Convergence of Catastrophes, page 19
After the failure of economic progressivism and consumerist universalism, there could well be a planetary global economy (it could even get stronger) with no ambition to draw all humans into its order, since it would involve only an international minority. This is a very possible scenario for the post-catastrophe world, since techno-science and the industrial market economy cannot be neglected; they are too deeply rooted and are already well on the way to globalisation. Universalising industrial society to all humans cannot be attempted, since it is impossible from energy, health and ecological perspectives. The ‘neo-global’ economy that will follow the catastrophe will certainly be planetary in its networks, but in no way universal. The inequality intrinsic to it will permit, by the general decline in energy consumption, ending the destruction of the ecosystem and its reconstitution and so the improvement of every people’s way of life.
Of course, the GDP of the world economy will shrink considerably, like a deflating balloon. Some will object that the shrinking of the world’s GDP will dry up financial resources and make investments impossible because of ‘loss of scale’, since industrial society will involve only a fraction of humanity and therefore markets and demands will shrink proportionally. This objection ignores the fact that this economy will be freed from two considerable burdens. Lower pollution will reduce the enormous volume of external diseconomies and costs now experienced. The expense of loans to ‘developing’ nations will disappear along with the goal of development. The costs of the welfare state will collapse since the massive social service budgets will disappear, because they will be rendered useless in the context of a return to economies of solidarity and proximity of a neo-medieval type.
Obviously, there could be another solution: keeping universalism and persuading rich countries to accept a lower standard of living and energy consumption in order to preserve the environment, share with poor countries, and pay for the industrialisation of ‘emerging countries’. From this clever and logical perspective of the ecologists, the solution is more equality rather than less.
This hypothesis, however, turns out to be totally idealistic and unworkable. Rationality has never had the upper hand in history. Can you imagine Americans voluntarily giving up their cars and agreeing to double their taxes to help the countries of the global South? In the scenario of the economic division of the Earth, large areas and fractions of the population in the heart of the industrial countries of the global North could well return to traditional economic ways of life with a low level of energy use and centred on a diversified rural subsistence economy.
A Non-egalitarian Economy
We need to understand that, although techno-science has had devastating effects, this is because it is directed by egalitarian universalist progressivism and not because of faults that are intrinsic to it — quite the opposite of what traditionalists of the Right or dogmatic ecologists believe. Because the techno-scientific method has been extended beyond due measure and people have attributed to it an imaginary gift of miraculously bringing a crowd of benefits, some people today are disenchanted with it. In reality, techno-science is, by nature, suited to concern only a minority of humanity. It devours too much energy to be generalised.
Of course, there are good-hearted souls who will reproach these theses for extolling a generalised exclusion. This is yet another quasi-religious concept, born from reductionist ways of thinking, convinced that the present model of development is the morally legitimate one for everyone.
In reality, the ‘exclusion’ of neo-traditional societies from the techno-scientific sphere is part and parcel of the exclusion of the latter from the neo-traditional world. We need to abandon the prejudice that techno-scientific societies are ‘developed’ in comparison with traditional societies. This is the myth of the savage that is based on an implicit racism.
Neo-traditional communities would be, in the hypothesis of the preceding scenario, in no way seen as inferior or underdeveloped. They would live according to the rhythm of another civilisation and perhaps live better than today. The entire Western intelligentsia is characterised by an inability to rid itself of progressivist and egalitarian dogmas and paradigms, of even imagining other socio-economic solutions.
Pascal Bruckner,[209] for example, in an article in Le Monde, begins by recognising the disenchantment with and failures of technology and then admits the unintended consequences of extending technology to the entire Earth. He adds naïvely: ‘Despite the hopes of the Eighteenth century, technological progress is never synonymous with moral progress. At least we have a guide for action, the democratic values inherited from the Enlightenment, values that are themselves secularised translations of the messianic beliefs of the Gospels and the Bible.’
This pitiful recitation of talking points amounts to saying: to oppose the bad consequences of technological progressivism, a legacy of the Enlightenment, let us return . . . to the philosophy of the Enlightenment! What ideological imbecility! He does not grasp that it is precisely the egalitarian progressivist universalism of the Gospels, reinforced by the Protestant ethic and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which has expanded techno-science excessively and massively with an unsustainable momentum like a runaway engine to the entire Earth, instead of limiting it to certain areas.
Techno-science as Esoteric Alchemy
Question: By predicting and extolling this socio-economic model, are we not trying to make science and technology confidential, like alchemical formulas, restricted to a minority of humans who know how to control them? Yes, exactly. It is a question of removing techno-science from the rationalist mentality . . . and liberating it from the egalitarian utopia that claims that it is suitable for all humanity.
In one scenario of the post-catastrophe era, when people will have taken the measure of the dangers of the indefinite extension of science, technology and the industrial economy and the harmfulness of uncontrolled exchange of information (excessive communication), it would not be surprising if there were a return to an initiatory and almost esoteric vision of techno-science, in order to preserve humanity from the dangers of its viral, massive and uncontrolled excesses. This techno-scientific civilisation is eminently risky, but intrinsically linked to the spirit of certain peoples and human groups who are a minority scattered over the Earth. The ideal would be for it to be attempted by only a few and remain esoteric. Techno-science cannot be a mass or ‘open’ phenomenon. The planet rejects the hypothesis. Only 10 per cent to 20 per cent of humanity can lead this way of life. For some people there is wisdom and the natural certainty of reproducing the species, cyclical time and the agrarian or tribal welfare of stable traditional societies. For others there are the temptations of a global and historicised world: for some, René Guénon;[210] for others, Nietzsche.
When the Worst is Probable
Economic growth continues, in appearance, but it has a sickly hue. The world economic system is not sustainable, because it is based on the short-term and the myth of the unlimited maximisation of individual consumption. The economy of the Earth, which has now become a homogeneous and interdependent whole (‘globalisation’), is experiencing an immense fragility and its collapse is predictable, because of several factors:
1) The exhaustion of fossil fuels, especially petroleum, but also natural gas, without speaking of the decline in agricultural and fishing resources. The world economy is still growing and using up the planet’s natural resources at a rhythm four times higher than its capacities. We know the analogy: it would take four Earths to satisfy the frenzy of our current needs!
Developing nations, with their vast and continually multiplying populations, aspire to the economic level of the West, an aspiration that is politically comprehensible but physically impossible. We shall inevitably reach the breaking point.
2) The globalised economy has become purely speculative (the casino economy), having abandoned any idea of planning — even in Communist China, and that says it all! This lack of planning makes the economy fragile and dependent on the volatility and pusillanimity of the financial markets. Add to this the very dangerous phenomenon of the indebtedness of most of the world’s states, which has become like a house of cards that is always being built higher with no realisation that it rests on nothing but a virtual reality. The bankruptcy that struck Argentina in 2003 will occur again, but on a gigantic scale. The factors that precipitated the crisis of 1929 are all present, but in a much more acute state.
3) As we have seen, a massive recession in the European economy is very likely after 2010. Because Europe is a central economic player in the world economy, this catastrophic event will have consequences that will worsen other factors contributing to the coming collapse.
4) One can also foresee a generalised economic war provoked by the exhaustion of resources. There could soon be wars for petroleum, water, agricultural and fishing resources; conflicts over access to the markets of the developed world; incompatibility between the economic egoisms of the global North and the needs (or dreams) of the South, and so on. The present myth of generalised growth is incompatible with conflicts where politics interferes with the economy. Commercial competition is positive if it does not pass a certain threshold of hysteria and stress. Beyond that, confidence erodes and markets and investors back off, when the situation becomes too hostile. This situation awaits us.
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Let us also mention the paralysing effects on the world economy of the catastrophes described earlier, as for example the conflicts involving Islam, the rise of giga-terrorism, the explosion of mafias that intrude into every sphere, and so forth. It is known that stock exchanges and investment levels are extremely sensitive to the slightest quiver in the economic or political situation. The attacks of 11 September 2001 — which was only a pinprick in the edifice of the Western system — caused global growth to lose several points. Imagine what would have happened if an event one hundred times worse had occurred, and that could well take place . . .
This globalised economy, on which the entire framework of the present worldwide civilisation rests, is a giant with feet of clay. Its fragility comes from the fact that it no longer recognises any partition, any frontier. By choosing the paradigm of a single economic space — according to free trade dogma — that stretches over the entire Earth, it has made a serious mistake. It should have opted for a general model of economic spaces that are relatively watertight, semi-autarchic, according to a continental logic, each of which develops at its own rhythm.
Interdependence is synonymous with fragility. But ideology has obscured and neglected the facts (the ideology of ‘development’, of ‘progress’ interpreted in a quantitative and material sense, the ideology of international free trade present in liberal capitalism as well as Communism). The fault lies with this aberrant notion of a unified humanity that informs all the ideologies, from ultra-liberal to anti-globalist.
The End of ‘Growth’
‘Growth’ today is very superficial and will be ephemeral for the following reasons, which portend the possibility of a general collapse. What are they?
1) The fragility of the stock market economy. The present globalised economy is based, even more than in the 1920s, on the speculative fragility of international stock market frenzy, which is completely unreal. The Dow Jones, the Nikkei and the CAC 40[211] direct the world economy with an extremely short-term vision, in a day-to-day speculative spiral (because of the lure of immediate gain from sudden panic or euphoria), while politicians have abdicated their economic responsibilities and long-term realities are neglected.
At the slightest bad rumour, speculative investment, business’ motor, can collapse. We have already had a warning shot with the ‘Asian crisis’ of the 1990s.[212] Frédérique Leroux writes in Le Figaro Économie (20 March 2004): ‘With the least grain of sand in the cogs the virtuous machine stops and goes into reverse.’ It is the ‘butterfly effect’, as in meteorology: a chain of minor events provoking panic in investors. A speculative and globalised economy is a giant with feet of clay. Leroux writes, ‘In the ephemeral nirvanas of the economy and the stock markets, the smallest change of fashion turns irrational exuberance into anorexic depression. . . . We are today at the same critical point of the long economic cycle where the securities market, that versatile entity to which we have abandoned ourselves, is in charge of the economy.’
‘Growth’ or control over the economic fundamentals totally escapes governments and the political sector. This growth is in the hands of the pure psychological chance of speculation, which depends on euphoric states or irrational depressions. It is significant, however, that Europe (unlike the USA) no longer has a monetary policy, which depends now formally on the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, that is, in reality on the caprices of the short-term market, a situation unknown in history. Based completely on speculation, the so-called ‘new economy’ is only an exaggerated form of finance capitalism, made still more fluid by the Internet.
2) The exponential growth of world indebtedness, public and private. All the world’s countries, rich and poor, are in debt. There is talk of cancelling the debt of the Third World. Who is going to pay for this, at the end of the day? The world’s economy resembles a business on the edge of bankruptcy but still maintained, in euphoria, by a virtual banker. The bulletin of the Prigest society of investment banking (July 2000), which can hardly be suspected of anti-capitalism, notes: ‘Private debt is increasing at an uncontrolled rate. It has become the transmission belt of a “vertical” circularity between the increase in stocks and economic inactivity. It makes the system fragile while giving the impression of strengthening it by the increase in growth that it still permits.’ The report also speaks of the ‘irrational exuberance’ of this ‘new economy’, which is surfing on the edge of the abyss. A world economy cannot last very long when it is based on indebtedness (monetarist dogma) and no longer on work and the estimates of serious extra-economic parameters (demography, ecology, energy, etc.).
3) The demographic ageing of Europe and other leading industrial countries is multiplied by the economic burden of immigration. For the time being, we can still hold out, but this will not last. The lack of active workers, the burden of retirees and the expenses of healthcare will end, from 2005-2010, with burdening European economies with debt. Gains in productivity and technological advances (the famous ‘primitive accumulation of fixed capital’, the economists’ magic cure) will never be able to match the external demographic costs. Lastly, far from compensating for the losses of the working-age native-born population, the colonising immigration Europe is experiencing involves first of all welfare recipients and unskilled workers. In addition, this immigration represents a growing expense (insecurity, the criminal economy, urban policies, etc.). An economic collapse of Europe, the world’s leading commercial power, would drag down with it the United States and the entire Western economy.
4) Contempt for ecological limits. The planetary development of the mass industrial economy (which ecologists do nothing to fight against, impostors in fealty to the kings of petroleum) has generated enormous pollution that is already beginning to make its effects felt and is only going to get worse: climate catastrophes (which have increased 290 per cent between 1970 and 1999 according to the insurance companies), exhaustion of reserves of ocean fish, increase of desert areas and shrinking of fresh water reserves, destruction of forest cover and the marine phytoplankton that renews oxygen. And so on.
To summarise, in spite of the infantile euphoria provoked by the ‘new economy’, the expansion of the Internet and the purely situational short-term and fleeting acceleration observed for some years, the fundamentals of the world economy are flashing warning signals and we are probably headed towards an enormous planetary economic crisis at the start of the Twenty-first century. This civilisation, entirely based on exalting the market society, affirming financial values as the only true ones and placing the economy in a position of absolute privilege (under its socialist and capitalist forms), may well perish because of the crisis of the activity it has installed in the heart of the world. The economy will collapse precisely because it was placed in the centre of everything, because everything has to rest on it before crushing it.
This society will perish exactly as a society based on strict militarism perishes, as a result of the unnecessary wars it provokes and then ends up losing. It is always those who know the economy well (Maurice Allais, François Perroux) who warn against the idolatry of the economy, and military men who warn enthusiastic civilians against militarism.
The structural factors (especially demography and ecology) are never taken into account in a world fascinated by immediate results that can be computed in the very short term. The apostles of the ‘new economy’ are only infants disguised as experts. The new world economic order these pusillanimous false prophets hope for is only the swan song of the old order.
