A Good Book
Curtis White’s intelligence, colored by righteous indignation, is a slippery and protean thing. He’s tackled Liberalism and contemporary Art Culture and in his newest book, The Barbaric Heart, he examines the hidden ills of the environmental movement. We were fortunate enough to publish an excerpt of it in the “Dread” half of Issue #41, called “A Good Without Light” — check it out.
We were quite impressed with the essay and book and followed up with him via email.
Tin House: In your previous non-fiction work, you’ve played the Socratic gadfly, uncovering all sorts of life’s sinister things even the “educated” among us fail to see as sinister. How does The Barbaric Heart, if at all, continue that line of attack?
Curtis White: I’ve come to think that the three recent nonfiction books—The Middle Mind, The Spirit of Disobedience, and now The Barbaric Heart—really are a trilogy. They are all books critical, in order, of what passes for art culture in this country, what passes for liberalism, and finally what passes for an environmental movement.
I think the guiding idea has been, as Marx wrote, “If capitalism must have enemies, it will create them itself and in its own image.” The major environmental organizations are enemies in the image of their purported foe. And I say this while acknowledging that I’ve belonged to just about all of these organizations for decades.
So, The Barbaric Heart describes the most important ways in which environmentalism consorts with the enemy, especially when it makes science and quantitative reasoning its primary voice, and when it agrees, as it does in the utterly failed Kyoto protocols, that economic growth is a desideratum of the future and that any negative environmental consequences will be handled by wiser bureaucracies, laws, and technological fixes.
I advocate a reconsideration of the origin of our concern with nature: Romanticism. The Romantics believed that the human and natural worlds were one, that the natural world was the realm of spirit, that materialism, rationalism, and money had alienated us from nature, that human beings were in this context not capable of being fully human, and that the best response to this situation was art, especially poetry and music. Just as important, they practiced “romantic irony,” the rather postmodern attempt to undermine all ideologies, even its own. Romanticism was a movement of the provisional. But if you went to an environmental conference now to say such things, imagining that you could get the politicians and urban planners and climate gurus to shut up for a moment, people would cluck their tongues and complain (as has already been said of my book) that there is nothing “practical” in it. What this plea for practicality really means is that we should work within the assumptions of the status quo, the world as it stands.
The book attempts to provide a kind of metaphysics for the environmental movement. The question it asks is, “Given that we are destroying the world, but why?” The usual implicit answers are, I think, lame and not thought through: We’re greedy sinners, we’re naturally destructive, or it’s the work of evil-doer CEOs. My answer is that it’s not our sins but our virtues that are the root cause. The virtues of the warrior ethic: if you can profit from the skillful use of violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. This is obviously the ethic of capitalism and its great defender the state, but it also penetrates deeply into the entire culture through our respect for athletes, the military (consider all the oohing when fighter jets pass overhead at “air shows”), the triumphs of business wealth (the Jack Welch story), and every action movie out there where the hero uses uber-skillful and hyperbolic violence to “fight his way through” the enemy in the name of preserving the good, i.e. his own people. Think Bruce Willis and Die Hard.
Willis: Activist, Actor, Sexy
Ours is not simply a violent culture. It is a culture that believes that violence (especially violence with a skill set) is a virtue. It is really our national religion, if, as Tolstoy said, a culture’s true religion is not the things it claims to “believe” but the ideas that it lives through on a daily basis. Some people call this disconnect between belief and conduct hypocritical. It’s not really. Competitive business practices are, for their practitioners, virtues, destructive virtues but virtues. For a while, we admired the math whizzes and physicists that Wall Street recruited to “quant” finance markets. Only now can we see what it really was: rapacious violence against the vulnerable or naïve, including other financiers. The math whizzes may or may not have understood this. Whether they did or did not, they must now stand with all the scientists and engineers in the arms industry.
TH: You say that the Barbaric Heart describes how environmentalism consorts with the enemy and that makes for some fascinating reading, for sure, but this idea of the Barbaric Heart is rooted much, much deeper than just that. The issues you find with environmentalism, in other words, are but one expression of the Barbaric Heart. Could you talk a little about the dynamics of the Barbaric Heart, how it has arisen out of capitalism and eclipsed other modes of being, and maybe some of the particular ways it plays out in the day-to-day living of life?
White, Moments Before Discovering Truth About Environmentalism
CW: Actually, I don’t think that the Barbaric Heart rose from capitalism. Capitalism rose from it. It is the dominant contemporary example of the Barbaric Heart. But the Barbaric Heart itself is as old as humanity. It was first the warrior virtues of being able to fight your way through animals, nature, and other humans. Then, in the ancient world, it became the conviction that there was no virtue as virtuous as triumph. Winning. Obviously a large part of the problem is that the Barbaric Heart penetrates deeply into the culture in all sorts of ways. We admire, almost to a person, violence with a skill set. As I said above, this is all around us though mostly not understood for what it is. Why are we as a culture so given over to worship of athletes, action heroes, business success, and the stoic military?
TH: While you say you’re attempting a metaphysics of the environmental movement, much of the book, especially when the anger and disgust is most pointed, appeals to ethics, i.e. how now, with everything the Barbaric Heart has wrought, are we supposed to live good lives. So, could you take, say, 80 words and answer: how are we to live good lives?
CW: I don’t think we can live good lives. We’re all complicit in the corporate life world and the easy assumption that profit is dependent on violence (against workers, against nature). Like getting coal or gas to power a huge-screen HD TV in every home. We are not going to get rid of those things until we have no other choice. I don’t say that the Barbaric Heart is evil or sinful. I say it is dishonest. So what I advocate in the very intellectual practices of the book, the book as an act, is that we need to stop “mental lying” as Thomas Paine called it. Perhaps capitalism is the best of all possible economic systems. Perhaps that’s true. But can we at least stop saying all these deluded things about it? Like that it provides freedom, supports democracy, cares about fairness, cares about the environment. It has other values and virtues that make these things most unlikely.
TH: You say in the book that we’ve ‘lost our sense of what it should mean to be American.’ Could you explain this a bit? Sorry if this is redundant, but as a corollary, could you talk about what to your mind it means to be a good citizen?
CW: Americans have always been known for their bluntness. As any Henry James novel would show, that has not always made us popular among Europeans. And Asians are dumbfounded by it. But it was Romantics like William Blake that first said “honest indignation is the voice of God.” I believe that. That’s a religion I can belong to.
William Blake observed just after a Greenpeace Canvasser waylaid him. He really did have somewhere better to be.
Americans should be the voice of honest indignation. Instead we are, as Sonic Youth put it some time back, a “Daydream Nation” incapable of self-scrutiny in any fundamental way, and willing to live in a corporate life-world of deadening work, strip mall communities, and cities designed with the needs of technology (like automobiles and those wretched cell phone towers) most at heart.
TH: You mentioned practicality and that you and your book are often accused of not being so. To say that is, to my mind, an almost willful misreading of the book. I’d even go so far as to call it fatuous. That said, in what ways do you hope the book will work on a reader?
CW: Slavoj Zizek expressed this well in a recent issue of Harper’s. “The old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!” is one of the stupidest things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense. Perhaps the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much…. Perhaps it is time to step back, think, and say the right thing.”
Perhaps thinking and talking can be dangerous again, just as it was for Voltaire, and Paine, and Marx. The job of the writer, as I see it, is not to create strategic plans or utopian projects all based upon the “best science” or “best practices.” The job of the writer is to seek clarity, starting with self-clarity. “What do I really think about this problem?” Marx once wrote to Engels of the unpublished early essays, “We can submit this work to the criticism of the mice. We have achieved our purpose: self-clarification.” We know how dangerous this self-clarity was to become. How practical. I think readers experience a kind of joy in finding a writer willing and capable of being honest and lucid. “Finally, someone willing to tell me the truth.” That’s what I try to do.
TH: This might lead to the same question as before, or be my attempt to answer it, but hell, whatever. Heidegger (hear the yawns?) once wrote that the genuine sense of what philosophy can achieve is ‘the burdening of historical Dasein, and thereby at bottom of Being itself…Burdening gives back to things, to beings, their weight. And why? Because burdening is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the arising of everything great, among which we include above all else the fate of a historical people.’
Man in High Dudgeon with the Concept of the Burdening of Historical Dasein Driven to Protest
Would you mind entertaining me (and really maybe only me) by responding to this?
CW: I never yawn around Heidegger. He too is heir in his own way to Spinoza’s and Romanticism’s first engagement with the idea of Being-as-such. I don’t know this particular passage (Being and Time?) but I like what it says. Heidegger was critical of the instrumentalization of our relation to Being. The quantifying of the world both human and natural. To “burden” that world is to oblige it to step out of the “automatic,” our numb sense of normalcy, our “received ideas” about who and where we are, and be obliged to take on the weight and anxiety of self-reflection, of thinking. The nausea of having to begin from the zero degree (as Sartre might have expressed it). I try to burden not only capitalism but environmentalism. Environmentalism is too used to thinking itself the voice of the righteous. It does not sufficiently see the ways in which its mission has been compromised. This is all very much in the interest of the reigning economic order (whatever that should be called). For that order, instead of having to deal with the unruly, often revolutionary zeal of poets, musicians like Richard Wagner, and uncompromising spiritualists like Muir, it can now deal with something it is very familiar and comfortable with: science, technicians, and quantitative reason. Risk assessment. Data. The reign of Numbers. It has also succeeded in transforming a movement that was originally not only a protest against the denaturalization of the world but the dehumanization of the world. It has remade that movement in its own image.
The failure of science is not with science as such, its discoveries, but with its failure to become what Morse Peckham called “romantic science,” that is, a science whose first job is to use its knowledge to undermine ideologies of power, to destroy their “regnant platitudes.” Instead, science, even environmental science, has put itself at the service of these ideologies.
As Ken Burns’ new film The National Parks: America’s Best Idea shows, it is one thing to ask John D. Rockefeller to give millions for the creation of a national park, but quite another to ask him to take responsibility for how he made those millions in the first place: oil, monopolies, the exploitation of workers, and even the massacre of workers (as in the 1913 Ludlow mine massacre, although it was his son that was responsible for that). Burns sees no need to dig into this. It might get in the way of feel-good moment when the banjos are playing.
Still taken from Ken Burns documentary
It is one thing to ask capital to contribute to certain sites that provide “spectacle,” but another to ask it to stop the profitable destruction of the rest of the world through behavior that is little more than systematic violence (factory farming, for instance). Ken Burns’ film is marked by this contradiction: his sponsors are nearly all conduits of corporate philanthropy. He knows where the boundaries of the possible are just as he knows that national parks have boundaries beyond which is the slowly dying world we are becoming ever more familiar with. In the end, even those park boundaries are unlikely to resist the steady erosion of climate warming, pine bark beetles (been to Colorado lately? it’s a very brown experience), species extinction, the bio-accumulation of toxins in animals, invasive species, and the rest of it. Parks are not the answer. They’re not even the beginning of the answer or a step in the right direction. They avoid a confrontation with the real problems.
Well, now you’ve outed me as one of those shameful academics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back in a manuscript and delete some Heideggerian or Hegelian digression that my editors are always sure doom my rating on Amazon.
TH: And finally. (Finally!) Could you define the word ‘creative’ outside the context of any market? I’m reminded of this section from Joshua Ferris’s hilarious debut novel, Then We Came to the End:
‘Sometime later in the afternoon, Max Jackers surprised Jim by calling him back. “You folks over there,” said Max, “you say you call yourselves creatives, is that what you’re telling me? And the work you do, you call that the creative, is that what you said?” Jim said that was correct. “And I suppose you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet.”
“I suppose so,” said Jim, wondering what Max was driving at.
“And the work you do, you probably think that’s pretty creative work.”
“What are you asking me, Uncle Max?”
“Well, if all that’s true,” said the old man, “that would make you creative creatives creating creative creative.” There was silence as Max allowed Jim to take this in. “And that right there,” he concluded, “is why I didn’t miss my calling. That’s a use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate.”’
CW: God. I know. I sometimes get appreciative comments from the audience that say, “He’s right. Art is the best path.” You’ve got market creativity, which is mostly a joke. Then you’ve got this quasi-mystical New Agey reverence for creativity, even if its products are awful. One of the paradoxes of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is that he is really saying that the only time we really need art is when the world is damaged. Art is the response to that damage. The rest is the product of the Culture Industry or is kitsch. In theory, art goes away in a restored world. Of course we’re in no danger of that any time soon.
But I think I agree that art has a mostly negative function for the moment. It is the call to life. It is the refusal of death. I don’t argue that everyone should start writing poetry. I argue that we should create a common language of Care (Heidegger!) that makes us not environmentalists but members of a greater Party of Life.
Pledge Yourself to the Party of Life
CEO, CFO and COO of the Party
