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Lester B. Pearson’s Public Address at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, June 13, 1972 on the Occasion of the Presentation to Him of the Victor Gollancz Humanity Award Companion piece to the United Nations Association in Canada's research paper "Lester B. Pearson's Role in the Formation of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and in Other United Nations Activities" (click here) I am greatly honoured in having been chosen to join the small but distinguished company elected to receive the Victor Gollancz Award. I accept it with humility and pride: conscious of the fact that there are so many who have laboured and are still labouring in this field with greater claim to the distinction than I possess; conscious also that the Award commemorates one whose whole life was one of triumphant and unselfish service to humanity. I pay him my tribute, deep and sincere. In 1926, the American novelist James Branch Cabell wrote, "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." The evidence of this century gives some support for the latter view. Threats to global survival, though they are sometimes exaggerated in apocalyptic language which makes our flesh creep, are real. The prophets of doom and gloom may be proven wrong but it is a chilling fact that man can now destroy his world by nuclear explosion or ecological erosion. The first threat to survival is nuclear war fought with weapons, a single one of which may have more destructive power than all the guns and bombs of all the wars of history. Such a war is not unthinkable though we like to think so. Today we can measure the universe and split the atom. In the world of science and technology we show the most amazing courage and imagination. But in the world of social and political behaviour, in controlling the human instincts and emotions that make for conflict and war, we are as primitive as our tribal ancestors ten thousand years ago. The real enemy of man and his world remains man with his fears, his pride; his prejudice and often his stupidity. If we have escaped the total catastrophe of nuclear war up to the present, it is primarily because of the awareness of two super-states that each, by the full use of the power it now possesses, can destroy the other but that, in doing so, it will destroy itself. Therefore it dare not use that power. Suicide is not at least a calculated objective of national policy, though it may be a result of such policy. This is the ultimate irony, the final absurdity; power reaching the stage where it immobilizes itself and where its possession becomes the only effective deterrent against its use. Having escaped disaster, we have become accustomed to living under its threat. Therefore, we seem to become less inclined to take the essential long-range measures necessary to remove the threat; not merely postpone the disaster. We have failed during these years to find a better deterrent against war, a better foundation for peace than force, because we have refused to make the basic changes that are necessary in the relations between states which could convert existing international anarchy into world co-operation and ordered human progress. We know that national problems are now world problems and call for world solutions, but we feel no compelling sense of international community which would create the effective international institutions through which the community can operate! History may be "bunk" but those who ignore its lessons are doomed to repeat its tragedies. The first and vital lesson is that deep and unresolved political differences between armed sovereign states, ultimately lead to military conflict. Why should we expect to escape that fate if we refuse to take the effective measures for international global cooperation that are now essential? Never were the demands and compulsions of inter-dependence greater or more generally recognized. Never before has there been so much technical and functional internationalism; or a greater understanding of its need. Yet nations remain divided, disunited, disturbed; hesitant in building those effective international political and economic institutions which they now admit are essential for human progress or even human survival in a nuclear and technological world. It is so clear, and so easy to state, that we must reconcile the compulsions of interdependence and the pressures of independence; that only in this way will we ever be able to conclude any effective international arrangements for a world security system which will be able to maintain world order and make possible balanced world progress. We seem to get closer to such a system after the disenchantment and revulsion that follows a world war; or in the fear that comes from the imminent danger of another one. Then we forget. The situation seems to improve, the crisis ends, and we again become careless and quarrelsome and selfish and smug. We return to the normal state of dissension and division and disturbance. We begin to plan "against" rather than "for"; to compete rather than to cooperate; to link the love of our own land with claims to superiority over others. We confuse greatness with power: "God who made us mighty, make mightier yet." The hard fact is that the world remains organized and power works, through sovereign nation states; especially through a very few very big ones whom we call "super-powers". The qualification for this status is the possession of nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them against an enemy. Without these weapons, a state can only have second-class military and political status. Their possession has changed the whole nature of power and its influence on policy. It is true that these weapons are useless in many situations of national or international conflict, as we have learned in recent years, but the threat of their use in a "great war" and the capacity to carry out that threat, is not only the deterrence I have already mentioned, it is the key to super-power politics and strategy. As a result, world peace now rests not on the will, and the organization of the international community, but on the nuclear deterrence possessed, in full effect, by only two states. From this has developed a new kind of balance of power clearly revealed in the recent summit meeting in Moscow and which is very different from that which operated throughout the nineteenth century and until 1914. That earlier balance was both political and military, broadly based, and with some flexibility in its operation. It depended on diplomatic maneuvering inside and between groups of states. It also depended on the accumulation of conventional military forces on both sides; on their political reliability as well as their military effectiveness. Today’s balance depends primarily on a nuclear power relationship between two super-states which accept the fact that each can destroy the other and therefore that the risk of nuclear war must be controlled. This has, I know, begun to result in the recognition of certain common interests and concerns by these two super-powers: that nuclear weapons should be balanced and nuclear proliferation be opposed; that situations which might lead to accidental war or the escalation of small wars should be contained; that the balance of deterrence must not be destroyed by a capacity on the one side to destroy the other so quickly and completely that the ability to retaliate is removed. Out of this awareness of certain common interests, and of the consequent negotiations primarily between Moscow and Washington, has come whatever progress has been made to prevent a big war, even at the price of accepting some small ones. That we have to rely on this kind of deterrent force as our shield and our security is, of course, a recognition of the failure to bring about international cooperation and action on any broader basis; above all on the universal basis of the United Nations. That failure, however, cannot be accepted as permanent, for a peace that rests on power alone, I repeat, can never be enduring or stable. The situation, then gives no ground for optimism; but also no cause for despair. It is a challenge to hard and realistic effort without loss of idealism or abandonment of hope. The ideal of world peace and security through international action and institutions may seem Utopian in today’s world but, as Anatole France once wrote,
That "essay into a better future" will also have to be made against the only other threat to peace that I have time to mention; the division of the world into the rich and the poor; into industrially and economically developed and less developed nations. John Kennedy said in his Presidential inaugural address: " If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few that are rich". He was right; not only in respect of relations between the poor and the rich within a country, but also of relations between countries. I know that economic development and higher standards of living do not themselves ensure peace, order, and progress; or friendship between peoples. Nevertheless there can be no peace, no security, nothing but ultimate disaster, when a few rich countries with a small minority of the world’s people alone have access to the brave, and frightening , new world of technology, science, and of high material living standards, while the large majority live in deprivation and want, shut off from opportunities of full economic development; but with expectations and aspirations aroused far beyond the hope of realizing them. Yet this is happening in spite of what has been done in recent years, multilaterally and bilaterally, officially and non-officially, to prevent it by the transfer of financial, technical, and other resources from developed to developing countries. Indeed, statistics -- which of course of not tell the whole story -- show that the imbalance between rich and poor is increasing rather than decreasing. In the decade of the 1960s the annual income of that two thirds of the world’s population (the percentage is getting higher) who inhabit the poorer, developing countries, increased in monetary terms by $40 per head, while that of the rich minority of nations increased by $650. In those ten years, 80 per cent of the increase in the world’s GNP went to countries with 25 per cent of the world’s population where incomes were already over $1,000 per head. It is a gloomy picture, made worse by the fact that, I repeat, existing disparities are widening, not narrowing. Economic growth, of course, is not everything. Even when growth itself is satisfactory it cannot be divorced from its social consequences and some of these may be disruptive and disturbing. So when we think of development, we must think of the state of society and not merely the state of the economy; of the effect of economic growth on social and cultural values, on the ecology and the environment. We must think of the misery of marginal men as well as the success in maximizing national income. Indeed, we must broaden and deepen the whole concept of development, as something which will lead to the enrichment of life and not merely a better material standard of living. Ivan Illich was right when he said not long ago:
This means that we of the economically developed countries must resist the temptation to try to make over developing countries in our own image. Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out that in the West there is a natural wish and temptation to believe that the underdeveloped countries would come to follow policy lines similar to those of the Western countries, and that they would develop into national communities that were politically, socially, and economically like our own. For this reason, he felt, there was an inevitable tendency to follow a Western approach in studying these countries, as this would play down the initial differences and make development seem more feasible. Such an approach may be understandable, but it is wrong and unwise; as is the related tendency to assume that if something works, say, in Canada, it should work in Kenya; or even that there is a general and uniform pattern of development applicable to all economically underdeveloped countries. There is no "third world" in the sense of a separate and solid bloc, in unhappy contrast to our rich, Western industrial, technotronic world. Peoples differ everywhere and their progress and problems are bound to differ. Even the division which we make, and which I have already made, between "developed" and "developing" countries is neither clear nor clean-cut; it is often confusing and misleading. Misleading also can be the emphasis we place on the "gap" between the two categories of countries. There is such a gap, and I have already referred to the frightening fact that it is widening, not narrowing, in a way which should alarm us and spur us to do something about it. But perhaps the gap that matters most to the people of the developing countries is that between their own political, economic and social situation now and what it was twenty-five years ago. The question they ask themselves most often is not so much: am I living more and more like a tenant in a high-rise, high-price apartment house in Brooklyn with all its gadgets and conveniences, but, am I living better than I did in my own village a few years back? But here also there is no cause for complacency. We must also change, as misleading and demeaning, the concept of "aid" as a reward for, or an incentive to, good behaviour as interpreted by the donor; or as something which is reduced or refused as a punishment for wrong-doing or no-doing. We will never succeed in bringing about genuine constructive and successful cooperation between developing and developed countries until we approach the problem in a different way, politically and psychologically, from that which has characterized so many of our well-meant, but inadequate, even if substantial, efforts in the last two decades. Governments need, in short, a whole new strategy for development. This is true for governments of developing as well as developed countries. I know something about the difficulties in the way. I also know that the main problem is not the means to overcome these difficulties so much as the will to do so. In many places -- and in some where it matters most -- that will is getting weaker, and, tragically, just at the time when, from the lesson of the last twenty years, we are in a position, not only to do more, but do it better. There is one other thing to remember. While so much of our cooperation for development is necessarily designed to help the poorer, developing countries enter the modern technological and scientific age, and while they have a right to share in the benefits from the progress that has been made, and will be made here, we must also assist them to secure these benefits while avoiding the threats to their own tested values and traditions; to their own environment and culture, from uncontrolled technological progress. The Director General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Dr. Wilfred Jenks, in his recently-issued report on "Technology for Freedom," wrote: "To make planet Earth a healthy and congenial home for all mankind is the first priority of technology for freedom." It should be, but unhappily it is not. As a result, in our own Western industrial societies, we are becoming more and more conscious of the dangers which come from the uncontrolled speed and complexity of technological change. Such change has certainly resulted in economic progress and increased productivity, especially in field of agriculture, but it has also created new social problems and accentuated old ones. Growth has not removed inequalities, development lessened discrimination, or prosperity eliminated privilege. The economy of a developing country for instance, (there are specific cases) can increase as much as 10 per cent a year for a decade and, in the tenth year, there will be greater unemployment and as much social injustice as in the first. Technological change can be unbalancing, disruptive of natural laws in a way never experienced in the past. It can even destroy societies, if political and social change fail to keep pace with it; or if we try to transfer and transplant indiscriminately the techniques and methods and institutions that have been successful in Western industrial countries but fail to work in the environment and the conditions of very different societies and cultures. In his moving farewell address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1971, the retiring Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, Mr. Paul Hoffman, a dedicated servant of humanity, summed up the situation thus:
There is not enough evidence to prove that Mr. Hoffman is too pessimistic. Our age is one of trouble and tension and violence. It is also one of great progress and achievement. It holds both the promise of a far better life for all men and the threat of no life at all for mankind. Which is it to be? We can remove the threat and we can realise the promise, but only if we have the will, the resolve, as we have the capability to bring our social and political concepts and institutions into line with the compulsions and the opportunities of technological and scientific change. This is the vital, the supreme, challenge that faces us. Posted on the internet with permission from Geoffrey Pearson, son of Lester B. Pearson. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is hereby granted without fee and without a formal request provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage. |
