(This is a chapter in a longer essay, starting with Limits )

Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric

Even if not perfectly executed, Western values have been among the best ever implemented on such a big scale. I’m talking about peace, equal rights for everyone, life according to the rule of reason, fraternity, liberty, education, literacy, the search for objective answers and the separation of church and state. These are values that, if followed, should lead to a fairly calm and nice-to-live-in society that is well-prepared for potential downturns and is resilient in dealing with disasters. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, slavery was still a thing and so were discrimination and the belief that women are irrational beings. The roots of the Enlightenment are not entirely clean. But the previous centuries have been the start of the end of such nonsense.

If we believe that all people deserve a life without suffering, then we are morally obligated to do what’s in our power to create a society that realizes such equal rights. In the final section of this essay, I’d like to look into some of the values we have to develop as a globalizing human society that deals with scarcity and uncertainties while striving to transcend its own limitations to levels we haven’t seen before.

A broader need for self-limitation

It is a basic ecological law that resources limit the growth of a population. For example, if there’s little water in a savanna, then animals have to compete for it and some will die of thirst. The population doesn’t grow. Humans have transcended this law to a certain degree in the past, by a process called eco-economic decoupling. An example: an increasing chunk of our current economy is based on internet applications. While the internet does require an increasing amount of power, the growth of the economy that is built upon it, far transcends the increasing power demand. With the shift towards green energy, this effect is expected to become even stronger. By our increased efficiency, we manage to decrease our resource demand. Despite the decoupling, we are entering a phase of scarcity of several resources that are vital in our current global economic infrastructure.

There are many technical ways to and decrease the impact of scarcity. All will be necessary, but they merely broaden the bottlenecks; they won’t remove them alltoghether. We will inevitably have to reduce our consumption of certain goods. This means rationing. We roughly have three options here. First, we can keep postponing this up till the moment where some strong authority has to implement a ration because a certain substance has disappeared. Second, we can leave it to the market, meaning the poor will no longer be able to afford certain resources. And third, we can bring this into the public debate and make informed decisions about who gets what. We have seen during the pandemic that this last approach is far from ideal and will lead to new inequalities, but in my view it still is preferable to the other two.

We are no longer used to limit ourselves. It’s something our grandparents were forced to do, but more recent generations have forgotten about. Yet we simply don’t have the capacity to all eat meat every day, fly around the world a few times per year and become obese simply because we enjoy the taste or because it temporarily relieves us from stress. It is a painful insight, but it’s a necessary one, and it applies to the rich more than to the poor. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably among the richest 5% of the world. Voluntary reduction of your consumption is what is needed of you, and it’s time you realised that, if you didn’t already.

Self-limitation goes against our instinct. People want to thrive and procreate. We all have a deep animal urge to eat as much sugary, fatty food as we can find. This desire helped us evolutionary, because these foods contain the energy we need to survive in the long run. We also have the need to stand out, to be recognized in the group and to shine with our colourful new clothes, our big house and our glittery car. It has taken us eras of evolution to reach this amount of societal wealth and celebration. Why stop now? Why not live it while it lasts? Why not create and indulge to the max? Why settle for a liveable life in the many generations after us, if we can have it all here and now?

The cliché, but I think true answer, is that happiness and quality of life do not depend on excess and are in fact reduced by it. You can create lovely art with a few leaves and branches. Or with a paper and a pen. You can make delicious foods for people you admire with three ingredients. You can lead a healthy life with just some friendship and the strength of your body and mind. It’s simple. But the problem is, forcing simplicity upon another, requires a fundamental review of our libertarian values. We can do this reactively, because of scarcity, or proactively out of …, let’s call it wisdom and solidarity. All we need to do, is learn to find joy and creativity in simple things.

Checks and balances would help to reduce our impacts, but what we really want, is that people reduce their impacts out of compassion. Could compassion naturally arise, once our own life is secured? Or will jealousy and vanity keep blinding us to the impact of our deeds? Could what’s happening to the Western birth rate also happen to the consumption rate? Will we see, at some point, that we have everything?

On Saturday: Let live