The Quest for Prosperity
This is an amended version of Tim Jackson’s Foreword for Richard McNeill Douglas’ new book The Meaning of Growth—Anti-Environmentalist Rhetoric and the Defence of Modernity. Tim situates Richard’s book in a longstanding quest for meaning as a central dimension of prosperity.
By Tim Jackson
What can prosperity possibly mean when you’re living on a lonely rock hurtling blindly through space at half a million miles an hour?*
Some questions are as old as the hills—and yet remain fresher than the darling buds of May. Our attempt to create meaning in a chaotic and seemly uncaring universe has occupied the waking hours and the nightly dreams of sages, philosophers, and priests from the dawn of human time. Never more so than today.
Beyond the obvious necessities of food and shelter, the quest for cultural and personal meaning appears to be an absolute in the human psyche. It’s also a pre-requisite for a coherent social order. Its pursuit is visible across cultures of every age, attitude, and latitude. And, if anything, that need is felt more keenly than ever in our current turbulent times.
The lust for economic expansion threatens to tip the natural world into chaotic regimes that will prove entirely inhospitable to human life. The hawks of the military-industrial complex stir up the seeds of conflict in pursuit of profit—leaving bloodshed and destruction in their wake. The flawed and broken ‘rules-based order’ submits once again to the vagaries of powerful men bent on the pursuit of personal gain.
The suffering of the oppressed, the health of those less fortunate, the survival of the other species who share this planet with us, the happiness of future generations—of our own children: all of this is being subordinated to a vision of progress built on power and material wealth for the lucky few—and devastation for those left behind.
How can this be happening? Where can we find some consolation for our losses? Where is the justification for all this destruction and pain? What’s the point of it?
The urgency of these questions is immediate and ongoing. But their provenance is ancient. The same tortured cries have haunted humanity for aeons. Each society must face them for itself. Sometimes anew. And sometimes with the help of the sages who came before.
As the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, a part of the function of religion is to accomplish a vital societal task. To create and maintain the social world. To provide a foundation for personal and cultural meaning. To build a ‘sacred canopy’, beneath which we may rest in the assurance that justice will eventually be served, that consolation for our loss will eventually arrive. That there may be a happy ending, at least for the faithful, secured in return for allegiance to the rules and norms of the religious day.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, that religious function was already trembling. Crumbling beneath the weight of unwieldy deities who claimed for themselves both benevolence and omnipotence. How could a caring God allow the innocent to suffer? Either he doesn’t really care at all. Or else he is not as powerful as he thinks he is, the reformers argued.
Religion began to fall foul of its failings in what became known as theodicy—literally, the justification of God—the increasingly desperate attempts to confront and make sense of the existential suffering and deep inequality that marked and marred our lives.
And it was patently failing. Archbishop Paley’s rose-tinted vision of a benevolent Christian God struggled vainly against the reality of life in the early mill-towns thrown up by industrial capitalism, where life was still ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
Paley was no more successful in persuading poor people to put up with their lot than the philosopher Leibnitz had been before him. To insist that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ is to deny the reality of suffering. Suffering meted out in particular to the poor and the disenfranchised. It wasn’t good enough. As Kenneth Surin has pointed out, ‘a theodicy is not worth heeding if it doesn’t allow the screams of our society to be heard.’
Of course, the increasingly secular world in which we found ourselves (particularly in the West) was by no means entirely the result of an obscure theological failing. It was as much the product of a new and powerful ‘evolutionary’ view of nature in which there was not only no need for God but, as some critics of religion delighted in pointing out, ‘no room for God’. And in liberating us, not only from the obscure and failed theodicies of the past but also from the oppressive elites who proffered them, this new Darwinian view of the world started to change our sense of ourselves. And to dismantle the sacred canopy.
A powerful combination of evolutionary theory and consumer capitalism began to offer what seemed like unprecedented grounds for a new and more wonderful kind of freedom. Infinite vistas of material possibility. New horizons of happiness. Unfettered by God or indeed by his omnipotence and benevolence. Religion was, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, ‘knocked to pieces’.
The effect, said Shaw, was at first exhilarating: ‘we had the runaway child’s sense of freedom before it gets hungry and lonely and frightened.’ But therein lies the rub. The hunger, the loneliness, the fear. To do away with a sacred canopy is not to do away with the need for one. That need is perennial. And in the years that followed the nihilism of the early twentieth century, a new sacred canopy began to take on a very particular form.
By the time I was working, some two decades ago now, to unpack the failings of consumerism and to unravel the tenacious hold which a growth-obsessed capitalism has on our economy and our psyche, the seeds of a powerful and frightening idea were already sown.
The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and his colleague Eugene Rochberg-Halton had shown convincingly how people use everyday objects to convey personal and collective meanings. The consumer researcher Russell Belk and his colleagues had explored how material goods play a key role in people’s processes of sacralisation and de-sacralisation. The anthropologist Grant McCracken had argued that consumer goods play a vital role in the pursuit of ‘displaced meaning’. The sociologist Colin Campbell had articulated a view in which the continual ability to pursue identity through material possessions allows us to address fundamental questions about who we are.
It’s not that our religious and quasi-religious instincts had gone away, as my colleague Miriam Pepper and I showed at the time. The consolatory power of religious forms was still very much in evidence. But we could also already trace how it held sway only within the grip of a much more powerful shift in perspective. It was becoming increasingly clear that the allegiance to economic growth is a new religious form. That growth-based consumerism is itself a secular theodicy.
Even as I was exploring these ideas, I was also engaged, as economics commissioner to the UK Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), in what was to become a deeply provocative critique of economic growth. To say that its provocation fell almost entirely on deaf ears amongst those in government for whom it was intended would be an understatement. It encountered some of the most ferocious criticism I’ve ever experienced in my life. Even now, more than a decade and a half later, I am still surprised to encounter ‘friends’ who casually inform me that that provocation ‘put an end to [my] career’. It’s a sentiment that I resist. Not because I don’t recognise an element of truth in it. But rather because I experienced something entirely different. That experience didn’t put an end to anything real. I had no particular desire for acceptance by an establishment intent on avoiding precisely those questions I felt were most in need of answering. In my experience, the publication of Prosperity Without Growth led not to an end but towards a beginning. The advent of something new. Something massively important to my career. One of the ‘privileges’ of being an official advisor to government is that you will sometimes gain access to its critical machinery—if not directly then indirectly. My paymasters may well have been displeased with our attack on their gods, but one small part of Westminster was surprisingly receptive to the arguments. The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) returned several times to the SDC report, urging successive governments to take its analysis seriously.
That’s where, in the halls of Westminster some fifteen years ago, Richard Douglas and I first met. He was at the time committee specialist to the EAC, responsible for collating evidence, liaising with witnesses, and drafting the committee’s reports.
I recall our early encounters with an enduring fondness. In retrospect, I see that they bore witness not only to a shared interest in the questions that we were pressing collaboratively into the hands of those in power. But also to the lightness and erudition that this (then) young man brought to his task. That same sense is evident in Douglas’s new book: The Meaning of Growth. From the early anecdotes in the Prologue to the final calls for us to return to the task at hand, the writing is both familiar and serious. Inquisitive and insightful.
Quite possibly these qualities owe something to that early experience on the Environmental Audit Committee. Not just to Douglas’s deep engagement with the machinery of government but also to the curiosity—and the openness—which informed his exploration of the evidence. Not just my evidence of course—the evidence of the government’s own advisors on sustainability. But also the evidence of an opposing view. Of a view which positions economic growth as the centrepiece in an entire framework on which our cultural meaning and our societal coherence intrinsically depend.
It’s not impossible to see how Douglas’s role in that early conflict might have motivated his later work. His own direct experience—not dissimilar to mine—that when some apparently unshakeable axiom comes under external attack, it will generate a fierce defence. The more central the axiom, the fiercer the defence. And to his instinct that our job in addressing a failing theodicy is not just to dismantle it—but to understand its role as one.
Be that as it may, it was just a few years after that first encounter, during the period of that new beginning I mentioned when our paths crossed again. In fact, I was delighted to find that the same young man I first met in the corridors of power had applied to study for a PhD within CUSP—the research Centre I had set up as part of my own new beginning. That PhD was to become the foundation for The Meaning of Growth.
The Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity takes as its guiding aim that most pressing of questions—the question with which I began this Foreword: what can it possibly mean to live well—to prosper—within the material limits of a finite planet?
We are still in search of answers to that question. We will continue to be in search of answers to that question. Perhaps the most important thing of all is to continue to search. And to do so with humility. With a recognition that the essential dimensions of the inquiry are not just technical, not just economic. They are psychological and philosophical and perhaps even spiritual in nature.
That same central question motivates the inquiry Douglas’s new book. It precipitates an understanding that, in today’s turbulent world, growth is not an arbitrary economic construct but a profound ingredient in our sense of progress. A key element in our cultural identity. A source not simply of security—in a narrow economic sense—but of meaning. A key pillar in the sacred canopy.
To argue that this canopy (like the religious one that preceded it) is failing is not enough. The screams of our society are louder than ever. We must also understand how the canopy works and why it is needed. Only from that point, can we begin to construct something better. Richard Douglas’s The Meaning of Growth sets out on that vital journey.
Tim Jackson
Guildford, May 2025
* References to the authors, papers, and quotations cited here may be found in: Jackson, T and Pepper M 2011. Consumerism as Theodicy: religious and secular meaning functions in modern society. Chapter 1 in Thomas, L (ed), Religion, Consumerism and Sustainability: Paradise Lost? London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Related links
