Guest Editorial

Humanity must seek its Humanity

Wherever we are on this planet these days, it appears quite clear that our development thinking has to encompass more than the GNP produced by converting dead or dying soils, fossil energy and inert matter into major products and by-products of warfare, civil or military. The post World War II period of unprecedented industrialisation and urbanisation notwithstanding and without discounting the real improvements enjoyed by some, here and there, let us admit that the current concept of GNP is more a measure of human failures than of human progress.

Nature, or God's realm, forcibly reminds us of the lien we have now placed on the planet's resource base: if the present circumstances prevail, we will clearly be in breach of the Brundtland Report's stricture not to diminish the next generations' inheritance. It is thus, not too early to shift from a set of policies focused on the immediate conversion of resources into tangible, quick-term consumables to a higher plateau of awareness where there is but one all-impressive image of life-forms on earth in critical, intimate harmony.

From a matter-energy thrust, we must now make a right-angled shift to a concern for the imperatives of 'life' and of 'time'. The ecological problem is already upon us, relentlessly terminal in our blindness and denial. Time is no longer a political, institutional or fiscal convenience; it has to embrace all its Einsteinian space-time complexities. Human brain cells subject to the femto-second aggression of the coming optical computer will produce mind-numbing hallucinations instead of the future-oriented excursions into our cortical potential.

If we allow the necessarily complex 'life-time' perspective to suffer the fate of prevailing over-simplification and reductionism, the human organism will find it impossible to maintain a sacred vision of its evolution, and our institutions will lose the legitimacy of the human dimension needed for a sustainable development.

There is a critical need for a vision. This vision must be phrased in terms of mission statements for the planet assertively, plausibly, boldly. Leaders are needed as trustees of humanity's vision and as servants of its missions. Newton may have been the noble 'mechanistic' patron of those 'machine ' metaphors which have bound our speech in the industrial age: the wheels of progress, the gears of change..., the production of new ideas. With our development strategies losing ground, we should look for another metaphor. 'Humanity must seek its humanity' is a deserving raison d'etre in the reach of the higher promise of development.

In this coming 'new age' the Newtonian metaphors must yield to more encompassing images. The UNCED in Rio next June will want to respond to the challenge of a new organic, time-bound metaphor which will account for the change of direction, the change of horizon, the change of perspective arid of attitudes.

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