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| T.S. Eliot: a touch of poetry today |
But first a few words from Pope Francis in Laudato Si:
We can be witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration.
Let us mention, for example, those richly biodiverse lungs of our planet which are the Amazon and the Congo basins, or the great aquifers and glaciers. We know how important these are for the entire earth and for the future of humanity. The ecosystems of tropical forests possess an enormously complex biodiversity which is almost impossible to appreciate fully, yet when these forests are burned down or levelled for purposes of cultivation, within the space of a few years countless species are lost and the areas frequently become arid wastelands.
Many of the world’s coral reefs are already barren or in a state of constant decline. “Who turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of colour and life?”
Human beings too are creatures of this world, enjoying a right to life and happiness, and endowed with unique dignity.
And now for other important voices:
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality.
Fear, the inspiring principle of action in tyranny, is fundamentally connected to that anxiety which we experience in situations of complete loneliness. This anxiety reveals the other side of equality and corresponds to the joy of sharing the world with our equals.
[T]he enterprises produced by the individualistic energy of the European peoples presuppose physical actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved. It is the fact, however you gloze it over with phrases.
The critical economists Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg write: “This inextricable entanglement of economics with capitalism appears to be the best guarded secret of the profession. . . . The failure of mainstream economics to recognize the insistent presence of this underlying social order, with its class structure, its socially determined imperatives, its technologies and organizations, and its privileges and rights, derives from its preconceptual basis in a natural rather than a social construal of economic society.” And later: “[The] universal grammar [of modern economics] does not communicate a message of any economic interest or significance, unless it applies to a society that possesses the institutional and cultural elements of capitalism: indeed, the very meaning of ‘economic’ would be unintelligible outside capitalism.” Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On the other side of the debate we have a diverse group of economic optimists consisting mainly of neoclassical economists, economic historians, and agricultural economists. (At some point during the last two centuries, economics transformed itself from the “dismal science” of Malthus and Ricardo to a doctrine of hope and optimism for humanity.)
Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity.
Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the Trump revolution, made clear that one of his central goals was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded?
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