Fantasy - think Howard, Tolkien, Leibler and many others - conjures up stories of heroic adventures involving evil sorcerers, monsters, and lost civilization.
Fantasy offers a welcome escapade from our daily lives. It also incarnates the opposite of bureaucracies. In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber argues that fantasy books act not only as an enjoyable form of escapism, but also as a reassurance that bureaucracy is actually needed (this only represents a fraction of the wealth of ideas that are presented in the book, I highly recommend it).
Think about it: In all fantasy work, bureaucracies and administration are evil, or incompetent at best. Fantasy is the counterpoint of the administrative restraints of our lives. As David Graeber puts it: “It offers us the guilty pleasure of exploring life without administration, but no one would like to live there.”
In the fantasy genre, elves provide another recurring trope. Elves live in balance with nature. Their aspirations are beyond the mere accumulation of material goods and power, and instead are focused on knowledge, art, and their spiritual elevation. They aim to live in harmony with other races, and are not looking to expand beyond the forests they live in and that sustain them.
Following Graeber’s logic, elves represent the opposite of some dynamics imposed by our societies. My contention is that elves are the counterpoint of growth in our societies. In our modern societies, the system itself is designed to only be sustained by constant growth. This translates into an ever-growing consumption of energy and materials, fueled by debt, appropriation of resources, exploitation of cheap labor, and outsourcing of externalities. Remove growth and everything starts to fall apart.
The opposition between elvish and our modern, growth-based societies should be obvious (interestingly, you could argue that elves started to appear in the litterature in their modern form, i.e. not as the mischievious fays found in the folk stories but as a Legolas-like race, around the time when industrialization and capitalistic societies were picking up).
The other opposite of growth societies is sustainable degrowth. While the term is loosely defined, I use it here in the sense of prosperity without growth. Broadly speaking, sustainable degrowth is a political agenda that tries to address our structural issues around the climate emergency, social inequalities, and unbrided capitalism. The overall principles involve reaching a new state compatible with our planetary boundaries while improving well-being and in a just and democratic manner. This involves, among other changes, less consumption, a refocus of investment and technology in areas to accelerate the energy transition, and a just distribution of resources.
However, all degrowth movements struggle to paint a concrete and rallying picture of this future. This is partly because they have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that no one can predict the future, but more importantly because they embrace a plurality of models and futures, and don’t want to impose a vision that might in the process recreate some of the hierarchies and inequalities we see today.
The downside is that, even for their proponents like myself, it is difficult to convinve others that this path is worthy of pursuit (as a side note, one of my friend, who is already convinced by the degrowth principles, is not willing to embrace it for himself unless the whole society shifts. That was both revealing and depressing discussion for me).
So, could the degrowth movement get inspiration from the fantasy litterature to make their ideas more relatable to people?
Interestingly, the presentation of fantasy elves - and thus of a degrowth or a-growth society - is mixed. On the one hand, elves are described as ‘superior’ beings in many aspects, something men can aspire to. On the other hand, they are also characterized as living in a static or even declining society, and in somes cases even against progress and change.
If valid, this litterary association suggests that the degrowth movement will need to not only appeal to the positive side of elven societies that a century of fantasy has ingrained in our collective imaginary, namely a better balance with nature and strong personal fulfillment, but also explicitly address the implicit concerns and objections of a static and less innovative society.
Degrowth discussions will need to put more emphasis on the fact that they will continue to embrace technological progress, but as a source of democratization, empowerment and well-being, instead of the unguided, inequality-creating process (we now have lost 20 years of the best engineering and scientific talent to build targeted ads that everyone hates and trading algorithms for Wall Street that only enriches the few).
This will likely not solve the adoption problem. But one of the most important thing I learned in my career is that stories matter. And degrowth could use a better story.
