“Ford v. Ferrari,” now playing in cinemas, is about a maverick team of car designers and drivers who have been commanded by the Ford Corporation to build a car that will win at Le Mans. In one scene, corporate head Henry Ford II is unexpectedly taken for his first ride in the GT40, the car his crew is piloting. The car takes off, and Ford is rocketed up and down an airport runway, his face frozen in terror. This is about the time a newbie soils himself, a seasoned observer remarks.
When the car finally screams to a halt, Ford bursts into a fit of weeping. At first he seems unmanned—‘crying like a little girl,’ to quote a familiar gibe. But then we learn the real reason for his tears. If only granddad could see this, he says. The implication is that jetting a human body 200 miles per hour over a patch of cement was what his legendary namesake was really after all along. To push a limit, to break a record, to go faster. The sacralization of speed is a move the film makes over and over. Whether automobile or airplane or rocket ship, the petroleum-fueled combustion engine is the machine we have made to surpass limitations.
What’s the old riddle about Mount Everest? “Because it’s there.” For as long as I can remember, this ‘breaking of a limit for its own sake’ has been lifted up and celebrated as the quintessential mark of human distinction.
How have we come to think about limits this way? How has the idea of limits shaped our economics, our politics, and our relationship with the living world around us? These are precisely the questions Giorgos Kallis asks in Limits, his new book from Stanford Briefs.
A prominent advocate for degrowth, Kallis is a prolific writer of articles and books that deliver careful research and argument in no-nonsense persuasive prose. (One of his sidelines are essays on how to be a productive academic.) Born in Athens, educated transnationally, Kallis is an environmental scientist working in the field of political ecology and a professor at the Autonomous University in Barcelona. Limits, however, is a straight-ahead history of ideas. It’s based on a reading of a classic text, Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1798 essay on population and food supply. The subtitle of Kallis’s short book is Why Malthus was Wrong and Why Environments Should Care.
The argument is a little difficult to put succinctly because it runs so counter to the way Malthus has been commonly understood. Malthus, the prophet of scarcity, said that human population would always outrun the amount of available food. Malthusian pessimism signifies a kind of regressive blindness to the human capacity to surpass limits, to innovate, and to discover new sources of fuel, both for our bodies and for our machines. This popular understanding of Malthus comes from a mis- or half-reading, Kallis finds.
Kallis stresses the political motivation behind the essay. In 1798, Malthus was writing expressly to refute those who were challenging the new capitalist order and calling for redistribution. Because we’d never have enough to feed the poor out of current stock, he countered, continuous exertion was necessary to stay ahead of the geometric ratio. So, yes, Malthus did raise the prospect of a limit to human reproduction, but it was only to remove the prospect of a limit to economic growth. Malthus’s genius was “that he managed to make scarcity compatible with growth, limits with no limits,” Kallis writes. His essay was “the first rejection of redistribution and welfare in the name of growth of free markets” (29, 21).
So Malthus was wrong, Kallis argues, but not for the reasons popularly understood. He was wrong, first, to assume that the human species was incapable of regulating its own reproduction. Second, Malthus was wrong to assume that the Earth was capable of sustaining the ever-increasing demand on its resources that was necessary. This should matter to environmentalists because environmentalists have largely accepted Malthus’s model of inevitable scarcity. They have taken upon themselves the mantle of Malthusian pessimism. When they argue that we are confronting nature’s limits, they re-inscribe Malthus’s growth calculus and reduce their own case “to a sterile scientific dispute … of how growth can be sustained and for how long.” Environmental policies become bleak schemes to stave off, for as long as possible, the day of reckoning (48).
But thresholds need not ever be passed, Kallis claims. Limits don’t exist out there in nature. They exist in our own intentions, how we define the good life, and most of all, in our politics. Those concerned about economic, social, and environmental justice shouldn’t be trying to figure out how to make growth more efficient and sustainable. Rather, they should abandon growth as a goal altogether and work to institute a “non-fatalistic politics of [self-imposed] limits” (62). Malthus taught that sharing will do no good because there would never be enough for everyone. Kallis argues that we will only have enough when we limit ourselves to our fair share. The problem isn’t natural. It’s social and political.
I’m one who’d only dipped into Malthus’s essay and had received its common meaning without question. Kallis’s reading isn’t an in-depth engagement with the original text—the book is less than 150 pages, after all—and it likely fits his degrowth agenda a bit too cleanly. But a reconsideration of Malthus, like recent ones of Adam Smith, is a welcome part of the assault, across many fronts, on the neoliberal order.
In the second half of Limits, Kallis touches on his own biography, which is something I’d not seen in his writing before. He was close to his mother, an Athens activist, and her death, when he was a young scholar, hit him hard. Among her possessions he found the book she’d long kept by her bedside. Its author was the Greek political theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. His mother’s favorite theorist would have a great influence on his own intellectual journey. We see something of this in the second half of the book, a discussion of the relationship between self-restraint and freedom, which comes partly from Castoriadis and his understanding of the culture of ancient Greece.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of Castoriadis readily available to the American reader. I found a copy of A Society Adrift, a compilation of late interviews and writings, which Kallis cites a good deal in Limits. I felt some due diligence was required in regard to Castoriadis’s concept of “the social imaginary.” It’s a term I’ve used a lot in the last couple of years, having picked it up from my reading in the environmental humanities, without really grasping its provenance. The term seems a lot like the terms worldview, or mindset, or paradigm, or episteme, which is to say, it aids in articulating the relationship between our immaterial ideas, our immaterial descriptions of those ideas, and the material world we come to live in as a result.
Castorious develops his explanation of the social imaginary with dense intricacy; this concept and his thinking in general shows the influence of systems theory. The systems theorist Dana Meadows confronts the matter and sums it up quite simply: “A society that talks incessantly about ‘productivity’ but that hardly understands, much less uses, the word ‘resilience’ is going to become productive and not resilient. A society that doesn’t understand or use the term ‘carrying capacity’ will exceed its carrying capacity” (174). Kallis would probably see some re-inscription of Malthus in Meadows’ thought, but they share a foundation in the importance of frames, rules, and goals in contemplating how to work toward change in a destructive system spinning out of control.
Anyway, here’s a tip: don’t go see “Ford v. Ferrari” if you’ve been reading Meadows, Kallis, or Cornelius Castoriadis. Or at least, if you do, don’t expect to enjoy it. As I watched, Castoriadis’s various descriptions of the “capitalist imaginary” were fresh in my mind. History had seen conquerors who thirsted for power before, Castoriadis explains. “But with capitalism, for the first time, this tendency toward the unlimited extension of might, or of mastery, encountered the appropriate, adequate instruments: ‘rational’ instruments'” (62). Henry Ford II is buckled into one of those rational instruments. He experiences this expansion of mastery in real time, as it were.
The thing about imaginaries is that they can be challenged; they can be replaced. That’s the theory, anyway, and the basis of Kallis’s political project. He relies on what Castoriadis calls “autonomy,” the capacity to continually critique both the imaginaries that dominate our perception as well as those we put up, experimentally, as alternatives. “We can have less suffering instead of destruction,” Kallis writes, “to the extent that we can institute mechanisms that help us reflect on our wants and prudently manage those that are excessive. At the level of the individual, this is the mission of psychoanalysis; at the level of the collective, Castoriadis argued, this is the role of democracy” (93).
Today, with democracy on the ropes and growth in throughput still the barely-questioned measure of all economic success, one can’t help but ask if imagining a steady-state economics of sharing isn’t too flatly utopian. It is, I suppose, if one’s thinking is shaped by Malthus’s model of scarcity. It is if one’s politics is shaped by fear of apocalyptic collapse. And it is if one’s definition of the good life is shaped by a devotion to ever-increasing, ever-accelerating production, consumption–and speed.
WORKS CITED
Castoriadis, Cornelius, Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay. A Society Adrift Interviews and Debates, 1974-1997. 2010.
Kallis, Giorgos. Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. 2019.
Meadows, Donella H., and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. 2015.
4 Thoughts on this Post
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Thanks, Anthony, for introducing this title by Kallis to us.
In the natural world what is not growing is dying, so it is hard to abandon the notion of growth altogether. I would argue that there are indeed “limits” of a kind in the natural world. We might think of these “limits” more along the lines of the Daoist as evidenced in the Daodejing. Our re-conceptualized picture of limits could also draw upon analogies (and perhaps even more directly) from work on the nature of self-chosen constraints or self-binding as explored so brilliantly by Jon Elster in several books, but especially in Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
In other words, we cannot absolutely divorce our conceptualizations of the natural world from our anthropomorphic proclivities (we are the only creatures or natural beings capable of ‘transcending’ our creatureliness or animal nature in several respects, hence our status as human animals, as Kant and other philosophers have well understood; of late, see the works of Raymond Tallis for precisely what this transcendence entails). There is indeed no “view from nowhere” or a perspective drawn completely from the vantage point of the natural world itself bereft of human mediation, however much we might be enjoined or inspired to let nature, as one might say, speak for herself (as the Daoist appears to do). Thus we might forswear our modern economic conceptions of growth in favor of models that involve reference to or dependence upon notions of individuation, self-realization, flourishing, and so forth, “perfectibility” in the sense understood by both Godwin and Condorcet; in brief, models of psychological, personal, or spiritual growth and human flourishing (which appreciate the myriad reasons for ‘self-binding’) that assume an altogether different model of what economics is all about (a topic broached in your previous post), of the ways in which economics is wholly subordinate to and structured by criteria and standards outside the discipline itself, in other words, sans the pretensions of social scientific objectivity unmoored from our most cherished values and principles (hence there is no such thing as ‘pure’ economics), be they spiritual, metaphysical, moral and ethical. I strongly suspect the “steady state” model is more or less the economist’s general equilibrium writ large, and provides little by way of practical guidance for the creation of utopian and practical alternatives to the status quo, for constructing models of moral and political economy that are simultaneously humanistic (or ‘humane,’ if the former term carries to much historical and philosophical baggage) and environmentalist.
Incidentally, another book with a non-standard treatment of what Malthus was up to that appears not dissimilar from Kallis’s “reconsideration” is Eric B. Ross’s The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, 1998).
Something inside me wants to push back whenever I hear “whatever isn’t growing is dying.” I won’t say it’s false in some basic sense but it does seem to undermine “maturity” as a life stage. I mean, I hope I’m growing in wisdom, in knowledge (though I regularly confront evidence otherwise), but my body has been the same size for quite some time now. Does that mean I’m dying? Maybe. But if so, it’s as it should be, and dying is not such a bad thing. Mostly, I object to the saying because it seems so often to rationalize or justify addictive behaviors, superfluous actions, or explosive patterns–feedback loops that have slipped away from sources of information that might slow them down, that might add complexity, that might reate multiple, diverse, meandering streams rather than destructive gushes and blasts.
Kallis’s claim that limits are in human intentions, not nature, is the most immediately controversial, and he takes a few pains in his book to explain what he means. An overly simplistic way to express it is to say that a slightly warmer climate would not appear as a natural limit to human flourishing, nor would there be a concern about peak oil, had modern societies never chosen to expand their ‘rational mastery’ by the massive extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Yes, there are limiting parameters to life, but healthy systems don’t tend to push up against them and trigger them by regularly and persistently crossing thresholds. Healthy living systems are organized in ways that stay within bounds.
But I’ve only broken off a few pieces of your comment, Patrick, which considered as a whole, is welcome and supportive of goals we share. Your long middle sentence is one I’ll have to meditate on for a while, and the books by Elster and Ross that you mention sound like ones I need to add to my ‘sooner than later’ list. Thank you for sharing your expertise!
My impression is that it has long been a standard and I believe correct critique of Malthus that Malthus failed to anticipate The Pill. IOW, Malthus assumed that population would increase as fast as food supplies allowed. Methods of contraception mean that the Malthusian assumptions about food and population aren’t really valid today, if they ever were. And Malthus also didn’t anticipate, I don’t think, the modern developments in agricultural productivity. (Caveat that what I know about Malthus comes mostly from reading Heilbroner many years ago.)
A problem, though, is that the global population, while projected to taper off sometime in the middle of this century IIRC, will reach about 9 or 10 billion first, which will inevitably put further strains on fragile ecosystems and worsen the problems of mega-cities in the poorer countries, surrounded as they are in some cases by squatter settlements and large permanent slums or favelas, and choking in some cases in blankets of pollution, and pressed to come up with adequate supplies of water, basic services such as garbage and waste disposal, etc. There is no way a city such as Dhaka, for example, can function as an urban space today, when it has some 9 or 10 million people (or whatever the exact figure is) in the same way it functioned when I lived there as a child decades ago, when the population was probably under a million.
These remarks are not very profound and I’m not sure exactly how they relate to the issues eloquently addressed in the post, but I thought I’d throw them in anyway.
The Pill seems both an example of the ability of the human species to limit its own growth and an example of one of those rational instruments to expand mastery over its conditioned nature. In that way it disturbs the scenario I’ve sketched out there. Thanks for reading and commenting, Louis.