Degrowth, Ungrowth, Anti-Growth

As Bob Herbert says in a very moving op-ed in the New York Times (nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html?hp), “America has sold its soul for oil”. He might as well have said the entire world – with projected global oil consumption in 2020 three times the 1970 level, pretty much all of us are riding this juggernaut, and all too few seem to want to (or to know how to) get off.

The conventional “wisdom” (never was the word more inappropriate) regarding the current Eurozone crisis is that the continent needs economic growth of 3%-4%, plus increased “competitiveness” – as if economic competition hadn’t already created millions of human casualties, in the form of the growing numbers of long-term unemployed and unemployable. The same “wise” commentators point with admiration to China and India’s 10%+ growth rates, passing over if they mention them at all the extraordinary stresses developing in those societies – such as the recent knife attacks on small children in China.

Apart from the fact that endless growth on a finite planet must end up destroying its very fabric (that’s another topic), this obsession causes immense damage to our souls. Contentment with what we have becomes impossible; basic self-acceptance is undermined by a perpetual sense of insufficiency. Further and further from the path prescribed by all the world’s spiritual traditions, we invent ever more gadgets to become attached to – gadgets which need charging or they literally die on us; gadgets which after a few years become obsolete pieces of metal and plastic junk

In the overall timescale of human history “growthism” is a very recent phenomenon, and it pretty much coincides with the emergence of modern all-powerful mega-corporations and financial markets. It’s their need for ever-growing profit that drive the economic policy of nations and ultimately the behavior of individuals, via advertising and other media – even though most of the material rewards for this plunder of the earth’s resources and the human psyche accrue to a tiny number of people, who have not just more than they need, but inconceivably more than anyone could possibly ever imagine needing even if they were to live for 10,000 years. The pyramid of wealth distribution is perfectly matched by a pyramid of greed, ruthlessness and insecurity.

An interesting counter-initiative is starting to develop, based not on the chimera of environmentally sustainable economic growth – which doesn’t address the psychic/spiritual crisis at all – but on abandoning the concept of growth altogether. Under the clumsy English name of “degrowth” (the original French term, décroissance, is much easier on the ear) a conference was recently organized in Barcelona (http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/).

Not yet a movement as such, “degrowth” is still casting about for a sense of its own identity, and, judging from the papers delivered at the Barcelona coference (http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/fileadmin/content/press/Degrowth-_Abstracts_Book_1.0.pdf) and an angry and rant-filled magazine (http://www.ladecroissance.net/) I picked up on a recent visit to Paris, there’s a danger of its being taken over by the anti-capitalist left. It’s a danger because, though modern capitalism is clearly at the root of the problem, mere opposition to it won’t produce the solution – since no problem is ever resolved at the level on which it was created. “Degrowth” needs to start at the psychic and spiritual level where the deepest damage lies – damage which prevents us from even envisioning a different world – and to formulate and inculcate a vision of a spiritually rooted sense of sufficiency together with a deep reverence for the created world. As Joni Mitchell sang over 40 years ago “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”’. There are no chargers in the garden, and everything in it that grows is balanced by something else that decays and passes away.

In a future blog I’ll try to sketch out something of what that world might look like.