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Title: Civilization as Dis-ease
Author: William Manson
Date: Fall 2006
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, anarchist analysis, William Manson, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #373
Source: retrieved March 30, 2015 from: http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/373-fall-2006/civilization-as-dis-ease/
Notes: Originally appeared in Fifth Estate #373, Fall 2006

William Manson

Civilization as Dis-ease

“The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for

civilization, or is he past it and mastering it?”

— Walt Whitman

Early in 1905, Leo Tolstoy wrote to a close friend in England:

“Yesterday and today I have been reading Edward Carpenter’s book,

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and am enraptured by it…. Please

inform me of what you know about Carpenter himself. I consider him a

worthy successor to Carlyle and Ruskin.” The query as to Carpenter’s

identity may well be repeated a hundred years later; his striking

originality, which at one time inspired poets and anarchists alike, has

since been virtually forgotten.

As a young man, Carpenter (1844-1929) abruptly abandoned a planned

vocation in the clergy after reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a volume

which, in its celebration of pastoral pantheism and robust sensuality,

enthralled generations (until the twentieth century military-industrial

nightmare rendered it a seeming anachronism). In Whitman, Carpenter had

found a champion of the body, a liberator of sensation and feeling. They

became friends when Carpenter made a visit to the U.S. in 1877 (during

which he also became acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson–who had once

facetiously remarked to Thoreau that Leaves of Grass was “a mixture of

the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald.”)

Returning to England, Carpenter soon settled on a few acres in

Millthorpe, a Derbyshire hamlet near Chesterfield, where he lived

modestly for the next forty years–a pioneer in the practice of the

“voluntary simplicity” he so admired in Thoreau’s Walden. Over the

years, he would travel intermittently into London to lecture and to

offer his pastoral-aesthetic (or “green”?) brand of anarchism to the

lively discussions spearheaded by such figures as William Morris and the

expatriate Prince Pyotr Kropotkin. Like the poet Oscar Wilde–who once

characterized philistines as knowing “the price of everything and the

value of nothing”–Carpenter deplored commercial regimentation and the

stunting of aesthetic-spiritual qualities.

Like Thoreau–and unlike Marx–Carpenter emphasized a transformation of

sensibility which would prefigure the restructuring of society. In

particular, the intimate contact with the aesthetic delights of the

natural world would overcome alienation and lead to renewed spiritual

evolution–a pantheistic “cosmic consciousness” which is the true

religiosity.

Today, “living” as we do in the entirely dehumanized megamachine, it is

almost impossible to recapture the lyrical, pastoral-humanism and

pantheistic sensibility of such pre-1914 poets as Carpenter, whose

Towards Democracy (1883) embraced the Whitmanesque celebration of human

self-realization in harmony with nature. Carpenter’s sensibility also

greatly influenced the young D.H. Lawrence, a not-too-distant neighbor

in rural England. Carpenter, perhaps more boldly than Lawrence, also

praised the varieties of bodily-spiritual Eros in such books as Love’s

Coming of Age (1896) and The Intermediate Sex (1908).

Unlike the German “anti-Civilization” (really anti-cosmopolitan)

movement of a century ago–which linked a crude Social Darwinism with the

racial mystique of the Volk–Carpenter combined the communitarian ideals

of Kropotkin with the romantic humanism of Whitman. Modern civilization,

distorting human nature and generating enmity and strife, could be

overcome by rediscovering communal reciprocity (and what we might now

call a “spiritual ecology”).

Carpenter’s Civilisation, which had so fascinated Tolstoy, was initially

outlined in a lecture to the Fabian Society in 1888. Carpenter had often

puzzled over the “strange sense of mental unrest which marks our

populations, and which amply justifies Ruskin’s cutting epigram: that

our two objects in life are, ‘Whatever we have–get more; and wherever we

are–go somewhere else.'” This pervasive sense of agitation, of dis-ease,

seemed symptomatic of artificial, strife-ridden modernity, of

“Civilization.”

Friedrich Engels, remaining prominent in English socialist circles after

Marx’s death in 1883, in fact had published his treatise on cultural

evolution the following year. Drawing upon the American

proto-anthropologist L. H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), Engels

managed to sketch the lineaments of “primitive communism” and to trace

the historical origins of inequality, class stratification, and the

State. Carpenter–undoubtedly influenced by Engels–was nonetheless closer

to the Romantic poets’ meditations on modern alienation and their

imaginative reconstruction of idealized, egalitarian communities.

Social reciprocity and “mutual aid,” as Kropotkin argued and

anthropologists later documented, largely characterized tribal cultures

prior to conquest by predatory, imperialistic Civilizations. When

Community was forcibly superseded by Mammon, fragmentation ensued,

characterized by “warfare of classes and individuals, abnormal

development of some to the detriment of others, and consumption of the

[social] organism by masses of social parasites.” This organic analogy,

in which the structural-normative integrity of “primitive society” is

likened to a self-regulating organism, was also taken up by early

twentieth century British anthropologists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.

In The Decline of the West (1922), Oswald Spengler carried the analogy

further, characterizing modern Civilization as the decadent, terminal

stage in the life-cycle of European Kultur. More generally, Carpenter

had already noted that no culture has “come through and passed beyond

this stage” of Civilization–and most have succumbed “soon after the main

symptoms had been developed.”

In vivid prose, Carpenter exhumed the pathogenic roots of modern

discord: the change from communal to private property; the replacement

of matricentricity with a male domination which “turned the woman into

the property of the man”; the polarization of class antagonisms founded

upon expropriation of wealth; and the institutionalization of slavery,

serfdom, and wage-labor. Like Engels (as well as Nietzsche), Carpenter

saw expanding State power as symptomatic of the breakdown of traditional

community:

“If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of his

fellows, no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it is when the vital

unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be preserved by

artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of the primitive

and instinctual social life there springs up a form of government which

is no longer the democratic expression of the life of the whole people;

but a kind of outside authority and compulsion thrust upon them by a

ruling class or caste.”

Laws and penal sanctions, not only tools of ruling-class coercion, were

more broadly symptomatic of the social fragmentation resulting from the

destruction of tribal communities. (This theme was imaginatively treated

in Dostoevsky’s fantastic tale “Dream of the Ridiculous Man.”) One can’t

help wondering whether Carpenter, like William Morris, was thinking of

the centuries-old English peasant “commons” destroyed by Parliament’s

Enclosure Acts (1760 through 1830).

The isolated individual, alienated from communal solidarity, was further

estranged from the natural world. The loss of direct, intuitive

perception was compensated for by abstract thought: “man builds himself

an intellectual world apart from the great actual universe around him;

the ‘ghosts of things’ are studied in books; the student lives indoors,

he cannot face the open air…”. Yet this denial of the immediacy of

bodily-sensuous experience quite literally results in physical dis-ease:

“he falls prey to his own organs.”

The Cartesian subject-object dichotomy, Bacon’s dominion over nature,

Newton’s “single vision”: all manifested the pervasive alienation from

ecological relatedness of urban-industrial Civilization. But scientific

knowledge would be superseded by “a higher order of perception or

consciousness”: “self-consciousness” would evolve toward “cosmical

consciousness.” Carpenter therefore urged that “Civilization” be defined

as a transitory stage in the psycho-spiritual evolution of humanity–as a

phase of social dis-ease antecedent to the restoration of wholeness and

to further harmonious development.

Rather than calling for a return to some hypothetical “Paleolithic

consciousness,” Carpenter’s vision is closer to that of the pathbreaking

psychologist Abraham Maslow: after attaining self-actualization, human

cognition may evolve further toward a “transpersonal consciousness”

(pure “Being-Cognition”?). Carpenter foreshadowed by a century the

rediscovery of “ecopsychology”–i.e., modes of experiential connectedness

with nature and the cosmos almost entirely stifled in modern

Civilization, but lying dormant, ready to transform the pervasive false

consciousness into the fundamentally “aesthetic ethos” heralded by poets

as disparate as Schiller, Whitman, Wilde–and Carpenter .

References for further reading

A. Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: Later Years (London: Constable, 1910)

F. Schyberg, Walt Whitman (New York: Columbia, 1951) “Biophilia: Toward

Re-humanization.” Fifth Estate, spring 2003

E. Carpenter, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (New York: Scribners,

1921)

F. Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New

York: Penguin, 1986)

E. Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918)

A. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (second edition; Van Nostrand,

1962).

T. Roszak, Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (New

York: Touchstone, 1993).

H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969)