Book Review
George Smith
This short book is an elegant, compelling and fascinating exploration of our relationship with ‘limits’. Acknowledging the necessary presence of limits – both within our individual lives and at the level of society – has effectively become unthinkable in our neoliberal age, blasphemy to the unrelenting march of social and economic ‘progress’. Challenging our economic and cultural attitudes towards limits, Kallis’ central argument here is that we need to develop a culture of autonomous (i.e. self-imposed) self-limitation – one that recognises the abundance of the world around us, and the subsequent necessity to limit our wants and desires in order to lead a more free and fulfilling life. Adopting this philosophy of self-limitation not only challenges the ways we see ourselves in the world, Kallis proposes, but also presents a new paradigm for thinking about environmentalism.
Malthus
In order to trace our contemporary relationship with limits, we must start with Malthus. Malthus is famous for maintaining that there are physical limitations to the unlimited growth of human populations. In other words, the growth of human populations must necessarily be limited by the amount of food available to that population. In this light, Malthus seems to be making a definite case for limits. However, as Kallis is at pains to point out, Malthus’ argument is a little more nuanced. The real legacy of Malthus’ work was to make the case for scarcity – scarcity as an inescapable aspect of human life, since we have insatiable, unlimited desires in a physically limiting world. No matter how much food there is to eat, our desire to reproduce will always be more. Poverty is therefore a natural and necessary part of life in the eyes of Malthus – the poor being ‘the excess for which no share is left’ (p.13). By this logic, the only tentative way to alleviate some of this misery is to produce more. Malthus’ iconic status as ‘the prophet of limits’ is therefore misplaced, Kallis points out: ‘He did not claim that population growth must be limited’, neither did he see a ‘natural limit to the food production’ (p.15). His point instead was to say that the unavoidable existence of scarcity must stimulate activity and the continued, never-ending expansion of production. Malthus was, therefore, a ‘prophet of growth’ (p.15). This is why his work remains with us to this day; it’s central to liberal economic thought. We should not interfere with the market since, left to its own devices, equilibrium will always return; giving the poor food parcels and other hand-outs will disrupt this natural equilibrium and thus perpetuate this their immiseration in the long run.
Why was Malthus wrong?
Traditionally, people say Malthus was wrong because he failed to anticipate the impact of technological progress, which would be able to feed the ever-increasing working class population. However, as Kallis reiterates, Malthus never actually called for limits to population or resources, ‘nor did he question the prospects of growth’ (p.21). His main argument was to point out that there would never be enough for everyone – that perpetual scarcity would always drive the need for more growth. So why was Malthus wrong then? According to Kallis it is because he failed to entertain the idea that we ‘could limit our numbers and be happy – that we can have sex, have fun, and enjoy life without having scores of children’ (p.26). In other words, Malthus failed to entertain the idea that perpetual scarcity need not be a defining characteristic of human life – that in limiting our wants and desires, we could in fact find fulfilment and contentment. Indeed, the very condition for finding fulfilment and contentment might actually lie in the limiting of our wants and desires.
How can we think differently about limits?
And so we come to Kallis main point: we need to develop a healthy culture premised on the notion of self-limitation. In other words, we need a culture that understands how limiting and controlling our wants and desires can be a powerfully liberating experience. Indeed, this is something that we all implicitly understand already. I like drinking beer, but I also know that drinking too much is unhealthy. In this sense, the pleasure I get from beer is not in buying so much of it that I couldn’t possibly want anymore, but in being able to say ‘enough is enough’. As Kallis reminds us, there is an old latent wisdom in imposing such limits on ourselves – in self-mastery, discipline and moderation. Yet we live in a culture that encourages our unlimited desires. Our dominant economic logic says all our wants should be ‘pursued to the fullest extent; and that we should produce as much as possible to satisfy them’ (p.85). Limiting our desires is akin to limiting our freedom, according to this worldview.
Inevitably, this worldview has a significant effect on the Earth’s biosphere and climate, the stable conditions of which have enabled human life to flourish over the last 10,000 years or so. Kallis’ point, however, is not to go searching for external, ‘out there’ limits, but to make the case that our relationship with limits should ultimately ‘be about us and our own wants… we shouldn’t limit ourselves just because there are limits [‘out there’], but because we want to do so’, he says (p.61). This seemingly subtle shift in emphasis could have radical implications, encouraging us to see the world not as scarce but as abundant. When the world around us is one of abundance and diversity, deciding how much to take – deciding how much is enough – becomes a much more self-reflexive question concerning what it actually is to live a good life.
A positive environmentalism
When I speak about ‘the environment’, I often encounter this glazed over, despondent look in people’s faces, as if they’re thinking: “this must be just another rule-making environmentalist telling me what I can and can’t do”. And, to some extent, they wouldn’t be so misguided in thinking like this. As Kallis points out, Malthusian thinking has also influenced much environmentalist thought, which still conflates self-limitation with externally imposed limits. As environmentalists, we too often argue that limits are ‘dictated by Mother Nature, and we have to adapt to them whether we like it or not’ (p.58). This frames environmentalist discourses in very negative terms; limits become heteronomous; they are imposed upon us through scarcity. Conversely, the limits Kallis is advocating for are self-imposed; they derive from a state of autonomy, not heteronomy:
The case for self-limitation rests on the negative consequences, or the risks of not limiting ourselves; and on the freedom of not setting limits to our own powers and intentions, limits without which freedom loses its meaning (p.56).
The limits environmentalists should be advocating for must therefore come from a recognition that the world is abundant and that, left unchecked, our wants and desires are corruptible. In other words, environmentalists should be asking what we actually need in order to live free and fulfilling lives – and how this in turn will help us to preserve the abundance and diversity of the world.
Living within limits
The ability to live within limits, in a society that pushes us to pursue without limit… is a privilege’, Kallis reminds us (p.117). In other words, to be able to live a life free of the debilitating forces that drive us to work harder and longer just afford the rent – this is a privilege only a minority enjoy. Self-limitation is not a project of individual or small-group change, therefore – ‘it must be a universal, political ambition to change the structures that prevent people from living with limits (p.102). In other words, we need to create the spaces where we are all free explore life within limits – whether that means pursuing ideas and dreams you never previously had the time for, or just spending more time with your family and friends.
Of course, we will need to decipher what collective limits we want and don’t want to adhere to as societies and communities. There is a difference, for example, between limiting how much advertising can encroach into public spaces, and limiting access to free education. To distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ limits we need sound and transparent democratic institutions – institutions we can trust to create a spaces for us to express our autonomous self-limitation, as opposed to impose external limits upon us. This is no easy task, Kallis admits. But to avoid making these changes will ultimately mean the acceptance of living in an ever scarcer world.
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