Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2010.
Waking Up from Denial
by Jordi Pigem
How far does the crisis reach?
I believe the current crisis has hit more than the core of neoliberalism and even capitalism. What now has fallen into crisis is the whole worldview of economism: the belief that the key element of society is the economy, which is conceived of as a purely abstract, quantifiable, and self-sufficient system, aloofly independent of the biosphere that hosts it. This goes hand in hand with the belief that material welfare is the key to human fulfillment. Economism is common to both capitalism and Marxism. To see the economy as the key to everything may have seemed common sense to many of us, but it would have been regarded as a preposterous delusion in most other human cultures, which generally saw the key of their universe in more intangible elements—cultural, ethical, or religious.
But not only economism is in crisis, because the current crisis is systemic, not just economic. It has an obvious ecological dimension (biodiversity loss, destruction of ecosystems, pollution, climate change), and it also affects our culture, our goals and values, and our personal lives.
We are in a systemic crisis that we managed to ignore because we were under the spell of the alluring figures of economic growth, and because the pleasures and promises of consumerism were bribing our consciousness. Our economy was like a somnambulant giant, crushing communities and ecosystems under its feet while immersed in the reverie of an outdated worldview. Now the mirage of unlimited economic growth is vanishing and we suddenly realize we cannot carry on neglecting the ecological crisis, the cultural crisis, the crisis of values. We have mountains of data, hundreds of theories, and many answers, but most of them are of little use for the new questions that are being asked. What is now in crisis is the whole modern worldview, which is suddenly out of date, desperately crying out to be replaced.
This crisis, therefore, is not only an opportunity to move forward into economic and social arrangements that are more just, sustainable, and meaningful. It is also an invigorating cold shower, a wake-up call, an opportunity to rise out of denial. Welcome to the real world.
Economics as if the World Mattered
As Karl Polanyi explained in The Great Transformation, it is unprecedented that a whole culture would be under the sway of the economy. Indeed, in all human cultures until not so long ago, the economy occupied a limited area within the bounds of ethical, social, and religious considerations. Through some magical trick, we've now inserted society into the economy, instead of having the economy as a part of society. The global economy claims to be above all things, and yet it is only a franchise of the biosphere, without which it would have no water, no air, and no life.
Keynes is back, we hear. But John Maynard Keynes, possibly the foremost economist of the twentieth century, was already—three generations ago—criticizing the trend to reduce everything to economic values: "We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendours of nature have no ‘economic' value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and stars because they pay no dividend."
In his late years, Keynes pointed to a young German economist as the best candidate to take on his mantle—someone who, according to Keynes, was able to make figures sing. That was E. F. Schumacher, who in the early 1970s published a classic of ecological economics, Small is Beautiful—a critique of the modern obsession with giantism and acceleration that called for "economics as if people mattered." Schumacher knew that any economic theory is based on an underlying view of the world and of human nature. And still today, in the twenty-first century, in spite of quantum physics and transpersonal psychology, mainstream economics is based on a nineteenth-century worldview: it is a reductionistic and fragmenting approach that regards the world as a random sum of inert and quantifiable objects and tends to pit human beings against each other and against nature. Back in 1973, Schumacher diagnosed that "the modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success," adding that nowadays we are "too clever to be able to survive without wisdom."
Bioeconomists and ecological economists were aware that the quest for economic growth had turned into a race against the biosphere and against common sense, and quite a few of them had seen this crisis coming since the pace of economic globalization speeded up. Others seem to have foreseen it much earlier. In Money and Magic, the Swiss bioeconomist Hans Christoph Binswanger looked at Goethe's Faust as a critique of the Faustian modern economy, ahead of its time. Money—our favorite substitute symbol of immortality—becomes so addictive that we give away our souls for it. In the fourth act of the second part, Faust defines his deepest yearning in this way: "Property and power I shall gain." Foreshadowing our hyperactive society, he adds, "Action is everything." Alchemy has been replaced by financial speculation: the point is to make artificial gold that can grow endlessly out of nothing. About 98 percent of economic transactions in today's world do not correspond to the real economy but to a craving for profit that moves swiftly in abstract realms, cut off from real assets and from ethical, social, or ecological criteria.
The Cognitive Bubble
In other cultures the ultimate purpose of human life was to honor God or the gods, to flow in harmony with the world, or to live in wisdom and peace. Yet in our society the ultimate purpose of life has been to increase GDP forever and ever. On the altars of this creed, everything else has been sacrificed, including the sense of the divine, respect for all creatures, and inner peace. Our economy has been the first truly universal religion. The ora et labora (pray and work) of medieval monks was replaced by another way to paradise: producing and consuming. As David Loy has noted, "The discipline of economics is less a science than the theology of this new religion." It's a religion that has something of an opiate of the masses (Marx), a belief system that is hostile to life (Nietzsche), and a childish delusion (Freud). For decades the economic system managed to deny the evidence about the limits to growth and about the environmental and social disruption it was generating. Now the economic system has started to collide with the physical limits of reality. It is time to account for the denial it has been based on.
Let's imagine that tomorrow at noon an unforeseen solar eclipse occurs. Professional astronomers would have failed us, but we could not blame them personally. It would signal the need in astronomical theory for a paradigm shift, such as the one with which Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo overturned medieval cosmology. Instead of patching up the old astronomical theory with more epicycles, scientists should completely transform it. In 1989 it was said that all political scientists should resign, given that none had foreseen that the Berlin Wall was about to collapse. It has also been said that most professionals in economics should resign for not having foreseen the scope of the current global crisis. Other than Nouriel Roubini (originally regarded as an eccentric), no major conventional economist seems to have been aware enough of it. No less worrying than the crisis of the economic system is the collapse of conventional approaches to economics that reality has completely overridden.
There is a much older and bigger bubble than the financial and the property ones: it is the cognitive bubble—the bubble that sustains the worldview of economism. In this sense, the crisis of the economic system ultimately arises from a crisis of perception. The solution to the economic crisis cannot come solely from economics.
A Rite of Passage
A crisis leaves everything wide open. It is like a journey through the spaces analyzed by chaos theory, in which a slight fluctuation can result in unexpected and lasting developments. And so in times of crisis our actions can have a much deeper effect than in times of stability.
Until yesterday, economic and material growth seemed to have no limits. We thought progress would never cease to speed up and would bring us ever more prosperity and fraternity. We now know that our ways are not sustainable in economic, energetic, ecological, or psychological terms. As long as the economy was growing we were able to brush aside growing inequalities and ecological degradation. Not anymore. The cognitive bubble is beginning to burst: the real world is here and is knocking hard at our doors—showing up, for instance, as climate change or as declining resources. The interrelated crises of today's world place us at the door of an unprecedented rite of passage, at both a personal and a planetary level.
In traditional societies, rites of passage used to mark the crossing of the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. Our society is now due to cross that threshold. Our contemporary world embodies, in a number of ways, a kind of immature rebellion and hyperactivity: rebellion against the biosphere nurturing us and against a cosmos from which we feel estranged, and hyperactivity in consumerism and in the acceleration that drives us away from the present, making us yearn for fulfillment in a future that never arrives. The crisis as a rite of passage challenges us to reach a contented and sustainable maturity that rediscovers the gift of being in the here and now.
Happy Crisis
Crisis comes from Greek krinein (to distinguish, to decide, to choose), which is also at the root of critical and criterion. During a crisis it is essential to use our best criterion. Krisis was the noun used by Hippocrates to describe the turning point in the course of a disease, for better or worse. This medical sense is the only one that crisis had in Latin and in most Western languages until the early seventeenth century. The political sense of crisis came later, when what had been a matter of the human body was metaphorically applied to the social body. Over the centuries physicians and laypeople spoke naturally of the good crisis, the favorable crisis, or even the happy crisis that leads to the curing of a disease (the expression "happy crisis" was already used in a medical text in 1625). In its original sense, a crisis is an opportunity for healing. In our case the patient is the system: our global crisis is therefore an opportunity to heal an obsolete system, the pathologies of which have until now been hidden behind the false screen of economic prosperity.
The coming years are likely to mark a rite of passage for humanity and the earth, a turning point in the long path of human evolution. We may find ourselves taking part in radical transformations, in luminous dawns and dazzling sunsets. The collapse of the material and ideological structures with which we tried to rule the world shall open spaces for more meaningful ways of being.
In this rite of passage at the end of the modern age, a bad crisis would increase our craving for control, our colonization of nature and of each other, and our gnawing unease. A good crisis would usher us into a postmaterialistic age, reintegrating our economy into the cycles of nature and putting it at the service of personal and social growth. In this postmaterialistic economy, life would be aimed at creating and celebrating rather than at competing and consuming, and consciousness would not be regarded as an epiphenomenon of an inert world, but as an essential feature of a living and intelligent reality in which we fully participate. If in our rite of passage we find ways toward a saner, wiser, and more ecological society, and toward a more meaningful world, it will have been a good crisis.
Jordi Pigem is a Catalan philosopher who has taught at Schumacher College and at the University of Barcelona. His latest book is Buena crisis: Hacia un mundo postmaterialista (Good Crisis: The Coming Age of Postmaterialism).
Source Citation
Pigem, Jordi. 2010. Waking Up from Denial. Tikkun 25(1): 25.
