By Guy Zimmerman, Senior Editor of Arts and Culture with Cyrano’s Journal
6/1/07
From the VOXPOP section of Cyrano’s Journal
Capitalism, for all its effectiveness in certain arenas, is the source of potentially fatal imbalances in the ways human beings interact with others and with the environment. Capitalism is unspeakably cruel to those it enslaves, and it is a moral catastrophe for those it empowers. It should correctly be viewed as the socio-economic embodiment of the “3 poisons” of greed, hatred and ignorance given historical expression by the Enlightenment. The human species must move to an entirely different way of interacting with each other and with the geosphere, and the first step is clarity about where we are now and hence what this process will entail.
The rubric of “right” and “left” is itself a holdover from the 18th century and the French revolution and I suspect its usefulness is nearly over. In any event, in my last post I wasn’t at all promoting the right as successful in anything but defending the prerogatives of an utterly indefensible system. Change, when it comes, will certainly NOT come from those who are willing to turn a blind eye from the human and environmental devastation that is the by-product of Capital and its “success.” By raising the issue of nihilism I was simply trying to illuminate why the left has been able to muster so little traction against the right since the 1970s.
I do think the Neocons very consciously embrace the nihilism of Machiavelli, which is the seed out of which modern political thinking sprouts and which infects every branch of modern experience. What I find hopeful about Buddhism as the source for a new perspective by which progressive thinking can organize itself is how the dharma takes nihilism one step further, riding it to the end of the line, so to speak, where the mental trap of dualistic thinking can potentially be overcome. The Buddhist critique of capitalism, from this point of view, is total whereas the Marxist and Freudian critiques are only partial. The Buddhist picture of the relationship between man and experience, in other words, is untainted by the distorted (dualistic) thinking that gave rise to Capitalism in the first place.
Back to Machiavelli for a moment. The Prince was about how the true potentate, in order to maximize his or her power, must establish a new system of values that he or she uniquely embodies. It was written on behalf of the new mercantile (proto-Capitalist) oligarchs of 16th century Italy to help them cement their power in the modern age that had just begun to emerge. Modern thought - both Cartesian rationalism and the empiricism of Hobbes - can be viewed as different efforts to articulate the philosophical basis for the values needed for Capital to achieve its full glory.
In launching this enterprise, Machiavelli was combating the existing set of values that had been put in place by the previous “Prince.” And who was that “Prince?” My candidate would be the carpenter’s son from Galilee, Christ himself, who, albeit by a circuitous route, managed to inaugurate a system of values that held sway in the West for the preceding millennia. While I’m no defender (far from it) of any organized religion, Capitalism can truly be considered a demonic system, and was in fact seen this way by Luther and many others. It is fueled by the sublimation of greed and aggression rather than any real attempt to come to terms with them before they are given (sublimated) expression in the world.
But what I find interesting here is the trajectory, because what I’ve in effect been proposing is that we had better look to yet another “Prince” for a way out of the cul de sac western history has brought us to…and this prince is over 2500 years old. How’s that for a dialectic?
To recap the argument and bring it back down to earth…if you accept that Capitalism is the socio-economic embodiment of greed, aggression and ignorance given full sway…then to overcome Capitalism we need to find ways to counteract these same forces in ourselves and in our interactions with others…and it just so happens that a host of intelligent and articulate people have been developing such techniques for centuries, and probably we should check out what they’ve managed to uncover.