Survival and Modernity - a dialogue on our times

Edward Goldsmith and Krishna Chaitanya

Introduction

The life-support resources of the planet are being rapidly exhausted to cater to the insatiable and ever-multiplying appetites of a consumerist culture which threatens to become globally pervasive. Soil, water and air are being increasingly polluted by industrial production that expands to generate artificial demand while neglecting genuine needs. The crucial balance of Nature is threatened by wanton destruction of Nature's own regenerative capability. With a nuclear stockpile that has already acquired the equivalent of three tonnes of TNT to kill each man, woman and child on earth, our epoch has become the most critical in history.

The central thesis of this dialogue shared by the two thinkers, Edward Goldsmith and Krishna Chaitanya, is that the industrial way of life is no longer sustainable. It must end, one way or another, within the foreseeable future. Mankind, feel both thinkers, could meet the logical end only in two ways: either by an act of will to alter the course of progress fundamentally, or by allowing consequences to overtake it. This dialogue, on the malaise of our times, would therefore be of interest to readers.

Edward Goldsmith is the editor of The Ecologist magazine published from Cornwall, UK. For the past two decades he has dedicated himself to sensitising British society to the environmental hazards of the industrial and technological civilisation. He is consultant to several environmental protection agencies and a member of the Wadebridge Ecological Centre, which has brought out his three well-known volumes: Can Britain Survive? (1971); The Stable Society (1977); and The Social and Environmental Impact of Large Dams (1984), issues he has pursued with diligence. It was in the early Seventies, with the publication of the book he edited, A Blueprint for Survival (Tom Stacey, 1972) that Goldsmith shot into fame. The document pointed out the imminence of a possible environmental crash and the means to avoid it.. It sold over a million copies.

Krishna Chaitanya is the author of over thirty books on culture, literature and art. The work most closely related to the theme of this dialogue is his pentalogy on the philosophy of freedom: The Physics and Chemistry of Freedom; The Biology of Freedom; The Psychology of Freedom (Somaiya, 1972, 1975, 1976); The Sociology of Freedom and Freedom and Transcendence (Manohar, 1978, 1982). Reviewers have regarded the work as "building up to a spire of certitude on the foundations of a radically fresh interpretation of the sciences" and as having "the potentiality to be an optimistic philosophy in the Age of Overkill".

Krishna Chaitanya: Teddy, I don't know whether you have read that lovely poem by Paul Eluard which is really on peace, though titled "Liberte". It is full of images of serene but very simple domestic items of happiness. He wishes to live in a world where he can play with his grandchildren and then wishes the world to continue, so that they, in turn, can play with their grandchildren. He talks of his puppy also, playing with the kids - all very unpretentious. But I have a feeling that even these simple joys are going to be denied to us.

If I remember right, the Club of Rome's first report was The Limits to Growth. Now, the idea of unending growth, the hangover of the growth mania of the 19th and early 20th centuries, seems to me to be preposterously ambitious. I am more concerned about survival. Therefore, I was very happy that The Ecologist's report, A Blueprint for Survival, which came out in January 1972, three months before the Club of Rome's report, went to the primaries. It stressed survival, not growth. That is more realistic; and I think it said that if we fail to take very serious corrective measures to change our lifestyle radically, possibly by the end of the century, certainly within the lifetime of our children, the world will grind to a stop. So, Eluard's dreams will never be fulfilled.

The situation, as of now, seems to be that we have a choice of how we are going to meet our end! We may starve to death on a planet completely exhausted of its life-support resources, or suffocate to death in a cloacal mess of pollution, or be burnt to cinders, all in the holocaust of a nuclear bomb.. Which is your choice. Can anything at all be done to avoid this terrible fate?

Edward Goldsmith: I quite agree with you. I think it is very unlikely that our grandchildren will lead the sort of life we would wish them to lead. I think that the very survival of our species today is threatened. Tropical forests are being cut down so rapidly that in two or three decades at the most, all the accessible ones will have gone - with terrible ecological and climatic consequences. The hot tropics are being systematically desertified.

We are seeing, for the first time, famine on a continental scale. Two-thirds of the countries of Africa are affected by it and the totally irresponsible policies of the FAO, the World Bank and the bilateral aid agencies can only exacerbate that problem rather than solve it. Massive industrial pollution is now seriously changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere - killing off forests throughout the industrial world and making lakes so acid that they can no longer support fish life. These, and many other equally disastrous trends, could easily combine to make our planet uninhabitable for the complex forms of life, in a matter of decades.

What is particularly distressing is that the authorities do not seem to care one iota. The most current reaction of our politicians has been to deny the problems. To give you a few examples, our Government has constantly denied that there has been soil erosion in Britain. However, two years ago, the Soil Survey of England and Wales published a report to show that the extent of soil erosion was quite serious. What was the Government's reaction? It did not even consider changing the present highly destructive agricultural practices in order to reduce erosion. All it did was to make sure that the Soil Survey could no longer publish such subversive information, by drastically reducing its budget.

In the USA, Dr. Doherty, of the University of Florida, found that the sperm count of students at his University had been seriously reduced, so much so that many of them were now functionally sterile, while the spermatozoa that remained were contaminated by all sorts of pollutants including DDT and PCBs. Needless to say, this horrifying information did not lead to any change in pollution control policies. All Mr. Reagan's administration did was to close down Dr. Doherty's unit!

The response of international institutions is still more irresponsible. They pretend to do something about the problems - while, in reality, applying politically expedient policies that can only make the problems worse. Thus, as I already mentioned, the world's tropical forests are being cut down at a horrifying rate. We know that this will lead to the elimination of a considerable proportion of the world's plant and animal diversity. This will also give rise to erosion and desertification that can only further increase global impoverishment and famine. It will also, almost certainly, affect the global climate, probably very dramatically. This was made clear at a meeting organised by the United Nations University in Brazil in February 1985, which was attended by my colleague Peter Bunyard.

But how have Governments reacted? The answer is that they just have not. Their attention is monopolised by totally superficial short-term considerations, those that they judge relevant to the achievement of their overriding goal - that of staying in power. On the other hand, the international institutions have reacted, albeit somewhat belatedly. The World Resources Institute in Washington, in conjunction with the World Bank and the FAO, has drawn up an eight million-dollar plan to save the rain forests. That is what it is meant to do but in reality, it does nothing of the sort. It is a shameful document that does not even suggest abandoning any of the large development schemes financed by the World Bank and similar organisations which are causing much of the forest destruction, or curtailing the activities of logging companies. Its main preoccupation seems to be to set up more destructive eucalyptus plantations.

Krishna Chaitanya: Yes, we have an enormous amount of evidence to show that we are heading towards destruction. But tell me this - why is it that the people who belong to the ruling hierarchies of the various States of the world, refuse to realise that they too have personal stakes in survival, and when the big crash comes, they will also perish? Why this hostility to change? Is it because they can remain in power only by assuring the people that all is well, and that they do not care two hoots about what is going to happen day after tomorrow? You know of my strong conviction that unless there is an internal transformation deep in the psyche, no external arrangement or 'fixing', can work. Is that not plain to see?

Edward Goldsmith: Perhaps they think that by making enough money, ways can be found to survive the inevitable crunch. However, I think the best way to look at the whole issue is in terms of the breakdown of social control. A tribal society, which I regard as the norm, is under control - a control exerted by public opinion, reflecting traditional values. This assures that the social unit functions as a co-ordinated whole, the parts co-operating with each other so as to achieve the society's overall goal. However, once society breaks down, it disintegrates into its component parts, each one of which is concerned only with the satisfaction of its own aberrant short-term interests.

This is basically what has happened in our society. Had the different parts into which our society has now disintegrated, been relatively small and powerless, it might have been tolerable, but today, the segments are massive and increasingly powerful. Government departments; international institutions; multinational corporations; all of them concerned only with their own immediate interests can rapidly make this planet unliveable and that is precisely what they are doing.

Krishna Chaitanya: It was probably Buckminster Fuller who first started really thinking in terms of the planet as a unit. Cutting through all political and geographical divisions, he started building up data about the resources of the planet at a planetary level. And I do not know whether you have seen the reports of the Worldwatch Institute of Lester Brown, called the State of the World.

Edward Goldsmith: Of course.

Krishna Chaitanya: There is a report on every primary life-support resource, of the world. It is very clear that if the developed countries leave the Third World to the dogs, the consequence will soon catch up with them too. I just do not understand how these people can forget that they too will go down along with the rest of mankind. Is it true, then, that the lesson of history is that we do not learn any lesson from history? For we do not need any more data on the catastrophes that are about to overtake us and yet we think that something will intervene to save us. Or are we still hugging the superstition that technology can fix it?

Edward Goldsmith: Today's technological achievements are indeed very impressive. For instance, technology can enable man to fly to the moon. But so what? Man has never suffered from not flying to the moon. The truth is that most of the problems that confront us and even threaten our very survival are of a non-technological nature. They are due to the breakdown of natural systems.

Thus, in the present-day West, there is an epidemic of crime, delinquency, drug addiction and alcoholism. This is unavoidable as a society develops, because development destroys social structures and cultural forms and people are made to live in a void, without a family, a community, a culture, without beliefs and without a goal structure. In other words, their fundamental psychological and social needs cease to be satisfied.

Now there is no technology that is going to bring back together the members of a family that has broken down; no gadgetry that can recreate a culture that has disintegrated; no machine that can constitute a community that has become no more than an anonymous mass of alienated people.

Nor can the setting up of specialised institutions do any real good. At best, they can only mask the symptoms of social breakdown. Thus, we can build prisons to house criminals and de-alcoholisation centres to which we can consign our alcoholics; but all they can do is treat the symptoms of a disease whose real cause - economic development - we are incapable of addressing, since it is our society's overriding goal to which all other considerations are mercilessly sacrificed.

Krishna Chaitanya: You are quite right in saying that technology cannot restore the family and its deep bonds which have enabled man to survive all the cataclysms of history so far. But I shall go further in my criticism to say that technology cannot guarantee even that which it primarily set out and claimed to do. For example, production to raise everybody above poverty. In fact, it has created poverty. And we now seem to be shackled to it. The Indian idea of karma can be applied in a new context.

Do you remember Jacques Ellul's revealing study, The Technological Society? He proved that if you allowed your instrumentation or technology, to rise beyond a certain level of power, you lose your control over it. It will cease to be your instrument and the determinants of autonomous technology will become the inevitabilities of our fate. And Galbraith did a study which allowed that in 1903, if Ford had wanted to change over to the battery or steam, he could have done it, because the total investment was only about $30,000; but today for developing a single new model of a car, the investment goes up to $60 million. You just can't pull out.

According to Mark Hatfield, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Pentagon is spending $25 million every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The prosperity of quite a lot of people is tied up with this rate of expenditure. There is a revealing study of Hanford, the place in Washington State where plutonium is processed for bombs. It used to be a village; it is now a flourishing city. This study shows that people are very very happy; they don't care about the terrible work they are doing.

One or two people who got tied up with the peace movement were first ostracised and later sacked. So, this is what I am worrying about. Even with the awakening among the people - and there is a lot of it now - even if we make a decision, "It is all wrong, we have got to go back", can we do it? Many of the people in the well-paid death industry, are sending their children to Ivy League colleges, living in fine apartments and maintaining a very high standard of living. Going back to peace means not only surrendering those standards but may mean even privation, one meal every alternate day. Are we prepared to accept that?

You see, my worry throughout has been that it is too late; awareness has come too late. There is a tremendous desire for radical change but the Karmic grip is tight on us. I wish somebody would tell me that I am unduly pessimistic, that we still can change but if we can do that, it will almost be like a tremendous religion conversion. What do you think about the possibilities here?

Edward Goldsmith: I share your pessimism. The march of regress seems unstoppable. Consider that as soon as you set up an industry that builds, say, 200,000 houses a year; it will want to do so indefinitely, even when there is no more land left in the country to build the houses on, or people to put in them. What is more, it will become increasingly rich and powerful and hence increasingly capable of persuading politicians to cooperate with it. It thus becomes little more than a cancer. The dam-building industry in your country is in that situation today. It is almost impossible to stop.

Of course, there are a few instances where specific industries have been brought under control. One example is the nuclear industry in America. Nuclear power stations are preposterously expensive and totally uneconomical. In America, the power generating industry is run by private enterprise and private industry does not like losing money. That is why no new nuclear power stations have been ordered in that country since 1978 and why a hundred orders have been cancelled. As a result, the U.S. nuclear industry can only stay alive by exporting nuclear power stations to countries where the State pays for them and disguises their real cost from the tax-payers. It is only in such countries (such as the UK, France and the USSR) that nuclear power stations can now be built.

The same sort of thing is happening with the dam-building industry in the USA Dams were being built largely because the State paid for them. Now the law has been changed and requires local communities to contribute. So dam building too, has almost come to an end in the USA and the industry keeps going largely by persuading Third World countries to buy these highly destructive and totally uneconomical devices.

Krishna Chaitanya: This brings me back once more to my pessimistic reading that we learn nothing from history. For example, the damages caused by a very big dam were well documented soon after the Aswan was built in Egypt. It was found that a great many disease germs were piling up there. Down below, the peasants used to build homes with bricks from the riverine mud or silt. That is no longer possible. There are other well-known ill-effects. Yet, we go in for building bigger and bigger dams.

And the same question arises - why do the rulers of developed countries persist in this kind of thing, knowing full well that they too will go down with the rest of mankind? From them, there now comes a radiation and an infection to catch the Third World leadership who have also begun to gang up with the big fellows. The Third World leadership ought to know that 'big' ultimately spells 'ruin'. What then, are the people going to do? Are there any methods of radical conversion; pervasive conversion of attitudes by which we can deflect these rulers from their irresponsibility?

Edward Goldsmith: There cannot really be a piecemeal solution. Even if we could stop certain destructive activities, we would not stop the development process as a whole and this, as I have already made clear, is the basic cause of impoverishment, famine and all the other problems that confront us today.

This may sound paradoxical to some people. One problem with the language we use is that it is most favourable to expressing the paradigm of modernism. In other words, the language helps to rationalise the sort of activities which are destroying our planet. In fact, we live in a hostile verbal environment. What we require is a new language or a new verbal environment for the formulation of a new paradigm, that can serve to rationalise more sensible and less destructive policies.

Consider the term 'economic growth', which you used at the beginning of this discussion. It involves systematic transformation of the world of living things, the biosphere or the real world, which is the product of the evolutionary process, into a totally different world; the world of human artefacts, the technosphere, or, if you like, the surrogate world. Now this process is 'anti-evolutionary' in that it must necessarily reverse the evolutionary process. This must be clear since the technosphere can only grow at the expense of the biosphere from which it derives its resources and to which it consigns its waste products. In other words, 'economic growth' is but another word for 'biospheric contraction'. They are but two sides of the same coin.

It follows then, that when one asks what are the 'limits to growth', we are really asking what are the 'limits to biospheric contraction'; or, in human terms, at what point do we regard the physical and mental impoverishment, the malnutrition, the famine and the disease that biospheric destruction must give rise to, as unacceptable.

Krishna Chaitanya: Let me cut in on that - how are the people so deluded and made to forget the human costs? You know, E.J. Mishan, who wrote the introduction to your book, Can Britain Survive? has pointed out that this calculus of GNP is a funny kind of thing. The number of accidents on the road and the expenditure involved in setting these people right, or just burying them, jacks up the income of physicians and undertakers and that in turn jacks up the GNP. Armament expenditure goes into GNP! So, unless the people are absolute fools, they ought to be able to see through this kind of prosperity. Still, for the sake of immediate prosperity we give our loyalty to the rulers! It is a terrible kind of situation.

Edward Goldsmith: I know it is. It has been pointed out that you can double a country's GNP by the simple expedient of getting every woman to cease looking after her own children for nothing and to look after her neighbour's children instead - for which she would, needless to say, require a salary.

Krishna Chaitanya: Shades of Dada!

Edward Goldsmith: This would, of course, lead to all sorts of social problems, for the children would be deprived of their mother's tender loving care and would be looked after instead by a paid worker who, to a certain extent at least, to use John McKnight's expression, would "only wear the mask of care". The fact is that the GNP is but a measure of the impact of the surrogate world on the real world - a measure of the destruction wrought to social and ecological systems.

Krishna Chaitanya: You know Herman Daly's wisecrack? "If people have no bread, why don't they eat growth?"

Edward Goldsmith: One of the problems is that the world economy can only survive by expanding. That is why it is continually necessary to bring in more traditional people into its orbit.

Both the World Bank and the IMF, were created, basically, to assure the continued expansion of the world economy. Their role is to lure Third World countries into the orbit of the industrial market system, by offering their Governments enormous loans on the condition that they accept IMF conditionalities. If they accept, the Governments have to open their frontiers to Western manufactured products. All import quotas and tariffs have to be abandoned and they must sell their food and raw materials in order to earn the foreign exchange required for paying for all the rubbish they import.

To achieve this, we must not forget, was the real object of colonialism. During the Colonial period, if the Third World Governments refused to buy our finished products and sell us their raw materials, we sent in the army. Today, we send in the I.M.F and the World Bank, to bribe them into accepting the very same policies and, what is more, we pretend that it is in their interest to do so.

If we are to stop this whole process, we have among other things, to imbue people with a very different world-view. This means teaching them the opposite of what they are being taught in schools and Universities today. It means rejecting modern science, modern economics and modern sociology. It means, in effect, creating a whole new culture. Can we do this in time? It seems very unlikely.

Krishna Chaitanya: That brings me back to my favourite point. You know, Schumacher's last book was called A Guide for the Perplexed. Theodore Roszak reviewed it. He gave Schumacher the merited tribute, but then brought out a very important point. He said that isolated from the long history of our decline, a kind of segmental advice just doesn't help, however well meant it is, however good it is. A radical rethinking has to be attempted; we have got to look into the vast negations of our time and see the horror there.

And he mentioned that we cannot side-step Nietzsche, Sartre, Kafka and Beckett, the four people who outline the state of our world-view today. According to Nietzsche, God is dead and there is nobody to replace him; even some kind of analogous concept is lacking. Sartre believed that man is without essence. For Kafka, existence is continuously running up against cruel and irrational riddles. Beckett's view is that we are waiting in vain for somebody, other than us, to come to our help.

Today's whole landscape of despair is sketched by the four writers he mentions. Now, though I have been gunning for these leaders of the world - the rulers of the world - at the bottom of my heart I believe that we get the Government we deserve and you cannot separate the people from the Government. So, let us take a closer look at the world-view we have inherited.

Two historic disenchantments have left us sadder but unfortunately not wiser. One was in the mediaeval ages. There were some who thought they had a liaison with the Transcendental and imposed a dogmatic creed on people. That led to the Inquisition, the burning of Bruno. So we changed over.

There was the scientific movement and science put in the place of dictated belief - a disciplined unbelief; that means, you shall not believe something unless it is proved. The tremendous optimism that science was going to do wonderful things for everyone and the pipe-dream of progress - unending progress, continuous progress, worldwide progress - was launched by the French Encyclopaedists. And look what has happened to them! Now, what are the parameters of our world-view, the basic view of Science?

You see, when Leucippus and Democritus developed the atomic theory in ancient Greece, the particle was an ensouled particle; it had the power of self-movement; it was divine. At the heart of physis or Nature, was nous or spirit. It meant that the atom was not a dead inert particle. Lucretius - I rate him very high - talks about the "inherent declination" of the atom, that is, its capacity for self-movement. And he derived the freedom of the will of man from that. It is a fantastic link-up and Lucretius here anticipates quantum physics and Sherrington.

But when the atomic theory was revived in modern times, we forgot all about this. Galileo said the brick of the universe was the inert particle and he added that particles moved only if pushed or pulled by external forces. Kepler assumed the same thing in the case of planetary motions. Newton integrated the whole and a drift of inert, dead particles, moving only if some force pushed or pulled them, fell into random conglomerations and produced the whole universe and evolution. That is the world-view of classical physics.

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.