hi john,

while i cannot speak for aom as a whole, i certainly agree with you that marketing plays a major role in the topics and relationships covered in organizations and the natural environment (one) . . .

however i wonder if there might be some discussion about "the desire to grow is based on achieving a share of a market demand that exists" . . .

two thoughts occur to me . . .

(1) i wonder if a complete discussion of impetuses for growth would not include
a) market share
b) absolute gross income, net income, total assets, and net assets . . .
c) return on investment
d) price earnings ratio

(2) it seems to me that firms grow by creating new demand, as well as by capturing some existing demand . . .

cheers,

craig

craig k harris
department of sociology
michigan agricultural experiment station
national food safety and toxicology center
institute for food and agriculture standards
food safety policy center
michigan state university

-----Original Message-----
From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of John Peloza
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 1:31 AM
To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

Hi Paul.

This is an interesting essay.  However, as a marketer, I have to say that the desire to grow is based on achieving a share of a market demand that exists.  And as long as that market exists, it is impossible to ask corporate leaders to change what they do.

I am relatively new to the academic profession; my four year anniversary is coming up this August.  But I am the only one finds it strange that marketing is absent from the AOM environment?  We are virtually the only management discipline that is not represented. Certainly a gaping hole no matter how you look at it.  Perhaps there is some history that predates my involvement. If so, can someone please share it with me?

Thanks,
John

John Peloza
SFU Business
peloza@sfu.ca
778-782-7338

"Life is one big group project." John Peloza


----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Shrivastava" <paul.shri@GMAIL.COM>
To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 11:31:39 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: The Barbaric Heart


Just returned from GRONEN 2010 debating truth and beauty of sustainable enterprise, and thought I would share this piece of passionate wisdom.



















With Best Regards,
paul S.
Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.
David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and
Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise
http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/sustainable
John Molson School of Business
Concordia University
Mail: 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd West, Suite MB 6-327

Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8
Ph. 514-848-2424 Ext 2367, Fax. 514-848-4547; Email: pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca









The Barbaric Heart
Capitalism and the crisis of nature
by Curtis White

Published in the May/June 2009 issue of Orion magazine




Photo: Meryl Joseph


THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that environmentalists are not very good at asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural world, happening?" We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who care about something called nature or (if they're feeling a little technocratic, and they usually are) the "environment." They are concerned, as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may experience a "system collapse." But as scientifically sophisticated as environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal. Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources." Industrial sources. Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do we have all of these polluting sources? "

Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience has been like Mickey Mouse's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": for every berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place, implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or "mitigate," since we can't seem to really turn off anything), another two pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.

Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a sort of "presentism" in which the culprits are all of recent vintage: Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation, you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that's very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, "greedy." Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra Club.)

After all, isn't it true that what corporations and the individuals who run them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable? They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own dominance. In short, they try to win . They try to thrive . We should all be so committed to the risk of "living large." The problem is not with these qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it is that they're trying to help thrive.

My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not merely name-calling. This is so because, as I've already suggested, there is something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism has brought into being. What economists call the "spontaneous order" of the free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi . The slow, winding flow of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the northern lights.)

To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact, the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice even when it didn't (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a "blonde beast." (He mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a slave.)

Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, "What's the economy for?" Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It's as if the only alternative to "growth" was "recession," and no one is allowed to be for that.) Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel according to John reads, "In the beginning was Logos ." What is the logos (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does it act?

THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the barbarian is not an "other" to be driven away in the name of civilized virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas . For the Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence, to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was above all orderly . As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome "billowed in booty."

This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence . Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. That was Roman virtu . Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to "win," and by whatever means necessary.

Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart, they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole .

For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self. What else could care so blindly about "winning"? But it also feels, at some dark recess of the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of being able to cart off the enemy's silver and gold (and women). Plates, jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death meant nothing. Through the "right of conquest" (the unwritten law of the ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a "hero").

Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out. Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus's tragedies, humans pursue what they perceive to be their own interest only to become "the slave of their own destruction," an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts, economic, military, and environmental.

What is tragic is that the bloody end, "the great wound swimming upwards" like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for that. We don't intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don't intend that our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable spiraling of violence, but it does. We don't intend that the pursuit of our happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification, drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is presently "swimming upwards" regardless of what we intend.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond beauty, doesn't get. First, it doesn't look at itself. It is frustrated by questions like "What makes life worth living?" Or it assumes that the answer is obvious: "Winning! Of course." It doesn't even wonder what its relation to other barbarians might be. It doesn't know about solidarity beyond a blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.

Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn't understand, except at the very last moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two thirds of the Emperor Valens's Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called "blind and irregular fury." Their "mischievous disposition" consumed with "improvident rage" the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while "immersed in wine and sleep," and there followed in turn a "cruel slaughter of the astonished Goths." Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.

Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.

THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder, and eventual anguish and regret.

The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be "shown the light of day." The proposals of the environmental community for better systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time for corporate polluters-none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke , in May of 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? "Trenchard's answer was: more . More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing-heavier bombers, more bombers."

If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness. (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of "thinking" that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances, thoughtfulness's first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl , for example, was its determination not to believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a "bright shining lie," in Neil Sheehan's phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally repugnant.

In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness's primary attribute is not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic. Thoughtfulness's primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of the Barbaric is beauty. "Don't think profit," it argues, "think beauty. The beauty of the polis , the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled natural world." Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as opposed to Homo barbarus . It seeks a culture in which humans can become what they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That's the logos of our better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.

The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say that within those communities human beings should be able to live in dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled. What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we go for a hike, or when we visit an "eco-friendly" town full of bike paths and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not say of such places, "I'm grooving on this system's ecological balance." Or, "The Green Economy is working well." We say, "It's beautiful here!" And yet when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful. The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I'm embarrassed right now!

What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is "unrealistic," by which they really mean "does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring triumph of the Barbaric Heart." By this measure, to be realistic is to say, "We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest has even begun."

Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs comment. One has simply to say "television." Nevertheless, it is art, or the aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should replace Adam Smith's famous "division of labor," the work that promises only tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction. Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within communities, and in our relation to the natural world.

IN VIRGIL'S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are never not Trojans because they take with them their "household gods," those figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we're not even at home at home. We're strangers on our own shores, thanks to the way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and towns, turning them into one big McSame.

Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche's mordant phrase, "estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs." But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a "high standard of living." Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs? MBAs?) do not think to ask, "What makes life worth living?" The answer is obvious: "The high standards, of course!" A very strange conclusion for a people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is called for is the discovery or invention of our own "household gods" that might speak powerfully to us. "Gods" that will keep us in touch with a sense of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our own world.

We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it is nature. It doesn't pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the gods that encourage living things to thrive.

We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the impossible and calling it Beautiful.

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I don't understand the basic premise of this article.  We really don't know why we are destructive of the planet?  Hasn't economics done a pretty good job of explaining when and how private incentive and public welfare do not go together.  Haven't the resilience analysts developed pretty good theories for why we tend to destabilize ecosystems?  What is new here other than some vague finger pointing at our natural drive.  Was that in doubt?

And sentences such as this, sound like old warmed over marxism: "THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as empty."   Yes, modern man can fall into alienation.  Marx was at least right about that.  And so?

And "thoughtfulness" is the cure?  Isn't that a very very old way of thinking about the problem?  It is as if we can tell people that they have an effect on the environment and they will say "My god man, you are right, I will stop driving my car."  How many of you all have stopped driving as a result of the spill in the gulf?  Surely we cannot expect the average man to reach the thoughtfulness of this group.  Economics returns:  full private value versus 1/300 millionth of the public value.  Is that thoughtless or thoughtful.

Seriously, we may not like the answers we get from economics and ecology -- not to mention history --  but surely we should at least respect them.

Or am I missing something?

A
________________________________________
From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Shrivastava [paul.shri@GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 2:31 PM

To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Subject: The Barbaric Heart

Just returned from GRONEN 2010 debating truth and beauty of sustainable enterprise, and thought I would share this piece of passionate wisdom.

With Best Regards,
paul S.
Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.
David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and
Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise
http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/sustainable
John Molson School of Business
Concordia University
Mail: 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd West, Suite MB 6-327
Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8

Ph. 514-848-2424 Ext 2367, Fax. 514-848-4547; Email: pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca<mailto:pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca>

The Barbaric Heart
Capitalism and the crisis of nature
by Curtis White

Published in the May/June 2009<http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/4676/> issue of Orion magazine


[http://www.orionmagazine.org/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.orionmagazine.org/i/article_images/05-01-09450white.jpg&w=450]

Photo: Meryl Joseph


THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that environmentalists are not very good at asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural world, happening?" We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who care about something called nature or (if they're feeling a little technocratic, and they usually are) the "environment." They are concerned, as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may experience a "system collapse." But as scientifically sophisticated as environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal. Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources." Industrial sources. Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do we have all of these polluting sources?"

Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience has been like Mickey Mouse's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": for every berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place, implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or "mitigate," since we can't seem to really turn off anything), another two pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.

Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a sort of "presentism" in which the culprits are all of recent vintage: Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation, you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that's very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, "greedy." Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra Club.)

After all, isn't it true that what corporations and the individuals who run them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable? They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own dominance. In short, they try to win. They try to thrive. We should all be so committed to the risk of "living large." The problem is not with these qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it is that they're trying to help thrive.

My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not merely name-calling. This is so because, as I've already suggested, there is something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism has brought into being. What economists call the "spontaneous order" of the free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The slow, winding flow of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the northern lights.)

To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact, the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice even when it didn't (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a "blonde beast." (He mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a slave.)

Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, "What's the economy for?" Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It's as if the only alternative to "growth" was "recession," and no one is allowed to be for that.) Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel according to John reads, "In the beginning was Logos." What is the logos (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does it act?

THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the barbarian is not an "other" to be driven away in the name of civilized virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas. For the Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence, to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was above all orderly. As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome "billowed in booty."

This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to "win," and by whatever means necessary.

Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart, they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole.

For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self.  What else could care so blindly about "winning"? But it also feels, at some dark recess of the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of being able to cart off the enemy's silver and gold (and women). Plates, jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death meant nothing. Through the "right of conquest" (the unwritten law of the ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a "hero").

Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out. Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus's tragedies, humans pursue what they perceive to be their own interest only to become "the slave of their own destruction," an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts, economic, military, and environmental.

What is tragic is that the bloody end, "the great wound swimming upwards" like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for that. We don't intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don't intend that our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable spiraling of violence, but it does. We don't intend that the pursuit of our happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification, drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is presently "swimming upwards" regardless of what we intend.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond beauty, doesn't get. First, it doesn't look at itself. It is frustrated by questions like "What makes life worth living?" Or it assumes that the answer is obvious: "Winning! Of course." It doesn't even wonder what its relation to other barbarians might be. It doesn't know about solidarity beyond a blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.

Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn't understand, except at the very last moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two thirds of the Emperor Valens's Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called "blind and irregular fury." Their "mischievous disposition" consumed with "improvident rage" the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while "immersed in wine and sleep," and there followed in turn a "cruel slaughter of the astonished Goths." Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.

Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.

THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder, and eventual anguish and regret.

The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be "shown the light of day." The proposals of the environmental community for better systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time for corporate polluters-none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke, in May of 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? "Trenchard's answer was: more. More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing-heavier bombers, more bombers."

If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness. (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of "thinking" that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances, thoughtfulness's first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, for example, was its determination not to believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a "bright shining lie," in Neil Sheehan's phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally repugnant.

In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness's primary attribute is not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic. Thoughtfulness's primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of the Barbaric is beauty. "Don't think profit," it argues, "think beauty. The beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled natural world." Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as opposed to Homo barbarus. It seeks a culture in which humans can become what they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That's the logos of our better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.

The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say that within those communities human beings should be able to live in dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled. What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we go for a hike, or when we visit an "eco-friendly" town full of bike paths and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not say of such places, "I'm grooving on this system's ecological balance." Or, "The Green Economy is working well." We say, "It's beautiful here!" And yet when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful. The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I'm embarrassed right now!

What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is "unrealistic," by which they really mean "does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring triumph of the Barbaric Heart." By this measure, to be realistic is to say, "We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest has even begun."

Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs comment. One has simply to say "television." Nevertheless, it is art, or the aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should replace Adam Smith's famous "division of labor," the work that promises only tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction. Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within communities, and in our relation to the natural world.

IN VIRGIL'S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are never not Trojans because they take with them their "household gods," those figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we're not even at home at home. We're strangers on our own shores, thanks to the way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and towns, turning them into one big McSame.

Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche's mordant phrase, "estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs." But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a "high standard of living." Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs? MBAs?) do not think to ask, "What makes life worth living?" The answer is obvious: "The high standards, of course!" A very strange conclusion for a people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is called for is the discovery or invention of our own "household gods" that might speak powerfully to us. "Gods" that will keep us in touch with a sense of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our own world.

We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it is nature. It doesn't pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the gods that encourage living things to thrive.

We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the impossible and calling it Beautiful.

Paul(s),

It was to better understand how people are thinking and feeling that I wrote in.  I understand some need to better connect to the natural world and some yearning for a more spiritual connection.  I can even believe such a connection if applied to 6 billion people might make a difference.  I often hear such yearning and hope within the ONE community, and it touches something inside of me.  But upon reflection, I conclude that such spiritual change is not directable and thus not an effective way for me to expend my time.  I also worry that it is counterproductive.  It takes the focus off the failings of the system and puts it on the failings of humans.  Humans are not any different than any other animals.  If left unchecked, species get out of control.  Humans have just been better at avoiding the checks.   Of all the species, we need to impose those checks ourselves.  That is a daunting prospect.

I remain interested in why articles like "The Passionate Heart" are thought to be wise (Paul Shrivastava's word).  I don't get it for the reasons I have already stated.  Perhaps one of you can explain it to me.

A

In response to Andrew's comment, and question about whether we know why we are being so destructive of the planet and embarking on a course of potential collective suicide, whilst taking along a good number of other species with us,  I find the answers given by economics and resilience analysis only very partial answers. I also suspect they offer a solution only within the terms of the paradigm which has brought us to this point. That is not therefore to devalue them or decry their usefulness but on their own I think they are limited. They go some way to satisfying my intellect but say nothing to, for want of a better word, my soul.

So I think some kind of pyschological exploration is also needed and here I mean depth psychology not the trite understandings that a conventional ego-based individualistic psychology offers. And at least I think this article by Curtis White is pointing us in a direction worth pursuing

And we have to consider more our relationship with nature

"It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds."    Jiddu Krishnamurti

--
Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

Las cosas no son como aparecen ni tampoco son de otra manera

http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

Dr Paul Roberts
Calle Independencia #32-2
Ciudad Guzmán
Jalisco
México
C.P. 49000

tel: +52 (341) 412 6940
cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

Hi, all. I've been watching this conversation, and I have some sympathy with the various views expressed. While the Krishnamurti quote below is beautiful, though, I believe there is much more to the overall picture. I've spent a lot of time with nature. Sure, there are beautiful things in nature. But there's plenty that ought to give anyone pause. I've seen hawks swoop down and nail smaller birds at my bird feeder. I've seen a fight-to-the-death between a fish and a snake. I've seen plant species literally take over my backyard. I've seen snakes eat baby birds and male cats eat kittens.

It's not just me. Anyone who has followed Jane Goodall's work knows that she's witnessed warfare between chimpanzee groups. Robert Sapolsky has documented newly dominant male baboons systematically killing all male infants in the troop. You can see videos on Nova or the Discovery channels showing pretty gory views of predator-eating-prey. How about that Nova show about Orcas, showing them chasing a baby Gray Whale to exhaustion and then eating it?

So what have I learned? First, Mother Nature is wasteful in terms of life – there's an awful lot of it, and a lot of lives just don't go anywhere. Mother Nature doesn't make value judgments; she doesn't care at all about individual lives, beautiful images, or human values. Second, with very few exceptions, individual self interest is the name of the game, and the exceptions are primarily insect colonies where the interest of the particular colony is the objective – not really so different.

Humans are unique (we believe) in noticing and fretting about the role we play in our environment, and we are just beginning to understand the paradox of being a  species successful enough (self-interest, again) to destroy that environment. And although a species destroying its environment is probably not new, we believe we are the first to be able to do so on a global scale. But that doesn't change the basics. Self interest is still the name of the game. The real challenge is NOT to learn from nature – it could be argued that we've done that, and we've done it all too well. The real challenge, in my mind, is how to put constraints on ourselves, constraints that are contradictory to our very nature. To make matters worse, we are trying to do so very late in the game – late in the sense that there are very powerful economic systems and institutions in place that serve our human self-interests with incredible efficiency.

Cheers – BC

-----

Bob Clemen

Professor

Fuqua School of Business

Duke University, Box 90120

Durham, NC 27708-0120

Phone: 919-660-8005

Cell: 919-451-4073

WWW: http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~clemen/bio

....

"It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds."    Jiddu Krishnamurti

--
Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

Las cosas no son como aparecen ni tampoco son de otra manera

http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

Dr Paul Roberts
Calle Independencia #32-2
Ciudad Guzmán
Jalisco
México
C.P. 49000

tel: +52 (341) 412 6940
cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

Paul(s),

 

It was to better understand how people are thinking and feeling that I wrote in.  I understand some need to better connect to the natural world and some yearning for a more spiritual connection.  I can even believe such a connection if applied to 6 billion people might make a difference.  I often hear such yearning and hope within the ONE community, and it touches something inside of me.  But upon reflection, I conclude that such spiritual change is not directable and thus not an effective way for me to expend my time.  I also worry that it is counterproductive.  It takes the focus off the failings of the system and puts it on the failings of humans.  Humans are not any different than any other animals.  If left unchecked, species get out of control.  Humans have just been better at avoiding the checks.   Of all the species, we need to impose those checks ourselves.  That is a daunting prospect.

 

I remain interested in why articles like "The Passionate Heart" are thought to be wise (Paul Shrivastava's word).  I don't get it for the reasons I have already stated.  Perhaps one of you can explain it to me.

 

A

 

From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Roberts
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 8:54 AM

To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

 

In response to Andrew's comment, and question about whether we know why we are being so destructive of the planet and embarking on a course of potential collective suicide, whilst taking along a good number of other species with us,  I find the answers given by economics and resilience analysis only very partial answers. I also suspect they offer a solution only within the terms of the paradigm which has brought us to this point. That is not therefore to devalue them or decry their usefulness but on their own I think they are limited. They go some way to satisfying my intellect but say nothing to, for want of a better word, my soul.

So I think some kind of pyschological exploration is also needed and here I mean depth psychology not the trite understandings that a conventional ego-based individualistic psychology offers. And at least I think this article by Curtis White is pointing us in a direction worth pursuing

And we have to consider more our relationship with nature

"It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds."    Jiddu Krishnamurti

On 29 June 2010 16:53, King, Andrew A. <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

I don't understand the basic premise of this article.  We really don't know why we are destructive of the planet?  Hasn't economics done a pretty good job of explaining when and how private incentive and public welfare do not go together.  Haven't the resilience analysts developed pretty good theories for why we tend to destabilize ecosystems?  What is new here other than some vague finger pointing at our natural drive.  Was that in doubt?

And sentences such as this, sound like old warmed over marxism: "THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as empty."   Yes, modern man can fall into alienation.  Marx was at least right about that.  And so?

And "thoughtfulness" is the cure?  Isn't that a very very old way of thinking about the problem?  It is as if we can tell people that they have an effect on the environment and they will say "My god man, you are right, I will stop driving my car."  How many of you all have stopped driving as a result of the spill in the gulf?  Surely we cannot expect the average man to reach the thoughtfulness of this group.  Economics returns:  full private value versus 1/300 millionth of the public value.  Is that thoughtless or thoughtful.

Seriously, we may not like the answers we get from economics and ecology -- not to mention history --  but surely we should at least respect them.

Or am I missing something?

A
________________________________________
From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Shrivastava [paul.shri@GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 2:31 PM

To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Subject: The Barbaric Heart

Just returned from GRONEN 2010 debating truth and beauty of sustainable enterprise, and thought I would share this piece of passionate wisdom.

With Best Regards,
paul S.
Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.
David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and
Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise
http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/sustainable
John Molson School of Business
Concordia University
Mail: 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd West, Suite MB 6-327
Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8

Ph. 514-848-2424 Ext 2367, Fax. 514-848-4547; Email: pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca<mailto:pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca>

The Barbaric Heart
Capitalism and the crisis of nature
by Curtis White

Published in the May/June 2009<http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/4676/> issue of Orion magazine


[http://www.orionmagazine.org/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.orionmagazine.org/i/article_images/05-01-09450white.jpg&w=450]

Photo: Meryl Joseph


THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that environmentalists are not very good at asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural world, happening?" We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who care about something called nature or (if they're feeling a little technocratic, and they usually are) the "environment." They are concerned, as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may experience a "system collapse." But as scientifically sophisticated as environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal. Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources." Industrial sources. Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do we have all of these polluting sources?"

Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience has been like Mickey Mouse's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": for every berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place, implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or "mitigate," since we can't seem to really turn off anything), another two pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.

Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a sort of "presentism" in which the culprits are all of recent vintage: Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation, you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that's very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, "greedy." Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra Club.)

After all, isn't it true that what corporations and the individuals who run them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable? They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own dominance. In short, they try to win. They try to thrive. We should all be so committed to the risk of "living large." The problem is not with these qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it is that they're trying to help thrive.

My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not merely name-calling. This is so because, as I've already suggested, there is something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism has brought into being. What economists call the "spontaneous order" of the free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The slow, winding flow of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the northern lights.)

To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact, the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice even when it didn't (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a "blonde beast." (He mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a slave.)

Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, "What's the economy for?" Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It's as if the only alternative to "growth" was "recession," and no one is allowed to be for that.) Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel according to John reads, "In the beginning was Logos." What is the logos (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does it act?

THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the barbarian is not an "other" to be driven away in the name of civilized virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas. For the Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence, to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was above all orderly. As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome "billowed in booty."

This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to "win," and by whatever means necessary.

Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart, they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole.

For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self.  What else could care so blindly about "winning"? But it also feels, at some dark recess of the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of being able to cart off the enemy's silver and gold (and women). Plates, jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death meant nothing. Through the "right of conquest" (the unwritten law of the ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a "hero").

Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out. Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus's tragedies, humans pursue what they perceive to be their own interest only to become "the slave of their own destruction," an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts, economic, military, and environmental.

What is tragic is that the bloody end, "the great wound swimming upwards" like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for that. We don't intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don't intend that our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable spiraling of violence, but it does. We don't intend that the pursuit of our happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification, drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is presently "swimming upwards" regardless of what we intend.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond beauty, doesn't get. First, it doesn't look at itself. It is frustrated by questions like "What makes life worth living?" Or it assumes that the answer is obvious: "Winning! Of course." It doesn't even wonder what its relation to other barbarians might be. It doesn't know about solidarity beyond a blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.

Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn't understand, except at the very last moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two thirds of the Emperor Valens's Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called "blind and irregular fury." Their "mischievous disposition" consumed with "improvident rage" the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while "immersed in wine and sleep," and there followed in turn a "cruel slaughter of the astonished Goths." Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.

Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.

THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder, and eventual anguish and regret.

The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be "shown the light of day." The proposals of the environmental community for better systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time for corporate polluters-none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke, in May of 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? "Trenchard's answer was: more. More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing-heavier bombers, more bombers."

If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness. (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of "thinking" that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances, thoughtfulness's first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, for example, was its determination not to believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a "bright shining lie," in Neil Sheehan's phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally repugnant.

In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness's primary attribute is not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic. Thoughtfulness's primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of the Barbaric is beauty. "Don't think profit," it argues, "think beauty. The beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled natural world." Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as opposed to Homo barbarus. It seeks a culture in which humans can become what they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That's the logos of our better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.

The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say that within those communities human beings should be able to live in dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled. What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we go for a hike, or when we visit an "eco-friendly" town full of bike paths and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not say of such places, "I'm grooving on this system's ecological balance." Or, "The Green Economy is working well." We say, "It's beautiful here!" And yet when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful. The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I'm embarrassed right now!

What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is "unrealistic," by which they really mean "does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring triumph of the Barbaric Heart." By this measure, to be realistic is to say, "We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest has even begun."

Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs comment. One has simply to say "television." Nevertheless, it is art, or the aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should replace Adam Smith's famous "division of labor," the work that promises only tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction. Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within communities, and in our relation to the natural world.

IN VIRGIL'S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are never not Trojans because they take with them their "household gods," those figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we're not even at home at home. We're strangers on our own shores, thanks to the way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and towns, turning them into one big McSame.

Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche's mordant phrase, "estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs." But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a "high standard of living." Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs? MBAs?) do not think to ask, "What makes life worth living?" The answer is obvious: "The high standards, of course!" A very strange conclusion for a people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is called for is the discovery or invention of our own "household gods" that might speak powerfully to us. "Gods" that will keep us in touch with a sense of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our own world.

We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it is nature. It doesn't pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the gods that encourage living things to thrive.

We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the impossible and calling it Beautiful.

--
Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

Las cosas no son como aparecen ni tampoco son de otra manera

http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

Dr Paul Roberts
Calle Independencia #32-2
Ciudad Guzmán
Jalisco
México
C.P. 49000

tel: +52 (341) 412 6940
cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

I am more and more confused. 

Let me try to outline what I think was the original idea in the article.

1)  We don't know why we are destroying the planet.

2)  Perhaps an explanation is that out natural drive -- the barbaric heart -- causes both our success as a species and out current problems.

3)The solution is for us (collectively I presume) to be more "thoughtful".

I propose that this is:

1)  Wrong in its original starting point.  We do know.

2)  Impractical in that it involves world-wide psychological change.

3)  Counterproductive because it misses the point about the need and effect of governance (regulation, associations, etc.)

But, I also propose that the interest in this article reveals something.  Paul, who has been involved in this field as long as I, called it "passionate wisdom".  I still want to know what it reveals.  Does it demonstrate something about our hopes: we seek a spiritual solution perhaps.  Does it demonstrate something about my own narrow understanding?  So far, I have heard a couple people write in saying the article is empty and a couple more write as if in explanation – but I couldn't quite catch the point.

Perhaps people like the article for its passion?

A

-----Original Message-----
From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of jon@JONENTINE.COM
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 5:53 AM
To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

Organizinig production so humans can subsist through periods when supplies were less plentiful is the very definition of civilization.

 Talk of a society based on "consuming only what we need" is not only unachievable its genetically silly for all living forms, humans and otherwise-it would be species suicide.

Could this discussion get any less connected to a serious discussion about the Consumption Paradox?

 I'm traveling or I would provide a link to a reflective essay on this subject written a few months ago for Ethical Corporation.

Jon Entine 

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----

From: "Anita D. Bhappu" <abhappu@EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>

Sender: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion

      <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 21:15:32

To: <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Reply-To: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion

      <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

All living species consume. Therefore, the question is not whether but how we

consume. On that note, humans are different than other living species in that

we consume more than we need to meet our basic survival needs. As a result, we

have created organizations to meet the demands of our excess consumption and

we, furthermore, expect these organizations to grow continually in order to

fund our excess consumption. So we and the organizations that we have created

are co-dependent in an ever escalating cycle of consumption that is depleting

Earth's natural resources that sustain all living species.

Why do we consume more than we need? Well, it was indeed one of us (an

academic)

who conceived of coupling planned consumption to human motivational needs as a

way to salvage a struggling, post-war American economy. And it worked for all

the reasons outlined by the classical motivation theorists. So I do believe it

is our collective responsibility, as academic thought leaders and scientists,

to help consumers find alternatives to excess consumption in their quest to

satisfy learned (higher-order) motivational needs. Although one could classify

this effort as "spiritual change", because it will require

introspection on the

part of consumers and the organizations that service them, I don't see

religious

institutions leading this effort. In my humble opinion, contemporary morality

and its purveyors are anchored more by self-interest than compassion. It will

take nothing less than a Gandhi to lead our masses out of this mess. I, for

one, think that contributing to this daunting challenge is an effective way to

spend my time.

Anita D. Bhappu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor & Division Chair, Retailing & Consumer Sciences

Research Fellow, Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing

Norton School of Family & Consumer Sciences

The University of Arizona

650 N. Park Avenue

P.O. Box 210078

Tucson, AZ 85721

Phone: (520) 621-5948

Fax: (520) 621-9445

Email: abhappu@email.arizona.edu

Quoting Paul Roberts <surdejalisco@GMAIL.COM>:

> Dear Andrew et al

> 

> I don't see why spiritual change is not directable. If spiritual change does

> not lead to a difference in the world then I think it is worth very little.

> Surely Gandhi is just one particularly powerful and noteworthy example of

> the worldly difference that spiritual change can lead to.

> 

> Also I don't agree with your dichotomy between humans and the system. We

> create the system and the system creates us.

> 

> I also wonder re: your point about "Humans are not any different than any

> other animals.  If left unchecked, species get out of control.  Humans have

> just been better at avoiding the checks" that what we are now going to see

> shortly is the way that self-checking, self-regulating processes on human

> population and the effect we are having on the climate are going to start

> operating of their own accord without us imposing those checks.

> 

> I think and fear this is almost inevitable, given that we appear to be

> failing to do any real checking ourselves  - as far as I can see all the

> trends of key global environmental indicators (emissions, fresh water usage

> and scarcity, ocean acidification, human population, loss of biodiversity,

> deforestation, chemical pollution etc. and even a strictly human indicator

> like inequality) are worsening. *It would be great if someone on this list

> could point to a global sustainability indicator they think is getting

> better.*

> 

> What remains to be seen is the scale and extent of these self-regulating

> processes. As James Lovelock has said, we are still in the early stages of

> skirmishes with Gaia, and the full extent of her wrath (to personalise this

> a little) has yet to be felt.

> 

> regards  Paul

> 

> PS Regarding the earlier discussion about the reasons why we are not doing

> anything and your points about economics and resilience analysis providing a

> more than adequate explanation, and therefore what was the article by Curtis

> White getting at,  I am reminded of what Ray Anderson, founder of Interface

> said, when asked why his business was climbing 'Mount Sustainability'. He

> said that: "When I face my maker, I don't think he is going to ask me about

> shareholder value". Likewise I don't think he/she will be asking us about

> economics and resilience analysis.

> 

> 

> 

> On 1 July 2010 10:51, King, Andrew A.

> <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu>wrote:

> 

>>  Paul(s),

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> It was to better understand how people are thinking and feeling that I

>> wrote in.  I understand some need to better connect to the natural world and

>> some yearning for a more spiritual connection.  I can even believe such a

>> connection if applied to 6 billion people might make a difference.  I often

>> hear such yearning and hope within the ONE community, and it touches

>> something inside of me.  But upon reflection, I conclude that such spiritual

>> change is not directable and thus not an effective way for me to expend my

>> time.  I also worry that it is counterproductive.  It takes the focus off

>> the failings of the system and puts it on the failings of humans.  Humans

>> are not any different than any other animals.  If left unchecked, species

>> get out of control.  Humans have just been better at avoiding the checks.

>>  Of all the species, we need to impose those checks ourselves.  That is a

>> daunting prospect.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> I remain interested in why articles like "The Passionate Heart" are thought

>> to be wise (Paul Shrivastava's word).  I don't get it for the reasons I have

>> already stated.  Perhaps one of you can explain it to me.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> A

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> *From:* Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:

>> ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] *On Behalf Of *Paul Roberts

>> *Sent:* Thursday, July 01, 2010 8:54 AM

>> 

>> *To:* ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

>> *Subject:* Re: The Barbaric Heart

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> In response to Andrew's comment, and question about whether we know why we

>> are being so destructive of the planet and embarking on a course of

>> potential collective suicide, whilst taking along a good number of other

>> species with us,  I find the answers given by economics and resilience

>> analysis only very partial answers. I also suspect they offer a solution

>> only within the terms of the paradigm which has brought us to this point.

>> That is not therefore to devalue them or decry their usefulness but on their

>> own I think they are limited. They go some way to satisfying my intellect

>> but say nothing to, for want of a better word, my soul.

>> 

>> So I think some kind of pyschological exploration is also needed and here I

>> mean depth psychology not the trite understandings that a conventional

>> ego-based individualistic psychology offers. And at least I think this

>> article by Curtis White is pointing us in a direction worth pursuing

>> 

>> And we have to consider more our relationship with nature

>> 

>> "It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the

>> insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling

>> for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the

>> earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we

>> would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect,

>> a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to

>> heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something

>> totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with

>> nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes

>> through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds."    Jiddu

>> Krishnamurti

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>>  On 29 June 2010 16:53, King, Andrew A. <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu>

>> wrote:

>> 

>> I don't understand the basic premise of this article.  We really don't know

>> why we are destructive of the planet?  Hasn't economics done a pretty good

>> job of explaining when and how private incentive and public welfare do not

>> go together.  Haven't the resilience analysts developed pretty good theories

>> for why we tend to destabilize ecosystems?  What is new here other than some

>> vague finger pointing at our natural drive.  Was that in doubt?

>> 

>> And sentences such as this, sound like old warmed over marxism: "THE

>> BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as

>> empty."   Yes, modern man can fall into alienation.  Marx was at least right

>> about that.  And so?

>> 

>> And "thoughtfulness" is the cure?  Isn't that a very very old way of

>> thinking about the problem?  It is as if we can tell people that they have

>> an effect on the environment and they will say "My god man, you are right, I

>> will stop driving my car."  How many of you all have stopped driving as a

>> result of the spill in the gulf?  Surely we cannot expect the average man to

>> reach the thoughtfulness of this group.  Economics returns:  full private

>> value versus 1/300 millionth of the public value.  Is that thoughtless or

>> thoughtful.

>> 

>> Seriously, we may not like the answers we get from economics and ecology --

>> not to mention history --  but surely we should at least respect them.

>> 

>> Or am I missing something?

>> 

>> A

>>________________________________________

>> From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [

>> ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Shrivastava [

>> paul.shri@GMAIL.COM]

>> Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 2:31 PM

>> 

>> To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

>> 

>> Subject: The Barbaric Heart

>> 

>> 

>> Just returned from GRONEN 2010 debating truth and beauty of sustainable

>> enterprise, and thought I would share this piece of passionate wisdom.

>> 

>> With Best Regards,

>> paul S.

>> Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.

>> David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and

>> Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise

>> http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/sustainable

>> John Molson School of Business

>> Concordia University

>> Mail: 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd West, Suite MB 6-327

>> Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8

>> 

>> Ph. 514-848-2424 Ext 2367, Fax. 514-848-4547; Email:

>> pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca<mailto:pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca>

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> The Barbaric Heart

>> Capitalism and the crisis of nature

>> by Curtis White

>> 

>> Published in the May/June 2009<

>> http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/4676/> issue of Orion

>> magazine

>> 

>> 

>> [

>> http://www.orionmagazine.org/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.orionmagazine.org/i/article_images/05-01-09450white.jpg&w=450

>> ]

>> 

>> Photo: Meryl Joseph

>> 

>> 

>> THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that environmentalists are not very good at

>> asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural

>> world, happening?" We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who

>> care about something called nature or (if they're feeling a little

>> technocratic, and they usually are) the "environment." They are concerned,

>> as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the

>> industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may

>> experience a "system collapse." But as scientifically sophisticated as

>> environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its

>> ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on

>> those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in

>> environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal.

>> Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources." Industrial sources.

>> Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even

>> natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic

>> tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do

>> we have all of these polluting sources?"

>> 

>> Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead

>> limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience

>> has been like Mickey Mouse's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": for every

>> berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place,

>> implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal

>> deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or

>> "mitigate," since we can't seem to really turn off anything), another two

>> pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have

>> become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the

>> ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the

>> dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of

>> mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.

>> 

>> Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of

>> modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a

>> sort of "presentism" in which the culprits are all of recent vintage:

>> Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation,

>> you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that's

>> very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are

>> not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, "greedy."

>> Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate

>> to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist

>> melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra

>> Club.)

>> 

>> After all, isn't it true that what corporations and the individuals who run

>> them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable?

>> They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to

>> grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always

>> been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the

>> merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators

>> of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They

>> try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which

>> they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who

>> are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for

>> creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own

>> dominance. In short, they try to win. They try to thrive. We should all be

>> so committed to the risk of "living large." The problem is not with these

>> qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it

>> is that they're trying to help thrive.

>> 

>> My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical

>> capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an

>> unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is

>> important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not

>> merely name-calling. This is so because, as I've already suggested, there is

>> something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism

>> has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the

>> complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism

>> has brought into being. What economists call the "spontaneous order" of the

>> free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one

>> end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to

>> believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a

>> cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every

>> year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to

>> admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly

>> fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of

>> shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the

>> primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on

>> the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at

>> shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday

>> afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was

>> flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the

>> other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you

>> might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots

>> of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The slow, winding flow

>> of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the

>> northern lights.)

>> 

>> To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is

>> to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart

>> itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact,

>> the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has

>> always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth

>> King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy

>> suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice

>> even when it didn't (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable

>> for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take

>> risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful

>> animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a "blonde beast." (He

>> mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a

>> slave.)

>> 

>> Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on

>> difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the

>> Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is

>> no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than

>> capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic

>> Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, "What's the economy for?"

>> Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It's as if the only alternative to

>> "growth" was "recession," and no one is allowed to be for that.)

>> Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel

>> according to John reads, "In the beginning was Logos." What is the logos

>> (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does

>> it act?

>> 

>> THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to

>> describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed

>> in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that

>> followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the

>> barbarian is not an "other" to be driven away in the name of civilized

>> virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military

>> success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas. For the Roman forces under

>> Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the

>> routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence,

>> to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the

>> time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material

>> thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was

>> above all orderly. As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome "billowed in

>> booty."

>> 

>> This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then

>> you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led

>> to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you

>> should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country.

>> That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a

>> form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing,

>> and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes,

>> Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types

>> are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to

>> "win," and by whatever means necessary.

>> 

>> Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine

>> confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with

>> what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have

>> been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of

>> honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian

>> virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope.

>> There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the

>> Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the

>> law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or

>> another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What

>> these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart,

>> they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole.

>> 

>> For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real

>> as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self.  What else could

>> care so blindly about "winning"? But it also feels, at some dark recess of

>> the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps

>> at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always

>> claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of

>> being able to cart off the enemy's silver and gold (and women). Plates,

>> jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to

>> buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death

>> meant nothing. Through the "right of conquest" (the unwritten law of the

>> ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel

>> full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become

>> virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a "hero").

>> 

>> Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only

>> itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called

>> tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you

>> put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out.

>> Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus's tragedies, humans pursue what they

>> perceive to be their own interest only to become "the slave of their own

>> destruction," an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts,

>> economic, military, and environmental.

>> 

>> What is tragic is that the bloody end, "the great wound swimming upwards"

>> like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for

>> that. We don't intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the

>> bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don't intend that

>> our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable

>> spiraling of violence, but it does. We don't intend that the pursuit of our

>> happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification,

>> drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is

>> presently "swimming upwards" regardless of what we intend.

>> 

>> THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond

>> beauty, doesn't get. First, it doesn't look at itself. It is frustrated by

>> questions like "What makes life worth living?" Or it assumes that the answer

>> is obvious: "Winning! Of course." It doesn't even wonder what its relation

>> to other barbarians might be. It doesn't know about solidarity beyond a

>> blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of

>> loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why

>> self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.

>> 

>> Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn't understand, except at the very last

>> moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward

>> Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of

>> the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has

>> gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For

>> example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two

>> thirds of the Emperor Valens's Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of

>> barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to

>> passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called "blind and

>> irregular fury." Their "mischievous disposition" consumed with "improvident

>> rage" the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an

>> army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while "immersed in

>> wine and sleep," and there followed in turn a "cruel slaughter of the

>> astonished Goths." Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.

>> 

>> Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half

>> later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the

>> managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst

>> and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to

>> evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually

>> overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the

>> peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.

>> 

>> THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know

>> itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a

>> mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but

>> also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder,

>> and eventual anguish and regret.

>> 

>> The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be "shown

>> the light of day." The proposals of the environmental community for better

>> systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time

>> for corporate polluters--none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is

>> frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it

>> simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As

>> Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke, in May of

>> 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily

>> bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? "Trenchard's answer was: more.

>> More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing--heavier bombers, more bombers."

>> 

>> If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even

>> simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That

>> is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it

>> desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its

>> people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take

>> pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route

>> what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in

>> this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness.

>> (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of

>> "thinking" that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and

>> violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to

>> think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances,

>> thoughtfulness's first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to

>> ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture

>> is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of

>> Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, for example, was its determination not to

>> believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl

>> erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal

>> realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as

>> the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked

>> and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a "bright shining

>> lie," in Neil Sheehan's phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of

>> economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy

>> of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally

>> repugnant.

>> 

>> In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a

>> spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and

>> tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness's primary attribute is

>> not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic.

>> Thoughtfulness's primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what

>> thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of

>> the Barbaric is beauty. "Don't think profit," it argues, "think beauty. The

>> beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed

>> from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled

>> natural world." Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as

>> opposed to Homo barbarus. It seeks a culture in which humans can become what

>> they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings

>> intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That's the logos of our

>> better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.

>> 

>> The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction

>> is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we

>> desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we

>> say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say

>> that within those communities human beings should be able to live in

>> dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are

>> arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for

>> such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a

>> barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by

>> the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and

>> prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are

>> actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled.

>> What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we

>> go for a hike, or when we visit an "eco-friendly" town full of bike paths

>> and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not

>> say of such places, "I'm grooving on this system's ecological balance." Or,

>> "The Green Economy is working well." We say, "It's beautiful here!" And yet

>> when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost

>> embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful.

>> The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I'm embarrassed right now!

>> 

>> What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we

>> want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments

>> will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and

>> sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been

>> intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is "unrealistic,"

>> by which they really mean "does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring

>> triumph of the Barbaric Heart." By this measure, to be realistic is to say,

>> "We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest

>> has even begun."

>> 

>> Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded

>> aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs

>> comment. One has simply to say "television." Nevertheless, it is art, or the

>> aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we

>> were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the

>> museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should

>> replace Adam Smith's famous "division of labor," the work that promises only

>> tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction.

>> Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean

>> the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart

>> through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within

>> communities, and in our relation to the natural world.

>> 

>> IN VIRGIL'S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from

>> Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are

>> never not Trojans because they take with them their "household gods," those

>> figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in

>> Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on

>> strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past

>> to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we're

>> not even at home at home. We're strangers on our own shores, thanks to the

>> way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and

>> towns, turning them into one big McSame.

>> 

>> Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the

>> rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians

>> in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The

>> constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living

>> with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both

>> the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche's mordant

>> phrase, "estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs."

>> But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a

>> "high standard of living." Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs?

>> MBAs?) do not think to ask, "What makes life worth living?" The answer is

>> obvious: "The high standards, of course!" A very strange conclusion for a

>> people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.

>> 

>> All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for

>> environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion

>> of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from

>> its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the

>> larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis

>> of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is

>> called for is the discovery or invention of our own "household gods" that

>> might speak powerfully to us. "Gods" that will keep us in touch with a sense

>> of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call

>> our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our

>> own world.

>> 

>> We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric

>> Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity

>> as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal

>> among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold

>> comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The

>> Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its

>> world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an

>> animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it

>> is nature. It doesn't pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the

>> snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The

>> Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships

>> the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the

>> gods that encourage living things to thrive.

>> 

>> We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort

>> of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are

>> members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and

>> pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the

>> mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the

>> mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the

>> impossible and calling it Beautiful.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> --

>> Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

>> 

>> Las cosas no son como aparecen ni tampoco son de otra manera

>> 

>> http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

>> 

>> Dr Paul Roberts

>> Calle Independencia #32-2

>> Ciudad Guzmán

>> Jalisco

>> México

>> C.P. 49000

>> 

>> tel: +52 (341) 412 6940

>> cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

> 

> 

> --

> Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

> 

> Las cosas no son como aparecen, tampoco son de otra manera

> 

> http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

> 

> Dr Paul Roberts

> Calle Independencia #32-2

> Ciudad Guzmán

> Jalisco

> México

> C.P. 49000

> 

> tel: +52 (341) 412 6940

> cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

Andrew

Regarding your numbered points below:

1.       The adequacy of our insights into why we are destroying our plant is hardly reducible to a binary yes or no issue, though it is one to which you definitively declare the answer is "yes". Economics offers an explanation for virtually everything, but given your decrying the impracticality of the focal barbaric heart approach, I encourage you to think a bit more seriously about the remedial practicality of most economic theory. Many leading economists seem rather more modest about the completeness and real-world usefulness of their explanations. How is it not useful for our scholarly community to ponder alternatives to the clearly valid though also demonstrably limited utility maximization assumptions underlying most economic theory?

2.       Is it really so axiomatic that widespread psychological change is inherently impractical? A common target of psychological interventions is attitude change (Aronson, 1999). Are the billions spent by advertisers to alter attitudes to products and services that obviously impractical? What about the initiatives during the 1960s-70s to alter attitudes to racial segregation among those below the Mason-Dixon line? Just because widespread attitude change is extremely difficult does not mean that initiatives to attain it are inherently impractical or doomed to fail.

3.       It is a false dichotomy for you to argue the notion that, "The solution is for us (collectively I presume) to be more "thoughtful"" ... is "Counterproductive because it misses the point about the need and effect of governance (regulation, associations, etc.)". On the contrary, this is because the barbaric heart thesis can be viewed in part as a call to be more thoughtful about our need to be willing to study (and join) associations, as well as develop prudent regulations (which I appreciate is in a sense a contradiction in terms) and peoples' willingness to accept the imposition of those regulations. As a big Ayn Rand fan, I appreciate how abhorrent this feels to some of us. I find it hard to imagine, however, that external regulation, together with effective attitude change interventions (E. Aronson, 1999; Heslin, Latham & VandeWalle, 2005; Pratkinis & Aronson, 2001), will not both be indispensible parts of the mix of any viable path back to a more sustainable future for our planet and humanity.

You asked if you were missing something. I hope these comments help suggest what that might be.

Sincerely,

Peter Heslin

Sent from iPhone

I am more and more confused. 

Let me try to outline what I think was the original idea in the article.

1)  We don't know why we are destroying the planet.

2)  Perhaps an explanation is that out natural drive -- the barbaric heart -- causes both our success as a species and out current problems.

3)The solution is for us (collectively I presume) to be more "thoughtful".

I propose that this is:

1)  Wrong in its original starting point.  We do know.

2)  Impractical in that it involves world-wide psychological change.

3)  Counterproductive because it misses the point about the need and effect of governance (regulation, associations, etc.)

But, I also propose that the interest in this article reveals something.  Paul, who has been involved in this field as long as I, called it "passionate wisdom".  I still want to know what it reveals.  Does it demonstrate something about our hopes: we seek a spiritual solution perhaps.  Does it demonstrate something about my own narrow understanding?  So far, I have heard a couple people write in saying the article is empty and a couple more write as if in explanation – but I couldn't quite catch the point.

Perhaps people like the article for its passion?

A

-----Original Message-----
From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of jon@JONENTINE.COM
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 5:53 AM
To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

Organizinig production so humans can subsist through periods when supplies were less plentiful is the very definition of civilization.

 Talk of a society based on "consuming only what we need" is not only unachievable its genetically silly for all living forms, humans and otherwise-it would be species suicide.

Could this discussion get any less connected to a serious discussion about the Consumption Paradox?

 I'm traveling or I would provide a link to a reflective essay on this subject written a few months ago for Ethical Corporation.

Jon Entine 

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----

From: "Anita D. Bhappu" <abhappu@EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>

Sender: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion

      <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 21:15:32

To: <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Reply-To: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion

      <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

All living species consume. Therefore, the question is not whether but how we

consume. On that note, humans are different than other living species in that

we consume more than we need to meet our basic survival needs. As a result, we

have created organizations to meet the demands of our excess consumption and

we, furthermore, expect these organizations to grow continually in order to

fund our excess consumption. So we and the organizations that we have created

are co-dependent in an ever escalating cycle of consumption that is depleting

Earth's natural resources that sustain all living species.

Why do we consume more than we need? Well, it was indeed one of us (an

academic)

who conceived of coupling planned consumption to human motivational needs as a

way to salvage a struggling, post-war American economy. And it worked for all

the reasons outlined by the classical motivation theorists. So I do believe it

is our collective responsibility, as academic thought leaders and scientists,

to help consumers find alternatives to excess consumption in their quest to

satisfy learned (higher-order) motivational needs. Although one could classify

this effort as "spiritual change", because it will require

introspection on the

part of consumers and the organizations that service them, I don't see

religious

institutions leading this effort. In my humble opinion, contemporary morality

and its purveyors are anchored more by self-interest than compassion. It will

take nothing less than a Gandhi to lead our masses out of this mess. I, for

one, think that contributing to this daunting challenge is an effective way to

spend my time.

Anita D. Bhappu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor & Division Chair, Retailing & Consumer Sciences

Research Fellow, Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing

Norton School of Family & Consumer Sciences

The University of Arizona

650 N. Park Avenue

P.O. Box 210078

Tucson, AZ 85721

Phone: (520) 621-5948

Fax: (520) 621-9445

Email: abhappu@email.arizona.edu

Quoting Paul Roberts <surdejalisco@GMAIL.COM>:

> Dear Andrew et al

> 

> I don't see why spiritual change is not directable. If spiritual change does

> not lead to a difference in the world then I think it is worth very little.

> Surely Gandhi is just one particularly powerful and noteworthy example of

> the worldly difference that spiritual change can lead to.

> 

> Also I don't agree with your dichotomy between humans and the system. We

> create the system and the system creates us.

> 

> I also wonder re: your point about "Humans are not any different than any

> other animals.  If left unchecked, species get out of control.  Humans have

> just been better at avoiding the checks" that what we are now going to see

> shortly is the way that self-checking, self-regulating processes on human

> population and the effect we are having on the climate are going to start

> operating of their own accord without us imposing those checks.

> 

> I think and fear this is almost inevitable, given that we appear to be

> failing to do any real checking ourselves  - as far as I can see all the

> trends of key global environmental indicators (emissions, fresh water usage

> and scarcity, ocean acidification, human population, loss of biodiversity,

> deforestation, chemical pollution etc. and even a strictly human indicator

> like inequality) are worsening. *It would be great if someone on this list

> could point to a global sustainability indicator they think is getting

> better.*

> 

> What remains to be seen is the scale and extent of these self-regulating

> processes. As James Lovelock has said, we are still in the early stages of

> skirmishes with Gaia, and the full extent of her wrath (to personalise this

> a little) has yet to be felt.

> 

> regards  Paul

> 

> PS Regarding the earlier discussion about the reasons why we are not doing

> anything and your points about economics and resilience analysis providing a

> more than adequate explanation, and therefore what was the article by Curtis

> White getting at,  I am reminded of what Ray Anderson, founder of Interface

> said, when asked why his business was climbing 'Mount Sustainability'. He

> said that: "When I face my maker, I don't think he is going to ask me about

> shareholder value". Likewise I don't think he/she will be asking us about

> economics and resilience analysis.

> 

> 

> 

> On 1 July 2010 10:51, King, Andrew A.

> <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu>wrote:

> 

>>  Paul(s),

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> It was to better understand how people are thinking and feeling that I

>> wrote in.  I understand some need to better connect to the natural world and

>> some yearning for a more spiritual connection.  I can even believe such a

>> connection if applied to 6 billion people might make a difference.  I often

>> hear such yearning and hope within the ONE community, and it touches

>> something inside of me.  But upon reflection, I conclude that such spiritual

>> change is not directable and thus not an effective way for me to expend my

>> time.  I also worry that it is counterproductive.  It takes the focus off

>> the failings of the system and puts it on the failings of humans.  Humans

>> are not any different than any other animals.  If left unchecked, species

>> get out of control.  Humans have just been better at avoiding the checks.

>>  Of all the species, we need to impose those checks ourselves.  That is a

>> daunting prospect.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> I remain interested in why articles like "The Passionate Heart" are thought

>> to be wise (Paul Shrivastava's word).  I don't get it for the reasons I have

>> already stated.  Perhaps one of you can explain it to me.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> A

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> *From:* Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:

>> ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] *On Behalf Of *Paul Roberts

>> *Sent:* Thursday, July 01, 2010 8:54 AM

>> 

>> *To:* ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

>> *Subject:* Re: The Barbaric Heart

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> In response to Andrew's comment, and question about whether we know why we

>> are being so destructive of the planet and embarking on a course of

>> potential collective suicide, whilst taking along a good number of other

>> species with us,  I find the answers given by economics and resilience

>> analysis only very partial answers. I also suspect they offer a solution

>> only within the terms of the paradigm which has brought us to this point.

>> That is not therefore to devalue them or decry their usefulness but on their

>> own I think they are limited. They go some way to satisfying my intellect

>> but say nothing to, for want of a better word, my soul.

>> 

>> So I think some kind of pyschological exploration is also needed and here I

>> mean depth psychology not the trite understandings that a conventional

>> ego-based individualistic psychology offers. And at least I think this

>> article by Curtis White is pointing us in a direction worth pursuing

>> 

>> And we have to consider more our relationship with nature

>> 

>> "It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the

>> insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling

>> for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the

>> earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we

>> would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect,

>> a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to

>> heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something

>> totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with

>> nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes

>> through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds."    Jiddu

>> Krishnamurti

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>>  On 29 June 2010 16:53, King, Andrew A. <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu>

>> wrote:

>> 

>> I don't understand the basic premise of this article.  We really don't know

>> why we are destructive of the planet?  Hasn't economics done a pretty good

>> job of explaining when and how private incentive and public welfare do not

>> go together.  Haven't the resilience analysts developed pretty good theories

>> for why we tend to destabilize ecosystems?  What is new here other than some

>> vague finger pointing at our natural drive.  Was that in doubt?

>> 

>> And sentences such as this, sound like old warmed over marxism: "THE

>> BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as

>> empty."   Yes, modern man can fall into alienation.  Marx was at least right

>> about that.  And so?

>> 

>> And "thoughtfulness" is the cure?  Isn't that a very very old way of

>> thinking about the problem?  It is as if we can tell people that they have

>> an effect on the environment and they will say "My god man, you are right, I

>> will stop driving my car."  How many of you all have stopped driving as a

>> result of the spill in the gulf?  Surely we cannot expect the average man to

>> reach the thoughtfulness of this group.  Economics returns:  full private

>> value versus 1/300 millionth of the public value.  Is that thoughtless or

>> thoughtful.

>> 

>> Seriously, we may not like the answers we get from economics and ecology --

>> not to mention history --  but surely we should at least respect them.

>> 

>> Or am I missing something?

>> 

>> A

>>________________________________________

>> From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [

>> ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Shrivastava [

>> paul.shri@GMAIL.COM]

>> Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 2:31 PM

>> 

>> To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

>> 

>> Subject: The Barbaric Heart

>> 

>> 

>> Just returned from GRONEN 2010 debating truth and beauty of sustainable

>> enterprise, and thought I would share this piece of passionate wisdom.

>> 

>> With Best Regards,

>> paul S.

>> Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.

>> David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and

>> Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise

>> http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/sustainable

>> John Molson School of Business

>> Concordia University

>> Mail: 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd West, Suite MB 6-327

>> Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8

>> 

>> Ph. 514-848-2424 Ext 2367, Fax. 514-848-4547; Email:

>> pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca<mailto:pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca>

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> The Barbaric Heart

>> Capitalism and the crisis of nature

>> by Curtis White

>> 

>> Published in the May/June 2009<

>> http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/4676/> issue of Orion

>> magazine

>> 

>> 

>> [

>> http://www.orionmagazine.org/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.orionmagazine.org/i/article_images/05-01-09450white.jpg&w=450

>> ]

>> 

>> Photo: Meryl Joseph

>> 

>> 

>> THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that environmentalists are not very good at

>> asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural

>> world, happening?" We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who

>> care about something called nature or (if they're feeling a little

>> technocratic, and they usually are) the "environment." They are concerned,

>> as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the

>> industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may

>> experience a "system collapse." But as scientifically sophisticated as

>> environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its

>> ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on

>> those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in

>> environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal.

>> Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources." Industrial sources.

>> Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even

>> natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic

>> tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do

>> we have all of these polluting sources?"

>> 

>> Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead

>> limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience

>> has been like Mickey Mouse's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": for every

>> berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place,

>> implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal

>> deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or

>> "mitigate," since we can't seem to really turn off anything), another two

>> pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have

>> become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the

>> ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the

>> dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of

>> mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.

>> 

>> Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of

>> modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a

>> sort of "presentism" in which the culprits are all of recent vintage:

>> Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation,

>> you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that's

>> very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are

>> not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, "greedy."

>> Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate

>> to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist

>> melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra

>> Club.)

>> 

>> After all, isn't it true that what corporations and the individuals who run

>> them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable?

>> They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to

>> grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always

>> been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the

>> merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators

>> of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They

>> try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which

>> they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who

>> are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for

>> creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own

>> dominance. In short, they try to win. They try to thrive. We should all be

>> so committed to the risk of "living large." The problem is not with these

>> qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it

>> is that they're trying to help thrive.

>> 

>> My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical

>> capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an

>> unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is

>> important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not

>> merely name-calling. This is so because, as I've already suggested, there is

>> something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism

>> has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the

>> complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism

>> has brought into being. What economists call the "spontaneous order" of the

>> free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one

>> end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to

>> believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a

>> cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every

>> year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to

>> admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly

>> fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of

>> shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the

>> primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on

>> the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at

>> shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday

>> afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was

>> flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the

>> other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you

>> might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots

>> of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The slow, winding flow

>> of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the

>> northern lights.)

>> 

>> To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is

>> to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart

>> itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact,

>> the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has

>> always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth

>> King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy

>> suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice

>> even when it didn't (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable

>> for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take

>> risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful

>> animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a "blonde beast." (He

>> mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a

>> slave.)

>> 

>> Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on

>> difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the

>> Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is

>> no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than

>> capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic

>> Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, "What's the economy for?"

>> Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It's as if the only alternative to

>> "growth" was "recession," and no one is allowed to be for that.)

>> Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel

>> according to John reads, "In the beginning was Logos." What is the logos

>> (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does

>> it act?

>> 

>> THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to

>> describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed

>> in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that

>> followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the

>> barbarian is not an "other" to be driven away in the name of civilized

>> virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military

>> success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas. For the Roman forces under

>> Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the

>> routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence,

>> to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the

>> time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material

>> thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was

>> above all orderly. As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome "billowed in

>> booty."

>> 

>> This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then

>> you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led

>> to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you

>> should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country.

>> That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a

>> form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing,

>> and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes,

>> Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types

>> are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to

>> "win," and by whatever means necessary.

>> 

>> Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine

>> confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with

>> what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have

>> been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of

>> honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian

>> virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope.

>> There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the

>> Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the

>> law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or

>> another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What

>> these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart,

>> they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole.

>> 

>> For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real

>> as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self.  What else could

>> care so blindly about "winning"? But it also feels, at some dark recess of

>> the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps

>> at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always

>> claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of

>> being able to cart off the enemy's silver and gold (and women). Plates,

>> jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to

>> buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death

>> meant nothing. Through the "right of conquest" (the unwritten law of the

>> ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel

>> full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become

>> virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a "hero").

>> 

>> Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only

>> itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called

>> tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you

>> put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out.

>> Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus's tragedies, humans pursue what they

>> perceive to be their own interest only to become "the slave of their own

>> destruction," an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts,

>> economic, military, and environmental.

>> 

>> What is tragic is that the bloody end, "the great wound swimming upwards"

>> like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for

>> that. We don't intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the

>> bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don't intend that

>> our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable

>> spiraling of violence, but it does. We don't intend that the pursuit of our

>> happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification,

>> drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is

>> presently "swimming upwards" regardless of what we intend.

>> 

>> THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond

>> beauty, doesn't get. First, it doesn't look at itself. It is frustrated by

>> questions like "What makes life worth living?" Or it assumes that the answer

>> is obvious: "Winning! Of course." It doesn't even wonder what its relation

>> to other barbarians might be. It doesn't know about solidarity beyond a

>> blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of

>> loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why

>> self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.

>> 

>> Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn't understand, except at the very last

>> moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward

>> Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of

>> the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has

>> gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For

>> example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two

>> thirds of the Emperor Valens's Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of

>> barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to

>> passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called "blind and

>> irregular fury." Their "mischievous disposition" consumed with "improvident

>> rage" the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an

>> army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while "immersed in

>> wine and sleep," and there followed in turn a "cruel slaughter of the

>> astonished Goths." Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.

>> 

>> Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half

>> later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the

>> managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst

>> and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to

>> evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually

>> overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the

>> peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.

>> 

>> THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know

>> itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a

>> mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but

>> also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder,

>> and eventual anguish and regret.

>> 

>> The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be "shown

>> the light of day." The proposals of the environmental community for better

>> systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time

>> for corporate polluters--none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is

>> frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it

>> simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As

>> Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke, in May of

>> 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily

>> bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? "Trenchard's answer was: more.

>> More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing--heavier bombers, more bombers."

>> 

>> If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even

>> simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That

>> is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it

>> desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its

>> people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take

>> pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route

>> what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in

>> this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness.

>> (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of

>> "thinking" that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and

>> violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to

>> think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances,

>> thoughtfulness's first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to

>> ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture

>> is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of

>> Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, for example, was its determination not to

>> believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl

>> erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal

>> realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as

>> the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked

>> and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a "bright shining

>> lie," in Neil Sheehan's phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of

>> economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy

>> of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally

>> repugnant.

>> 

>> In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a

>> spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and

>> tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness's primary attribute is

>> not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic.

>> Thoughtfulness's primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what

>> thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of

>> the Barbaric is beauty. "Don't think profit," it argues, "think beauty. The

>> beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed

>> from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled

>> natural world." Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as

>> opposed to Homo barbarus. It seeks a culture in which humans can become what

>> they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings

>> intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That's the logos of our

>> better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.

>> 

>> The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction

>> is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we

>> desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we

>> say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say

>> that within those communities human beings should be able to live in

>> dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are

>> arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for

>> such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a

>> barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by

>> the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and

>> prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are

>> actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled.

>> What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we

>> go for a hike, or when we visit an "eco-friendly" town full of bike paths

>> and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not

>> say of such places, "I'm grooving on this system's ecological balance." Or,

>> "The Green Economy is working well." We say, "It's beautiful here!" And yet

>> when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost

>> embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful.

>> The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I'm embarrassed right now!

>> 

>> What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we

>> want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments

>> will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and

>> sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been

>> intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is "unrealistic,"

>> by which they really mean "does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring

>> triumph of the Barbaric Heart." By this measure, to be realistic is to say,

>> "We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest

>> has even begun."

>> 

>> Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded

>> aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs

>> comment. One has simply to say "television." Nevertheless, it is art, or the

>> aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we

>> were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the

>> museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should

>> replace Adam Smith's famous "division of labor," the work that promises only

>> tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction.

>> Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean

>> the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart

>> through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within

>> communities, and in our relation to the natural world.

>> 

>> IN VIRGIL'S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from

>> Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are

>> never not Trojans because they take with them their "household gods," those

>> figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in

>> Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on

>> strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past

>> to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we're

>> not even at home at home. We're strangers on our own shores, thanks to the

>> way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and

>> towns, turning them into one big McSame.

>> 

>> Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the

>> rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians

>> in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The

>> constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living

>> with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both

>> the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche's mordant

>> phrase, "estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs."

>> But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a

>> "high standard of living." Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs?

>> MBAs?) do not think to ask, "What makes life worth living?" The answer is

>> obvious: "The high standards, of course!" A very strange conclusion for a

>> people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.

>> 

>> All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for

>> environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion

>> of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from

>> its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the

>> larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis

>> of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is

>> called for is the discovery or invention of our own "household gods" that

>> might speak powerfully to us. "Gods" that will keep us in touch with a sense

>> of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call

>> our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our

>> own world.

>> 

>> We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric

>> Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity

>> as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal

>> among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold

>> comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The

>> Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its

>> world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an

>> animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it

>> is nature. It doesn't pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the

>> snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The

>> Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships

>> the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the

>> gods that encourage living things to thrive.

>> 

>> We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort

>> of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are

>> members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and

>> pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the

>> mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the

>> mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the

>> impossible and calling it Beautiful.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> --

>> Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

>> 

>> Las cosas no son como aparecen ni tampoco son de otra manera

>> 

>> http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

>> 

>> Dr Paul Roberts

>> Calle Independencia #32-2

>> Ciudad Guzmán

>> Jalisco

>> México

>> C.P. 49000

>> 

>> tel: +52 (341) 412 6940

>> cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

> 

> 

> --

> Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

> 

> Las cosas no son como aparecen, tampoco son de otra manera

> 

> http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

> 

> Dr Paul Roberts

> Calle Independencia #32-2

> Ciudad Guzmán

> Jalisco

> México

> C.P. 49000

> 

> tel: +52 (341) 412 6940

> cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

Well this is interesting. 

First,  let me say that I am not an economist.  I appreciate the discipline of economics but I am neither a member of the religion nor a certified authority of the science.  So, sentences like "many leading economists seem rather more modest about the completeness and real-world usefulness of their explanations"  are off the mark – though I do think their ad homonym tone carries some information. 

Here is what I am taking away:

1)      I am bad because I think "The Barbaric Heart" had a false premise.  I said economics could say a lot about the causes of environmental problems.  I am now told that this claim is too strong and that it is caused by a lack of "serious" consideration.  Maybe, but it seems to me that economics makes pretty good predictions of the use of permits, quotas, common-property usage, self-regulation...

2)      I am wrong that widespread psychological change is impractical.  I admit that this may be on target – though I find the examples of both Gandhi and the US civil rights movement both of limited relevance.  Still,  I stick with my claim that it is not a practical place for me as a management scholar to spend my time.  I also stick with my claim that many examples of mass psychological change have not been supportive of basic human rights or welfare.  Is this how you see yourselves, as champions of social change? 

3)      The call for thoughtfulness in "The Barbaric Heart"  was addressed  to academics.  I don't see that in the original document, but I agree thoughtfulness among academics is a good idea.  Seems like motherhood though.  Was that really the "wise" message in TBH.

What remains elusive is any clear argument why this article is "wise".  I continue to argue that it is even counterproductive.  It is a bit like blaming the financial crisis on human misperceptions of risk.  That may have been so, but misaligned incentives seem a much better explanation to me, and blaming people's risk perceptions seems to take the pressure off regulators and financial institutions.

I ask again, please explain the appeal of the original article to me.  Don't attack me or my queries.  What about it is "wise"?

A

Andrew

Regarding your numbered points below:

1.       The adequacy of our insights into why we are destroying our plant is hardly reducible to a binary yes or no issue, though it is one to which you definitively declare the answer is "yes". Economics offers an explanation for virtually everything, but given your decrying the impracticality of the focal barbaric heart approach, I encourage you to think a bit more seriously about the remedial practicality of most economic theory. Many leading economists seem rather more modest about the completeness and real-world usefulness of their explanations. How is it not useful for our scholarly community to ponder alternatives to the clearly valid though also demonstrably limited utility maximization assumptions underlying most economic theory?

2.       Is it really so axiomatic that widespread psychological change is inherently impractical? A common target of psychological interventions is attitude change (Aronson, 1999). Are the billions spent by advertisers to alter attitudes to products and services that obviously impractical? What about the initiatives during the 1960s-70s to alter attitudes to racial segregation among those below the Mason-Dixon line? Just because widespread attitude change is extremely difficult does not mean that initiatives to attain it are inherently impractical or doomed to fail.

3.       It is a false dichotomy for you to argue the notion that, "The solution is for us (collectively I presume) to be more "thoughtful"" ... is "Counterproductive because it misses the point about the need and effect of governance (regulation, associations, etc.)". On the contrary, this is because the barbaric heart thesis can be viewed in part as a call to be more thoughtful about our need to be willing to study (and join) associations, as well as develop prudent regulations (which I appreciate is in a sense a contradiction in terms) and peoples' willingness to accept the imposition of those regulations. As a big Ayn Rand fan, I appreciate how abhorrent this feels to some of us. I find it hard to imagine, however, that external regulation, together with effective attitude change interventions (E. Aronson, 1999; Heslin, Latham & VandeWalle, 2005; Pratkinis & Aronson, 2001), will not both be indispensible parts of the mix of any viable path back to a more sustainable future for our planet and humanity.

You asked if you were missing something. I hope these comments help suggest what that might be.

Sincerely,

Peter Heslin

Sent from iPhone

I am more and more confused. 

Let me try to outline what I think was the original idea in the article.

1)  We don't know why we are destroying the planet.

2)  Perhaps an explanation is that out natural drive -- the barbaric heart -- causes both our success as a species and out current problems.

3)The solution is for us (collectively I presume) to be more "thoughtful".

I propose that this is:

1)  Wrong in its original starting point.  We do know.

2)  Impractical in that it involves world-wide psychological change.

3)  Counterproductive because it misses the point about the need and effect of governance (regulation, associations, etc.)

But, I also propose that the interest in this article reveals something.  Paul, who has been involved in this field as long as I, called it "passionate wisdom".  I still want to know what it reveals.  Does it demonstrate something about our hopes: we seek a spiritual solution perhaps.  Does it demonstrate something about my own narrow understanding?  So far, I have heard a couple people write in saying the article is empty and a couple more write as if in explanation – but I couldn't quite catch the point.

Perhaps people like the article for its passion?

A

-----Original Message-----
From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of jon@JONENTINE.COM
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 5:53 AM
To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

Organizinig production so humans can subsist through periods when supplies were less plentiful is the very definition of civilization.

 Talk of a society based on "consuming only what we need" is not only unachievable its genetically silly for all living forms, humans and otherwise-it would be species suicide.

Could this discussion get any less connected to a serious discussion about the Consumption Paradox?

 I'm traveling or I would provide a link to a reflective essay on this subject written a few months ago for Ethical Corporation.

Jon Entine 

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----

From: "Anita D. Bhappu" <abhappu@EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>

Sender: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion

      <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 21:15:32

To: <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Reply-To: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion

      <ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

Subject: Re: The Barbaric Heart

All living species consume. Therefore, the question is not whether but how we

consume. On that note, humans are different than other living species in that

we consume more than we need to meet our basic survival needs. As a result, we

have created organizations to meet the demands of our excess consumption and

we, furthermore, expect these organizations to grow continually in order to

fund our excess consumption. So we and the organizations that we have created

are co-dependent in an ever escalating cycle of consumption that is depleting

Earth's natural resources that sustain all living species.

Why do we consume more than we need? Well, it was indeed one of us (an

academic)

who conceived of coupling planned consumption to human motivational needs as a

way to salvage a struggling, post-war American economy. And it worked for all

the reasons outlined by the classical motivation theorists. So I do believe it

is our collective responsibility, as academic thought leaders and scientists,

to help consumers find alternatives to excess consumption in their quest to

satisfy learned (higher-order) motivational needs. Although one could classify

this effort as "spiritual change", because it will require

introspection on the

part of consumers and the organizations that service them, I don't see

religious

institutions leading this effort. In my humble opinion, contemporary morality

and its purveyors are anchored more by self-interest than compassion. It will

take nothing less than a Gandhi to lead our masses out of this mess. I, for

one, think that contributing to this daunting challenge is an effective way to

spend my time.

Anita D. Bhappu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor & Division Chair, Retailing & Consumer Sciences

Research Fellow, Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing

Norton School of Family & Consumer Sciences

The University of Arizona

650 N. Park Avenue

P.O. Box 210078

Tucson, AZ 85721

Phone: (520) 621-5948

Fax: (520) 621-9445

Email: abhappu@email.arizona.edu

Quoting Paul Roberts <surdejalisco@GMAIL.COM>:

> Dear Andrew et al

> 

> I don't see why spiritual change is not directable. If spiritual change does

> not lead to a difference in the world then I think it is worth very little.

> Surely Gandhi is just one particularly powerful and noteworthy example of

> the worldly difference that spiritual change can lead to.

> 

> Also I don't agree with your dichotomy between humans and the system. We

> create the system and the system creates us.

> 

> I also wonder re: your point about "Humans are not any different than any

> other animals.  If left unchecked, species get out of control.  Humans have

> just been better at avoiding the checks" that what we are now going to see

> shortly is the way that self-checking, self-regulating processes on human

> population and the effect we are having on the climate are going to start

> operating of their own accord without us imposing those checks.

> 

> I think and fear this is almost inevitable, given that we appear to be

> failing to do any real checking ourselves  - as far as I can see all the

> trends of key global environmental indicators (emissions, fresh water usage

> and scarcity, ocean acidification, human population, loss of biodiversity,

> deforestation, chemical pollution etc. and even a strictly human indicator

> like inequality) are worsening. *It would be great if someone on this list

> could point to a global sustainability indicator they think is getting

> better.*

> 

> What remains to be seen is the scale and extent of these self-regulating

> processes. As James Lovelock has said, we are still in the early stages of

> skirmishes with Gaia, and the full extent of her wrath (to personalise this

> a little) has yet to be felt.

> 

> regards  Paul

> 

> PS Regarding the earlier discussion about the reasons why we are not doing

> anything and your points about economics and resilience analysis providing a

> more than adequate explanation, and therefore what was the article by Curtis

> White getting at,  I am reminded of what Ray Anderson, founder of Interface

> said, when asked why his business was climbing 'Mount Sustainability'. He

> said that: "When I face my maker, I don't think he is going to ask me about

> shareholder value". Likewise I don't think he/she will be asking us about

> economics and resilience analysis.

> 

> 

> 

> On 1 July 2010 10:51, King, Andrew A.

> <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu>wrote:

> 

>>  Paul(s),

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> It was to better understand how people are thinking and feeling that I

>> wrote in.  I understand some need to better connect to the natural world and

>> some yearning for a more spiritual connection.  I can even believe such a

>> connection if applied to 6 billion people might make a difference.  I often

>> hear such yearning and hope within the ONE community, and it touches

>> something inside of me.  But upon reflection, I conclude that such spiritual

>> change is not directable and thus not an effective way for me to expend my

>> time.  I also worry that it is counterproductive.  It takes the focus off

>> the failings of the system and puts it on the failings of humans.  Humans

>> are not any different than any other animals.  If left unchecked, species

>> get out of control.  Humans have just been better at avoiding the checks.

>>  Of all the species, we need to impose those checks ourselves.  That is a

>> daunting prospect.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> I remain interested in why articles like "The Passionate Heart" are thought

>> to be wise (Paul Shrivastava's word).  I don't get it for the reasons I have

>> already stated.  Perhaps one of you can explain it to me.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> A

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> *From:* Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [mailto:

>> ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] *On Behalf Of *Paul Roberts

>> *Sent:* Thursday, July 01, 2010 8:54 AM

>> 

>> *To:* ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

>> *Subject:* Re: The Barbaric Heart

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> In response to Andrew's comment, and question about whether we know why we

>> are being so destructive of the planet and embarking on a course of

>> potential collective suicide, whilst taking along a good number of other

>> species with us,  I find the answers given by economics and resilience

>> analysis only very partial answers. I also suspect they offer a solution

>> only within the terms of the paradigm which has brought us to this point.

>> That is not therefore to devalue them or decry their usefulness but on their

>> own I think they are limited. They go some way to satisfying my intellect

>> but say nothing to, for want of a better word, my soul.

>> 

>> So I think some kind of pyschological exploration is also needed and here I

>> mean depth psychology not the trite understandings that a conventional

>> ego-based individualistic psychology offers. And at least I think this

>> article by Curtis White is pointing us in a direction worth pursuing

>> 

>> And we have to consider more our relationship with nature

>> 

>> "It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the

>> insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling

>> for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the

>> earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we

>> would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect,

>> a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to

>> heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something

>> totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with

>> nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes

>> through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds."    Jiddu

>> Krishnamurti

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>>  On 29 June 2010 16:53, King, Andrew A. <Andrew.A.King@tuck.dartmouth.edu>

>> wrote:

>> 

>> I don't understand the basic premise of this article.  We really don't know

>> why we are destructive of the planet?  Hasn't economics done a pretty good

>> job of explaining when and how private incentive and public welfare do not

>> go together.  Haven't the resilience analysts developed pretty good theories

>> for why we tend to destabilize ecosystems?  What is new here other than some

>> vague finger pointing at our natural drive.  Was that in doubt?

>> 

>> And sentences such as this, sound like old warmed over marxism: "THE

>> BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know itself as

>> empty."   Yes, modern man can fall into alienation.  Marx was at least right

>> about that.  And so?

>> 

>> And "thoughtfulness" is the cure?  Isn't that a very very old way of

>> thinking about the problem?  It is as if we can tell people that they have

>> an effect on the environment and they will say "My god man, you are right, I

>> will stop driving my car."  How many of you all have stopped driving as a

>> result of the spill in the gulf?  Surely we cannot expect the average man to

>> reach the thoughtfulness of this group.  Economics returns:  full private

>> value versus 1/300 millionth of the public value.  Is that thoughtless or

>> thoughtful.

>> 

>> Seriously, we may not like the answers we get from economics and ecology --

>> not to mention history --  but surely we should at least respect them.

>> 

>> Or am I missing something?

>> 

>> A

>>________________________________________

>> From: Organizations and the Natural Environment Discussion [

>> ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Shrivastava [

>> paul.shri@GMAIL.COM]

>> Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 2:31 PM

>> 

>> To: ONE-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

>> 

>> Subject: The Barbaric Heart

>> 

>> 

>> Just returned from GRONEN 2010 debating truth and beauty of sustainable

>> enterprise, and thought I would share this piece of passionate wisdom.

>> 

>> With Best Regards,

>> paul S.

>> Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.

>> David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and

>> Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise

>> http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/sustainable

>> John Molson School of Business

>> Concordia University

>> Mail: 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd West, Suite MB 6-327

>> Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8

>> 

>> Ph. 514-848-2424 Ext 2367, Fax. 514-848-4547; Email:

>> pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca<mailto:pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca>

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> The Barbaric Heart

>> Capitalism and the crisis of nature

>> by Curtis White

>> 

>> Published in the May/June 2009<

>> http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/4676/> issue of Orion

>> magazine

>> 

>> 

>> [

>> http://www.orionmagazine.org/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.orionmagazine.org/i/article_images/05-01-09450white.jpg&w=450

>> ]

>> 

>> Photo: Meryl Joseph

>> 

>> 

>> THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that environmentalists are not very good at

>> asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural

>> world, happening?" We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who

>> care about something called nature or (if they're feeling a little

>> technocratic, and they usually are) the "environment." They are concerned,

>> as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the

>> industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may

>> experience a "system collapse." But as scientifically sophisticated as

>> environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its

>> ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on

>> those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in

>> environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal.

>> Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources." Industrial sources.

>> Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even

>> natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic

>> tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do

>> we have all of these polluting sources?"

>> 

>> Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead

>> limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience

>> has been like Mickey Mouse's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": for every

>> berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place,

>> implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal

>> deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or

>> "mitigate," since we can't seem to really turn off anything), another two

>> pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have

>> become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the

>> ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the

>> dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of

>> mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.

>> 

>> Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of

>> modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a

>> sort of "presentism" in which the culprits are all of recent vintage:

>> Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation,

>> you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that's

>> very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are

>> not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, "greedy."

>> Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate

>> to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist

>> melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra

>> Club.)

>> 

>> After all, isn't it true that what corporations and the individuals who run

>> them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable?

>> They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to

>> grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always

>> been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the

>> merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators

>> of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They

>> try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which

>> they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who

>> are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for

>> creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own

>> dominance. In short, they try to win. They try to thrive. We should all be

>> so committed to the risk of "living large." The problem is not with these

>> qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it

>> is that they're trying to help thrive.

>> 

>> My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical

>> capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an

>> unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is

>> important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not

>> merely name-calling. This is so because, as I've already suggested, there is

>> something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism

>> has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the

>> complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism

>> has brought into being. What economists call the "spontaneous order" of the

>> free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one

>> end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to

>> believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a

>> cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every

>> year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to

>> admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly

>> fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of

>> shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the

>> primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on

>> the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at

>> shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday

>> afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was

>> flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the

>> other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you

>> might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots

>> of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The slow, winding flow

>> of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the

>> northern lights.)

>> 

>> To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is

>> to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart

>> itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact,

>> the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has

>> always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth

>> King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy

>> suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice

>> even when it didn't (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable

>> for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take

>> risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful

>> animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a "blonde beast." (He

>> mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a

>> slave.)

>> 

>> Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on

>> difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the

>> Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is

>> no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than

>> capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic

>> Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, "What's the economy for?"

>> Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It's as if the only alternative to

>> "growth" was "recession," and no one is allowed to be for that.)

>> Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel

>> according to John reads, "In the beginning was Logos." What is the logos

>> (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does

>> it act?

>> 

>> THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to

>> describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed

>> in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that

>> followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the

>> barbarian is not an "other" to be driven away in the name of civilized

>> virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military

>> success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas. For the Roman forces under

>> Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the

>> routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence,

>> to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the

>> time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material

>> thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was

>> above all orderly. As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome "billowed in

>> booty."

>> 

>> This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then

>> you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led

>> to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you

>> should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country.

>> That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a

>> form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing,

>> and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes,

>> Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types

>> are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to

>> "win," and by whatever means necessary.

>> 

>> Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine

>> confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with

>> what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have

>> been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of

>> honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian

>> virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope.

>> There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the

>> Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the

>> law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or

>> another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What

>> these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart,

>> they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole.

>> 

>> For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real

>> as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self.  What else could

>> care so blindly about "winning"? But it also feels, at some dark recess of

>> the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps

>> at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always

>> claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of

>> being able to cart off the enemy's silver and gold (and women). Plates,

>> jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to

>> buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death

>> meant nothing. Through the "right of conquest" (the unwritten law of the

>> ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel

>> full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become

>> virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a "hero").

>> 

>> Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only

>> itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called

>> tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you

>> put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out.

>> Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus's tragedies, humans pursue what they

>> perceive to be their own interest only to become "the slave of their own

>> destruction," an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts,

>> economic, military, and environmental.

>> 

>> What is tragic is that the bloody end, "the great wound swimming upwards"

>> like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for

>> that. We don't intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the

>> bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don't intend that

>> our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable

>> spiraling of violence, but it does. We don't intend that the pursuit of our

>> happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification,

>> drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is

>> presently "swimming upwards" regardless of what we intend.

>> 

>> THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond

>> beauty, doesn't get. First, it doesn't look at itself. It is frustrated by

>> questions like "What makes life worth living?" Or it assumes that the answer

>> is obvious: "Winning! Of course." It doesn't even wonder what its relation

>> to other barbarians might be. It doesn't know about solidarity beyond a

>> blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of

>> loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why

>> self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.

>> 

>> Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn't understand, except at the very last

>> moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward

>> Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of

>> the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has

>> gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For

>> example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two

>> thirds of the Emperor Valens's Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of

>> barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to

>> passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called "blind and

>> irregular fury." Their "mischievous disposition" consumed with "improvident

>> rage" the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an

>> army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while "immersed in

>> wine and sleep," and there followed in turn a "cruel slaughter of the

>> astonished Goths." Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.

>> 

>> Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half

>> later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the

>> managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst

>> and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to

>> evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually

>> overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the

>> peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.

>> 

>> THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn't know

>> itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a

>> mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but

>> also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder,

>> and eventual anguish and regret.

>> 

>> The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be "shown

>> the light of day." The proposals of the environmental community for better

>> systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time

>> for corporate polluters--none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is

>> frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it

>> simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As

>> Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke, in May of

>> 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily

>> bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? "Trenchard's answer was: more.

>> More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing--heavier bombers, more bombers."

>> 

>> If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even

>> simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That

>> is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it

>> desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its

>> people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take

>> pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route

>> what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in

>> this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness.

>> (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of

>> "thinking" that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and

>> violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to

>> think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances,

>> thoughtfulness's first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to

>> ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture

>> is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of

>> Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, for example, was its determination not to

>> believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl

>> erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal

>> realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as

>> the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked

>> and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a "bright shining

>> lie," in Neil Sheehan's phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of

>> economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy

>> of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally

>> repugnant.

>> 

>> In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a

>> spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and

>> tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness's primary attribute is

>> not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic.

>> Thoughtfulness's primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what

>> thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of

>> the Barbaric is beauty. "Don't think profit," it argues, "think beauty. The

>> beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed

>> from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled

>> natural world." Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as

>> opposed to Homo barbarus. It seeks a culture in which humans can become what

>> they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings

>> intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That's the logos of our

>> better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.

>> 

>> The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction

>> is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we

>> desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we

>> say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say

>> that within those communities human beings should be able to live in

>> dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are

>> arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for

>> such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a

>> barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by

>> the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and

>> prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are

>> actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled.

>> What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we

>> go for a hike, or when we visit an "eco-friendly" town full of bike paths

>> and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not

>> say of such places, "I'm grooving on this system's ecological balance." Or,

>> "The Green Economy is working well." We say, "It's beautiful here!" And yet

>> when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost

>> embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful.

>> The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I'm embarrassed right now!

>> 

>> What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we

>> want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments

>> will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and

>> sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been

>> intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is "unrealistic,"

>> by which they really mean "does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring

>> triumph of the Barbaric Heart." By this measure, to be realistic is to say,

>> "We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest

>> has even begun."

>> 

>> Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded

>> aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs

>> comment. One has simply to say "television." Nevertheless, it is art, or the

>> aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we

>> were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the

>> museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should

>> replace Adam Smith's famous "division of labor," the work that promises only

>> tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction.

>> Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean

>> the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart

>> through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within

>> communities, and in our relation to the natural world.

>> 

>> IN VIRGIL'S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from

>> Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are

>> never not Trojans because they take with them their "household gods," those

>> figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in

>> Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on

>> strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past

>> to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we're

>> not even at home at home. We're strangers on our own shores, thanks to the

>> way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and

>> towns, turning them into one big McSame.

>> 

>> Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the

>> rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians

>> in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The

>> constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living

>> with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both

>> the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche's mordant

>> phrase, "estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs."

>> But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a

>> "high standard of living." Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs?

>> MBAs?) do not think to ask, "What makes life worth living?" The answer is

>> obvious: "The high standards, of course!" A very strange conclusion for a

>> people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.

>> 

>> All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for

>> environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion

>> of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from

>> its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the

>> larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis

>> of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is

>> called for is the discovery or invention of our own "household gods" that

>> might speak powerfully to us. "Gods" that will keep us in touch with a sense

>> of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call

>> our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our

>> own world.

>> 

>> We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric

>> Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity

>> as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal

>> among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold

>> comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The

>> Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its

>> world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an

>> animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it

>> is nature. It doesn't pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the

>> snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The

>> Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships

>> the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the

>> gods that encourage living things to thrive.

>> 

>> We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort

>> of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are

>> members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and

>> pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the

>> mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the

>> mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the

>> impossible and calling it Beautiful.

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> --

>> Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

>> 

>> Las cosas no son como aparecen ni tampoco son de otra manera

>> 

>> http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

>> 

>> Dr Paul Roberts

>> Calle Independencia #32-2

>> Ciudad Guzmán

>> Jalisco

>> México

>> C.P. 49000

>> 

>> tel: +52 (341) 412 6940

>> cel: +52 (341) 102 0774

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

> 

> 

> --

> Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

> 

> Las cosas no son como aparecen, tampoco son de otra manera

> 

> http://livingandworkinginmexico.wordpress.com/

> 

> Dr Paul Roberts

> Calle Independencia #32-2

> Ciudad Guzmán

> Jalisco

> México

> C.P. 49000

> 

> tel: +52 (341) 412 6940

> cel: +52 (341) 102 0774