When five years ago the World Council of Churches began the study, many people thought it was part of the diversionary tactics of the West, to draw attention away from the burning issues of justice in society. Perhaps at that time it partly was. For, the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society had made even the World Council of Churches somewhat aware that there was global injustice, that the rich of the world were oppressing the poor and exploiting them, and that the North Atlantic countries had a 1ion’s share in the guilt of oppression and exploitation in the world today.
If the W CC and the rich Western Churches which form the bulk of its financial and personnel support were conscientiously to follow the lead of Geneva 1966, the Churches would probably have undergone severe persecution in all countries. For to expose the pattern of oppression and exploitation in the world is to invite persecution from the powers that be.
So in a sense, when the WCC’s fourth assembly at Uppsala 1968 picked up “Development” rather than International Justice as its main emphasis for the coming years, the conclusion was easy to draw that Global Justice is still a hot potato, too hot indeed for the W. C C. to handle. In that sense it was legitimate that the Department of Church and Society, which organized Geneva 1966, went on after Uppsala 68 to launch a five-year study programme on “The Future of Man and Society in a world of science-based Technology” rather than on the Future of Man in a World of Growing Global Injustice. The study programme concluded with a big world pow-wow of scientists, theologians and sundry other professional conference-goers like the present writer, held at the Theological Institute of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Bucharest (June 24 to July 2, 1974), on the topic “Science and Technology for Human Development. The Ambiguous Future and the Christian Hope”.
Despite the bombastic title, the conference managed to keep up the fairly mediocre standards of most WCC Conferences. There was a flood of information, a bevy of luminaries, and a sickening torrent of words, all as usual. Lynn White’s wry, witty clever speech on “Technology and the Future of Compassion” did not get the attention it deserved partly because the man looked too chubby, rotund, funny and complacent in the face of the enormous illness of humanity" for which he was prescribing active compassion towards the whole universe as a single remedy. In sharp contrast was the African Jesuit Professor Mveng's (Cameroun) paper on “Cultural Values and the Future of Technology”. American wit was no match for African wisdom. Seldom have I seen a French speech make so profound an impression on a largely English speaking conference. The sources of its wisdom lay more in African traditional lore than simply in the so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition. He spoke not only of the integral relation between Man and Cosmos in traditional African lore; he insisted that African culture taught men and women to read and understand the book of human destiny and the book of the cosmos in a single optique, and to discern one’s true allies and real enemies in the world of reality.
And then came the fable of Evu-Mana, which gripped the conference; this was the African counterpart of the story of Adam and Eve. The story of a woman who was fishing in the forest for little fish, catching" nothing after a whole day’s toil; coming upon a gazelle that had just been arrowed down; taking the meat home, having a feast. A secret benefactor (Technology?) did this for her every day, so that she was no longer poor. Then after a few days the benefactor appears to her and asks to be taken home with her to her village, provided she could feed the benefactor. She agrees; he insists on getting inside her and being carried home in her stomach or womb. Once in the village, the benefactor inside her gets hungry and wants to eat. His appetite is insatiable. He eats and devours, until he consumes the whole village, all its people, animals, everything living. Finally, his appetite still unsatisfied, the benefactor reveals his true identity to her “I am hungry, hungry, hungry. I am Eva- Mana the demon of Death; my appetite is insatiable. Now you alone are alive; I must eat you too”. Evu-Mana devoured the woman.
Evu-Mana, Mveng said with the simplicity of wisdom, is not technology, but "the greedy demon of Consumerism, that possesses the body of humanity and finally devours humanity itself. Despite the profound wisdom and truth of his analysis, Fr. Mveng’s remedy left the conference unsatisfied-- the merging of technology and culture.
Prof. Georg Borgstrorn of Michigan State, formerly of Sweden, struck a distinctive note of prophetic passion, pleading “Back to Reality-- a Basis for Ethical Guidance”. He spoke convincingly about “the protein Empire?’ built on prevailing trade patterns, sucking all the nutrients of the world, in the shape of grain, oil-seeds, and sea-food, into the well-fed, but voraciously hungry stomach of the West. He castigated those who seek to palliate the hungry --world’s misery by verbal tranquilizers, religion being most guilty at this point. The "Soaring Sixties have now given place to the Sobering Seventies. We have been deluding ourselves with dreams of a world of plenty while creating an oasis of affluence in the midst of a vast desert of penury. The affluent world has treated the rest of the world as a market to be tapped or as a field to provide them with food and fibres. We need now to see the world as people. The famous Kennedy question has to be enlarged. Not “what the world can do for us, but what can we do for our world?”
Science and Technology in the service of Consumerism, of culture, or of compassion -- that seemed the way the question was posed. To many from the Two-Third World, that way of putting the question seemed too paternalistic, and occidento-centric.
The weakness of the conference lay precisely in that. At Geneva I966, the voices of Africa and Latin America were the loudest, and the West was put down to a guilty silence. At Bucharest 1974 care seemed to have been taken to make the Western voices loud enough not to be unheard. There was Margaret Mead, the President elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, loud enough to be heard around the world; Dr. Magnus Pyke, Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science seeking in that inimitably entertaining Oxbridge donnish style with wit and cadence, but in vain, to convince us that science and technology were totally innocent and had done so much good to all around; Peter Odell (Oil and World Politics) himself persona non gram to the oil companies, strongly pleading that the multinationals were not the villains of the piece; the giant economist Kenneth Boulding telling the conference with astonishing insensitivity that exploitation was only a minor problem. Add Lynn White, President of the American Historical Association, Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago Divinity school, World Council Patriarch Willem Visser't Hooft; you can hardly complain, as one perhaps could at Geneva 1966, that the white Western world was not adequately represented on the platform.
In contrast the speakers from the Two-Third World appeared mild-mannered, quiet, unstrident. Prof. Sam Parmar of India, the co-chairman of the conference, was low-key even in some of his most penetrating remarks. Harnilcar Herrera's (Bariloche Foundation, Argentina, Director of Special Study on a Latin American world model in response to the Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome) erudition was too vast to gain attention. Prof. Warwick Kerr of Brazil spoke about his own personal imprisonment and torture. Prof. Nathan Shamuyarira of Tanzania spoke quietly about Africas' determination to be self-reliant. Prof. Philip Shen of Hong Kong seemed to have been specially chosen to represent a conservative Asian view. On the whole the Two-third world, including Prof. Mveng, gave the impression that little purpose was served by branding the West as the culprit, when our own houses were not very much in order.
The socialist countries of Eastern Europe also made very little impression on the conference. Minister Mircea Malitza, Counsellor to the President of Romania, sounded blandly Western, almost consumerist, but eloquent on socialist achievements in Romania. And Eastern Europe seemed dead scared of all this criticism of consumerism, perhaps because they are only barely getting into it now. There was little response from European socialist countries to the humanist critique of science-technology.
On the theological side, the confrontation was not so much between science and theology, as between the ancient Eastern tradition and the younger Western tradition. Scientists were, in general, not prepared to expect much from Western theology. And there was no major Western theological presentation. The theological working group’s report came under heavy fire. No Black Theology, no Liberation Theology, but just more of the old Bland Theology.
Only Charles Birch of Australia, the other co-chairman of the conference, produced a report from his group which was both substantial and ample in size, full of bold fresh analyses and insights. The reports, it is hoped, having gone through various stages of WCC processing will make some difference to the Nairobi Assembly this year. (The preparatory work for Bucharest was exceptionally good).
One last caveat. This writer was struck by the political naivete of the experts in Science and Technology. When will we get that dialogue going, between science- technology and economics-politics? People seemed sometimes to be assuming that since the experts are so compassionate and full of good will, the catastrophe can be avoided, if everyone just gets in and does his or her little bit along with the experts. At other times the facts seemed to question the very assumption that humanity has a future at all.
Without justice, who wants a future, anyway?