Modern Studies

One day I decided to count how many times on my local NPR station I could hear the term "economic growth."  I quit counting at 50.  In all cases it was used as an unquestioned good, in some ways the good, the telos of modern Liberal society.  Economic growth is the idol of our time.  Nevertheless (or therefore) its mechanics, its requirements, and its consequences are rarely understood, nor are the difficulties from extracting ourselves from this planet-destroying pursuit.  Why?  There are all sorts of powerful interests at stake in addition to the immense momentum of our institutions.  But more profoundly, the Liberal social and political order is fundamentally growthist.

There are no carbon offsets for ranting and raving about conservative climate deniers.  The common view among mainstream liberals, visible also in the Green New Deal, is that we can unplug our current way of life from fossil fuels, plug it back into renewable energy, and be on our merry way (if only those damn conservatives weren't in the way).  This view, one that denies some basic thermodynamic challenges, ignores the deeper and further reaching changes required to keep carbon emissions from ballooning and the earth habitable for large-scale human civilization, and does so based on some simple, yet unshakable, myths about the way energy and the economy work.  Here I discuss six of these myths that limits the liberal imagination.

Wendell Berry has a discriminating intellect and his writing is based on sharp distinctions.  "Discrimination," in both senses of the word, have a strained relationship both with individual freedom and the ideal of community, though each in different ways.  This is a reflection on a paradox central to community-focused localism within a cosmopolitan society

In this review of David Fleming's _Surviving the Future_, I reflect on the difference between localism in North America and Britain.  Britain, has a "slack" pre-market society to consider as it remakes itself.  The history of white people in America has little history prior to the advent of the market economy, which developed in concert with the conquest of the "New World."

America was not infinite; it only seemed that way to early European explorers, conquerors, and settlers for whom the size of the known world had suddenly doubled and the quantity of effectively unclaimed resources increased by far more than that. This sudden immeasurable and unearned abundance, it is clear, authorized a new set of cultural practices that would not have been deemed appropriate by a people confronted by visible boundaries and limits. The stories we continue to tell ourselves about the discovery of America, its conquest and settling, the Enlightened awakening from an age of unreason are similar to those that helped develop and profoundly shaped a new way of thinking about the world whose main contours are still in place today. The remaining question is how deep beyond these specific practices and habits of consumption does the false image of the infinite run? Our way of life is clearly not sustainable; but what if our way of perceiving reality-our fundamental political, economic, even scientific categories-were also inalterably deformed by the false image of an infinite land? Is philosophical Liberalism compatible with a finite planet and a way of life designed to live on it? How fundamental are the changes we must make in order to recast the American way of life to fit on a finite, increasingly crowded, planet?

.  Liberal and progressive anti-war activists, I will suggest, engage in what I will refer to as the peace fallacy[iv]—the belief that peace is a result of people coming to their senses and demonstrating outrage at those who “preside over our wars,” or perhaps of adopting an attitudeof peacefulness from which action might flow.  Our relationship to our international aggression is far more complex than this.  War, I will suggest, has a significant function in American life and its ugliness reveals an ugliness that runs far deeper that Bacevich, who thinks of war as a “bad habit, recognizes.  Bad habits can be kicked.  War, unfortunately, is part of who we are and have become, and becoming unwarlike will require far-reaching changes.
I should be immediately clear that in saying this, I’m not speaking from the “other side” of the political divide, nor do I condone these wars in any way.  Rather, my insistence is that we understand the role that war plays in the American way of life.  To Bacevich and other liberals, I would say, the elimination of our wars and foreign interference will also eliminate other parts of our way of life that few seem ready even to question.

The context is the ecological requirements of having, buying, and using less.  Can one coherently imagine a society that has modernity's freedoms without its surplus?  Following Hegel and Marx, though without accepting their conclusions, I am suspicious that society can be "built" a la carte, but evolves in ways that contain a certain kind of consistency.  In this essay I argue why.

This is a follow up on The Closed World and the Infinite Universe.  Here I argue that freedom as we understand it makes sense only in open systems with no boundaries, for closed systems are saturated with a kind of cause and affect that violates the operating system of Liberal freedom

This is part three of a multi-part critique of Liberalism, focused on its impoverished vocabulary of limits.  In this installment, I discuss Liberalism's "Other," a post-Rousseau counter-tradition running from Rousseau, through Romanticism, Hegel and Marx, modernist literature, existentialism, and much of modern environmentalism.  Despite its compelling rejection of the instrumental values of the Enlightenment, it too fails to ground the truth of the self and, as I will argue in the next installment, offers no true alternative to Liberal growthism and consumption

Part II of my  exploration of an Aristotelian alternative to Liberalism.  Here I argue that "deep sustainability" requires a notion of "the good" that is inimical to Liberalism's official neutrality with regard to the good.  Despite its apparent connection with liberal politics, sustainability and the limits to growth requires an alternative to the liberal/conservative division of the political world

Not a call for political moderation  or some election-driven centrism, I'm exploring a kind of Aristotelian conservativism as an antidote to the triumph of Liberal effectiveness, most sickeningly represented by Donald Trump, but visible throughout our means-based society.  The basic argument is that the division of the political world into liberal/conservative is limiting.  Neither wing of Liberalism has the political or conceptual resources to address the limits to growth because, for some good reasons, it has relinquished a notion of the good and the ideal of excellence.  But the consequences are becoming deadly.  Liberalism, to put it another way, is thus an an anti-ecology.  Following Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle provides some interesting possibilities as we embark on this critique of effectiveness, Liberalism, and the ideal of limitlessness.

In January 2014 Permaculture co-founder, David Holmgren, wrote a controversial essay, entitled "Crash on Demand," that followed up on his notable "Future Scenarios."  There had been a vague sense among permaculturalists and other peak-oil watchers that peak oil and its economic consequences might save us from climate change.  By 2014, it was clear that this was not to be the case and Holmgren wrote a plea that the wealthy of the world purposely crash the economy in the way peak oil had failed to do.  This sort of bold call naturally created disagreements among those who usually agree.  At issue, I argue, is the problem of agency, a problem that is clarified by the difference between peak oil as a kind of narrative and climate intervention as a kind of narrative.  The former could side-step the issue out of a belief in a new kind of historical necessity, while the latter often maintains naive hopes about the tractable nature of ideological systems and material investments.

What exactly is the unconscious? Although this question has not been sufficiently addressed, the notion 0/ the unconscious is oflen used in philosophy, literary and cultural theory, and 0/course psychology, as ifit provided a relatively solid/oundation or basistor the stories we tell about our culture and ourselves. This article is part 0/a larger project in which I argue that 'the unconscious ' is not a basis tor our narratives 0/selfand culture, but is, itself, a narrative development-a way %rganizing, and thus creating, knowledge. In my discussion, here, 0/HegeI and Nietzsche, I concur with the supposition that something like the unconscious appeared in Nietzsche 's work (while being absent/rom Hegel 's),. but instead 0/maintaining that Nietzsche discovered this principle, I suggest that he invented it. More specijically, Nietzsche needed a narrative principle that would help /ree cultural values that he thought important/rom their 'entrapment' in the Hegelian dialectic. RESUME: Qu 'est au juste I 'inconscient? Malgre son indeterminite, la notion d 'inconscient est souvent utilisee en philosophie, dans la theorie culturelle et litteraire, et evidemment en psychologie, comme si elle pouvait servir de /ondement ala narration culturelle et personnelle. Cet article s 'insere dans un projet plus large qui cherche amontrer que "I 'inconscient" ne peux servir de/ondement aux narrations de soi et de la culture, mais qu 'il represente lui-meme un developpement narratifune /at;on d'organiser et, de ce /ait, de creer la connaissance. Dans la presente discussion sur Hegel et Nietzsche, je concede que I 'inconscient est apparu dans l'oeuvre de Nietzsche (alors qu 'elle est absente de l'oeuvre de Hege/); mais loin de I 'avoir decouvert, je pretend que Nietzsche I 'a invente. En effet, ce dernier devait recourir a un principe narratif qui libererait les valeurs culturelles qu 'il croyait importantes de leur emprisonnement dans la dialectique hegelienne. Throughout much ofthis century the unconscious has been seen as something real. This is true even in contemporary critical theory-the context out of which I write-which has little use for the concept or "reality" in its traditional form. I use a vague word like "real," because despite the