Norman Wirzba on love, disenchantment, consumerism, and blueprints
From The Essential Agrarian Reader:
The modern image of the knower and ethical agent as one who constructs a blueprint of how the world ought to be, and then remakes the world according to his or her own design, simply misunderstands and forfeits a philosophical life. This is life without wisdom, guilty of a basic impropriety that confuses wisdom with the possession of a body of knowledge. Wisdom, more properly conceived, has to do with the patience, courage, and strength we need to remain true to our situation and condition as we work our way thorugh it. Put in most simple terms, wisdom is the capacity to remain faithful and true to reality as we encounter it, wihtout falsifying, evading, or destroying it. [italics added]
As has already been suggested, one of the hallmarks of the modern and postmodern worlds that makes the acquisition of such wisdom difficult is our growing disillusionment and disenchantment with the world. Fueled by otherworldly [his critique here is of ‘otherworldly religion’ that trashes the planet in preparation for leaping off into a harp chorus] attachments or by anxiety, boredom, and disaffection in the face of a valueless universe, we find fewer instances in which people deeply or responsibly love their bodies, their homes, or their habitats. We see this in the growing trend of self-mutilation practices among young adults and in the ashamed desire to make our bodies something different (hopefully more sexually appealing) than what they naturally are. We see it also in the inability of most people to care for and maintain their living spaces (for these tasks we hire professional cleaners, fixers, builders, and sanitation experts) and their communities (for these we hire childcare workers, therapists, and nursing home providers). What is lacking is the sense of the abiding connection between ourselves and our worlds; because of this disconnection we cannot exercise the virtues of love (such as attention, patience, affection, resilience) that would enable us to be the caretakers of the world and ourselves that we should be.
Our love, in other words, has become abstract, cut off from a deep (and practical) immersion in and commitment to place and community. What we fail to see, oftentimes, is how a ubiquitous consumer mentality directly contributes to this abstraction. Consumerism does not refer simply to the purchasing of many (often unnecessary) things. It is, rather, an approach to reality that fundamentally alters the ways we engage and relate to the world around us. As consumers our attention is focused primarily on obtaining or anticipating (since the future is the primary temporal mode) for ourselves the commodities that will satisfy desires manufactured and induced by the market. Our engagement with an external world, now increasingly characterized in terms of commodity exchange, has less to do with reality itself than with marketable images that determine production and spending. Our perception and reception of the world are thus made oblique. We do not encounter reality on its terms, but in terms of the much narrower orbit of of market concerns. A consumer mentality, in other words, contributes to our overall ignorance about the truth of reality, just as it works against a life of wisdom, because we now relate to the world ephemerally as the scanners and purchasers of it.
This way of speaking will sound strange only until we consider the fact that in our time, when we claim to “know” more about the world than ever before, we are also responsible for its most widespread and systemic exhaustion and destruction. Our much trumpeted knowledge has not led to a sympathetic or affectionate understanding that would induce us to take care of the world, because our knowledge is the sort that is content with knowing about rather than knowing from within, from the perspectives of intimacy and practical engagement, the character of our world. Our knowledge has become increasingly economic and simplistic, reducing things to their exchange value, and thus abstract, much like our love. It has become improper [without propriety -SG] and without art, oblivious to whether or not our understanding results in a greater “fittedness” with the wider world.
We can see how a consumer society and mentality contributes to abstraction if we compare it to the disciplines of production as they have been practiced in many traditional and indigenous cultures. To be a producer, an artisan for example, is to submit oneself to a socially/culturally defined discipline or craft that requires extensive training and patience. One must learn the art of design, which means that one must gain a sense for the deep reality of things, have a qualitative grasp of things as they naturally are. To know the nature of things means that one grasps their essential and manifold characteristics as they connect with the world of which they are a part. Building on Aristotle’s famous account of how knowledge is achieved, we can say that someone who genuinely knows will be able to answer the following questions: What type of material will make the product good? What are a material’s (and habitat’s and community’s) limiting conditions? What methods of production will yield the best (and the most sustianable and safe) results? To what end or purpose should the products be made, and how well does this goal fit with broader social and ecological ends? What form or design will best promote quality, durability, beauty, functionality, i.e., excellence? To answer these questions is to enter practically into a complex, moral dimension that takes seriously the places we are in and the character of our dwelling within these places. They demand the sort of democratic and public conversation that has all but disappeared in our time. None of these questions can be adequately or truthfully answered without patient, detailed attention to place, or without sustained commitment to place and community. True knowledge and understanding grow out of our productive engagement with the world, the engagement serving as the corrective and guide to our fanciful and flight-prone ways.
The contrast between a producer and consumer is thus fundamental. Insofar as we are primarily consumers of the world (engaging reality in terms of our desires and wishes), we limit and distort our knowledge of it, and thus our ability to care for it properly. But as we take up productive roles, become active participants in the construction and maintenance of the flows of life — as when we grow food, become intentional about parenting, celebrate communal contributions, and develop a sense of civic responsibility — the claims and benefits of place will become more richly felt and appreciated. This is not to say that we will cease to be consumers or that we will all suddenly become good. Rather, we will become responsible consumers who now more honestly appreciate the costs and requirements associated with living.
The difference becomes clear if we consider the example of food. To grow food requires that one become knowledgeable about biological and chemical processes, that one be attentive to topography and weather, that one be mindful of the particularities and peculiarities of place, plant, and community. Success is thus directly tied to our ability to get our egos out of the way and fit in and work with natural processes going on around us. To eat the food one has grown is thus to become aware of the gifts and limits of place — we cannot master growth, only gratefully assist and receive it as it comes — and the costliness of those gifts, since the processes of life are always intertwined with the processes of death. If we are merely the consumers of food, we will fail to appreciate these costs, and thus more likely take for granted or abuse the natural contexts that make food production possible. But, actively involved in food production, we will come to see our own lives enveloped in a much larger drama that is life-giving but also vulnerable to exhaustion and destruction. The responsible, sacramental sense that we must care for this natural drama, see that it is maintained and not destroyed or compromised, will be a natural outgrowth of our sustained engagement with it.
What this means for the moral life is that the matter of first, and perhaps greatest, importance is that we not think of ethics as primarily constructing blueprints for action, particularly if these blueprints are drawn up by a disembodied or disenchanted mind.
Miraculix:
In a word, YES.
The only thing I would not hesitate to add is that though consumer “-ism” (I have always had a strong distaste for -ism constructions and the required abstraction level at the core, used to obfuscate and power right on past all manner of moral and ethical obstacles by way of advancing a “cause”) may lead the human animal, the human animal also contributes to the larger dilemma: by being less than thoughtful, considerate and aware. I suspect this has always been the case down through history. The rise of the modern industrial system merely took advantage of this reality, exacerbating the causal factors and pushing the human side of the phenom to previously impossible levels via the ever more pervasive communication technologies that rule the echo chamber with velvet glove and iron fist.
Interestingly, the food aspect lies at the heart of the mess. What we would think of as “dirt poor” individuals of past millenia, noble savages and/or neanderthal cave dwellers, subsisted on whatever they could coax from the ground, the forest, sea or sky. Ironically, they often enjoyed better nutrition than the vast majority of western “civilization”, with its denatured and dead foodstuffs clogging up human innards and as a direct result human intellect.
This is not a reality, however, that almost the entire modern world wishes to acknowledge, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting such an idea. From the most famous of the traditional diets, like that of the Hunza, to the cannibals of Indonesia, each and every solution was intensely local. But I will wager a €urobuck that even the Hunza tribes had their disaffected and less thoughtful individuals; especially those who disdained the traditional diet or refused to partake of all that their body required for good health and the regenerative abilities (healing) that remain the most amazing part of the human corpus, above and beyond even the realm of the conscious mind.
So, where exactly am I going with this?
Nowhere in particular, as I have no intention of leading anyone anywhere anytime soon. This wisdom comes only to those who choose to transform the wealth of non-industrial information available to us all into a base of knowledge that can eventually ferment into what the author above defines as wisdom. I agree with his definition, by the way.
Without awareness, nothing happens. We are a leaf caught in an eddy on the fast-moving surface of the river of life. Once we begin cultivating awareness, however, the resultant flow of information becomes valuable and begins to determine action beyond the moment. Thoughtfully applied and observed in situ, it can then be transmogrified into useful knowledge, which in its most practical forms will offer be mistaken for wisdom. True wisdom comes not from effort or study, but emerges only via the merging of the conscious and subconscious in a defining act of individual insight. You are wise. A tree could also be said to have a form of wisdom, by the above definition. Nature possesses an abundant wisdom in its very being that can teach the mindful a great deal without ever opening a single book. A society will never collectively develop wisdom, as the scale of the situation dwarfs the individual wisdom available to the institutions and processes that comprise “civilization”.
In the end, stating the obvious, nearly all of our problems as a species are rooted in issues of scale. So the Club of Rome and every other think tank would have us believe; and they’re right.
However, as intelligent and informed and correct as all those wealthy and powerful minds may believe themselves to be, they lack perspective. The very perspective alluded to in the text above, and as a result, any wisdom whatsoever.
At the level which they are operating, the necessary awareness has disappeared behind vast and monolithic abstractions, designed to reduce the decision-making process down to bite-sized and actionable pieces that can be acted upon — without a full and complete understanding of what they are actually doing.
And at the same time, it becomes clear to anyone paying close attention to the machinations atop the system that they are highly aware of both the nature of their actions and the resultant effects.
Is this pure evil in play? Or is it simply the same limiting effect (malnutrition) that negates and diminishes the abilities of the rest of humanity, whether they be native dirt farmers in a drought-plagued region or Starbucks-swilling westerners living the “system will take care of us all” illusion at the very core of industrial life?
29 July 2008, 1:01 ameoinmonkey:
Is venerating artisans in pre-capitalist cultures as somehow “more in touch” with nature not just a modern form of Romanticism? How do we know they actively thought this way? Is it not more likely that such human societies simply lacked the capacity to seriously damage/destroy their environment (with certain notable exceptions) that modern Human society so obviously possesses?
29 July 2008, 9:51 amStan:
I didn’t see any venerating. I read that artisanal practice is an antidote to de-communalizing abstraction. The ability to destroy a planetary ecosystem was not known back in the day in the sense that we can know it.
I do know that artisans still resist taylorization, that peasant farmers had to be “enclosed” off the land before they’d work in factories and mines, and that consumer culture shapes an extremely superficial and deracinated personality.
I definitely don’t accept the notion that peasant farming is PRE-capitalist, in the sense that it is more “backward.” Agrarianism was not superceded by the industrial capitalist mode of production (means or relations); it had to be intentionally wiped out by industrial capitalism… as well as by state socialism when it adopted industrial capitalist methods.
Progress is a pernicious myth.
29 July 2008, 1:38 pmjimquomodo:
the Romans successfully desertified the N. African littoral by over farming. Indigenous civilisations in N&S America overexploited and destroyed their environment before the europeans came. This suggests to me that greed is a pretty powerful motivator, and that population control is the greatest human virtue needed to ’save the planet’ and us. HOORAY for the pill and the condom!
29 July 2008, 4:33 pmStan:
I let you on with this racist drivel just to say, Bullshit. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It’s pretty common bullshit, especially among white folk, so you come by it predictably.
The overfarming by Romans was driven by the need to feed Rome itself’s urban (de-landed) population. This is spelled out in detail in a quite a few places, and I’d suggest A Green History of the World (Clive Ponting) for starters. The primary dynamic is not population; it’s a core-periphery relation. And it’s the core-periphery relation that creates the “population problem.”
I suppose it was the “pre-capitalist” indigenes that spread the plague of cotton and sugar across the continent to cut the trees and wreck the soil, then “opened the West” by slaughtering indigene foodstocks (Bison, eg). I suppose the Amazon rain forest that is disappearing now to grow cattle is part of that indigenous wreckage, too.
The greed of a well-to-do peasant cannot even begin to match the destructive power of a mediocre rentier capitalist who can use “general purpose money to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.” All “greed” is not equal.
Before you come here and spout off, you’d be well-advised to at least take ten minutes to see if you are talking out of your behind.
The birth rate in the USA is 14/1000. In Bolivia, it’s 22.82/1000. Per capita energy use in the USA is 7794.8 kgoe. In Bolivia, it’s 503.8 kgoe.
Think about it. There’s still hope for you; but you have to give up being so white.
29 July 2008, 8:07 pmRobert Karaffa:
But the concept of greed in this thread is, to me, not unappreciated; everything else excepted. Look back at all that has happened to humanity since civilization started in terms of machinations of power; and greed, and the tangential function of ego, is perhaps the greatest force expressed in the past and the greatest hurdle on the human horizon.
Every professor, economist, human on the street, think tank rep., politician and “green energy advocate” who talks about “GROWTH” needs to be smacked down. But growth is the accepted model accepted by everything from churches to opportunists who see energy supply problems as an “opportunity.” Is the earth getting bigger? Does this system work? Lock yourself in your garage with a car running and see how sustainable that situation is. “Control” the populations of societies that burn the most if we are to go there. Don’t really want to go there. Actually, because of greed, sectors of those pops. regulate themselves because couples don’t want to limit there capacity for consumption and that “perfect american life.” In the US, immagration for obvious starving reasons makes up for that. Europe’s carbon footprint per captita is half that of the US. Is there room here for communication and improvement of the uses of extraordinary technology before they take the internet away from us and compartmentalize it into “Service Packages?” There is alot to discuss here. Re-Think GREED.
29 July 2008, 9:34 pmStan:
I am and have… rethinking greed, that is. It’s too easy a word, and too individual… too biological. The better word at the individual level is concupiscience: “The never satiated desire to draw as much of reality as possible into one’s self; the unlimited striving, for example, for knowledge, sex, and power. The seeking for one’s own pleasure through another being without the desire to unite with, affirm, or love the other being.” And even that has to be understood in light of the fact that our desires are shaped by culture and community.
Growth is a euphemism, a fairly recent one at that, to make it more anodyne for a culture that still claimed through its dominant systems of religion to stand with the weak and victimized (then someone like John Brown shows up and take his religion seriously). In olden days, those in power were straightforward in calling “growth” expansion and conquest. The Brits started that insidious equivocating when they talked about “the white man’s burden to civilize the darker races,” as a rationalization for mass murder and plunder. Now, since racism has been called out in the public square, a different, more sterile and abstract Idol was required: growth. Ask the person in the street what that means, and you’ll see how it operates as an unexplained axiom.
Behind that is what I’ll call the intersection of two major interacting/interchangeable metaphors that form the foundation of modernism’s episteme: woman-as-nature/nature-as-woman, and infection (or epidemic)/warfare. Chicken-and-egg question about which of the halves of these two interchangeable metaphor pairs comes first…but now you can call warfare the eradication of a pestilence or the eradication of life forms a form of warfare… you can call women chaotic nature to be dominated, or you can call nature a woman to be conquered.
That’s the background. And the epistemology did not appear out of our brain structures, but out of the minds and mouths of the most successfully consupiscient.
Our disenchantment is an outcome of our disembeddedness (de-localization). Our attachment to abstract and general (disembedded) “solutions” is a direct reflection of that lived experience and its corresponding episteme. That’s why it’s so hard to see. We are in it; it feels natural. That’s what Wirzba is saying — pretty obviously, I thought — when he says that with our “disaffection [disenchantment growing out of disembeddedness, and loss of the sense of the sacred] in the face of a valueless universe, we find fewer instances in which people deeply or responsibly love their bodies, their homes, or their habitats.”
Did anyone read what Wirzba is saying about “blueprints”? It is a very important point. Yet our first reaction to our crisis is to spin out blueprints… even when this is pointed out to us in the most explicit terms.
An earlier point, made here more than once, is that “civilization” is itself the core problem (pun intended). The core-periphery relation is inherently disembedding.
And I need to point out that the other subject that Wirzba takes on is love. We do have the capacity for love, but it cannot be abstracted without becoming meaningless. Anyone who has experienced deep love, for another, or for a place, knows that there is nothing selfish in it… it is the opposite of selfish, anti-concupiscience. Therein lies the redemptive hope.
A consumer-capitalist (and patriarchal!) society’s structure forces us to behave concupisciently, even forces us to work for the system. It’s no wonder we see the reflection of the system’s mandates in almost every individual. But anyone who has cared for small children and felt the deeply resonant sense of Now in the simpliest transendent moments — with no desire whatsoever to aggrandaize oneself, but “the desire to unite with, affirm, or love the other being” — has already seen the possibility of fulfillment through a moral and philosophical (read: reflective, caring, self-critical) life.
Wirzba’s thoughtful essay deserves to be considered for its main points: love and the destructive power of disenchantment (a concept that Hornborg emphasized as well).
30 July 2008, 5:44 amMasa:
“Our disenchantment is an outcome of our disembeddedness (de-localization). Our attachment to abstract and general (disembedded) “solutions” is a direct reflection of that lived experience and its corresponding episteme. That’s why it’s so hard to see. We are in it; it feels natural. That’s what Wirzba is saying — pretty obviously, I thought — when he says that with our “disaffection [disenchantment growing out of disembeddedness, and loss of the sense of the sacred] in the face of a valueless universe, we find fewer instances in which people deeply or responsibly love their bodies, their homes, or their habitats.””
I’d like to add…
31 July 2008, 1:06 amI think “desecrated” might be a good term, Stan, as a reference to both the land and the people redirected into an abstract lifeway from the time of childhood. Shopping at the store for food, flushing the waste off to who knows where. The desecrated then desecrate further because of their wrongheaded ways. The professor and author Jack Forbes calls this “Wetiko disease”, or cannibalism. His book “Columbus and Other Cannibals” is very hard to find, but might be available through interlibrary loan. It is invaluable. Your work is so neccessary and appreciated by me. Thanks Stan.
Stan:
Here’s Tillich on the same topic:
Jessica Benjamin suggests the same thing in her exposition of an intersubjective psychological theory that tries to answer the whys of dominaton. Martin Buber when he wrote about “I and Thou” as opposed to I and it.” Merchant and Mies on the Nature=Woman=Colony domination meme. Here’s Audrey’s three-and-a-half-minute video on that again.
The topic is not new; but it keeps coming up. Dr. Wirzba’s identification of “blueprint” thinking with this abstraction is particularly interesting and helpful. I would also suggest that this tendency to reach for an abstract “blueprint” is decidedly male. When the polis was separated from the household, abstraction attached itself to the former and relational thinking attached itself to the latter. So the valorizaton of women in the coming period — as relational thinkers — is not what Benjamin calls the “reactive valorization of femininity,” as in magical thinking about some Sacred Feminine essence, but a historically-determined reflection of this division between polis and household.
Now the polis is self-destructing because of what it left behind at the house. The reintegration of the political with the relational is a crucial project: a process, not a blueprint.
And “desecrate” is a fine term here, imo. The opposite of consecrate (to put with the sacred).
31 July 2008, 5:33 amCharles:
What is done in the household is “making” people, caring labor. Not just the children , but the adults are reproduced by Women, in the main. Women are the main producers of persons/personality.
This caring labor goes beyond the household to schools, hospitals and nursing homes, et al. Again, women predominantly do the caring labor in these locations as well in our society.
However, this is _not_ in women’s genes. It is culturally determined, though this cultural pattern may have grown out of an analogy or continuation of the biological fact that only women can get pregnant, and “make” people in their pregnacies.
Subjects are made in caring labor. Objects are made in productive labor.
31 July 2008, 9:48 amRobert Karaffa:
OK, Read all of this again and again. I can pull away from the word greed and accept concupiscience (still can’t readily spell or pronounce it but thanks for enhancing my vocabulary and making me think even harder.) And the mechanisims of disembeddedness and disenchantment. And especially the anti-concupiscience in the love of another or of place, I’ve learned alot about those things (about love) over the years. And I will hope for redemption with you there.
But there is still some intrinsic sense of a very biologically/brain structure driven lust for money (money being a substitute perhaps) that I see as an essential part of the background in the behavior of individuals on various levels; and collectively. I can’t explain this. It’s more of a feeling and perhaps shouldn’t be discussed here. But I have watched folks that seem to care mostly about money move. One can feel the design of their thinking. Wait a minute, guess I just got back to Chicken or the Egg with that. Will try harder next time.
31 July 2008, 2:12 pmCharles:
As far as Conquest, the first to be conquered in the Western Civiliztion trope of conquest is _Other Peoples_, whole peoples. Discussion of conquest of women and Nature must acknowledge this primary and literal meaning of conquest in Western discourse, culture and history. “Conquest” of women and Nature are figurative based on the literal meaning of conquest, i.e. empire building through colonialism and slavery. Imperial Rome is the myth revived in Imperial Europe and America.
STAN: Conquest: n., The act or process of conquering, or acquiring by force; the act of overcoming or subduing opposition by force, whether physical or moral; subjection; subjugation; victory.
1 August 2008, 1:00 pmThomas Thacker:
Damn you’ll are smart people who use big words. Concupiscence…? As a Southern white boy old enough to find his desire for things physical waning, I’m reminded of John Lennon’s “Just give me some truth.” Found some truths r/t the physical world we appear to be inhabiting on the National Security Archives website today. Paul Wellstone addressing the horrid facts r/t the Atomic Veterans gives the factual evidence that we live with a government that sprayed Zinc Cadmium Sulfide on 239 cities including Minneapolis, St. Paul and Corpus Cristi in 1957 and 8. They knew since the 30s that it would mess us up. And I thought his plane went down merely due to his seat offering a majority to the Democrats. God, I love that man. Still holds the record in the Senate for push-ups and pull-ups, on Carolina’s wrestling team, did his graduate work on inner city crime in Durham NC., before winning his seat travelling Minnesota in a bus. Where are you Ken Kesey? Well, Stan’s the best voice left since Kesey left for greener pastures. Incidentally, Mr. Goff I plead with bookstores here in Raleigh to invite you for speaking engagements. Your address at the peace rally in Fayetteville calling out Monkey George tickled the shit out of me. I was disappointed Democracy Now played several speakers but left you out. I’m going to continue to advocate for your getting a speaking engagement and maybe selling a few books. Hope to hear you again before I leave Raleigh for upstate Maine where I hope to use petroleum free fertilizers from bats and ocean produced sea-weed and algae to grow a little food. I have to leave N.C. even though I’m one of her organic products. After Wake County sheriff’s invaded my aluminum house trailer due to a reported robbery they confused a health drink, Kombuch mushroom tea, with Crystal Meth. They brought in the haz. mat. unit, surrounded my house with crime scene tape, told my neighbors I was a drug dealer and searched without a search warrant and never filed charges related to what was stolen from me. Two felonies and a misdeamenor later for the small amt. of marijuana they found, I must leave my home of 48 years in N.C. I’m not bitter, but rather grateful. And though all these erudite bloggers are infinitely smarter than me, there’s something you’ll are missing. We’re eternal spiritual beings. There’s nothing to lose here, but I still support all of you. I bless the seekers and wish for you Courage, Love and Peace.
4 August 2008, 3:43 am