Good News Agency
INTERVIEW WITH ERVIN LASZLO
by Sergio Tripi
23 June 2000
Ervin
Laszlo, scientist, philosopher, pianist and author of over 50 books, is the
founder of the Club of Budapest, member of the Club of Rome, of the
International Academy of Science, scientific consultant to UNESCO and Rector of
the Vienna Academy. He taught as resident professor in several universities,
among them Yale, Princeton and the New York State University. He lives in Italy,
in the Province of Siena.
Sergio
Tripi, an author and journalist, is the Representative in Italy of the U. N.
University for Peace. He is the founder and
president of the Associazione Culturale Triangoli e Buona Volontà Mondiale, a
non-profit organization that operates in synergy with the Lucis Trust and
with other international organizations engaged in the spreading of a culture of
peace in the ‘global village’ perspective.
Sergio
Tripi: One of the thoughts that attracts most people is the fact that the world
today is confronted with a number of basic emergencies requiring urgent
attention. In your opinion, what are the most striking and pressing emergencies
that the world today is facing?
Ervin
Laszlo:
I can summarise it in one word : sustainability – which, in a well recognised
and international community, is not only an ecological issue but also a social
and economic issue; of course it is thereby also a political issue. The single
key factor that poses the greatest challenge is the fact that the kind of world
we have created in the second half of the twentieth century cannot live for long
into the early twenty-first century without causing major breakdowns. Therefore
we have to change. Now this has ecological dimensions in terms of the
deterioration of the basic ecological life support systems, and it has
social-economic dimensions in terms of marginalisation when an increasing number
of the human community, about one and a half billion people, that is one fourth
of the human population, live below the minimum living standards, defined by the
World Bank as one dollar a day. And the problem that consumption patterns,
management styles, and political behaviour are still not adapted to a community
of six billion people. They are more adapted to a nationally based industrial
system of the middle of the twentieth century. But that is now on the way out.
We are moving into a globally interconnected information based society which is
not sustainable in the present mode.
S.T.
: The picture you paint is the picture presented to us by certain attitudes of
the human being: selfishness, aggressiveness, and the consequent exploitation of
the world today. How do you think these attitudes should change and be anchored
to a new set of values, and what should these new values be?
Ervin
Laszlo : One
could say again – using a single key word for this – one would have to
re-socialise the human community into
its new global condition. We are socialised into small regional communities, at
the most into national states. We are having difficulty moving from the national
state in Europe to a European Union and in finding common values. We are
motivated here of course by open markets and by a common currency, but world
wide, despite the presence of the United Nations, the human community is still
very strongly centred on so called independent and sovereign nation states which
cannot solve the problems that are confronting the overall community, or cannot
create an equitable and peaceful system that includes about 190 independent
national governments. We can only conceive such a world if people; if politics;
if societies; re-socialise into a global community creating a foundation for
peace. That means that the individual has to develop multiple loyalties;
solidarities, beyond the level of his or her own family, enterprise, community
or nation. These stands of loyalties have to move to the level of an entire
cultural region, to the intercultural and international level, and finally to
the global level. As long as people do not feel themselves to be members of a
human community, developing on this planet as an integrated whole, interacting
and sustaining themselves within the ambit of nature, its biosphere; and as long
as people feel themselves separate from each other, from other cultures, from
nature, they are going to behave selfishly, they are going to have consumption
patterns that are intolerable for others, the rich are going to consume far too
much – without respect for the needs and possibilities of the poor, the poor
in turn will overload their immediate environment – over exploiting it in
their own search for survival. And in some cases, with the present patterns of
political and civic behaviour, the present consumption patterns, the present
style of management of major international business organisations, and in the
present style of political leadership in national government, we are creating a
stress in the system which means that instead of integrating on the global level,
this system is coming apart. It is becoming stressed and fractionated into rich
and poor; into powerful and powerless; into those who have access to resources
and those who do not have access to resources.
S.T.:
Urgent issues requiring new attitudes; and attitudes based on new values. Do we
have time to adopt these new values and new attitudes and, assuming that we do,
in which areas do we need to intervene as quickly as possible to see them
adopted?
Ervin
Laszlo:
We are in a race against time, against change. As H.G.Wells said at the
beginning of this century: the future will be decided in a race between
education and disaster. We could repeat this. We could say that our future in
the early twenty-first century will be decided in a race between the evolution
of a new, more global consciousness in the masses and the increasing fractioning,
the increasing divergences that we have in the contemporary world. So the
important elements are: information and education. Information obviously is a
general term but it is not enough just to have information, it also has to be
relevant. It also has to be the kind of information that people need in order to
orient themselves in this world. It is not enough just to give immediate
attention to sensationalistic items of information, to catastrophes, or to the
doings of political leaders, or wars. All of these of course have their place in
the media and in the information flow, but what we need is the understanding of
the basic trends, the basic processes that shape our world and decide our
destiny, our future. So we need more relevant information – this so as to
reach the main stream population: adults and young people, old people, people of
all ages. This is possible because we have the necessary flows of information;
we have the technology.
The
other area is obviously education, where we have to reach young people, those
who will come onto the scene as the managers and the actors of the human
community in the next ten or twenty years. Without their understanding, without
the development of their consciousnesses, we have no future at all. So education
has to start at a very early age; it has to start in the kindergartens and move
on, through the secondary schools to the universities. It is not a hopeless task
because humanity has always created the values that it needs to survive in a
society that is becoming ever more complex. But right now we have a lag. Our
system of values, our world views, the way we look at ourselves, look at nature,
and look at other cultures, is below the needed threshold; is behind the times;
it is obsolete. It was alright fifty years ago, it was alright perhaps thirty
years ago, but in the last twenty years certain developments have overtaken it.
So we need the kind of consciousness, the kind of values that permit all people
to survive in this world, and young people have to understand from the very
beginning that in order to achieve this they have to know what the basic trends
are, why they occur, why our world is unsustainable, and how we can make it
sustainable.
S.T.:
Information and education then are the two most urgent areas that need to be
stimulated and tuned up to synthesise with these new trends. This seems to be
possible at least where education is concerned – in several countries there
are examples of fresh approaches to educational issues. The media on the other
hand seems to continue to be guided by its quest for quantity rather than for
quality – looking for audiences and readers as desperately as ever. What
possibilities are there of seeing this change in the future?
Ervin
Laszlo:
The problem with the media is that they underestimate the change in the
public’s mentality. They believe that it is still the old context, the old
values that dominate. They don’t realise that a lot of people: young people,
intellectuals, sensitive people of all kinds are frustrated, fed up and are
wanting something different, are more interested in understanding our future,
understanding the evolutionary processes under way than just looking at
sensationalistic headlines. Once media understand that there are more people
interested in this kind of information I am sure that they will supply that
information because what they are looking for is audience. Now they are
dominated, as you say, by quantitative measures – what is the rating of a
television or radio programme, how many people tune in to it, what are the
subscription rates of a journal or of a newspaper, or a magazine. These are the
issues that decide the media’s attention. If the media
understand that they can
sell (and I use this commercial term advisably, because they do want to sell)
relevant information, I am sure they will provide relevant information.
S.T.:
This picture seems to correspond with a new situation in the audiences and
readership of the media. There is an increasing number of people who are losing
interest in the information they receive. They are often disoriented and they
are looking for something new. So it is a matter of becoming aware of that part
of the public that is desperately looking for new viewing and reading material.
And another factor that might endorse and support what you are saying is the
presence in this country of over five million people making some sort of
voluntary contribution to society in one field or another. Would you say that
this is indicative of hope, of progress for the future?
Ervin
Laszlo: Well,
there are two sectors of society that are extremely important and representative
of hope for the future. One is this voluntary sector, which is often
consolidated in the non governmental organisations, whether national or
international, and they try to do something that is more meaningful than the
official inter-governmental and governmental agencies do. And the number of
these NGO’s has grown exponentially in the past ten to twenty years. This is a
very hopeful sector; an important sector. The other one is an informal sector
which is sometimes called the alternative cultures and which ranges from the
people who are close to the mainstream and who actually just want to live in a
different way and to change there own life style, all the way to the sects, the
somewhat crazy lunatic age people who ardently share a very different ideology,
rejecting the establishment, society. So it’s a very wide spectrum. But very
many people, even in this informal sector, are seriously trying to change their
own lifestyle, their own patterns of consumption, their own political behaviour.
Many of them are trying to leave the big cities, to go out to the country, to
live more their own life. You can see this in Tuscany where many people come
from big cities all over Europe and all of a sudden find themselves trying to do
organic farming or to live a more self-contained, a more sustainable way of
life. So both the formal and the informal sectors of society show a process of
change. These processes of change need to be supported.
Ervin
Laszlo: I
think the two go together. The more the situation becomes critical, the more
people are re-thinking their behaviour patterns and their values and are
evolving their own consciousnesses. The hope for an entirely smooth, linear kind
of a transition by little steps is actually fading. We are likely to see some
major changes occurring quite suddenly, like we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989
and 1990 when all of sudden that whole, so called second world just disappeared,
practically from one day to the next. We are likely to see major changes which
are unforeseen even just the day before. But at the same time I think the
preparedness of people is increasing. More and more people are coming on to
wavelengths where they realise that a strongly non linear, a strongly
qualitative kind of a change process is ahead of us. And especially young people
are looking for new ways of being and of doing things and are ready to take
responsibilities. So I think in this sense the desperateness of the situation is
at the same time a cause for hope because it is coupled with a greater awareness
and a greater willingness to change.
S.T.:
Are there definite signs that support this view – signs of a response on the
part of those people who are more aware?
Ervin
Laszlo:
There are some surveys being done in Europe – we still have to do more of them.
In America some surveys have been conducted which show that there are over forty
million Americans who belong to so called integral cultures – a term used to
describe organisations or groups of people who are adopting an entirely
different lifestyle and consumption pattern, and trying to live in a more
sustainable way, a more modest way. Voluntary simplicity is another term used in
this connection. So it appears that there are more people than one would think
who are already attempting to change. The greatest need, and at the same time
the greatest lack, is communication between these people. They are a bit lost.
These people think that they are very few in number, think that yes, we are, or
I am, willing to change but that few people in other parts of the world, or even
in my country, are willing to do that. Yet this is not true. So I think joining
these people together, finding a common platform for them, establishing
communications between them, would be a very important activity.
S.T.:
In conclusion, the message then is: work hard and look to the future with
enthusiasm. Is that right?
Ervin
Laszlo:
That’s right. With hope but with the acceptance of responsibility. Not only
asking for your own rights but accepting responsibility for yourself, for other
people in this world, for nature, and even for future generations.
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