by Gunter Pauli*
On June 4 to 6, 1979 The Government of Salzburg and UNESCO hosted over 100 academics and pedagogues to debate the Report to the Club of Rome entitled “No Limits to Learning: Bridging the Human Gap”. It was my first Club of Rome meeting. As guest of Dr. Aurelio Peccei, its founder, I was invited to join as a representative of the students in business and management. I was exposed to the bright and innovative minds of that era. This conference greatly influenced my thinking and work for decades to come. Here I met, and was accepted, sharing my experience as an elected student leader keen on motivating and prepare my friends for a life long career as entrepreneurs for the common good.
The Club of Rome had been advocating the limits of our physical world, the incapacity to regenerate resources sustainably, an excessive consumption and destruction of the ecosystems as demonstrated by the mathematical model of Jay Forrester (MIT), summarised eloquently by Donella Meadows in the “Limits to Growth” Report to the Club of Rome (1972). Seven years after the first report had been commissioned, a team of experts was invited by the Club to explore the inner limits of humans to empower us to deal with change.
The world and our societies have changed since this report was written and debated in the Baroque Halls of the Salzburg Residenz. It is clear that education, and especially schooling has not been able to keep up with the need to adapt, even when everyone recognises the urgency to anticipate the fundamental shifts that humanity is making.
While apparently advancing, humankind is clearly losing ground, and is going through a phase of environmental, social, cultural, and ethical, if not also existential decline. Societies are entangled in old and new problems, too complex to be apprehended by the current analytical methods and too tough to be attacked by traditional policies and strategies which continue to pursue growth at all cost. The statistics cannot be negated: the human conditions are stressed, in some regions already beyond redress.
A New Opium of the Masses
There is a clear gap between rhetoric and action from the political and business leadership. The lack of following through on promises and even international agreements has been described by the French intellectual Idriss Aberkane as “The New Opium of the Masses” paraphrasing Karl Marx who originally referred to religion. Poverty is on the rise, the gap between the extremely rich and the inhumanly poor is rising rapidly. The statistics are beyond doubt.
Analysing environmental indicators from the loss of biodiversity to the rising global temperatures and the acidification of the oceans, sustainability is on the decline. Worse this once popular subject is not part of the political top priorities. It has been degraded to lip service only. The bold measures required to correct course are not taken. The COP meetings, now preparing for the 28th edition have never come to binding solutions, and the promises made have never been kept. There is only a promise that we strive to net zero by 2050, and amazing 27 years from now. When the house is on fire, we cannot fix an agenda to have the problems solved by the next generation.
The Human Gap
Men and women, like you and me, have great difficulty to grasp fully the meaning and consequences of what we are doing. We all fail to understand the mutations we bring about in the natural environment, our own living conditions and quality of life. We continue to produce, consume and discard as we did half a century ago, and most innovations to go green are cancelled out due to the rebound effect: even when unit consumption of energy or emission of green house gases drops, the total keeps on rising. Communities, cities and nations are at odds with the real world. This is the human gap – already large, and yet destined to get much wider unless we turn this reality around.
Increasing World Disorder
A large portion of ordinary people feel how formidable the threat is, realizing that increasing world disorder and real or feared scarcities of natural resources, pandemics and financial crises, exacerbate political tensions triggering an extreme polarisation in society, while permitting uncontrolled military build-ups of demential proportions. Democratically elected parliaments witness swings to the left and right, splintering votes amongst dozens of parties where the extremists deliver the few votes needed to form a majority Government by extracting concessions that alienate the majority of the population.
Each nation’s frantic search for its own security is leading increasingly to instability. The world has become an armed camp. Borders are now meter high fences, and seas like the Mediterranean are zones of death as thousands flee the harsh realities and brutalities at home. The arms race continues to spread from the great powers to scores of other countries, including the poorest diverting money from education and health care to defence spending – a euphemism for “offence” spending. The nuclear overkill capability continues at absurd levels without a sign of diminishing. The entire world population can be wiped out many times over. First there was only one country, but now there are several states that refuse to adhere to the core principles of non-proliferation, and no one seems to care.
Military vs Education
Two-thirds of the non-nuclear countries are importing huge weapon arsenals. Almost half the world’s scientists are engaged in “defence” projects. The annual worldwide military expenditure in 2022 exceeded US$6 billion a day. The estimated cost to provide a quality primary education in low-income countries is only $131 per child per year. The basic equipment for a soldier at war is $17,500. The world spends 150 times more money to equip each soldier as it spends educating each school age child in the least developed countries. The refusal to address basic educations implies that the answer to perceived threats of immigration will remain ever higher border walls and tougher sea controls.
Cutting Corners to be Competitive
We know we are losing in terms of habitat, health, and quality of life and yet we advocate war. Once wars were waged in quest of salt. Today energy is, and tomorrow food and water will become the salt of the modern economy. At the same time, the so-called renewable resources face a silent war waged on them by our production and consumption model that proposes a success model where the most competitive on the market is the cheapest. More, we have given global corporations a licence to cut social and ecological corners and to pay hardly any taxes on profits. The model of globalisation has turned a blind eye to the rapid degradation of the world’s tropical rain forests, the unrelenting advance of desertification, and a fast accelerating extinction of animal and plant wildlife. These trends have continued since decades, and nothing will ever change unless we change the business model of “cheap”.
A New Learning Enterprise
We do not seem to know how to strengthen our very capacity for survival. There is a need to break the vicious circles and set humanity on the ascent again. An entirely new enterprise is required, one that generates value with available resources and responds first to basic needs of all, instead of satisfying far away consumerism. This requires a new learning enterprise that must aim at developing the latent, the innermost capability of understanding and learning, so that decline at multiple levels can be brought under control, and ultimately reversed.
The Common Good
We do not need to stress immensity of the task. It should not deter us either. The way of turning the global situation around is by improving the human quality and the citizen’s preparedness for the radical changes ahead. People throughout the world, particularly the young, fortunately perceive there is more needed than a simple reset and a dramatic reduction of the world population. Their consciousness should give us courage not to waver and pursue a new pathway for strengthening the common good.
Untapped Resources of Vision and Creativity
One must assume that the human being possesses untapped resources of vision and creativity as well as moral energies which can be mobilized to direct humankind towards a better future. The average person, even when living in deprivation and obscurity, is endowed with an innate brain capacity, and hence a learning ability, which can be stimulated and enhanced far beyond what schooling achieves today. This was called “The Right to be Intelligent” by Luis Alberto Machado, the Venezuelan politician who proposed his Ministry for the Promotion of Intelligence at the 1979 Club of Rome Conference in Salzburg.
A Milestone for Learning
For these reasons, a learning project is timely and, if successful, can become a milestone. We have heard for over 50 years provocative and intelligent presentations of the outer limits of our finite planet. This narrows our possibilities of material growth something we continue to neglect. We have to free the inner limits within ourselves knowing that we as humans have the potency of unparalleled growth, even happiness provided we learn how to anticipate with innovative learning.
Improve our Individual and Collective Capacity
The immediate objective of this strategic initiative “No Limits to Learning” is to improve our individual and collective capacity for judgment and choice so that we can steer the course towards favourable, sustainable and healthy future for all living species with who we share this planet.
Critical Points
We should come to understand two critical points. First is that humanity as a whole is moving rapidly towards momentous crossroads where there will be no room for mistakes. The second is that we must break this vicious circle of increasing complexity and lagging understanding while it still is possible to exert influence and some control over our own destiny and future. We have to get out of the prison imposed on societies by a few experts who get the freedom to decide what is best for all of us without debate or participation under the pretext that we face an emergency situation. The world is now suffering from a permanent state of emergencies caused mainly by man- made disasters.
Unwilling to Change – for now
The human gap is the distance between growing complexity and our capacity to cope with it. Clearly, one eternal human endeavour has been to develop additions to knowledge and improvements in action to deal with a complexity which, for most of history, derived primarily from natural phenomena. An essential difference today is that contemporary complexity is caused predominantly by human activities which we seem unwilling to change.
Peak of Knowledge
It is a profound irony that we should be confronted with so many problems at the same time in history when humanity is at a peak of its data gathering, knowledge and power. Yet to an intelligent being observing from another planet, we must appear absurd. We are debating artificial intelligence which derives its knowledge from simple digitised hypertexts written in the past. How can this ever take us towards the future, or help us deal with the present?
Learning to Bridge the Human Gap
We propose the concept of “No Limits to Learning” to examine how learning can help bridge this human gap. Learning means an approach, both to knowledge and to life, that emphasizes human initiative, creativity and values. It encompasses the acquisition and practice of new methodologies, new skills, new attitudes, and new sense of responsibility necessary to live in a world of dramatic change. It shifts away from the present over reliance on analyses which have clearly led to a paralysis exploited by experts often driven by commercial objectives. There is no sign of corrective and innovative action sufficiently pervasive to turn reality around.
Learning to Cope with Complexities
Learning is the process of preparing to deal with new situations. It may occur consciously, or often unconsciously, from experiencing real-life, simulated or imagined situations. Practically every individual in the world, whether schooled or not, experiences the process of learning – and probably none of us at present are learning at the levels, intensities, and speeds needed to cope with the complexities of modern life. Unfortunately, educational institutions and schools do not challenge each of us to live up to our innate potentials. We are still obsessed with passing exams that teach the wisdom of the past fixed by detailed Government learning programs that leave no freedom to teachers. We all need to learn to deal with rapid change and that includes unlearning what is irrelevant from the past.
Learning People and Organisations
We distinguish learning from schooling. This does not mean that we ignore education, which is a fundamental way and a formal means to enhance learning. However, other less formal modes such as family up-bringing, peer groups, mentorship, work and play, hands-on transfer of know how, and social media are significant and sometimes predominant factors in learning. Further, we contend that not only individuals but also groups of people learn, that organizations learn, and that societies can learn.
Contemporary Learning is Inadequate
The fact is that contemporary learning is inadequate contributes directly to the deteriorating human condition and a widening of the human gap. Learning processes are lagging appallingly behind and are leaving both individuals and societies unprepared to meet the challenges posed by global issues. The human potential is being artificially constrained and vastly under- utilized. This is in stark contrast with the conclusions of pedagogues and brain experts who broadly agree that there appears to be virtually no limits to learning.
Failure of Education limits our Capacity
Unfortunately, this failure of learning means that human preparedness remains underdeveloped on a global scale. Learning is in this sense far more than just another global problem: its failure represents the issue of issues in that it limits our capacity to deal with every other issue that we have to face. For long-term survival, particularly in times of turbulence and uncertainty, change, or discontinuity, another type of learning than practiced is essential. It is the type of learning that can bring change, renewal, restructuring, and problem reformulation – which we call innovative learning.
Innovative learning Relied on Shock Events
Throughout history, the conventional formula used to stimulate innovative learning has been to rely on the shock of events. Sudden scarcity, emergency due to invasions, adversity, and catastrophe have interrupted the flow of traditional learning and acted – often painfully but effectively – as ultimate teachers. Even up to the present moment, humanity continues to wait for events and crises that would catalyze or impose this primitive learning by shock.
Humans cause the Shocks
But the global dilemmas that are human-caused introduce one new risk – that the shock could be fatal. This possibility, however remote, reveals most clearly the crisis of conventional learning: primary reliance on learning not only blocks the emergence of innovative learning, but it renders humanity increasingly vulnerable to shock; and under current conditions of global uncertainty, learning by shock is a formula for disaster.
The changes of life on earth is undergoing go much deeper than simply the possibility of annihilation of the human species through war, a massive nuclear accident, the sudden disappearance of the polar caps, or an irreversible ecosystem destruction. Even in cases less threatening to the survival of life itself, the reliance on reaction, crisis management, and even apparently mild shock can be self-defeating.
Lead and Lag Times
Global challenges can have unusually long lead times, and because traditional learning has unfortunately very long lag times an important risk and cost of discouraging innovative learning is that indispensable options may not be available by the time they are needed. There is no room for mistakes inherent in learning by trial and error when the subject is for example large, centralized and costly energy installations. Learning about alternative sources of power must occur before it is forced upon us by high energy prices, petroleum scarcities, or nuclear accidents.
Shock Learning
The conventional pattern of shock learning is inadequate to cope with global complexity as we know it, and is likely, if unchecked, to lead to one or more of the following consequences: (1) The loss of control over events and crises will lead to extremely costly shocks, one of which could possibly be fatal. (2) The long lag times of traditional learning virtually guarantee the sacrificing of options needed to avert a whole series of recurring crises. (3) The reliance on expertise and short time periods intrinsic to learning by shock will marginalize and alienate more and more people, worse it requires the population to blindly follow instructions. (4) The incapacity to quickly reconcile value conflicts under crisis conditions will lead to the loss of human dignity and of individual fulfilment. It is clear that crisis management will annihilate the individual, and will strengthen a totalitarian approach that will not tolerate dissent.
Who Will Determine the Human Condition?
The net result of following any one of these four paths is that humanity persistently will lag behind events and be subjected to the whims of crisis, and the experts who take control often with hidden agendas. The fundamental question that this prospect raises is whether humanity can learn to guide its own destiny, or whether events and crises will determine the human condition.
Main Purpose of “No Limits to Learning”
The first and fundamental purpose is human survival, the regeneration of ecosystems by putting Nature back on its evolutionary path, and the opportunity for each to be their best. Survival begins with the provision of adequate food, shelter, and health. To ensure that these needs are adequately met, innovative learning is essential.
It is time to initiate a debate on learning and the future of humanity, centered around the concept of innovative learning. I make no claim that this provides a definitive statement about learning that will be applicable to all societies. Nor do I assert that innovative learning by itself will solve any of the pressing issues. However we must present innovative learning as an indispensable prerequisite to resolving any of the global issues.
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*Gunter Pauli is the recipient of the 2022 Goi Peace Prize of Japan. He is the author of the Blue Economy. He has written 365 fables which have been published by the Chinese Government (Indian editions by Scholastic is forthcoming) and made available to all school children in an effort to promote innovative learning that stimulates entrepreneurship for the common good. Author of “The Blue Economy” – A Report to the Club of Rome translated in 55 languages . Essay sent to Other News by the author, on June 22, 2023.