The Growth Problem (JP)

THE PROBLEM of the age seems to be that all the millions of commercial enterprises across the entire world need to be inspired to expand, if they fail to be so inspired they are only too likely to go bust.

The ruling economic motive is thus focussed on growth at any legitimate price as an alternative to going under. It does not matter if that price includes building motorways, chemicalising farming and having vast impersonal shopping malls in place of small family-run local shops. It does not matter if that price includes destroying the rainforests and promoting TV and tabloids which desecrate the sensibilities of millions where they might
otherwise be elevated, inspired and enabled to rub shoulders with cultural greatness.

Our civilisation in its present form is the outcome of three or four centuries of the promotion of economic and technological development above all other considerations, a development which has been one of constantly accelerating speed to a degree that today it is clearly out of control.

This economic and technological development has caused the massive poisoning of the land, the seas and the air across the planet, as well as the exploitation and destruction of vast quantities of its mineral resources to the extent that even of oil, which is a vital basic to the entire process, availability is now reported already to have peaked. It has also caused the outright extermination of countless life species on which the survival of all species depends and the destruction of personal and social relationships of local human-scale communities leading in turn to an explosion of human numbers so vast and rapid as to make death by starvation of many millions as inevitable as a sunset. Yet still this process proceeds apace, as though there is no need to worry, no tomorrow and no limits to further development in a world dependent on the availability of resources which are strictly finite.

The fact is there is no way the process can be halted within the framework of assumption of which the prevailing lifestyle is the fruit. As Einstein has remarked, you cannot solve a problem with the mindframe that has created it.

What confronts us is an economic drive which assumes the legitimacy of limitless expansion in a finite world. A drive which in current lifetimes is already showing signs of total collapse and of social breakdown.

Whatever the technical aspects of this headlong process, whatever the technical merits of solutions being applied to exploding human numbers, to restrain global warming, to the dearth of oil, or of food or water, whatever the merits of proposals to reduce crime, drug dependency and other social or physical ills which are filling our jails and hospitals to overflowing, there is a need not to overlook that what confronts us is a moral crisis, a crisis stemming from a failure to act in accord with traditional moral wisdom and an unreflective readiness to pursue courses which repudiate it.

But morality itself is a function of relationships, a readiness to accept that the divine law to love our neighbours is a supreme consideration for living the good life; one of the dynamic tragedies of the economic process has been to make it impossible to sustain such relationships. You cannot love your neighbour if you do not have one, and neighbourly relationships, where they still exist at all, are now subordinate to the power of economic and political institutions. Power relationships are now supreme whilst the normal relationship stemming from family and community life are either nonexistent or subordinate to power. Often I wonder, when is the penny going to drop? When are all of us going to realise we are living fantasy lives? Or realise that to solve any of the many practical global problems confronting us we have first to solve the moral problem, for it is the neglect of the moral factor that has created them. Religion is not some marginal aspect of life that can be pushed aside to give more focus to practical affairs; it is the factor on which all else is dependent.

John Papworth