Futurism, in effect, does not enlarge the fu ture but annihilates it by absorbing it into the present. What makes this trend so insidious is that it also annihilates the imagination itself by constraining it to the present, thereby reducing our vision-even https://loveconnectionreviews.com/ our prophetic abilities-to mere extrapolation. From the distant Hellenic era to the early Renaissance, nature was seen primarily as a source of ethical orientation, a means by which human thought found its normative bearings and coherence.
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That I see “progress” in organic and social evolution will doubtlessly be viewed skeptically by a generation that erroneously identifies “progress” with unlimited material growth. I still cherish a time that sought to illuminate the course of events, to interpret them, to make them meaningful. Just as I believe that the past has meaning, so too do I believe that the future can have meaning. If we cannot be certain that the human estate will advance, we do have the opportunity to choose between utopistic freedom and social immolation. Herein lies the unabashed messianic character of this book, a messianic character that is philosophical and ancestral.
All too often, we are flippantly prepared to use hydroponic trays as substitutes for actual gardens and gravel for soil. Since the object is to fill the domestic larder with vegetation, it often seems to make no difference whether our gardening techniques produce soil or not. Unless human mentality validates its claim to “superiority” by acquiring a better sense of meaning than it has today, like it or not, we are little more than crickets in a field, chirping to one another.
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Freedom is viewed as utopistic and fanciful, and relegated to the underworld of repressed dreams, mystical visions, and Dionysian “excesses” like the Saturnalia and other ecstatic mystical rituals. The subversion of organic society drastically undermined this principle of authentic freedom. Cuneiform writing, the basis of our alphabetic script, had its origins in the meticulous records the temple clerks kept of products received and products dispersed, in short, the precise accounting of goods, possibly even when the land was “communally owned” and worked in Mesopotamia. The early cuneiform accounting records of the Near East prefigure the moral literature of a less giving and more despotic world in which the equality of unequals was to give way to mere charity. No longer was it the primary responsibility for society to care for its young, elderly, infirm, or unfortunates; their care became a “private matter” for family and friends — albeit very slowly and through various subtly shaded phases. On the village level, to be sure, the old customs still lingered on in their own shadowy world, but this world was not part of “civilization” — merely an indispensable but concealed archaism.
This is the heroic moment of innocence, before the materiality of equivalence in the form of the commodity reclaims an early idealism. At this time, justice is emergent, creative, and fresh with promise — not worn down by history and the musty logic of its premises. The rule of equivalence is still loosening the grip of the blood oath, patriarchy, and the civic parochialism that denies recognition to individualism and a common humanity.
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It is the former traits, rather than the latter, that elevate the “well-born” over the “ill-born.” Much that passes for luxury in the precapitalist world was a lavish exhibition of power rather than pleasure. Repression has commonly been the affirmation of authority, not merely of exploitation, and we often misinterpret history when we suppose that the knout has been applied solely to extract labor rather than obedience. Indeed, the ruling classes of the past have dealt with the ruled as children, not merely as toilers — a fit that has its template as much in patriarchy as it does in technics. This book traces the landscape of domination from its inception in a hidden prehistory of hierarchy that long precedes the rise of economic classes.
The word fecundity, here, is decisive-and we could add other terms, such as variety, wholeness, integration, and even rationality. To render nature more fecund, varied, whole, and integrated may well constitute the hidden desiderata of natural evolution. That human beings become rational agents in this all-expansive natural trend-that they even benefit practically from it in the form of greater and more varied quantities of food-is no more an intrinsic defilement of nature than the fact that deer limit forest growth and preserve grasslands by feeding on the bark of saplings. It is no longer a “New Age” cliche to insist that, wherever possible, we must “unplug” our “inputs” from a depersonalized, mindless system that threatens to absorb us into its circuitry.
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Thus ideas, as Marx shrewdly observed, really make us conscious of what we already know unconsciously. What history can teach us are the forms, strategies, techniques-and failures-in trying to change the world by also trying to change ourselves. We may reasonably question whether human society must be viewed as “unnatural” when it cultivates food, pastures animals, removes trees and plants-in short, “tampers” with an ecosystem. We normally detect a tell-tale pejorative inflection in our discussions on human “interference” in the natural world. But all these seeming acts of “defilement” may enhance nature’s fecundity rather than diminish it.
But a radical ethical doctrine — or an “amoral” one in the gnostic sense — there surely was. “A man [and certainly a woman] can perform a sinful act without being in sin, and as long as he acts with the intention of following the will of the Spirit, his action is good.” But from this highly mixed welter of independent, often conflicting or intersecting beliefs, there emerges one figure who bridges the chasm from religious to secular communism. Gerrard Winstanley is perhaps best known as the leader and theorist of the Diggers, a miniscule group of agrarian communists who in 1649 tried to cultivate the “free” or waste lands on St. George’s Hill near London. Actually, these experiments, which were conceived as an “exemplary” effort to promote communal ideals, were ignored in their day.
And the Sumerian “harlot” who sleeps with Enkidu in the Gilgamesh Epic irrevocably denatures him by separating him from his friends, the beasts of the plains and forest. The Odyssey is a spiteful expedition through history in which the epic exorcises the ancient female deities by ridiculing them as perverse harridans. Its theoretical purity removes it from his category of practical reason to which the formulation of a rational polis and its administration belong.
Medieval hedonistic conventicles were compellingly individualistic and almost completely free of patricentric values. Christianity’s powerful message of the individual’s sanctity in the eyes of God, its high valuation of personality and the soul, and its emphasis on a universal humanity bred a sense of individuality and freedom that could easily turn against clerical hierarchy and dogma. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a variety of highly radical sects surfaced from the depths of Christianity’s fascinating cauldron of ideas. Some, like the Free Spirit, were quite explicitly radical; others, like the Beghards and Beguines, were less so.
This instrumental reason — or, to use Horkheimer’s terms, “subjective reason” (in my view, a very unhappy selection of words) — is validated exclusively by its effectiveness in satisfying the ego’s pursuits and responsibilities. It makes no appeal to values, ideals, and goals that are larger than the requirements for effective adaptation to conditions as they exist. Carried beyond the individual to the social realm, instrumental reason “Serves any particular endeavor, good or bad,” Horkheimer observes. “It is the tool of all actions of society, but it must not try to set the patterns of social and individual life,” which are really established or discarded by the mere preferences of society and the individual.
Our very concept of nature may be more fully expressed by the way in which biological facts are in tegrated structurally to give rise to more complex and subtle forms of natural reality. Society itself may be a case in point, at least in terms of its abiding basic elements, and human associations that extend beyond the blood tie may reflect more complex forms of natural evolution than the highly limited biological kinship relations. If human nature is part of nature, the associations that rest on universal human loyalties may well be expressions of a richer, more variegated nature than we hitherto have been prepared to acknowledge.