Are you quite sure you
don’t mind giving this interview?
I turned my attention to the monitor, or more precisely, to the young
woman on it. She was new to Al Jazirra and had obviously been told I rarely
gave interviews. Following the
Great Crisis of 2037, all unnecessary media contact by Academicians had been
tacitly discouraged.
I smiled.
No, of course not.
The young woman glanced down at her notes and cleared her throat. The
red studio light blinked ON AIR.
Today we are pleased to
welcome to the program one of our most eminent integral philosophers, Kazim
Khalili. Kazim, your mother sought
asylum in Australia in 1999 having fled the Taliban. You never knew your father
who was shot by the regime for adhering to liberal ideals. You were born, and spent
your early years, in a detention centre in South Australia. Your release from
detention came just before Christmas 2004 in a widely-publicised effort by the
federal government to assuage growing concern in the community about conditions
in those centres. Traumatised, you hadn’t spoken a single word while captive.
Your first words were, ‘Wire not here. Is Kazim here?’ You were four. Your face, dubbed the
‘Face of Hope’ by journalists, became known to millions around the world.
Forty six years later and
your life still remains something of a mystery. Last year you were Time Magazine’s ‘Face of the Future’ -
yet most people probably wouldn’t recognise you if they saw you in the street.
Yasmin, your Vietnamese-born life partner, is a widely-published ethicist and
former actress who also happens to be one of the most glamorous women in the
world – yet the two of you seldom appear in public. You are a moral philosopher
to some of the most powerful corporations on the planet and one of only 20
elected Sages of the Gaian Academy – yet you eschew political power, which
could be yours for the taking. How can this be?
What a question! I cast my
mind back to those early days…
After my father’s death, my mother, five months pregnant, gambled her
life’s savings on securing safe passage to Australia. Like all politicians at
the time, Australia’s political leaders were too egocentric, too taken up with
their own self-importance and petty differences, to care much about refugees.
All my mother wanted was freedom. Even this basic human right these, so-called
civilized, people denied her. Dismayed and depressed she eventually set herself
ablaze in full view of visiting dignitaries. Her suicide was an excruciating
cry for the plight of all refugees; the kind of protest that causes even the
most powerful to shudder. How could I not live my life wisely after such
sacrifice?
How did you find growing
up in Australia?
Oh, I can’t deny it was tough – just ask any immigrant from that time.
My foster family, though kind, were not affluent. I wore clothes bought at the
local market and because I spoke with an accent I was bullied unmercifully at
school. Most Muslims were pilloried, receiving the kind of treatment dished out
to greedy and corrupt officials today. I worked my way through college doing
jobs nobody else would do. Cleaning public toilets, driving taxis, sweeping the
streets… Whatever was
available.
You studied philosophy and bioethics at University?
I did. I devoured every book I could get my
hands on. It was a revelation.
Today we accept the idea that human purpose is bound up with
experiencing and respecting all life, learning to grow and take responsibility
for stewardship of the whole Earth and for each other. But we simply didn’t know that then. Indeed, such views ran
counter to almost everything we took for granted and assumed about reality.
Back then, for instance, it was widely assumed that biological control came
about through dissecting life down to the minutest particle. By the end of the
20th century James Lovelock’s Gaian hypothesis was more or less
accepted by a majority of scientists.
But other significant thinkers, like Lipton, Sheldrake, Buchanan, Watts,
Strogatz and Wolfram, for example, were considered wackos by many mainstream
scientists. Bruce Lipton’s thinking, in addition to the pioneering ideas proposed by Roy Madron and John Jopling in their book The Gaian Democracies, provided the tipping point
for Australia’s venture into a new form of "Gaian" democracy. It was Lipton, you recall, who
first showed genes did not control biological expression and were but a small
part of the equation. That was an amazing discovery. It was Lipton, too, who
insisted long before anyone else, that by looking at the physical world through
reductionist eyes, we had ended up viewing the world and human beings as though
matter and the material world were the only things that – well, matter. Then
there were remarkable breakthroughs in economics with the establishment of the
first Commons Trusts, derived from the thinking of people like James Quilligan
and Ken Wilber.
Today, we openly admit that all knowledge and
all ways of knowing contribute to our comprehension of who we are; that
understanding arises from perceiving both the material and immaterial worlds.
We accept that love and joy promote growth, while fear and stress lead to
breakdown of the system as easily as we accept constructs in quantum physics.
This is why the Gaian Academy, which arose out of the Institute of Noetic
Sciences and has become the key advisory body on global affairs, is necessarily
based on a philosophy of wholeness.
So the noetic sciences are more important to you than philosophy?
On the contrary. Both are absolutely integral
to the Gaian worldview. Noetic
science brings emotions, aesthetics and spirituality into the ambit of science.
But it is philosophy that shows us how to maintain a viable civic society. A
love of philosophy helped me to understand how I might live my life with
greater wisdom; how I might tread more lightly on this Earth. In terms of a
career, though, it was a disastrous choice. Employers sought accountants,
engineers and lawyers back then. Everything had become focused on individual
and material progress, you see. Greed, competition, prejudice, ignorance and
fear were rife. You can’t begin to imagine what it was like unless you’d lived
through it.
The Great Awakening changed that didn’t it? In fact it seemed to impact most things.
It certainly did. Oh, we’d had more or less ongoing ‘red alerts’
regarding issues such as climate change, the impact of pollution on the
biosphere, terrorism, corruption in business and politics, and the dangers of
genetically modified foods, for example. But in spite of the fear propagated by
governments and activists alike, enthusiastically aided and abetted by the
media it must be said, society had become complacent. We trusted that money, or
smart technologies created by even smarter brains, would fix all our problems.
The Great Awakening really forced us to come to terms with the stark reality of
the human condition. After the collapse of the climate negotiations in Mexico
in 2010 it became clear to most people that we couldn’t go on as before. But
what to do? In essence, we needed
to find a different way to live our lives, and quickly too. The fallout from
global climate change happened far faster than anyone had predicted you see. The
Great Awakening also allowed us to develop new kinds of governance that moved
beyond classic parliamentary models – what we now refer to as Gaian democracies. Old governance and political models had
long outlived their usefulness, it’s just that we hadn’t realised it.
What was it like living
through the Great Awakening? How did it feel?
It felt… Actually it felt
as though the end of the world had come – like all those old science fiction films
you see about Armageddon. Really, nothing can do justice to the sense of sheer
dread shared by the community at that moment. The most damage occurred between
2020 and 2028. Scorching summers, protracted droughts and severe storms,
cyclones and bushfires gripped the country. There were crippling water shortages.
Power blackouts lasted days rather than hours. Entire National Parks were
destroyed. Corals in the World-Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef were bleached
white by the warm acid waters. Tourism collapsed completely. Almost 68 per cent
of farmers went bankrupt – especially those that were still reliant on
European-style crops and farming methods. It really did feel like the end had
come. But without those disasters I doubt that significant change could have
occurred. Mind you, we were fortunate in having Gaian principles and noetic
sciences available to us. This knowledge, once considered heretical, now made
perfect sense – even to those who had been sceptical about its unorthodox
scientific pedigree. Severe problems we’d never imagined we could figure out,
like soil erosion and desalination, for example, seemed suddenly possible to
resolve. Our knowledge and our technologies had both shifted. As science
assumed genuine systemicity, so researchers started incorporating diverse
topics, relationships and methods in their work. One discovery followed another
in quick succession. The innovation commons enabled ordinary people and small
communities everywhere to start using low-cost democratic technologies
bypassing any involvement from massive and uncaring corporations. It was so
liberating you see...
What kinds of problems
are you talking about here? Can you give us some examples?
By all means. One of the first things we did
was to completely redesign and rebuild local energy
systems so that they
drastically reduced carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions. Breakthroughs
occurred in the generation and distribution of solar, wind, hydrogen, and other
forms of energy, together with new policies and financial instruments to
accelerate the transformation process. The implications of this were
staggering, especially in urban conurbations where every internal combustion
engine, every coal-fired power plant, every methane-emitting landfill was
transformed or replaced with an alternative that was climate-neutral and
environmentally benign. At the same time we developed a globally- coordinated
system for managing the global carbon balance at scientifically determined
acceptable levels.
That system marked the beginnings of the
Academy and its subsequent influence on global geopolitics, if I’m not
mistaken?
Correct. That
degree of global cooperation was simply unprecedented. The only way we could
have started to deal with some of these problems was through agreed global
policy settings. It worked. Indeed, it worked so well that the Academy is now
the most influential global institution as far as applied holistic science and
governance is concerned.
What other early Gaian policies emanated
from the Academy?
Oh, far too many
to list during this interview. But I can give you a feel for the scope of new
policies back then. International efforts shifted from the previous focus on
emissions (which was never going to succeed) to scalable and actions relevant
to different situations and locales. The production and use of chemicals was completely
overhauled so that no known toxins could accumulate in the biosphere. A
tax was levied on carbon. Then there was a concerted effort to completely
eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons and materials from escaping into
the biosphere by finding new ways to transform highly radioactive and
long-lasting materials like plutonium into more benign materials. The fact that
nuclear energy is once again one of the most common forms of energy on the
planet is a testimony to the innovations that have been achieved there.
But not in the UK, US and Canada surely?
Wave-power generators now produce most of their electricity?
That’s correct. Unhappily
Australia had no mandated green-power targets at the time. Legislation still favoured
fossil fuel polluters. So yet another Australian invention was commercialised
overseas for lack of local investment capital.
Sorry Kazim, I interrupted you. You were talking about the new policies
emanating from the Academy…
I suppose the
most important dual issues were the elimination of global poverty (largely
through the application of sufficiency economy principles) as well as the
threat of war. We shouldn’t underestimate the efforts that went into this –
even though politicians only started taking it in earnest once they’d realised
that poverty was creating all kinds of ecological destruction while increasing
social instability and diminishing our humanity. War is far too dangerous in an
era of globally destructive weaponry. In the first assembly of the Academy we
agreed that nothing less than the full elimination of these two scourges would
be sufficient to attain sustainability and establish the full proof of our
maturity as a species.
And
the physical environment, which is also an area close to your heart?
Because I’m an
Australian, the physical landscape is a potent part of my personal identity and
consciousness. Landscapes have both a tactile and an aesthetic beauty that is
almost spiritually palpable, for me as for most other Australians, I suspect. My
inaugural address as a Sage included policies designed to protect absolutely
the integrity of the Earth's natural and agricultural systems. In
Australia and New Zealand, hard boundaries were drawn around biodiversity
preserves, critical ecosystems, and places of awe and wonder like Kakadu and
Uluru, for example. I proposed that farmlands and food production should be
protected from displacement by urban sprawl and colonization by overzealous
profiteers. And I called for human habitations to become completely
self-sufficient, no longer drawing down resources at unsustainable rates or
destroying places of living mystery with thoughtless extraction, pollution, or
overuse. All of which is now government policy I’m pleased to say.
But what of the Australian landscape
itself. Does it look any different today?
Superficially
speaking, probably not too much. Urban environments are designed far more
elegantly. Most buildings are extremely energy efficient and look more
sculptural than in the past. I suppose visitors from the 20th
century might be surprised by the lack of green in our inner cities. We no
longer try to mimic European landscapes as we did then. Even our Botanic Gardens
are full of native species. New legislation and methods of farming as well as
broad acre permaculture projects have ensured the survival of critical ecosystems.
The rivers are clean and the oceans have abundant fish. There are probably more forests today
than there were even 20 years ago.
The main difference is the fact that we’ve been able to produce a system
whereby native and introduced species of flora and fauna can coexist. We
haven’t had to opt for one or the other.
Kazim, can you say a little about how all
of this has been achieved?
There were
perhaps four critical elements, without which none of this could possibly have
worked. First was the platform for change provided by the Great Awakening
itself. Second was the new Gaian paradigm which balanced individual wealth with
new commons and trusts and futures banks (designed to protect the rights of all
people to things like fresh air and potable water) and repositioned the role of
governments in that regard. The third had more to do with a critical mass of
people from all walks of life, change agents if you like, who dared to take seriously
the challenge of personal life-style transformation: the activists who called
our attention to those issues about which society was in denial; the artists
who helped us feel the gravity of our predicament and inspired us to strive for
better things; the scientists and technologists who found breakthrough ideas to
rapidly transform our way of life; the designers who fused beauty and
functionality in a transformed world; and the business people who re-imagined
and redirected capital flows, investment and talent in ways that recreated the
world while enhancing global prosperity. Fourth, and perhaps most important,
was the introduction of third-generation, people-powered, political systems as
well as the establishment of participative processes and collaborative global
institutions, such as the Academy. I doubt very much whether we would be here today if we were still
enmeshed in the ego-based, corrupt political systems of the late 20th
century.
Kazim, thank you so much for your time. It’s
been fascinating to talk to such a distinguished Sage about the evolution of
Gaian society. In today’s world of preferential networks, collaborative
communities and the tendency to downplay ego as a natural response to the 20th
century’s individualistic excesses, it’s not often we have access to such
fascinating and inspirational personal insights. Is there anything you would
like to say in conclusion?
Only that our
journey continues still. So many dreams have been realised over the past half
century. Humanity’s impact on nature has declined dramatically. We have learned
to live as stewards of the biosphere rather than as ravagers of it. Wealth is
being created in ways that were simply unimaginable barely 25 years ago and
poverty is almost a thing of the past.
Society is transformed and it enriches us – spiritually, socially, economically.
There is still much to be done though. Perhaps we will never completely
understand why we are here. But what we’ve discovered already is quite profound
and we are living together more compassionately and developing wealth more
equitably as a result.
Kazim Khalili, thank you so very much for
your time. Namaste.
Namaste.