Meanings and values: their significance for progress and sustainability

by Richard Eckersley, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health Australian National University

Presented at the Manning Clark House conference, Our population, our Future, Canberra, 9 October 2003.

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Introduction

This conference explores Australia’s population in the context of national identity and sustainable development, a context framed by the question, ‘what sort of country do we aspire to be?’ Implicit in this theme is a recognition that the ‘population question’ will not, and cannot, be resolved by treating it as an ‘issue’. By ‘issue’, I mean regarding the question as a discrete problem amenable to specific policy or other responses. In this paper, I argue that people’s perceptions of the question are deeply influenced by their worldviews; their differences cannot be assessed, let alone reconciled, except at this level.

The division between people’s opinions on Australia’s human carrying capacity or optimal population reflects the differences between two worldviews – material progress and sustainable development. Thus these opinions reflect differences over much more than the number of people who can – or should - inhabit this island continent. They have to do with fundamental questions about the purpose of life and the foundations of human health and happiness. This is also true of other ‘problems’ we need to address.

A clash of worldviews

Material progress, the dominant paradigm of modern Western societies like Australia, regards progress as a pipeline: pump more wealth in one end, and more welfare flows out the other. Economic growth is paramount. It creates the wealth necessary to raise material living standards, to widen our choices, and to address social and environmental problems such as unemployment, poverty, crime, pollution, land degradation and global warming. Australian Governments explicitly frame their goals in these terms.  ‘The overriding aim of our agenda is to deliver Australia an annual (economic) growth rate of over four per cent on average during the decade to 2010,’ the Prime Minister, John Howard, declared in a speech to a World Economic Forum Dinner in Melbourne in 1998. According to this perspective, then, more is usually better, including more people. The most common argument in favour of population growth is that it is necessary if Australia is to remain economically competitive and so maintain economic growth rates.

Sustainable development, on the other hand, does not accord economic growth ‘overriding’ priority. Instead, it seeks a better balance and integration of social, environmental and economic goals and objectives to produce a high, equitable and enduring quality of life. A common theme is the perceived need to shift from quantity to quality in our way of life and our measurements. The World Commission on Environment and Development described sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The World Conservation Union (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Program and the World Wide Fund for Nature have defined it as ‘improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems’. Sustainable development acknowledges the dynamic relationship between the goals of improving wellbeing and ensuring that improvements are compatible with a healthy natural environment. According to this view of the world, limiting populations is one of a wide array of changes in human organisation needed to achieve sustainability.

From the human perspective, then, the bottom line of sustainable development is to optimise human potential and wellbeing; that of material progress is to maximise wealth. Which is the better framework for making decisions and taking actions in the 21^st Century?

If we take the three dominant measures of the human condition – population size, life expectancy and per capita income – we can conclude that, globally and nationally, many more people are living much richer, longer lives today than ever before. In the year 1000, there were about 270 million people in the world who, on average, could expect to live about 24 years and earn US$435 a year. Today there are over 6 billion people on earth who, on average, can expect to live about 67 years and earn almost US$6,000 year. All parts of the world have shared in the gains. In the past one hundred years, Australians have, on average and in real terms, become about five times richer. There are fives time more of us and we are living, on average, more than 25 years longer.

So is all well and good? Not exactly. Against the gains we have to set several qualifications: the benefits have been unevenly distributed globally and there have been recent reversals in some nations in both income and life expectancy; the benefits of rising income to quality of life diminish as income increases, and in rich nations health and happiness are at best only weakly related to average income levels; economic growth is not the only factor behind improving health and wellbeing - increased knowledge, better education and institutional reforms have also made major contributions; and increases in life expectancy partly reflect biomedical advances and individual lifestyle choices that say little about changes in social conditions and may be offsetting adverse health impacts of these changes.

Beyond these qualifications of the benefits of material progress, we must also acknowledge several formidable and growing costs: the destruction of the natural environment, of which we are an intrinsic part, on a scale that grows ever greater and more pervasive; increasing inequalities in income and employment, pressures on public services such as health and education, and the geographic concentration of disadvantage; and psychic costs that relate to what might be called meaning in life - a sense of purpose, autonomy, identity, belonging and hope.

It is for all these reasons, then, that the concept of sustainable development has become widely accepted in the past decade, and represents the most significant challenge to date to material progress as the defining process of human development.

Values and meanings

Researchers acknowledge that sustainability is fundamentally about values, not simply policy and practice. New values underpin the preferred visions of both the United Nations Environment Program’s Geo-3 report and the Stockholm Environment Institute’s influential report, Great Transition, for example. The latter’s ‘Great Transition’ is galvanised by the search for a deeper basis for human happiness and fulfilment. While sustainability is the imperative that pushes the new agenda, desire for a rich quality of life, strong human ties and a resonant connection to nature is the lure that pulls it towards the future.

The ‘Great Transition’ pathway moves beyond solving the economic problem of scarcity into a ‘post-scarcity world’ where all can enjoy a decent standard of living. It acknowledges the reality of a ‘fulfilment curve’, which shows that past a certain point increased consumption fails to increase fulfilment:

Additional costs exceed the marginal satisfaction of additional luxuries as we work to pay for them, learn to use them, maintain and repair them, dispose of them and perhaps feel guilty about having them when others have so little. Profligate consumption sacrifices the cultivation of other aspects of a good life – relationships, creativity, community, nature and spirituality – that can increase fulfilment.  

There is growing evidence that a shift in worldviews is occurring, with those in the West admitting to deep concerns about their societies, cultures and lifestyles, in particular the excesses of materialism and individualism. Some surveys suggest this moral anxiety is a majority view. Others indicate that between a quarter and a third of people in Australia, the United States and Europe are translating attitudes into actions; they are making a leap of faith to a new view of the world that is shaping what they do in the world.  These ‘cultural creatives’, as American researchers Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson have described them, are disenchanted with materialism, greed, status display, glaring social inequalities and the hedonism and cynicism that pass for realism in modern society. Instead, they are placing emphasis in their lives on relationships, communities, spirituality, nature and the environment, and real ecological sustainability.

Cultural creatives represent a coalescence of social movements that are concerned not just with influencing government, but with reframing issues in a way that changes how people understand the world. Ray and Anderson say that in the 1960s, less than 5 per cent of the population were making these momentous changes. In just over a generation, that proportion has grown to 26 per cent. ‘That may not sound like much in this age of nanoseconds, but on the timescale of whole civilisations, where major developments are measured in centuries, it is shockingly quick.’

The ‘cultural creatives’ trend is consistent with the views of American sociologist Ronald Inglehart. Drawing on surveys of people in the United States and several European nations in 1970 and 1994, he found a pronounced shift from ‘materialist’ to ‘postmaterialist’ values. The trend is one aspect of a broader shift from modern to postmodern values taking place in advanced industrial societies. Postmaterialists are still interested in a high material standard of living, but take it for granted and place increasing emphasis on the quality of life. ‘The economic outlook of modern industrial society emphasised economic growth and economic achievement above all,’ Inglehart says. ‘Postmodern values give priority to environmental protection and cultural issues, even when these goals conflict with maximising economic growth.’

I have focused here on the evidence for a cultural transformation. But there is also counter-evidence that the hold and attraction of the status quo continue and are even growing. This includes survey evidence that financial and material goals have become more important to people and that, despite our wealth, many people feel they cannot afford all the things they need or want. Civilisational shifts are not necessarily straightforward and one-dimensional. We don’t have a fixed quantum of social energy so that if pressure mounts in one area, it must ease in another. Pressures can rise in several conflicting realms, increasing social tensions. The paradoxes and contradictions in the evidence about social preferences reveal the very real ambivalence in people’s minds and the state of flux in modern societies. All in all, most people may still be obeying the cultural imperative to consume, but growing numbers are opting out of a way of life they feel is becoming increasingly destructive to health and wellbeing, both personally and socially, and seeking alternatives.

Furthermore, we may now be witnessing a new, more rapid, phase in this social process as the clash in worldviews becomes increasingly reflected in politics, as the cultural tensions become an ideological contest.

An ideological contest

Karl-Henrik Robert, the Swedish founder of The Natural Step, an international sustainability organisation, has said that developing and achieving a new vision for the world requires several preconditions. The first is that we can successfully maintain democracy and the necessary balance between right and left.  The second is that this balance must be ‘operationalised’ through new institutions and traditions that are relevant for the problems at hand.  But Robert goes further with his third precondition, the most difficult: the need to find a ‘story of meaning’, a ‘story of what it is all about’ that fits modern society and provides the basis of new cultures.

Robert’s preconditions highlight the relationship between culture and ideology, which is crucial to the task of achieving a transition from a worldview framed by material progress to one centred on sustainable development. American sociologist Ann Swidler has argued that in stable periods culture exerts a pervasive but diffuse influence on actions, providing the underlying assumptions of an entire way of life. In unsettled times, cultural change can become focused into an ideological contest, in which ideologies exert a powerful, clearly articulated, but more restricted, basis for social action.

As Robert implies, and a growing number of commentators and analysts acknowledge, the appropriate political responses to our situation do not fit the traditional prescriptions of the progressive-socialist left and the conservative-capitalist right. The fundamental flaw in both left and right perspectives is that they stem from an essentially materialistic or economistic worldview, reflected in a pre-occupation with how material wealth is created and distributed.

But it this may now be about to change. There is evidence that in our clearly unsettled times, a new focusing of cultural shifts into an ideological conflict is occurring, and that the momentous events of the past few years, especially the rise of global terrorism and the war being waged against it, are having a profound impact on the political expression of the responses to our situation. So while the social transformation to sustainability will always go beyond ideology, it may be becoming more coherently reflected in ideology.

After several decades of narrowing and blurring at the political level, recent events are forging a sharper distinction between left and right. While this is not yet apparent with the major political parties, there are signs the ideologies of the right and left are aligning themselves more closely with, respectively, material progress and sustainable development, the established order and radical change. However, the allegiances that go with this re-alignment are not necessarily obvious or traditional, and there could be a significant change of membership as it takes place, including among political parties and within the corporate sector.

The defining issues here go beyond the war on terrorism and include environmental, social and economic concerns at local, national and global scales. The massive public protests against the war drew together a wide cross-section of the public and a broad coalition of interests that extended well beyond the question of war. Conversely, the American and Australian stance on the war is part of a ‘neo-conservative’ position on a range of global issues, including trade, governance and sustainability (this is less true of Britain, however). But as the protests demonstrated, it is the war that has escalated the process of ideological intensification.

The ideological divide extends well beyond government and the major political parties to many other levels in society. For example, while Christian and Islamic fundamentalists grow in strength and are arrayed against each other in the war on terrorism, more mainstream and progressive religious groups have emerged as powerful opponents to the current course of action, as well as becoming more active in other issues such as environmental sustainability.

In the short term, the right might appear triumphant.  The left is widely seen to be in crisis, unable to articulate an alternative vision. Yet the cultural foundations for a new left agenda exist, while some commentators argue the right is veering dangerously towards fascism, especially in the United States. In the longer term, we might hope that the question may be less a matter of which side prevails than it is one of when increasing knowledge, shifting public sentiment and global events bring us to a tipping point, and a gradual movement becomes a rapid transformation. Here, then, is how the clash of worldviews, catalysed by terror and other shocks, is being translated into an ideological contest.

Conclusion

What does this broad analysis of human progress mean for the population debate in Australia?  It means that both the size of Australia’s population and how it shapes Australian society and impacts on the natural environment will ultimately and significantly be determined by which worldview prevails – within Australia and globally. A population target cannot usefully be set outside this larger context. How many people live in Australia will emerge as an outcome of a very much bigger debate about what makes for a better life.

There is perhaps only one thing certain about our situation: there can be no grand plan or strategy for bringing about the social transformation that we need. It is a dynamic process of public and political debate, discussion and action that is messy, difficult, disturbing and protracted, undertaken at many levels in many different ways, with the eventual outcomes always uncertain. Individuals may feel powerless in the face of the immense forces shaping the world. But the process of challenging those forces is being driven by individual and community initiative and action.

Fairshare International, an Australia-based global community group, has proposed a 5.10.5.10 formula for people who refuse to be bystanders in this process and want to take actions that matter:

• Give at least 5 per cent of your gross income to organisations that assist the poor and disadvantaged and help to protect the environment.

• Reduce use of resources, including water and energy, to at least 10 per cent below the national per capita average – and preferably keeping cutting.

• Spend at least 5 per cent of your leisure time in voluntary work helping others or tackling social and environmental challenges.

• Take significant democratic action to correct bad practices at least ten times a year, such as writing letters to politicians, the media or corporations.

Note: this paper draws on the author’s forthcoming book on progress and wellbeing.

References

Fairshare International. www.fairshareinternational.org

Hamilton, C. & Mail E. 2003. Downshifting in Australia : A Sea-change in the Pursuit of Happiness. Discussion paper no. 50, January, the Australia Institute, Canberra. Summary available at: www.tai.org.au

Inglehart, R. 2000. Globalisation and postmodern values. The Washington Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 1, winter, pp. 215-28.

 Maddison, A. 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris.

Raskin, P, Banuri, T, Gallopin, G et al. 2002. Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead. Report of the Global Scenario Group. Stockholm Environment Institute, Boston.

Ray, P. H. & Anderson, R. S. 2000. The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World. Harmony Books, New York. www.culturalcreatives.org

Robert, Karl-Henrik, 2001, The hidden leadership towards sustainability, The second Jack Beale Lecture on the Global Environment, University of NSW, Sydney, 27 November 2001. http://ies.web.unsw.edu.au/publications.htm#JBL

Swidler, A. 1986, Culture in action: symbols and strategies, American Sociological Review 51: 273-286.

United Nations Environment Program, 2002. Geo-3: Global Environment Outlook 3, Synthesis. www.unep.org.

World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

World Conservation Union (IUCN), United Nations Environment Program, World Wide Fund for Nature, 1991. Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living. IUCN, Gland.