In Arena 17, Scott Robinson argued that degrowthers draw on naturalistic metaphors, opening the door to technocracy. Leahy argues they look for real limits within nature, while elaborating a full politics.
Scott Robinson’s ‘Degrowth and the Technocratic Turn’ in Arena Quarterly 17 raises some interesting points for people in the degrowth movement. As a left program for human survival and flourishing, degrowth links the reconstruction of the global production system with a social justice imperative. There are several variants of it, from state enforcement and market reform to a non-monetary version with common ownership and voluntary working groups.
Robinson’s critique
Robertson cites Hickel as a prominent exponent of the degrowth position. Hickel claims humans are evolved for sharing and argues that we must take steps to evolve beyond capitalism:
Nevertheless, since political conditions alienate us from these capacities, managerial intervention is required, for instance using quotas to rationally assign energy use. [This] embrace of socialist planning is moderated by Hickel’s emphasis on ‘open discussion’, which he calls the ‘ultimate democratic act’. But his model of open discussion is derived from consensus models that inevitably result in [a situation where a] majority can ‘overrule the selfish minority and keep their destructive impulses in check’ … degrowth faces challenges in moving from small (affluent) communities to the national and international level, shifting from democratic discussion to technocratic expertise … Beck warns that the scientistic inversion that accompanies degrowth’s naturalist metaphors accepts the premises of bureaucratic rationality and risks ‘the intensification of technocracy’ in the management of ecological crisis.
Issues raised by Robinson’s critique include:
- the problem of scaling up from small, voluntary initiatives by the middle class into a program that might make a dent in a global crisis,
- the difficulty of using a majoritarian political framework to implement environmental regulations,
- the temptation to control society from above, using technological knowledge to shut down political debate, and
- the use of naturalistic arguments and metaphors to justify technocratic management.
I will begin with the last of these points—that the appeal to arguments that model human society on natural systems leads degrowth to foreclose political debate. The implication is that ‘nature’ has an answer, and that it is up to a technocratic elite to implement it. What I find odd about this argument is that Robinson himself provides a counter-argument. He quotes Lorraine Daston:
Nature displays so many kinds of order that it is a beckoning resource with which to instantiate any particular one imagined by humans … nature functions as a justification.
We can turn to nature to find a model of holistic integration. Or look to it for competition, or disruptive change. I completely agree with Daston’s critique: the most we can say is that something that happens in nature may provide an example that is useful when we want to understand human societies, which means that an aspiring technocratic elite cannot in fact be reading rules from the book of nature, bringing them on tablets to command an ignorant populace. If they make that claim they are, in reality, making political choices and rationalising them through naturalistic metaphors, and indeed, in the long history of naturalistic metaphors, one finds both appeals to harmony and the ‘organic society’ and physics-derived conflict models, with social forces contesting the social space and new social developments coming out of those clashes.
Which brings me to consider how degrowthers, and environmentalists more broadly, in fact use naturalistic models. I will draw on my recent research on the permaculture movement. I have no doubt that permaculture is a version of the degrowth movement, even a key part of that movement globally. From their earliest writings, the founders of permaculture have argued that affluent industrialism is built on the cheap energy of fossil fuels, and thus cannot be maintained indefinitely.
In my interviews with permaculture people, it was extremely common for them to claim inspiration from nature. Permaculture is a way of doing agriculture—or making life choices—that takes lessons from the natural world, they would say. This claim was most often tied to specific ideas about what might make agriculture sustainable.
Thus a principle of permaculture co-founder David Holmgren’s, ‘catch and store energy’, was cited by one of my interviewees as an example of drawing lessons from nature. I asked her what she meant, and she gave an example. A stream stops where a platform of rocks blocks it, storing water in a little pond. This, she said, is nature catching and storing energy. In designing our permaculture farm, we need to take heed of that lesson and catch and store water (potential energy in the farm system), using swales (contour bunds) or a dam rather than pumping water using fossil fuel energy. This is a causal analysis of non-human nature, combined with assumptions about the goals people might have as they design their farms.
I will draw an example from Holmgren’s book to illustrate the absence of the reasoning that concerns Robinson. Holmgren notes that permaculture has been associated with a model of the natural world based on the ecology of a climax forest—a stable system, with the wastes from the trees re-circulated to the forest floor, breaking down, feeding many other species and finally being taken up again by tree roots. Permaculture people have believed that a sustainable closed system like that is what we should aim for. Holmgren counsels us against this.
What we should realise, he goes on to say, is that human society today is more usefully conceived in terms of that model of disruption and chaotic change. We are in the middle of a pulse of human use of energy, of social complexity, and we are coming down the other side. At this point in time, nothing that we achieve can be expected to remain as a stable endpoint. Instead, we must learn to adapt to energy descent. What is very clear about this argument is this: Holmgren is not discovering lessons for human society by reading the book of nature and recommending a set of policy prescriptions based on that. Instead, he is selecting a metaphor from the vast range of natural processes. The criterion for the usefulness of the metaphor is not that it fits with some singular truth of nature. It is whether it fits with the reality of human society.
Let us look more broadly at the ‘valorisation of ecology as a political and economic model’ and at how the degrowth movement models ‘economy and society on ecological processes’, as Robinson argues. A typical environmentalist metaphor is to treat society like an organism, or a bounded ecological system made up of different living species. A common diagram shows a social system as an oval with arrows representing the resources and energy that are put into the system and the waste that it expels, like a tree or a rainforest.
This metaphor certainly makes sense. Societies do use resources and energy, and do produce wastes. The lesson drawn from this, however, is not to model society on an ecosystem. The system diagram represents society as already being a system that in important respects resembles an ecological one. Instead the lessons are much more specific: if we wish to continue living well, we need to reduce our use of resources and energy and our production of wastes. These claims are not based on the analogy of natural systems and human society. They are specific empirical claims about the way human society and non-human nature interact at the present time: for example, that we have reached peak oil, and that we will run out of lithium if we replace every petrol car with an EV.
Natural limits and tuning in to nature
Robinson’s critique is not confined to the tendency to model society on natural systems. He argues that the proposal to ‘attune societies with nature’ leads to ‘the need for rational planning and strictures on consumption and economic development’: for example by ‘using quotas to rationally assign energy use’. This perspective is backed up by degrowth’s emphasis on ‘limits and boundaries’. These are treated as ‘natural facts’ rather than political choices, implying a technocracy integrating society within an ecological framework ‘that only a priestly caste of scientists can interpret’. Accordingly, the degrowth agenda can ‘serve the needs of technocratic managers as they usher in an era of constriction and restraint at the price of politics’.
Does an emphasis on natural facts and natural limits imply a technocracy controlling masses deprived of political choice? The degrowth movement is divided on the political system most appropriate for a post-growth society. Robinson cites Hickel’s promotion of a democratic process: a ‘majority can overrule the selfish minority and keep their destructive impulses in check’. This is a harsh way of putting the issues. I doubt that the minority resisting environmental regulations is always ‘selfish’ and ‘destructive’. Yet the general point is well put. Hickel comes from the ‘radical reformist’ tendency in degrowth, envisaging national regulation by a representative democracy that is supplemented by more local participatory engagement, along with a cultural shift that permits a voting majority—‘an altered conception of pleasure and enjoyment’.
So what is so elitist about this? This kind of decision-making is typical of representative democracy, and has been applied in contexts ranging from laws against violent assault, to smoking in bars, to taxation for funding schools. Why is environmental regulation different? We clearly already have a great deal of environmental regulation, going back to the nineteenth century. I am assuming that the issue is that the environmental regulation degrowthers are calling for is based on scientific analysis that ordinary punters cannot be expected to understand.
Democracies have a range of ways of dealing with that issue. Parties set out general lists of programs for voters and consult scientists on the detail. To ensure unbiased advice, governments may consult a variety of scientific experts. Ideally, the government also funds research. When a government program has widespread support, this process remains uncontroversial and most often goes unnoticed. Who knows, cares about or understands the scientific advice that specific flu vaccines work? Scientific complexity does not imply technocracy.
Robinson also has a darker scenario in mind: that somehow or another, degrowthers take the reins in a technocratic coup: ‘Without a collective base, the degrowth agenda can just as easily serve the interests of technocratic managers’. It is very difficult to see how this dark vision might come about. What social forces could engineer the coercion of the reluctant masses for an environmentalist technocracy? Surely not scientists in their labs, jumping into tanks to defeat the army. The degrowth movement itself is made up of activists from the professional managerial class. Within the broader capitalist economy, this grouping is a small minority. The working class by and large fears economic disruption that might curtail employment; the capitalist class may embrace environmentalist window-dressing, but in fact they are confident that the market will sort out all problems. It is understandable that Robinson fears a technocratic takeover. But in fact, it is extremely unlikely.
We may well think of the Chinese regime as moving in this direction. It is an autocracy, surely, but a technocratic executive of the degrowth program? The Chinese government has embraced renewables and EVs as a sensible business measure. This fits absolutely with the interests of a regime halfway between mercantilism and state capitalism. The EV export industry they are now funding is faux environmentalism. There are not enough available minerals to run current transport with EVs.
Robinson’s suggestion that limits are technocratically imposed by being allegedly derived from metaphors leads him to claim that degrowth treats limits as natural facts rather than matters of political choice—that the aim of degrowth is to ‘attune’ society to these limits. Let us imagine that you have a desire to jump off a tall building and fly. You can jump or not jump, but either way, you won’t fly. The limits to growth that degrowth cites are like this. We may desire to continue mining at the current rate, but we will run out of available ores. We may desire to continue burning fossil fuels, but climate change will destroy our social systems. These natural limits do not obviate political choices. Whatever choices we make we cannot in fact be ‘out of tune’ with nature.
So, what does the emphasis on being in tune with nature really mean? The meaning must be contextualised in relation to the capitalist economy: to the issues that Marx and Bellamy Foster speak of as a ‘metabolic rift’. Capitalism is the only society so far to base its economy predominantly on market relationships.
When environmentalists speak of being out of tune with nature what they mean is this: that the market system is ignoring very real environmental and human costs. These costs do not appear as monetary losses where firms are concerned, but they are nevertheless important to people and other species. What lies behind talk of limits and being in tune with nature is a set of political choices. My problem with the radical reformist agenda is something quite different from Robinson’s. It is that any kind of market economy creates a political context in which the degrowth program is unlikely to get hegemonic support.
So what are the options for the degrowth movement? How is it to scale up from a minority movement located within pockets of the middle class in the rich countries? Sociologists have discovered a kind of ‘two-track thinking’ to be prevalent. In one track, business as usual reigns supreme. People expect their children to succeed, to get good jobs and to settle down with the usual consumer accoutrements. In the other track, they expect nothing less than a catastrophic breakdown of current civilisation. The first track leads voters to back parties that promise full employment and progress. This context suggests several options for degrowth:
1. The increasing environmental crisis and neoliberalism tip the balance. People start to behave as though they are really concerned about the breakdown of civilisation. They embrace a radical reformist program of degrowth and vote for an environmentalist agenda.
2. The local grassroots programs of the degrowth movement intensify. The movement concentrates on places where people are suffering: food provision, housing, transport. These initiatives link up as the industrial global system starts to collapse.
3. The movement does not bother to advocate government regulation. Instead, it invites people to take over their workplaces and run their own economies without money, through compacts to provide and receive goods and services. A classic revolution takes place and successfully implements this program, much to everyone’s surprise.
Scott Robinson replies:
Thanks to Terry Leahy for the engagement, to which I will respond at greater length in Arena Online. Leahy’s reply illustrates use of naturalist metaphors in exactly the way I (following Lorraine Daston) find suspect, namely as a description that serves as prescriptive justification for a political agenda. Leahy appears to view the task as to use the metaphors correctly (society as an ecosystem, Holmgren’s disruptive model of change). The metaphor is involved in the re-naturalisation of politics, even as it serves to de-naturalise economic growth. Proponents may think re-naturalisation is no bad thing; I am not so sure.