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Title: Nature, Essence and Anarchy Author: Paul Cudenec Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: anarchy, spirituality, anti-politics, postanarchy, post-industrialism, nature, complexity, philosophy
âTo the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men
are different from one another and do not live alone â to a time when
truth exists and what is done cannot be undone. From the age of
uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from
the age of double-think â greetings!â
George Orwell, 1984
At a time when the very future of our species and of planetary life is
at threat from the unchecked growth of the industrial capitalist cancer,
the need for a powerful and coherent resistance can hardly be disputed.
One of the effects of this disease, however, has been a
thought-paralysis which renders any authentic and holistic
anti-capitalist philosophy difficult to conceive and communicate. This
is not by chance, of course â it is by disabling our intellectual immune
system that the illness has been able to take and maintain control over
us.
As well as fighting capitalism in a physical and day-to-day sense, we
need to fight it in our heads and in our hearts by rooting our thinking
in a healthy intellectual soil beyond the mental toxicity of its
philosophically polluted wastelands. However, to expound a world-view
that stands outside the received wisdom of contemporary industrial
rigidities is far from simple when you have to communicate using a
language which has been remodelled to reflect the requirements of
capitalist modernity and when you are addressing a public whose deepest
assumptions are those ingrained by the very system you seek to
challenge.
In previous books, namely The Anarchist Revelation, The Stifled Soul of
Humankind and Forms of Freedom, I have attempted to set out one overall
argument that runs throughout the length of the book, developing
sequentially from one chapter to the next. This is not the case here.
Instead, you will find a series of separate essays, addressing similar
issues from different angles. Each essay is like a cross-section of the
overarching critique I am trying to present, through which a particular
seam of analysis is revealed. One practical advantage of this format is
that the reader can safely feel free to read the chapters in any order
that happens to appeal. I also hope that the intersections and parallels
between the various essays, as well as the spaces between them, will
help stimulate the readerâs thinking in ways that are not possible
within a single linear thread.
The first essay, Natural anarchy, begins with an echoing of Guy Debordâs
condemnation of the world of artifice in which we live. I describe how,
in order to hide its own falsity, capitalism denies that humanity
belongs to a holistic natural world and also denies the very possibility
of authenticity. I discuss the way that, despite Peter Kropotkinâs work
in describing the
evolutionary importance of mutual aid and solidarity for all species,
including humanity, many anarchists remain strangely suspicious of the
idea of ânatureâ. Widespread misuse of the word, and the effects on our
thinking of the industrial society surrounding us, make it difficult to
reclaim the term and overcome our separation. I look at the nature-based
philosophy of the 16^(th) century physician Paracelsus and suggest that
we might rediscover authenticity by feeling within ourselves what he
termed the Spiritus Mundi, the vital energy of the universe.
The second essay, Denying reality: from nominalism to newthink, explores
the way in which contemporary society has a problem with objective
reality. George Orwell warned about this in his novel 1984, in which the
Big Brother state insists that everything exists only in the human mind.
I argue that this fallacy dates back to medieval nominalism, when
traditional âuniversalsâ were redefined as merely words describing
human-invented categories. Postmodernists and postanarchists today
extend this approach to deny the validity of concepts like essence.
Everything is said to be a construct. Subjective language is confused
with objective reality. Anything outside industrial capitalist reality
is denied legitimacy, trapping us within the dominant mindset.
In When negative is positive, I stress that the anarchist desire to
destroy capitalist society cannot be regarded as negative. For one
thing, it aims to clear the way for a better world. But it also arises
from a belief, as voiced by Rudolf Rocker and Noam Chomsky amongst
others, that an anarchist society is always possible and that humans
have the capacity to live harmoniously as a social organism. This
capacity, which is innately present in the human mind but not always
activated, reflects the overall tendency of the universe to take on a
coherent structure. Conflict arises when the innate structures of the
human mind meet an external world which does not allow them to fulfil
their potential. As Otto Gross explains, some individuals give way and
adapt to circumstances, while others rebel. A hatred of corrupt and
unnatural society is founded on a positive vision of how things are
meant to be.
Essence and empowerment begins by suggesting that modern life maintains
us in a state of metaphysical sensory deprivation. If we wish to
discover our core reality we need to look deep within ourselves. âKnow
Thyselfâ is a maxim dating back to at least Ancient Greek times and
still central to contemporary paganism. The descent into the unconscious
to find the Self, as invoked by anarchist Gustav Landauer for instance,
is a reconnection to the organic universe described by Plato and
Plotinus and also by the Sufi tradition. Understanding the individual as
an aspect of a greater collective entity does not deny individual
freedom, but rather removes the limits imposed upon it by our separation
and reveals an empowering and anarchic truth, always regarded as a
dangerous heresy by authority.
In Naturaphobia and the industrial-capitalist death cult I insist that
humankindâs belonging to the living flesh of our planet is an essential
reality of our innermost nature and will always resurface in our spirit.
The industrial system finds ingenious ways of blocking and diverting our
awareness of this. It claims that the âprogressâ of its technologies
equates to an upward path for humanity. Some on the left have fallen
into the trap of equating individual freedom with the artificiality of
industrial capitalism and of thus condemning ânaturalismâ and
âessentialismâ as reactionary. Transhumanism is an extreme example of
this trend. Its nature-hating naturaphobia and life-denying vitaphobia
are combined with a denial of the polluting and destructive realities
behind its sanitised industrial-capitalist image of the future.
The starting point of The eye of the heart is that escaping the
capitalist mindset is like digging a tunnel out of a prison camp. We
need to go far enough and deep enough to go beyond its perimeter fences.
Anarchists often fall short of understanding that industrial society is
inherently capitalist and swallow the lie of âprogressâ. Mahatma Gandhi
understood the need to oppose industrialism and rediscover simple
village life, the natural harmony of Sanatan Dharma. Traditional culture
has always been an obstacle to capitalism and has been systematically
eradicated across the world. I further join E.F. Schumacher and Ranchor
Prime in calling for humankind to draw on our ancient spiritual wisdom
so we can deepen our opposition to capitalism. We must access the âeye
of the heartâ to better understand multi-faceted reality. We need a
metaphysical dimension to our revolt to allow us to pass completely
outside the concrete confines of modern industrialist dogma.
In the final and longest piece, Necessary subjectivity, I write that the
well-known phrase âthink globally, act locallyâ translates on a
philosophical level as âthink objectively, act subjectivelyâ. If, like
Plato and Plotinus, we define The Universe as all-inclusive, it
necessarily includes abstracts as well as objects â numbers, dimensions,
capacities and possibilities. We can never know the objective reality of
this Universe, but we can know that this objective reality must exist
and that it includes abstracts. Each of us has an abstract essence,
which is a potential rather than a limit: the butterfly essence, for
instance, exists even within a caterpillar which is eaten by a bird
before this physical stage is realised. The specific realities of our
subjective existence must always provisionally limit our core essence as
aspects of The Universe, of which we should be metaphysically aware. But
this limiting is also the only way in which The Universe can manifest
itself in physical form. The same applies to time. We can only
experience time through the necessary subjectivity of our living, just
as a needle must follow the groove of a vinyl record. But the whole
piece of music is always contained in the record, in the same way as all
time must be contained within a Universe which contains everything. Our
subjective presence-in-the-present means we do not just observe events
unfolding, but participate in the process. We are part of the
self-shaping of The Universe, with all the responsibility that this
implies.
All in all, these essays are perhaps best imagined as a handful of
philosophical stones hurled from within a crowd of protesters towards
the massed ranks of riot cops who have surrounded them. They are all
slightly different in form and trajectory, but essentially they are all
coming from the same place and aimed at the same opposition. I can only
hope that one or two of my ideological lumps of rock will hit their
intended targets and help break open the restricting encirclement of our
thinking by the life-denying cyborgs of the industrial-capitalist
Thought Police.
The capitalist world in which we live is a world of artifice. Everything
about it is fake, from the cancer-causing industrial food that rolls off
its factory conveyor belts to the so-called âneedsâ that it claims to
answer. As Guy Debord writes at the beginning of The Society of the
Spectacle: âThe whole life of those societies in which modern conditions
of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere
representationâ.1 It is a world where âthe commodity contemplates itself
in a world of its own makingâ,2 a world of âthe superficial reign of
imagesâ.3 Its version of the past is as fake as its vision of the
future, its democracy as much a manipulative illusion as the constant
threats conjured up by its propaganda to keep us in our place. Its very
idea of normality is fake: its alienated individuals; its weekly rhythms
of paid labour and consumption; its imposed concepts of land
âownershipâ, âlegitimate authorityâ, ânationalityâ.
Moreover, this capitalist world reduces everything to its own shallow
terms, cannot admit that there is anything beyond the four thin walls of
its own empty, sterile, valueless universe. There can be no meaning in
the world, because meaning has no place in its thinking. There can be no
authenticity, because the very existence of that term would throw into
sharp relief its own fundamental inauthenticity. For the constructed
capitalist world, everything else has also been constructed. Aware on
some level of its own fundamental falsity, it defends itself by
projecting that falsity on to everything else that exists, in order to
level the playing field and create a theoretical realm in which its own
artifice no longer stands out as aberrant, alien, toxic. It becomes
impossible to accuse capitalism, in particular, of being fake if you
accept its big lie that everything, in general, is fake, and that there
is no such thing as truth, meaning, origin, essence and nature.
But what if we reject that lie? What if we dare to look beyond the
material and philosophical artifice with which have been surrounded
since birth and search for something real on which to base our
understanding? Here we will have stepped beyond the perimeter fence of
the possibilities as dictated to us by the dominant system of
all-embracing mendacity. We will be wandering in forests of thought that
are not marked on the street-maps of modernity, encountering outlaws and
thought-criminals regarded as dangerous by our mind-masters, taking
paths that lead us far beyond the limits of the world as laid out for us
by their systems of domination.
The very first reality we encounter, on emerging from the capitalist
world of falsity, is that we, as human beings, are in fact part of
nature. This is a truth that has been denied to us, in the West, for
centuries â initially by the religious form previously taken by the
tyranny that still stifles us today.4 âSeparation is the alpha and omega
of the spectacleâ,5 writes Debord and by reclaiming that primal sense of
belonging to our world we shatter that separation, free ourselves from
the mirrored cage of self-referential human intellectuality.
Our understanding begins with the knowledge of what we are in our flesh,
by breathing and feeling the raw actuality of our own physical presence.
As John Zerzan sets out in Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization:
âThis is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of separateness from
the Earth grows and we are meant to forget our animality. But we are
animals and we co-evolved, like all animals, in rapport with other
bodily forms and aspects of the worldâ.6
For all the layers of self-deception we have built up around us, we
cannot alter the fact that âwe are still animals on the planet, with all
its original messages waiting in our beingâ.7 If we are to ever forge a
new future completely free of the alienating lies of the industrial
capitalist spectacle, we will need to find roots for our thinking that
predate our contemporary separation. Ancient wisdom, folk culture, myth
and lore can all feed into our understanding of who and what we are, so
that we can fashion a sense of grounded freedom emerging from our
inseparability from the natural world to which we owe our physical
being. There are also individual thinkers who carry seeds of that
awareness to us and whose work needs to be reappraised, demarginalised
and used to help build our new/old metaphysics of liberation.
One of these is Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim
(1493â1541), better known as Paracelsus. The wandering Swiss-born
polymath, philosopher and physician is often remembered today as one of
the early precursors of modern medicine. But he in fact represents a
late and creative flowering of an ancient way of thinking that was to be
crushed under the iron wheels of industrial capitalism in the centuries
to come. His philosophy is based on a holistic concept of living nature.
He declares: âNature, made of the Universe, is one and its origin can
only be the eternal Unity. It is a vast organism in which natural things
harmonise and sympathise between themselvesâ.8 Animating all this is
âthe vital energy of the Universe (Spiritus Mundi)â,9 a âfundamental,
invisible, vital, vitalising forceâ.10
Lucien Braun summarises Paracelsusâs idea of nature thus: âIt is indeed
everything that we see before our eyes: trees, minerals, animals,
diseases, birth, death⊠But what it gives us is always something else as
well: the manifestation of a âdeeperâ reality â although for the time
being we cannot define this depth more clearly. Nature is simultaneously
visible and invisible: visible in form, invisible in power â but the two
aspects are intimately boundâ.11 He explains how, for Paracelsus, âthe
Great World shines in every being, in every plant, in every mineralâ.12
It does so by means of a subsidiary principle, a star or Gestirn, which
lies behind their particular physical form. A specific seed grows into a
specific tree because of this inner essence manifesting itself.
âItâs advisable, therefore, not to remain on the superficial level of
things, or to look merely at the determination of forms. On the
contrary, we should never consider a visible determination without at
the same time considering the agency presupposed by this determination,
in other words the invisible and secret force behind the principle of
its manifestation. This is how we must read nature, everywhere: in the
intimate unity of the visible and the invisibleâ.13
Even when we are engaged in philosophy, we cannot leave the realm of a
nature which is, after all, universal and all-embracing. Nature is
certainly the object of Paracelsusâs enquiries: âWhat is philosophy if
not the discovery of invisible nature?â,14 he asks. But, at the same
time, it is also their subject. The Paracelsian concept of the
philosopher has nothing in common with the model of the modern
scientist, an outside observer of all that takes place in the separated
realm he is studying. âAccording to Paracelsus, the real philosopher no
longer belongs to himself, but serves natureâ, writes Patrick RiviĂšre.15
More than serving nature, he is nature, serving itself. The philosopher
and his philosophy are both part of the self-revealing of nature.
Paracelsus spent his life speaking out against dogmatism, against the
fixed orthodoxy of Medieval medicine, against the exploitation of the
poor: âin shortâ, says Braun, âagainst everything which he regarded as
artifice or conventionâ.16 It is, therefore, nothing less than tragic
that the breadth of his thinking, the opening-out of the human spirit
that he represented, was to be closed down again by new waves of
artifice and convention, new modern versions of dogmatism and orthodoxy.
The rationalism of the Enlightenment brought with it all the scientific,
positivist thinking that fitted so well with the pragmatic realities of
the capitalistsâ Industrial Revolution. There was no more place for
open-ended thinking, for the embracing of paradox, for the awareness
that the mysteries of the universe must ultimately lie beyond the
complete grasp of human beings. The multi-dimensionality of wisdom was
replaced by the one-dimensionality of mere knowledge and âknowledge is
truth externalised, displaced, thrown off centre. It is, for Paracelsus,
something like sinâ.17
Nature as seen by Paracelsus was not something that could readily be
flattened out into a scientific theory or mathematical equation. As
Braun says: âNature, despite all the attempts at interpreting it, cannot
be tied down (capitur): it instantly eludes all concept. It bursts the
banks of language. And Paracelsusâs work can only be an impossible
attempt to express with words (nearly 8,000 pages of them!) something
which has always been thought by its author to stretch beyond the
possibilities of plain logicâ.18
The new industrial society needed a new definition of nature that could
be expressed in its own restricted scientific language and which would
âcorrespond with the new consciousness that man (now bourgeois) had of
himselfâ.19 Thus, in the centuries following Paracelsusâs death, we see
the ideological construction of âa nature which was inert (and thus
artless, lifeless), which was conceived in mechanical terms and was
therefore open to mechanisation and boundless manipulationâ.20
A highly significant part of this process was the creation in the
19^(th) century of a theory of evolution which fitted in perfectly with
all the assumptions of imperialistic industrial capitalism. The message
of Charles Darwinâs On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was
taken to be that the domination of the poor by the rich, of workers by
bosses, of indigenous people by Europeans, was all perfectly ânaturalâ.
Indeed, it was claimed, this domination was essential for evolution â if
the economically and physically unfit were allowed to thrive and breed,
the progress of humanity would be thrown into reverse.
The obvious response from socialists and anarchists, as Renaud Garcia
states, was to âdevelop a critique of the ânaturalistâ illusion, in
other words the idea according to which we ascertain what we can
justifiably expect from human societies on the basis of a human essence
possessing a certain number of immutable characteristicsâ.21 But then
anarchist scientist Peter Kropotkin came up with a new interpretation of
the political implications of evolutionary theory. He showed that the
struggle between individuals was an inadequate description of the
workings of nature and that co-operative mutual aid was a much more
important factor among all species, including humankind.
Kropotkin wrote in Mutual Aid, first published in 1902: ââDonât compete!
â competition is always injurious to the species and you have plenty of
resources to avoid it!â That is the tendency of nature, not always
realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword that comes
to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. âTherefore
combine â practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to
each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and
progress, bodily, intellectual, and moralâ. That is what Nature teaches
us; and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest
position in their respective classes have doneâ.22
In simple terms, he was saying that anarchism is natural â that, left to
their own devices, people and other animals tend to co-operate with
others for their collective benefit. Kropotkin was essentially echoing,
in the scientific language of his time, Paracelsusâs vision of nature as
âa vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathise
between themselvesâ.
The view of nature as violently competitive has always been used as the
pretext for the existence of a state in order to keep all the dreadful
chaos under control. Demolishing this fake idea of ânatureâ and
replacing it with an understanding of complex organic harmony would
therefore seem to be central to the anarchist project. As Theodore
Roszak has noted: âAnarchism has always been, uniquely, a politics
swayed by organic sensibility; it is born of a concern for the health of
cellular structure in society and a confidence in spontaneous
self-regulationâ.23
Kropotkinâs ideological intervention totally undermined the industrial
capitalist claim that its inhuman and exploitative system was merely
evolution in practice â and thus, also, removed the need for
anti-capitalists to distance themselves from any notion of nature. But
while Kropotkin is still respected and quoted today, the primary
relevance of his response to the reactionary Darwinists often seems to
have been overlooked or misunderstood. The anarchic quality of nature,
and thus the naturalness of anarchy, has not taken the central place in
anarchist ideology that might have been expected. Under the pervasive
influence of Enlightenment rationalism and its industrialist
intellectual offshoots (including Marxism), many anarchists have kept
the idea of nature at armâs length.24 For all Kropotkinâs work, ideas of
ânaturalnessâ continue to be associated with reactionary positions and
it is often held that there is no continuity between the natural world
and human society. Ultimately, this amounts to a claim that human beings
are somehow outside of nature altogether, as if we had dropped on to
this planet from outer space. This is a metaphysical separation of âmanâ
from âbeastâ shared with Christian dogma, a ridiculous human vanity that
blinds us to the truth that for all our idiosyncrasies we remain
animals, we remain part of nature.
Braun writes that when Paracelsus ponders what is philosophy âif not the
discovery of invisible natureâ, he goes on to declare that âall
philosophy which deviates from that goal is pseudo-philosophy
(Schaumphilosophie) and is like fungus growing on a tree and remaining
outside itâ.25 Any philosophy which is based on a denial of our
belonging to nature is based on a lie. Any further ideas constructed on
that mendacious foundation can have no truthful solidity. Since
Paracelsusâs day, whole layers of Schaumphilosophie have accumulated in
the modern mind, creating the artifice of Debordâs all-suffocating
spectacle. These layers of falsity make it almost impossible to express
truths that are denied by the spectacle. This is hardly surprising as
that is the whole raison dâĂȘtre of the falsity â it is intellectual
cover for industrial capitalism, a fake ârealityâ in which that
spectacle makes sense and anything outside of that spectacle makes no
sense at all.
We have now reached a layer of falsity in which it has become possible
not simply to claim that nature is something apart from humankind but to
claim that nature does not exist at all and is merely a construct of
humankind. Of course, human definitions of nature are all constructs.
And the idea that we should or can define nature in the first place is
the product of narrowed-down rationalist thinking. But the falsity of
definitions of ânatureâ does not mean that nature itself does not exist!
The fact that nature can never be defined does not mean that it does not
exist. Indeed, we might almost say that its indefinable character is
part of its (non-)definition. It simply cannot be reduced to mere words.
The inability to distinguish between words and reality is a key feature
of contemporary Schaumphilosophie. It arises from the same human hubris
that imagines us to be outside nature, superior to the rest of life on
the planet. Our self-indulgent vanity has reached a level at which we
imagine that the human words which we use actually create physical
reality and that by exposing these words as mere words, we also somehow
affect or undermine the physical reality they were intended to
describe.26 Humans invent a word called ânatureâ to describe the world
to which they belong and then declare that this was just a word they
invented and that therefore they do not belong to the world at all! This
is an advanced stage of sophisticated fakery â fabricating a lie and
then pointing to its falsity in order to disallow the truth that it had
falsely purported to designate.
All of this is the end result of a human subjectivity that has gone far
beyond the stage necessary for us to conduct our subjective individual
lives27 and has turned into an egocentric denial of external objective
reality. Discussing Paracelsusâs understanding of a universe that
reveals itself in us, Braun comments: âIt is clear that we find
ourselves here at complete odds with everything that would be taught to
us, in the centuries to come, by the philosophies of the subject which
would try to explain the world on the basis of the capacities and
categories of the subject! There, the world would become an image of
myself. Here, itâs the World which tries to know itself and find its
fulfilment through the human beingâ.28
Ultra-subjectivism on a philosophical level translates to
ultra-individualism on a social level and the same barriers to
contemporary understanding of Paracelsus also block understanding of
anarchist thinking. The co-operative nature described by Kropotkin is
the foundation stone of human society â society as it should be, in any
case. But in a world that sees only atomised individuals creating their
own subjective realities, what place is there for this collective level
of human life, so important for socialist and anarchist theory? In our
capitalist world of separation, any authentic communal belonging has to
be destroyed so that each isolated individual has to turn to the system
for their sense of identity, which is sold back to them in fake form as
part of a lifelong process of exploitation based on dispossession.
The psychological separation of humanity from nature is part of the same
phenomenon as our separation from each other in our industrial
capitalist cities. The anarchist aim of reforging those social bonds,
creating solidarity and mutual aid, therefore goes hand in hand with the
aim of reforging our bonds with nature. Reversal of separation, reversal
of isolation, reversal of exploitation, reversal of ultra-individualism,
reversal of ultra-subjectivism, reversal of capitalism, reversal of
industrialism â these are not so much intersecting struggles as facets
of one and the same effort.
The immediate task at hand is the peeling away of all the layers of
lies, of Schaumphilosophie, that have accumulated over the centuries.
However, this is incredibly difficult, since we all live entirely within
the spectacle of lies that is deceiving us. Insights that come from
somewhere outside that paradigm make no sense to someone whose
understanding of the world is entirely contained within the fake
assumptions it harbours. The idea that we could live without a state
seems laughably naĂŻve to someone who has been conditioned to believe
that authority exists to protect us, not to enslave us, that we need
rulers in order to stop society descending into the chaotic violence
that would inevitably result if we were left to our own devices. The
idea that we could live happily without industrial infrastructure seems
ridiculous to someone whose whole life has been led within that system,
who associates the search for food with visits to the supermarket and
companionship with electronic communication. The idea that we, as human
beings, are part of nature seems absurd and dangerous to someone who has
learnt to regard nature as either an external non-human reality, a
romanticised fantasy or a kind of violent brute force that has
constantly to be repressed by civilized human society.
It is not just our intellectual environment that determines these
reactions, but the physical one, too. If we live in an urban,
industrialised outer world then our inner world risks being limited to
the shallowness of all that is urban and industrialised. Braun writes
that Paracelsusâs ideas make no sense in the context of modern surrounds
which âimpoverish us to our very depths by depriving us of real images,
by filling our vision with right angles and machines, in other words
with ontologically shallow products spawned by a rationalism of
representation. We are far from the sights which would have sparked
Paracelsusâs imagination in the depths of the Swiss forests, teeming
with forms and beings, and which would have spoken to him in quite a
different way than do the concreted spaces of todayâ.29
If our everyday experience is of traffic jams, shopping malls and office
blocks, if our minds are constantly filled with images of consumerism,
domination and war, how are we to see the world as âa vast organism in
which natural things harmonise and sympathise between themselvesâ? The
answer is in our imagination. As anarchists have long understood,
another world is always possible and will flourish in our collective
mind long before it becomes a physical reality. We need to imagine
ourselves out of the suffocating confines of industrial capitalism,
leaping over all the barriers of lies that it has erected around us. We
need to dream ourselves into a state of authenticity â to allow nature
to dream itself into the core of our inner being. âFreedom for
Paracelsus is anything but the arbitrary will of the subject,â says
Braun. âIt is not defined on the basis of the subject, of the will of
the subject. Instead, itâs an act of letting-be, letting nature
illuminate itself in usâ.30
We need to reach out beyond the cardboard cut-out words which seek to
define, reduce and destroy reality; we need to feel within ourselves the
Spiritus Mundi, the vital energy of the universe. This is how we can
find freedom, the natural freedom of anarchy which arises from
intertwined individuality and collectivity, unaffected by the
metaphysical separation that is the âalpha and omega of the spectacleâ.
And if this authenticity is hidden from us by an ultra-individualism and
ultra-subjectivity that has enclosed the whole terrain of modern
industrialised thinking, then we will have to tear down the barriers of
that false mindset and plant a holistic philosophy for the future in the
living soil of our neglected metaphysical past.
You can tell a lot about the metaphysical health of a society from the
philosophical questions it asks itself. In the case of our own culture,
one of the best-known such questions is: âIf a tree falls in a forest
and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?â The answer is
quite obviously âyesâ and the question is ridiculous on more than one
level. For one thing, it is blindly anthropocentric, assuming that the
presence of a human being somehow makes a unique difference to the
reality of sound. But even if the âno oneâ in the question includes the
whole range of non-human living creatures that might have heard the
hypothetical tree, the whole thing is still inherently absurd. The tree
cannot fall silently. It will make a noise as it hits the ground,
regardless of whether or not this is witnessed.
This so-called âphilosophical puzzleâ reflects a deep underlying problem
with contemporary thinking, in that it potentially denies the existence
of objective reality, suggesting that the crashing sound made by the
tree may only become real if it is subjectively experienced by some
âoneâ. This denial of objective truth is identified as a dangerous
delusion by George Orwell in his book 1984. Although presented as a
science-fiction warning of a totalitarian society to come, Orwellâs
classic novel is, of course, a commentary on mid-20^(th) century
realities, exaggerated and projected on to a fictional future. Thus the
propaganda machineries of the Ministry of Truth are very much inspired
by the authorâs personal experiences working for the BBC in London
during the Second World War. Likewise with Orwellâs astute observations
on a more abstract philosophical level â he is warning us of the way
things are heading.
In the novel, Ingsocâs Big Brother dictatorship has established
near-complete control of the population not merely on a physical level,
but on a psychological one too â it is able to manipulate the experience
of those it dominates, by denying the possibility of any objective
reality. âNot merely the validity of experience, but the very existence
of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy
of heresies was common sense⊠If both the past and external world exist
only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable â what then?â1
When OâBrien, the Inner Party stalwart, is torturing the novelâs hero,
Winston Smith, he tells him: âYou believe that reality is something
objective, external, existing in its own right⊠But I tell you, Winston,
that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and
nowhere elseâ.2 Later, he again stresses: âNothing exists except through
human consciousnessâ.3 Winstonâs struggle to keep a grip on objective
reality, to know that two plus two makes four whatever the ideological
demands of the Party, is a central theme of Orwellâs novel. Early on in
the story the character tells himself: âTruisms are true, hold on to
that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard,
water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earthâs centreâ.4
Orwell has him conclude: âThere was truth and there was untruth. And if
you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not madâ.5
But thanks to all the torture and brainwashing doled out by OâBrien and
his comrades, Winston ends up becoming a defeated conformist goodthinker
and deciding that this idea of objective truth was an obvious fallacy
because âit presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there
was a ârealâ world where ârealâ things happened. But how could there be
such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own
minds? All happenings are in the mindâ.6 Having rid himself of the
oldthink notion of objective truth, the way is clear for him to accept
that two and two does indeed make five â or any other number that the
Party demands.
There seems to be something very modern about this strange delusion that
truth is brought into being by someone thinking it, that the sound of a
tree falling is purely the result of someone hearing it, that the result
of a mathematical process is whatever we want it to be. But I suspect
that its origins can be traced back to the latter part of the Middle
Ages and the emergence of nominalism. Nominalism, or the via moderna as
it was known for a while, represented a challenge to the certainties of
the original oldthink â or via antiqua â which had been inherited from
classical Greek philosophy and before that from a catena aurea or golden
chain of thought stretching back into remotest antiquity.
This traditional approach, known as realism at the time and today
usually termed essentialism, holds that there is an essential reality
behind the specifics that surround us in everyday life. This essential
reality casts the shadows on the wall of the cave in Platoâs famous
philosophical tale. The prisoners mistake the moving shapes for actual
reality in the same way that we might mistake temporary physical
manifestations of essential reality for the real thing. The concept is
most clearly imagined in terms of numbers. The number âthreeâ exists in
abstract form, without the need for the existence of three actual
things. The possibility of there being three of something (or seven or
nineteen) is always present. The numbers themselves can therefore be
described as âexistingâ â or âsubsistingâ â on a level more abstract and
less transient than that of physical reality. Likewise, the
possibilities of âdurationâ in time or of âextensionâ in physical space
clearly exist in the same way that mathematical concepts exist, even
though they cannot be seen, touched, smelled or heard. The same was held
to be true of terms such as âdarkâ or âlightâ, âcoldâ or âhotâ and so on
â there was an idea that existed in a real but non-physical way, as a
kind of necessary potentiality behind actual physical things.
The new thinking challenged the notion that these abstract âuniversalsâ
actually existed as âthingsâ on some level. Fourteenth century thinker
William of Ockham said that all such categories were, instead, concepts
formed in the human mind, while fully-fledged nominalists said these
categories were just words â hence ânominalismâ, from nomen, the Latin
for ânameâ. The nominalists were not disputing the existence of
objective reality as such, just the existence or subsistence of
universals, which they regarded as
categories which had merely been created in our heads. However, with
historical hindsight, this was a significant step towards the human
narcissism that was to characterise the centuries to come. We were
starting to imagine certain intangible non-human aspects of the world
around us as merely the constructs of human minds and language.
As humans were increasingly separated from the rest of nature by the
industrialisation of society, the process was justified by the new ways
of thinking. Thomas Hobbes (1588â1679) redefined the interconnected
organic natural world as a brutal battlefield between selfish individual
creatures, while John Locke (1632â1704) effectively denied that humans
even formed part of nature, but claimed they were born with no innate
qualities at all. This, of course, made them the entirely-malleable
products of the specific human society into which they were born.
This industrial-scientific thinking, in the form of positivism,
dominated European thought for centuries and paved the way for the
massive social changes, termed âprogressâ, which have created the world
we find ourselves in today. If humans were not part of nature, it was
simply there to be exploited for our own benefit. If human communities
did not exist, but were just collections of individuals, there was no
problem in destroying them.
Inevitably, though, there has been some reaction to the rigidity of this
scientific-capitalist outlook (which also, unfortunately, infected
supposedly oppositional philosophies such as socialism and anarchism7).
Some of this reaction took the form of what Michael Löwy describes as
âRomantic anti-capitalismâ8 and related currents of thought reclaiming
the connection to the natural world denied by positivism. Another angle
involved a deep analysis of the relationships and structures within
human society, which revealed realities overlooked by over-simplistic
economic and social analysis. This very much appealed to anarchists,
whose broad critique of contemporary capitalist society had always
reached down below the surface of economic life into the murky zone of
all those assumptions and formulations which make up the system of
domination. Gustav Landauer, for instance, had been pointing out as
early as 1910 that: âThe state is a social relationship; a certain way
of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new
social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another
differentlyâ.9
The criticism of mass society pioneered by the Frankfurt School and the
Situationists was taken in interesting new directions by Michel Foucault
and other postmodern thinkers. They identified hidden power structures
embedded in society â within the mental health system, prisons,
education, families and in gender definitions, for instance. In many
ways this analysis sat well with anarchist thinking, in that it exposed
and challenged means of social control that were not obvious on the
âpoliticalâ surface. Saul Newman, in his influential essay The Politics
of Postanarchism, claims that postanarchism, which is part of this
general trend, has performed âa salvage operation on classical
anarchismâ and broadened its philosophical horizons.10
But this approach also brought with it certain problems and in many
instances served to undermine, rather than underwrite, left-wing
criticism of capitalist society. This phenomenon is discussed in some
detail by Renaud Garcia in his 2015 book Le désert de la critique.11
Here he offers an invaluable analysis of the effect of the postmodern
approach, particularly the intellectual impact of Foucaultian thought on
anarchist and left-wing thinking. Of particular concern is the way that
the postanarchists have continued where the post-medieval nominalists
left off, in denying the existence of certain notions which were
previously considered to be real. Foucault himself even used the label
ânominalistâ to describe his approach.12 This deconstruction of reality
goes well beyond the anarchist insight of denying fake concepts which
are used to deceive and dominate â such as âpropertyâ or âlawâ or
ânationâ. It questions the actual existence of any entity or structure
which exploits and dominates us. In fact, the very context in which
Foucault describes himself as a ânominalistâ is in arguing that it is
naive to think you can fight repressive external âpowerâ, since it only
exists within inter-personal relationships.13
Newman likewise refutes the old-fashioned anarchist notion of there
being âa subject whose natural human essence is repressed by powerâ and
claims that âthis form of subjectivity is actually an effect of powerâ.
He argues: âThis subjectivity has been produced in such a way that it
sees itself as having an essence that is repressed â so that its
liberation is actually concomitant with its continued dominationâ.14
This comes dangerously close to a declaration that âLiberation is
Dominationâ â a slogan worthy of being placed alongside âWar is Peaceâ
and âSlavery is Freedomâ in the lexicon of Orwellian goodthink!
On a metaphysical level, postanarchists, like all postmodernists, deny
that there is any essence behind anything in the world. Nothing in the
human mind is innate and there is no such thing as human nature. The
very idea of âhumanityâ as a universal concept is rejected. In his
essay, Newman specifically opposes the notion of âa universal human
essence with rational and moral characteristicsâ15 which, as he notes,
forms the basis of Kropotkin and Bakuninâs anarchism. Indeed, not only
do the postmodernists insist that universals do not exist, but they
claim that the very idea of universals is part of the domination that we
have to resist. Anything that smacks of âessentialismâ is not only
questionable, but dangerous.
It is at this point that the approach of the postanarchists starts to
combine a version of nominalism with the manipulative dogmatism of
Orwellâs fictional Ingsoc totalitarianism. The meaning of terms is
contaminated in order to make their continued usage unacceptable in
goodthinking circles. Thus, for many contemporary left-wingers
influenced by postmodernism, âessentialismâ no longer indicates the
metaphysical position held by Plotinus, Plato and generations of
thinkers before them, but something more akin to a rigid social
conservatism. For them, an âessentialistâ is a reactionary who believes
that each of us is born into a certain slot in society determined by our
heredity, ethnicity, sex and so on. âHuman natureâ is likewise seen by
Foucaultians as nothing but a construct, which is used to justify the
narrow limits imposed on individual potential by a system of domination.
This idea of âhuman natureâ might dictate, for instance, that people
should live in family units, pair off in monogamous heterosexual
couples, restrict their own sense of identity to one deemed ânaturalâ by
that particular society.
From this postmodern point of view, the possibility of anything being
âinnateâ to human beings is regarded as absurd, threatening and close to
racism â it denies us the absolute freedom of constructing our own
selves. The idea of something being âuniversalâ is seen as an imposition
from above, an attempt to eradicate diversity in the name of some
all-embracing constructed standard. Even the concept of âhumanityâ
itself is seen as being suspect by this school of thought and regarded
as a plurality-denying device with which to bring people under a
theoretical umbrella of domination.
However, these postanarchist definitions of essentialism, human nature
or universality are nothing but caricatures, based on the narrowest and
most reactionary usage of each term and imposing the worst-possible
interpretation of the intent behind them (isnât it possible that someone
who expands his or her personal vision to include the whole of humankind
might be motivated by an open-hearted desire for inclusion rather than a
manipulative urge for repression?). They are straw man definitions â
deliberately inadequate representations of a certain point of view set
up by an opponent for the sole purpose of being easily knocked down. As
a result, the real philosophies behind these fake versions can no longer
easily be distinguished and once the terms in question have successfully
been contaminated, it becomes impossible to use them without immediately
appearing to be expressing the completely unacceptable views with which
they are now automatically associated. Orwell describes this linguistic
blocking process in his novel: âAll mans are equal was a possible
Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All men are
redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a
grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth, i.e., that all
men are of equal size, weight or strength. The concept of political
equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly
been purged out of the word equalâ.16
Contemporary âanti-naturalistsâ (to use Garciaâs term) in fact pull off
the impressive ideological gymnastic feat of endorsing right-wing
definitions of words in order to dismiss as right-wing all those trying
to use the words in different ways. Thus left-wing anarchist definitions
of human nature (as intrinsically co-operative rather than competitive,
as something potentially broad and diverse that has been stifled by the
repressive limits of contemporary society) are ignored and replaced by
narrow right-wing neo-Darwinist notions. Any use of the term âhuman
natureâ is thereafter interpreted as an endorsement of the right-wing
version adopted by the postmodernists themselves. It becomes impossible
to use âhuman natureâ in a left-wing anarchist sense. You would think
Kropotkin had never existed!
All of this manipulation is built on a misunderstanding of the
relationship between human language and actual reality. It is simply not
true to say that ânatureâ, for instance, is only a word. It is a word,
and thus capable of containing all sorts of meaning dictated by the
cultural context in which it is used. But, like all words, it is also
used to designate something beyond the word itself. Just because
ânatureâ is a word does not mean it is not also a real thing. Sometimes,
of course, words do not relate to something real at all. But the
existence of a word certainly does not preclude the existence of a real
thing, even though when a word describes something that is not
empirically observable, the relationship between the word and the thing
it designates becomes more difficult to grasp.
If I use the word âwindowâ, I am still using a mere word. The concept of
âwindowâ is large enough to include a variety of different kinds of
window and one personâs mental picture of what that window might look
like will no doubt vary from anotherâs. However, nobody would suggest
that because âwindowâ is only a word, there is no such thing as a window
in reality. In fact we are talking about two different phenomena here,
operating on two distinct levels. On the level of language there is the
word âwindowâ and on the level of reality there is the actual thing that
is a window, in all its various specific manifestations. Supposing for
some reason a society had misused the word âwindowâ in some way â
perhaps, for instance, by applying it solely to stained-glass windows of
the kind used in churches. The word âwindowâ as used by that society
would therefore become suspect and loaded with an artificial and
ecclesiastical restriction to its meaning. In the same way we might say
that the word ânatureâ as used by 19^(th) century right-wing
neo-Darwinists also became suspect. But the suspect definition of the
word âwindowâ in that imaginary society would not mean that actual
windows, as we know them, would have suddenly ceased to exist! There is
no direct causal relationship here between the use of a specific word
and the nature of objective reality. You can distort the meaning of the
word âwindowâ all you like, redefine it to mean âcabbageâ if you choose,
but the window next to me as I write these words will remain the same.
Likewise, nature remains nature, regardless of how the mere word
ânatureâ might be manipulated or misused. Nature is not in any way
dependent on the human word ânatureâ for its existence or essence.
Postmodernists have fallen into the nominalist trap of believing that
the reality of human language and thought â the subjective truth of
human beings â is more real than actual objective truth. They mistake
word for reality, shadow for object. This is not a question of whether
or not we can adequately understand abstract realities, like ânatureâ or
âuniversalsâ. From our limited human perspective that may not be
possible. But it is a mistake to imagine that something we cannot
observe or define, or which we usually designate with a word that is
loaded with our own limited subjective social assumptions, consequently
does not exist at all. This mistake is like a small child playing âhide
and seekâ for the first time, who imagines that if he closes his eyes
and thus cannot see his playmates, his playmates will not be able to see
him either. This child has not grasped that his own subjective
experience of reality is not the same as objective reality. This mistake
is also like a contemporary philosopher who ponders long and hard over
whether a tree crashing loudly to the earth in a forest can really be
said to have made any sound, if this has not been subjectively
experienced by a human being like him.
The political implications of this metaphysical mess are worrying. We
have now reached the sorry point where it seems that any mention of the
essence behind something, or of anything remotely universal, sets the
ideological alarm bells ringing. We are apparently expected to censor
ourselves in advance by never uttering such terms and by deploying what
Orwell terms crimestop â âthe faculty of stopping short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thoughtâ.17 This even now
seems to apply to the classic anarchist argument, as put forward by
Kropotkin, that humanity (stop!) is innately (stop!!) disposed to
co-operation and mutual aid and thus could naturally (stop!!!) live
perfectly well without state management.
In 1984, one of the Party members developing Newspeak tells Winston
Smith: âYou think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new
words. But not a bit of it! Weâre destroying words â scores of them,
hundreds of them, every dayâ.18 He explains: âDonât you see that the
whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we
shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it⊠By 2050 â earlier, probably â all real
knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the
past will have been destroyedâ.19
In destroying the full metaphysical meaning of words like âessenceâ,
ânatureâ or âuniversalâ by means of their straw man constructs, the
conformists of contemporary goodthink are destroying our connection to
reality. Because they ideologically object to everything beyond
subjective individual experience, they are destroying, in particular,
our connection to the reality that we human beings are more than
individuals. They are destroying our understanding that our individual
freedom and well-being are in fact dependent on a collective level of
existence as part of a community, as part of a species and as part of
nature as a whole. They are thus destroying our capacity to see what has
been stolen from us by the alienation and separation of the industrial
capitalist system and what it is that we must reclaim. âIf one is to
rule, and to continue ruling,â declares Orwellâs Emmanuel Goldstein,
âone must be able to dislocate the sense of realityâ.20 A
philosophically dislocated anti-capitalist movement that has lost all
sense of what it is fighting against and what it is fighting for will
never be able to persuade the rest of the population of its arguments
and thus will never represent any kind of threat to the dominant system.
Another part of this ideological dislocation is the undermining of our
belief that the world of which we dream could one day come about. The
abstract (and thus physically âunrealâ) possibility of a future
anarchist society â without domination, exploitation and alienation â is
something that has always sustained us in our struggle. Another world is
possible, we like to remind ourselves. Convincing rebels that this
possibility does not and cannot exist, that their resistance is futile,
is an obvious counter-revolutionary strategy. OâBrien tells Smith in
1984: âIf you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection,
you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be
overthrown. The rule of the Party is forever. Make that the starting
point of your thoughtsâ.21
A similar message is being delivered by the postmodernists and spreading
as a self-destructive meme within what should be the anti-capitalist
movement. This tells us that the system we oppose does not even exist as
an external objective reality but that, in Newmanâs words, we should
instead look to âour complicity in relations and practices of power that
often dominate usâ.22 The reality of our repression and exploitation by
a solidly-existing ruling elite is not only questioned in this way, but
turned into an accusation against would-be rebels. The convoluted
reasoning, cited earlier, which leads Newman to conclude that âthe
universal human subject that is central to anarchism is itself a
mechanism of dominationâ23 is not one that inspires revolutionary
engagement. What would be the point, if we are dominated primarily by
our own mistaken belief that we are being dominated? In any case, for
Newman, history is just âa series of haphazard accidents and
contingencies, without origin or purposeâ and âwe have to assume that
there is no essentialist outside to power â no firm ontological or
epistemological ground for resistance, beyond the order of powerâ.24
For postanarchists, there is no objective reality beyond the fixtures
and fittings of the society we know today â no universal human spirit,
no innate desire for freedom, no essential belonging to community,
species or planet and, therefore, no possibility of ever rediscovering
that belonging. As David Graeber and others have pointed out, there is
little that ultimately separates this vision of the world from the
dominant neoliberal ideology.25 Both world-views preach a general
acceptance of the one and only reality of fragmented
industrial-capitalist society and locate freedom within the individual
âchoicesâ that can be made inside that âhaphazardâ world. All we have to
do is to sit back and enjoy the ride into the industrial capitalist
future that is the only possible future available to us, give up all
hope of revolution, accept the defeatist newthink of the Partyâs
post-philosophers, reject the idea of objective truth, understand that
two and two makes five and learn to love Big Brother.
There has always been a destructive aspect to anarchism, whether it
takes the form of broken windows or uncompromising calls for the
shattering of the social status quo. This destructivity is only part of
the story, but at the same time it is an important part and needs to be
embraced rather than avoided. And it is crucial to understand that it
arises from an overwhelmingly positive mindset.
The will to destruction is obviously targeted at an existing order which
anarchists find entirely unacceptable. The defeat of this old order will
pave the way for a new and better world â and this is, in itself, a
fundamentally positive vision. But it goes deeper than that. Anarchists
classically regard their better world as something that already exists
on an abstract plane, as a possibility waiting to be made reality. There
is a certainty that the society to which they aspire is not the
âcloud-cuckoo landâ derided by right-wing opponents, but something that
would really work. Furthermore, it is not something that could, or would
need to be, imposed by a âpeopleâs stateâ, but represents the way in
which the bulk of humankind would wish to live if they were freed
(physically and psychologically) to make a choice. Explains the
anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker: âFor the Anarchist, freedom is not an
abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for
every human being to bring to full development all the powers,
capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them
to social account. The less this natural development of man is
influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more
efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more it will
become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which
it has grownâ.1
The idea of doing away with all laws and authority does not make any
sense if you believe that human beings are naturally brutal, selfish and
greedy â or, indeed, if you maintain that the right kind of thinking and
behaviour has to be drummed into them by a (state) system of education.
It only makes sense if you believe that human beings have some kind of
inherent capacity to live freely as what Rocker terms a âsocial
organismâ,2 in an anarchic condition of non-hierarchical co-operation
and mutual aid.
This is certainly the theory behind Peter Kropotkinâs anarchist response
to the right-wing Darwinistsâ bleak view of human nature. He insists:
âNature has thus to be recognised as the first ethical teacher of man.
The social instinct, innate in men as well as in all the social animals,
â this is the origin of all ethical conceptions and all the subsequent
development of moralityâ.3 It also remains an underlying assumption
behind anarchist thinking at every level, even if this is sometimes
implied rather than fully spelled out. For instance, in his book The
Philosophy of Punk, Craig OâHara complains of contemporary society:
âHuman beings act as if they have nothing in common with each other. It
is as if we have all been brought here to function for ourselves in a
way that does not include othersâ.4 Behind this negative lies an obvious
positive, which could be translated as: âHuman beings have much in
common with each other. We are here to function for the collective good
in a way that includes othersâ.
If you believe that this natural potential for mutual aid is being
thwarted by the structures of contemporary society, that âdictatorship
is the negation of organic development, of natural building from below
upwardsâ5 as Rocker puts it, then it is not a ânegativeâ thing to want
to smash that dictatorial society to pieces. And there isnât even any
risk involved, since you know that people will naturally re-form
themselves into communal structures, rather than fall apart into the
murderous âchaosâ which right-wingers always identify with the absence
of authority.
This empowering underlying truth declared by anarchists â that human
beings do not need authority to âmakeâ them behave well â has long been
recognised as a threat by the dominant system and therefore furiously
countered. The repressive implications of the prevailing anti-anarchist
theory are clearly spelled out by Noam Chomsky when he warns: âIf in
fact man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no
innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social
character, then he is a fit subject for the âshaping of behaviorâ by the
state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central
committeeâ.6 This view is echoed by anthropologist Robin Fox: âIf there
is no human nature, any social system is as good as any other, since
there is no base line of human needs by which to judge them. If, indeed,
everything is learned, then surely men can be taught to live in any kind
of society. Man is at the mercy of all the tyrants â be they fascists or
liberals â who think they know what is best for himâ.7
Chomsky speculates that there is a connection between the ongoing
dominance of the âempty organismâ theory, despite its being
âdemonstrably falseâ, and the ideologically-driven need to counter the
anarchist belief that human communities can work (and indeed work best)
without external authority. He writes: âOne speculation derives from the
question: who benefits? We have already seen a plausible answer: the
beneficiaries are those whose calling is to manage and control, who face
no serious moral barrier to their pursuits if empty organism doctrines
are correctâ.8
Kropotkin and Chomsky both see an innate and invisible structure within
human minds and communities, but neither of them is suggesting any kind
of rigid or limiting version of human nature. Kropotkin sees evolution
as a process of constant dynamic social interaction with the
environment9 and Chomskyâs thinking, in his linguistic work as well, is
centred on the idea of capacity rather than specific content. A human
being is born with an ability to learn a language â any language â which
will be activated by interaction with a specific language and will thus
take on a definite content, he explains. As Robin Robertson puts it:
âChomskyâs work points to a deep underlying structure that eventually
shows itself as languageâ.10
There are definite similarities between this concept of an underlying
structure â so central to the anarchist idea of naturally
self-organising human communities â and the theories of Carl Jung. Jung
insists, in a direct rebuttal of the âempty organismâ fallacy: âMind is
not born as a tabula rasa. Like the body, it has its pre-established
individual definiteness; namely, forms of behaviour. They become
manifest in the ever-recurring patterns of psychic functioning. As the
weaver bird will build its nest infallibly in its accustomed form, so
man despite his freedom and superficial changeability will function
psychologically according to his original patterns â up to a certain
pointâ.11
Behind the invisible structure of our innate mind, Jung sees the
existence of archetypes, which James Hillman describes as âthe most
fundamental patterns of human existenceâ.12 Jung himself makes it clear
that these archetypes are very real: âArchetypes are not whimsical
inventions, but autonomous elements of the unconscious psyche which were
there before any invention was thought of. They represent the
unalterable structure of a psychic world whose ârealityâ is attested by
the determining effects it has upon the conscious mindâ.13 But, at the
same time, like Chomskyâs ability to learn language, they emerge
initially in the shape of a capacity, a potential which needs to be
triggered by contact with the outside world. Explains Jung: âThey are
eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific
content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the
individualâs life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely
these formsâ.14
Robertson makes the connection between Jungâs theory of inherent
content-less archetypes and âphysicist David Bohmâs hypothesis that
there is an implicate order from which the explicit order of the
physical world we know emergesâ.15 Bohm himself, explaining Einsteinâs
unified field theory, says: âNowhere is there a break or a division.
Thus, the classical idea of the separability of the world into distinct
but interacting parts is no longer valid or relevant. Rather, we have to
regard the universe as an undivided and unbroken wholeâ.16 Describing
what he terms a ânew notion of orderâ, he continues: âThis order is not
to be understood solely in terms of a regular arrangement of objects
(e.g., in rows) or as a regular arrangement of events (e.g., in a
series). Rather a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in
each region of time and spaceâ.17
This is anarchist order, on a universal scale â an underlying natural
capacity to take on a coherent structure. The basis for this coherence
is always oneness. Individual human beings have an innate capacity to
behave in socially co-operative ways because they naturally form part of
a greater whole â a community, a species, a planetary organism. Elements
of the universe together possess a certain kind of order, because they
are all part of one cosmic whole. Different parts of one single entity
cannot permanently disintegrate into multiplicity and chaos because they
will essentially always be that one single entity, which has divided
itself into a multiplicity of elements.
Writes Fritjof Capra, in his account of quantum theory: âIt shows that
we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest
units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated
âbasic building blocksâ, but rather appears as a complicated web of
relations between the various parts of the wholeâ.18 When discussion
turns to quantum theory, the mind tends to conjure up images of outer
space, distant galaxies and black holes. But the real relevance of this
cosmic unity lies much closer to home. âBecause the universe is an
immense organic being, all the parts of the world are subject to the
same lawsâ,19 writes Johannes Fabricius in a book on alchemy, and the
physicistsâ discovery of overall order in the universe in fact confirms
the age-old Hermetic wisdom of a single structural reality which
manifests on every possible level. This is the theory behind the
microcosm and the macrocosm, the law of correspondence which links inner
and outer, lower and higher in one âunified fieldâ. It also fits in
perfectly with the theories of Jung, Chomsky and Kropotkin regarding an
invisible and innate structure within the human mind, ready and waiting
to be stimulated by contact with the outside environment into taking on
a more concrete content-bearing form.
But what happens when the inherent structures of the human mind, waiting
to be stimulated by the corresponding structures of collective human
society, find themselves confronted with the society we know today?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon writes that each human being âcarries in his
heart the principle of a morality superior to himself. This principle
does not come to him from outside; it is secreted within him, it is
immanent... Justice, in other words, exists in us like love, like
notions of beauty, of utility, of truth, like all our powers and
facultiesâ.20 When a human being, equipped with an innate sense of
justice, encounters the rank injustice of the modern capitalist world,
their natural response can only be one of disgust. This is a common
reaction to contemporary society and individuals can cope with this in a
variety of ways. Some simply push their feelings to one side and adapt
to the world in which they find themselves living. The everyday details
of their complicated modern lives and external pressures to conform âare
so strong that they drown the quiet voice of natureâ, 21 as Jung
observes. This is not necessarily the end of the matter, because the
suppression of a natural reaction by what Herbert Silberer calls
âanother will, something determined by our cultureâ,22 will often lead
to deep anxiety, hence the spiralling use of anti-depressant drugs, and
other numbing addictions, in the industrial world.
Other individuals, who unfortunately are currently in the minority,
refuse to suppress their natural revulsion at the injustices of society.
Instead, in the words of the anarchist psychoanalyst Otto Gross, they
are infused with âthe revolutionary instinct of humankindâ which
ârefuses to adapt to that which is inferior, to power, to subjection, to
property, to habit, to tradition, to moralityâ.23 Note that there is a
two-fold action involved in this process â the revolutionary is calling
on both the particular inner strength of their own individuality and, at
the same time, the universal human revolutionary instinct. Ultimately,
these cannot be separated â the revolutionary instinct of the species
depends on the strength of certain individuals to express it. It is only
through the individual that it becomes physically active. This is why
anarchists, in theory and in practice, always insist as much on the
freedom of the individual as on the social welfare of the community.
Punk activist Mark Andersen urges us: âThink for yourself, be yourself,
donât just take what society gives you, create your own rules, live your
own lifeâ.24 OâHara stresses: âIt is not enough for a person to look
different from the mainstream, there is an important emphasis on
consciously becoming oneâs own selfâ,25 going on to describe a
self-questioning process âaimed at making a person aware of himself and
his own identityâ.26 It is telling that he writes of âbecoming oneâs own
selfâ and being âawareâ of oneâs self â implying, as one would expect
from the anarchist tradition, that there is, indeed, a pre-existing self
in there to discover, rather than the malleable empty organism proposed
by the dominant capitalist discourse. âPunk is gut rebellionâ,27 says
OâHara â according to my dictionary, this means it is characterised by
what is âbasic, essential or naturalâ. This is the same gut rebellion as
that voiced by Michael Bakunin when he calls for a liberty consisting of
the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers
that are latent in each person, âliberty that recognizes no restrictions
other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature,
which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are
not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are
immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material,
intellectual and moral beingâ.28
The rejection of societyâs laws, in favour of oneâs own inner laws,
tends to lead to confrontation with that society and Gross regards this
as being inevitable for any individual with the mental strength to stand
firm for their own inner principles. He writes: âIt appears that the
real nature of these conflicts always leads back, in the last resort, to
a general principle: the conflict between that which is proper to the
individual and that which is alien to them, that which is individually
innate and that which is suggested, learned, imposed from the outside.
This conflict between individuality and an external authority which
reaches into its interiority, tragically affects childhood more than any
other period in life. It affects it all the more tragically if the
personality involved is rich and powerfully original in its aptitudes.
The earlier and more intensely that the capacity to resist authority and
external intervention begins to take up its protective function, the
more the wrench of conflict is aggravated and rapidly deepens and
intensifiesâ.29
This permanent state of conflict, caricatured in the persona of an
anarchist rioter or an angry punk, might appear on the surface to be
purely ânegativeâ. But, as should now be clear, that is far from being
the case. The conflict is a positive revolt, the expression of an innate
sense of justice, the reassertion of natural order against
the corruption of the modern capitalist world. As Silberer says:
âWhoever has his conscience once rightly awakened, has in his heart an
endlessly burning flame that eats up everything that is contrary to his
natureâ.30 Hatred for contemporary society and rebellion against it are
born of an unconscious awareness that this is not how things are
supposed to be. We are born into the world with implicit expectations as
to what we might find there, implicit needs from an environment that is
supposed to activate and stimulate all that is best in us, bring out our
full human potential. Sadly, all we find is artifice, hypocrisy, greed,
self-interest, injustice, tyranny, war and deceit. âAversion and hate,
the opposites of desire and love, are not independent affections but
depend upon the latterâ,31 writes Silberer, and it is our desire and
love for a world of our imagination, always present in its possibility,
that inspires the aversion and hate we feel for the real modern world in
all its ugliness and inauthenticity.
Negativity would be to adapt to our surrounds, to compromise, to
surrender to all that we know deep down to be wrong. Positivity is to be
found in resistance, in struggle. Our first, inner, struggle is to fight
the modern world as it exists in our heads, as it tries to block our
true self from emerging, developing, becoming aware of itself. And our
second, outward, struggle is to fight the modern world as it exists in
our society, as it tries to block the natural structures of co-operative
human community from reasserting themselves against its all-crushing
dictatorship. And both of these struggles are based on the awareness of
a positive: an implicit organic structure and order to life, denied by
the dominant system. âRevolt passes judgement on an existing disorder;
but an idea of order is implied in any verdict of disorder, and explains
itâ, writes philosopher Joseph Vialatoux.32 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
argues: âTo reform what has been deformed means that we must take
account of an original âformââ.33
When we look out of a window in the middle of winter, we can only regard
the season as being bleak because we have in our minds the memory of
springs and summers past â and the anticipation of those still to come.
When we look out at the grim industrial capitalist system which
suffocates us, we know it must be destroyed because we see in our minds
another world which we know is possible. This other world is what Martin
Buber describes as âthe image of a perfect spaceâ34 â a utopia nourished
by the past but in no way limited by it, a utopia that exists on an
abstract rather than a physical level of reality but which is
nevertheless solid enough to serve as the foundation both of our
rejection of the modern industrial capitalist system and of our
determination to build a better future in its ruins.
Sensory deprivation is a technique used to disorientate human beings.
Sometimes it is harnessed in a therapeutic way, to induce a state of
relaxing meditation. But it is also deployed as a form of psychological
torture. If we are confined alone and in the dark, perhaps even floating
in a tank of water, the brain loses all sense of time, memory is
affected, hallucinations are common and suggestibility tends to
increase.1 The undermining of the sense of self and reality thus makes
us vulnerable to delusion and manipulation â we become ideal victims.
A general sense of disorientation is prevalent in modern society. We
find it difficult to see any meaning in what we do, to relate to the
world outside us. The events which mark our lives seem random and we
mostly do all we can to avoid staring into the existential abyss of our
ultimate individual death. This confusion does not reflect an inevitable
absurdity of the human condition, but is instead the result of sensory
deprivation on a cultural level. We are effectively blindfolded in two
directions at once. When we look outwards, our understanding of the
society in which we live, the history that brought us here, the
possibilities that lie ahead, has been obscured by what Guy Debord
famously termed the spectacle.2 He described a fake reality which is
presented to us as the genuine thing, the passive world of employment
and consumption, a multi-layered illusion, an urban labyrinth of TV
screens and advertising billboards that keeps us trapped inside its own
self-referential irreality and tells us that there is no other life than
the industrial slavery it offers us.
Things have certainly not got any better in this respect since Debord
wrote La société du spectacle in 1967⊠And when we look inwards, towards
our essence, our understanding has also been blocked. This was
originally carried out in the name of religion. But, because it was
really always about social domination, the taboo has now taken on a
secular guise to suit the times and has become a philosophical tool of
the modern spectacle, locking us into a state of mental disempowerment.
As I will explain, the way we are taught to think about ourselves and
our surroundings is keeping us in the dark, blinding us to the knowledge
of what we really are. It also, of course, blinds us to any awareness
that we are blind to the knowledge of what we really are! Indeed, the
very suggestion that we really are anything at all, that we even have an
essence, is considered unacceptable from a narrow contemporary
perspective.
If we wish to discover our core reality we need to look within
ourselves, beneath the surface of external circumstances and the
outward-facing personality with which we greet the world, and deep into
the inner self that underlies everything that we are and do. âKnow
Thyselfâ is a maxim which was inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at
Delphi and which is likely to have been passed down to the Ancient
Greeks from the wisdom of even earlier civilizations. It has been cited
by writers from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Ralph Waldo Emerson
to Samuel T. Coleridge and even made a cameo appearance in the 1999 film
The Matrix.3 It is also an important phrase in the interesting
contemporary religion of Wicca, which is itself a deliberate re-merging
of Neoplatonist and Stoic thought with the pantheistic pagan world-view
from which Greek philosophy originally emerged. Wicca specialist
Vivianne Crowley explains in her book Wicca: The Old Religion in the New
Millennium: âCarved above the doors of Mystery temples were the words
Know Thyself. This is also one of the aims of Wicca. The Pagan mystery
religions were systems through which their initiates came to understand
the true nature of reality and also their own inner nature: who and what
we really areâ.4
Crowley suggests that the true centre of our being âlies not in the
rational world of the conscious mind, but in the depths of our
unconsciousâ.5 She explains that her interpretation of Wiccan philosophy
is very much influenced by the thought of Carl Jung, who himself found
much inspiration from the interrelated traditions of pagan, Hermetic and
alchemical metaphysics. Thus when she writes about âthe older and deeper
levels of the psycheâ,6 she is very much referring to the collective
unconscious of humankind as imagined by Jung. The act of inner
self-discovery is therefore a process of going beyond the limits of mere
individuality to access a level of collective being. She writes: âThe
process of finding the Self is akin to digging the tunnel downwards to
the cave deep underground where the jewel of the Self awaits us shining
in the dark on the central altar. Until this tunnel is wide enough, the
Self cannot come to the surface. The work of self-development is making
that channel sufficiently wide for the Self to rise into the daylit
worldâ.7
This psychological journey predates Crowleyâs, and Jungâs, description
of it by many millennia. It is the mythological descent into the
underworld, the world of individual death, and the discovery there of a
psychological reality that was previously inaccessible to us. The
German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer â himself heavily influenced by
the Neoplatonist and Hermetic tradition by way of Meister Eckhart,
Friedrich Hölderlin and Wolfgang Goethe â recommends this descent to
fellow anarchists, in the form of a metaphorical suicide, in his 1901
essay Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism. He suggests that anarchists should
kill themselves âin the mystical sense, in order to be reborn after
having descended into the depths of their soulâ.8 Landauer takes up the
same theme again in Through Separation to Community, an article
published the same year, declaring that we must âallow ourselves to sink
to the depths of our being and to reach the inner core of our most
hidden natureâ.9 He makes it clear that this inward-directed journey is
not a flight from the world but an attempt to achieve an authentic
reconnection with it: âSince the world has disintegrated into pieces and
has become alienated from itself, we have to flee into mystic seclusion
in order to become one with it againâ.10
One of Landauerâs biographers explains that the ultimate aim is to
realise that we are part of âthe universal organism, which in Landauerâs
Weltanschauung is recognized as realityâ.11 This is plainly the same
process as that described by Crowley when she states: âIf we go into
even deeper levels of consciousness, we lose all sense of our
individuality and melt into the last reality which I shall call the
unitive reality. Here things are not discrete and separate; all objects
merge into one another and all are part of a greater whole that is the
cosmos. This is what mystics call the Way of the OneâŠâ12
The similarity is no coincidence, of course â this idea of union with
the universe is central to Neoplatonist metaphysics. Plato, much less of
a mystic than those he later inspires, nevertheless writes in Timaeus
that the universe is a âsingle living creature containing in itself all
other living things mortal and immortalâ.13 Some 500 years later, in the
third century of our own era, Plotinus lays the foundations for
Neoplatonist philosophy by declaring: âThe universe is one living
organismâ.14 He adds: âYour personality does not come from outside into
the universal scheme; you are part of it, you and your personal
dispositionâ.15 He describes, in The Enneads, the same discovery of the
universe-within as later described by both Landauer and Crowley: âIn
that you have entered into the All, no longer content with the part; you
cease to think of yourself as under limit but, laying all such
determination aside, you become an All⊠By the lessening of the alien in
you, you increase. Cast it aside and there is the All within youâ.16
Plotinusâs deepening of Platoâs metaphysics might well be due to
non-European influences.
Born in Egypt, in north Africa, he enjoyed a lifelong friendship with an
Arab doctor by the name of Zethos and is known to have had an interest
in Persian culture. He was under no illusion that either he, Plato or
Greek civilization could be credited with originating the metaphysics he
set out, and his writing displayed instead a âgeneral assumption that
all his system is contained already in the most ancient knowledge of the
worldâ.17 The same idea of a mystical unity with the cosmos is central
to the esoteric Islamic tradition of Sufism. This was partly an
inheritance from Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, but was also
reinforced by Persian and Indian metaphysics, particularly at the
influential School of Baghdad between around 800 and 900.18 Again, it is
our short-sighted fixation on our purely-individual subjectivity that is
seen as the barrier to broader awareness. As the ninth century Sufi
mystic al-Junayd puts it: âKnow that you are your own veil which
conceals yourself from youâ.19
When we have descended into the inner self-discovery of Landauerâs
metaphorical suicide, and grasped the reality of our essential belonging
to the wholeness of the universe, the implications ripple back towards
us through all the intermediate levels of our belonging. As these
ripples reach closer to our own physical subjectivity, they relate in a
more concrete way to our everyday lives and inform our thinking in a
practical and âpoliticalâ way. For example we can see clearly that our
supra-individual identity must necessarily also apply, in a manner that
is more particular and thus more restricted than that of the universal,
to the planetary life-system of which we form part. This realisation of
our belonging to nature â to life as a whole on our planet â is at the
forefront of the metaphysical battle between industrial capitalism and
its opponents. If people can be successfully persuaded that nature does
not exist, or that humans are not part of nature, then they are less
likely to stand in the way of the machineries that eat up the living
planet and turn it into the dead vanity of financial wealth.
On a still more particular level, we also belong to the human species.
This entity is very clearly biologically defined and thus can be
identified as a living organism in its own right, although one which
takes the dispersed physical form of millions of individuals, constantly
dying off and being replaced by new cells. Below the significant level
of humankind, our circles of collective identity become more blurred,
overlapping and multi-faceted. Humanity is as diverse as the number of
individuals that make it up and there are no entirely clear-cut
categories of ethnicity, culture or association with which we can divide
it into reliably identifiable permanent sub-organisms.
However, these sub-organisms can take shape, and can deliberately be
created, even though they may be short-lived and fuzzy at the edges. The
feeling of belonging, no matter how vague, remains an important element
in human self-fulfilment. This is a central pillar of Landauerâs
anarchist philosophy. Through Separation to Community, written more than
a century ago, explores themes that are ideologically very relevant
today. In a key passage, he accepts that the medieval nominalists played
an important role in challenging the opinion of the ârealistsâ of the
day (today termed âessentialistsâ) that various abstract notions, some
of which were only constructs of the human mind, were actual realities
on a certain plane. But he describes with dismay how this attitude led,
notably through Max Stirner, to the elevation of the
metaphysically-separate individual into a new kind of modern god. Writes
Landauer: âOur task is to prove that the concrete and isolated
individual is as much a spook as God. We therefore have to restore the
wisdom of the realists that also exists. The objections against them
throughout the centuries were important, but now it is time to realize
that there are no individuals, only affinities and communities. It is
not true that collective names are only sums of singularities or
individuals; rather, individuals are only manifestations and points of
passage, the electrical sparks of something greater, something
all-encompassing. (Whether the generic cut and dried names that we are
using are adequate, is another question)â.20 Landauer emphasises: âThe
individual is a spark of the soul stream that we know as humanity,
species or universeâ.21
It is crucial to grasp that this definition of the individual as merely
an aspect of greater collective entities in no way denies individual
freedom. It is, rather, a denial of the limitations placed on human
freedom by our psychological separation from the world of which we form
a part. The journey of self-discovery that leads us away from our
individuality and into our collective reality, eventually leads us back
round in a spiral to individuality in a renewed form. The result of a
metaphorical suicide, a lifting of the veil of individual identity, is
an enormous sense of empowerment. My being is no longer confined inside
a single, flawed, limited, mortal individual but is set free to expand
into the infinite and the eternal. My awareness of a belonging to
everything around me also gives me a deep sense of responsibility, which
combines with my sense of empowerment to dynamic effect. Says Landauer:
âI recognize the universe and thereby give up my individuality; but only
so as to feel myself as the universe into which I am absorbedâ.22
Crowley writes that ancient mystery religions revealed to people âall
they were and all they had the potential to beâ.23 This is a telling
phrase. The word âpotentialâ stems from the Latin word for power,
potentia. Being free to fulfil oneâs potential is to be empowered. The
word âpossibleâ shares the same origins. Self-empowerment and the
release of oneâs inner potential open up possibilities that are
otherwise closed to us by our own psychology, hidden from us by the veil
of our limited purely-individual identity.
Throughout the long and sorry history of domination in human societies,
psychological disempowerment has always played a significant repressive
role alongside the brute physical violence by which authority is always
imposed. Time and time again we are told to âknow our placeâ. We are
only peasants and have no right to challenge our lords and masters. We
are uncivilized savages and must bow to the improving rule of a superior
culture. We are women and thus inferior and incapable of determining our
own lives. We are employees and have to learn to do what we are told. We
are the public and must trust in our leaders. We are miserable sinners,
creations of an all-powerful and distant God, and must bow our heads in
shame at our unworthiness. A reversal of this psychological
disempowerment therefore presents serious problems for those who would
rule over us â as their reactions have shown us on many historical
occasions.24 Crowley notes: âChristianity condemned all magic â spells,
incantations, herbalism, divination, weather lore â the whole gamut of
activities by which human beings sought to control their environment.
The Christian attitude was that these activities were not the
prerogative of the ordinary men and women, but the prerogative of the
Church with its monopoly on the line to Godâ.25 It is not the
âprerogativeâ of the disempowered to rediscover that power within. No
such tendency can be tolerated by the authorities. All such heretics
must be crushed. Crowley describes how the real motivation behind witch
hunts became increasingly clear. Originally, witches had been accused of
blighting crops, causing animals to die or miscarry and so on. âFrom the
fifteenth century on, however, there were also political accusations.
Witches were accused of undermining Church and stateâ.26
The history of the Christian religion in repressing any âhereticalâ
thought challenging its monopoly on power in Europe is well known, but a
similar process also took place within Islamic culture. Describing
ninth-century Mesopotamia, Dr Ali Hassan Abdel-Kader writes: âBaghdÄd at
that time was the spiritual and cultural capital of the Islamic World,
and in this setting the SĆ«fi School of BaghdÄd flourished and was truly
representative as such. Its influence spread far and wide, to the
western countries such as Syria, Egypt, Arabia and Africa, and to the
east as far as KhurÄsÄn. This school held in itself all the preceding
and contemporary mystic thoughts belonging to and within the reach of
the Moslem Worldâ.27 However, the school began to come under attack from
conservative elements within Islam. âThe sĆ«fis were said to be promoting
superstition and pantheistic viewsâ,28 he explains, and âevery member of
the school, including al-Junayd, was publicly accused of heresyâ.29 The
crucial dividing line between what was theologically âacceptableâ or not
was basically the question of whether the immanence of the mystical
Oneness included the physical universe, and thus humankind, or whether
it was transcendent to the point of being separate. Pantheists and
heathens took the former view and âproperâ Muslims the second view,
according to the authorities.
Al-Junayd, the subject of Abdel-Kaderâs book, adopted a cautious
approach and managed to walk a clever line by extending the idea of an
immanent One as far as he could, while still preserving the obliged
element of a transcendent deity. His was a similar approach to that of
Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance translator of Plato and Plotinus, who
carefully tailored Neoplatonist mysticism to make it acceptable to the
Vatican and to thus avoid the wrath of the fifteenth century
Inquisitors. But one of Al-Junaydâs friends, AbĆ« al-Husaym Ahmad ibn
Muhammed an-NĆ«ri, was prosecuted by the authorities and, although
eventually acquitted, died shortly afterwards. Junayd is said to have
commented later: âSince the death of NĆ«ri, no one has spoken about the
essential Truthâ.30 And what was the essential Truth that could no
longer be spoken? Simply that human beings are aspects of the universal
Oneness. As such, they are not condemned to âknow their placeâ and obey
the rules set up by those who declare themselves to be representatives
of a separate authoritarian God. âThis complete indifference to the laws
of religion and the established customs of society may lead the sƫfi to
a special kind of libertinism, as the history of sƫfism has shown
repeatedlyâ,31 notes Abdel-Kader.
One of the more outspoken Sufis at the time was Persian-born Abuâl
MughÄ«th al-Husayn ibn MansĆ«r al-HallÄj, who insisted that union with the
divine makes the mystic what Anton Kielce calls âa free and living
representative of the Divinityâ.32 Al-HallÄjâs use of the formula âAnaâl
Haqqâ (âI am the Truthâ or âI am Godâ) did not go down well with the
authorities and he was arrested and charged with heresy.33 He protested
in court: âI am not proclaiming my divinity, but it is what we mystics
call the complete Unification with the Divine Will (âayn al-jamâ). God
is the Writer and I am only an instrumentâ.34 But his accusers were not
interested in the subtleties of his position and al-HallÄj was put to
death in 922. The political significance of his persecution is
recognised by Reynold A. Nicholson when he writes of al-HallÄj: âHis
crime was not that, as later sĆ«fis put it, âhe divulged the mystery of
the Divine Lordshipâ, but that in obedience to an inward call he
proclaimed and actively asserted a truth which involves religious,
political and social anarchyâ.35
This metaphysical sourcing of anarchy is well expressed by Crowley: âIn
Wicca, we believe that each of us has free will. We cannot have other
than free will because each of us in our innermost centre is Divineâ.36
Likewise, for Landauer âthe core of anarchy lies in the depths of human
natureâ.37 He insists: âWe must realize that we do not just perceive the
world, but that we are the worldâ.38 The taboo which has prevented
everyone â from Sufis to witches â from expressing this simple truth
still exists today. Words such as âessenceâ or âuniversalâ or ânatureâ
are considered intellectually unacceptable in many circles,39 along with
any world-view founded on our belonging to an organic supra-individual
reality. The ostensible justification may now be philosophical rather
than theological, but the underlying reason remains social â to keep us
all safely âin our placeâ and free from any fanciful notions of wanting
to participate in life rather than just observing it, of wanting to help
create our collective future rather than simply accepting what is ladled
out to us, of refusing all authority other than that which speaks from
inside us.
If only we could smash our way through this odious taboo once and for
all, we would discover waiting for us an inner collective potential that
would entirely transform everything we think and know â our world would
be turned joyfully upside-down. No longer would we be prisoners in a
metaphysical sensory deprivation tank, aware of nothing but the
absurdities of our individual limitations and mortality. No longer would
we be confined in a supine state of isolation, disorientation,
suggestibility, dependence, gullibility, fear and obedience. Instead we
would be free to breathe a deep sense of connection and belonging, of
meaning and authenticity, of courage and empowerment.
âLet us walk proudly and hold our heads high; For the Sky is our Father
and the Earth our Mother,
And we are the children of the Godsâ.40
Humankindâs belonging to the living flesh of our planet is an essential
reality of our innermost nature. A profound sense of this belonging will
therefore always surface, time and time again, in the hearts and minds
of each new generation, whatever the obstacles placed in its way by the
dominant anti-natural system under which we live. The barriers to this
metaphysical understanding have varied over the course of the centuries.
Sometimes the barrier has been the hierarchical theological dogma that
sets âGodâ apart from âHis creationâ and âmanâ apart from ânatureâ, over
which âheâ has been appointed ruler. This same dogma has also often
denounced any feeling of spiritual connection to the earth and our
fellow creatures as being some kind of sinister âdevil-worshipâ.1
Sometimes the barrier has been the idea that there is no such thing as
ânatureâ and that it is merely an illusion, a projection of our human
subjectivity. Alternatively this barrier tells us that nature is in fact
deeply unpleasant and is something to be overcome rather than respected.
Either way, the result is a justification of the wholesale destruction
and exploitation of a living world of which we are told we do not form a
part. We are instructed to accept that our goal as humans is purely the
advancement of the human species at the expense of all other life-forms.
Because the awareness of our real identity as part of nature keeps
re-emerging in the human spirit, the attempts to block it can become
quite convoluted. A good example comes in the form of a book published
in the USA in 1990 and the UK in 1991, at a time when there was a
general upsurge of interest in âgreenâ thinking. Dorion Saganâs
Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth2 is designed to appeal to
those of an environmentalist persuasion. Its cover features an image of
the earth, around which is draped a female figure, presumably meant to
be the goddess Gaia. Inside, Sagan sets out what may appear at first
glance to be an argument based on an understanding of the natural
reality of humankind. In order to reinforce this impression, he cites
indigenous North American and Buddhist wisdom, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau
and Giordano Bruno and, throughout his text, he includes hooks that are
clearly intended to appeal to ecologically-minded readers and persuade
them that he is basically on their side.
Early on, for instance, he declares that âfar from being an inert lump
of matter, the Earth behaves as a giant organismâ.3 He continues in the
same vein, putting forward an analysis that would not be out of place
elsewhere in these pages: âThe presence of life anywhere in the universe
is a signal that the whole of reality is, in a sense, alive. Although
there is little scientific evidence to support this view of universal
life, Aristotle and other Greek philosophers who laid the metaphysical
foundations for Western science, held similar views. In addition, some
thinkers at the forefront of quantum mechanics, such as physicist David
Bohm, believe that the mechanical world view is no longer supportable
and that the universe (physical reality from the level of quarks to
galaxies) displays features of wholeness that make it far more like an
organism, an integral entity, than any collection of essentially
unrelated atoms or partsâ.4 This tone even extends to a call for action:
âThe only way to avert polluting the oceanic, atmospheric, near space,
electromagnetic, and other commons is for the members of human nations
to realize and behave as integral parts of a single collective entity or
organism. Even if we donât recognize our planetary interrelatedness, it
remains true that our destinies are fused and that we will live or die
together, integrated, perhaps, into the life cycle of a single giant
beingâ.5
Unfortunately, though, it quickly becomes apparent that all of this is
merely window dressing, designed to trick the reader into thinking that
Saganâs argument is based on environmental sensibility â an impression
that could hardly be further from the truth. The biographical
information describes Sagan as a âsleight-of-hand magician and writerâ,
but the ideological sleight-of-hand he deploys here is clumsy and
blatant. His basic line is that nature benefits, rather than suffers,
from industrial capitalism. âHuman technology reforms the planetary
body, creating a new system for all species to useâ,6 he claims at one
point. âTechnology may be dangerous, but adding technology to nature
makes nature stronger and more stable than nature without technologyâ.7
He even has the audacity to pretend, with pseudo-scientific authority,
that pollution is something to be welcomed. Sometimes this argument
comes across as simply laughable, as when he writes: âIt would be
difficult to wax poetic about medical waste, chlorofluorocarbons, and
carbon dioxide. Yet smog can enhance the colors of a sunsetâ.8 In other
passages he makes a serious attempt at more or less proving that âtoxic
sludge is good for youâ, to reference the ironic title of John Stauber
and Sheldon Ramptonâs 1995 exposĂ© of the greenwashing PR industry. âIn
the long run, undoubtedly organisms will evolve means of digesting
technological excessâ,9 Sagan assures us. And the end result will
apparently be resoundingly positive for nature: âOur technical
civilization brings into circulation and combines many substances â such
as pharmaceutical compounds, metals (for example, the platinum of
weapons and the copper of pennies), rubberlike plastics, and other
synthetics that were rarely or never used by other organisms. Garbage
disposals, jet airplanes, and factory exhaust increase the rate of
atomic migration at the Earthâs surface⊠Physicists have even
synthesised elements that never before existed at the surface of the
Earth. With world-wide commerce and computer communication, the flow of
atoms intensifies. With the appearance of Homo sapiens, all the chemical
elements for the first time became involved in the process of life, the
biologically aided circulation of elements at our planetâs surfaceâ.10
It is surely no coincidence that Sagan refers many times to James
Lovelock in the course of the book. As I have written elsewhere,11
Lovelock uses the idea of a self-regulating Gaia to suggest that we
should take no action against pollution, arguing that we should perhaps
instead regard industrial waste, like cow dung, not as pollution but as
a âvalued giftâ. And Sagan approvingly quotes the celebrated former NASA
scientistâs extension of his Gaia concept to suggest that environmental
concerns about the effects of industrialisation are baseless: in a 1986
paper, Lovelock asks: âCould it be that our very deep concern about the
state of the world is a form of global hypochondria?â12 Since then, the
veteran Lovelock, a long-time supporter of the nuclear industry, has
made it increasingly clear that his theory about Gaia is not in any way
combined with a desire to defend life from the industrial capitalist
system. A newspaper article about his 2014 book A Rough Ride to the
Future reports: âThe scientist and inventor James Lovelock claims we
should stop trying to save the planet from global warming and instead
retreat to climate controlled citiesâ. And it quotes Lovelock as
concluding: âWe should give up vainglorious attempts to save the
worldâ.13
Saganâs approach is very much in the same vein. Like Lovelock, he merely
uses the theory of living planet as a âsleight-of-handâ means of
justifying its destruction by the capitalist system. To this end, he
comes up with the ridiculous notion that the earth is âactually on the
verge of reproductionâ14 and that the horrors of pollution are nothing
more alarming than the birth pains of new entities. These new entities
will be the âbiospheresâ of the bookâs title, artificial pods that will
set off into space and allow humanity to colonise the universe. He
suggests: âSomeday people may be in the position of the shrimp inside
the ecosphere, the captives and crews of biospheric starships sheltered
in spacecraft that double as synthetic Earthsâ.15
Why would people want to live like shrimps in synthetic earths, rather
than like human beings on a real earth? Perhaps because, like Sagan,
they despise this planet and look forward to its complete destruction!
âIt is claimed that a truly advanced civilization would be no more
attached to the planet of its origin than a newly hatched chick is to
the eggshell from which it emergesâ,16 he writes. And he enthuses: âOnce
Earthâs biosphere reproduces into biospheres, the Earth itself â our
planetary parent â could be crushed like a sunflower seed with no threat
of violence to life as a wholeâ.17
Sagan adopts the approach common to most cheerleaders of industrial
capitalism in presenting the future he predicts as a fait accompli â
âBiospheres themselves are destined to arrive; there is about them an
air of evolutionary inevitabilityâ.18 This has always been the script
for âprogressâ. It unfolds as a matter of course, like the passing of
time. There is no way of stopping it and anyone who tries to do so is
guilty of trying to âturn the clock backâ. The idea of industrial or
technological âprogressâ has been gradually merged with the idea of any
kind of improvement in human life. This assumption was unfortunately
swallowed whole by most socialists and anarchists of the 19^(th) century
who felt culturally obliged to present their social utopias in the
context of technological development.19 This manipulation remains in
place today, with any resistance to the âprogressâ of industrial
capitalism often branded as a reactionary attack on the social
âprogressâ with which it is wrongly bracketed.
There was an alarming illustration of this phenomenon in France in 2014
and 2015, following the publication of La reproduction artificielle de
lâhumain by Alexis Escudero.20 The book is an anti-capitalist attack on
the bio-technological engineering industry, which is busy building a
Brave New World in which the rich can buy designer babies and ensure
that their children are superior in every way to those of the exploited
majority. Escudero reveals, for instance, that the Fertility Institute
in Los Angeles produces 800 test tube babies a year, of which 700 have
parents with no fertility problems â these wealthy Americans like to be
able to pick the embryo with the âbestâ genetic characteristics, and
also to choose the sex of their child.21 This is a profitable business
with all the usual trappings â the first Fertility Show in London in
2009 attracted 80 exhibiting companies, ranging from specialist clinics
to sperm banks, and drew in 3,000 visitors.22 A report issued in 2015
estimated that the US fertility market was worth between $3 and $4
billion a year,23 while in the UK it has been estimated as being worth
ÂŁ600 million.24
However, Escudero sparked controversy by criticising the way that the
left had failed to respond to the growth of this sinister eugenics
business, which has its origins in Nazi Germany. He complained in his
book: âDebate on the subject: nothing. Zilch. Nada. As if being on the
left and supporting artificial reproduction of humans necessarily went
hand in handâ.25 The problem was that Medically Assisted Procreation
(MAP) in France was being vociferously opposed by religious
right-wingers, who particularly objected to the idea of babies being
produced for gay and lesbian couples. Escudero made it plain that this
was not his motivation at all. He was countering the liberal-left slogan
âMAP for everyone!â with the anti-industrial slogan âMAP for no-one!â.
It was the business he opposed, not the sexual orientation of its
customers. He also stressed that he had nothing at all against the DIY
insemination technique often used by lesbians and that this did not in
any case come under the MAP label. Left-wingers who championed the MAP
industry because they felt it was socially âprogressiveâ were falling
into a terrible trap, he warned. He drew attention to a slogan used by
French gay rights group inter-LGBT which had declared: âThere is no
equality without MAP!â. Commented Escudero: âFor the cyber-liberal left
there is no equality without recourse to biotechnologyâ.26 He warned
that this fascination for technology was drawing left-wingers far away
from the positions they claimed to defend and into de facto support for
the industrial capitalist system. âThis cyber-liberal left is misusing
the fight for individual freedom as a vindication of market freedom. It
is confusing political equality with the biological uniformisation of
individuals. Its dream is of liberal eugenics, of abolishing the body
and using artificial wombs. Its fantasy is of a posthumanity via the
technological re-creation of the human species. Behind the mask of
transgression and rebellion lies an enthusiastic identification with
technocapitalismâ.27
This criticism of an influential and vociferous section of the left
prompted a hostile response. On October 28, 2014, there was a picket of
a talk that Escudero gave at le Monte-en-lâair bookshop in Paris, in
which placards accused him of lesbophobia, homophobia and transphobia.28
Then on Saturday November 22 a group of opponents mobilised against a
workshop he was due to give at the Lyons anarchist bookfair. A leaflet
claimed that Escudero was joining José Bové and Pierre Rahbi in an
âenvironmentalist drift towards essentialism, in the name of the
âdefence of the livingââ. It declared: âNo to LGBTphobia! Yes to the
extension of the right to MAP! No to essentialism and naturalism!â29 An
eye-witness account published afterwards by Annie Gouilleux describes
how the âfascisticâ pro-technology contingent blocked the entrance to
the room hosting Escuderoâs workshop, insulting people who were trying
to get in. In the end, the organisers felt they had no choice but to
cancel the meeting. There is a profoundly worrying ideological
phenomenon in evidence here, which is identified by Gouilleux in her
account. She writes: âItâs obvious that from the moment people consider
that âhumanâ and ânatureâ are either taboo words or that they donât
exist, then the discussion will descend into absurdity. Or
fisticuffsâ.30
In his book, Escudero describes how the aim of the new eugenics will
inevitably develop from merely screening out hereditary defects towards
making people more attractive, bigger, more athletic, more intelligent.
They will, in short be âbetter than humans â who are imperfect by
natureâ. Leaving behind the out-dated human model, these new products of
industrial capitalism will be superhumans, âposthumansâ.31 This vision
of the future, born of a mindset which regards nature as reactionary and
associates technology with emancipation, leads very easily into the
worst excesses of industrial-capitalist fantasy, namely the
transhumanist movement. This cult, which originated in the USA in the
1950s, basically envisages that humans will soon outgrow the
restrictions of their natural bodies and, thanks to technological
advances, evolve into semi-robotic beings. They will have artificial
bodies, with replaceable parts, and their brains will eventually be
uploaded into computers, giving them unimagined mental powers.
Not so long ago, this strange vision was regarded as little more than a
sci-fi joke, but it has increasingly become the religion of the
technological avant-garde and is supported by businesses such as Google.
One of its key texts is Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism, written in 1985 by Donna Haraway, an American
neo-Marxist and postmodernist academic who has declared war on what she
calls the âknee-jerk technophobiaâ of part of the feminist movement. A
gushing profile in Wired magazine explains that her opposition to the
âback-to-nature platitudesâ of âso-called goddess feminismâ is based on
the insistence that âthe realities of modern life happen to include a
relationship between people and technology so intimate that itâs no
longer possible to tell where we end and machines beginâ.32 In 1986,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology nanotechnology scientist K. Eric
Drexler brought out Engines of Creation and 1999 saw the publication of
The Age of Spiritual Machines by transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, an American
businessman who works closely with the US Army Science Board, has been
honoured by three US presidents and has been proclaimed a âgeniusâ by
the Wall Street Journal.33 Another important transhumanist work is I,
Cyborg (2002) by Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading in the UK.
Here he predicts: âHumans will be able to evolve by harnessing the
super-intelligence and extra abilities offered by the machines of the
future, by joining with them. All this points to the development of a
new human species, known in the science-fiction world as âcyborgsâ. It
doesnât mean that everyone has to become a cyborg. If you are happy with
your state as a human then so be it, you can remain as you are. But be
warned â just as we humans split from our chimpanzee cousins years ago,
so cyborgs will split from humans. Those who remain as humans are likely
to become a sub-species. They will, effectively, be the chimpanzees of
the futureâ.34 So this is how Warwick and his colleagues see human
beings as we are now â as âchimpanzeesâ destined to be trampled
underfoot by the rise of the new race of cybernetic overlords.
Whether or not these unhinged transhumanist visions are ever likely to
become reality is almost beside the point here. The immediate danger
lies in what can only be described as their morbid aversion to nature â
their naturaphobia â and the way this insidious ideological meme35 is
encouraging support for industrial capitalism, even among supposed
anti-capitalists. Writes Escudero: âWhile pretending to support freedom
and emancipation, post-feminists and transhumanists nurse a boundless
hatred of nature; hatred of the innate, of that which is given to the
human being at birth; of everything that isnât produced, manufactured,
standardised, regulated, rationalised; hatred of everything that doesnât
quite fit, that doesnât work, that falls ill, of everything that isnât
efficient and productive 24/7; hatred of everything which gets away and
canât be controlledâ.36 This attitude comes across very clearly in an
interview with sociologist and queer activist Marie-HĂ©lĂšne Bourcier
conducted by Christelle Taraud for the book Les FĂ©minismes en questions:
ElĂ©ments pour une cartographie. She declares: âWe have to reinvent and
rebuild a feminist theory that sets itself apart from the subject of
biologically-constructed âwomanâ. Letâs not regard âwomanâ as the
subject of feminism, let alone its horizon. For me, itâs fundamentally
important â and, for that matter, interesting â to do so by inventing or
reappropriating figures which are abnormal, inhuman or posthuman.
Haraway proposed the cyborgâ.37 Bourcier explains that she is pushing
this latter vision âso that women, and particularly feminists, stop
being part of a technophobic traditionâ and âto destroy the notion of
natureâ.38 She says we need to celebrate the âgood newsâ that if there
is no more nature then we are all âthe babies of techno-cultureâ.39
Bourcierâs undisguised transhumanist naturaphobia is only the tip of the
iceberg of a certain brand of left-wing ultramodernist orthodoxy that
has become so exaggerated that it was even apparently possible for a
high-profile French anti-racist activist like Clémentine Autain to
declare that ânature is fascistâ.40
Despite his reputation as some kind of environmental guru, Lovelock
fuels this same naturaphobia every time he announces that pollution is
not a problem or that we should give up trying to save the planet. He
has also explicitly supported the transhumanist approach, saying in
2014: âOur species has a limited lifespan. If we can somehow merge with
our electronic creations in a larger scale endosymbiosis, it may provide
a better next step in the evolution of humanity and Gaiaâ.41 Sagan, with
his daydream of the earth being âcrushed like a sunflower seedâ as human
beings float off into space in little artificial pods, shares the same
twisted philosophy, based on a contempt for everything that we are, for
the planet of which we form part and upon which we depend. This is not
just naturaphobia but vitaphobia, a fear and hatred of life itself â a
Thanatos, death drive, projected from the self-hating mind of the
individual out on to humanity as a whole, on to the planet. How else, in
fact, could we describe industrial capitalism itself, other than as a
death cult, ever-hungry for the sacrifice of millions upon millions of
living beings in its machineries, its contaminations, its wars, its
abattoirs, its cancerous civilization?
Because nature and life are both real, the naturaphobic and vitaphobic
industrial death cult also necessarily hates reality, to the point that
it develops post-philosophies which deny the very existence of objective
reality. It derides and fears everything that is authentic and is
obsessed by the artificial.42 Its complete immersion in falsity means
that it is blind to the fact that the path it would lead us along is a
complete dead-end. For, on the most basic level, the industrialist
vision of a technological posthuman future is entirely divorced from the
physical realities of industrialism. Even if post-natural posthumans
managed to upload their minds (or, rather, soulless copies of their
brains) into a virtual realm of their own construction, the objective
reality of the world they thought they were escaping would not somehow
cease to exist. Pollution would worsen as the technological world
expanded, animals would suffer from its consequences, the food chain
would be imperilled, the very life-system of the earth would be at risk.
Their technological bubble would still be dependent on an outside
reality and infrastructure. There would still have to be mines to
extract the minerals to build the computers, oil and gas wells to
provide the energy, waste to be disposed of, pipelines and cables to be
laid and repaired, flood defences to be built or strengthened as the
climate span further into extremities, cooling systems to be installed
for the huge banks of computer servers, bolts to be tightened, cogs to
be lubricated, mould to be wiped off walls, and so on ad nauseam. Even
if all the hard labour was done by machines and there were further
machines to repair those machines, who would repair these? Who would be
doing all the dirty work, wiping the metaphorical bottoms of the
immortal posthuman narcissists plugged into their ego-massaging virtual
existences? A race of âchimpanzeeâ slaves maybe, the left-over
essentialist scum who had refused to jump on the naturaphobic bandwagon
to oblivion? There is nothing very âprogressiveâ about this vision of
âprogressâ which is in fact, despite the âradicalâ or âleft-wingâ
posturing of those promoting it, an industrial-capitalist mutation of
fascism. Here is perhaps the ultimate truth that these naturaphobes
cannot face â that their technological dream is nothing but a dangerous
nightmare. It is dangerous because even if it never comes true, its
ideological distortions serve to undermine anti-capitalism and promote
enthusiastic participation in a supposedly âprogressiveâ industrial
system that is killing our planet.
I suspect that behind the outward-projected Thanatos of the
post-humanists lies thanatophobia, a fear of their own personal death
and a refusal to accept its natural and organic inevitability â hence
the fantasies about machine-assisted immortality which lead them to
embrace techno-capitalist ideology. As Theodore Roszak asked, as far
back as 1972: âHow many members of our own culture would not trade in
their natural body tomorrow for a guaranteed deathproof counterfeit?â43
In this desire, these artificialists are themselves victims of the same
lack of understanding that they are helping to maintain and worsen by
promoting a hatred of everything real and natural. The individualism
that forms a central part of their dogma is itself an illusion, albeit
sometimes a necessary one on a practical level.44 All of us are merely
temporary manifestations of much larger living entities, the most
obvious of which is the human species. As such, in some ways we cannot
really be said to âdieâ when our time is done. The living entity itself
exists in the form of constantly regenerating cells, or individuals,
which are naturally replaced as part of the ongoing process. Trees do
not die when their leaves fall off. Species are not âdeadâ as long as
they keep reproducing. Immortality comes from the continuation of the
species, or planetary life, the birth of new generations. The end of our
individual subjectivity does not imply the end of the objective reality
of which we form part.
There is an essential collective nature to our existence that does not
limit or oppress us, as the anti-essentialists imagine, but which in
fact sets us free to experience a broader reality. This reality extends
beyond the human species to nature as a whole, to all that is living, to
all that makes up the universe. Behind the transhumanist loathing for
life lurks an almost spiritual yearning for transcendence. But this
yearning is tragically misdirected. It has lost sight of the fact that
universal connection already exists and does not have to be artificially
created by means of industrial technology. The connection is there
waiting for us, in nature and the cosmos beyond, if we would only seek
it out.
It is not by cutting ourselves off from our innate and organic essence
that we will find individual fulfilment and true immortality, but by
embracing it.
Imagine that you are being held captive in a prison camp and that, with
some fellow detainees, you are trying to escape. In order to do this,
you manage to dig a tunnel from the floor of a cell into the outside
world. But when the big day comes, you find you have simply surfaced in
the courtyard outside, so you hide your traces and try again. This time
your tunnel is much longer, but again it is a failure. You have arrived
beyond the courtyard but still within the prison grounds and in sight of
the machine-gun-toting security guards. Months later, you have succeeded
in digging a tunnel that is already much longer than your previous
attempts and must surely be about to take you beyond the final boundary
and into freedom. But then you have to stop. Your tunnelling has brought
you up against a massive concrete wall, sunk deep into the ground
precisely in order to stop escape attempts such as yours.
There are many different ways in which one could use this scenario as a
political analogy in order to illustrate the limits of certain
approaches. One might, for instance, regard a faith in the possibilities
of radical change through electoral participation as being a very short
tunnel that leaves the would-be escapees firmly within the same prison
compound. One might regard the slightly longer tunnel as being akin to
an anti-capitalism which fails to take into account the fact that the
whole infrastructure of industrial society is inherently capitalist and
that in order to escape capitalism we will have to escape industrialism.
And one might regard the final tunnel as being an attempt at political
thinking that, for all its far-reaching radical intent, remains very
much contained within the superficiality of modern industrial-capitalist
thought and is therefore incapable of sourcing the metaphysical depth
which is necessary to break free from its self-referential limitations.
I would like to take a closer look at the last two of these
propositions, starting with my insistence that an authentic
anti-capitalism must necessarily be anti-industrialist. âFactories,
machines and bureaucracies are the real pillars of capitalist
oppressionâ, Miguel AmorĂłs writes in his essay Elementary Foundations of
the Anti-Industrialist Critique.1 I absolutely agree with him, but his
insight is by no means shared by all those who terms themselves enemies
of the capitalist system. This is not a recent ideological phenomenon,
either. In his illuminating 2015 study, José Ardillo writes that
â19^(th) century social thinkers and agitators nearly all positioned
themselves within the movement for scientific and technological
progressâ.2 He notes with evident frustration how this attitude has
continued into the 21^(st) century and even corrupted environmental
thinking with its emphasis on âgreenâ technological fixes, such as
so-called renewable energy sources, for industrial capitalismâs many
problems. âItâs not alternatives to conventional energy sources that we
need to find, but a way out of this whole world of energy consumption
that they have led us intoâ, Ardillo rightly insists.3
E.F. Schumacher also calls for a wider vision in his classic book Small
is Beautiful, when he writes: âFossil fuels are merely a part of the
ânatural capitalâ which we steadfastly insist on treating as expendable,
as if it were income, and by no means the most important part. If we
squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilization; but if we squander
the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life
itselfâ.4 First published in 1973, Schumacherâs book inspired a whole
new wave of thinking that challenged the assumptions behind capitalist
economics and spread the alternative idea of décroissance or degrowth
based on his observation that âinfinite growth in a finite environment
is an obvious impossibilityâ.5
Unfortunately, this idea has remained distinct from the main thrust of
anarchist and other left-wing thinking. Partly, perhaps, this is because
some of those embracing degrowth are naĂŻve in other respects, and are
effectively committed to digging the shortest tunnel in our analogy,
imagining that somehow the machineries of âdemocracyâ and the state can
be used to bring about fundamental change. But there is also fault to be
found on the anarchist side. Although generally less dogmatic than
Marxists in this respect, many anarchists are still stuck within the
broader sphere of industrial-capitalist thought. They fail to challenge
the greatest myth that capitalism has created to justify its own
existence â the myth of âprogressâ, of âdevelopmentâ, of the need for
permanent âeconomic growthâ. Ardillo puts some of the blame for this on
Murray Bookchin, the late American social ecologist whose brand of
municipal anarchism has recently been taken up by the Kurdish rebels of
the PKK: âBookchin believes that technological development must
continue; in his view, the liberation of humankind depends on this.
According to him, criticism of âabundanceâ, thatâs to say the political
consideration of a possible self-limitation based on simple methods and
human energy, is therefore consigned to the scrapheap of reactionary
thinking. Itâs to be regretted that Bookchinâs views on energy and
industrial abundance have had, and continue to have, such an influence
on the opinions of a large part of the anarchist movementâ.6
Industrialism is capitalism. It is capitalism in the shape of bricks and
mortar, of steel and concrete, of tarmac and plutonium. Its sole purpose
is to make money, to enrich the few at the expense of the many and of
the planet. An inability to understand this â and still worse to imagine
that this radical anti-capitalist insight is somehow reactionary â
represents a serious impediment to the revolutionary potential of the
anti-capitalist movement. It prevents the digging of any ideological
tunnel that can lead us out of the nightmare of unending capitalist
âdevelopmentâ, of spiralling environmental destruction, of a planetary
poisoning which can only end in disaster. Why would any anti-capitalist
want their thinking to remain within the philosophical prison built for
us by the capitalist system, with all its capitalist assumptions about
the purpose of life, individually and collectively? It is only from the
specific capitalist point of view, in which its own continuation and
expansion is equated with human improvement, that a rejection of the
industrial direction appears to be backward-thinking or reactionary.
From a point of view outside of that thought-system, the
industrial-capitalist belief in infinite âgrowthâ is revealed for what
it really is â sheer insanity. Anti-capitalist thinking must position
itself defiantly outside the system it opposes, reject all ideological
perspectives that are based within that system, find its own ways of
describing and evaluating the past, present and future of human society.
Herein lies the only possibility of real resistance to the capitalist
system as a whole. As Ranchor Prime writes: âTinkering with the present
system is not going to be enough. If there is to be real hope of a sane
life on this planet for the coming generations, we will have to find a
new way of understanding our place in the worldâ.7
This search for a new way of understanding does not have to start from
square one â we would do well to look for guidance from the way humans
lived before the industrial era enslaved them. This was very much the
approach of Mahatma Gandhi (1869â1948) whose resistance to British
imperialism in India went hand in hand with a deep opposition to the
industrialism which it brought with it. He wrote in 1909: âMachinery has
begun to desolate Europe. Ruination is now knocking at the English
gates. Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it
represents a great sin⊠Railways accentuate the evil nature of man. Bad
men fulfil their designs with greater rapidityâ.8 His vision for India,
betrayed by his capitalist successors, was a return to the simple
village life his land had known for thousands of years. And this, he
saw, was the only sustainable long-term way forward for humankind as a
whole. Gandhi said in a letter to fellow independence campaigner
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1945: âI believe that if India, and through India
the world, is to achieve real freedom, then sooner or later we shall
have to go and live in the villages â in huts, not in palaces. Millions
of people can never live in cities and palaces in comfort and peaceâ.9
Behind Gandhiâs imagining of a village-based future (which, of course,
need not reproduce the social mores of any particular village-based
past) is what Prime describes as âthe Hindu ideal of a simple life of
dependance upon natureâs goodnessâ.10 Once we leave behind the
quantitative mindset of modern capitalism and its crazed obsession with
the never-ending multiplication of needs and consumption, we begin to
come back into contact with what Schumacher calls âthe traditional
wisdom of mankindâ.11 In India, as elsewhere, this wisdom understands
that nature is not a âresourceâ to be exploited but a living entity of
which we form a part. Sevak Sharan explains: âIn our Indian perception,
manav means a human being who perfectly respects nature and danav means
one who misuses nature. It is not wise to go against nature. History has
shown that any culture that is not respectful to nature does not last
long: it brings about its own downfall. Vedic culture, on the other
hand, has lasted for many thousands of years and is still visible even
now. It is called Sanatan Dharma, which means the way of life that lasts
forever, is self-perpetuating and regeneratingâ.12 This ancient wisdom,
this cultural belief in a stable natural harmony outside the linear
âdevelopmentâ of industrial âprogressâ, remains a potent inspiration for
opposition to the capitalist system. Indian environmentalist Vandana
Shiva describes how she met many people during her years fighting the
construction of dams âand I found that they were all inspired by the
idea that the river is divine, a sacred mother, and that trying to
appropriate her water is like annihilating the very source of your
sustenance. In fact Iâve learned that there is not one environmental
movement in India that is not informed by the ecological roots of Vedic
cultureâ.13
The loud-mouthed and whip-wielding ring-masters of El Circo Capitalista
have always poured derision on traditional ways of thinking that get in
the way of their ticket sales and profit-margins, denouncing them as
being primitive, reactionary, obstructive to the best interests of
humanity as defined by their very own philosopher-clowns. Thus, when the
imperialist UK state introduced the Charter Act in 1813, âLord Macaulay
argued in Parliament that it would be necessary to introduce English
education in India at all levels so as to create an elite that was
Indian in body, but English in taste and thought. He believed that
Indian literature â the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Ramayana and
Mahabharata â was primitive and bore no comparison to the value of
European literatureâ.14 Authentic human cultures, and the non-capitalist
life philosophy that they invariably enshrine, have always been regarded
as an obstacle by those who would steamroller over everything real and
natural in pursuit of their own wealth and power, as I have described
elsewhere.15 It is not for nothing that the spectacle of modern
capitalism has pitched its philosophical Big Top in the United States of
America. Not only was the cultural identity of the indigenous North
American peoples ruthlessly crushed by the genocidal European invaders,
but those settlers were themselves cut off from the cultures of their
home countries. The rich West African culture of the imported slaves,
including the spiritual practice of voodoo, was also systematically
attacked by the ruling elite. As Angela Davies notes, the slaveocracy
âsought to extinguish the collective cultural memory of black people in
order to confine them to an inferior social spaceâ.16 That process was
to be continued by a new black middle class whose attachment to the
folly of modern capitalism necessitated a rejection of the wisdom of
ancient culture, she explains.
Another attack on a manifestation of this same human wisdom, so
unacceptable both to the power-hungry Christian religion and to the
modern capitalist world which it helped to create, came with the twisted
cruelty of the witch-hunts. It was not just individual women who were
targeted, but, as Vivianne Crowley sets out, âthe remnants of the Old
Religion of Europe, the indigenous Paganism that Christianity had
suppressedâ.17 Traditional cultures, old ways of thinking, cannot be
tolerated by the capitalist system because they fundamentally contradict
the modern world-view it has built up and imposed on contemporary
society, in which the only way forward can be the capitalist way.
A measure of capitalismâs success in this respect can be seen in the way
that, as we noted above, even those who imagine themselves
âanti-capitalistâ still accept the fundamental assumptions of capitalism
and consider it beyond the pale to question the existence of the
industrial world it has manufactured. Too many anti-capitalists and
anarchists also accept another, related, assumption of the modern world
â that any form of spirituality is utter nonsense. There is a close
correlation between anti-industrial philosophy and a spiritual outlook â
so close that it is often difficult to draw a clear line between them.
Gandhiâs anti-industrialism, for instance, was rooted in his Hindu
beliefs. As Prime explains: âEven the planet Earth has a soul, and
therefore Hindus treat the earth with love and respect, considering her
as their mother who gives them life and without whom they would dieâ.18
He adds: âIn the Vedic vision of the world, consciousness pervades the
universe and all within it. A human being, an elephant, a cow, birds,
ants, trees, mountains, rivers and the planet earth itself â all are
consciousâ.19
Satish Kumar tells Prime that whereas Western Civilization considers
human life to be sacred, Hindus have gone much further and applied this
to all life: âTherefore all life forms, not just human beings, must be
revered and respected. This is the reason for being vegetarian, which is
ecological in the deepest sense. Animal life should not be taken for our
own purposes, nor should it be artificially created, as it is in the
West where millions of cattle, pigs and chicken are reared for slaughter
in factory farms. There should be a natural pattern of birth and death
in the forest, on the land, in the air and seaâ.20 The problem in India,
says Prime, is that this spiritual awareness of our belonging to nature
has been deliberately destroyed by the industrial capitalism originally
introduced by the British Empire. âFor nearly two hundred years Indians
have been estranged from their own culture by English education. They
have been encouraged to think in Western ways and to value the things
that the West values. Their own traditional values have been
marginalized. In many cases they no longer know what those values were
or why they were held because those things are no longer taughtâ.21
Across the world, then, humankind has been deliberately cut off from the
cultural and spiritual beliefs that once informed its thinking, because
these acted as ideological bulwarks against industrial capitalism. It
hardly seems outlandish, therefore, to suggest that opponents of
industrial capitalism might do well to revisit those beliefs in search
of inspiration. It is certainly the case that a narrowly political level
of struggle will not suffice to combat the all-pervasive totality of the
capitalist system, which has progressively built up ideological defences
which extend further and further into our collective thinking, imposing
limits which are now so deeply ingrained and widely accepted that they
appear self-evident.22 We need to go much deeper, much further, in our
quest for the roots of meaningful resistance. As Schumacher says: âWe
are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore
be metaphysicalâ.23
In searching for these ancient anti-capitalist beliefs we should not be
restricted by the specific form that these might have taken in the past
and the now-obsolete socially-conservative attitudes with which they
might have become historically associated, such as mysogeny, homophobia
or the caste system. It is, instead, the inner content of these
traditions which we must seek and in this context any specific genuine
path we take will end up leading us to the same spiritual centre. In
Small is Beautiful, Schumacher imagines an alternative economic system
based on Buddhism, but he insists: âThe choice of Buddhism for this
purpose is purely incidental; the teachings of Christianity, Islam or
Judaism could have been used just as well as those of any other of the
great Eastern traditionsâ.24 Schumacher follows the likes of Adolf
Bastian, René Guénon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in identifying what
Joseph Campbell describes as âthe fundamental unity of the spiritual
history of mankindâ.25 The theory here is that beneath the level of
specific cultures and practices (Völkergedanken in Bastianâs terms),
there are elementary ideas (Elementargedanken) that are universal to
humanity.26 At the core of this universal thinking is the idea of a
natural state of harmony and order, explains Campbell: âThe Egyptian
term for this universal order was Maâat; in India it is Dharma; and in
China, Taoâ.27 There is also emphasis, in Schumacherâs words, on âthe
hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted
primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the
spiritualâ28 or âthe pretence that everything has a price or, in other
words, that money is the highest of all valuesâ.29 Instead there is the
conviction that âNature is sacred, all life is sacred, the whole earth
is sacredâ and that natural harmony, Sanatan Dharma, has been disrupted
by modernity: âWestern industrial life has become desacralizedâ.30
In his exploration of the differences between sacred and desacralised
ways of thinking, Mircea Eliade stresses the way that the creation of
âsacredâ places and âsacredâ occasions opens up our experience of life
beyond the mundane.31 Connections are made between different levels of
existence and the historical linear time within which we are normally
trapped is interrupted by our immersion in a time-outside-of-time, a
kind of eternity. A holistic universe is revealed to us by âsacredâ
thinking, a multi-dimensional reality whose macrocosms and microcosms
interact and interrelate on every conceivable level.
This idea of âlevelsâ is something which is particularly unacceptable to
modern industrial thinking, not least because such an approach
inevitably places its own supreme values â money, material possessions,
production, quantity â at the very lowest level of human activity.
Writes Schumacher: âWhile traditional wisdom has always presented the
world as a three-dimensional structure, where it was not only meaningful
but of essential importance to distinguish always and everywhere between
âhigherâ and âlowerâ things and Levels of Being, the new thinking strove
with determination, not to say fanaticism, to get rid of the vertical
dimension. How could one obtain clear and precise ideas about such
qualitative notions as âhigherâ or âlowerâ? Was it not the most urgent
task of reason to put into their place quantitative measurements?â32 The
very terms âhigherâ and âlowerâ are considered unacceptable in certain
left-wing intellectual circles today, as they are seen to in some way
reflect a hierarchical social approach and therefore to be elitist. This
is, of course, a serious misunderstanding â although any attempt to
explain that it is so because the terms do not belong to the
socio-political level of reality is doomed to failure since the argument
cannot be made without reference to something (ie: a level) that is
deemed not to exist by those subscribing to this approach!
The switch into a âhigherâ way of thinking could be seen as a kind of
sudden departure from the one-dimensionality of everyday practical
thinking, not dissimilar to the creative mould-breaking âlateral
thinkingâ promoted by Edward de Bono. In some ways we might regard
âhigherâ as indicating âmore abstractâ and, at the same time, âmore
significantâ, because it is dealing with general principles with a
permanent universal application rather than specific instances on a
provisional physical plane. The âhigherâ mode of thought is more
distanced from the individualâs daily life, being a sort of zooming-out
from the issues that normally concern us. But paradoxically it is also
closer to the core of the individual and is thus at the same time a
zooming-in. Explaining the quasi-universal use of the terminology,
Schumacher explains: ââHigherâ always means and implies âmore innerâ,
âmore interiorâ, âdeeperâ, âmore intimateâ; while âlowerâ means and
implies âmore outerâ, âmore externalâ, âshallowerâ, âless intimateâ.
This synonymity can be found in many languages, perhaps in all of
themâ.33
The fruits of this âhigherâ thinking are not the pragmatic
considerations of the âlowerâ thought-processes, but something much more
exciting â ideas! Writes Schumacher: âIdeas produce insight and
understanding and the world of ideas lies within us. The truth of ideas
cannot be seen by the senses but only by that special instrument
sometimes referred to as âthe eye of the heartâ which, in a mysterious
way, has the power of recognising truth when confronted with itâ.34 He
argues: âOnly through the âheartâ can contact be made with the higher
grades of significance and Levels of Being. For anyone wedded to the
materialistic scientism of the modern age it will be impossible to
understand what this means... He insists that truth can be discovered
only by means of the brain, which is situated in the head and not the
heart. All of this means that âunderstanding with oneâs heartâ is to him
a meaningless collection of words... For him, in other words, higher
levels of reality simply do not exist, because his faith excludes the
possibility of their existenceâ.35
The concept of the âheartâ as a neglected organ-of-thought is related to
the notion of an unconscious mind, both individual and collective, whose
existence and significance has been stifled throughout the centuries by
the life-denying dogmas of both organised religion and modern industrial
society. âChristianity can be seen as the triumph of the conscious mind
over the realm of Nature,â writes Crowley from her pagan perspective,
for instance. âThe Gods were no longer to be seen as within Nature, but
outside it. Nature was no longer sacred and holy, but the creation of a
transcendent father (without the mother). Our conscious minds learned to
suppress the unconscious and keep it at bayâ.36 For the alchemist
tradition, says Johannes Fabricius, the search for treasures hidden deep
inside the Earth is âa symbol for their penetration of the âcrustâ of
consciousness and for their discovery of the treasure hidden beneath it
in the darkness of the unconsciousâ.37 Martin Lings explains that this
same idea is also significant in Islamic thought and that âthe Quranic
perspective agrees with that of the whole ancient world, both of East
and of West, in attributing vision to the heart and in using this word
to indicate not only the bodily organ of that name but also what this
corporeal centre gives access to, namely the centre of the soul, which
itself is the gateway to a higher âheartâ, namely the Spiritâ.38
The heart, or the unconscious, is the organ of our human spirituality,
whose âhigherâ taste and perspective allows us to look down with disdain
on the plastic-wrapped fast-food meal of appearance, money and
possessions served up to us at the uninspiring philosophical banquet of
industrial-capitalist thought. This spirituality will never be
destroyed. It is a quality that survives deep within us and is reborn
with each new generation. However, for those who have to grow up in the
deadness of the modern world, whose so-called âreligionsâ are mostly
nothing more than controlling constructs of the dominant socio-economic
system,39 it is difficult to find a framework in which to express this
inherent spirituality. We search for meaning, search for magical
experiences, search for a deeper and more vibrant sense of being. But,
thanks to the narrow and spirit-denying orthodoxies of the ideological
thought police who patrol the boundaries of permissible opinion, this
yearning is kept apart from any political engagement. We are forbidden
from making the crucial connection between our thwarted desire to really
live and the need to shake off the physical and mental shackles of
industrial capitalism. We are warned off listening to our hearts â âthe
faculty of direct spiritual (or intellectual) visionâ40 â and are thus
steered away from unleashing the metaphysical uprising that could set
human beings free to be everything they have the potential to be.
This uprising, this âmetanoiaâ41 or âGreat Turningâ,42 will take place
on the vibrant âhigherâ level of being whose existence is denied by the
defenders of monochromatic industrial flatness: a level of being on
which we are not merely isolated individual units, but vital
manifestations of organic collective nature and flashing glints in the
eye of the eternal cosmos. This does not mean that it will not also take
place on the everyday social level â and the depth of the anarchist
vision makes it particularly capable of bridging these levels, I have
argued elsewhere43 â but it cannot succeed if it only unfolds on what is
regarded as the âpoliticalâ plane. We must rediscover our belonging to
the living universe of which we will always be part, rediscover the
ancient wisdom which told of us of this belonging, understand the ways
in which this belonging has been hidden from us by an industrial
death-dogma which has even contaminated ideologies which seem to preach
resistance. That way, when our metaphysical tunnel reaches the final
perimeter wall of the industrial capitalist prison, we will have dug
deep enough to pass underneath its confining ideological concrete and
finally escape to the glorious freedom of Sanatan Dharma, the natural
harmony that is the ultimate aim of genuine anarchism.
The slogan âthink globally, act locallyâ, sometimes attributed to Raoul
Vaneigem,1 has become something of a cliché since it became common in
the environmental movement in the 1970s. But it nicely reverses the
advice handed out by a capitalist system which recommends we think only
of ourselves and our immediate surroundings and, at the same time, step
back with a sense of disempowered resignation from the apparent
impossibility of ever âchanging the worldâ. And it provides us with a
useful concept of transcending the limits of a false âeither/orâ choice
in order to act simultaneously in two different modes. The phrase might
usefully be expanded beyond the day-to-day level to guide us along the
difficult existential path that we all have to tread. The âgloballyâ
could be extended outwards to the universal and the âlocallyâ extended
inwards to the individual vantage point, leaving us with âthink
objectively, act subjectivelyâ. And here I will be suggesting that it is
just this combination we need to embrace so that we can be fully and
actively human â an awareness of the objective reality of the world
around us and a necessary subjectivity which provides the means to help
shape it.
To this effect, I would like to begin by considering the standard
definition of the word âuniverseâ. My dictionary says that it describes
âall existing matter, energy and spaceâ. The fact that the universe is
defined specifically in this way poses questions about what the
dictionary writers mean by the term. No matter how inclusive that
definition initially appears to be, it leaves open the potential for
exclusion, for non-accepted material to be left outside of its imagined
limits. And this rules out all-inclusivity. âA defined One would not be
the One-Absoluteâ,2 as the philosopher Plotinus observes. We are left to
wonder about the elements that lie outside their definition. Can an
idea, for instance, be labelled as matter, energy or space? Perhaps if
it is being thought by someone, it could arguably be regarded as a
property of their physical mind, but the idea itself remains beyond
physical definition. And how about clearly non-personal abstract
concepts, like number? The existence of numbers (as opposed to the
figures representing them, which are only human-constructed symbols) is
real on an abstract level. The existence of the number 13 does not
depend on the existence of 13 apples or 13 pencils. The fact that apples
or pencils can be used to illustrate the number 13 indicates that the
dependence is, in fact, the other way round. The abstract â13â is a
pre-condition for the physical existence of 13 apples, pencils or
anything else. Again, it could be argued that numbers do exist in the
minds of actual people, and thus could be said to arise from physical
existence. But that is not the seat of their existence. They do not need
to actually be âthoughtâ â let alone written down or represented by
actual objects â in order to exist. If, somehow, every living being
managed to banish the idea of the number 13 from their heads, would 12
items plus another one result in anything other than 13?
Numbers are neither matter, energy nor space but are still very much
part of the make-up of the universe. Plotinus regarded them as
constituting, along with ideas, something he termed âthe
Intellectual-Principleâ.3 The same applies to other abstracts, such as
capacities and possibilities. The capacity of things in the universe to
possess spatial dimensions, for example, is undeniably real. If they did
not have that capacity, they could not exist on the physical plane.
Possibilities are also real. There must necessarily be the possibility
of something happening in order for it to happen. As Ananda K.
Coomaraswamy notes: âThe impossible never happens; what happens is
always the realisation of a possibilityâ.4 If there were no
possibilities, there would be no existence, nothing would ever happen.
And yet capacities and possibilities are excluded from the âofficialâ
definition of the universe.
If I were to throw a party, announce that âeveryoneâ was invited, and
then proceed to list all the kinds of people that this term included
(friends, relatives, neighbours), I would raise the suspicion that I
was, in fact, trying to exclude one or more persons who would slip
through the net of my definition of âeveryoneâ. If I really meant
âeveryoneâ, I would simply say âeveryoneâ without qualification. In the
same way, the term âuniverseâ does not mean âall that there isâ if it is
limited in any way. By using the term âuniverseâ but subtly excluding
anything that does not fit into their idea of reality (namely âexisting
matter, energy and spaceâ), those who share the worldview of the
dictionary-writers are presenting a so-called âuniverseâ that is not
what it appears to be.
They are also leaving a gaping logic-hole in our potential
understanding. If numbers do not actually exist within the universe,
where do they exist? Likewise with the capacity to be or do something
and the possibility of something happening. How can any part of the
universe be said to have the capacity or possibility of doing anything
at all, if capacities and possibilities are not part of the universe?
Are these abstracts seen as existing in some realm of abstraction
outside the defined limits of the universe? What are the implications of
this? A universe that has to allow for the possibility of something
beyond itself? A universe with borders?
If so, it is also a universe with disputed borders. The separation of
ânon-existentâ principles, or abstracts, from the âexistentâ things they
describe causes further logical difficulties. When abstracts such as
number or possibility become physically real (such as when there are 13
apples rather than just the concept of â13â) do they suddenly, then,
spring into the universe without warning? Is their origin considered to
come from beyond the universe? Or are they somehow seen as being created
by the physical level on which they are represented? Does this
back-to-front point of view suggest that the existence of 13 apples
calls into being, retrospectively (as it were) and from out of nowhere,
the possibility of â13â? There is a certain dishonesty here, which can
be traced back to the use of the word âuniverseâ â or, as far as my
hypothetical party goes, the word âeveryoneâ. Both words, through their
root meanings (âuniverseâ means âall togetherâ) imply complete
inclusivity but, as we have seen, this is not the case. Using the words
as if they meant what they appear to mean, while knowing that the
fullness of the term is limited, is an act of deception. By announcing
that I am inviting âeveryoneâ to my party and then subtly limiting the
definition of âeveryoneâ to potentially exclude someone who is not
welcome, I am trying to appear to be something that I am not. In
forcibly evicting abstracts from their physical-plane âuniverseâ, the
dictionary-writers and their allies are simply restating their personal
belief that these abstracts do not exist in themselves, that reality is
limited to the purely physical (âmatter, energy and spaceâ). Their use
and limited definition of the universe is therefore a disguised
ideological manoeuvre, designed to exclude certain ways of seeing
existence that do not meet with their approval, in the same way that my
use and limited definition of the word âeveryoneâ is an exclusion of
certain people who do not meet with my approval, disguised as
all-embracing generosity.
Needless to say, I am not here suggesting that the actual writers of the
dictionary, or any other specific texts, are deliberately conspiring to
impose this limited definition of âuniverseâ upon us. Their attitude is
merely part of the culture of the moment, the contemporary world-view
which shapes and limits our thinking, and the potential for our
thinking, on so many levels. It is part of the modern blindness. The
ârationalâ view of the world expressed by the dictionary definition
arises from what is now a rather old-fashioned âscientificâ outlook.
This outlook is the religion of the industrial era and has necessarily
become dominant in our culture in order to internally justify the way
our civilization functions. Part of any dogma is the self-defensive
aspect that insists that this dogma is an unquestionable truth and here
the modern industrial dogma is no exception. The movement of society
away from the appreciation of abstract ideas or principles, and towards
a limited, purely physical, definition of reality is presented as
movement towards enlightenment. Contingent reality, the way things are
right here and now under our noses, is presented as the only reality.
The 13 apples are real and the number 13 is merely descriptive of that
reality. There is no such thing as the essential reality of something.
There are no universal principles beneath the surface of physical
reality. Human beings are nothing more than flesh-and-blood machines,
whose behaviour is âconstructedâ and can be âprogrammedâ into them.
There is no such thing as âspiritâ, because it cannot be scientifically
identified or measured. The natural world is not a living being, but a
resource to be exploited. The only possible world is the one we live in.
Industrial civilization is the only destination at which humankind could
ever have arrived. The continuation of that industrial civilization is
the only possible future open to us. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool
or charlatan. Nobody who challenges the fundaments of the dogma can be
taken seriously. Indeed, nobody who calls the dogma âa dogmaâ can be
taken seriously, for there has never been a dogma which calls itself
such, or could tolerate being identified as such.
It is strange how blinded people can be to the existence of a dogmatic
intellectual culture, when they themselves form part of it.5 Suppose we
lived in a society which believed, for instance, that before human
beings are born, they enjoy a kind of pre-existence as bees. That whole
culture would be built around honouring bees, making sure they were
happy, examining the behaviour of bees for portents of future human
lives to come, identifying individual bees who might soon become the
hoped-for child of a human couple. Literature, art, poetry, music â all
would be packed with references to bees in a way that to our eyes would
seem insane. And yet, for members of that society, the bee-obsession
would not only not seem insane, but would not even be seen to exist.
âWhat bee âobsessionâ? Thatâs just the way things areâ. Their language
would, moreover, make it impossible to easily distinguish between bees
as physical living insects and bees as the custodians of future human
souls. To challenge the whole bee theory would not only be unthinkable
heresy but also virtually impossible, as it would be taken as claiming
that bees themselves did not exist.
In my writing, I have often tried to challenge the underlying dogma of
contemporary industrial civilization â or at least to hurl a few pebbles
of defiance in its general direction. I have discovered that it is very
difficult to do so within the restrictions imposed by the language of
that civilization, which means too much time and energy has to be spent
on justifying or deconstructing the meanings of words. The way that the
culture appropriates and redefines the symbols of our vocabulary to
reflect its own ideological assumptions makes it difficult to pull clear
of its gravitational field and express ideas which have no place within
its dogma. This is very much the case with my intention here to go
beyond the purely terrestrial sphere and discuss the universe. It is
hard to do so by using an understanding of the universe that is confined
to the physical plane and which, moreover, denies the existence of any
other plane. I am therefore going to avoid the need to continually
explain my own broader definition of the universe by using instead the
term The Universe, with capital letters. And what do I mean by it?
Simply âall there isâ, âall togetherâ, âeverythingâ. There is nothing
outside The Universe. The Universe is itself the definition of
all-inclusivity.6
Here are two statements about objective truth. 1. It is impossible for
us to be completely objective about the truth. 2. There is such a thing
as completely objective truth. Why is it impossible for us to be
completely objective? The problem is that, as scientists have
demonstrated, it is impossible to be present in a system â even as a
mere observer â and to be objective about what takes place within it. If
The Universe is a system in which we are present, then we cannot be
objective about anything that happens in The Universe. This is not
difficult to grasp and needs no further explanation. But what about the
second statement, that there is such a thing as objective truth? This is
also easy to understand, but confusion sometimes arises when people
mistakenly imagine that it is disproved by the first statement. This is
not logically so. It does not follow that because we cannot ascertain
the nature of an objective truth, then that objective truth does not
exist. A goldfish in a bowl will never be able to look at the bowl, and
at himself swimming around the bowl, and gain an objective impression of
it. But the bowl, containing the goldfish, exists nonetheless.
Different historians describing the same episode will all present
different, subjective, versions of the truth. No matter how hard they
try to be completely objective, they cannot succeed. Two former lovers
describing the break-up of their relationship will do so in different
ways â maybe radically different, maybe just subtly so. That is
inevitable, because each experienced what happened from their own
subjective vantage point. Any âoutsideâ account can only be dependent on
various subjective versions, so objectivity is not possible there
either. In both these cases it is perhaps unclear, at first glance, as
to whether there is even an objective truth that could be described.
Neither the nuances and complications of the social processes described
by historians, nor the unspoken tensions and ever-twisting emotions that
make up human relationships form obvious objective realities in the
manner of a goldfish bowl. The objective truth behind what happens
between people is something that could probably never be fully described
with the limited tools of language, even if objectivity were magically
made possible. But it is still there. Its existence does not depend on
the ability of some theoretical outside agent to describe it in all its
shifting detail and complexity.7
An actual sequence of events did occur in order to create the historical
event or the relationship break-up. Actual objective truth does exist,
even though it remains inaccessible to us. It is not truth that is
subjective, just our experience of it. The ultimate objective truth is
that there is such a thing as The Universe and that it embraces
everything, without exception. This means, of course, that we are part
of The Universe â not just present within it, but part of it. We are
nothing else but The Universe. Our essence is entirely of The Universe.
We are all twigs on the same tree, limbs on the same universal body. If
we use modelling clay to make the figure of a little man, does the clay
stop being clay when it forms a shape? Does it turn into âthe figure of
a little manâ? If so, does it miraculously become mere clay again when
the figure is rolled up and added back into the rest of the clay? Or is
it always clay, but just taking on various temporary forms?8 On the
other hand, although our essence is of The Universe, our particular form
is human and we have to adopt human subjectivity in order to live. The
little clay man still takes on the shape of a man, even though he is
made of clay. We have to inhabit our bodies. We have to eat, drink,
defecate, exercise, wash and so on. We have to be ourselves in order to
be human beings. We have to think inside our own heads, speak through
our own mouths.
This is not a problem for us â thatâs what we do all the time without
thinking about it. We live our human lives with a necessary subjectivity
which is built into our bodies. We only see and hear what is around us
(even if that consists of artificial images from elsewhere). We can only
touch that which is within physical reach.
Imagine if we werenât limited in that way. Imagine, for example, that
our universal essence allowed us to see through all the eyes of the
human species at once. What a dream, to be able to see everything that
every other human being could see, all the time, everywhere on the
planet! And yet, of course, what a nightmare as well. My brain would be
overwhelmed by the visual input of an entire species, billions of exotic
faces and places streaming simultaneously into my head. How could I
focus on chopping up a cabbage for my dinner? We are all limited by the
physical form we take. That is what each of us is â a specific physical
limitation of The Universe. And part of that necessary limitation is our
subjectivity.
I have been using the words âessenceâ and âessentialâ and I am aware
that this requires some explanation, if only because âessentialismâ is
sometimes deployed as a term of abuse. The kind of âessenceâ that people
usually take exception to exists on a purely social or political level.
It is, as I set out elsewhere in this book, a fake definition of essence
which sets out to limit and constrain human potential within a certain
pre-ordained social framework. I am not using the idea in this way at
all and I am very wary of the use of the term âessenceâ in relation to
any sub-categories within humanity. However, I would talk about
essential human nature. The definition of a human being is clear and
uncontroversial and it follows that there are certain essential
qualities that go along with being human. Obviously this does not mean
that all human beings are identical, merely that they share a certain
essence, even if that essence takes the form of a capacity to be or do
something, rather than the physical reality of being or having done
something.
Our identity as human beings is not just a word or label attached to us
by our culture, but an objective reality, albeit one not fully
describable from the subjective point of view in which each of us is
confined. We might look at a caterpillar and conclude that its essence
relates to its caterpillar-qualities. However, when it turns into a
butterfly, its essence would appear to have changed. In fact,
objectively, the essence of the creature in question includes all the
stages of its existence. This includes its potential, in that the
butterfly-quality still forms part of its essence while it is at the
caterpillar stage. This remains the case even if it is, for instance,
eaten by a bird before it can ever become a butterfly. It does not
actually need to become a butterfly in order for it to contain the
essence of butterflyness. As mentioned above, some thinkers have
objected to the idea of essential reality on the basis that it defines
and restricts the potential of the thing in question. But that is to
confuse an externally-imposed definition or restriction with a quality
that is contained within. The objective essence of a thing, which exists
regardless of whether it is ever named or alluded to, is the wholeness
of its potential being. Its essence is necessarily broader and higher
and deeper than the physical form its existence will take, and so cannot
in any way restrict that existence. Instead, its actual existence will
always inevitably be a restriction of the full potential available
within its essence. The actual reality of the existence of the
caterpillar eaten by a bird is more limited than the full
butterfly-potential which it possesses in its essence.
This limitation which is always implied in a particular existence also
applies, of course, to our ultimate essence as an aspect of The
Universe. Critics of metaphysical essentialism have therefore missed the
point if they imagine that it is the idea of essence per se that is a
restriction or a limitation. Instead, it is the movement away from the
ultimate essence towards particular essence and physical form that
limits potential. Our ultimate essence is unlimited: it is the necessary
subjectivity of our existence that constrains us within certain
boundaries.
While subjectivity underlies all human experience, it does not represent
the core of our existence. That core resides, as we have seen, in the
objectively-authentic and all-inclusive Universe. So, while our everyday
existence proceeds from a starting point of subjectivity, this cannot be
the case on a metaphysical level. There we must start from our essential
belonging to The Universe, The Whole, from which all else is a
contingent derivation, a temporary blossoming. This metaphysical
knowledge or gnosis is not necessarily easily achieved. In some ways our
belonging to The Universe in this way seems obvious and in other ways
unthinkable. Yes, humankind must be a part of The Universe, which must
logically be the seat of our ultimate existence. Of course, we cannot
really be âindependentâ or âseparateâ. And yet, there is something
disturbing about the idea that humanity is nothing more than a passing
and localised form that The Universe has taken. That thought makes us
feel even more uneasy when we apply it to our individual existence and
see that we are, in turn, merely a tiny part of the human species that
is merely a tiny part of The Universe. We feel that our own
sense-of-life exists within us, comes from within us, so how can we be
simply a part of something so much bigger? Rationally, we might
understand that although our form is individual, the stuff of which we
are made is of humankind, of the planetary organism and of The Universe.
But when we focus that understanding on our own selves and conclude that
we (yes, you!) do not actually exist as individuals in the way we think
we do, then things become more difficult for us to cope with.
Our primary self-identification as individuals is deeply embedded in
contemporary industrial culture and applies even on the social, rather
than metaphysical plane. While people may feel some sense of belonging
to a community, or to the human species, they generally do not regard
themselves as being part of that broader entity. Indeed, they often
react angrily against any such suggestion, since a misunderstanding has
developed, in which considering oneself to be a part of a larger entity
is seen as a surrender of individuality and freedom. However, as I have
argued elsewhere,9 this stems from a broader misunderstanding of freedom
itself, and of the symbiotic relationship that it enjoys with
responsibility. The individual is not âlostâ or âdevaluedâ by being part
of a whole, but instead plays the vital role of representing the whole,
of acting for the whole, of bearing the burden of actual physical
existence on the behalf of a more abstract collective entity. A
community cannot exist without the individuals that make it up. It is
dependent on the individuals that make it up, even though its collective
level of existence transcends that of any particular individual. When
something is dependent on you, the individual, this lends you a weight,
a responsibility, which is at the same time your freedom to participate
in that entity. The assumption of the responsibility of being part of a
community or species is the assumption of true individuality. The
realisation of individuality is rooted in the acceptance of
responsibility, the acceptance of oneâs own reality and of the need to
act on and through that reality.
The same thinking applies on a more abstract level, the âspiritualâ one
in which an individual becomes aware that the ultimate source of their
consciousness lies beyond them, that the prism of individual
self-awareness merely refracts the existential âlightâ of the organic
Universe. Also here, people resent the idea that their individual
freedom might in some way be compromised by the idea of being part of a
greater whole, The Universe. Having seen the way that organised
religions have distorted this spiritual understanding into a demand for
âobedienceâ to institutions supposedly representing the separate âGodâ
which they substitute for an all-embracing Universe, they imagine that
abandoning the certainty of separate individual existence would also
mean abandoning individual validity. Again, this is not so. On the
contrary, the importance of the individual as a limited manifestation of
the Whole could hardly be greater! Each of us is the whole Universe
itself, but condensed and channelled, through necessary subjectivity,
into a specific physical form with a specific sense of existence. This
is how The Universe actually manifests itself, exists, on a real and
specific level â through its physical parts, including us.
A possible objection springs to mind: if this metaphysical realisation
is so hard to come by, does this not indicate that human beings are not
supposed to be aware that the separateness of their individual existence
is ultimately an illusion? Does that term ânecessary subjectivityâ not
mean, perhaps, that it is necessary for us to stay within our
subjectivity and to not bother ourselves with ideas of universal
wholeness or objective truth which we are not equipped to fully
understand? Isnât our role, in fact, dependent on not understanding that
our ultimate being is universal? Arenât we meant to simply carry on
being human beings, in our necessarily subjective way, in the same
manner that trees carry on being trees, worms carry on being worms,
seagulls carry on being seagulls? In what way would an awareness of the
limits of our own subjectivity help us live it out in all its necessity?
Wouldnât it, in fact, impede it, get in its way, interfere with the
specific role that we have to play within The Universe, the specific
responsibilities that we carry?
My answer is that, on the contrary, to live the full potential of a
human being necessarily involves an awareness of the limits of our own
subjectivity. This is one of the factors that makes us different from
other parts of The Universe. Notice that I do not say this makes us in
any way âsuperiorâ â what meaning can âinferiorâ or âsuperiorâ have when
we are talking about the diverse parts of one living thing? Is a birdâs
beak âsuperiorâ to its wings? Are the roots of an oak tree âinferiorâ to
its leaves? Everything has its own nature and it is in the nature of
human beings to have the capacity to rise up out of their necessary
subjectivity from time to time and take a broader view of existence. How
can we know if the same isnât true of other creatures? I can well
imagine that the swallow, as well as being very much swallow, is also
infused with a sense of being part of the air, the sunshine, the
life-system that provides the insects on which it feeds. But human
beings have, nevertheless, their own particularly human way of feeling,
and thinking, their unity with the Whole. Or at least they have the
capacity for this feeling. If that capacity is not activated, not
realised, this is not an instance of a human being merely being human
and of going about their human business in a necessarily subjective way,
naturally oblivious of any wider picture. Instead, it is an instance of
a human being failing to fulfil their capacity, their potential, and
going about their subjective daily business in a way that would better
be described as less-than-human, for it in no way reflects the fullness
of human essence. A human being who fails to transcend the subjective
level of reality is like a caterpillar which never becomes the butterfly
that is part of its essence. And the tragedy is made worse by the fact
that it is not a hungry bird that thwarts this potential, but a blockage
within humankind itself.
There are clear adverse consequences to individualsâ lack of a sense of
belonging to community or species â a loss of social responsibility,
little empathy with others, an absence of community spirit, a general
disassociation from the interests of humanity as a whole. In the same
way, there are adverse consequences to our unawareness of our
consciousnessâs source in universal rather than individual existence. We
lose our connection to nature, for instance, and lose a sense of meaning
in our existence, a sense of belonging to something much bigger than
ourselves. We also suffer from the fear of death. We generally assume
that our sense of âbeing aliveâ is something that is linked to our
specific individuality. It miraculously appeared in a puff of
existential smoke at the moment of our conception or birth (or at some
unspecified point in between â this is never very clear!) and will
remain with us until our demise. What happens next is a matter of
controversy. Various religious dogmas suggest that this individual
sense-of-being continues beyond death. For those within those cultures
who find these theories unbelievable, the only alternative seems to be
to conclude that there is no further sense-of-being and that the
individual is consigned to the void of non-existence. This is a chilling
prospect. The idea of not existing at all, not even on the level of
non-awareness, the idea that not only will everything that you have ever
known, experienced, thought, felt or dreamed no longer exist, but that
even the deepest flicker of you-ness at your innermost core will have
been extinguished, is difficult to take on board.
The absolute nothingness at the heart of this prospect is enough to make
you conclude that life, in that context, is nothing other than absurd, a
kind of cosmic joke. The gnawing awareness of that ever-approaching
oblivion will forever be present in the back of your mind as you live
out your life. Perhaps, to escape this shadow of fear, you will plunge
yourself into activities that take your mind elsewhere, that distract
you from this dreadful ârealityâ. What a way to live! What a negative
foundation for an existence! And yet, what an unnecessary burden to
carry! There is no need to believe in the simplistic religious notions
of life-after-death to escape the horror of the awaiting vacuum. If you
can understand that our ultimate essence is in The Universe â that The
Universe is a living entity of which are simply a part â then you can
understand that your sense-of-being is not tied to your individual
existence at all, but pre-dates it and will outlive it. This
sense-of-being is the spiritual sap which feeds the branches, twigs and
leaves of the tree of universal life. The leaf may fall but the sap
still flows. It is this sap which feels, which is, inside us. Our
necessary subjectivity enables us to function on a day-to-day basis, but
it also hides from us, most of the time, our ultimate reality. Our
ultimate reality lives on after our individual death and therefore our
individual death will not be the absolute void and darkness that we
fear, but something more akin to a withdrawal from the specific, a
pulling back of the existential focus from the lens of our individual
life to the broader view.
It is not so much extinction that awaits us, but diffusion. Diffusion
not into darkness, but into the light of the living Universe. Our
individual death will not lead to non-being, but to continued being on a
level which has always been there, but which maybe has not been a part
of our self-definition. When the sun shines and the sky is blue we
cannot see the stars. But they are always there. Darkness falls on our
particular part of the planet and we are able us to see the vast reality
of the cosmos that surrounds us. When the sun has risen again, and the
curtain of the sky is once more pulled shut, do we forget that the stars
and planets are out there? Do we claim that because we cannot see them,
they do not exist? There are those who talk about the being of the
individual as the fundamental reality and in saying this they imagine
that they are in opposition to the idea of essence. But they are not!
Because the being of the individual is the being of The Universe. When
the individual asserts to themself the reality of their existence, this
is The Universe speaking to itself, via the restricted channel of this
individual. All being flows from the essence of The Universe. How can it
be otherwise if we have defined The Universe as absolutely everything,
without exception?
We have arrived back at the two statements cited earlier. 1. It is
impossible for us to be completely objective about the truth. 2. There
is such a thing as completely objective truth. There is no
contradiction. The subjectivity of individual being, and sense-of-being,
is an aspect of the overall objective truth of The Universe. The
Universe includes everything. This (obviously) includes us. Therefore
our ultimate being and essence are of The Universe. As a consequence,
our being does not arise from merely-individual existence and our
merely-individual death will not entail the end of that being. Failure
to understand the above insight amounts to failure to understand the
fundaments of our existence within The Universe. And yet, this lack of
understanding is rampant within contemporary culture to the extent that
it is those possessing the understanding who are regarded as straying
from the norm.
It is worth speculating a little as to why this might be the case, as to
why metaphysical attempts to transcend subjectivity â which are
sometimes termed âspiritualityâ â are so often derided. The reasons seem
to me to be very complex and to be intertwined with the development of
the society in which we currently live. I say âintertwinedâ because it
is not always clear what comes first â the social forces which repress
âspiritualâ belonging in their own interests or the lack of âspiritualâ
belonging which allows the interests of these social forces to
predominate. A common feature of these reasons also seems to be a form
of self-concealment which has enabled them to avoid detection and
reversal. For instance, the discrediting of the idea of âspiritualityâ
as I define it â an urge to surpass subjectivity and connect with
universal levels of reality â can be partly blamed on religion. The
natural soaring of the human spirit, its reaching-out beyond the narrow
limits of individual self, is corralled into a different set of narrow
limits by religious dogma. There are no greater enemies of true
spirituality than organised religions such as the Roman Catholic
Church.10 While movements towards spirituality can occur within
religions (Sufism within Islam, for instance) they are often crushed by
the forces of religious anti-spirituality. The narrow unspirituality of
religion repels people with the greatest sense of genuine spirituality.
Religionâs claims to represent spirituality succeed in repelling these
people from the very idea of spirituality, which would otherwise have
attracted them. Things are made even worse by opponents of religion who
dismiss spirituality as a disguised form of religion. At the same time,
the word âspiritualityâ is used by other people to describe something
that falls short of true spirituality, that is in fact a kind of vapid
sentimentality dressed up in quasi-spiritual clothing. The emptying-out
from the word âspiritualityâ of any authentic meaning makes its true
essence almost invisible to us. We are not even aware of the potential
existence of this authentic spirituality, so how can we be aware that it
is something from which we have been largely separated?
Another example of self-concealment by the ideological forces which
repress genuine spirituality would be their âofficialâ definition of the
universe, discussed earlier. By confining the meaning of âuniverseâ to
the physical plane of existence, they block off the possibility of a
metaphysical approach, forcing the invention of another term (âThe
Universeâ in this instance) with which to express the real and forbidden
content of the word, while not appearing to be doing anything of the
sort. A further example can be seen regarding the manifestation of
spirituality through a connection to nature, which is a stepping stone
between the human level of existence and the awareness of our belonging
to The Universe. This spirituality was not only suppressed by the
hostility of religion, but by the hostility of an increasingly debased
society which saw in the natural world only the means for exploitation
and superficial enrichment. But alongside this open antagonism to
nature-spirituality gradually came concealed varieties. Because nature
was often taken to be brutal and competitive, an attachment to nature
was sometimes taken as an endorsement of all that is lowest in humanity,
as the opposite of an elevating spirituality. Because sometimes the love
of nature, in the face of these trends, later took on an overly
sentimental quality, the love of nature was itself taken as sentimental
or âunrealisticâ. The idea that our belonging to nature is both
spiritual and real became difficult to find and express amidst all the
confusion created by false definitions â and this difficulty itself
became a further means by which the idea was lost from view.
Layer upon layer of assumptions has been built over the original loss of
authentic spirituality, a whole modern pseudo-philosophical language has
been constructed in which it is now impossible to express the banished
ideas. And, following the pattern already identified, this denial
conceals itself by presenting itself as an advance in thought and those
that dissent from its world-view as hopeless relics of a discredited
past. The dogma of âprogressâ dictates that it is considered insane to
search for insight in the works of the great philosophers who were
writing hundreds or thousands of years ago. All thought must be
contained within, and referred back to, a prescribed body of
âup-to-dateâ thinking, whose superiority is apparently ensured merely by
the amount of time that separates it from its predecessors. It fits in
well with the rejection of all notions of essence and meaning to insist
that there are no eternal metaphysical truths that can be rediscovered
and re-described by generation after generation and that only
propositions derived from theories enjoying contemporary intellectual
popularity can be regarded as serious contributions to human thought.
Our understanding of The Universe is always going to be incomplete. It
has to be: we are part of it and necessarily bound to living out our
particular part in it, seeing it through individual eyes and occupying a
specific physical space. Given the absolute scope of The Universe, we
could never in any case hope to come anywhere near describing it. The
Universe would not be The Universe if it could be regarded objectively,
as an object, from âoutsideâ. But our understanding is further obscured,
and to an extent that we often do not understand, by the way that our
limitations also apply to time. If we turn back, for a moment, to the
dictionary definition of the universe (without the capital letters), we
will recall that it spoke of âall existing matter, energy and spaceâ.
There is a secondary implication behind the word âexistingâ here. As
well as referring to a physical existence of some kind, it also implies
an existence in time, in the present. This has to be so, for otherwise
the matter in question would not be seen as âexistingâ in physical terms
either. A dinosaur is not an abstract idea, but a very real and solid
animal. However, would it be spoken of as âexistingâ in current times,
except in the shape of fossilised remains? We may say it âexistedâ in
the past, but the use of this tense shows that we do not regard it as
âexistingâ now. We appear to limit our definition of âexistenceâ to that
which exists at the moment in time in which that definition is being
made. What is our justification for this? It would seem to be based on a
very clear attachment to the exclusive reality of what we call the
âpresentâ. But what is this present? Is it something so absolute that it
can be used as the foundation stone on which to build our whole
conception of what is or isnât real?
In fact, our experience and understanding of time is another aspect of
necessary subjectivity. The same considerations are at play. The fact
that we cannot simultaneously see everything happening in the world does
not mean that all those things are not happening, that all those
billions of other human lives are less real than our own. We are merely
restricted, for practical reasons, to the subjectivity that is part and
parcel of our personal existence. We can only live the one life. In
terms of time, the fact that we can only live in the present does not
mean that the past and future do not exist. How could we live our lives
if we did not experience them from a certain vantage point to the
exclusion of all others? How could I focus on chopping up a cabbage for
my dinner if I could simultaneously see that I hadnât been born yet, the
cabbage didnât yet exist and also that I had already eaten it, grown old
and died?
The whole of a recorded piece of music is already embedded in the groove
of a vinyl record. But we cannot listen to the whole of it at once, in a
glorious split-second explosion of sound. Why not? Because the dimension
of time is part of the reality of music (and indeed of speech). It needs
to exist in time, with temporal extension, in the same way that a
sculpture needs to exist in an actual physical space. When the needle
follows the vinyl groove it reproduces the music in the dimension in
which it makes sense, the dimension of time. Likewise with our lives.
The sense of âthe presentâ that keeps us poised between a constantly
approaching future and a constantly receding past is like the needle on
the record. We need to experience it this way in order to make sense of
it all. That doesnât mean that, objectively speaking, the rest of the
record or the rest of reality cease to exist. All of that is simply
hidden from us by the blinkers of the necessary subjectivity by which we
have to lead our lives. We remain aware of the past and the future, of
course, in the same way that the enjoyment of the record involves a
sense of continuity between what we have just heard and what is still to
come. But in our conscious minds we set them aside from the thing we
call reality. The past is often very real, but we classify our awareness
of it as memories. The future is more obscure, since the needle of our
lives has yet to activate it, but its reality is waiting for us.
Instead of imagining The Universe as a massive cosmic blob of matter,
energy and space we have to picture a blob that also includes what we
think of (from our subjective point of view) as the past and the future.
Against any objection that the dimension of âtimeâ cannot reasonably be
included in the definition of any âthingâ, I would point back to the
example of music and in addition to films, conversations and football
matches. In their full manifestation (rather in terms of a physical
disc, transcript or result) they all extend over a temporal dimension
and yet their integrity as an identifiable âthingâ is not questioned.
There is no subjectivity that confines The Universe, there is no
restriction to the particularity of one specific viewpoint. It does not
merely exist at one point in âtimeâ, at one point on the groove of the
record. It is, itself, the whole record rather than the notes we happen
to be hearing right now. It is the whole piece of music, the subjective
discovery of which, from our particular perspective, we perceive as the
playing of the record, the passing of âtimeâ.
This understanding also, incidentally, helps us to grasp the nature of
âpossibilitiesâ, mentioned earlier as abstract realities denied in the
purely-physical definition of the universe. Possibilities have to exist
before anything can happen. There is the possibility that I will fall
off the weir the next time I try to cross the river. If there was no
possibility, I wouldnât even need to think about where I put my feet. I
could run across with my eyes shut and know that I could never fall off.
However, the possibility of me falling into the river is clearly real.
It exists. But what happens to that possibility, that real possibility,
when it doesnât turn into reality? When I have successfully crossed the
river without any accidents, what becomes of the previous possibility of
me falling? We can now see that possibilities are not really speculative
notions, as they might appear from a subjective viewpoint in time, since
they do not in fact refer to things that âmightâ or âmight notâ happen
in a future yet to be formed. Rather, they are part of the structure by
which the âfutureâ â that is to say, the extension of The Universe in
the dimension regarded by us as the âfutureâ â takes shape. They form
part of the invisible, internal dimensions through which The Universe
exists, like magnitude or quantity. As such, they have no actual content
in themselves. They are principles, frameworks. The âpossibilityâ of
something existing or happening is not a prediction and it is not
negated by the eventuality of that thing not coming into being. It is
merely the means â neutral and waiting to be activated â by which that
thing could happen. The possibility of me falling into the water is an
abstract pre-condition that has to exist if I am to (possibly) fall.
That pre-condition continues to exist regardless of whether or not the
reality is fulfilled. If I do not fall, it does not become
retrospectively impossible for me to have fallen! That possibility
remains, from within the subjectivity of the point before I started to
cross the river.
This last point is important, because it is a reminder of the way that
possibilities, and thus the âfutureâ, remain open from within the
subjectivity of a place in âtimeâ, regardless of the timeless nature of
The Universe. At any particular moment in the subjective reality of
âtimeâ we can never be sure of how the process will continue to unfold.
The idea that The Universe embraces all time â that from its absolute
viewpoint everything is, has and will be happening simultaneously â is
worrying for some lovers of human freedom. It seems to imply that there
is such a thing as immutable destiny, that the future has already been
written and all we can do, as human beings, is live it out with dignity
and acceptance. And yet that is not the case at all. The non-existence
of time is only true from the unique viewpoint of The Universe. It is,
and can never, be true from our own necessarily subjective vantage point
in the midst of time. Moreover, in the same way that we cannot be
objective observers of a Universe of which we are part, we cannot be
objective observers of time passing, of âfateâ unfolding.
We make our own decisions in life, we steer our own course. Everything
that happens to us in our own lives follows on from a choice we have
made. This is not to say that we choose, or deserve, everything that
happens to us. We can accidentally find ourselves in the right place, or
the wrong place, at the right or wrong time. But we will have arrived
there by means of a certain choice we have made at a certain point. It
could be countered that the choices we make, blind and inexplicable as
they often seem, themselves form part of the âfateâ that controls our
lives. We are propelled forward, it might be argued, by invisible and
irresistible forces that guide us along the path that we were always
meant to, that we always had to, follow. From a retrospective personal
point of view, of course, that might appear to be true. Once a thing has
happened, it is fixed and might look as if it had âalwaysâ been going to
happen. From the alternative perspective of a Universe transcending
time, events may also look that way. A process works itself out, lays
itself out within the sequence of time, and seems complete in itself.
How could it ever have been any different? However, both these imagined
perspectives fail to take into account the reality which necessarily
conditions our experiences. They deny the active nature of our
present-tense subjectivity. We do not experience the present as an
âobserverâ, casting our mind back from some point in the future and
watching what is happening with the full knowledge of how it will all
play out. Neither is it somehow possible for us to transcend time
altogether, in the way that The Universe does. We are human beings,
existing on a physical and temporal plane of reality. We experience the
present from the point of view of the present, the stage of the
time-process at which it is being shaped. Our presence-in-the-present
empowers us to participate in the process at the only point at which
that is possible. To retrospectively justify our actions on the basis
that we were simply going along with what âhadâ to be, is to hide from
our own freedom and our own responsibility, to pretend that somehow we
were not âthereâ in a real present in which our presence was a formative
part. It is to deny the important understanding that the future, in the
guise of possibilities, remains open from within the subjectivity of our
place in time. It is to deny that possibilities have a reality, tied to
our time-perspective, and that they necessarily (all âpossibilitiesâ
are, by definition, possible!) have the potential to turn that abstract
reality into a physical one. Most importantly, it is to deny that we, as
human beings present in subjective time, have the power â indeed the
responsibility â to help decide whether or not possible reality becomes
physical reality.
Let us take a hypothetical step back for a moment and ask ourselves why
human beings possess this subjectivity-in-time which means we are always
riding the crest of the breaking wave of reality as it unfolds. We have
seen that it is necessary for our individual daily existence, but is
there more to it than that? Hereâs a related question: as the reality of
the Universe unfolds (within the subjectivity of time), how does it
shape itself? What are the forces at work that allow it take on the form
that it takes? Obviously, it forms itself â as it is, by definition, all
that there is â but what aspect of itself is involved in the formation?
The aspects of The Universe involved in shaping a very time-specific and
particular area of reality will be those most relevant to that area.
Thus in the world of human affairs, that ongoing self-shaping will
naturally be carried out by The Universe by means of human beings. At
first glance, that phrase âby means of human beingsâ might ring alarm
bells. Am I saying that, after all, human beings are not free and
responsible for their own actions but are merely tools of The Universe?
No, because human beings are living parts of The Universe and our
freedom and responsibility are, likewise, aspects of The Universe. If an
individual anarchist describes themself as part of a broader anarchist
movement, this does not mean that they have surrendered their individual
freedom and responsibility. Likewise, that broader anarchist movement
would not be an anarchist movement without the freedom and
responsibility of the individuals out of which it is constituted.
The Universe, in order to be alive, needs living parts. Human beings are
among those living parts (and I only focus on human beings on the
subjective basis that I am human!). In order to live, in order to form
itself, shape itself, it needs those living parts to carry the
responsibility appropriate to their sphere of influence. That is why
they exist, that is what they essentially are â specific and
subjectively-functioning organs of the overall whole. The Universe would
not be The Universe if it had no actual presence on the physical level
of being, if it had no actual presence in the present moment. It needs
to contain the function of subjectivity in order to be able to be
present and to participate in its own self-shaping. We are one of the
ways in which The Universe exists on this physical and time-bound plane.
We are its representatives, as it were, its avatars in this time and
place.
In a metaphorical way, The Universe descends into us in order to act
through us and through our being. It descends in the sense of passing
from an abstract level to a physical one, which is often described as
the passing from a âhigherâ to a âlowerâ level,11 but without any sense
of inferiority or superiority since we are considering different
modes-of-being of one and the same entity. The necessary subjectivity
with which we lead our lives is also the necessary subjectivity with
which The Universe takes on a real form and becomes both present and
active in its own self-shaping. Thus, in a way, we are doubly present in
our own subjective experience. Firstly, we are there as our individual
selves leading our own individual lives. Secondly, we are there as
manifestations of The Universe, of which we all form a living and active
part. There is no contradiction between these two forms of presence â
they are two aspects of the one reality, two sides of the same coin.
There is a problem when we become too immersed in the one aspect and
lose sight of the other. Most commonly, human beings become too attached
to the subjective aspect and cling to their individuality at the expense
of any larger belonging. But it is also possible to err in the other
direction, to retreat from the âillusionsâ of the physical world and
seek reality on a purely spiritual plane. Neither of these is
acceptable. We have to be aware of our supra-individual belonging and at
the same time understand that we have a duty to use our own individual
presence in this world for the benefit of a greater collective interest
â whether that be our community, our species, our planet or an
intangible sense of good. We have to see both sides of the coin at the
same time, by setting it spinning perhaps,12 by living in a state of
permanent oscillation between the knowledge that there is an objective
truth we can never properly know and the determination to lead our own
subjective lives in the best way we can. Infused by the gnosis of our
ultimate belonging to The Universe, our necessary subjectivity is set
free to be real, present and active at a particular place and at a
certain time, to play its part in the self-shaping of history without
the crippling fear of individual death â to joyfully accept the full
responsibility of authentic human existence.
1. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 1, p.
3.
2. Debord, 53, p. 31.
3. Debord, 199, p. 152.
4. Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex: Winter Oak
Press, 2014).
5. Debord, 25, p. 13.
6. John Zerzan, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization (Port Townsend,
WA: Feral House, 2015), p. 97.
7. Zerzan, p. 106.
8. Paracelsus, cit. Patrick RiviĂšre, Paracelse: medicinalchimiste,
âphilosophe par le feuâ (Paris: Ăditions de Vecchi, 2008), p. 97.
9. RiviĂšre, p. 58.
10. Roland Edighoffer, Préface, in Lucien Braun, Paracelse
(Paris-Geneva: Ăditions Slatkine, 1995) p.x.
11. Braun p. 36.
12. Braun pp.158â59.
13. Braun, p. 37.
14. Paracelsus, SĂ€mtliche Werke, VIII, 71, cit. Braun p. 51.
15. RiviĂšre, p. 91.
16. Braun, p. 11.
17. Braun p. 34.
18. Braun p. 31.
19. Braun p. 43.
20. Ibid.
21. Renaud Garcia, La nature de lâentraide: Pierre Kropotkine et les
fondements biologiques de lâanarchisme (Lyon: ENS Ăditions, 2015), p.
16.
22. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Freedom
Press, 1993), p. 73.
23. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and
Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p.
424.
24. François Jarrige, for instance, tells how the anarchisme naturien
which emerged in Paris and elsewhere in France at the end of the 19^(th)
century and start of the 20^(th) century was attacked and sidelined both
by Marxists and by elements within the anarchist movement itself and
eventually disappeared, only to re-emerge in the 21^(st) century in the
form of the anarchist wing of the contemporary décroissance (degrowth)
movement. François Jarrige, Gravelle, Zisly et les anarchistes naturiens
contre la civilisation industrielle (Neuvy-en-Champagne: Ăditions le
passager clandestin, Les Précurseurs de la Décroissance collection,
2016).
25. Braun p. 51.
26. See 2. Denying reality: from nominalism to newthink.
27. See 7. Necessary subjectivity.
28. Braun, pp. 157â58.
29. Braun, pp. 238â39.
30. Braun, pp. 45â46.
1. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1950) p.80. The original UK
title is Nineteen Eighty-Four.
2. Orwell, p. 249.
3. Orwell, p. 265.
4. Orwell, p. 81.
5. Orwell, p. 217.
6. Orwell, p. 278.
7. See JosĂ© Ardillo, Les illusions renouvelables (Paris: LâĂchappĂ©e,
2015).
8. Michael Löwy, Rédemption et utopie: le judaïsme libertaire en Europe
centrale (Paris: Ăditions du Sandre, 2009) p. 40.
9. Gustav Landauer, Weak Statesmen, Weaker People! in Revolution and
Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. by Gabriel Kuhn
(Oakland: PM Press, 2010) p. 214.
10. Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism,
11. Renaud Garcia, Le désert de la critique: Déconstruction et politique
(Paris: LâĂchappĂ©e, 2015).
12. Garcia, p. 117.
13. Ibid.
14. Newman.
15. Ibid.
16. Orwell, p. 310.
17. Orwell, p. 212.
18. Orwell, pp. 50â51.
19. Orwell, pp. 52â3.
20. Orwell, p. 215.
21. Orwell, pp. 261â62.
22. Newman.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False
Coin of our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
1. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p.
31.
2. Rocker, p. 11.
3. Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development (Dorchester: Prism
Press, n.d.) p. 45, cit. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A
History of Anarchism (London: Fontana Press, 1993), p. 320.
4. Craig OâHara, The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise!! (Edinburgh
and San Francisco: AK Press, 1995), p. 8.
5. Rocker, p. 75.
6. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Anarchism, ed. by Barry Pateman (Edinburgh,
Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2005), p. 114.
7. Robin Fox, Encounter with Anthropology (New Brunswick: Transaction,
1991), p. 17.
8. Chomsky, p. 174.
9. Renaud Garcia discusses a definition of anarchy in Kropotkinâs work
that âallows us, for instance, to see in every human society an organism
which lives in a form most appropriately adapted to the environmental
conditions, by means of increasingly active co-operation between its
constituent partsâ. Renaud Garcia, La nature de lâentraide: Pierre
Kropotkine et les fondements biologiques de lâanarchisme (Lyon: ENS
Ăditions, 2015), p. 63.
10. Robin Robertson, Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of
Archetypes (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas Hays, 1995), p. 107.
11. C.G. Jung, Psyche & Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C.G.
Jung, ed. by Violet S. de Laszlo (New York: Anchor Books, 1958), p.
xv-xvi.
12. James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Dallas:
Spring Publications, 1990), p. 3.
13. Jung, p. 108.
14. Jung, p. 293.
15. Robertson, p. 166.
16. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Abingdon: Routledge,
2002) p. 158.
17. Bohm, p. 188.
18. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels
Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (London: Flamingo, 1992) p.
78.
19. Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal
Art (London: Diamond Books, 1994) p. 26.
20. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans
lâĂ©glise, in The Anarchist Reader, ed. by George Woodcock (Glasgow:
Fontana, 1986), p.20.
21. Jung, p. 20.
22. Herbert Silberer, Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts,
trans. by Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Dover, 1971) p. 48.
23. Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et RĂ©volution: Essais, trans. by Jeanne
ĂtorĂ© (Paris: Ăditions du Sandre, 2011), p. 147.
24. Mark Andersen, handout, 1985, cit. OâHara, p. 22.
25. OâHara, p. 22.
26. OâHara, p. 23.
27. OâHara, p. 24.
28. Michael Bakunin, La commune de Paris et la notion de lâĂtat, cit.
Chomsky, p. 122.
29. Gross, pp. 96â97.
30. Silberer, p. 156.
31. Silberer, p. 348.
32. Joseph Vialatoux, Lâintention philosophique (Paris: Presses
Universtaires de France, 1959), p. 84.
33. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays
(Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989), p. 8.
34. Martin Buber, Utopie et socialisme (Paris: LâĂchappĂ©e, 2016), p. 40.
1.
2. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
3.
4. Vivianne Crowley, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium
(London: Thorsons, 1996), pp. 2â3.
5. Crowley, p. 82.
6. Crowley, p. 86.
7. Crowley, p. 224.
8. Gustav Landauer, Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism in Revolution and
Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. by Gabriel Kuhn
(Oakland: PM Press, 2010), p. 88.
9. Landauer, Through Separation to Community in Revolution, p. 96.
10. Landauer, Through Separation to Community in Revolution, p. 105.
11. Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution. The Mystical Anarchism of
Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971), p. 73.
12. Crowley, p. 81.
13. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin,
1977), pp. 96â97.
14. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin,
1991), p. 143.
15. Plotinus, p. 158.
16. Plotinus, p. 467.
17. Stephen MacKenna, Extracts From the Explanatory Matter in the First
Edition, in Plotinus, p. xxxv.
18. Majid Fakhry asserts that âthe first phase in the development of
Muslim philosophy was predominantly Neoplatonicâ â Majid Fakhry, Islamic
Philosophy: A Beginnerâs Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), p.
3. E.G. Browne comments: âIt was certainly the Persian sĆ«fis who went to
the greatest lengths in developing the pantheistic aspect of sĆ«fismâŠâ
E.G. Browne, History of Persia, I, pp. 427â28 cit. Dr Ali Hassan
Abdel-Kader, The Life, Personality and Writings of Al-Junayd: A Study of
a Third/Ninth Century Mystic (London: Luzac, 1976) pp. 22â23.
19. Abdel-Kader, p. 175.
20. Landauer, Through Separation to Community in Revolution, p. 101.
21. Landauer, Through Separation to Community in Revolution, p. 102.
22. Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners
Sprachkritik (Cologne: 2d ed, 1923), pp. 7â8, cit. Maurer, p. 68.
23. Crowley, p. 3.
24. See Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex, Winter Oak
Press, 2014).
25. Crowley, p. 17.
26. Crowley, p. 20.
27, Abdel-Kader, p. 47.
28. Abdel-Kader, p. 39.
29. Abdel-Kader, p. 37.
30. Abdel-Kader, p 41.
31. Abdel-Kader, p. 88.
32. Anton Kielce, Le Soufisme (Paris: M.A. Ăditions, 1984), p. 139.
33. Abdel-Kader, pp. 45â46.
34. Abdel-Kader, p. 46.
35. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Legacy of Islam, p. 218, cit, Abdel-Kader,
p. 46
36. Crowley, p. 70.
37. Landauer, Anarchic thoughts on Anarchism in Revolution, p. 87.
38. Landauer, Through Separation to Community in Revolution, p. 98.
39. See 2. Denying reality: from nominalism to newthink.
40. From the Wiccansâ Esbat Invocation, Crowley, p. 56.
1. The figure of the Devil as imagined by Christians bears an uncanny
resemblance to the Greek nature god Pan and other horned pagan gods such
as Cernunnos and Herne.
2. Dorion Sagan, Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth (London:
Arkana, 1991).
3. Sagan, p. 3.
4. Sagan, p. 4.
5. Sagan, p. 8.
6. Sagan, p. 125.
7. Sagan, p. 145.
8. Sagan, p. 18.
9. Sagan, p. 108.
10. Sagan, p. 41.
11. Paul Cudenec, Antibodies, Anarchangels and Other Essays (Sussex:
Winter Oak, 2013), p. 42
12. James Lovelock, Geophysiology: A New Look at Earth Science, in
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (April 1986) 67 (4) pp.
392â97, cit. Sagan p. 144.
13. The Daily Telegraph, April 8, 2014.
14. Sagan, p. 4.
15. Sagan, p. 36.
16. Sagan, p. 159.
17. Sagan, pp. 16â17.
18. Sagan, p. 6.
19. See JosĂ© Ardillo, Les illusions renouvelables (Paris: LâĂchappĂ©e,
2015) and François Jarrige, Gravelle, Zisly et les anarchistes naturiens
contre la civilisation industrielle (Neuvy-en-Champagne: Ăditions le
passager clandestin, Les Précurseurs de la Décroissance collection,
2016).
20. Alexis Escudero, La reproduction artificielle de lâhumain (Grenoble:
Le monde Ă lâenvers, 2014).
21. Escudero, p. 62.
22. Escudero, pp. 69â70.
23. Fertility Market Overview, May 2015, www.harriswilliams.com.
24. Maxine Frith, Youâre big business now, baby, in The Daily Telegraph,
October 19, 2014.
25. Escudero, p. 10.
26. Escudero, p. 174.
27. Escudero, p. 12.
28.
29.
30. Ibid.
31. Escudero, p. 118.
32. Hari Kunzru, You Are Cyborg, in Wired, February 1, 1997.
33.
34. Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg (London: Century, 2002), p. 4.
35. Theodore Roszak writes of âthe anti-organic fanaticism of western
cultureâ. He explains: âOrganism is spontaneous self-regulation, the
mystery of formed growth, the inarticulate wisdom of the instincts.
Single vision cannot understand such a state of being, let alone trust
it to look after itselfâ. The extension of naturaphobic anti-organism
into the political realm, specifically in terms of a fear and hatred of
the instinctive self-regulatory wisdom implied by authentic anarchism,
is clearly conveyed here. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends:
Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York:
Doubleday, 1972), pp. 95â96.
36. Escudero, p. 186.
37. Marie-HĂ©lĂšne Bourcier in Christelle Taraud, Les FĂ©minismes en
questions: ElĂ©ments pour une cartographie (Paris: Ăditions Amsterdam,
2005), p. 53.
38. Ibid.
39. Bourcier in Taraud, p. 54.
40.
www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/IMG/pdf/Entretien_avec_La_De_croissance_inte_gral_-3.pdf
41. The Daily Telegraph, April 8, 2014.
42. Roszak notes that âthe whole process of urbanindustrialism upon our
tastes is to convince us that artificiality is not only inevitable, but
better â perhaps finally to shut the real and original out of our
awareness entirelyâ. Roszak, p. 23.
43. Roszak, p. 97.
44. See 7. Necessary subjectivity.
1. Miguel Amorós, Fondements élémentaires de la critique anti
industrielle, in Préliminaires: Une perspective anti-industrielle
(Villsavary: Ăditions de la Roue, 2015), p. 60.
2. JosĂ© Ardillo, Les illusions renouvelables (Paris: LâĂchappĂ©e, 2015),
p. 91.
3. Ardillo, p. 229.
4. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If
People Mattered (London: Abacus, 1974), p. 13.
5. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p. 40.
6. Ardillo, pp. 127â28.
7. Ranchor Prime, Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom for Surviving the
21^(st) Century (Novato, California: Mandala, 2002), p. 154.
8. Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 1909, cit. Prime, p. 86.
9. Gandhi, letter to Nehru, October 5, 1945, cit. Prime p. 91.
10. Prime, p. 65.
11. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p. 250.
12. Prime, p. 36.
13. Prime, pp. 130â31.
14. Prime, p. 101.
15. Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex: Winter Oak,
2014).
16. Angela Y. Davies, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York:
Random House, 1998) p. 155.
17. Vivianne Crowley, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium
(London: Thorsons, 1996), p. 30.
18. Prime, p. 43.
19. Prime, p. 47.
20. Prime, p. 96.
21. Prime, pp. 148â49.
22. See 2. Denying reality: from nominalism to
newthink.
23. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p. 83.
24. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p. 43.
25. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (London:
Souvenir Press, 2011), p. 5.
26. Campbell, p. 32.
27.Campbell, p. 149.
28. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p. 31.
29. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p. 38.
30. Prime, p. 103.
31. Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
32. E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Jonathan Cape,
1977), p. 20.
33. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, p. 43.
34. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, p. 58.
35. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, pp. 54â55.
36. Crowley, p. 181.
37. Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal
Art (London: Diamond Books, 1994), p. 21.
38. Martin Lings, What is Sufism? (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975),
p. 48.
39. Witness the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the
Roman Empire.
40. Lings, p. 51.
41. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, p. 153.
42. âThe term âThe Great Turningâ, popularized by Joanna Macy and David
Korten, describes the movement from an industrial-growth society to a
lifesustaining oneâ. Helen Moore, Ecozoa (Hampshire: Permanent
Publications, 2015), p. 80.
43. Paul Cudenec, The Anarchist Revelation (Sussex:
Winter Oak, 2013).
1. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: histoire secrĂšte du vingtiĂšme siĂšcle
(Paris: Ăditions Allia, 1998), p. 276.
2. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin,
1991) p. 380.
3. Plotinus, p. 389.
4. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays
(Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989), p. 70.
5. âThere is nothing more difficult than to become critically aware of
the presuppositions of oneâs thoughtâ. E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the
Perplexed (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 54.
âThe individual who has been more deeply marked by this impoverished
spectacular thought than by any other aspect of his experience puts
himself at the service of the established order right from the start,
even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention.
He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the
only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak.
No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but
he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of
spectacular dominationâs successâ. Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la
société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). p. 38.
6. In Forms of Freedom (Sussex: Winter Oak Press, 2015) I use the term
âthe entity-that-is-not-an-entityâ to describe what I am now referring
to as The Universe, having encountered the same problem of the general
definition of the universe in purely physical terms. It now seems
appropriate to me to use the term The Universe for these purposes.
7. Any more than the reality of the sound made by a falling tree depends
on someone having heard it â see 2. Denying reality: from nominalism to
newthink.
8. As Plato writes in Timaeus: âSuppose a man modelling geometrical
shapes of every kind in gold, and constantly remoulding each shape into
another. If anyone were to point to one of them and ask what it was, it
would be much the safest, if we wanted to tell the truth, to say that it
was gold and not to speak of the triangles and other figures as being
real things, because they would be changing as we spokeâ. Plato, Timaeus
and Critias, trans. by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 69.
9. Forms of Freedom.
10. See Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex: Winter Oak,
2014).
11. See 6. The Eye of the Heart.
12. See Paul Cudenec, The Fakir of Florence: A Novel in Three Layers
(Sussex: Winter Oak Press, 2016).