Human beings are healthier, wealthier, longer-lived and better educated than at any time in history, and in greater numbers.
We may quibble about the healthier claim, but bad diets in part result from excess food and bad choices - and stress, which is a consequence of 'progress' - read on.
I like to provoke with the above 'healthier and wealthier' claim. The facts and figures seem to support it. I like to test people's responses. Those who smile in smug self-satisfaction at capitalism's success in cracking the economic problem flunk the test.
Those who challenge facts and figures that can, indeed, be challenged, also flunk the test. The people who try to prove that we are not so well off are stuck in the game which equates progress and development with being healthier and wealthier - politics thus reducing to the competition between rival parties and systems claiming to be the ones better equipped to deliver abundance.
I'm more interested in the paradox of abundance.
I'm interested in moral and spiritual and social loss in pursuit of material gain.
The fact that I'm critical of who think themselves a whole lot smarter than they think they are, and the fact that I argue that not everything is rational and a matter of logic, facts, and figures, shouldn't be construed as an anti-intellectual position. It's a call for greater social and emotional intelligence, in furtherance of a democratisation in which people become capable of running their own affairs, in unison. I argue for a power-with as against a power-over.
I'm not remotely anti-intellectual. Arguing consistently for 'rational freedom,' I couldn't be.
It would be a gross error not to cultivate the intellectual virtues as well as the moral virtues. An 'ordinary ethics' has to be one that is attuned to the 'ordinary' phases of a healthy and organic growth, and not the runaway 'system' imperatives of a social organisation that proceeds at ever further remove from our biological and ecological matrix. We are caught in 'wicked' problems that will require intelligence to resolve. I like to provoke people by stating that we are healthier, wealthier, better educated and longer lived than ever before, and in greater numbers. That's what the objective facts and figures show. So why the discontent? The discontent is evidence of our 'ordinary' natural selves knowing deep down that something is amiss. And we are right. “The liberal euphemism for the tension between actuality and potentiality is 'rising expectations.' What this sociological phrase fails to reveal is that these 'expectations' will continue to 'rise' until utopia itself is achieved. And for good reason. What goads the 'expectations' into 'rising' – indeed, into escalating with each 'right' that is gained – is the utter irrationality of the capitalist system itself.” (Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism 1971: 15).
We are caught in a progress trap in which things keep getting worse as they get better. The effect of economic development is to enrich us in the short run - enough to keep us running inside the gilded cage - whilst impoverishing us over the long run. Development is not a matter of taking resources from some and giving them to others, robbing Peter to pay Paul, but leaving the whole system no worse off (or wealthier, even, if the ideologues of capitalist economics are to be believed (they are not)). Instead, economic development takes £100 from Peter whilst only giving £10 Paul, leaving everyone worse off as a result of inflicting a £90 loss on the system. Hence the paradox that our healthier and wealthier than ever 'progress' has made us all worse off. The system takes nature's free gifts and renders them scarce under a price tag, taking a natural abundance in order to transform it into an artificially re-created abundance - with the latter being much lesser than the former. The costs of capitalist development come with a shadow price attached, and which necessarily grows over time. 'Progress' as economic development thus creates artificial scarcity out of natural abundance. Capitalist abundance has impoverished us, since it has been required destroying an inordinate amount of natural abundance in order to get it. And the shadow price accumulates and, at some time sooner or later, has to be paid.
A substantial part of the price that has to be paid as a result of our artificially created abundance is that human systems are more vulnerable to disruption, collapse, and sclerosis than the natural systems they supplant. Economic development destroys self-regulating and self-maintaining organic communities - including human societies - and replaces them with engineered systems that are anything but.
So the next time I make the statement "human beings are healthier, wealthier, better educated and longer lived than ever before, and in greater numbers," treat it as a statement of a half-truth in search of the problematic other half - the costs, the losses, the shadow price that has to be paid. Those who say that we have abundance and should be satisfied are complacent defenders of the status quo; those who say we need another crew in charge to unfetter the productive forces and deliver the promised but repressed abundance, are also prisoners of status quo thinking. As for the techno-bureaucratic managerialists with their rational plans for managing austerity .. God help us. Those people are the ones claiming the right to decide who pays the shadow price and who doesn't, as in who gets to die first.
I'll stick with my 'ordinary' ethics, which involves the unity of each and all within a thoroughgoing democratisation and self-socialisation, a mutual aid society based upon communities of practice and character. Which is to say that each and all possess intelligence, and that intelligence is social, moral, and emotional as well as cognitive.
So the next time I make the "healthier and wealthier" statement, know that I am testing to see who has the root of the matter in them, as distinct from those who still can't see at all.
People who mistake me for an apologist of the system are missing the deeper point I'm aiming at - Weber's 'iron cage' is also a gilded cage, with material largesse enough to pay enough people to conform and continue producing and consuming in the short run, all the time increasing the shadow price for others to pay in the long run. The extent of the scarcity produced out of natural abundance is not apparent immediately because it is displaced and deferred in time or space—from some individuals, groups, classes, territories, nations, generations, and species' to others. And much energy is absorbed in the politics of development, in which people fight who gets to control and monopolize as much of the surplus against the claims of others. That's where the political mind of the day remains stuck. We are a long way from the ecological transformation of the political that I argue for, not least for the reason that that transformation entails revaluing the political, not abolishing it by rendering it subordinate to reified ecological imperatives in the hands of elites and experts (the technocratic approach will always but always default to asymmetries in power in the all-too-human and none-too-ecological world).
The contemporary age is shadow-boxing in an unreality pocket.
Here's the tricky bit: the human social metabolism is governed by exactly the same laws and principles as the universal metabolism as nature (call them ecosystems if you like), but human beings have a creative agency and intelligence which allows them to manipulate natural processes and appropriate natural 'resources' in such a way as to defy, divert, and pervert these laws and principles in the short-run and an inordinate capacity for self-deception that allows them to deny their existence over the long-run. Or, at least, until it is too late. Some environmentalists are having very excited dreams about enlightened despots/philosopher kings - call them technocrats - who will institute an austerian climate regime for the greater good (with 'greater' here being redefined to be in tune with reduced human wants and numbers). Thinking themselves above politics, they will find themselves the greatest prisoners of an ineradicable power dynamic - with leaders being selected not for enlightenment and knowledge, but for the capacity to pursue, gain, maintain, and extend power. They think enlightened despots will be people like themselves. That's not serious politics, it is a dangerously deluded anti-politics that results in the naked rule of brute power.
We should know that wicked problems don't have easy solutions.
I've been routinely dismissed for proposing long-term solutions at a time when we have lost the long term.
Fine, with that 'reasoning,' we should just crash the economy and install dictators.
A wasteland is not a solution, it's an evasion born of despair. And it's part of the same megamechanical system destroying social and natural communities, not a coherent response to it. Langdon Winner writes of the sociopolitical impact of a technology that has become "autonomous" of human agency: "No matter which aims and purposes one decides to put in, a particular kind of product inevitably comes out." It is, therefore, human beings who must adapt to technological imperatives rather than impose human choices and values upon it, a process he calls "reverse adaptation." The result is an all-encompassing "disenfranchisement" by a "megatechnical corporate-government alliance" that forces greater control, centralization, hierarchy, and inequality on each and all. In fine, technology has become the essential politics of our age, determining our social and political destiny. Those who look for short-term solutions will be swallowed up within institutional, systemic, and technological imperatives over which they have zero influence, enlightened or otherwise. Spare me the talk of environmental despots armed with science and technology, they are children, and very naive ones at that.
"Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights." (Weber, Politics as a Vocation in Gerth and Mills 1946/1958, p. 128).
In the aftermath of 'the death of God,' the modern world finds itself engulfed by the metaphysical void, with those humans haunted by the cosmic longing for meaning, being, and belonging inventing all manner of surrogates, even seeking to impose them on recalcitrant, unbelieving others. Weber's 'nothing' here refers to the world that remains after the orgy of metaphysical destruction unleashed by the Enlightenment and the disenchanting advance of science, technology, and industry. 'All that is holy is profaned,' wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, 'all that is solid melts into air.' Marx felt that the establishment of conscious common control over the range of human social relations would suffice to ensure the necessary resolidification. But it would now appear that Marx, a post-Enlightenment critical theorist who resolved the philosophical dimension into sociological critique, was overly optimistic. And the notion of a material abundance produced by science, technology, industry and the rational regulation of human relations lay at the heart of that optimism. Marx, properly understood, has a large part of the answer. He argues for the human organisation of power and wealth in such a way as to emphasise quality of relations over the quantity of things.
But developments in the past one hundred years or more have served to confirm Weber's gloomy prognostications rather than Marx's optimistic view of the powers of human reason and creative labour. That may well be less a judgement of the flaws of Marx's position than a comment on the extent to which socialists and leftists have tended to read Marx's humanist democratic socialism too much in the developmental terms of capitalist modernity. As things stand, the modern world continues to live under Weber's shadow rather than in Marx's light. And bear in mind that the endless accumulation of material quantity does nothing to refute Weber's pessimistic thesis but rather, to the contrary, confirms it. Weber would not have been remotely surprised to have learned that his 'iron cage' is also the 'gilded cage,' something that keeps people conformed to their determined and enslaved status, regardless of how unevenly the gold is distributed.
There is no substitute for long-term measures with respect to social forms and relations, modes of conduct, communities of practice, character construction, the nurturing of the moral and intellectual virtues as qualities for successful living. We are talking civilisation change, after all - which is not the work of a summer's day. And none of this precludes the taking of short term measures but, rather, form the essential backdrop providing orientation, inspiration, and internal coherence.
I make zero apology to people who have wasted decades arguing the same thing and getting nowhere, for the simple reason they have misdiagnosed the problem in the first instance, leading them to propose solutions that fall far short of the problem in the second. You'd have thought these extremely clever peope would have learned something by now, something more than 'politicians are stupid and people don't care.' That's a copout for political ineptitude.
So I shall continue to argue the case for long-term, 'deep' and integral solutions involving an eco-praxis and ecological self-socialisation. The problem is not size and scale alone, caused by exponential economic growth without limit, but the fact that the problem is multi-layered and consists of many dimensions: economic, technical, administrative, intellectual, moral, psychological, social, political. These problems are irreducible, which is to say they cannot be reduced to some simple theorum for engineering solution. These problems interact with each other so as to generate unanticipated and often unwelcome consequences, often trapping us within the vicious circles which characterise the paradox of progress and abundance, adumbrated above. As a species, human beings have climbed very high up in terms of civilizational complexity, and it is no wonder people accustomed to good living should not want to climb back down. The problem is that in climbing ever higher, we have come to live at ever greater remove from the biological and ecological matrix that is the source of all life and which sustains the civilisation we have built. That distance leaves us vulnerable, prone to suffering a long and hard fall should we fail at the task of managing our creativity effectively in relation to nature. But the paradox we are caught within, in which things get worse as they get better, is precisely the result of being caught in a progress trap, of having to run ever harder and faster for diminishing returns and results. There are already signs of impending overload and collapse, as diminishing returns set in and ever quicker and harder running on the spot starts to consume most of our available resources.
And the world of politics is going hell-for-leather in the direction of appropriating and consuming abundance, with rival tribes and gangs mugging what's left of the public realm for a greater share of the spoils, making demands and claims on public life without putting anything back. Many of those groups see themselves as leftist, I see them for what they are: liberals on steroids engaged in an organized hyperpluralism based on the Hobbesian war of all against all, only levelled on the group/identity rather than the 'free individual' of the free market myth.
In fine, the equation of quantity, economic abundance, with abundance as such is not merely simple-minded but delusional, and dangerously so. True abundance is more than economics and concerns such thing as the wealth of relations, deeper connections to the things that matter, time, people, autonomy. The facts and figures of economic growth can look impressive, but once we take account of displaced costs, shadow prices, losses, stresses, vulnerabilities, it soon becomes apparent that far from being healthier and wealthier and better educated, we have impoverished our lives, showing that our much vaunted economic abundance is at base a wretched scarcity, a social, psychological, and spiritual poverty, meanness in fact, as well as a material deprivation.
So, yes, human beings are healthier, wealthier, longer-lived and better educated than at any other time in history, and in greater numbers.
That we are profoundly unhappy as a result comes with good reason.
And given that there are still any number of political commentators, of right, left, and liberal persuasion who persist on blaming Jean-Jacques Rousseau for everything that has gone wrong, I'll state this loud and clear, our awkward Genevan friend anticipated this outcome from the very first, challenging smug Enlightenment assumptions that progress in science, technology, and trade was the key to political progress and peace. Rousseau saw the emergence of new aristocracies based on a relentless assault on nature, unravelling the human ecology in the process. I saw historian David Starkey claim that every bad idea in the modern world can be traced to Rousseau. Starkey was smugly defending the English liberal tradition that, frankly, is the real source of the current malaise - Hobbes' 'war of all against all,' his false description of nature as brutish and aggressive as a prescription for the coming capitalist society, John Locke's 'blank sheet' (tabula rasa) view of humanity and life, paving the way for the constructivist, self-creating madnesses of today, David Hume's absolute nihilism and scepticism which detached us from reality, Adam Smith's free markets and free trade uprooting individuals from place and loyalty - this liberalism is all sail and no anchor, and Rousseau sought to address the consequences. Tocqueville - who read Rousseau every day - also saw the rise of "manufacturing aristocracy." What these thinkers warned of a coming danger, Max Weber announced as an accomplished and irreversible fact:
“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
- Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 1918
Marx focused upon the determinism that the accumulative imperatives of the capital system imposed upon socio-economic and political life of human beings; Weber, in turn, examined the institutional and bureaucratic determinism implicit in modern capitalist development. Langdon Winner follows in the footsteps of the likes of Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul in drawing attention to the technological determinism of the modern age, arguing that technological decisions taken with respect to such things as introducing a new device or practice are effectively legislative acts, even the creation of political constitutions, for the reason that the establish an all-encompassing and enduring framework for public life, establishing the terms of political order. A public order established through such imperatives is the complete antithesis of our most cherished ideals and principles with respect to freedom, democracy, and citizenship, not least the notion of self-assumed obligation, the idea that human beings are bound only by those lose that they have played a conscious role in making. In the end, Winner draws the conclusion that the Enlightenment goal translated into politics and economics is a chimera, one that repudiates the hopes of both economic liberals and socialists alike - the possibility of combining high production with a benign politics through the attainment of material abundance is doomed by the paradox of progress. It is possible to pursue high levels of production via modern technology; it is also possible to seek a communal life in which the hierarchical division of labour, class exploitation, and political domination are eliminated - but you can't do both. Such was Weber's criticism of Marx. Dismissing the Communist Manifesto as a 'pathetic prophecy,' Weber argued that, owing to the inescapability of modern bureaucratic and organisational imperatives, Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would be realized as the 'dictatorship of the officials.'
I repudiate such notions of inescapability. My Introduction to the Thought of Istvan Meszaros is a systematic repudiation of Weber. But - and this is an enormous but - escaping the 'iron cage' means precisely that: it means that would-be escapees understand precisely the terms of confinement and release, and don't continue to use the means of their enslavement in the mistaken belief that they are the means of their emancipation. The historical record of socialism is depressingly unpromising in this regard.
Conservatives and socialists alike, thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Lewis Mumford, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Ellul, Erich Fromm, EF Schumacher, Martin Buber and many more besides, issued warnings to the effect that technology is not politically neutral, but is embedded in the politics of prevailing social relations, transforming and constituting the sociopolitical order. Despite these warnings, the moderns have continued to give technology a free rein, in the utopian belief that it wilol deliver material abundance and thereby freedom and happiness. The appeal to those of scientific persuasion is that this free reign offers a non-political route to desired ends. The paradox is that those committed to polities based on free markets and free trade, in the belief that these promote and secure individual freedom, have allowed technology to become an autonomous force. This was bound to happen, however unwitting (or, I would suggest, most certainly witting), since economic freedom ensures not the freedom of the individual but the freedom of the new collectivities and communities of private property, capital, money, and now corporate power over atomised, powerless individuals. The result is that radical socio-political changes were forced upon people embedded in place, in contradistinction to conservative notions of organic change and community. People have been forced to accept developments they did not want and certainly did not vote for. Leftists may savour the irony of those "conservatives" who have the most to say with respect to moral and social decay being the most active supporters of laissez-faire policies with respect to enterprise and innovation. The freedom they have actively sought with respect to uprooting communities, social supports and stabilizers standing in the way of free markets has freed not 'the individual' - that discrete and sovereign and self-choosing entity that is the great liberal fiction - but 'things' in the form of capital, money, commerce, corporate power and technology but also those 'collectivist' institutions and bureaucracies that are anathema to conservatives. Other than the satisfaction of seeing the biter bit, and the neoliberal revolution devour its conservative progeny, there is nothing for leftists to savour in all of this, because such developments consume the possibilities for socialism, too. And environmentalism for that matter, insofar as this refers to an ecological self-socialisation that produces organic human communities attuned to their surrounding natural communities.
In return for economuc freedom, we have had to accept a technological and institutional-bureaucratic freedom that is inimical to the political ideals of freedom, democracy, and self-government. Higher levels of production may well have been achieved, but at the expense of an enormous price in terms of a lost internal moral and social cohesion and political autonomy. Technical and supposedly politically neutral imperatives associated with "efficiency," "utility," and "exchange" involved in the effort of attaining ever higher levels of production have come to colonize the public realm, in flagrant denial of explicitly political values of freedom, democracy, dialogue, and deliberation. Supposed 'leftists' are really just liberals posing as radicals in order to define themselves in opposition to 'conservatives,' who themselves are really free-market economic liberals. Both sides are equally deluded in being equally addicted to the production of material abundance, committing to the conquest of nature through technology and endless industrial expansion. Those of liberal-leftist persuasion entertain the possibility of attaining this end in such a way as to ensure that the citizen body - what Marx described in more explicitly socialist terms of the 'freely associated producers' -will come to call the political and social tune, ignoring the unpallatable truth that it is the capital system that pays the piper, with institutional, systemic, and technological imperatives setting the tempo and rhythm. In fine, as Marx's alienation thesis told us all along, 'things' have acquired an existential significance, with human subjects being reduced to the status of objects determined and driven by their reified creations. As means have come to be elevated to the status of ends, in denial of ends chosen by human subjects, the economic, institutional, and technological servant has become the political master.
Which brings me to the dangers and delusions of those who think that science and technology can come to the rescue of politics from the outside. Science and technology are not independent forces but are embedded in prevailing social relations. Whilst scientists and technicians and engineers may well be politically innocent, science and technology are not - and there is no-one in any field of human expertise and endeavour is not immune from selling themselves for money, power, and comfort. Those claiming to be outside of politics may well be the most dangerous and deluded people of all. Thorsten Veblen dismissed socialism for the being predicated on the revolution of the proletariat. He felt that the proletariat to be much less important than socialist politicians and intellectuals thought it to be, and much less revolutionary to boot. Veblen instead called for a 'revolt of the engineers.' At the same time, he drew attention to the 'trained incapacity' of 'experts' whose professional and technical boundaries were also blinkers that they were unable to see beyond. Such people demonstrate a pronounced tendency to translate socio-political questions into technical terms, gutting them of their radical force, rendering them passive and beyond challenge and contestation. Such people determine to put politics and people on ice. Their decisions are removed from politics, choice, and deliberation and seek to set the terms of public order in the world to come. 'Progressives' claim to see this as a genuine solution to the impasse of a contemporary politics paralysed by the endless 'yes/no' of self-cancelling contention. They fail to see that such a 'non-politics' really brings the anti-political, anti-democratic tendencies of liberal 'freedom' to their final completion. In their desperation, they have succumbed to fantasy, embracing a 'non-politics' that promises to furnish them the effective means to their already determined ends. This way lies not the Enlightened Despotism of environmental philosopher kings which exists in the very excited dreams of those who despair of people and politics, but a techno-bureaucratic managerialism that, far from being politically neutral, is firmly under the control of the corporate form, doing the bidding of corporate power, and extending and entrenching corporate imperatives through the entire sociopolitical, social, cultural, and institutional fabric. A more inorganic and anti-ecological a political form is impossible to imagine, and yet it is this upon which many environmentalists, demanding 'world war' style global mobilisations, are pinning their hopes on. It is so transparently obvious that such a 'global' rule will facilitate the final and total enclosure of the global commons that one is forced to conclude that those pushing for such a thing are not deluded naifs at all - they know, they are managerialists, and they owe their money, power, and position to the corporate form. Follow the money and power.
Leaving aside questions of intent, in effect, such environmental technocrats and managerialists are complicit with the abdication of control over political and socio-economuc life to the vast, impersonal, and autonomous processes of economics, technology, and institutions. This is the path to the Megamachine, a total and totalising regime of unified, centralised, and irresistible power. We err profoundly in using the term 'system change' to describe these developments. When your causes are being advanced by the corporations you should know that you are not part of a revolution. These revolutionaries are, in fact, 'progressives' aligning themselves with the internal processes of the prevailing system. They are engaged in the kind of 'revolution' that eliminates old, obsolete forms but preserves asymmetrical power relations intact, ensuring that the pillars of the predatory, exploitative, accumulative system remain system. This is not revolution and system change at all but a continuing institutional and technological coup d'etat within the corporate form. It is a socio-political takeover which will bring the curtain down on democracy. The process of democratisation stalled in face of private economic power, the socialists were defeated, divided, and demoralised, and supplanted by a 'cultural Left' more concerned with media and identity and margins. There is little stomach to fight for democracy. The activists and ideologues advancing their causes in the streets give the common refrain - democracy has failed and existing politics is inadequate, so they are taking direct action. This is a grassroots rejection of democracy from below. The rejection is also being prepared from above in the shape of a techno-bureaucratic class of lawyers, financiers, managers, educators, and professionals who operate the technocratic regime in accordance with legal, bureaucratic, technical, and financial criteria established not by the citizen body but by members of this class themselves. This class is the class that dares not speak its name. They are comparable to Hegel's 'universal class' of bureaucrats who, claiming independence of particular interests, claim also to rule in the universal interest of all. I expose their pretensions in Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism (2020)
Environmentalism takes a seriously wrong and anti-ecological turn when, succumbing to its tendencies to scientism, it goes in this direction. It may appear to be an attractive workaround enabling those with climate goals to evade the annoying, time-wasting controversies of politics, but it effectively joins forces with those private capitalist and corporate interests which have worked to check and dismantle democracy since ever.
These developments are fundamentally anti-democratic. Power within the capital system is not exercised directly by anyone in particular, but systemically through accumulative imperatives arising from within capitalist relations. The same with respect to institutional and technological imperatives. We are still subject to the imperatives of the capital system as an alienated system of production. At the same time, the collective power of this universal class of managerialists is immense and, like that of the capitalists and corporate interests they serve, much greater than that of democratically elected officials. (To see so many people expressing themselves with high-pitched revolutionry fervour in their animosity to the Coronation of King Charles III confirmed to me just how far supposed leftists are from genuine socialism, and from a genuinely revolutionary concern to restructure power and resources in favour of 'ordinary' members of the demos. They are safe, tame, conformed, and confirmed liberals who think that the completion of the bourgeois revolution will serve to resolve all the problems we face - problems generated by the liberalism of that very revolution. Targetting old aristocracies saves them from confronting the challenges posed by the new aristocracies. Such people are not revolutionaries, they are reactionaries who prefer fighting old battles against soft, easy targets to fighting enemies of real power and force.
Forget monarchy and the old aristocracy, we have a global capitalist and managerial class that is circumventing national sovereigny, political freedom, and democracy, and has been doing for some time now. This class effectively decides what the major problems are (and are not), what is to be done about them, who pays and how much, and whether the doing worked and the expense worthwhile. This is a self-justifying, self-validating class that seeks to insulate itself from the 'yes/no' of politics, in particular from from the 'no' of ordinary members of the demos. Like the technical and scientific truth it claims to embody, this is a class which you can only say 'yes' to, at its insistence. This class is almost entirely in control of the rational means of the modern world — material resources, organization, budget, personnel, technology - and on that basis claims the right to determine the ends which govern us all. This is a remarkable grant of extrapolitical power to an extraconstitutional class. This has characterised the relation of politics and economics under the capital system, with the socialist challenge being concerned to extend the process of democratisation into the social and industrial spheres beyond the merely formal political sphere. Now, with the extension of the corporate form, that extrapolitical capitalist control is being joined by a techno-bureaucratic managerial class, firmly rooted in the corporate form. Operating within an ostensibly democratic constitutional framework, a class of persons entirely lacking formal political status and democratic legitimacy is taking control of the affairs of the polity. This, of course, is a continuation of developments within the capitalist system. Every socialist party in history discovered by hard experience that economic affairs were not at the bidding of their chancellor, regardless of their democratic mandate. It is not votes that count but accumulative imperatives. We have already been effectively disenfranchised by capitalist economics, so there should be no surprise that a technological capacity under the control of corporate power shoud continue and confirm the process. At the same time it is worth repeating one of Marx's essential lessons - those who control are themselves controlled by the imperatives arising from the accumulative dynamic. The unelected class that wields this unauthorized and unconstitutional extra-political and undemocratic power are not themselves enfranchised as the members of the demos are disenfranchised, for the reason that they mere functionaries of the system and hence subject to institutional, systemic, technological, and bureaucratic imperatives, if not in precisely the same way as the citizens are. Marx was always clear on this point, and it is still very poorly understood. Abolishing the institutions and changing the personnel of capitalism is a fairly simple and easy process; the task, however, is to uproot and supplant the social forms of the capital system. That means going beyond obsessing over personnel and aiming at institutional expropriation to engage in genuine systemic transformation. The degree to which the problem lies in an alienated system of production, establishing an alien, external control that determines all, effectively disenfranchising us all, even the class of managerial controllers, is little understood or acknowledged.
I write not to repudiate environmentalism but out of cocern to ensure that the ecological transformation of the political is precisely that, genuinely ecological and genuinely politica - and not an assertion of natural necessity swallowing up politics, which is no more than an update of the Hobbesian solution that lies at the source of all our problems. There are reasons for thinking that the dominant character of contemporary environmentalism deliberately scotomizes key political values and concerns, erasing values of democracy and citizen involvement under pressure of necessity and emergency, in order to justify an authoritarian imposition of an austerian environmental regime. Whilst this is justified in terms of 'saving the planet', the truth is that it serves to preserve existing social relations. Ultimately, assertions of scarcity and necessity, natural or otherwise, and political despotism go hand in hand. We are thus confronted with precisely the situation Tocqueville warned of: "In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune," people have largely neglected "their chief business, which is to remain their own masters." And environmentalists make this mistake as a result of believing that science and technology are fundamentally non-political whereas in fact they are intrinsically political, and certainly become so as soon as one seeks to extend them into the realm of practical reason.
Assuming control of our socio-economic life, as opposed to continuing to allow it to be determined for us by autonomous imperartives - economic, technological, institutional - will require not only radical political transformation but a profound reenvisioning of our means in light of ends we determine for ourselves. Modern 'man' prides himself on the great powers he thinks he commands. The truth is, however, that he commands nothing: means have become enlarged to the status of ends, supplanting true ends and determining the ends to be followed; these means are not the slaves of human agents but their masters. As Marx's alienation thesis said from the first, human beings are not in control but are controlled by their own powers in alien, external form. The tragic propensity of modernity for biocide and genocide arises from such estrangement from our own creativity.
The modern world is in the grip of the tragic dialectic of progress, a dialectic of disaster.
Liberals believed they had found a resolution of the political and economic problem both: economic development by way of the technological conquest of nature would create abundance, eliminate poverty, alleviate inequality, overthrow of tyranny, and bring about the benign polity characterised by peace and plenty for all. It's a view you can find expressed by Adam Smith and Tom Paine in the eighteenth century. I mention this because the anti-monarchists have been out in force, issuing quotes from Tom Paine. Fine. But Paine's day is largely done. Like Smith, he thought that free trade and the liberation of the individual from restraint would result in universal plenty and therefore political peace. Eminently reasonable in theory, the cure has not merely failed in practice but has made the problem much worse. This was bound to happen given that the economic development upon which the promise of peace and plenty is predicated is predatory and exploitative: waging war on nature could never produce a society that is at peace. Economic expansion pursued in such terms has incited a human aggression that people have turned against one another in their own societies. Such predatory behaviour is also pathological, unravelling the organic communities of human beings, dividing social beings into atoms compelled to shift for themselves and pursue their own self-interest within an impersonal market system. Even worse, the promised abundance as a result of such development is based on a false prospectus, feeding addiction rather than delivering satisfaction. Once costs and benefits are weighed and balanced against one another, it is apparent that economic development actually intensifies scarcity rather than reduces it.
The apparent abundance produced by rendering nature our energy slave is fraudulent, for the reason that it is based on stolen goods, hidden costs, and deferred payments. The concern with producing material abundance is not only delusional, it is dangerous, in that the political counterpart of energy slavery is energy despotism, an austerian technocratic regime that purports to manage and maintain that energy slavery and in the process turns to enslave the citizens under the figures of scarcity, necessity, and emergency. Supposed masters of a world of their own creation, human beings are masters of nowhere and nothing, least of all of themselves. The obsession with self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment has carried us further and further away from our biological and ecological matrix, with the result that we now find ourselves even more tightly incarcerated in Weber's "steel-hard cage," grace of the closing environmental circle. We are thus enacting the tragic dialectics of progress, committing ourselves to actions that are not of our choosing and which are bringing about results that are the precise opposite of intentions and promises - liberal modernity's purported solutions for the problems of society serve only to make things worse.
This tragic dialectic cuts across political and ideological boundaries, embracing conservative and socialists and liberals and greens alike.
The search for the economic plenitude that ensures political freedom is chimerical. The origin of the tragic dialectics of progresslies in abandoning the "original affluent society" and falling into the progress trap, becoming ever after a prisoner of a necessary development trying to reconcile the perpetual disparity between unlimited wants and his insufficient means. Liberal modernity, arising in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, sought to resolve the problems arising from this original mistake - call it a Social Fall - with more of the same, magnified by the power of science, technology, and industry. Far from resolving the problem, this approach has compounded the error and deepened the tragedy to such an extent that managerialists are seeking even greater control and freedom to act in light of necessity and emergency. This will be the final realization of the political despotism that has stalked this method of thinking and acting from the first.
One of the most depressing aspects of the tragedy of progress is the evidence that environmentalists of various stripes and persuasions so easily betray ecological principles to buy into the false prospectus. Whether they do so out of despair or material interest is a moot point.
There were thinkers who exposed the fallacies from the first. Jean Jacques Rousseau challenged the fashionable progressivism of his age, the belief that the path to human happiness lay in making human beings wealthier, more knowledgeable, and more powerful. The distinction that Erich Fromm would come to make between 'having' and 'being' in the twentieth century is one that Rousseau made in the eighteenth century, accusing the Enlightened world of substituting having for being. In his Second Discourse, Rousseau writes:
"Savage man, when he has eaten, is at peace with all nature, and the friend of all his fellowmen.... But for man in society ... it is first of all a question of providing for the necessary, and then for the superfluous; next come delights, then immense wealth, and then subjects, and then slaves; he does not have a moment of respite. What is most singular is that the less natural and urgent the needs, the more the passions augment, and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them; so that after long prosperity, after having swallowed up many treasures and desolated many men, my hero will end by ruining everything until he is the sole master of the universe."
In Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), John Maynard Keynes speculated that the day might not be all that far off when everybody would be rich. 'We shall then,' he claimed, 'once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.' In conceding that modern capitalism is an immoral system whilst insisting that we have no option but to be immoral until we become rich enough to be moral, Keynes engages in reasoning that is not merely diabolical but incoherent. The key words here are 'once more.' If we could afford to be moral when we poor, valuing ends over means, then why do we need to become rich in order to do so again? It is upon this incoherent diabolism that modern society has been founded. Keynes' view that moral considerations must be ignored until we have become rich reveals the self-defeating, self-destructive nature of a liberal modernity predicated on a capitalist economics. By ignoring moral considerations to wage war upon the Earth, looting it for 'resources' in order to produce abundance, modern 'man' actually destroys the possibility for permanent prosperity on a level that is capable of satisfying legitimate human needs. It is not that we shall one day be rich enough to be moral once again but precisely the opposite: the pursuit of riches without regard to moral purpose serves only to destroy the restraints and inhibitions that curb wants and desires and unleashes an unsatiable appetite within the human community, thus initiating the vicious circle of a limitless and endless power-seeking, until finally self-made man finds himself the master of nowhere, fighting over Weber's 'nothing.'
I work in the virtue tradition. In my work in ethics, I expose the emptiness and futility of modern moral theories. It's not that modernity cannot generate its own moral theories, it generates plenty of them, so many, in fact, as to give grounds for suspecting there is something amiss. The problem is that whilst modernity generates many moral theories, none of these can offer sufficient reason and grounds for taking them seriously. I favour a virtue ethics for the reason it avoids intractable theoretical debate to emphasise practice. The reason for the indispensability of virtue was stated concisely by Rousseau in the Social Contract:
"We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty. . . ."
Hence the importance of the principle of self-assumed obligation. In light of this principle, it can clearly be seen that the concern to make ourselves materially rich enough to be able to afford morality 'once more' is to view the relation entirely the wrong way around, something that must necessarily lead not only to corruption but perversion. Keynes openly admitted that the Bloomsbury Group of which he was a member consisted of 'immoralists.' He openly stated in Economic Possibilities that we must carry on pretending that fair is foul and foul is fair, arguing in flagrantly diabolical fashion that enriching ourselves required the use of means that were "foul." Rousseau is classes upon such people and their perverted reasoning, insisting that morality is 'obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself.' It is this cultivation of virtue that furnishes us with the courage, fortitude, and wisdom to break the tragic cycle of progress and commit ourselves to a new political order based upon ends of our choosing, guided by a moral purpose and a conception of the good life that not only restores means and ends to proper relationship, but does so in a way that takes account of our need to be in attunement with environing nature. Such a vision of the good life doesn't preclude a concern with material well-being, but restores it to its proper placein the order of things. The result is a life that is simple in means but rich in ends, with abundance conceived in the expansive sense of the wealth of human connections, to others, to nature, to spirituality, and to ourselves: true wealth is to be found within, and not to be sought without as something to pursue and possess. Conceiving wealth as being rather than having, economics is restored to its proper aim of securing the health and well-being of the household, supporting an economy of sufficiency that sustains a social abundance, a plenitude that dulls the urgeon each individual's part to accumulate worldly goods, lest others steal an advantage and one falls behind. John Stuart Mill put the point this way: "The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be any richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward."
That view recalls another sage passage from Rousseau:
“With regard to equality, this word must not be understood to mean that degress of power and wealth should be exactly the same, but rather that with regard to power, it should be incapable of all violence and never exerted except by virtue of status and the laws; and with regard to wealth, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”
Ultimately, the acquistion and exercise of the virtues as qualities for a flourishing existence serve to bring economics back into relation with ecology. A virtuous economics concerns living lightly, simply, and wisely on this Earth. Properly understood as an ecological quality, abundance is not paradoxical and pathological, something that undermines the system's long-term health, but a stock that, when skillfully maintained through the commensurability of means and ends, is self-sustaining. The ecological virtues tell us to replace the endless pursuit of material quantity to infinity with an appreciation of quality; to curtail consumption in favour of conservation; and to abandon having in order to enjoy being. This is to realize the vision of the good life as a life in which ideals of political freedom and democracy, crucial to our flourishing well in a social habitus, are brought into attunement with the natural metabolism, which is crucial to our flourishing at all.
Against that view, there is this:
"...it is still more horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy...is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics. . . we were to deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is therefore not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life." (Max Weber 1909/1944, pp. 127-128).
References to Max Weber
Max Weber on Bureaucratization in 1909," in J.P. Mayer, 1909/1944, Max Weber and German Politics, London: Faber & Faber.
Weber, M. (1962). Basic Concepts in Sociology by Max Weber. (H. Secher, Ed., & H. Secher, Trans.) New York: The Citadel Press.
Weber, M. (1921/1968). Economy and Society. (G. Roth, C. Wittich, Eds., G. Roth, & C. Wittich, Trans.) New York: Bedminster Press.
Weber, M. (1946/1958). Essays in Sociology. In M. Weber, H. Gerth, & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weber, M. (1925/1954). Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. (E. Shils, & M. Rheinstein, Trans.) New York: Simon and Schuster.
Weber, M. (1903-1917/1949). The Methodology of the Social Sciences. (E. Shils, H. Finch, Eds., E. Shills, & H. Finch, Trans.) New York: Free Press.
Weber, M. (1904/1930). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (T. Parsons, Trans.) New York: The Citadel Press.