In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 sci-fi film, Arrival, extraterrestrial ships descend to float ominously over various points of the earth. (Spoiler alert!) Amidst a backdrop of widespread fear and panic, scientists are employed to make contact, to study the strange beings inhabiting these ships and try to come to terms with what they might want.
The aliens speak in utterly foreign ‘logograms’ – beautiful circular images with recurring patterns (see image above) that allow some form of understanding to eventually be developed. However, attempts at communication with these beings soon break down, amidst panic at the use of a symbol which is (mis)perceived as ‘weapon’. Governments do what they do best, and enter an aggressive war footing. Armies are mobilised to counter the threat.
Arrival, however, is ultimately a thoughtful film about understanding and communication, not the dramatic Hollywood flick about aliens and warfare that it might appear on the surface. Rather than weapon, it turns out, the extraterrestrials are trying to provide a ‘means’ or ‘tool’ – and, well, I’ll let you finish the film from there.
Degrowth has been described even by its proponents as a ‘missile word‘ – an idea so shocking and provocative that it is difficult to co-opt (though there are many who try). With the release of yet another poor critique of degrowth, this time authored by Eoin McLaughlin in The Conversation, it is clear that the knee-jerk hostility which faces degrowth is also a problem of understanding amidst uncertainty.
To continue the analogy between the misunderstanding that ensues in Arrival, and that between degrowth and its constant train of critics, it is clear to any fair-minded reader that degrowth advocates – these alien beings to the status quo – are trying to provide humanity with a gift, not a literal missile or weapon. At a time of polycrisis, Degrowth is about discovering pluriversal ways of understanding and proceeding which are both equitable and truly ecologically beneficial. Yet it is consistently (mis)perceived as its opposite: as a threat, or a weapon which will implode the economy. The barrage of poorly-grounded critiques (here’s another from last month) makes clear that, at the end of the day, this is not just an issue of rage farming and click bait, but also a question of misaligned languages, world views, and histories.
This time, McLaughlin, an economics professor deeply rooted in the worldview of neoclassical economics, argues that the UK’s ailing and unequal economy shows us what life would be like under conditions of degrowth. Rather than recognising that degrowth is a process of democratically cultivating and slipping into very different socio-economic patterns altogether, the author erroneously puts forward the UK’s decades-long stagnation and decline in living standards as a ‘case study’ for what inevitably happens under conditions of degrowth. The end of degrowth is to ‘impoverish people’ apparently.
The article is not entirely bad faith. There is some attempt to concede to the degrowth perspective. McLaughlin acknowledges, for instance, that degrowthers ‘do also call for various pro-equality measures, so the comparison only works up to a point’. But what is the ‘point’ to which the comparison works? I would argue that by comparing apples and oranges, there is no point at all – just a total breakdown in communication and a failure to read the extensive and nuanced degrowth literature on innovation, technology and decoupling. While McLaughlin points to the UK’s declining GDP figures, must it really be repeated time and again: degrowth is not the same as recession.
The article itself is not much different to those which have come before, so I won’t go into a point-by-point breakdown. Rather, the point here is to encourage us to take a deep breath and give more time to those who would like to engage in genuine dialogue around growth and post-growth, rather than shouting ‘weapon’ and jumping straight on the offensive. Indeed, on the side of its advocates, this might even include judiciously recognising when the use of the term degrowth becomes an obstacle to communication, or distraction from other issues. We may, from time to time, step away from it temporarily or altogether. After all, even when it serves its purpose, it does not subsume all relevant socio-ecological questions. However, like in Arrival, we must at least be willing to accept the gifts being offered, in spite of misunderstandings and mistrust, and this article is simply another example of an academic refusing to do that.
We can debate this until the cows – have died out.
There is only one direction for an overshot species; down. And we have levered ourselves (using fossil energy to do the work) into a grossly more overshot position than if we had not tapped into that one-off resource. So we have much further to fall, than if we’d kept on with a largely solar lifestyle, as per up to 1800. It still wasn’t sustainable – hence Europeans needing to expand – but it wasn’t as unsustainable as we are at present.
Really, economics as taught, is telling a lie – a fatal one for billions, and a consumption-reducing one for many who will survive; perhaps all. We need to be challenging them head on – but we also need to be building the replacement social constructs, the replacement food systems, learning/teaching the future-relevant skills.
One point to achieve progress in this discussion – the neoclassical economic argument depends only upon the constructs created by neoclassical economics. The self-fulfilling prophecy aspect must be clearly recognized. Pretending and insisting that economic constructs actually represent and capture reality is an outrageous and pretentious falsehood that costs lives and causes vast suffering. False imaginations have kidnapped us and confined us within the imposed terminologies and operations. We do not need to accept nor obey economic constructs imposed by wealthy elite minorities operating through anti-democratic governments.
Economics as constructed and failing is fully in power. It is fervently anti-democratic and unaccountable. To address this pervasive social norm, we must recognize the arrogance, the systemic corruption and the presumed authority with which unelected members of a single discipline of thought have effectively imposed extremist economic views onto our world. Instead of ensuring that other disciplines of knowledge, and other universes of human values are fully utilized, political economics performs its essentially totalitarian and reductive manifesto of domination and coercion. Fully colonized by this ideological extremism, we have grown into passive acceptance of our commodification and our anti-social submission to a destructive artifact of the imaginations of minority wealth and power. Fiction has become truth… but this ‘truth’ will never set us free. Nor will it promote the well being of people and planet. Neoclassical economics is essentially false advertising with a sick heart. Politics has bought the lies. The myth must be shattered and replaced with a pro-social economics with foundationally different principles.
By enacting a blatant imperialism of the intellect, many generations have been dominated and coerced into operating according to an authoritarian economics. We need to remove neoclassical economics from constituting the supreme power of nations. Accompanying this would be changes in laws and banking with the necessary enforcements to redirect our new economics towards equality and the provision of affordable life necessities, not for profit, under a reduced and cleaner energy use format. A peaceful world would also be a much less expensive and dirty world. A democratic and accountable world is necessary to unseat authoritarianism dressed up democracy.
Escape our cognitive entrapment – do not kowtow to the installed economics.
That my friends is “growth” in a very real and positive sense!
Back in Grade 10 I read Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud for Chemistry (it had a good exposition of the scientific method). One of the sub plots was communication with an alien — the titular “cloud”. At first the decision was made to “make the foreigner learn English” but the Cloud eventually observed that doing so limited the conversation to things we humans already knew. In addition our language uses a lot of short cuts to streamline conversation but at the cost of specificity of meaning. To expand the discussion usefully, the cloud suggested that we learn its language.
It didn’t go well.
The first human to learn this language burnt his brain out.
Having guessed that the issue was a difference of perspectives, the second survived a little longer by choosing the new, alien, perspectives in place of his own. Eventually, he encountered a cherished belief that he couldn’t relinquish and he too died.
A few years later, in university, I took a survey course in computer languages. It was patently clear with these purpose-built languages that each made certain operations very easy whilst making others quite difficult. The underpinning philosophy and functionality of the task informed the style of the language.
Human languages perform similarly.
There must have been something in the water at the end of the twentieth century because two writers conceived of very similar aliens whose omnidirectional physique mirrored a particular non-linear perspective and philosophy: Robert Sawyer with the Wreeds of Calculating God and Ted Chiang with the Heptapods of The Story of your Life… Arrival.
Common to these stories is a version of Maslov’s Rule of the Tool — if you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail.
But they also touch on the power of language to limit… or expand… on what you can think, convey or understand. In the case of the Heptapods the limit of temporally-bound cause and effect was relaxed.
The movie illustrates the difficulty of communicating across language barriers with the baggage that each language brings to the table. The word “weapon” was plucked out of the handbags of the humans who were in the room. Their language was philosophically adversarial and their language equally so.
In our political discourse we have a similar thing happening. We all think we’re talking “English” but each side often has a different understanding of the identical words being used. Or worse, has redefined the words the correspondent on the other side of the table uses to mean something diametrically opposed to their actual meaning.
Maybe the solution is a new language that is “alien”, that loses the baggage that constrains mutual understanding. It would probably be like one of our computer languages. I liked Algol. It was self consistent and self defining… no baggage from COBOL or APL or anything else. That could work.
But maybe our heads would explode.
Nicely summarised! Author of the piece here — this is why I am interested in Nowtopias, at the very least we can learn future-oriented skills for resilience, and begin constructing infrastructures which are more able to cope in what is to come.
Many interesting points. Glad to see science fiction being referenced!
I’m not sure that human languages have underlying philosophies that are all that different. After all we share the biological experience of being human. I know several languages and they are more different flavors than different philosophies.
I learned Esperanto which is about as neutral a language as is practical. Very easy to learn. Contrary to popular belief, I think it may be due for a revival, as tensions increase between the English-speaking world and the Global Majority.