[T]he gap between infinite human desires and finite biological resources is at root a moral problem—How and where shall we place a controlling power on human will and appetite?—not something that can be bridged by merely technical or material measures. Hence the solution must be spiritual or religious lest it be nakedly political.
Many will balk at this bald statement, believing along with the Enlightenment philosophes that religion has no place in the political realm. But in fact we do have a guiding myth of eternal progress through technological prowess and a tacit religion in the form of a secular ideology tantamount to a religion—namely, an absolute faith in the efficacy of instrumental rationality. The problem is that this “faith” lacks a moral core—in other words, anything that would moderate human self-seeking or the insatiable quest for more wealth and power. Its credo is that humankind must use rational means to become the master and possessor of nature and then use that power to achieve personal and national wealth. The overly rationalized and morally unrestrained world in which we find ourselves was created by this quasi-religion and cannot be reformed with more of the same, only by metanoia. That is, by a conversion to a radically different metaphysical stance that restores humanity’s relation to the infinite and provides guidance and practical support for living well on the earth without devouring it.
My initial reaction to reading this? To yell "Amen! Amen! Amen!" We can't heal our political divisions until we have a sense of the common good, a morality, a new sense of being in the world. Truly, a "metanoia," a "conversion"--a change in our heart-mind-- is required if we are to survive, let along thrive.
Morris Berman and Stephen E. Toulmin chronicle the development of the modern mindset: Berman sees revived participation as the necessary response to the disenchantment of the world; Toulmin’s revisionist history suggests that we would have done better to ground modern science on Montaigne rather than Descartes, for this would have lead us earlier to an ecological worldview.
Where Western Civ too a wrong turn.
Although it was rarely clearly articulated or even fully realized by the contrarian artists and intellectuals themselves, the liberal values of modernity were deemed unacceptable because they lacked a strong vision of the transcendent—a form of ultimate meaning that is more important than the needs of the individual self.
Compare to the first Ophuls quote above.
Physical energy is the obvious source of power in biological organisms and human economies, but consciousness, and the agreements that constitute human culture, are not physical or material. While the domain of culture is closely connected to physical things and transactions in the exterior objective world, like consciousness itself, culture is largely an interior phenomenon which can only be fully known by participating in the subjective agreements that give it life.
Also compare to the first Ophuls quote. Our culture needs a metanoia.
If a “community of rational interests and values” existed on the domestic front, then why not in the international community as well?
Because, [Hans] Morgenthau answered, there was no such thing as an international community. Domestic disputes could be resolved—not solved—through discussion and negotiations, or when negotiation failed, by appeals to the sovereignty of the state and the authority of the law. In the relatively benign context of the Western democracies, even those who disagreed with particular outcomes were willing to accept them so that they could live to dispute another day. Only small, knuckle-dragging minorities resorted to violence, and they were vastly outnumbered by the overwhelming law-abiding majority. Consensus was possible because within national borders people agreed to disagree. This was the very meaning of “legitimacy.” “Disputants could not fail to realize that what they had in common was more important than what they were fighting about. They met, indeed, on the common ground of liberal rationality, and their conflicts, since they arose under the conditions and within the framework of the liberal society, could all be settled through the instrumentalities of liberal rationality.”
Query: per this re-statement of Morgenthau's contention, can we say that current American politics, government, and law have lost their legitimacy--at least among Trumpists who are more than ready to overthrow democracy to remain in power?
The experience [of losing a great deal of money in the stock market] left a deep impression on Keynes. Financial markets, he had discovered, were very different from the clean, ordered entities economists presented in textbooks. The fluctuations of market prices did not express the accumulated wisdom of rational actors pursuing their own self-interest but the judgments of flawed men attempting to navigate an uncertain future. Market stability depended not so much on supply and demand finding an equilibrium as it did on political power maintaining order, legitimacy, and confidence.
My conclusion: all economics (or at least macroeconomics) is political economics. "The economy" (a major league abstraction) is a function of groups, individuals, mores, interests, beliefs, culture, institutions, etc., and not a neat system of intersecting curves.
Europe, it appears, offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe, and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and other spheres.
It comes back, then, to the question of the self-image. Miseries, humiliations, embarrassments, accidents, have the effect of creating partial self-images—self-images which, since they present themselves as complete, are bound to be false. Consciousness narrows, and my self-image becomes as false and distorted as if I was seeing myself in a trick mirror at a fairground. But a trick mirror at least shows you your whole self, from head to foot; the partial self-image is a pocket-size distorting mirror.
I propose that Michael Pollan’s seven words for healthy eating ["Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"] can be re-stipulated into these six words: 1) protect the liver, 2) feed the gut. This includes animals.
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