Progress - The Paradoxes economic growth unsustainable

We are evolving, right? If we can just weather this storm our species will progress and there will be peace and prosperity for everyone. All we need is for those damned regressive types to see the light, and then we’ll be on our way!

I don’t think so. Firstly, the notion that other people are the problem is as old a story as you’ll ever read, going back to Cain and his brother Abel. In that case, the removal of the obstacle (a regressive meat eater) was by murder (perpetrated by a vegetarian), but the intent was exactly what we are talking about: for Cain, Abel stood in the way of the future he dreamed. The slain brother is an archetype of “those people” who stand between us and a better world.

Obviously, the story isn’t meant to endorse Cain’s thesis or justify his actions. It is a cautionary tale, written by people who were very recently subjected to the most ruthless persecution that civilization had yet devised. The story they tell probes the origins of injustice and discontent in human society, the two brothers symbolizing the first generation of humanity to lose its peaceful and secure estate. How they lost it was by acquiring know-how that was inimical to human happiness. It was eating from the Tree of Knowledge that exiled Cain and Abel’s family from Eden, setting them on a course of alienation and pain. To their parents, such knowledge was progress. To the children it was a legacy of despair.

If it’s not my brother’s fault, whose is it?

But if this was the problem, namely a fundamental shift in human society, (acquiring knowledge that made people “like god,” as the Bible puts it), why then, did Cain blame Abel? The ancient Book of Genesis describes an angry and frustrated man whose own attempts at bettering his world had failed. Something was wrong and he couldn’t fix it with his version of religion, his ideology, so he lashed out at his sibling rival who held different beliefs. Abel was a scapegoat whose death masked a problem too hard to face, a problem we will review as this story unfolds.

Before getting to that, it is worth noting that Abel’s murder was an act of genocide. Think about it. Abel was fifty percent of their entire generation. There were only two types of people in the world of this story, a profound statement of “us” and “them.” That’s how it usually is in our minds. We want to be rid of “them,” the ones who are holding up human progress. The culprits are usually categorized by type, whole classes of humanity, the people of whom we say, “I just can’t understand why anybody would vote that way.” You know what I’m talking about; if I asked you, “wouldn’t the world be better without…?” I’d bet it wouldn’t take a split second for your gut to fill in the blank.

Of course, good progressives have moved past the point of thinking genocidally. Let’s say you aren’t looking at others as objects to be removed, but rather feel that except for those few leaders who are beyond redemption, most people (or at least their children) can be convinced, converted or educated onto the path of progress. Barack Obama eloquently gives a voice to those in this sublime state of progression:

“I would create a hundred or a thousand or a million young Barack Obamas or Michelle Obamas,” he said in the midst of launching his foundation. They would be “the next group of people who could take that baton in that relay race that is human progress.”

Aside from how alarmingly like an invasion of the body snatchers this future sounds, there is something else he says here that troubles me. I believe his conclusion is an existential falsehood: I think his idea of progress is wrong. The race that Mr. Obama hopes to hasten is a runaway drive over a cliff. We don’t need to go forward; we need to go back to Eden, and returning to Edenic conditions means just that, reversing, not going forward. It is time for us to become regressives.

Why regressive is a good thing.

Now allow me to explain before casting a judgment. To begin, let’s look at this from two connected angles that clarify what progress means. Our two points of reference are economic growth and technology, the pillars of civilization. They upheld the social structures that first appeared in Mesopotamian city states 6,000 years ago. And at the time, these were novel concepts. It was only then, after at least 100,000 years of linguistically capable human life, that anyone imagined these key elements of our modern world—the beginnings of progress!

This was a turning point in human development and the very thing that the Hebrew victims of Mesopotamia pointed to when they wrote the story of exile from Eden. It is a plot that poetically describes the course of human development. First, there was the garden, illustrating our human experience before civilization. Then there was the eating from the Tree of Knowledge and the procurement of god-like (in other words, inhuman-like) abilities, which quickly led in the Bible’s mythology to broken relationships, murder, fruitless labor and the rise of the despot Nimrod, who was said to found those first cities of Mesopotamia.

The story is symbolic of course, but it fairly represents verified history. All the elements of the modern world were swiftly invented in those first cities 6,000 years ago. It was just a nanosecond in the past in terms of geologic time, and only a blink of the eye in respect to the totality of human development. The turning point itself was swift. In the same way that Genesis describes an instantaneous transformation of consciousness and social relationships, history reveals an unprecedented and rapid advent of modernity.

It was the start of the race, and we exploded off the blocks. The first mark of progress entirely changed how humans relate to one another. We see this burst into history as Mesopotamia abruptly developed a universal ideology, establishing the first conceptual state. With it came a hierarchy, the first government, and of course, the means to enforce governance. Just as quickly, they conjured the know-how to make the system work, inventing math and a system of accounting (compound interest too!) and with that, the impetus for an ever expanding market. Progress!

Then, just around the first turn, the pace quickened, giving us the wheel, the miracle of writing, metal technologies, irrigation systems and a raft of weapons technologies. To keep up the momentum, the Mesopotamians devised schools for children. Their purpose was to encode the new culture into each successive generation. It was a developmental frenzy, a wave that is still rolling on today. Progress!

We understand, I hope, that before then, there was no such progress. Technological advances were minor and infrequent, separated by gaps of thousands of years. Neither were there any states, hierarchies, armies, schools or universal religions. But after firing the starting pistol for the first time in Mesopotamia, our ancestors came up with new tech and novel ways of thinking decade by decade.

And to what end, those technologies and theories? Why, the expansion of the economy of course! The newly conceived hierarchy had to keep their realm growing for the theory to work. Progress therefore meant conquest and exploitation. Weapons technology and economic growth are the conjoined twin children of civilization.

Mr. Obama’s race of human progress has thus continued until our day, one novel overarching social theory in many guises. That’s why a growing economy is so important to us. It also explains the monkey on our backs that is the weapons industry. Nobody wants weapons of mass destruction, except that everyone wants them! Weapons are and have always been at the heart of the system. Economic expansion was civilization’s primary concern, but we always achieved it by extending imperial borders. The new-born state acquired new markets, new materials and new, cheaper labor through expansion of the realm. This remained true everywhere civilization dawned, right up through our own recent colonial age, and right into the biggest push of all, globalization. Progress!

Hitting the wall.

So now what? As of the late 20th century, Mesopotamian civilization has finally assimilated the last corners of the globe. From China to Africa to the Americas, every system on the planet has adopted the Mesopotamian model. Look anywhere you like, everyone follows this model of governance or finds themselves subjected to its militarization and economics. The planet throbs with that passion, Babylon rules!

It should also, they tell us, bring about a global standard of sufficiency. If globalization has its way with us, we will give birth to a global culture of peace. That’s the promise. When Mr. Obama talks about the race of human progress, which we are so close to winning, this is what he means.

But how can we possibly win this race? This is the burning concern of the day. How can we keep the now global economy growing so that civilization’s promised utopia is achieved for all? How will progress finally achieve its end goal?

The answer is simply that we can’t, no matter how many Baracks and Michelles we produce. The concept is fundamentally flawed. There is no space for expansion. There are simply no new realms to conquer, and very few resources left to exploit. The only way to continue endless economic expansion is endless population growth, and that, I am afraid, is a marriage made in hell. Looked at rationally, continued growth means the death of the planet.

Biologist Paul R. Ehrlich commented on this in 2014. “How does one explain that economists, many of whom have knowledge of mathematics, consider that 3% per annum is a healthy or a decent economic growth rate? After all, a simple calculation shows that if the U.S. (or any other) economy grew at 3% for about 23 years, it would double in size. In less than 150 years the economy would be 100 times as big. Picture the drought situation in California or the air pollution in Beijing with a doubling of economic activity occurring in only 23 years. Then picture a doubling again and again every couple of decades. Is this the future we want for our children and grandchildren?”

In the near future we will have to admit to having hit a wall. In truth, we have already hit it. Just meditate for a little while on human population and you will see what I mean:

When civilization was first dreamed up six thousand years ago, there were 4 million people. That is to say, 4 million people on the planet.

When Jesus was born, there were 200 million.

A millennium later, during the Crusades, there were 300 million, fifty percent more in a thousand years.

By 1850, just 850 years later, there were 1.2 billion. That’s a three hundred percent jump.

A hundred years later and we find 2.5 billion. A doubling of population in a fraction of the time.

Fifty years after that and it was 6 billion. More than double in half the time again.

In 2016, not even two decades later we hit 7.4 billion. And if all progresses well(!), the UN predicts close to 10 billion by 2050 and 16 billion by 2100 when the world will have to produce 70 percent more food. Is that sustainable? Absolutely not.

Our religion is the problem.

It’s a Catch-22. To sustain the population we need ever-increasing growth of the economy and technology. To make the economy grow, the population must increase. If by some chance the population shrinks, the markets will shrivel and the whole model of sustainability collapses. But if the population grows, the environment will collapse.

Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Unfortunately, most of us assume that the march of civilization is just how the cosmos works. We see the paradigms given us by Mesopotamia a mere 6,000 years as a set of natural laws. Just consider how we talk about the Market. Commentators speak as if it is an omniscient and all powerful deity, and one that is capricious and unfathomable. This mystical commentary often sounds like some early text from Mesopotamian mythology. Some days we are told it likes something, on another day we are to understand it is nervous, but one thing remains constant: your life is in its hands. Many people consult the Market’s omens on a daily basis, in other words—religiously.

Indeed, for the Mesopotamians it was a religion, but there is no good reason that it should be ours. The system is not divine, not inevitable, and not a law of nature. In fact, it is not natural at all. It is time for us to remember that humans invented all this, and not too long ago. If we made it, we can break it. That was the key insight of the Axial Age prophets. Jeremiah, Isaiah, Plato and Buddha all warned that it is foolish to make gods out of what the imagination conjures.

Of course, shattering the old idols means adopting a culture that does not assume unending growth and endlessly advancing technologies. Some might say that is a dream and not reality. But that’s the point. Since everything humans do is dreamed up, it ought to be easy to exchange one dream for the other. What I am talking about is in fact a reality check: the status quo that seems so real and inevitable is just a Mesopotamian fantasy, it is made up. All those constructs of civilization and economics and technology are mutable.

Hard to change? Yes. It would be a revolution as big as civilization itself, but civilization proves that point too: it dawned quickly and without precedent, based entirely on a transformed way of seeing the universe. It can happen again. Our task is to recognize this and reconnect with the immutable and natural—that which is truly the law of nature. You can even call it progress if it makes you feel better, although in my mind it is an appropriate regression, or in the terms of many spiritual practices, it is repentance.

If that sounds like a paleo manifesto, don’t worry. I don’t mean an actual return to a pre-civilization Eden of hunter-gatherers, but rather a disavowal of civilization’s ethos. This is a return to Edenic consciousness. My point is that this can’t happen by continuing to pursue the growth and increasing complexity of the civilization epoch. We have to turn back from this destructive path. Anything less than that is just wishful thinking. The race, as Mr. Obama puts it, will not be made safer if only Obama clones are driving it. “If they are like me, then the race will be won,” is the same folly pursued by Cain. No, Mr. Obama, humanity is not progressing, civilization is, and at the expense of humans and of nature. Why is that so hard to see?