The Barbaric Heart

Look deep into what Curtis White calls "the Barbaric Heart" and you'll find yourself traveling, like some blood clot in a House episode, down the aisles of Wal-Mart and Costco, into the boardrooms of multinational corporations, along the streets of suburban sprawl, through alleyways of junkies and the homeless, to some dinner party where beautifully dressed people feel simultaneously empty and self-important. For English professor and social critic White, author of The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature, the Barbaric Heart is where we live today. We are slaves and masters (but mostly slaves) of the Market God of capitalism, a belief system that reduces all things-trees, animals, human creativity-to profit, where the only virtues are winning and accumulating.

At heart, The Barbaric Heart is a diatribe: grouchy, freewheeling, entertainingly laden with historical and cultural references, and sometimes quite funny. White argues that the Barbaric Heart is only one expression of being human and that the environmental crises we face today cannot be addressed strictly in economic terms. Turning to the arts and our spiritual traditions, we could instead live in a culture that prioritizes "thoughtfulness" and aesthetics rather than money and power and is "intent upon the beautiful as a social principle." By definition, a culture that values beauty would also value a healthy natural world.

According to White, it is not enough to tame or green the forces of capitalism. A Kyoto Protocol that bows to economic growth and development is just "whistling past the graveyard." The author is particularly scornful of environmentalists who adopt the language of economics, technology, and even good science to persuade the American public to stop treating nature as if it were one large convenience store. The Market God must be overturned.

Unfortunately, the author doesn't give many specifics as to how we can achieve this end. He suggests we begin with self-
reflection (questioning the assumptions of capitalism), read more poetry and philosophy, think seriously about our spiritual values and our relationship to Being (the joyous miracle of existence itself), engage personally in the creative arts, and work toward a public educational system that teaches our children a "deep literacy" as well as a deep ecology.

Like your favorite eccentric professor, White delivers some memorable lectures-on how today's capitalism has strayed from Adam Smith's original vision of a free market, for instance, and on the pantheism of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Like that same professor, White can also seem obtusely impractical (even a flawed Kyoto Protocol seems better than none), deliberately provocative, and only occasionally humble. Most of the ideas are not original. (News flash: capitalism has no moral center!) Yet in these days of economic downturn, as our leaders rush to save the banking and automotive industries and encourage consumers to spend more  and send the Dow ever upward, such an obvious caution still bears repeating.