Global Good Governance: Remembering Thor Heyerdahl & Norman Cousins

Yesterday’s NYT column “On this day” (April 28)took me down the memory lane. In the mid-1970s I was introduced to the legendary Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl by Norman Cousins, famous American editor and a versatile genius, at New Delhi. As a young Indian journalist, I was fascinated by their crusading spirit to ensure world peace, justice and human freedom.

In these present turbulent times, the two visionaries life and work, and their musings, come to mind. And now nearly three decades later seem almost prophetic.

Thor Heyerdahl (born October 6, 1914 in Larvik, Norway – died April 18, 2002 in Colla Micheri, Italy) was a world-famous marine biologist with a great interest in anthropology, who became famous for his Kon-Tiki Expedition. He said the world’s oceans should be treated as one vast highway.

That was how, he claimed, that ancient civilisations saw them. Modern people, he said, should be more ready to think in ancient terms. He warned that do not treat the seas/oceans as sewers.

Thor Heyerdahl’s controversial beliefs on human migration may have cut across the conventional wisdom of his time, but his pioneering spirit and continuing quest for understanding endeared him to millions.

In his 1997 memoir, In the Footsteps of Adam, he frequently makes the point that academic specialists often fail to see the forest for the trees.

“The more I do and the more I see, the more I realize the shocking extent of ignorance that exists among the scholarly circles that call themselves authorities and pretend to have a monopoly of all knowledge,” he wrote.

While Thor Heyerdahl’s theories on ancient seafarers spreading civilization were initially ridiculed by scientists, a younger generation is studying his ideas from five decades ago as the basis for new ideas about early cultural exchanges.

Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University, who studied how the American continent became populated, calls Heyerdahl “a visionary ahead of his time.”

Now about Norman Cousins (June 24, 1915 – November 30, 1990). I befriended him in New Delhi when he and Thor Heyerdahl had come to attend an interesting two or three-day seminar on “One World: One Government” at Vigyan Bhavan, India’s swanking hub for seminars/meetings/gatherings.

The two gentle and soft spoken men became a centre of attraction at this huge gathering.

In Who Speaks for Man, published in 1953 following extensive travels in Europe and Asia, Cousins expanded his arguments for world federalism and for a world no longer based on the supremacy of nationalism and other superficial differences: “The new education must be less concerned with sophistication than compassion. It must recognize the hazards of tribalism…

“Leadership on this higher level does not require mountains of gold or thundering propaganda. It is concerned with human destiny. Human destiny is the issue. People will respond.” He concluded the book with this hopeful affirmation: “War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.”

Cousins’s concern for peace and human well-being was more than an abstract idea. His concern, for example, for the victims of Hiroshima, following a postwar visit to that devastated city, became quite personal. He arranged, with funding from Saturday Review readers, for medical treatment in the United States for twenty-four young Japanese women who came to be known as the “Hiroshima Maidens.”

Saturday Review readers also supported the medical care of 400 Japanese children orphaned by the atomic bomb. In the 1950s Cousins and his wife legally adopted one of the “Maidens.” A few years later, again with the support of Saturday Review readers, Cousins helped create a program for the “Ravensbrueck Lapins,” thirty-five Polish women who had been victims of Nazi medical experiments during the war.

Cousins’s own words, from his 1980 book Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, perhaps best capture how he strived to live his life: “I can imagine no greater satisfaction for a person, in looking back on his life and work, than to have been able to give some people, however few, a feeling of genuine pride in belonging to the human species and, beyond that, a zestful yen to justify that pride.”

At Saturday Review, Norman Cousins not only spoke his own mind as editor, he also encouraged other writers and critics in a collective effort, “not just to appraise literature, but to try to serve it, nurture it, safeguard it.” Cousins believed, “There is a need for writers who can restore to writing its powerful tradition of leadership in crisis.”

In an interview with John M. Whiteley for Quest for Peace Video Series, Norman Cousins said: “In the United States we like to think, or at least we’ve been told by the American Founding Fathers, and I believe they’re right, that in a good society the ultimate power belongs to the people. We now have to recognize that governments by their very nature will not move in this direction. The government becomes concerned with its own survival…”

Let me end this nostalgic piece on a lighter note with a quote from Cousins: “Laughter may or may not activate the endorphins or enhance respiration, as some medical researchers contend. What seems clear, however, is that laughter is an antidote to apprehension and panic.”

We do need to laugh…and let us not forget to invite Bush and Saddam to join us…Who knows we may, after all the mess that we have created for ourselves, discover a way to peace…Laughter, it is said, is the best medicine.