Growth and its discontents

Perhaps riding the wave of growth is what allows me to write this blog.  I use a computer and post the blog online, things made possible by innovation and work.  Niches are filled and entrepreneurs meet market demands.  Evermore consumers are born needing goods for maintaining life and status demands.  It seems that if growth stopped then the way of life I have grown accustomed to would also stop.

And I’m not the only one: a subdivision of economics looks at economic contraction.  Some call for purposefully instituted contraction.  Some writers, such as Chris Hedges, blame growth for the state of the world: worth the short read - http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/growth_is_the_problem_20120910/.

Hedges’ article explores the idea that continued growth is required to continue living the way we do now.  The idea that continual growth is good  must come with an asterisk: we would need to find another planet to continue growing.  Part of this asterisk, corollary to the new planet idea, is that new technologies will grant us the energy resources to clean up our mess and continue living happily and green/sustainably (just one planet though!).

Some might say that there is no problem – the various factors that led to the late twenty-aughts economic woes was due to an uncomfortable hunk of gristle caught in our civilization’s gullet.  It will pass and growth will continue to buoy us materially and spiritually.  Honestly, taking renewable energy options out of the picture (just relying on what we got, like known reserves) we have 30-plus years easily.

If you don’t think we have any problems right now (just need to complete the swallow on this hunk of gristle) then great!  Living in the now is called accepting the status quo and it has been/is currently proving to be a successful way of negotiating the world.  We wouldn’t even be worried about the future if it wasn’t for science and learning.  Also at fault for this future-mindedness is morality which gains insight from science and learning.  Get rid of morality and a concern for future generations and its all good, right?

Quite facetious.  But just thinking that our way of life is awesome does not address the future and the way that we live should have the future in mind.  It is an aesthetic; it is up to one’s predilections.  But it beats living blindly.  It beats the de facto worship of the status quo – that is easy because it is something you do without having to consciously do anything.