. Similarly, the old idea of successional development towards a climax (a state of ecological adulthood) which is basic to ecology, has been abandoned. Like the previous ideas, it was not reconcilable with the paradigm of modernism – in this case, the idea of progress.
To replace the subversive concept of the ‘climax’, a new concept was developed by the Oxford ecologist, Tansley: the ‘anthropogenic climax’. His thesis was that Nature was not alone in being capable of creating a stable climax. So could man – and the man-made variety – the product of science, technology and industry, was of course a bigger and better one. As a result, the theoretical ecology that is now taught in our Universities is the very opposite of what people think ecology is and indeed what it should be. This is a typical phenomenon, for the same thing has occurred in other fields too, like theoretical biology, for instance.
Thus, the reason why Darwinism originally caught on, as we all know, was that it fitted in very well with the developing paradigm of modernism. The modifications brought to it by Weissmann and Bateson, towards the end of the century, and by Julian Huxley. Gaylord Simpson and others in the 1940s and 50s, have come to reflect, still more closely, this world-view of modernism, which we both regard as so destructive.
The mechanism of evolutionary change could not be mechanistic. Evolution is seen in terms of the functioning of two machines: a generator of randomness, on the one hand and a sorting machine, on the other. It sees living things as passive, in fact dead, in that they have to be ‘selected’ by some external manager. For some reason, the undefined environment that does the managing is seen as alive, (even though it is made up of other living things – similar to the one being managed).. No one, of course, has explained why it should be capable of selecting the ‘fittest’ living things with such extraordinary discrimination, still less, why it should want to.
The world of neo-Darwinism is also a nasty one, full of competition and aggression. Indeed that aspect of it is rationalised as being necessary for the evolution of species and hence for the perfection of life on earth. Natural selection, of course, is but a biological version of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand,’ that undefined mystical force that serves to rationalise competition and aggression in the economic sphere.
Krishna Chaitanya: You know, Bethell had done a lot of work to prove that Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith when he formulated the Theory of Evolution.
Edward Goldsmith: I remember Bethell’s article.
Krishna Chaitanya: And Marx wanted to dedicate the second volume of Das Kapital to Darwin.
Edward Goldsmith: Darwin, of course, turned him down.
Krishna Chaitanya: Yes, but Marx’s reasons for wanting to do it are interesting. He found Darwin’s ideas very mechanistic and materialistic and, therefore, very congenial.
Edward Goldsmith: Karl Marx of course had a materialistic and technological view of the world. He believed in the industrial system, indeed, that it had to be expanded. He merely wanted the cake to be sliced up in a different way. The ecological movement, I think, denies the desirability of industrialism itself – whether capitalistic or Marxist. Both systems are leading to the destruction of our planet.
Economic development cannot successfully combat poverty. First of all, we have never properly defined poverty. Is a tribal man living in NEFA we might ask, or an Indian living in Amazonia, poor? Clearly not, in the sense in which a slum-dweller in Bombay is poor. Still less in the sense in which a man living in a North American slum is poor, one whose family and community have broken down; who has no beliefs, no religion, no identity and who spends most of the money he has on drugs and alcohol.
Ivan Illich denies that development has eliminated poverty. All it has done is modernise it and in America, modernised poverty is, in some ways, as bad as the poverty of an Indian slum-dweller.
On the other hand, it is only if we adopt a totally materialistic and technological view of the world, that we can regard an Amazonian Indian or a tribesman from your NEFA territory as poor. He may not have electric toothbrushes nor plastic Mickey Mouses – but he has a family, he has a real community, he has a wonderful life, full of ritual and ceremony. He eats a varied and rich diet consisting of all sorts of fresh foods. His life is, in fact, very fulfilling.
As development occurs, however, his life becomes increasingly degraded – until he reaches the situation we find in the western world, where the average man, though he may possess a wealth of sophisticated gadgetry, leads a socially and culturally deprived life.
Consider that the average young man in the UK and the USA has a vocabulary of no more than a few hundred words, whereas tribal people have been known to possess vocabularies of more than 10,000 words. Unfortunately, social and cultural riches are not currently regarded as constituting wealth. I think that it is Karl Polanyi, rather than Karl Marx, to whom we should turn for inspiration. He proposed a non-materialistic view of the world about 50 years ago.
He pointed out, for instance, that when a slave trader tore a man from his family and community in West Africa and sent him to work on the plantations of Georgia, his standard of living, calculated in materialistic terms, went up enormously, for he had an iron bedstead and lived in a hut with a tin roof. But it would be absurd to suggest that he was better off. This would mean ignoring the social, ecological and cultural wealth of which he had been deprived as a result of his enslavement.
Krishna Chaitanya: Talking about Polanyi, there are two things about him that I like. One is that he pointed out that the market economy is not going to redeem us, because in the market economy goods move where they fetch the highest price, not where the needs are the greatest. Secondly, he pointed out that land cannot be regarded as just an economic resource. Land is Nature and it is basic to our existence. And from that point of view, what you have just revealed about the subversion of the ecological discipline in academic circles, shocks me.
For, as Lynn White has pointed out, ecology’s momentous significance is this: until now every science has been working in a kind of compartmentalised field without any contact with other sciences. Ecology brought home the point that they are all interconnected, absolutely interrelated. It pointed towards the fact that the world is a unitary system, which also suggests that there are right and wrong ways of living in this system which we certainly can sort out, without being bothered by the tiresome arguments about ethics being hopelessly subjective.
Edward Goldsmith: Well, you know Barrington Moore said this; he was President of the American Ecological Society and in his 1919 presidential address to the Society, he said just what you have said now. Ecology was to provide the new synthesis. It was going to bring all these other disciplines together. Indeed, ecologists such as Clement and later Allee and Gerard, tried to do this but, as we have seen, the subject was corrupted so that it has become but another reductionistic science.
Now let us turn to economics and sociology. The main failing of these disciplines is that they are based on a study of the last 150 years, i.e., of the industrial age, which they assume to be normal, healthy and permanent. The opposite, of course, is true. It is abnormal, aberrant and necessarily short-lived. In fact, they have not distinguished between a tumour and a healthy organism. They are studying pathology and taking it to be physiology.
How can they, under such conditions, develop a discipline that is anything but nonsense? They cannot. Now with regard to economics, it was Karl Polanyi who made this quite clear in his extraordinary book, The Great Transformation, which showed that the basic principles of economics were not of universal application, but only applied to the industrial era. Traditional societies, he said, whether of the tribal or the peasant type, cannot be understood in terms of modern economics, for their economic behaviour does not obey the laws which our economists have formulated. There is no homo economicus in the traditional world.
Indeed, as Polanyi noted, the market system itself is absent.. People may trade in the superfluities of life; they may sell spices to each other for instance, but not fundamental things. The ‘great transformation’ – the change that did more than anything else to create the modern world, with all its horrors, and trigger off the destruction of our planet – was the development of the market system in which people traded not only in spices, but in the basic constituents of the living world, such as man himself and more important still, NATURE.
Krishna Chaitanya: It is a commodity!
Edward Goldsmith: Indeed, when labour becomes a commodity then man himself becomes a commodity. For, as Polanyi notes, what is labour but another word for man – seen from the production point of view? And when land becomes a commodity then so does Nature – since land is nothing else but Nature. Now, if you allow the market system to determine the fate of man and that of Nature, both must inevitably be degraded and eventually destroyed, for their normal dynamics – that which enables them to survive and prosper – is diametrically opposed to that which they must exhibit, once subjected to the laws of the market.
The market system is simply not a rational means of distributing resources within a natural system. It cannot be. If you want to find out how to do it, see how Nature does it; take a plant, a human organism or an ecosystem. You will see that resources are distributed within such natural systems in such a way that they are made available where they are most required. If you starve, for instance, the resources are made available to each organ; and each tissue of the body is rationed in a rational manner.
Krishna Chaitanya: For the whole, for the continuation of the whole.
Edward Goldsmith: For the whole. The organs which will obtain the requisite resources, when other organs and tissues are being deprived of them, are the brain and the heart; The brain will always obtain the requisite oxygen for instance, because when it ceases to work, the organism as a whole will cease to function.
If you look at the economy of a tribal society, you will see that the resources it requires are distributed in the same way. In other words, resources are distributed within a tribal society according to the same laws as those which govern the distribution of resources in all other natural systems, including biological organisms and ecosystems.
We know how this is achieved. Each family has access to a particular piece of land which enables it, by virtue of its status within its clan and tribe, to produce most of its food. Surplus resources are distributed to satisfy kinship obligations, which means that every member of the kinship group, regardless of wealth or ability, obtains his share. Resources are further distributed within the community by ‘big men’, as they are called in Melanesia, in order to acquire social prestige.
Polanyi accentuates how, in traditional societies, economic activities are ‘embedded’ (that is the word he uses) in social relationships. In other words, they are ‘under social control’. That means that they are distributed in order to satisfy social requirements.
Now with us, it is the other way around. Our society and social relationships are ‘embedded’ in our economy. Instead of using our resources to assure the survival of our society, we are torturing our society into that shape – however aberrant – that best assures the distribution of resources. These are now distributed in a manner that is totally random to the requirements of people, their society and of the ecosystem of which they are part.
So you see, economics has to be re-written altogether. To develop a new culture would mean re-writing evolution, re-writing ecology too and re-writing almost everything. Now to a certain extent, this is already happening. In the field of psychology, the behaviourism of Watson and Skinner, which fits particularly well into the paradigm of science, has been seriously criticised by you and others. It is now largely discredited, though it is still taught in many Universities.
In the field of epistemology, both logical positivism – and logical empiricism which succeeded it – the theories which best fit in with the paradigm of science have been totally discredited by such people as Carl Popper. Michael Polanyi, Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend and others, are being rapidly replaced by a theory of knowledge that provides a firm theoretical basis for the developing paradigm of holistic ecology.
Krishna Chaitanya: I have just brought out a book on the Gita. All these negative kinds of doctrines were current also during the time the Gita was composed, which I place at about 150 BC. We had the Lokayatikas, who were the materialists and the Charvakas, who were the hedonists. But the Gita affirms that certitude can be re-won, not by knowledge alone but by knowledge and wisdom.
Edward Goldsmith: That’s right.
Krishna Chaitanya: We have been using knowledge without wisdom.
Edward Goldsmith: That’s right.
Krishna Chaitanya: Now I would like to return to your revelation which came as a shock, because I was hoping that the interest in ecology would point towards a possible redemption of man. But even that is being degraded by man’s fantastic capacity to degrade anything he touches. Aldo Leopold, 40 years ago, had this kind of pessimism. He watched the ecological movement but said that it had not gone deep into our belief system. It had not become sufficiently philosophical.
Joseph Wood Krutch, who used to do that fine column in the Saturday Review, also said that it was not going deep enough and therefore exploitation and our war on Nature would not cease; it would become more canny, more devious but it would still be exploitation. Ultimately, we cannot put off the day of the crash.
You and I could talk for hours, but every good thing too has to come to an end. Let me try to find out what we have been able to accomplish by our talk. So far as I can see, we still have not been able to suggest any means by which the new humanising knowledge can motivate man. Knowledge is not a motivating factor. It has to mix with the blood which courses through the veins before it can become a motivation.
The enormous task ahead is a sacrificial endeavour; as I said, people may have to be satisfied with one meal every alternate day for a long while, if they want to change over to a new kind of order. We still grope for the answer.
But one definite conclusion that we, in our small way, seem to have arrived at, is that the world is a continuum, a system in a profound sense, not in the materialistic sense or in the sense of the physicist; that, as Lynn White said, the balance in Nature is related to the balance in human nature. And, as Akerman has pointed out, we have to adopt new lifestyles which will not violate the outer limits of Nature and the inner limits of man. And we have to follow up new thinkers in every discipline who see the light. For example, Weisskopf is an economist but he writes on economics and existential balance.
And he has pointed out that the basic doctrines – the basic assumptions of our economics – are not shared by old cultures like the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian cultures of the past. And Schumacher also, towards the end of his life, became interested in Buddhist economics and similar cultural patterns.
So, a tremendous shock, which only a religious conversion makes. Only that kind of radical change deep within, can probably help us to survive for long here. And by religion, I want to make it very clear that I do not speak of a traditional kind of religious type. I am willing to go by Paul Tillich’s definition, that if there is an ultimate concern, it is a religious concern. By ‘ultimate concern’ I mean what is going to happen to me, to the deepest truth of my nature and being. What is going to happen to the world, which contains, besides me, myriad marvels of creation, flora and fauna?
Edward Goldsmith: Quite.
Krishna Chaitanya: So, unless there is a conversion like that, it is very likely, Teddy, that you and I may not be able to meet next year. The world may have been wound up by that time!
Edward Goldsmith: As I have already said, I regard man as a fundamentally religious animal. He cannot survive in a religious vacuum. Indeed man is naturally religious. Marx got it wrong. It is materialism, not religion, that is the opiate of the people and in a materialistic and scientific age, the only religion that appears to make sense is science.
Krishna Chaitanya: Of course, but today’s science seems to be scientism, not true science.
Edward Goldsmith: Today’s science is unquestionably a religion. It promises a future life, a materialistic paradise from which all the problems that have beset man since the beginning of his tenancy of this planet – like poverty, disease and famine – will be eliminated.
I remember not long ago, a scientist actually telling us that science would eliminate death itself. Scientists are quite clearly priests. They wear special clothes to identify themselves as such; they speak a language of their own which other people cannot understand – the mathematical language – just as our priests speak Latin or Sanskrit or whatever – and they claim to be the only intermediaries between man and his vile deity – and thereby the only ones who can bring about the materialist paradise that the religion of science preaches.
What we need today is an ecological religion. One that makes it clear above all that if God created the world of living things, then its annihilation by means of science, technology and industry can only be the work of the devil.. God, it must teach us, can only be served by helping him reconstitute his creation.
Krishna Chaitanya: Let us hope that this reawakening will come to be – in our time.
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