Barbaric Heart

Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

Curtis White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351220002
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

One
Naked Force Clothed in Beauty

We are somehow fated to enjoy the favor of the gods in larger measure when warring than when at peace.

CINCINNATUS

IN OUR TIME, the most disturbing and saddest form that state violence takes is violence against nature. And yet as clear and evident as it is, this violence is also a sort of mystery. Why, we ask, is the destruction of the natural world happening? Why are we doing this to our own world? Even those who are most dedicated to the problem of the destruction of the natural world, environmentalists, seem not to know how to answer this question, or even how to pose it. 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. Non-point sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic tundra). For example, the Chinese applied this logic to Beijing in the hope of cleaning up that hapless city in time for the 2008 Olympic games. They tried to create more “Blue Sky Days,” as they put it. So they asked, What is producing the pollution? And they concluded, Then shut it down until the tourists and the cameras go home.

We may not be quite so cynical in our search for dirty sources, but our analytic methods are not all that different, and neither is our suspicion that half the fight is public perception (hence the Bush administration’s notorious grant of pollution privilege to the power industry, which it cheerily called the “Clear Skies Initiative”).¹ Even with the spur of such hypocrisies, environmentalism has not been very good at asking, Okay, but why do we have all of these polluting sources? What has made them? Is it something about human nature? Our violence? Is it something about sin? Our greed? Is it something about evil? Corporate villains?

Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question but 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, relentlessly 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 a recent thing, not something we can blame uniquely on the development of industrialism or of the postwar petrochemical industry, but something as old as humanity itself. Environmentalism is committed to a “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 isn’t with the fact that they’re trying to thrive (or “survive,” as they’re more likely to put it, in that dramatic Darwinian way of theirs). 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 profit. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is important to say that in associating free market capitalism with the barbaric I am not merely name-calling. As I’ve already suggested, there is something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism has made. No amount of human or mechanical computation can really 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 is a 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. Millions of people out at once, from Madison Avenue to Chicago’s Miracle Mile to LA’s Rodeo Drive and all the thousands of malls in cities and towns in between. 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 gray flannel 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.)²

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 growth of the Gross Domestic Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, What’s the economy for? It 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 fundamental question we should want to ask has to do with what is at the beginning of the Barbaric Heart. As the Gospel according to John opens, we read, “In the beginning was the Word.” What is the “Word” or, in Greek, logos, of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in the name of what 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 and troops 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. In this way, as the Roman historian Polybius put it, Rome “billowed in booty” (261).

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 athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do.

How force became the earliest form of virtue was lucidly expressed by the famed Egyptologist James H. Breasted in his 1934 book The Dawn of Conscience:

In wandering for years through the ancient lands of the Near East I have been impressed with this outstanding fact: the insistent monuments now surviving in all those distant lands have been primarily expressions of man’s power. It is as if his struggle with the forces of nature, a struggle which has now been going on for perhaps a million years, had imbued him with a defiant consciousness that he could win only by fighting his way through as he met the opposing forces of the natural world which challenged him on every hand. It was with this same attitude of relentless force that he met his own human fellows when the long struggle for supremacy eventually arose among the earliest nations. (413)

The ethics of fighting your way through potential calamity, whether natural disasters or human enemies, is reconfirmed by nearly every Hollywood action movie and every television drama to this day. It is still, for us, the most necessary virtue. This is an assumption to which even “liberal” Hollywood gives consent through its heroes: John Wayne, Batman, James Bond, Dirty Harry, computer-enhanced Spartans, and on and on.³

Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine confirmation of their character, virtue has very little to do with what gods command. Virtues are specific to cultures and rarely are they exclusive. They are always challenged by contrary organizations of virtue. As Tacitus tells us in A Dialogue on Oratory, in the Roman world there were only two kinds of virtuous man: the soldier and the orator. The orator was not merely eloquent (a rhetorician) but was imbued with “those studies which treat of good and evil, of honor and dishonor, of right and wrong” (Complete Works, 759). The orator entered the world “like a soldier equipped at all points, going to the battlefield. . . armed with every learned accomplishment” (760). It was the orator who was the natural candidate to the highest office of consul, and who wielded the greatest weapon, the power of persuasion with the people. As such, he was a direct challenge to the virtue of “brutal courage” (Polybius) that was the soldier’s claim to leadership. In our own political structures, we can easily see the lasting consequences of this challenge from oratory: the government is civilian and determined (in theory) by persuasion while the military’s virtues are (in theory) subordinate.

Barbaric virtues have also been challenged—usually with the aid of the orator’s persuasive power—by competing ethical visions like those expressed in the ancient wisdom literatures of the Egyptians and the Hebrews, like the Stoic virtues of honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, and like the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other articulations of virtue as well, most notably the Enlightenment’s advocacy of the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law. The environmental movement has used all of these strategies at one time or another, somewhat fitfully, in its increasingly desperate effort to reason with the Barbaric Heart.

What these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart, they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole. In his “Second Philippic” against Marc Antony, Cicero chastised him for surrounding the Senate with his armed men. “Why do your henchmen listen with their hands on their swords?” he accused. For Cicero, Antony represented the City of Force, while the Senate represented the City of Reason. Reason’s interest was in “the brotherhood of the entire human race.” Justice and the desire for the good unite men in “a kind of natural league” (22).

Yet for the Barbaric Heart there is nothing about Cicero’s notion of the Good 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 its heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. The Ego is an empty sock for gathering wind. 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).⁴ 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 (the achievement of justice through revenge) only to become “the slave of their own destruction,” an apt expression of our current situation.

Our own preferred form of self-destruction to which we seem mostly enslaved is our sense that we have a right to happiness, to what we call our lifestyle, which can be satisfied only through the unfettered acquisitiveness of property, consumer goods, and pleasure. But, as we slowly came to understand through the sea-to-shiningsea folly of the consumer debt and credit crisis of 2008, this principle too has a very dark side. It would have been no secret to Aeschylus, who wrote:

Running after pleasure,
Thoughtless, careless
As a boy
Chasing a bird.
He ruins his people. (24)

What is tragic is that the bloody end, “the great wound swimming upwards” like a shark (Aeschylus), is unintended but no less inevitable for that. We don’t intend that the pursuit of personal possessions and 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.

Worse yet (and environmental scientists know this feeling well), it doesn’t seem to help to show that our supposed virtues are also bringing about ruin. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the prophetess Cassandra told the people that she saw the death of Agamemnon coming, but the Chorus could only say, “Are you mad? Those words should never be pronounced” (61). Similarly, we can say that free market capitalism is an expression of the ancient Barbaric Heart, and that it is bringing about catastrophe for all living things, but we will mostly be met with incomprehension, indifference, and indignation. “Don’t worry, the system is self-correcting. This is just a down cycle.” Or, if things get very crude, “You’re a communist. Go to Cuba.”

There are two things that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: The Riddle of the Barbaric
• BOOK I THE ANGUISH OF THE BARBARIC HEART
• 1 Naked Force Clothed in Beauty
• 2 The Problem with Pluralism: America's Hot Air Gods
• BOOK II THE CRISIS OF NATURE
• 3 The Idols of Environmentalism
• 4 The Ecology of Work
• 5 Sustainability: A Good without Light
• BOOK III MONEY, THE VISIBLE GOD
• 6 The Revenge of the External
• 7 On the Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith
• 8 "Socrates, Practice Music"
• BOOK IV A GOD "DEEP DOWN THINGS"
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author