On September 26th, 2023, Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW, stated on a television news program that the average auto worker would have to work for 400 years to earn what the average CEO was paid in one year. He added that no one is worth 36 million dollars a year, that no one has the right to that kind of annual reimbursement. Besides wondering how anyone spends that kind of money, unless it is for the benefit of the greater community, I would add that the CEO cannot do his or her job without the workers, whereas the reverse is not the case.
That same day, on the NPR program 1 A, Jen White interviewed the Brothers Osborne, (not to be confused with the Osborne Brothers of the 1960’s.) John and TJ Osborne, who have been performing for some 20 years and have a list of awards including a Grammy, said in part that “We live in a capitalist system – you’ve got to drive, got to go, got to get more and more and more …. and yet, after getting so many things we thought we wanted and needed, it turned out we had all the things we needed all along.” The more you get, said John, “the less happy you are because you lose perspective. I have learned more from my six month old twin daughters than I learned in there last twenty years of my life – how simple life is, how perfect it already is, how to stay present.”
The freelance writer and investigative journalist, Christopher Ketcham, argues that a basic tenet of western civilization is the idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet. “Illogical as it may be, we hear this deluded fantasy in the decrees of elected officials, in the laments of economists about flagging GDP, in the whirligig of advertising, at the World Bank and on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of globe-spanning corporations and in the halls of the smallest small-town chambers of commerce. Growth is sacrosanct. Growth will bring jobs and income, which allow us entry into the state of grace known as affluence, which permits us to consume more, providing more jobs for more people producing more goods and services so that the all-mighty economy can continue to grow.”
First expressed as ‘The American Dream,’ it has now gone global not least as a moral imperative in the developing world where, they are told, it will free the poor from deprivation and disease, enrich and educate the women, reduce birth rates, and provide the means to pay for environmental remediation—to clean up what so-called progress has despoiled. This was most evident to me in Nairobi ten years ago with huge roadside billboards of modern American washing machines, even though the majority of the city’s population live in what can only be described as slums. Or in Zimbabwe twenty five years ago when we saw a television set in a one roomed house in a small rural village that did not have, and still does not have, electricity.
Sadly, the American Dream, as expressed in terms of living a better life than did one’s parents, is measured solely in financial and material terms.
Not as well known as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, is the work of Aurelio Peccei. He had fought for the resistance in Italy, where he had been captured and tortured by the Fascists, and then in industry where, as an executive at Fiat, he began to question the legacy that industrial civilization was leaving its children. His book, The Chasm Ahead, published in 1968, expressed concern about the “suicidal ignorance of the human condition” on a planet of dwindling resources, rampant population growth and material consumption, mounting pollution and waste. In 1970 Peccei connected with a professor of system dynamics at MIT, Dennis Meadows, who had helped design the World3 computer program, and who led a team of researchers questioning the orthodoxy of growthism. Using the new gigantic mainframe computer, they emerged two years later with The Limits to Growth. Its message was commonsense : if humans propagate, spread, build, consume, and pollute beyond the limits of our tiny spinning orb, the ultimate result will be a collapse of civilization, which would mean the loss of human life, culture, and capital on a scale unimaginable. The World3 business-as-usual model suggested that the collapse would likely begin around the middle of the 21st century.
This was not what Americans indoctrinated in growthism had been accustomed to hearing—and never had they heard it from PhD.’s marshaling data at one of the world’s citadels of learning. Not surprisingly, The Limits to Growth was the subject of vicious attacks by the defenders of growthism because it dared to question the viability of the American Dream. It was an affront to the credo of mainstream economics – that the combination of profit and innovation will always save us – and cited as evidence how the Green Revolution and genetically modified organisms had innovated a route around predicted world hunger, and deep drilling had provided access to previously untappable aquifers.
Over the last decade, Limits has attracted renewed interest from ecologists and economists, using new methodologies to gauge its accuracy. The conclusions ranged form “the alignment of data trends with the LTG dynamics indicates that the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway, “ to “ The projections are quite on target. We are not aware of any model made by economists that is as accurate over such a long time span.”
And if you want a version of what lies ahead as we blunder along with business-as-usual, driven by the false promises of free markets and individual profits, I would recommend a novella of futuristic science fiction, The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of science at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology, respectively. What stuns the future chronicler is that the smartest scientists in the world, employing the most advanced analytical and technical methods available, had charted the trajectory toward climate doom long before it was a fait accompli. ”Virtually all agree that the people of Western civilization knew what was happening to them but were unable to stop it,” says the narrator. “Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew.”
The report from COP28 that met in Dubai last month (sub-titled by some as Cop Out or Cash In) suggests that we are not much closer to committing to sustainable global solutions.
What brought the above to mind was one of the comments that followed Ketcham’s article. It read, in part, “We need to wind back the social decay of our modern societies, where individuals have become separated, isolated, alienated and purposeless. We need to reconnect with each other to form intentional self-sufficient communities that permit a synergy of our efforts, supporting each other and increasing our chances of survival.”
My first response : he’s describing a colony of honey bees! This is not to suggest that we should live like bees; rather that there are principles at work in a bee hive that we can emulate. ie. Biomimicry writ large. As beekeepers, we know the power of the collective society that is ‘the colony’ – a super-organism of individuals united in common purpose. We know our bees communicate with each other in several ways (and undoubtedly other ways that we don’t yet realize.) We understand the importance of the queen pheromone in giving a colony it’s identity. We know the bees produce enough raw food not only to survive but also to grow, to flourish and to share. Honey bees work together, share information and identify with a unifying purpose.
The question becomes whether our global society can organize itself to live within its means while providing a peaceful, equitable existence for its people. There is enough to go around, so long as we all agree not to want too much, a terrifying notion for those who are entrenched in the free-market capitalist mindset, who have been assured that we will never need to share our piece of the pie provided we just keep on growing the pie.
The industrial revolution escalated the economic differences between classes of society, and some converted their new wealth into power which was then used to protect their privileges and affluence under the justification of the myth of perpetual growth. ‘A rising tide lifts all ships,’ it was argued, and recent times have shown this clearly is not the case. If wealth is to be divided more evenly among a growing global population, the per capita material affluence of the global north will have to drop. Can a civilization indoctrinated in selfishness do this? I fear not. As Ketcham writes, “It would be a process of social maturation on a scale never before seen. Because in order to retain our humanity in the face of limits, we would have to confront inequality head on.”
Literally, we would rather die than share our toys.
Our Green Cathedral 