Macroshift: Evolving with Technology

An interview with Ervin Laszlo

Barbara Vogl

I interviewed Dr. Laszlo last March 25th when he was visiting San Francisco to inaugurate the Club of Budapest in the United States. He is the founder of general evolution theory and foremost exponent of systems science. He is founder and president of the Club of Budapest, a global think tank oriented to promoting new values and a more planetary consciousness. He has taught at many universities in the U.S., Europe and the Far East, and was project director and advisor at the United Nations. We talked about his new book, Macroshift 2001 - 2010: Creating the Future in the Early 21st Century.

Barbara:

Dr. Laszlo, you've written so many books on the aspects of changing scientific world view that it is very hard to know where to begin. Perhaps I should begin by congratulating you on the birth of your new grand daughter, Kahlia, and ask how that has changed you?

Ervin Laszlo:

It is my third grand daughter and I'm delighted that both of my son's and their wives are devoted parents and that they can combine their professional interests with their personal interests. I think there is personal development going on in the children at the same time they are getting educated, informed about the world in which we live and in which they are going to come to live. Kahlia is really a child of the 21st century.

B:

The world that she is born into has some problems to say the least. You have said that we are living in humankind's greatest Age of Bifurcation. I wonder how that term, bifurcation, helps us understand the critical problems that we face today?

L:

Bifurcation comes from Thermodynamics, a new science developed in the 60s and 70s, but it doesn't just apply to physical systems. It is a general process. The relevance of it is that in a bifurcation process you have a linear process which gets broken at a given point and becomes non-linear. Things move very smoothly, reach a critical juncture, and then there comes a break. During this break many things are possible except continuing the way it was. So the system can completely break down as can happen in many different cases, in Nature, in Society, in Culture, in the Galaxies, etceteras, etceteras. Or it can find a new fashion of continuation. It can't go on the way it was and during the time this selection process is going on, the mutation if you like, the system is not determined--not predictable.

So at the time the bifurcation is going on there is a period of rapid change during which the future of the system is being decided. During this period almost anything goes except going back or staying where we are. It is an extremely critical period. There is a great deal of freedom in it, a great deal of chaos and you might say it is crucial for the future of the system.

B:

Would you share your ideas about how education is crucial for a positive shift?

L:

When you apply bifurcation to society then you get what I call a macro shift--macro because it is not micro--it goes on all levels at the same time. And shift because it is basic--what is called a phase change, a change from a previous state to a new change. In this kind of a very general civilizational change, how people think, what they know and even more what knowledge they take to heart, what they absorb which makes a difference in their behavior, their values and their consciousness. That is the critical aspect because if it is true as I have said in a macroshift as a bifurcation process you can neither go back nor stay put, then there will be choice in alternative futures and will depend on what we do now. And that in turn depends on the kind of thinking we have now. So Education should not be just handing down information from the past but it should be education whereby people can learn how to think for themselves, how to develop their thinking, not just thinking in a rational way which, of course, is extremely important, but also with what is called emotional intelligence, the ability to absorb, to feel and to relate not only with one's brain but with one's heart.

B:

We recognize that we are in a predicament with population growth and environmental degradation but the idea of linear progress is so strong that we still think that there will be technological fixes. Would you comment on this?

L:

In a way there are technological fixes but they're not really fixes because a fix is like a patch that you can apply very quickly. There are technological solutions. This is very fortunate because, actually, practically all of the problems we have today are caused by the unreflective uses of technology--short term thinking in terms of applications of technology. I use the term, technology, in a very broad sense--not just hardware but the various soft wares such as human relationships and how we organize ourselves. It's not just technology like you take down from the shelf in a supermarket and take it home and cook it. Here we need a whole different kind of priority. It starts with the kind of investment people make in the production process, the consumption process, the discarding of the product, the demand structure. The whole thing has to change and this whole change is involved in the selective use of better more appropriate technologies and means developing a different set of priorities. There is technological solution but it is not an easy fix.

B:

You mention several times the need to forget old ways. Would you talk about your choice of the word, forget, in developing a new ethic?

L:

The greatest problem in learning is forgetting the old. It is very difficult to absorb something new as long as one holds onto the old. The great physicist Heisenberg said he finds that scientists in general can learn new theories but the greatest difficulty they have is in forgetting the old because until they forget the old, the new thinking appears to be variations at best or perhaps a deviation, but not the real thing. So for that reason one has to be able to forget, not by putting it away but one has to transcend, overcome, re-absorb in a new context from the old.

B:

In your new book, Macroshift, 2001 to 2010, you describe the macroshift as having four phases. You differentiate the soft technologies from the hard technologies. Would you describe how you arrived at those four phases?

L:

That's an application of systems thinking to bifurcation process in society. Of course, systems thinking is the way you organize this material. But it is very common sense if you reflect on things. What is it that creates change in society? First of all its changing the way people relate to each other and the environment. All of a sudden you find yourself in different environmental circumstances, in different social circumstances. What changes peoples' relationships to each other and the environment? In one way or another it is technology. You have new ways of handling energy and information. Therefore you can communicate differently, use resources, process resources, and discard them in different ways. So hard technology is at the core, it is the trigger. You change the technology and all of a sudden a lot of things happen way beyond the given technology.

Technology doesn't get adopted in society unless and until it does something more. The first thing it does is open up access to more resources; it uses more resources, not only information but physical resources like oil and water. And then this leads in turn to an expansion of the population. Historically, every time you have a new technology--from agriculture onward to steam, to the machine--more people can live because people could do more things. You have more people, you use more resources, you have to get better organized. So now come the soft technologies. You have to organize your educational system, your society, political system, economic system, communication system in ways in which more people relate and do more things.

How easy is it for people to create new soft technologies? Here is where you get to the softest point--to the point where you have to forget to some extent the old and develop the new. To do this you have to develop what you might call a new mind set. You don't solve old problems with the same mind set that created the problems as Einstein said and it is true in society in general.

B:

And that would be the beginning phase of the macroshift?

L:

That is the crucial phase, the consequent phase. In the beginning phase from 1960 to 2000 when you start manufacturing things in a certain way. In a very simple way you think that's all there is to it but you are changing people's expectations, life styles, changing society That brings us to the crucial point. Can people develop new ways of living, new ways of relating to each other and the environment in ways in which the new technology can be used? Because if you don't, the new technologies will create crisis sooner or later.

B:

That is the choice of going one way or the other--destruction or a sustainable world. I see the 60's was the beginning phase of macroshift where many people were beginning to change their mind sets. We had the anti-Viet Nam war movement where many woke up to the effects of war; we had the free school movement where we questioned the traditional system.

Actually, I discovered General Systems Theory during that time and I want to thank you for your books because they were the clearest than any of the other books I had to read in school.

L:

That's a complement.

B:

It was a mind-blower to begin to understand systems thinking. University professors like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were exploring the world of psychedelics and the breakthrough in consciousness. Would you comment on that period and would you talk about your collaboration with Stanislof Grof and Peter Russell?

L:

Yes, I was in this country in the late 40's to the late 50's and then I came back to Yale University in '67 and spent a year there and taught there for seven years. I was involved to some extent with the follow-up to the Kent State tragedy because the President of Kent State asked me to come in and give a series of seminars to re-align the University in a new way. My sense is that was a period of ferment. Something started at that time, very chaotic but hopeful. A movement like that never completely disappears. In new and different ways in the '90s another spiritual renaissance started. I found the 1960s for me personally very exciting because it was then I shifted my professional focus from music to science and philosophy and systems theory.

B:

You were in music before?

L:

Yes, I was a professional concert pianist until the '60s when I did my studies of systems science on my own. I did not think I would make a career of it until, more or less accidentally, my first book was published in '63. The notes I had made for myself got into the hands of an editor. He offered to publish it and then I realized that this could be of interest to others besides myself.

B:

May I suggest that the universe called?

L:

Something called. It was difficult to resist (laughs).

B:

You mention the necessity of non-ordinary states of consciousness for evolution of spirituality in humankind. How do you see the emerging spirituality in relation to the new sciences?

L:

This also gets back to your previous question about Stan Groff and Pete Russell. To develop a new mindset with its forgetting and the learning processes involved, it is greatly facilitated when one can move beyond the every-day common sense framework of one's life. This everyday framework is where the urgent overwhelms the important. You just do one thing after another that has to be done and you gradually keep postponing and finally you don't do anything new. However when you get into these altered states whether it is just getting a little distance and reflecting on what you are doing or doing more systematic meditation or prayer or any one of the more guided ways of psychotherapy--any one of these ways you have an easier time of transforming your mind, creating a new kind of feeling and thinking, evolving your consciousness. So altered states of consciousness are very much researched these days and people are very much aware of the fact that more and more people take these things seriously. Before it used to be thought of as deviation from the ordinary normal thinking or a sign of madness. Now we know they are discovering some are states of creativity and range all the way to states of genius in science and art and religion.

B:

There are so many people experimenting with new ways of thinking that there is a growth of support systems, people getting together to support each other. You can find them in almost every community. I've been impressed with this quite spontaneous movement as belonging to what you call the Consequent Phase and I take hope from it. But I'd like to ask you about your work with the Club of Rome and the study resulting in the publication of the Meadows' book, The Limits to Growth. How do you reconcile those findings with a global economy that measures itself by growth?

L:

The study which was using Jay Forrester's model by Donella and Dennis Meadows had a very great impact because it was one of the first applications of computers to social concerns. It was not the intention of the authors to forecast the future. It was merely making a scenario and projecting it to the future and say "IF things don't change this is what will happen." The second scenario said "If we don't change the KIND of growth process the system will break down within 100 years which I think is a very conservative estimate because I think if we don't change we would probably have been in a deep crisis already. So we don't have that much time.

We need to ask what kind of growth. There are all kinds. Human growth is desirable; cancerous growth is not. Just a linear kind of growth process that uses more of the same thing reaches the limits of that resource. But growth can be qualitative. Growth and development go together as well as growth and non-development go together as in cancer. We have both kinds.

B:

The statistics you provide on the gap between the rich and the poor really shocked me because it shows how rapidly that gap is growing. How does this contribute to the melting of national boundaries and the growth of MegaCities?

L:

The problem is that poverty is spreading in the world and in many countries the middle-class is diminishing. There will be those living the life of affluence and then there will be the poor people on day-to-day survival. Those are the people who constitute perhaps a third of the population who have to be mobile to find jobs. There's a tremendous migration from poorer countries to the richer ones and fro the country to the cities.

B:

Historically, the nation-state is a recent invention. At the grass roots level now we are beginning to re-think our boundaries around eco-systems. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmond coined the phrase bio-regionalism. How does this fit into your ideas of macroshift?

L:

Well macroshift is a process and because these ecological concepts show that the current pattern of development is unsustainable it moves us into macroshift, into the bifurcation process of indeterminate rapid change. A good concept also is the ecological footprint which simply says that a given population needs a certain set of resources to survive. Megacities and the richer nations have an ecological footprint that is far larger than themselves. The ecological footprint of humanity as a whole is larger than the biosphere.

B:

You've changed the popular saying, "Think globally, Act locally" to "Think globally, Act morally." Would you comment on genetic modification of crops and agricultural patents of life forms. I understand you were involved in the Convention of Biological Diversity.

L:

First of all the change in the motto is motivated by the insight of Gregory Bateson when he said you can't do just one thing. You act locally AND globally at the same time because whatever you do in any local environment touches people around you in usual or unusual and unexpected ways... very, very fast The key element therefore is the moral content--whether you act in a way that is suited to life on a small planet shared by 6 billion people or more. The genetic modification is a very special issue. In principle, technology means that you can improve plants so you can produce more food, more resources. But if it would work the way it is expected to it would have a positive effect., But unfortunately, in action it doesn't work like this because nature is just too interactive and interdependent. There are so many interactions in these ecological systems that it is practically impossible to control. In the gene transfer, for example, you inject the genetic modification into one plant and the same genes that produce the positive results in that plant get transferred to another one. Then you have a whole series of change reactions which end up by de-stabilizing a system which has taken sometimes millions of years to stabilize in a given way. Once you interject some new information into a system a set of new processes occur and you cannot control all of them at once and you have a serious chance of de stabilizing the system so you end up with an ecosystem that is less friendly in relation to human needs than the one you have. That's the danger.

B:

So the concerns of the general population about this recent development in science has some grounds.

L:

Yes.

B:

I was very surprised and impressed by the fact that, thanks to the internet, thousands of people from all over the world gathered in Seattle to petition the World Trade Organization to allow a more democratic system that would deal with these questions. It seems to me that that is a good sign of a positive macroshift.

L:

You will find in my book, Macroshift, a reproduction of an open letter addressed to the WTO where a group of some 140 scientists__I was one of them__ call attention to the need to find out alot more how these systems operate before wholesale jumping in and doing it. The big danger is commercializing the processes, to give out patents, and all of a sudden you find a company picks it up and runs with it, obviously for its own purposes and profits. What we are calling for is a moratorium of five years. I'm not normally for postponing decisions but I find that in certain cases you just have to have more information before you act. The stakes are enormous. It involves the basic food supply for the human population.

B:

So, there is a positive grass roots instinct?

L:

Fortunately, because we live largely in a democratic world, the key is the thinking of the individual. Now we live in a world where, with a few exceptions, people are able to express their own preferences. The choice is there but the choice has to be made more clear to people. How many people know, for example, what alternatives there are to genetically modified foods? How many know what alternatives there are to the present automobile, to the jet fuels used in our airplanes? There are technically a great many things possible which are patented, which are known to a selected few technicians but are not known to the public and are not brought into use because they are not profitable. More information is needed and then people will be able to make more conscious, responsible choices. And when they do that, the global economy will respond to change.

B:

My concern is that our compulsory school system is still functioning in an obsolete scientific world view. How do you see the shift to the emerging scientific world view in the domain of education?

L:

Education, traditionally, is the handing down of knowledge from one generation to another. When there is rapid change in our knowledge systems and they come to be applied, then the traditional educational process becomes very problematic. Not that the past isn't extremely relevant, but it has to be put into the context of the future. Here is where selective forgetting comes in. We have to be able to incorporate our knowledge of where we are in the framework of the process which has periodic bifurcations. These are qualitative changes so you don't apply the knowledge that you use in the pre-shift area during the shift and after the shift because it would not be functional. It is very difficult because in a normal educational system your textbooks have been written by people who have spent some time getting experience and then write a textbook. the book takes some years to write and takes another few years to be recognized and get adopted. In Astrophysics and some areas that move very rapidly this process is shorter but in the humanities in general it is slower. so the leading edge is very seldom reflected in textbooks and the mainstream education. So the new technologies of the internet through the web and the media are needed to bring the leading edge into the classroom. It can be done.

B:

There are very few professional development courses for teachers that concern this leading edge. I think it is important to introduce your work and other systems scientists' work so that teachers can recognize the need to help make a positive macroshift.

L:

Educating the educators, that's what it comes down to. It's not a question of teaching but a question of learning. and creating an environment in which learning becomes exciting and attractive. Teachers have to recognize that their knowledge needs to be further developed because knowledge changes. History has to be, as I said, incorporated into the present. As an educator for a number of years, I find that the greatest excitement I experience is in what I learn from the students. When I give a course where I don't learn then it is a waste of my time.

B:

I want to personally thank you for the work you are doing in educating for a positive macroshift and I'd like to bring a close to this interview by just reading this wonderful image you created in one of your books about the popular butterfly effect of chaos theory. I'll read it so you can enjoy it yourself. "Not dictators, armies, and police forces, but the changing values and ideals of people are the butterflies that, flapping their wings, determine which way society will grow and develop. It is up to each of us to flap our wings and to launch our bifurcating societies along a humanistic evolutionary path." I think that is a goal we all hope to see.

L:

There is this lack in education. In the sciences there is still a lack between the leading edge and the mainstream. Why? Because there is a lingering snobbishness that is now breaking up a bit but is still present that if you are a leading scientist you don't write for the general public. You can paraphrase some things about art in which people are saying "if it is for everyone, then it is not art." So scientists say to some extent, "if you write in a popularizing fashion then you probably are not a serious scientist." This is breaking up fortunately because people are realizing that there is a real hunger on the part of the larger public of finding out just what scientists tell us about ourselves, our world, and even about the cosmos. This is also done by science journalists but for them to pick up a leading development they usually ask the mainstream establishment what is important and the mainstream is not interested or doesn't know these leading edge breakthroughs. So by the time science journalists get across to the leading edge, it has become the mainstream and there is a new leading edge. So there is a real responsibility on the part of the leading edge scientists themselves; for the theoreticians and experimentalists to try to interpret their findings, to discuss the implications and to bring it to the attention of their colleagues so they can appreciate what it means. That's why people appreciate so much Stephen Hawkings' efforts to write for the public.

B:

And that is why I appreciate your books and the work of the Club of Budapest.

Dr. Laszlo's recent books:

• The Creative Cosmos (Floris Books, Edinburgh 1993)
• The Interconnected Universe (World Scientific, Singapore & London 1994)
• The Choice: Evolution or Extinction (Tarcher/Putnam, New York 1994)
• The Whispering Pond (Elemental Books, Shaftesbury & Boston 1997'98)
• Evolution: The General Theory (Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J. 1997)
• The Systems View of the World (Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J. 1997)
• Holos: The Fabulous World of the New Sciences (in preparation)

Today, at the portals of the 21st century, we enter on another Macroshift. This shares with earlier Macroshifts the basic dynamics of its processes, but it unfolds in a highly compressed time frame. As all Macroshifts, it consists of the following phases:

• The Precursor Phase
  Innovations in "hard" technologies create a greater efficiency in the exploitation of natural resources:
  The Buildup period: approximately 1860-1960

• The Beginning Phase
  Technological innovations bring about higher resource production, faster population growth, greater societal complexity, and an unsustainable impact on social structure and the environment:
  The Initiation period: 1960-2000

• The Consequent Phase
  Changed social and environmental relations trigger -or fail to trigger- corresponding changes in the dominant mindset (values, worldviews, ethics, ambitions):
  The Critical period: 2001-2010

• The Consolidating Phase
  The changed mindset guides -or fails to guide- the "soft" technologies required to re stabilize society in the new conditions (the creation or reform of social, political, and economic institutions and systems):
  The Concluding period: 2010-2020