The five world order values were formulated by the World Order Models Project of the Institute of World Order (now World Policy Institute) as: Peace (or minimization of violence), Economic welfare, Social justice, Ecological balance, and Democratic participation. (See e.g. Mendlovitz.) We will use this framework here in slightly abbreviated, reworded, and rearranged form, as follows: Peace, Wealth, Justice, Democracy, and Nature. The symbols will be P, W, J, D, and N.
These five values form a Pentagon of Values, as shown in the diagram on the front cover. It can be visualized as a completely connected graph, or the most dense network, forming a five-pointed star inscribed in the pentagon. The connecting lines (sides and diagonals) represent binary relationships between the values. There are also 10 inscribed triangles (5 using 2 sides and 1 diagonal, 5 using 1 side and 2 diagonals) representing triadic relationships.
When reversed into their polar opposites, the 5 values are converted into 5 world problems: war, poverty, exploitation, tyranny, and nature degradation. Four of the values (and problems) refer to the socio-sphere, the last one to the biosphere. Four refer to goal values (what our decisions should aim at), one (Democracy) is a means value (specifying how to reach decisions).
There are complex relationships between the values, as indicated by the lines and triangles in the diagram. The whole Pentagon illustrates the “world problematique” of interlinked crises, or more optimistically the Guiding Star of the goal of harmony being pursued.
Some of the links have been investigated in several world reports by UN Expert Commissions or Independent Expert Commissions. But before getting to this, let us define a few more values derived from the basic five, either by combination or subdivision.
We shall define Development as a compound of Wealth and Justice; i.e. Dv = W+J. Let us also define Human Rights as a compound of Justice and Democracy; i.e. HR = J+D. And finally, let us divide Peace into Disarmament and Security; i.e. P = Ds+S.
There have been world reports on Disarmament and Development (Thorsson), on Disarmament and Security (Palme), and on Environment (or Nature) and Development (Brundtland). If we also add to the list the Covenants on Human Rights, then all the five world order values are covered in these recommendations.
Summarizing the most basic insight of each report or covenant in the most succinct possible term, we come up with the following list: Common security (Palme), Conversion to peacetime production (Thorsson), Sustainable development (Brundtland), and Human dignity (CHR).
What has been said so far can be diagrammed as shown below.
where Pal = Palme Report, Tho = Thorsson Report, CHR = Covenants on Human Rights, Bru = Brundtland Report.
We now provide some discussion to flesh out the bare bones of this framework.
Definitions of world order values and derived values.
PEACE (P) means assured (stable) absence of war and of violence. This somewhat narrow (“negative peace”) definition is justified here because the other 4 values add the other ingredients of “positive peace”, and because the original definition from World Order Models Project said “minimization of violence” which is even narrower. We say “absence” rather than “minimization”, because the latter can be seen as a partial approach to full absence, which is the end-point of the spectrum. We add the term “assured (stable)” to the WOMP definition, to signify that we mean more than a temporary truce or suspension of violence; in Boulding’s terms (Boulding 1978), we mean “stable peace”, not “unstable peace”.
WEALTH (W) means roughly a larger Gross National Product, although we are aware of the shortcomings of the GNP as a quantitative measure of national wealth. We do mean material wealth, since the other 4 values add the other ingredients needed for high quality of life, which is certainly more than wealth, or even quite different from it. Nevertheless, a certain amount of wealth is a value, since it brings access to the basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, health and education.
JUSTICE (J) could be defined either by merit or as equality, and this constitutes an ideological problem that we wish to avoid. Therefore, following Rawls (1971), we define justice as a compound of freedom and equality, thus partaking both of capitalist and of socialist values. In addition, justice also means non-discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, religion, class, gender, etc.
DEMOCRACY (D) means rule by the people, and it means not only the right to vote in electing leaders or directly deciding issues, but also active participation by citizens in the political process between elections. Its realization depends not only on the presence of mechanisms for participation, but on the efforts by ordinary people to utilize these mechanisms. We leave unspecified such questions as whether decisions should be made by majority vote (simple or qualified) or by consensus, whether democracy should be direct, representative or “responsible”, or whether it should be a parliamentary or presidential system. However, one important stipulation should be added: even where the majority rules or decides, all minorities should have the right to express their opinions and to form organized oppositions.
NATURE (N) is often called “the environment” in discussions of world problems or world values, but, following Ursula Franklin (1989), I prefer the term “nature”, because it denotes an independent power with whom we have to accommodate and negotiate, not an inert outside “environment” which we can in principle totally control. Other possible terms are “ecology” – but this is a science describing the relationships between different animal and plant species in a region like a forest or a meadow or a stream. A good term would be “biosphere”, because it denotes that we are part of it, not outside of it; but it might require too much explaining when used in political discussions.
PEACE AS A COMPOUND OF SECURITY AND DISARMAMENT. It has been said that “threat” depends on both capability and intent, i.e. on the presence of armaments and on the presence of hostile intentions. If peace is attainable only by the removal of threat, we must remove both the capability and the intent to harm one another. Removing the capability means removing the arms, i.e. disarmament. Removing the intent might be called, first of all, confidence and trust building, in the second stage the resolution of concrete conflicts, and in the third and final stage active cooperation between the formerly hostile nations. (Cf. Dietrich Fischer, forthcoming.) These three stages of removing hostile intent (making friends out of enemies) can be seen as building security from military attack. (There have been attempts to define security in a wider sense, including economic and ecological security; but we choose the narrow definition again here, because the other meanings are covered by the other values.) To realize peace, we have to simultaneously disarm and build security.
DEVELOPMENT AS CONSISTING OF BOTH WEALTH AND JUSTICE. The old concept was that “development” means simply increase in GNP, and is thus synonymous with wealth. In fact, the cluster of indicators that closely correlate with GNP per capita, such as the degree of industrialization, the degree of urbanization, percent literacy, energy consumption, number of radios etc., in a nation used to be called “the development index”. But then the realization dawned on development economists that the internal distribution of wealth was also important; that to have wealthy modern enclaves in cities and a poor primitive countryside population is not to have true “development”. It is for this reason that we require Justice to be a component of Development along with Wealth. An approach to equality in land distribution and income distribution would be factors contributing to Justice. A good index of Development (Wealth plus Justice) would be average life expectancy, or a low infant mortality (see Alcock et al., 1978.), because these indicators take into account the distribution of wealth as well as its absolute amount.
HUMAN RIGHTS AS A COMPOUND OF JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY. This formulation emphasizes that humans have a natural or moral right both to substantive end-satisfaction (as specified under Justice) and to fair procedures for determining what these ends should be (as implied by Democracy). The CHR, like the preceding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is divided into the two categories, civil and political rights on the one hand, and social, economic and cultural rights on the other hand. This division reflects the previously mentioned division of Justice into its components, Freedom and Equality. Freedom refers to the civil and political rights, Equality to the social, economic and cultural rights. We shall leave out of the discussion here the so-called “third generation” rights (group rights) as introducing too much complication.
Some Binary Relationships Between the Values.
PEACE AND WEALTH. There are regions in the world where stable peace prevails, i.e. war is not only absent and has been for some time, but is almost unthinkable in the future. Such regions are, for example, Scandinavia, the undefended border between the U.S. and Canada, and since World War II (in which France and Germany fought each other for the last time) Western Europe (EC). Now Bruce Russett (1982) thinks that the zone of stable peace should be widened to include all of OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), i.e. not only merge the North-American and the West-European stable peace zones into one, but also include Japan.
Matthew Melko (1990) argues that East and West Europe have been living in a state of stable peace, along with their superpower leaders US and USSR, all through the years of the Cold War, in spite of ideological tensions and occasional military crises. This has already been called “the Long Peace”, even though truly a negative peace only. Whether it was motivated by nuclear deterrence, substantial balance of power, remembered horrors of World War II, high intentions and lack of aggressivity by the leaders, or the absence of real down-to-earth issues to fight about, we shall leave undecided. The significant new development is that this Long Peace now promises to continue, after the Soviet perestroika and the revolutions in Eastern Europe in November 1989, in a much friendlier spirit after the Cold War has ended.
Thus the Zone of Stable Peace, covered by the overlap of OECD and CSCE (Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe, or the Helsinki Accords), now extends through the entire geographic belt in the Northern temperate latitudes of the Earth. This is still very new and needs testing and confirmation through time, since new instabilities could well develop within this vast region, as already appears to be the case in the incipient break-up of the USSR into its constituent republics. But this may in fact proceed peacefully — we shall see.
In sharp contrast to Melko’s view of stable East-West peace (already during the Cold War, and presumably even more so now) stands Michael Andregg’s prediction (1990) that “the next general war should begin between 1997 and 2001”; he gives several plausible arguments for this prediction. So on the whole, it is still too early to tell if the whole Northern temperate zone is in fact a Zone of Stable Peace, but there is at least a real possibility. However, Andregg is too optimistic regarding the world as a whole, where general war could start any day now. (Written in August 1990.)
This same geographic region (i.e. the Northern temperate zone) is also the wealthiest in the world, in sharp contrast to the “Third World” extending through the tropics. Parts of the Third World are still in a state of “stable war” (Boulding’s term (1978)), i.e. almost perpetual war with occasional short interludes of truce. Alan and Hanna Newcombe (1980) outlined a chain of nations extending from South Africa through East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia, along which most of the world’s recent 200 wars have occurred or are occurring. Each nation along the chain is surrounded by two hostile neighbours who are in alliance with each other, so all feel threatened, and war can spread or diffuse, as if by contagion, from one pair of enemies to the next all along the chain. As a result, all are overarmed. Some are actual or potential nuclear proliferators. Many have chemical weapons and modern missiles. Many support rebels in each other’s civil wars. This whole region has been compared either to a “fuse to the bomb which is the world”, or to an earthquake fault along which the Big One will come. This seems uncannily real today (August 1990), a time of high tension in the Persian Gulf. In this regard, Andregg’s prediction of the next general war occurring between 1997 and 2001 may be entirely too optimistic.
The Third World as a whole is a region of poverty as well as chronic wars. Some Third World regions outside the Fuse chain are not in a state of Stable War, but only in a state of Unstable (occasional) War, or even Unstable Peace (peace interrupted by occasional short wars). But in any case, the wealthy North is much more peaceful than the poor South (really tropics), and so correlations between Wealth and Peace, in quantitative studies such as Russett’s (1983), are high.
The Southern hemisphere of the Earth is mainly ocean, but Australia and New Zealand are a part of the Northern Zone of Stable Peace, though geographically displaced; South Africa used to be the Southern anchor of the Fuse, but is undergoing a vast transition at the moment which makes its future unpredictable; Chile and Argentina in the Southern cone of South America seem sometimes like the Third World and sometimes like the North; and Antarctica is largely uninhabited, but a harbinger of the future, positively as an area demilitarized by treaty and a World Common, negatively as the site of the first hole in the ozone layer.
Why is Peace and Wealth linked in this manner? William Eckhardt (1977) thinks that, just as the North’s wealth is extracted from the South by imperialistic methods (e.g. unequal trade), so also the North’s peace exists at the expense of the South’s wars. Put in another way, the North exports both poverty and war to the South, the latter by such means as proxy wars, interventions, the arms trade, and political support for military dictators.
In opposition to this theory of imperialism, we can put the theory of delayed development. In Rostow’s scheme of economic development (Rostow 1960), there is a sharp transition (in the form of an S curve) from a traditional (subsistence) society through a transitional society (on the steeply rising part of the S curve) to a modern wealthy society (on the upper plateau). (See diagrams at the end.) Accompanying this, there is a demographic transition from high birth rates and high death rates in a traditional society, through high birth rates and low death rates in a transitional society (which produces a population explosion during this stage), to low birth rates and low death rates in a modern society. Nations in the North have entered these growth curves at an earlier time in history than did the nations of the South. The reason for this may indeed have been colonialism with its attendant exploitation of the South, but we need not assume that this exploitation continues today, for the time delay itself may account for the difference between present conditions in the North and the South.
But now we should perhaps add a third transition to the previous two: the transition from traditional stable peace under fragmented tribal conditions of low contact between societies, through periods of unstable or even stable war during a rapid-rise transitional period of turbulence or “crisis”, to a new plateau of stable peace in wealthy modern societies after the transition. The North is only just entering this higher plateau, while the South is still in transition, because of the historical time delay. This is why Eckhardt (1990) and others find that there were fewer wars in primitive societies than in present-day “civilized” societies – because so many of the latter are still in the turbulent transitional stage.
According to this theory, we could all enter the Zone of Stable Peace, if we could only survive the extreme dangers of the transitional crisis. (This should be compared with my essay on The Rise and Run, unpublished.) The main difficulty is that the economic transition to Wealth (the original Rostow scheme) is not possible for all the world’s people in their present or future-as-predicted numbers, because the Earth’s resources would run out. Either we limit our numbers or change our definition of Wealth — or both. (More about this in a later section.) But perhaps the economic S-curve and the stable-peace transition are not strictly linked, and we could have a transition to stable peace without all of us becoming extravagantly wealthy. The demographic S-curve might also be independently manipulable.
So we may not have to go back to primitive society and abandon civilization in order to become peaceful. There is another state of stable peace at the higher plateau of development if we could just manage to reach it. It is there like a sand-bar on the beach, but we have to swim through deep water to get there. On that plateau we may also have demographic stabilization (constant population numbers, at whatever level), and some reasonable level of economic wealth, above subsistence but perhaps without extravagant luxuries and certainly without waste, using intermediate technology and renewable energy in a conservation and recycle mode. But I am getting ahead of myself and introducing concepts from the value of Nature, to be discussed later.
PEACE AND JUSTICE. The relationship between (negative) peace and justice is ambiguous: stable peace requires justice as its foundation, but the cry for justice is the most frequent cause of war. But on closer inspection, these two statements really say the same thing: in the absence of justice, peace cannot last.
Since the definition of justice itself is so highly ideological, and depends so strongly on the perceptions and the definition of the situation by the “oppressed” and the “oppressors” (who deny that they are such), we are really in the thick of things with this pair of values. This is the very crux of war/peace issues as well as justice issues: when is the use of violence justified? Theories of the “just war” have grappled with this question, and more recently theories of the “just revolution”. (See Klaassen 1978.)
Application of the methods of nonviolence on the Gandhian model seems to be the solution to this question. This makes it possible to oppose injustice without harming fellow-humans. And indeed, much has been accomplished by nonviolence, as attested to by Gene Sharp’s book (1969), as well as the recent East European revolutions (except Romania). The wave of “People Power” that started in the Philippines, then jumped to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia…and eventually South Africa was an exhilarating experience for all of us. It failed in China and in Burma, but then you cannot expect 100% success – the use of violence also often fails to attain its goal.
The East European independent groups emphasized both peace and human rights in their struggles, as pointed out in my essay “Quantity, Quality, Equality of Life” (unpublished). It was difficult for Western peace groups to understand this close coupling, because logically they thought that survival (peace) must come first. But for those experiencing injustice at first hand, the coupling is very close indeed. Even in the West, one of the largest and oldest peace groups is called “Women’s International League for Peace AND FREEDOM”, and the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice is also well known.
Nevertheless, trying to serve both peace and justice is fraught with great difficulties. Fighting a war or a revolution to obtain or restore justice does not always succeed in doing so. There are two kinds of outcomes of violence that may thwart the drive for justice: one is the possibility of losing, in which case the sacrifice of lives will have been in vain; the other is the possibility of winning and then lapsing into another type of injustice, which may be even greater than the original injustice.
Let us illustrate this for the case of revolutions. The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were both fought for the sake of justice (though defined differently in the two cases), and both ended up in dictatorship and terror. This is because the same ideological zeal which is necessary to start and carry out the revolution in the first place, later interferes with the art of governing when the victory is won. Revolutionaries make bad rulers. The two roles require different qualities: a revolutionary must be zealous and austere, and somewhat fanatical and dogmatic; a ruler should be open and sensitive to others, a mediator and a reconciler, able to accommodate to circumstances.
A similar type of reasoning applies to international wars. The original war aims are rarely achieved, especially in a long war. The aims may be modified during that time; vengefulness toward the enemy may emerge, especially when one has suffered heavy losses at his hands. The aim of even-handed justice then fades into the background, and the initial high-mindedness disappears when dragged through the horrors of war.
A proponent of principled nonviolence, like Gandhi or M.L. King, would insist that not only does the end not justify the means (thus invalidating the entire Just War theory), but the means determine the end: i.e. if we use violent means, this changes us into violent people and we continue to be such even after victory, as do our opponents. If they win, they oppress us unjustly; if they lose and we oppress them, they will plot revenge the next time around and violence will keep recurring. In either case, justice is not really achieved.
It is a romantic idea to fight for justice, but if violent fighting does not actually achieve justice, practical-minded and rational people will avoid it. For what counts in judging ethical behaviour is consequences and not motives or intentions. That is the ethic of responsibility, and we have an awesome responsibility to preserve life on this planet. We cannot afford to indulge in the romantic impulses of the ethic of purity. Turning the Biblical saying upside down: What would it benefit us to save our soul and lose the world?
Nonviolent struggle offers us another kind of purity: that of total deliberate harmlessness (ahimsa). Perhaps this too should not always remain 100% pure; a pilot gone crazy who is intent on bombing the enemy and starting a nuclear war must be shot down. SOME ends DO justify SOME means. But we must be extremely careful not to get on the slippery slope of too much justification, as the Just War theory has done in practice. Strictly applied, the rules of the Just War (proportionality, exhaustion of all other means, reasonable expectation of winning, non-harming of civilians and neutrals) would make nearly every war in history unjust; yet every nation at war has always claimed that its war was just – usually on both sides of any given war. And the slippery slope of justification leads straight to a Holy War or Crusade or Jihad, as has happened historically – and all limiting rules are then left by the wayside in the pursuit of one’s holy cause.
PEACE AND DEMOCRACY. In this pair of values we have an interesting finding of historical peace research: democratic states do not fight wars with each other, though they do fight wars – but only with totalitarian or authoritarian states. This empirical observation (e.g. by Dean Babst (1964) and Rudolph Rummel(1985)) may seem surprising at first. It may still prove to be an artefact, due to the scarcity of democratic states until recently (the lists of wars for testing this theory extend quite far back), and not so abundant even now. Perhaps there have not been enough of them to have had the opportunity to get involved in wars with each other.
However, I consider it more likely that we are dealing here with a real phenomenon and not just an artefact. The explanation for the relationship may be the same transition to stable peace that we have already encountered while discussing Peace and Wealth. There we had three curves of transition: the economic, the demographic, and the stable peace transitions. Here we should add a fourth: the transition from the original traditional authoritarian regimes at earlier times; through the steep part of the curve on which harsh totalitarian regimes flourish, with occasional excursions into brief democratic episodes; to the later plateau where we find stable democracies. Perhaps K. Boulding’s (1978) fourfold scheme for war/peace (stable war, unstable war, unstable peace, stable peace) should be extended to another fourfold scheme: stable dictatorship, unstable dictatorship, unstable democracy, stable democracy.
In any case, if this theory is true, the reason why democracies are peaceful (as well as wealthy and not growing in population) is that they are on the upper plateau of development – an advanced stage that all nations will eventually reach, unless all are destroyed first. Of course, the links should still be traced in detail as to the mechanisms. Are nations wealthy because they trade rather than fight? Are they peaceful, because the common people who help run democracies have never wanted wars, but could not get their way under dictatorships? Are they democratic because they are wealthy and don’t have to compete with each other so fiercely any more for basic necessities? All these causal links are plausible. Probably there is a self-reinforcing cycle that could be drawn for all these variables, with mutually reinforcing feedbacks that maintain the system at the high plateau of civilization.
PEACE AND NATURE. Nuclear war would be the ultimate eco-catastrophe, and any war is a source of environmental destruction, whether through bomb cratering of fields as in Vietnam, or the destruction of jungle vegetation by herbicides, in the same unfortunate country. Arthur Westing of SIPRI has written extensively about this. (Most recently in Westing (1988).) Even preparation for war has adverse ecological effects, since arms race spending diverts financial resources to destructive ends, with not enough left for beneficial applications.
While the above is a link between negative anti-values, there are also links between the positive values. The coming of peace and disarmament could free up resources which could be used to remove environmental dangers. In reverse, the need to overcome global environmental threats might act as a superordinate goal to help nations to overcome their hostile mutual images and to cooperate. (Cf. Sherif et al., 1961.)
WEALTH AND JUSTICE. Again, it has been observed that in the wealthy, peaceful, democratic, demographically stable nations, there is a greater equality of land ownership and income than in the rest of the nations which have not yet reached that stage of development.
Perhaps no more needs to be said about this, except that we seem to observe a convergence of four of our five World Order Values at this high-development plateau. The exception is Nature (the high-plateau nations are generally more polluting and more wasteful), which may be a fatal flaw, unless we can manage a radical S-curve transition there too – and rather quickly, in this “turn-around decade” of the 1990s.
WEALTH AND NATURE. The preceding paragraph leads us straight to this troublesome binary relationship, usually conceived as a trade-off: it seems as if we can get wealthier only at the expense of exploiting and degrading Nature (on whose health and beneficence we ultimately depend), or we can become kinder and gentler to Nature only if we lower our material standard of living.
In the Ehrlich-Commoner equation with which I dealt in my essay Limits to Growth versus Sustainable Development (unpublished), wealth is one of the three terms which contributes to environmental degradation, the other two being overpopulation and technology. There it was stated that each of these additive terms will have to be held to some limiting (no longer increasing) level if environmental degradation is to become zero, as it must in order to attain long-range sustainability and survival.
The particular level of wealth which is sustainable may be argued about; but it is known that beyond a level of about $700 per capita Gross National Product, the average life expectancy no longer increases very much, and infant mortality does not decrease as rapidly as at lower GNP per capita levels; there is a sharp change of slope in the curves, as shown by Alcock et al. (1978) in their “Economic Law of Life”.
That GNP level is rather lower than that for the high-plateau nations at present, but we have been warned that it will be impossible for all nations to attain that level, because resources of Nature would not be sufficient, certainly not for the long run. We could choose, of course, to blow everything in a great big binge or orgy of luxurious living, but it could be done only at the expense of survival for our children and grandchildren.
At the lower, sustainable level of wealth, the Quality of Life may still be high, even if the material standard of living is only medium-level. Quality of Life depends on such thing as a healthy happy family life, low crime rates in our cities, access to satisfying fullfilling kinds of jobs and careers – in general, Maslow’s higher values of belonging, achievement, and self-actualization. Quality of Life does not depend, as much as we now think, on being able to buy the latest gadgets or cars or clothes or entertainment.
In other words, happiness is attainable without excessive wealth, although a certain minimum level of wealth is essential to satisfy basic material needs, and a small excess saved up for contingencies is also desirable. But that minimum material level would be available at GNP per capita of $700, if evenly distributed within each nation.
Very relevant in this connection is Gandhi’s statement that Happiness equals the fraction of perceived needs that are satisfied. We have been trying to increase happiness by increasing the numerator of that fraction (needs satisfied), but happiness could also be increased by decreasing the denominator, i.e. the needs perceived. This means simple living, as long advocated and practised by Quakers and other groups.
WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY. This relationship has already been discussed as part of the complex at the higher plateau of development.
JUSTICE AND NATURE. Here we should note the point made by the Brundtland Report, that poverty (not only wealth) harms the environment. This is shown for example in the case of deforestation, when poor peasants need land for cultivation or firewood for cooking.
JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY. While these two values go together in the compound which we have called Human Rights, we should also note a possible negative link. Democracy is only a means value; the “sovereign people” (in practice the majority) can decide to perpetrate injustice on the minority. This is, of course, quite common, and has led to secessions and civil wars, as well as positive experiments in federalism and consociational democracy. There is a tension between these two values, but solutions have been invented and are available.
The same kind of tension also exists between Democracy and some of the other values, e.g. Peace and Nature. The people in a democracy could decide (unwisely) to wage war or destroy the environment. I don’t believe that the Voice of the People is the Voice of God, necessarily. The value of Democracy must be moderated by Wisdom – a sixth value.
DEMOCRACY AND NATURE. This last binary link has been adequately covered in the preceding paragraph.
Concepts Developed In the World Reports.
COMMON SECURITY as defined in the Palme Report, means that Peace must henceforth be defined in a universal, global manner, because we live in an interdependent world. Specifically with respect to modern weapons of mass destruction, we live at each other’s mercy, or as Boulding (1962) put it, we are only conditionally viable. For this reason, depending for our security on unilateral national means is no longer functional.
CONVERSION TO PEACEFUL PRODUCTION, as defined in the Thorsson Report, highlights the vicious and virtuous cycles of interconnection by the metaphor of the intermeshing gears. (This is done in Clyde Sanger’s (1982) popularization of the Thorsson Report.) The three intermeshing gears are called Security, Disarmament, and Development. In the vicious cycle mode, insecurity leads to armament which leads to maldevelopment which leads to insecurity, and so on around again. But the direction of the gears can be reversed to the virtuous cycle, in which security promotes disarmament which promotes development which promotes security, and round we go again.
Another idea from the Thorsson Report is the creation of a United Nations Disarmament Fund for Development, into which the savings from disarmament (the “peace dividend”) would be put, and from which Third World Development would be financed. This very reasonable idea was not accepted by the donor nations at the U.N., but perhaps could be resurrected at a later time.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, as advocated by the Brundtland Report, is a concept fraught with certain difficulties, in view of our previous discussion of the negative link between Wealth and Nature. Certainly, if “development” is to mean unlimited growth, then this could never be sustainable, and we have here an inner contradiction in the term. However, if “development” is redefined as recognizing the limits to growth, especially in wealth, and emphasizing instead the non-material aspects of the Quality of Life, then the term “sustainable development” can be made meaningful. One thing we must not do is redefine “sustainable”; this must continue to mean “NO long-term degradation of Nature – that is, ZERO”. There is no such thing as “almost sustainable”.
CONCLUSION. The Five World Order Values provide a fairly well-integrated whole, with Peace, Wealth, Justice and Democracy possibly stabilized at high levels at a high plateau of civilization. However, there are troublesome trade-offs and tensions between Nature and Wealth, and between Democracy and some of the other values. Nevertheless, possible solutions to these problems were outlined here, though their attainment will not be easy.
The Five World Order Values define an accessible Utopia, but much effort, determination and wisdom will be necessary in order to reach it.
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POSTSCRIPT TO CONCLUSION.
It would seem possible, if the tentative conclusions reached here are valid, to reach a high stable plateau of social order characterized by peace, justice, democracy, and stable population, as well as wealth, for in all these cases, transition curves may connect the primitive balances to the final post-modern balances.
The transition times are and will be stormy, plagued by war, injustice, dictatorship, and runaway population growth; but in these extended times of crisis, we already see the glimmerings of a light at the end of the tunnel – more democracy in Eastern Europe, Philippines, and Latin America, more justice in South Africa, more peace in Europe and the whole Northern hemisphere.
The worrisome aspect is the difficult reconciliation between wealth and nature. Wealth is a part of the configuration of the higher plateau of social order, but it seems inaccessible to the rest of humanity, for reasons connected to nature. Does that make peace, justice and democracy on a global scale inaccessible as well? Are we condemned to crash from the stormy transition crisis, perhaps to oblivion, while already in plain sight of bliss? Is the promised land destined to remain a chimera, a Fata Morgana in the desert? Is the light at the end of the tunnel only the headlight of an oncoming locomotive?
I received new hope that this need not be so at the recent (September 1990) Pugwash Conference, where a speaker reminded us that, in principle, solar energy could supply 4000 times the energy needs for the present population size at the present U.S. level of energy consumption. Much of this will be technically too difficult to use, but 4000 is such a large factor that we may be permitted to be hopeful.
Other resources, such as metals, will dwindle, but availability of energy can overcome this by developing substitutes, or recovering metals from very lean ores or clays or scrap. Energy is the basic currency of both the biosphere and the sociosphere/technosphere, and if its supply is assured, we may get through the transition crisis.
Solar energy has powered the biosphere at least from the times of the transition crisis in which photosynthesis was invented by the cyanobacteria. Perhaps it is the Sun to the rescue again in our present crisis.
ODE TO THE SUN
Peace and justice, people’s might,
widely practised as a right
by small bands at human dawn,
when free and equal links were drawn.
Agriculture, technique, skills,
raised subsistence up to frills
beyond needs, to worship wealth,
as pollution threatens health.
In transition to this stage,
wars increased; and to assuage
cries for justice, now more lacking,
dictators received more backing
from the military leaders
and from other special pleaders.
Poor and rich, now deeply split,
at two sides of deep gaps sit.
While transition is so troubling,
wildly turbulent and bubbling,
we do catch a fleeting view
how we might get safely through.
Higher level, as a fusion
of peace, wealth in great profusion,
justice, free and equal powers,
like a leading beacon towers.
In our aim to reach this state,
what would this necessitate?
High wealth level has meant harm
to Earth’s climate, town and farm,
by waste dumps heaping up fast
and resources that won’t last;
air and water now less able
to keep Earth’s biosphere stable.
To reconcile wealth and nature —
please note, every legislature —
needs new economic thinking,
closer ecology linking.
Energy from Earth and Sun
and the Moon, as now begun,
may yield sustainable basis
for the tasks that mankind faces.
Four thousand times present need
to the whole world the Sun can feed;
if a fraction is employed,
wealth to all can be deployed.
We may reach the Promised Land,
where together values stand:
peace and justice, wealth and rule
by the people, in a pool
of unspoiled nature, safe and whole,
can coexist in focused role,
at high plateau, as end state,
all our aims to integrate.
All high values we desire,
that for ages us inspire,
we can have them all, and fun:
let’s pin our future to the Sun.
Let’s hitch our wagon to our Star
and happily we’ll travel far;
to a future calm and bright,
with nature bathed in clear Sunlight.