June 17, 1975
Page 19297
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS BY GEORGE W. BALL
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, it was my privilege recently to attend commencement exercises at my alma mater, Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. George W. Ball, the esteemed former Under Secretary of State, delivered a commencement address of significance not merely to young college graduates, but to all of us with responsibilities toward or concerns about the future of the race of man. He noted:
No longer dare we limit our concerns to the fear that men may destroy one another through wars. Today there is the emerging possibility that we may bring about the world's destruction by getting out of joint with natural forces.
I commend Ambassador Ball's remarks to my colleagues. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that his speech, along with the invocation from the Bates College commencement on June 9, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[Bates College Commencement, June 9, 1975]
PRAYER OF INVOCATION
Eternal God, in which and by which all things flourish and pass away; we give thanks for the glories of creation, for the seasons of bounty and beauty, for the graciousness of the earth and its ministry to our need.
We give thanks for our noble heritage; for all the generations before us who through effort and pain have so lived that we might be heirs of liberty and truth and peace.
We give thanks for opportunities used and unused, for victories over besetting sins, for the gladness and courage of abiding loyalty.
We give thanks for the discipline that enriches, for the burden that strengthens, for the failure that is true success, and for the sorrow that enlarges the heart.
We pray for a deeper knowledge and clearer understanding of our world, of others and ourselves.
We pray for new confirmation of the wholeness of reason. We pray for the strengthening of our aspirations toward noble and spacious thinking. We pray for the scattering of the darkness of ignorance which terrifies the human spirit, demeans the human community, and wantonly destroys the resources of life.
We rejoice and give thanks for the human spirit and its powers, for the impulse to share, to serve, and to save. We pray that the spirit of love which quickens us to noble deeds and actions will continue to abide amongst us. We pray that this love will continue to make us faithful and strong, patient and tender, eager to fulfill the purposes of our lives.
We pray for the power to return to others a small portion of the hope that springs from a remembrance of the good things of our lives, only that this world and the human community will be enriched by the spirit of gratitude and forgiveness. Amen.
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS BY GEORGE W. BALL
This beautiful land where most of you have spent the last four years is blessed with trees and rocks and verdant hills, with lakes and sandy beaches and the long sweep of the ocean. It is exhilarating country, craggy but open, where a man or woman can walk full stride, where solitude is possible and silence and that deep sense of personal freedom which comes from space and privacy. Yet the feeling of scope and scale you have known here is unfamiliar to most men and women today, and by the time you reach your latter forties you are going to have to accustom yourselves to a much less spacious world.
Within the next twenty-five years – between now and the end of the century – there will be a geometric increase in the earth's population. Yet it is not in our country that this increase will principally occur. Most of it will take place in the poor countries of the world – lands that are in many cases already bursting with surplus humanity.
Today the population of the world is estimated to be between 3.6 and 3.9 billion people, only a little over one billion of whom live in the so-called developed nations. By the year 2000, when most of you will still be in your forties, only two or three hundred million will have been added to the population of the developed nations but the underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America will contain more than five billion wretchedly poor people packed tightly within their borders. If the world population were to continue to increase at the current pace (doubling in Asia every thirty years, in Africa every twenty-seven years and in Latin America every twenty-nine years), the poor nations would have to accommodate 40 billion by 2070.
Obviously the world could never sustain such huge numbers. Historically populations have been kept in check by the Malthusian constraints of famine, war and pestilence, and if the habits and customs in the poor nations were to persist as they are today, we could again experience those dreadful indecencies. Yet, if we face the problem promptly, the world need not pass the point of no return. The experience of Western Europe has shown that the process of industrialization tends progressively to limit the size of families. And, besides, in a few countries systematic family planning programs are at last beginning to make some small dent in the problem.
Yet the time spans required are not reassuring. A slowing of the birth rate that accompanied the industrialization of Western Europe consumed several generations, and the current pace of economic development is far too slow to turn down the soaring demographic curve in many of the poor countries, particularly the largest and poorest. Thus, it is clear that you are going to have to learn how to live on an overcrowded globe, and it is hard for any of us to visualize the constraints this may place on every man's freedom of decision.
Nor is population by any means the sole new problem that will complicate your mature lives. At current high rates of consumption we are beginning to deplete some of the earth's natural resources at an alarming pace. Our industrial processes and life habits are poisoning the environment, polluting our water supply, despoiling the air we breath, and contaminating the seas that are a potential source of food for a world population bursting at the seams. Only now are we beginning to realize the awesome implications of the interdependence of natural processes. Only now are we beginning to realize that apparently unrelated activities may critically interfere with fragile but essential life systems and that we cannot always be sure of the feedback of one activity on another. Finally, we must be on guard that our scientific discoveries not get out of hand. For example, in our strenuous efforts to meet the world's burgeoning energy requirements, we must avoid raising the world's temperature to a point beyond human tolerance.
These are some of the new problems that, over time, are likely to dwarf many of our familiar anxieties. No longer dare we limit our concerns to the fear that men may destroy one another through wars. Today there is the emerging possibility that we may bring about the world's destruction by getting out of joint with natural forces.
One predicament recalls an anecdote that enjoyed a brief. vogue a year or two ago. An airline pilot announced to his passengers both good news and bad. The good news was that, with the aid of a powerful tailwind, the plane was flying faster than any other plane in history; the bad news was that the navigational system had failed, so no one knew where the plane was going. Today the speed at which our affairs are moving and changing is clearly a record. Yet we can no longer take it for granted that mankind will win the race for the pursuit of happiness, realize its own perfectability – or even survive. Hobbled by the imperfections of our habits and institutions, we may be unleashing natural forces beyond our capacity to resolve or control, ironically placing the individual of the Twentieth Century in the vulnerable condition of his ancient forebears.
For fear of nature as an implacable enemy is as old as time. Running throughout Greek and Roman thought was the feeling that men confronted unknown and incalculable powers lying just beyond – an undefined threshold of knowledge – powers that might destroy them if they pressed the bonds of inquiry too far. Aeneas, so Virgil suggests, would never have been subjected to the hazards of the high seas had man not discovered the art of navigation. Daedalus defied the air by inventing wings, with which his son, Icarus, flew too near the sun and was destroyed. Insisting on opening the box she had brought from heaven, Pandora released evils on the world, while, in the Hebrew myth, Adam ate of the Tree of Knowledge and was ejected from Eden.
Belief in progress had no place in the classical credo. Fate kept mankind in its place; to expect earthly improvement was to challenge the bars dividing the human from the divine. Though men of the Middle Ages used a different vocabulary, they held roughly the same dour conviction: man's original sin destroyed hope for his moral improvement and, with no prospect of improving his human lot, he could rely only on the expectation of a happier afterlife.
Not till late in the Renaissance did the idea of progress begin to emerge. It was that extraordinary frontalist, Francis Bacon, who first suggested that, rather than fearing nature, man could, by increasing his knowledge, ameliorate its hazards and increase his prospects for happiness. The role of science was to endow human life with new "inventions and riches" – or, to put it another way, to establish the reign of man over nature. "It was wrong to assume," wrote Bacon, "that men of antiquity had any monopoly of wisdom." Belonging to an earlier period of history, they were younger in relation to the age of the world. So, just as men were taught by the experience of their elders, each succeeding age had good reason to achieve even greater things than its predecessors, since knowledge was cumulative. In other words, as Leibnitz later put it, "the present is pregnant with the future."
I need say little more about the evolution of the concept of progress that has dominated modern thought; it evolved slowly through the cumulative thinking of many men. Descartes made a seminal breakthrough by insisting that the laws of nature were invariable. Fontenelle extended the argument with the thesis that each generation must take into account what gave the theory of progress its value – the postulate of an indefinite future. Since it depended on invariable laws, progress, he contended, was both necessary and certain.
What was implied by the concept of progress was that an individual's obligations ran not merely to himself and to his friends, but also to posterity – to generations yet to be born. With Huxley's popularization of Darwin's concept of evolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the public began to expect a steady improvement of society and of human well-being. Optimism became the order of the day. Renan saw mankind perpetually achieving a more perfect state through the growing domination of reason. Herbert Spencer, interpreting Darwin, envisaged man undergoing an evolutionary adaptation to the point where "the ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain."
Thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, with the prospect of perfectability inferred from Huxley's interpretation of Darwinism, the human race seemed assured not only that it was here to stay but also that it had a noble future. Nature was to be mastered rather than feared. Even the German pessimist, Professor Rudolf Herman Lotz, though unpersuaded of the perfectability of human nature, could still argue that "as far as men may judge, it seems that in our days there are greater safeguards than there were in antiquity against unjustifiable excesses and against the external forces which might endanger the continued existence of civilization."
It is remarkable that such an optimistic idea could have survived the convulsions of two brutal world wars. Yet, though doomsayers such as Spengler conjured up apocalyptic visions, it was not until the development of nuclear weapons that many men turned toward a new skepticism. The advent of the nuclear bomb marked the end of Western, and particularly of American, innocence; it forced many of us to endure in shocked surprise long thoughts about last things, compelling us, in fact, to experience once again the ancient anxiety that the world might destroy itself at some unpredictable time. Fortunately, we survived the most nervous days of the Cold War without anyone pushing the red button, and, after the Cuban missile crisis had brought both sides face-to-face with the realities of confrontation, the Kremlin made at least a tactical decision to reduce its bellicosity toward the West. Mankind had won a reprieve and Western man again breathed more easily. Provided the Cold War did not heat up again, it seemed possible that the United States and the Soviet Union might gradually agree on arrangements to check the endless escalation of nuclear armaments.
Yet, though there was basis for renewed faith in the inevitable march of progress, optimism enjoyed only a brief Indian summer. Inquisitive men and women began to extrapolate trends, putting together bits and pieces of evidence that pointed toward a new crisis which threatened not only man's faith in himself but the basic assumptions on which Western civilization had long proceeded. The nuclear weapon had been only a warning of other and equally complex problems and even more subtle dangers. They were not easy to comprehend, nor did the doctors agree on the diagnosis – much less the cure.
Yet through all the confusion one or two central ideas have managed to emerge. If the world is engaging in excessive production, it is primarily the production of people and, unless the process is slowed down, there is no possible way to cope with the problems of sustaining population of such magnitude.
A dour English parson named Thomas Malthus had first sounded that alarm a century and a half ago. He foresaw that as the population in Europe began to grow faster in the early nineteenth century, it would, sooner or later, outrun the food supply. With population increasing at a geometric rate (2,4,8) and world food supplies at only an arithmetic rate (2,3,4), starvation seemed inevitable on a vast scale. What was unfortunate for Malthus' reputation as a scientist and prophet – though fortunate for the human race – was that, just at the time he put forward his central proposition, man was beginning to triple his food yield per acre.
Thus, particularly through the introduction of fertilizer, the world has, since the nineteenth century, been able to sustain more and more people at higher standards of living than anyone had earlier thought possible. As a result, for a long time, Malthus' theories were regarded as fallacious and he was treated by his successor scientists with disdain. Yet today that disdain does no credit to his critics, though the fad went so far that as late as 1938, respected intellectuals such as Dr. Gunnar Myrdal were dolefully predicting the collapse of the West because of its declining birth rate.
Now unmistakable realities have given a new validity to the Malthusian prophecy, though in far more complicated terms. If an English parson in the early nineteenth century could hardly be expected to anticipate the expansion of agriculture, neither could he foresee the great acceleration in growth resulting from the worldwide improvement in public health. Particularly since the Second World War, well-intended measures have materially lengthened the average human life span, especially by reducing infant mortality, with the result that more females have survived to child-bearing age. Meanwhile, more older people have been kept alive.
Thus, our humanitarian efforts may have created more formidable problems than they solved. When our doctors eliminated disease, our engineers drained swamps, our agricultural programs distributed food, we hastened the dangers of a Malthusian debacle by ignoring the total equation.
Although we still have a considerable margin before reaching the ultimate level of food production, population growth has proceeded relentlessly. Thus we can now begin to perceive that, even if we were recklessly to deplete the feed stocks for petrochemicals on which modern fertilizer production depends and to open new lands for cultivation at a breakneck pace, there are outer limits to the production of food.
Today some serious men are raising hard questions in lurid terms, suggesting if we help feed poor countries already overcrowded in relation not only to space but to resources we may be intensifying the misery of future generations.
As with every other major issue, there are alarmists and iconoclasts – those who overstate the problem by extrapolating curves without adjustment for intervention either by nature or man and those who, reacting negatively to the alarmists, display an excessive complacency. It is hard to tell just where the truth may lie between these two extremes. The most deeply alarmed have likened to earth to a lifeboat that can hold only a finite number of people. To take on board more would jeopardize the lives of all the other passengers. Others have expressed their concern by employing the term "triage" – which came into usage during the First World War and means, in effect, that an army cannot waste its limited medical resources on the critically wounded.
Yet it is by no means clear that painting the future in such stark terms encourages men to find solutions. It may lead more to paralysis than to action, since, when a problem seems insuperable, men are more tempted to ignore it than to solve it. Thus the doomsayers may not do us much good. Anyone who literally accepted their predictions would be as likely to seek escape through some esoteric escapist religion – as some of your generation are doing now – as to tackle the problem in a modern pragmatic fashion.
Still, we would be intellectually dishonest – perhaps the more accurate word is cowardly – if we were to ignore the dilemma the pessimists pose, even though it involves a profound challenge to our religious and moral precepts – and, indeed, to the optimistic belief in unlimited progress that has for a century, at least, been Western man's dominant operating assumption.
Clearly, it is a problem which sooner or later all of you will have to think about. Is it humane to try to support populations that are rapidly expanding beyond their capability for economic production when, by such action – by keeping those populations alive and failing to make rigorous population control a condition to assistance – we may be doing millions of unborn human beings a tragic disservice? Do we, in other words, have an obligation to future generations – to the unborn – that can in some circumstances transcend our obligation to human beings now alive whom we can see and hear and come to know?
As I suggested a moment ago, the concept that mankind had a responsibility to future generations was a corollary to the idea of progress which is, after all, a relatively recent and peculiarly Western contribution to intellectual thought. But how does one measure his or her relative obligation to unborn generations as against man's duty to help his fellow man? Is man capable of so completely letting logic dominate emotion that he can be – as someone put it – cruelly kind rather than kindly cruel?
The iconoclasts, of course, dismiss this whole set of problems as founded on misconceptions of the true capabilities of the wealthier countries. They argue, with considerable force, that we have by no means approached the outer limits of our food supply. A great deal of food could be saved if peoples in the advanced nations (and particularly the United States) would, for example, change the emphasis of their habits from meat eating to the direct consumption of cereals, since the body, after all, is a highly inefficient machine for processing nutriment. Thus, they contend, we should all become happy – or, at least, resigned – vegetarians.
All this may enable us to buy a little time and it would no doubt be possible to accomplish a great deal along this line if the world could be promptly committed to a common effort to improve production and mitigate the consumption of available foodstuffs. But it will significantly ease the problem only if meanwhile we have taken far-reaching steps to check the current vaulting growth in the total number of consumers. What good does it do to tap even the most remote sources of food if the world's increment of people, either as a result of excessive births or lengthened time spans, still neutralizes the benefits of everything we do as is now the case, for example, in Bangladesh.
Moreover, even if we were able to sustain the unchecked increment of human lives in areas of meager resources and low capabilities, we might well find the cost excessive since the effort could require us to redesign our social, political and economic arrangements in a manner destructive of our basic values.
The question we face is not, after all, merely whether we have the political will to make the extraordinary effort required to preserve human lives in areas where, in G. K. Chesterton's paraphrase of Oliver Goldsmith, "men accumulate and wealth decays;" the question is whether, if we should undertake the task, it will require us to make changes in our habits and institutions that will impose such draconian limits on individual decision and action – and, in essence – on the free operation of our democratic processes – that we would have destroyed more than we had saved.
Obviously, population is only one of the factors that determine the form and shapes of a nation's institutions. Important also are the magnitude of its natural resources, the state of its technology, the extent of its territories, the volume of its foreign trade. The more affluent a country, the more freedom of choice its people are likely to have. Though Belgium is, for example, a densely populated nation, it can, with its high standard of living, afford the luxury of democratic institutions. But when a country is poor, its technology relatively backward, its natural resources undeveloped, an excessive population may well force it toward a distasteful choice – either squalor and ultimate disorder or a repressive, political system that dominates every aspect of life, channeling the actions and even the thoughts of men and women within a narrow, rigid doctrinaire framework. Only in this way can meager resources be so fully shared as to prevent widespread starvation; only in this way can people's exertions be effectively harnessed and coordinated toward a goal of common survival.
The comparison that comes quickly to mind is that between India and China, which are, in terms of population, the two largest nations in the world. Both are miserably overcrowded. Much of China's land area is mountainous or otherwise uninhabitable so that seven-eighths of the population, or roughly 700 million people, are crowded into the eastern one-third of the country – and dependent for their food supply on the produce of less than 12% of the surface area of the country. India – with only one-third the area of China to begin with – but with agriculture lands slightly more extensive than those of China – today contains nearly 600 million people. In the city of Calcutta alone, millions huddle together in one vast noisome slum. To the extent that statistics are at all reliable, the per capita income of the two countries is about the same – something less than $100 per year.
But, although the basic economic and physical circumstances of the two countries are not far different, their social, economic and political structures are poles apart. India has developed what it proudly calls the world's largest democracy with a parliamentary system derivative from its years under British rule.
China, on the other hand, is organized with the rigor of a beehive, under an all-pervasive political control and with the people indoctrinated from childhood in a rigid code, their thinking directed on a massive basis and their economic activity constrained within an intricate bureaucratic command system. Yet, repulsive though the Chinese system may be to anyone devoted to the values of the West, the Chinese nation today seems capable of surviving and, indeed – largely through its own efforts – of gradually beginning to move toward more efficient agriculture, industrialization and progressively higher standards of living. Though the extravagant claims of the Peking Government must be substantially discounted, it seems probable that they are approaching – or will within a few years approach – a relatively stable demographic situation that will insure a population with a diminishing, and ultimately a zero, growth rate.
The prognosis for India, on the other hand, is much less sanguine. With an overblown bureaucratic structure that seems to impair more than stimulate progress and with great disparities of wealth between a rich class and the vast mass of wretchedly poor, it is hard to foresee how the present system in India will ever enable the country to manage or overcome its problems. The iron constraints of religion and culture alone are a major impediment to material progress. With inefficient – and for the most part primitive – agricultural methods and an even more imperfect system of distribution, with religious taboos that impose on the food economy a totally parasitic cattle population almost twice that of the United States, the nation is a deficit food producer, in spite of miracle rice and miracle wheat.
Yet, although a number of dedicated Indians have worked to turn down the population curve, family planning has made only a tiny dent on the problem, so that Ambassador Moynihan, who has just returned from an extensive tour of duty in India, predicts that by the turn of the century the population of that country is likely to approach a billion people.
What are the lessons to be drawn from this? Not at all that the Communist structure of China is good and Indian democracy bad, but rather that, if population is permitted to outrun resources in any huge country with a low standard of living, the people may face the hard choice between authoritarian methods or ultimate collapse.
But if the poverty and lack of resources and relatively low capabilities of a country may tend to shape its domestic policies and institutions in the direction of autocracy, they cannot help but influence its foreign policies, as well. Just what that influence may be has never been adequately studied, although some scholars have looked at bits and pieces of the problem. During the thirties Japan's imperialistic drive was no doubt nourished not only by the claustrophobia of an island nation but also by the desire of a raw materials deficit country to acquire a resource base of its own, as well as assured markets. At the same time, "Lebensraum" provided a convenient – though not convincing – rationalization for Hitler's aggressions. Thus there is little doubt that, at different times in history the pressures of excessive population has contributed to expansionism, although this is probably less significant under modern conditions of warfare where industrial might and modern technology are more important than mass armies.
Still one cannot discount the importance of population when related to resources, technology, territory and trade in determining a nation's international behavior. And more and more we shall, I think, have to design our foreign policies to take account of those factors.
Just how much these swollen populations may threaten the peace of the world only time can tell. But with the new prospect of widespread proliferation that opened up when India recently joined the nuclear club there is understandable speculation that an impoverished nation threatened with widespread famine, might sometime use its nuclear capability as blackmail in a frantic search for food.
In spite of the forebodings and alarms I have adverted to this morning, you who are graduating today should take comfort from the demonstrated fact that events tend more often than not to confound the prophesies of the experts. If there is one operating hypothesis that is usually safe, it is that things rarely work out as expected. Somewhere, somehow, there are almost certain to be forces working beneath the surface of events that will, to some degree, neutralize or transform forces now apparent. But whether they will work for better or for worse is by no means assured.
This is, therefore, no time for complacency. And in our national concern with transient minutiae, we should not overlook the urgent imperative to seek answers to the questions posed by some of the developments I have suggested. More often than not, you will find those answers in history.
That, after all, is your best recourse, for even though the present may wear a new face and the problems seem novel and unfamiliar, you are very likely to discover parallels and precedents if you only probe deeply enough. There is, after all – as the authors of Ecclesiastes told us long ago – "No new thing under the sun," and, as Justice Holmes once put it, "Historical continuity with the past is not a duty, it is merely a necessity."
In living through the aberrations of recent years, we should have been more aware than many of us were that there have been periods of frustration before – and even in our own national history, as Professor Boorstin has eloquently pointed out. Had Americans – including some of your predecessors on the campuses four or five years ago – only applied themselves more diligently to the study of history – the chronicle of our past experience – they would not have been so impressed with the novelty of their own behavior or so intoxicated with the ferocity of their own self-righteousness.
It is a lesson I would commend to your earnest attention. We would all do well to heed it.