In his latest book, The Barbaric Heart, Curtis White argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by capitalist or technological achievements that have landed us in this predicament - but rather that our desire for aesthetic and spiritual beauty will be our guiding solutions.

A novelist, essayist, and professor of English at Illinois State University, he has written several widely acclaimed books, including The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves.  Curtis kindly took the time to answer some questions about The Barbaric Heart, and explain what can be done to reshape  and improve our approach to protecting the planet and ourselves.

Danny Jensen: What inspired you to explore the concept of The Barbaric Heart?

Curtis White: I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for no reason better than that I’d never read it. I started thinking about the concept of the barbaric as I read. What I saw was that Roman virtue, Romanitas, was not all that different from the virtues of the barbarians: they were both willing to profit from violence, and they both thought that the only virtue was triumph. Winning. What we don’t quite understand is how faithful our culture has been to this idea of virtue over the last two thousand years. Virtue as violence with a skill set is still the leading source of national pride in our military, in our business leaders, in our athletes, and in our action movie heroes who must fight through legions of enemies. Bruce Willis in Die Hard is a virtuous man from our point of view. This point of view is not just capitalism’s, it saturates the culture.

DJ: What do environmentalists need to understand about the Barbaric Heart that’s been missing all this time?

CW: I think I’ve discovered a truly new way of thinking about the causes of the destruction of the natural world. We tend to think that it has something to do with sin (Wall Street greed), or human nature (aggression), or evil-doers (CEOs). I think it has more to do with this ancient (if not primeval) tendency in Western culture to admire survival through violence. It is the warrior ethic. Our behemoth earth moving devices may be the means of tearing down mountains in West Virginia, but we can’t stop admiring the massive strength and ingenuity of the machines. We’ll even give our children toy versions of the machine. Same thing with fighter jets, as every “air show” demonstrates. This insight has profound consequences for how environmentalism should think about its relationship to science and technology and to the idea that it is possible to green capitalism.

DJ: What do you find problematic about the environmental movement as a whole?

CW: I find mainstream environmentalism’s dependence on science as its primary voice unfortunate. The first environmentalists were Romantic poets and artists like Blake and Richard Wagner. From a scientific point of view, they were simply irrational. I think we need to restore the thought of religion, philosophy and art to the center of the movement. They are capable of much broader critiques than science is. They are not content with technological or economic fixes that basically leave in place the barbaric mentality that caused our problems in the first place. They broaden the question of the destruction of nature into the question of the dehumanization of the world, especially in relation to work. But if we did that we would find ourselves in a fundamental confrontation with the state and capitalism (or the alliance of the two in what John Kenneth Galbraith called the techno-structure). On the whole, the major environmental organizations are not interested in that fundamental confrontation.

DJ: How do you propose we shift the way in which the Barbaric Heart seeks to thrive towards a new and, as you suggest, “thoughtful” path?

CW: Well, start with allowing the thought of the arts, philosophy and religion to play an equal role with science. The last two popes have understood the relationship between capitalism, the dehumanization of work, and the destruction of the earth. Where is our openness to the Catholic Church? Science’s centuries old hostility to the Church prohibits this. But I see the Pope as a potential ally. We also need to stop making art a kind of decoration surrounding the truly important work of science, technology, city planners, and politicians.

DJ: How can we develop a capitalistic culture that values beauty over self-serving violence and profit?

CW: I make an important distinction in the book. Market economies and capitalism are not the same thing. There were market economies before there was capitalism. Capitalism is a hierarchical order of power that has assumed the function of markets while really only being interested in impoverishing others for the sake of their own privilege and wealth. They know this but, as the Straussian neo-cons have shown, they’re really very proud of themselves for this organization of violence. They think of their astonishing and complex world of orderly violence as virtuous. They see virtue in triumph, never mind the bodies. Ask Karl Rove how this works. So, we can’t change capitalism but we can reclaim human markets.

DJ: What is problematic about being seduced by the economic and scientific appeals of efficiency, sustainability, and prosperity?

CW: Even environmentalists see the reigning economic order as a good thing. It needs correction, they say, or “greening”. We need to reason with corporations. I think only groups like Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network have always understood that the only way to deal with the corporate world is as a finally irrational antagonist. (I’ll leave the Earth Firsters out of this for the moment.) We imagine that we all prosper from the rule of technocrats. We don’t. The environmental movement would sound very different if it were articulated from the perspective of poverty. But I read the magazines of the major environmental groups, like Audubon, and I see the same propaganda from carmakers and big oil, and the same advertisements for luxury goods, presented on the same glossy paper stock as I see in the pages of The Economist. It’s hard to see a difference in their audiences.

DJ: How has the Barbaric Heart of corporations made us strangers in our own land?

CW: Well, not strangers so much as alienated human beings, as Marx would have put it. The countryside is a big factory and getting more industrial with each wind turbine that is installed. And we’re supposed to be all for wind power? At what cost? We live in a world of franchises where every town has come to look like the same town with the same eateries, Best Buys, supermarket chains, Wal-Mart, etc. That is a crime not only against nature (in sprawl, profligate energy use, etc.), but against human beings as well. It is a desecration of the human world. For me, we don’t need environmentalism, we need a Party of Life that recognizes the violence against humans as well as the violence against nature. If we understand the common origins of these two forms of violence, we find ourselves in a confrontation with the moral sentiments of the entire culture, capitalism on top. The political state itself as well. That’s why I think that the Barbaric Heart is broader than capitalism. Because even capitalism’s enemies indulge in it.

DJ: What can we do individually and collectively to make ourselves more at home?

CW: Some folks are already doing a lot. The locavore movement seeks to restore a local market economy. It does this, rather wonderfully, not by confronting capitalism but by ignoring it. As best it can. See the work of Michael Ableman on “beyond organic”. Any city planning that emphasizes walking over cars is doing important work. See the work of James Howard Kunstler on suburbs and urban space. Any effort that seeks to reclaim time from work in the name of a fuller human world. See John de Graaf’s Take Back Your Time organization. You know, workers of the world…relax!

DJ: How does the pursuit of art and beauty better serve our goals and vision of a healthier planet?

CW: I’m just saying that if we are seeking a way to change what we used to call technocracy (the rule of the managerial class in government and in business) through technology and “the best” science alone, we’re doomed. I go into why this is so in the book in some detail. So, let us work toward something science is ill disposed to do: creating a common language of Care. Science can tell you that the polar bear is endangered, but it can’t tell you why you should care. That has always been the work of spirit, thought, and art. Our culture is already impoverished on all three of those fronts, why should environmentalism not work against that as well? But it doesn’t seem as if it’s going to. At best, it believes that that work is for somebody else.

DJ: What organizations or daily activities do you recommend that will help us create a world that values thoughtfulness and beauty?

CW: As I mentioned above, the locavore communities, the Beyond Organic movement, activists seeking to make cities in human proportions through walking and biking, Take Back Your Time, all good things. All things that go beyond the hopeless task of greening people who think they’re warriors. As for art and beauty, the major environmental groups—like government and business—are large, rather inaccessible bureaucracies. How do you tell them that they ought to take the traditions of art and philosophy more seriously and not always lead with data? My protest was to write this book. Orion Magazine, for one, always seeks to foreground the arts and humanities, so I’ve got some allies. On the other hand, the review of my book in the NRDC’s On Earth was dismissive. They referred to me as someone’s “favorite eccentric professor.” Now, I have been a member of the Natural Resources (gag) Defense Council for decades, so I recognize the practical necessity of their work. But come on, if you think of the world of nature as natural resources, whose values do you share ultimately? Not a poet’s.