Extracted from: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315747361

Cite as: Baruchello, Giorgio. “Good versus bad tourism: Homo viator’s responsibility in light of life-value onto-axiology.” In Tourism and the Anthropocene, pp. 111-128. Routledge, 2015.

Good versus bad tourism

Homo viator’s responsibility in light of life-value onto-axiology

Giorgio Baruchello¹

Homo viator

A founding father of French existentialism, Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) rediscovered the Augustinian notion of homo viator, whereby the human condition is understood as akin to a traveller whose true being is defined by the journeys that she chooses to pursue and, above all, by the relationships that she establishes along the way (Kuntz, 1980). Unless a person is condemned by early death or severely disabling conditions, choosing no journey at all and engaging in no relationships whatsoever are not options, for we are naturally bound to inhabit a specific place in time and space as well as a human community of sorts, as sedentary or even as suicidal as we may eventually decide to be. Whether we like it or not, we are cast in this world and will have made many choices, trodden many paths, endorsed many values and met many people, our own family relatives or guardians in primis, before we can even begin reflecting upon the possibility of taking a step into the nihilistic abyss of self-seclusion or self-destruction (Marcel, 1962, 1967).

Yet it is not the ‘absolute despair’ driving some individuals to isolation or suicide that Marcel (1967, 28) concentrates upon, unlike other famous French existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. Rather, it is the ‘unconquerable hope’ that, mysteriously, animates most human lives. Neither the nauseating awareness of inevitable mortality and seemingly absurd Sisyphean toil, nor the painful testimony of physical, mental and moral degeneration can disarm most people’s ability to retrieve some value in their experiences, or the ‘substance of life’, as Marcel (1962, 43; emphasis added) dubs it. Fired by a hope-fuelled ‘enthusiasm or ardor for life’, we are generally capable of finding a modicum of fulfilment in our existence, as troublesome and as finite as we understand it to be (Marcel, 1962, 43; emphasis added).

According to Marcel (1962, 38–9), by informing our mental abilities with hopeful ardour for life, we set in motion a ‘creative process’ whereby we establish our ‘I’ through time (i.e. our individuality) and move beyond our immediate circumstances by conceiving of our own future constructively, recognizing value both around and within us, while at the same time opening ourselves to other persons like us, ‘our neighbors’. In this manner, we may be able to overcome the ‘temptation to despair’ induced by the consciousness of our unavoidable transience, constitutional frailty and possible solitude (Marcel, 1962, 36). Echoing Augustine, Marcel (1962) depicts a human reality in which sin is always afoot; but so is the way to salvation. The latter requires acknowledging interpersonal relationships and how we are going to go about them, not least about the one that we may discover and accept to have with a divine person, as Marcel himself did in his adult life (he converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s, distinguishing himself once more from French existentialists like Sartre and Camus, who were professed atheists; Hernandez, 2011; Sweetman, 2008).

Given the inherent inescapability of our journeys on this Earth, the notion of homo viator is nothing but another philosophical definition of the human being, alongside Schiller’s homo ludens and Bergson’s homo faber. Whichever journeys we may be on, whichever relationships we may engage in, for as long as we live and act, we are travelling. Furthermore, we are not alone on our journeys, even if we may not like all or any of our fellow travellers, or choose not to believe that some do actually exist, such as present society, future generations, the Earth’s local and global ecosystems, or these ecosystems’ unified totality as a living entity.

Consistent with Augustine’s original emphasis, Marcel’s (1962) notion of homo viator focuses eventually upon the immortal soul’s journey from its earthly dwelling to post-mortem otherworldliness, and the significance of our earthly moral standing for this journey. Under this perspective, crucial is the relationship that we may or may not decide to establish with the supreme fons vitae, i.e. God. In daily experience, many journeys are undertaken in an apparently much more prosaic way, such as those of contemporary tourists. What we commonly associate with these journeys are evasion, relaxation, breaks from work routines, last-minute deals and a modicum of legal rights when things do not work as they should. The crushing power of mortality, frailty and solitude are not part of tourist brochures. God is hardly ever mentioned in connection with Easyjet or Ryanair, unless the traveller experiences much turbulence during a flight. The commonplace experience of tourism sounds not only anti-climactic vis-à-vis Marcel’s homo viator; it seems totally unrelated.

This unrelatedness is obvious only prima facie. No matter how profound or exceptional the key questions of existentialism may sound, ordinary tourism is also affected by how we give shape to our own identity, how we think about our future, what type of values we opt for and what kind of interpersonal relationships we cherish. As banal as people’s summer holidays may seem at first, these too are journeys that impinge upon matters of life and death; they too define our identity and the authenticity of our existence. For one, albeit catered as an alternative among many in conventional tourist marketing, pilgrimages in Christian, Muslim and Buddhist cultures are a patent example of journeys that aim at more than sheer entertainment. Supposedly, the fate of one’s own soul may depend on them. For another, choosing to travel in order to hunt down or eat animals listed among an ecosystem’s endangered species, or to seek sexual gratification with adults or minors in poverty-stricken communities, says a lot about the person that we are, that we become, and how we associate ourselves with other persons.

As to less faith-inspired and morally extreme examples, the way in which we decide to travel (e.g. by more or less polluting means of transportation), the way in which we look – at, upon or after – the persons that we meet (e.g. waiters or travel guides) and the way in which we select our souvenirs and memorabilia (e.g. by purchasing archaeological artefacts of dubious origin) can tell us something about the ilk of persons that we are, become and associate with. The same can be said of whether one travels to discover oneself, be oneself or amuse oneself into oblivion of her circumstances. The very fact that we may or may not think about some of the moral implications of our not-so-extraordinary journeys reveals much about ourselves.

Tourism, like any other dimension of human agency, is no stranger to ethical and axiological assessment. As the pivotal World Tourism Organization’s (WTO) (1999) Global Code of Ethics for Tourism (GCET) asserts, if ethically conducted, ‘tourism’ is capable of ‘contributing to economic development, international understanding, peace, prosperity and universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms’. By implication, if tourism is not ethically conducted, some of the above goods may be diminished. In essence, depending on who gives shape to it and how, tourism can be good; or it can be bad.

Who is to say what is good and bad, though? On what ground can this kind of judgement be passed? How can assertions like those contained in GCET, which was adopted in 2001 by the United Nations (UN), be assessed and, if challenged, defended? Questions of this variety have kept philosophers busy for centuries and a number of answers have been provided over the long history of the discipline – far too much for a sheer book chapter like the present one. Rather, in what follows, whilst keeping the ground-breaking GCET in the background, I endorse, outline and apply John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, which is in all probability the most articulate theory of value developed by any philosopher in the 21st century. By doing so, given that the reader of this book is more likely to be a scholar in tourism studies than an academic philosopher, I offer first a detailed yet succinct presentation of a significant development in contemporary philosophical thought. Secondly, I offer a set of criteria whereby the reader can think about, and discriminate between, good and bad tourism, grounding GCET and any analogous normative approach to tourism in as deep a source of value as philosophical thought can retrieve. Moreover, as the paragraphs below show, the criteria offered by life-value onto-axiology are pertinent to the science and politics of tourism in the Anthropocene, neoliberalism and the global age, theorizing the Earth and humanity, carbon-fuelled capitalism and the end of nature and society – all of these being central themes of the present volume. I conclude this chapter by reflecting upon our being homines viatores in light of the implications of life-value onto-axiology for human agency, tourism included.

Life-value onto-axiology

McMurtry’s entire endeavour is based upon the reasoned belief that, pace fashionable relativism and subjectivism, it is possible to identify a universal and objective ground of value. There may exist a ‘marketplace of ideas’ about what is good and what is not, but some preferences are actually better than others. According to McMurtry (2009–10a, para. 1.16; emphasis added), we can ‘recover step by step the missing life-ground of values and the ultimate meaning of how we are to live’. The definition of the life-ground is not overly complicated: ‘Concretely, all that is required to take the next breath; axiologically, all the life support systems required for human life to reproduce or develop’ (McMurtry, 2009–10b). Without enough bread, clean water, breathable air, open spaces in which to move, regular sleep, acceptable education and meaningful socialization, no value whatsoever that we cherish will ever be expressed in reality. No value whatsoever, whether ethical, political, legal, economic, epistemic, spiritual or aesthetic, can be given independently of this vital platform. Life is the fundamental precondition for any and every other value that there can be (hence the prefix ‘onto-’ i.e. ‘concerning being’) and, a fortiori, it is itself valuable and inescapable whenever reflecting upon evaluations (hence ‘axiology’, i.e. ‘value theory’). There can be no life as such, not to mention any good life, outside the life-ground. As McMurtry (2009–10a, para. 6.2.1) states:

Life support systems – any natural or human-made system without which human beings cannot live or live well – may or may not have value in themselves, but have ultimate value so far as they are that without which human or other life cannot exist or flourish.

If Earth qua totality of its biodiversity-sustaining ecosystems is akin to a living individual, which one may wish to dub ‘Gaia’ (Lovelock, 1972), then the planet’s life-support systems are akin to the functioning metabolic, psychological and socio-cultural apparatuses allowing a living individual to lead a life as such, and possibly a good life. To all effects, they are vital functions allowing concrete individuals to be alive as animals and active as human beings. Therefore, to deny the life-ground’s import constitutes a token of performative contradiction, for she who denies it has been meeting her vital needs for the very long time entailed in developing the faculties required to deny its import. Even pessimists, suicides and gnostics affirm it, albeit via negativa, for they take their departure from a better life that is no more, that is dreamt or conceived of, or that is to be gained post-mortem (Baruchello, 2007). Logically, it is possible to distinguish between life’s intrinsic value and the life-ground’s instrumental value. Ontologically, it is not: ‘All that is of worth consists in and enables life value to the extent of its experienced fields of thought, felt being and action (intrinsic value), and what underlies and enables these fields of life themselves, life support systems’ (McMurtry 2009–10a, para. 6.1.4).

As revealed in the preceding quotation, McMurtry (2009–10a) maintains that life manifests itself in three modes of being: ‘action’ (also ‘biological movement’ or ‘motility’), ‘felt being’ (also ‘experience’ or ‘feeling’) and ‘thought’ (para. 6.1). In the religious sphere, these modes of being are exemplified in the believer’s gratitude for one’s being alive, the comforting or even exhilarating presence of the divine within one’s heart, and the thought-provoking subtleties of theological argumentation. In the secular sphere, health professionals come across these ontological modes under the guises of physical, psychological and mental well-/ill-being. Tourists encounter them too, for instance as healthy, pleasant, meaningful ethnic food in its original historic setting. Also, as shown by Baruchello and Johnstone (2011), human rights legislators and lawyers run into them qua constitutional provisions regarding, inter alia, ‘rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay’, ‘age limits below which the paid employment of child labor should be prohibited and punishable by law’, and ‘the diffusion of science and culture’ (ICESCR, 1966, arts 7(d), 10 and 15).

All that is intuitively saluted as genius, justice, happiness or health is – if truly good – a constructive and comprehensive expression of life-value, in one or more of these modes of being: action (e.g. fitness), felt being (e.g. wonder at nature’s intricate complexity) and thought (e.g. proportionality in judiciary adjudication). No sharp ontological tri- or dualism is implied by McMurtry’s tripartite distinction:

Although we can distinguish the cognitive and feeling capacities of any person, this does not mean dividing them into separate worlds as has occurred in the traditional divisions between mind and body, reason and the emotions. Life-value onto-axiology begins from their unity as the nature of the human organism.

(McMurtry, 2009–10a, para. 6.3; emphasis removed)

Thus, the fundamental axioms in McMurtry’s ‘life-value onto-axiology’ read as follows:

X is value if and only if, and to the extent that, x consists in or enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action than without it

X is disvalue if and only if, and to the extent that, x reduces/disables any range of thought/experience/action.

(McMurtry, 2009–10a, para.6.1; emphasis in the original)

These axioms apply to all types of human agency. For instance, as far as contemporary environmentalism is concerned, McMurtry (2013, 42) distinguishes between ‘zero growth’ and ‘zero bad growth’, claiming the former to be negative and the latter to be positive, since ‘growth of production that serves universal human life-needs is necessary and good the more there is deprivation’.

To all intents and purposes, McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology achieves a traditional goal of philosophical inquiry, since it allows for the determination in principle of good and evil, cutting across received dualisms, e.g. nature vs. culture, geoengineering vs. sustainable retreat, res extensa vs. res cogitans, utilitarianism vs. deontology, free choice vs. paternalism, free trade vs. protectionism, individualism vs. collectivism, liberalism vs. conservatism, cooperation vs. competition, theism vs. atheism, description vs. prescription, present vs. future, economic value vs. environmental value, etc. In theory, the definitive axiological criterion is sharp: life-enablement is good; life-disablement is bad.

In practice, there are going to be simpler and more complex evaluations to be made. Thorny cases and dilemmas are part of the fabric of the human world. Not even the most perceptive philosophy can save us from having to face them. Nevertheless, if life-value onto-axiology is correct, then the better option is bound to be always the result of comparisons of coherent life-value, since no good can be given outside the life-ground, the composition and scope of which McMurtry clarifies by means of two key concepts: ‘need’ and ‘civil commons’.

On the former key concept, McMurtry (1998, 164) observes that not anything that we may claim to ‘need’ is, after closer scrutiny, a need: ‘“n” is a need if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of n always leads to a reduction of organic capacity’. Only that ‘without which life-capacities are always reduced’ counts as need (McMurtry, 2013, 19). We can live, and even prosper, without travel cheques or credit default swaps, but we cannot live, not to mention prosper, without ‘sufficient nutriment, clean water, sewage facilities, learning of society’s symbol systems, home and love, and expert care when ill’ (McMurtry, 2013, 1). To strengthen the point, McMurtry scholar Noonan (2006, pp. xiv and 57) neatly separates needs from economic preferences (‘wants’): (A) ‘deprivation of needs always leads to harm whereas deprivation of wants is only harmful in light of revisable self-interpretation’; (B) ‘needs are satiable whereas wants are not’. No much-desired expensive consumer goodies will ever be vital like water and bread.

McMurtry (2002, 156; emphasis removed) identifies humanity’s fundamental ‘means of life’ or ‘vital need[s] … for none can be deprived without reduction of vital life capability’. In his formulation for the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), established in 2002 by the UN’s Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), McMurtry (2009–10a, para. 10.10.4) lists seven vital goods that refer to as many vital needs:

1. the atmospheric goods of breathable air, open space and light;
2. the bodily goods of clean water, nourishing goods and waste disposal;
3. the home and habitat goods of shelter from the elements;
4. the environmental good of natural and constructed elements all contributing to the whole;
5. the good of care through time by love, safety and health infrastructures;
6. the good of human culture in music, language, art, play and sport; and
7. the good of human vocation and social justice – that which enables and obliges all people to contribute to the provision of these life goods consistent with each’s enjoyment of them.

If these goods are not provided, then vital needs are not met; and if these needs are not met, then human capabilities disintegrate, to the eventual point of individual and/or social annihilation. If these needs are met, instead, then human capabilities do not merely endure: they can ‘flourish’ into the good life, individual as well as social (McMurtry, 2002, 156).

On the latter key concept, McMurtry (2009–10b) defines ‘civil commons’ as ‘[a] unifying concept to designate social constructs which enable universal access to life goods’. McMurtry (2013, 240) lists an array of concepts, arrangements and artefacts aimed at fulfilling life-enabling ends under diverse socio-historical contexts (I italicize those that seem particularly relevant as regards tourism):

The nature of language, the air we breathe, the common fire, food recipes, universal health plans, the world wide web, common sewers, international campaigns against US war crimes, sidewalks and forest paths, sports and sports fields, the open science movement, the Chinese concept of jen, the jubilee of Leviticus, public streetscapes, effective pollution controls, birdwatching, city squares and sidewalks, Buddha’s principle of interdependent origination, old-age pensions, the rule of life-protective law, universal education, universal hygiene practices, footpaths and bicycle trails, fair elections, unemployment insurance, the global atmosphere, maximum work hours and minimum wages, public parks, clean water, the Tao, community fish-habitats, public broadcasting, the ancient village commons before enclosures, the unnamed goal of the Occupy Movement.

Albeit usually devoid of an explicit overarching theory of value as their intellectual foundation, societies have been valuing, protecting, respecting and fulfilling life-requirements and life-support systems for millennia. Possibly built upon the cooperative inclinations that have helped the survival of many animal species, including ours, these many concepts, arrangements and artefacts have established ‘commons’ that are characterized by the predicate ‘civil’. This predicate reveals the socially constructed and socially aimed dimensions of the institutions nurturing ‘real capital’, i.e. ‘life-capital – the natural and human-made wealth that produces more through time without loss’ (McMurtry, 2013, 199; emphasis removed).

McMurtry is not talking, say, of pastures available to all without supervision and sanctions for misuse, but of pastures that the community consciously or pre-consciously (i.e. akin to linguistic syntax) recognizes in its symbolic systems and manages in order to yield life-supporting fruits through time for all its members, thus reducing a prime cause of internecine competition. McMurtry’s ‘civil commons’ should not be confused with Hardin’s (1968) unregulated natural ‘commons’, whose tragic doom justifies their appropriation for private ends (McMurtry, 2013, 239). McMurtry’s works are consistently critical of such an appropriation, since it has regularly taken place for class or elite benefit (e.g. 19th-century Highlands clearances), and/or converted the existing civil commons into means of non-universal (e.g. costly for-profit academic indexes) and/or life-disabling ends (e.g. employing higher human knowledge for the production of speculative ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ [Buffett, 2003, 15]).

As to what constitutes ‘real’ or ‘life capital’, McMurtry (2013) treats it consistently as the evolving onto-axiological base for measurable life loss and gain through generational time. It is the totality of the biological species, their life-support systems, human cultures and technologies as they produce, reproduce and enable more life capacities. The Anthropocene implies per se no destructive agency on humankind’s part. However, it has witnessed an exponential increase in the significance of human agency for this life-capital accumulation, which the human economy directs by its own corresponding order – and disorder – of production, reproduction and growth (cf. Johnson and Morehouse, 2014). How to steer human agency on Earth, and therefore the economy itself, constitutes the ultimate context for the exercise of freedom, as anxiety-laden and burdensome as such a responsibility may be.

Good and bad tourism

Given McMurtry’s two fundamental axioms of life-value onto-axiology, tourism can be deemed good or bad depending on whether it enables life-means provision and enjoyment or not. Also, given the composition and scope of the life-ground, we can better grasp GCET’s intended positive function for ‘responsible tourism’. In essence, GCET is a token of civil commons, insofar as it is a social construct attempting to steer human activities nationally and internationally so that life-enabling goods, in this case those related to tourism, may be provided universally. As article 7(1) of GCET (WTO, 1999, 5; emphasis added) reads: ‘The prospect of direct and personal access to the discovery and enjoyment of the planet’s resources constitutes a right equally open to all the world’s inhabitants.’

But there is more. Life-value onto-axiology can help the discerning mind not to take even GCET’s declared aims of ‘economic development, international understanding, peace, prosperity and universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms’ at face value, but to discriminate in principle between good and bad forms of each. This principled discrimination may sound counter-intuitive, yet it is most relevant in connection with ‘economic development’, to which I confine the present discussion, for not all activities that fall under this notion are genuinely life-enabling.

Consider for instance the effects that GDP-engrossing tourism can have vis-à-vis the ‘environmental crisis’ denounced by the international scientific community at its highest levels (McMurtry, 2013, 170). Depletion of freshwater sources and pollution of the atmosphere by fossil fuel consumption are not the exclusive province of more commonly vilified industries, such as agribusiness and mining. They can apply to the tourist industry too (e.g. high water consumption in tropical resorts; increased aerial traffic). These negative contributions to the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene are not the result of any inherent malevolence or callousness in the business sector, even though such cases do exist (e.g. hydro-intensive golf courses built in desert regions). Rather, they are the result of the inherent incapacity of private enterprise at large to act in accordance with ultimate, endogenous, life-grounded criteria.

Somewhat convolutedly, the preamble of the GCET (WTO, 1999, 2) itself admits this inherent incapacity by stating that ‘the world tourism industry as a whole has much to gain by operating in an environment that favors the market economy, private enterprise and free trade’ for the sake of ‘the creation of wealth’, which is not life-grounded per se. On the contrary, in order to bring forth life-enablement, such a wealth-driven ‘tourism industry’ must bow to ‘a number of principles and a certain number of rules’ (ibid.). Without such exogenous constraints, ‘responsible and sustainable tourism’ would be ‘incompatible with the growing liberalization of the conditions governing trade in services and under whose aegis the enterprises of this sector operate’ (ibid.; emphasis added). Left to their own devices, business agents in the tourist sector would concern themselves chiefly if not solely with making money, not with protecting and enabling life at large; the former is their paramount telos, the latter is not. It is only by means of criteria external to prevailing economic logic ‘that it is possible to reconcile in this sector economy and ecology, environment and development’ (ibid.).

The conflict between standard business logic and what is actually needed for life-enablement lies at the heart of McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology in its application to world affairs, tourism included. Spanning across, and delving into, an immense amount of scientific literature, McMurtry’s research since the 1980s constitutes an empirically solid demonstration of how ‘common interest’ and ‘money-demand growth’ are not one and the same thing (McMurtry, 2013, 256–7), as so often claimed under the superstitious assumption of an all-optimizing invisible hand (Baruchello, 2013). Quite the opposite, in spite of the theodicy hidden within mainstream economics’ assumed equilibria and much-repeated notions of ‘positive spill-overs’ and ‘trickle-down’ boons, common interest and money-demand growth have been increasingly at war with each other:

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level.

(McMurtry, 2013, 6; emphasis removed)

This picture of contemporary reality may sound hyperbolic to some, yet a search for even one exception to these empirical generalizations reveals how exact and precise they are (IPCC, 2012; Jonas, 1984, 1993; UNESCO, 2002–13; Weston and Bollier, 2013). An engaged intellectual, former journalist and maître à penser of Peter Joseph’s (2007–13) Zeitgeist movement, McMurtry does not shy away from forceful, effective language. Yet the picture offered above is not a matter of rhetoric. So bleak are the bio-environmental and socio-economic trends of the past decades that McMurtry (1995; 1999; 2002; 2013) diagnoses the Anthropocene’s malaise to be a cancer.

The first, crucial step in McMurtry’s oncological diagnosis is the determination and assessment of the defining modus operandi of the world’s leading economic agents, i.e. national and transnational corporate businesses, of which tourism ones are but a small fraction. Whether cast as ‘money-sequences’, ‘money-making’, ‘profits’, ‘return on equity’, ‘quarterly earning reports’, ‘shareholder value’ or other accounting formulae, and taking account of the actual behaviour of private bureaucracies, the one and essential characteristic or ‘ruling value code’ (McMurtry, 2013, 9) that best describes what paramount goal these agents pursue is: ‘to maximize by any vehicle, method, or channel open to its entry the ratio of its owners’ money-demand increases to money-demand inputs’ (McMurtry, 2013, 179; emphasis removed). In the words of Chicago economist Milton Friedman: ‘The one and only responsibility of business is to make as much money for stockholders as possible’ (cited in McMurtry, 2013, 115; emphasis removed)

This ‘responsibility of business’ is very far from GCET’s pursuit of ‘responsible tourism’, i.e. a ‘tourism development’ that ‘safeguard[s] the natural environment with a view to achieving sound, continuous and sustainable economic growth geared to satisfying equitably the needs and aspirations of present and future generations’ (WTO, 1999, 3, art. 3(1); emphasis added). In Friedman’s iconic formulation, no vital needs are mentioned, whether present or future, only making money. Consistent with this understanding, common economic practice refers to carcinogenic pesticides, junk food, cigarettes, armaments, pollution quotas and many pathogenic types of labour as economic ‘goods’, for they generate profits to businessmen and investors, even if bad for life. As McMurtry (2013, 11; emphasis in the original) concludes: ‘The ruling paradigm is in principle life-blind.’ Such an economic logic pursues relentless self-expansion and yet can draw ‘no distinction between what serves organic, social and ecological life-hosts and what poisons, dismantles and loots them’ (McMurtry, 2013, 188; emphasis removed). In oncology, that is precisely what cancerous cells perform: a theoretically endless process of self-replication within a host body, whose health or eventual survival is not and cannot be perceived by the self-replicating cells as an effective control response.

The second step in the diagnosis consists in the recognition that the effects of this theoretically endless self-replication are also analogous in practice. As any oncological record can show, the uncontrolled sprawling of cancerous cells leads eventually to loss of organic capacity, down to the very point of killing the cancer’s living host. As McMurtry (2013, 169) writes: ‘As global capitalist exploitation of the environment has advanced and advances across global life-conditions and elements, all of these global life-conditions and elements – the atmosphere, freshwaters and oceans, top soils, trees, animal habitats and species and mineral resources – degenerate in direct proportion in their life-carrying capacities and biodiversity.’ Life-blindness may not signify hostility to life in theory, but it does so in practice.

The third step in the diagnosis relates to the fact that, in cancerous pathologies, the immune defences of a living organism fail to identify the cancerous cells as harbingers of death and keep facilitating their self-replication. Analogously, societies’ civil-commons institutions have been largely unresponsive to the ongoing assault upon local and/or global life-conditions. Instead of providing and enforcing life-grounded distinctions in the business sphere, these institutions have actually cooperated with the process of life-blind and life-destructive sprawling by facilitating, inter alia:

[R]uin of government programmes, workers’ jobs and small business with the cranking up of interest rates to over 20 per cent prime in the 1980s … [,] the repeal of Depression-installed regulations like Glass-Steagall … the race to the bottom of wages, benefits and social legislation by global competition with no life-standards … cannibalist interest rates and debt charges … ‘market reforms’, trade-treaty edicts prohibiting legislation reducing ‘profit opportunities’, and wars on resource rich regions with social control … supranational treaties in vast all-or-nothing tranches of ‘investor’ rights … according all rights only to transnational corporations … [and] binding regulations … [overriding] all human and natural life-requirements through generational time … private bank displacement of sovereign control over currency and credit

(McMurtry, 2013, 3–4 and 14; emphasis in the original)

Some genuine civil-commons responses have been attempted, undoubtedly, as exemplified by GCET in the tourism sector. They have been very timid, though. The measure of their timidity is easy to gauge: have they stopped or reverted the life losses that McMurtry (2013) compiles vis-à-vis the Earth’s atmospheric degradation, arable-topsoil desertification, water-aquifer impoverishment, biodiversity reduction, rising income inequality, food contamination, production and consumption of addictive pathogenic commodities, non-contagious disease multiplication, growing private debt levels, public-sector investment cuts or proliferating tax evasion schemes? Apart from occasional local progress, which indicates how alternative courses of action are possible, the answer is globally negative (e.g. Cecchetti et al., 2011; CHRP, 2013; European Commission, 2013; IPCC, 2012; House of Commons, 2013; House of Lords, 2013; IFS, 2013; ILO, 2013; OECD, 2011, 2013a–b; TFAH, 2011; UN, 2012; WHO, 2011).

Concluding remarks

Thus far, as McMurtry’s publications adamantly record and explain, the depletion of life-support systems in the Anthropocene has been so severe that the international scientific community has repeatedly denounced the threat posed by human agency to the present well-being and the long-term survival of our species. Over the past four decades, we have been told over and over again that if the governments of the world do not act in a concerted, life-enabling way, major suffering will unfold inevitably and many of humankind’s achievements will be lost, if not humankind itself (UNESCO, 2002–13). And with humanity being lost, who will ever have consciousness of what we have done, and failed to do?

The threat of species-wide suffering, extinction and oblivion can have a terrifying, paralysing effect. They are certainly dreadful thoughts to entertain, unless we are engulfed by a nihilistic death wish. Indeed, the threat at issue mirrors in collective form the terrifying, paralysing awareness of mortality, frailty and solitude that Marcel observed in the sphere of individual existence. Yet, reasoning by analogy, the temptation to despair can be overcome by means of hope. If anything, Marcel’s homo viator reminds us of the mysterious resilience that we display before that which makes us fear and tremble. There is hope. Perhaps it is a fool’s hope, but it is hope nonetheless.

McMurtry (2013, 288), despite the dismal facts and trends that he conveys in his oeuvre, states that ‘recovery from the Great Sickness’ is possible, though by no means undemanding. His research does not aim solely at regaining sight of the common root of both the environmental and the economic crises, but also at finding ways to let the human economy be life-enabling rather than life-disabling. Collective choice might opt eventually for the former path; or it may not. Freedom’s burden, which existentialists like Marcel explored thoroughly, contemplates the possibility of self-destruction. As tourism is concerned, GCET itself can either remain a mere list of good intentions or become a well-established set of binding guidelines.

The first step towards a cure is McMurtry’s (2013, 20ff.) set of definitions of ‘human’, ‘natural’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘social’ capital as well as ‘globalization’ and ‘development’ in terms of ‘real capital’, i.e. ‘life capital’. After defining these key concepts along life-grounded lines of interpretation, he proceeds to outlining three ‘universal parameters of diagnosis’ of the ‘general determinants of social health and disease’ that should guide any ensuing social actions and, a fortiori, modern tourism too: [I] ‘Continuity of life-necessities and means to members of society’, [II] ‘Functioning contribution of citizens to society’s life-requirements’, and [III] ‘Sustaining the life-carrying capacities of the environmental life-host’ (McMurtry, 2013, 62–3). Whatever viable community we may choose to conceive of, its members must have their vital needs met, which can be done by letting all able members participate in life-sustaining economic activities, which in turn must not be harmful to the natural and human-made preconditions for need-satisfaction, i.e. natural and human life-support systems or civil commons.

It should be noted that nature’s life-support systems, insofar as they are thought of and/or managed for life-enablement, are ipso facto civil commons. As soon as any natural or human activity is conceived of as having an import upon life and is managed so as to let this import be comprehensively and coherently positive, then that activity becomes a token of civil commons. The great challenge of the Anthropocene is for humanity to acknowledge to itself that nature’s life-support systems themselves, such as the Earth’s water and nitrogen cycles, are now well within the province of human understanding and steering, however varying the latter may be in degree, and can turn all too easily into life-disabling systems when poorly managed. The deep and extensive intermingling of natural and human factors in the Anthropocene can then be deemed good or bad depending on its life-valued implications. No realm where human agency is involved can be excluded. Tourism itself, by fulfilling parameters [I]–[III], would become a true token of civil commons.

The second step towards a cure is a set of four shifts in prevailing economic policy that would turn money-making into a means of life-enablement, instead of continuing to treat life-hosts as a means of money-making: [1] ‘higher taxes and disincentives for the very rich’ (McMurtry, 2013, 262–5), [2] ‘aggressive national recovery of control over public owned resources’ (McMurtry, 2013, 268–72), [3] ‘public banking and investment’ (McMurtry, 2013, 286–94), and [4] ‘policy-led elimination of structural depredation of the poor and the environment’ (McMurtry, 2013, 295–9). All four shifts are articulated for the sake of nurturing ‘real capital’, not for the sake of predatory ‘State power’ (McMurtry, 2013, 258–60) or even ‘equality’ as such (McMurtry, 2013, 300). Still, in today’s world, McMurtry (2013) argues that only state power qua civil commons is likely to achieve such ambitious shifts. To make the point clear, who or what else, if not state power, could ever let Ray Anderson’s (1998 and 2009) much-praised case of 100 per cent sustainable industrial production become the effective norm for all businesses on Earth? Who or what else, if not state power, could actually streamline the tourist industry along the parameters [I]–[III] defined above by means of consistently enforced GCET’s ‘principles’ and ‘rules’ (WTO, 1999, 2)?

Besides, none of the advised policies is unknown to modern humankind. They are not trite utopias, but policies that have been tested practically and successfully in the recent past on several occasions, showing how ‘the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good’ (Pope Francis, 2013) can be employed to a vastly life-enabling effect. McMurtry (2013) recounts inter alia the 1940s–2010s Scandinavian fiscal regimes, 1990s–2010s Latin America’s renationalization of strategic resources, 1920s–2010s North Dakota’s public bank, the 1987 Montreal Ozone Protocol and the 1966 UN’s ICESCR.

In the case of tourism, the principles and regulations invoked by GCET fit squarely within the fourth policy shift discussed by McMurtry (2013), given above all the explicit connection made therein between ‘responsible tourism’ and existing human-rights legal ‘instruments’, especially the ICESCR (1966, 2, 5, art. 7(2)). Furthermore, without watchful monitoring and concrete enforcement of life-grounded principles and regulations, there would be little chance for any truly responsible tourism, the economic ‘competitiveness’ of which would be easily undermined by business practices cutting corners vis-à-vis environmental standards or ‘the fundamental rights of salaried and self-employed workers in the tourism industry’ (WTO, 1999, 6, arts 8(4), 9(1) and 10(2)). The first and third policy shifts are relevant with regard to the costs associated with monitoring and enforcement by societies’ civil commons agencies, since more substantial and more readily available public funds could support these agencies, the ambitious aims of which the WTO’s code extends to ‘saving rare and precious resources’, ‘avoiding … waste production’ (WTO, 1999, 3, art. 3(2)) and ‘preserving and upgrading monuments, shrines and museums as well as archaeological and historic sites’ (4, art. 4(2)).

McMurtry’s focus, unlike Marcel’s, is set upon collective dimensions of agency. However, life-value onto-axiology applies equally to the individual dimension, particularly with respect to existential choices and moral behaviour. The fundamental axioms of life-value onto-axiology tell us what is good and what is bad. Therefore, they offer ultimate criteria for each person’s existential and moral evaluations. Thus, we can make sense of McMurtry’s (2009–10a) claim that through life-value onto-axiology we can ‘recover step by step the missing life-ground of values and the ultimate meaning of how we are to live’ (emphasis added): it is also on a personal level that life-enablement constitutes the good and life-disablement its opposite. The good life is a life in which life-capacity is nurtured as extensively as possible, as exemplified emblematically by the life-nurturing healing and caring acts of religious prophets and saints.

Given the social and natural milieus in which individuals live and act, the individual’s good life means for her to operate as a life-capacity multiplier: ‘The more human beings subsume the requirements of their fellows’ and their environment’s life-capital capacities into their organizational regulation, the better they are’ (McMurtry, 2013, 310; emphasis removed). In the pursuit of the good life, we cannot limit ourselves to fostering our own life-capacity in isolation. We must equally nurture other persons’, living creatures’ and ecosystems’ life-capacity qua extensions of our own, as instantiated daily in the subjectively and inter-subjectively rewarding experiences of parenthood, education, nursing, care, genuine friendship, empowering leadership and service, constructive cooperation, compassion to people and animals, humane animal husbandry and environmentally sound behaviour. Responsible tourism qua individual agency falls under this line of understanding.

Although McMurtry (2009–10a) acknowledges extensively the commonalities between the recognition of life’s supreme value to be found in many spiritual traditions and the one articulated in his own philosophy, neither the bulk of his work nor life-value onto-axiology is focused primarily on the meaningful relationship that individuals may establish with a personal God. In this, Marcel’s discussion of homo viator emphasizes quintessentially religious themes that are not central within McMurtry’s philosophy. Nevertheless, the recognition of life’s supreme value is sufficient to clarify how the awe and existential import vis-à-vis life’s majesty characterizing many spiritual traditions persist within life-value onto-axiology, which extrapolates ‘the ultimate meaning of how we are to live’ from the life-ground. On this point, illustrative are the words of 20th-century environmentalist, bio-ethicist and historian of religion Hans Jonas (1993, 48–9), who explains the implicit continuity between the spiritual traditions’ existential and moral focus points – at least the Judaeo-Christian ones – and the secular concern with the environmental crisis threatening life’s continuation on Earth:

[T]he ‘human condition’ has been transforming … In the old days religion told us that we were all sinners because of the original sin. Today it is our planet’s ecology that accuses all of us of being sinners because of the overexploitation of human ingenuity. Back in the old days, religion terrified us with the Last judgment at the end of times. Today our tortured planet predicts the coming of that day without any divine intervention. The final revelation … is the silent scream emerging from things themselves, those things that we must endeavour to resolve to rein in our powers over the world, or we shall die on this desolate earth which used to be the creation.

The ruling economic paradigm is not only blind to life-needs, it is also deaf to the peculiar scream that the ‘tortured’ Earth emits. Worshipping Mammon rather than Gaia, many human beings seem oblivious to the sacred primacy of life. This peculiar scream is therefore a call to renewed personal responsibility vis-à-vis creation itself. It is a secular path to salvation or, if failing, damnation.

Responding constructively to the threat to life caused by the ‘Great Sickness’ is not merely a social task, but one that involves, and gives ultimate meaning to, individual agency as well, just like the pursuit of redemption has done traditionally for countless believers. First of all, no social task would ever be accomplished without widespread individual agency. Secondly and more distinctively, to be conscious of, and positively responsive to, the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene is part of what the individual’s good life requires, since the properly directed expression of an individual’s life-capacity cannot but enable to some extent the surrounding individuals, living beings and life-conditions. In order for a specific individual’s life to be truly good, her contribution to life in general must be truly good, now and in the future.

As odd as such a notion may have sounded at the beginning of this chapter, it should be clear by now that the same ethical and existential considerations apply to individual choices within the realm of tourism, whether entrepreneurial, recreational or occupational. Tourism is no vacation from personal responsibility. We have no guarantee that the individual should opt always, primarily or even frequently for the good life. Freedom’s burden entails having the concrete prospect of opting for its opposite too. Ignorance, greed, stupidity, ennui and capriciousness are but a few of the failures conspiring to draw the worst out of humankind. Uncompromisingly, the sprawling cancer diagnosed by McMurtry (2013) shows how systematically humankind has been capable of taking a path that is not good. Yet, humankind’s long-evolved civil commons, GCET included, remind us also of our potential for taking a positive one. Following Marcel, we can hope that this latter path may be the decisive one for most of us in the face of the Anthropocene’s greatest challenge: our own survival as a species.

References

1. Anderson, R. 1998. Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model. White River junction, vA: Chelsea Green Publishing.
2. Anderson, R. 2009. Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose. Doing Business by Respecting the Earth. New York: St Martin’s Press.
3. Baruchello, G. 2007. Western philosophy and the life-ground. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Paris and Oxford: Eolss. <http://www.eolss.net> [accessed Apr. 2014].
4. Baruchello, G. 2013. The hopeful liberal: Reflections on free markets, science and ethics. Nordicum-Mediterraneum 8(2). <http://nome.unak.is/nm-marzo-2012/vol-8-no-2-2013/58-conference-paper/395-the-hopeful-liberal-reflections-on-free-markets-science-and-ethics> [accessed Apr. 2014].
5. Baruchello, G., and Johnstone, R.L. 2011. Rights and value. Construing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as civil commons. Studies in Social Justice, 5(1), 91–126.
6. Buffett, W. 2003. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. 2002 Annual Report. <http://www. berkshirehathaway.com/2002ar/2002ar.pdf> [accessed 28 Apr. 2014].
7. Cecchetti, S.G., Mohanty, M.S., and Zampolli, F. 2011. The Real Effects of Debt. BIS Working Papers, 352. <http://www.bis.org/publ/work352.htm> [accessed 28 Apr. 2014].
8. Center for Human Rights in Practice (CHRP) 2013. Reports on the Impact of Public Spending Cuts on Different Disadvantaged Groups within the UK. <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/ fac/soc/law/chrp/projects/spendingcuts/resources/database/reportsgroups> [accessed Apr. 2014].
9. European Commission 2013. EUROPA – Food Safety – Chemical Safety of Food – Food Contaminants. <http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/chemicalsafety/contaminants/index_ en.htm> [accessed Apr. 2014].
10. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–8.
11. Hernandez, j.G. 2011. Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God and Virtue. London: Continuum.
12. House of Commons 2013. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (HC 141), Food Contamination, vol. 1. Fifth report of session 2013–14, incorporating HC 1035-i-ii, session 2012–13. London: The Stationery Office.
13. House of Lords 2013. Select Committee on Economic Affairs (HL 48), Tackling Corporate Tax Avoidance in a Global Economy: Is a New Approach Needed? 1st Report of Session 2013–14. London: The Stationery Office.
14. ICESCR 1966. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted 16 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200A, U.N. GAOR, 21st sess., Su No. 16, at 49, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), entered into force 3 jan. 1976. <http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/ Pages/CESCR.aspx> [accessed Apr. 2014].
15. Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 2013. Food Expenditure and Nutritional Quality over the Great Recession. IFS Briefing Note BN143. <www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn143.pdf>. [accessed Apr. 2014].
16. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2012. Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation. <http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/ SREX> [accessed Apr. 2014].
17. International Labour Organization (ILO) 2013. Public Sector Shock: The Impact of Policy Retrenchment in Europe. Geneva: ILO.
18. Johnson, E., and Morehouse, H. (eds) 2014. After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch. Progress in Human Geography, 38(3), 439–56.
19. Jonas, H. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
20. Jonas, H. 1993. Il concetto di Dio dopo Auscwitz: Una voce ebraica. Genoa: Il melangolo.
21. Joseph, P. 2007–13. The Zeitgeist Film Series. Official Website for Peter Joseph’s Award Winning Documentary Trilogy. <http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/> [accessed Apr. 2014].
22. Kuntz, P.G. 1980. Augustine: From Homo Erro to Homo Viator. Augustinian Studies, 11, 79–89.
23. Lovelock, J.E. 1972. Gaia as seen through the atmosphere. Atmospheric Environment, 6(8), 579–80.
24. Marcel, G. 1962. Homo Viator. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
25. Marcel, G. 1967. The Philosophy of Existentialism. New York: The Citadel.
26. McMurtry, J. 1995. The social immune system and the cancer stage of capitalism. Social Justice, 22(4), 1–25.
27. McMurtry, J. 1998. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Toronto: Garamond.
28. McMurtry, J. 1999. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 1st edn. London: Pluto.
29. McMurtry, J. 2002. Value Wars. London: Pluto.
30. McMurtry, J. 2009–2010a. What is good? What is bad? The value of all values across time, place and theories. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Paris and Oxford: Eolss: <http://www.eolss.net> [accessed Apr. 2014].
31. McMurtry, J. 2009–2010b. Glossary. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Paris and Oxford: Eolss: <http://www.eolss.net> [accessed Apr. 2014].
32. McMurtry, J. 2013. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure, 2nd edn. London: Pluto.
33. Noonan, J. 2006. Democratic Society and Human Needs. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
34. OECD 2011. Divided we stand: Why inequality keeps rising. <http://www.oecd-ilibrary. org/social-issues-migration-health/the-causes-of-growing-inequalities-in-oecd-countries_9789264119536-en> [accessed Apr. 2014].
35. OECD 2013a. Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. <http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/ taxation/addressing-base-erosion-and-profit-shifting_9789264192744-en> [accessed Apr. 2014].
36. OECD 2013b. Crisis squeezes income and puts pressure on inequality and poverty. <http:// www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2013-Inequality-and-Poverty-8p.pdf> [accessed Apr. 2014].
37. Pope Francis 2013. Evangelii Gaudium. <http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_ exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium. html> [accessed May 2015].
38. Sweetman, B. 2008. The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
39. Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) 2011. F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future. <http://healthyamericans.org/reports/obesity2011/Obesity2011Report.pdf‎> [accessed Apr. 2014].
40. UN 2012. Political Declaration of the High-Level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases. Adopted 24 jan. 2012, G.A. Res. 66/2, U.N. GAOR, 66th Sess., Agenda item 117, U.N. Doc. A/RES/66/2 (2012).
41. UNESCO 2002–13. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Paris and Oxford: Eolss. <http://www.eolss.net> [accessed Apr. 2014].
42. Weston, B., and Bollier, D. 2013. Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43. World Health Organization (WHO) 2011. Noncommunicable Diseases: Country Profiles 2011. <www.who.int/nmh/publications/ncd_profiles_report.pdf> [accessed Apr. 2014].
44. WTO 1999. Global Code of Ethics for Tourism. UN references A/RES/406(XIII) and A/ RES/56/212. <http://www.unwto.org/ethics/full_text/en/pdf/Codigo_Etico_Ing.pdf> [accessed Apr. 2014].

1. Giorgio Baruchello, born in Genoa, Italy, and now an Icelandic citizen, serves as Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. His publications encompass several different areas, especially social philosophy, theory of value, and history of philosophy. Since 2005 he has edited Nordicum-Mediterraneum <http://nome.unak.is>, the first Icelandic scholarly journal in Nordic and Mediterranean studies.