1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 121

A. H. ESSER

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reconceptualizations became guided by technological practicalities. The pollution brought about by Christian exclusivity continued and became compounded by the efforts of a materialistic individualism. The growth of interest in personal gain, which is close to our basic spontaneous survival behavior and therefore readily teachable, prevented the necessary evolution of altruism (about which later) which is equally important in spontaneous social behavior. We can therefore consider most of our contemporary Western individualistic behavior a direct source of social pollution. The difficulty is, that most of such behavior is so akin to our earliest environmentally determined behavior; therefore, the continuing education of youngsters along these lines seldom meets with resistance. Take, for example, our western attitude toward individual rights to property, easily transmitted in our culture because of its consonance with what has been termed the territorial imperative. Only when the younger generation grows up does it see the incongruity between what they have been taught and the real conditions on this overpopulated planet — and then it is too late for radical reform. The mental images have become reinforced: the mind is polluted from the beginning. Paradoxically, our great adaptability to all types of circumstances forms our greatest danger, as René Dubos remarks (Man, Medicine and Environment p. 87). At this point, one might well ask, „How can there be any further psycho-social evolution for the West at all?" Is the philosophy of individualism not part and parcel of our Western culture because it is reinforced by the continued adaptation of territorial and dominance images? In that case the pessimists, who despair of the chances of a new humanism in a technological world, are quite right: without the collapse or destruction of our current society, life in the West will become a nightmare. It is true that we could allow our culture to be hollowed out so that it may repeat the cycle of history: decay and replacement by another culture. But, the wars which inevitably accompany this process will mean the extinction of mankind; we will have to look to another alternative. This is provided by a concept of John B. Calhoun: the Compassionate-Systems Revolution (2), leading to what we can call compassionate man.

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