Fox: Well, as I say, what I see is young people just doing it, without asking for any official support, or daddy’s permission. They can’t afford to live alone; they don’t want to go back and live with their parents; so they’re finding or creating opportunities where they can to live in communities. Of course where we should be seeing support is in the media. Why aren’t thinkers like David Korten on talk shows more often? Instead, we see the same tired old men we’ve been watching for twenty years or more, and whose ideas, by and large, are the reason we’re in our current situation. Their ideas are of the past. It’s ridiculous that the media are so ignorant, or purposefully ignorant, and unwilling to bring new thinkers in front of the television camera.
And why isn’t President Obama bringing people like David Korten to advise the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and so forth? It seems to me that they’ve been doing nothing but trying to put a Band-Aid on Wall Street for eight years, and an awful lot of people are suffering in the meantime. There are other thinkers in other countries, too. For example, Serge Latouche, a French emeritus professor in economics at the University of Paris, is a proponent of what they call the “degrowth movement,” which is catching on as a grassroots movement in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and elsewhere. Again, it’s a movement about simplifying lifestyle. Proponents don’t associate degrowth with sacrifice or a decrease in well-being; quite the contrary. Reducing consumption enables people to work less, consume less, and maximize their happiness through non-consumptive means—such as art, music, family, culture and community. You see, we’ve reduced economics to consumerism, but a new style every year doesn’t necessarily make people happy. Or at least, not for long, because you can never get enough of that which doesn’t satisfy.
The MOON: We’re still being told that growth is the solution to our economic crisis. “A rising tide will lift all boats,” and so on. And indeed, growth is essential if our economy is based on debt. Economic growth is what supplies the surplus that enables us to pay the debt. But we live on a finite planet.
Fox: Exactly. And that’s exactly Latouche’s argument: the planet is finite. The question is not about infinite amounts of growth, but how to live within the resources of a finite planet. David Korten also speaks to this. When you consider that 70 percent of the American economy runs on consumerism—on consumers buying goods and services—I always thought that the crash of 2008 was an opportunity to move beyond consumerism to the more basic questions about meeting human needs. If we could cut back the percentage of the American economy based on consumerism to, say, 35 percent, it would free up nearly 40 percent to devote to human needs. That would be a far more sustainable situation and create far less division between haves and have-nots, along with far less depression and anger as a result of unemployment.
Another aspect of the problem is that many people are over-employed, in the sense that they’re addicted to their work; they’re workaholics. They’re not present for other aspects of their lives. So there’s an opportunity to find middle ground here. We could assist one another to lead happier, more balanced lives if those who were overworked, worked less, and those who are under-worked, worked more.
The MOON: You point out that we had an opportunity to rethink our economy seven years ago and we didn’t do it. If anything, the conversation has gotten even more rancorous between haves and have-nots. So what do you think it will take to start recognizing the limits of our finite planet and how we are sharing—or not sharing—its resources?
Fox: Certainly global climate change is staring people in the face and it’s getting far more difficult to live in denial of its impact. The people and countries of Europe are far ahead of us in terms of taking the reality of climate change seriously. It’s interesting that in Beijing, the capital of the most populous country in the world, the air pollution is so bad that all residents—including the elite—have to wear masks when they venture outside on bad air quality days. So China is waking up to the reality of limits to the environment’s capacity to serve as a sink for our effluents, and they’re waking up because they’ve been bitten by environmental degradation. The word is that they’re leap-frogging ahead of the U.S. in terms of solar and other renewable forms of energy. Often it’s crisis, disaster, despair—as well as necessity—that motivates humans to change. I think that’s part of what’s stirring the pot at this time—the disasters that we face. The increase in hurricanes and tornadoes; the droughts; the wildfires. Denial is a very strong force, and we can try to create a box and lock ourselves in, but it gets pretty hard to do that when a hurricane blows across your state, or the rising seas enter your neighborhood. The water has risen in southern Miami to the extent that in some neighborhoods people now walk around in water, where a few years ago there were dry sidewalks. The world is changing, no matter how much denial our political parties engage in. Disaster itself is an evolutionary force.
Father Bede Griffiths, a very able monk, used to say that despair is a yoga. Many people do not experience Spirit, or God, until they go through despair or brokenness and collapse. So the very darkness of our time can be a sign of hope. There’s potential for movement, for change; we change when we have to.
I live in California, where we have only enough water for the next two years. We don’t know what we’re going to do the third year unless there’s a deluge. The drought in California is unprecedented in historic terms—and California is the most populous state in the union. I say this not to advocate despair: we’re capable as a species of reinventing our economics. That’s why I wrote a book on it! We’re capable of displacing fossil fuels with clean energy. We’re capable of designing cars that run on air. We’re capable of building solar panels into our roadways. We’re capable of cleaning up the oceans and distributing the world’s food to everyone. So again, we don’t want to wallow in despair. Our imaginations, our creativity, are certainly capable of transformation, but unfortunately, we usually wait until we’re forced into it.
The media really need to step up here and play a major role in reporting both the bad news and the good news. They need to start interviewing those who are proposing new solutions, instead of being so invested in the status quo that they either say nothing about the new, or they mock it. We have to take a hard look at who owns the media and what their ideology is, because otherwise we wallow in ignorance, and ignorance never solved anything.
Speaking theologically, Meister Eckhart said that “God is the denial of denial.” That’s a very powerful statement. Until we put aside denial, Spirit does not flow, and that includes the spirit of creativity and imagination and caring for one another. All of it gets bottled up when we live in a box of denial. Denial is a very heavy thing: it’s a decision to remain ignorant. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century said that “Willful ignorance about something important is a mortal sin,” meaning it’s deadly to the human soul.
The MOON: More and more jobs are being replaced by machines—from robots on assembly lines, to automated customer service centers, to self-serve, camera-enforced bridge toll-takers. On the one hand, automation increases so-called productivity for the individual company, but on the other hand, it creates legions of unemployed for the society overall. How are we to create an economy that includes everyone?
Fox: Exactly. That’s part of the capitalist system in this time in history: it’s asking only, “How can we do this more cheaply?” without considering “How many people are we throwing out of work by doing it this cheaper way?” In the bigger picture, it’s not really cheaper because you’re going to need a bigger safety net, more prisons, more mental hospitals, and so on. A lot of prophetic people in business have been saying this for a long time. For example, the late Anita Roddick, who was the founder of The Body Shop, started an MBA program at the University of Bath in England in a new kind of economics that tested for a triple bottom line: profit, ecology, and community. Yes, we’re capable of creating an economy based on robots that don’t need a salary, or health insurance, or coffee breaks, or a day off. That may be more efficient—but more efficient at what? Certainly not more efficient at creating a society that includes everyone. It’s only more efficient if you have a very narrow definition of the term “business.”
The ecologist Garrett Hardin called this the “tragedy of the commons.” Businesses are allowed to transfer to the public “common” all of the “externalities” like the increase in unemployed, the need for a bigger safety net and more prisons, the water and air pollution. Thus, businesses don’t have to bear these costs; taxpayers do. We also end up with more costs for damaged souls and damaged lives.
Look at what is happening with education. So many young people are graduating from college with debts of $50,000, $75,000, even $100,000 before they even get their first job. That effectively makes them indentured servants for an entire generation. That’s causing young people to ask the question: is education really worth it?
Of course, with the Internet you can educate yourself a lot online, without going to school and incurring such heavy debt, but is it an education that an employer will accept? Again, in Europe, governments contribute much more to a person’s formal education, but in the U.S., it’s “sink or swim” for so many people that a higher education is becoming an elitist accomplishment. But this crisis could also spawn new educational paradigms: more online education; more schools stepping out of the “accredited” box and offering learning for learning’s sake at much more reasonable cost; perhaps more learn-by-doing programs. A crisis often elicits imagination and opportunity.
The MOON: About 30 years ago you anticipated that because the Cold War had ended we could repurpose our military to peacetime uses and transform our economy to one that is more sustainable. Instead, we’ve ramped up our military machine. Can you comment?
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