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August 27, 2009
One of the most entrenched ideas in Australian politics is that the good is economic growth and prosperity, and that this is the only good. The end of economic growth in the "regime" of liberal democracy is prosperity, and though economists and politicians talk in terms of happiness and well being, they generally reduce this to prosperity. As this position is monist not pluralist, so we have the rejection of sustainability and quality of life as an end of public policy; even though we have been getting prosperous by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows. What is constantly reasserted in the face of global warming is growth, growth, growth.
Paul Gilding, in his Eco Watch blog at href="http://www.businessspectator.com.au/">Business Spectator, had raised the issue in his The End of Economic Growth. post in March. He called it “The Great Disruption” in which he argued that the global economy had hit its ecological and resource limits so it can grow no more, triggering the global ecological and economic crisis now unfolding as the current system breaks down.
It was picked up by Thomas Friedman in his The Inflection Is Near? in the New York Times in March. Friedman asks:
What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...We can’t do this anymore.
What is needed, Friedmanargues, is a paradigm for development is called: “Low carbon, green growth.” But, we should add, the purpose of that is a better quality of life. These ideas are not new---Aristotle had argued that the city-state exists for the sake of the good life---living well.
It is is true that whilst writers in the Aristotelian tradition believed that politics has to be based on a fundamental conception of the good as an objective ultimate end for human beings, political theorists in early and late modernity have tried to base politics on anything but a shared idea of the good. The initial reason for this change was the fear of Hobbes that claiming the existence of one objective end for human life is too likely to lead to serious conflicts like the Wars of Religion.The Enlightenment was likewise largely a reaction against the Aristotelian tradition. As the Aristotle's Politics Study Guide says:
All liberal political theories, no matter how far-ranging in specific tenets and prescriptions, hold in common one fundamental premise: the freedom and equality of human beings...liberal political theory claims the ability to separate the virtues necessary for politics from an agreement on the foundations of those virtues. To effect this separation, liberals in the end must rely on a utilitarian conception of virtue based on enlightened self-interest, arguing that unless people act with at least a minimal amount of virtue, the society will collapse and all will be worse off.
Utilitarianism then says that what is good is the greatest happiness is the greatest number and that is given by economic growth or prosperity. Monism is quietly slipped in via the back door.
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