The Growth of a Global Community

When we hear the word “growth” spoken in political discourse, we generally think in economic terms—and usually with the implication that growth is a good thing. But at least since E.F. Schumacher’s Limits to Growth, the West has been faced with the notion that economic growth in and of itself may not be the unmitigated blessing we once thought it to be.

If we try to bring the discourses of economy and personal psychology together, we run into real problems: few would argue that “personal growth”—as conceived by psychologists like Rogers or Maslow—is anything but a good. Schumacher’s “limits” don’t come into consideration at all.

At first glance, this is nothing more than cross-disciplinary crosstalk. One discipline using a word in one sense, another in a different sense, and—to paraphrase Mark Twain—you’re OK if the trains don’t meet. But in a new and provocative reflection on the future of progressive political thought, Waiting for Something That Never Arrived: Meditations on a Progressive America in Honor of Tony Judt, Dan Shanahan lets the trains meet. And instead of a head-on collision, we get something more like atomic fission, and it produces a remarkable amount of energy.

As the title suggests, the book is in part an homage to Tony Judt, the brilliant New York University political historian known to readers of the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. Shanahan had a brief set of email exchanges with Judt in the waning months of the historian’s life, which ended last year due to Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Shanahan had been struck by the implied optimism of Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, a 2010 book on the alarming increase in unequal distribution of wealth in Western democracies, so he found himself wondering if Judt wasn’t leaving himself open to the accusation of naïveté with respect to his assessment of the possibilities of social democracy in America. Pondering that question up to and after Judt’s death, Shanahan set out to ask what foundations, beyond altruism and liberal guilt, might exist upon which a progressive vision could be built in the age of Limbaugh, Palin, and the Tea Party.

Enter “growth.”

Shanahan says life has two irreducible qualities: it tries to survive and reproduce, and to aid in that effort, it “grows”—both with respect to its complexity (thus Darwin’s findings on natural selection) and with respect to what, for lack of a better word, we might call “wisdom” in elaborating its interactions with its environment. Anything that nurtures those qualities, Shanahan says, is “progressive” and therefore good in the eyes of people who call themselves by that name.

But Shanahan also finds fault with the American Dream and the focus on purely economic growth (a focus often veiled by the use of the word “prosperity”). Particularly in a world where relative affluence is guaranteed for the many, he says, to make economic growth the pinnacle of human aspirations is to demean what it is to be human. In short, the focus upon prosperity has left Americans in a vacuum where meaning is concerned; the dream reduced meaning to the material, and when the material was assured, no new aspirations appeared, leaving the country in an unbroken cycle of material pursuits centered around the increasing variety and volume of consumer toys.

Shanahan fears that this cycle has already infected not only other Western democracies, but also the many countries that are striving to achieve economic liftoff and enter the ranks of the affluent—as well as the many that cannot yet even protect themselves from famine and disease. This, he suggests, requires progressives to reexamine the foundation of their political philosophy, but also affords the opportunity for growth of a more satisfying and ultimately a more deeply human kind.

Shanahan introduces Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, long a staple of both personal psychology...