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September 11th, 2018

9/11/2018

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BACK TO BASICS

The US anarcho-primitivist, John Zerzan, is certainly no idiot, in spite of the ‘luddite extremity’ of his message. I do not necessarily agree with him, but he does have the courage to take his insights to their logical conclusion, and stand by them, come hell or high water. I am not personally a great fan of taking things to their logical conclusion. After all, that’s what Hitler did, but Zerzan’s actual insights are rather more interesting than Hitler’s, so I am prepared to give him a little more latitude. However, I must confess, that someone who uses language to denigrate and condemn language for being at the root of human alienation - including our alienation from reality - is rather like the Cretan who said that all Cretans were liars – which obviously meant his own statement, if true, must be untrue. But I love paradoxes, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. Nonetheless, that does not mean that Zerzan’s insights regarding the alienation implicit in civilisation are not often acute. As I said, he is no idiot and is, after all, only echoing some of Freud’s arguments in Civilisation And Its Discontents.
            The first of his ideas is that civilised humanity has lost its way and its first step in doing so was the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago. I’ll have something to say about this later. Such phenomena as civilisation, language, time, technology, art, representation, religion, work, and so on, are all symptoms of us having lost our way. He is not actually suggesting that we return to primitive hunter-gatherer lifeways, but rather that we progress towards them in order to rediscover our lost Eden – as it were. Apparently, we were much better adjusted and happier during this stage of our evolution as a species which lasted for about 99% of our time on this planet. 10,000 years ago, however, the Agricultural Revolution ended this idyll and we have been maladjusted ever since. There may be a lot of truth in this, but it is less his analysis that I have difficulty with, than his solutions to the problems he identifies. Many would doubt the feasibility of progressing towards a Utopia which is a faithful reflection of this lost Eden - anarchists like Murray Bookchin especially. Hakim Bey, the author of TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones) talks, I believe, of the return of the primitive -  rather than a return to (or progression towards) the primitive – in the manner of Freud’s “Return of the repressed”, which Freud said always returned in disguised form.  Zerzan has attacked Bey quite savagely, but Bey seems to me to have something of a point here.
            Another anarchist, Murray Bookchin, dismisses Zerzan’s ideas out of hand. He makes a big play on the distinction between Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism and he places both Zerzan and Bey to their detriment in the latter category. For my own part, I don’t think we should leap so readily to these partisan either/or positions. Many anarchists speak of changing life as well as society, and that seems crucial to me. Anyway, all in all, I think these two ‘kinds’ of anarchism are rather stuck with each other. Anarchists will no doubt continue to experiment in new ways of living and being, whether or not there is some kind of social revolution to complement their efforts. And their experiments may still be valid for all that.
            Bookchin comes originally from a Marxist background. His book, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left contains fascinating accounts of his time as an activist in the Thirties as well as his time in the New Left during the Sixties. As a result of his experiences and time on the left, Hegel and Marx are definitely among his intellectual heroes, in spite of his having graduated to anarchism since his Marxist days The thing is, however, he does take a lot of this Marxo-Hegelian baggage with him into anarchism – particularly the Dialectic. Let me tell you what I think about dialectical reasoning. It consists of adopting an idea, which is your conclusion before you have even arrived at your premises and then working towards that conclusion through a series of ‘resolved’ antinomies, in an effort to integrate all conflicting positions into the conclusion you have already arrived at. (Kant at least understood the paradoxical nature of his antinomies and therefore didn’t waste too much time in trying to resolve them.) In Plato’s time, the dialectic was a relaxed and gentlemanly procedure in which the object was to win arguments, not to determine the ends of history – a la Hegel or Marx. Hegel thought the Prussian state, which was his employer of course, was the end of history and Francis Fukuyama cites Hegel as an influence on his book, The End Of History; for Marx it was the Communist society in which the state had withered away. I think Marx’s take on the “end of history” was perhaps a little less interested than Hegel’s, but that is another matter. Bookchin was in this dialectical tradition and proudly carried its banner with him and was always willing to invoke it in his writing. My feeling is that he should have recalled Robert Burns’s line, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley.” For had he done so, he might have freed himself “frae money a blunder” as a result.
            But back to Zerzan. I wonder, if he too does not have an Hegelian scheme he works to and wants to impose on reality – his own version of The Negation Of The Negation – with the original negation being Man’s fall into civilisation and the negation of that negation being Humanity’s liberation from civilisation. I am not denying the possibility of such a negation of a negation emerging out of the ‘blind forces’ of ‘history’. What I would deny is conscious planning and preparation to achieve it in some kind of utopian spirit. To paraphrase Louis Macneice, World is a bit crazier and more of it than that. Will alienation be overcome as a result of our conscious choices? I very much doubt it. Perhaps Zerzan is right, but my incredulity does tend to get the better of me at the suggestion, in spite of the fact that, as far as I am concerned, the jury is still out and I don’t want to arrive at any premature conclusions regarding what its verdict might be.
            From an analytical perspective I accept a lot of Zerzan’s critique of civilisation. However, solutions to the problems civilisation creates are another matter entirely. That we have only to progress towards a simpler more ‘primitive’ way of life and all the problems of the last 10,000 years will sort themselves out seems a bit far-fetched to me. When dealing with civilisation’s prehistory, Zerzan talks in a time-scale of about two million years of human evolution or more. I am not sure if he includes Australopithecus  in this huge sweep  of ‘early man’. However, it does seem to include homo-erectus and homo-habilis and, later,  Neanderthals. Homo-sapiens fits into this scenario as a late-comer and from what I can gather the rot started with ‘him’. I have no idea how this squares with current scientific thinking on the subject of our evolution and therefore I don’t know if Zerzan is right or wrong. I am also not going to comment too much on whether or not pre-civilised ‘man’ was on much more friendly terms with wild animals than civilised man - as Zerzan says was the case. I suspect that that is some kind of projection. I am sure Paleolithic humans were as wary of sabre-tooth cats as I myself would be if I ever encountered one, and I really don’t think that civilisation has all that much to do with that. As for the claim that people communicated telepathically rather than with words in those far-off days, well, what can I possibly say?  Furthermore, I do strongly suspect that the idea that things began to go sharply downhill with the Agricultural Revolution and domestication some 10,000 years ago is more than a little simplistic.
            Agriculture seems to take the rap for a lot of our problems. But there was no straight-forward evolution from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones – and from there to states and all the horrors of civilisation. It seems to me that human societies bifurcated at the end of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer  era and agriculture wasn't the only path we travelled down. The concurrent emergence of nomadic  pastoralists appears to complicate this neat scenario. According to some schools of thought, nomadic pastoralists played a crucial role in the emergence of states. They were much more warlike and hierarchical than agriculturalists and as a result would eventually conquer the latter, subjugate  and exploit them, creating states in the process and becoming warrior aristocracies whose way of life was supported by the peasants who were now well and truly under their thumb. Thus, domination, exploitation and inequality didn’t just evolve from agriculture. Franz Oppenheimer recognised that already in the 19th Century. The existence of more warlike pastoralists was really what threw the spanner into the works of stateless societies, not agriculture. This idea seems much more realistic to me than the one which has class-societies emerging from non-class societies in some kind of evolutionary way. I suspect that if certain members of a basically egalitarian society attempted to coerce and exploit other members of the same society, those other members would very quickly rebel and put them back in their places. On the other hand, for more aggressive and militarised outsiders, like nomadic pastoralists, it would be much less of a problem. All they would need to do is conquer, subjugate and terrorise the local populations they encountered into submitting to their will. They would have both the means and the psychological disposition to do so because their own way of life as nomadic herders in perennial conflict with other nomadic herders would have made them much more warlike than the sedentary agriculturalists. That doesn’t seem to be a possibility which Zerzan has given much thought to however.
            So, I disagree with Zerzan who sees the fall of a free humanity simply in the emergence of agriculture. I am not saying that that would not have been traumatic, but how crucial it was I cannot say. And since I disagree with Zerzan about that, I would also have to disagree with him regarding what it might take to extricate ourselves from the mess civilisation has bequeathed us. Along with Zerzan, I agree with Freud, Lacan, Heidegger and others that such phenomena as civilisation, language, time, religion and so on engender forms of alienation. Heidegger recognised it in our flight from Being to subect-object relations and an instrumental view of the world. Lacan views the Symbolic Order as one in which our needs and desires are alienated. Heidegger also critiqued technology as a source of alienation. Zerzan explicitly recognises the importance of these seminal thinkers – among whom he includes Wittgenstein, who he regards, along with Heidegger, as one of the two most important philosophers of the 20th. Century.  Zerzan cites other thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Debord, as well as the American Abstract Expressionist painters who had moved away from representation towards something more inchoate and 'primitive'. His intellectual background is thus fairly catholic from that point of view, indicating that he has a wide culture and is willing to find inspiration wherever he comes across it. However, I have to re-iterate that the problem for me remains power, not civilisation. That is to say, economic, political and military power and the connections between states, capitalism and warfare. I don’t have any definite answers to any of these questions – especially not of the wholesale variety which Zerzan put’s forward.  And the fact that I don’t have any answers – though I do  have a  lot of   questions – means that  I do not think we have too much control over the future, which is, I suspect,  in the lap of the gods.
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Religion and Poetry

9/1/2018

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RELIGION & POETRY
(The case of Gerard Manley Hopkins)


 
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
G. M. Hopkins

 
Quite recently, on Facebook, I had a small difference of opinion with another poet about the poem Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It wasn’t serious, but I felt the need to state it as my opinion that it was still a great poem. He agreed, but he qualified his own enthusiasm for it by saying “Yes, it is a great poem for the ear and the heart until I overthink its implications.” I assume (I may be wrong, of course; I frequently am.) that he was referring to religious implications. Hopkins was a Catholic and a Jesuit priest and that aspect of him is certainly on display in Pied Beauty as it is in much else he wrote. Just in case anyone doesn’t know the poem, I have taken the liberty to reproduce it here.
​
Pied Beauty
                                                                                            Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him.
 
I must confess that for me Hopkins is by far and away the most enjoyable and linguistically stimulating Victorian English poet. I do not respond to other Victorian poets with anything like the relish with which I respond to Hopkins. Not Tennyson, not Browning, not Arnold, not Hardy, nor anyone else. I can work up very little enthusiasm for any of them. But Hopkins is another kettle of fish entirely. And I have felt the same since I first read his The Wreck Of The Deutschland. Furthermore, the religious elements in the poem just seemed all of a piece with the rest of the poem, because to me  they are essential not just to the content of the poem, but also Hopkins’ language and technique – the sprung-rhythm used and the general linguistic panache of the poem right from the opening stanza.

                                    “Thou mastering me.
                           God, giver of breath and bread,
                  World’s strand, sway of the sea,
                        Lord of living and dead:
     Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me
                                       flesh
            And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
                   Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
   Over again I feel thy finger and find thee."

            Could anyone but a Christian - and a Catholic to boot - have written this? Its language is drenched in that religion from the very first word, and, though I am not a Christian and detest what that religion has come to represent, I can still respond to the very Christian sentiments expressed in that poem because I see them as part and parcel of the whole aesthetic experience of the poem, which, indeed, could not do without them. To paraphrase Nietzsche, who said that the aesthetic alone justifies life, Hopkin’s poetry too justifies life - especially in the light of the fact that it can be such a glorious celebration of life into the bargain - not because of the religious aspect of the poetry, but because of its actual aesthetic qualities; and yet it just so happens that these aesthetic qualities are a product of Hopkins’ whole religious temper and outlook in such a way that you cannot separate the two. The fusion is such that you cannot appreciate the poem as an aesthetic experience, without recognising that Hopkins’ own religious sensibility is part and parcel of that aesthetic experience.
            Is there anything unusual about this? Are not the religious elements in The Iliad also part and parcel of the enjoyment of that poem? Do not Zeus’s marital tiffs with Hera add comic relief to the grinding tragedy of what’s going on down on the ground? And of course, the whole architecture of Dante’s Divine Comedy would be unthinkable without Dante’s religious vision. Sometimes, I think that you have to take the rough with the smooth in poetry and not worry too much about what might have inspired a poem. What matters after all is the end-product, not how the poet arrived at it or the accidental make-up of a poet’s personality which contributed to how the poem got written. Hopkins is a wonderful poet, end of; his work is extraordinary and to quibble about the religious inspiration behind it is kind of like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. It’s there; just live with it and be grateful.
            Richard Dawkins seems to believe that Haydn should have written an evolution oratorio instead of The Creation. No doubt, he sees himself as some kind of Commissar for the Arts dictating the proper subject-matter for a piece of music, a painting or a poem, while damning whatever doesn’t conform to his requirements and consigning it to some kind of critical limbo because, of course, the fact that he’s a scientist makes him especially qualified to make such judgements. In contrast, Murray Bookchin, who is an anarchist with a strong desire to change the world in accordance with his own vision of it, at least seems to recognise that the arts – as opposed to politics - where mytho-poesis is invariably reactionary – may safely have a mythopoeic dimension - which, of course, could also draw on certain religious impulses. Bookchin may be a bit too obsessed about the deleterious influences of what he calls “Lifestyle Anarchism” - a la Hakim Bey - but he is perfectly right when he writes “Mythopoesis is a way to sharpen and deepen human sensibilities”, especially in its application to art, music or poetry. So it's OK, in spite of "No masters, no gods" et cetera, gods are OK in a poem. And that's because, in spite of Philip Larkin's dismissal of "the myth-kitty", poetry is not all about social-realism after all and can easily accommodate and soak up religious impulses without losing a stitch.
            The more important thing for me, however, is that we can’t judge work purely on its subject-matter and content. You have to look at it as a living whole aesthetic event – and at the way the subject-matter and content contribute to it as a living whole aesthetic event. Unless you are peculiarly susceptible, Hopkins’ poetry is not going to turn you into a Christian. Auden was right to say "Poetry makes nothing happen", so have no fear. You really are free to enjoy it in spite of the ‘sinister designs’ it may have on you.  You are not, after all, a captive child receiving religious instruction at school. There is nothing sinister in the enjoyment of religious impulses in poetry – any more than in music. And that’s certainly true of the Christian elements in Hopkins’ work – or TS Eliot’s Four Quartets for that matter. Such work should be taken as it is found. And if you think there are sinister implications in that, then there is not much more I can say.
 
 


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    Richard Livermore is a poet, who also edits Ol' Chanty. 

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