The Religion of Everlasting Growth

The Religion of Everlasting Growth

Limits to growth arguments typically meet with ferocious resistance. People are in love with a shining and glorious image of human 'progress' which includes constantly increasing levels of wealth. These people will sacrifice their rationality before they give up their image of the great and glorious human destiny represented by a constantly advancing economy. The more extreme members of this group will deny that any limit to growth exists outside of the eventual thermodynamic heat death of the universe. After all the total supplies of uranium and thorium produced in all of the supernovas in the universe is "effectively infinite", not to mention the even vaster supply of hydrogen which will be available as fuel when we have mastered controlled nuclear fusion. Such people seem not to have read Isaac Asimov's essay The Power of Progression in which he pointed out that a population growth rate of 2% per year continued for a little over a millennium would convert the entire mass of the known universe into human beings (assuming of course that the laws of special relativity could be suspended so that we could travel throughout the whole universe in this period of time).

The more sophisticated limits to growth deniers (of whom there are many) will admit that the human population of the earth needs to stabilize in the relatively near future (within this century or half century), but that once such stabilization has taken place, then a combination of new non-fossil energy sources and increased efficiency of manufacturing can increase our per capita wealth for vast periods of time. I had one exchange with a limits to growth denier who explicitly claimed that everlasting exponential increases in manufacturing efficiency are theoretically possible. He told me that if we ever stop getting richer it will be through sheer boredom not because of physical necessity.

A third group of believers in the growth religion are somewhat more realistic and will admit that growth cannot continue forever, but because abandoning 'progress' as it is conceived of in modern private finance capitalism would be a horrible defeat and degradation for the human race, they maintain that we are better off to go down fighting (i.e. constantly striving to grow richer) than to voluntarily commit suicide.

Of course, the equation economic simplification=death is physical nonsense. Clearly if we completely stop investing in our economic infrastructure and allow all of our productive power to decay away, then we will all perish. But such neglect of infrastructure is not the meaning of economic simplification. Instead economic simplification means investing in an infrastructure which requires less consumption of energy and other production resources. If one believes (as I do) that resource depletion will limit or even reduce our net productivity over the next several decades then economic simplification seems like a much more intelligent survival strategy than keeping the pedal to the metal on economic growth and hoping that the resources we need to continue our extravagant lifestyles will magically appear.

However, this straight forward physical justification for a strategy of economic simplification is irrelevant to the true believers in the religion of growth. Economic simplification represents a sort of spiritual death, so that no real motivation for the continuation of civilization would exist under these circumstances. 'Give me growth or give me death' is their rallying cry.

To me economic simplification does not imply an end to humanity's technological and scientific development. It implies a change to the ends to which that development is directed. Our goal should be to live well within the ecological budget of the earth and not to constantly increase our short term material wealth as rapidly as possible. If we cannot find 'meaning' within the context of such a goal, then the 'give me growth or give me death' point of view will prevail and death will come sooner or later in a spectacular fashion.

June 4, 2008