3:45 PM - 4:45 PM
Keynote
Media, Ethics and Global Humanitarian Responsibility
Robert Muller, former UN Under Secretary General
Dr. Ervin Laszlo, renowned Evolutionary Systems Scientist and Futurist and President of the Club of Budapest
Moderated by: Martin Perlmutter, President, Multisensory Interactive Learning Institute, a non-profit Math Education Venture
Robert Muller was born in Belgium in 1923 and raised in the Alsace-Lorraine region in France, he experienced constant political and cultural turmoil during his
youth. His grandparents had five successive nationalities (French, German, French, German, French) without leaving their village as a result of three wars (1870-1871, 1914-1918, 1939-1945). Often as a child, Robert Muller would look out of his window at the border he could not cross and long for the day when he, like the birds, the clouds, the sun and the stars, would no longer have to observe the imaginary line. Today, thanks to the dream and effort of his compatriot Robert Schuman who similarly hated these borders, Robert Muller's passport reads, "European Union" with the sub-title France, and he is free to cross all western European borders. Robert Muller knew the horrors of World War II, of being a refugee, of Nazi occupation and imprisonment. During the war he was a member of the French Resistance. After the war he returned home and earned a Doctorate of Law from the University of Strasbourg. In 1948 he entered and won an essay contest on how to govern the world, the prize of which was an internship at the newly created United Nations. Dr. Muller devoted the next 40 years of his life behind the scenes at the United Nations focusing his energies on world peace. He rose through the ranks at the UN to the official position of Assistant-Secretary-General. He has been called the "Philosopher" and "Prophet of Hope" of the United Nations. Robert Muller is a deeply spiritual person. From his vantage point of a top level global states-person he has seen a strong connection between spirituality and the political/cultural scene. Robert Muller created a "World Core Curriculum" and is known throughout the world as the "father of global education." There are 29 Robert Muller schools around the world with more being established each year. The "World Core Curriculum" earned him the UNESCO Peace Education Prize in 1989. Based on this curriculum and his devotion to good causes, Dr. Muller has recently drawn up a "Framework for World Media Coverage" as a public service, as well as a "Framework for Planetary and Cosmic Consciousness" and a "Framework for the Arts and Culture."Dr. Ervin Laszlo is the author or editor of 69 books translated into as many
as 17 languages, and has over four hundred articles and research papers and six volumes of piano recordings to his credit. He serves as Editor of the monthly World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution and of its associated General Evolution Studies book series. Laszlo is generally recognized as the founder of systems philosophy and general evolution theory, serving as Founder-Director of the General Evolution Research Group and as Past President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. He is the recipient of the highest degree in philosophy and human sciences of the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, as well as of the coveted Artist Diploma of the Franz Liszt Academy of Budapest. His numerous prizes and awards include four Honorary Doctorates.Ervin Laszlo’s unusual career spans music, philosophy, science, futures studies, and world affairs. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1932, his talent for music was discovered at the age of five. At seven he was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy under the wing of famed composer-conductor Ernst von Dohnanyi. His debut with the Budapest Philharmonic at the age of nine established him as one of the great child prodigies of the time. Following a hiatus of barely a year due to the siege of Budapest at the end of World War II, Laszlo embarked on an international music career highlighted by the Grand Prize of the International Music Competition of Geneva in 1947, and a New York recital debut a few months later. Just fifteen, he was hailed by New York’s critics as an artist who has few peers among pianists of any age. With major write-ups in LIFE, Time, Newsweek, and other national and international media, Laszlo settled in New York and travelled from there to tour the five continents.
In his late teens Laszlo’s childhood interest, fostered by his philosopher uncle in Budapest, in questions about meaning in nature and life and destiny in society resurfaced. It prompted him to undertake systematic readings on these fields and to follow courses and seminars in New York’s Columbia University and New School for Social Research. His copious notes accompanied him on his concert tours and in 1961 were the subject of a casual dinner conversation following a recital in The Hague. His dinner partner, who showed keen interest in his ideas, took the notes and reappeared the following morning with an offer to publish them—he turned out to be the philosophy editor of the famed Dutch publishing house Martinus Nijhoff. The publication of these notes two years later marked a turning point in Laszlo’s career. He was asked to join the University of Fribourg’s Institute of East European Studies, and two books and numerous research papers later received an invitation to spend a year at the Philosophy Department at Yale University.
Laszlo’s professional involvement in science and philosophy followed a consistent if highly personal path. His main interest centered on the perennial "great questions" of science and philosophy, in particular the origins of the cosmos, the nature and direction of the evolution of life and of consciousness, and the meaning of the changes and transformations we are witnessing today in culture and civilization. His initial 1963 book Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction was inspired by the metaphysics of Whitehead and was followed by Beyond Scepticism and Realism, a methodological treatise, and Individualism, Collectivism and Political Power, an analysis of the ideological divide in the postwar world. La Metaphysique de Whitehead, an application of Whitehead’s "organic philosophy" to human society, served as Laszlo’s thesis at the Sorbonne for the Doctorat d’Etat es-Lettres et Sciences Humaines, completing his formal credentials in the academic world.
While at Yale, Laszlo read von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, met von Bertalanffy, and began to elaborate Introduction to Systems Phiosophy, the seminal work with which his name became thereafter associated. Appointments at various US Universities, including the State University of New York, led to a visiting semester at Princeton’s Center of International Studies. His seminar at the Woodrow Wilson School on the systems approach to world order engaged the attention of Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei, who enlisted Laszlo to complement the economic and physical "outer limits" emphasis of the Club’s first Report, The Limits to Growth, with a human and cultural "inner limits" orientation. Laszlo’s research resulted in 1977 in the publication of the voluminous Goals for Mankind, the third global report to The Club of Rome, as well as of the personal treatise, The Inner Limits of Mankind. To research these works the Executive Director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) invited Laszlo as Special Fellow; an appointment that was followed by his being placed in charge of the Institute’s work on the New International Economic Order. As Programme Director Laszlo spent seven years at UN headquarters in New York, producing fifteen volumes on the New International Economic Order and another six volumes on Regional and Interregional Cooperation.
Having completed these assignments in the mid-80s, Laszlo decided to take a sabbatical period before returning to his university. He moved to his converted medieval farmhouse in Tuscany in search of the peace and freedom to analyze his experience in the academic world and at the United Nations. He returned to his quest of researching anwers to the great questions of evolution in our time. His Evolution: The Grand Synthesis was published in 1987 and was soon translated into Italian, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Portuguese. It was followed by the application of his evolutionary insights to contemporary society: The Age of Bifurcation. Inspiring considerable debate and discussion, it appeared in Russian and Turkish in addition to all of the previous languages.
Laszlo’s reading and research at his Tuscan farmhouse was soon punctuated by frequent visits to the US, Japan, China, and many parts of Europe, as the United Nations University, the newly formed European Culture Impact Research Consortium, and then Federico Mayor, the Director-General of Unesco, sought his advice and collaboration. These activities culminated in 1993, when Laszlo, one of the two plenary speakers at the Third World Congress of the World Federation of Hungarians (the other being nuclear scientist Edward Teller), proposed that Hungary, neither a major economic nor a military power but a significant force in the field of science, art, and culture, should be the host to an international "Artist’s and Writer’s Club" to complement the Club of Rome’s insistence on economic and political measures with emphasis on the urgency of new thinking, better values, and a deeper sense of personal and professional responsibility. The Hungarian government responded with the offer to set up the secretariat of the worldwide organization that was to become known as The Club of Budapest.
Since the middle of the 1990s Laszlo has been dividing his time and energies between fundamental research in the new sciences—resulting in a series of books (The Creative Cosmos, 1993, The Interconnected Universe, 1995, and The Whispering Pond, 1996)—and building up the worldwide organization and activities of the Club. He produced the first Report to the Club in 1997: Third Millennium: The Challenge and the Vision. The definitive enlarged and updated version of this Report is MACROSHIFT: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable Civilization, published in September, 2001.