You’d expect nothing else from a Goethe-Institut magazine — we’re touching on one of the world’s greatest mysteries: What is time? What’s the relationship between time and the world? Or to lay it on even thicker, the relationship between time and the universe? And what does that mean for the mission of our Western economy: infinite growth?
If there’s any truth in the Big Bang Theory, then the universe came into being around 13.8 billion years ago. We all know that this Big Bang didn’t happen within a defined space, it caused space to exist in the first place, along with matter and time. And before that? Even the concept of “before” only makes sense under the assumption that there was time before the existence of time.Another puzzle is that this universe is currently undergoing an expansion process that transcends all human powers of imagination and understanding (and heading where?), which at its outer edges is happening even faster than the speed of light. This never-ending inflation leads to serious cognitive problems. We cannot even understand this infinity since we only have the capacity to think of a beginning and an end. In fact, the phenomenon of this faster-than-light, super-luminary speed is the cause of the phenomenon of the event horizon that moves away from us, behind which phenomena will disappear from our cognizance forever and for all time, on and on.
The Universe Is Expanding in Linear Time Into Nothingness
Now, you may be wondering, dear reader, what these cosmological speculations have to do with the topic of our magazine: The idea of understanding infinite growth as an expansion of the universe that never seems to reach its limits and is itself responsible for pushing those limits into nothingness. This notion is associated with a feeling of dread that makes Kant’s horror of the sublime — surging ocean and stark, icy mountain landscape — seem like a children’s story in comparison. But it’s not our emotional response that matters here, it’s the crystal-clear insight that paradoxes that cannot be solved by any economic theory are just one aspect of infinite growth. There are also concepts of time that are in no way self-evident.The idea of constant growth only proves easy to understand if based on a linear interpretation of time, rather than on something like a circle, spiral, or otherwise convoluted concept like the ones from Indian philosophy, which calculates the endless sequence of the Four Ages with mathematical precision.
The Goal on the Horizon Is a Mirage
In European philosophy, the linear concept of time is associated with the problem of teleology, a secular version of the idea that the destiny of the world and the fate of human beings are heading towards a specific goal — although, admittedly, the finer details are unknown. Christianity understands the Last Judgment as the endpoint in history when a sometimes angry but always fair God speaks the final word, and two diametrically opposed eternities open up — eternal pain and punishment, and eternal happiness. The Enlightenment replaced the world order governed by this fair and wise God with a final goal or final reason towards which everything would be directed. The fact is, even if all things can be attributed to causes, there must be something at the beginning of that chain of causality, which is itself solely a cause and not a consequence of something else. Otherwise, the horror of infinite regression (see: the universe) would loom. There was no more appetite for faith in God other than as a regulative idea, so they had to come up with an alternative final purpose, if necessary, something they fancied they could glimpse within the individuals themselves, in the Weltgeist — or even in the Prussian state.This should make it clear to the readers — who hopefully still hold a favorable opinion of me — what they had already long suspected: All ideas about the goal of all time owe their origin to conditional points in time, and all considerations about ultimate reasons, goals, and purposes, despite the blustering histrionics of metaphysical theatrics, turn out to be philosophical lightweights surprisingly quickly.
An Economic Growth Paradigm Based on Diverse Forms of Exploitation
It might sound like an unacceptable oversimplification, but if you look back at the ideology of growth still prevalent in economic philosophy (of constant growth, in particular), it’s clearly a descendant of European philosophy that first saw the light of day after the Second World War when it challenged its older cousins, colonialism and imperialism. It has long been commonplace that global growth is only possible because someplace (or even in a whole lot of places) in the world, exploitation is used to produce added value: exploitation of workforces in low-wage countries, exploitation of natural resources, exploitation of cost factors not reflected in the cost-benefit balance — for instance, parenting, childcare, and caring for the sick or elderly.If economies want to grow, they rely on discovering many new opportunities for creating added value. They find these new continents of profit in tax havens and low-wage countries. While the Kraken of colonialism was wrapping its tentacles around the globe in search of raw materials, the economies in pursuit of the growth paradigm were spreading their nets across the planet to generate added value on the back of the wage differential. One thing is clear: It isn’t just the evil Global North playing the role of the villain in this game. Autocratic capitalist states like China and huge economies like India exploit their own populations mercilessly to keep their investment markets interesting for the foreign industries of the future and to be able to take part in the thrilling ride toward the future.
While the relationship between the growth paradigm and the employment market is a popular subject of debate, the relationship between growth and the increasing importance of the finance sector is often ignored. You see, growth in the real economy only seems essential under the condition that financial market liabilities must be compensated for by an increase in bank money and the increase in interest payments by a rising gross domestic product. However, where the financial economy has already decoupled itself from the real economy, the growth paradigm becomes obsolete. You don’t have to be a Marxist to criticize this ideology, for instance by commenting that the trickle-down effect promised by the finance economy never became established anywhere. On the contrary, the accumulation of wealth has become more concentrated, and the poor have remained poor or become poorer.
Death — the Regression Into Nothingness — Is Also Part of Growth
The growth paradigm’s compelling character may derive from the fact that it has been assimilated from the field of biology and applied to the field of economics. All organic things grow, so it seems like the most obvious thing in the world that the economy would grow too. What is overlooked here — something that is also overlooked in Western teleology — is the detail that growth includes shrinking and death, the regression into nothingness.Teleology compensates for the absurdity of growing toward death with the leap into a secularized version of the eschatological expectation borrowed from religion. We need some sort of telos! Even if the timeline unfurling before each individual is growing toward nothing, according to any teleological construction, this individual life contributes to the success and growth of humankind (or the people, or the species — as long as it’s on a large scale). Ultimately we all contribute to the manifestation of the Weltgeist. But the apparent unquestioned status of biology is in turn contradicted by another unquestioned status: circularity — something we have many opportunities to observe, including every morning and every evening, and at the start and finish of every year.
The philosophy of history (and the ideology of growth) might save the linearity of time by secularizing “transcendence,” but at the same time, this ignores the dovetailing of circularity and linearity in the natural world and therefore the inconsistency of its own imagery. Marxism found the solution to the problem of linearity and circularity of periodically recurring crises, Alois Schumpeter developed the theory of business cycles and the destructive creativity of capitalism, which would inevitably lead to its collapse.
Not Bigger but Better
If you prefer less drama, you could embrace the idea of growth in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. The latter is still preached to us as a solution without an alternative by unimaginative capitalist apologists who see an immediate danger to progress and human happiness as soon as someone criticizes quantitative growth. But qualitative growth does not exclude technical progress, it actually depends upon it. To increase efficiency, you need advanced technology. Qualitative growth does not mean reclaiming quality of life, it means developing intelligent solutions with the help of technical innovation. Growth critics who like to point out pre-modern social systems and rave about holistic approaches are just as wrong as the conservative growth ideologists who warn of a regression back to the Stone Age. This distinction is as inescapable as the revision of the growth ideology is inevitable.Qualitative growth means doing things you can already do even better. The fact that progress does not always have to go hand in hand with transgression, as the prevailing Western art ideology insinuates (which brings us closer to our actual area of expertise, culture), is demonstrated by art practices, for example in South and East Asia, that do not represent a break with tradition. Instead, these practices favor the refinement and improvement of traditional artistic techniques and genres over the breach of tradition. You get better rather than bigger, you probe deeper rather than spreading wider, you explore limits rather than exceed them, and you utilize rather than consume. Why, to what point, for what reason, and for how long the universe will continue to expand are questions without answers. Its limits are already beyond the event horizon and forever removed from us. But the limits of growth are right here, in the form of a problem we need to solve.
Dr. Leonhard Emmerling on Growth and Time
09/2023