Reverence before Restraint (interview question #22)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
Let me close this interview by engaging you on a theme that you shared in a new essay, unpublished at the time of writing. The thesis of your manuscript is implied in your provisional title: ‘Reverence Precedes Restraint: How Sacredness Transforms the Limits-to-Growth Crisis.’ You seem to be arguing that if we begin our strategic response to the limits-to-growth crisis by advocating ‘restraint’, we marginalise the more fundamental problem of our spiritual or existential orientation in the world. Conversely, if we begin with a position of humble reverence to the world, the question of restraint may not arise, because restraint comes naturally once we embrace the sacredness of existence. Could you please unpack this argument in more detail? How might a rediscovery of sacredness help dissolve the civilisation challenge of colliding with ecological limits to growth?
Yes, I think that formulation captures the essence of the argument very well. The central claim of that essay is that the ecological crisis cannot ultimately be resolved at the level of restraint alone because restraint, when experienced merely as external limitation or imposed sacrifice, will almost always remain psychologically and politically fragile. If people experience ecological limits only negatively – as prohibition, deprivation, austerity, or loss – then the culture of growth will continue to exert immense gravitational force.
I have been developing this line of thinking with my friend and writing colleague Joshua Floyd. Our suggestion is that the ‘limits to growth’ problem is, at root, not merely biophysical, technological, economic, or even political. It is spiritual. It concerns how human beings experience, perceive, and value the world. Modern industrial civilisation is fundamentally desacralising. Nature appears primarily as a resource, matter, standing reserve, and economic input. Time becomes productivity. Land becomes property. Human beings become consumers and labour units. Within such a disenchanted worldview, restraint inevitably feels like diminishment because value itself has already been defined in terms of expansion, accumulation, and domination.
This is why ecological arguments framed purely around limits often fail to inspire. They may be scientifically accurate and ethically necessary, but existentially they can appear thin and joyless if detached from a deeper transformation of perception and meaning. Asking a civilisation organised around endless consumption simply to ‘consume less’ without transforming its underlying conception of the good life is extraordinarily difficult, probably impossible.
The argument of ‘Reverence Precedes Restraint’ is therefore that restraint becomes sustainable and meaningful only when rooted in reverence. Once the world is experienced as intrinsically valuable, expressive, beautiful, or sacred, exploitative excess begins to feel not merely imprudent but profane. Restraint ceases to appear primarily as externally imposed sacrifice and instead becomes a natural expression of care, humility, gratitude, and participation in something larger than the isolated ego.
Now, when I speak of ‘sacredness’, I do not mean supernatural theology or anything religious, as such. Inspired by Thoreau, I am simply trying to recover a mode of existential orientation toward reality – one characterised by wonder, attentiveness, humility, and reverence before the mystery and beauty of existence. This connects directly to the aesthetic worldview developed throughout SMPLCTY.
If the cosmos is encountered aesthetically – as expressive, beautiful, sublime, and meaningful rather than merely instrumental – then the Earth is no longer experienced as a warehouse of resources awaiting extraction. Forests, oceans, species, landscapes, and even human communities begin to appear as worthy of care in themselves. This does not abolish practical use or material necessity, of course, but it fundamentally transforms the spirit in which human beings inhabit the world.
I think many traditional and Indigenous cultures understood this intuitively. Sacredness functioned not only metaphysically but ecologically. Rituals, taboos, and cosmologies often embedded restraint organically within systems of meaning and reverence. By contrast, modernity desacralised the world while simultaneously unleashing technological powers capable of planetary destruction. The result is a civilisation of immense capability but profound existential disorientation and anxiety.
This is partly why I argue that ecological civilisation requires not merely institutional transformation but a transformation of consciousness, sensibility, and taste – what we discussed earlier as aesthetic education. People must increasingly come to feel ecological belonging rather than merely understand environmental statistics intellectually. Art becomes crucial here because aesthetic experience often awakens precisely this sense of reverence. Music, poetry, landscape, ritual, architecture, contemplative practices, and experiences of beauty can temporarily dissolve the isolated consumer-self and reconnect people to wider dimensions of existence. Profound aesthetic experiences remind us that value cannot be reduced to utility or price.
This also helps explain why I increasingly use spiritual language, albeit cautiously and non-dogmatically. I think the ecological crisis ultimately confronts humanity with existential questions modernity tried to suppress: How much is enough? What is worth revering? What is the good life? How shall we live knowing we are finite creatures embedded within fragile ecological systems? The dominant growth paradigm cannot answer those questions satisfactorily because it substitutes quantitative expansion for existential depth. Consumer capitalism promises transcendence through accumulation, but endless con-sumption cannot satisfy spiritual hunger. In fact, it often intensifies alienation because the deeper longing beneath consumer desire is frequently aesthetic, existential, and relational.
This is why I say that reverence may ‘dissolve’ rather than simply ‘solve’ certain dimensions of the limits-to-growth crisis. Once fulfilment shifts from accumulation toward participation, beauty, contemplation, creativity, community, and ecological belonging, many forms of excessive consumption lose their psychological necessity or allure. The imperative for endless growth weakens because the underlying existential void it attempts unsuccessfully to fill has been approached differently.
To put it another way: restraint imposed externally feels oppressive, but restraint organically arising from reverence feels coherent and even liberating. A person who deeply loves forests does not experience refraining from destroying them primarily as sacrifice. Care flows naturally from perception. This connects closely to the distinction between im-poverished austerity and frugal abundance. Ecological civilisation cannot succeed by offering only less. It must offer another mode of richness – aesthetic, communal, contemplative, and spiritual richness.
I should emphasise, however, that reverence does not magically eliminate tragedy or political conflict. Ecological overshoot, inequality, power structures, and material realities remain very real. Reverence alone will not dismantle fossil capitalism or redesign economies. Structural transformation remains essential. But without a deeper shift in consciousness and orientation, political reforms alone will likely remain unstable and reversible.
Ultimately, the argument is that civilisation’s crisis is not simply that humanity has exceeded material limits. It is that we have forgotten how to encounter the world reverently. Bound to our phones, we have become estranged from beauty, mystery, sufficiency, and participation in the larger community of life. This presents industrial civilisation as a spiritual problem. A rediscovery of sacredness – understood aesthetically, existentially, and ecologically – may therefore help humanity inhabit limits not as humiliations imposed upon us from outside, but as the very conditions within which meaning, beauty, and flourishing become possible.
In this sense, perhaps ecological civilisation will emerge not primarily through fear of collapse, though that fear is understandable, but through a renewed love for the living world and a renewed gratitude for the astonishing privilege of participating, however briefly, in the beauty and mystery of existence.
