by Guido Dalla Casa – 03/29/2024
Source: Guido Dalla Casa
Premises
Eighty-two people were connected on zoom on Saturday 23 March 2024 to listen to Serge Latouche, economist, philosopher and degrowth theorist. This is a notable number for meetings of this type, due to the fame of the French professor. The dialogue focused on the theme of work which is also the subject of Latouche’s latest book published in Italy and entitled “Work less, work differently or not work at all”.
Latouche’s presentation and answers were precise, clear and in keeping with the theme of the meeting, but the feeling remained, especially in the type of questions, that overall something was missing, something truly profound, that is, something that concerned vision of the world that underlies the problems, including those of work.
Something was missing
In the discussion that followed I only heard a few minimal references to the position of our species in Nature, to what work actually means, to the philosophical or thought premises that gave rise to industrial civilization. We have remained practically within the West: there has been a lack of any discussion or connection to the conceptions of other human cultures, to the complex of sentient beings of which we are part, to the functioning, or to the life, of the Earth System. Yet the French professor had spoken on other occasions about the “Westernization of the world” as the cause of the serious problems afflicting the Earth.
The situation on Earth is also connected to work and the idea we have of it. Work, in our cultural model, is largely seen as an activity that alters, or destroys, the natural world: it is performed to replace inert matter with living substance, to destroy ecosystems that have very long lifespans by putting in their place inert matter (roads, machines, plants, factories).
Out of the West
I was surprised by the fact that there was no mention of different concepts, which were present many centuries ago, such as work/non-work which would result from what the Taoists called wu-wei. Wu-wei is an important concept Taoist, a teaching of when to act and when not to act. It is an almost untranslatable expression, but here we will adopt the translation “act (work) only in accordance with Nature”, let Nature take its course. Among the maxims of wu-wei: “Even while doing nothing, there is nothing that is not done”; “Nothing to do, nothing to conquer, nothing to want and everything happens spontaneously.”
Almost none of the activities of industrial civilization conform to ideas of this kind, which are unthinkable in the West. Here even “work” is done just to leave traces in history; instead I remember a teaching from a native culture of the North-West of the American continent: “Never leave traces so deep that the wind cannot erase them”. So, we have to get out of the West, it’s not enough to play with employment contracts.
All these problems related to ecology are much deeper than they want to appear. They are philosophical, cultural, worldview problems, not technical details of a social nature: we cannot get out of it just with a “transition”, perhaps we will get out of it with a collapse followed by new models, but compatible with the life of all other sentient beings , plants, other animals, ecosystems, collective beings.
Instead, in the West, someone, now at the limits of madness, even thinks of attacking life at its roots by technologizing its very foundations, even on our own species.
The primary causes
What are the premises that gave rise to industrial civilization? Anthropocentrism, materialism, dualisms man-animal, man-Nature, ego-world, spirit-matter. The materialistic-mechanistic science that is disseminated and which quickly became the slave of technology and industry (and therefore of the economy) is based on these premises. It is by undermining these foundations that we must act, and there is far too little talk about actions of this type. It is not enough to blame “polluting industries” and want to save the system. Industries are polluting by their very nature, but it is not “their fault”, it is the entire technological-industrial system which is impossible, because it is incompatible with the Life of the larger Complex, the Earth System. The current system, which has invaded the world, was born two or three centuries ago: “today’s” work is a consequence of it. Once its premises are removed from the collective mind, degrowth will result as a consequence.
An interlude, and a small example: how can we ask for “peace” if we maintain an industrialized world where in the game there are weapons factories, so-called “sovereign states” and competition propagated in all possible ways?
Then we never talk about the excess human population that afflicts the Earth: 8 billion of a 70 kg Primate (who also wants to eat meat!?) cannot fit on this Planet! And should there be “work for all”? At work, it seems that at least the French professor has clear ideas.
But how did we arrive at such a situation??
Conclusions
As a start, we should have a clear understanding of our species’ position in Nature. Let’s start with a couple of the dualisms mentioned: man-animal and man-Nature. I just can’t imagine a baby australopithecus waking up one morning and telling its parents: “I am a man (or woman) while you are animals”. As for dualisms such as ego/world and mind/matter, well rooted in the West especially after Descartes, they were completely absent in many philosophies of the ancient East: today help can come from quantum physics, where those dualisms have disappeared as a consequence of the principle of indeterminacy.
However, the situation is now such that any movement that can undermine the ideas of the industrialist-developmentists is welcome. However, I would advise not to abuse the term “capitalism” by using the word “industrialism” instead so as not to fuel the idea that it is only an economic-social problem.
