What It Means to Be a Grown-Up Civilization
Tackling the politics of sustainable, balanced growth
By MARTIN REZNY
You may be wondering what exactly do I mean by “grown-up”. And you’d be right to do so, because I mean it more in the sense that the opposite of a grown-up civilization is one that’s childish, rather than one that completely stopped growing. This metaphor works quite well on a number of levels.
Once a person becomes a grown-up adult, it doesn’t mean that they have to stop growing in every sense of the word. It’s more a question of how having grown up, maturing both physically and mentally, transforms the nature of further growth. It’s very simple — largeness doesn’t equal greatness.
While having more power is by default better than having less power (again in both meanings), it’s more a question of what one does with the power. It is also by default more impressive to accomplish larger greatness the less power you had to use to do so. Again, doesn’t matter if we talk electricity or politics.
So far, our civilization seems to be obsessed with greater largeness, measuring how awesome we are by how wasteful we can get. Like a child would, and not a particularly bright one. What kind of advice would you give it? I doubt you’d congratulate it on having figured out life and tell it to never change.
Looking at a society as an organism, a theory called organopolitics, is something that has been disqualified ever since the Nazis used it to justify their version of eugenic Darwinism, but that doesn’t mean that every possible version of it must be entirely incorrect. Nazis had a bit of a toxic mindset.
Specifically, their minds were set on the acquisition of more “Lebensraum”, or “living space”, which they would take, as the fittest political organism around, from the weak and degenerate races. Let’s call this subset of the theory predatory organopolitics, and leave it deep in prehistory, where it belongs.
If you look at a society as an extension of a human organism, an intelligent, social creature, aspiring to achieve a more symbiotic relationship with its environment, the conclusions of organopolitics become very different. If you look at mature persons who live balanced, fulfilling lives, what do you see?
Here are some highlights. They tend to use violence only in self-defense and vastly prefer conflict prevention, first and ideally with diplomacy. If that fails, they go for deterrence by being prepared and vigilant. If that fails, they use the minimum amount of force necessary to end the conflict, ideally quickly.
They don’t go about starting fights, especially not to take other people’s stuff, like living space or resources. If they start getting short on resources, they will conserve them until the situation improves, and it will improve, because they will start working to remedy the situation immediately, if it was unforeseen.
More likely, though, they had foreseen all kinds of calamities and already have pre-existing plans and reserves to deal with the current one. As for plans for growth during good times, they also have those. Plans that account for a growth that would be affordable, so the calamity wouldn’t be their fault.
Mature persons would still like for things to improve over time, for their society to grow larger, become more advanced and sophisticated. But they wouldn’t be jealous or spiteful, so they wouldn’t need their society to be better off than other societies. They wouldn’t want to live at the expense of others.
They would still likely value their family and friends over strangers, and strangers over wildlife, but they wouldn’t want to hurt any other living thing unless they had to. They would understand, and not resent, that human life depends on other kinds of life, and they would try to preserve enough of it.
As for “enough” as a concept, they would grasp it, and would see growth as a means to meet their legitimate needs — feeding, housing, clothing, health, education, defense, needs tied to tangible realities. They would indulge themselves in some excess, to celebrate life, but they would have sober goals.
They wouldn’t hoard stuff they don’t need, they wouldn’t flaunt excess, because they have nothing to prove to other people. They may have a lot they want to prove, but to themselves. They would challenge themselves to become smarter, more skilled, more kind, a better parent, better steward of the earth.
They wouldn’t consider it productive to churn out ever-increasing amounts of meaningless material crap, or numbers in ledgers. They would see value in things with intrinsic value, like knowledge, art, or companionship. Abstract goods that need some energy, but rarely sustained obscene amounts.
Considering all that, our current civilization clearly isn’t anything like a mature person. Perhaps it has something to do with a shortage of mature persons in leadership, perhaps with a shortage of mature persons within the population. Perhaps with the aversion of mature persons to politics.
Whatever the underlying cause is for the immaturity of our civilization, nothing about what kind of sociopolitical transformation needs to take place is mysterious. Every person is supposed to grow up, to stop behaving like a child. To the extent that anyone does, it should help the global situation.
Given that following this metaphor, we’re an orphan species, we unfortunately don’t have any parent to snap us out of our current temper tantrum. Well, tough luck, we still have to do it. Then again, I guess you could count calamities like pandemics as parental interventions by Mother Nature.
I understand that having to grow up isn’t fun, and that many people will die because of this mess. But that’s precisely the point. Having to do some serious introspection, become responsible, and deal with one’s own limitations, mortality chief among them, are the key themes of mastering adulthood.
To address the ageism lurking in the shadows of these arguments, becoming a grown-up isn’t guaranteed just by getting older. It may happen, or not, at any age. If you look around, you’ll find a bunch of pretty grown-up kids and a bunch of pretty immature grandpas, as well as the other way around.
There are many mature people of all ages everywhere. The sociopolitical challenge before us is to figure out a workable way to get the majority of people to support mature politics and mature leaders, and to somehow get many more mature people to involve themselves in politics. It is possible.
I’m reasonably sure we’ll get there, eventually. The open question is how much more self-inflicted pain we’ll have to go through before that happens. I think it’s important to keep in mind that immature people are not an enemy to be condescended to. A mature person shows understanding and compassion.
What that means in practical terms is that it’s not enough to just be right about inconvenient truths and declare them, they have to be communicated in the right way. Resolutely, yes, but with calm, patience, and respect. Not in a divisive, judgmental, antagonistic manner. I you want to help, act like it.
Mature people are still free to disagree about any number of things, after all, just not about the realities of problems. There doesn’t have to be only a single sustainable solution to our future, both ecomodernists and degrowthers may have a point. Wouldn’t it be nice to debate that, instead of “What problem?”
If there is an enemy of humanity right now, it would be the legion of lobbyists and other lackeys of the child emperors of business and finance. People who might even be mature themselves, but who are disingenuous, or at least morally apathetic. These are the people who have to be fought.
With words, of course, unless you’re drawn into an actual war, but in a decisive fashion nonetheless, wielding truth as your weapon and integrity as your shield. Your enemies will cheat, but that just means you’ll need to become proportionally better than them. Becoming corrupt to win is defeat.
Maybe not in some scenarios, but definitely if what you’re fighting for is a cause that transcends personal gain. If you can’t be trusted, then people won’t trust your politics either. Buying off opponents is how the billionaires neutralize the credibility of political movements attached to the opponents.
There’s a difference between being a mature grown-up, and being conservative or cynical. A mature person doesn’t feel the need to take shortcuts. They also realize they absolutely can fail while trying to do the right thing in the right way, but that they still have to try to do no wrong.
But that gets into a whole another discussion about what it means to be a good person. A mature person may decide to not be good, an immature person may decide to be good, and anyone who decides to be good may fail to actually do good in the end. Conversely, an immature asshole can do good.
A useful way of looking at the moral aspect of being a grown-up civilization is that putting a well-meaning mature person in charge is by far the best bet for the long haul. Sustained lack of maturity, good intent, or integrity is bound to cause harm more often than it does good over an extended period of time.
Again, none of this is rocket science. As long as you think of the society as a person, which is a pretty close analogy, what kind of person do you think it should be? How should it behave? As a drunk hooligan? Probably not. As a narcissistic teenager? Probably not. As a grumpy grandpa? You get the idea.
Figuring this out will not be an end to politics or history, only a new phase in the development of our civilization. Eventually, like all organisms, our civilization will meet its end, but it is on us whether it will be as a wise elder at peace, or as an insufferable manchild winning a creative Darwin award.
