Nightmares of Reason — Chapter 11

By Bob Black (2010)

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Untitled Anarchism Nightmares of Reason Chapter 11

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Robert Charles Black Jr. (born January 4, 1951) is an American author and anarchist. He is the author of the books The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and Defacing the Currency, and numerous political essays. (From: Wikipedia.org.)


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Chapter 11

Chapter 11. Humanists and Subhumans

The Director Emeritus identifies himself as a humanist. Indeed, he has devoted an entire book to chastising the “antihumanists” in the ecology movement. It is as a humanist, for instance, that he is scandalized by the “blatant callousness” of David Watson.[583] He has dirtied the word. A humanist is supposed to believe in the dignity and equal worth of men. What Bookchin believes is shockingly otherwise. Not only does he deny that all men are created equal, he denies that all men are men. Not only does he consider the societies and cultures of primitives inferior, he denies that primitives are social and cultural beings. They are “merely natural” — in other words, they are nothing but animals (see Chapter 10). In Bookchin’s peculiar terminology, they engage in “animalistic adaptation rather than [ ] activity”; put another way, “human beings are capable not only of adapting to the world but of innovating in the world. Innovation means, for Bookchin if not for the dictionary, to engage in practices “beyond everyday eating, sleeping, reproducing, excreting, and even playing.”[584] “Even playing” is denigrated as mere animality (and animals do play) — as if it were not the case that “a certain play-factor was extremely active all through the cultural process and that it produces many of the fundamental forms of social life.”[585]

Herbert Read produced language very similar to Bookchin’s — to characterize the world-view of the designing “political fanatic”:

Living is fundamentally an instinct — the animalistic scrounging for food and shelter, for sexual mating, for mutual aid against adversities. It is a complicated biological activity, in which tradition and custom play a decisive part. To the pure mind it can only seem monstrous and absurd — the ugly activities of eating, digesting, excreting, copulating. It is true that we can idealize these processes, or some of them, and eating and lovemaking have become refined arts, elaborate “games.” But only on the basis of long traditions, of social customs that are neither rational nor consistent — what could be more “absurd” than a cocktail-party or the love-making in a Hollywood film? The political fanatic will denounce such customs as aspects of a degenerate social order, but his new social order, if he succeeds in establishing it, will soon evolve customs just as absurd, and even less elegant.[586]

Purposeless play is an “affirmation of life” (John Cage).[587] Hence Bookchin is against it.

It was the rise of the city which uplifted our species — most of it, anyway — from animality to true humanity (see Chapter 10):

Human beings emerged socially out of animality, out of societies organized according to biological realities like blood ties, gender differences, and age differences that formed the real structure of aboriginal societies, and they developed the concept — as yet unfulfilled in practice — that we share a common humanity. This idea was made possible with the emergence of the city, because the city made it possible for people from different tribes that were formerly hostile to each other, to live together without conflict. City culture made it possible for us to begin to communicate with each other as human beings, not as tribal members, and to shake off in various degrees the superstition, mystification, illusion, and particularly the authority of the dream world, which had ideological priority in tribal society.[588]

There are premonitions of this viewpoint in earlier Bookchin writings in which he referred to “the biological realities of the tribal world, rooted in blood ties, gender, and age groups,”[589] but only now are the implications spelled out with brutal clarity. It doesn’t trouble the Director Emeritus at all that his individual/social unbridgeable chasm does not match up with his animal/human unbridgeable chasm. As Kropotkin, a real social ecologist, emphasized, “Society has not been created by man; it is anterior to man.”[590] The underlying flaw is absolutizing the nature/culture dichotomy itself: “Even the idea that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are two relatively distinct kinds of objects is probably not universal.”[591] Like the notion of objectivity, the nature/culture distinction is itself an example of parochial Western native folk taxonomy. Theories of opposites are among the baleful aspects of our Hellenic heritage. They are not universal; “in certain Near Eastern societies,” writes G.E.R. Lloyd, “there was simply no conscious distinction drawn between the realm of Nature on the one hand and the realm of Society on the other.”[592]

Of course it’s all crazy. The difference between animal “adaptation” as opposed to human “innovation” or “activity” is undefined and does violence to the ordinary understanding of these words. “Adaptation” and “innovation” are near-synonyms, not antonyms. “Innovation” and “activity” are not synonyms at all; the former is a subset of the latter. If adaptation means changing the environment instead of just living in (and off of) it, then it fails to distinguish primitive from civilized behavior. Primitives may transform their environment — by firing the bush, for instance, as the San do — as I pointed out in Anarchy after Leftism. The Director Emeritus said so himself in SALA.[593] And he has also confirmed the tautology that primitive society is social: “A tribe (to use this term in a very broad sense to include bands and clans) was a truly social entity, knitted together by blood, marital, and functional ties based on age and work.”[594] Finally, just who is innovative? “Man”? What man? What’s his address? How many world-historical innovators are alive today? If innovation is the hallmark of the human, and if innovation means invention, then there are about six billion animals in human form walking the earth today who have never innovated anything.

Bookchin’s critique is of “the community, based on kinship alone,”[595] but it is doubtful if many, or even any such communities ever existed. Primitive social organization is not based exclusively on kinship, gender and age. The community, for instance, “the maximal group of persons who normally reside together in face to face association,” is, besides the nuclear family, the only universal social group. Propinquity is, after all, an even simpler idea than the blood-tie.[596] Largely kin-based communities exist, but so do others. Furthermore, there is more to kin ties than “blood ties,” there are also affines in every type of family organization — as Claude Levi-Strauss observes, “the incest prohibition expresses the transition from the natural fact of consanguinity to the cultural fact of alliance.”[597] Thus it was the primitives, not the civilized, who accomplished the transition from nature to culture.

The Director Emeritus cannot conceive of kinship as anything but ascriptive, arbitrary and exclusive. Presumably that’s why the “blood oath” is needed to validate kin-based society — as if without it no one would follow the rules of consanguinity and affinity. In reality, kinship, through marriage, is the basis for alliances with outside groups.[598] Kinship can be flexible and adaptive, as it is in cases of classificatory or fictive kinship or adoption. In the 19th century Sir Henry Maine stated that the family has been “constantly enlarged by the absorption of strangers within its circle.” Kinship can be negotiable, even volitional. In general, people enact multiple roles which may not correspond to their membership in a descent group, and the “use of kin terms often turns out to be a political strategy, not an everyday social nicety”:

Kinship norms specify how people should or would behave toward one another in a world where only kinship mattered. But actual kinsmen are also neighbors, business competitors, owners of adjacent gardens, and so on; and their quarreling and enmity characteristically derive from these relationships, as well as competition for inheritance, power in the family or lineage, and so on. Brothers should support one another. But the owner of a pig who eats your garden should pay damages. If the owner is your brother — and in small-scale tribal societies it is your kin who will most often be your neighbors and rivals — there is a “gulf” between the ensuing quarrel and ideal behavior between kin.[599]

Among important forms of non-kin organization, Robert H. Lowie speaks of sodalities, which include men’s tribal clubs, secret societies, age-class systems, and guilds: “The concept is of some utility in bringing home the fact that individuals associate irrespective of whether they belong to the same family, clan, or territorial group; and that such associations play a dominant part in the social lives of many peoples, rivaling sporadically and even overshadowing other ties.”[600] Another non-kin social formation is moieties — divisions of a community into two groups — these are rather common.[601] Trade relations, such as the famous kula ring in Melanesia, connect unrelated trading partners, sometimes at distances of hundreds of miles, as they did throughout Australia and New Guinea. Even the San engage in hxapo (direct reciprocity) relations with partners within a radius of 200 kilometers.[602] Religious and recreational associations are widespread and often cut across kinship lines. The relation of villagers to their chief, where there is a chief, is not necessarily based on filiation. As often happens, the Director Emeritus has refuted himself: “Tribal peoples form social groups — families, clans, personal and community alliances, sororal and fraternal clubs, vocational and totemic societies, and the like.”[603]

On the other hand, family, gender and age are fundamental principles of organization in civilization. Even today they are of the foremost importance, and in the past, for thousands of years, they were even more important. Bookchin has mutilated the master-cliché of modern social theory, the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (community/society) dichotomy. He has travestied the notion of development from status to contract, in Sir Henry Maine’s famous phrase, until it is even cruder than it appears in 19th century social evolutionism. Urban anthropologists are no longer sure that the urbanization of the Third World, for example, inevitably emancipates the individual and the family from the larger kinship groupings of rural society. One of them writes: “Recent studies by anthropologists of urban situations in Africa and elsewhere attest to the remarkable vitality of traditional kinship concepts and practices.”[604] The modernization thesis itself, including its deformed Bookchinist version, is a product of modernization. It is Western native folk ideology expressing “the occidental world’s obsession with its uniqueness and historical destiny.” “Building on the best of the Western heritage,” brays the ex-Director, “in the great tradition of European intellectuality,” humanity will at last reach its destiny to dominate nature and attend many meetings.[605] The West is the best. All hail Jim Morrison and Murray Bookchin.

The earliest urbanists, the Sumerians, knew that blood is thicker than water: “Friendship lasts a day, Kinship endures forever.” It has endured forever. The ancient Greeks, the ex-Director’s paragons, by no means transcended the family. For them it was always the primary institution through which most of life was organized and continuity assured. Even Bookchin speaks of the power of the Oresteia of Aeschylus “over an ancient Greek audience that had yet to exorcize the blood oath and tribal custom from their enchanted hold on the human psyche.”[606] It is almost impossible to believe that the Director Emeritus is serious about the blood oath, but he has made his meaning quite clear. His perverse position is only explicable in terms of his visceral hatred of the family, which he would replace with communes (not Communes) — a rare spasm of lifestyle anarchism.[607]

One has to wonder how bad his childhood and marriages were. He was an only child, and the father deserted the family when he was five. That is within the age range (2–6) of the prelogical, preoperational, egotistical cognitive stage in which the child, confronted with contradiction, concludes that the evidence must be wrong, since he cannot be wrong: “The preoperational child’s thinking was dominated by egocentrism, an inability to assume the viewpoint of others, and a lack of the need to seek validation of her own thoughts.” Normally the child progresses to concrete operational thought as social interaction with his peers gradually dissolves his cognitive egocentrism.[608] My hypothesis is that the too-successful resolution of the Oedipal problem (by the father’s desertion), the spoiling of the only child by the single mother, and premature isolation from his peers (by immersion in the adult world of Stalinist politics) fixed the future Director in the prelogical egocentrism and intolerance which he exhibits as an adult. Still egotistical,[609] still convinced he is infallible, still unable to enter into another’s point of view even to the extent necessary to refute him, Murray Bookchin has never grown up.

As the Director Emeritus describes his parents, they were fanatic leftists obsessed with politics, just like their son. This is almost the only thing he deems important enough to tell us about them. As far as the ex-Director is concerned, his life began when he joined the Young Pioneers at age nine: “In fact, it was the Communist movement that truly raised me, and frankly they were amazingly thorough.” This much is obvious. At the tender age of 13 he became a soapbox Stalinist.[610] Here are the makings of a monster. Bookchin recounts his story with such satisfaction that he seems truly unaware that he was robbed of something irreplaceable: his childhood. He who was never fully a child will never be fully adult. In effect, he was deprived of family and raised to be a vanguard Platonic Guardian. Ever since, when he hears about a vacancy for philosopher-king, he sends his resume. The Communist Party spurned him. The Trots spurned him. SDS spurned him. The Clamshell Alliance spurned him. The Greens spurned him. Now the anarchists have every reason to spurn him.

But I digress.

Quite absurd is the nonsense category of “biological” relations consisting of kinship, gender and age. Malinowski pointed out 90 years ago that maternity and paternity are socially determined. The Director Emeritus never got the word that family, gender and age roles are socially constructed. They presuppose certain “biological realities,” but when you think about it, so do all other roles.[611] There cannot be a disembodied worker, soldier, priest or professor. Kinship, wrote Robert H. Lowie, “is not biology, and kinship is differently conceived in different societies. That biological relationships merely serve as a starting point for the development of sociological conceptions of kinship. Societies may ignore or restrict the blood tie; it may artificially create a bond of kinship, and again it may extend a natural bond to an indefinite extent.”[612]

Similarly, “sexual relations are not a matter of sheer biology; marriage and family are the cultural superstructure of a biological foundation.”[613] Whatever their other shortcomings, hereditary monarchy and aristocracy are not animalistic; Marx was clothing critique with irony when he treated the distinguishing feature of the monarch as his reproductive capacity.[614] Bookchin is of course incapable of irony. The gender-exclusive Masons and the gender- and ancestry-exclusive Daughters of the American Revolution are not based on biology. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are not hominid packs. A boys’ tree-house is no more biologically based than the Institute for Social Ecology. The Catholic priesthood is not biological. The Hair Club for Men is not rooted in animality. By Bookchin’s criterion, presumably the Mile High Club is biological. That’s the club for people who have had sex (= biological) at an altitude of at least one mile. My application is pending.

Even if the other biological characterizations made sense, age does not. Not only is age itself a cultural construct, so is our Western “folk construct” that aging is only biological.[615] Anyone over 50 is eligible to join the American Association of Retired Persons. Bookchin and I are both eligible.. But if we joined (I have), that would not establish a biological relation between us or between either of us and the organization or any of its members. The subject of age is one which always seems to bring out the sillies in the ex-Director. Thus his theory of the origin of hierarchy and domination is that the old men somehow take over (gerontocracy) to make sure they will be cared for when they become infirm.[616] The implication is that hierarchy and domination are natural. Why did anyone ever think that this guy was an anarchist?

It is ridiculous to say that civilization enabled people “to communicate with each other as human beings, not as tribal members.” In civilization we relate to one another as family members, neighbors, employers or employes, coreligionists, “customer service representatives” or customers, bureaucrats or their supplicants, classmates, roommates, professionals or clients, tenants or landlords, stars and fans — in fragmentary ways almost always mediated by specialized roles. The regime of roles is the social organization of alienation. From the individual’s perspective, he is compelled to play “hybrid parts, parts which appear to answer our desires but which are really antagonistic to them” — constricting yet compensatory. To play a role is always more or less to play yourself false.[617] No one’s self is fully expressed, much less fulfilled, by the sum of her roles. Civilization does not enable us to communicate as fully ourselves (as human beings, if you prefer — I don’t), rather, it impedes unmediated expression beyond the instrumental and categorical, channeling it through roles. The role of the revolutionary, as of the proletarian, is to understand the role of rules and abolish the rule of roles including his own.[618] In band or tribal societies, or in traditional village communities, people may rarely communicate with outsiders,[619] but the people they do communicate with, they communicate with as, and with, whole human beings.

The synoecism[620] by which several tribes united (without amalgamating) to form the city of Athens did not result in tribesmen communicating with each other as human beings: it resulted in them communicating with each other as Athenians. City chauvinism simply replaced tribal chauvinism. The chronic wars of the Greek city-states indicate that their citizens barely communicated with each other as Greeks, much less as abstract universal men. If any Hellenic Greek even took a step toward recognition of universal humanity, as the Director Emeritus states, it was Pericles; and yet by the law of Pericles (451/450 B.C.) (see Chapter 14), Athenian citizens were forbidden to marry noncitizens, a measure which was, as M.I. Finley says, “accepted without a murmer.”[621] Given the intense parochialism of the polis, the absence of universalist feeling among the Hellenic Greeks is to be expected.

Instead, it was the succeeding Hellenistic period of cosmopolitan empires which brought forth correspondingly cosmopolitan views of man. In the fourth century B.C., the man who first called himself a citizen of the world, cosmopolites, was Diogenes the Cynic, the first Lifestyle Anarchist: “He coined the term ‘cosmopolitan’ — citizen of the world — to underline his rejection of conventional city states and their institutions.” As Lewis Mumford put it, “a polis could not become a cosmos.”[622] But a universalistic religion could: “few epochs have had a stronger and better sense than the Western and Christian Middle Ages of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries of the universal and eternal existence of a human model.”[623] All are the same before God (see Chapter 8).

Bakunin observed that “the Greeks and Romans did not feel free as human beings and in terms of human rights; they thought themselves privileged as Greeks or Romans, in terms of their own society.”[624] The very existence of the Greek distinction between Greeks and “barbarians,” i.e., between Greeks and everybody else, indicates that Greek civilization failed to foster a sense of common humanity. The ancient Greeks, as Simmel observes, denied the specifically and purely human attributes to the barbarians. Aristotle thought them inferior to Greeks. Polis Greeks indulged in self-flattering national stereotypes. Thus Plato spoke of the vigor and energy of Thracians and Scythians, the commercial instincts of Phoenicians and Egyptians, and “intelligence, which can be said to be the main attribute of our own part of the world.” One is reminded of the “muscularity of thought” which Bookchin modestly attributes to himself. The Athenians considered even other Greeks inferior because only the Athenians were autochthonous, born from the very soil of Attica.[625]

Aristotle thought that barbarians were slaves by nature and that slavery was a natural relationship. And for him, slaves were much like domestic animals: “Moreover, the need for them differs only slightly: bodily assistance in the necessary things is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from tame animals alike.”[626] Athenian interest in communicating with barbarians may be gauged by the fact that foreign languages were not taught in Athenian schools.[627] Since nearly all Athenian slaves were barbarians,[628] it is understandable that Aristotle blurred the categories. Slaves were one-fourth to one-third of the population of Attica; they were widely employed in agriculture and mining as well as in personal service; one-fourth to one-third of the slaves were worked to death in the Laureion silver mines at their peak. The attitude toward barbarians “was a mixture of something akin to modern racism and nationalism.”[629] Thus slavery was not, as Bookchin so often insists, a surface blemish on the polis. Even aside from its economic necessity, slavery was a natural expression of polis exclusivity.

Another anarchist opinion is Rudolf Rocker’s: “Plato, the only one among the Hellenic philosophers to whom the idea of national unity of all Hellenic peoples is at all clearly apparent, felt himself exclusively Greek and looked down with unconcealed contempt upon the ‘barbarians.’”[630] And if this was true of Greek civilization, it was probably still more true of earlier, more archaic urban civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus valley. In The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin told us that Pericles’ Funeral Oration may take a step toward humanism but “it provides us with no reason to believe that the ‘barbarian’ world and, by definition, the ‘outsider,’ were on a par with the Hellene and, juridically, the ancestral Athenian.”[631] But now he says that tribesmen are not human beings. We might as well enthralled them, as did the godlike Greeks. Bookchin’s utopia rests on (nonexistent) high technology which he explicitly states is the functional counterpart of Athenian slave-labor, thus fulfilling one of Aristotle’s fantasies. But since another of Ari’s fantasies is that the slave is a mechanical extension of the master, whether our machines are of metal or meat would seem to be morally indifferent.[632]

And geography is just as limiting, even as irrational a basis for consociation as kinship; and for most people, only marginally more voluntary. Many people interest or concern me more than my next door neighbors; none of my significant others resides in my neighborhood; most are at great distances. It seems I am typical. Thus in Pittsburgh as in Toronto, those with whom people have the most intimate ties are not in the neighborhood. With impressive unanimity, studies based on network analysis — identifying who, for what and how often a person relates to others — identify “personal communities” which are mostly not based on locality. These consist of half a dozen intimate ties and a dozen other active ties, half kin, half nonkin; only one or two intimate neighborhood or workplace relationships, and 6–12 further community ties to neighbors and workmates. Similarly, in the Zambian city of Ndola, men know only one or two neighbors well, and avoid neighborhood visiting, whereas personal kinship networks are very important.[633]

If, as Bookchin believes, there is any liberatory high technology, it can only be the communications and transportation technology which abolishes distance and renders localism irrelevant: but “With fast trains, the generalization of air travel, and the diffusion of cable networks and the Internet, the city has no boundaries. This change marks a shift from the old principle of contiguity to the new principle of connectivity.” What civilization and its technology have really brought us to is the brink of an atomistic contractual society of frictionless transactions, “one that transcends all geographical barriers to human relationships as well as the shackles of prenatally determined bondage that we are fond of calling citizenship.”[634] We come up against the state and civil society as givens. As Stirner complained, “Our societies and states are without our making them, are united without our uniting, are predestined and established, or have an independent standing [Bestand] of their own.”[635] Blood and soil tie us down arbitrarily; roots restrain us. If the permanence of relationships declines far enough, arguably the result may be called the Union of Egoists, Temporary Autonomous Zones, or “situational anarchy.”[636]

Having renounced the blood oath, why affirm the dirt oath? Isn’t it objectionable in just the same way? If blood ties represent the animal in us, so do geographical ties: some animals are territorial. Communism does not require Communes in Bookchin’s sense, namely, omnifunctional geographically bounded units: there might be “extraterritorial communes,” free associations for particular common purposes.[637] To a significant degree, they already exist, even as states, neighborhoods and other mud-based social forms decay.

The ex-Director must mean it about primitives being animals, because he says it in several ways. If you strip away the “psychic layers” imposed by civilization and “our various civilized attributes,” there will be little if anything left except “our barest physical attributes, instincts, and emotions.”[638] (Isn’t that true by definition?) But it follows that foragers, horticulturalists, herdsmen and some peasants possess nothing but physical attributes: they don’t even have minds! This understanding of primitive animality resolves several knotty problems, such as primitives’ attitude toward nature — they don’t have one, because they are part of nature themselves! “Aboriginal peoples could have no attitude toward the natural world because, being immersed in it, they had no concept of its uniqueness.”[639] Never mind that they do have well-documented and by no means homogeneous attitudes toward nature,[640] because they “could have” no such thing. But as Alexander Hamilton wrote: “However proper such reasonings might be, to show that a thing ought not to exist, they are wholly to be rejected when they are made use of to prove that it does not exist, contrary to the evidence of the fact itself.”[641]

The Director Emeritus has also written that in primitive society “Nature is named even before it is deified.” How can primitives name nature if they have no concept of it? Also, that “the aboriginal vision of nature was also strikingly non-hierarchical.” How can they have any vision of nature if they don’t see it’s there? By parity of reasoning, civilized peoples can have no attitude toward civilization because, being immersed in it, they have no concept of its uniqueness. Presumably Bookchin has no concept of reality because he has nothing else to compare it with. As appalling as the ex-Director’s attitude is, he has Marx to vouch for him. In the Grundrisse, Marx says that the natural relation predominates in pre-capitalist societies; in those where capital rules, the social, historically created element predominates.[642] Bookchin must prefer capitalism.

The instrument of our humanization was the state: “Here an evil became the means for humanity to extract itself from animality, and it seems to have been unavoidable.” “Humanity had to be expelled from the Garden of Eden to attain the fullness of its humanness.”[643] Elsewhere the Director Emeritus credits the city, not the state — but they’re inseparable anyway. For the realization of freedom, something has to be added to the “limited passions” of mere animality, and Hegel tells us what: “This essential being is the union of the subjective with the rational will; it is the moral whole, the State.”[644] To say that the state created civilization is to say that the state created civilized society or, in Hegel’s and Marx’s phrase, civil society.[645] Hegel believed this; Marx did not: “He [Hegel] wants the ‘absolute universal,’ the political state, to determine civil society instead of being determined by it.”[646] Marx pointedly did not regard either civilization or the state as accomplishing the emergence from animality. Something else did that: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization.” Bookchin once quoted this passage with seeming approval.[647] By this criterion, all members of homo sapiens have transcended animality, except retirees like the Director Emeritus. Thus Bookchin is a bad Marxist. Aristotle, who is second to none in his appreciation of urban civilization, believed that we are rendered human by speech.[648] Thus Bookchin is a bad Aristotelian.

The trouble with identifying the human essence is that there are many attributes which arguably distinguish humans from animals, but there can be only one human essence. In addition to (as we have seen), the city, the state, and labor, other plausible candidates include reason, language, religion, and possession of a soul. Nietzsche nominated laughter. According to conservative Paul Elmer More, the human essence is property: “Nearly all that makes [life] more significant to us than to the beast is associated with our possessions — with property, all the way from the food which we share with the beasts, to the products of the human imagination.” Anthropologist Edmund R. Leach suggests that “the ability to tell lies is perhaps our most striking human characteristic,”[649] in which case Bookchin is indeed human, all-too-human. No rational method exists for adjudicating these inconsistent claims.

As everyone but the Director Emeritus knows, what distinguishes humans from animals is not civilization or the state, it is culture. Every society, even a small band society of almost propertyless foragers, has a culture. There must be a small spot somewhere under Bookchin’s beret where he knows that too. His shrill denunciations of primitive mysticism, custom (Chapter 9), shamanism (Chapter 8), mythopoesis, etc. are nothing but condemnations of aspects of primitive cultures. The Director Emeritus deplores the same things the missionaries did, but the missionaries censured the primitives as culturally inferior and, at worst, morally depraved, not as Untermenschen.

There is nothing to the postulated antagonism of territoriality and blood. Both are self-evidently universals. “Blood and soil” went together in Nazi ideology. “Perceived ethnic distinctiveness” is so characteristic of the city-state that it is often included in the definition, and “there is no ancient (city)state in which kinship does not play a major role.” It even appears that in the ancient Greek order of battle, kinsmen and tribesmen were stationed together. [650] To trick up the appearance of an unbridgeable chasm, the Director Emeritus heroically, and arbitrarily excludes the pre-industrial cities of the Near East, Asia, and pre-Columbian America — i.e., most cities — from consideration as cities. The Aztec State, for instance, was for him merely a chieftainship, and its so-called cities — such as Teotihuacan, population 200,000–300,000, where the Spaniards “saw things unseen, nor ever dreamed” (Bernal Diaz) — were just “grossly oversize” pueblos! By way of comparison, contemporaneously the population of Geneva, “the largest city in a siz[e]able region,” was 10,300.[651] The ex-Director’s discussion is not only self-serving, it “reveals a disappointing ethnocentrism” (Karen L. Field).[652] Disappointing, but not surprising. Bookchin is a bigot.

Bookchin would no doubt exclude African cities too if he knew they existed. 60 years ago, the Yoruba of Nigeria were as urbanized as France, and more urbanized than Canada, and they had been so for centuries. In 1953, 12 Yoruban cities had a population of over 40,000; one of them, Ibadan, had over 100,000 people — peopled by farmers, craftsmen of many specialized goods, and long-distance traders. These communities were thus economically differentiated, just as cities are supposed to be. And yet there were nine strata in the ethnically homogeneous population, and the lower five, with at least 95% of the people, were organized in patrilineal clans which occupied and defended their own neighborhoods, as in Renaissance Italy (see below). Even in the 1950s there was no evidence that city life weakened the lineages. By 1978, all but two cities were still kinship-dominated, typically with a population of 70% farmers, 10% craftsmen and 10% traders.[653] But there’s a crucial distinction between the Italian and Yoruban urbanites: Italians are white.

Bookchin believes that it is “by building on the best of the Western heritage” that the democratic revolutions must be renewed.[654] However, even European cities can be refractory. Kinship was a central principle in the Italian city-states dubiously claimed to be Communes, where “little neighborhood ‘communes’” with fortified towers were “held by noble families in consortia or sworn family groupings [the blood oath!].”[655] Bookchin tells us this without even trying to square it with his claim that urbanism is the “solvent” of extended family ties. These city-states were wracked with conflict, often violent, “along all the lines of cleavage so familiar today: family, kinship, neighborhood, occupation, class, religion.” Here’s a description fully applicable to the Renaissance city-state as discussed by historian Lauro Martines: “Each family controls its own territory — rural village or town, an urban street or neighborhood. Incursions are considered slights and invite a violent response. The territory is closely identified with the family as seen from the prevailing naming practices and sensitivity to even minor forms of trespassing.”

What anthropologist Anton Blok (a former teacher of mine) is describing is, however, not a Renaissance city but the modern Sicilian Mafia. He concludes: “Overwhelming evidence suggests that the power base of mafiosi is always local.” For the medieval city dweller generally, “ties of blood sheltered him, as well as those of work, class, and religion”[656] — this from E.A. Gutkind, the real founder of Social Ecology. Aristocracies of large extended families form the ruling elites of pre-industrial cities; indeed, such families are achievable only in full-blown form only by urban elites. Intermarrying aristocratic or patrician families were normal in pre-industrial cities.[657] Viewed objectively and inclusively, the historic city could and normally did incorporate considerable kinship organization.

Nor can such examples be dismissed as transitional, as the tenacious resistance of the “primal blood oath,” [658] not unless there are no failed prophecies, only prophecies which have not been fulfilled yet. We already saw the Yoruban case. A contemporary example studied in the 1950s was Bethnal Green, an old working-class neighborhood in London’s East End. There the kindred, often centered on a mother/daughter tie, structured much social interaction. Kinship was used (for kinship is not just something that happens to people, it is something they do), not to exclude non-kin, but to network with them. Thus people met friends through relatives, and the relatives of friends through friends. Ties of extended family, class and community were compatible.[659] My parents met on what used to be called a blind date, set up by mutual friends. Because they did, the world is a better place.

In East York, a Toronto suburb, most of the intimates identified by respondents were kin, whereas only 13% of their intimates (be they kin or non-kin) lived in the neighborhood, and few have more than one intimate in the neighborhood.[660] Admitting that in his theory, the city is both cause and effect of the shift from kinship to territoriality, the ex-Director bids farewell to common sense: “In fact, urban life from its inception occupies such an ambiguous place in the commonsense logic of cause and effect that we would do well to use these concepts gingerly.”[661] If there’s an unbridgable chasm between Bookchinism and the commonsense logic of causality, then, so much the worse for logic and causality.

His latest effusions reveal that Bookchin’s atavistic obsession with blood is more than just another example of his freakish choice of words. Consider this grotesque conceit: “Nature literally permeated the community not only as a providential environment, but as the blood flow of the kinship tie that united human to human and generation to generation.” He actually believes that the blood of the parents literally runs in their children’s veins! How the father’s blood gets in there boggles the mind.

Just as there is much that is childish about Bookchin’s fetishes, so there is much that is primitive about them. As Sumner and Keller observed, “the thought of the race has centered so persistently about blood” that it must have bulked large in primitive life. The bloodline is the boundary of the kin group, the ex-Director explains, as the skin is the boundary of the body. The ex-Director’s shuddering revulsion against “blood ties” (never family ties) and “the blood oath” expressly extends to the bodily functions: “eating, sleeping, reproducing, excreting, and even playing.” (Fucking is too disgusting even to mention.) When he accuses anarcho-primitivists of aspiring to “four-legged animality,”[662] an outright fear of the feral has to underlie this extraordinary phrase. His denial of the animal nature of humans is, because we are animals, an expression of profound sickness and self-loathing. And we know that the ex-Director was then a sick man.[663]

You can arrive at the same diagnosis by another route. Bookchin’s rigid ideology is structurally simple: it consists of dualisms, like the “unbridgeable chasm” he posited between the imaginary entities Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism. Thus, “As the Greeks well knew [but seem not to have written down anywhere], the ‘good city’ [why the quotation marks? this is not a Greek quotation] represented the triumph of society over biology, of reason over impulse, of humanity over folkdom [sic].” Another list devoted to this topic enumerated five antitheses. Another, four.[664] Anything more complex than a binary opposition is correspondingly ambiguous and thus a source of anxiety. For the authoritarian personality, binary thinking is a mechanism to circumvent ambivalence or keep it unconscious: “The most outstanding of these mechanisms consist in terms of dichotomies, i.e., in terms of pairs of diametrical opposites, and in an inclination toward displacement. Thus, glorification of the ingroup and rejection of the outgroup, are familiar from the sphere of social and political beliefs, can be found in as a general trend in some of our clinical data, predominantly to those relating to high scorers [on the authoritarianism index].”[665] So says one of Bookchin’s oft-quoted favorites, Theodor Adorno. Humanists, according to Philip Slater, often try “to devise a conceptual system in which all the things one likes fall into one conceptual category and all those things one dislikes into another. But ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are always orthogonal to important distinctions.”[666]

Bookchin’s idea of an argument is to assign his preference to the positive side of his list of dichotomies:

Social Anarchism & Lifestyle Anarchism

Mind & Body

Society & Individual/Biology

Politics & Statecraft

Humanity & Animality

Culture & Nature

Reason & Emotion/Faith

The General Interest & Self-Interest

Potentiality & Actuality

Moralism & Mysticism

Civic Compact & Blood Oath

Temporality & Eternality

City & Country

Delegation & Representation

Territory & Kinship

Civilized & Primitive

Social Ecology & Deep Ecology

History & Cyclicity [sic]

Two Legs & Four Legs

Rationality & Custom/Myth

Majority Rule & No Rule [An-archy]

Western Civilization & Eastern Civilization

Organization & Spontaneity

High Technology & Convivial/Appropriate Technology

Paris 1793, 1871, 1936 & Paris 1968

Moral Economy & Zerowork

Craft & Nature

Literalism & Myth/Metaphor

The 30s & The 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s ...

The Left That Was & The Post-Left That Is

The Town Meeting & The Town Drunk

Old age & New Age

Etc.

Some of these polarities might seem relatively unimportant, but that is to misunderstand the ex-Director’s dynamic dualism. Every dichotomy is equally important because every dichotomy is all-important. Every dichotomy is all-important because every dichotomy manifests the same dichotomy, the master dichotomy, which can be called either Good vs. Evil or Us vs. Them.

Dualism is the simplest form of classification. Mythic thinking, which the Director Emeritus supposedly detests, is binary.[667] It is the imperatives of the policing process, defining in ever more detail the distinctions between regulated and unregulated behavior, which multiply binary oppositions.[668] Philosophies of the Many authorize pluralism; philosophies of the One authorize inclusiveness; but philosophies of the Two condemn half of reality to hell or nihility. They are about shutting out. Totalitarian ideologies are always dualistic. Dualistic thinking has an affinity for what Hakim Bey calls gnostic self-disgust.[669] And thus it is the organizing principle of moralism, a prominent feature of the ex-Director’s ideology.[670] Anarchist James L. Walter speaks of “how far the philosophy of Egoism differs from the logomachy of the Moralists, who, not content with dividing men into sheep and goats, would be glad to divide ideas of facts in the same way and on the lines of their own prejudices. With them the facts must be opposites, absolute opposites all the way through, if there be opposition in them in some relation.”[671] All difference is opposition.

Despite its bracing negativity, anarchism is not dualistic: “The traditional dualism in human thought that pitted humanity against animality, society against nature, freedom against necessity, mind against body, and, in its most insidious form, man against woman is transcended by due recognition of the continuity between the two, but without a reductionalism [sic] or ‘oneness’ that yields, in Hegel’s words, ‘a night in which all cows are black.’”[672] That’s what Bookchin used to say.

To think one’s way into some overworld is to deny and devalue this world, the real world of which we are each an indefeasible part, and thus to deny and devalue oneself/one’s self.[673] At first blush, the doctrine of essentialism might seem to protect a thing’s irreducible integrity, but you can always redefine a whole as a part of a larger whole — a citizen, for instance, as a part of the state — if you like its essence better. Thus Murray Bookchin’s whole bloody philosophy of social ecology would reject wild nature, nature as it is, by humanizing it, as if to correct a defect. Because conscious humanity is the highest form of being, it is ultimately the only part of nature which is allowed to be itself.[674] It’s not that the relation of humanity to nature is like the relation of mind to body — analogy and allegory are too complex for Bookchin — humanity is nature’s mind, and nature is humanity’s body. As a mythical charter for the domination of nature, this tops even the Biblical assignment of dominion to man. As an ecofeminist critic acutely observes, “Bookchin rarely mentions nonhuman nature without attaching the word ‘mere’ to it.”[675] It’s a travesty for the Director Emeritus to identify his philosophy, as he does, as any kind of naturalism.[676] You cannot be a naturalist if you loathe nature. He misconstrues the value of consciousness: “The fundamental mistake is simply that, instead of understanding consciousness as a tool and particular aspect of the total life, we posit it as the standard and the condition of life that is of supreme value... But one has to tell [the philosophers] that precisely this turns life into a monstrosity,” adds Nietzsche.[677]

It is Bookchin’s ideology, not Watson’s, which is anti-humanist, unless Adorno is right about humanism: “In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.” The Director Emeritus has to be the only humanist (note my restraint in abstaining from ironic quotation marks) who believes that “humanity ... is still less than human.”[678] This is the reductio ad absurdum of assigning potentiality a higher order of reality than actuality: finally, nothing that exists is real, which makes nonsense of the words “exists,” “is,” and “real.” It is also pure Buddhism: the experienced world is Maya, illusion. If man is less than human, he must be an animal — a “mere” animal — after all! Nietzsche was right: man is something to be surpassed:

Most men represent pieces and fragments of man: one has to add them up for a complete man to appear. Whole ages, whole peoples are in this sense somewhat fragmentary; it is perhaps part of the economy of human evolution that man should evolve piece by piece. But that should not make one forget for a moment that the real issue is the production of synthetic men; that lower men, the tremendous majority, are merely preludes and rehearsals out of whose medley the whole man appears here and there, the milestone man who indicates how far humanity has advanced so far ... [W]e have not yet reattained the man of the Renaissance, and the man of the Renaissance, in turn, is inferior to the man of antiquity.[679]

Murray Bookchin: Ecce Homo! Zarathustra!

Bookchin is a racist. His delineation of the true humans precisely traces the color line. The tableau of primitives doing nothing but eating, sleeping, reproducing, excreting, and (as if all this were not vile enough) even playing evokes the crudest racist caricatures of lazy, dirty, lascivious Africans, Arabs, Amerindians and other “natives.” So does the ex-Director’s comic book caveman image of the prehistoric man who “grunted” as he tried and failed to practice the division of labor.[680] Fully developed urban civilization was created only by European whites, whose superior civilization he stoutly affirms. Amerindians, Asians and Africans tried and failed at urbanism — although it is an Asian invention — as the primitives tried and failed with the division of labor. Contemporary primitives, the object of Bookchin’s piggish prejudices, are also nonwhites who have failed to become civilized or else they “literally devolved.” If only in principle, Bookchin’s humanism is worse than Nazism. At least the Nazis grudgingly acknowledged that the Jews were a depraved, demonic kind of human being. That is a higher status than the Burlington humanist accords the aborigines (and, apparently, all the rest of us). To him they are, as I prophetically put it in Anarchy after Leftism, little more than talking dogs.[681]

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

Robert Charles Black Jr. (born January 4, 1951) is an American author and anarchist. He is the author of the books The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and Defacing the Currency, and numerous political essays. (From: Wikipedia.org.)

Chronology

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2010
Chapter 11 — Publication.

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April 18, 2020; 2:41:07 PM (UTC)
Added to http://revoltlib.com.

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January 15, 2022; 6:52:36 PM (UTC)
Updated on http://revoltlib.com.

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