But Europeans soon began to use racial or physiological differentiation to explain cultural differences. Descent from one race or another, it was assumed, meant acquiring the mental and moral traits of that people, and the traits then played themselves out in cultural activities. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a figure from the Bayreuth circle around Richard Wagner, brought to racial theorizing the notion that the Jews were responsible for the destruction of Teutonic vitality. And the seeds were sown. For the eco-pessimist, mankind is practically an intruder on the earth, with no more claims to privilege than a bug in the Amazon.
Human beings ravag e and pillage and destroy, for profit.
This ferocious, manufactured sent imentality, directed against an economic system that has given the sentimentalists the leisure for their enthusiasms, is coming to have the status of dogma and threatens to do great harm. The zealots see everything that is careless, destructive, and contemptible in human beings and nothing of what is generous and ingenious. Mr. Herman exposes the roots of the foolishness, and, upended in the light, th ey look not just bare but barren. The Unabombers, Albert Gores, Cornel Wests, Noam Chomskys, Toni Morrisons, and Edward Saids are actually throwbacks to a nineteenth-century view of society in which the modern West is a predetermined whole created by the impersonal forces of race, cla ss, gender, and nation. An alternative view of society and social action, one that stems from the Enlightenment and an earlier humanist tradition, is not much in evidence these days.