Unsustainable Sustainability

[scholast]

Dittmar’s Talk

Michael Dittmar, a physicist, environmentalist, and the president of CERN discussion club “ConCERNed for Humanity”, recently gave a talk “After the RIO+ 20: disaster reflections about the unavoidable transition to a sustainable way of life.” In his talk he “quantifies how unsustainable our current society and its development really is”, concluding “that the end of cheap energy will likely mark the beginning of the process which brings our industrialized cultures to their knees”, and suggesting “different theoretical and real options for the coming years and decades.” The talk appeals “to learn (and practice) how to live less and less unsustainably and how to enjoy this, to contribute to the defense, conservation and enlargement of the remaining biodiversity and small scale human cultures.” As a “most important point”, the speaker calls “to act for a world without weapons of mass destruction now.” The author foresees that “during or after the unavoidable collapse, basically two social options remain: feudal-like/mafia-like larger scale societies with unsustainable pseudo stable conditions, and small scale egalitarian societies, surrounded by a growing biological and cultural diversity.” Below I am suggesting my reflection on dominant environmentalist appeals in general and this talk in particular.

Main Questions

No question, ecological sustainability will come: the resources are limited, and nonrenewable energy sources are going to be over. The question is: how will it come? What will be the natural, the demographical, the social, the political and the spiritual characteristics of humanity at the transitional and at sustainable historical periods? Does the humanity have a chance for a meaningful life after the nonrenewable resources are gone? What should be the current short- and long-range goals for this life be meaningful?

Creativity and Freedom

The greatness of the European civilization lies in its creativity – philosophical, artistic, scientific, social. Its creative power is unique, by far exceeding all other civilizations –contemporary as well as past ones. The European civilization is a very special cultural space, where new entities are appearing at extreme power. That burst of creativity has its roots in the ancient world; then after the catastrophe of the Dark Ages it reappeared in the Renaissance, increasingly growing after that. Creativity is not just one of the human values and abilities - it is a core of humanity making us different from animals, it is the substance of our history.

If one will look into the most creative periods of the European nations, it becomes rather obvious that there is a strong correlation between creativity, progress, in a broad sense, and personal freedoms and civil rights. Individual freedoms and creativity support and enhance each other. When the freedoms were oppressed, the progress stopped, and stagnation or degradation started. This correlation between the two factors, political and cultural, is not instantaneous, there is a delay of a generation or two, but still it is rather obvious.


Loss of Freedom

If progress and freedoms are so strongly related, what then forced the European nations in different epochs to come to oppressive political regimes, what forced them to lose their freedoms? A general answer could be following: freedom not only led to benefits, but also created new problems with a permanent seduction for the once-and-for-all problem solving by a means of people’s unity for all good things against all bad things. In the last century we had two examples of these, seeming to the participants as goodwill, actions of the united people. One was driven by a teaching based both on convincing scientific analysis and strong appeal for justice. This movement is known as Marxism. Another strong movement was based on the patriotic unity and solidarity of one of the greatest European nations. It is known as national-socialism. Results of these two movements are well-known, although not yet enough reflected in people’s minds. The two teachings were quite different, but identical at a certain point: they both were based on a frustration of liberty - thus, they disrespected and despised personal freedoms, seeing them as an enemy to their surely right social orders. Since the freedoms were already strongly rooted in the social life, triumphs of the new glorious orders required those impressive crimes they both had committed.

Pointing to injustice in the lives of the working people, to the greed and the cruelty of bourgeoisie, Marxism pointed to real problems. However, its proposed solution was wrong. Implementations of Marxist teaching had never improved lives of working people; on the contrary - that made them much worse. In the countries where proletarian parties came to power, proletarians, together with the rest of the population, were turned to the worst form of slavery. Similarly, the patriotic teaching of national socialists lead their beloved nation to its gravest crimes, tragedy, and humiliation.


Environmentalism and Marxism

There are clear similarities between the two socialist teachings of the past, especially Marxism, and mainstream environmentalism.

• Similar to Marxism, sustainability teaching is based on real and significant problems.
• Similar to Marxism, it claims itself irrefutably scientific. The consequences for its opponents follow.
• Similar to Marxism, scientific greens treat their opponents as agents of the privileged classes; similar to Marxism, this movement is heavily infected with fanaticism and intolerance.
• Similar to Marxism, the sustainability teaching does not care or even despises personal freedoms of thought and actions - religious, political, economical. It is not an accident, that in his entire talk, Michael Dittmar did not say a word for importance of personal freedoms - in that he just follows the green mainstream.
• Similar to Marxism, green teaching appeals to increasing government control, on the state and international level.
• Similar to Marxism, it appeals to a new egalitarian order. Similar to Marxism, it does not realize that egalitarian goals without real primacy of libertarian law lead to a serfdom. Favoring “small egalitarian groups”, Michael Dittmar does not care that all those groups were and are totalitarian. That is why they do not have their history, time is stopped for them.

Do not all these similarities mean that results of the winning sustainability teaching should be expected similar to Marxism as well?

Marxism and environmentalism have the same epistemological drawback, which both of them consider as their main merit - an extremely scientific approach, described by F. Hayek as abuse of reason [1]. Due to their scientism, they both are missing the human essence, creativity, which cannot be taken into account by any scientific method. Science is dealing with existing things, it cannot deal with something not existing yet. However, creativity is an ability to bring into existence an essence which did not exist before. That is why any scientific approach is very limited in its forecasts. History was never and cannot be ever designed since it follows from extreme multiplicity of creative ideas and actions. An absolutization of the scientific approach in its application to humanity leads to negation of creativity and freedom. Science, as any other branch of culture, is born by the freedom of thought and creativity; however, this baby is fatally unable to see its parents. That is why not only Marxism, but any purely scientific worldview is blind to freedom, thus tending to be a totalitarian teaching.


Whoring after Idols

There are some differences between Marxism and green teachings. One can mention that the greens do not have yet their “Das Kapital”, that this movement is extremely variegated. In that sense, it is more similar to general socialist movement than to Marxism. Another difference is that Marxism is based on a value of scientific and technological progress, it’s a progressivist teaching, while the ecologism, based on a value of nature, is a regressivist one. Politically, ecologism can be described as regressivist socialism. Spiritually, ecologism is one more form of idolatry, and as such has many similarities with other idolatries: fascism, national-socialism, communism.

In its core, the problem of sustainability is a problem of values, of the meaning of life, of idolatry and religion. Arnold Toynbee, the author of classical twelve-volume “A Study of History”, wrote in 1955 [2]: “The plan on which the decisive spiritual battle was likely to be fought was neither the military nor the social nor the economic nor the intellectual; for in A.D. 1955 the crucial questions confronting Western Man were all religious.” Meaning of life, how it was discovered in the European history, is based on the inspirational vision of human divinity. This inspiration is a great source of all the miracles of the Western Civilization, its fantastic discoveries in all the branches of culture. Main tragedies in the European history were related to a loss of this inspirational vision, to following idolatries of empires, nations, egalitarian order, science, progress. Any idolatry is based on absolutization of an essence which is good by itself. The evil comes when this specific good is absolutized and worshiped as an ultimate good. At this stage the good entity turns to be an idol. When the commandment “thou shalt have no other gods before me” is broken - the evil comes. Now humanity is going to be seduced by a new idol - the idol of nature. Actually though, this idol is not new; it is a return of an old - very old - idol in new “scientific” clothing. This idol always promises to feed those who worship him. Are we going to sell our birthright?


True Danger

Michael Dittmar predicts an ecological and a following social catastrophe, promising without any doubt a “hard landing”. Are we really doomed to his dark scenario? I do not think so. Yes, the nonrenewable resources are reducing, but this is a slow process. Decrease of oil, gas and coal natural reserves will take century or centuries. For uranium this time is several times longer. This process already causes and will cause slow average growth of prices on the energy resources, increasing market demand for energy-saving and renewable energy technologies. If human freedoms are not suppressed by state’s degradation to totalitarianism, mafia rule or socialism, people will continue to make inventions and apply them for their own and social profits. There is no reason to doubt the inventive and entrepreneurial ability of current and following generations. The only power, which is able to stop our creativity is we ourselves. History knows many examples of stagnating and degrading societies. They all were / are entrapped in the vicious circle of blocked individual freedoms. The main danger is not in the environmental problems per se, but in totalitarian tendencies of environmentalism.

Michael Dittmar also calls “to act for a world without weapons of mass destruction now.” Does he mean to convince all the nuke-possessing countries to get rid of WMD now? If so, it is, softly speaking, strange. If it is an appeal for unilateral disarmament of the West - it is an appeal for the West to become a voluntary hostage of any nuke-possessing dictator.

At least a few words have to be said about the problem of overpopulation. Well, contrary to Malthusian nightmare, the European population does not grow any more; it declines. Causes of that change of the population trend are in cultural demands of the Europeans, in their priority of quality of life for their kids over their quantity. This change of the demography trend by itself shows a power of a free society, its ability to prevent an ecological catastrophe of the overpopulation. However, high quality of life in the Western countries attracts immigrants, whose mentality and values are not European. This is a true challenge and a real danger for the West. The ancient Greek-Roman civilization fell because it was too attractive for the outside tribes. The civilization fell under invasions of too many barbarians. As a result, the dark ages started. A hard challenge for the West is not to repeat this sad precedent, but turn aliens into new good Europeans.

The ecological problems are important, but the real danger is not in these problems per se. By themselves they can be solved and overcome due to the inventive spirit of the European civilization, increasingly growing onto the entire humanity. The real danger is in old and new idolatries, in totalitarian teachings, in eternal seduction of escape from freedom [3].


Responsibility of the West

The Western civilization is suggesting a paradigm for the humanity: for Latin America, Russia, Muslim world, India, China, Africa. For none of them, this path can be easy and short. It requires something much bigger than technical education. It requires for Man to see himself according to the Western DNA - as a free kid of God, Who is the Source of Reason and the World Creator. The individual freedoms and creativity are the consequences. The West is a leading power for the entire humanity; thus, the Westerners have a special responsibility for the destiny of humans, and may be for the entire Universe.

I am thankful to my son Lev for discussions and his help in preparation of this paper.

[1] F. Hayek, “Road to Serfdom” (1944), “Counterrevolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason” (1952), and other works.
[2] A. Toynbee, “A Study of History” (1974).
[3] E. Fromm, “Escape from Freedom” (1941).