The vision of Aurelio Peccei and Daisaku Ikeda
The vast amount of information available on the internet and social media offers us many opportunities. Among these is the chance to learn about particularly wise individuals, whose thoughts provide interesting food for thought. After writing the article Artificial intelligence and natural wisdom, I was looking for further insights on the topic, and a search engine suggested a link about someone who immediately caught my attention.
Aurelio Peccei was born in 1908, he was a partisan during the Second World War, during which he was imprisoned for about a year, and later became a brilliant manager at Fiat and Olivetti.
Beyond his professional successes, Peccei developed a passionate interest in ecology, to the point that he began actively engaging in concrete actions to protect the environment1.
Peccei was a co-founder of the Club of Rome, established in 1968 to facilitate meetings among scientists, economists, politicians, and heads of state, and to draw attention to the problems threatening the planet’s future. In 1972, in his introduction to the famous report The Limits to Growth, sponsored by the Club, he made clear that certain changes could be “irreversible” and that “without a strong wave of global public opinion, fueled by the most creative segments of society, the political class in every country will continue to lag behind the times, trapped in the short term and in self-interest.”
He saw wisdom as the quality missing from modern progress: humanity was growing in technological and productive power, but not in the ethical and moral capacity to manage that power. Peccei argued for the need for a global ethic that placed human dignity and responsibility toward future generations at its core. It was precisely this focus on human dignity that led him to meet Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International, an organization whose mission is to promote peace, culture, and education based on the Buddhist teaching of respect for the dignity of life. I quote here an excerpt from a text in which Ikeda recalls his meeting with Peccei in Florence in 19752.
When we met on May 16, 1975, he was sixty-six years old.
As he spoke, Peccei would occasionally lean forward in his chair with great intensity. Humanity, he said, has so far experienced three revolutions: the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. These have all been external revolutions. The problem is that the wisdom needed to decide how to use the fruits of these revolutions is not yet sufficiently developed.
He went on to say that humankind possesses an enormous amount of knowledge, but is also surprisingly ignorant about how to behave. He stated that although technology is developing rapidly, culturally our development has come to a standstill, as if petrified. To bridge this gap, he said, we need a rebirth of the human spirit, a human revolution. It was 1975, but I am sure that even today Peccei would assert that the human revolution is more important than the information revolution we are currently experiencing.
The real challenge was to develop a collective wisdom capable of guiding civilization toward a sustainable future. Ikeda and Peccei were dedicating their lives to this challenge, and they decided to compile their ideas in the book A Wake-up Call for the 21st Century. Here is an excerpt from the book available on Amazon3.
We both believe that the most pressing problems of our time are of an ethical and spiritual nature and cannot be solved through scientific and technological power, nor by strictly economic means. They belong to the most intimate and profound sphere of humanity: only if every single human being is able to completely re-examine their values and their vision of life will they be able to understand them and approach them with the serene hope that, by virtue of their inner renewal, we will never be overwhelmed. The pressing need for this human awakening—which we believe is possible—and our faith in a human revolution aimed at fostering such renewed awareness led us to title our book “A Wake-up Call for the 21st Century.”
Today, this issue has become even more urgent, as we are in the midst of yet another technological revolution: that of artificial intelligence. This represents yet another technological leap forward, one that risks having serious social and economic repercussions, given that the human revolution envisioned by Peccei and Ikeda is still being stifled by winds of war and oppression.
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Translated with DeepL.com (free version)