The Church Of Eternal Growth
A new study about green growth is a reminder that our current crises descend from our preference for ideology over reality.
What happens to a society that becomes trapped in its own ignorance? That's a question explored by Russian director Alexei Roman in his 2013 film Hard To Be A God. In the film, three scientists find themselves on the planet Arkanar, which is almost identical to Earth, except that human civilisation stopped progressing at some point in the Medieval period. The scientists learn that that's because anyone identified as an intellectual is immediately killed by the dung-smeared locals.
For many reasons, Hard To Be A God is a hard watch. The script is a non-sequitous morass; the Russian dialogue has been redubbed so it feels like it's taking place in your head; the black and white visuals are surreal and aggressively repulsive. Roman's portrayal of the revolting squalor and filth in which his characters writhe and gibber stains you in perpetuity. Hard To Be A God is truly a horrifyingly blunt skewering of the human hankering for self-imposed ignorance.
The film perfectly encapsulates the wanton depravity of the 2025 Trump presidency. From its ending of climate research at NOAA to its assault on universities and education in general; from the ludicrous assertion that RFK Jr is going to discover the cause of autism, to its ever-intensifying campaign of bigoted cruelty against minorities, Trump 2.0 looks like a federal-level attempt to load civilisation into a trebuchet and fling it into the 9th century. It’s all-too-literal a realisation of Carl Sagan’s 1996 warning that, in a society based on science and technology, our “combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces”; that “if we are not able to ask skeptical questions” then “we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along”.
But while Trump's assault on expertise is a manifestation of the most extreme anti-intellectualism, it exists on a spectrum with subtler forms of ideological blindness and an unwillingness to question answers. Even in academia's highest towers, where reason and evidence are deemed to reign supreme, deeply held beliefs regularly supplant empirical reality. And as new research suggests, this tendency toward comfortable myths over uncomfortable truths isn't limited to populist politics—it can shape the thinking of even our most educated experts.
Lost In The Salsa Verde
The power of ideology was recalled this month by a new study titled "Green growth beliefs”, which came to some nuanced yet unnerving conclusions about what smart people choose to believe. The study surveyed about 3,000 high-level researchers across different academic disciplines about their belief in the idea that economic growth can be environmentally sustainable. The study authors—who include Naomi Oreskes, writer of Merchants of Doubt, an influential book about science disinformation—found significant differences of opinion between fields, with economists strongly endorsing green growth (74%) while earth scientists were more skeptical (41%).
This result might not have been especially noteworthy were it not for a further finding: that the strongest predictor for believing in green growth is a belief, held most strongly among economists, that "continued GDP growth is essential for human well-being", a link that the authors note is "academically contested". This is an understatement: increasingly, we’re learning that such a belief is not sustained by scientific observation. The authors stress: "It is not clear if green growth is possible. But the importance of this topic is undeniable, because many influential policies are based on green growth beliefs."
