Hjælpeløs vækst af Dougald Hine

Under min research til min bog, At Work in the Ruins, hørte jeg om mødet mellem Greta Thunberg og Emmanuel Macron. Det må have været i begyndelsen af 2019, kort efter Thunbergs tale i Davos, hvor hun sagde til verdens ledere: ”Jeg vil ikke have jeres håb, jeg vil have jer til at gå i panik.” Da de mødtes i Elysée-palæet, sagde den franske præsident direkte til hende: ”Frankrig kan ikke reducere sine emissioner på grund af sin økonomiske vækst.”

Det, der slog mig første gang jeg hørte dette, var den ærlighed, som indrømmelsen blev sagt med. At fortsat økonomisk vækst ikke kan forenes med økologisk bæredygtighed: Jeg havde hørt denne tanke udtrykt af heterodokse (afvigende fra mainstream. red.) økonomer, klimaforskere og anonyme junior embedsmænd, men det forblev politisk utænkeligt, et forslag som ingen valgt leder eller kandidat, der håber på magt, kunne associeres med. Så det overraskede mig, at det var blevet sagt højt af nogen i Macrons position, selv bag lukkede døre.

Når jeg senere har tænkt over denne historie, er der noget andet, der slår mig, og det er tonen af hjælpeløshed i præsidentens ord. Der er noget her, som jeg tror mange af os genkender fra os selv, når vi forholder os til klimaforandringer; tynget i stille stunder, med bevidstheden om problemets dybde, i spekulationer sent om natten eller når vi ser vores børn lege. Vi ser på verden og har svært ved at forestille os, hvordan ting kan fortsætte sådan, og endnu sværere ved at se, hvordan de kan ændre sig. Hvad optrinnet i Elysée-palæet antyder er, at denne dobbeltbinding ikke er et symptom på vores relative magtesløshed – eller vores manglende evne til at få dem, der har magt til at lytte – men at de magtfulde selv kan være lige så handlingslammede og ude af stand til at forestille sig en løsning.

Dét er knuden, som jeg vil forsøge at løsne: en knude, hvor hjælpeløshed og vækst er bundet stramt sammen. Ved at slække grebet lidt, tror jeg, vi kan komme til at forstå noget om vores situation og måske begynde at undgå panik- og lammelsesfælden, som mange af dem, der er mest bevidste om dybden af det problem, vi står overfor, falder i.

Når en politiker taler om ”vækst”, eller når ordet bruges i en avisartikel, ved de fleste af os, hvad der menes. Begrebet dækker over stigningstakten i en økonomis ”samlede produktion”. Alle varer og tjenesteydelser produceret inden for et afgrænset område og handlet for penge i løbet af et år, lægges sammen og udgør BNP, Bruttonationalproduktet, og denne figur sammenlignes derefter med totaler for tidligere perioder, og de stignings- eller faldhastigheder der opstår fra år til år, bliver til overskrifter i nyhederne. På denne måde vil tilstanden i et land, i en gruppe af lande som EU eller verden som helhed – ”den globale økonomi” – blive repræsenteret af en enkelt figur, der anskues som en overordnet indikator for, om tingene bliver bedre eller værre.

Rapporteringen af økonomisk vækst er den daglige manifestation af en stærk kulturel logik: en måde at se og forstå verden på, der former vores samfunds fornemmelse af, hvad der er virkeligt, vigtigt, muligt og ønskeligt. Denne logik hviler på et sæt af sammenknyttede antagelser, som sjældent udtales direkte, men som, i lighed med en bygnings fundament, forbliver skjult, selvom strukturen uden grundlaget ville vælte.

Den samme logik viser sig i konceptet økonomisk udvikling, hvor verdens nationer kan stilles op og måles som børns højder mod en væg. Når de er rangordnet på den måde – fra ”mest” til ”mindst udviklet” – opfattes det nemt som om dem af os i lande som Danmark eller Sverige, Storbritannien eller USA lever tættere på fremtiden, mens dem i Mexico, Palæstina eller Bangladesh lever i en version af vores fortid. Med afsæt i denne logik kunne Hans Rosling med erklæringen, ”Jeg blev født i Egypten!”, synliggøre, at Sverige i 1940’erne ville score det samme som nutidens Egypten på udviklingsindikatorerne. Men for at det giver mening, må vi antage, at der er en lige linje gennem historien, en smal sti, som alle menneskelige samfund til alle tider har fulgt, og som fører til den levemåde nogle af os har i dag. Med denne antagelse reduceres relationen mellem vores samfund til en envejstrafik i ideer og teknologier – og hvordan skulle de, som indikatorerne viser at være ”mest udviklede”, så have noget at lære af dem, der er bagud?

Det, vi har at gøre med her, er fremskridtets kulturelle logik. Det er den logik, som har igangsat den moralske forestilling om modernitet: nogle af de mest imponerende frembringelser af moderne samfund er blevet inspireret af denne logik, og det samme kan siges om de største rædsler. Når vi taler om fremskridt, er vi tilbøjelige til at se fortiden som en ringere version af nutiden. Fremtiden opfatter vi som det eneste sted at lede efter mulige forandringer. Og historien udlægges som noget, vi kan stille op på et regneark, dens tab afbalanceret mod dens gevinster, for at skabe en fiktiv ækvivalent til BNP, der gør det muligt for os at se, om tingene bevæger sig i den rigtige retning og i hvilket tempo. Baseret på disse antagelser muliggør fremskridtets kulturelle logik, vækst og udvikling en bestemt form for viden og en særlig følelse af handlefrihed. Og dog, som hofmændene i eventyret om ”Kejserens nye klæder” er dem, der ser verden gennem disse briller, ude af stand til at se det, som er tydeligt for det uafhængige blik.

Lad os lave et tankeeksperiment, som måske kan gøre dette klarere. For at beregne vækstraten er det nødvendigt at behandle alle de aktiviteter, hvor penge overleveres, som udskiftelige. Ifølge Verdensbanken udgør landbruget i øjeblikket omkring 4% af den globale BNP. Set i den sammenhæng er dyrkning af mad en relativt lille og skrumpende del af det store kludetæppe, der i dag udgør menneskehedens økonomiske aktivitet. Dette er dog en illusion. Uanset hvilke 4% af kludetæppet den globale økonomi, vi fjerner, vil resultatet være udfordrende for alle involverede. Jeg er dog næsten sikker på, at vi kunne sætte os sammen i eftermiddag, bygge videre på vores egne erfaringer, og identificere 4% af kludetæppet, der kunne udslettes i morgen, til stor gavn for næsten alle: lad os begynde med de største tobaksselskaber, dernæst online gambling industrien, som vi ser reklamer for overalt, eller hvad med reklamebranchen selv? Forestil dig nu et scenarie, hvor landbruget udslettes – og du indser, at netop den industri ikke er en lille og skrumpende del af det samlede kludetæppe, men den underliggende vævning, der holder det hele sammen. Uanset hvad tallene synes at sige, er vi stadig lige så afhængige, som vi altid har været, af landbruget og aktiviteterne omkring dyrkning af mad.

Vores forhold til landbrug og fødevarer spiller en særlig rolle inden for fremskridtets logik. Dette blev tydeligt for mig i en samtale, jeg havde en nytårsaften ved et køkkenbord i et pænt kvarter i en europæisk hovedstad.

Manden, jeg havde denne samtale med, arbejdede som ministeriel rådgiver – eller for en tænketank, en avis eller en af de store NGO’er. Det er ligegyldigt, hvad det var, eller hvor præcist, han fik sin ph.d. Det, der betyder noget, er, at vi næsten ikke kunne forstå hinanden. Det startede, da han spurgte til mit forfatterskab. Noget, han havde hørt, havde gjort ham nysgerrig, og pludselig var jeg i gang med at udfolde disse tanker om fremskridtets logik og de antagelser, som strukturerer den måde, de fleste af os har lært at se verden på. Disse antagelser bringer visse vinkler af historisk erfaring i fokus, sagde jeg, men de blænder os for andre, og det billede af verden, som er resultatet, er stadig mere i strid med den levede erfaring for mange omkring os. Fremskridtets logik kan ikke længere bruges som et fundament for at bygge politiske projekter eller at afgive løfter, der lyder sande. Værre er det, at logikken gør os blinde for de rammer, der giver håb og de handlinger, der er nødvendige i disse tider. Vi skal forstå, hvordan vi kan fortsætte sammen, hvordan man skaber liv, der er værd at leve – uden fremskridt.

Han forstod det ikke: hvordan kunne jeg ikke se, at historien gik i den rigtige retning? I hans verden var fremskridt en kendsgerning, der kunne demonstreres med statistik; at betragte det som en fortælling, et sæt kulturelt bestemte antagelser, var simpelthen forkvaklede (perverst.red). Under andre omstændigheder ville han nok have fundet en undskyldning for at forlade samtalen, men der var lang tid til midnat, og vi var begge gæster i hjemmet hos en fælles ven. Så han fortsatte og forsøgte at finde et solidt grundlag for enighed. Og det, der sidder fast i mit hoved, år senere, er det basale argument, han faldt tilbage på, den kendsgerning, som han syntes sikker på, at ingen kunne bestride.

”Du må i det mindste give mig ret i, at det er godt, at vi ikke allesammen skal arbejde i landbruget længere?”

Når det opstilles på den måde, lyder det selvfølgelig overbevisende: hvem vil argumentere for, at det er en god ting, at nogen skal tvinges til noget? Men lad os vende udsagnet på hovedet og se, hvad der falder ud. Jeg vil se bort fra historierne om tvangsforflytning af landbefolkningen, de enorme bevægelser af jordløse bønder, som kæmper mod de samme processer i dag, og bare spørge: er vi sikre på, at det er en god ting, at vi i vores højt udviklede samfund næsten ikke længere beskæftiger os med at arbejde med landbrug og fødevarer? Hvornår begynder udvikling at føles som hjælpeløshed?

Lad os se på den hjælpeløshed, som mange af os oplever, når vi konfronteres med det, vi ved, og hvad vi, med god grund, frygter i forhold til klimaforandringer. Jeg vil nu præsentere min forståelse af denne hjælpeløshed, hvor den kommer fra, og hvad vi måske kan gøre ved den. Jeg vil også komme med forslag til, hvordan vi kan tænke over vækst, for jeg er begyndt at tro, at der er en vigtig forbindelse mellem denne hjælpeløshed og vores forhold til landbrug og fødevarer.

For det første vil jeg argumentere for, at denne hjælpeløshed ikke er noget nyt, opstået som reaktion på klimaforandringerne. Den har været der hele tiden, kun dens betydning har ændret sig. Inden for den kulturelle samfundslogik, mange af os er født ind i, er vores uvidenhed og mangel på færdigheder eller erfaring med at dyrke jorden, et tegn på fremskridt; vores afstand fra landet er bevis på, hvor langt vi er kommet. For dem, der er mest beskyttet mod omkostningerne og konsekvenserne af modernitet, er klimaforandringer stedet, hvor denne logik rystes og begynder at bryde sammen. Når vores tidligere antagelser forsvinder, er vi ikke mere uvidende eller hjælpeløse end vi allerede var, men det, der engang var en kilde til stolthed, bliver nu en kilde til angst.

Bag meget af det, der siges om klimaforandringer, er der en grundlæggende eksistentiel angst for, hvor vores mad på lang sigt skal komme fra. For at gøre tingene mere komplicerede bor denne angst dybt i vores tarm-intelligens, i de dele af os selv, som vi deler med vores forfædre og vores medskabninger, mens vores samtale om klimaforandringer foregår i et sprog centreret om problemer og løsninger, der taler til en kropsløs hoved-intelligens.

Den mest hensigtsmæssige reaktion på hjælpeløsheden, som mange af os oplever, når klimaforandringernes realiteter rammer os, er at genopdage en anden form for vækst: ikke som en konstant voksende mængde varer, handlet gennem markeder og behandlet som om de var udskiftelige, men som den cyklus af den sæsonmæssige vækst, som vores liv fortsat afhænger af. Jeg mener dette helt bogstaveligt: i modsætning til fremskridtets logik og den stolthed, der opmuntrede os til at have over vores afstand fra landet, ville det være positivt for langt flere af os igen at blive beskæftiget med jorden og få nogle basale færdigheder og erfaringer med at dyrke mad.

Det er klart for enhver, at klimaforandringerne er i fuld gang. Mønstrene af varme og regn bliver mere og mere underlige og mindre og mindre forudsigelige. De dyrkningsmetoder, der har domineret i industrielt landbrug, er særligt sårbare over for disse ændringer, fordi de involverer store satsninger på et lille antal afgrøder. Disse dyrkningsmetoder er også stærkt afhængige af fossile brændstoffer, der ødelægger jordens liv og andre arter, hvilket bidrager til klima- og biodiversitetskriserne. Deres dominans skyldes deres rentabilitet for de få globale firmaer, der kontrollerer hovedparten af den industrielle fødekæde. Dog estimeres det, selv i dag, at kun 30% af verdens mad produceres inden for denne kæde, mens 70% produceres inden for bondefødevarenetværket.

                                                                    *

Når vi kan være mindre sikre på årstidernes forløb fra år til år, får vi brug for stadigt mere holdbare måder at brødføde os selv på. Dette vil kræve en større diversitet af fødearter, mere hands-on involvering, færdigheder, viden og opfindsomhed. De vanskeligere forhold udfordrer vores arbejde med jorddyrkning og dyrehold. Det vil kræve al vores menneskelige snilde, men også mere af vores opmærksomhed, tålmodighed og omsorg, end industriens mønstre generelt har tilladt. Vi kan begynde arbejdet i dag, både i egne haver og i det offentlige rum. Vi kan genopdyrke forladte pletter af natur i vores byer eller bringe liv til affolkede landdistrikter og herigennem opbygge kultur og fællesskaber. Der er næsten helt sikkert mennesker i nærheden af dig, som allerede er i gang.

Ovenstående tiltag er ikke de eneste, der kræves, som svar på den krise, verden befinder sig i. Handlingerne fungerer ikke som løsninger, der vil få problemerne til at forsvinde, men de giver en idé om, hvad der kræves i den forandring af verden, som menneskelig aktivitet har skabt, og de peger på en vej ud af den hjælpeløshed, som mange af os oplever, en magtesløshed som altid er skyggesiden af vækstens, fremskridtets og udviklingens logik.

Oversat af Agnete Shepelern, Daniel Rastén, Jon Auring Grimm & Ditte Marie Nesdam-Madsen

English:

During the research for my book, At Work in the Ruins, I heard a story about what happened when Greta Thunberg met Emmanuel Macron. This would have been in early 2019, soon after Thunberg’s speech at Davos where she told world leaders, “I don’t want your hope, I want you to panic.” When they met at the Elysée Palace, the French president told her straight out, “France is unable to decrease its emissions because of its economic growth.”

What struck me the first time I heard this was the frankness of the admission. That continued economic growth cannot be reconciled with ecological viability: I’d heard this thought expressed by heterodox economists, climate scientists and anonymous junior officials, but it remained politically unspeakable, a proposition with which no elected leader or candidate hoping for power could associate themselves. So it was startling to learn that it had been spoken aloud by someone in Macron’s position, even behind closed doors.

Over time, as I’ve thought about this story, there’s something else that strikes me, and it’s the note of helplessness in the president’s words. There’s something here which I suspect most of us will recognise, if we have been visited by thoughts of climate change; if an awareness of the depth of the trouble it represents has weighed on us in quiet moments, in the small hours of the night, or as we watch our children play. We look out at the world and find it hard to imagine how things can go on like this, yet harder still to see how they could change. What that scene at the Elysée suggests is that this double bind is not a symptom of our relative powerlessness – our inability to get those who hold power to listen – but that the powerful themselves may be as gripped as anyone by the same paralysis of the imagination.

There’s a knot here that I want to try to unpick: a knot in which helplessness and growth are bound together. If we can loosen it a little, I think we may learn something about our situation, and perhaps begin to slip the trap of panic and paralysis which takes hold of many of those who are most alive to the depth of the trouble we are in.

*

When a politician talks about “growth”, or when the word is used in a newspaper article, we have a sense of what is meant. According to the textbook definition, it stands for the rate of increase in the “aggregate production” of an economy: all the goods and services produced within a given territory and traded for money in the course of a year are totalled up to give the Gross Domestic Product, this figure is then compared with the totals for previous periods, and the rate of increase – or decrease – from year to year is headline news. In this way, the state of a country, a group of countries such as the European Union, or the world as a whole – the “global economy” – comes to be represented by a single figure which is treated as an overall indicator of whether things are getting better or worse.

The reporting of economic growth is the everyday manifestation of a powerful cultural logic: a way of seeing and understanding the world that shapes our societies’ sense of what is real, important, possible and desirable. This logic rests on a set of interlocking assumptions which are rarely stated outright, but which, like the foundations of a building, remain hidden from view, though without them the whole structure could not stand.

The same logic shows itself in the concept of economic development, according to which the nations of the world can be lined up and measured like children’s heights against a wall. Once they have been ranked in this way – from “most” to “least developed” – it becomes easy to talk as though those of us in countries such as Denmark or Sweden, the United Kingdom or the United States live closer to the future, while those in Mexico, Palestine or Bangladesh are living in a version of our past. This is how Hans Rosling could declare, “I was born in Egypt!”, since Sweden in the 1940s would score the same as present-day Egypt on the development indicators. Yet in order to talk like this, we must assume that there is a straight line running through history, a single path which all human societies have been following forever, which leads to the way that some of us have been living around here lately. And having made this assumption, the relation between our societies is reduced to a one-way traffic in ideas and technologies – since how could those who the indicators show to be the “most developed” have anything to learn from those who have lagged behind?

What we are dealing with here is the cultural logic of progress. It is a logic which has animated the moral imagination of modernity: some of the most impressive achievements of modern societies have been inspired by this logic, though the same can be said of their greatest horrors. When we begin to talk in terms of progress, we are drawn into viewing the past as simply a poorer version of the present, the future as the only direction in which we might look for a sense that change is possible, and history itself as though it were capable of being represented on a spreadsheet, its losses balanced against its gains, to produce some notional equivalent of the GDP that would allow us to say whether things are moving in the right direction and at what pace. Founded on these assumptions, the cultural logic of progress, growth and development makes possible a certain kind of knowledge and a certain sense of agency. Yet, like the courtiers in Andersen’s story of the naked emperor, those who view the world through this lens are unable to see things which are plain enough to the unassisted eyes of common sense.

 Let us try a thought experiment which might make this clearer. In order to calculate the rate of economic growth, it is necessary to treat all of the activities in which money is handed over as essentially interchangeable. According to the World Bank, agriculture currently makes up around 4% of global GDP. Seen in these terms, the growing of food is a relatively small and shrinking part of the patchwork of human economic activity. Yet this is an illusion. Wipe out almost any other 4% of the patchwork of activity we call the global economy and the result would be hardship for those immediately affected. Actually, I suspect we could sit down together this afternoon, drawing on our own experience, and identify 4% of that patchwork which could be wiped out tomorrow, to the overwhelming benefit of almost everyone: start with the big tobacco companies, the online gambling industry whose adverts are everywhere, or how about the advertising industry itself? Now, imagine a scenario in which agriculture is wiped out – and you realise that it is not a small and shrinking part of that overall patchwork, but the underlying weave without which none of the rest is possible. Whatever the numbers seem to say, we remain as dependent as we ever were on the land and the activities of growing food.

*

Our relationship to land and food plays a particular role within the logic of progress. This was brought home to me by a conversation I got into one New Year’s Eve at a kitchen table in a nice neighbourhood of a European capital city.

He worked as a ministerial advisor, the man with whom I had this conversation – or for a think tank, or a newspaper, or one of the big NGOs. It doesn’t matter which it was, or where exactly he got his PhD. What matters is that we could barely understand each other. It started when he asked about my writing. Something he’d heard had made him curious, and so I found myself tracing out this line of thought about the logic of progress and the assumptions which structure the way that most of us have learned to see the world. These assumptions bring certain aspects of historical experience into focus, I said, but they blind us to others, and the picture of the world which results is increasingly at odds with the lived experience of many of those around us. The logic of progress no longer serves as it once did, as a foundation on which to build political projects or to make promises that ring true. Worse, it ends up blinding us to the forms in which hope could come and the moves that are worth making in times like these. We need to learn how to go on together, how to make lives worth living, in the absence of progress.

He could make no sense of this: how could I not see that history was heading in the right direction? In his world, progress was a fact that could be demonstrated with statistics; to treat it as a narrative, a frame of culturally determined assumptions, was simply perverse. Under other circumstances, I suppose he would have found an excuse to leave the conversation, but there was a long way to go till midnight and we were guests in the home of a mutual friend. So he kept going, trying to find some solid foundation of agreement. And what sticks in my mind, years later, is the baseline to which he fell back, the fact which he seemed sure that no one could dispute.

“You’d have to agree, at least, that it’s a good thing we don’t all have to work on the land anymore?”

Put like that, of course, it sounds compelling: who wants to argue that it’s a good thing that anyone has to do anything? But let’s turn the statement inside out and see what falls out. I’ll leave aside the histories of enclosure and forced displacement of rural people, the huge landless peasants movements which struggle against the same processes today, and just ask this: are we sure that it is a good thing that, in our highly developed societies, hardly any of us are involved with working with the land and growing food anymore? At what point does development begin to feel like helplessness?

*

Let’s bring this back to the helplessness which many of us experience when confronted with what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change. I want to make some suggestions now about the nature of this helplessness, where it comes from and what we might do about it. These are also suggestions for how we might think about growth, because I have come to suspect that there is an important connection between this helplessness and our relationship to land and food.

First, then, I want to suggest that this helplessness is not something new that arises in response to climate change. It was there all along, only its significance has changed. Within the cultural logic of the societies into which many of us were born, our ignorance and lack of skill or experience in growing food were a mark of progress; our distance from the land was proof of how far we have come. For those most sheltered from the costs and consequences of modernity, climate change is the place where this logic is shaken and begins to break down. As our earlier assumptions give way, we are no more ignorant or helpless than we were already, but what used to be a source of pride becomes instead a source of anxiety.

Behind a lot of what is said about climate change is a basic existential anxiety about where our food is going to come from. To make things trickier, this anxiety lives deep in our gut-intelligence, in the parts of ourselves that we share with our ancient ancestors and our fellow animals, while our talk about climate change takes place in a language of problems and solutions that speaks to a disembodied head-intelligence.

I suggest that the best response to the helplessness which many of us experience when the realities of climate change come home to us is to recover another sense of growth: not as an ever-increasing bundle of commodities, traded through markets and treated as though they were interchangeable, but the cycle of seasonal growth on which all of our lives continue to depend. I mean this literally: contrary to the logic of progress and the pride it encouraged us to take in our distance from the land, it would be a good thing for far more of us to get back involved with soil and gain at least some skill and experience in growing food.

It’s clear that the climate is already changing. The patterns of heat and rain become stranger and less predictable. The ways of growing which have dominated industrial agriculture are particularly vulnerable to these changes, because they involve placing big bets on a small number of cash crops. These ways of growing also tend to be highly dependent on fossil fuel inputs, destructive of the life of the soil itself and of other species, feeding into the climate and biodiversity crises. Their dominance has to do with their profitability for the handful of global companies that control key parts of the industrial food chain. Yet even today, it is estimated that only 30% of the world’s food is produced within this chain, while 70% is produced within the peasant food web. 

When we can be less sure of the shape of the seasons from year to year, we will need more resilient ways of feeding ourselves. These will require a greater diversity of food species, more hands-on involvement, skill, knowledge and inventiveness. Getting back involved with land and food under difficult conditions will be a humbling experience. It will call for all of our human cleverness, but also more of our capacity for attention, patience and care than the patterns of industrial activity have generally allowed for. We can begin practising this today, in gardens and public spaces, reclaiming abandoned patches of land in our cities or bringing life to depopulated rural areas, building culture and community through these efforts. There are almost certainly people near you who are already doing this.

These are not the only things that are called for in response to the trouble that the world is in, they do not offer a solution that will make that trouble go away, but they offer clues as to what is going to be called for in the changed world that human activity has brought about, and a path beyond the helplessness which many of us experience, a helplessness which always is the shadow side of the logic of growth, progress and development.