All You Need is Growth?

We hear a great deal today about economic growth. If you listen to our politicians – of all parties – they vie with each other to show they are the true believers in economic growth, and they will deliver more of it and more quickly than their rivals. So entrenched is this acceptance of growth as an economic and political model, that you might almost think it a force of nature, like gravity or the rising of the sun every morning: you would have to be a crackpot to oppose it.

Yet, what creature, what plant, what river or lake in this world continues to grow forever? There is nothing that does not eventually reach its optimum size or comes to the end of its natural life, yet the politicians ask us to believe that they can defy the laws of nature and, indeed science. Plastic waste amasses in our oceans, civic tips pile up with unwanted consumer products, and working people work harder and harder for less real income.

West Sussex writer, Hilaire Belloc, noticed this febrile trend in politics and economics developing one hundred years ago and warned in vivid terms where this would lead – to a world more and more obsessed with the individual at the expense of the whole, and one where craftsmanship, skill and status were replaced by mass production and greed.

As his life, including his political life, took many twists and turns, he remained consistent in his belief in the ‘redistribution’ as opposed to the monopoly or the abolition of property. It was a view that sat uncomfortably with either the socialist or the capitalist point of view, and as a result, Belloc can appear at one moment a revolutionary, and at another, a reactionary. This uneasy, we could say, untenable position, born from his sense of what a just society society should be like, grew from his own experience of life and his strongly held spiritual beliefs.

Belloc saw how industrial capitalism was ensnaring and exploiting millions, but he also saw what brutal tyranny had arisen in Soviet Russia, where millions had been enslaved by the government. In a 1927 radio broadcast, Belloc, reiterated his view that only by the ‘restoration of property,’ could real freedom be found – when all ownership was universal, not confined to a few wealthy capitalists or to governments. Belloc hoped for better days, but he also foresaw what would happen if the system of growth spread across the globe -

“The industrial civilisation which, thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude, leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human a airs…. based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens. Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert. Or it will lead the mass of men to become contended slaves, with a few rich men controlling them. Take your choice.” human

Which one of us today cannot read those words without a shudder, when we contemplate the power and influence wielded over our lives by the likes Je Bezos, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates?

Belloc also perceived that controlling the information ordinary people received was the key to this system advancing. Belloc saw that the purpose of the ‘popular press’ was to stifle debate and divert their readers’ attention with trivial and manufactured news -

“….the press of our great cities is controlled by a very few men, whose object is not the discussion of public a airs, still less the giving of full information to their fellow-citizens, but the piling up of private fortune. As these men are not, as a rule, educated men, nor particularly concerned with the fortunes of the State, nor capable of understanding from the past what the future may be, they will never take up a great movement until it is forced upon them….they will waste energy in getting up false excitement upon insignificant matters.”

In the 1920s, Belloc wrote that there would never be a free stream of information in England until we “Dam the Beaverbrook and Dredge the Rothermere,” a reference to the two lords who owned most of the country’s newspapers.

Belloc sought solace from the world by sailing his small boat around the coasts of Britain, or by enjoying the remoteness of the Sussex Downs. Yet even this was changing. In 1936, he sadly noted that even on Chanctonbury Ring you could hear tra c and the loud ‘machine-gun’ sound of motorbikes passing by on the road below. He could find no escape from “the blind inhuman clatter.”

Towards the end of his life he began to perceive the danger posed by what we would today call ‘Big Pharma,’ although in his time the huge, billion-dollar pharmaceutical corporations were still only a bad dream, although one that Belloc sensed in one of the last verses he wrote –Of old when folk lay sick and sorely tried The doctors gave them physic, and they died. But here’s a happier age: for now we know Both how to make men sick and keep them so.

Belloc was always impressed by the skilled artisans he met in Sussex, who still enjoyed their work and were largely free from oppressive bosses and rigid hours of employment. These were people who made beautiful furniture that lasted a lifetime, or created handmade hurdles and wattles that graced both farms and gardens. There were the shepherds with their extraordinary knowledge, not only of sheep, but of all aspects of the natural world and country lore. Belloc set great store by the rich country dialects of England and the ancient folk songs sung for generations by Sussex men and women.

We live in very di erent times, but have we sacrificed our human spirit on the altar of economic growth?