JANICE E. HARVEY
I believe that … strong theories of fatality are abstract and wrong. Our degrees of freedom are not zero. There is a point to deliberating what ought to be our ends, and whether instrumental reason ought to have a lesser role in our lives than it does. But the truth in these analyses is that it is not just a matter of changing the outlook of individuals, it is not just a battle of ‘hearts and minds,’ important as this is. Change in this domain will have to be institutional as well.
—Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (1991), p.8
1. INTRODUCTION: FROM ETHICS TO ACTION
The authors of this book, although coming from diverse disciplines and perspectives, are united in their concern that conventional growth economics cannot survive planetary limits, nor can ecosystems survive relentless growth in economic production and consumption. Although change is inevitable, the direction and outcome of that change is not. Rather than the alternative of some form of economic and social collapse, the preferred direction is the replacement of the current growth economy with an ecological political economy. But how might this transition occur? Only recently has this question attracted much attention. While we still need to articulate and model the elements of an ecological economy, we must also begin to imagine the sociopolitical processes that might move us toward that goal.
It is one thing to argue, as this book does, that an ecological economy requires a new ethos of based on the principles of membership, householding, and entropic thrift (chapter 2), and thus a new ecological political economy (chapter 10). It is quite another to see how such an ethical shift might occur, and further, how it would contribute to the dynamics of system change. On the one hand, ecological economics as a field of knowledge should embed an ethics of right relationship and in this way facilitate its dispersion throughout society. On the other, until a new ethos becomes widely grounded, the prospects for an ecological economics to exert much sway beyond its natural constituency are limited. It is the proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma. As Jennings asked in chapter 10 of this volume, “Where is our theoretical point of entry into the circle of social change to be found?”
There are insights that can be brought to bear on the complex project of ethical shifting and economic structural change. Given our rather discouraging history of environmental politics and the overwhelming influence of powerful interests vested in the status quo (Speth 2008), not to mention the privileged status of neoclassical economic dogma in our major institutions, it is naive to expect—and folly to wait for—political leadership in this crucial social project. Politics are mercurial, influenced by planned strategies, unplanned reactions, accidents, the weather, and of course, money. Gains and losses are ephemeral; governments and policies come and go at the rate of election cycles. Transforming the now-global growth-dependent political economy is a long-term prospect ill-suited to short-term political expediency and tactical maneuvering.
Nevertheless, political theory provides an essential insight around which to organize our thinking. Although systems tend toward self-perpetuation and are therefore inherently stable, they are dynamic and subject to stresses, both internal and external. Because external stresses are beyond the reach of conscious human agency, we will not deal with them here. Internal stresses, on the other hand, can create crises of legitimation at which point systemic change becomes possible (Bourdieu 1993; Habermas 1976). In this view, the institutions of the growth economy could be transformed into systems designed to function effectively without growth should the public broadly come to recognize the illegitimacy of economic growth as a public policy priority.
In this chapter, I draw on two seemingly distinct theoretical frameworks to propose how we might think about—and act upon—this proposition. From a critical perspective, discourse theory holds that the process of institutional-cultural change is discursive and dialectical (Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak 2011; van Dijk 2011). World systems theory, on the other hand, reminds us that such social constructions occur within a unique historical context that either constrains or propels but ultimately shapes systemic change (Wallerstein 1999, 2004). The publication of this book is itself a discursive event. While intended to help ecological economics on its journey, it aspires to change our relationship with life and the world by grounding our self-understanding in an evolutionary worldview. In this task, it joins an ever-expanding corpus of ecological discourse with similar aspirations. The objective of this chapter is to come to terms with the change process of which the production and distribution of this book is a part.
2. ETHICS AND CULTURE
We would do well not to underestimate the task facing ecological political economy. It is both an ontological reorientation and an ethical innovation. It goes beyond the physical and life sciences in a descriptive sense and implicates the normative foundations of social order and human agency. All structures of organized human activity must give a sense of meaning to the purposive, self-conscious human agents who comprise them; thus, a new ecological political economy will need a new foundational story and a new conceptual framework of norms and ideals.
Broadly speaking, ethics is one of the constitutive elements of culture, along with the ideas, beliefs, values, norms, moral obligations, truth claims, and ways of knowing that situate us in and give meaning to our experience of the world. This “culture of the mind” (Wuthnow 1989) is prereflexive and subconscious—a way of being as well as a way of acting (Bourdieu 1993). Yet, it is manifest and made visible in real behavior, practices, and products and “exists within the dynamic contexts in which it is produced and disseminated” (Wuthnow 1989:16). It provides the lenses and filters through which we interpret the myriad stimuli of daily life, indicates what is and is not valuable, sets the rules and obligations for everyday living within communities, and locates us in the greater scheme of things relative to everything else (Milton 1996).
A change in ethics implies a cultural shift, but this is not a matter of will. Culture is contextual and historical, a mix of inherited tradition and new understandings created through social interaction (Hunter 2010). As a hegemonic framework of meaning, culture is manifest in the institutions of society; thus, a change process must engage the nature, workings, and power of institutions (Wuthnow 1989). The market, the state, education systems, religions, the media, scientific and technological research, and the family are all carriers of culture while safeguarding their own logic, place, and history. Institutions embody particular forms of knowledge, expertise, credentials, and authority that are imbued with cultural meaning. This “symbolic capital” confers power, the ultimate expression of which is the power of legitimate naming, which in turn defines reality itself (Bourdieu 1989:20–23).
Hunter (2010) conceptualized the power dynamics of “naming” or meaning production by locating social positions, networks, and institutions along a center-periphery spectrum according to their endowment of “symbolic capital.” Those most critically involved in the production of cultural “meaning”—what is seen as important or “true” and, conversely, what is seen as marginal and of little value—occupy or comprise a cultural center where prestige is highest; those least influential in the meaning production process are found on the periphery where status is low. This dynamic is mutually reinforcing. Powerful actors reproduce their own status through networks. The more “dense” and interactive the network, the more influential it is in the reproduction of meaning (Hunter 2010). The reverse is also the case. Culture changes when challenges to orthodox meaning production arise from outside the center and become embedded within dense networks of supportive elites and institutions (Hunter 2010; Wuthnow 1989). So while there is great inertia built into culture, it is an open system subject to change. Ethics have changed dramatically since the advent of industrial society, with attendant changes in practices and institutions, and they continue to change. But how much of this can be attributed to human agency? Is the field of cultural change amenable to active or strategic intervention?
3. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CULTURAL CHANGE AND DISCOURSE
As this theory increasingly pervades the social world, and more and more people become convinced by it—and in some cases benefit mightily from it; thus, people’s behavior, and the social and cultural worlds that support it, alters accordingly. They proceed to see the world through the lens of that theory, and so change the world accordingly—as much as they are able.
An ecological political economy will come about only through change at both the level of individual behavior and the level of social norms and institutions. In practice, this means that we must learn to articulate the values and ideals that the members of these societies would express if they thought and acted like interdependent and relational selves—ecological selves, or ecological citizens and trustees. … For this task, ecological public philosophy needs the vocabulary of solidarity, mutuality, reciprocity, community, and the common good—norms that are certainly contained, or at least alluded to, in the principles of membership, householding, and entropic thrift.
The possibility and role of human agency becomes clearer when we consider that cultural meaning and reference points are produced, reproduced, and transformed through discourse. Even though these processes are interrelated, for analytical purposes we can distinguish between two layers or dimensions of discourse effect. The first is the intersection of the personal and the cultural. We come to understand the world around us and how we fit into it through complex combinations of individual perception and social interactions, interpretation and argument, transmitted through and by various forms of communication, including the telling of cultural narratives and myths (Hajer 1995; Milton 1996). These are the raw materials from which we construct, reproduce, and adapt, from one generation to the next, “basic frameworks of implicit meaning”—“a culture’s deep structure”—through which we understand our world (Hunter and Wolfe 2006:91). Communicated symbolically through discourse over time, these subconscious frames or “schemata of interpretation” contain deeply rooted assumptions that become “second nature, well entrenched, and built into the way of doing things,” and provide a broad account of social reality. Because deep cultural frames are implicit and widely shared across a culture, they are persistent over time; the fact that frames are resistant to change suggests that they are satisfying some important need (Reese 2003:14–18).
Not only do implicit frames provide the filters through which people receive and interpret information about the world around them, they also shape and legitimize societal institutions that arise within cultures.1 For example, the dominant cultural frame that has humanity separated from and master of nature has served Western imperial/industrial expansion very well. As one of the core assumptions on which liberal institutions were built, this frame persists despite growing evidence of its destructive pathologies (McKibben 1989; Merchant 1980). An ecological economic discourse relies on a different cultural frame—a different “way of knowing”—that sees humans as members of the Earth community rather than masters of it (Leopold 1966). The transformation of growth-dependent political-economic institutions implies the transformation of the underlying ethical-cultural frame. At the most basic level, then, a change in ethics implies and requires modification or transformation of the dominant cultural frames that now underpin the pathological relationship between modern society and its planetary host.
This points us to the second dimension of discourse effect: the active “framing” of social reality through discourse. This process is at the heart of the call for a new cultural narrative. Because there are “different ways of knowing,” discourses “always operate in relation to power—they are part of the way power circulates and is contested.” According to Hall, the question of whether a discourse is true or false is less important than whether it is effective in practice—“in other worlds, whether it succeeds in organizing and regulating relations of power” (Hall 1996:201). In critical discourse studies, discourse is understood as a social practice in which power relations between and among social actors are expressed. In most instances, these relations operate at a subconscious level:
Discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially shaped. … It is constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contribute to transforming it. Since discourse is so socially influential, it gives rise to important issues of power. In a dialectical understanding, a particular configuration of the social world … is implicated in a particular linguistic conceptualization of the world; in language we do not simply name things but conceptualize things. Thus discursive practices may have major ideological effects … discourse may try to pass off assumptions (often falsifying ones) about any aspect of social life as mere common sense. Both the ideological loading of particular ways of using language and the relations of power which underlie them are often unclear to people.
(Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak 2011:358)
This locates discourse in the political as well as the cultural sphere, marrying the two. There are, in every society, dominant or hegemonic discourses that reflect an orthodox worldview—one that both shapes and is perpetuated by the major institutions of society, including the state and its security apparatuses, the judiciary, educational institutions, and the media (Bourdieu 1989). Discourses are hegemonic not only because they reside in elite institutions, however, but because they resonate with subconscious cultural frames. George Lakoff highlighted the special potency of cultural-moral frames (also constructs of discourse). Discourses that do not resonate with these implicit frames are rejected, often in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence of validity (Lakoff 2004:xv).2 It is when this discursive process of cultural articulation fails that the conditions for cultural change arise.
While central institutions and their dominant groups propagate hegemonic cultural discourses that reproduce cultural frames, they are not impenetrable. Because discourses are sites of power, there are always “subaltern” or subordinated interests around which resistance or counterhegemonic discourses arise. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1989) conceptualized the relationship between dominant and challenger discourses as a game played on a discursive “field” where discourses compete for legitimacy and authority. The extent to which a discourse succeeds or fails in this competition is a function of its symbolic capital, whether economic, social, or cultural. In economic discourses, financial capital and economic-academic credentials convey authority. In other discourses, other forms of capital may be more important. On environmental issues, for example, environmental organizations are routinely cited by the public as the source they most trust, while the private sector scores badly. This is a function of moral authority vested in the environmental movement compared to the profit motive of business. In a competition between economic and environmental discourses, however, the subconscious frame of economic growth as necessary to societal progress invests proponents of growth with far greater symbolic capital than those arguing for ecological protection. That said, these cultural frames themselves are constructed and reproduced through discourse and thus are subject to change. When the discursive logic and practice of central institutions fall out of step with the norms and expectations of the culture, or when the contradictions within the dominant discourse can no longer be contained, the resulting tension creates a leverage point for change. Through the continual presence of challenger or resistance discourses, which introduce new frames of meaning that better explain the world as it is actually experienced, dominant discourses can be delegitimized and their associated cultural frames can be transformed. Once widely disseminated, new discourses result in new ways of being and doing, resulting in social and institutional change (Wuthnow 1989).3
4. THE HEGEMONIC DISCOURSES OF NEOLIBERALISM AND CONSUMERISM
That we should have caused such damage to the entire functioning of planet Earth in all its major biosystems is obviously the consequence of a deep cultural pathology. Just as clearly, there is need for a deep cultural therapy if we are to proceed into the future with some assurance that we will not continue in this pathology or lapse into the same pathology at a later date.
—Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts
Discourse is historical and contextual. Its meaning can only be derived through an analysis of the “times” within which it is produced (Hajer 1995). Arguably the most powerful barrier to transitioning to an ecological economics is the neoliberal discourse of late capitalism, which has permeated Western democracies and spread virally throughout the world via economic globalization. The cultural-moral system implicit in freeing the market is a two-hundred-year cultural legacy that has become particularly potent.4 The neoliberal discourse holds that global wealth and ultimate freedom will be achieved through the unleashing of capital from the fetters of state regulation, economic planning, and national borders, while the role of the state should be limited to those interventions that facilitate capital expansion and minimize or manage social dissent (Harvey 2005).
The market as a precapitalist institution was shaped and controlled by society according to the dominant norms and structures of authority of the day.5 Accordingly, the creation of the free market capitalist economy in the early nineteenth century required the creation of a market society and a cultural transformation (Polanyi 1944; Smelser 1959). While the postwar social welfare state acted as a check on the ravages of a market society, the neoliberal turn in the 1980s began a process in Western democracies of removing social constraints from the market and commoditizing formerly social spheres. Since that time, neoliberal discourse has become hegemonic, to the point where it now defines our collective identity. A new ecological discourse grounded in an ethos of membership, householding, and entropic thrift is, then, a counterhegemonic discourse. For this resistance discourse to gain a foothold in public discourse, the legitimacy of neoliberal discourse must be undermined in public consciousness.
As we have discussed, a discourse is hegemonic when it influences institutional practice. The practice of neoliberal discourse has been manifest in deregulation, privatization, and bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements in all regions of the world, and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, severe structural adjustments in debtor nations (a category that now includes Ireland, Greece, Italy, and Spain). Although these measures have failed to deliver the promised free-market utopia (they have starved states of revenue to support public works and the social wage, precipitated several financial crises, and hastened ecological destruction globally), they have succeeded in restoring processes of capital accumulation and wealth concentration to pre-1930s levels (Harvey 2005).6 Nevertheless, apart from the Occupy movement’s outing of the “one percent,” the neoliberal discourse remains entrenched not only in economic and political circles but throughout civil society including, significantly, the academy and mainstream media.7 British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “there is no alternative” has lodged deeply in the psyche of capitalist society. Mass consent, implicit and explicit, has been granted to political elites to continue to pursue neoliberalism’s seductive yet elusive promise of economic and individual emancipation. Meanwhile, the spectacular concentration of capital in private hands driven by a seemingly boundless reach for global resources has entrenched the power of transnational capital to dictate the trade and finance policies of most countries (Bakan 2003). Within the grip of this globalized neoliberal paradigm, politics can make only limited concessions to ecological and social sustainability without undermining the internal logic that gives global capitalism its life breath.
This pathological situation is mitigated from time to time by public outcry and collective action within social movements.8 In his classic account of the dynamics of the self-regulating market economy, Karl Polanyi (1944) observed that the inevitable social and environmental disruptions created by unregulated capitalism would generate an equally inevitable resistance—a phenomenon he called the “double movement.” He warned, however, that this double movement can just as easily result in destructive regression as in constructive transformation, pointing to the rise of fascism following World War I as an important case in point. The direction change takes depends on the particular circumstances of time and place, including whether or not there are social institutions in place that can protect vulnerable people and nature, and whether alternative discourses and models for progressive social organization are circulating and readily invoked.
Despite the best intentions and endurance of social movements over the past decades, these points of resistance have not been sufficient to counteract the hegemony of the neoliberal discourse as the determinant of public policy. Writing in the mid-1990s, Raymond Rogers explained this failure as the absence of a counterdiscourse that sufficiently challenges the capitalist relations which shape industrial societies. According to Rogers, the only way we can meaningfully deal with environmental problems is to “create a perspective which problematizes … the structures and processes of capital and markets,” which “have become so dominant that humans only know themselves according to this social context” (Rogers 1994:1–2). In other words, the sociocultural milieu of everyday life—where people and capital meet—must become a locus of contention. As the new millennium unfolds, this appears to be happening. Early twenty-first century political ecology discourse is evoking and invoking the 1970s radical critique of industrial society and the discourse of limits.9 Authors are explicitly naming the growth economy as the primary driver of climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as social dislocation and cultural and spiritual malaise.10 After a lifetime of advocating for environmental policy from within government, the United Nations system, nonprofit organizations, and the academy, noted scholar James Gustave Speth concluded that without challenging capitalism, ever-increasing environmental degradation is inevitable:
The system of modern capitalism as it operates today will generate ever-larger environmental consequences, outstripping efforts to manage them. Indeed, the system will seek to undermine those efforts and constrain them within narrow limits. The main body of environmental action is carried out within the system as currently designed, but working within the system puts off-limits major efforts to correct many underlying drivers of deterioration. … Working only within the system will, in the end, not succeed when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.
(Speth 2008:85–86)
This analysis is echoed, although somewhat less passionately, by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report to the 2012 Earth Summit, Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) 5. In it, UNEP explicitly identified global population and economic growth as the drivers of ecological decline:
Population growth and economic development are seen as ubiquitous drivers of environmental change with particular facets exerting pressure: energy, transport, urbanization and globalization. While this list may not be exhaustive, it is useful. Understanding the growth in these drivers and the connections between them will go a long way to address their collective impact and find possible solutions, thereby preserving the environmental benefits on which human societies and economies depend.
(United Nations Environment Programme 2012:5)
This is a marked change from its GEO-4 report of 2007, which recognized “economic activities” as a driver along with demographics and other considerations, but its view was distinctly neoliberal in advocating for market-based responses: “Economic instruments, such as property rights, market creation, bonds and deposits, can help correct market failures and internalize costs of protecting the environment. Valuation techniques can be used to understand the value of ecosystem services” (United Nations Environment Programme 2007:5). In 2012, UNEP acknowledged that such approaches fall within the conventional economic framework; although not rejecting them outright, UNEP rather diplomatically proposed another approach, taken directly from the ecological economics playbook:
An alternative physical approach, stemming from the industrial metabolism or industrial ecology tradition, seeks to identify the rates and volumes of material flows through the economy. A system such as material flow accounting (MFA) is presumed to reveal more accurately the pressures on resources and the undesirable impacts on the environment from any part of the life cycle of resources—from extraction through combustion or conversion into a usable commodity and consumer consumption, to recycling, disposal or stewardship.
(United Nations Environment Programme 2012:11)
The discourse of this international institution is clearly changing, presumably in the face of environmental indicators that suggest the failure of neoliberal political economy to address the environment-development crisis. The eco-political discourses of accommodation and reform of the 1980s and 1990s, namely sustainable development and ecological modernization (e.g., see Carruthers 2001; Hajer 1995), are being delegitimized by empirical evidence and are challenged by counterdiscourses that call for structural transformation of the capitalist economy. Discourses that more closely align with “reality” are providing new models for understanding and responding to the ecological crisis. As with the presence of dissenting social movements, this is a necessary condition for institutional transformation. Yet, it is not sufficient. Economic, political, and administrative institutions have been constructed or adapted to operationalize the prescriptions inherent in neoliberal discourse. Institutional resistance to challenger discourses is a given, and the forces of inertia are structural. In the spirit of encouraging an “eyes wide open” approach to the difficulties that confront us, I will mention the most obvious barriers to change.
4.1. The Globalization Straightjacket
The formidable power of transnational capital has been so concentrated in both national and international institutions, and the tight integration of global finance has created such widespread vulnerability, that single nation-states cannot adopt a significantly divergent economic policy direction from the dominant economies without risking retaliation and potentially disastrous capital flight. The 2008 global economic meltdown and its ongoing hangover brought two realities into sharp relief: global finance capitalism has become dysfunctional and destructive, and there is an appalling lack of political courage within any and all wealthy nations to confront this pathology. The orthodox solution to the crisis of neoliberalization has been more neoliberalization. In Greece, for example, in order to pay interest to foreign lenders, the structural adjustments imposed on public services and the social wage have thrown many thousands into poverty. Because defaulting on those loans would destabilize the entire European Union banking system, member countries appear willing to sacrifice just about anything to avoid this eventuality. In Greece and Italy, where elected heads of state were for a time replaced by financial technocrats, the shift toward government by external fiat reveals the shallow roots of democratic processes when confronted by the demands of finance capitalism, even in Western democracies.
4.2. The Microeconomic Straightjacket
There is an equally pathological codependent relationship between the growth economy and those who work within it. Each needs the other for its survival. Households are immediately vulnerable financially to any slowdown in gross domestic product growth or reduced consumer spending, which might undermine the viability of the firms that employ them, the pension funds in which they have invested, or the sustainability of the social safety net. The perceived risks in abandoning “grey” economic sectors for the promise of more fulfilling livelihoods in a “green” economy remain untenable for the vast majority of citizens, for the simple reason that their immediate financial stability is vested in the growth economy. In the current context of high consumer debt, low savings, high cost of living, and job insecurity—the product of late capitalism—public support for systemic change is understandably low. Paradoxically, the material insecurity created by the system binds people to it. Thus, an internal momentum, continually primed by official discourses, perverse incentives, and other political interventions, keeps the system moving day to day along its fatal trajectory. Long-term well-being and biospheric integrity are traded off in myriad daily decisions that favor short-term individual satiation and household stability.
4.3. The Discourse of Consumer Culture
Several theorists have embedded the ecological crisis in a larger “crisis of modernity.” They identify a general cultural malaise characterized by a loss of meaning associated with the release of individuals from the moral and social strictures of traditional authority, the shrinking of a collective consciousness in favor of self-referent individualism, technological and scientific determinism, increased complexity and rationalization, the reduction of all value to instrumental factors in cost-benefit analysis, and the commodification of things of intrinsic worth.11 As traditional reference points wane, materialism emerges to fill the void.
The allure of consumerism, rooted in the conviction that personal fulfilment comes at the cash register, has bought a fierce mass loyalty to high consumption, no-limits lifestyles. This is not by accident. In 1955, marketing guru Victor LeBow proffered this solution to the problem of excess postwar industrial production: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert our buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfactions, in consumption” (quoted in Assadourian 2010:15). This project—the production, constant adaptation, and dissemination of a very specific scientifically designed and verified discourse—has been wildly successful (Ewen 1976). Material wealth and consumption have become the generic cultural source of value and identity for most people in industrialized countries. An annual survey that queries first-year college students in the United States about their life priorities revealed a trend in this direction over forty years. In 1970, nearly 80 percent of students identified “to develop a meaningful philosophy of life” as their aspirational goal, compared to less than 40 percent who chose “to be well off financially.” By 2008, those ratings were almost exactly reversed (Assadourian 2010:10). Such Western aspirations are now spreading as the consumer class grows in high-population countries such as China, India, and Brazil (Jackson 2008).
Exorbitant consumer debt and the fallout of the financial crisis that began in 2008 may be turning this around somewhat, as a function of necessity rather than choice. With 70 percent of the U.S. economy dependent on the retail sector, however, collapsing consumption would have severe economic consequences. Thus, governments make continual and paradoxical adjustments to monetary and fiscal policies to bolster “consumer confidence” and increase retail sales. Despite growing evidence of the futility and harmfulness of high-consumption lifestyles, including the delinking of income and happiness beyond a relatively low income threshold (about $15,000 per capita), increased stress related to work and debt, and diseases related to diet and lifestyle (Jackson 2009:42), making consumer culture problematic in the public consciousness remains a marginal activity. Furthermore, discourses that reject both the subjective and objective experience of mainstream society have a long tradition, but “dropping out” of a dominant culture is a marginal act. It does nothing to steer a culture’s trajectory away from the brink. In short, the postwar creation of mass consumer culture fuelled by a global annual advertising budget of 1 percent of the gross world product—$643 billion in 2008 (Assadourian 2010:11)—has insulated the dominant growth-based political economy from meaningful social criticism. Even mainstream environmental discourse has “given in” to the dominant culture, proffering “green consumption” and recycling as viable responses to the ecological crisis.
4.4. Media Reinforcement of Norms of Economic Growth and Consumption
The final significant defense of the status quo is wielded by the mass media, which is still the dominant purveyor of public discourse in modern society (Newspaper Audience Databank Inc. 2012). According to Duane Elgin, media activist and author of the best-selling Voluntary Simplicity, “To control a society, you don’t need to control its courts, you don’t need to control its armies, all you need to do is control its stories. And it’s television and Madison Avenue that are telling most of the stories most of the time to most of the people” (quoted in Assadourian 2010:13). Consider also Bernard Cohen’s insight in the seminal book The Press and Foreign Policy:
[The press] may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. … The editor may believe he is only printing the things that people want to read, but he is thereby putting a claim on their attention, powerfully determining what they will be thinking about, and talking about, until the next wave laps their shore.
(Cohen 1963:13)
In this sense, what the media chooses to ignore is just as important as what it chooses to cover. Norman Fairclough described media language as “ideological work.” It represents the world in particular ways, presenting its own particular constructions of social relations and social identities. Furthermore, as an increasingly monopolized private sphere, the media “diverts attention away from political and social issues which helps to insulate existing relations of power and domination from serious challenge” (Fairclough 2005:12–13). The positioning of different actors or protagonists within the public discourse realm by the media is an exercise of micropower (to use Foucault’s term) that influences public understanding and interpretation of the issue at hand. To use the example of global warming, the media positioning of the issue has contributed to an insidious public paralysis on this issue (e.g., see Bell 1994; Carvalho 2005; Grundmann 2007). This is not by accident. The very techniques of hegemonization that propelled neoliberal discourse into prominence in the West (Harvey 2005) have been used to counteract the climate change discourse of mainstream climate science and international institutions (Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman 2008). The effect has been to give politicians a free pass in their blatant subservience to those corporate interests that stand to lose in any effective program to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Gouldner (1990) provided essential insight into the power relations inherent in contemporary communications. He distinguished between producers of ideological products (intellectual elites) and the media through which these products are distributed. In industrial countries, there is considerable tension between the “cultural apparatus,” largely influenced by the intelligentsia and academicians, and the “consciousness industry,” largely run by technicians within the framework of profit maximization and now increasingly integrated with political functionaries and state apparatuses. The growth in reach and influence of the latter has created what Gouldner (1990:310, 314) called “a crisis for ideological discourse” as the “producers of ‘culture’ in modern society cannot communicate their work to mass audiences except by passing through a route controlled by media, and those who control the mass media, the consciousness industry.” Mass culture is shaped not through argumentative ideological discourse or ideal communicative action in the public sphere (Habermas 1989) but through a mediated discourse controlled by the consciousness industry. Clearly, the dependency on the media as the primary disseminator of alternative discourses presents a substantial obstacle to a discursive shift toward an ecological economy.
The three-frontal combination of commercial advertising, programming, and news creation/reporting constructs a social reality that is difficult to ignore. Media exposure, much of which reinforces consumer culture norms and economic growth discourses (Good 2013), occupies from one-third to one-half of people’s waking hours (Assadourian 2010:13). The Internet is touted as the way around corporate and ideological media messaging; to the extent that people have limitless access to alternative views through online sources, this may be true. It depends, however, on one’s voluntary effort to go looking for a different representation, the capacity to sift through vast quantities of online information, and finally the ability to discern the credibility of what is on offer. Whether or not individual consciousness-raising through this medium can or will translate into sustained collective action for transformation remains to be seen. Nevertheless, any program of transformative change for the earth must confront the role of the media in reinforcing dominant discourses of economic growth and consumerism while also generating and disseminating alternative discourses however it can. Although one may argue that media effects on the general public are ambiguous, I would argue that the mutual dependency between media and decision-makers is clearer, with the media generally reinforcing dominant economic policy paradigms, making them unproblematic from a political perspective.
5. POLITICAL CHANGE OR CULTURAL CHANGE?
Overcoming these obstacles to cultural change appears daunting, even unlikely. Yet, to repeat Charles Taylor (1991), “Our degrees of freedom are not zero. There is a point to deliberating what ought to be our ends.” Normally when we consider how to achieve substantive change, we understand the democratic political arena to be the locus of action. In theory, elected governments are stewards of the commons and of the common good; as such, they are accountable for their success or failure to meet this obligation. While political action is critical in holding governments to account, and while important victories are often won through advocacy and electoral involvement, there is an important distinction between political change and cultural change to be made (Hunter and Wolfe 2006). Political change is tactical and transient, easily won (relatively speaking), and just as easily lost. The gutting of a forty-year corpus of environmental law and policy by the Conservative government in Canada in two omnibus budget bills (2011 and 2012) is a case in point. Undoubtedly, at some point the tide will turn and at least some of these losses may be recouped, but the larger point is that political gains are always vulnerable.
Cultural change is a different matter. It derives from changes in belief systems, norms, ethics, and knowledge that ultimately become manifested in institutions and practices. It goes without saying that such change is difficult, conflictual, and typically happens gradually over decades, not years. Once realized, however, the changed culture is resilient and enduring—the very features that make culture change difficult in the first place (Hunter 2010). Such change has happened throughout human history. Over a period of several decades now known as the Enlightenment, the Church was sidelined as the sole arbiter of knowledge, social order, and moral authority (Wuthnow 1989). More recent examples in various countries include the abolition of slavery, apartheid, and segregation; the liberation of women from oppressive social roles; the establishment and protection of minority rights; and the collapse of certain colonial and totalitarian regimes. Such changes incubate for decades or longer, then happen with apparent lightning speed when historic conditions converge to create a moment of transformation.
In each of these cases, new discourses emerged to challenge the authority and legitimacy of existing dominant discourses. They provided a common language, including metaphors and symbols, to be employed by the networks of leaders, organizations, and institutions aligned around the particular issue. Yet, simply the existence of a challenger discourse is not enough. Its central principles or elements must be taken up and reflected in practice or action by individual and institutional actors, a self-reinforcing process that at once reflects a changing cultural milieu and drives the integration of new cultural values throughout society (Wuthnow 1989).
Antonio Gramsci (1999), writing from a political perspective, provided a key insight here. He understood hegemony not as an oppressive force but as an ideological unity within a culture. From the vantage point of a prison,12 Gramsci’s reflection on why workers would vote for a fascist regime (among other political puzzles of the interwar years) led him to conclude that political aims can only be reached if there is an “intellectual and moral unity” of the culture in support of such aims. Achieving and maintaining political-economic hegemony requires an ongoing dialectical relationship between political discourses and cultural frames, in which the former responds to cues from the latter in the ongoing effort to have a political agenda articulate with mass consciousness. This complex discursive process includes dissemination of cultural narratives and discourses embedded with a set of ideas, beliefs, and norms embedded in cultural narratives and discourses that legitimizes the ideological basis for the exercise of power. The goal is to gain the “consent of the governed” by having the masses assume the ideological elements of such discourses as their own.13 Without ideological-cultural support, structural change—changes in the institutions of government and economy—can only be achieved through political fiat or coercion, and then only temporarily.
Cultural change, then, is a prerequisite for changing the institutional formations of society, including the economy; this process is fundamentally discursive. Gramsci (1999) identified two distinct conditions under which a challenger or counterhegemonic discourse achieves cultural acceptance. First, it must accommodate to some extent competing ideologies and expectations. While this accommodation must be genuine (Gramsci’s intent was not cynical), it cannot undermine the primary ideological elements that distinguish the challenger from the hegemonic discourse. Thus ideological accommodation must be limited to secondary principles. Second, the challenger discourse must resonate to some degree or articulate with the subconscious “common sense” of popular culture.14 By “common sense,” Gramsci means “the traditional popular conception of the world”—in other words, the deep frames that comprise the worldview of the dominant culture. In short, there must be enough familiar territory within the new discourse that it can be recognized, while at the same time allowing its radically new steering ideas to become established and diffused. Once new ideas gain currency within the culture, the governing paradigms of institutions can be altered accordingly. As institutions are changed, the premises underlying the change become taken for granted; their assumptions become “second nature.” Alternative conceptions become “impossible,” their promotion tantamount to high treason (Gramsci 1999:134–161). Thus, political-ideological hegemony depends on achieving cultural-ideological unity.
Robert Wuthnow drew on Gramsci’s insights in his empirical inquiry into three cultural shifts that changed the Western world: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of socialism in response to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. To understand these cultural shifts, he studied “the historical manifestations of culture … the concrete expressions of public discourse … speakers and audiences, discursive texts, the rituals in which discourse is embedded, and the social contexts in which it is produced” (Wuthnow 1989:538–539). He discovered that in each case alternative discourses to the dominant ones abounded, but the successful ones were those that both “articulated” (Gramsci’s term) and “disarticulated” with the existing “discursive field.”15 The discursive field sets the limits on public discourse, particularly what is and is not legitimate knowledge, what is and is not up for debate, etc.—in other words, the dominant paradigm. Successful challenger discourses were those recognizable within common perceptions of reality, thus constituting a plausible alternative view. At the same time, they “disarticulated” with common perceptions such that they shifted perceptions into new territory, embracing new symbols of meaning and thus new understanding. Within a relatively short period of time (a few generations), new constellations of discourse or ideology (he used the terms interchangeably) replaced the old and the limits of discourse were changed (Wuthnow 1989:12–13). For Wuthnow, cultural change was manifest in a transformation of the discursive field itself.
In a more contemporary context, David Harvey (2005) used Gramsci’s explication of the process of gaining “ideological unity” to analyze how neoliberal discourse moved from its place on the intellectual margins during the Keynesian years to become the dominant or hegemonic discourse of the late twentieth century, replacing the paradigm of “embedded liberalism” and resulting in the concrete institutional restructuring of politics, economics and social conditions in much of the world. He wrote:
So how, then, was sufficient popular consent generated to legitimize the neoliberal turn? The channels through which this was done were diverse. Powerful ideological influences circulated through the corporations, the media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society—such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations. The “long march” of neoliberal ideas through these institutions … the organization of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the capture of certain segments of the media and the conversion of many intellectuals to neoliberal ways of thinking, created a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom. These movements were later consolidated through the capture of political parties and ultimately, state power. … Furthermore, once the state apparatus made the neoliberal turn, it could use its powers of persuasion, co-optation, bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpetuate its power.
(Harvey 2005:40)
Neoliberal discourse appeals to “common” sensibility, according to Harvey, in its invocation of the idea of individual freedom. He argued that this value is held not only by conservatives but broadly by the “baby boomer” generation, which cut its teeth on individual and collective challenges to traditional authority structures, roles, and identities. While social movements combined the idea of freedom with a social justice agenda, the single idea of individual freedom, argued Harvey, taps more directly into values embedded in the cultural subconscious.16 Neoliberal discourse would “disarticulate” with common perception in its demonization of the welfare state and its elevation of the free market as the vehicle through which individual welfare will be realized and protected. Harvey described the effects:
[Neoliberalism] has pervasive effects on the ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world. The process of neoliberalization has, however, entailed much “creative destruction,” not only of prior institutional frameworks and power (even challenging traditional forms of state sovereignty) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart.
(Harvey 2005:3)
Although this was an ideological process, it served very real material interests from which it generated material support. It was strategically and generously facilitated by a corporate sector, whose goal was not an ideal free market but restoration of conditions conducive to the capital accumulation that had flagged during the 1970s and 1980s. The point is important. Wuthnow discovered that successful challenger discourses were able to marshal resources from powerful sources to back their diffusion throughout society. Whether from the state, the nobility, or other powerful benefactors, material support and influence in high places ultimately determined which of the new contending discourses became institutionalized. Ultimately, success depended on gaining support from the state (Wuthnow 1989:577).
Returning to the project of diffusing a new ethos of membership, householding, and entropic thrift through a culture, we can distill two related ideas from these scholars. The first is that the dominant, albeit pathological, growth-dependent political economy is underpinned by deep-seated, pre-reflexive beliefs, values, and assumptions about how the world works. These are embedded in cultural narratives and discourses that legitimate existing institutions and power relations, while at the same time making other conceptions of society implausible. The dominant paradigm ossifies as it is institutionalized, creating systemic interdependencies. Furthermore, powerful beneficiaries of these structures expend considerable energy and resources maintaining their stake in the system. The combination of cultural belief systems, institutional inertia, and vigorous protection of vested interests creates a daunting barrier to change.
The second idea is that within these deep cultural frames are also the seeds of change. Belief systems represent the cultural accumulation of those values, stimulated by the experience of successive generations living within that culture. The system acts like a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The cycle is interrupted when peoples’ direct lived experiences begin to contradict the common understanding of how the world works. When dominant discourses become dissonant with “common sense” and direct lived experiences, they lose authority and ultimately legitimacy. This provides an opening in the public sphere for new discourses that better explain a changing world, activate different but preexisting latent values,17 and propose alternatives that are plausible within cultural frames of reference (Crompton 2010). This is the foundation on which a new ecological conscience can be built, thereby providing the necessary cultural impetus for the restructuring economic and political institutions. In short, the unhinging of hegemonic discourse from its cultural base is a prerequisite for institutional/systemic change.
6. OF PARADIGMS, SYSTEMS, AND HISTORICAL BIFURCATIONS
I have argued so far that cultural change is a prerequisite to the kind of structural-institutional change that is required to achieve an ecological economy. Yet, the construction and dissemination of challenger discourses that articulate with deep cultural frames is not sufficient to propel this change. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote:
Societies that are in … good working order have a kind of mute organic consistency. They do not foster ideas that are hostile to their fundamental working arrangements. Such ideas may appear, but they are slowly and persistently insulated, as an oyster deposits nacre around an irritant. They are confined to small groups of dissenters and alienated intellectuals, and except in revolutionary times they do not circulate among practical politicians.
(quoted in Speth 2008:66–67)
Similarly, Stephen Reese (2003) observed that deep cultural frames are resistant to change because they satisfy some important need. As long as the need is being met, there is no compulsion to jettison one frame for another. On the other hand, when a frame no longer “fits” with direct experience of the world, a space is created within public discourse for new discourses to compete for public salience. In other words, timing is (almost) everything.
Wallerstein characterized particular socio-geopolitical-economic configurations as historical systems, all of which have a beginning and an end; the present capitalist world system is no exception. A historical system ends when it can no longer accommodate new demands within system parameters: “There comes a moment when it has or will have exhausted the ways in which it can contain its contradictions, and it therefore goes out of existence as a system” (Wallerstein 1999:124). Every system contains internal contradictions—gaps between claims and expectations and lived reality. New belief systems arise that challenge the old; tensions between internal contradictions and opposing value systems lead to systemic stresses. These secular trends act as “vectors moving the system away from its basic equilibrium.” Once a system paradigm—embodied in institutions, norms, and conventions—loses broad social legitimacy, then it must submit to demands for change. The system initially responds with incremental accommodation of increasingly difficult demands through legislative and judicial means. Yet, these negative feedback mechanisms that function to return the system to equilibrium never bring the system back to its exact previous state. System parameters are constantly changing—a function of the “arrow of time.” “Eventually social unrest accumulates to the point that the system becomes dysfunctional or breaks down. The system moves further and further from equilibrium, the fluctuations become ever wilder, and eventually a bifurcation occurs” (Wallerstein, 1999:124). Essentially, the rules change such that the system in its previous state cannot survive.
Although the system through its long development may be impervious to disturbances, even large ones, at the point of bifurcation small interventions have large impacts (Wallerstein 1999:129–130). In short, there comes a point in historic time when, as a result of historic secular trends and human agency exercised in myriad historically contextual decisions, system paradigms are changed. This process is by definition nonlinear—an indeterminate evolution toward unknown radical transformations. The actual trajectory can only be discovered and explained after the fact through historical analysis from the perspective of the “longue durée” (Wallerstein 1999:1–3, 130).
Wuthnow’s historical analysis of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of socialism affirmed Wallerstein’s theory. In each case, specific historical conjunctures made cultural innovation possible. Unique institutional contexts influenced what ideologies could develop and thrive. As products of history (Wallerstein’s “arrow of time”), they were not planned or controlled. At a certain point in time, institutions became vulnerable to deliberate interventions. It began with “oppositional movement discourses defining new boundaries within which discourse can be framed … [thereby constructing] an alternative source of authority with which to challenge the authority of prevailing ideas.” It ended with selected ideologies becoming institutionalized. Society was changed.
In each historical episode the leading contributors to the new cultural motifs recognized the extent to which the institutional conditions of their day were flawed, constraining, oppressive, arbitrary. Their criticism of these conditions was often extreme and unrelenting. It was sharpened by an alternative vision … constructed discursively, a vision that was pitted authoritatively against the established order, not as its replacement but as a conceptual space in which new modes of behaviour could be considered.
(Wuthnow 1989:582–583)
Notably, it was not simply a matter of exchanging one ideology for another. The producers and disseminators of successful new discourses were tightly networked across sectors and they gained the support of certain influential elites, thereby penetrating the sphere of power. Furthermore, the successor ideology translated into practices that appeared to resolve the problems articulated by it. Wuthnow (1989:583) wrote, “The strength of their discourse lay in going beyond negative criticism and beyond idealism to identify working models of individual and social action for the future.”
Thus, we see that systemic change emerges from a conjuncture of social action within a particular “historic moment,” which itself is the product of the arrow of time. The process is dynamic, nonlinear, and to a great extent opportunistic. Intelligent interventions are those that anticipate, shape, recognize, and seize opportunities as they arise. The outcome, however, is unpredictable because the system has its own internal dynamic over which there is no control. There will always be unintended consequences of actions. Although the universe may not be unfolding “as it should,” it is unfolding along a historic trajectory that social agents can try to influence, but they cannot control it.
For the purposes of this book, we can envision the production and dissemination of ethical-ecological discourses combined with ready-at-hand alternative economic models around which a new cultural consensus can coalesce. Most importantly, these elements must coincide with a historical conjuncture—a period of system bifurcation—that ploughs the ground in which they can root and grow. Wallerstein asserted that the capitalist world-system has “entered into a terminal crisis and is unlikely to exist in fifty years.” The ecological-climate crisis is but one symptom of the inability of capitalism to contain and mitigate its inherent contradictions. We may in fact be in that historical moment when small interventions can trigger very large changes.
7. WHAT NEXT?
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. … If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
—Frederick Douglass, “An Address on West India Emancipation,” August 3, 1857
Lest we are tempted to oversimplify, James Davison Hunter (2010) interrogated cultural change theories strategically, from the perspective of crafting an agenda for proactive intervention for cultural change. In this section, I present and examine four of his propositions about human agency and structural change.
Proposition 1: Culture Changes from the Top Down, Rarely If Ever from the Bottom Up
While social unrest in response to unacceptable conditions can topple authoritarian dynasties, defeat sitting governments, and force major policy reforms, these are political, not cultural, changes. To change culture, an idea must penetrate “the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality” (Hunter 2010:41). Such penetration is rarely if ever achieved through grassroots mobilization; more likely, such mobilization is the manifestation of a deeper transformation underway. Hunter explained:
The work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even when the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites. The reason for this … is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.
(Hunter 2010:41)
The cultural innovation process, according to Hunter, unfolds something like this. Creative thinkers and theorists generate ideas; researchers explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas and create knowledge; educators pass ideas and knowledge on to others; popularizers turn these into simpler forms for public consumption; and practitioners turn ideas into concrete applications (Hunter 2010:42). Wuthnow described a similar process in Western Europe: ideas were formulated into discourse and related cultural artefacts; they went through a process of selection based on their perceived legitimacy and means of diffusion (Bourdieu’s symbolic capital); and the ones that best “articulated” with the social circumstances finally became “a relatively stable feature of the institutional structure of a given society” (Wuthnow 1989:9–10). In the case of the Enlightenment, for example, he found that in those countries where the state provided support, particularly ensuring freedom for intellectual and artistic innovation, this cultural revolution flourished. In countries where the state did not support innovation, it languished. I would add this caveat from a contemporary perspective. When the public is mobilized behind a new idea, the state is more likely to follow. The extent to which the public can be mobilized and provide sustained pressure on the state depends on the resources or symbolic capital that can be attracted to the project from civil society and nonstate actors. Either way, without significant resources and intellectual leadership, human agency is unlikely to drive systemic change.
Proposition 2: Change Is Typically Initiated by Elites Who Are Outside the Centermost Positions of Prestige
This proposition follows from the first. Hunter conceptualized spheres of influence within society as stratified gradations of prestige from a nucleus in which power is concentrated out to the periphery from where power is least exercised. Systemic change rarely originates within the nucleus of power. Culture-changing elites18 are situated in the zone between the nucleus and the periphery. It is from here that challenger discourses are produced and disseminated outward. As new discourses are broadly diffused, the influence and prestige of the initiating elites is increased, while that of the nucleus is diminished (Hunter 2010:42–43).
There are two insights here. First, we should not look to those located in the nucleus of cultural power and prestige to take the lead in overturning their world. What may appear to be a shortcut to social transformation—convincing those with their hands on the steering wheel to change direction—usually ends up wasting scarce time and resources. New demands can be accommodated by the center only to the extent that accommodation does not require getting off the main highway and onto a path less taken. Such route changes will be vigorously resisted.
Second, elites outside the nucleus must be willing to deploy their symbolic capital, however it is embodied, to help achieve transformational change. John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Paul and Ann Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Dennis and Donella Meadows, Fritz Schumacher, and Amory and Hunter Lovins wrote the canon on which the modern environmental movement has been built. However, they were also activists participating in one way or another in the diffusion of their ideas into the public sphere and doing battle there. Commoner went so far as to run for president of the United States, a strategy Ralph Nader has continued. It is not enough to research, write, and publish for an audience of peers. The counterdiscourse producers and disseminators need to be actively and publicly engaged in the change process, making sure counterhegemonic cultural products articulate with the lived experience and perception of possibilities within the mass public, and then moving them out into the public sphere. This will require all the resources we can possibly muster.
Proposition 3: Culture Changing Is Most Concentrated When the Networks of Elites and the Institutions They Lead Overlap
Wuthnow’s study of the Enlightenment revealed a cultural revolution generated by “an alternative network of leaders, providing an alternative base of resources, oriented toward the development of an alternative cultural vision (a new anthropology, epistemology, ethics, sociality, and politics), established in part through alternative institutions, all operating at the elite centres of cultural formation” (Hunter 2010:75). The new idea here is the network. Isolated individuals or institutions do not change cultures. Instead, the outward flow of ideas through the various stages of refinement, transfer, and application can only diffuse broadly through the culture if the elites producing alternative discourses are networked with elites in myriad dissemination centers. The key is to build dense networks in overlapping social and cultural spheres that work together for a sustained period measured in decades, not years. “When cultural and symbolic capital overlap with social capital and economic capital and, in time, political capital, and these various resources are directed towards shared ends, the world, indeed, changes” (Hunter 2010:43). It is precisely such dense networks—deliberately constructed—that propelled the “neoliberal turn” in Western nation-states (Harvey 2005).
Many factors mitigate against the development of dense overlapping networks that can propel counterhegemonic discourses forward. Institutions of all types tend toward competition rather than cooperation. Social movements and their “organic intellectuals” are fragmented, sometimes even antagonistic. The most significant barrier is the failure of progressive elites across civil society to articulate a common problem definition. Many environmental organizations, which enjoy a certain status in civil society, not to mention social justice and labor groups, are still avoiding the hard questions about economic growth. Only recently has economic growth (or more accurately, uneconomic growth) been targeted as a driver of ecological decline by a fairly broad spectrum of thinkers and analysts—many of whom have already been cited. Fewer are ready to openly declare capitalism to be an anachronism that cannot survive in a source- and sink-constrained world (or vice versa).
Problem definition is the first step in discourse construction; the form and content of a discourse depends on this initial work (Hajer 1995). Without widespread agreement on the problem, it will be difficult to generate the critical mass of idea generation and diffusion throughout cultural and social networks. This situation makes the need for a new integrative counterdiscourse, around which all progressive change agents can coalesce, all the more urgent.19
Proposition 4: Cultures Change but Rarely, If Ever, Without a Fight
Here we invoke Frederick Douglass, a key protagonist in one of the greatest cultural-economic transformations of Western history. By definition, culture is a contested domain. It consists of competing values, beliefs, and ideas, albeit of unequal status. Vested interests will vigorously defend their ideological and institutional terrain against challengers, so conflict is ever-present in the change process (Hunter 2010). This is difficult to accept; thus, the appeal of discourses that suggest win-win solutions to the environmental crisis can be found. At this stage of planetary overshoot, however, to achieve the elusive “balance” of interests, the heavy end of the scale onto which the world’s most powerful vested interests have piled will have to be significantly lightened. They will not jettison their cargo willingly.
Because the stakes are so high, resistance is responding in kind, in a potentially significant “historical moment.” In August 2011 and again in the winter of 2013, among those arrested for acts of civil disobedience outside the White House in opposition to a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to Texas refineries and export terminals, were several prominent scientists and academics associated with prestigious institutions, including Speth, NASA’s climate scientist James Hanson, and a coeditor of this book, Peter Brown. In Canada, Mark Jaccard—an academic and consultant to federal, provincial, and state governments; member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and Royal Society of Canada fellow—was arrested blocking a coal train en route to the Port of Vancouver (Jaccard 2013). Although there were no arrests, Canadians also took notice when hundreds of lab-coated scientists converged on Parliament Hill and at various points across Canada in protest against their muzzling and cuts to environmental research (Semeniuk 2013). These examples are notable in that they involve local elites outside their typical roles and comfort zones, in concert with tens of thousands of others who are engaged in active resistance against expansion of the fossil fuel economy.
Equally notable and perhaps with much greater consequence, new resistance discourses are arising from outside the dominant culture. While the Idle No More movement of aboriginal peoples coalesced around the dismantling of environmental protections by the Canadian government, it has empowered many First Nations struggles for sovereignty and in defense of their lands and waters (Idle No More 2014). In September 2013, in protest against shale gas exploration and “fracking,” the people of Elsipogtog, a Mi’kmaq community in eastern New Brunswick, issued a “notice of eviction” to Houston-based SWN Resources, declared stewardship over their unceded territory, and with their Acadian and Anglophone neighbors, launched a several-week-long blockage of seismic trucks owned by the company. The aggressive police response sparked solidarity actions across the country (Martens 2013), including the erection of a traditional longhouse, the seat of government, across from the New Brunswick Legislature by the Wolastoq (Maliseet) nation as a declaration of their sovereign nation status in opposing harmful resource exploitation (CTV Atlantic 2013).
These actions are illustrative of new alignments and modes of intervention grounded in new discourses of resistance that suggest two possibilities: First, overlapping networks are beginning to coalesce around a common discourse of an alternative to a fossil-fuel-dependent growth economy. Second, we may be witnessing on a global scale an intensification of forces pushing the capitalist world system “far from equilibrium.” The ground is being ploughed; the tempest is being engaged.
Reflecting on the forty-year history of trying to achieve reform within the parameters of capitalist institutions, Speth considered the effort of the environmental movement (of which he counts himself a part) to date to have been ultimately futile. He wrote, “My generation is a generation of great talkers, overly fond of conferences. We have analyzed, debated, discussed and negotiated these global issues almost endlessly. But on action we have fallen far short” (Speth, 2008:18–19). This cohort vested their talents and faith in the administrative state to cope with the environmental fallout of rampant consumer-capitalism. Except in ameliorating localized environmental irritants, the experiment has failed. The only way forward now, Speth concluded, is to directly challenge the institutions of capital which require and are the engines of growth.
If we see capitalism through Wallerstein’s lens as a historical system with a beginning and end, then we realize that whether or not capitalism continues indefinitely is not a matter of choice. The “limits to growth” thesis explicates the most potent and intractable force that will bring this growth-dependent system to an end. To paraphrase Limits to Growth co-author Dennis Meadows, it is not a question of being for or against growth. On a finite planet, growth in material consumption will end (Stone 2010). Former chief economist of CIBC World Markets Jeff Rubin concurred. Our world, said Rubin, is about to get a whole lot smaller. Triple-digit oil prices due to increasing scarcity will end economic growth (Rubin 2012). The question is, how will the transition from the old system to a new one occur, and what will that successor be? Because system change is nonlinear and beyond human control, the outcome cannot be predicted. But the earth’s chances (and humanity’s) are enhanced if discourses that embody an ecological ethic, coupled with plausible alternative models of economic life, are widely diffused throughout the public sphere.
The theoretical work underpinning a new ethos and economy has been done. Research to refine, clarify, and validate theories in concrete terms is amassing daily across the globe, and new discourses and narratives are being constructed and tested. Although many have been conceptualized, we are less advanced in constructing and test-running new institutional models (or at least less successful in replicating or scaling them up). Penetration of educational institutions remains low, however. While the No Child Left Inside movement is boosting public school systems out of a forty-year environmental education rut (Louv 2008), universities remain bastions of defense of the dominant growth paradigm, even while they incubate challenges to it. Furthermore, environmental studies programs are failing to prepare their students for the structural challenges we face (Maniates 2013). Popularization and dissemination of alternative discourses are the bread and butter of environmental organizations; however, their influence waxes and wanes with economic fluxes and political currents. Globally, the social and aboriginal movements for economic, social, and ecological justice are expanding and well documented, constructing new discourses that reflect the cultural diversity of a global movement (Hawken 2007). There are signs of the institutionalization of these discourses, sometimes directly facilitated by states (e.g., Germany’s renewable energy strategy, the entrenchment of the rights of nature in national law in Ecuador and Bolivia) and other times through civil society (e.g., the Transition Town and Ecovillage movements in the North, Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya, other common property movements in the South).
Notwithstanding, the process of cultural transformation is largely invisible and the outcome cannot be determined. Hunter explained:
The most profound changes in culture can be seen first as they penetrate into the linguistic and mythic fabric of a social order. In doing so, it then penetrates the hierarchy of rewards and privileges and deprivations and punishments that organize social life. It also reorganizes the structures of consciousness and character, reordering the organization of impulse and inhibition. One cannot see change taking place in these ways. It is not perceptible as an event or set of events currently unfolding. Rather, cultural change of this depth can only be seen and described in retrospect, after the transformation has been incorporated into a new configuration of moral controls.
(Hunter 2010:47)
It is tempting to abandon this project for something that delivers more tangible, short-term results. Yet, it is the conclusion of Charles Taylor, Thomas Berry, the authors of this book, and many others that unless we arrive at a “new configuration of moral controls,” we consign many species to extinction and human life on Earth to a miserable future. Most of the tools and some of the conditions needed are at hand. Creating the dense networks across institutions and throughout civil society through which the challenger discourses are linked and diffused is the next critical step.
8. CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have made a preliminary attempt to understand the dynamics that might lead to this new moral code, and how such cultural transformation intersects with the renewal of societal institutions toward an ecological political economy. I have engaged discourse theory as well as world systems theory to account for the social construction of belief systems, values, and norms on the one hand, and the structural-historical constraints on human agency on the other. Other theories or configurations of theories may well provide more cogent insights into change processes. Conversely, it may be argued that an ecological-political economy can be realized without cultural-structural transformation of capitalist society. In either case, there is a gap to be filled between analysis of the problem—the ecological crisis—and the solution, an ecological political economy. This gap is a systematic consideration of the processes by which the solution may be realized—and most importantly, the levers and interventions available to change agents and how they may be used to best effect.
NOTES
1. Peter Timmerman in this volume provides rich examples of economic practices that follow very different cultural discourses than those which shape industrial society.
2. We can think of climate change denial as well as the “tea party” phenomenon in the United States as examples of this.
3. Wuthnow (1989) provided historical evidence of this process in his study of three major cultural shifts in Western Europe: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth-century rise of socialism.
4. This was achieved through a four-decade-long struggle to displace the hegemonic social welfare discourse of Western democracies, which David Harvey documented in his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).
5. Polanyi in The Great Transformation explained that a self-regulating market economy cannot exist outside a market society because it depends on society to create and maintain the conditions for its operation.
6. David Harvey argued that the restoration of conditions for capital accumulation was the goal all along, not some ideal free market. He pointed to the rapidity with which the principles of free-market competition are abandoned when they threaten monopolistic corporate strategies of profit maximization.
7. While the academy is the source of much critical analysis and counterdiscourses, as institutions universities are either silent on or supportive of orthodox discourse, especially economic discourse. Likewise, while the media is an instrument for the dissemination of counterdiscourses, corporate media does not challenge economic orthodoxy.
8. Until recently, the antiglobalization movement, which reached its pinnacle with the disruption of 1999 World Trade Organization talks in Seattle, Washington, was the most obvious example of this. Public discontent reemerged in the wake of the 2008 global finance crisis with mass civil disobedience led by the Occupy movement, as well as mass protests against economic structural adjustments in southern Europe. Since 2012, civil disobedience actions have been deployed against pipelines associated with the expansion of Canada’s Athabasca tar sands, including the Keystone XL pipeline which would transport the bitumen from Alberta to Texas, and the Kinder Morgan pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver, British Columbia. The Global Frackdown movement against hydraulic fracturing of methane and oil trapped in shale deposits is growing in size and scope (Food & Water Watch 2014), manifested most powerfully in Canada in aboriginal sovereignty claims in New Brunswick (Schwartz and Gollom 2013).
9. See Hajer (1995) and Carruthers (2001), for insightful overviews of 1970s radical environmental discourse and its evolution into discourses of sustainable development and ecological modernization.
10. See, for instance, McFague (2001); Nadeau (2003); Meadows, Randers, and Meadows (2004); Homer-Dixon (2006); Victor (2008); Jackson (2009); Foster (2009); Brown and Garver (2009); McKibben (2010); Speth (2011); Korten (2009); Heinberg (2011); Gilding (2011); Rubin (2012); and Czech (2013). This is just a sampling of books that are circulating in the public arena that either call for or predict an end to economic growth. There is a whole other vast peer-reviewed literature that is generally circulated only within academia, particularly in the field of ecological economics but also in other social sciences.
11. See, for instance, Marcuse (1964); Habermas (1976); Catton (1982); Lyotard (1984); Winner (1986); Alexander and Sztompka (1990); Lasch (1991); Rifkin (1991); Taylor (1991); Rogers (1994); and Ophuls (1998), among others.
12. He was imprisoned by the Mussolini regime as a leader of the Communist Party in Italy.
13. The prestige or status of the discourse-sponsor group and their spokespersons is important in gaining this consent. I take this matter up later in the chapter.
14. Gramsci’s use of “common sense” is similar to the anthropological understanding of culture as the mental milieu that gives meaning to the world. He distinguished this from “good sense,” which is a conscious understanding based on careful consideration of relevant factors. Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and habitus appear similar to Gramsci’s “common sense.” In both cases, because they are subconscious, they are quite inaccessible to deliberate examination through discourse.
15. Wuthnow employed Bourdieu’s concept here.
16. Harvey suggested the conscious values related to social justice were not activated by neoliberal discourse and therefore lost ground in the political-cultural milieu as the new discourse “marched through the institutions.”
17. Studies in social cognition tell us that individuals possess the values needed to support an ecological ethic. Intrinsic values (concern for bigger-then-self issues, sense of community, high empathy levels, internal validation of self-worth, low concern for status and wealth) coexist with extrinsic values (concern for wealth and power, envy of high social strata, strong focus on financial success, low empathy levels, external validation of self-worth). The relative weight one gives each class of values is determined by a range of factors, such as upbringing, social norms, role models, circumstances, and life experience. Values are exercised (or moral identity enhanced) through repeated exposure to those values through peers, media, education, or experience with societal institutions. Consistent exposure to external stimuli that trigger extrinsic values will strengthen those values relative to intrinsic ones. Likewise, the more individuals are exposed to bigger-than-self intrinsic values, the stronger those values will become relative to the opposing extrinsic values (Crompton 2010). Narratives and discourses are framed to trigger particular values, whether inadvertently or deliberately, with the concrete result that particular conceptions of society become more or less plausible depending on their alignment with preexisting, subconscious belief systems (and not with evidence-based reasoning or “good sense”) (Lakoff 2004).
18. These are individuals who possess high levels of symbolic capital by virtue of their wealth, education, personal achievement, or position of authority or leadership in their respective fields or institutions who are engaged in “cultural” or “ideological” production (Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and Wuthnow’s well-placed backers of resistance discourses).
19. The emerging degrowth movement, which began in Europe and has recently crossed the Atlantic, is an example of intellectuals joining with social movements to deepen the critique of the hegemonic economic growth discourse and to articulate new models of ecological-economic relations (Martínez-Alier et al. 2010; Schneider, Kallis, and Martinez-Alier 2010). Another hopeful development is the collaboration of environmental leader Bill McKibbon and social change activist and author Naomi Klein on the climate change issue, beginning with their joint “Do the Math” tour in 2012–2013 to promote a fossil fuel divestment campaign on university and college campuses in North America (350.org 2013). In her speech at the September 1, 2013, founding of Unifor, a new megaunion created by the Canadian Autoworkers and the Canadian Energy and Paper Workers Union, Klein argued that climate change transcends all other interests and should be the common focus of all social and environmental justice organizations (Klein 2013).
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