John Naish
Hooray, we are going to get back to ‘normal’. That’s what the UK’s political leaders are promising us in the run-up to the general election: a return to economic normality after the global crisis. But I don’t want normal. I want anything but normal.
A sniff of panic does funny things to humans. Thanks to the credit crunch, broad debate about alternative social futures has all but disappeared. Fear has instilled mass amnesia, forgetting how our constant-growth economy is not sustainable physically; forgetting that our constant-striving lifestyle is not sustainable emotionally (hence our spiralling rates of depression, anxiety and related ills such as hypertension).
Politicians are eager to help us to forget. They do not want to imperil votes by declaring that the normal system they lead is kaput, that our consumerist model keeps crashing itself and burning our planet. Instead, we get confident reassurance. Early in the global financial crisis, the Bank of England declared: “This is just a transitory period of subdued growth. We will get through the other side and the growth will resume to more normal levels.”
Normal levels? Despite the financial meltdown, carbon emissions from fossil fuels rose by 2 per cent last year to an all-time high, reported scientists in Nature Geoscience in November. This leaves us on a worst-scenario track for global warming, says the Global Carbon Project (GCP), a collaboration of more than 30 climate specialists. It also says that the capacity of the world’s oceans and forests to absorb greenhouse gases is fading.
But still we want to return to normal. Western-led culture might benefit instead from attending some kind of Econ-Anon meeting. It’s stuck in a destructive, addictive cycle of repeating the same behaviour over and over, thinking that the behaviour will get it out of the problems that the behaviour creates. This bears remarkable similarities to individual human addictions to things such as alcohol or bad relationships.
There is some emerging evidence of consumer cycle-breaking. A newly published report, A Darwinian Gale, by the influential marketing forecaster, The Futures Company, says we are moving from an “era of indulgence” to an “era of consequences”. Instead of never worrying about credit, consumers will increasingly take economic risk into account when buying things, it predicts. “Even if consumers don’t make different choices, the process of arriving at those choices will be different,” it adds.
That’s hardly a revolution, though. It’s still the unsustainable norm. John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th-century economist, would be sorely disappointed. He thought that we would have learnt enough by now to realise that fundamental social change is needed. In a 1930s essay, “On the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, he predicted that in three generations’ time (i.e., about now) we would have solved the “economic problem” – the problem of allocating scarce resources so that everyone has enough to satisfy their needs and basic desires. Once past that point, he thought that we would dump growth and instead evolve intellectually, to explore the greater potentials of humankind. And how we’d flourish, into the arts, into culture, into perfecting the ultimate refinements of beauty and friendship.
But our culture is stuck in consumer addiction. It lacks the insight needed for us to break the cycle. I believe that much of the fault for this lies in the present state of religion and spirituality, which effectively encourage us to feel disengaged from each other and from our planet. Organised religion obsesses about dogma and about splits over dogma (Anglican Catholicism versus Anglican Evangelism being the latest example). This leaves many feeling alienated and unmoved. More and more people explore their spirituality as individuals – as in, “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual”. This denies them the shared communality of human transcendent experience and often leaves them prey to consumerist bauble-selling – magic crystals and “how to be happy” guides.
Without any strong alternative voice, consumer culture is free to prey on isolated people’s fears, to tell them constantly that they are alienated, atomised individuals whose identity lies in competing with each other to achieve self-realisation (remember Mrs Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”?)
The radical alternative is to embrace our human commonality, to be encouraged to look into the eyes of strangers and see someone astonishingly like ourselves staring back. This sense of interconnectedness spreads wider, to a sense of “interbeing”, which embraces all living things, all dynamic systems and ecosystems, all pasts and futures. It makes us realise that we are not alone, that our every action is part of a universal web of consequences. It’s the sort of higher human potential, of true spiritual awareness, that Maynard Keynes describes.
This may not do great things for the global economy. But we don’t know. The developed world’s leaders have poured around £1000bn into propping up our current system, but not a cent on getting some of the world’s best economic brains to design sustainable global alternatives from a blank sheet. Whatever emerged from such a fundamental redesign might not, I freely admit, look normal. But right now, our normal is in fact an aberration.
John Naish is a journalist and author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton)
