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The Future of The World Future Council
by
John Papworth
(July 24th 2003)The letter below was sent to Jacob Von Uexkull in response to an exchange relating to his project to establish a ‘WORLD FUTURE COUNCIL INITIATIVE’.
I am seeking to express my disquiet about what it can accomplish, not least in the light of the record of the vast number of similar initiatives concerned to promote peace, social justice and other important social objectives which have surfaced over recent generations. Neither singly nor collectively have any of these otherwise admirable initiatives succeeded in having any practical effect in preventing the multiple global horrors of 20th century life and, despite the growing public concern with the doomsday scenario now hanging over us, there is lacking any evidence that they can have any greater effect in the 21st.
I am seeking to indicate the reasons for this failure and to suggest some basic considerations we need to grasp if we are not to simply project a repetition of it.
It will be clear I hope, that I am not seeking to pour cold water on Jacob’s proposals, but to generate discussion on them that will help to clarify more fully the nature of the problems confronting us in the hope that he may succeed where so many others have failed.
John Papworth
Ok, I am hearing you. What you are saying is we want peace and lots of other lovely things; the world is in a mess, we can change things and create the world we want.I fully share your aspirations, but your manner of projecting them suggests to me they are only too likely to compound the problems they are expected to solve. In 1957 a book was published which was a major intellectual breakthrough in human history. Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations was followed in 1973 by Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which won instant acclaim even as its author freely acknowledged the debt he owed to the earlier work.
Both authors put their stamp firmly on the crucial factor that is promoting the global crisis, the factor above all others which was responsible for the horrors of World War I and all the monstrous evils that ensued from it – the soviet and nazi dictatorships, the second world war, the multimillion victims in deliberately organised death camps, the gestation of nuclear bombs, the evil squandering of the planet’s finite resources for the presumed benefit of scarcely 5% of its human population, the appalling assault on the global ecosystems, the frightening destruction of localised community structures as a result of the consolidation of global economic and political forces and much else; that factor, both argued, was size.
Both asserted in different ways how giant states and massively centralised institutions, by the mere fact of size itself, made it impossible for people to control their workings, impossible to use them to achieve decent social objectives and made catastrophe in many reprehensible forms inevitable.
At a stroke the work of both men had made a vast literature of social reform dating back several generations obsolete, had made it clear that the primary lesson of modern history is that despite the idealistic strivings of liberals, communists, socialists and others, that if ever they achieved power on the same scale the result would not be progress but disaster.
It was a lesson pacifists, socialists and others have failed to learn and this is the reason why in 1914 it made them powerless to prevent the supremely tragic disaster of the first world war. Again the Russian communist revolution was the work of unnumbered, ardently idealistic radicals who wanted an end to autocracy, tyranny and war; they helped with all their idealism and dedication, to usher in one of the most revolting degrees of tyranny the world has ever seen, a tyranny in which millions of those concerned to promote reform were imprisoned or murdered by the supposed instruments of liberation they had helped to create.
The real problem confronting them was a failure to grasp the need not to capture giant, centralised forms of power for central government purposes, but to reduce the scale of the power they captured to a level that enabled ordinary people to control it for their own purposes. Their failure here spelt the failure of the revolution at the price of a toll of human life and happiness beyond compute. But then of course they lived without the advantage of the Kohr/Schumacher breakthrough.
But you don’t. You have presumably seen and read these books, so why does their revolutionary message not resonate in your literature? You are right, “We can change the world,” but the Kohr/Schumacher thesis makes it clear beyond cavil that we can only change it for the better if the power to do so is in our hands so that that power can be compelled to be responsive to our moral judgements. If it is not then all our idealism and social striving becomes a moral fudge, we are back to the same basis as that accepted by all previous generations of reformers, not least by those Labour Party idealists now confronted with Tony Blair and his partnership with the US oil-war machine, and his ambition to ditch such sovereignty and democracy as Britain can now boast, in favour of the economic globalisation conspiracy based in Brussels.
Do you get the point? That if you want to change the world and make it safe and sane for our children you must have the power in your hands to do so?
Were Kohr and Schumacher mistaken? If they were, and given the bearing of their ideas on our current concerns, why does not somebody explain why and how they erred, as a step to advancing an alternative principle of organisation, and an alternative strategy we should adopt? And if they were not mistaken why is there a total absence of any reference to their conclusions in relation to your proposals? Why are you not helping to promote them for all you are worth as an indispensable adjunct to any prospect of the success you seek?
It is not a scrap of use having well publicised gatherings of the great and the good and passing the most impeccable reforming resolutions, in the hope that the generality of people around the world will support you and try to put them into practice. The lesson of April 12th is that even if you get such support the war machine and the global ecological despoilers will roll on regardless.
You do not confront the questions why, when all the major countries dominating global politics are assumed to be democratically governed, that instead of living in peace, freedom and ecological sanity, we are being involved in more and more war, that liberty is being eroded by ever increasing laws and prohibitions, and that market forces are dominating our lives and despoiling our ecosystems with the mindless abandon of a pack of gaderine swine in a steep place. Why?
Why indeed? The majority of people are not itching to fire guns or drop bombs, nor do they want to poison the planet and squander its finite riches, so why is all this and more happening?
Idealism is not enough, what is so urgently needed is a positive strategy to undermine and dilute all centralised forms of power into local hands. So long as that power remains in its present highly centralised and uncontrollable forms it is simply a time bomb ticking away towards the next disaster, and when you find people making changes in their lifestyles, (organic veg, intermediate technology, cooperative water wells in African villages), let your applause for positive news of such matters be tempered by an awareness that these changes on the fringe of things are being made despite the present power system, not because of it, and that that system, under our noses, is rushing us towards ultimate forms of disaster, (global war, ecological suicide and social disintegration), with all the power and the speed it can muster not, let it be added, because those in the driving seat want them to happen, but because they know if they make any attempt to change course they will at once be ejected from the driving seat by more disaster-dedicated drivers. (Try, as a board member of a car company, suggesting to your fellow directors that in the interests of ecological sanity they should produce fewer cars: or, as a political leader, try to persuade your leadership colleagues that they should fight the next election with a campaign to promote public transport and to discourage mass motoring).
So that if we want to change the world we are unavoidably involved in transforming the power structures that now dominate the world, and doing so not by capturing that power on the same scale ourselves, a fact our post Kohr/Schumacher awareness now enables us to see was why the communist and socialist victories of 1918 and 1945 proved in the end to be such tragic defeats, but by scaling down power structures into the hands of local people so that it enables them to project their moral priorities into their operations as a matter of course.
If we ignore these vital considerations, if we ignore the challenge to formulate a strategy to enable democracy to prevail on the only basis on which it can operate, on a basis which is local and modest in size, we are not promoting any kind of solution, we are simply projecting a distraction.
Our dearest possession is life, and since it is given to us to live but once, let us so live as to have no torturing regrets for years without purpose, so live as not to be seared with the shame of a trivial and cowardly past, and so live that dying we can say, all my life and all my strength has been given to the finest cause in the world, the liberation of mankind.
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e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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