Peter Thiel on the flawed mantra of endless growth: “What if the Club of Rome is right, though, and we really have reached the limits to material growth? I put to him for a number of reasons \u2014 culturally and materially \u2014 it seems more than possible that we\u2019ve irretrievably passed the point of Peak Progress. If this is so, he tells me, the first response should be frank realism. We should, he suggests, \u201cat least be able to talk about it, and figure out ways to make our society work in a low-growth world\u201d. But he sees this attitude less as realism than a cop-out: \u201cI think that sounds like a lazy excuse of people who don\u2019t want to work very hard. It sounds too much like an excuse.\u201d Far from being a matter of humans bumping up against natural limits, he argues, \u201cI want to blame it on cultural changes, rather than on us running out of ideas\u201d.
\nWhat, then, does he see as driving the cultural side of stagnation? Thiel thinks the decline of Christianity is a major factor. To him \u201ca more naturally Christian world\u201d was \u201can expanding world, a progressing world\u201d that hit its apogee in late Victorian Britain. \u201cIt felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology \u2014 a Christian vision of history. Then somehow the stagnant ecological world that we\u2019re in is one in which there\u2019s been a collapse of religious belief. I want to say they\u2019re somehow sociologically linked.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s missing from the world now is a clear vision of the future \u2014 or even any vision. Reviving Christian faith might help, he thinks: \u201cif we were more Christian, we would also have more hope for the future, and if we\u2019re less Christian we\u2019re going to have less hope. And there\u2019s probably less action.\u201d Failing this, any vision of the future at all would help, especially if it\u2019s an optimistic one.\u00a0Thiel thinks even bleak or apocalyptic visions are better than no vision at all. The picture of European climate catastrophe associated with Greta Thunberg is, as he sees it, one of only three realistic European futures; the other two are \u201cIslamic sharia law\u201d, and \u201cChinese Communist AI\u201d.
\n\u201cI think there are dangers to science and technology, but there are also great dangers in stagnation,\u201d he tells me. In his view, though, the only way out is through: the fantasy of returning to some form of vanished past is just that, a fantasy. \u201cWe can\u2019t go back to the Paleolithic era, we can\u2019t go back to an agrarian economy, we can\u2019t even go back to a 19th century industrial economy. And then it seems to me that we don\u2019t know how to make a zero-growth society work.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n
https:\/\/unherd.com\/2022\/07\/peter-thiel-on-the-dangers-of-progress\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Thiel on the flawed mantra of endless growth: “What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n