89
Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
89 points (100.0% liked)
Degrowth
824 readers
5 users here now
Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I dunno man. If you look at aboriginal peoples around the globe who still live by their old native ways like in the Amazons, in isolated parts of Asia, Africa and Australia, and how American natives used to live, I'd say they were doing pretty well before western colonization happened. Greedy fuckers would get put in their place pretty quick or cast out of their collectivity for having antisocial behavior that is typically associated with greedy people.
The greed that we know today, historically speaking, is fairly recent. With its money and loans and debt and accumulation of wealth.
So no. I disagree with your argument that it is a problem with humanity. It's a problem with a system that's been built over time by a small group of people who were craving power.
Your analysis is certainly pretty easy on you personally, though, isn't it? Someone else is to blame, move on. Whenever you take part in modern society - eating meat, driving and flying, buying junk and throwing it away, everything basically - it's someone else's fault, move on. Personally I choose to accept that I also have some responsibility in the matter.
As for the virtuous-native argument, I don't buy that either. For one reason: population growth. A human civilization can never be sustainable unless its population is stable. It's just basic ecology. Well, AFAIK, there is no premodern human society that has mastered this. Their populations are all increasing, just from a lower baseline, since they haven't adopted farming yet. Their impacts may be lower because the absolute numbers are lower, but the trajectory is exactly the same. I know that's not a popular opinion among the race-obsessed modern American left, but I'm a universalist so that's how I see it. The color of people's skin does not exempt them from responsibility. We're all humans, we're all implicated in this endeavor.
Jared Diamond's book Collapse contains an anecdote which is a possible caveat. Apparently some of the premodern societies of the New Guinea Highlands have, in fact, mastered birth control and so managed to stabilize their populations. But AFAIK this is very much an exception. Even if one believes that premodern society - without proper healthcare, mostly patriarchal, often violent - is superior to ours, one still has to contend with the population issue. Humans in my view are all the same. We all want the same thing, we're just progressing at different speeds towards the same reckoning.
I think we can pick one story and show one thing, and then another one to show another thing. Or hell, pick the first one again to say something different than the first time.
History is a malleable thing, and what you base your argument on is a version of it, not sure it's the truth.
But the gist of what you are saying is that any people would have done what White folks did. Just give them time.
You know, I don't believe that. White folks were exceptionally OK with genocide, we always have been. Intergenerational traum, I guess, from the millenias of tragedy of the Continent.
To presume that our white trajectory is the necessary trajectory for ALL PEOPLES, because 'ecology' (which is a scholarly discipline defined by who, may I ask) is.... BONKERS.
I'm sorry, I am sure you are bright and you seem well-read and intelligent but the idea you propose as an infallibility for all humans is completely and utterly bonkers.
The concept of "white folks" is entirely unscientific, it's an American cultural construction.
But yes, I am indeed saying that we just need to give other cultures time and we will all end up at the same destination. I don't essentialize humans by their arbitrary racial characteristics.
I think you miss the point of history and cultural legacies.
I'm not making the argument that genocidal violence is in the genetic markup of white folks.
White folks is broadly speaking "European-descended people".
I think this group of people is... Special in this regard. Most likely due to infighting and a long history of savagery - not due to their DNA!
So... Other peoples won't necessarily have this brutal background, and so would not necessarily have done what white folks did.
I think owning up to the uniqueness of what it means to be white, or European-descendant, is an interesting project. And that project should not be tossed aside by some rationalisation that, incidentally, is terribly convenient for.. white folks.
Boring meal on Christmas eve?
So it's not about DNA yet it is about being "descended" from these people whose culture was uniquely evil? This sounds very, very like essentialism.
The convenience of the "rationalisation" is in any case moot if the person you're addressing does not even accept your label of them ("white"). What do you propose to do about that problem? Tell them that you know what invented category they belong to better than they do?
What a mess! I resubmit my simpler solution: we are all humans, there is only one species, we are all implicated in its successes and failures, end of story.