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.

While it is impossible to know all the trade-offs in advance, we should at least know that there are always trade-offs, and that we always run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we make big changes in society.

The trade-offs of removing traditional constraints

With the aim of maximising individual freedom, liberal philosophy has long sought to remove all constraints of custom, religion and popular prejudice that might have stood in the way of individual rights and freedoms. In the last 60 years in particular, we have seen the successful removal of barriers to free trade to create a truly globalised economy, as well as the removal of barriers to the free movement of people, leading to mass immigration in many countries and the rise of mass tourism worldwide. We've also seen the sexual revolution made possible by the invention of the pill in the 1960s and the subsequent removal of social norms that had previously stigmatised casual extramarital sex. More recently, we have seen the mass adoption of gender ideology based on the belief that we are free to choose our gender and that sex is in fact a social construction.

Many areas of life that were formally sacred have been commodified, such as the growing global market for surrogate mothers to satisfy the right and freedom to have a child even when a woman cannot or does not want to give birth herself.

In his seminal book The Great Transformation, published in 1944, the economist Karl Polanyi showed how, under capitalism, the logic of commodity and market exchange extended into spheres of life from which it had previously been excluded. What we now understand as 'the economy' in pre-capitalist societies was embedded in social institutions such as rituals, kinship networks and state or religious mechanisms of redistribution. Market activities were subordinated to politics and values.

If Polanyi could see our world today, he would find an economy that is more disembedded than ever. There are not many areas of life that have not been commodified by the market. In particular, our modern institutions are now heavily geared towards satisfying the growth-dependent economy.

Even as the massive downsides of these enormous changes are now being observed on a large scale, the liberal elites who still run most Western governments and institutions are proving extremely reluctant to acknowledge these failures, let alone do anything about them.

All over the world, mass tourism is destroying local cultures and turning cities into mere theme parks. Venice has lost almost three quarters of its population in the last 70 years. Many neighbourhoods in Barcelona, Lisbon, etc. are on a similar trajectory. Of course, as much of tourism depends on air travel, its energy consumption and environmental destruction are massive.

The rapid economic globalisation of the last 40 years has led to widespread deindustrialisation in old industrialised countries such as France, Germany, Britain and the US. While the elites in these countries have benefited both economically and culturally from these developments, the working classes in rich countries have been the losers of globalisation, mainly because manufacturing jobs have moved to countries with lower wages, or because they have had to accept lower wages due to high levels of immigration. As a result, many ordinary people have felt left behind, leading to a sense of neglect and disenfranchisement.

Mass immigration has also led to a huge breakdown of social trust in Western societies, an increase in crime and a deterioration of the public sphere. The idea that enforcing the law would be enough to hold our societies together has been proved fatally wrong. Multicultural ideology has promoted the diversity of immigrant cultures as an enrichment, while making integration largely optional or even discouraging it. Yet some cultural assimilation is necessary for societies to function. Without shared norms and values, we cannot function properly as a society. Events such as the recent demonstration by thousands of radical Islamists in the German city of Essen, calling for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Germany, are wake-up calls that are increasingly difficult to ignore.

The sexual revolution was supposed to free women from the constraints of tradition and make them happier. Although the pill and legalised abortion freed women from unwanted childbearing, this has not happened. As Perry describes in her book The case against the sexual revolution, the costs outweigh the benefits, because casual sex without commitment doesn't satisfy most women. It goes against their evolutionary instincts. The decline of traditional institutions such as marriage and family has mainly benefited a few men who live polygamous lives, while many other men and women live more lonely and often miserable lives. The decline in the birth rate to well below the replacement rate is a clear sign that this particular experiment doesn't seem to be working and may come to a natural end not too far from here.

The recent mainstreaming of transgender ideology has led many children (and their parents) across the Western world to believe that they are suffering from gender dysphoria, when in fact they are most often going through a ‘transient phase’ and will grow out of it as even the British NHS is now beginning to acknowledge. Too many doctors are prepared to give immediate treatment with puberty blockers, changing and damaging these children's bodies forever, with no way of reversing the changes if they eventually decide to detransition after realising they were confused.

These are, of course, just a few examples out of many to show that maximising a good, in this case individual freedom, can have massive downsides. In fact, it usually comes with downsides. As Jonathan Haidt says, "virtues become vices when carried to an extreme".

The value of traditional limits

In our traditional societies we accepted the existence of our natural human limits, whereas since the Industrial Revolution we have created a world view that assumes there are no limits that we cannot and should not overcome. We have developed technologies to overcome the limits imposed by human nature or previously set by traditional norms and institutions, to travel faster and further, to free ourselves from the perils of weather and disease, and so on.

The contraceptive pill, as the writer Mary Harrington argues, was the first transhumanist technology, designed to free women from unwanted childbearing. Hormone therapy, which aims to make the body conform to a person's gender identity, is a more recent technology that aims to transcend the limits of human nature.

The rarely questioned goal under the liberal worldview is to extend life ever further. During the Covid pandemic, we sacralised the goal of prolonging life at all costs, even if it meant resorting to inhumane measures that left elderly patients isolated in hospitals to suffer and die in solitude and without the support of their loved ones.

Anyone who understands that unbridled economic growth can be problematic for the environment, and that the disembedded market economy is not well compatible with human flourishing, should be able to revise his world view on the need for the existence of limits more generally.

We should all review our world view and stop seeing limits as something problematic and something to be removed. Instead, we should begin to see that there can always be too much of a good thing.

The Bible is very clear about the need to set limits and to exercise restraint. For example, that we should rest one day a week. "God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it he rested from all the work that he had done in creating the world" (Genesis 2:3).

The story of Adam and Eve contains another set of specific instructions about limits. God tells Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or he will die. It's a story that tells us that not everything that can be done should be done.

To protect the common good and the good life, setting limits is indispensable.

Protecting a place from overtourism is an act of love for one's own culture. We must set limits to tourism and immigration if we want to preserve our identity and way of life. Setting limits is an act of love for our own people, not an act against others. The Bible also teaches us to 'love your neighbour as yourself'. But in order to do this we must also love ourselves and not just our neighbour. If we give up our identity and our way of life, we cannot love anyone.

In the case of Barcelona and Catalonia (where I live), we have had a strong movement for many years to preserve the Catalan identity and language. The enemy of the Catalan independence movement has always been the Spanish state. But for all its historically justified grievances, including prominently the Catalan struggle against Franco's dictatorship, the threat to Catalan identity today comes more from mass tourism, mass immigration and the globalised economy than from the interference of the Spanish state.

If we abandon the doctrine that focuses on extending individual freedom as far as possible, we can have a conversation about what the good life actually means and how our societies can truly flourish.

As Mary Harrington argues in her book Feminism Against Progress, this also means a different feminism that truly has the interests of all women and also men at heart:

We'll need [...] to take more of a realist stance on where the limits to individual freedom really are. We are all, perhaps, liberated enough. It's not just women who need a freedom haircut; it's everyone. And it's my hope that we may be able to mitigate some of the negative side effects that may otherwise accrue from our effort to scrape the barrel of freedom long after its best fruits have been exhausted. We can do this by taking the initiative on where and how we set about constraining ourselves in ways that are overall in the common interests of both sexes.

Where do we go from here?

We cannot turn back the clock to the past, even if we wanted to. But we can examine what we have gained and what we have lost under the liberal world order, and we can decide which of the traditions and institutions that we are about to lose, or have already lost, we want to preserve or revive.

Rather than embracing new technologies to push existing boundaries further, we should be building technologies that contribute to human flourishing and help us to live well. Jon Askonas, a political scientist, argues:

Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well. In some places, the renewal, revival, and reoccupation of the human order of things requires a return to what was done within living memory. In other places, however, it will need to be far more radical in the literal sense: It must return to human nature rooted in man’s bodily dwelling upon the earth. Simone Weil called this process enracinement – actively putting down roots where none exist.

Liberalism as we know it is broken and will not survive. The ease with which Western governments and elite institutions now curtail free speech and civil liberties under the banner of defending liberalism shows how authoritarian and illiberal the elites are becoming. The default direction our societies are now taking is one of authoritarianism and digital surveillance.

To avoid continuing down such a dystopian path, we need to build alliances between all those who see the excessive costs of the obsession with individual freedom, and who don't want to give up the idea of a self-determined future.

A politics of limits could be a starting point for a common language in defence of the common good and the good life.