The world is on a path towards ecological overshoot and social collapse. To correct course will require ‘a fundamental revision of the fabric of present-day society’. This effort must begin ‘without delay’, and ‘significant redirection must be achieved during this decade’.
These remarks are as true now as they were when they were written… all of fifty-three years ago. They appear in the Limits to Growth report. To be precise, they appear in an annex written by the report’s sponsors, the group of socially-concerned intellectuals who made up the self-styled Club of Rome.
One of the central texts of the environmentalist movement, the Limits to Growth used early computer modelling to emphasise a common sense message: you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. Those behind the report hoped that once this message was made explicit, the truth would dawn on global policy elites. Interventions would be made to place the global economy on a sustainable footing.
Five decades on, Donald Trump is leading a global movement of far-right activism hell-bent on wrecking the international action on environmental protection that was in general far too weak anyway. The truth is, even where political progress has been made (protecting the ozone layer; growth in renewable energy), global trends in resource extraction and pollution have continued to grow, matching the collapse scenarios projected in the Limits to Growth. Scientists are increasingly warning that we are at risk of passing dangerous tipping points in planetary systems—dieback of the Amazon rainforest; meltdown of major ice sheets; shutdown of the circulating currents of the Atlantic.
The fact that opposition to environmentalism is now becoming even more irrational—just as the impacts of climate change are beginning to really bite—appears all the more dispiriting. Trump’s second administration has sought to cancel an offshore wind farm that was all-but-ready to be connected to the grid, to go out of its way to corral funds to resuscitate the coal industry, and to switch off satellites that monitor the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As the sociologist William Davies has analysed the issue, actions such as these go far beyond the partisan playing to certain business interests or economic theories: there’s an almost ideological commitment to stupidity involved.
Or as I have put it, what we are witnessing today is the rise of ‘morbid irrationalism’, a degeneration of neoliberal arguments for growth into alt-right crackpotism. This is what happens when the demands of denying the worsening reality of climate change, and of maintaining the faith in a failing economic orthodoxy, pass the point of rational self-respect.
What can anyone who perceives the reality of our environmental predicament hope to do in this situation? The first step is to try to make sense of it—to decode the irrationality manifest in the political denial of the core message of the Limits to Growth.
This has been the motivation behind research I have carried out at the UK’s Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), resulting in a book: The Meaning of Growth: Anti-environmentalist Rhetoric and the Defence of Modernity.
To try to make progress in understanding what appears to be an upsurge in irrational denialism, I borrowed from the empathetic approach to research exemplified by the likes of Arlie Russell Hochschild (in her interviews with anti-environmental Tea Party supporters in Louisiana), Katherine Cramer (conservative voters in rural Wisconsin), and Alan Finlayson (hardcore Brexit supporters and the online alt-right).
These approaches do not mistake empathy for agreement, but what they do set out to achieve is to uncover the subjective rationality behind ostensibly irrational actions and beliefs. They listen for what is it about a belief that makes sense to the person who holds it.
Applying this approach to anti-environmentalists—treating them as making explicit the more implicit reservations about hard limits to growth I suspected would be held more broadly—I sought to build up a positive picture of the world-view that they are motivated to defend. This revealed three overriding concerns.
The first is freedom. Those who argue against the reality of environmental limits, do so on the basis of their vision of the good life. In this vision, plucky individuals apply their own ingenuity and hard work towards breakthroughs in technology which enlarge the possibilities of us all to enjoy life and do as we will.
The second is power. The argument that we can continually overcome environmental limits is based on a keystone belief that ingenuity, as a mental property, is inexhaustible—and that applying it to the economic transformation of natural resources infuses them with that same inexhaustibility. As bizarre as it may seem once uncovered, the implicit belief that powers climate denial is the faith that we are able to progressively turn matter into mind—in the process, gradually removing all barriers to turning our will into reality.
The third is immortality. At the core of climate denial is a denial of mortality: this is what provides the real emotional force of this movement. Economic growth itself is depicted in terms of a dynamic life-force, feeding on natural resources in a way that in effect (magically) creates more of them—such that humanity can grow without limit.
To sustain this belief, this movement has made a myth of human ingenuity, imagining that technological progress will invent a way of overcoming the physics of entropy—and the limits of biology. Most vividly we can see how these beliefs play out in the transhumanist enthusiasms sweeping Silicon Valley, where people are trying all kinds of faddish treatments in the hope of living long enough that they will never die. This is the idea of the Singularity, promoted by the likes of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, that technological progress will soon reach exponential lift-off. At that point anyone alive may be able to live forever—if only as a digitised version of themselves, growing ever more powerful as we colonise the entire cosmos.
What should we make of this picture? The first thing to observe is that, underneath seemingly prosaic political objections made to environmentalism, we find the most fantastical beliefs. Looking further, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a kind of religious vision. Given its preoccupations, we can tell that what we are really seeing is a defence of modernity, conceived in religious terms.
On one level, for all of the rich detail that leads us here, this is not an original conclusion. The insight that anti-environmentalists are concerned to defend a (Western, white-male-dominated) vision of modernity has been a regular feature of environmentalist critique for decades. But, I would argue, the importance of this insight has been overlooked by the way in which modernity itself has been presented in the form of, in George Marshall’s phrase, an ‘enemy narrative’. Modernity has been presented as something destined for the guillotine, or the hospice.
In reality, we are all part of a global culture of modernity today. To talk about modernity coming to an end is to talk about as profound an epochal upheaval as the passing of classical civilisations, or the eclipsing of European medieval theocracy by the rise of modern science itself. Modernity is the evils of colonialism, exterminism, and extractivism—but it is more than this as well. There is a wealth of research—Peter Berger, for example—that stresses the human, essentially religious, need for a shared, intragenerational world-view. There is also a profound literature that sees the idea of progress at the heart of the modern world-view as a secularized theodicy, that developed from a preceding social belief in divine providence. For the great sociologist of world religions, Max Weber, theodicies—representing the human demand for ‘liberation from distress, hunger, drought, sickness, and ultimately from suffering and death’—have been at the heart of cultural world-views throughout history. Without them there is no pattern to the chaotic flow of events, no cause for hope among the personal and collective tragedies we live through.
The true importance of viewing climate denial as a defence of modernity is to understand that anti-environmentalists have got something right: there is something fundamentally incompatible between the idea of environmental limits and foundational aspects of the modern world-view.
Seen from this perspective, it is no surprise the Limits to Growth report did not secure the kind of rapid political action its sponsors hoped for. It’s not just that the idea of environmental limits contradicts an underlying image of the modern individual, living in a world of ever-increasing progress. It’s that environmentalism has not offered an alternative vision, of equivalent explanatory power and emotional resonance.
But all the environmentalist critics are equally right to perceive that modernity is coming to an end. The theodicy of progress—of material growth triumphing over all obstacles unto the end of the Universe (and beyond)—cannot be maintained. As environmental chaos increasingly breaks through the mental barriers of denial, and as faith in the political narratives of growth dwindles further, the conditions are growing for an epochal paradigm shift. What the history of past epochal shifts tells us is that it is not enough for an old world-view to break down; a new one needs to take its place.
What we are lacking is an inspiring vision of our lives, collective futures, and spiritual reality in a world in which we cannot keep growing forever. As much as we need policy wonks, scientists, and campaigners, now is the time for religious thinkers, philosophers, and writers to apply themselves to social change.
