The Ecology of a Different Modernity
I want to start with the basic claim that genealogical work is as much about the future as it is the past. Even when we are exploring the past, we have our eye on the future, especially when we consider or propose other possible modernities. In so doing, we hope to discover possible paths into the future. Nietzsche, in Untimely Meditations, describes this when he writes of those whose “looking to the past impels them toward the future.” For Nietzsche, the usefulness of history is an understanding of possibilities realized. Seeing the past as the time of possibilities realized reopens our sense that the future is pure possibility, the temporal space of the freedom to act and create. This way of thinking clears the space for a future that is not just the playing out of the past, a future that allows for different modernities.
Kate Soper proposes such an alternative modernity in her book Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. Her book is about a future modernity that frees itself from “the parameters of our present modernity” through a lust for growth. Our present modernity is a trap, a kind of heaping up of life and activity that closes our temporal horizon by denying us the time we need “to envisage, let alone act on, alternative ways of living.” It does so “through the theft of time and energy, [as] the work and spend culture deters development of free thinking and critical opposition.” It also proposes endless progress and so claims for itself “newness” but in fact forecloses the possibility of newness. Always progressing but never changing, we end up in a cycle of repetition, a perverse recurrence of the same. We are too busy working in order to be busy buying to actually imagine, enact, and welcome the new. The modern—perhaps because of its rejection of the past—is incapable of allowing the future.
To posit a different modernity means to develop a post-growth socio-economic existence. Modernity is premised on endless growth as a necessity for happiness and a thriving society. This growth is the growth of more: more possessions, more travel, more rooms and bathrooms in our homes, more cars, and more money. Soper also blames our current environmental crises on the modern cult of growth. Endless growth turns out to be a path not towards life but death. Not only that, but this material “growth” strips us of our time. Both material excess and temporal depletion make social reordering increasingly unlikely. For Soper, we must fight back and move toward a post-growth model.
Soper’s vision is not that of a scold, shaking her finger when we reach for things that bring us pleasure, proclaiming doom when we want a little more. A vision of doom, in and of itself, is not a vision of a different modernity, just a vision of modernity no longer able to get what it wants. Conversely, technocratic fixes do not offer an alternative modernity. Soper critiques “technical quick-fix solutions that might keep labour and consumer spending indefinitely on course.” For Soper this is the “naturalization of capitalist priorities.” It is precisely this naturalization of consumptive growth that marks the modern even in its “green” iterations, with its promises that we can endlessly accumulate more stuff because we have switched to lower wattage lightbulbs, 50 mpg automobiles, and plastics that we tell ourselves we can recycle. Neither a doomed modernity nor a green modernity offer a new modernity. The latter case might still seem more appealing, but ultimately it just offers ecological disaster on a slower pace.
What then would it mean to offer a different modernity? To see this, we should turn to Augustine. In trying to understand what makes a people, he writes, “if we are to discover the character of any people, we have to examine what it loves.” To speak of a historical epoch is really to speak of the people who lived then. As Augustine writes, “we are the times: such as we are such are times.” Modernity is “a people,” not in a geographic or political sense but in a temporal and historical sense. This we is the people that make modernity by means of a “common agreement as to what it loves.” To propose an alternative modernity is to propose that the we of this time come to a different agreement as to what we love without merely reconstructing a past epoch.
Homo Ludens by Pieter Bruegel
Soper challenges modernity because she proposes that we examine what we love in order to change what we love. We need an “alternative structure of satisfactions.” We have modes and sources of pleasure that we need to shift away from to find other structures of satisfaction. This necessitates
A revolution in our thinking about the very nature of progress and prosperity—a revolution that challenges the idea that consumer culture delivers the good life, that undermines attempts to maintain the hegemony of work over our lives and value system, and that highlights the pleasure for everyone of a less speed-driven, time-scarce, acquisitive way of living.
If we think the good life is perpetually multiplying the square feet of our homes, flying to distant places for vacations, buying new phones every year, all while working endlessly, then we are still stuck in our current modernity. To break away and build a different future, Soper says, we must shift to a more enriched community life, a leisure-centered existence, and ownership of fewer but better things.
A new modernity will be marked by a different account of the good life with a different set of shared loves. Soper shows that underneath our tawdry love of stuff there are deeper, more interesting loves. If we stop buying and start working less, we might stumble on things that we love more but have been too busy to attend to. The surfeit of stuff doesn’t make for more happiness, but it does make for more isolation, as we hide away in ever expanding home entertainment centers. More damningly, ever growing consumption necessitates ever growing production, which is why we find ourselves working more. Increasingly, all we have is work, with a combination of precarity and the constant proximity of our boss’s demands.
Soper envisions a future life that is slower, with fewer possessions, more time, and more communal solidarity. She argues for a leisure-based society that has the time for making music instead of subscribing to Spotify, has time for home-cooked meals with others instead of streaming yet another hour of Netflix by ourselves. It is a society that reduces the workweek from its current sprawl to a limited allotment of time. Freed from consumption and production, we can return to craftmanship and community. In other words, instead of constantly working so we can constantly pay for stuff, we could work less and do things that make us happy. For Soper, this is what a true leftwing politics should offer: time, leisure, and the spaces in which to share in these features of life. Modernity, as Max Weber showed, is the era of perpetual work-ethic. To shift towards an economics and politics of leisure would combine a better life with a reduced environmental impact. Our general malaise—combined with perpetual agitation—indicates a deep dissatisfaction with the work-and-spend ethos of modernity. If we start attending to our time together, making things and cultivating a deeper spiritual life, we will realize that we actually don’t want more stuff and more work.
The challenge for Soper is how to convince people to take up the good life she proposes. Can we make a craft and community vision appealing? According to Soper, this requires major economic reforms, such as instituting a thirty-hour (or less) work week, vastly expanding biking and walking possibilities, making local spaces more appealing for leisure and travel, and perhaps providing some kind of universal basic income so people won’t be trapped by their jobs. On more intellectual fronts, we need to challenge modernity’s ahistorical account of progress as necessitating
Close up of Pieter Bruegel’s Homo Ludens
new forms of representation of the relationship between the past and the preset, tradition and modernity: in place of a stadial and evolutionist conception of history, a degrowth understanding committed to social justice and a fairer distribution of environment resources requires a more complex narrative on the old-new divide.
Soper calls this an avant-garde nostalgia that is capable of drawing from tradition—whether in the form of Thomas Aquinas or the anti-modern communitarian life of post-war Ireland—to foster a new way of living.
My fear, though, is that there is so much leaning against Soper’s vision. Our moral imaginary for what happiness is has been structured by marketing firms too powerful for Soper’s little book to overcome. Nietzsche would propose the ubermensch, who could shatter the current configuration through a creative transvaluation of values. Soper is no Nietzschean and seems much closer to a virtue ethics mindset, which makes her lack of attention to the need for education surprising. But then Soper is, in a very particular way, closer to Augustine then most virtue ethicists. What she is proposing is a conversion, and conversion is always about changing or reordering our loves. A new modernity requires such a reordering, and Soper has done the hard work of proposing just this. If we reorder our loves, we may be able to avoid the consumerist dystopia of an ecologically wrecked world.
The problem is that conversions often require more than just thoughtful education. Something, or someone, must turn us. One might think of a moment like the Covid pandemic, with its flourishing of baking and gardening, as an opportunity for such a conversion. But at the same time, Covid seems to have fostered the growth of Amazon and the decline of localized retail. We may need more shattering events to bring about the change Soper proposes. We can convert to different loves and create a modernity on our terms, or we can let the ecological crisis convert us. In any case, this modernity cannot go on. Best to follow the lead of Soper, and others such as Pope Francis and Eugene McCarraher, and prepare a new modernity with a new set of shared loves.
