With the kind permission of the author, Professor Anthony Seaton, I thought this time of year was appropriate to share this thought-provoking article published in the “Scottish Review” in August 2012.
We all know what growth means; it is something we have all experienced. It starts at the beginning and continues for a while, then stops. Not all of it stops at the same time but sooner or later it stops dead. It is uneven.
Our brains grow rapidly in utero then fall away slowly through life. We shoot up in adolescence and shrink a bit when we become elderly. Our girth has a tendency to resist this law of decline and in many of us pursues a fluctuant course at the whim of our vanity or reluctance to buy a new pair of trousers.
In my younger years as a doctor, we used the word ‘growth’ as a euphemism for cancer. It seemed brutal to tell someone that they had cancer outright in the clinic; instead we’d say that the x-ray shows a growth, and this always elicited the response: ‘Is it cancer, doctor?’. Leaving the patient to use the dread word first seems cowardly, and changes in attitudes accompanying the general understanding that cancer could be cured allowed us eventually to come to the point more directly. It was never easy and even after many years I always dreaded giving the bad news. But I digress.
The characteristic of a cancer is that it exhibits unrestrained growth, not just in the bulk of the tumour but in spreading around the body. It is a parasite, sucking nutrition from the body until its host expires or until it is overcome and destroyed by the body’s defences or, more usually, by the power of medicine. If the cancer wins, it wins a Pyrrhic victory as it dies also, no longer sustained by the blood and nutrients of its victim. All growth eventually ceases. Cancer and us, we are all dust.
Decades ago during the 1970s, in conversation with an American colleague, I recall suggesting to him that the financial growth on which capitalism is predicated was unsustainable and would one day cease, leading to financial collapse of those countries that espoused it. The thought had not occurred to him and he was shocked that anyone could hold such dangerous views; indeed in those days the earth did seem to have almost limitless resources. But I remained troubled and became increasingly so as the years passed and we became a ‘consumer society’, wanting so much more than we needed.
It was not possible to think of a civilisation that had not collapsed; why should ours be any different? On a holiday I once visited some of the deserted Mayan cities in Mexico and thought, as I surveyed the ruins, of the hubris of Canary Wharf. Surely the only questions could be when and in what manner.
There are at least two notable Diamonds. I shall bypass Bob, the unwelcome metastasis from Wall Street, and mention Jared, the polymath author of ‘Collapse’. In this book he traces the history of the decline of past populations and civilisations, identifying five important explanations: environmental damage, a change in climate, hostile neighbours, decreased support by previously friendly neighbours, and finally an inadequate response to looming problems.
Even world-dominating societies, the Greeks, Romans and Arabs, commercially and militarily powerful, cultured and artistic, are included with smaller societies like the Vikings in Greenland and the Mayans among peoples whose society has declined in response to these factors. Look at those factors again with respect to the capitalist West: think of over-fishing and huge agricultural monocultures, of rising global temperatures and ships sailing to the Far East over the top of Siberia or via the North West Passage, think of the hostility of the Arab world and even, in a more local context, of the growing enmity of closer previously friendly trading partners. Finally, think of the appalling delays by our inept EU and UK governments in recognising the systemic problems that face us, and of their wholly inadequate responses to date. I return to my metaphor for growth, cancer.
All growth requires fuel, nourishment. A cancer sucks that from its host. The fuel of financial growth in society is money but money is nothing more than pieces of paper or the flow of a few electrons for bartering; its value comes from what it can purchase and it is produced only by selling goods and products, be they tangible or intellectual, turbines or literature. Goods ultimately come from our endeavours, and a society that cannot produce and sell its goods shrivels and dies just as surely as does a cancer victim. Goods also require the beneficial support of our environment to produce our food, water, mineral and energy resources.
Everything is a matter of balance. We can take more resources out and produce more goods, sell more than we import and have a positive balance, growth, or we can do the opposite and have a negative balance, recession. Just like a middle-aged person, we can eat more and get fat or diet and get thinner, but for most of our lives further growth is not necessary. Our society is at this stage; we do not need to grow as we have more than enough. Our problem is the grossly disparate distribution of goods, both in our own small country of Scotland and in the wider world.
If we get a cancer we require more and more fuel and still get thinner; it eats away at us. We in the West have become fat but now we have a cancer in our society. Some of our cells have become malignant and are draining our energy and life from us. What are its symptoms and signs? Clearly, the financial crisis is the most obvious, with increasing poverty, unemployment and hopelessness among the poor. Along with this goes the conspicuous consumption of the very rich. Underlying it is the nexus of corruption.
We have watched in horror as politicians cheat taxpayers, newspapers connive with the police and politicians and break the law, and banks cheat everyone. These are all symptoms, but the cancer itself lies deeper in society; it is greed, desire for more of everything without caring where it comes from or who is harmed by the getting of it. It is why we have come to live in a plutocracy.
The most important consequence of this cancer in Britain has been the progressive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, to be changed from paper into essentially untaxed property and possessions. The conduit for this is the City of London, increasingly populated by clever but amoral people whose sole ambition is to make money. I’ve heard the City described as a sewer; it is not. Sewers are useful mechanisms for ridding us of waste and thus preventing epidemics. Rather, it is a conveyor belt for the transfer of money to the rich. It has lost sight of the original purposes of banks, insurers and so on, in its burning imperative to enrich its owners, operatives and cronies. It is the primary site of our cancer. It needs surgery, but where are the surgeons?
Jared Diamond’s book, ‘Collapse’, has a sub-title, ‘How societies choose to fail or survive’. We do have a choice, identified by the Occupy movement. We can make a fairer and more environmentally friendly world, but we need politicians who have the moral courage to grasp the nettle and we all need to accept that our society is middle-aged and cannot be expected to keep growing forever. Willy-nilly, our children and grandchildren are now confronting this, but we can make it easier for them.
Professor Anthony Seaton is an emeritus professor in the school of medicine and dentistry at the University of Aberdeen.