Beyond the Limits to Growth?
Addressing these issues, so The Future of Money argued, would force a redesign of the monetary system before 2020, because a monopoly of a single currency created by bank debt could not possibly allow citizens, businesses and governments to develop workable solutions. Only by opening up the possibility of a plurality of exchange means could we overcome the obstacles that we are facing in the 21st century. In a sense, The Future of Money focused on the need to re-think money in order to answer the questions formulated by The Limits to Growth. Essentially this was because the conventional principle of creating money through interest-bearing bank credit has a systemic growth obligation built into it – not even necessarily out of ideological choice (although this can also be present as an additional factor), but out of sheer mechanical necessity. Therefore, seeking to counteract all the deleterious effects of economic growth without questioning the omnipresent monetary tool that drives this growth, could not work. But getting to the solution requires us to find a way to see some way around the monetary blind spot that we identified in Chapter II. An economy based on several currency systems running in parallel would actually not be new. In reality, it would be the recovery of an ancient idea. In Dynastic Egypt and the Central Middle Ages in Western Europe – to name two examples – such an idea was considered totally obvious. As Jean Houston put it elegantly: “The icons of old are the codings of tomorrow. And tomorrow holds the promise of recovery of forgotten wisdom.”4 Still, the assimilation into common sense today of such an old idea requires that it be heard, understood, accepted and internalised. This is a very ambitious goal, as some learning will be needed on almost everyone’s part. For today’s elites, particularly financial elites, revisiting the classic works of Arnold Toynbee5 or more recently the writing of Jared Diamond,6 might be useful. Toynbee is the economic historian who demonstrated that the collapse of 21 different civilisations could be attributed to just two causes: too much concentration of wealth and an elite that, confronted with changing circumstances, remains unwilling to shift its priorities until it is too late. Diamond focuses on environmental degradation as a proximate cause for the collapse of civilisations. We are currently pushing the limits on all three causes, at the same time! Being part of an elite is no real protection in a collapsing civilisation. Is the advent of a monetary ecology, even if it implies some losses compared to the status quo, not a suitable terrain for compromise?
4 Jean Houston, Life Force: The Psychohistorical Recovery of the Self (1993), p.13. 5 Toynbee (1939). For a mercifully abridged version, see Toynbee (1960). 6 Jared Diamond (2005).
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