Ways of happiness for degrowth: some thoughts
Filka Sekulova, Research & Degrowth
There are thousands of ways in which one can think about happiness and even more ways in which the universe of happiness interpretations can be relevant for degrowth. Starting with the former, for the sake of rooting ourselves in the literature, much of the academic writing on subjective well-being differentiates between positive affect, often regarded as 'happiness' and the cognitive evaluation of life, referred as life-satisfaction. Both concepts are normally inserted in the hedonic tradition, or going back further in the past, as originating from the Epicurean school. Another way of reading happiness brings forward the Aristotelian concept of eudemonia. Here happiness is seen as a process of fulfilling one's virtual potentials, which do not have to do (only) with the feeling of psychologically wellness. Certainly, there is considerable overlap between the hedonic and eudemonic traditions. Waterman and colleagues would argue that eudemonic living would necessarily involve a hedonic enjoyment, while not all hedonic enjoyment would be associated with eudemonic living (Deci and Ryan 2008).
Why is it relevant to make this distinction? For many the path to true happiness eventually involves degrowth, and vise verse. Others would argue that (individuals) happiness could be socially unjust, might not be equitable, social, nor meaningful. The variety of definitions above can help explain what types of happiness we mean as being a part and parcel in the pursuit of degrowth. As ample in significations as degrowth is, the ways of happiness associated with it are also multidimensional.
Objective here is thus not to downplay hedonism and elevate eudemonia, but to embrace the two as equally relevant building blocks of happiness. Epicurus, for example, talks about the false beliefs in the limitless pursuit of material goods as a means of reaching happiness, thus offering a cognitive solution where individual (alone) have the power to change the concepts, often illusive, on the constitutes of good life. In a think piece on well-being and sustainability, John O'Neil (2008) argues that Aristotelians and Epicureans would agree on the disconnection between improvements in quality of life (or call it happiness in either hedonic or eudemonic terms) and increases in consumption, certainly respecting the upper and lower thresholds to the material requirements for the good life. Yet, while the Epicurean approach would focus on consumers themselves, so that they recognize their “errors” and change believes and values, the Artistotlean way to happiness would be more institutional. The Aristotelian approach to eudemonia would rather consider policies addressing the structural determinants of increasing consumption.
Degrowth as a strong critique to utilitarianism would not align with a Bentham approach where happiness is the sum of pleasures that accrue in time which should be maximized. Similarly, under certain conditions, the voluntary simplicity streams of degrowth could link well with the Seligman et al. (2006) ideas of meaningful life as “a third” route to happiness. Third because it is perceived as firstly passing through “hedonic pleasure” and secondly through “eudamonic engagement” (Prinz and Bünger 2012). Meaningfulness for Seligman is here related to a dedication to ethical and universal objectives which all human beings jointly need to pursue, such as community, social movements, politics, family or religion. Thus explained the path to meaningfulness can easily slip into socially worrisome and dangerous directions, which are reactionary, racist, and overall conservative. Yet the pursuit of meaningfulness in the spirit of open localism and Buen Vivir could be an ally of degrowth. Finally, what is better, living a 'sad' life full of meaningfulness, or a 'happy' life, full of emptiness?
Bibliography
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. 2008. Hedonica, eudamonia, and well-being: an introduction. Journal of Happiness Studies. Vol. 11, pp. 9:11.
O'Neil, J. 2008. Living Well Within Limits: Well-Being, Time and Sustainability. The fourth opinion piece for the Redefining Prosperity, fourth seminar "Wellbeing Policy."
Prinz, A. and Bünger, B. 2012. Balancing ‘full life’: An economic approach to the route to happiness, Journal of Economic Psychology 33m pp. 58–70
Seligman, M. E. P., Rashid, T., & Parks, A. C. (2006). Positive psychotherapy. American Psychologist (November), pp. 774–788.
Waterman, A.S: 1993, Two conceptions of happiness: Contrasts of personal expressiveness (eudaemonia) and hedonic enjoyment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, pp. 678–691.
Install Read Only Mode module (https://www.drupal.org/project/readonlymode). In this way, people still have access to the content, but there is no risk that the content is changed while you make the changes.
1. turn on Read Only Mode with Drush: drush vset site_readonly 1
2. clone foo.com to upc.foo.com
3. Update modules on upc.foo.com with Drush: drush pm-update --no-core --no-backup
4. test that everything works on upc.foo.com
5. migrate foo.com to old-foo.com (migrating effectively renames the site)
6. migrate upc.foo.com to foo.com
7. turn off Read Only Mode with Drush: drush vset site_readonly 0
Further documentation at https://omega8.cc/your-drupal-site-upgrade-safe-workflow-298
Degrowth for detox
Sylvain Fisher from Can Decreix
Pesticides, nanotechnologies, GMO, electromagnetic waves, side effects in medicine, nuclear accidents, garbage accumulation, chemicals and pollutions in air, water, soils, buildings... industrial innovations bring a wide diversity of toxic elements in our environment. Forecasting the consequences of each innovation is even not possible to since potential interactions with ecosystems are so numerous and so complex that they remain far out of any predictability. Moreover researchers and corporations unlikely criticize their own activities. As an illustration asbestos lasts 100 years to be recognized carcinogenic. And today there is no way to discover why bees get annihilated...
A degrowth proposal could simply be to avoid as much as possible the use of such innovations rediscovering the benefits of low-techs. Indeed low-tech is already a reference for many people and many activities.
Most emblematic sector is agriculture where organic farming chooses to refuse chemistry through its bill of specifications. European people spend only 15% of their budget in food (to be compared to around 50% in preindustrial societies). So we can give priority to support organic producers, paying a bit more... and more importantly stop giving money for conventional agriculture which worldwide contaminates soils, water, workers and consumers. Note that when we give a little money to conventional farming, it also receives a remainder through public subsidies. Please boycott strictly!
Ancient building techniques with earth, natural fibers, lime... can be safest, warmest, more enjoyable. As in most productive sectors, we need to rediscover skills to do it ourselves since it requires an important working time. Anyway, companies do not have this low-tech knowledge, and they prefer to pay more for industrialy-processed materials so as to intensively reduce human work (i.e. also human creativity).
We can empower ourselves preparing our own house cleaning products, cosmetics, collecting wild plants for eating and medicine; learn how to cook with non-processed ingredients, how to fast, how to take care about our body and health... For enjoying life, no car, no flight, we can go for local tourism at friend's farm: there we will find a great cultural shock! Most efficient communication is direct meeting. Any media, phone, internet, etc. brings a lower quality of human connection. Why not meeting again and creating conviviality in our neighborhood? Thus stop hiding away behind long distance and often poorer relationships! Rediscovering acoustic music and traditional dance is participative, pleasureful, possible everywhere and everyday without the expensive electronic equipments!
As a conclusion, degrowth can participate to open the path for detoxifying our life and our world, recovering skills for community life and do-it-ourselves together!
Stories or say narratives are chains of events that people have in mind, events linked by logical implications. They are lines of thought that manage to link various issues in a coherent way, while creating a system where every item has a meaning and a justification. Narratives can be individual or collective, they can tackle personal trajectories as well as social and political issues.
In the case of collective narratives, all narratives are not on the same level : hegemonic, or at least dominant narratives, diffuse and reinforce establishment forces, while presenting the political choices of the dominant as the only possible and logical chain of events. All dominant narratives tend to pretend being exclusive, while creating imaginaries that block any possible change (Castoriadis, Latouche).
In the context of degrowth, the growth dominant narrative is the promise of an endless growth, synonymous of development and progress. As far as growth narratives are omnipresent, degrowth policies are discarded by default[1]: the lack of storylines outside the growth paradigm impedes the possibility of alternative policies (Berg & Hukkinen 2011). In the present situation degrowth is a “non-story” that cannot act as a policy motivator. The colonization of the imaginary, as described by Latouche (2005) or the existing mental infrastructure as described by Welzer (2011) are blocking the entry of degrowth into the political and policy horizon.
Our first task as degrowers would be to change the imaginaries. One way to break through is to understand current narratives and to identify other pathways. We need to work on them collectively, building together stories that touch us, stories that make sense in order to make a new reality a new reality possible. While narratives are certainly not descriptions of the “truth”, pathways, are not descriptions of the future. Rather they are hypotheses of future paths, used for generating a societal debate. The pathways here presented are a result of the collective intelligence of members of academia, policy-makers, and civil society representatives. The combination of all degrowth proposals leads to coherent results and synergies between them, while the simultaneous development and implementation of degrowth and growth-based proposals creates a tension. The pathway is a good way to illustrate the links between the “bottom” and the “collective” levels as well as between different dimensions (and disciplines).
[1] Degrowth is defined here as a democratically led redistributive downscaling of production and consumption in industrialized countries as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and well-being (Demaria et al, 2013).
Brief notes from course Work in degrowth society