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SOCIAL ECOLOGY - SOME CONCERNS -by Philip Winn
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Murray Bookchin is unquestionably one of the most interesting
anarchist theoreticians to emerge in recent decades. It is
impossible in the space given to produce as comprehensive a
critique as is required to do justice both to the scope of
Bookchin's work and to its inherent problems. I will touch here
on only a few concerns.
There's not much new about a person in the West taking as their
task the discovery of the ordering principles of history, within
culture, within reality itself. Just look at Hegel or Marx. The
problem arises in the claims these folks make to universal truth.
The construction of Truth always represents a massive grab for
power - the power of framing, the power of naming, the power of
valuing. Marxism is a case in point, surely the greatest act of
political chutzpah the world has ever seen. At a time when the
very act of creating such similarly ambitious projects are
finally being questioned and challenged, Bookchin emerges as a
self-described defender of the Western right to present the Grand
Truth. His particular version is (politically) Social Ecology or
(philosophically) Dialectical Naturalism.
So what are the realms of power present in social ecology, what
is its particular regime of inclusions and exclusions? Again,
there isn't space to deal with them all, but a crucial exclusion
is contained in its developmental view of evolution, the
"directedness" and "becoming" reflected in dialectical
naturalism. Although Bookchin tends to play this aspect down,
other social ecologists accept that such a perspective places
them firmly in the teleological tradition of Western thinking.
What this implies is that evolution has an inherent purpose and
direction, it moves towards a predetermined goal. Bookchin views
this dynamic as applicable both to the biological world and to
the human social world, creating a perspective that lends support
to theories of cultural evolution - the idea that human culture
moves through stages, from the most basic (often referred to as
primitive, or simple) through to the most advanced.
It's not surprising to find that the folks who construct schemes
which depict culture evolving as a rule tend to put their own
towards the advanced end of any sequence. For Bookchin, it is
indeed Western culture, its modes of knowledge and world views,
its intellectual history which is seen as holding the most
promise for fulfilling the purpose of evolution. The vast array
of indigenous peoples, their knowledges and world views, their
lifeways and struggles do not feature in Bookchin's work except
when relegated to the past, as early "organic societies"
illustrating past events or previous stages in the course of
human history and development. They are universally described as
"preliterate" or "primordial", and unfortunately, "flawed" in
numerous ways, most notably in possessing features of "nascent
hierarchy" - what Bookchin interprets as inequalities based
around age and gender, and which eventually give rise to the
fully blown hierarchies we are all familiar with.
The ethnocentricity and cultural arrogance of such a position is
breathtaking but again not particularly new for the
universalising Western intellectual. Interestingly, while
challenging Marx's theoretical elevation of questions of
production and economic exploitation and replacing these with
notions of hierarchy and domination, Bookchin ultimately simply
reproducers the classical Marxist depiction of indigenous peoples
and their static culture left behind in the process of historical
advance.
Bookchin is unable however to explain in any meaningful sense
just how these original inequalities and nascent hierarchies
emerged, given the evolutionary impetus (as he interprets it)
towards non-hierarchical social and ecological forms inherent in
the Purpose Of Nature. Simply saying that things happened a
certain way does not make them so, but this is a common problem
within Bookchin's work. Additionally, Bookchin draws on an
extremely limited range of material for information to support
his generalising about indigenous cultures, and exhibits a total
lack of appreciation of the current controversies raging in the
anthropological world around issues of the authority and
legitimacy of past and present ethnographic representation. Not
the least of these is the claim that sexism within early,
frequently colonial, accounts led to a widespread neglect of the
role of women in indigenous societies, problematising the easy
accusations of inequality or injustice that are aimed at
indigenous people and which continue to be used to justify the
destruction of their lifeways and knowledges by those who
consider their own morality, ethics civilisation or political
purpose as superior.
There is a major contradiction at the heart of social ecology.
It is committed to diversity as an expression of dialectical
naturalism but fails to take serious theoretical account of one
of the most evident diverse productions of human beings -
culture. If there is inherent, objective value in natural
diversity, then the multiplicity of forms of human cultural
expression must surely also contain value, must also reflect
evolutionary teleos, purpose. If indeed Nature is to find its
voice through humans, must this voice take only one form, that of
the Western cultural tradition, rather than continuing its
dialectic movement towards diversity and complexity through an
abundance of human voices?
The reality is that those areas of the world with the greatest
enduring biological diversity are the remaining homelands of
(living, breathing, present-time) indigenous people - the
ecological credentials of their systems of knowledge are
therefore self-evident. Are Bookchin's? At the same time many of
these peoples are actively resisting their forced incorporation
into the world economy and its client states - surely any
contemporary liberatory social theorist must approach ideas of
the global with a great deal of cultural humility.
Finally I'd like to pose a more general question: which of the
following seems the more anarchic approach, which orientation
seems to lend itself to a greater fostering of self determination
and genuinely participatory democracy? To attempt to sell the
masses yet another 'New Improved' version of universal Truth
fresh from the oven of Western Enlightenment ("forget Marxism,
Anarchism or Feminism, lets do the Dialectical Naturalism.) Or to
develop instead a thorough understanding of the ways in which
elements of power and hierarchy operate through the creation and
validation of all truth and knowledge claims, and to reach for
social visions and practices based on an affirmation and
politicisation of difference, multiplicity and diversity? I'll
leave it to you.
END NOTE - It seems to need repeating as often as possible that
the outcome of a position that affirms the partiality of all
knowledge claims is not necessarily the embracing of absolute
relativity. This accusation is as easy to make as the one about
all anarchists wanting chaos, and just as flippantly ill-
informed. Creating the discursive space for radical plurality,
for the radical democratising of any emancipatory project, is not
the same thing as the total absence of any basis for constructing
personal or community values. For those who continue to think it
is, and for anyone interested in exploring in greater depth some
of the ideas underpinning this article, the works of Elizabeth
Grosz and/or Anna Yeatman are a good instruction; both women are
writing in Australia now and both provide accessible and
stimulating accounts of the relation of the postmodern to the
political (and feminist).