The present Essay consists of three parts: Part I attempts to construct the historical and conceptual scenario in which the notion of Civil Society plays a dominant role. Part II "What is Meant by Qualitative Growth?" and Part III "Challenges Confronting Industrial Global Society" treat two of the factors constitutive of the institutional content of Civil Society as an event in the last half of this millennium, from the Renaissance down to the present problems of global society while issue from the termination of the Cold War. These two factors are presented as:

Today, within the new global context which we experience and from our specific vantage point, the model of Civil Society receives new meaning. It is like the experience undergone by living entirely in one’s own family house and, suddenly, realizing that one is also part of a whole town. Each person within his own Commonweal can perceive the origins, the present conflicts and the eventual future forms Civil Society is bound to take; each one of us can study his or her familiar habitat and learn how to evaluate the different factors acting upon it. Nevertheless, this does not mean that general conclusions cannot be reached on the basis of one’s particular experiences, for we are talking about a specific manner of community life on the part of human beings in our age. Consequently, in spite of the variety of forms, there exist also common elements of content. The main ones being that it is composed of human beings; secondly, that it takes place on the planet earth; and third, that is has to do with communities each of which have undergone a particular historical development serving as the base for the common global development we have entered since the end of the Cold War. Specific problems arise from the present globality of our coexistence which were not present when each nation and region carried on a more or less autonomous existence. Consequently, the first question is what has driven us toward the present day global horizon, and does that exercise a pervasive influence on the crisis? Is the change of dimension from a tribal to a global perspective a factor determining the crisis, or is existence merely undergoing a process of enlarge-ment?

Chapter I above notes many reasons now being cited for the present convergence of attention to Civil Society, namely: a) that it can expand the actual participation of citizens; b) that it expresses an achieved synthesis of different values in the search for the good life, and c) that it is the cutting edge of the search for freedom in the modern world.

These reasons indicate that Civil Society is a realm of broad and properly human association concerned with the general welfare, rather than specifically with the economic or political order. Hence, values relating to the quality of human life occupy here a higher ranking than other values, viz. economic, religious or technological. If so then we are advancing towards reestablishing what is meant by Civil Society on the basis of a new order of values conditioned by historical circumstance. Consequently, we should attempt to reconstruct the historical events under which those human values of free and responsible participation in the search for the good life have attained their acceptance in order to grasp what is threatening them in our post Cold War era and to evaluate their chances of survival. As we behave according to our perspective of the world in which we live, this problem becomes one of how we acquire a Weltans-chauung which validates a specific set of values. Do we simply discover it by a process in which the mind is a tabularasa upon which sensible or value realities impinge, filling it with ideas which reflect the world; or is it a matter not of perceiving, but of constructing? If the constructive alternative accords more with the way the cognitive relation between Mind and Weltanschauung takes place then Civil Society inevitably is a function of historical circumstance.

The predominantly positivist and empiricist interpretation of the scientific revolution had attributed to a passive Mind the capacity to construct our view of the physical and moral Cosmos as a mirror image of reality, so that the subjective relation between perception and the ensuing reality became accepted as transmitting an objective reality. However, an examination of the role played by any animal’s sensorial apparatus in the construction of its specific view of reality cannot be ignored. The resulting attribution (in the case of the human animal) of a constructive role in our vision of reality to the active direction of Mind becomes a matter of common sense and epistemic coherence; further, it alone makes scientia possible. Civil Society and the human values associated with it represent, historically, a spin-off from this capacity to know nature and our place in it. Hence, as sensorial beings the world we live in is our own construction according to some specific perspective initially determined by the genetic structure of the human species. Each animal organism constructs its world as perceived through its sense organs, and adopts a preferred behavior according to the information processed. Thus a value is attached to certain socially sanctioned forms of behavior resulting not only in an institutional feeling of tribal identity, but in one of greater personal security.

Whether we feel secure or threatened, our response to what is offered or denied by perceived reality, and hence our behavioral values, are related closely to individual and collective survival. Consequently, an institution that enhances personal security and well-being gains a permanent and paradigmatic statute among the values supporting its life-style. As the world is perceived sensorially and information is processed with a view to behavior appropriate to one’s goals, tribal identity and the survival of law and order are considered to be of supreme value (note Socrates’ preference for law, above even his own life). At this point the human animal becomes something different from other animals. No doubt, one behaves according to the needs of survival, but one chooses not only the objects perceived, but the manner of reacting to them, even with regard to the requirements for survival; in this, the human acts as an animal. This is not a question of seeing man in the animal, but, on the contrary, of seeing the animal in man. Such behavior implies a knowledge in which the input and the ensuing behavior constitute a closed unit. But are we to compare this input-behaviour reaction with the knowledge through the geometry of Thales or the Science of Galileo? If so, we should say that animals also act upon knowledge where the organism triggers responses to the signals received from an outside which is not its own creation, but a fact or world in which it is placed.

The relation between input and the ensuing or triggered behavior is genetically conditioned. It is in this sense that Descartes says animals are machines, in as much as they are determined in their interactions. Note that this is not like the mechanical action of a toy which is steered only through its inner mechanism, and lacks a survival priority. However, when cultural values play a role in the reaction there exists a certain freedom of choice on the part of the subject; the condition for overcoming a deterministic animal behavior is the intermediation of a culture. That intermediation and its prescriptions are what we call the values of the specific cultural and historical entity to which we belong.

It has been the purpose of the above discussion to show that values are a function of the preferences governing the survival behavior in each tribe. This implies the following conclusions: the manner of reaction in homosapiens is channelled by specific forms of behavior which are characteristic of each community. We call values the characteristic forms of behavior which are specific to each community, which define the identity of that social group and which are specific to the historical period of tribal life within which a particular individual acts. Among these forms of behaviour language holds a priority, for in learning a language there is developed the basic mental operation of creating meaning through the use of sounds" or visible objects (written communication), without which little advance in cognition is possible. It is not that some specific behavior pattern would not ensue from specific sensorial input patterns, but that the rationality of truth and of freedom of choice has operative existence only as a function of our linguistic capacity taken in a broad sense. Whenever such capacity is absent humans are seriously impaired and remain at the thought level of animal reaction. In human beings the instinctive behaviour we share with animals receives a rational dignity originating in the elective exercise of our linguistic capacity.

I say the similitude of passions, which are the same in all men, desire, fear, hope, etc., not the similitude of the objects of the passions which are the things desired, feared, hoped, etc.; for these the constitution individual, and particular education do so vary. . . . And though by men’s actions we sometimes discover their designs, yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguish the circumstances by which the case may become to be altered is to decipher without a key and be for the most part deceived.

 

This Hobbesian insight in his Leviathan suggests for our own day the possibility of a universality of insight (encoded in local forms and values) into the structure of human behavior. Only through such an insight can Civil Society become a science in the meaning which the XVIIth century gave to that term. What is important in the Hobbesian position is that individual behavior should be looked upon as a particular way (because of the constitution individual and particular education) of expressing a universal trait in human behavior. It is then a question of finding the form common to local variations, and of disclosing (by means of the key to deciphering) the hidden filogenetic structures channelling individual behavior. Such a capacity for deciphering demands a great deal of training and objectivity in order to overcome the tendency to attribute absolute value to one’s tribal cultural identity. Providing such a cultural dictionary for translating values from one tribe’s cultural currency into the currency of another could become a major task of cultural anthropology. The lack of such a dictionary produces the ethno-centric tendency prevalent among members of XXth century Western culture, which has led to an alienation from non-european ethnic traditions and even to misunderstanding and falsely evaluating European behavioral patterns and values of scarcely two genera-tions ago. An example of deciphering, i.e., of gaining insight into the universal significance of a local value that provides the right to tribal membership, is the case reported by Alexander von Humboldt from his travels along the Orinoco where not sharing a language subjects one to becoming an object of cannibalism. There a shared language is a condition for the right to stay alive. Whether having such a life-saving passport originates in speech, race, religion, social class, age-group, level of instruction, family name, or some other criteria for group-membership is a secondary matter, in comparison to the sanction for not having the correct passport.

Despite a quantitative mutation separating them from animals in their confrontation with their environment, humans do not shed or contradict their animal nature as such, just as a tree develops trunk, branches and fruits without losing its roots. Rather, based on their animal roots, humans develop a more complex and creative side to their nature. A change of paradigm regarding behavior, including what can be learnt, takes place. However, an incommensurable distance separates the animal and the human, which distance originates in the use of language in confronting space-time events. Though no key to deciphering natura in a different way from that of animals is given to the human organism, yet already at the Darwinian level of survival behavior homosapiens develops, in the course of time, another strategy. The strategy developed is not one of adaptation to nature, of finding an adequate niche, but of transforming nature in order to meet human needs. True, if man is nothing but a creation of nature, it is nature as a whole which has experienced in the chain of being an incommensurable mutation. But then the question arises, is inert matter by itself capable of experiencing such a mutation?

As part of such a process Civil Society can be defined within the modern scenario in which the rational, quantitative ways of adapting nature to human purpose determine the values regulating individual and tribal conduct. Such a special form of Civil Society has emerged in the last five millennia of recorded historical process which established the conditions of possibility of Civil Society. The question is whether as a result of the accelerated increase in knowledge taking place in the last four centuries a change in the paradigm for Civil Society is now called for. Nature as defined in prehomeric times no longer exists. Homosapiens has developed his creative powers and ambitions beyond what he himself thought possible in the century of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. Acting in an entirely new scenario, his confrontation is not with nature as a force outside himself, but with his own power to subjugate Nature.

A model of the origin of Civil Society as a process of liberation appears in western Civilization tied to the possibility of manipulating universal nature ta serve human wishes. In the political arena such liberation meant abolishing a series of prohibitions imposed by local traditions, prohibitions which themselves were duly rooted: i) in the process of adapting nature, and ii) in the vision of human needs for whose satisfaction it was taking place. With the emergence of a universal science, one casting its cognitive net beyond the micro- to the meso- and macro-cosmos and thus spanning all space-time phenomena, the behaviour-paradigm imposed by local values loses its rationality. The new values regulating Civil Society must originate in the scenario of universal science. Such became the basic thought model of the Enlightenment and its humanism.

The reactions of a genetically conditioned individual as to his priorities and the tempo at which changes in consumerism should occur have, nevertheless, made themselves felt: this time not through Fascism and Marxism-Leninism, but through less politically articulate behavior. That is, namely, through the breakdown of the sense of solidarity and institutional family values around which Civil Society was organized; through such bizarre behavior as drug use and the antics associated with the different varieties of sexual libera-tion; and last, but not least, through a longing for those all-embracing and stable authorities common to fundamentalist movements.

The Historical Context of the Confrontation:

The starting point for our answer to the question: What is the meaning of qualitative growth? is to define the terminological and historical meaning of the problem under consideration. Such a historical-contextual reference finds its most significant features within Western Industrial society, its stages of development and the ideological-philosophical conflicts in its present stage as a planetary model intimately related to the deterioration of our biosphere. However, ecology is not the only area of standards of high consumption. Alongside perestroika and its effects, along with the ending of the military and ideological Cold War, attention must be given to the attempt at reconciling basic socialist ideals with the efficiency of a free-market economy. Last but not least, a major problem closely linked with all major problems of the post-war period is the unresolved and menacing north-south confrontation.

Any relevant answer to the problem of quality in economic development, with pretensions to thematic completeness, must in one way or another have reference to all such "areas of crisis". The simple and obvious reason for this is that, through different inroads and factors, they all originate in the predominance of merely quantitative criteria within which industrial society, as the socio-economic model developed over the last two hundred years. Consequently, we shall begin our treatment of the question by making more precise the conceptual terms of reference of our discussion.

As a guiding principle for our presentation we adopt, as point of reference for producing a confrontation with mere quantitative growth, the principles and ideas behind the eco-social-market-economy model, ESME. This model originates in an ever growing awareness on the part of political leaders of the major industrialized nations of the deficiencies detected in the traditional model which was dominated by considerations related exclusively to the operation of the law of supply and demand, without regard for the social and ecological consequences or for regulating the price of consumer goods and services. A quick and preliminary glance at the conclusions of our study may be helpful in guiding the reader in the stages and aims of our argumentation.

Confronted with the question of quality vs quantity in economic growth we shall now apply the analytical method current in philoso-phical reflection. It consists in decomposing a complex concept of an object, a process or an event into its component parts in order to gain insight into its different elements, their mutual interdependence, their causal origin, and the part each one contributes to the total phenomena. The analytic method applies both to organic, holistic phenomena as well as to purely mechanical ones. Consequently, the fact that one talks about the "addition of elements" does not preclude that the totality is more than the mechanical sum of its parts. The notion of holistic totality has become very familiar in analyzing certain phenomena through Gestalt Psychology and related areas of scientific inquiry.

In order to apply the analytic method let us assume ESME is a historical reality of our time representing a model of economic growth with in-built qualitative parameters, and also combining the efficiency of the market economy with two basic humanist principles definitory of quality: the social consequences of different manners of production and consumption, and the reference to the care and quality of the biosphere. The relevant question in order fully to grasp the revolutionary character of ESME is: why did we have to undergo three socio-political revolutionary upheavals of 1789, 1917 and 1989 (end of Yalta), with all their physical and social consequences, in order to arrive at the notion of ESME and its pretended applicability on a planetary scale? What is the existent relation between the technological, social, cultural-historical and political elements constitutive of this concept? And, as a consequence of answering the historical and ideological questions, how does this model relate to the quantity versus quality polemic? For the topic of this essay, we insist, it is important to refer the problem, "What does qualitative growth mean?" to ESME in order to infuse the historical dimension. Without this we would run the risk of proposing another mathematical model and of side-stepping the challenge proposed, namely, to define in historical terms the issue of quantitative vs qualitative growth. Hence, we wish to define what is understood by qualitative growth directly within the context of historical references so as to make it clear why ESME represents a model of economic activity aimed at growth, yet one within which quality becomes a major concern. It is then a question of demonstrating that such a problem, namely, quantity vs quality, coincides with the emergence within Western society of the industrial and technological process leading to what may be called the post-industrial age.

However, it is quite probable that sophisticated planners do not totally exclude social variables. They usually do something much worse: they think on the basis of implicit or hidden ones currently in-built into their own home-experience as if they were part and parcel of filogenetic human nature. Such a necessary differentiation between explicit and hidden variables leads to the conclusion that in reality modernization in Western societies has been the result of the presence of historical factors classified as non-economic, for example, the role in modern European history of international warfare with its demand for national unity, social discipline with in-built consensus, stable leadership, physical vigor, technological inventiveness and related factors. Consequently, when attempting to breach the gap separating modern industrial societies from in-built underdevelopment it is at the planner’s own risk that he or she ignore the soil which nourishes the roots of the tree from which the golden fruit of modernization is to be plucked. This is to indulge in in-built wishful-thinking, a feature which Simon Bolivar prophetically saw as the greatest threat to the well-being of the Republics emerging in Latin-America in the early XIXth century. Of this attitude Dante, referring to some political goals of his contemporaries, politely remarked: "They want the sweetness, without the iron." For this reason, ending the Cold War was a prerequisite for liberating human energies and critical imagination, thereby making it possible to transfer them from tribal to eco-global thinking.

The problem with the social variables is not simply that they are ignored within the individualistic model of present day GNP economics, as happens with the two major variables: the social nature of man and his dependence on the equilibrium of nature. In relation to North-South relations the problem is that the social variables of the North implicitly, but effectively, condition the applicability of the model to other societies; in other words, they constitute significant implicit limitations through applying ethno-centric criteria. Consequently, as with the Constitutions devised by Professor Duverger for African countries after decolonization, they are doomed to failure. Almost two centuries ago Simon Bolivar referred to such attempts at applying Euro-centered Constitutions to multi-ethnic and tropical America as "republicas areas" (castles in the air)—an expression equally applicable to many present day economic development plans dominated by quantitative growth criteria. The macondian figure of Bolivar, in essential outline aptly described and analyzed by Garcia-Marquez in The General in His Laberynth, represents a Caribbean attempt to affirm quality in the post revolutionary Latin-American political context. What all those repeated failures of Euro-centric good-intentions reveal is a state of mind, a structural tendency to objective disinformation similar to the one analyzed by Francis Bacon in his theory of the Idols of the Mind. In his time these idols were preventing the use of mathematical functions as a tool for understanding nature; in our times, however, the idol is the contrary. It is the over-valuation of mathematics, mere quantity, which has prevented us from understanding social and historical processes as a result of claiming an exclusive and dogmatic dominance of the scientific objectivity with regard to for quantitative growth phenomena.

In an age dominated by the mathematical and quantitative imagination it is indeed, at first sight, paradoxical that two major unexpected crises present themselves. One in the field of ecology, the other in the field of the relation of the individual to society or, as in the case of perestroika, of the relationship between the Public and the Private Sectors. These two major crises suggest, and may even express, the fact that some miscalculation has been operating for centuries within the historical process and that it is now time to begin to take notice of it through experiencing its effects. The following reflections include an explanation of what undetected phenomenon may exist at the root of such destabilizing miscalcula-tion. They seem convergent with von Neumann’s critique, Can We Survive Technology?, discussed below in Part.

From Sensorial Objects to Galilean Functions. The under-lying cause for such miscalculations may very well be that the brain of homosapiens is naturally wired to experience and reflects upon the conditions determining survival in the context of a world of objects—preindustrial society and inductive science—totally unaware that the objects with which he is familiar can exist only in reference to something which is not itself an object, namely, an equilibrium, a function resulting from a special and delicate balance of "natural" objects. In terms of functional relations the survival of such an equilibrium depends upon a system of checks and balances holding between those objects called Nature or the environment. Yet, man’s Darwinian speech and thought capacity (Aristotelian syntax and sensorial qualities) is geared to objects and it is to such a world that he directs his actions and his daily-life calculations, not to the world of abstract, sophisticated mental constructs dealt with in Galilean science and called numerical "functions". There exists, consequently, a certain type of in-built disinformation regarding the conditions of our survival issuing from the spontaneous associative ways our mind restricts its operations to commands issuing from the brain, yet mainly restricted to a world of non-Galilean objects. In the words of the filogenetically inspired critic of industrial society, Lionel Tiger:

We have evolved and survived in a world consisting of those physical, perceptible things, from which issue alarm signals prompting our philogenetic response to action. Only when the statistical equilibrium making up our environment changes abruptly do we realize that some impending danger worth looking into is going on. Yet, from the point of view of people accustomed to perceive and "think" reality in terms not of objects, but of the values which are "states of equilibrium", it is clear that tampering with nature in an arrogant and careless manner must end up altering in some serious way the equilibrium known under the collective appellation of biosphere.

Survival and Self-interest. Assuming that such crying "wolf" does take place, why do people not react to the cry? The answer to such a question is varied and shows the limitations of our mind in an objective way. It is not because of a will to deceive or deliberately to ignore the callings of an ecological Cassandra, but has to do more with the spontaneous—one might even call them filogenetic—ways in which the mind disinforms us through its routine—and, indeed, fragmentary—way of conceiving reality when acting as an instrument of Darwinian survival. This is true both when pursuing rudimentary and elementary individual forms of survival-behaviour and when acting within a frame of reference of shor-term self-interest, aiming at "immediate" profit without reference to long-term effects. In other terms when guided by spontaneous, instinctive impulses rather than rational calculation. In describing thus the situation one easily runs the risk of assuming a moralistic attitude in which personal interest is confronted with social responsibility. This is a misleading and not very profitable way of stating the ecological problem which deprives it of its main force, which is the rational necessity of self-survival. In other words, ecological behaviour must be viewed as a selfish way of assuring one’s own profit, of maximizing one’s benefit, a maxim valid for all human beings interested in self-preservation, in which sense it becomes a part of one’s ethical duties towards one’s own well-being. It ceases to be a form of altruism, of ethical idealism, as preached in many religions and becomes one of rational profit-calculation. In order to grasp that, one has simply to change the scenario in which such behaviour takes place. As when in order to eliminate juvenile delinquency and violence in a neighborhood one develops programs for changing the negative conditions of local daily life: lack of community-life, lack of education-recreation facilities, lack of job-opportunities appropriate to the ethnic standards of the respective social-group, etc. Elimi-nating local violence becomes not a noble ethical ideal like saving a person from drowning by risking one’s own life or attending the sick during an epidemic, but a rational means of providing for, and investing in, one’s own self-preservation.

Following the idea of changing the scenario, what are the new circumstances and ideas, the functions and variables, that need to be adopted? If to get the right answer, as an elementary survey of the history of scientific thought teaches, one has to use the right vocabulary in order to formulae the right question, what, we must ask, has to be altered in the calculations for profit-making in order to make positive ecological behaviour not a moral-idealistic form of conduct, but one based on good old-fashioned self-interest, like choosing the right marriage-partner or raising healthy children? Is it then more a matter of right-knowledge than one of a noble and lofty mind bent on serving one’s fellow human-beings at the cost of personal sacrifice and renunciation? Would one call personal sacrifice the willingness to pass the ball to another player in basket-ball if he is better placed to score? Or is passing the ball a rational act?

Let us now review the essential elements made visible through our argumentation regarding the problem of qualitative growth, as to both content and method.

1. We have used ESME as an economic model from which the concept of quality, in growth derives its historical-semantical cum humanism operative and anthropological meaning.

2. We have examined the difficulty of arriving at such a result due to the fact that the expression quality in contrast to quantity, normally is used as a generic term denoting sensorial elements of physical objects: color, taste, sound. Thus it represents a reaction of the human organism to the manner in which our sensibility is being affected by the world around us.

3. However, in geopolitics and the cultural sciences, quality, when applied to designate a specific property of, say, an economic model, is not a perceptible attribute. However, "lack of qualitative content" does designate the absence of certain features which render the model merely quantitative.

4. Yet, used within the context of models descriptive of the way intersubjective phenomena occur, quality has reference to feelings or passions which arise in the organisms of individuals acting within a given scenario related to consumption. Hence, the demand for quality is tied partly to feelings accompanying behaviour taking place within the economic sphere.

5. Quality is not comparable to a raw material, or time of execution, or a calculation of the labor required for a certain operation of industrial production. Accordingly, quality refers to whether an economic system includes or excludes variables con-sidered social or cultural when planning and implementing growth-models. As a term of the meta-language, quality designates a reference to significant non-economic factors in the traditional sense of the term economic refereed to by, say, Gunner Myrdal.

6. The parameters or non-economic factors which belong or become essential to a non-quantitative model have to do with cultural, traditional, filo-genetic elements which define the identity of a social group, usually associated with the emotions and will to "defend our values". These are forms of conduct closely related to man’s use of symbols associated with moral, religious, political and other insti-tutions. The meaning of quality is, consequently, tied up with motivations and values, prompting individual behaviour within a system of cultural, psychological and ethical priorities. Not being a sense-data it is associated with spiritual values, and hence, with non-quantity.

7. Quality is definable, hence, only within the totality of the motivations of an individual, including his relationship to the social groups with which he identifies himself. In analogy to the equilibrium of the biosphere it is not an object, but a relation between objects. Yet, it is not an intellectual creation like the concepts of geometry, but a spontaneous act or condition of survival and life inherent in organic nature.

I wanted to support people, not to advance knowl-edge. People all over the world have developed ways of surviving in partly dangerous, partly agreeable surroundings. The stories they told and the activities they engaged in enriched their lives, protected them and gave them meaning. The progress of knowledge and civilization—as the process of pushing Western ways and values into all corners of the globe is being called—destroyed these wonderful products of human ingenuity and compassion without a single glance in their direction. Progress of knowledge in many places meant the killing of minds.

 

From such reflections he concludes: "I am against ideologies that use the name of science for cultural murder." It seems that to clarify the meaning of growth in quality constitutes, indeed, a necessary step in protecting man against such murderous activity.

A major and perplexing philosophical question confronting present day global society runs: how does technological change affect institutional stability, daily-life, individual values and the behaviour of present-day human beings? A first approach to an answer would be: in the measure it affects the life-styles of its citizens. And such life-styles are determined, for better or worse, through the acquisition of new attitudes towards providing for a family through mental or physical work patterns, understanding the cosmos, society, law and government, and past and present historical life; in other words, as individuals and through the mere act of surviving, acquiring a cultural identity. However, in order to gain insight into the forces lending shape and substance to the processes inducing disruptive changes in one’s cultural identity, frequently from one generation to the next, it is not enough to realize that in some fundamental matters such changes in life-style frequently do not originate in one’s own beliefs or national traditions.

It should be clear that since the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the XVIII century, as a consequence of improved techniques of navigation coupled with European imperialistic policies and rivalries, willingly or unwillingly most human groups started to partake the life-style of a global society, having as its undisputed power-center Western Europe. Given the dynamics of the social and economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and prowling over continents and oceans, it is only natural to expect that after two-hundred years no human community, excepting small groups like the Old Christians or the descendents of the Moravians, would have any chance of exempting itself from humanity’s "manifest industrial destiny", i.e., modern mass-consumption. Consequently, in a way similar to that in which changes in the quality of the biosphere do not remain restricted to certain portions of our planet, the effects on cultural identity issuing from science and technology admit of no geopolitical limitations as to where they are welcome, or where they are declared undesired trespassers. No effective barricades protecting against the amenities or discomforts of modern life is even thinkable. In conclusion, technology not only has unified the world by invading every spiritual or material cubic inch, it also has acquired the responsibility to run it. In principle technology and the groups that direct it are accountable for producing dangerous alterations in the equilibriums sustaining biological diversity and cultural pluralism. A conspicuous example of such alterations is an international trade and pricing system causing the destruction of extensive areas of the tropical rain forests. This is not so much a matter of sustainable development, as eurocentered ecologists imagine, as of sheer sustainable suicide through the use of industrial means (electric saws, chemical products, etc.). Present day societal existence, wherever it is geographically located, developed or underdeveloped, living in misery or in abundance, sooner or later becomes impregnated with the spirit and material expressions of industrial civilization, as seen in its three grand-children, true black-sheep of the human family: the ecological crisis, overpopulation. and technological unemployment.

The Children of Science and Technology. All of humanity has become, in fact or in hope, ‘the children of science and technology’, as when in the Christian tradition it was said that all were, ‘Children of the One God’. Is it then that science and technology have substituted for divine Providence; does humankind pray or offer sacrifices to Science? Perhaps not, but it does pay it daily homage simply by adopting a life-style which has become a ‘second nature’ resulting from its omnipresence in the visible and invisible universe, as in those remote periods in history when humans lived in a cosmos enlivened and dominated by animistic forces and entities.

Another question related to the present ‘state of global civilization’ is: Why and how does technology change our life-styles? Is it not because we voluntarily accept it because through technological gadgets we experience a certain feeling of liberation or in the face of natural forces of becoming masters of our own destiny ? This may be partially true: and there is no question that for millennia technological innovation has been part and parcel of the achievements of homosapiens (domestication of animals; astrono-mical time-keeping). But the fact that we desire it, accept it, profit from it, pray for it, in no way alters a deeper and more threatening verity, namely: Even if we didn’t like it, there is nothing we could do about it. It imposes willy-nilly its own life-style. That chapter of modern biology concerned with the conditions determining filo-genetic behaviour tells us why the buildings we construct and the streets we walk through end up by determining those typical XXth century urban life-styles.

Our human animal nature is institutionally wired to the environment in a way which permits only a life-style determined by a daily give-and-take with our physical surroundings. Under the influence of industrial civilization every day these surroundings are to a higher degree man-made. External nature has been obliterated; it no longer determines the conditions of survival. In present-day industrial society the flight from a man-made environment to the silence and loneliness of the desert, as was practiced in late Roman times, is nothing but a ‘lost cause’, a longing of romantic and unrealistic imaginations. Perhaps acting under the self-evidence of such a reality and making of necessity a virtue, the Enlightenment proclaimed the inevitability of ever increasing progress and happiness for all of technology’s children. Within the historical process a cosmic optimism arose that with a few additions and modifications, such as the claim that "Belief in a God is the consequence of an empty stomach or a repressed libido" became the scientific and dialectical Weltanschauung of the Marxist and/or psychoanalytic liberation. At this point of the argument one may recall Churchill’s saying at the end of the Second World War regarding the reconstruction of Britain’s bombed cities that we must be very careful with the buildings we are going to construct because in the end they will be the force constructing us. The expression distantly echoes the traditional theory of man’s alienation from his own true self expounded by Marxism and the Mosaic Book of Genesis. Though biblical alienation is present at the beginning of the human adventure whereas Marxist alienation occurs in one of its phases, nonetheless, both require redemption and a saviour. Pursuing this principle of redemption, now that traditional theological and ideological forms of alienation have become somewhat obsolete, let us ask if there has not, like a Greeks deus exmachina, irrupted on the historical scene some secular substitute—one related to ecology or some variety of nuclear Holocaust, one originating in the technological process itself and its determining influence on the institutional life-style dominating the character of post-industrial global events.

In an article in Fortune Magazine, June, 1955, the mathema-tician and physicist John von Neumann anticipated a major crisis "attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and under-organized. . . . Indications of this appeared early and with dramatic force in the military sphere. By 1940 even the larger countries of continental Western Europe were inadequate as military units. . . . The advent of nuclear weapons merely climaxed the development. . . . As early as World War I it was observed that the admiral commanding the battle fleet could "lose the British Empire in one afternoon. . . . Soon existing nations will be as unstable in war as a nation the size of Manhattan Island would have been in a contest fought with the weapons of 1900." And as a conclusion he points to the fact that: "Such military instability has already found its political expression."

According to the non-ideological analysis of von Neumann’s exceptionally penetrating, clear and well informed mind, the relation between space and technology’s natural and uncontrolled advance presents geopolitical equilibria, institutions and techno-economic leadership with unmanageable problems encroaching on humanity’s welfare and survival. The originality of the theme does not lay in the thesis itself, but in pointing out the fact that the ‘variables’ causing the crisis not only cut across different political, societal and religious systems of societal life, but constitute the fountain from which industrial society itself springs into History. Hence, they are beyond ideology, beyond capitalist and socialist models, and beyond private and state ownership. The cold-war had to do with which of the superpowers is more capable in generating an efficient industrial-military establishment; until very recently (perhaps until the Rio de Janeiro Summit), most world leaders continued to think in terms of ideologies or competitive power-games. But the real crisis is inherent to industrial society and to the fact that the technological factors constituting the traditional military, energy and pollution equilibrium have become obsolete, with no formula in sight to restore it. Besides, as with every equilibrium, once the process starts to roll it snow-balls into chaos.

The above warnings of a rapidly maturing crisis were not fruits of the over-heated imagination of some science-fiction writer, nor of some reckless journalist trying to make the headlines; they come from one of the greatest coolly reflective minds in post-Renaissance science. But, despite the uncontested authority of their author, they carried no influence in the public policies of any major nation. Only in the context of the arms-race between Washington and Moscow, and of the process that led to the ending of the cold-war did John von Neumann exercise a decisive influence on highly placed Govern-ment officials. In his view the best way to get the Russians to negotiate seriously at a peace-table was to have them clearly realize that they cannot finance an arms-race. In this he was not politically naive, a reactionary, a superpatriot or a war-monger as he was officially labeled by the leftist intelligentsia, but a realist longing for an understanding with those playing the world-supremacy game behind the Iron Curtain. The confirmation was provided thirty years after von Neumann died at Walter Reed Hospital of a deadly cancer, probably contracted while watching some nuclear explosion. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall represented the unequivocal and triumphant answer to a correct political game strategy based on his calculation of how to get the Russian to seriously negotiate for peace.

Nevertheless, at his death he called for Father Anselm O.S.B. and expressed his wish to die and receive burial as a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I interpret this as reflection of skepticism and doubts on his part concerning how far science can be trusted to throw light on the great questions life puts to an informed and critical human beings.

The present situation in Latin America must be considered in relation to the global context taking shape at the threshold of the third millenium. Political parties and Parliaments are held accountable for the welfare of society as far as it depends upon legal implementation to maintain survival and improve living conditions, or to prevent their deterioration within modern industrial society. For this reason information as to the forces shaping a life-style, plus a critical capacity for analyzing social process, become prerequisites for effective legal action. There seems to be no other vehicle for controlling the forces in modern history that menace societal existence.

The Cold War as a substitute for the insanity of a hot one, following the von Neumann analysis, exercised a negative effect on our capacity to become aware of the approaching crisis. It kept world attention focused on the Washington-Moscow confrontation and focused the major thought and energy of those two superpowers upon protecting not global, but their own, security. Since the rivalry was based on ideological models it blindfolded attention to the real objective planetary threats. When the Cold War ended people began to realize they had been misled as to where to look for future and imminent dangers. Consequently, after loosing precious time we feel threatened by the ecological crisis, the population explosion, massive migration movements, ethnic particularism and in-built technological unemployment. In relation to the changes brought about by industrial society most leading figures in Latin-American parliaments as well as the mass media show a lack of awareness or continue to think ideologically.

Apart from the emergence of a new power division based on competition for world markets, the following major features of post-industrial global society are escalating to a crisis scenario.

1. Where the classical Industrial Revolution substituted muscular work by energy-driven machines, thereby creating the proletariat and giving origin to the Marxist societal model based on class struggle, post-industrial society appears to have fused into one the XIXth century working and middle-classes.

2. At the lowest economic and cultural strata of society, in many countries throughout the world there has appeared an intense Lumpen for which there exists only a diminishing job supply: Demand far exceeds offer.

3. The computer revolution has eliminated not only the proletariat, but also a substantial percentage of the main body of the second level managerial class, viz., the secretarial work of gathering, processing and communicating information. Basically all the new managerial class does is economic analysis for the market and for profit and loss risk-taking.

4. It was generally believed that after the end of the Cold War, the Washington-Moscow confrontation would be replaced by a North-South one. However, the ‘invisible hand’ has decided otherwise: we are witnessing a multi-polar power struggle in which each geographical power establishment—there exist at least four—has extended its industrial-technical area of influence to the developing countries in a selective way in order to pursue a multipolar Cold War ‘by other means’.

5. A new form of the XVII-XIX century metropoli-colonial scheme, adapted to the ‘equilibrium’ of global post-industrial society is emerging. The North-American Free Trade Association is quickly reaching to the Straits of Magellan and will control, for the next decades, trade in the Pacific Ocean. This means that Europe will be relegated to the role of an ‘Atlantic Power’. How this ‘new order’ will evolve in terms of geopolitics and global peace is still an undecided question.

Since the proletariat has been absorbed into the life-styles of the middle class and the lower and middle levels of the middle class have been eliminated, the struggle is between power groups at the top, that is the remaining middle class, and the Lumpen. The middle class is caught between a new aristocracy and third world pressures. Its position is becoming one of institutional insecurity since the aristocracy is bent on power and profits; or better still: on profits as a means to power. It is a scenario in which cultural identities and religious motives, united with race and tradition, are quite visibly and dangerously active. The individual’s struggle is for status within the new society. But this demands a security—not only economic, but cultural and moral—which for many people originates in the status attached to their employment. However, as market economy competition plus robots tend to diminish the space of employment we have become aware all over the world that not only poor or developing countries suffer from massive unemployment, but that modern industrial society was and continues to be conceived as a means to produce goods and services, not to provide employment. This fearsome reality is shaking the pillars and beliefs of both elites and masses the world over.

As a corollary to the above search after new forms of planetary equilibrium the political problem of individual countries, but not the answer to it, is clear. Does the managerial aristocracy competing for economic power and jet-status—something perfectly legalized through Perestroika since the debacle of Stalinist and goulag egalitarianism—have the information and the will to act with global historic perspectives? Or will they be guided exclusively by power-cum-profit motives? The question should be asked: Are these groups capable of preserving basic world peace and ecological survival, or are they too preoccupied with their own short term interests and fixations, as were the ideologists until Perestroika? The answer to these questions is not yet to be seen. However, through previous experience one aspect has become fairly clear given that human behavior tends to repeat itself, adapting its aims to new circumstances: profits and power are basic motivations. Classic profit making, i.e., before globality and Perestroika, discovered that getting more customers produced more profits cum power. Whereupon, to make of the proletariat a consumer by increasing its purchasing power became a guiding idea of any free-market economy. This was done recently with ecology and pollution control, making of them not so much a moral and civic minded issue—which undoubtedly they also are—but profit makers from a market-economy point of view. This resulted in a diminution of the votes favoring the political greens. In other words, profit making has shown its capacity to absorb certain threats to the top managerial establishment. It remains to be seen if the party of structural unemployed can also become allies of the market-cum-robot economy. If an harmonious coexistence between profit-making, mass production, a stable and clean biosphere and the craving for employment can be reached, such new equilibrium would constitute an appalling demonstration of how the Scottish invisible hand, the protestant equivalent to the Neapolitan and Catholic Divine Providence of Gian-Battist Vico, really manages to fulfill ‘through the passions and vices of individual men its own divine purposes’. The impending problem, at least theoretical, within global post industrial Civil Society may no longer be absolute poverty, but to share the available jobs with the jobless.

MARIO LASERNA

The presentation focused on method and its importance as showing how to discuss and the limits of what we can see.

1. Descartes considered animals to be machines, not in the sense of mechanical self contained units, but in that they behave in a deterministic manner. Homo sapiens, in contrast, is not only (1) deterministic, but also (2) rational in the sense of being capable of choice and being social.

2. Question: how did homo sapiens get from determinism to rational choice? There is a close relation between deterministic matter and rational choice by spirit. The behavior of animals is programmed by their genetic constitution, which can be either filo-genetic (species) or ont-genetic (family); this is operative also in humans, who in addition free and social.

3. Cultural Institutions. If we try to explain distinctively human behavior (choice/freedom) simply by education all is reduced to will or voluntarism, which would be socially chaotic. Instead we should look to the cultural institutions which, as human creations, destroy any mere biological determinism. Thus, whereas when faced with food a mouse acts automatically due to the univocal relation between the stimulus and the action which it triggers, human beings are able to make a choice due to the cultural institutions interposed between the stimulus and the action trigger.

Without this people would lack freedom, would be reduced to mere individuals acting as separate atoms, and hence would not be able to form community.

4. Values reflect this inasmuch as we accept or modify the choices made by our predecessors, and hence create our identity in community. Persons have virtues (or strengths) if they accept and follow what is truly beneficial to life (i.e. values).

5. Freedom. How free are we to accept such cultural institutions? In reality there is little freedom here because such institutions are human inventions intended precisely to break down the animal determinism and to be free, that is, in order to express the "esprit" of which Descartes spoke as that which is most central and undeniable in the human subject.

Civil society expresses the fact that people are expected to act within a certain range of choices, for the cultural institutions embody the relations between the individual and society. This changes through history as progressively we develop different values due to the fact that humans must live in relation to the environment and are able to invent new ways of doing so. Whence this power? Greek myth recounts that Prometheus stole fire from Heaven; the Bible tells of this power being given by God to Adam and humankind, who then would be the lord of creation.

6. Control. Hence the big problem would appear to be that in applying our power in order to avoid acting automatically we shape our actions to only one goal, namely, that of controlling nature (Bacon and Hobbes), a happened initially in the rebellion in Eden. This is reflected in our destruction of liberal education and its being supplanted by an education directed toward technical control, which in turn soon developed the capacity to destroy nature and human-kind.

7. Market. In Christian civilization one must add also the reality of grace to act in a meaningful way. This is an addition in the cultural institution, but whence come its signals? In these days they come via the mass media, which, however, transmits only what is decided by the oligarchy who own the media. The economy or market has broken the monopoly of the state, but now is supplanting the state, the family and all else in forming the citizen.

8. Inevitably we are changing. But we need to move more slowly in order to be able to absorb and direct change. Though the elders blame the young, it is the elders who have created the world in which the signals are perceived.

9. Method. We need a method in order, not to solve, but to understand the problems we face, namely, that we have turned to technology in order to control nature, but now find that the techno-logy controls us via the media, which, in turn, is controlled by the capital market.

In the discussion, on the more superficial level of having a range of choices some saw culture as being particular and hence as limiting one’s range of choices and freedom. In these terms one would look rather to abstract, universal and minimal norms. In these terms, too, one could hope that the profit motive of the market would assure that the media might respond to freedom by showing what people want. This takes freedom at its first level of simply being able to choose whatever one wants. But it does not attend to a second level of freedom according to which one chooses as one ought; nor does it attend to a third level of freedom which consists in the ability to make oneself in terms of the sense of human perfection as goal had in one’s culture. Indeed the idea that interest and profit motive will suffice because they drive or attract persons to the real good of society seems too short sighted. The rampant corruption in high places which undermines progress in the political economic and social orders throughout the world, the exploitation of the poor and the weak, in daily labor and the cruder forms of direct violence and crime in the streets—all testify to the fact that individual advantage tends to focus on "short-term self interest, aiming at immediate profit without reference to long-term effect," but guided only by the law of the jungle. If today we have a problem, it is this.

The contribution of the paper in this regard is to point out that moral life is one that produces concrete goods and hence is the intelligent way to live. It stresses that in this the norm is not the simple quantitative accumulation of material or economic profit, but the quality of life as is extensively elaborated in Part II of this chapter. If so, however, the contrast is not between lofty ideals attained only by self renunciation, on the one hand, and "old-fashioned self-interest" whose vicious effects were listed above, on the other. Clearly, that would be a short term view of self interest. Rather, the contrast is between such selfish self interest and the kind of open and generous gift of self which the paper typifies by the example of choosing a good life partner to whom to give oneself in marriage and the raising of children. Ethics and morality do not consist in otherworldly ideas, but in the choice of goals appropriate to us as personal and social beings and the kinds of concrete actions which lead to their qualitative realization. The lofty ideals beyond daily affairs may echo the moralistic attitude of a Kant, but not the concrete concern for the poor of a Christ.

Philosophy can provide a method, but in addition there is need to apply this to life with others. To convince others, however, reason does not suffice; and it is a weakness of our times that we act as if it were. In fact, what is proper to human interrelationships is love as shared concern and care. Christian culture is especially marked by this sense of love as self sacrificing service of others. This is not separated from daily life, but is integrated into a wholistic vision of life with, and for, others in society.

This vision must recognize the fact of the distortion in the exercise of one’s freedom. How should this be understood? It was suggested that what was symbolized by Adam and Eve’s eating of the apple was in reality the human grasp for absolute power, which today is the effort to control all via technological means. In this sense sin is not an external force which would constitute an excuse for avoiding one’s responsibility, but is rooted properly one’s own deficient sense of responsibility: Augustine held that sin was the only thing that humankind could claim as its own, as its responsibility.

It should be noted, however, that given the extent and "control" that evil can exercise in our lives the drama of human freedom may be greater and more far reaching than has thus far been recognized. It has often been said that evil can weaken the will in its drive toward human perfection. This is the dimension expressed by the notion of original sin, not merely as a particular action, but as a choice of evil which damages our conscious relation to the good in love.

If sin is what we can claim as totally our own and if this weakens our conscious openness to other—the love which binds us in a civil society—then we are in need of a gift that is gratuitous (or grace) in order to be able to realize civil society. In this light then religion is not merely one dimension among others in the multifaceted bonds of solidarity which constitute civil society. Instead, if there is need to see a subsidiarity between these bonds, its ground lies in our relation not only to the creative source by which all are originally constituted, but to the source of grace by which all are enabled to overcome human weakness in the exercise of the divine gift of human freedom, and thereby enabled to achieve a level of quality in social life and civil society.