Discuss: The Ecology of Work

Re: Part 1 -
Talk about bowing down to false idols. This is an exercise in pointless finger-pointing, apparently just to sound like an informed skeptic for the thrill of it, or maybe to undermine whatever momentum we have for rescuing our Planet. I have no knowledge of Curtis White or Orion magazine, but if they are concerned for our collective future, this essay is an act of self-destruction.

We DO have powerful corporate villains partly to thank for the sorry state of the natural world, along with the personal responsibility of every individual. And the word “ecosystem” IS a vital concept for understanding the interconnectedness of living systems and organisms, and does not in any way preclude “respect for life” or “reverence for creation,” which are not trademarked by the Catholic church at all. White’s scolding arguments seem to appeal to the the kind of self-guilt the Catholic (and many other) churches specialize in. Environmental science does not criticize more spiritual notions of nature at all, but reinforces them with earthly evidence of the miracle of Life on Earth. Who is this guy talking about?

On the first point, that powerful corporate villains are partly to thank for the sorry state of the natural world, I would like to know, just for example, who is orchestrating the campaign to keep deca PBDEs in production and on the market. Of course we have the lobbyists and the “industry reps” but behind them has to be actual individuals with names and faces, who own the industry, or the investment group that owns the industry, and hand down their wishes through boards and CEOs, who hire PR firms who hire lobbyists who then say they represent “the industry.” I’d like to pull back the curtain and see exactly who is shaping the campaign in favor of PBDEs and trying to shape the consciousness of the public to accept them. I think we need a public conversation with these individuals. They have a big influence on our lives and our future. I want names, faces, bios and contact information.

Who set up the think tanks and endowed positions that spew out the pundits that are nothing but loyal team players who have no standards of truth to fall back on, but only allegiance to the captain and to making the scores and claiming moral superiority over the other team? Who does Rupert Murdoch, for instance, have dinner with, meet at the club, go hunting with? The campaign to declare that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by corrupt scientists and greedy environmentalists was not just spontaneously concocted by Sean, Rush and Glenn Beck, to name a few. These hired guns were carefully taught to tell such preposterous lies by….who? These lies are immensely damaging to the consensus we all desperately need if we are to change our lifestyles rapidly, and for the major industries to take seriously the increasingly obvious threats of global warming, or we will indeed cook in our own exhaust fumes. It’s as if we’re all on a train that is headed over a cliff, and some of us see the danger, but we can’t get the engineer to stop or turn, because the crowd in the club car are laughing at us and calling us kooks, in an orchestrated, coordinated fashion, like a trained choir. Who trained them?

I agree with White about the fallacy and timidness of carbon credits and the inadequacy of the Kyoto protocols, but those were designed mainly by the same corporate villains, or by politicians to avoid the wrath of those corporate villains, and not by any broad-based, well-informed constituency, because such a thing still doesn’t exist, although the IPCC papers are helping bring people into reality.

White says: “It is true that there are CEO-types, few in number, who are indifferent to everything except money, who are cruel and greedy.” While they may be few, the hierarchical authority structures in multi-national corporations only require a few at the top, who are not just CEOs but actual owners of controlling shares, who control the boards that control the CEOs, to pass down policies and directives that are then repeated with gusto and personal investment by every underling down the line, including billionaire CEOs, to please their bosses, obscuring the original source of the order. This is a job for sociologists and investigative journalists, but to say that: “Besides, corporations are really powerless to be anything other than what they are.” is meaningless apology and obfuscation of these corporate villains.

Believing in powerful corporate evildoers as the primary source of our problems does not force us to think in cartoons, if we are balanced enough to also see that each of us also carries personal responsibility to live better and make the world a better place. Rather, focusing on corporate evildoers prompts us to perform the investigative, empirical work to to ferret out the actual lines of authority, not just the formal corporate flow charts that lead to the nominal CEOs, but the real, effectual lines of influence that lead to the small clusters of actual, behind the scenes, obscenely wealthy puppeteers who put people like Cheney and Bush in power, build media empires to manipulate the masses to keep them in power, and whose only true allegiance is to that ages-old and universal value of amassing personal wealth, which means power, albeit mostly illusory power. These are not “corporate entities,” but at the top are just plain human beings, with names and faces, and grandkids, who need to be brought into the light of day and talked to about the future we all face.

White says: “But many babies went out with the bath water of Christian dogma and superstition. One of those was morality.” Wrong again. It doesn’t take a prescribed, imposed, decreed-by-God-code of ethics for people to care about their families, respect their fellow citizens or villagers, understand the miraculous web of life and our dependency on it, and generally behave responsibly. The belief that morality depends on Christian (or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim) dogma is an “idol of the tribe” toward which White has no critical perspective.

I suppose if the shoe fits, wear it, and I know many people put all their faith in rigid, materialistic, positivist science and miss the joy, wonder and miracle of Life on Earth, so maybe this essay is trying to correct that imbalance. But science is the study of the natural world, not an obsession with fleeting wealth or delusional divine guidance. The scolding tone, the complete exoneration of corporate deciders, and the reliance on Christianity as the only true answer, provide no helpful guidance at all. If anyone takes this essay seriously, they will become paralyzed with guilt and inferiority and afraid to point out that, really, the train we’re on is heading straight for the cliff.

I agree with: “Even when we are trying to aid the environment, we are not willing as individuals to leave the system that we know in our heart of hearts is the cause of our problems. We are even further from knowing how to take the collective risk of leaving this system entirely and ordering our societies differently. We are not ready. Not yet, at least.” OK, that’s our problem, but White is steering us toward obedience to corporate and religious masters that in fact, are the foundations of the system that is the cause of our problems.

Is this essay masquerading as pro-environmental?

Whether you are one of the critics or one of the cheerleaders for Mr. White’s essay, we must admit that it is a necessary discussion.  Wendell Berry addresses these issues in a very practical sense, and what is needed is both the slowing down of our lives along with the renewed caretaking of our local places.  We can, and once did, operate this way under our capitalist system, but industrial advancements and the huge scale that it introduced allowed us to escape from the limits of our locality and thus from the responsibility for it.  As many issues converge such as global warming and peak oil, we may be seeing the end of the industrial age, which will force us to focus back upon our localities.  What I fear is that we may have destroyed so many of the natural systems that once were our sole support. This, coupled with our now greatly bloated population, could lead to massive starvation, disease, and conflict.  The sooner we begin to discuss it and take those first steps toward a return to local responsibility and economies, the easier the transition ultimately will be.

Maybe I’m just feeling charitable, but I find no “diatribes against capitalism” in White’s two essays. Certainly they could be read that way, but I wouldn’t attribute to them the reactive angst I’ve read in some of the posts to date. Yes, he takes on capitalism, but he also takes on pretty much every social, cultural, and economic institution of the last 400 years - including my personal favorite, Christianity.

Ironically, he reaches the same conclusion about this world that Martin Luther reached about his nearly 500 years ago. We are all “mired in sin,” trapped in a system not of our making but nonetheless kept alive by our every thought, word, and deed. Luther’s solution was two-fold: repentance (of the deep, fear-and-trembling variety) and gratitude (of the deep awe-and-wonder variety).

The thing that disturbs me is that everyone so far seems to have missed his intended conclusion. The route to “saving” ourselves, our communities, and our planet lies in connecting to our own individual vocations: the places in each of us where our deepest passions meet the world’s deepest needs. It’s an interior re-orientation he’s arguing for, not a systemic dismemberment of our current socio/cultural/economic milieu.

Luther’s your buddy on this one, Curits.

Dear Curtis White,

Without any doubt you are expressing with unparalleled lucidity and coherence of mind the nature of the distinctly human-derived predicament posed to humanity in these early years of Century XXI.

Sincerely,

Steve

(Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D.,M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
1834 North Lakeshore Drive
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-6733
USA
Tele: 919-967-5764)

Has Mr. White heard of the Earth Charter?  It seems to me to be the kind of ethical/religious statement that he is calling for, combining concern for ecological integrity, social and economic justice, nonviolence, democracy, and peace.

Practical Transitional Step #1:  Stop doing work that contributes to the erosion of authentic community, culture, quality, integrity, and compassion.

Practical Transitional Step #2: Start doing work that conserves or rebuilds community, culture, quality, integrity and compassion.

While I typically eschew glib quotations, this one is succinct and apt in avoiding the “big” solutions that mire politicians, enviros, and nearly everything else: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Curtis White is right in pointing out that any substantial change in the current (very) bad situation is going to take a spiritual awakening in the hearts of men and women. This means seeking out your own Practical Transitional Steps.  That’s one problem with our culture of avoiding responsibility: we want someone else to tell us what we need to do.  I’m afraid it won’t be that simple.

This is a most insightful article. As an ecopsychologist specializing in career counseling, I find that indeed a second option is in order. We can start providing for a different world of work right now if we are willing to personally take the risk to step out of the false security of the “job world” and create meaningful employment for ourselves in independent careers that serve individuals and small enterprises that serve our communities as well as commit to supporting other self-employed individuals and small local enterprises. It’s really not that complicated, just not the current norm. Yet this is the very “dream” of two out of three individuals in the US at sometime in their lives.

The ‘C’ Word

I have one basic question for you Mr. White, What is capitalism?

In my way of understanding what makes up a human society there are three basic components: consciousness, how we think about ourselves, others, the world and the relations between all of them; power, how we govern our own and other people’s behaviors for the common good; and economics, how we exchange goods with other people to get what we need.

In your article you refer to ‘capitalism’ but I can’t figure out what you really mean by the term except as a generic reference to all the bad things in the world today. We can’t stop exchanging with others to get what we need but you explicitly suggest that ‘capitalism’ is an all pervasive idea that must be eliminated without offering an alternative.

As best I can tell in the absence of a more concrete definition of what you mean by capitalism, it sounds like you are saying that “the humans among us” are the only ones who are really going to accomplish anything, and not by boycotting corporations or by being concerned scientists, but by living in some mysterious way that does not involve any of the bad things that capitalism does.

I wholeheartedly agree with most of your judgments about the bad things in the world today, but I believe the moral obligation of social criticism is to offer people more than a very long litany of complaints about the state of the world and just a scant few suggestions.

I appreciate your thoughtful reflections on how we play out the organizing principles of our society in modern work, but please help me with discerning more specifically capitalists forms of exchange from other forms.