2 - Prometheus Prostrate (1984)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
Summary
The last decade has seen a fierce debate on the material prospects of industrial civilization. Spurred by the publication, in 1972, of Limits to Growth, controversial first report to the Club of Rome, this debate registers notes of anxiety and truculence not previously heard in discussions of the postindustrial future. Limits to Growth attempts to identify the consequences of exponential growth in population, production and pollution, were high rates of growth to continue as they have in Western life for the last two centuries. Before the report few would have argued that such growth was possible indefinitely, but almost everyone conveniently assumed that material abundance produced by prior growth would permit deceleration of future growth and the solution of growth-induced problems. Underlying this assumption was a faith in instrumental knowledge, which has grown along with everything else and enabled the conquest of the most intractable problems by reducing them to manageable elements and subjecting them to specialized expertise, backed by mammoth societal resources as needed.
Limits to Growth also values analytic procedures. It reduces the characteristic products (and by-products) of industrial civilization— material advantages, capital (both human and physical), depletion and contamination— into several categories, the relations among which are represented as a model, subject to computer-facilitated simulation into the future. Upon reaching the scale and complexity we find today, the full range of productive activities results in an impenetrable tangle of difficulties and dilemmas having no historical parallel. The Club of Rome promoted a new and quite useful term for this phenomenon: the global problematique.
Limits to Growth further presumes that instrumental knowledge, problemsolving skills and technological advances can and do overcome obstacles to growth as they arise in each category of productive activity. Nevertheless, the Limits argument will not assign to technological problem-solving a redemptive role: technological success, and continued growth, cannot occur indefinitely in all categories because success in one is an additional problem for the others. New problems pyramid, compounding their effects and outstripping the capabilities of the problem-solving enterprise, itself increasingly cobbled by problems of scale and complexity. Limits to Growth follows this logic to its drastic conclusion that a collapse of the whole system within decades is a distinct possibility. Technological wizardry may buy time, but, by driving growth all the more certainly beyond sustainable limits, it also increases the likelihood of disaster.
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- International Theory at the MarginsNeglected Essays, Recurring Themes, pp. 43 - 57Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023