Through the canyon

The recent spate of postings here on Rawls & Me has brought back some familiar themes, not least the contested role of technology in securing environmental sustainability. As in the past, I find myself discussing policy measures while sensing that much of the debate actually concerns far more fundamental questions.

Looking toward the future, I believe the stage is set for a grand debate about the direction of the human enterprise. While there are already ample signs of a growing planetary consciousness, much of its focus remains on the global challenges we face rather than on the solutions we might develop.

If humanity is to make it through the mid-century canyon of environmental stress, as the world adopts Western lifestyles, we need to reflect seriously on what brought us here. Rather than viewing escalating environmental destruction as the ultimate evidence of social and political failure, it may be more productive to see it as a painful feedback signal within a longer process of civilizational learning. After all, it is difficult to imagine how a planetary civilization could develop without at some point confronting its biophysical limitations. The real question is whether we will, in time, be able to overcome the traumatic character of our initial encounter with modernity and use the knowledge we have gained to chart a more sustainable trajectory into the future.

In searching for such a trajectory, we should be careful not to fall victim either to romanticized notions of a pastoral past or to utopian visions of some advanced, Star Trek–like future. At the same time, we must recognize that given the unsustainable nature of current trends, any viable response to the ecological crisis will almost certainly need to be radical in scope.

One key fault line in the coming debate concerns our relationship to the natural world. As Martin Lewis already noted in 1993, “the central theme of modern environmentalism may well be the idea that humanity’s separation from nature lies at the root of the ecological crisis.” Among environmentalists, it is commonly believed that the only way to heal this rift is by re-immersing ourselves in nature: by relying on locally produced natural materials (such as wood) and by “treading softly” on the planet. As is evident not least from this weblog, I hold almost the opposite view. In order to protect the natural environment, I believe we should seek to decouple ourselves from it.

Recognizing that any attempt to “return to nature” in a world of seven billion people would quite literally destroy nature as we know it, I argue instead that we should return nature to itself and begin a process of ecological restoration. While nanotechnologies may hold part of the key to such decoupling, it seems clear that only space industrialization on a massive scale can truly allow us to disengage from the sensitive ecological systems that we currently occupy with our buildings, roads, and mines. This does not mean that I fail to appreciate the spiritual value of nature. On the contrary, it is precisely because I recognize this value that I believe nature should be preserved, and that direct human contact with it should largely be limited to recreational purposes.

A second fault line concerns the legacy of the Enlightenment. As Stephen Eric Bronner argues in Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, there is today a deep confusion among intellectuals on the Left regarding the origins and objectives of progressive politics. According to a widely held view, the Enlightenment is the source of all exploitation, and its values are inherently racist, sexist, and Eurocentric. What such a view overlooks is that the very yardstick used to judge the Enlightenment is itself a product of the Enlightenment. While it is impossible to deny that individual Enlightenment thinkers harboured the prejudices of their time, it is – as Bronner persuasively argues – wholly unsustainable to reduce the ethos of the Enlightenment to those prejudices alone.

I believe that the true legacy of the Enlightenment lies in its emphasis on critical reflection, its cosmopolitan sensibility, and its enduring commitment to social reform. If progressive politics is to offer any real hope for the future, it must reconnect with this legacy and point toward a world of universal democracy and freedom.

Finally, and closely related to the previous point, I believe capitalism represents a third – and potentially very dangerous – fault line in the debate to come. When living in a money-obsessed society like Hong Kong, capitalism can easily appear as an unstoppable force. Driven both by powerful economic interests and by billions of individual aspirations, the accelerating process of capital accumulation that began in Europe in the seventeenth century is now unmistakably global in character.

There is no doubt that this process has done much good: it has unleashed human productivity, enabled unprecedented levels of functional differentiation, and given a majority of the world’s population a far richer material life than their ancestors could ever have imagined. At the same time, the human and ecological toll of capitalism has been catastrophic. Child labour, maimed workers, and animals confined in factory farms all provide ample reasons to resist capitalism in its current form.

Yet, as I have repeatedly argued, it is a mistake to equate capitalism as such with exploitation. As economies become more sophisticated, value creation increasingly depends on high levels of human ingenuity and creativity. While it was once possible to grow rich primarily through the exploitation of labour, a mature capitalist economy instead relies on access to a highly educated workforce – and, not least, on consumers who can afford to buy what is produced. It is my belief that a social-democratic system is uniquely equipped to provide this broader context for growth.

I recognize that this belief is partly shaped by the fact that I grew up in one of the most successful yet egalitarian economies in the world: Sweden. I will not pursue this argument further here, but I strongly suspect that many critics of capitalism (and many capitalists as well) fail to grasp its full long-term implications. In any case, few would deny that our global future will, to a large extent, depend on how the capitalist system evolves – and on the direction it takes in the decades ahead.