The End of Meaningful Growth
Resilience and Responsibility - Part II
For much of Western history, growth functioned as a primary source of meaning.
In the Christian tradition, growth appears early and explicitly. In Genesis, the command to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it” establishes expansion as both a blessing and a responsibility. Human flourishing is tied to increase—of people, of territory, of influence.
This orientation is reinforced in the New Testament. Some of Jesus’ parables, such as the mustard seed, describe the Kingdom of God as something that grows from small beginnings into something large, emphasizing expansion as a positive and even necessary process. Elsewhere, Jesus instructs his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” extending this logic geographically and culturally, from Jerusalem to the “ends of the earth.”
Unlike many ancient religions tied to specific places or peoples, Christianity claimed a universal truth meant for all humanity. This universality encouraged a culture of continuous outward movement. Growth was not simply permitted; it was a moral obligation.
The ultimate aim of this growth was to become closer to God—an aspiration without clear bounds. Over time, individual spiritual growth shaped social and institutional models that favored expansion more broadly. What began as a religious orientation toward growth gradually influenced how societies understood progress, success, and their relationship to the world.
This legacy promoted an anthropocentric vision in which humans stood above nature, authorized to transform and appropriate it. That vision proved extraordinarily effective. It provided moral support for geographic expansion and later offered a foundation for modern economic systems—including in societies with very different religious traditions.
Scholars continue to debate the extent to which these Christian roots contributed to today’s environmental crisis. The point here is not blame, but recognition: growth long served as a coherent source of meaning.
That model is now being challenged—by constraints, and by ethics.
World War II marked the last large-scale attempt at unconstrained geographic expansion. Its cost proved unbearable, and the nuclear era that followed imposed hard limits on territorial conquest. Space exploration has not offered a credible alternative for satisfying expansionist impulses.
At the same time, the ongoing mass extinction event forces a reversal in how humans relate to other species—from domination to coexistence. When domination loses legitimacy, sustainability takes its place as a new moral reference point.
The ethical lens has also shifted in time. For much of history, growth was evaluated by comparison with the past. Today, it is increasingly judged by its future consequences. Economic development since the Industrial Revolution was powered by fossil fuels, and although the climatic implications of this strategy have been understood since the nineteenth century, they were largely ignored. Only recently has it become clear that these consequences pose an existential threat.
One of the clearest signs that growth is losing its meaning may be demographic. When people cannot imagine a better future, they hesitate to bring new lives into it. The sustained decline in birth rates across some of the world’s most economically developed societies suggests a quiet withdrawal—a collective recognition that existing models of growth no longer make sense, and that no credible alternative has yet emerged.
Growth, however, was never the only source of meaning available within religious traditions themselves.
Christianity also developed a strong ethic of poverty and restraint, often treating wealth as an obstacle to spiritual growth rather than its reward. In parallel, other traditions—such as Buddhism—placed acceptance, impermanence, and detachment at the center of their moral vision, explicitly decoupling meaning from accumulation or expansion.
These traditions did not dominate the historical trajectory of economic development, but they endured. Today, they offer something different: not solutions, but moral resources. They suggest that meaning can arise from limits rather than growth, from restraint rather than expansion, from continuity rather than progress.
For most of human history, there was no clear distinction between ethics, moral obligation, and religion. Religious traditions did not merely prescribe beliefs; they provided comprehensive moral frameworks that explained what mattered, what was expected, and how one ought to live. Meaning, responsibility, and purpose were embedded in shared narratives that organized individual lives and collective behavior.
Modern societies gradually separated ethics from religion, relying instead on progress, growth, and material improvement to carry moral weight. For a time, this substitution worked. Growth did not only generate wealth; it justified effort, sacrifice, and delay. It told a coherent story about why the future would be better than the past.
That story is now breaking down. What is missing is not faith in a particular tradition, but a shared moral framework capable of providing meaning under conditions of constraint. Whether such a framework is grounded in religious belief or articulated in secular terms remains an individual choice. The need for it, however, is no longer optional.
The search for a new moral grammar—one that can sustain meaning, responsibility, and resilience without relying on endless growth—is a societal imperative. What resources we draw on to build it, and how we choose to live within it, is the question that follows.