The socio-ecological crisis encompassing all the countries of the world forces us to rethink growth and development, as occurred in Rio+20. There we empirically experienced the limits of the Earth. The prevailing models are unsustainable.
For this reason, many analysts assert that the developed countries must get over their fetish of sustainable development/growth at all costs. They no longer need it, because they have accumulated practically everything necessary for a decent life, free from need. Consequently, instead of growth/development, a socio/ecological vision must prevail: prosperity without growth (improving the quality of life, education; the intangible goods). It is the poor and emerging countries that need prosperity with growth. For them, it is urgent to satisfy the needs of their impoverished populations (80% of humanity).
It no longer makes sense to pursue the central purpose of economic industrialist/consumerist/capitalist thought, that used to pose the question: how can we earn more?, and that presupposed dominating nature for economic benefit.
Now that conditions have changed, the question is different: how can we produce and live in harmony with nature, with all living beings, with human beings and with the Transcendent?
The response to this question will determine if there is to be prosperity without growth for the developed countries, and properity with growth for the poor and emerging countries.
To better understand this equation, we should distinguish four types of capital: natural, material, human and spiritual. Whether prosperity is with or without growth is determined by the manner that these four forms are developed. Natural capital consists of the goods and services that nature offers gratuitously. Material capital is produced by human labor. And here we must consider the conditions of human exploitation and the degradation of nature by means of which this material capital has been built. Human capital consists of culture, arts, world vision, and cooperation: properties that pertain to the essence of human life. Here, it is important to recognize that material capital has distorted human capital, because it has turned cultural goods into merchandise. As David Yanomami, shaman and cacique, recently denounced in a book published in France, and titled The Fall of Heaven, (La caída del cielo): «you, the Whites, are the people of merchandise, those who do not listen to nature because your only interest lies in economic benefits» (desinformemonos.org).
The same must be said of spiritual capital. It also pertains to the nature of the human being, who wonders about the meaning of life and the universe, what to expect after death, the values of excellence such as love, friendship, compassion and openness to the Transcendent. But given the predominance of the material, the spiritual is anemic, and still cannot realize its capacity for transformation, and for creating equilibrium and sustainability of human life, society and nature.
The challenge now is how to move from material capital to human and spiritual capital. Logically, the human and spiritual do not exclude material capital. We need some material growth in order to assure, sufficiently and decently, the material sustainability of life.
However, we cannot limit ourselves to growth with prosperity, because this is not an end in itself. The integrated development of the human being is required.
Recently, Amartya Sen, from India, 1998 Nobel laureate for economics, helped us to better understand what kind of human development can be sustainable and bring prosperity. The title of his book defines its central thesis: Development as Freedom, (Desarrollo como libertad, Companhia das Letras, 2001). The author grounds himself in the heart of human capital, when he defines development as «the process of expanding the substantive liberties of the people» (p. 336).
Brazilian Marcos Arruda, economist and educator, also suggested a means of transforming education, starting from the practical, and the democratic exercise of all liberties, (Education for an economy of love: education for a practical and solidarian economy, Idéias e Letras, 2009).
It is not just a question of addressing nourishment and health, basic conditions for any prosperity. What is decisive is the transformation of the human being. To Amarthya Sen and to Arruda, education and participatory democracy are fundamental. Education is not to be transformed into an article of merchandise (professionalization), but must be the means of revealing and developing the potentialities and capabilities of the human being, whose «ontological and historical vocation is to be more… which implies to excel, to go beyond oneself, to activate the latent potentialities in the human being» (Arruda, Educación para una economía del amor, pag.103).
Thus the growth/development that prosperity seeks presupposes broadening the opportunities to determine life’s path, and define one’s destiny. The human being discovers himself as a utopic being, that is, a being always under construction, possessed of infinite potential. To create the conditions for this potential to be revealed, and implemented, is the purpose of human development as prosperity.
It is about humanizing the human. In service of this end are the ethical-spiritual values, the sciences, technologies and our modes of production. Besides education, the best political way of facilitating a prosperous and sustainable human development is, according to Sen and Arruda, participatory democracy. Everyone must feel included in, and united for, building the common good.
The more it is used, the more human and spiritual capital grows, contrary to material capital, that decreases as it is used. Perhaps this is the great legacy of the present crisis.
