Human resourcefulness in a time of diminishing resources

‘Progress’ and technology

The seeds of planetary devastation were sown at the time of the early industrial era. This was recognised intuitively by the Romantic Poets: Wordsworth presciently cursed the outrage done to nature, which would ‘avenge her violated rights for England’s bane’. ¹ The critique was taken up by Cobbett, Carlyle, Ruskin, who were seen at the time by some as ‘reactionary’, since they stood against progress − a progress manifest in the prodigious engines of production which had transformed Britain.

Faith in progress dominated industrial society until the mid-twentieth century, and also extended to the moral sphere. All the evils that had afflicted humanity – want, poverty, disease – would, with time, be overcome by the inexorable march of technology and the more elevated way of life made possible by affluence.

This faith was severely shaken, when the ideology of racism was repatriated to the heart of Europe in the 1930s; the more so since the destruction of European Jewry was made possible by the latest, most efficient industrial technology. Racism had never been absent from the political economy of imperialism, but it had generally been confined to the colonial periphery, where starvation, massacres and suppression of whole cultures had long been an aspect of the imperial adventure. But after it had expressed itself in Nazi Germany with such barbarism, the ‘moral’ dimension of progress appeared no longer defensible.

Because social breakdown had occurred in Germany as a consequence of economic disaster, it was in the realm of the economy that atonement was sought. Material improvement became a substitute for moral progress; and the rich societies began to devour the planet. Once set in movement, the culture of consumption took on a life of its own; and would not be halted, even when the Soviet Union, the great socialist rival, had been reduced to rust and rubble.

Violence was seen as a consequence of poverty, and therefore the creation of wealth would assure social peace and equitable ‘development’. As long as people could depend upon a rising disposable income, they would be distracted from the melancholy seductions of both inequality and racism. That this would also involve a ransacking of the earth did not disturb the conscience of those who had devised this expedient for humanity to live happily ever after.

After the dissolution of Communism, the whole world was brought to see the wisdom of the model of development issuing from the pioneers of economic expansion; a vanguard which had long passed from Britain to the USA. The fact that wars, persecutions, migration and crime were not abolished by faith in economic ‘miracles’, did not impair the wonder-working ideology of the age.

In the process, ancient demands for a secure sufficiency, contentment with a modest plenty were by-passed, as the peoples of the world were re-educated in the folly of such formulations. The crisis of climatic heating, species extinction, dwindling of biodiversity, the fouling of oceans, soil and air stem from faith in the limitless capacity of an economic system to offer a ‘permanent settlement’ not only to economic but also to social, moral and spiritual questions.

The day of reckoning is come. Politicians who have promised the earth to the people are finding that the earth has already been spoken for, several times over.

As the material resource-base of the world is depleted, humanity will depend less upon the plunder of ‘natural’ resources, as a largely untapped reservoir of human resourcefulness will supplement the used-up treasures of the earth.

If this possibility is generally avoided by politicians, as a terrifying sacrifice of ‘our way of life’, this is because it was, they – or their predecessors – who launched upon the world the dangerous and destructive cult, a deepening market-dependency, sometimes called ‘consumerism’. This has spread like the wildfires in Australia and elsewhere, which reflect to the world something of the fury within. This cult has also taken on a life of its own which politics and power can no longer re-call or command. Demonstrators and activists against climate change and planetary degradation are wrong to focus their attack solely on those in power; for the cause is also to be found within that same treasured ‘way of life’, which is making converts all over the world, to the wonder – and envy – of more formal religions.

Restraint on abuse of the earth’s treasures does not have to be the disaster some have foreseen. Many deficiencies can be made good from the storehouse of inventiveness and creativity that has historically, for societies which suffered chronic insufficiency, helped to mitigate want, share misfortune and provide for basic needs.

Damage and humanity

There is no damage to the earth which does not have its counterpart in the ruin of the inner landscapes of humanity. As dependency upon consumption has grown, not only have we seen the threat of global warming, reduction in biodiversity, invasion of the oceans and the marine food-chain by micro-plastics, vitiated air and poisoned water-courses, but also, at the same time, an extraordinary squandering of the powers and possibilities within. We have seen a depletion of the spirit, toxic dumps of hatred and poisonous landfills of the psyche, erosion of the sensibility, a depopulation of the heart, acidification of the sympathies and desiccation of the sentiments. This double waste is part of a single, dynamic system. A remedy for the overheating planet cannot be found without addressing the combustion within, the fevers of consumption, the ebullition of desire, all that has scorched the earth in which human resourcefulness might flourish.

This is more than metaphor; although the reflection of planetary disaster in the human psyche is rarely seen for what it is. ‘Human nature’, as represented by the forces of power in the world, has been relegated to a separate realm from the natural world of which it apparently forms no part. And accordingly, it must follow its own course, wherever that may lead. Indeed ‘human nature’ has been the triumphant cry of all who see no need for any adjustment in this best of all possible worlds.

When the energies of people are diverted from directly answering their own and other people’s needs into acquisition of that which will allow them to ‘buy in’ all that is needful for a full life, it is inevitable that, in the process, competence in self-provisioning is diminished. Throughout the industrial period, the world has witnessed a slow devaluation of our own capacities, and their replacement by what may be obtained only through monetary transactions. The allure of what is industrially produced has disgraced all that is ‘home-made’, familiar and imperfect, however serviceable, however durable.

Need versus the market

There are areas in which monetary exchange is appropriate; but in many more it is ruinous. A market, however expansive and sophisticated, cannot be expected to distinguish between the two. And the dogma of ‘free’ markets may lead to the enslavement of human beings no less than the dictatorship of any other ideology. Markets – or rather, those whose credulity they command – mistake wealth for well-being and money for the meaning of life.

Reduction in the intensity of labour has been, perhaps, the greatest blessing of the modern industrial order, along with medicines that have lengthened life and alleviated pain. That is not in question. But these benefits have concealed the suppression of other human longings, among them, desire for a secure sustenance, which has been by-passed by the great engines of industrial production; and it becomes hard to say where human needs cease and economic necessity begins. Because the absence of a sufficiency for survival is the most grievous assault upon human beings, this does not mean that its opposite, excess, represents freedom or even happiness.

There comes a point, surely long past, when the neglect of human competences in favour of market transactions becomes pathological. We, who have lived longest, have witnessed the continuing appropriation of human abilities by an economic system that must grow or perish, and which transforms all experiences into products ripe for monetary exchange. It is a form of enclosure, of a piece with the tradition of enclosing land and the commons by the great historic raiders of the material resource-base. This has left us increasingly at the mercy of a culture which robs us of the power to provide, make or create anything directly in answer to our own, and our neighbours’ needs. When people expressed grief at the dissolution of neighbourhoods, the tearing apart of the great network of sympathy spun by women who made the industrial experience less brutal than it would otherwise have been, these counterparts of the loss of industry were not merely nostalgia for the tenderness of the women who laid out the dead, who served as informal midwives and even lay with the dying so they should not perish alone. They were part of a humanising culture, an inner wisdom, the forfeit of which has made us unable to ‘cope’ without extensive support from counsellors and advisers, the leaders of other people’s lives, as well as the prompters and whisperers of desire, with their hymnals of commodities which distract from life and entertain to death.

We have seen the extinction of the oral tradition and the knowledge it brought of those who made us who we are; and now must seek genealogists, tracers of family trees in the plantation economy and experts in ancestry to unearth our buried identity. ‘Role-models’ are now sought, not in the living flesh and blood of those we love, but in the shadows of celebrities and stars, who are supposed to inspire a new generation. And if it is the natural ambition of the young to become rich, this is because it places at their disposal a ‘purchasing power’, which has supplanted many other human faculties and abilities. When we insist children ‘realise their potential’, we mean easing their access to the potency of money and what it will buy.

‘Human resources’ no longer mean what the words say. ‘Human Resources’ are institutionalised in what used to be called Personnel Departments, in companies, bureaucracies and official establishments. The term now suggests an office, in which indestructible evergreens known to no other ecology, flourish, devoted to data collection and the distribution of ‘cases’ to disciplinary hearings, promotion boards and tribunals. These words should be rescued and treated with the respect they deserve; our reliance upon them becomes more vital, as humanity is forced to renounce the abuse of ‘raw materials’ which has characterised the industrial era. But like wounds to a lacerated planet, human resources will require a period of recovery and intensive healing.

How much ingenuity has fallen into disuse because of the effortless availability of things! Money is a potent somnifer. It can put to sleep human powers and capacities, since it enables those who have it to purchase what they will, instead of exerting themselves to answer the need which the transaction effortlessly accomplishes. This is what Ivan Illich referred to, almost half a century ago, in his Tools for Conviviality, when he wrote ‘People have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead . . . These basic satisfactions become scarce when the social environment is transformed in such a manner that basic needs can no longer be met by abundant competence.’ ²

To state this is not to resuscitate some archaic yearning for unnecessary labour or a vanished world of simplicity, when apples grew on trees and milk came directly from dairy to table, even less for the time when handloom weavers were starved into the factories and bed-linen had to be pawned before people could eat. But the busy somnambulism of fast-food, gratuitous mobility and distracting entertainment are a far cry from the ability of people to answer need by the pooling of resources, mutual help and collective endeavour, without depending upon transnational corporations for the simple necessities of water, daily bread, rice and corn, clothing and shelter.

The devoured treasures of earth have been deployed in such a way as to lay waste also the inner power of people to take pleasure and satisfaction in sustaining themselves and others through their own efforts.

Human topography

During the half century I worked as teacher, social worker, researcher and writer, it was impossible to ignore how existential ills – loss, bereavement, debility, ageing – were decreasingly mitigated by social support, but rather aggravated by the absence of simple interventions that make easier the bearing of common burdens. Residual care for such things is now left to TV programmes, which invite viewers ‘who have been affected by any of the issues involved’ – from rape and murder, self-harm, sexual assault, people-trafficking and hate crime – to call a ‘hotline’, where, presumably, their traumas will be dealt with. Laissez-faire may have deserted the economic realm for season, but it has never before prevailed to such a degree as it does in the societies of North America and Europe. Indeed, much suffering is left untreated, sometimes under pretence of ‘lack of resources’, but also in the name of ‘freedom’ by ‘libertarians’, for whom it is axiomatic that people should remain free to be as poor or unhappy or exploited as they choose.

These are not theoretical concerns. A friend who died in 2019 was for the last twenty years of her working life a psychiatric social worker at a boarding school for children who, in the 1970s and 1980s, were described as ‘maladjusted’. Many damaged, neglected and turbulent children found a secure structure in schools that separated them from an abusive environment. The preventive work she did lapsed when she retired. The schools were closed, psychiatric social workers retired and were not replaced. At the age of 95, as she surveyed the victims of knife-crime and drug-fuelled gang violence, she said bitterly that the children with whom she had worked were saved from such a fate, precisely by the intervention of the ‘caring society’, of which she felt herself a part. The prophylactic structures were dismantled, and the problems of children went unaddressed, and, as a result, became more virulent, often ending in human sacrifice – lives abridged by blade or bullet, and heedlessly thrown away in sites that became makeshift shrines of flowers, teddy-bears, cards and improvised poetry, a muted lament for the squandering of flesh and blood, gone the way of all other discarded resources.

Society has virtually ceased to exist in areas not called ‘deprived’ for nothing, since a generation has been robbed of the capacity to ‘socialise’ their young, who have been delivered directly to the tender solicitude of the market. As a result, they become prey to persistent insecurity and a morbid fear of others, against whose imagined assaults they must carry knives, guns and other weaponry about their person, in order to ‘get’ their enemies before they themselves are targeted. This version of the nature of humanity is, in other contexts, lauded as its most authentic expression – the ideology of ‘dog eat dog’, the ‘rat race’, the ‘law of the jungle’. This perishing of empathy is another aspect of the blight of natural phenomena withered by the searing breath of capitalism. Humans, like all other natural resources, require careful tending if they are not to fall into disuse or become distorted in the pursuit of a diminished version of ‘wealth’.

It is acknowledged that the transformation of the riches of the natural world into artefacts of a disposable consumerism is doubly destructive, in that it depletes the store from which they are taken and then swiftly abandons them to garbage or landfill sites, where, in a baleful second encounter with the earth that produced them, they will leave their contaminants.

Of course, the inventiveness that goes into producing the amenities of the modern world is also considerable. But the development of technologies that alleviate burdens of labour has nothing to do with the neglected experience of joy, compassion and delight that people take in one another’s being, company, conversation, humour and the enhancement of mutual intercourse and exchange. That many of the technologies designed to make our lives easier are used to humiliate, insult, bully and intimidate others suggests that these inventions have less to do with improving human life than with providing fortunes for those with whom they originate.

Improvement and illness

No efforts have been spared to separate the spectacular ‘improvements’ in the lives of the people from the deterioration that accompanies them; that is to say, social goods are carefully sequestrated from social evils, so that they appear to have quite different origins. The products of affluence are the object of a persistent psalmody that elevates and haloes them with an aura of extreme desirability. The evils which attend them are a consequence of human frailty, a distant consequence of the ‘fall’ in Christian mythology, and therefore irremediable. In this way, archaic interpretations of human behaviour persist; and if psychic and emotional disorders, mental illness, sicknesses of the spirit are liable to neglect, it is because au fond, it is believed, despite all the evidence, that this is the province of religion and not the material world at all. The great spoliation of the subjective spaces in our time is like the physical enclosures of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, presented as economic ‘improvement’, for the sake of pasture for sheep, ‘efficiency’ or simply parkland for the rich.

Pillaging of the inner resources becomes, like the diseases of the market, individual pathologies, to be treated in the great isolation hospitals of personal sorrow. In order to protect them from being seen for what they are, they are medicalised or bureaucratised, so that they appear beyond the scope of political scrutiny. For instance, when the World Health Organisation tells us that there are 264 million people suffering from depression in the world, and that this is a major cause of disability, this fact exists in a detached sphere of white walls, hushed corridors and sedation.

In the USA as in Britain, each year one in four people will have some diagnosable mental illness, while 29 per cent of adolescents can expect some impairment to their psychological wellbeing. Between 1997 and 2017 more than 700,000 people in the USA died from a drug overdose. In Britain the charity Relate estimated in 2017 that one in eight adults in the country ‘has no friends’, and that since 2016 there has been a 65 per cent increase in demand for private counselling services. Suicide is the main cause of death for men in Britain between the ages of 20 and 49. In the USA in 2017 almost 40,000 people died by firearms, including almost 24,000 suicides.

Such statistics are usually cited to plead for more ‘resources’ for individual treatment, rather than as evidence of profound disorders in need of radical attention. Despite an heroic and wounded National Health Service in Britain, a pall of human misery hangs over the postindustrial landscapes in much the same way that smoke and grit hung over the sulphurous sites of manufacture in the nineteenth century. This is how the great looting of the heart and spirit of humanity becomes ‘acceptable’, and is transformed into work for specialists, doctors, experts, and others in the rustically-named ‘field’, to deal with.

There is little curiosity about why such crises occur, and whether there might be a relationship between them and an economic and social system of which they are a malignant efflorescence. Rarely does public curiosity desire to know why the richest societies the world has ever seen, produce so much avoidable distress. This is especially clear in the question of drugs: with dealers, children used as couriers and go-betweens, or suppliers and poisoners of the minds of innocents, only ‘supply’ is at issue. Where does the demand or need for mind-altering substances arise in societies whose institutions are the most sophisticated on earth; where everything has been brought to such a degree of perfection that nothing requires to be changed, except, apparently, the minds of the people?

The disclosure of statistics, figures and tables dissimulates the disturbance within – mouldering wastes of resources abandoned, unharvested crops and stagnating waters, the festering of unused energies and rejected powers. The industrialisation of humanity, and more recently, the creation of artificial intelligence (not all of it, alas, confined to machines) preclude the now unfashionable form of liberation Illich meant in Tools for Conviviality, when he wrote of deliverance from ‘a consumer society [in which] there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy’. The vision of Illich – ‘joyful sobriety and liberating austerity’ is blasphemy to the ears of those accustomed from infancy to the melancholy lullabies of acquisitiveness. Illich observed that people have many capacities, each of which meets a need. ‘The means for satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities.’

It is upon a reclamation of that ‘only marginal dependence’ that future hope, disengagement from the capitalist version of Škvorecký’s engineers of human souls, rests. The surrender of an ‘abundant competence’ to industrial entities robs us of forms of wealth that can never be made good in the realm of monetary exchanges, and leaves to new generations an undreamt-of bequest of loss. What can young victims of marketised technology know of the richness of the inner life, when they are susceptible to bullying, diminished sense of self, an inability to conform to models of perfection which have no counterpart in daily experience? The psychic resource-base of a new generation has been impaired, just as the natural world has been used up to feed needs, desires and appetites, the purpose of which is to expand and grow an economic system, not to protect, make wise and give a sense of purpose and value to children and young people. Damage to the ecology of the planet always mirrors the desolation within: incalculable upheavals in the heart and spirit and imagination – the mining of desire, the weaving of fantasy, the forging (in every sense) of need, the large-scale excavations, the uprooting of identity, a debasement of idealism. A great industrial enterprise has been at work, modifying, altering, reconstructing the spaces within, just as the towers of glass and steel, the mega-projects that now tower over the cities have replaced neighbourhoods and homesteads. As monumental structures have diminished the human scale in the great agglomerations, so cold images of perfection, inaccessibility, celebrity and wealth have eclipsed the real power of flesh and blood to cherish a generation which will inherit a world without meaning. Perhaps that is the worst fate that can befall any culture, as the ruin of the fragile cosmos of indigenous peoples by colonial incursions never ceases to attest, when the remnants of ruined civilisations retreat to city slums to die of grief, drugs and alcohol.

The chaos within is not a new story. No doubt, in the slums and tenements and sweat-shops of the nineteenth century, with its gin-shops, street-children, abandoned infants, domestic violence and internal squalor, the inner landscapes of the poor – had they been accessible to observers and reformers – would have presented an aspect no less wretched than the external imagery of want and devastating poverty. But at that time, these were seen merely as an attribute of that poverty. With the dramatic transformation of the landscapes of the world, where anthems to luxury and excess fill the ears and images of wealth and extravagance assail the eyes, it is harder to associate the stream of cruelty and violence that flow through the culture with the regime of which it remains, at least partly, an expression.

In the nineteenth century, in every industrial town and city, mills, pits, factories, forges, shipyards stood as choiceless deterministic monuments, waiting to absorb the energies of the young. The far more diversified division of labour in the contemporary world was to have freed the people from forcing their inclinations and abilities into a single occupation. Since almost 80 per cent of the economy of Britain is now located in the ‘service sector’, this might have been expected to be a liberating experience.

Harnessing meaning

Yet many are dissatisfied with or repelled by the work they perform, since it is often detached from any identifiable human need or function. In 2015, a survey of British workers found that 37 per cent thought their jobs were ‘meaningless’. ³ They have learned that the employment structure does not exist for their benefit or self-fulfilment; and the growth of sub-contracting, the so-called gig-economy, the casualisation and degradation of work, means that, however governments boast of full employment, this bears little relation to the needs, desires or even capacities of those who carry out the labour of society. The mudlarks, cress-sellers, vendors of second-hand clothes, the runners of errands, chimney-sweeps, umbrella-repairers, sellers of the hair of the dead have their counterparts in the pizza-delivery drivers, the waiters for work on-line, the zero-hours contracts, nail-polish colour-namers, pet psychiatrists or subway-pushers. That so much talent remains stifled, so much ambition choked may be seen in the long-queues that form outside TV studios for talent and singing shows – a great sea of young people seeking celebrity, fame and money, a way out of boredom, labour that negates their hopes, uses up their energy and crushes their spirit.

This is of a piece with all the other reckless misuse of the reserves of the earth, jettisoning that which is as precious as corals bleached by pollutants, soil defiled by toxic residues, the metabolism of living creatures, including human beings, host to the scourings of a plastics industry. For so we should regard the contamination of our most elevated powers by the sombre monoculture of money, the human tribute due to a system which has detached wealth from life. If a fraction of this waste of human possibilities were deployed in the mitigation of suffering, much of it created by the very processes which claim to relieve it, who knows what might not be its liberating effect, and its capacity for ‘empowerment’; that much abused term suggesting the severely limited power which the truly powerful are going to confer benevolently upon the weak.

These developments are a result of what is, perhaps, one of the greatest social surgical operations ever performed, one before which even the most intricate procedures known to medical science pale: a by-pass of the heart of society by the market, so that the market communicates its lavish spectacle and treacherous promises without intermediaries to the individual. Whether the occupied territory within can be freed as quickly as a ravaged planet can renew itself is no academic question, for both are an aspect of the same pathology.

Rereading Keynes

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, in his Essays in Persuasion, foresaw a future of leisure and abundance. Yet he imagined that we would adhere to the economic conventions of accumulation, repellent though this might be, until we were rich enough to cast them away.

For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

Keynes warned that the time to dispense with the existing economic paradigm had not yet arrived. In the meantime,

for at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. ⁴

Keynes’ readiness to postpone morality for a century might be regarded as an acknowledgement of reality; and although many have suggested it since, there is little sign of any general readiness to dispense with the ‘laws’ of economics, however discredited. For Keynes’ compromised vision of a moment when ‘absolute needs’ would be satisfied, and we would be prepared to ‘devote our further energies to non-economic purposes’ has been forgotten, in favour of a growing dissipation of the riches of the earth, including the prolific human powers that lie, like fallow fields, neglected in the shadow of the industrial garden of earthly delights.

Far from the prodigiously rich countries declaring themselves satisfied with what they have, they have, instead, insisted upon a permanent insufficiency of resources for all the purposes to which they claim to be dedicated; and in the process have spread this injurious doctrine to the whole planet. The peoples of the world have had to be taught that they are poor, in order to learn of the necessity for perpetual growth. Marshall Sahlins, in Stone Age Economics claimed that hunter-gatherers constituted the original affluent society; not because they were overwhelmed with possessions, but because they generally enjoyed enough for their sustenance. ‘Primitive’ economies have been used as a spectre to frighten the rich as dominated by ‘mere subsistence’, ‘an incessant quest for food’, ‘meagre and unreliable’ natural resources, ‘lack of economic surplus’. These conventional views are used to justify the imposition of alien forms of provisioning upon those who had no idea they were poor until they fell under the benign tutelage of imperial powers. ‘Poverty’, writes Sahlins, ‘is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation.’ ⁵

The restorative capacity of the earth and its resources can only be accomplished with a parallel regeneration of human resourcefulness. The future of humanity will not cease to depend upon the fruitfulness of the world; but if reduced dependency upon economic growth is to be achieved, it will be accompanied by greater reliance on the slumbering powers of people to answer need for themselves and each other, to offer consolation, meaning, and fulfilment, a mixture of joyful material frugality and a rich social, spiritual and emotional life, nourished by re-awakened competences and a retrieval of wasting inner powers.