Why is the current discussion about happiness, wellbeing, lifestyle and work-life balance taking place now? Is it because we are living with the long-term consequences of a form of development that has remained virtually uncontested for 50 years? Could it be that it is only now that the externalised costs of that development have become so overwhelming that they can no longer be avoided? Are we seeing the real price of all the rewards, prizes, free gifts and offers with which we have been beguiled for the past half century?

If the most forceful question is the increasing weight of the global economy on the fragile resource base - the forests, water, the land of the planet and, above all, its climate - then this external threat is paradoxically a consequence of the resolution of an earlier internal contradiction.

In the early industrial period, it seemed that the poor and the labouring classes would remain permanently estranged from society, and represented a disruptive and possibly ruinous force. In order to forestall this, runaway economic growth in the postwar period showered an unparalleled plenty upon them. That this led to an abusive exploitation of global resources is now clear.

The maintenance of social peace has been more costly than anyone dreamed. How sad that this extractive and unsustainable model should now be the object of global propagation at the very moment when the excesses of privilege are now being seen as the cause of the current crisis.

There is an intimate connection between the way in which social unrest in the rich societies was resolved and the burden we are bequeathing to a future already apprehensive about its legacy. More than this: even the version of social harmony the rich countries have attained now appears threatened and uncertain. The malaise pervading the richest societies the world has ever known is not gratuitous; it has a precise and inescapable origin.

The emphasis on economics in the immediate postwar period is understandable. Since it was spectacular economic breakdown in Europe that had produced the hatreds and barbarisms of Nazism and Fascism, it was understandable that the slogan "never again" meant ensuring that the first priority was the avoidance of economic collapse. That this eventually led to an obsessive and reductive concern solely with economic growth was scarcely foreseen.

Few pointed out at the time that the economy is not an instrument either of redemption or transcendence; nevertheless, it seemed to be both, and thus it was that the economy became the only area of human experience (not excepting religion) in which miracles were still believed to occur.

Since economic growth became the overriding preoccupation over the past six decades, no effort would be spared in promoting it. Labour shortages were answered by the transport of people from distant parts of the world; a national division of labour exploded to become a vast international system of outworking; capital and goods moved around the world at an accelerating speed, while the people were to be contained within arbitrary borders of countries created by a defunct imperialism. This was then called "order" or "stability".

It seemed that what became known as the postwar settlement - a "permanent" accommodation between capital and labour - had achieved the impossible: the lion had lain down with the lamb, and the war between social classes had yielded to unity between rich and poor in a universal quest for more. A growing economy would not interfere with the liberties of the creators of wealth, and would raise up the poor through a mixture of welfare provision and a trickling down of the wealth generated.

But for this model - the win-win situation beloved of politicians- to work effectively, certain adjustments had to be made between what the people wanted and what was necessary to the survival of the capitalist industrial system.

Now, the supreme desire of the poor and the excluded, the marginalised, the dependent and the vulnerable of industrialism had been for sufficiency: a secure livelihood, a modest prosperity, healthcare, education, enough free time for the enjoyment of life and a moment of peace in which to bring up a new generation. Because the majority of people had been tormented by want, insecurity and loss - the history of industrial society has been one of continuous technological change, loss of skills, forced change and the threat of depression and poverty, punctuated by war, upheaval and emigrations of despair - what people wanted was the relief of poverty and an end to the uncertainties that had characterised their lives for the six generations.

And in the 1940s, it seemed, part of what the labour movement had struggled for was conceded, in the shape of the welfare state, with its "cradle-to-grave" emphasis on wellbeing. This was the "socialist" element of the postwar settlement; the "capitalist" rejoinder in the 1950s was the affluence of the consumer society. We ended up with the blend of public and private provision, the inextricable marriage of welfare and enterprise, which with varying emphases on one or the other has been part of our common experience ever since.

The best of intentions characterised this historic compromise. Few dissented from the conviction that economic wellbeing, underpinned by the safety net of the welfare state, would produce the good society.

It was perhaps too subtle a political analysis to observe in the euphoria of the newfound spending power of people who had always feared poverty that all their demands had to be subtly reworked, if not deformed, if they were to be plausibly answered in the context of an unchanging industrialism. Only now, two generations later, we can see the warping of what used to be called the "aspirations" of the people and the reshaping of human needs so they accorded with the economic necessity of capitalism.

Instead of sufficiency, we got economic growth; instead of prosperity, consumerism. Security became a competitive heaping up of weaponry to fight the communist adversary. Instead of free time, we got the leisure and entertainment industries; in place of sexual liberation, we got pornography. And the desire for a healthy life was overtaken by the needs of pharmaceutical industry. In lieu of the reaffirmation of the local and the neighbourly, we got globalisation; in place of livelihoods, we got jobs; instead of travel, we were given tourism; education was swiftly occluded by the instruction that comes from the market, of which our children swiftly became the starveling dependants; nourishment was colonised by the food industry, while the spiritual life was answered by industries devoted to the promotion of fantasy. All this was attained with a prodigious waste of resources.

In other words, we passed from a culture of penury to a culture of excess without any recognition or acknowledgement of what was happening to us. What is in question now is the nature of that moment of liberation of the postwar period; and how we can extricate ourselves from it without impairing the way of life to which we have become accustomed, and on which we have become dependent.

It is not helpful to blame or to accuse. It is possible that the current crisis was generated by the greatest goodwill and most earnest endeavour - a desire to forestall conflict, to create social harmony. But the consequences can no longer be evaded now that the same model is being advocated to a world that can scarcely sustain the lifestyle of the privileged quarter of its inhabitants let alone extend this to the 3 billion people who live on less than $2 a day.

Not only has the postwar settlement mutated into an impossible project, but even its beneficiaries are no longer exempt from the consequences of this tainted version of "success": obesity and the sicknesses of excess; the baleful effects of climate change; the loss of faith in the future that leads to falling birthrate and the failure of populations to replenish themselves; the avidity for escape; the restless nihilism of binge-drinking and drug-taking; and the curious effect of the triumph of the market over society in the strange, recombinant cult of money, sex and fun.

It is fitting that the question should be heard once more: what is to be done? It is useless to cast this epic quandary in the received terms of the interests of capital and labour - although the language of social justice is certainly not archaic in a world of growing inequality. Perhaps the best hope lies with those who have presciently said that we are all in this together.

But "we" means the whole world, not just the people of Britain or the US, of India or Brazil. We need to recuperate older ideals and dreams that were bypassed by a single-minded dedication to economic growth: the desire for a secure sufficiency, a yearning as old as humanity and still unrealised, despite the ingenuity of all the mechanistic technologies of universal improvement. It means older ambitions - for a safe sustenance, for a good-enough life, for a space for everyone to breathe freely without the torments of want - must be reclaimed from their falsified versions, of which we have remained for too long uncritical.

It may prove impossible; but that is no reason not to formulate a hope and an ideal to inspire a new generation, a conserving radicalism that advocates a more sparing use of material resources combined with a deeper reliance on human resourcefulness; not to recover the occluded dream of a more modest version of human joys, less extravagant consolations for our sorrows and a recognition that we share a common fate, not only existentially but socially and economically as well.

The debate is only beginning. Will it develop and deepen, or will it be overtaken once more by the sinister promoters of business as usual?