As someone who first went to college (naive, first-generation, dysfunctional childhood, working class—the works) to be an environmentalist and subsequently realized how hopeless environmentalism is, I have to say I’ve outgrown my early antipathy to capitalism. The human race was destined to end up in a polluted, overpopulated global mess one way or another.
And, capitalism didn’t corrupt human nature; it simply reflects and enhances what we are. Even stone-age tools did that on a vastly smaller scale. If you want capitalism to be good, make it good. It’s that simple; and it isn’t.
Take the diary I just wrote on Francis Fukuyama: at the time he was getting famous writing his triumphant end-of-history polemics, an environmental educator, David Orr of Oberlin College, was writing a book nobody noticed called Earth In Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect.
Fukuyama was partly right, and Orr was partly right. Orr said that communism failed as an “ascetic morality,” whereas capitalism failed because it “destroys morality altogether.” At the time, I had Orr’s point of view, but I have subsequently come to accept that people are “largely amoral.” That is exactly how Martha Nussbaum put it in her introduction to Rawls’s Political Liberalism (page 3). Most people frankly don’t care about problems like climate change—and they typically lie about it on opinion polls.
Capitalism didn’t “destroy” morality in Orr’s sense, because we never had terribly much of it to begin with. The upshot is that I have learned to respect, if not to like, Fukuyama’s point of view more, because economic incentives provide a far superior mode of human cooperation than morality ever will. In that sense, as well as others, the industrial revolution was our best hope for attaining sustainability.
Adding political insult to the injury of my environmentalism, Oberlin College has been socked with an eye-popping $32-million lawsuit due to foolishly overplaying its hand in the culture wars. As a progressive, I find it embarrassing and painful to witness a school that pioneered both social justice and environmentalism in North America brought low by false accusations of racism. It’s an example of how the right gains so much traction criticizing “wokeism,” cancel culture, CRT, and the rest.
Progressives must do better than this, and it is true that we have a public image problem. That doesn’t mean I’m about to get red-pilled, though. Hardly.