Why bother?

In many ways, what this page is all about is a combination of a positive perspective of advancing the plight of common people with a negative acknowledgment of the limits to growth. This combination is a contradiction in terms to many people, and so, most of the time, political debates keep to one topic or the other. That's why, on the one side, 'Malthusianism' is a derogatory term for misanthropes who really want a 'cleansing' of our overpopulated planet. (Texas radio host and New World Order conspiracy theorist Alex Jones actually puts Henry Kissinger and the Club of Rome in one and the same category.) On the other side it explains why 'peakniks' often find Chavez' use of oil revenues to create a welfare state naive in the extreme.

Issues like peak oil, the current world wide economic collapse and climate change tell us about how life has become harder and will become much harder still in the future. Looking through all the literature and information it seems like the era following the second world war was a friendly time of rising prosperity and the consolidation of the middle class, accomplished by pushing problems into the future, with the future beginning just about now. From this perspective, many people discard the aspiration for a good life for all people on this planet as a tragic wild goose chase, reminiscent of Tantalus' eternal torment in Hades.

It is very understandable that the limits to growth have turned precisely those committed people with a social conscience into utter fatalists. How can humanity possibly improve its fate when at a peak of prosperity inequality has spiraled out of control, leaving half of the world population in dire poverty and lacking the most basic of necessities? In a desperate attempt for some kind of hope and meaning, these environmental (and/or Marxist) determinists retreat into a more soothing geological timescale. They hope that even if we are not able to stop the ongoing collapses of the economy and ecology and the societies that depend on them, wiser future generations will scavenge a sustainable economy out of the corpse of industry and the natural resources it left unscathed.

I have been, and in darker moods still am one of those fatalists who retreat in their impotent determinism. The scarce forces that point in the good direction are so often so lacking in coherence and determination. But even if our darkest fears will play out as predicted, it would be good to know that someone tried to do something. You probably heard that one before, so let me put the argument another way; I also know that there are more than one or two possible futures, even if there are increasing natural boundaries to what is possible. As anyone who traced back the contingencies of his birth knows, the present world is the result of an infinite number of causes, both natural and human. Like ripples in a pond, actions that seem insignificant might change the world incrementally in unexpected ways, and you never know what is possible unless you take the initiative to find out.

What I have become increasingly convinced of is that as scarcity, climate chaos and economic collapse become ever more frightfully real, we should least of all abandon our social ideals. To many of us in the West solidarity has a quite abstract meaning; it means softening the sharp edges of the market, or giving a coins to charity. We have quite forgotten to practice the moral convictions that now seem like intellectual allegiances. As life gets tougher, we might actually have to make some more concrete life choices; we might have to share our food even if that means that we have no desert ourselves. We might have to start really opposing the international trade regime that has so systematically kept the third world underdeveloped to stimulate overconsumption in the West, in stead of just bandaging the results of this scandal with our charity money. To take seriously the imperatives of ethics, to do something for the other will only gain in its already critical importance, in small scale daily life or in grand scale international politics.

Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurter theorist and co-writer of the profound 'Dialektik der Aufklärung' is famous for saying that ethics should not be about individuals solving dilemmas in concrete life situations, but about avoiding that individuals find themselves in those situations. In other words, it should be a philosophy of social systems, not of the actions of the morally autonomous individual. I believe we need both. If we just do systems ethics, the now disappears as a moment of action and ethics becomes an interesting but ultimately pointless battle of ideology, while actual politics is left to the usual players. On the other hand, if we just do dilemma ethics, we get things like the hypocritical and shallow practical ethics that Peter Singer has been trying to escape from.

In stead, we need an ethics that is visionary enough to imagine all kinds of ways to advance the plight of common people that are now still unthinkable or politically impossible. We need that kind of broad understanding and orientation now, and in the dire years to come, to shape better societies than the ones existing now. But a better society has always been a long way away. For the shorter term and more limited scope we also need to think seriously about the moral choices that we face while we are still living in the self-destructive and often cruel systems that are in place at the moment. And, to use a rhetorical trick again, even if everything goes wrong, I would still prefer to live in a broken society in which people share their scarcities than in one where people fight each other over them. The point is that only by taking seriously both of these dimensions of ethics, both Singer and Adorno, can we profoundly make sense of what we should do to curb and to mitigate the tide of the collapse of economies, ecosystems, and societies that we are very concretely facing.

So to retreat into a deterministic analysis of capitalism, population growth, and environmental destruction I think is a mistake. Not because the analyses are wrong, but because it denies the present of its importance, being the only sliver of history over which we have any kind of influence. Capitalism may be inherently expansionist and self-reinforcing, poverty and population growth may be locked in the most cruel of positive feedback loops, and we may be too late to stop both serious climate change and the peak oil worst case scenario, but never will I give up on the only thing that can prove the predictions wrong; action by conscientious and strategically savvy people in the here and now. And I hope that anyone kind enough to read this article to the end won't, either.