Toward a politics of limits
Virtues become vices when carried to an extreme
I have never liked the term ‘degrowth’. It invokes an unappealing negative vision of a world of constraints and of loss. It is also a clumsy word, narrowly focussed on economic output.
However, I sympathise with many of the analyses and premises on which the idea of degrowth is based. GDP is a very poor measure of human welfare. Economic growth is not always desirable, as much of it impoverishes rather than improves our lives. Most importantly, for all the talk of sustainable economic growth, our growth-dependent global economy, fuelled by our consumer culture, is destroying the natural world at an unprecedented rate, ultimately threatening the conditions for human life on this planet.
Degrowth advocates clearly understand the downsides of economic liberalism, how it successively commodified most spheres of life and thereby destroyed many of the institutions that had previously ensured that economic activity would serve human wellbeing instead of becoming a goal in itself.
However, the activists who have been advocating for a different economic system that would not be based on economic growth and could operate within ecological limits have too narrowly focused on the economic system instead of critically examining our culture more holistically. Degrowth is based entirely on leftist ideology. Everything that contradicts today's leftist zeitgeist or raises uncomfortable questions for it is blanked out. Obviously, dogmatism and ideological narrowness is a much broader problem of today’s academia and intellectual thinking in general. By looking at our social problems through tight ideological lenses we are creating flawed ideas and bad solutions.
Whereas the degrowth movement has so far failed to create interest beyond the progressive elite sphere, a much more holistic politics of limits could potentially create mass appeal and speak to the core intuitions that both many progressives and the more conservatively minded working-class share.
While the mainstream media bombard us daily with the narrative that we are in the fight of our lives against the enemies of liberal democracy, while suppressing even the slightest self-critical nuance, the reality is that many people now sense that there is something wrong with the stories we are being told, and that our own system actually seems to be failing from within, rather than just being attacked and destroyed from without.
After its extraordinary success in becoming the world's dominant ideology, many people in the West now believe that we have reached a situation where the costs of liberalism outweigh its benefits. In pursuing a society that prioritises individual rights, freedoms and autonomy, where individuals are free to pursue their interests without undue interference from cultural, religious or societal constraints, we have ultimately created a fragmented society with weakened shared norms and values.
The individualistic mindset promoted by liberalism has led to a decline in social cohesion and the erosion of community ties. This has led to the decline of traditional institutions such as the family and marriage, resulting in increased social atomisation and the erosion of social trust.
Those progressives who decry the ecological externalities of unfettered capitalism and the commodification of all aspects of life are as unhappy about the downside of liberalism as many more traditional-minded ordinary people who decry the breakdown of the family and the erosion of social trust in a society where traditional norms and institutions have long been seen as an obstacle to progress.
Despite their common critical stance towards liberalism, the anti-capitalist left doesn't have much sympathy for the many ordinary people with a more traditional worldview.
But if one understands the downsides of what is generally regarded as progress in the economic sphere, one should be able to come to terms with the fact that what is generally regarded as progress in the social sphere also has costs, and that it may well be that these costs at times outweigh the benefits. If everyone were able to develop a much broader and deeper understanding of the costs of liberalism, particularly of what I would call the excesses of liberalism over the last 60 years, there is a lot of potential for common ground.
As the writer and feminist Louise Perry recently said, "traditions are experiments that worked".
Throughout human history, people have learned to do the right thing without understanding why it was the right thing to do. This doesn't mean that traditions have optimised human welfare, but the fact that traditions have stood the test of time means that “they were the there for a reason” as Perry says, while other social experiments failed.
Since the Enlightenment, our societies have experienced very rapid technological, economic and social change. Ultimately, the liberal-progressive project has eliminated most of the traditions of Western society and replaced them with a system in which everyone is supposed to pursue their own individual interests, with the modern state there to prevent them from taking advantage of each other.
The thinking behind this project was that we could rationally design and construct a utopian society. What we now see, however, is that we overestimated our ability to understand our complex societies. We didn't anticipate many of the problems that have arisen as a result of the rapid changes that have been made in the name of progress. We didn't, and in many cases still don't, fully understand what each traditional institution and social norm was actually good for. And we didn't understand that change inevitably involves trade-offs.