Sustainability initiatives in the United States were buffeted for a generation following the 1980 election of political conservative Ronald Reagan. Commensurate with the ascendancy of the political right was the reassertion of the neoclassical economic paradigm. Linking politics and economics, also, was the ascendancy of a highly influential rhetorical industry, focused on undermining sustainability policies and initiatives. This paper considers examples of the ideological rhetoric of anti-sustainability in the U.S., links that rhetoric to the neoclassical economic paradigm, and sketches ideological responses.

According to James Speth (2008), Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University: The escalating process of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification that continue despite decades of warnings and earnest effort constitute a severe indictment, but an indictment of what exactly? If we want to reverse today’s destructive trends, forestall further and greater losses, and leave a bountiful world for our children and grandchildren, we must return to fundamentals and seek to understand both the underlying forces driving such destructive trends and the economic and political system that gives these forces free rein. Speth explains the underlying “drivers” of environmental deterioration. They range from enormous growth in human population and the meteoric growth of dominant technologies, to values that shape human behaviors and determine what is considered to be important within the human community. The most threatening impacts, he observes, are connected to encroachments of the global economy.

This section presents sketches of six strategies responsive to the rhetoric of anti-sustainability. Some overlap with others.

Philosopher Karl Popper (1962) has had a profound impact upon science, generally, but perhaps less so upon economics, specifically. His work offers a criterion for isolating propositions that are ideological, therefore unscientific. As such, it does not mean that ideological propositions are innately inferior to scientific ones. The distinction is crucial, however. According to Popper, the definitive characteristic of a scientific proposition is falsifiability. That is, the community of appropriately trained scientists must be able to determine criteria and collect empirical evidence that may render the proposition false, if in fact such evidence exists.

Eventually, if challengers are to prevail against the laissez-faire resurgence also described as classical liberalism – according to the perspective of early 20^th Century political economist Antonio Gramsci (1986) [16] – either they must demonstrate the prevailing paradigm is without foundation, or alternately, they must pose philosophical syntheses of greater importance and significance. Many of neoliberalism’s challengers become exhausted in pursuit of the former, when the paradigm’s primary vulnerability is with the latter.

Contrary to the elegance of the scientific method, an emerging methodology, in the parlance of Gramsci, and Schön and Rein, may look like this: First, one takes control of (meta) problem identification; then second, one dismisses opponents espousing perceived dysfunctional, self-interested questions and solutions; and third, one replaces or modifies opponents’ paradigms with ones that are more workable and also friendlier to one’s own “salon”. The short answer, with regard to anti-sustainability rhetoric, then, is to build an alternative case that may “fly in the face” of the dominant neoclassical paradigm. Among those who have done this credibly are Herman Daly and John Cobb in For the Common Good (1989). They operate somewhat in the tradition of Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead in holding that human life is continuous with nature in the sense that reality as such consists of socially constituted individuals… [19,] [20]

Closely related to “Pursuing Other Outcomes” is realism, or “common sense” about how the world is perceived to work. For instance, in the run up to the subprime lending crisis in the United States, even casual observers of lax lending standards might have predicted the pending crisis, based simply upon concern for the obvious diminishing quality of loans in bank portfolios. Donald Schön (1992) addresses the critical need for realism in applied fields, particularly his field of urban planning. Arguably, economics is similar in many respects to urban planning. Schön reflects particularly on the legacy of early 20^th Century education philosopher John Dewey (1938) and comments on his perception of a growing skepticism about the practical utility of professional knowledge. In part, its diminishing practical utility stems from what Schön describes as a radical separation of the world of the academy from the world of practice. In this Schön sees what he calls a dilemma of “rigor over relevance”. Reflecting upon his experience teaching urban planning at MIT, there is a growing suspicion, he asserts, that some academic research may actually exacerbate some social problems. In this he sees an encroaching “dualism”, for instance, of thought and action, research and practice, science and common sense, the academy and everyday life. John Dewey devoted his career to overcoming such dualisms, Schön observes, therefore he sought to unify mental reasoning with action, into a “creative tension” called praxis by some authors.

The rhetoric of reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, by interdisciplinary social scientist Albert O. Hirschman (1991), professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is the sole focus of this section. The book “is a progressive exploration of reactionary argumentative tactics”, according to reviewer Eugene Garver (1991), a rhetorician. Garver observes that Hirschman raises the quality of the “left-right” debate by shifting attention toward the historical pattern of argument, and away from attention to motives of people who are either using or opposing various arguments. Garver captures the essence of reactionary rhetoric, Hirschman’s broad target, with phrases such as: Of course I’m in favor of equality, but university curricula that explore the diversity of humanity as reflected in the student body will not promote equal respect and good manners but bigotry and resentment, just as forced integration causes segregation. Of course I’m in favor of equality, but you can’t legislate morals. Making laws that say that men and women have to be treated equally is as futile as making a law saying that from now on cows will have five legs. Everyone knows that past discrimination against people because of race, religion or sex was a terrible thing. But trying to eliminate all the vestiges of discrimination will threaten the progress we’ve already made.

Jeff Madrick (2005) of the New York Times observes the American profession has become too comfortable with powerful interests, not unlike 19th Century Parisian artist’s salons. Then, rules were promulgated to maintain standards, but also to exclude “up-and-coming artists” who chose to circumvent the salon’s style. Thus, salon-related “norming” behavior enhanced visibility and prestige, and the wealth and power of its senior members. However, it excluded the interesting work of Impressionist challengers such as Monet and Cezanne. Unless the challengers complied with what Madrick decries as an enforced “paint-by-the-numbers” scheme, they had little hope their work might reach around the hegemons, into the hands of collectors and consumers. Certainly the cartel-like structures Madrick describes do not sustain innovation.

Too often one encounters economists masquerading as scientists, even as the questions asked, the methods employed, and the answers forthcoming are indicative of passionately held, ideologically driven agendas. Such ideological agendas may be legitimate, but only if one distinguishes carefully, for audiences and counterparties alike, the boundaries between “doing science” and doing something else. Eight decades ago J. M. Keynes (1926) spoke definitively of similarities between religion and the passionate pursuit of religion-like, ideologically driven agendas of political economists. Nowhere did these prescriptions reach a more “extravagant and rhapsodical expression”, said Keynes – speaking of “the political economist’s religion” – than the writings of Frédéric Bastiat [22] (1801-1850) and Anglican Archbishop Richard Whately (1787-1863). These among other authors believed they were observing and describing natural laws of commerce. Violation would bring misery upon human beings analogous to willful violation of natural laws of physics such as those described by Isaac Newton.