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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 47 it can expand and grow and for this it constantly needs to extend its power over new resources. How can sustained growth be managed in a sane way on a planet with a limited capacity to support, in the knowledge of the alarming decrease of essential natural resources? The secret of the mystery of sustainable growth is contained in the dogma of universal replaceability. Technology takes the place of nature and of human nature as well. As imagined by the technophiles, this characteristically end-of-the-world sect in wait of a miracle, not only will digitalisation, gene technology and the other technical miracles save the human race from its original imperfections, but the self-programming information systems can even take over man’s governing role if needs be. According to the transhumanists, the computer is the summit of creation, the goal and purpose of evolution, the clear intellect liberated from its mortal shell. It is no wonder that faith in the digital afterlife is spreading rapidly among the youth, since their lives already revolve around the computer, which fulfils their imagination and desires. They do not even notice the ecological catastrophe, despotism or the collapse of society. So long as there is a network connection. For an ecological economy, as already shown, taking into account the natural limits of economic growth is an unavoidable starting point. Herman Daly seeks to console his colleagues who have grown up in the belief of indefinite growth by showing that the market indicators of economic performance have long since become detached from reality; they indicate not the enrichment of society but rather potentially the exact opposite, for they do not include the serious but not directly demonstrable or priceable natural and social costs of growth. This growth exacerbates social injustice, destroys nature, damages health and creates unemployment and inhuman conditions of life and work. It is caused by a purposeless and joyless wastefulness. ‘The increased traffic of war materials or medicine in times of war or epidemics does not produce an increase in wellbeing, security or satisfaction; it is useless. In the original sense of the word “economy”, we might even term it uneconomical.” In his work, For the Common Good, Daly draws attention to the fact that the principle of “the more, the better” only applies to the economics of profit (what Aristotle terms chrematistics), while the economics of subsistence (oikonomia) seeks right measure: what is just 1 Herman Daly: Uneconomic Growth: in theory, in fact, in history and in relation to globalization. In Herman Daly, Edgar Elgar eds: Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics. Edgar Elgar, Cheltenham 1999.
