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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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47. Jean-François Revel

French author, journalist and philosopher Jean-François Revel was born in Marseilles in 1924.
He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy. He taught philosophy at the French Institute in Mex-
ico City (1950-52), at the French Institute at Florence, Italy (1952-56) and has taught philosophy at Lille and in Paris.
In 1963 he withdrew from academic life and became a full-time writer and journalist. As Paul A. Samuelson does for Newsweek, Revel writes columns for the French weekly l'Express.
His book Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun (1971) has drawn sharp attention in the United States. He is preparing a history of Western philosophy, of which two volumes have been completed and which is to be published in the US by Doubleday in 1974.

The first line of your book1 forecasts that the revolution of our time, of our century, will take place in the United States. What do you mean by revolution?

 

By revolution I mean change. What you have to take into consideration when we talk about revolution is not the kind of ordinary revolutionary phenomenology, as it is often used, but about the very substance of change. I'll give an example: We speak in France about the revolution of 1848. In my opinion it was not a revolution because it lasted about three months. Afterwards we had the Second Republic, which lasted about two years and then came a dictatorship for twenty years under Napoleon III. When we speak of revolution, we should observe the outcome, what went into the very depth of society. America today seems to me more or less the melting pot of a world revolution.

 

You mention on page 183 of your book why you think that the United States is a prototype nation for this kind of revolution. You sum up the reasons, like continued economic prosperity, rate of growth, affirmation of individual freedom, etc. This tremendous Americanization of the world, on the basis of what is happening in the United States today, versus Japan - do you think it's possible that Japan with its enormous rising influence and economic growth will achieve in the East what the United States did in the West?

 

Yes, I think it may have a great impact on Asia, namely, on China. Japan up until now has had growth without development.

What do you mean?

 

We will come to that later when we talk about the Limits to Growth because I think that's the key point of the issue. Japan had an economic takeoff but no cultural revolution. In my book I mention that a true revolution has five components. One of them, only one, is economic growth. The great revolution towards the end of the eighteenth century in England (I don't speak of the first industrial revolution of the seventeenth century, which was purely political and a classical type, it could have taken place among the Greeks and has nothing to do with - but I am speaking of the world revolution - the Atlantic revolution of the end of the eighteenth century: America, England, France, Switzerland, Holland) was made possible by the first economic takeoff which took place in the United Kingdom.

Japan has had its economic takeoff, but Japan does not create for the world new models of culture, of behavior, like we see in the United States - as the Women's Lib, pop art and pop music, counterculture, the communes, everything like that - exciting a transformation in sensibility, in the way we perceive the world. The complete turning upside down of the perception of the world accomplished by Jean Jacques Rousseau2 was as important for the French revolution as, for instance, the political thinking of Montesquieu.3 Rousseau reversed the classical vision and Rousseau created a kind of emotional drive, a new attitude about nature, toward education. If you notice, each time you have a many-sided revolution, you have an upheaval in education: Jean Jacques Rousseau during the eighteenth century, Ivan Illich4 today. All ideas of a new kind of pedagogy that came to Europe some years ago were shaped in the United States in the beginning of the sixties. I am talking about a new kind of laboratory for a new culture, a new civilization.

 

I find your thinking the same approach as Limits to Growth, which is attacking the planet with global thinking, the concept of a global revolution.

 

The Club of Rome has raised an important issue. This was useful. It is pleasant to see an idea, a thesis which was devised in 1965 or 1966 by some pot smokers in Californian communes - individuals considered half-demented parasites of the affluent society - become a theme thought about by the great technocrats of our world. That's a typical example of the American revolution too.

I lunched recently with Herman Kahn.5 According to him, the Gantal culture is dead. I told him, that the Gantal culture was not dead at all, since all that he was saying to me were ideas that were devised by the Gantal culture five years ago. The most effective revolutions are the revolutions that are taken up by their enemies and then go unnoticed.

Some experts say Limits to Growth was a little garbage-in, garbage-out. Nevertheless, perhaps the greatest benefit of the publication of this report will be that we will become more and more aware of problems of environment, of possible exhaustion of energetical resources and of course of problems of the Third World.

However, we must draw a distinction between growth and development. Growth is a purely quantitative concept, and you always have growth. You even have growth in Haiti or Tanzania. You have tremendous growth rates in Russia, but a bad quality of life, even a daily life, which for the average Russian citizen is a kind of underdeveloped situation, sometimes coming close to starvation, as we have seen last year.

Development is something else, development involves changes in the political structure and in the culture. What we saw at the end of the eighteenth century during the industrial takeoff in England and France was not only an economic growth. It was at the same time a change of civilization, political change, moral change, artistic change, philosophical change, change in the structure of the family, everything. The reason why so many countries in the Third World don't develop themselves and don't transcend poverty is, as Gunnar Myrdal has seen correctly, that we experts of the developed world have taken into consideration only the economic aspect. We thought that just sending money would do it, would create an economic takeoff without changing human attitudes, social infrastructure, a new administration and a new management.

In Latin America, for instance, to fight birth increase is impossible for cultural and moral factors. The Latin man wants children. When we give the pill to an Indian woman in Mexico, her husband beats her, because he does not want her to take the pill. He wants her to have many boys.

Growth is a pure economical concept. Development is something which lays at the point of convergence between economic accumulation and innovation at all levels. That will be my answer. I would say that the problem Limits to Growth, in the pure economic sense, is a technical problem, it's a problem of management. The fact that I decided I will spend less coal or oil for this or that is a purely technical problem. In

that sense I am for Limits to Growth, but I could not support limits to development.

 

Proust6 once observed that disease is the only doctor who can exact obedience from the patient. Would you say that the problématique of the planet at the moment would warrant the declaration of an emergency?7

 

Yes, I would say that. I would add, however, that I also think that there is no solution now, except on a world scale. I am only afraid we are too late. We are too late politically. I think that we have too much technology in certain areas of the world and not enough technology in other areas of the world. But in order to use technology as we use wealth or money in the developing areas of the world would mean that there would be a kind of world government to manage these areas. I don't see how the rich West could first ask General Amin8 to limit growth because, first of all, he has no growth at all in Oeganda, or not enough at least; and second, even if he had an economic takeoff, the kind of civilization he's creating is something so abominable that what would be the point? The great problems are exponential growth of the developed world and the nondevelopment of the so-called developing world, which is not developing at all. They are world problems, and we have to cancel completely the fiction of the nation-state, the De Gaulle philosophy.

 

De Gaulle9 never spoke of nations, but of states.

 

Yes. Therefore, I think that it's wrong that the Portugese government feels it has a right to do what it has done in Mozambique or Angola. Nations are historical accidents. Don't get me wrong, I do believe in cultural diversity.

 

You also mentioned in your book that you are against bilateral accords. They must be avoided like the plague, you wrote.10 We see the United States and Russia achieving the SALT agreement, which makes us recall the Von Ribbentrop-Molotov11 pact of 1939. How to globalize nuclear power treaties, how to make the world safe?

 

Here you are touching upon something very special: security problems. It's a fact that there are two big nuclear powers and a few little ones. The SALT talks are necessarily bilateral because there are but two big military powers in that field -

But their pacts won't make the world any safer -

 

They do to some extent, because it's not either completely and exclusively bilateral. There are some consultations of the Europeans by the Americans, for instance. Of course it is not enough, but it's better than nothing. Towards multilateral entente - I was thinking, for instance, of phenomenons like the slowly growing European unity, or the Stockholm Conference on pollution and environment.

 

All politicians, dictators as well as democratically chosen politicians, seem to run behind the consciousness of the people.

 

Yes. And what makes a revolution is when the vital difference is no more than five or ten years; when the difference is fifty years, everything is lost. But when the politicians understand that earlier, under pressure, since more and more people are becoming internationally minded, the wall between domestic affairs and foreign affairs is collapsing at last.

 

You went further. You said in your book, foreign affairs are dead.

 

They should be dead. I think as far as affairs are foreign, they are damaging to mankind. Why should they be foreign? Because they are all our affairs. We are of course aiming towards not a global village, as McLuhan says.12 Perhaps we should speak of a metropolis - and not in the sense of an expressionist movie of Fritz Lang, but in the Greek city sense.

 

Maybe McLuhan used the term village with his characteristic sense of humor. But you agree, I assume, with the Limits to Growth concept of starting to manage the planet like a big company, like Shell or Phillips.

 

Yes, but we have first to regulate democracy. In the Third World you cannot. The people there have not reached the cultural level for that kind of massive operation. Theirs is a very slow change and this is a tragedy.

 

This is a political problem?

 

Yes, a political and cultural problem.

 

Noam Chomsky13 spoke to me about the proletarianization of intellectu-

als. Do you believe that the minds, the thinking people, would be able to revolutionize - to gang up and put sufficient pressure on the politicans to really do the job that's needed?

 

The present political systems are completely archaic. The way individuals reach positions of power and I do not only refer to the fact that most of the world is governed by dictatorship, the so-called democratic one-third is very archaic too. Through publicity people win votes.

 

McGuiness, The Selling of the President.14

 

McGuiness is one. Did you see the movie The Candidate, with Robert Redford? I compare the modern political leader to the man who was riding the stagecoach, the coachman. Our modern society is a Boeing 747, and instead of a pilot, you would see arrive a coachman - from the American Wild West in the 1880s, with his whip and his spurs, his Texan hat - and he thinks he can fly that 747 the same way as he used to drive the stagecoach at the end of the nineteenth century.

The issue is more democracy. After all, it has always been the solution. There is not a single problem in the history of mankind which has been solved otherwise, by other ways than simply more democracy, more participation, cultural participation. The more people are able to understand issues, the more democracy we get. In the United States - and to a less extent in Western Europe - we can say that two-thirds of the population can really understand what's going on, compared to five percent a century ago. The world is closer to a working democracy.

The modern revolution - the new kind of revolution, let's not forget - is something new. It is not something that has already happened. A true revolution cannot be compared with any previous form of revolution, because otherwise it would not be revolution.

More and more people are getting an education. In 1990, ninety percent of young Americans will get a college education. Yet, we cannot solve the great problems of mankind, summed up by Limits to Growth, without world planning. At the same time people demand more and more personal freedom. Here lies the complete contradiction. We have to do planning as the result of a convergence of individual choices. That is what democracy really is.

I think that we reach the point where the big reconciliation will have to take place, between collective planning and individual creativity. One cannot say ‘I am against pollution’ and at the same time say ‘I am

going to do what I damned please. I am going to throw one thousand liters of oil in the sea because I am a free man.’ That's absolutely insane. One cannot speak in favor of both ideas, as we hear every day. We cannot say, ‘il est interdit d'interdire,’ like we read on the walls of the Sorbonne. ‘It's forbidden to forbid.’ We have to have growth; we have to stop growth. How to stop growth if you do not limit personal freedom? That's the world's political issue, the moral and cultural issue of our time. That is the heart of the question. There will be needed only one new type of social contract, of world social contract, which can lead to the solution of the problem.


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