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CO-DESIGNING
ECONOMIES
IN TRANSITION
RADICAL APPROACHES IN DIALOGUE WITH
CONTEMPLATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Edited by
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino
And Zack Walsh
Co-Designing Economies in Transition
 Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino
Zack Walsh
Editors

Co-Designing
Economies in
Transition
Radical Approaches in Dialogue with
Contemplative Social Sciences
Editors
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino Zack Walsh
Department of Economic and Social Claremont School of Theology
Sciences Claremont, CA, USA
University of Turin
Turin, Italy

ISBN 978-3-319-66591-7    ISBN 978-3-319-66592-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66592-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963222

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Chapter 13 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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 Foreword

Environmentally, time is running out for the world as we know it. As we

find ourselves in what Paul Crutzen termed the Anthropocene epoch, the
earth could be up to seven degrees hotter by the end of the century. But
perhaps a name even more apt for our epoch is what in this volume Zack
Walsh refers to in his chapter as the Capitalocene, for much of what is
currently disruptive environmentally can be traced to the normal func-
tioning of the now worldwide capitalist economic system. From external-
ized costs to air and water quality that result from ever fiercer capitalist
competition to the proliferation of ever more commodities to satisfy a
culture of consumption, the capitalist system has become as out of con-
trol as, per The Communist Manifesto, the conjurings of the sorcerer’s
apprentice.
Even apart from the environment, things are not well. World capital-
ism struggles, both north and south, to generate the number of good jobs
that could accord everyone a middle-class income. With the newest
advances in artificial intelligence, automation will make good job genera-
tion even more difficult. And as things stand, the world’s richest eight
people now enjoy the same wealth as the world’s poorest 50%, with exec-
utives—at least in the USA—making now hundreds of times the income
of average workers.
The effects go beyond the economic to the political and spiritual.
Often the jobs that are produced are alienating, done exclusively for
v
vi Foreword

extrinsic reward rather than for intrinsic fulfillment. As in a game of

musical chairs, each job-holder comes to be in permanent competition
with many other job-seekers, making job insecurity an ever-present anxi-
ety. It is hardly surprising therefore that among the economically inse-
cure, suspicions arise across ethnic divides over any special treatments,
regardless of the previous disadvantages for which those treatments are
supposed to compensate. It is unsurprising as well that those economi-
cally insecure would begrudge immigrants and even refugees, whom they
judge as threats. Thus, even professed religious values are displaced by
perceived threats to economic interests.
In such milieu, it is also unsurprising to find parents regarding higher
education principally as a way to enhance their children’s employability.
While in a market economy self-marketability is an ever-necessary con-
cern that certainly needs to be addressed, too often the students too,
sometimes grudgingly but more often with enthusiasm, come to regard
their entire being as commodities to be bought and sold on the market,
eschewing therefore coursework in the arts or humanities that will not
somehow eventuate in cash. The students forget—and are encouraged to
forget—to feed also their souls as well as their future coffers. They forget
and are encouraged to forget that we are meant to be more than just fac-
tory products and our education more than just cultural capital inputs to
our employability. We are also called and need to learn how to be good
citizens, not just of our own countries but of the world. And beyond
good citizens, good people. But our institutions of higher learning, them-
selves increasingly under competitive pressure, increasingly regarding
their students as customers, are themselves losing devotion to their greater
call.
If ever there were a time calling for good citizenship and good person-
hood, it is now. Across Europe and the USA, we witness the rise of a
mean-spirited—and in the USA certainly a vulgar—populism, motored
by resentment, fear and disrespect. Before now it would have been hard
to imagine a movement and a presidency that was intent on building a
literal wall across a national border to keep neighbors out. It is a move-
ment, unfortunately, that begets its opposing mirror image: a correspond-
ing resentment, a corresponding fear and a corresponding contempt. The
 Foreword
   vii

resulting polarization, perhaps most acute in the USA but apparent else-
where as well is something from which we all need redress.
Especially in the USA, which paradoxically presents itself as the bas-
tion of democracy, economic inequality distorts both the political process
and national cultural consciousness. Against the specter of big money
that always threatens to run more conservative candidates against them,
US Republican Congress people have been pulled so far to the right that
they fear even to acknowledge the human contribution to climate change.
It is an alienation as it were from the world and from truth, and it legiti-
mates and encourages similar alienation culturally. Republican constitu-
encies, looking to their leaders, find legitimacy for untenably extreme
views. To win votes, even the oppositional Democratic party is likewise
obliged to concede ground to politically induced idiocy and move right-
ward itself. Thus, the land most committed to the freedom of free enter-
prise must also struggle to find cultural support for the universal health
care that is taken for granted in most other advanced industrial
societies.
Suffice it to say that the night is dark and we are far from home. And
the social sciences have not always been guiding stars. As professions,
economics and political science have often served instead to justify the
current world order. Just think, as mentioned in this book, of the homo
economicus that dominates professional economics, a model of the human
actor as what philosopher Harry Frankfurt once termed a wanton, that is,
a creature who can only want without moral reflection or prioritization
among felt wants. Sociology often has been more critical, but with the
exception of anthropology, the whole of the social sciences have generally
been tied to a positivist philosophy of science that holds, among other
things, to a rigid split between facts and values. The social sciences have
accordingly been ambivalent about addressing moral facts that carry an
ineluctable value component.
Even more have the social sciences been at pains to distance themselves
from anything that smacks of spirituality. Understood perhaps as per-
sonal religion sans the organization, even spirituality can seem too other-­
worldly to fall under the examination of empirical social science. That
sentiment too is a legacy of positivism, which sees values as purely subjec-
viii Foreword

tive rather than anything objective and all matters of an ontological

nature as meaningless metaphysics.
But if the social sciences refuse to move from facts to values or toward
addressing ontology, then they cannot address, as the chapters in this
book do, what the title of Margunn Bjornholt’s chapter explicitly refers
to as “what really matters”. What matters is clearly a question of values,
but if we ask what as a matter of fact does happen to matter to people,
our question remains entirely empirical, entirely factual, and not particu-
larly evaluative in itself. Conventional sociology thus has no problem
with such questions. In different ways, it asks them all the time.
But if we ask what should matter or what matters ultimately, then we
are no longer asking empirically what others think matters but as analysts
making value judgments ourselves about what ought to matter. It is here
that positivistically inclined social sciences would demur, denying that
what should matter is a properly scientific question.
Positivistic social sciences are certainly correct that what ought to mat-
ter is not strictly or at least not entirely an empirical question. It is a ques-
tion about values. But the collapse of the fact/value distinction goes both
ways. In other words, just as many facts are theory and value laden, so are
values theory and fact laden.
The theory- and fact-laden nature of values is what distinguishes values
from brute tastes, like a preference for vanilla over chocolate, about which
there is nothing to argue. In contrast, when it comes to values, there is
much over which we can argue. One once common argument, for exam-
ple, to value capitalism over socialism was that capitalism aligns better
with human nature, held to be selfish, aggressive and greedy. That capital-
ism does align better with human nature is a theory and whether human
nature is as described is a matter of fact to be determined empirically.
Were humans shown to be more altruistic and social in nature, that deter-
mination would undermine at least this particular rationale for valuing
capitalism over socialism and hence call the value itself into rational
question.
An evaluative preference for capitalism over socialism could be saved
by alternate reasoning, but that is the very point here. The point is that
unlike brute tastes, rationally held values depend on some sort of rational
reasoning that is in part theoretical and factual. Thus, arguments about
 Foreword
   ix

theories and facts should affect the values we hold and, if we operate in
good faith, lead us to values that are more rationally tenable.
Not to entertain such value-laden questions is to leave important areas
of our social life unaddressed. In fact, it is to leave unaddressed what
really matters or most matters.
When we ask specifically about what most matters, we are driven to
fundamental ontology. Who are we and what are we about? What is most
conducive to our collective flourishing?
These questions have a spiritual dimension but they are accessible to
reason. Even Karl Marx, the historical materialist, trod in this direction
when he spoke of species being. And, indeed, it would be difficult for
Marx to speak of alienation without any specification of that which we
are alienated from.
The contemplative traditions are likewise a call in this direction, an
inspiration to be mindful of who we really are and are meant to be. It is
especially welcome therefore to have a book such as this that seeks to
reimagine a new economics from a mindful, contemplative perspective.
Not only transdisciplinary, the volume is also transnational in character.
With both theoretical expositions and practical exemplars of alternative
economic forms, the book offers an important opportunity to think
through our way ahead.

Doug Porpora
 Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social
Science

The current crisis in the economy could teach us to look beyond material value
and unrealistic expectations of limitless growth. When things go seriously wrong
such as in the financial crisis, it is often because a new reality is still being
viewed with outdated concepts, and this is certainly also the case in the domain
of the economy today. (The Dalai Lama)

As this quote, expressed by the Dalai Lama in 2009 after the eruption of
the financial crises (Tideman, 2016), indicates, the changing economic
reality calls for a fundamentally different way of thinking and seeing.
Philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1962) defined this as a shift in paradigm,
meaning a fundamental change in the mode of perception, frames of
reference and underlying beliefs and assumptions. French novelist Marcel
Proust (1923) described this shift in vivid terms: “The real act of discov-
ery consists not in finding new land but in seeing with new eyes”.
The current book testifies that an increasing number of scholars rec-
ognize the need for such shift in perspective. They seem to agree with
my view that the economic crisis has been created (and persists),
because our political and economic leadership employs flawed and
increasingly outdated frames of reference, based on limited assump-
tions about the current economic reality and the multifaceted drivers of
human behavior.

xi
xii Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social Science

These assumptions of classical economics were mainly derived from

Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology. In this worldview, the econ-
omy and environment are seen as separate spheres of life, and humans—
the ‘fittest’ among competing species—are supposed to hold dominion
over all natural (and human) resources. This privileged role gives humans
the power to extract value from all resources, against as low as possible
cost, and utilize it for our human agendas (or, for that matter, to liquidate
it to maximize GDP or quarterly profit margins). In this worldview, indi-
viduals and companies regard themselves as autonomous, individual
agents who make their own rational choices—the image of homo clausus
or homo economicus—in a relatively static and predictable context.
Economist Milton Friedman (1970) expressed this worldview in the
business context in a famous quote: “the only business of business is
business”.
This way of thinking was the cornerstone of the industrial age when
both natural and human resources seemed abundant and inexpensive. Its
underlying worldview, however, is no longer fit for purpose. In fact, this
rather simplistic ideology of economic activity is increasingly recognized
as the prime driver behind the emerging “tragedy of the commons”, in
which producers, consumers and financiers hold each other in a “prison-
ers’ dilemma”: a race to the bottom of over-production/consumption/
borrowing and consequential ecological overshoot and social inequality.
Given the fact that we have finite common resources for a rapidly grow-
ing population, by continuing to focus primarily on our own short-term
business interests, we collectively end up as losers.
Fortunately, thanks to discoveries in many scientific disciplines, most
notably in social psychology and neuroscience, there is a new worldview
emerging that is more suitable to the modern context. It is a view in
which people, business, economy, environment and society are no longer
separate worlds that meet tangentially, but are deeply interconnected and
mutually interdependent. This matches with the view of sociologist
Norbert Elias (2000) who said that humanity should see itself as homines
aperti, in which people are in open connection with each other and their
environment, being formed by and dependent on others and nature.
For example, Daniel Kahneman (1979), who received the 2003 Nobel
Prize in Economics for his studies on intuitive judgment and decision-­
 Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social Science
   xiii

making, has explored the intersection of neuro-science, psychology and

real economic behavior. The significance of this work lies in its ability—
for the first time in the history of economics—to describe the neuro-­
biological basis of economic behavior. This work is bridging the heretofore
distinct disciplines of psychology and economics.
These insights are revelatory because they provide empirical evidence
derived from a physical-biological basis for the notion that human nature
is not driven by greed, materialism, extrinsic motivation and egoism
alone; at least equally important are pro-social motives, such as inclina-
tion to cooperation, moral fairness, altruism and psychological well-­
being. This not only uproots the classical model of homo economicus but
also challenges the deep-felt belief that only external gratification through
money and consumption can meet our needs.
The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 and the increasing impact of
social technology has made it clear that this interconnected worldview is
not merely academic: it best describes the reality of global society, busi-
ness and finance, which functions as a tightly interwoven web of human
relationships and interaction. This web extends into our global climate
and ecosystems, which has been recently recognized by the global com-
munity as evidenced by UN Global Sustainable Development Goals.
They are built on the scientifically determined notion that in order for
our economies to function and societies to survive, we need to respect
planetary boundaries and ecological laws (Rockstrom et al., 2009). In the
new reality “business as usual” or “politics as usual” is no longer an option
from a long-term survival viewpoint. Indeed, leading companies have
recognized the new reality—which is generally labeled as “sustainabil-
ity”—as the next business “Megatrend”, just like IT, Globalization and
the Internet did earlier, determining their long-term viability. Or in the
words of management scholar, Frank Horwitz (2010): “The only business
of business is sustainable business”.
The shift toward sustainability implies a departure from the simplistic
three-pronged production-consumption financing model in which
money is abundantly made available by banks, to a more holistic and
realistic life-based model in which constraints in financial, natural and
ecological resources are recognized as natural and consumers are
­recognized as real people. It is a shift from the speculative debt/growth
xiv Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social Science

economy to the real economy, not only in a macroeconomic sense but

also in terms of understanding the real drivers of economical value and
sustainable performance.
Matching real needs and resources entails a focus on the way we think
and relate to each other. Given the central role of human thinking and
interacting in the new economic paradigm, we should shift our percep-
tion of markets as anonymous transactional trading places to a commu-
nity operating in an interdependent economical and ecological context.
The members of the community are all interrelated stakeholders who are
engaged in a continuous complex inter-dependent process of co-creation
of value, while fulfilling needs, both short and long term. These needs go
beyond merely material economic needs, but also include emotional,
social and ecological needs. Therefore, the rules of the new economic
game should no longer be to maximize return on invested capital, but to
create optimum resilience of the system by enhancing well-being, shared
value creation and performance of all participants within the system. This
presents a major shift in economic thinking indeed!
The leading management thinker Gary Hamel (2007) described this
shift as follows:

The biggest barrier to the transformation of capitalism cannot be found

within the observable realm of org charts, strategic plans and quarterly
reports, but rather within the human mind itself […..]. The true enemy of
our times is a matrix of deeply held beliefs about what business [and eco-
nomics] is actually for, who it serves and how it creates value.

The reinstatement of the mind as a prime driver in economic value cre-

ation and the revolutionary insights into the mind’s pro-social nature are
giving rise to a new economic science. It is here that one can find the
exciting intersection with contemplative science. This field, first postulated
by Francesco Varela (1992), gained popularity through the research con-
ducted by medical researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn (1990) whose program
called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) turned out to dimin-
ish the suffering experienced by people with chronic pain, and neurosci-
entist Richard Davidson, who has shown that contemplative practices
such as meditation and other forms of mind-training, can be observed in
 Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social Science
   xv

measurable change patterns in the brain (Davidson & Begley, 2012).

Since then, multiple research studies have shown that this process of con-
templation results in positive effects on one’s mental and physical health
and well-being. Most interesting is the fact that, when these practices are
complemented with other educational methods, they become more than
tools for people’s sense of well-being: they help people to expand their
awareness of one self and one’s environment—in other words, they
expand our frames of reference. MIT researcher Otto Scharmer (2013)
describes this shift as a transition from ego-system consciousness to eco-­
system consciousness.
Continued research in this field shows that contemplation is not merely
an internally oriented process: it is both embodied and interpersonal, which
means that it is shared in and through relationships and with the world
(Siegel, 2016). The process of contemplation, over time, is set to evoke the
discovery of one’s natural interconnectedness with the world around one-
self. Such recognition will inevitably lead to a shift in the perception of
one’s role in the world, ultimately to the point of recognizing one’s interde-
pendence with the world around oneself, which typically results in an
adjusted sense of purpose. At that point, one can no longer see oneself as a
disconnected isolated homo economicus, but rather as a full co-creative
member of the human family and the sacred natural world.
While this mind-state has been recognized as a possibility for individu-
als, the question is if it can be applied to the field of economic policy. For
example, when people become overly greedy/fearful when confronted by
the ups and downs of markets, can policies be envisioned that help peo-
ple to make more balanced choices by not giving in to the ‘primal’ fight-­
flight-­freeze response? Can governments design economic policies that
discourage mindless consumption, and instead empower consumers to
make sustainable purchasing choices? Currently, many policies achieve
the opposite: they reinforce a vicious cycle of desire and fear, with count-
less negative impacts on nature and society.
Thus, the crucial question is as follows: Can the groundbreaking
insights of the emerging contemplative science be translated to the level
of policy making? Can we learn to develop policies that help people to
transform negative mental states into constructive and compassionate
action, replacing negative economic incentives into more positive ones
xvi Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social Science

that stimulate sustainable economic behavior of individuals and institu-

tions? These are excellent questions to ask in this new field of science,
which we can call contemplative social science.
In conclusion, while there are many initiatives addressing the crisis in
capitalism directed at changing political-economic systems from the ‘out-
side’—such as ecological footprint reduction, the circular economy, green
product innovation, sustainable investing, new governance and account-
ing systems—this book makes the argument that equally important is
changing the ‘inside’ realm of the mind-sets and worldviews underlying
the outer economic systems. Contemplative science has ascertained that
these mind-sets can be developed through education and mind training
(they are available to us because they are integral to our human nature).
This argument is not just theoretical: it may be the most important work
that we need to do in order to sustain human life on this planet.
Contemplative social science can now take this further by exploring how to
develop the mind-sets, beliefs, assumptions and mental models that can
help us create sustainable economic systems that are in line with actual
human nature and respect planetary boundaries.

Winterhur, Switzerland Sander Tideman

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 Contents

1 Introduction   1
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino and Zack Walsh

Part I Transdisciplinary Foundations for Contemporary

Social and Economic Transformation  13

2 In Search of a New Compass in the Great Transition:

Toward Co-designing the Urban Space We Care About  15
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino

3 Navigating the Great Transition Via Post-capitalism

and Contemplative Social Sciences  43
Zack Walsh

4 Having, Being, and the Commons  63

Ugo Mattei

xix
xx Contents

5 
Par Cum Pari: Notes on the Horizontality of
Peer-to-Peer Relationships in the Context of the
Verticality of a Hierarchy of Values  73
Michel Bauwens

6 Economics Beyond the Self  89

Laszlo Zsolnai

7 The Koan of the Market  99

Julie A. Nelson

8 Epistemology of Feminist Economics 109

Zofia Łapniewska

9 How to Make What Really Matters Count in Economic

Decision-Making: Care, Domestic Violence,
Gender-­Responsive Budgeting, Macroeconomic
Policies and Human Rights 135
Margunn Bjørnholt

10 Contemplative Economy and Contemplative

Economics: Definitions, Branches and Methodologies 161
Xabier Renteria-Uriarte

Part II Collective Awareness, the Self, and Digital

Technologies 189

11 From Smart Cities to Experimental Cities? 191

Igor Calzada
 Contents
   xxi

12 FirstLife: From Maps to Social Networks and Back   219

Alessio Antonini, Guido Boella, Alessia Calafiore, and
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino

13 The Organic Internet: Building Communications

Networks from the Grassroots   235
Panayotis Antoniadis

14 Technocratic Automation and Contemplative Overlays

in Artificially Intelligent Criminal Sentencing   273
Philip Butler

15 One Bright Byte: Dōgen and the Re-embodiment

of Digital Technologies   297
David Casacuberta

Index 317
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Major steps in technological change after World War II 16
Fig. 2.2 A diverse economy framing (Source: Gibson-Graham,
2006, p. 71). Note (from Gibson-Graham): The figure
must be read only along the columns, not along the rows 26
Fig. 12.1 Applications classification by users’ expertise 221
Fig. 13.1 A speculative model of the NeNa1 neighborhood where
today is located a parking structure and a bus station,
across the main train station. Drawing by Hans Widmer.
See http://nena1.ch 266

xxiii
 List of Tables

Table 6.1 Mainstream Western economics versus Buddhist economics 93

Table 11.1 From smart cities to experimental cities. (Elaborated by
the author) 198
Table 11.2 Techno-politics of data collection, analysis, storage, and
reuse (Elaborated by the author from Shilton, 2016, p. 26) 199

xxv
 1
Introduction
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino and Zack Walsh

Life as we know it is changing rapidly and dramatically. We have entered

what scientists now call the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch
underscored by large-scale social and ecological changes. The truth is
humanity has become a geophysical force—one whose actions pro-
foundly shape Earth systems and increasingly determine the conditions
of life for its many inhabitants. By 2050, for example, the UNDP and the
International Organization for Migration say there will be an exodus of
about 250 million people due to drought (Brown, 2007; Pinto-Dobernig,
2008). It is high time we asked how we will meet the great challenges of
the twenty-first century, including climate change, technological unem-
ployment, and widening social inequalities.

V.M.B. Giorgino (*)

Department of Economic and Social Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics,
University of Torino, Torino, Italy
Z. Walsh
Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, Claremont, CA, USA
Toward Ecological Civilization (EcoCiv), Claremont, CA, USA
Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany

© The Author(s) 2018 1

V.M.B. Giorgino, Z. Walsh (eds.), Co-Designing Economies in Transition,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66592-4_1
2 V.M.B. Giorgino and Z. Walsh

Some have suggested that we can make a Great Transition to a socially

just and sustainable future. But fundamentally, this would require a cul-
tural transition aligned with a new economic system. All of us can easily
recognize that the continuous changes we deal with exert an enormous
pressure on us, our relationships, and our existing institutions. Few of
these changes do not affect our economic interactions. By overcoming
the presumed independence and a-historicity of economics, we may
more accurately understand economic interactions in relation to society
and as part of a broader set of human interactions. Most scholars agree
that we are embedded in various systems of economic relationships, some
of which are market-based, state-based, voluntary or non-profit-based,
and household-based. What needs to be better understood, however, is
the quality of these relationships—the texture of the different binds that
they create. This is why sociologist Viviana Zelizer (2012) prefers to
define the economy as relational work.
It is difficult to understand the immense challenges of our everyday
lives in such exciting and complicated times, since the changes we experi-
ence often appear new, confusing, and incapable of being easily encapsu-
lated in established conceptual frameworks. The anxiety to classify our
experiences under a known umbrella is quite strong, motivated especially
by academics’ never-ending battles for theoretical dominance, rather
than their desire to transcend paradigms. As a result, there is a clear cul-
tural need to develop tools and methods able to reduce our strong ten-
dency toward divided thinking. When we attempt to go beyond the
principles and values of our field and observe processes as they appear,
then new interactional patterns will likely emerge. This, however, requires
a return to the basics—a return to the elementary condition of our
humanity, considering all our relationships, so that no one and nothing
is left out for lack of attention or empathy.
Contemplative social sciences place these processes at the core of their
inquiry. Their specific contribution is to help us become aware of our
pre-­judgments and find a way to a more open-minded approach to
understanding very different phenomena within a participatory, but not
pre-classificatory, scheme. They establish wise and pragmatic methodolo-
gies to develop and nurture fresh approaches to social interactions. At the
core, they are based on systematic efforts to integrate the wisdom ­traditions
 Introduction 3

with the social sciences. This implies that the understanding of contem-
plative knowledge transcends the religious contexts in which they are
typically born and cultivated. It also means that we are taking the first
steps in uncharted territory, in which wisdom traditions and social sci-
ences are invited to dismiss their respective dogmas and be open to unex-
pected solutions. Approximately 50 years ago, Michael Polanyi (2015)
wrote that the production of knowledge is a personal enterprise that is
neither subjective nor objective; rather, it is a personal commitment char-
acterized by dwelling in.
John Dewey said rationality and reflective thought does not ground us
(D’Agnese, 2016). Rather, we are all groundless, situated knowers. Our
personhood and our capacity for knowledge are both processes. We are all
events. With this understanding, we may use embodied, embedded,
extended, and enactive (4E) approaches to cognition to provide us new
ways of understanding how minds and bodies are co-produced in interac-
tion with environments (Hutchins, 2010; Thompson, 2007). These
innovative approaches help researchers better understand the role of cog-
nition in social and ecological systems, affording them new ways to more
consciously and sustainably design structures and systems to support
ethical values. This can help us not only become aware of people’s subjec-
tive (cognitive and affective) processes, but also become aware of the
social and ecological conditions underlying our existence and the possi-
bilities for transforming perception and behavior “intra-actively” with
material transformations (Barad, 2007).
This book creates dialogue between radical knowledge-practices and
contemplative social science to create these connections more clearly. It
seeks to transgress disciplinary boundaries, imagine, and implement new
visions of reality—in short, to co-design economies in transition. What
that specifically entails varies dramatically depending on a variety of fac-
tors, including one’s scope of interests, expertise, and social and geo-
graphical location. The chapters in this volume thus do not all agree with
one another, nor should they. Showcasing their differences is productive
of grasping the interconnections between fields and disciplines, and
including such difference is part of the task of mapping the Great
Transition. In this sense, this book is more akin to a proposition, than a
statement. Its chapters are intended to have an un-disciplining effect,
4 V.M.B. Giorgino and Z. Walsh

decentering our habitual ways of thinking about challenges exclusively in

terms of technical problems with technical solutions. They are intended
instead to provoke thought and conceive possibilities, which exist but
remain largely unseen. This is clearly tangible, for instance, if we pay
attention to the newly distributed technologies and the efforts underway
to implement a collaborative commons at the urban level. These changes
are intended to forever modify our landscapes, and we can play a funda-
mental role in directing them toward collective well-being.
At the same time, despite such differences between its individual
authors, this book presents a transdisciplinary vision pragmatically ori-
ented toward social transformation, able to create islands of change
chiefly concerned with disintermediate and dehierarchized social and
economic ties. The languages and competencies of each author remain
separate, but in our opinion, there is a thread that connects each of the
following chapters. That thread is the awareness that we are entering an
era characterized by new social and economic forms beyond our
understanding.

Part I
In Part I, we examine the “Transdisciplinary Foundations for
Contemporary Social and Economic Transformation.” Vincenzo M. B.
Giorgino leads off the discussion in the first part of Chap. 2 by specifi-
cally addressing the disruptive potential of distributed ledger technolo-
gies toward our social and economic relationships. Some of these
technologies’ possible architectures can enhance our lives, while others
may cause many challenges and enact certain prejudices in their support
of collective well-being. Along these lines, the tokenization of non-­
material values is the most intriguing area for its unexplored potentiali-
ties. In the second part of his chapter, Giorgino maintains that it is
important to pay attention to the forms of divisive thinking with which
we interpret social relations and orient our social action so as to allow that
kind of urban co-design that favors the joy of living and purposive action.
He concludes, in the third part, by emphasizing the centrality of an enac-
tive approach to ground our efforts.
Another random document with
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under his own roof.”
Mario was about to leave the palace, but the Cardinal touched his
arm. “Stay a while,” he said, “and I will go with you.” For a moment
he held Tarsis in the regard of his kindly though keen eyes, as if
studying him. “Much of the injustice that man does his neighbour is
by reason of his seeing him through the glass but darkly,” he
affirmed, in the manner of one who would dispel a misunderstanding.
“It is not the first time that the Honourable Forza has been called a
demagogue, but always it has been a calumny. I, who am his friend
and know him, can do no less than say this. To be a demagogue, I
take it, is to be at war with truth—to strive for popular favour by
inflaming the selfish passions of men. I am sure he has not done
that. He has wielded a lance, and an able one, but always it has
been the lance of truth and valour. He has striven to mellow the
world’s hard hopes with even-handed justice. Wrong is not a mender
of wrong. The sorrow we all feel in this hour and revengeful passions
go ill together. The occasion does not call for denunciation or abuse
of men or doctrines. Let us try to find the use there may be in this as
in all adversity. Anarchy has no more determined foe than Signor
Forza. His war is upon offenders against human justice, and that is
the same as war upon anarchy. No one loves his country more than
he, no one loved the King more. I know that his public services are in
harmony with the things that we all should hold best—the Church,
which is of Christ, and Italy, which is our country.”
In the hush that reigned Mario said, “I thank your Eminence,” and
Hera, silently, breathed a thanksgiving.
Tarsis had not spoken his last word. His lips were curving with the
sarcastic smile that he could summon. “I perceive,” he remarked,
“that your Eminence has become an apostate to the New
Democracy.”
The Cardinal made no reply, though he stood a second or two
weighing the words. Then, with the calmness of one who has
schooled himself to avoid fruitless and painful discussion, he turned,
smiling, to Mario.
 “Shall we go, Honourable?” he said, and the other inclined his
head. They gave a parting word to Hera, and, bowing to the rest of
the company, moved toward the door. As they passed nearly all
made reverence to the Cardinal. Their exit proved the signal for a
general departure of the guests, and with scant ceremony the
company began to go its way.
 CHAPTER XIII
AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT

Tarsis gave orders that no bright lights be shown at the windows

and that the palace in other respects preserve an air of mourning. He
passed the night in the library, writing at his Napoleonic table,
smoking and brooding over the utter failure of his efforts to break
Hera’s determination. He did not regret the attack he had made on
Mario in the presence of the guests. For the New Democracy he
harboured a deep hatred, and from a conviction born of this he had
linked the doctrines of that party and Mario’s advocacy of them with
the assassination of the King. It was easy for him to charge Forza
with the loss of the royal visit, and easier to behold him as the author
of his marital discord. The last fact clung to his meditations, which
lasted into the morning hours.
Hera, alone in her apartments, thought over the events of the
day. What dwarfed all else in her consciousness was the discovery
that Mario’s love had never faltered. In the joy of this revelation she
was able to forget for the moment the bondage into which she had
been lured by Tarsis, the price she had paid for obeying an instinct of
honour. But in the days that followed she was reminded of it bitterly.
At first the manner of her husband was such as to inform her
negatively that he was willing no longer to keep up even a show of
compliance. Next it took on a tenor of positive vexation. If she had
been keenly sensible before that he exerted himself to win her
affection, she was alive now to his studied resentment. He made no
effort to mask his feelings. On the contrary, he paraded them
resolutely. The details of domestic experience offered opportunities
without number, and she observed that he seldom neglected them.
He did not conduct his campaign of protest as a man of finer
grain might have done. From open indifference to her wishes he
passed to pronounced acts of discourtesy. Once, while she was with
her maid dressing for a night at La Scala, he quitted the palace
without warning, and did not return until long after the curtain had
fallen on the ballet. In the morning he offered an apology, but no
word of explanation. Every day brought a new sneer to his lip and to
his eye glances of deepened ill-will. This mood never left him. She
was made to feel it alike at the breakfast table and when he paid her
the parting civilities of the night.
Though all his approaches to her heart were foreordained to
failure, she had been disposed to retain a certain spark of respect for
him; now this was extinguished because of the discovery she had
made about the message from Rome. In its place there burned a
detestation of the man which every hour intensified. She realised
that his was not a character to accept, even to perceive, that her
attitude was, after all, just toward him, surveying it, as she did, in the
light of their pre-nuptial agreement. Her blame of him, in
consequence, was not so large as her commiseration of self for
having been so weak as to heed other counsels than those of her
heart. With the feeling that she had wronged herself was
compounded a fear that she had wronged Tarsis as well.
But the idea of surrender had never crossed her mind. Reason
had no play here; it was merely the intuitive firmness of a fine and
wholesome soul, for whom real marriage could never be aught but a
profound and moral naturalism; a loving union between man and
woman such as the name of Mario Forza conjured up, ardent with a
sense of the infinite—the apotheosis of a hallowed passion. When
the duplicity of Tarsis was laid bare she had known an impulse to
leave his house, to release herself from an obligation he had
imposed upon her by deceit. But she listened for the moment to a
less selfish voice, and decided to accept the events of her ill-starred
wedding—to endure, suffer silently, even stolidly, all that it should
entail. She felt so alone. To her father she would not go; his was a
nature to be relieved of care, not one to be asked to share it. As to
Aunt Beatrice, try as she did, Hera could not think of her except as
the projector of the trouble, well meaning as her purpose may have
been.
 There was only one heart that could give sympathy, only one
fellow-being that called to her, and to this one she might not go, in
his counsel she might not seek guidance. Nevertheless, chance
brought them together one morning in the garden of the General
Hospital. Every week Hera sent roses there, and it was on Flower
Day, as it had come to be known, that she met Mario in the director’s
office. Soon they found themselves walking in the garden, he telling
of a plan he had for a hospital where soldiers fallen on the industrial
field might be cared for until restored for the struggle.
“I come as a student,” he explained. “It is my second visit this
week. The organisation here has no superior in Europe, and in many
respects we shall take it as our model.”
“In what respect will you not take it?” she asked, as they passed
a broad lawn where pale men and women sat in the sun.
“In our dealing with such as those,” he answered, indicating the
convalescents.
“They seem to be dealt with kindly,” she observed. “They look
contented.”
“Now, yes. Most of them, you can see, are persons who in health
are accustomed to work, and not at light employment. They belong
to the class who can rest without starving only when they fall sick
and go to a hospital. Most of those patients on the lawn are done
with the doctor and the nurse. Time, fresh air, good nourishment,
and rest are their needs. In a few days they will be dismissed as
cured. The demand for beds is pressing. Their room in the wards is
wanted. They must go. They will not be strong enough to do heavy
work, the only kind for which most of them are fitted. If a man is
friendless he has an excellent chance to starve because the hospital
turns him out before he is well enough to earn a living. No employer
wants a gaunt-visaged convalescent.”
“You would provide for him until he is able to provide for himself,”
she said, comprehendingly.
“Yes. We should not pronounce him cured until he was strong
enough to earn his living.”
 They entered an avenue of poplars, on either side of which stood
the rows of isolated wards, and were alone except for the flitting
presence here and there of a white-jacketed attendant or a nurse in
sombre gown. Mario told her that what she had made known to him
at Palazzo Barbiondi had lit up his world again. When the news of
the wedding reached him, he said, his thoughts were black indeed. It
was as if the sun had fallen just as it had begun to fill the east with
glory. The love of her had given him a new heart, a new mind, new
senses. Suddenly all life had been transfigured with an infinite
beauty. It was in the railway carriage returning to Milan that he
learned of the wedding. He told her of the change that came over his
spirit. Bitterly he cried out against her and the universal heart. The
rapture that had raised him into heaven broke and he dropped into
the pit of hell. And so it was until he learned that she was the dupe of
—the forged message. He was glad for the warmth of sympathy that
then suffused his being. He saw the cruel facts that had ruled her,
the forces that had driven her to the other’s wish.
“Our temple is in ruins,” he said, filled with pity for her and
himself; “but perhaps it will some time be rebuilt. It must be!” he
declared, passionately. “This love is a necessity of my life, and will
be so long as life shall endure.”
“But it must be content now,” she warned him, “to live as does the
edelweiss of the Alps—that lonely plant which grows amid the snow.”
“But always with a flower ready to bloom safe and warm in its
heart,” he added. And he told her how hope had come to him the day
before in the ruined monastery, where he had gone to live again, in
its delicious memories, that hour they passed during the hailstorm.
“The leaves were thick on the eglantine,” he said, “and the chapel
was gay with sunshine and the voices of birds. All the growing, living
things had entered upon their heritage of joy, and then it was that the
light of a great hope, as if from prophecy, filled——”
She had started a little and admonished him to silence at sight of
a familiar figure in the arched entrance to the main wards, whither
their steps had led them. It was the large frame, ruddy face, flaxen
hair and beard of Ulrich the Austrian. The man who had sent Hera
the false telegram stood wide-eyed with astonishment and
comprehension to behold her in the company of Mario Forza. But he
quickly recovered his air of effusive good nature. With uncovered
head and smiling he approached to greet her.
“I have been through the wards,” said Tarsis’s most confidential
retainer, “and everywhere are the beautiful flowers your Excellency
has given. Ah! the rooms are filled with their fragrance—and,” he
added, bowing low, one hand pressed upon his chest, “with the
praises of your Excellency.”
Wondering that chance should have brought the man there, and
conscious for the first time that in this walk and converse with Mario
there was aught of indiscretion, and preoccupied as well with an
intuition that the Austrian’s presence boded a new ill, Hera replied to
his compliments with few words, and she and Mario passed on.
The meeting, in itself a trivial occurrence, proved a source of
much illumination for the Austrian. It explained what had puzzled his
mind ever since the night he had performed for Tarsis the service of
sending the message that made Hera listen to his plea. He had tried
in vain to account for that affair as some ruse in a political game
where his resourceful master had set his skill against that of the
leader of the New Democracy. Now he divined that a woman—no
other than she who became his wife—was the stake that Tarsis had
won. He recalled the words of the telegram, and felt sure that he had
hit the mark.
The Honourable Forza, he reasoned, was a rival before the
marriage, and, plainly, was a rival still. The thought of intrigue
obtruded itself in his survey of the situation, and, in the light of his
new knowledge, duty demanded that in this branch of his master’s
affairs he perform another confidential service. It was only just, he
told himself, that Signor Tarsis, too great a man to keep a watch on
his wife, should know that she had an interest in the General
Hospital that was not confined to visiting the sick and cheering their
lot with gifts of flowers.
Together Mario and Hera entered a ward for women, and he was
with her still as she moved through the great sick-room, pausing
here and there for a word to some patient. She told him that she
wished above all to visit a certain little girl, because it was the last
opportunity she would have to do so. “The doctor says that she will
not be here when I come next week. They cannot save her. She is
only twelve years old, but she worked in a mill ten hours a day.”
“Was it there she contracted the disease?” Mario asked.
“The doctors think the bad air of the place did as much as the
work and long hours to break down her health.”
“Is she alone in the world?”
“No; her mother, also a mill-worker, is alive, but she was disabled
for a time, and the girl had to toil for both. In the same mill the
mother met with an accident which left her face scarred terribly. She
is here now with her daughter. Only yesterday was she let out of
prison.”
Hera indicated a bed a few yards away where a woman was
kneeling in prayer.
“It is a cruel, often-told tale,” Mario said. “In the days when most
of our factories were built the world had not thought much about the
moral welfare or health of those obliged to work in them. With our
enlightenment about other things, we have learned that forces for
combating foes of the public health are as important to the state as
the army or navy. New laws are compelling builders of factories to
have a care for the health of the workers.”
“The laws that the New Democracy has given the country,” she
said, aware that Mario more than any man in Italy had worked to this
end.
“Something has been accomplished,” he told her, “but the work is
only begun. Do you know what mill this girl worked in?”
“Yes,” she answered, but said no more, and he understood. In all
the Tarsis silk-mills child labour was employed.
They saw the woman rise from prayer, look down upon the face
of her child, and, with a shriek that resounded through the ward,
bringing patients up from their pillows and nurses running to the
bedside, fall upon the girl’s body, wailing, and beseeching the ashen
lips to speak.
“Don’t go, Giulia! Don’t leave me! You are all I have!”
With the others Hera drew near and yielded to an impulse to
speak to the mother so alone in her grief. The sound of her voice
hushed the woman’s sobbing. She looked into Hera’s face, heavily at
first, then set her gaze more sharply and passed a hand over her
brow like one of bewildered senses. Another moment and she
sprang to her feet, a malediction on her tongue, and the scar across
her eyelid and cheek glowing angrily, as it had that day in the
Cathedral square when she shook her fist at Tarsis and his bride.
“It’s her husband’s work!” La Ferita cried, pointing her finger at
Hera. “He killed my Giulia. He worked the life out of her in his
factory; gave her fifteen soldi for ten hours, and when she could toil
no more left her to die like a whelp. And for what? That he might
have a palace for her Excellency, and horses, carriages, jewels, and
servants. Look at the two! There she, there my Giulia!”
Hera, full of pity, could find no word to speak to her, and the
others in the group about the bed stood speechless, divided in
sympathy between the great lady so mercilessly arraigned and the
stricken woman malevolent in her sorrow. In the moment of silence a
physician who had been listening at the girl’s heart arose and
nodded his head. This brought a fresh outburst from La Ferita.
“Oh, it’s death! Never fear!” she exclaimed. “His work was well
done, your Excellency! Well done, friends, neh?”
Mario, who had moved to Hera’s side, touched her arm. “Let us
go,” he said, and as they drew away La Ferita filled the air with new
imprecations against Tarsis. The doctor and the nurses tried to calm
her, but without avail.
“My day will come!” were the last words of hers that Hera caught
as she passed from the room. “He shall pay. He killed her. He shall
pay!”
 CHAPTER XIV
AN HOUR OF RECKONING

Two days afterward, when Hera and Tarsis were dining alone, he
asked her about the work she had begun among the poor of the
Ticinese quarter, and she told him that she had subscribed 150,000
liras to a fund to build a settlement there after the London plan, and
that she had been chosen an officer of the Society of Help, and
intended to take an active part in its service.
“By the way,” he remarked, affecting a manner of light concern, “I
have decided to withdraw my offer of funds for your charitable
enterprises.”
“Have you changed your opinion of the work?”
“No; but I’ve changed my opinion of you,” he answered, and she
saw his cold smile at play. “Perhaps it is as well you should know,”
he added, “that my eyes have been opened.”
In his mind the tale that Ulrich had carried about the meeting with
Mario at the hospital, he regarded her narrowly, studying the effect of
his words; she was aware of a note of challenge in them; their
meaning puzzled her, and she broke the rule of silence she had
observed hitherto toward his displays of malevolence.
“Your eyes have been opened?” she said. “May I ask what you
have seen?”
“I—have—seen—your—subterfuge!” he responded, leaning
forward and striking the table with the tip of his forefinger.
“Subterfuge?”
“Yes; and let me tell you that it is not worth while to continue the
masquerade of charity. I am aware of your secret designs.”
“I do not understand you.”
 “My belief is that you do,” he returned, speaking fast and
vehemently, “though you may make yourself believe that you do not,
just as you delude yourself with the idea that you are exceptionally
noble to wrong me, your husband, that you may be faithful to another
man.”
Hera had risen from the table; it was his first open blow, and she
met it standing. A deep flush of colour dyed her temples, but she
compressed her lips resolutely, obedient to an instinct which forbade
her to quarrel with him, as it would have forbidden her to bandy
words with the domestic who appeared just then with the cordial and
glasses. She moved to the open window and stood with her back to
him. Before her lay the garden with its stately white urns, the rich
foliage of the trees, and beyond the wall the moonlit roofs of the
workers’ homes, all touched with the mystery of the night, and Hera,
looking out upon the picture, endeavoured to think clearly; she tried
to pacify her warring emotions, to detach right from wrong, to stand
them far apart, and with the eye of justice survey each in its naked
proportions. As to what might be the whole meaning of the
suspicions he had expressed she gave no thought; she
contemplated only the cause of the angry spirit that was roused in
him, and of which she saw herself the author; and for this her
conscience adjudged her guilty.
“The fault is mine,” she said, at length, turning toward him,
sadness in her face. “I have done you a great wrong. By reason of it
I am suffering more than you can know. I ought never to have
become your wife.”
“Still, it is a wrong that you may redress,” he returned, more
gently, as he paused in his measured pacing of the room.
“No; it is impossible,” she avowed, painfully.
“It is your plain obligation to do so,” he asserted, his manner
harsh again. “What right have you to accept all that your husband
bestows and give nothing in return?”
She answered him slowly, measuring every word: “The wrong I
did you was in yielding to your solicitations—in allowing you to
persuade me to marry you. I should have been stronger. For the rest,
I am giving you all that I promised. Can you deny this?”
He did not answer the question. Instead, he swept her with a
contemptuous glance. “I perceive that with all this pretty show of
remorse,” he said, “you are determined to keep up your defiance of
me.”
“Indeed, I am acting in no spirit of defiance,” she replied. “You
must believe that. I tell you that, in the circumstances, I should deem
myself on a plane with the women of the Galleria if I became to you
what you wish.”
She turned again to the window, and his coarse laugh sounded in
her ears.
“You would have me believe,” she heard him sneering, as he
drew nearer to her, “that you are living up to some poetic ideal. At
the outset I was fool enough to swallow that fiction. I thought that you
were merely carrying idealism to the verge of absurdity, and at that
point you would come to your senses and turn back. I credited my
wife with being honest, you see.”
“Will you spare me these insinuations?” she said. “I beg of you to
speak out.”
“Oh, your counterfeit of lofty virtue is skilful,” he went on, mocking
her manner. “Though a little cheap at times, on the whole it would
deceive a critic who did not know the truth. I happen to know the
truth, signora.”
Now she faced him with flashing eyes. “Tell me what you mean!”
He snapped his fingers in her face. “Bah! Your imperious airs do
not fool me. I know something of the blue blood now. It is like any
other—has the same passions and gratifies them in the same way.
As a noblewoman you ought at least to have the courage of your
vices.”
She started for the door, but stopped suddenly and faced him
again. “Say what you mean in direct words or I shall go.”
 “Oh, I will be plain!” he flung back, going close to her. “The man
by whom you pretend to be inspired so grandly is simply one who
provokes your appetite more than I do. You have never given him
up. He cannot come to you. That would destroy the pretty illusion of
virtue; so you go to him. To this end you employ a shrewd
subterfuge. Suddenly you are seized with a fever of pity for the poor
of Milan. You have a burning desire to feed the hungry, to clothe the
naked. You select the Porta Ticinese quarter for your field of labour,
although the same conditions prevail not a stone’s throw from this
spot,” and he pointed towards the roofs that showed above the
garden wall.
She had turned her back to him. “Why do you go to the Porta
Ticinese?” he went on. “You wish plain speech. I answer, then,
because Mario Forza is to be found there in his Co-operative Society
offices. He, too—snivelling demagogue!—loves the poor. That you
may go to him, whom you love, you come to me, whom you choose
to despise, for money!—that you may carry on your intrigue under
the cloak of charity! I was blind before, signora, but now——”
“Stop!” she commanded him, wheeling suddenly. “What you say
is false, madly, monstrously false!” She rose before him a queenly
young figure, erect and tall. Had it been given to Tarsis to know he
would have perceived in that moment, as he looked upon her, that
his anger had driven him to a terrible misjudgment. The poise of her
head, the intrepid, direct message of her eyes, her bearing, so
superior to vulgar graces—these were her clear ensigns of a disdain
profound for the mean, the low, the perfidious; but to all this Tarsis
was blind, as an enraged bull is blind to the glories of the sunset.
She turned from him and moved once more toward the door to the
passage that led to her private apartments; but still the impassioned
voice of Tarsis was at her ear.
“Oh, don’t play the grand nobility with me”; he muttered. “I have
been too easy with you, too eager to serve, to please you. I have
been weak—I, who was never weak before. But that is past. I don’t
care what you do. Henceforth I shall be strong. Do you hear? I know
my rights. In Sicily we have a way of spoiling such games as you
have been playing.”
 Hera kept moving toward the door, but always she felt his breath
panting beside her. At the threshold she turned and paused long
enough to say, her voice issuing without a tremor:
“I repeat that what you have said is false, absolutely false!”
Then she went her way down the corridor.

In solitude, she put herself face to face with the situation’s

hideous fact. Though wounded to the depths of her being, she had
no impulse to tears. She felt impelled rather to bitter smiles for her
grim failure in striving to serve two masters—to travel any path but
that which the heart pointed. So this was the price of her father’s
peaceful days, her aunt’s triumph over the bloodhounds of debt, the
restoration of a Barbiondi to the palace of her ancestors! Ah, well,
she would end it now, and she cared not whether the sequel should
be good or ill.
The force of events had awakened in her a latent Titanic element
that lifted her superior to weak scruple. She was conscious of a
marvellous accession of moral strength. Now she felt that no barrier
might rise high enough to baffle her purpose. Fervidly she was
thankful that her spirit had come forth unconquered, and that,
chained though she was to a rock, her soul could be free. She
thought of her father, and weighed the effect upon his fortunes that
parting from Tarsis might produce, but not for long did she harbour
that consideration; she cast it from her as she might have dashed a
cup of hemlock, resolved that her life should be poisoned no more
for other people’s good. Come what might, in this crisis she would
honour the heart’s edict. She had learned somewhat of her great
mistake. It had proved a tree of knowledge, and in eating of the fruit
her moral nature had found itself—become well defined and unified
—so that she stood now as a law unto her own processes.
Nevertheless, she retained her sense of justice, and drew
comfort from the fact that her husband had been the aggressor; that
the deceit by which he had obtained her consent to the marriage, his
rash accusations, his insults, gave her warrant for quitting his house
and ending the mockery of their relation. It never occurred to her
mind that the situation left any alternative course. She rang for her
maid and directed her to prepare for their departure on the morrow,
by an early train. Then she wrote a message to Tarsis, enclosed the
sheet in an envelope, and stood it against a mirror, to make sure that
it should catch her eye in the morning.
 CHAPTER XV
A BILL PAYABLE

In ten hours, or at nine o’clock in the morning, Hera, and her

maid, the only servant she had brought from the Brianza, entered a
cab that had been summoned to the Via Cappuccini gate and drove
to the Central railway station. They took a train that started at about
the hour that Tarsis, heavy-eyed after a sleepless night, seated
himself at the breakfast table and received her eloquently brief note.
It was placed in his hand by Beppe, the velvety man-servant who
brought the coffee:
My Husband:
Your groundless accusations leave me no
alternative but to withdraw from your house. It is
my purpose to make the separation permanent.
I go to my father.
Hera dei Barbiondi.
He read it a second time, then leaned back and flecked the sheet
with his fingers in a studied show of cool reflection; but his bitten lip
spoiled the effect that he strove to produce. When he looked up
Beppe’s eyes were riveted upon him in a manner unheard of for that
genius in the art of seeing and hearing nothing. The incident, small in
itself, proclaimed loudly enough that the palace retainers, from
stable-boy to the head of the kitchen, were feasting already on the
delicious scandal. It advised Tarsis as well that before nightfall the
fashionable world would have the news on its tongue, thence to fly
from the twelve gates of Milan to all parts of Italy.
Though contempt for public opinion had marked his career in all
else, he had taken a keen pride in standing before the world as the
husband of his young and beautiful high-born wife. It was the dearest
of all his triumphs because it fed his vanity most. And now he
perceived the glare of ridicule into which her desertion must throw
him. Oddly enough, it was this realisation that set the first brand to
his wrath. He was seized with a wild impulse to follow her to Villa
Barbiondi and assert his authority over her—compel her, by main
force, if the need should be, to return to the palace.
When he rose from the table the servant was not too busy to take
notice that he caught up the bit of writing and crushed it in his fist.
What step this man of the South would take in the case at hand was
a question of absorbing interest to the Northern men and maids of
the household. They believed, one and all—and in hushed voices
uttered their belief as a black forecast—that the life of some one
would be demanded in payment of the bill, and that it would not be
the life of their master. Every item of news that could be carried to
the kitchen and stables was awaited avidly, and Beppe, there on the
spot, knew that many ears yawned for the report of his observations.
Tarsis was aware not only that the man’s eyes followed him when he
moved from the breakfast room, but that a neck was craned to keep
him in view as he made his way across the Atlantean chamber.
The splendours of that great room played upon his feelings with a
strange subtlety. He felt the power for mockery which at certain
moments resides in lifeless things. With its spell upon him the marble
Atlantes began to breathe; their hollow eyes had the gift of sight, and
from their high stations between the windows they looked down upon
him with cynical interest. He noted for the first time that all the
portraits of the Barbiondi were painted with a broad grin. The very
walls of the palace chuckled in their re-echo of his solitary footfalls.
Entering the library, he closed the door and paced before the
printed wisdom of ages; but no quieting message was there for him
in all that treasury of placid thought, divine inspiration, human
experience. It was as if no Greek had ever meditated, no Christ ever
lived, no fellow-being ever suffered. In his own life the tragedy of
ages was on for its hour, and the spirit that swayed him was the spirit
of the cave-dweller robbed of his female in the dawn of the centuries.
The events of the last two weeks rose before him. A vision of all that
had come and gone grew vivid in his mind. At first Donna Beatrice
and Don Riccardo and Hera were there, each standing in proper
relation to the whole; but one by one these faded out to disclose with
infuriating boldness the face and figure of Mario Forza.
A few minutes more and Tarsis ceased walking to take a seat at
the Napoleonic table. He rested one arm on the mosaic and
drummed meditatively with the tips of his fingers. There was naught
in his bearing now to indicate the storm through which he had
passed. Nor was there any sign that he had reached a terrible
decision. Again he was the self-centred man of business, calmly at
work upon the details of an important project. The prophecy of the
kitchen and the stable yard was in the first stage of its realisation. To
Mario Forza the account was to be rendered and payment
demanded in full.
His native impulse was to present the bill in person, to exact a
settlement with his own hand; it would be no more than the
honouring of a law sacred to his island birthplace. By that method
the honey of revenge was sweetest. Nevertheless, for a man of his
estate its disadvantages were undeniably real. With a cool head he
counted the possible cost and found it too great. An ancient Sicilian
proverb ran with his thoughts—“’Tis easier to shed blood than to
wash out its stains.” Here was a reasoning that appealed to his mind,
accustomed as it was to weigh all in the balance of profit and loss;
and so it fell out that he shaped a plan of vengeance that should
enlist the service of another. Some one else, skilled in the art, but of
smaller importance to himself and the world, should wait upon Signor
Forza and—present the bill.
So much for the main design; that was clear. But there were
indispensable details, and over these Tarsis puzzled until he opened
his other hand—the one not resting on the table—and looked at the
scrap of paper it had been clutching. It was Hera’s note crushed into
a ball. A moment he weighed the thing on his open palm and
regarded it in bitter reflection. Here lay the epitome of his fondest
ambition, his capital disappointment. It was the first and only time
she had written to him; and with the rising of this fact in his mind
flashed an idea that grew and supplied the details. He dramatised
the future on a stage set with the ruins of a cloister and an old
church for the background; it was a scene redeemed from total
darkness by the glimmer of a moon that hung far on the slope of the
heavens and there was no sound save the breathing of him who
watched and waited in the shadow, with a keen blade ready for work.
The conception touched some artistic chord of his nature, and he
smiled and told himself it was good. In the old monastery Mario
Forza had contracted the debt; in the old monastery he should pay.
He picked open the crumpled paper and spread it flat on the
marble. He smoothed out the creases as best he could, then got
blank paper, a pen, and a well of ink. It may have been for an hour
that he sat there copying again and again the few lines his wife had
written. In the first essays his eye travelled often from the copy to the
pen as he fashioned each letter after Hera’s hand observing minutely
and matching the slightest peculiarity. Patiently he went over and
over the precise curl of a y’s tail, the loop of an l, or the dot of an i. At
length he was able to write off the missive, Hera’s signature
included, to his satisfaction without once looking at the model.
His next step was to leave the library, locking the door to make
sure that no one should enter and see the table littered with the
evidence of his work; the next to go to the chamber that was Hera’s.
There he took from a desk some of the dainty paper and envelopes
that bore her monogram. A few minutes and he was back in the
library making a copy of her note on that paper. He held the finished
product at arm’s length, then at closer view, and pronounced it
perfect. He was about to carry this part of his plan to its fruition by
writing a note of his own wording in the hand of his wife when a
knock stayed his purpose. Instead of calling to the visitor to enter he
rose and opened the door a few inches, mindful of the scraps on the
table. Beppe was there with a card on his tray.
“Ask Signor Ulrich to wait a few minutes,” Tarsis said, after
glancing at the name. He appreciated the value of finishing his
critical task while the knack of it was warm in his brain and fingers.
With composure unaffected and care unrelaxed he wrote the letter
that he had shaped in his mind. It began with “My Beloved Mario”
and closed with the words, “Yours, though all the world oppose,
Hera.” He inscribed the envelope, “To the Honourable Mario Forza,
17, Via Senato, Milan,” sealed it, and placed it in an inner pocket of
his coat.
Beppe knocked again. “I beg your pardon, signore,” he began
when Tarsis had swung the door no farther than before; “but the
gentleman is so urgent. He says he must see you—that he has news
which you ought to have at once. He seems very full of it, signore,”
he added, gravely. “I am afraid the poor gentleman will explode if he
is not admitted very soon.”
“Ask him to wait another five minutes,” Tarsis said, and Beppe
made off with a submissive “Very good, signore,” but his head
shaking dubiously.
One by one his master gathered the sheets on the table into an
orderly pile, folded the lot deliberately, and slipped them into his
pocket; he looked under the table and the chair to be certain that no
trace of his work remained. Then he lit a cigarette, rang for Beppe,
and told him to show in Signor Ulrich.
The superintendent-general of the Tarsis Silk Company bustled
into the library, his lips puffing, eyes big with excitement. Tarsis
greeted him standing, waved his hand to a chair, and asked what
had happened.
“Happened!” exclaimed Signor Ulrich. “Per Dio, I could tell you
sooner what has not happened.”
“Let us have what has happened first,” was the other’s quiet
command. “Be good enough to give me the facts briefly.”
“Briefly, then,” cried the Austrian, too much agitated to sit down,
“hell is at large!”
“A strike?”
“No; a revolution!”
Tarsis had schooled himself not to take the man too seriously; he
valued the ardour that he gave to his tasks, but took care to divide
the chaff from the wheat of his enthusiasm.
“What are the particulars?” he inquired.