Steven Covey died yesterday [7-16-2012]. His best-selling, self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is a paragon of the Western, goal-oriented culture that conflates “effectiveness” with human value. In Covey’s seminal work, he promotes seven behaviors, which he contends will lead to self-mastery, interdependence and self-renewal. Nobody could argue with these goals. Self-mastery and knowledge, and intimate integration in a meaningful way with one’s natural and human communities, could be viewed as the ultimate goals in a human life.Covey was a popular motivational author and speaker in the US and was very influential among people looking to get ahead in the capitalist system. Like the system itself "getting ahead" is a capitalist value that is never questioned. It is simply taken for granted. In this system getting ahead is almost always interpreted in materialist terms--wealth, status, possessions, etc. Hence his guides to effectiveness were themselves effective in supporting people within this system to function well without questioning the values underpinning the system, and most certainly to never question the system.
As an environmentalist K. Wood is well aware of the ongoing ecosystem destruction that is occurring, but in this otherwise insightful essay she safely confines the identification of the causes to "macho men [as if there weren't macho women], inept politicians, predatory economies, religious fanatics". No doubt because of the long years in academia and its ideological conditioning, she is unable to accurately identify the organizing system that is destroying the planet and degrading human lives. The closest she can come is Western culture.
