Abundance Liberalism: A Spiritual Critique
More clean energy and affordable housing would be great. But humans don't live on technocratic materialism alone
“I think there has been an evaporation of a bright horizon in liberal thought, in a lot of left thinking,” Ezra Klein confessed to his conservative New York Times colleague, Ross Douthat, in an interesting podcast exchange last month. Rather than imagining a better future and providing a potentially compelling road map to get there, progressives have been hyper-focused on what Klein describes as “averting different kinds of calamities.”
Democrats, in other words, are against a lot. Here, Klein specifically cites opposition to “fascism,” “white supremacy,” “climate change,” and “oligarchy.” (As we know all too well, however, the Democratic coalition’s list of “calamities” to “avert” is far longer than that — what about, for example, the supposed oppression imposed by the unchecked continuation of “the gender binary”?) All of this presumptive disaster aversion, however, begs the question of what Democrats are actually for. That’s much harder, if not impossible to say.
It’s not news that the liberal left no longer feels the wind in its sails on the “right side of history,” as Presidents Clinton and Obama used to love to say back in the day. What’s refreshingly different with Klein, though, is that he’s ready, willing, and able to assert that quite clearly. Pointedly, he wants to take time out from the Democrat’s otherwise nonstop fear-mongering over what they’re against (which, it must be said, he still engages in far too frequently). Unlike most Democrats, Klein is not only aware that the Party lacks a positive vision; he also understands that’s a serious problem and wants to address it. Which, perhaps needless to say, is all to the good.
Abundance, the title of the book that Klein co-authored with Derek Thompson, has quickly established itself as the bumper-sticker slogan for this aspirational left-liberal movement. As described in the book’s Introduction, which describes its core vision and program, “Abundance” is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” Put differently, Abundance is simply a commitment to “a liberalism that builds” — builds, that is, big, concrete, and socially useful things like high-speed rail and affordable housing.
As a first priority, Klein and Thompson propose that the Democratic Party spearhead a government-led commitment to building out:
a comprehensive clean energy transition (“electrify everything,” they urge, and run it all on wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear energy); and
a whole lot more affordable housing in America’s most dynamic urban centers (which, they argue, should be prioritized as our key drivers of technological innovation and social mobility).
To do this, Klein and Thompson continue, Abundance liberals must commit to cutting back the dense thicket of burdensome (and often weaponized) laws and regulations that make such building far too expensive and time consuming, if not impossible. While their contention that we need to cut a lot counterproductive red tape makes perfect sense, for some Democrats it nonetheless lands as heretical — after all, they’re the party that likes regulation. Plus, Klein and Thompson add insult to injury by insisting that many, if not most of these regulatory roadblocks were put into place by Democrats themselves.
As prominent Democrats, this is an admirably self-reflective and even self-critical view for Klein and Thompson to take. Combined with their commitment to developing a positive vision for the left-liberals to rally around, there is much to like about the Abundance movement. Personally, I believe that the goals of clean energy and affordable housing are good ones. I also agree that government can and should play a role in spearheading the drive to get such things built.
Nonetheless, I find their vision of the “Abundant” society to be a profound turn-off. From my perspective (which is unaligned with either party) there are two fundamental problems with it:
First, the Abundance vision is utterly and unapologetically materialistic. The operative assumption seems to be that if everyone had enough stuff, then everything else would sort itself out and be good. Much as I like the idea of a more equalitarian society, I don’t believe that materialism alone can possibly offer the sort of positive aspirational vision that we need. Most of what makes life purposeful and meaningful is completely absent from the Abundance vision. And without it, the discourse feels narrow, wonky, and uninspiring.
Second, despite the Abundance agenda’s commitment to clean energy, it’s premised on a vision of dominating and overcoming nature, rather than cooperating and connecting with it. True, there’d be no air or water pollution in Klein and Thompson’s imagined Abundant world, which is great. Yet the Abundant society is also described as one in which we’d all live in urban high-rises, eat lab-grown food, and ingest copious pharmaceuticals (which would be helpfully dropped on our doorsteps via drone). While the natural world would still exist in “rewilded” enclaves outside of our urban centers, human beings would no longer, apparently, be part of it.
Klein and Thompson describe this purportedly utopian vision in the opening pages of Abundance:
The year is 2050. You walk to the kitchen to turn on the sink. Water from the ocean pours out of the faucet. It’s fresh and clear, piped from a desalination plant. These facilities use microbial membranes to squeeze out the ocean salt . . . You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant, shipped from the nearest farm, mere miles away. These crops don’t grow horizontally, across fields. They grow vertically on tiered shelves inside a tall greenhouse . . . As for the chicken and beef, much of it comes from cellular meat facilities, which grow animal cells to make chicken breasts and rib eye steaks — no live animals needed . . .
Out the window and across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills. Several years ago, daily medications that reduced overeating, cured addiction, and slowed cellular aging were considered miracle drugs for the rich . . . But these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit. Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth . . . the air is clean and humming with the purr of electric machines all around you . . . Your micro-earpiece pings: a voice text from a friend and his family, on their way to the airport for another weekend vacation . . . Your friends are flying from New York to London. The trip will take them just over two hours.
Ew. Sorry, but this sounds at least somewhat dystopian to me, even with weekend vacations to London. Does anyone else feel some Brave New World vibes here? Are babies perhaps being grown in vats to forestall the physical messiness of pregnancy and childbirth? Is everyone blissed out on Soma? While I’m no Luddite, this “Abundant” vision is far too mechanized, artificial, drug-dependent, and disconnected from nature for me.
My alternative utopian society would look more like this:
The year is 2050. You walk to the kitchen to turn on the sink. Now that your city has been retrofitted with water-saving technologies and vertical, rooftop, and community gardens that grow much of the local food supply, you feel an affirming sense of connection with this fundamental earth element, even in the most ordinary of everyday acts.
You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer, there’s an abundance of seasonal, locally grown delicacies. You love knowing that you and your community helped grow much of this food right in your own neighborhood. As for the chicken and beef, which round out your mostly vegetarian diet, you feel good knowing that the animals you’re consuming led happy lives, roaming freely outside together.
Since farmers are now using sophisticated regenerative methods, you also feel good knowing that the fields they’re rotating their cattle and poultry through are naturally engaged in an ongoing process of atmospheric carbon capture. Your kids study the science behind these processes in school and always enjoy their annual field trip out to a local farm to learn more. It’s fascinating, as well as uplifting to know that society is now working with ecology rather than against it, as used to be ‘normal’ back in the day.
Out the window and across the street, you see the usual group of local kids playing. Now that the streets are safe and smartphones have been redesigned to incentivize meaningful work, education, and communication, unsupervised outdoor playtime has once again become the norm. The air is clean and sparkling with the sounds of a high-trust community full of well-utilized playgrounds, parks, community gardens, and independent small businesses.
Living this way, it’s no surprise that Americans’ use of drugs — both street and prescription — has plummeted. While available for medical emergencies, the vast majority of people no longer have any need or desire for regular medication.
Even better, they now have the time and resources necessary to enjoy this new abundance of health. City dwellers love to utilize their local network of high-speed rail, share-cars, and e-bikes — all run on green energy — to visit the many family farms and small towns in the region. The resulting human connections are a win-win: Urbanites get a taste of country life, while rural folks enjoy the diversity of people who come out from the city. Together, they foster a shared culture infused with a love of the land and its people, along with an appreciation of the interconnectedness of the human and natural worlds.
Ultimately, the difference between these two visions isn’t one of means — it’s of ends. The goal of Abundance liberalism is to use technology to create a self-contained human zone that’s parallel to and separate from the Earth’s natural ecologies, which will be preserved in designated “rewilded” areas. In contrast, what I’ll call “ecohumanist liberalism” aspires to integrate natural and human ecologies in ways that synergistically enable both humans, animals, plants, and the planet to thrive.
Abundance liberalism represents the sort of hyper-materialist, hyper-secularized, and hyper-technocratic mindset that saturates elite professional culture today. Ecohumanist liberalism, in contrast, is countercultural, prioritizing what’s ultimately a spiritual commitment to repairing as much of humanity’s broken connection to nature as possible.
Science and technology can and should play important roles in this alternative ecohumanist vision as well: Both clean energy and regenerative farming methods, for example, rest on sophisticated scientific understandings. In the final analysis, however, the goal is to subordinate human technologies to the higher goal of building a new and better society that more organically connects each of us as individuals both to our deeper selves, each other, the rest of life on Earth — and, in the process, to Nature, the Creation, the Mystery, the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, which is infinitely more vast, powerful, and awe-inspiring than ourselves.
Thanks for this thought-provoking essay (and sparing me the burden of reading thev Thompson/Klein book). :-)
I completely agree with you, Carol!!