1 Enough is enough?
Re-imagining an ethics and aesthetics of sustainability for the twenty-first century
Lawrence Buell
DOI: 10.4324/9781315795522-2
âSustainabilityâ and âthe good lifeâ are both very elastic terms â so elastic as to raise suspicions of bad faith.1 On one hand, what many consider the âgood lifeâ is ecologically unsustainable. On the other hand, âsustainabilityâ has a bad history of being co-opted as a euphemism in order to justify a degree of economic development only a little less bad than worst-case exploitation. Such has been the ambiguous legacy of the landmark 1987 Brundtland report, Our Common Future, as the eminent Norwegian environmental philosopher and activist Arne NĂŠss (2008:294â297) was one of the first to foresee. If we hope to be good earth citizens, then we must narrow down what counts as the good life to practices that would enable and further ecological sustainability and narrow down âsustainabilityâ to mean an order of existence better than the status quo: one that would conduce to and insofar as possible optimize the flourishing of human beings together with that of nonhuman life and planetary health generally. NĂŠssâs admonition could not be more telling: âa development is ecologically sustainable if and only if there is a long-term trend that ensures, or that may justifiably be considered to ensure, ecological sustainabilityâ (2008:298).
Within these normative bounds I shall venture some reflections about âenoughnessâ, both at the level of personal ethics and at various social levels. Given the nature of the subject, this discussion will perforce be more exploratory than prescriptive and more idealistic than pragmatic, suggesting pathways far easier to commend in principle than to realize in practice. As I do, readers will quickly perceive my disciplinary bias as an environmental humanist, a bias that I seek to turn to advantage here, however. For I maintain that literature and other expressive arts â by reason of their power to rivet attention and to motivate through narrative, image and symbol â have a much more significant role to play in identifying and combatting todayâs environmental crises than is usually recognized.
The impediments to bridging the gap between notional value and behavioural practice begin with the divergences in understanding of âenoughnessâ among persons and across societies and historical epochs. These differences in turn are influenced by judgement calls about many specific ethico-environmental factors such as proper standard of living, proper balance of work and leisure, level of resource consumption possible without exhausting supply, and so on.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find philosophers drawing the line very differently when defining the standard of material enoughness necessary to the good life. In Aristotleâs Nicomachean Ethics, the good life â for male citizens, that is â presupposes a certain affluence, a certain surplus of assets: because, he writes, âit is impossible or at least not easy to perform noble actions if one lacks the wherewithalâ (1962:21; I.1099a). Whereas for the Stoic Epictetus the proper âmeasure of possessionâ is minimum bodily need: âIf you go beyond its fitness to the footâ, he warns, the shoe âcomes first to be gilded, then purple, then studded with jewels. For to that which once exceeds the fit measure there is no limitâ (1944:347).
In modernity, the dominant tendency has of course not only been more Aristotelian than Stoic but also to go far beyond the moderation Aristotle elsewhere counsels. âWhat is âenoughâ?â asks E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful:
Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues âeconomic growthâ as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of âenough.â There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich country that says: âHalt! We have enough?â There is none.
(1973:25)
Schumacher wrote those words 40 years ago, and they are even truer today. No rich country, indeed only one country worldwide, meets the UN Human Development Indexâs criteria for both sufficient human well-being and sufficiently light âecological footprintâ: Cuba.2
Not that the wealthy countries of the world should rush to imitate the Cubans. The point is simply that the world at large has a grave ethics of sustainability problem. In a thoughtful assessment of the ethics of enoughness at the personal level, Robert and Edward Sidalsky â a British fatherâson team of economist and philosopher â make the same claim about intrinsic human nature that Schumacher makes about societies. Human âmaterial wants know no natural boundsâ; âthey will expand without end unless we consciously restrain themâ (2012:69).
The Sidalskys are too anthropocentric to say anything very useful about environmental ethics per se. But that does not lessen the relevance for our purposes of their historical diagnosis that the inherent human susceptibility to immoderation has been aggravated in modernity. As they see it, a crucial unintended consequence of scientific and industrial revolution was an ethical paradigm shift. During the nineteenth century, they argue, this led to a fetishization of economic growth that still persists as the key measure of social well-being and, concomitantly, to the displacement of traditional sufficiency-based models of the good life by an ethos of ceaseless striving after progress and improvement.
Against this, the Sidalskys offer a counter-model to the bad ethics of progress-first: seven basic requisites of the good life, in the following order of importance: health, security, respect, personality (that is, a sense of inward freedom), âharmony with natureâ, âfriendshipâ and âleisureâ (ibid.:165). This recipe of ingredients is certainly worth consideration. My chief interest here, however, is not in such âbottom-lineâ seven-step solutions, but in frameworks and fundamentals. For an environmental humanist, the importance of Small is Beautiful and How Much is Enough? lies especially in the failure of modern ethical imagination, individual and collective, that they both describe. This failure requires value transformations on three interlocking levels, which if seriously undertaken by a critical mass of people might bring about all else. These are: voluntary simplicity at the individual level, bioregional mindfulness at the subnational level and ecosocial equity at the national and international levels. In what follows, I shall take up each in turn.
Voluntary simplicity
The question of enoughness arguably starts with individual persons, especially those with the freedom and means to make discretionary choices. If a large number of well-off people, in the rich world especially, made a concerted effort to consume less and manage with less stuff, planetary health would surely benefit.
Voluntary simplicity (VS) is an ethos towards which many more are attracted than can justly boast of having achieved, however. I cannot deny living in a single-family home in a prosperous suburb, notwithstanding the distinct remembrance of passionately agreeing with my best friend in youth that the curse of life was superfluous property. But I take consolation knowing I am not alone. The prominent American poet-essayist and agricultural reformer, Wendell Berry, rightly insists that: âA protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is⊠a convocation of the guiltyâ. (1972:74). The protesters themselves are inevitably more or less complicit in the wrongs they decry. So too with a forum on VS at a Western research university. Many, if not most, of the participants who are sympathetic to the VS as an ideal are likely to prove reluctant, when put to the test, to adjust their lifestyles more than a limited degree in accordance with it. In a late 1990s poll of American attitudes towards materialism, 83 per cent of those responding agreed that the US consumes too much and a still higher percentage agreed that âprotecting the environment will require âmajor changes in the way we liveââ, but only 28 per cent claimed they themselves had voluntarily made lifestyle changes in accordance within the past five years (UNEP). I suspect that the same poll would yield quite similar results today. Such has long been the nature of what might be called âenvironmental doublethinkâ.
A certain slippage between professed values and behaviour is only to be expected. Such has no doubt been the case universally and for all time. The prophets of the great world religions stood for a degree of self-restraint that institutionalized Confucianism, Christianity and Buddhism have never matched. In the secular arena, US history offers perhaps a particularly egregious case insofar as American promise has for centuries been linked both to striking it rich and to the dream of a purified social order. As the American historian David Shi writes, the dream of the simple life â Puritan, Quaker, Shaker, Transcendentalist, etc. â took hold in early colonial times and remains deeply embedded in national culture, but it also has a way of âbecoming enmeshed in its oppositeâ even while serving âas the nationâs conscienceâ, and âthereby providing a vivifying counterpoint to the excesses of materialist individualismâ. âThe simple lifeâ, he predicts, âwill persist both as an enduring myth and as an actual way of livingâ (1985: 277â279), but with no guarantee that any one movement will endure for long.
Indeed, there is good reason to worry about worsening trend lines in the contemporary US, of accelerated techno-social change depleting planetary natural resources and a widening gap between haves and have-nots.3 These have been aggravated by the entrenchment of the conjoined assumptions that economic growth is the key to well-being and that mass consumption is crucial to that growth process. The âConsumer Republicâ, as historian Lizbeth Cohen aptly calls the American variant of that persuasion, seems actually to have been born during the Great Depression, although it did not really take off until the broad-based boom in national prosperity after World War II, which devastated the economies of all other major world powers and put the US in a uniquely advantageous competitive position for the next several decades. The consumer republic âpromised the socially progressive end of economic equalityâ (Cohen 2003:118) â unfortunately without establishing adequate âmeans of redistributing existing wealthâ (ibid.:129), the temporizing argument among policy-makers and legislators being that âan ever growing economy built around the dynamics of increased productivity and mass purchasing power would expand the overall pie without reducing the size of any of the portionsâ (ibid.:401). Although this grand vision looks less credible today, Cohen rightly points out that âpatriotic shoppingâ continues to get held up in the twenty-first century as a distraction from foreign wars and as a remedy for recessions, despite recurring worry that the US and many European countries are spending beyond their means.4
Meanwhile, however, the valuation of economic prosperity itself as a measure of well-being has been increasingly questioned by economists and psychologists as well as ethicists. Does more money really make people happier? The unsurprising answer seems to be that although every societyâs haves are happier than its have-nots, âextra income increases happiness less and less as people get richerâ (Layard 2005:230).5 On a 2005 life-satisfaction poll, the cohort of âForbes richest Americansâ rated only slightly above groups of âTraditional Masaiâ tribesmen and of Pennsylvania Amish farming communities (cf. Biswas-Diener 2008:314). That the Masai and the Amish, whose ecological footprints are so much smaller than the billionaires, claim to feel so good â relatively speaking â seems a strong prima facie argument for simplicity as a corrective to the prodigalities of affluence.
VS as a self-conscious persuasion by that name, arose in the US as a counterweight to the Consumer Republic idea. Social philosopher Richard Gregg, a Gandhi admirer and nonviolence advocate, coined the term in a 1936 pamphlet written, he wrote, against âHenry Fordâs idea that civilization progresses by the increase in the number of peopleâs desires and their satisfactionâ. (1936:4â5). Gregg would keep consumption within bounds by propagating an ethic of âsingleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within [and] avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of lifeâ (ibid.:25).
Gregg knew that he did not invent the ethic he describes. He cites many precedents ancient and modern â Moses, Buddha and Gandhi among them. Of the American precursor whom Gandhi himself would have cited, however, Gregg curiously makes no mention: Henry David Thoreau. That Thoreau could matter much more to Gandhi than to Gandhiâs disciple Gregg can ironically be traced to Thoreauâs own mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. In late Victorian Britain, admiration for Thoreau as a progressive thinker in matters of politics, diet and general lifestyle was nurtured by the radical intelligentsia whom the young Gandhi met there, whereas the stateside vision of Thoreau that dominated until the mid-twentieth century was the image made famous by Emersonâs remembrance of him as a standoffish person who could be admired only with a shudder, because âthe severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human societyâ (1903â4:479).
What this image blocks out is restored by sociologist Robert Wuthnowâs enlistment of Thoreau in a perceptive book about traditions of moral restraint embedded in the American version of the Protestant work ethic. Wuthnow distinguishes two such strands, which he calls âascetic moralismâ and âexpressive moralismâ (1996:340). Both, he rightly claims, still persist, although in attenuated form. The first operates according to a âfixed set of morally prescribed rules of behaviorâ (ibid.:72) that regulate it. The second operates from the quest for modes of work fulfilling to the spirit. Wuthnow classifies Thoreau as a type-two expressive moralist.
Emerson of course knew Thoreau intimately and Wuthnow only through his writings. But ...