In other words, by providing compensations for basic biospheric benefits, industrialisation, by the same token, renders these benefits ever less available thereby creating a demand for further material and institutional compensations. Thus, state welfare is only necessary when the family and small community that once provided it have been disrupted – to which disruption it must contribute, directly, by usurping its functions, and indirectly, by favouring further economic growth.
What is more, no-one can seriously suggest that welfare dispensed grudgingly by an anonymous civil servant in some distant capital is a satisfactory compensation for that once lovingly provided by the extended family.
In the same way, the police, law courts, prisons etc. are but institutional compensations for that extraordinarily effective instrument of social control that in a traditional society, is provided by the normal operations of public opinion.
In the same way too, the domestic appliances and convenience foods whose availability we prize so highly would have been quite superfluous in a traditional household, where grandmothers, aunts and little children were available to fulfil all the household chores. It is the disintegration of the family that their general availability helps to foster, that has rendered these devices so necessary.
In fact, the more one looks into it, the more it becomes apparent that our economists’ notion of ‘benefits’ is no more satisfactory than is their notion of ‘costs’. This further confirms the view expressed in this report that today’s economic criteria are of no value for determining public policy. They are justifiable only in terms of that very misguided world-view according to which human welfare is assured exclusively by the provision of material goods, technological devices, and institutional services, i.e. of the technosphere or surrogate world with which we are supplanting the biosphere or real one.
The trouble is that this world-view is so firmly entrenched in many of us that we cannot conceive of life without these benefits, except in terms of hideous misery and deprivation. Hence our refusal to face the fact that economic growth is no longer an option for medium-term policy, nor to consider the possibility that we should adapt to an inevitable economic contraction by systematically reducing our needs for the ‘benefits’ that it provides.
Yet this is the only policy likely to prevent the socioeconomic discontinuities that at present threaten Canada and also the best means of maximising the real benefits (QOL) that can be made available to the Canadian people in order to assure their real welfare.
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