Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
agriculture to flourish. Today we rightfully celebrate its achievements: the rights and freedoms of the individual; the efficiencies of industrial production; the cornucopia of wealth; the endless succession of technological miracles; and the massively expanded perspective of science and the reliability of its inferences.
However, America’s founders could have had no inkling of how their ideas might translate in a twenty-first-century world. They wrote almost a century before Darwin and Marx and without the revolutionary insights of Freud and Einstein. We now know that neither human beings nor the universe operates like clockwork, and we are also painfully aware of the failings of eighteenth-century clockwork thinking as a basis for politics and society: most particularly, we’ve witnessed the depersonalization of mass bureaucratic societies and the failures of electoral and market mechanisms to ensure the good of the whole. We see that when individuals are encouraged to give up the search for wisdom, the blind outcome of collective selfishness damages and degrades the natural world while exploiting the weakest and most vulnerable. Without a truth-loving culture, no electoral mechanism can protect us from demagogues who manipulate fear and ignorance in their pursuit of power. The miracle of an ever more productive consumer economy — Adam Smith’s promised “wealth of nations” — now confronts us with a double bind: we face an immediate political crisis whenever the economy fails to keep growing, and we face the ultimate environmental catastrophe if the economy continues to keep growing. All the while, wealth is inexorably concentrated in the hands of the few, who then use part of it to perpetuate the status quo by propagating an ideology of self-interest.
Here we have to face squarely the most damaging and least understood consequence of the Liberal paradigm: the definitive elimination of a culture based on the love of wisdom — the truth quest. In the absence of the quest, which is both an individual and a collective effort, the culture fragments and society lurches between a cynical, pragmatic materialism and a closed-minded fundamentalism. People lose faith in each other and cling tightly to their own beliefs. Today, the majority of Americans regard politicians as morally equivalent to prostitutes, while many hold rigid ideological and religious beliefs in which bizarre individual interpretations are taken as divine certainties.52
It is demoralizing and ironic that one result of the Cartesian-based revolution of Liberalism in the United States is the persistence of scientific illiteracy. Today, a significant portion of the electorate defiantly embraces a simple-minded medievalism: one in five Americans believes the sun revolves around the earth, and almost one in two dispute biological evolution, believing instead that God created human beings in their present form within the past ten thousand years.53 In March 2009, an elected representative, Congressman John Shimkus from Illinois, a Lutheran who believes in the literal truth of the Bible, testified before a House Energy Subcommittee on Energy and Environment by quoting the book of Genesis (chapter 8, verse 22) to reassure the committee that humanity need not worry about global warming because of God’s promise to Noah after the flood. He added, “I believe that [the Bible] is the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation.…The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over.”54 Soon after this pronouncement, Shimkus made a credible bid to become chair of the House Energy Subcommittee dealing with global warming.
Even at the highest levels of government, dogma eclipses wisdom. Reality becomes what it is convenient to believe. Our political culture is losing its grip on the most elementary criteria for knowledge of what is real. Since industrial capitalism is more immense than ever — global, interlocked, and increasingly impersonal — the idea of radical change seems hopelessly quixotic. What to do?
We Are Each Responsible for the Good of the Whole
This brings us to another wonderful irony. At the inception of free-market capitalism, Adam Smith assumed that all participants in a transaction would need “relevant knowledge,” which suggests the more radical path not taken: invert the understanding that currently rules. Take Smith’s condition seriously. Recognize that ultimately markets will only serve justice and the common good to the degree that those involved pursue justice and the common good in their thinking and in their daily decisions. Instead of wishfully assuming, against all the evidence, that selfishness will be automatically converted by the market into the good of the whole, we need to address the heart of the matter — the values, awareness, and motivation of the human individual. Each of us needs to balance selfishness with an openness to others and a concern for the good of the whole, and we need to do this in our various roles and through the various institutions we participate in.
This pursuit of wisdom cannot be simply legislated and bureaucratically enforced. Government — like every other human-created, human-led institution — has a role and an influence in proportion to its power, but ultimately no external regulation will provide the good society we seek. Instead, at the center of such a revolution in political culture and consciousness must be the moral, intellectual, and spiritual regeneration of the individual — what Plato called a periagoge — a turning around of the soul toward a love of truth, beauty, and the good.
The rest of this book will examine what this “turning around” looks like and how it could be accomplished, in theory and practice, but it’s worth noting here that we can already see it taking place in a variety of arenas in civil society, the economy, and government. The formula is simple: start with where you are and with what you have. For example, one brief, paradigmatic story illuminates in general terms what is at the heart of our problem and the way forward. In 1996, Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, one of the largest office carpet manufacturing corporations in the world, became Forbes magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. Anderson’s recognition came after a revolutionary two-year process of transformation in his soul, and the ethos of his company, that produced a model of ethical behavior and business more aligned with the truth quest.
The story starts with Interface setting up an environmental task force in response to consumer pressure. The task force approached Anderson as the CEO to give an inspirational kick-off speech presenting an “environmental vision” for the company. With a shock, Anderson realized he had no environmental vision. He had never given a thought to what the company was taking from or doing to the earth in the making of its products. Desperate for inspiration, he read a book that had propitiously landed on his desk, Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce. In an interview, he described the moment when he came to a particular phrase that suddenly confronted him with the enormity of the industrial devastation of the earth: “the death of birth,” E. O. Wilson’s term for species extinction. Anderson said, “It was a point of a spear into my chest…and as I read on the spear went deeper, and it became an epiphanal experience, a total change of mind-set for myself and a change of paradigm… for the company.”
As he investigated his company’s processes, Anderson was shocked to discover that, for every ton of finished product, his company was responsible for thirty tons of waste. It was, he realized, the “way of the plunderer… plundering something that is not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth.” He then faced squarely the political dimension of the issue and realized that “the day must come when this is illegal, when plundering is not allowed…[and] people like me will end up in jail.” Anderson translated his periagoge into action and institutional change. He decided that if Interface couldn’t produce carpets more sustainably, then maybe it shouldn’t be producing them at all. He instituted “Mission Zero” for the company — a model program for recycling and eliminating negative impacts on the environment. In 2007, he was named as one of Time magazine’s Heroes of the Environment. By 2009, Interface was about halfway to its goal.55 Implicit in what Anderson called his “mid-course correction” was the moral revolution of giving priority to the truth quest, inverting the market principle and making a concern for the good of the whole a condition of pursuing profit.
This sort of turning around of the soul can be seen in a variety of citizen groups now pushing for greater corporate responsibility. There is a related consumer movement advocating “socially responsible investing” and