The Good Life Beyond Growth

New Perspectives

Hartmut Rosa, Christoph Henning, Hartmut Rosa, Christoph Henning

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134885244
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Negocios y empresa
• Categoría: Negocios en general

Many countries have experienced a decline of economic growth for decades, an effect that was only aggravated by the recent global financial crisis. What if in the 21st century this is no longer an exception, but the general rule? Does an economy without growth necessarily bring hardship and crises, as is often assumed? Or could it be a chance for a better life? Authors have long argued that money added to an income that already secures basic needs no longer enhances well-being. Also, ecological constraints and a sinking global absorption capacity increasingly reduce the margin of profitability on investments. Efforts to restore growth politically, however, often lead to reduced levels of social protection, reduced ecological and health standards, unfair tax burdens and rising inequalities. Thus it is time to dissolve the link between economic growth and the good life.

This book argues that a good life beyond growth is not only possible, but highly desirable. It conceptualizes "the good life" as a fulfilled life that is embedded in social relations and at peace with nature, independent of a mounting availability of resources. In bringing together experts from different fields, this book opens an interdisciplinary discussion that has often been restricted to separate disciplines. Philosophers, sociologists, economists and activists come together to discuss the political and social conditions of a good life in societies which no longer rely on economic growth and no longer call for an ever expanding circle of extraction, consumption, pollution, waste, conflict, and psychological burnout.

Read together, these essays will have a major impact on the debates about economic growth, economic and ecological justice, and the good life in times of crisis.

Part I
Foundations

Alternative conceptions of the good life

1 The misadventures of the good life between modernity and degrowth

From happiness to GDP to Buen Vivir

Serge Latouche

Let us assume (certainly wrongly) that the expression “the good life” is a neutral term without connotations designating a universal and transhistorical aspiration reflected in various languages, cultures, and periods by means of different concepts such as, for example, Glück, bonheur, felicità, happiness, etc. but also bamtaare (Pular), sumak kawsay (Quechua), etc. We will consider all these expressions as what the Indo-Catalan philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar has called “homeomorphic equivalents of the good life”. “Homeomorphic equivalents”, he explains, “are not simple literal translations, any more than they simply translate the role that the original word claims to play; instead, they are aimed at an equivalent (analogous) function. We are not seeking the same function, but the function equivalent to the one performed by the original notion in the corresponding cosmovision” (Panikkar 1998, 104). “Bonheur” in its different European linguistic variants, but especially in the French sense of the term, certainly constituted the form of eudaimonia, of “the good life” of nascent modernity. Despite the interest of such an investigation, we will not be concerned here with how the good life was first embodied in the medieval beatitudo, but only with the twofold movement from the emergence of bonheur to its economistic reduction as the “gross domestic product per capita” and from the criticism of indicators of wealth to the birth of the recovered aspiration to buen vivir, to frugal abundance, to a happy sobriety in a context of “prosperity without growth”, as Tim Jackson (2010) puts it.

From the emergence of bonheur to its economistic reduction

If, as the deputy to the Convention Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) thought, bonheur was a new idea in Europe on the eve of the French Revolution, that is because unlike heavenly beatitude and public felicity, it referred to a material and individual well-being, the antechamber of the economists’ GDP per capita, whose ethical dimension is weak, if not null. This reflects the rupture brought about by the great European movement that agitated what was known at the time as “the Republic of Letters”, before it overturned ordinary people’s lives by galloping through Europe under the name of “the spirit of the times” and was incarnated in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte, the man whom Hegel was to meet in Jena. This cosmopolitan movement of the Enlightenment marked a radical break with the Christian oecumene (the Middle Ages being assumed to have been dark and obscure), whose ideal of the good life was expressed in the clerics’ language by the Latin word beatitudo (“O beata solitudo, o sola beatitude”). Beatitude was primarily spiritual or even celestial, immaterial and collective (the Communion of the Saints repudiated by Luther).

The semantic field of each of the terms used in the various Indo-European languages to express “happiness” is significantly different, depending on the cultural and historical context. Bonheur, happiness, felicità, jubilacion, and Glück are not interchangeable. In Italian, bonheur is translated by “felicità”, but French also has the term “félicité”. Voltaire, assigned by Diderot and d’Alembert to write the article on “Heureux” for the Encyclopédie (vol. 15), notes the difference between félicité and bonheur. Félicité

is the permanent state, at least for a time, of a content mind, and that state is very rare. Bonheur comes from outside, originally, it was a bonne heure (good hour). […] One can have a bonheur without being happy. A man had the bonheur to escape a trap, and is sometimes only the more unhappy; it cannot be said of him that he has experienced félicité. There is a further difference between a bonheur and bonheur in general, a difference that the word félicité does not admit. A bonheur is a happy event. Bonheur in general signifies a series of such events.¹

La felicità, on which Neapolitan illuminismo reflects, is primarily public; it is less an individual quest for prosperity than an objective of the Prince’s “buon governo”. It is, in a way, a terrestrial beatitude. One cannot save oneself by one’s own efforts alone.

The greatest happiness for the greatest number with the greatest GDP per capita

It is not pointless to recall here the context in which Saint-Just uttered his famous formula. It was in his report on a new social policy on 13 Ventôse (March 3) 1794 – four months before Thermidor and his death at the age of 27, on the scaffold alongside Robespierre – that he wrote: “Let Europe learn that you want not a single unhappy man or oppressor on French territory, let this example bear fruit on the earth; let it propagate the love of virtues and happiness! Happiness is a new idea in Europe” (Saint-Just 1996, 61).

The great philosopher of technology, Jacques Ellul, comments on this statement:

When Saint-Just proclaimed his famous formula according to which happiness is a new idea in Europe, he was wrong; for 2,500 years, the idea of happiness had been well-known and happiness had been consciously desired and wished for. But what was new, and there is no doubt that this is what Saint-Just had in mind, was a change in means: industrialization, the growth of the consumption of a wealth that should have benefited everyone, at the same time that the Republic was proclaiming Liberty and Equality, seemed to him the means that would finally make the idea of happiness possible and concrete. What had changed is that people were emerging from the idea in order to enter into the possible realization.

(Ellul 2013, 183)

Even if for a disciple of Rousseau like Saint-Just, happiness is indissociable from virtue, the material and individual dimensions of the economists’ GDP per capita are clearly present. With more cynicism, adumbrating the hedonism of the post-Thermidor period, Voltaire noted: “Around 1750, the nation, fed up with moral reflections and theological disputes about grace and convulsions, finally started thinking about grain”.² Happiness, like material well-being, is thus directly a function of the wealth of nations. And in that sense, happiness is in fact a new idea that emerges almost everywhere in Europe, but mainly in England (“happiness”) and in France (bonheur). The Declaration of Independence made on July 4, 1776 by the United States of America, a country where the ideal of the Enlightenment was to be realised on an allegedly virgin land, proclaims as its objective: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in the French constitution of 1793 is still more explicit: “The goal of society is the common happiness”. Neither the promise of beatitude in the beyond nor the spectacle of the monarch’s happiness (or even that of the nation) satisfied the members of a bourgeois society (Gesellschaft as opposed to Gemeinschaft, to use Tönnies’ terms). In his critique of Kant, J. G. Herder is very explicit on this point (1971, 64):

Nothing is vaguer than this word civilisation, nothing more deceptive in its application to peoples and whole ages. How many civilized individuals are there in a civilized people? And what does this merit actually consist in? And to what extent does that contribute to their happiness? And, in fact, to what extent does it contribute to the happiness of individuals, because the notion that whole states can be said to be happy in the abstract, whereas their members suffer individually, is a contradiction or rather an imposture that is revealed as such at the first glance.

The program of modernity, which was to give rise to the society of growth, is nothing other than the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It was formulated almost simultaneously by a whole series of thinkers in the European Enlightenment, from Cesare Beccaria to Francis Hutcheson or Jeremy Bentham. The wealth of nations (the result of laws, updated in the eponymous book, which might “enrich the people and the sovereign”, and of which Adam Smith made himself the propagandist) is the means for realizing this objective,³ which, as utilitarian as it is, is not immoral. The goal is to realise the well-being of all thanks to the “trickle-down effect”, and thus realise the good life and justice in the sense defined by John Rawls, since inequalities are reduced.

In the passage from happiness to the GDP per capita, a supplementary triple reduction is carried out: 1) earthly happiness is assimilated to material well-being, matter being conceived in the physical sense of the term; 2) material well-being is reduced to statistical well-having, that is, to the quantity of commercial goods and services produced and consumed; 3) the evaluation of the sum of the goods and services is calculated gross, that is, not taking into account the loss of the natural and artificial resources necessary for its production.

The first point is made explicit in the debate between Thomas Robert Malthus and Jean-Baptiste Say. Malthus begins by expressing his puzzlement: If the trouble we take to sing a song is productive labor, he writes, why would the efforts we make to make a conversation amusing and instructive and that assuredly provide a much more interesting result be excluded from the number of actual productions? Why would we not include the efforts that we need to make to regulate our passions and to become obedient to all divine and human laws, which are, certainly, the most precious of goods? Why, in a word, would we exclude any action whatever whose goal is to obtain pleasure or to avoid pain, either in the moment itself or in the future?

Then he himself observes that this leads directly to the self-destruction of economics as a specific field, remarking quite rightly that “It is true that in this way one might include all the human race’s activities during all the instants of life”. In the end, he adopts Say’s reductive point of view:

“If then we wish, with M. Say, to make political economy a positive science, founded on experience, and capable of making known its results, we must be particularly careful in defining its principal term, to embrace only those objects, the increase or decrease of which is capable of being estimated; and the line which it seems most natural and useful to draw, is that which separates material from immaterial objects”

(Malthus 1836, 33)

Thus in agreement with Jean-Baptiste Say, who defines happiness by consumption, Ian Tinbergen (1972) once proposed to rename the GDP purely and simply “BNB” (Bonheur national brut, gross national happiness). This provocative claim by the Dutch economist is in fact only a return to the sources. Since happiness is materialised as well-being, a euphemised version of “good having”, any attempt to find other indicators of wealth and felicity would be pointless. The GDP is happiness quantified.

But then, after two centuries of growth and a colossal increase in production, we should be swimming in happiness. And yet that is clearly not the case. By setting as the objective of modern societies not happiness but “the greatest happiness”, the philosophers of the Enlightenment did include in addition the illimitation of which the economic was to be the medium. If it is no longer a matter of living well, but of living better, always better, quantification becomes indispensable for evaluating the realisation of this unattainable objective.⁴

The West’s ethical turning point

The transgression erected into a system in supermodernity finds its source in the decisive ethical turning point of the Enlightenment. Western society is the only society in history that has set free what all the others have sought, with varying degrees of success, to curb, namely, Spinoza’s “sad passions” (ambition, greed, envy, resentment, egoism) and Freud’s aggressive passions which are close to them and, for him, responsible for “civilisation’s discontents”. In contemporary late modernity, it even goes so far as to make transgression a kind of paradoxical or even antinomic ethics. The great turning point occurs with Bernard de Mandeville and his famous Fable of the Bees. Mandeville’s conclusion, namely that private vices produce the hive’s prosperity, scandalised readers, but gradually became, through Adam Smith’s invisible hand, the amoral or even immoral credo of Western societies. Modernity believed, and in fact continues to believe (or at least pretends to believe) more than ever, that private vices channeled by the economy, through self-interest, become public virtues and work, unbeknownst to the agents, for the common good. Consequently, they could be unleashed without danger. It was even obligatory to do so. That is why “Greed is good” is taught in business schools (and not only there). The wealth of nations is the equivalent of the public felicity of the Neapolitan School, which, while requiring action on the part of the legislator, nonetheless defends the liberal alchemy. Legislation, Giambattista Vico wrote in 1725,

“modifies for this purpose the three vicious tendencies that lead the whole human race astray and which are: ferocity, greed, and ambition, and it causes them to produce the army, trade, and the court, that is, the power, wealth, and knowledge of republics. These three great vices, which would suffice to destroy all the generations of man on this earth, become the source of civil felicity”

(quoted from Robin 2014, 34).

Thanks to the trickle-down effect, we are already on the way toward the greatest happiness for the greatest number that the consumer society has realised with Keynesianism-Fordism. It is remarkable and symptomatic that a philosopher influenced by Protestant pietism like Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his private notebooks in 1775/76: “If men suddenly became virtuous, several of them would die of hunger” (E 213). If in Saint-Just, a passionate admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the people’s happiness results just as much from virtuous behaviour as it does from individual and collective material well-being, the same does not hold as the economy swallows up the social. In the consumer society of the 1960s, happiness was calculated by the accumulation of objects. Georges Perec’s book Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which was contemporary with Jean Baudrillard’s sociological study The System of Objects (1968), is a good testimony to this. The word bonheur occurs very often in the story of the heroes who are in search of it, and it would be difficult to find in it the slightest moral connotation, only consumerist bulimia. Baudrillard even speaks of the terrorist conspiracy of happiness.

Western economist imperialism made this conspiracy a worldwide phenomenon. Nevertheless, if the growth and development of the North were able to produce the illusion, especially during the trente glorieuses (the thirty years between 1945 and 1975), that a certain kind of justice was being realised through the statistical rise in the average standard of living, and thus of the good life, today we are witnessing the bankruptcy of this quantified happiness and thus the collapse of one of the imaginary pillars of Western society, which is now globalised. Other conceptions of happiness are sought here and there, but unless the foundations of the society of growth are challenged and a society of frugal abundance is invented, they have little chance of succeeding.

From the criticism of indicators of wealth to the rediscovery of “buen vivir”

The growth society, whose program corresponds to that of modernity, is failing to fulfill its promises. Consumption is limited to a small number of people and does not produce happiness, and on top of that, it ensures an ecological collapse. Once the bankruptcy of modern happiness as “the good life” has been recognised, and having taken into account the proposals of critical economists, don’t we have to listen to the rising voice of native peoples and return to the age-old wisdom of limitin...