Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

He cast nature, and indeed matter itself, as devious, disordered, wild and chaotic – a beast that, to quote his words, must be ‘rest...

In Bacon’s writing we can also see hints of another idea emerging. Not only is nature something to be controlled and manipulated, it is also transformed from a living organism into inert matter.

But it was in the hands of another man, only a few years later, that this vision of nature-as-machine was formulated into a coherent philosophy: the French thinker René Descartes.

Descartes realised that the domination of nature Bacon called for could only be justified if nature was rendered lifeless. To accomplish this, he reached back to Plato’s idea of a world divided in two, and gave it a new spin. He argued that there was a fundamental dichotomy between mind and matter. Humans are unique among all creatures in having minds (or souls), he claimed – the mark of their special connection to God. By contrast, the rest of creation is nothing but unthinking material.

In Descartes’ hands, the continuum between humans and the rest of the living world was sliced into a clear, unbridgeable dichotomy.

This vision came to be known as dualism, and Descartes’ theory of matter came to be known as mechanical philosophy.

It was an explicit attempt to disenchant the world – a direct attack on the remaining princi...

And from the 1630s, these ideas came to do...

We often think of the Church and science as antagonists, but in fact the architects of the Scientific Revolution were all deeply religious, and shared common caus...

During the Enlightenment, dualist thought became mainstream for the f...

Of course, the fallacies of mechanical philosophy couldn’t last long. Within a century the notion of inert matter was debunked, as it became clear to scientists that animals and plants and other organisms are in fact alive.34 But the damage was done. Dualism had taken hold in European culture.

It became entrenched because it satisfied the need of powerful groups to divide the world in two.

Writing in the late 1700s, Immanuel Kant, one of Western philosophy’s most celebrated ethicists, wrote: ‘As far as non-humans are concerned, we have no direct duties. They are there merely as the means to an end. The end is man.’

The body as ‘raw material’

During the revolutionary period, peasant work followed a rhythm that from the perspective of industrialists appeared to be irregular and undisciplined: it depended on weather and seasons, on festivals and feast days.

Life was organised around the principles of sufficiency and desire: people would work as much as they needed, and the rest of the time they spent dancing, telling stories, drinking beer … having fun. As the sociologist Juliet Schor puts it:

The medieval calendar is filled with holidays … not only long ‘vacations’ at Christmas, Easter and midsummer but also numerous saints’ and rest days. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales – to mark important life events (brides’ ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in England took up probably one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbours. The ancien regime in France is reported to have gua...

According to the English historian E.P. Thompson, these festivals and carnivals ‘were, in an important sense, ...

All of this posed a problem for the ruling cla...

In Treatise of Man, Descartes argued that humans are divided into two distinct components: an immaterial mind and a material body.

‘I am not my body,’ Descartes insisted. Rather, it is disembodied thought, or mind, or reason, that constitutes the person. Thus the phrase by which we all know him: ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Descartes succeeded in not only separating mind from body, but also establishing a hierarchical relationship between the two.

Just as the ruling class should dominate nature and control it for the purposes of productivity, so the mind should domin...

During the 1600s, Descartes’ views were leveraged to bring the body under control, to defeat its passions and desires, and impose on it a regular, productive order. Any inclination towards joy, play, spontaneity – the pleasures of bodily experience – was regarded as potentially immoral. In the 1700s, these ideas c...

There is nothing natural or innate about the productivist behaviours we associate with homo economicus. That creature is the product of five centuries of cultural re-programming.

Descartes’ theory of the body made it possible to think of human labour as something that can be separated from the self, abstracted, and exchanged on the market – just like nature. As with land and nature, labour too was transformed into a mere commodity; a notion that would have been unthinkable only a century earlier.

The refugees that enclosure was producing came to be seen not as subjects with rights, but as a mass of labour to be disciplined and contro...

Cheap nature

In order to generate profits for growth, capital seeks to appropriate nature as cheaply as possible – and ideally for free.40

The elites’ seizure of Europe’s commons after 1500 can be seen as a massive, uncompensated appropriation of nature.

Enclosure and colonisation enabled the appropriation of cheap labour too. And while capital paid wages, however meagre, to Europe’s proletarian workers (mostly males), it did not pay for the (mostly female) labour that reproduced them: the women who cooked their food, cared for them when ill, and raised the next generation of workers.

As the Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire put it, colonisation is, at base, a process of thingification.42

The colonised were cast as ‘primitive’ precisely because they refused to accept the principles of human-nature dualism.

Indigenous people would have to be forced to abandon animist principles, and made to see nature as an object.

We all know that the violence of colonisation was justified, by its perpetrators, as part of a ‘civilising mission’. What we tend not to grasp is that one of the key goals of this mission was to eradicate animist thought.

The object was to turn the colonised into dualists – to colonise not only land...

Retweeting Descartes

We are all heirs of dualist ontology.

These ideas didn’t end with Bacon and Descartes. They have been retweeted and refined by a long parade of philosophers. Dualist assumptions show up even in postmodernist thought.

Postmodernism prides itself on critiquing the hubris of Mind and Self and Truth, and on questioning grand metanarratives of human progress. And yet in the end all it does is take dualism to new extremes.

The world, reality, doesn’t really exist; or it does exist but it doesn’t matter what it is, in itself, since reality is whatever humans construct it to be. Nothing really exists until it has been realised by humans, constituted in human languag...

Descartes claimed that the purpose of science was ‘to make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature’. Four hundred years later this ethic remains profoundly entrenched in our culture.

We not only regard the living world as other, we regard it as an enemy – something that needs to be fought and subdued by the forces of science and reason.

When Google executives created a new life sciences company in 2015, they named it ‘Verily’. Asked to explain this odd name, Verily’s CEO Andy Conrad said it had been chosen because ‘only thro...

Two Rise of the Juggernaut Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Murray Bookchin

when we think about the longer history of capitalism, it becomes clear that something is missing from this story. Enclosure, colonisation, dispossession, the slave trade … historically, growth has always been a process of appropriation: the appropriation of energy and work from nature and from (certain kinds of) human beings.

We can see this acceleration reflected in the breathtaking speed at which GDP has shot up over the past century. But it would be a mistake to see this growth as driven by fossil fuels and technology. It has been facilitated by fossil fuels and technology, yes; but we have to ask ourselves:

what is the deeper motivation, as it were, that propels capitalist growth?

The iron law of capital

When we go to the shops it’s usually to buy things that will be useful to us, like ingredients for dinner or a jacket to protect against the winter cold. We can summarise this kind of economy like this, where C stands for commodity (like a chair or a pear), and M stands for money: