Fixated on growth

Life appears purposeful and growth to be an imperative of life itself. Even a single-celled amoeba must grow large enough before it divides in two. Solar energy constantly bathes our planet, stimulating an over-abundance of growth and what often seems to us as great excess: 300-ft. tall Sequoia trees, massive one-million strong schools of herring, uncountable billions of insects and animals.

Growth is seductive, it feels natural and reassuring. We watch our gardens grow each spring, and over the years our children grow up and change with age. 

Biological and botanical growth are measurable, but different than statistical growth. Statistical growth is mathematical, an imaginative way of calculating and expressing change, such as the percentage growth in the numbers of living human beings over time. Math describes a reality but does not create one, and yet, mathematics works so well that we rely on it constantly.

Our passion for growth has been applied to almost every nook and cranny of human culture, from personal possessions to national economies. Growth, itself a natural physical phenomena, has become an institutional and political fixation, dominating views about economy and defining what constitutes a positive future. Conversely, absence of growth is generally regarded as negative, something almost dangerous and threatening. 

Growth is tantamount to survival, emotionally; that’s no surprise given our daily hunger and the prospect of starving if we have nothing to eat. Growth calms our anxieties about the future, as long as it’s positive. Wealth, success, fame, emotional maturity, good fortune, friendships, recognition, status, assets, health, power, possessions, portfolio value, influence, beauty, goodness, generosity; growth of all these is widely considered positive.

Negative growth conjures images of increasing poverty, sickness, death, conflict, crime, hatred, violence, lawlessness, cruelty, starvation, pollution, infection, disease, vermin, pests, greed, envy, dishonesty, and murder. When these things grow anxiety increases.

Culturally and personally, we react to experiencing the process of both positive and negative growth through warfare, drugs, entertainment, violence, alcohol use, government subsidies, charity, parties, gambling, gluttony, and consumption. Growth feels positive in one context but negative in another, demonstrating that positive and negative growth are complementary aspects of a single process, not opposites.

The Buddhist Heart Sutra teaches that there is no increase and no decrease, but a single process, and increase and decrease are but two of its measurable complementary appearances. So too integration and disintegration, not two but one ongoing, simultaneous, non-obstructing complementary process.

Ironically, our contemporary fixation on continuous positive growth threatens survival, our own and millions of species of living plants and animals. Although a natural phenomena of living systems, when growth is severed from a self-regulating bio-physical process and applied to the imaginary human realms of economics and wealth, it generates fears about tomorrow and having enough. In this emotional territory, craving generates over accumulation which is then spent though the instrumentalities of society; both social policy and hydrogen bombs are cultural elaborations fueled by fear of deprivation.

The human heart fills with blood and then empties itself in one continuous, complementary  process; so too, growth exhibits a dual nature. Accordingly, our fixation on positive growth is doomed to disappointment. Humanity is clamoring for a better tomorrow, one we want in order to satisfy the demands of our survival instinct, but in doing so we’re making matters worse; a tiny minority is accumulating vast benefits. This is not sustainable. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “Either it’s everything for everyone, or oblivion.”