Upon hearing Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, bray, "putting limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error."
Bill McKibben replied: "Summers is the perfect exemplar of that attitude: an incredibly smart guy whose context is so narrow it ends up making him very dumb indeed."
In my opinion, what caused Summer's level of intelligence to plummet at a Niagara Falls' grade incline can be traced to his unwavering fealty to the tenets of marketplace fundamentalism. The crackpot realist's notion that nature has no value in and of itself, and is only worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume.
This amounts to dharma for dimwits: A bio defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered ... commodified things that were once living beings.
What Summers' view of existence refuses to acknowledge is: The unsettling truth that what we inflict upon the world we will eventually inflict upon ourselves. When we internalize a self-destructive notion such as a rain forest is expendable - only fit for commercial exploitation -- then this is the demeaning manner in which we regard fellow human beings. Moreover, it is an absurd and dangerous fantasy to believe our species can have autonomy from nature, and we, for any extended length of time, can have mastery over it.
Federico Garcà a Lorca imagined this delusion of psychological separation from and mechanistic dominance over nature and fellow human beings as follows.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.
--Excerpt from: City That Does Not Sleep
Sadly, from evidence extant, both elite and hoi polloi of our era labor under this deranged perception. I reside on the island of Manhattan and I'm baffled that so many of my fellow New Yorkers (once a feisty, even belligerent breed) don't seem to care or even notice that they are being gamed. Our billionaire mayor protects his class; we pay for their follies, and they continue to grow richer. The game is so throughly rigged, even when they contrive to immolate the global economy, we get "austerity cuts," and they get on their Gulfstream jets and fly to Dubai.
As things stand at present, for the corporate class, their actions seem to yield no consequences. All this defies logic as well as gravity ... the invisible hand of the marketplace (actually the buckling backs of the middle and laboring classes) can't hold up their swaying tower of hubris much longer. But when it comes down, stand clear, there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles. Despite Larry Summer's pronouncements to the contrary.
Since poetic vision has no place in Summer's view of the world nor offers a solution for its ills, he may never seek counsel in what James Hillman has termed: the thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Hillman's view of the world offers a shift in perspective that could help restore our sense of beauty and tragedy, and, in doing so, bestow us with respect for our own humanity and a greater reverence for living things.
John Keats called earthly existence and the suffering therein a "vale of soul-making." In other words, we must descend into the human condition and into our own humanity in order to grow humble enough to learn and adapt to change. For our winged spirits must be forced out of their revelry of self-regard -- the intoxication of their sky-shackled swoon of impersonal flight (privileged passengers of corporate jets included) -- and be wounded by the conflicts and contretemps of this world and thus become more human.
This development means the end of grandiosity and the beginning of an appreciation of life's grandeur. Sarah Palin, Larry Summers, Mayor Bloomberg, and all the rest of the divas and supernumeraries contributing to the opera-scale cognitive dissidence of the age, will continue to belt out their crackpot realist arias, but, backstage, The Second Law of Thermodynamics has just begun to clear its throat.
I'll give the final word to Lorca:
No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
--Federico Garcà a Lorca
Excerpt from: New York (Office and Attack)
Bill McKibben replied: "Summers is the perfect exemplar of that attitude: an incredibly smart guy whose context is so narrow it ends up making him very dumb indeed."
In my opinion, what caused Summer's level of intelligence to plummet at a Niagara Falls' grade incline can be traced to his unwavering fealty to the tenets of marketplace fundamentalism. The crackpot realist's notion that nature has no value in and of itself, and is only worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume.
This amounts to dharma for dimwits: A bio defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered ... commodified things that were once living beings.
Federico Garcà a Lorca imagined this delusion of psychological separation from and mechanistic dominance over nature and fellow human beings as follows.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.
--Excerpt from: City That Does Not Sleep
Sadly, from evidence extant, both elite and hoi polloi of our era labor under this deranged perception. I reside on the island of Manhattan and I'm baffled that so many of my fellow New Yorkers (once a feisty, even belligerent breed) don't seem to care or even notice that they are being gamed. Our billionaire mayor protects his class; we pay for their follies, and they continue to grow richer. The game is so throughly rigged, even when they contrive to immolate the global economy, we get "austerity cuts," and they get on their Gulfstream jets and fly to Dubai.
As things stand at present, for the corporate class, their actions seem to yield no consequences. All this defies logic as well as gravity ... the invisible hand of the marketplace (actually the buckling backs of the middle and laboring classes) can't hold up their swaying tower of hubris much longer. But when it comes down, stand clear, there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles. Despite Larry Summer's pronouncements to the contrary.
Since poetic vision has no place in Summer's view of the world nor offers a solution for its ills, he may never seek counsel in what James Hillman has termed: the thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Hillman's view of the world offers a shift in perspective that could help restore our sense of beauty and tragedy, and, in doing so, bestow us with respect for our own humanity and a greater reverence for living things.
John Keats called earthly existence and the suffering therein a "vale of soul-making." In other words, we must descend into the human condition and into our own humanity in order to grow humble enough to learn and adapt to change. For our winged spirits must be forced out of their revelry of self-regard -- the intoxication of their sky-shackled swoon of impersonal flight (privileged passengers of corporate jets included) -- and be wounded by the conflicts and contretemps of this world and thus become more human.
This development means the end of grandiosity and the beginning of an appreciation of life's grandeur. Sarah Palin, Larry Summers, Mayor Bloomberg, and all the rest of the divas and supernumeraries contributing to the opera-scale cognitive dissidence of the age, will continue to belt out their crackpot realist arias, but, backstage, The Second Law of Thermodynamics has just begun to clear its throat.
I'll give the final word to Lorca:
No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
--Federico Garcà a Lorca
Excerpt from: New York (Office and Attack)
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