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Introduction

This book is primarily concerned with the pattern of consumption in affluent societies, the potential for its transformation, and the leverage that such change might exert in building a more egalitarian and sustainable global order. It argues that environmental crisis cannot be resolved by purely technical means, but will require richer societies substantially to change their way of living, working and consuming. Green technologies and interventions (renewable energy, rewilding, reforestation and so on) will prove essential tools for ecological renewal, but only if they go together with a cultural revolution in thinking about prosperity, and the abandonment of growth-driven consumerism.

Not all, but many environmentalists would agree with this. A more distinctive feature of my argument is its alternative hedonism: its resistance to viewing the needed changes in consumption as a form of sacrifice and loss of pleasure. I present them, on the contrary, as offering an opportunity to advance beyond a mode of life that is not just environmentally disastrous but also in many respects unpleasurable, self-denying and too puritanically fixated on work and money-making, at the expense of the enjoyment that comes with having more time, doing more things for oneself, travelling more slowly and consuming less stuff. The call to consume less is often presented as undesirable and authoritarian. Yet, the market itself has become an authoritarian force – commanding people to sacrifice or marginalise everything that is not commercially viable; condemning them to long hours of often very boring work to provide stuff that often isn’t really needed; monopolising conceptions of the ‘good life’; and preparing children for a life of consumption. We need, in short, to challenge the presumption that the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today is advancing human well-being rather than being detrimental to it. And that’s quite apart from the effects our consumption is having on the natural world. Rather than hankering after technical quick-fix solutions that might keep labour and consumer spending indefinitely on course (and these, in any case, seem unlikely to be forthcoming or to come without serious risks),¹ the developed nations would be better off focusing on the formation of a much needed alternative model of progress, and breaking with current ways of thinking about prosperity and well-being.

Until relatively recently scientific warnings on human-created global warming have gone largely unheeded by the general public. But between October 2018 and May 2019, while I was writing this book, that situation changed dramatically. During these months, the perils of climate change and species extinction received unprecedented publicity. It seems that some affluent nations, including Britain, are finally acknowledging these problems. I had not predicted this. Like so many other academics, researchers, journalists and activists in NGOs and progressive global networks, who for many years have been charting, theorising, reporting and agitating around ecological crisis and its resolution, I had become used to these issues and campaigns being given low priority by mainstream media and politicians. The eruption of attention and concern has certainly been welcome. Nonetheless, I fear it could rapidly dissipate, and I remain sceptical as to whether it will lead to the policy changes needed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5° Celsius, the emissions target agreed at the Paris summit on climate change (as I write, the UN World Meteorological Association predicts a rise of 3° Celsius or more by the end of the century).² Moreover, I suspect – though I hope to be proved wrong – that the reporting of climate change in those parts of the world where it is already having the most catastrophic impact will remain startlingly inadequate: so far we have been more likely to get reports about how air travel is being disrupted by flooding at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, and the 28 million dollars to be spent on barriers and drains there, than on the food crises caused by climate change that have ravaged Madagascar, Ethiopia and Haiti.³

I am above all sceptical about whether the recent high media profile of climate change will encourage more interest in what I shall call ‘the politics of prosperity’. In Britain we are still waiting for mainstream political debate on the purpose of all our labour and wealth production and on whether the competitive and acquisitive society perpetuated by such a system offers a satisfying way of living. Admittedly, the consumerist lifestyle has come in for criticism recently in relation to its ecological impact, particularly for the carbon emissions, air pollution and plastic that it generates. It has also been subject to justified ethical discussion and dissent because of its exploitation of labour and natural resources in the peripheral economies.⁴ What is much rarer is to find consumerism called into question from an alternative hedonist point of view – from a position that dwells on the inherently negative aspects of affluence and on the pleasures it is denying or removing.

In previous writings on alternative hedonism, I have argued (a touch cavalierly perhaps) that even if there were no environmental or moral obstacles to the triumphant spread of the consumer lifestyle, even if it could be extended to everyone forever, human happiness and well-being would not be enhanced. Today, in view of the latest IPPC and UN reports on the planetary condition, the urgency of checking growth and changing consumption to meet environmental constraints must be stressed in any argument. But if I place more emphasis than hitherto on the environmental – and therefore also moral – case for re-thinking consumption, that is not at odds with the attention I have paid, and still pay in this book, to the gratifications and forms of fulfilment that might be offered by an alternative hedonist rethinking of consumption. On the contrary: the more pressing it becomes for us to change our ways, the more important the hedonist critique becomes. Alternative hedonism makes an integral contribution to the creation of a new political imaginary that we urgently need. The main objective of this book, then, is to strengthen the environmental and ethical case for embracing a post-consumerist (and ultimately post-growth) way of life by foregrounding the pleasures this might bring us.

My argument takes note of indications of existing concern and discontent about the affluent lifestyle. It is grounded in already experienced ambivalence, and seeks to give voice to implicit aspirations for living differently. Rather than railing against the excesses of consumerism, I point to the disenchantments of consumers themselves. I examine the problems of time-scarcity and pollution along with the stress and ill-health of consumers and their lament for pleasures that our work-and-spend mode of existence has eroded or supplanted altogether. Although acknowledging the importance of altruistic motives for shifting to simpler and more sustainable ways of consuming, my argument revolves around more self-interested motives for doing so. This emphasis reflects my sense that appealing to what people could expect to gain from adopting more responsible ways of living may be more effective than instilling further panic over climate change. It also follows from my desire to avoid moralistic assertions about needs (or wants) which have no reflection in the experiences and responses of people themselves. The authors of the now classic The Limits to Growth may well be correct when they claim that ‘people need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy’, and that

To try to fill those needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth. A society that can admit and articulate its nonmaterial needs and find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfilment.⁵

It is, however, one thing to claim knowledge of what is ‘really’ needed; it is another to justify the claim by reference to the actual experience of people, and another again to demonstrate the transitional means through which the claimed needs might come to be collectively acknowledged and acted upon. Being sensitive to these difficulties, I am reluctant to impute or impose a structure of consumer preferences in the absence of any evidence of its existence. My argument, therefore, moves from expressions of concern to delineating an alternative structure of satisfactions, rather than presupposing unconscious needs for this alternative and then casting around in a theoretical void for consumers who might come to experience them.

That said, I do also argue in a more assertive manner that affluent societies must break with the social and environmental exploitations of money-driven, high-speed ideas of progress and explore less damaging ways of enabling creative and non-monotonous lives. This means opening ourselves to new forms of ownership and control over the means of provision for consumption, to more self-provisioning, mending and making do, to greener ways of travelling and, in general, to a less novelty-and fashion-driven way of meeting our material needs. For some, this will mean doing less work, and thus having more free time; for others it may entail working in differing ways and to different rhythms. It might mean resuscitating some earlier and slower ways of living even as we take advantage of the newest and smartest green technologies in the provision of our energy and such other key areas as medicine, transport, agriculture and construction. In this process, the monopoly of advertising over the hedonist imagination and the depiction of the good life will need to yield ground to a greened aesthetic of material culture in which polluting and wasteful commodities lose much of their appeal.

I am not confident that such changes will come about. But I am arguing that if the worst abuses of the environment are to be corrected, runaway global warming to be kept in check, and exploitation and inequality (both within the nation state and globally) to begin to be effectively addressed, then richer societies will need to accept a less expansionary, more reproductive material style of living. By this I mean that they will need to agree to a provision for the more basic material needs (for food, household goods and furnishings, clothing, toys, sporting and recreational equipment, and so on), that is less dependent on innovation and continuous replacement of goods. However, in exchange they can expect to have more leisure time along with the cultural and recreational provisions with which to enjoy it. And even though a more reproductive material culture would provide fewer and less glamourous goods, it would have the advantage of making them more durable and of cutting out built-in obsolescence, thus reducing waste. In advocating these developments I dissent from the hi-tech utopian vision of a post-capitalist, post-work future currently influential on the left, with its anti-humanist ethos, its trust in levels of automation that would dispense with workers and its rather orthodox views on consumption.⁶ Instead, I argue for a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working.

In all this, the book reflects a sense, based in the recollection and endorsement of the eco-friendlier practices and pleasures that are being swept away by capitalist ‘progress’, that we need to resist the chronocentrism that refuses to look to resources in the past that could help us in the formation of a more viable and enjoyable future. I do not advocate unreflective nostalgia or elegiac escapism, but I recommend a cultural politics freed of the patrician and patriarchal relations of pre-modern societies which seeks nonetheless to restore, in transmuted form, some of the fulfilling and sustainable aspects of earlier ways of living. The aim is to open up the prospect of an eco-benign politics neither uncritically committed to technology, on the one hand, nor overly ‘back to nature’ in outlook on the other, but grounded in new ways of working and spending leisure time, and the sensual and spiritual pleasures they can provide.

These moves, of course, are diametrically opposed to those advocated by neo-liberal ideology. Indeed, they involve a break with capitalism as we now know it, and require at the very least a highly regulated version of it. They mean re-thinking the current commitment to growth and growth-driven conceptions of progress and prosperity. So entrenched is this commitment that a recent media study found that four out of every five articles on the economy felt able to use positive language about economic growth without specifying what its advantages might be.⁷ In affluent economies, such a perspective is peculiarly distorting. As one commentator has put it, the notion that growth equates with progress

seems to lead some people to think that the issue of whether the planet will be inhabitable a hundred years from now is subordinate to indications that an increasing share of the world’s population is modestly improving its health, education, and purchasing-power. In this view, in other words, it does not seem to matter so much if we are generating changes that will lead to the extinction of our species, if increasing numbers of people today live somewhat longer, spend more years in school, and are able to consume a bit more than their parents.⁸

Those who continue to equate progress with endless economic growth, expansion of consumer culture and full employment will find the views expressed in this book fanciful and dismiss its recommendations as utopian. But there are growing numbers, represented politically in the Green Parties and some parts of the left, who would argue that it is mainstream politicians and their supportive media who are today pursuing an ultimately unrealisable agenda. This book will have more appeal for them. But it is also offered as a source of argument and information for all those, wherever they may locate themselves on the political spectrum, who are beginning to feel that the old certainties and assumptions about the nature of progress are breaking down, and that these must cede to a politics of prosperity more suited to our times.

The book is also intended as a call to those on the Marxist left to rethink their disparagement of the political importance of consumption, and to overcome their general reluctance in recent times to imagine post-capitalist ways of living. In this context, alternative hedonism is presented as the impulse behind a new political imaginary or conception of well-being that connects with the arguments and outlook of left-wing parties and social movements, and also with various initiatives seeking to bypass mainstream market provision by means of networks of sharing, recycling and exchange of goods, services and expertise. At the same time, I insist that the demands posed by eco-crisis cannot be made supplementary to existing party programmes nor allowed to become subject to the usual jostling for political advantage. As Yann Moulier Boutang writes,

The autonomy of green demands – the fact that they cannot be reduced to an adjustable variable of the situation – is not a recipe for electoral advantage; it is an ethical and political necessity, which lays the basis for the identity of any left party wishing to address social transformation. What appears now … is a new imperative, capable of uniting the field of radicals and reformists, to make an immediate and major green transformation the driving motor of politics. … Immediate social change is necessary because it will be impossible to carry through even the smallest programme of green transformation unless the population gets mobilised by itself and on its own account. If we decide that this is not possible, then the only remaining option … will be ‘enlightened’ authoritarian regimes … [W]ithout radical democracy and immediate elements of social transformation, there is no mobilisation.⁹

The thought that has gone into the writing of this book has been evolving over many years and undergone significant shifts of outlook and emphasis in the light of a political and cultural context that has itself been subject to significant change and evolution. But the book itself has been composed quite rapidly, in view of the ever more urgent need for social change, and in the hope that it can contribute to the mobilisation essential to the realisation of that change.