 | Re-enchanting Humanity — Chapter 9 : Re-enchanting HumanityBy Murray Bookchin |
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| Re-enchanting Humanity — Chapter 9 : Re-enchanting HumanityBy Murray Bookchin |
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Father of Social Ecology and Anarcho-Communalism
: Growing up in the era of traditional proletarian socialism, with its working-class insurrections and struggles against classical fascism, as an adult he helped start the ecology movement, embraced the feminist movement as antihierarchical, and developed his own democratic, communalist politics. (From: Anarchy Archives.)
• "...a market economy based on dog-eat-dog as a law of survival and 'progress' has penetrated every aspect of society..." (From: "The Crisis in the Ecology Movement," by Murray Bo....)
• "...Proudhon here appears as a supporter of direct democracy and assembly self- management on a clearly civic level, a form of social organization well worth fighting for in an era of centralization and oligarchy." (From: "The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism," by Murray Book....)
• "The social view of humanity, namely that of social ecology, focuses primarily on the historic emergence of hierarchy and the need to eliminate hierarchical relationships." (From: "The Crisis in the Ecology Movement," by Murray Bo....)
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Chapter 9
To the extent that space and possibly the patience of the reader allow, I have tried to critically examine an historic shift away from the Enlightenment to an antihumanist oudook that incorporates a postmodernist celebration of mysticism and anti-rationalism, and very significantiy, a subsuming of any social issues, intellectual critique, and moral criteria by a crude biologism of one kind or another.
By no means is my account of this shift complete; diere are far too many antihumanisms abroad for me to include them all. Nor is it clear what forms this shift will take in the years ahead. As we have seen, major antihumanist tendencies seek in varying degrees to reduce human behavior to the morality of the gene, and human beings to intelligent fleas that feed on a mystified Gaia, or to fruit flies competing with each other in a mindless biological struggle over limited means of life in the macabre play of Malthusian demographics.
I have tried to give the reader a critical view of the explicidy antihu-. manistic notions of mystical ecology that abound today, and of a regres-: sive primitivism predicated on a hatred of civilization as such and of; science and technology in particular, bodi of which are commonly regarded as the principal causal factors in producing the pathologies of what antihumanists and postmodernists dismiss as modernity.
There is, to be sure, nothing new about a rise of interest in religion during times of crisis and personal disempowerment: it is the perennial, palliative of a society in decline. Hence it is not surprising that one of the fastest-growing products on the market today, possibly second only to television sets and VCRs, is religion. What is dizzying is the rapidity with which this vast ideological counterrevolution has occurred. Within a span of less than twenty-five years, I have seen (as have many older readers of this book) a militant if theatrical social radicalism, influenced by anarchic and cultural socialists, give way to a political quietism that is almost unprecedented in this century. A new wisdom of passively dwelling and ‘be-ing’ on Gaia has defuzed social protest and revolutionary visions. The cry ‘the personal is the political’ has been reversed to read ‘the political is the personal’. Where the former once linked the fate of the individual to the broader society and called for social intervention as a form of personal realization, the latter has displaced the social by the personal and calls for social withdrawal as a form of personal redemption.
What do nostrums that draw from an ostensibly scientific field like sociobiology have in common with postmodernism, whose adherents often exhibit an aversion for reason? Indeed, in what way can seemingly science-based nostrums with roots in genetics and demographics be linked to mythic if not religious cults like angelology?
However different they may be in specific respects, the one feature that these antihumanisms share is what developmentally oriented philosophers would call their lack of mediations. By mediations, I mean that their thinking lacks the phased and articulated unfoldings that reflect and articulate developmental processes in the real world. From the very outset, antihumanists think, feel, and sense phenomena immediately, directly, intuitively — and reductively. Whereas the immediate is elemental, simple, initial, and given, the mediated is the result of a development, the ascertainable phase of a continuum. Yet mediations are also distinctive, delineable, and ‘determinate’, to use philosophical language — phases that lend themselves to conceptual clarity and rational interpretation. To antihumanists, reflection, ideation, and the processual determinations that enter into the apprehension of a phenomenon pollute its ‘authenticity’. However much antihumanists may disagree with one another on a variety of issues, in varying degrees they try to grasp phenomena in their ‘pure’ and reductively primal ‘be-ing’, free from the ‘imposition’ of rational categories — all of which, to one degree or ano ther, stand in the way of grasping the ‘authenticity’ of phenomena. I am not using terms like ‘being’ and ‘authenticity’, so basic to Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, in a Heideggerian sense here; the truth is that I have no choice but to use this language, since there are no satisfactory synonyms for these words.
Thus, fundamental to the morality of the gene, the dynamics of populations, the cybernetics of the Gaia hypothesis, the allegedly unspoiled attributes of primitive society, the fear of technology and science as such, and the rejection of reason is a devotion to primality. It is upon genes, populations dynamics, the primitive, and an uncomplicated technics that any discussion of philosophical, ecological, and social issues is anchored.
Their unmediated primality does not prevent antihumanists from exploding with wild speculations about the present and the future, but they are dismally minimalist. For antihumanists, the origins or substrate of things, from genes to the ‘Big Bang’, from reproductive behavior to a primal ‘Cosmic Self’ often radically determines what those things are. Results are confused with their origins. A minimalism of the thinnest kind is the surest way to ‘get in touch’ with one’s ‘feelings’ and with the world, particularly a natural world conceived as virginal and unspoiled.
If genes determine many, perhaps most of our actions and values, culture is merely an artificial impediment that improperly redirects our ‘inner self’ away from doing what our molecular fundaments demand. In the face of Gaia’s cosmic dictates, moreover, we wane into biological insignificance. Indeed, we taint our own capacity for self-realization if we intervene beyond the imperatives of meeting our simplest needs, in the larger Self of which we are mere constituents. Inasmuch as we are no more than animals, we can increase our numbers geometrically like fruit flies, but our means of life increase arithmetically, which presumably explains why we have the ecological and social dislocations that plague us. Worse still, technologies have an ‘imperative’ of their own. One technological innovation blindly leads to another until an industrial revolution emerges to befoul streams, oceans, and air, deforesting the planet, desiccating the soil, and warming the globe.
Having shed our primal ‘Paleolithic sensibility’, we are degraded creatures, intervening as we do in a once-pristine Nature. The gaps we have opened between our ‘natural’ past and our ‘industrial’ civilization must be closed by returning to the same primal harmony that shaped the behavior of our remote ancestors. How far back we have to go — whether to the dictates of our ‘moral’ or ‘wise’ genes, to the impulses of our hominid animality, to the foraging psyche of Paleolithic hunters, to the presumed pacifism of rustic Neolithic matriarchies, or to the various behavioral patterns of a simple preindustrial and prescientific past — is negotiable.
Like it or not, Heidegger has done more than any drinker in this century, however indirectly, to provide us with the vocabulary, prelapsarian mentality, and spirituality for this unmediated orientation toward reality. In large measure, the imagery of an unmediated world in which we are ‘One’ with first nature and with each other in ‘interconnections’ that dissolve our individuality, selfhood, and rationality in a black hole of antimodernism can be attributed to him, however unfamiliar many contemporary antihumanists are with his writings.
This antihumanist outlook is by no means as harmless as it may seem. In fact, disturbing consequences follow from any philosophy of immediacy.
The first one is the abolition of history — the denial of history’s reality, importance, unity, and meaning. Our evolution out of first nature and beyond primal forms of association is viewed as a ‘Fall’: a steady loss of our pristine animality (including our responsiveness to genetic and demographic imperatives), a corruption of our hominid sensibilities (which, we are repeatedly advised, were shaped over two or three million years by a Paleolithic ‘hunting’ way of life), a descent from our ‘direct’ communication with first nature into (variously) agriculture, urbanity, advanced technology, and science, and finally our objectification and massification by quasi-mystical technological ‘imperatives’. Thus was the edenic Golden Age of the Paleolithic superseded by the Silver Age of the Neolithic, the Bronze Age of fortress cities, and the Iron Age of industrial civilization.
This succession of ages represents not history in the sense of a progressive development away from primality but an atrophying, a steady erosion, a regressive undoing of our ‘inner nature’. Civilization raises ever more mediations — impediments to our genetic, demographic, ecological, ‘presencing’, and intuitive awareness of our ‘Oneness’ with the animal world, first nature, Gaia, or the cosmos. True self-fulfillment lies in plumbing the bosom of our origins — whatever their depths — in a preconceived harmony that constitutes our ‘authentic’ destiny. History is merely a series of ‘narratives’ at best, each of which has no meaning, or a fall at worst, one that portends the apocalyptic destruction of the biosphere and ourselves.
I do not claim that all antihumanists hold this precise constellation of beliefs. Many would hesitate to condemn civilization or even science and technology as such; still others would not want to sacrifice the benefits they enjoy as a result of technological innovation, such as their computers, cameras, binoculars, and fax machines. But a growing number of antihumanists do hold all the views I have described and, in fact, are more consistent in following the logic of their beliefs than their halfhearted colleagues.
On social issues, moreover, antihumanists share commonalities that cannot be ignored. If there is no ‘unitary’ history, there can be no progress. This denial of progress does not prevent antihumanists from insisting that history has directionality — that is, a vast regress in human affairs. The notion that a rational infrastructure, so to speak, can be discerned in history (despite the terrible failings, even horrors, that mark its course) in which human intellectuality does become more sophisticated, ethics does become more responsive to protesting oppressions and social afflictions, art does become more sensitive to the human condition, society does become more secular, and knowledge is increasingly guided by thoughtful reflection and the criteria of proof — all of these developments are denied by antihumanists or fractured into episodic narratives, each of which is dealt with relativistically, as though it had a life of its own apart from the whole.
The very concept of advances in ideas, values, political ideals, social systems, productive power, and insights is eschewed for episodic events, for constellations of local’ or ‘discontinuous’ phenomena, to use Foucauldian terms. The no tion of a meaningful history of humanity that includes an ascent from primality to complexity, indeed from animality to increasing humanity, is displaced by mere chronicles that consist mainly of anecdotal events and particularistic cultural phenomena.
Having dispensed with the very idea of progress — even with criteria forjudging what is and is not progressive — antihumanism leaves us at sea, bereft of any notion of civilization. Inasmuch as the fall of humanity refers more often to these chronicles than to any progressive ascent, human beings are little more than alienated beings who are the makers as well as the victims of a technocratic world, the product of their own hubris, rationality, and innate greediness or aggressiveness rooted in their genetic makeup, according to sociobiologists, or in their technically oriented culture, according to most postmodernists.
However distant many of the authors I have discussed may be from popular culture, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida speak to millions of people today through the impresarios of widely viewed television documentaries, such as Bill Moyers, David Suzuki, and Desmond Morris. These impresarios themselves may have very little acquaintance with antihumanist philosophers, but in an era of dark pessimism, the public appetite for antihumanistic messages is growing rapidly. The close proximity, indeed, the conflation, of antihumanist campus thinkers with Yuppie-type New Age ideologies is remarkable. Shoddy antihumanistic or antimodernist journalists who may never have read a line of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, or Derrida regale us with books that define human beings as mere ‘dwellers’ on the planet who must recover their primal ‘authenticity’ by ‘deconstructing’ civilization, denying putative ‘myths’ of progress, and ‘decentering’ human claims to uniqueness. We are derided for our ‘logocentrity’, ‘ethnocentricity’, ‘anthropocentricity’, ‘Eurocentricity’, or — for white males — ‘phallocentricity’.
In calling for the ‘re-enchanting’ of humanity, I refer — playfully — to the importance of recognizing humanity’s potentiality for creating a rational, ecologically oriented, esthetically exciting, and deeply humane world based on an ethics of complementarity and a society of sharing.
I use the word potentiality advisedly. The conventional way of exploring phenomena — through what I call conventional reason or conventional logic — is to intellectually carve out a realm of experience and subject it to close analysis. Given a particular object, we take it apart, so to speak, and explore its components and their interrelationships, then reconstruct it, all with a view toward understanding how it functions. This way of thinking is appropriate for making a watch or constructing a bridge, and even for determining how a living organism maintains itself. Without the rules of conventional logic, which are rigorously analytical and date back in the history of logic to Aristotle’s syllogisms in his Prior Analytics, we could not engage in the multitude of activities that make up our everyday fives. A syllogism (Aristotle uses the word deduction) is ‘a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so’ (23bl8). Most famously in elementary philosophy courses, syllogistic logic is illustrated by the propositions: ‘All men are mortal / Socrates is a man / Therefore Socrates is mortal.’[325]
But such a deductive system of propositions does not adequately encompass processes, developments, and the unfolding of phenomena in which potentialities, like seeds, initiate the becoming of a given tiring or condition. It cannot provide us with an adequate way of thinking out the evolution or history of an ever-differentiating potentiality and grasp its phases in a rational, eductive manner — indeed, of situating mind and body, the natural and the social, the individual and the collective, necessity and freedom in formative dualities that are not petrified ‘dualisms’, but rather new and complementary modes of emergent phenomena that enrich an unfolding continuum. Hence the tendency of so many people today to adhere to a simplistic reductionism that subsumes all differentiation or else to adopt a view of diversity in which utterly unrelated phenomena — a mere plurality of beings — are promiscuously united into a specious ‘Oneness’ like so many multicolored billiard balls contained in a wrack.
No — to understand evolution, to think historically, requires more than conventional logic. We have to ascertain the immanent drives that impel undifferentiated potentialities into ever-greater differentiation, complexity, and wholeness. We are obliged to ascertain the great parallels in history that unify humanity — the many similarities among independently developing cultures, the common issues that human beings confront throughout history, and the common solutions they so often devise.
It is not my intention to discuss dialectical logic, as it is usually called in contrast to conventional logic, except to emphasize that we cannot understand humanity, society, and their emergence out of first nature without recognizing humanity’s potentiality to become more than a product of biological laws, however useful biology may be as a source of insight into the animalistic attributes of human beings.[326] Like all phenomena, humans are always undergoing transformation. They can no more be viewed with fixity than first nature can be reduced to a scenic view on a picture postcard.
As I have emphasized, human biology is rooted in an evolutionary elaboration of a specialized physical system — the nervous system — as well as a variety of anatomical attributes (stereoscopic vision, free forearms, opposable thumbs, and an oral flexibility in producing complex sounds) that have made it possible for our species to advance from adaptive behavior to innovative behavior. The unfolding of this potentiality marked a decisive breach with first nature that yielded the creation of a predominantly cultural evolution, or second nature. This breach, far from being a malevolent and aberrant creation of man the destroyer’ is, above all, the consequence of potentialities that are latent in the evolution of life itself and that can very well yield the image of ‘man the creator’.
To object that human beings might never have evolved but for chance occurrences over the course of organic evolution ignores the compelling fact that humanity does exist, and that it did not emerge ab novo. In varying degrees, humanity’s emergence followed from developmental potentialities and a clearly discernible logic with a surprising degree of evolutionary autogeny. We are products of a self-developmental tendency in natural evolution, not only chance events and conjunctions of them.
Nor is it necessary to invoke supernatural agents to account for humanity’s appearance. But by the same token, this species could not have emerged unless there were potentialities in first nature to account for human evolution.
I have also addressed the emergence of culture or second nature in earlier chapters, emphasizing its institutional roots in biological facts such as age groups, gender differences, and kinship ties. It is with the development of society — of history and more precisely with the appearance of civilization — that we are obliged to ask if humanity has indeed progressed or, if not, whether it can progress.
If many an tihu manists see humanity’s redemption in the form of a retreat to a noninterventionist, passive relationship with the natural world, I wish to contend, by contrast, that a crucial function of culture is to render it possible for humanity to rationally and creatively intervene in the world and improve upon existing conditions, be they the product of natural evolution or social development.
More specifically, the monumental work of social evolution or second nature is to innovatively transcend the narrow cultural horizons of early humanity, however beneficent many of them may be; to go beyond the eady biologically conditioned social wodd, based on age cohorts, gender differences, and kinship ties, into an increasingly universalistic, secular, and hopefully rational world. The function of second nature has been to transform the parochial domain of ethnic communities, in which people were fragmented into kin groups based on a common ancestry, into a universal humanitas in which people recognize themselves as a species: indeed, to transform tribalized people into urbanized citizens, to exorcize superstition through the insights of reason, and — by no means a trifling task — to endow human beings with the material security to free their bodies and minds from economic uncertainty, the drudgery of toil, and craven submission to the seemingly overwhelming forces of first nature.
In short, insofar as humanity has ascended from a domain of passive animality guided by genetic makeup, myths, and material insecurities, into a more creative, civilized, and free second nature, the function of social evolution in the view of an enlightened humanism is the creation of a society guided by reason. It is in such a rational society that we can be truly human, according to norms worthy of being called ethical.
In a very real sense, then, we are still unfinished as human beings because we have not as yet fulfilled our potentiality for cooperation, understanding, and rational behavior. An enlightened humanism calls on us to be rational as well as imaginative, socially committed as well as highly individuated, and publicly involved as well as personally rounded. This enlightened humanism may sound to antihumanists like the rabid anthropocentrism of an unreconstructed humanist. But in my view humanity is faced with immense social and ecological dislocations not because there is too much civilization but rather because we are not civilized enough. I make no claim that social evolution has unilinearly and merrily unfolded toward civilization or that it will necessarily do so. Nor is there any guarantee that we will fulfill our potentialities to achieve a free, rational, and self-conscious society. Even so starkly teleological a philosopher as Hegel viewed ‘History’ as a ‘slaughterbench’, however much he regarded social development as the unfolding of reason toward complete human enlightenment
Indeed, Hegel was hardly unique in his harsh judgment of history. Many of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners advanced images of history even more critical than Iris, Opponents of the Enlightenment have mainly caricatured its thinkers and simplified its message, exaggerating its humanist outlook as a crude anthropocentrism if only to highlight their own antihumanist outlook.
But merely to agree that history has been a bloody slaughterbench, in which people commonly acted with terrible brutality, presupposes the existence of standards of humaneness, rationality, and virtue that provide the basis for defining that brutality. Without such standards, firmly grounded in reality as well as in philosophical thought, we are lost in a sea of meaningless adjectives and a relativism in which what is humane, rational, and virtuous is merely a matter of personal opinion and individual taste. This personalistic and relativistic approach divests us of the norms by which we may define what it means to be human — and hence our unique potentiality as social as well as individual beings.
In a very broad sense, our potentiality for achieving a rational society consists in the attainment of freedom. Freedom consists of a multitude of interrelated attainments: the opportunity to choose between various courses of action, to shape our personal and social fives creatively, to deal with each other and the natural world humanely, to be guided by an ethics of complementarity, to create communal forms of social organization, and to use reason in all our affairs. Hence rationally guided choice, certain basic virtues, and radically democratic institutions, constitute the partly realized potentialities for attaining humanness and achieving a free humanitas.
Freedom in tins substantial sense is not attainable by animals. Guided by genetic imperatives, the immediate needs of survival and reproduction, and instinct, and distinctly limited in learning ability, animals generally make adaptive adjustments to environmental circumstances. Normally, an animal does not ‘make’ its world; it exists within a world in which it finds itself Indeed, the survival of many species is highly vulnerable even to slight changes in habitat. The primitivist identification of ‘wildness’ or ‘wilderness’ with freedom in any human sense of multitudinous choices and innovations is grossly misplaced: the behavior of creatures that exist ‘in the wild’ is greatly restricted by imperatives beyond their understanding and control. No fion is born free, unless by freedom we simply mean the absence of physical confinement. An animal’s existence is significantly determined by its inborn behavioral equipment, its fairly circumscribed learning capacity, and its inherited physical ability to sustain itself in a highly precarious world.
To be sure, a relatively intelligent animal will try to find tree cover or a den, say, to avoid the chilling effects of rain; but unless it is imprinted genetically to do so or has learned to build a very crude shelter against inclement weather, it is very much on its own in meeting climatic changes and similar environmental problems.
By contrast, human beings (and to a limited degree, certain nonhuman primates) can literally create choices which do not exist in their natural habitats. They can imagine a great variety of alternatives from which to choose, constructing them in forms that do not exist in first nature. With extraordinary flexibility, they can remake their immediate environments to suit clearly understood or anticipated needs. And very significantly, they can articulate through speech, writing, cooperation, and by other expressive representations, such as pictures, specific aims that go far beyond mere survival, comfort, and self-defense. Reasoning by analogy or by inference and deduction, they can create increasingly complex and effective institutions, customs, and methods of systematic learning, normally developing appropriate ways to guarantee the satisfaction of their emotional as well as their material needs.
In short, human beings can begin, however limited their consciousness at first, to discover that they have the potentiality to go well beyond the existing circumstances of their fives and, with the passing of generations, develop — conceptually as well as materially — new needs and expanding ideas about their own cultural domain. They can establish definable systems of rights and duties; drey can rationally explain — even in mythic form — their place in the world as well as in their communities; and they can create mutable bands, tribes, villages, cities, and other elaborate forms of social organization. Not only can they create cultures, but depending upon time, place, and circumstances, they can expand their cultures and social ideas. These can be structured and embodied in a variety of ways by creating new methods of working together, distributing the products of their work, formulating belief systems, establishing institutions, and thinking out richer or more complex ideas about life and its meaning, including broad notions of justice and freedom.
To understand the vast historical movement of culture requires dialectical thinking beyond conventional logic, with its basis in the ‘law of identity’. For it obliges us to deal with a dialectic of becoming, of educing new phases out of the seemingly fixed, easily analyzable static facts. It obliges us to address a seemingly antithetical ‘other’ that always represents what is new and often alien to what is old, even as the new incorporates and modifies older realities.
Yet innovative as we may be as human beings, we nevertheless retain strong animalistic desires to adapt to what exists unless it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to continue. Our animal heritage thus fives on in us as a stultifying conservatism that we may not shake off unless the imperative to change, a given state of affairs and beliefs systems emerges as a compelling need or desire. The ‘other’ or antithesis of what exists is, by virtue of its uncertainty, often very fearsome; it threatens to disestablish deeply entrenched ways of life and belief systems. Indeed, there is no way of knowing how far an antithesis may unsetde stable, time-honored institutions, beliefs, reciprocities, social and personal habits.
It is out of this crucible of choices — whether presented to us by new circumstances or created by human consciousness — that the events that form humanity’s chronicles emerge. Events and chronicles are merely changes understood without regard for their meaning, developmental context, or connections to one another — in short, as mere displacements in social affairs, like the movement of balls over a billiard table. However carefully reported they may be by chroniclers such as Herodotus or Froissart, such events do not have to be situated in a broad continuum of time. They are mere events in the simple sense that they are indistinguishable from episodes, however significant they may be for the people who are involved in them.
It makes little difference over the long term if events and episodes are remembered or forgotten, retained or dispensed with, celebrated or ignored. If remembered, they are usually more entertaining than instructive. As animalistic phenomena, they are not the consequences of a rational development that enlarges overall human experience. They are important to those who have been affected by them, but fiiey are limited to specific times and places.
The Odyssey, which recapitulates important aspects of human history in mythic form, tells us of the island of the Lotus-eaters, who feast on fruit’ that deprives men ‘of any desire’ and renders them ‘forgetful of home’, indeed of recollection of the past or concern for the future.[327] They five in an eternal present in which the immediacy of existence is perpetual. They live on the bounty of Nature in bliss and meaninglessness. In fact, they do not exist in time conceived as a flow of changing phenomena, still less as part of an expansive development. The Lotus-eaters exist on the level of animals, for whom existence is always fixed in the present and the immediately given — a condition, I should add, that some primitivists regard as the edenic condition of humanity, to which it should now return, having been afflicted by the nightmare of history and civilization.
Such episodes are not what I mean by history. Events may be compiled as chronicles, unmediated by any association beyond sequential dates; history, by contrast, is an account of a development that unfolds as a consequence of the rational elaboration of humanity’s potentiality for freedom and self-consciousness. History is in great measure the development of humanity away firom the Island of the Lotus Eaters into the innovative fullness of freedom and self-consciousness. It consists of the mediations or ‘steps’ by which human beings have raised themselves out of a cultural void into a cultural development that has a complex past, a conflicted present, and the prospect of an emancipatory future.
History, then, is not what Foucault calls a ‘genealogy’, by which he means ‘local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges’, and which he contrasts with history and its ‘claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchize and order [those knowledges] in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects.’[328] Given Foucault’s proclivity for arbitrary, ‘illegitimate’ assortments of facts and events that constitute his own ‘encapsulation’ of various tortures, oppressions, and hells, he caricatures any endeavor to unearth a developmental meaning even in ‘local’ and ‘discontinuous illegitimate knowledges’. Foucault’s ‘genealogies’ order events through ‘filters’ of his own that are all the more dogmatic because his premises remain unstated, in contrast to many ‘unitary’ histories he arrogantly rejects.
Indeed, if it ‘hierarchizes’ human development to assert that one era is more expansive in its concept of freedom, humaneness, rationality, and values than an earlier one, then historians can cheerfully acknowledge the accusation that they are hierarchical. But so much the worse, then, for the ‘genealogist’, who would dissolve the unfolding of human potentiality or fragment it into scattered ‘discontinuous, illegitimate knowledges’ that provide us with nothing from which we can develop any perspective beyond the local — and that limit us to celebrating the episodic, the riotous, and the ‘ecstatic’ as acts of‘resistance’ to hierarchy.
On the other hand, to recognize a rational thread of development and rationally educible advances — yes, progress — in human affairs does not mean that there have not been discontinuities, regressions, diversions, and blind alleys. There has been no unilinear and undeviating advance in human affairs. History would indeed be mysterious if it consisted of an unbroken and predestined march toward an idyllic world, unsullied by brutalities and horrors.
But it is far too easy and perverse to make the breaches in second nature into a focal theme. No view is cheaper and more noxious than Theodor Adorno’s dictum, ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’[329] Whatever Adorno meant by universal, there is a massive history of humanity that consists of growing sensibilities, material achievements, culture, and, let it not be forgotten, great movements guided by high ideals to achieve a free society.
In fact, antihumanists and their ‘genealogists’ have an advantage over any endeavor to insightfully explore history: they can count on a general ignorance of extraordinary parallels over the course of humanity’s development — parallels that reveal a remarkable ‘unitary’ cultural dimension to our species’s history. They can also count on the laziness of thought that is easily wearied by nuances, explanations, and the painstaking effort to determine c what went wrong’ in history and why certain events have warped historical development, particularly during this century.
Given the current popularity of Foucauldian ‘discontinuities’, what is surprising when we consult history is how unitary it actually has been in areas of the world that did not have contact with each other for immensely long periods of time — indeed, for 10,000 years and possibly more — when enormous changes occurred in the human condition. In many regions of the globe a distinct social evolution occurred that brought growing populations out of small bands into tribal, feudal, and even imperial forms of organization, with almost identical material advances from foraging to large-scale agriculture. What is striking is the incredible similarity of progression in the belief systems and cultural features these regions shared over the course of their developments, from a simplistic belief in spirits probably derived from dreams to spiritual cosmologies and priestly guilds of imposing proportions.
Arguably, the often minute cultural features these historical civilizations shared may have been derivative, carried by traders or diffused by a’ multitude of possible contacts across land masses — or they might have developed independently. However unlikely it may be, the ancient Near East, for example, may have inspired the agricultural developments, city-states, and kingships in India and the Far East by diffusing agriculture and certain political institutions across Asia.
But it is as certain as any archaeological facts can be that major cultural and material traits arose quite independently in Mesoamerica, a region* that could not have had contact with the Near East after the late: Paleolithic. What is surprising when Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica are compared is not the fairly secondary differences that divide them but the enormous similarities that unite them. These similarities — not only their shared economic and cultural traits but their shared evolution from bands’ to large city-states — reveal a stunning unity in human history, from tribal life to fairly advanced civilizations.
The Paleoindians who crossed the large land bridge from Asia to America were undoubtedly late Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with a toolkit that could not have been more advanced than, say, that of the hunting people who painted caves in the Pyrenees region some 30,000 to 15,000 years ago. With the retreat of the glaciers about 10,000 years ago, Paleoindians left Asia and continued to develop socially in the Americas, with only tentative contacts from Viking seafarers and stray mariners. It is now generally accepted that they learned very litde, indeed probably nothing of any importance, from Europeans and Asians for thousands of years.
Yet archaeologists can trace an independent development in Mesoamerican inhabitants from nomadic foragers organized in fairly egalitarian and simple bands into increasingly hierarchical tribes, village gardening communities, feudal agricultural systems, warring kingly city states, and finally in the case of central Mexico, monarchical empires. All exhibit extraordinary parallels with the development of social life elsewhere in the world.
By the same token, in the Near East, late Paleolithic hunting bands and tribes underwent a transition to gardening villages at least 10,000 years ago and thence on to temple and kingly city-states based on the large-scale cultivation of grains (wheat and barley) about 6,000 years ago. Remarkably, in Mesoamerica there is evidence of grain (maize) cultivation and village gardening around 6,000 years ago, followed by a shift from nomadic foraging to a relatively setded village life.
Both regions went on to master pictographic writing, pottery, metallurgy, irrigation, and large-scale agriculture; and a highly functional calendar and mathematics (the Maya even discovered the zero). Both domesticated animals and plants. Both developed priestly, warrior, noble, and royal castes, together with temples, palaces, monumental architecture, and city-states — entirely independently of each other. Eventually, in both regions, some cities expanded to an immense size, supporting ever more craftspeople, merchants, and bureaucrats. Finally, the Aztecs developed an empire comparable in territory, population, and administrative techniques to some of the centralized states in the early Near East. In Mesoamerica as in Mesopotamia, cities engaged in the mass manufacture and trade over wide areas, making it possible for their populations to expand far beyond their agricultural base.
The extent to which status groups, quasi-feudal ties, religious practices, building techniques, and building materials resembled each other in both regions is almost uncanny. Complex status and class systems emerged, along with religious belief systems, deified kings and priesdy corporations. Architectural styles were nonnally geometrical, indicating not only a similarity of style but a command of shared mathematical and structural strategies. Commonalities appear even in such seemingly trivial facts as the use of straw to make clay bricks.
In both regions these city-states became involved more and more in internecine warfare over control of trade routes and land. Systematic warfare was conducted to take captives for large-scale human sacrifices, as was the case not only among the Aztecs but among the Chinese of Anyang during the Shang dynasty some 3,300 years ago. It would be preposterous to ignore this shared evolution in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica by emphasizing their local differences.
My account of these extraordinary similarities — and many more could be cited — is not designed to support the notion of an unwavering unilinear history that all civilizations had to follow. Indeed, for millennia, many people did not develop beyond the band and tribal level of social organization and foraging or horticultural techniques. Nor, where civilizations developed, did every one of them follow a path that corresponds to that of Mesoamerican and Mesopotamian civilizations. Peru’s highly totalitarian Inca empire certainly followed a significantly different trajectory. Moreover, the furious warfare in the Mesoamerican ‘classic era’, some 1,700 to 1,000 years ago, led to the widespread mutual destruction of city-states, for reasons that are still unclear. So destructive was this warfare that many once well-cultivated, irrigated, and densely inhabited areas reverted to tropical jungles. Warfare seems to have become a culturally hypertrophic feature, wherein an increasingly warrior-oriented society developed such exaggerated forms and functions, beyond any service they provided for the cities, that they became ends in themselves and tore down an entire centuries-old society.[330]
Here, to be sure, the parallels diverge. In both cases Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica independendy laid the bases — more precisely, created the potentiality — for parallel civilizations. But Mesoamerica saw the destruction of city-states by cultural hypertrophy that led to social stagnation, while Mesopotamian cultural achievements were picked up by Greece, later Rome, and Europe, and advanced to a more rational vision of a future that no tribal society could have developed.
However varied in details, even if warfare was endemic and shamans or priests conjured up terrifying ‘rniaginari.es’ (to use Cornelius Castoriadis’s expression) that legitimate ongoing bloody sacrifices, these societies followed a unifying logic once they developed agrarian cultures and learned to vastiy increase their food supply. Food cultivation makes possible large populations, often followed by an increasing division of labor. When powerful status groups, formed by alliances between chiefs, elders, and shamans, evolved, they all gained prestige, power, and material advantages by their collaboration. Normally, if not invariably, such societies followed a remarkably common path toward state formation, a warrior caste, and economic exploitation that either gave rise to cosmopolitan empires — or led to the ruin of a regional civilization. Indeed, what is surprising, then, are the shared stages of development — different in time, to be sure, but almost identical in trajectory — that unite Mesoamerican and Mesopotamian development, commonalities that flatly contradict the Foucauldian notion that a ‘unitary’ history of humanity is a dogma imposed upon social reality by historians with a ‘totalitarian predisposition for historical directivity and coherence.
The reasons a culture area undergoes a general breakdown rather than advance toward a greater degree of freedom and self-consciousness requires more of a nuanced analysis of history than flippant, selective Foucauldian assertions about the microscopic ‘institutionalization’ of power. Admirable as Foucault’s concern for the mistreatment of imprisoned people may be, his account of the ‘birth of the prison’ in Discipline and Punish is often misleading owing precisely to its limited range of narrative material. The institutionalization of punishment, in fact, was quite as extensive and regimented in the Roman world, for example, as it was in the nineteenth century, and the ‘alert gaze’ that figures in Foucault’s account of Jeremy Bentham’s proposed ‘panoptic’ design for surveillance over prisoners was beggared by various all-encompassing surveillance techniques that were employed throughout history, particularly in ancient latifundia and in modern plantations worked by slave labor.
Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ strategy emphasizes selective secondary, tertiary, and even hypothetical events — a strategy that grossly enlarges their meaning and implications at the expense of larger forces, patterns, and sequences that are found in broad historical accounts. Every bureaucracy and system of coercive power tends to expand and increase its power if it can — and such was the case historically, as legal and disciplinary systems became more entrenched at various times, no less in ancient Rome than in modern Europe. Little in Foucault’s work on the institutionalization of power demonstrates that the modern world has been more coercive and punitive than earlier periods of history.
Indeed, antihumanist and postmodernist emphases on the minutiae of experience — valuable as their data may be in sensitizing us to authoritarian institutions and attitudes — often miss the forest for the trees. They are no substitute for broader historical accounts that reveal great cultural evolutionary processes that enlarge the promise for human emancipation. An able archaeologist like V. Gordon Cliilde, for example — however hmited his detailed knowledge of the past may have been, two generations ago — still deserves respectful reading because he had a stronger grasp of macroscopic changes in history than the largely empirical and postmodernist monographers of recent times, whose dogmatic denial of a ‘unitary’ development of humanity abandons us to a warehouse of factual debris.[331] Contrary to what Foucault suggests, the institutionalization of punishment (and the reduction or elimination of earlier forms of physical punishment like the removal of hands, limbs, and finally death by quartering) was more the product of a specific society than it was a causal factor in shaping that society.
‘The urban revolution’, as Childe called it, beginning some 7,000 years ago, marked a vast turning point in social evolution, as did the consolidation of city-states into empires and later nations, the transition from Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages, the accumulation of food surpluses and the stability these eras provided in human affairs, as well as the development of leisured elites, and finally the emergence of mass production. Indeed, rudimentary mass production based on assemblyline techniques dates back to the late Paleolithic and to hlesoamerican cities, as well as to Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and Sidon, and to medieval towns in northern Italy and Flanders, finally exploding with the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century England.
Thus, to dismiss Gerhard Lenski’s fact-laden sequence of huntinggathering, horticultural, agrarian, and industrial phases of social evolution — to which one can add innumerable intermediate phases — for a fashionable concern for empirical albeit tendentiously selective minutiae, for example, would shroud over the rich body of history and trivialize human development.[332] Having developed away from the parochial biological facts on which tribal society was based, humanity clearly followed a development that logically led it to construct cities, form complex civilizations, create the fact of citizenship, and achieve ever-broader actualizations of its potentiality for freedom and self-consciousness. That this development was arrested at certain levels of social evolution here and there or even regressed to earlier social forms does not alter the fact that its civic and economic forms of consociation, and its concepts of selfhood and personal freedom, of broad concepts of justice, responsibility, and empathy for its own kind — even for non-human beings — generally expanded to a point where differences in opinion over the progressive nature of evolution subtly attest to a radically new sensibility about what the human condition should be.
Put more concretely: terrible cruelties that were once taken for granted a few thousand years ago, indeed, only a few centuries ago, such as the extermination of entire cities in invasions and wars, now evoke shock where they once did not, even if they have not abated in practice. Today we no longer regard war as such as glorious or heroic. Torture, mental as well as physical, is regarded as shameful, however much it is practiced today — a view that only became widespread with the English, American, and French Revolutions. Elitism itself, once honored and mystified by religion, art, and poetry, is now viewed with suspicion, however much it is a reality of contemporary social life. Nearly every nation-state today tries to depict itself as a democracy, even as it dishonors the label in practice.
The prevalence of this higher ethical sensibility, in conjunction with the immense potentiality for providing for the basic material needs of everyone on the planet, due to technological advances and the secularization of knowledge, cannot be dismissed because of Stalins gulags and Hitlers death camps. At the height of the Greek democracy and the Roman republic, it was conventional wisdom that an entire people could be ‘put to the sword’ and/or enslaved. Nor could the ancient world have had any thought of abandoning slavery for moral reasons, even after Christianity became ascendant and heightened society’s sensitivity to individual uniqueness — indeed, the sanctity of the human soul. Despite terrible wars, the sophistication of military technology, and the ruthlessness of military conflicts, concurrent advances took place in human sensibility, expanding notions of freedom and a greatly expanding ethical awareness of virtue and evil. The mass murder of a people, whether systematically or sporadically, would not have been regarded as unacceptable in premodern times; today it is regarded as heinous and gives rise to widespread moral outrage.
It is easy to render history completely ‘discontinuous’ and flippantly deny the feet of progress, directivity, and sophistication in human development, wallowing in pessimism and dwelling on the dark side of human behavior. But aside from the incompleteness of such a view, it ignores the long, costly, and often unavoidable maturation process — material as well as cultural — that humanity underwent in emerging from the parochialism of a restricted and mystical world, developing and enlarging its ideals of humaneness and freedom. To fell back on conventional reason’s faculty for decontextualizing social behavior would be to dissolve a broad view of history and to reduce our approach to tallying up its assorted virtues and vices. It would reduce us to mechanically classifying advances and retreats in the sophistication of human behavior, and to cultivating a tunnel vision focused exclusively on the horrors that humans have inflicted on each other. It would give precedence to eventful waves, over the sweeping movement of great historical tides.
Yet antihumanists refuse to acknowledge the extent to which our sensibilities have advanced markedly beyond those of ‘dwellers’ on the Pleistocene Savannah and the Paleolithic tundras, beyond a shared fear of demonic spirits that inhabit animistic belief systems, and beyond a view of slavery as a normal condition of life. Having already cleared the way for the replacement of science with magic, they ignore the very real progress from stone tools to cybernetic devices — a history of technology that can rid us of onerous toil and provide us with the free time to manage a rational society. Ultimately they convey the regressive message that human beings are little more than brutes, and highly perverted ones at that.
The existence of a ‘unitary’ history is attested to not only by shared sequence of many social forms, each emerging out of an earlier one as part of a logic of continuous development; it is also attested to by the emergence of shared and abiding issues that are latent in humanity as a uniquely innovative species..
I refer to the conscious imperatives that drive people to insightfully change their environment and render it more secure, safe, abundant, and comfortable with minimal toil. This issue has always shadowed human behavior and thought. Unremittingly, it has demanded resolution, given the technological possibilities and social relations established at any given time.
Indeed, human beings are generally future-oriented. At one time, they may have accepted cyclical rather than linear concepts of time, and the rotation of seasons rather than the flow of history; but even within cyclical notions of time, they have tried to anticipate the problems that await them as one season passes into another. Indeed, the cyclical time within which certain ‘primitive’ and agrarian peoples lived was not always fatalistic. As Linda Scheie and David Freidel put it in their account of the Maya:
The Maya conception of time ... was very different from our own. Our old adage ‘He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it’ might have been expressed by the Maya as He who does know history cannot predict his own destiny.’ The Maya believed in a past which always returned ,. in historical symmetries — endless cycles repeating patterns already set into the fabric of time and space.
But this does not mean that they were quietistic or passive about the fiiture. Scheie and Freidel go on to tell us that ‘by understanding and manipulating this eternal, cyclic framework of possibility, divine rulers hoped to create a favorable destiny for their people.’[333] Hence, not even human beings rooted in cyclical temporal concepts like the Maya were necessarily at the mercy of inexorable changes of seasons. They could intervene in recurring events and alter them — a view that enhanced the function of their divine kings, who supposedly could manipulate the cycle in their own behalf and authority.
Ritual, too, was apparently regarded as a form of intervention, not merely the propitiation of the deities. ‘Like the great metaphor of Maya life — the life cycle of maize — the continued well-being of the universe required the active participation of the human community through ritual,’ Scheie and Freidel tell us. ‘As maize cannot seed itself without the intervention of human beings, so the cosmos required sacrificial blood to maintain life’[334] — and one may add, a panoply of ritualistic acts that involved the intervention of people into the functions of first nature. Rituals, like the stylized forms of human representation in Paleolithic cave paintings and sculpture, were probably not simply acts of propitiation but acts of human intervention — and eminently manipulative ones at that.
With any given set of conditions, there remains a ‘beyond’ that is latent with new possibilities for a better way of life, however fixed a people may seem in time and space. History, in fact, is a selective process in which a culture that is not driven to go ‘beyond’ the cultural confines that circumscribe its development risks the possibility of being overtaken and superseded by one that is more future-oriented. This probably accounts for why one Maya city-state staked out regional ‘empires’, subjugating others — possibly fairly static ones — or why the Aztecs and Incas established fairly large empires in a selective process that gave them ascendancy over more passive cultures.
We are considering the dynamics of societies that had barely advanced beyond middle or late Neolithic tool-kits, and whose well-being was overwhelmingly dependent upon natural vicissitudes. These vicissitudes significantly affected the well-being of huge populations up to the nineteenth-century revolutions in agricultural and industrial technology, as well as in means of transportation that could end the famines commonly caused not only by climatic vicissitudes but by poor communication between well-stocked regions and famine-stricken ones in the same country. Hence for thousands of years, as far back as the archaeological evidence allows us to judge, humankind was indeed ‘united’ by shared concerns and hence by elemental forces that made its overall evolution anything but ‘local’ and ‘discontinuous’, however numerous were the individual cultures that stagnated or even regressed to earlier levels of development, isolated as many of them were by physical features or by plundering invaders.
Thus we can say that a ‘unitary’ history, broadly speaking, existed that has been driven toward greater complexity, sophistication, and sensibility by the abiding demands that often compelled human beings to become part of a developing cultural continuum. However quietistically oppressed people have accepted their lot in the world, they seldom accepted their degradation without resentment toward materially privileged elites, which often broke out in revolutions as far back as ancient Sumerian and Egyptian times. Recent research suggests that in pre-Columbian America, popular uprisings did away with the centralized or feudal Mississippian mound culture in the midwestern United States, as well as with like societies in Asia, and in Europe during the Middle Ages. We have no way of knowing, due to the destruction of Maya records by their Spanish conquerors, whether or how frequently such revolts by lower classes exploded in Mesoamerica, but it is reasonable to suppose that they occurred.
I have emphasized the continuities and shared problems that exist in human history, the remarkable sequences in periods of social development that parallel each other among cultures that could not have had any contact with each other, and the common problems that faced humanity (the innovative species par excellence) because human development constitutes a very new kind of evolutionary process.
We can speak not only of a ‘unitary’ history — with due allowance for countless variations, degrees of advance, and even fairly static or regressive social conditions — hut also of a universalizing history.
The word universalizing, rather than universal, is meant to emphasize the direction in which this overall history tended to unfold: notably, a drift away from the tribal parochialism defined by kinship ties toward an increasingly citified social domain that allowed for strangers to intermingle with each other. Human beings were steadily united by social facts like common vocational, intellectual, and class interests rather than biological facts like common ancestry, gender, and age cohorts.
The most important medium for establishing social commonalities between people of different ancestral fines was the city — an increasingly cosmopolitan urban terrain wherein people from different blood lines were able to commingle with each other and develop common interests as craftspeople, merchants, and administrators of various sorts. They often formed mutually protective guilds, embracing civic as well as occupational filiations that were stronger than the blood ties drat traditionally cemented tribal forms of organization.
This movement of human beings from folk to citizens, from a life structured around biological facts to one structured around civic (more broadly, social) facts forms the subtly mediated evolution of people into second nature, which in turn constitutes a vast realm of social evolution beyond animal evolution. We can find its occurrence in what archaeologists call ‘pristine cities’, such as those that arose in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia. Here the sharing of goods increasingly gave way to bartering and even the use of money-like tokens for the exchange of commodities. Commerce increasingly became an extensive and vital part of ordinary life. Indeed, cities emerged that depended more on their commercial connections with one another than on any shared ethnic ties.
The leveling by commerce of traditional distinctions based on inherited status positions and kinship ties occurred, to be sure, very slowly and irregularly over the course of human history. But its role in replacing folk with citizens was almost unrelenting. Initially, towns and cities were rarely completely civic in the sense of being free of real or fictitious hereditary elites. Nor were they, with rare exceptions, completely secular, in the sense of being dissociated from religious ties. Even classical Athens, perhaps the most civic and secular of ancient cities, was named after a goddess, and the agendas of its citizens’ assemblies were divided into sacred and profane items. The city’s festivals intermingled secular with religious themes, just as trade fairs in Mayan city-states accompanied religious fairs, attracting people over wide regions of Mesoamerica. Such admixtures of the religious with the secular, indeed of the holy with the profane, persisted well into the Middle Ages. Only later, with the great democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century were Church and State definitively separated from each other, as was the religious from the secular. Civic life thereupon assumed a totally secular character, untainted by differences in religious creeds, ethnicity, and archaic traditions.
Thus a universalizing history — which we can interpret as a ‘unitary’ phenomenon only if we do not to lose sight of its immense implications — established the groundwork for a generalized humanitas. At various times in history this eminently humanistic goal of universality was raised and supported by radical movements, albeit ideologically, as a spiritual desideratum. Christianity conferred an egalitarian status on all human beings, in which everyone could hope for the salvation of their soul after death, and quasi-religious Utopians tried to translate such egalitarianism into calls for freedom from oppression and happiness, which could be attained in an admittedly ideal society, commonly fashioned along monastic fines.
This account would be incomplete, however, if I failed to emphasize that it was primarily in Europe that a remarkable constellation of historical and ideological factors converged to produce a common emphasis on reason, the importance of the individual, and a healthy naturalism — unequaled in so fecund a combination by odier cultures. The reasons for this unusual constellation are not difficult to explain. The combination of Germanic with Roman law, which together gave a common emphasis to the interests of the community as well as the individual; the growing sense of personal worth and uniqueness that Christianity conferred on the individual soul; the rational criteria in which European dieology, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas, was rooted; and very significantly, the mixed economy of free peasants, yeoman famiers, urban craftspeople, a fairly independent commercial bourgeoisie, and relatively weak feudal lords — all, from the fourteenth century onward, produced a variegated, rounded, and innovative civilization whose diversity of forces, spiritual as well as natural, played against each other in a creative unity in diversity. While non-European civilizations fell into cultural torpor, Europe gathered considerable momentum from the interplay of its constituents, giving it a dynamism unequaled anywhere else in the world.[335]
The religious and quasi-religious patina that clung to egalitarian aspirations was not removed from history until the eighteenth century — notably, with the emergence of the Euro-American Enlightenment. For the first time on a significant scale, a new and powerful movement to secularize knowledge and foster rational canons of thought swept up the educated strata of Europe and English-speaking America, creating a sense of ‘world citizenship’ based on reason, naturalism, and science rather than faith, supernaturalism, and metaphysics.
Although by no means a homogeneous phenomenon — profound differences in oudook, for example, separate a Deist like Voltaire from an atheist like Diderot or a mechanist like La Mettrie from a dialectician like Hegel — all of these thinkers shared a common belief in a society guided by reason. They held that the natural world could best be understood by science, and to one degree or another they believed in the scientific view of the natural world, and in the malleability — and educability — of people. And notoriously these days, they believed in the possibility of human progress — not as a linear advance toward a glowing future but as a prospect, indeed a hope, that the future would be better, freer, and more rational than the present. As I indicated in an earlier chapter, it would be simplistic, as I have already noted, to insist that the author of Candide (Voltaire) held a conviction that the wodd is necessarily beneficent, or that the author of ‘Old Man’s Tale’ in The Supplement to Bougainville’s Journey (Diderot) regarded European civilization as an unrelieved blessing. The author of Man the Machine (La Mettrie) would have had nothing in common with the author of The Science of Logic (Hegel) in their definitions of reason.
But the Enlightenment was both an idea and an ideal: it advanced a vision, often quite spiritually charged, of the aborning of a new time in which the world would be guided by reason and freed of superstition, despotic rule, and hereditary privilege. It militantiy demanded freedom of expression, the unimpaired exchange of ideas, and a deep concern for human material well-being.
The Enlightenment in all its forms never advanced beyond an ideal — more precisely, a program for intellectual reformation — but it was forward-looking in its hopes, progressive in its ideas, and deeply humanistic in its concern for human welfare. Translated into action, it nourished the ideas of the American revolutionaries — those avowed ‘citizens of the world’ such as the Virginia aristocrat Thomas Jefferson and the great plebeian Tom Paine. It reached one of its highest peaks in the Declaration of Independence in the United States and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France, both legimating revolution as great moral and political acts in the onward march of humanity away from tyranny of the mind as well as government.
But the fact that humanity that could not be free without the free time to practice freedom led, by the next century, to those great socialist movements that demanded not only political democracy but economic democracy — the public ownership of the means of production and the distributions of goods according to need. The Enlightenment quest for a political community comprehended by reason was rounded out by the socialist quest for an economic community comprehended by reason. Unless the basic means of life were placed at the service of human needs, argued socialists of all kinds, it meant little if political institutions, ostensibly democratic, were achieved. The use of these institutions would remain the privilege of those who had the material means and the free time to engage in public administration, thereby mystifying social problems by reducing them merely to legislative problems to be resolved between contending parties and parliamentarians.
It would not be sentimental to say that in that era, when socialism was fully wedded to democracy in material and political terms and further was equipped with concrete strategies for sweeping social change, humanity reached its most inspired, promising, and ‘enchanted’ moment. The disillusionmerft that directiy preceded the outbreak of the First World War among European intellectuals — a disillusionment that Nietzsche articulated more clearly than he knew — reflected a climate of growing fear within the middle classes of Europe. It was not simply the growth of a ‘technological society’ divested of romantic heroics that frightened them but a seemingly revolutionary workers’ movement — the stirring of the despised ‘herd’ — that seemed on the point of mastering the social issues that had haunted human history for millennia. Large socialist and syndicalist workers’ movements seemed poised to seize power, while the governing classes were completely unnerved, as Bismarck’s reforms to head off socialism in Germany reveal. It now seemed that the stirring of the ‘herd’ had opened the practical possibility of bringing humanity’s potentialities for freedom to fruition in all aspects of reality. Among Marxists at least, no belief seemed more certain than the inevitability of socialism as an irresistible consequence of social laws.
Much as the horrors of the First World War dimmed this certainty with its revelation that civilization was more tenuous than the Western society had once believed, the Bolshevik Revolution lifted the sense of popular despair created by the war, redeeming for a time the promise of the Enhghtenment and earlier European socialisms. Despite the failure of various continental socialist uprisings between 1919 and 1921, the ‘enchanted’ moment did not disappear. Indeed, it retained an extraordinary degree of life even as Stalin was engaged in tainting and finally bringing these hopes to grief. What cannot be recovered easily by the present generation of antihumanists and postmodernists is the sense of crisis yet one still pregnant with hope, that existed during the interwax period between 1918 and 1939. Indeed, as late as the 1930s people had few sides to choose from, given the extremes of economic collapse, fascism, a sthl-powerful Left, the Spanish Civil War, and finally the imminence of a war that many expected would either mark the end of civilization or produce worldwide revolution.
The crisis that produced socialist movements in the last century has not disappeared. What has changed is the nature of the crisis and the way in which increasing numbers of people are responding to it.
Auschwitz has become for the present era what the slaughter of an entire generation of young men on the Western and Eastern fronts was for the interwar generation — the source of doubts about the West s claim to a h uman e civilization. But the interwar generation refused to reject entirely the Enlightenment and its promise of progress, as long as the idea of revolution — which the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936, seemed to legitimate — persisted. If humanity had indeed advanced, despite its regressions at various times, there was no reason to feel that the universalizing of the human condition would come to an end. Humanity was indeed an ‘enchanting’ phenomenon.
But more than at any time in the twentieth century, the hope that the interwar generation retained is now being subverted, for reasons that lie partly in the way the crisis is being interpreted. The classical era of socialism, more precisely the era of rational rather than ‘scientific socialism, insightfully regarded the leveling and universalizing role of commerce as a means for transforming human beings in all their parochial mutations into a humanitas, united by its unique commonalities. Commerce — more specifically the commercial economy in its most advanced capitalistic form, based on commodity production — would (it was hoped) advance technology to the point where production for use rather than for exchange (or profit) would cease to be a chimerical ideal.
Our own era after the Second World War, however, no longer sees the reaction to the ills of capitalism as social problems to be solved by social means. Modern social pathologies are now attributed to effects rather than causes: the growth of technology, population, personal attitudes, even civilization itself — in short, to humanism, anthropocentrism, reason, science, and the like. Even though market competition and the global concentration of capital stare us in the face as the direct sources of social and ecological dislocations, these forces are currently being mystified by antihumanism and renamed ‘consumerism’, ‘anthropocentricity’, The need to form social movements — so clear in the classical era of radical social diought — has been supplanted by the need to form encounter groups or ashrams for attaining Buddhist ‘enlightenment’. If all else does not fully satisfy — and satisfaction is typically what contemporary mysticism is in the business of supplying — one may always take the voyage backward to the ‘primitive’ or to a recovery of ancestral ‘origins’ to immunize oneself against a turbulent social reality. Much of this flight to origins, to the unmediated world of instant experience, and to a divesture of reason, subjectivity, and intellectuality is legitimated by various postmodern ‘immediatisms’ that plead the case for instant and intuitive experience.
This ‘decentering’ of the social in favor of the personal, of intellectual analysis in favor of intuition, of reason in favor of feeling, and of a public life in favor of personal ‘authenticity’ — all, taken together as a cultural, even an esthetic agenda for the turn of this century, constitute a major ideological subversion of any endeavor to achieve a rational society.
For what is ultimately at issue in tins mutation of the social into the personal, indeed, this regression into the biological, the mystical, and an unmediated primality, is the nature of humanity itself Either humanity is merely an animal species, perhaps more destructive than most, subject to blind and overwhelming ‘forces of Nature’, and as dispensable as a mosquito that exists on the mande of Gaia; or it is a remarkable transformative agent that has produced a richly mediated history and a radically new evolutionary pathway of unequaled creativity and promise in giving meaning to the planet.
Given humanity’s increasingly expansive knowledge of the world around it, its ability to remake that world (including the social world) along rational lines, and its innovation of values and institutions in an evolving, albeit very incomplete second nature, serious people are obliged to take a radically humanistic stand in upholding the ‘enchanted’ qualities of our species. A humanistic stand does not deny in any way that human beings can behave barbarously and with terrifying cruelty toward each other and toward non-human life-forms. Nor does it deny the need, already given immense weight in the New Age, mystical, and anti-humanistic literature of our time, for a new sensibility — one diat highly values animals, forests, and ecological diversity — as only human beings can.
My call for the re-enchantment of humanity is meant not simply to reiterate, as I have for decades, the need for an ecological sensibility. Rather, it is to emphasize what is not being said today in this time of crisis — indeed, what by its very absence is producing a major lacuna in the causes of this crisis. In a society riddled by hierarchy and classes, human beings are too divided by conflicting class interests, ethnic distinctions, gender differences, and disparities in wealth to be regarded as a culpable species. Beneath the so-called ‘population bomb’, the deforestation of the planet, the diminution of biotic diversity, and the pollution of Gaia are the same underlying causes: an increasingly competitive marketplace, which leads to the unending growth of production so that one corporate entity can gain a competitive edge over its rivals. This competitive drive forces capital to pursue sources of cheap ‘raw materials’ in the farthermost recesses of the world’s land masses and even its oceanic depths, irrespective of its impact on the well-being of humanity and the future of the biosphere.
To obscure this social cause of nearly all our basic problems today — economic as well as ecological, cultural as well as institutional, and personal as well as political; worse still, to conceal it, however inadvertendy and clumsily, by blaming this devastation on ‘our’ malfeasances in reproducing, consuming, and seeking a materially rewarding life — this obfuscation fosters misanthropy, mystical quietism, and the withdrawal of an incalculable number of people from the public sphere into private life.
The need to address very real problems is replaced by an ambiance of etherealization, ‘spiritualization’, and a new religiosity. New masks are added to a society that already thrives on its concealment from critical insight. The mask of exploitation that capital created, in Marx’s view, by ‘mysteriously’ appropriating the surplus labor of its working class and the fetishistic quality of the commodity has produced the commodification of humanity’s own ‘fetishes’ — its various belief systems, values, and symbols, which are now systematically marketed as cultural snake oil for remedying our grim social and personal pathologies.
Thus we seem to be captive to things of our own making, whether they be deities, ideologies, mystical forces, ‘angels’, myths, magical practices, misanthropies, transcendental value systems, institutions, social relationships, technologies, laboratories — and mundane commodities. Although all are humanly created phenomena, they have been woven around us like a cocoon by shamans and shamanesses, not to speak of mystical or theological evangelists. The antihumanist culture has itself become a commodity to be marketed, like television sets and VCRs, in spiritual boutiques and department stores.
Either the commodification of the ‘fetishes’ will be brought to an end, or our most cherished humanistic values and goals will yield to cultural kitsch for titillating weary bourgeois. Worse, the thanatology that surfaces from tim e to time among acolytes of the Gaia Hypothesis, deep ecology, and various antihumanist sects is cheapening the value of human life. If human beings are nothing but proliferating fleas on the body of Gaia, there is no reason in principle to single them out as personalities that deserve respect. Such attitudes are the raw material that could allow us to consider famines, epidemics, and worse as purely biological in origin, letting the hungry, homeless, and even whole peoples perish.
The re-enchantment of humanity begins with the disenchantment of archaic ghosts: the spirits derived from the world of incomprehensible dreams; the hidden realm of the sacred and its deities — which, as cynically formulated by shamans and priests, are simply anthropomorphic projections of human beings themselves; the mystical search for an unmediated or, equivalently, ‘immediate’ primality that effaces history and its wealth of experience; the edenic myth of original sin, secularized into a view of human nature as tainted by civilization; the hypostasization of the irrational and intuitive as the most ‘authentic’ means of ‘disclosing’ reality or ‘Being’; and not least, the class and status interests that have perpetuated domination over thousands of years, including the idea of the ‘domination of nature’.
To denounce technology and science in particular because their emancipatory promise has been brought to the service of domination and destruction is like denouncing a concern with public affairs because attempts to achieve the public good may benefit evil people as well as virtuous ones. If freedom is to be equated with mere survival in a world infused with myth and magic, then the less developed an aboriginal culture is, the freer it is — which is to say, the less burdened by writing, literature, adequate shelter, a secure food supply, and medical practices that preserve life. If this state of ‘innocence’ be freedom, then hyenas and. zebras ax freer than any ‘primal’ human beings who ax obliged to live with social obligations and customs, not to speak of endless nightmarish fears.
Nor can human beings be free in a society, however pristine, if much of their lives is guided by the need to meet the material requirements for existence. That technology and science have been used for terribly oppressive ends does mean that they must invariably or inevitably be used in such a manner. Without technology and science, everyday life descends to one degree or another to the mere maintenance of one’s own existence, and no rituals, magical practices, or myths can supplant the need to continually focus on survival. To attack technology and science as such is to recreate a mythic patina for the social order that misuses them and to exculpate the real culprits — those who use knowledge exclusively to accumulate wealth and power. Indeed, those who, with preposterous demands to return to the Paleolithic, denounce civilization, rationality, technology, and science as such, are merely apologists for the status quo.
Only by removing the fetishes that are obscuring our capacity to see reality as it is and as it should be, can we re-enchant humanity as a creative and innovative agent in the world and the living potentiality for self-realization as rational beings. Such rational beings can be expected to have an ethical responsibility for the welfare of non-human life precisely because they are sensible to the pain, suffering, and death of all living beings. If it is true that first nature, like Lovelock’s Gaia, is blind to the reality of needless misery — then only the human mind, freed of its mystical and exploitative trammels, can really know what is actually needless and what cannot be avoided. Only that mind, in fact, can become a presence in dealing consciously not only with its own affairs but with those of the natural world. In short, only human beings can, for better or worse, possess an eminently sophisticated form of knowledge, the product of reason, science, and experience, and only they are, potentially at least, that most marvelous or ‘enchanted’ of all beings: knowing beings for whom a sense of place, responsibility, care, and futurity is possible.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org
Father of Social Ecology and Anarcho-Communalism
: Growing up in the era of traditional proletarian socialism, with its working-class insurrections and struggles against classical fascism, as an adult he helped start the ecology movement, embraced the feminist movement as antihierarchical, and developed his own democratic, communalist politics. (From: Anarchy Archives.)
• "Broader movements and issues are now on the horizon of modern society that, while they must necessarily involve workers, require a perspective that is larger than the factory, trade union, and a proletarian orientation." (From: "The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism," by Murray Book....)
• "...a market economy based on dog-eat-dog as a law of survival and 'progress' has penetrated every aspect of society..." (From: "The Crisis in the Ecology Movement," by Murray Bo....)
• "Or will ecology groups and the Greens turn the entire ecology movement into a starry-eyed religion decorated by gods, goddesses, woodsprites, and organized around sedating rituals that reduce militant activist groups to self-indulgent encounter groups?" (From: "The Crisis in the Ecology Movement," by Murray Bo....)
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Chapter 9
