How Much Is Enough__ Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky

Author:Robert Skidelsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781590515075
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Published: 2014-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

Limits to Growth: Natural or Moral?

Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

– Oscar Wilde

As well as failing to improve the human lot, economic growth has been accused of violating the innocence of nature. This second charge is almost as old as the first. Wordsworth in 1814 lamented the ‘outrage done to nature’ by machine production; others following him have bemoaned the destruction of forests and wildernesses, the extinction of flora and fauna, and the fouling of rivers, lakes and seas. But in the last two decades, one spectre above all has gripped the public imagination: that of a catastrophic, irreversible rise in the earth’s temperature. To avert this disaster, we are urged to abandon economic growth, perhaps even civilization as we have known it.

The environmentalist case against growth likes to present itself as a rational response to established facts. Yet its secret spirit remains that of romanticism. It is not self-evident, to dispassionate eyes, that global warming requires us to abandon growth. It might rather require us to persevere with growth, so as to finance the technologies needed to mitigate its consequences. Facts alone cannot decide this argument. The clash is rather one of world-views: Promethean optimism on the one hand, piety before nature on the other. But the utilitarian cast of our public discourse requires us to talk instead of offsets and emissions.

The covertly religious character of the Green movement is often viewed, by friends and foes alike, as an embarrassment, a scandal, even. In our public culture, science is the supreme arbiter of truth and falsehood; the rest is chit-chat. This is not our view. We respect and share the religious feeling at the heart of environmentalism. But we believe that this feeling is best expressed openly rather than hidden under the fig leaf of science. Concealment is not only dishonest, it creates hostages to fortune. For if growth turns out to be sustainable after all, as it well might, then those whose opposition to it was based solely on its unsustainability will have nothing left to say. They will be in the position of those early Christians whose faith was founded on the conviction of Christ’s imminent return.

There is something else that environmentalists might remember. Prophecies of plague and tempest are a time-honoured yet unlovely way of encouraging a spirit of renunciation. It is kinder (and probably more effective) to show people that a less cluttered life is a good life, one desirable in and of itself. The art historian Kenneth Clark spoke of the German Rococo, with its ravishing domes and ornaments, as persuading ‘not by fear but by joy’. Extremists have always relied on the exploitation of fear to achieve their ends. Our own aspiration is to persuade by joy, to present a vision of the good life as one to be pursued not from guilt or fear of retribution but in happiness and hope.

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