Restoring wisdom
Chris Thomson asks whether Scotland is making real progress
Is Scotland making progress? Well, it all depends what we mean by ‘progress’. Many will assume that if the economy is growing, we are making progress. Others will understand progress in terms of how healthy, educated, socially just and environmentally friendly Scotland is. There is a third understanding of progress, well off the radar screen of public debate in Scotland. Before revealing what it is, let us examine the other two.
There is nothing intrinsically desirable about economic growth. It simply means that more money was spent this year on goods and services than was spent last year. It does not tell us anything about the desirability or quality of these additional goods and services. It does not tell us anything about the human, social and environmental costs of providing them. It does not tell us anything about income and wealth distribution. And it does not tell us whether we are happier and healthier. The main national economic indicator, GDP, treats the good, the bad and the ugly as if they were all good. If there is more crime to be dealt with, more divorces to be sorted out, more pollution to be cleaned up, and more illness to be treated, then all of this counts towards economic growth. GDP gives us the impression that things are going well when they may be going badly. There are several good alternative indicators. Among the best known are the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). Unlike GDP, they subtract the costs of economic growth from the benefits, to give us a truer picture of progress. It is significant that while GDP in many developed countries has been rising more or less consistently in the last 50 years, ISEW and GPI have been tailing off since the late Seventies. While it is true that economic growth lifts the very poor out of abject poverty, there comes a point in the development of every economy when economic growth becomes counterproductive, and produces more problems than it solves. The advocates of growth tell us that if the economy is not growing, we have ‘stagnation’, and that if it is declining, we have ‘recession’. Yet surely there is nothing wrong with a society that is not consuming excessively and that actually chooses to spend less money on some types of goods and services. Imagine a Scotland where people walk and cycle more, where less money spent on divorce and crime, and where people take more care of their health and need less medical treatment. There would be less spending overall, but this would mean less growth and that would be taken to mean that we were doing badly. The other main pillar of the growth argument is that we need economic growth in order to eradicate poverty, unemployment, injustice, disease and crime. In fact, there is much evidence that the opposite is true. The *pursuit* of growth may be at the root of much ill health, crime, social breakdown, inequality, and environmental degradation, since it keeps putting increasing pressure on people and nature. Using economic growth to try to solve problems is like trying to put out a fire by throwing petrol on it.
What aboutother progress? Is Scotland really healthier, better educated, more socially just and more environmentally friendly? Scotland is not healthier. We have some of the worst health statistics in the developed world, but it is widely believed that many health problems can be reduced by addressing poverty, deprivation and inequalities. Although this may be true in extreme cases, it is questionable as a general proposition. Just as economic growth becomes counterproductive afer a certain stage of economic development, trying to cure health problems with economic growth could prove just as counterproductive, particularly if these problems have some of their roots not in poverty, but in materialism, overindulgence and the stresses caused by the pressures to work harder and consume even more. Although New Labour has reduced the number of people living below the poverty line and looks likely to meet its target of reducing child poverty by 25 per cent, it has failed to close the gap between rich and poor. In fact, inequality has increased every year in the last eight. The standard response is to claim that, although inequality is undesirable, what really matters is ‘equality of opportunity’. This might be true if money did not continue to buy so much advantage, in healthcare, education, and in many other ways. The reality is that social mobility is not improving and that current public service reform initiatives will simply reproduce in the public sector the advantages already enjoyed by the better off in the marketplace. Scotland may actually be less socially just than it was 10 years ago. As for the environment, it is significant that ‘sustainable development’ has come to mean ‘economic growth as usual, while trying to do less damage to the natural environment’. That is neither sustainable nor is it genuine development. There is an urgent need to redefine sustainable development to include health and the fabric of society, in addition to the natural environment, because these are just as threatened as the natural environment.
A word about the role of business. Business could, if it wished, play a major role in the shift from away from the economic growth agenda towards the sustainable development agenda. After all, business has a powerful vested interest in the sustainability of health, society and planet. Without these, there would simply be no business. However, business is unlikely to be able to embrace sustainable development until it abandons its attachment to the organisational equivalent of economic growth, i.e. the drive for profit maximisation and the drive to make the company bigger. That, in turn, is unlikely to change until the law changes. As company law stands, directors of companies are under a duty to maximise shareholder return, which is interpreted as maximising profits. The law does not impose a duty on directors to ensure that the activities of their companies enhance people, society and the planet. The CSR (corporate social responsibility) movement attempts to redress the balance, but it is swamped by the huge pressure for economic growth and profits. The law should be changed.
Adopting a wider understanding of sustainable development that includes the sustainability of health and society as well as the natural environment would be a big step in the right direction, but it might not be sufficient in the longer term to get to the roots of our problems. To do that, we may need to adopt a very different approach, which may seem strange and unfamiliar. For an example of what I mean, let us look at the Lakota in North America. We used to call them the Sioux. It is now generally accepted that the Lakota – and many other tribes of the Americas – used to live relatively healthy, happy, sustainable lives. Perhaps they would still be living that way today if they had not encountered modernity, in the form of the United States. That encounter, about 130 years ago, changed everything for the Lakota. It forced them to give up their healthy, happy, sustainable lives and to try to live modern lives instead. That proved to be catastrophic. Although it is true that modernity brought them cars, fridges and televisions, the tribes had to endure all the downside of modernity - poor health, addiction, dishonesty and crime, and wanton violence. But what exactly is this ‘modernity’ that proved so catastrophic for them? Modernity is the set of values, beliefs and behaviours that have shaped, and continue to shape, the modern world. They determine virtually everything we think, say and do.
Arguably, modernity has its origins in the worldview of modern science. Science has become very powerful and influential. So much so that all metaphysical, religious and philosophical claims that contradict science must be rejected. And if, as science insists, the universe began suddenly for no reason, and life emerged by chance, then the whole show must be meaningless. The fact that this statement, as part of the universe, must also be meaningless is little consolation. A life without meaning is a bleak life indeed. For many people today, the search for meaning has become little more than a constant attempt to find quick gratification and to try to solve the endless problems that they are constantly creating. Modern societies are also characterised by loss of wisdom. If science rejects the accumulated wisdom of the ages in favour of its own empirically derived body of knowledge, then wisdom is devalued and no longer informs our lives in the ways that it still informs the lives of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples. The obsession in modern societies with evidence and empiricism means that we end up having to prove everything, even the blindingly obvious. In non-modern societies, people are content simply to know things without feeling that they have to prove them. Perhaps we should not be surprised that, with wisdom and meaning pushed to the margins of our lives, we have become the most dangerous and destructive form of life on the planet. Modernity is also characterised by materialism. We live in an era of rampant materialism. Too many of us give the highest priority to money and material things. Conversely, we give far too little priority to spiritual things. Our economics, our politics, our education, our healthcare and our culture are all strongly influenced by material values and beliefs. We are paying a high price for this. Why are we surprised that we exploit and damage each other and the world? It is because we do not care for things we do not value. It is a short step from materialism and loss of wisdom and meaning to economism and consumerism.
Economism is the tendency to view the world through the lens of economics, to regard a country as an economy rather than as a society, and to believe that economic considerations and values are the most important ones. It is significant that in non-modern societies economics is a means to an end, whereas modern societies have made economics the end itself. Consumerism is the attempt to acquire happiness, fulfilment and identity through the acquisition and the possession of material things. Although people report that they get temporary satisfaction from shopping, they say it does not bring lasting happiness, and they need to do even more shopping to try to compensate for that. Consumerism is a dangerous downward spiral. By marginalising wisdom and removing deeper meaning from people’s lives, modernity has unwittingly created a spiritual vacuum. As a consequence, many people feel that something very big is missing from their lives. They experience this lack as anxiety, discomfort, fear, insecurity, or a sense of pointlessness. They try to compensate in all kinds of ways. They overeat, overconsume, engage in a lot of activity (no surprise that being busy is regarded as a virtue today), or they use sex and drugs as pain-killers. Modernity struck deep at the qualities that had enabled the Lakota to live relatively healthy, happy, sustainable lives - wisdom, deeper meaning, and spirituality. The Lakota’s problems were, until recently, identical to Scotland’s problems. The litany is all too familiar; obesity, alcoholism, addiction, depression and suicide, and crime. It significant that, while Scotland seems unable to solve her problems, the signs are that the Lakota are beginning to turn things round. Most significant, in my view, is the fact that the Lakota seem to be doing this not by using the moderniser’s solutions of service delivery and economic growth but instead by bringing wisdom, deeper meaning, and spirituality right back to the heart of their society. How they actually do this is beyond the scope of this article.
This is entirely logical. If, as it seems, modernity strikes at wisdom, meaning and spirituality, and if loss of wisdom, meaning and spirituality is at the root of many of the problems of our times, then it makes eminent sense to do whatever it takes to bring wisdom, meaning and spirituality right back into the heart of public and private life. Doing this might well be a key that will unlock sustainable solutions to Scotland’s seemingly intractable problems. The implications of this are immense, for it suggests that money and material things are unlikely to solve our problems, and that current policies will therefore not work, except as short-term expedients. It suggests that the solutions lie instead in replacing spiritual poverty with ‘spiritual wealth’. However, even if enough people were persuaded that this is the way forward, how, in practice, would we restore wisdom, meaning and spirituality to a society that has marginalised these things for so long? If Scotland really wanted to become ‘the best small country in the world’ then it would put this question right at the very heart of its policy debates and public discussions.
Chris Thomson is Director of Central Purpose
