By David M. Kinchen

BOOK REVIEW: The Barbaric Heart Says Environmental Crisis Won't be Resolved by Capitalism That Created It in the First Place

Much of Curtis White's The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature (PoliPoint Press, Sausalito, CA, 208 pages, $16.95) addresses the world's catastrophic environmental crisis.

Taking his cue from Edward Gibbon's famous passage describing the massacre of the Gothic (barbarian) youth by the forces of the Roman Empire  in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, White argues that environmentalists are barking up the wrong tree (my pun, not his) if they think Capitalism in its "Green" guise will solve the problems it created in the first place.

White says that environmental analyses tend to be about "sources"--industrial sources, nonpoint sources, urban sources, smokestack sources.  He argues that environmentalism is very good at pinpointing "sources," but not very good at asking why we have all of these polluting sources in the first place.

"Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources," he writes,  our experience has been like Mickey Mouse's in the classic 1940 Walt Disney movie "Fantasia."  In the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" scene Mickey plays a sorcerer-in-training who manages to convince a broomstick to fetch water.  The problem is, he can't find a way to turn the broomstick off, so buckets of water soon cause a flood.

Like Mickey, White says, 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 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."

The same "Barbaric Heart" that powered the Romans, that drove the Italian princes who hired Machiavelli is present today in the living, beating heart of capitalism, or as White puts it:   "... 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."

In his relatively short but densely packed book (complete with notes, an index and bibliography), White references a wide variety of thinkers, with the usual variety of thinkers Thoreau and Whitman and Emerson and philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer mixed in with singer/songwriter Tom Waits ("As Tom Waits put it in a song off 'Bone Machine,' The Earth died screaming / While I lay dreaming").  As a fan of Waits I was delighted to see him referenced not once, but twice. The other reference, on page 139, refers to the toxic financial "assets" that originated in the United States, but crippled the economies of Iceland and Germany as "spent jet trash." White doesn't want us to use Europe as a model to combat the doctrine of the "Barbaric Heart" any more than he wants us to emulate U.S. corporations.

In The Barbaric Heart, Sigmund Freud rubs elbows with Adam Smith (White's elucidation of Smith's The Wealth of Nations was eye-opening to me -- as it will be to many who've seen the famous economist's ideas distorted beyond his original intent) and  John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman in a book that will shake your firmly held conventional wisdom on just about everything.

What would White substitute for the Barbarian heart?  "Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don't mean the beauties of  a mountain vista," he writes in his final chapter, "Democratic Vistas."  "I mean a resistance to the  Barbaric Heart through a daily insistence on the Beauty within individual lives and within communities."

Environmentalism as portrayed by Al Gore and the Sierra Club and other supposedly well meaning people and organizations is irrelevant in White's view: "...there is no need for environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. Environmentalism has no problems to solve that can be limited to what we have grown wearingly used to call the 'environment.' 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 faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer)."

The Barbaric Heart is a profoundly disturbing -- in a good sense -- book that is full of fresh ways of looking at the world. I found it as stimulating as another book I admire wholeheartedly:  Neil Postman's prescient  look at media,  Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Just as many of the ideas Postman presented in his 1985 book have come to pass  -- all too often unfortunately  --  so I'm hoping that White's The Barbaric Heart will provoke a major change in our way of thinking.

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