Danny Dorling on Slowdown

This week, we have a returning guest to the podcast, Oxford professor of geography Danny Dorling, who spoke to me recently about his new book Slowdown.  Danny has given his book one of those subtitles that clearly map out the terrain he intends to cover: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives.

You may currently be feeling at best ambivalent about the idea of slowdown, with so many of us are enduring a Covid-19-enforced pause and desperate to know when we might get back up to normal speed.

Danny’s message is not that humanity collectively needs to slam on the brakes, but that slowdown in many aspects of modern life (though not quite all) is already happening, and we need to think about its consequences, and potential.

In our day-to-day lives we may fail to see it, he suggests, but look at the patterns in the data and slowdown becomes visible. As he puts it in his opening pages, “An era is ending.”

But he’s not out to paint a picture of societal collapse or some dystopian regression to barbarism. In his first chapter, he writes:

There are good seasons to come, but not fertile seasons in which our numbers, inventions, and aggregate wealth grow exponentially; in fact, our numbers will very soon stop growing at all.

The past few generations have seen great progress as well as great suffering, including the worst of all wars in terms of fatalities, genocides, and the most despicable of all human behaviors —including the planning and construction required for the mass nuclear annihilation of our species.

It may take us some time to accept that we now face a future of fewer discoveries, fewer new gizmos, and fewer “great men.” But is this such a bitter pill to swallow? We will also see fewer despots, less destruction, and less extreme poverty.

And we will never again worship the “creative destruction” that twentieth-century economists so stupidly lauded at the height of the great acceleration.

So for Dorling, slowdown is (potentially) a good thing: not only better than headlong acceleration, but our only hope of continuing to inhabit this planet. Not a guarantee of utopia, but a prospect of some sort of stable, sustainable life.

Danny Dorling, at home and podcast-ready, April 2020

But if slowdown sets the context, it doesn’t determine the political choices that will have to be made. And so much of what we believe about our lives and our world is still about quickening change, the need to keep up or be left behind, the obligation to produce more or be found wanting. We’re not imaginatively well-equipped to deal with the idea of slowdown. Canadian premier Justin Trudeau put it like this in 2018:

Think about it: The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.

That’s the strongly ingrained perception that Danny is challenging in his book, and that’s where we started our conversation.

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