Laurence and I are gaga over Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living:For an Alternative Hedonism, Verso Books, 2020, which we’ve been reading for a few minutes each morning these past couple weeks.
Because we’re also super busy right now on a multitude of other projects, we’ll not develop any long summation, other than to say WE NEED A NEW POLITICS AND A NEW ECONOMY IF WE WANT OUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN TO INHERIT A LIVEABLE WORLD.
Soper focuses on the pleasures that these new practices will bring about, rather than preaching a gospel of doom and austerity or promoting some fantastical head-in-the-sand response to the crises we face.
Here are some of our favorite passages:
p.12
[People writing on nature today] tend to hold back from any serious or sustained targeting of the everyday consumption practices that are mainly responsible for our environmental crisis.
p.13
Think of the flight patterns of the eco-tourists, the globe-trotting of eco-critics moving from conference to conference, or simply the amount of car-driving that goes on to beauty spots and nature reserves.
p.33
…This in turn will require a revolution in our thinking about the very nature of progress and prosperity—a revolution that challenges the idea that consumer culture delivers the good life even to those with the means to buy its goods, that undermines attempts to maintain the hegemony of work over our lives and value system, and that highlights the pleasures for everyone of a less speed-driven, time-scarce, acquisitive way of living. Only if the left commits itself to an alternative politics of prosperity along these lines have we any hope of setting off the relay of pressures that might issue an effective mandate for change.
p.47
…Paul Mason’s terse remark, “If climate change is real, capitalism is finished.”
p.50
…various initiatives [seek] to bypass mainstream market provision via alternative networks of sharing, recycling, exchange of goods and services and expertise (the Slow City, Slow Food movement, Buen Vivir, the New American Dream and now, most recently and possibly most ambitiously, at least for the US, the Next System project).
p.94
Thus self-driving cars are welcomed, but the needs (and more environmentally benign practices) of cyclists and pedestrians are overlooked and the car culture (which commands up to 60% of the municipal land area in some US cities) continues.
p.95
The legacy, then, of the tech-utopians is to welcome the collapse of the capitalist economy while accepting the legacy of its lifestyle as if it were a largely unchallengeable heritage.
p.113-117
Planes and cars, and using them less
…At present, however, jet-propelled flight and cars — the least sustainable ways of traveling — still command almost all investment and are regularly represented as an essential aspect of contemporary life…
…For holidays and short breaks, the pressure to make the most of time off from 24/7 work makes quick getaways and short journey times desirable. The plane is often the only feasible way to get to and from distant destinations within the time frames that constrain most holiday makers…the plans to expand London’s Heathrow airport are, as Green MP Caroline Lucas has said, “unforgivable.” If they go ahead with the expansion, future generations will surely not forgive the perversity….if commerce is always allowed to trump moral duty…
…Nonetheless, “going local” must be at the centre of the cultural shift required to make holidays greener…
…Hybrid and fully electric cars will be less polluting, but the electricity they use must be generated, the batteries wear out and must be disposed of, and like all cars they use large amounts of plastic in their construction. What is more, they are dystopian in protracting the car culture with its dangers, congestion, ugliness and dominance of space, rather than moving us beyond its mindset…
…Road vehicles also destroy the lives and habitat of living beings other than ourselves, at a time when the World Wildlife Fund is advising us that the current rate of loss of ecosystems and wildlife is no less threatening to our future than climate change…
…what Alex Wilson, in his study of the making of the North American landscape, [calls] the “motorists’ aesthetic.” The designers of the great American “scenic” national parkways “ have created an essentially visual experience, one that has ruled out taste, touch, and smell; for which landscape becomes an event in “automotive space,” and is comparable in its one-dimensionality to the view that is had in aerial photography. In the process, the designers of the scenic routes have literally instructed their users in the “beauties” of nature by promoting some landscapes at the expense of others, by removing whatever bits of it were deemed unsightly, and by restricting all activities incompatible with the parkway aesthetic…
…By contrast, where proper provision is made to walk or ride or cycle, one is able to enjoy sights and scents and sounds, and the pleasures (and benefits) of physical activity and experiences of solitude and silence, all of which are denied to those who travel in more insulated and speedier ways….
p.157-159
Cultural politics and alternative hedonism: “aesthetic revisioning”
An alternative hedonist politics of prosperity of the kind outlined above will depend, in part, on the evolution of an altered aesthetic response to the material culture of consumerism. It will involve wider resistance to the appeals and promises of advertising, and a more general shift of optic on the supposed attractions and compulsions of consumer culture….
…Consumption theory devotes much attention to what is arguably a pretty shallow notion of self-change, where all the emphasis falls on the instability of “identity” and the role of consumer culture in providing for its ceaseless performative remaking. Rather less attention has been paid to more profoundly reflexive and permanently achieved insights on personal need…
A salient instance of such deep change is the transformation in self-understanding brought about by feminism, whose cultural revolution “raised consciousness” for both sexes in ways that have profoundly and permanently affected their way of life….
Integral to any such gestalt shift will be an aesthetic suspension and reordering as commodities and services and forms of life once perceived as enticingly glamorous come gradually to be seen instead as cumbersome, ugly and retrograde, thanks to their association with unsustainable resource use, noise, toxicity, or their legacy of unrecyclable waste and waste products…
Images of waste may have an important part to play in a greening of aesthetic response, since the junk excreta of consumerist society is so plainly repellant. Paul Bonomini’s “Weee Man,” a 300-tonne, 24-foot high android…was made out of the average weight of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (Weee) that a single person disposes of in a lifetime…
I would still maintain that even if it were possible to sustain the consumerist market indefinitely and to extend its regime throughout the planet (and maybe beyond), it would not enhance human pleasure or happiness…
p. 182-185
Conclusion
…According to a poll conducted by Greenpeace in April 2019, 63 % of Britons think we are in a climate emergency… Why [then] are the 63% not doing everything they can to minimize their car use? Even if half our car owners did so, it would have a noticeable impact….If people in affluent societies are as troubled by climate change as they claim, let them change their voting patterns certainly, but let them also accept their personal liability and do something about it…
…the politics of prosperity that we need today must dissociate pleasure and fulfillment from intensive consumption, from the endless accumulation of new machines and gadgetry, from tourist space travel and the like, and from so much else based on unworkable assumptions about what would constitute globally sustainable modes of life….
…The commitment to an alternative politics of prosperity based on a sustainable economic order needs to be seen as a continuation of the emancipatory project. If we have a cosmopolitan care for the well-being of the poor and the world, and a concern about the quality of life for future generations, then we have to campaign for a change of attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure, and self-realization in affluent communities. Such a revolution will be comparable in the forms of social transformation and personal epiphany it will demand to those brought about through the feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist movements of recent history. Those who commit to it will be helping to improve both their own lives and those of future generations.
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