“Neither Left nor Right” … The small-c conservatism of Edward Goldsmith

1962: Silent Spring
1968: Club of Rome founded
1970: First Earth Day
1972: A Blueprint for Survival
1973: Formation of the UK People’s Party

The People’s Party (renamed “Ecology Party” in 1975 and then “Green Party” in 1985) was the first European party identified with the nascent Green politics movement. It was founded by Tony Whittaker, a former Kenilworth councilor for the Conservative Party, who had been inspired by the manifesto called “A Blueprint for Survival.” The principal author of the latter was Edward Goldsmith. Its original version filled the entire issue of the January 1972 edition of Goldsmith’s influential magazine The Ecologist.

Political ideologies don’t conform to hard-and-fast definitions. There are conservatives who champion free market capitalism; others romanticize some prior golden age of benevolent autocracy. Those types of conservatives are unlikely to be comfortable within the milieu of Green politics. On the other hand, there are self-identified conservatives who (a) prioritize conservation of social and natural resources, and (b) disdain big government social programs in favor of more local, decentralized solutions to problems. Consider Ted Trainer, who authored The Conserver Society or Paul Goodman, who called himself a “Neolithic Conservative.” Both were critical of capitalism yet not enamored of socialism or with leftism in general.

Likewise Edward Goldsmith. He published “A Blueprint for Survival” prior to the watershed 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm. A group of previously disparate environmental organizations coalesced around its ideas under the rubric of “The Movement for Survival.” Goldsmith influenced the movement toward embracing a “new paradigm, neither left nor right” orientation. When British leftists labeled him an anti-Marxist technological reactionary, Goldsmith responded: “To be a conservative with a small ‘c’ does not mean that I am right wing in the normal sense of the term. Right wing governments such as those of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush and John Major — and, in effect, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as well — are committed to defending economic growth and the interests of big corporations, interests that are in many ways in total conflict with those of the citizens who elected them to power. I hated Mr. Major’s government and set up a commission that published a 64-page booklet entitled ‘The Tory Record: an Assessment.’ It was a merciless indictment of its record, showing how it had sided with big industry and against the electors on such issues as unemployment, health, child malnutrition, the privatisation of the nuclear industry, and contaminated land. 87,000 copies of this booklet were distributed by Green Party candidates in different constituencies . . . I have never had any contact with right wing political parties. The only party I have been a member of is the British Green Party, whose formation was largely triggered off by A Blueprint for Survival. I stood for the first parliamentary election that the Green Party ever contested in October 1974.” (from: “My Answer,” January 2003)

Theoretician and activist

As the founding editor and publisher of The Ecologist, Edward Goldsmith was admired by many within the environmental and deep ecology movements. Wanting to go beyond mere theory, he and his editorial team relocated their offices from London to rural Cornwall, where they bought a farm and attempted to form a small-scale, relatively self-sufficient community of their own. Wikipedia relates: “In 1977, when the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) threatened to site a nuclear reactor on farmland in Cornwall, Goldsmith was among those who organized a continuous sit-in of the land, with local people blocking the entrance and staffing round-the-clock garrisons to prevent CEGB contractors from starting their drilling work — an early example of an environmental protest camp.”

In 1974 he spent four months with the Gandhi Peace Foundation in India, comparing the Gandhian (Sarvodaya) movement with the Ecology movement in Europe. This led him to forge close links with Indian environmental activists, in particular with the Chipko movement, including Sunderlal Bahuguna and Vandana Shiva. Owing to their critique of industrial modernity, Goldsmith and Shiva found themselves with many detractors on the left.

Historically, leftism has been imbued with the ideology of progressive development. Marx’s “stages of history” schema views industrial capitalism as initially progressive, the stage that “establishes the material basis” for socialism. In a certain sense, Edward Goldsmith was more anti-capitalist than Karl Marx. He said that industrial capitalism is and has always been ruinous. But, he added, so is industrial socialism. The notion of an ecologically and socially non-toxic industrialism is chimerical — whether the productive assets of society are owned publicly or privately.

Addressing the whole extant spectrum while forging an alternative worldview

Goldsmith worked toward a goal of having the destructiveness of the industrial growth paradigm become recognized all along the political spectrum. A dynamic speaker, he was much in demand on the lecture circuit. Among the hundreds of presentations he made over the course of many years, some were at the invitation of conservative-leaning organizations in various European countries and the US. The British left took him to task for it. He replied: “We must realize that we can only hope to win the critical battle we are fighting by getting the public on our side — and not just part of the public, but as much of it as possible. It is broad public pressure that can make governments change their policies. As it happens, almost half the population of a country like the UK or the US is made up of people who normally vote for Conservative or Republican governments. Just like liberal and left wing voters they, also, must be converted to our cause if we want our children to have a life worth living on this planet.” (ibid.)

Goldsmith disdained the left’s advocacy of economic growth and refused to compromise or attenuate his de-growth perspective. He pointed out that, rather than culminating in the social attainment of generalized abundance and security, progressive development has resulted in ecocide and the withering of local communities. And he didn’t shy away from talking about spiritual impoverishment, a discourse generally anathema to the left. He noted that the populaces of our post-modern societies are experiencing a kind of discontent that goes beyond material anxieties. At the periphery, the social fabric is disintegrating; after the death of “the god that failed” (communism) many have turned to religious fundamentalism. At the center, the majority has become affluent enough in a material sense, but the extent of discontent is evident in surging rates of clinical depression, patterns of mindless consumption, and a widespread retreat into the fogs of media, technology, and psychopharmacology.

For the sake of forging a pathway toward sanity, sustainability, and grassroots democracy Goldsmith gave us an image of a “Great U-Turn.” He understood, of course, that we can’t “go back” to any pristine or innocent earlier period — there are too many people and we’ve done too much damage. But he emphasized that we need to make some kind of dramatic turn at this point in history, and our praxis could well be informed by an appreciation of what Gary Snyder termed “the Old Ways.”

Living well while living more lightly

Edward Goldsmith posited increased life satisfaction via a decreased material standard of technology, commerce, and consumption. He said we’d be happier in a downscaled eco-communitarian world. He arrived at this conclusion after spending years intensively studying the literature addressing the lifeways of aboriginal peoples. He noted how the scale of their technological and social infrastructure was constrained (the past tense is appropriate because almost all of the remaining aboriginal societies have been heavily influenced by contact with moderns). Within such, the individual’s domain of experience was simpler and more local, yet there was no lack of cultural richness. Conjecturing that the quality of life was at least as good, he asked: If we can live perfectly well while living more lightly, doesn’t it follow that most of our touted “development” amounts to sheer folly?

Goldsmith maintained that simplification needs to be underpinned by a transformation of the modern worldview toward naturalism (in place of humanism), communitarianism (in place of individualism), ecologism (in place of economism), and transcendentalism (in place of materialism). Such a transformation could be the basis for a vision of a green society compatible with the sustainable, satisfying, and thriving lifeways that had characterized our species for 99% of its history:
* community-based vs. institution-based
* place-based vs. network-based
* humanly-scaled bioregional units vs. nation-states
* cultural diversity vs. the modern tendency toward monoculture
* vernacular localism vs. globalized cosmopolitan mass society
* sociality values vs. productivity values
* organic (communitarian) education of the young vs. schooling (segregation of the young)
* earth-based spirituality vs. sky-god religions
* tools as organic components of social-productive life vs. development of a Technosphere as an edifice “above” and dominating the social sphere
* a sense of belonging to the land and its community of life vs. ownership of the land and its resources (alienation from the community of life)

Green politics as a springboard

Edward Goldsmith’s radically transformative vision was neither left nor right, but deeply green. He asserted that material sufficiency in an eco-communitarian society could provide the conditions for a diverse variety of meaningful, grounded, and fulfilling lifeways. He held out hope that electing Greens to office, in conjunction with a broad movement for change, could begin to foster such a transition.

Goldsmith, who died in 2009 at the age of 80, recognized that the alternative vision he advocated was “off the spectrum” and thus would encounter much misapprehension and resistance. He believed that Green politics could be the springboard toward gradual affirmation of the new worldview. Whether or not his optimism in that regard was justified has yet to be determined.

(this article appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Green Horizon Magazine)