Strategy for tomorrow

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The second report of the Club of Rome has appeared. It is the work of 30 scientists, who specialise in different aspects of the world’s problems, headed by Professor Eduard Pestel of the Institute of Technology at Hanover, and Professor Mihajlo Mesarovic, Director of the Centre for Systems Analysis at Case Western Reserve University.

The general feeling communicated by this study is that we are much closer to the crunch than Meadows let us suppose in the first Club of Rome Report. Indeed, unless radical action is taken on a number of fronts, the situation by the end of the century will have become completely out of control.

In South Asia for instance, by the year 2000 there will be an extra 390 people to feed from every square kilometre of arable land. With the protein deficit for this area increasing at a rate of 50 million tons a year – and this is the most optimistic figure – the amount of food which would have to be imported to avoid massive starvation, would be considerably more than the total likely to be made available to the world as a whole by the exporting countries, several times more than could be financed by exports and more than the world’s transport systems could conceivably accommodate.

Nor is there any hope of providing the basic amenities which would he required by the exploding urban population. Consider that every week sees the arrival of 350,000 new people in the already hideously congested cities of South Asia. This figure is likely to increase to 750,000 by the end of the century, by which time Calcutta will have a population of 60 million.

To make matters worse, the amount of energy available to produce food and provide urban amenities would have long since ceased to keep up with demand. By then, the world’s oil reserves will have been exhausted and we shall have become dependent on nuclear power.

In order to generate the 40 terawatts of electricity required, we would need 24,000 nuclear reactors (assuming they function at 40 percent capacity). This would mean putting up four new ones a week for the next hundred years. Since they only last 30 years, we would have to build two a day, just to replace those which we are forced to abandon.

These alone would cost $2,000 billion a year, which equals 60 percent of the World’s income. Even were this conceivable, the dangers involved would be insupportable. Consider that 15 million kilogrammes of plutonium 239 would have to be produced and transported every year. This is one of the most toxic substances known and has a half-life of 24,000 years. The inhalation of one millionth of a gramme is sufficient to induce lung cancer, which means that a quantity of plutonium the size of a grapefruit would suffice to kill the entire population of the world.

The notion that nuclear power could be dispensed with in favour of solar power is chimeric. To produce the equivalent of 200 million barrels of oil would require covering approximately one per cent of the surface of the earth with solar collectors at a cost of between $20,000 and $50,000 billion at today’s prices.

Clearly all these trends must be reversed and there is no time to lose; but how? To find the answer one must consult the computer – which is referred to throughout this study as a modern version of the Delphic Oracle.

The model is supposed to be superior to the Meadow’s model in that the world is not regarded as a single unit but as made up of a number of different regions whose problems are not necessarily the same. In practice two differences emerge: some export oil, others import it; some are poor, others are rich.

The computer assumes that economic growth is a good thing and that it can actually solve human problems, whereas all available evidence, both theoretical and empirical, points to the opposite conclusion.

The computer works on the premise that our problems are not caused by growth per se but by a particular type of growth which is referred to as ‘undifferentiated’. Another type of growth referred to as ‘organic’ does not cause problems; on the contrary it helps solve them.

The distinction is a key one, though the term ‘differentiated’ would be better than ‘organic’ since it is not only in organisms that such growth occurs but in all natural systems including cells, societies and ecosystems. For several million years, human societies have fulfilled their specific functions as differentiated parts of the world’s ecosystems, as do other animal societies.

To suggest that economic growth can be ‘differentiated’ or ‘organic’ is simply to play with words. It is pseudo-science at its worst. Economic growth, whether it occurs in rich or poor countries, constitutes, from the point of view of the biosphere of which man is part, undifferentiated growth, randomness or entropy.

The solutions the computer has to offer are the same pious exhortations to do things, which, whether they are useful or not, will quite evidently never be done. Thus the rich must provide more aid to the poor. There must be more global co-operation. We must abandon the notion of national sovereignty. We must identify ourselves with future generations, etc.

The computer does not suggest how these tours de force are to be achieved. It does not consider that as galloping inflation makes the rich countries increasingly poor, they will be willing to provide less, rather than more, aid to the poorer ones; that as international stresses over resource shortages build up so will people become more, rather than less, nationalistic; and that once our very survival is at stake our concern with our own immediate problems will be such that we shall become still more indifferent to the lot of future generations.

At this point, we might well ask why the Club of Rome is failing to come out with any answers. One reason is that they have grossly overestimated the value of computers. They really seem to believe that these big clumsy adding machines can come up with answers which human brains cannot produce.

I am not suggesting that computers do not have their use. They force one to divert from what today passes for scientific method and to build models rather than look at things in test tubes. They force one thereby to face the assumptions on which conclusions are based and to quantify the variables used. Unfortunately this is, at present, a disadvantage rather than an advantage, since the most important factors determining the future of man on this planet – I refer to human values – have not yet been quantified.

The dichotomy between facts and values is one of the ‘myths of modern science’ which most requires exploding. The two most important principles of the ‘new science’ which we so badly need, is firstly that behaviour at all levels of organisation is goal-directed and secondly that the goal is ‘stability’ or in the narrowest sense of the term: survival.

Values are simply the basic principles underlying a society’s worldview on the basis of which its behaviour is mediated. They can thereby be judged objectively in terms of the extent to which they favour the achievement of stability.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. The assumptions underlying this model simply reflect the basic values of Industrialism and thereby provide a justification for industrialisation but cannot provide one for the opposite process of de-industrialisation – which is quite evidently the only possible strategy for tomorrow. Unfortunately, computers cannot modify the assumptions underlying the models which they contain.

It is not to the computers of the Club of Rome that we must look for a ‘strategy for tomorrow’ – but to a group of creative thinkers, who are capable of examining our problems not just in terms of the aberrant values of industrialism but objectively in their evolutionary context.

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