The Rise and Fall of Growth
Perhaps the greatest single threat humanity faces is that of inappropriate continuous unchecked growth. But we should not beat ourselves up too much about its inception in the first place, as it did provide great opportunities for humanity to shift to a more secure and meaningful level of existence. However, we may have now passed that level where growth was appropriate to one where unchecked growth is no longer appropriate and, indeed, if left unchecked, is extremely dangerous.
If so, the survival question is “How do we change our current growth worldview to a more appropriate sustainability worldview?”
It may seem incongruous that a person from a business school should be challenging the notion of continuous growth, because that is what a business school proposes. As James Dator (2009)[i] reported “Continued growth” is the “official” view of the future of all modern governments, educational systems, and organisations. The purpose of government, education, and all aspects of life in the present and recent past, is to build a vibrant economy, and to develop the people, institutions, and technologies to keep the economy growing and changing, forever.”
For a great deal of humanity’s history there was little growth which meant that only the strongest could survive, only those capable of hunting and gathering. This was appropriate for humans, as it was for other animal species, then as it kept the species strong enough to survive the conditions sustaining life by eliminating genetic weaknesses as a potential threat to the species survival. For many humans, as with many other life species, even today this applies.
With the coming of the Agrarian age, growth, as we know it, emerged which enabled human life to shift to a higher level of survival and civilisation but it also brought with it the beginning of that less admirable human trait - greed - and even worse than that, the downgrading of the equality of human individuality by the introduction of the class system – the haves and the have nots. These less desirable human traits, developed during the Agrarian age, have survived through the centuries and, sadly, are still alive and thriving today.
During the Age of Reason, Francis Bacon wrote "Above all things good policy is to be used so that the treasures and monies in a state be not gathered into a few hands... Money is like muck, not good except it be spread."
The so called ‘Information age’ I see as simply an extension of the machine age, albeit redefining human’s relationship with machines. NHL intelligence (non humanlike intelligence), transhumanism and singularity, are the ‘great’ breakthroughs information technology ‘machines’ offer. Social technology has provided tremendous opportunities for human kind to revaluate their interactions and relationships with each other, but it also brings with it the possibility of even greater inequality between the have and the have nots, with the potential that the have nots may be excluded altogether because they have no presence, whatsoever, in cyber space - out of sight, out of mind.
If society could acknowledge and accept that the age we live in now is the ‘Sustainability Age’, not the information age, change for the better may emerge. This shift in our consciousness suggests that we will need to redefine what we mean by growth and with that redefining what we mean by work, by social interaction, by surviving and thriving together. Along with this means redefining what it means to be human.
I am writing a new article for publication on this subject and will post it here shortly.
[i] Dator, James, (2009) Hawaii Research Centre for Futures Studies, Political Science Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa, ‘Four Generic Alternative Futures’, Journal of Futures Studies, Vol 14, No.2, November 2009 p. 1-18