The Costs of Growth

If a sense of doom seems to have descended on the entire political spectrum, that’s because all camps share an apocalyptic imagination. “Democratic politics in the West has turned into a clash between two extinction rebellions and two nostalgias,” write Leonard Benardo and Ivan Krastev. The left believes climate change will destroy life on the planet, while the right believes the “great replacement” will destroy life as we value it. Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea is of particular relevance, the authors argue in this review of the book. He “offers an original reading of the current crisis of democracy by defining it as a temporal regime and arguing that an ‘open future,’ one that is not predetermined but is shaped by human agency, is a precondition for the successful functioning of democratic regimes.”

“White’s most important suggestion is also the least inspirational. In his view, the only way to escape the trap of a politics of emergency is to confront head-on the apocalyptic appeal of both the climate left and the great replacement right. Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to assert that the discourse of crisis is the native language of any genuine democracy. Democratic politics, he claimed, need drama. … Democracy thus operates by framing the normal as catastrophic, while promising that all crises are surmountable, thus framing catastrophe as normal. Democratic politics functions as a nationwide therapy session where voters are confronted with their worst nightmares—a new war, demographic collapse, economic crisis, environmental horror—but are convinced they have the power to avert the devastation. In other words, democratic politics is impossible without a persistent oscillation between excessive overdramatization and trivialization of the problems we face. Elections lose their cogency when they fail to convince us that we’re confronting an unprecedented crisis and that we have it in our power to avert it.”

Iza Ding, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, discusses how American academia has framed and problematized authoritarianism, especially when it comes to China. This approach, which Ding dubs authoritarian teleology, interprets all actions of authoritarian regimes as strategies solely aimed at maintaining power, and as actions whose actual causes and complexities those regimes often overlook. This perspective is problematic, she argues, because it oversimplifies the regimes’ motivations and incorrectly assumes they are driven by a constant strategic effort to survive, ignoring the often inconsistent and non-strategic nature of their decision-making.

“The normative assumption is that because authoritarian regimes do bad things, they must be hated by their citizens who can’t wait to overthrow the regime. And that’s why the regime’s mere existence is called ‘survival’ and why this survival is puzzling. And I have to emphasize the word ‘survival’ here again, because it is a common word in the literature. And the things authoritarian regimes do are often called ‘survival strategies’ or ‘survival tactics.’ Usually, we don’t bother to show that the behavior, the actual behavior, is an actual strategy or a tactic. We just assume that. So, repression is a survival tactic, but sometimes recycling is also a survival tactic. So, assuming everything the authoritarian government does under this bundle of survival tactics is basically authoritarian teleology at work.”

Renewable energy has become cheaper than fossil fuels in the past decade, and yet large-scale adoption has stalled. Although renewables like wind and solar are now cost-effective, energy production from coal and natural gas has increased. Market-driven solutions have limitations. Relying solely on price mechanisms cannot drive a significant energy transition.

“My argument is that the key thing to think about is when thinking about whether renewables development takes place or not … is to look at profitability. The core argument of the book is that renewables development is going slower than we need it to globally because the business of developing and then owning and operating renewables facilities, and selling the activity that they generate … is simply not an attractive and stable enough proposition in profitability terms, in order for that development to occur. … My argument is that the economics is still the problem.”

In this conversation, the poet, translator, and author David Hinton calls for a radical rethinking of the relation between the mind and land, a rewilding of our consciousness. “So this is the idea of wild mind—consciousness as wild, just like Earth is wild. We think of Earth as nature or wild, but the idea is incorporating consciousness into that.” Tracing the material shifts in human lives and the accompanying transformations of consciousness that distanced us from nature, he draws on Tao and Ch’an Buddhist philosophy to help us navigate the sixth extinction with an ethics tempered by love.

“Most environmental books now are about practical technological innovation or social changes that have to happen. My argument is that’s not going to work. That’s not going to happen. It requires a transformation in our assumptions about the nature of what we are and what the world is. Otherwise, that instrumental and exploitative relation will remain. Even if some people want to preserve a piece of land—that’s how they want to use it—other people want to frack natural gas out of it—that’s how they want to use it. Because you’re sharing the assumption that the piece of land is something to use, then it’s just a disagreement. But if there were an assumption that that land, the animals on it—their self-realization is equally important to ours, then the whole conversation changes dramatically.”