Pastoral and Utopian Perspectives
“The truth of a myth…is not its words but its patterns.”
—David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
In popular usage “myth” has come to designate a false narrative. It can be based on, among other things, superstition, propaganda or malice e.g. the myths of Hell, of Iraq having WMDs or the alleged myth of the Holocaust. Of course the falsity of this kind of myth can be denied by asserting its truth, its basis in reality. In this essay I use the word to mean “archetypal narrative,” a recurring or central phenomenon in human experience that is not dependent for its validity on specific details that can be proved or disproved. In religion and literature a myth is literally a tale of gods and heroes, often involving supernatural or prehistoric events that became definitive in the history or culture of a people. Examples are the Creation in Genesis, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian captivity in Exodus or the fall of Troy in the Iliad through Greek treachery and the Trojan folly of accepting the wooden horse.
While these myths are rooted in specific situations they expand beyond them to contain many similar ones in a continuum. Every belief system has a creation myth: our secular version is the Big Bang. The myth of deliverance from slavery or oppression through divinely-supported heroic struggle retains the same archetypal structure whether the specific situation involves Moses leading the Chosen People to the Promised Land, African-Americans fighting their way up from slavery or Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” rising to strike down a tyrant. In The March of Folly (1984) historian Barbara W. Tuchman articulates a myth of state hubris and folly that she identifies in the fall of Troy, the collapse of the Renaissance Papacy before the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the loss of the American colonies by the British Empire and the loss of Indochina to Communism by the United States. The truth of these myths does not depend on empirical evidence. Those claiming to have discovered traces of Egyptian chariots and weaponry on the bottom of the Red Sea now assert that they have proved Exodus to be true. But it was always true. Mythic narrative belongs not to historiography or archaeology but to religion and literature, where the truth of a myth is its timelessness – it is always happening. In fact the truth of a myth is discoverable not outside it but inside it, as Albert Camus showed in The Myth of Sisyphus. These ideas are developed fully by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in his 1999 book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York and London: Routledge) and in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by H. Northrop Frye (London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1982).
The perfectibility of man is a concept we inherit from the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason when some Europeans tried to lead the human race out of the darkness of religious belief into what they considered the light of rational thinking. Christianity had long proclaimed the doctrine of Original Sin: because of the Fall of Man we were all conceived in sin, so that even newborn infants, without the sacramental cleansing of baptism, were filthy in the eyes of God. The evil, injustice and oppression that blighted the lives of all but the privileged few were thus inevitable. Our general consolation was that an evil elite may get away with it in this imperfect world but their souls belong to Satan: they will pay for their sins through all eternity. Our particular consolation was that our sins, if confessed and expiated, might be forgiven and our faith would lead us through the grace of God beyond the reach of Satan, sin and death to redemption and salvation.
The comforts of this sort of religious thinking began to break down with the flagrant corruption of the Renaissance Church and the horrors of the Thirty Years War, a series of brutal conflicts between European Catholics and Protestants during the first half of the seventeenth century ending in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. The carnage was so bloody and so fruitless that it called both religion and holy war into question; medieval Crusades and the Great War of 1914-18 had similar aftermaths. The sectarian ultimatum, “If you won’t believe that you are saved by the blood of my Redeemer I’ll drown you in your own” went out of fashion. Secular reformers pointed out that the Church had a vested interest in preaching that evil was too deeply rooted in the human heart to be torn out: this attitude allowed it to do business with evil. The Church assisted murderous tyrants to maintain absolute power over people by always deferring redress of grievances to the next world. Rousseau challenged the doctrine of the Fall by declaring, “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” For him the distinguishing characteristic of humanity among the animals is intelligence: because its unfolding is gradual and progressive, Rousseau called it the faculté de se perfectionner, or perfectibilité for short. The Latin roots are per and fecit, meaning utterly completed or finally accomplished. The English Romantic poet Wordsworth claimed that newborn infants do not enter the world polluted with sin but “trailing clouds of glory,” pure and innocent. Voltaire argued that the evil that infects people is caused by Church-dominated education – sinners are not born but made. Corrupt social institutions such as the Church and the autocratic regimes it supports must be reformed by revolution. If an aristocratic or bourgeois elite stands in the way of progress, they must be re-educated or destroyed. Then, free at last, people will develop their natural virtue though intelligence to achieve humanity’s age-old dream of a perfect society. This gives history a progressive or teleological structure, the “telos” being, in the final lines of Tennyson’s In Memoriam,
“The one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.”
The defining event at the start of this conflict and of the emergent myth of human perfectibility was the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. It fathered our modern world, more so than the slightly earlier American Revolution because it was more extreme: the USA struggle, a rather conventional revolt of a colonized people against foreign rule, lacked any equivalent to La Marseillaise, La Guillotine, the Terror or Napoleon. Ever since 1789, thinkers on both sides of the perfectibility vs. original sin debate have been stating and restating their positions: no middle ground, no chance for compromise, is evident in this argument – you must make a choice. Edmund Burke’s arguments against a version of the French revolution occurring in England became a cornerstone of Christian conservative thinking, still cited in The Brussels Journal or The American Conservative, just as Rousseau and Thomas Paine became standard-bearers of liberalism.
Today the choice is still before us, but the perfectibility myth enjoys so much prestige that many seem unaware of the alternative or regard it as a curable form of mental illness. The concept of human nature as deeply and irrevocably flawed needs to be restated in contemporary terms. Everywhere one hears the cry that all our systems must be fail-safe, that nothing should ever go wrong, that public safety must be absolute, that there are no bad boys. If only there were more laws and better education i.e. more comprehensive indoctrination against all forms of conservatism. Our societies are not perfect because people are just not working hard enough at it.
Conservatives who reject the perfectibility hypothesis are not necessarily misanthropes or nihilists who embrace human depravity. For them, a world without the possibility of human redemption or salvation is simply unbearable and the only conceivable source of redemption is religious faith. The history of perfectibility carries a series of ugly footnotes – eugenics, leading to the castration or euthanizing of the “feeble-minded,” racialism, leading to the mass execution of “inferior” humans and other utopian atrocities such as Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust committed in the name of creating – or restoring – perfection. Stalin and other Communists believed in the perfectibility of the State, or of politics – Stalin`s perfect Communist citizen of the future was called “Homo Sovieticus“ Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. After Communism collapsed some thought Wilson`s telos had been achieved and declared the end of history. The perfectibility of politics is a teleological concept in which politics becomes the highest and purest form of intellectual activity, displacing Plato`s and Aristotle`s concept of the philosopher seeking virtue As a look at the recent American election and its aftermath shows us, we`re not there yet. Perfection of the individual, state or political process has never been achieved on even a modest scale. For in all the belief systems that have ever existed, there is a distinctly human paradox – each system’s proponents are certain that they are right but they always fail to prove or even articulate their faith in such a way that it converts enough others to make that system dominant. If perfection were achievable, definable and demonstrable, there would be only one belief system. The greatest satirists of the Enlightenment, Voltaire (in Candide) and Swift (in Gulliver’s Travels), both following on from Thomas More’s Utopia and Plato’s Republic, demonstrated that point – to perfection. Perhaps the perfectibility of man should be identified as a teleological fallacy.
In his Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato shows Socrates and his students trying to construct an ideal or perfect society based on justice. This isolated republic is administered by a class of people called Guardians. However, the system can only work if the Guardians have absolute power and the support of the citizens who think them infallible. Socrates persuades his students that the qualities necessary in the Guardians, selfless obedience to the laws of the Republic, unwavering fidelity to their masters the citizens and relentless ferocity towards enemies, are qualities found only in animals such as dogs and horses, not in human beings. Therefore, the people must be systematically lied to so they will believe the Guardians are both infallible and superior in kind to them. Finally the famous question is raised, quis custodes custodiet? – who guards the citizens against the Guardians? Socrates’ perfect society looks remarkably like a 20th century totalitarian state. Plato’s message is simple: perfection is beyond humans, it can only become actual in the eternal world of Ideas, the next world beyond this one. Meanwhile, it may exist as a vision in the imagination of a wise philosopher who will obey the reasonable and just laws of that mental Republic even though he cannot force others to do so. Plato’s Republic is the first utopian satire or dystopia, a utopia which shows that setting up a utopia in space and time is impossible.
More’s Utopia, for which he invented the word (with its Greek origins eu or ou and topos meaning the good place or no place at all), reveals a pre-Christian society, an inaccessible island world without private property or money in which none of the vices and follies of Renaissance Europe are evident. More’s work like Plato’s is satirical, showing that this pagan utopia, despite lacking the Christian revelation and the achievements of European civilization, has nevertheless achieved what Christian Europeans have failed at – an ideal society. In Book IV of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the everyman protagonist Gulliver visits a perfect society on a remote island where every moral and ethical virtue is displayed: he cannot even make the inhabitants understand what lying is. Upon his return to England he tries to spread the word about this utopia but is dismissed as a madman because its inhabitants are not humans but talking horses – perhaps there is a little resonance here from Plato, and an anticipation of the popular science fiction series Planet of the Apes.
If it is impossible to achieve, why do we seek perfection? Before postmodernists, feminists and the like, dethroned Freud, Jung and Nietzsche late in the twentieth century and set up in their places their idol, the golden calf of Politics, the simple answer to this question was to see the pursuit of perfection as a neurotic compulsion, identical with the hopeless quest for lost innocence. At first a baby does not distinguish between itself and its mother’s breast – there is no “other,” only me. Driven by this limitless infantile narcissism, each of us (so says Freud) desires unconsciously to recover that “feeling of oneness with the universe,” the innocence destroyed irrecoverably by our developing sexual instincts. In referring to “the disease called man” and speaking of this repressed desire as “the universal neurosis of mankind,” the secular and anticlerical doctor was nevertheless still speaking the anti-utopian language of original sin. In his later work, he tied the illusions of perfectibility and the Perfect State to unconscious repression of Thanatos, the death instinct. By immolating our individual selves in order to become one with an omniscient, omnipotent and immortal State, we deny Death by embracing it. Orwell called it loving Big Brother and named the state religion of the 1984 superpower Eastasia “Death-Worship,” also known as “Obliteration of the Self.” The true perfection is death; perfect equality exists only in the graveyard. Thackeray ended his novel Barry Lyndon by remarking of his characters from the previous century, “they are all equal now.”
II Arcadia, Anarchism and the Social Contract
The lost paradise, whether it be childhood or a prehistorical Golden Age, is often connected with the ideas of perfectibility and utopia. The most common image of utopia is the city, its orderly structure a metaphor of rational planning, its perfection seen as the telos or final end of human evolution – examples are Marx’s classless, stateless community at the end of history, St. Augustine’s City of God or John Bunyan’s Celestial City in Pilgrim’s Progress. But at the other end of history stands not a city but a garden, the most common image representing the lost paradise. It is the Garden of Eden or, in the Greek and Roman world the pastoral country of Arcadia where desires and pleasures are radically simplified and work, if it exists at all, is joyful self-fulfillment. Both utopian city and pastoral garden are mythical constructs derived from analysis of present-day society. The city is a projection into the future of what our society would look like if all our ideals were realized and is thus closely identified with the concept of perfectibility. The garden is a construction, projected back into the past, of a social contract myth: innocent human happiness in the Golden Age got lost, either through our violation of taboos, as in the Fall of Man into disobedience and sin, or through a deal made in which people living in a society no longer innocent or perfect surrender some of their freedom and happiness in exchange for the security of government and law. In between the garden paradise and the shining city on a hill lies the depressing wasteland of human history, summed up by Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon as “a record of the vices and follies of mankind.”
The social contract between the State and the people is a myth in which power is surrendered or delegated to an authority that will govern according to law, ensuring order, protection and the greater good of society. It may be enshrined in a written document like the US Constitution or in a body of legal precedent as in the UK. It is a mythic conception because, while it is necessary to explain the origins of society, there is no evidence that such a contract was ever negotiated between specific parties at some definite point in historical time. Certain scholars argue that some tribe or other drew up the original social contract, now lost, while others such as Francis Fukuyama go back to the apes for evidence of the first polity, but mythic history, as noted earlier in connection with Pharaoh’s army and the Israelites, does not require empirical verification. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and John Stuart Mill all refer to the social contract as a necessary and binding conception but as Mill said, it is a fiction passed off as a fact. Anarchists deny the validity of the social contract, dismissing the authority of the State as false, a result of usurpation of the natural rights of humans to rule over themselves. They substitute their own pastoral or Golden Age myth, emphasizing communalism and equality without any need for laws, private property, money, taxes, bosses, wars and the like. In folk tradition this myth survives as Cloud Cuckoo Land and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Arcadian myth is as universal as that of the social contract and quite as unsupported by any decisive historical evidence. Scholarly efforts in this direction are usually perceived as variants of the myth of the noble savage. Anarchists are pastoralists because they deny the social contract, wishing to restore the Golden Age, peacefully or violently as circumstances dictate.
To most of us an anarchist is a person wearing a balaclava spreading destruction under a black flag – think anti-globalism protesters smashing windows or turn-of-the-century dynamiters and assassins like the one who started World War I by shooting an Archduke at Sarajevo. Conrad made such murderous anarchists infamous in his 1906 novel The Secret Agent which featured a fanatic known as “the Professor” who espoused the anarchist belief in “the propaganda of the deed” (also called “direct action”). He strode about the crowded streets of London with explosives strapped to his body, ready to kill hundreds of people along with himself, the prototypical suicide bomber. Sneering at one of his defecting colleagues who no longer has the stomach for terror bombing, he boasts, “You are a mediocrity – I am a force.” In this story of the early 1900s, the anarchist followers of the destruction-loving Russian Mikhail Bakunin plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, thereby destroying the bourgeois concept of time (GMT) and so disorienting the wage-slaves and clock-punchers of the capitalist masses that the evil world market will collapse, allowing a free and natural social order to spring up spontaneously. However, creating a new world while simultaneously destroying the old one is a mythic activity of the divine Hindu Lord Shiva Nataraja that is quite beyond the reach of murder-bombers and assassins. The turn-of-the century anarchists failed because the public became disgusted at and finally lost interest in “dynamite outrages” after too many of them had occurred and too many innocent lives had been lost. This cult of extreme violence also represents a mere fraction of the history of anarchist thought and deed.
The word itself is simply explained: Archon, Greek for “ruler”, and the Greek negative prefix an. The Lord of Chaos, that part of the universe outside of (and prior to) God’s creation, is called by the Christian poets Milton and Pope an Anarch. Pope depicted the anarchy he saw coming at the close of the eighteenth century in the final lines of his Dunciad:
Lo! Chaos, thy dread Empire is restored
Light dies before thy uncreating Word
Thy hand, great Anarch, bids the curtain fall
And universal darkness buries all.
However, as a social conception anarchism differs sharply from anarchy. It does not seek a return to the original pre-Creation chaos. It does not even seek the disorder and confusion with which it is usually identified (much to the chagrin of its apologists). It means simply “without government” or “against the principle of authority in social organizations” or “hatred of constraints on human desire that originate in institutions founded on the principle of authority.”
The classic philosopher of anarchism is William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was published in its final version in 1798, after the French Revolution and at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. His daughter Mary married one of his disciples, the Romantic poet Percy Shelley, who had been expelled from Oxford for promoting atheism and anarchism. Mary Godwin Shelley, whose mother Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin’s wife, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), wrote the novel Frankenstein (1817), a paradigm of man in the Industrial Age as the servomechanism or slave of his own technology, a theme that resonates among anarchists to this day. Godwin himself was rooted in the two most important sources of anarchist thought: firstly, religious dissent and heresy that stands opposed to State tyranny (exemplified here in Canada by the Sons of Freedom sect of the Doukhobors), and secondly, the European Enlightenment, from which he learned rationalism after he lost his religious faith. Rejecting the Christian doctrine of original sin, he embraced the ideas of innate natural virtue and benevolence and the gradual perfectibility of man. For Godwin, man is not so much naturally good as he is naturally social. All social authority is against nature and what is called evil or vice occurs because humans are not free to act according to their reason. Arguing that majority rule is a form of tyranny and that electing representative governments is an abdication of personal responsibility, he denied the social contract with central government, although accepting a prior social contract through which individuals agreed to join together in a society. He called for a decentralized federation of small, autonomous communities that he called “parishes.” He did not wish to follow the bloody excesses of the French Revolution, hoping that the “brute engine” of government would collapse as people attained to a state of enlightened freedom, but his gradualist reforms ruled out compromise. The State and its laws was entirely evil, he declared, “no otherwise removable than by its utter annihilation.”
Godwin’s contemporary the Romantic poet and mystic William Blake launched another quite different strain of modern anarchism, replacing emphasis on reason with glorification of human energy and imagination and the need to liberate human desire. In his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, associating the former with timid conformity to convention, he included among his “Proverbs of Hell” the following aphorisms:
“He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”
“The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”
“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
Many readers of Blake have complained that this kind of advice is more likely to lead to the detox centre, the insane asylum or the penitentiary than to the palace of wisdom, but in this aspect of his work the poet was being an agent provocateur stirring up the pious, conventionally-minded moralizers of his day. In the clinical language devised more than one hundred years later by Freud, he was encouraging the oppressed and repressed ego to stop obeying the tyrannical superego, the internalized voice of social authority, and to follow instead the promptings of the id, that seething cauldron of natural (and unnatural) desires residing in the unconscious mind.
Back in the revolutionary days of 1848, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Prince Pyotr Kropotkin used to meet in a Paris café to argue about the best way to overthrow the system. For a time the four agreed that the great insurrections of the recent past, the English, American and French Revolutions, had failed because they were merely political rather than social. Marx of course went on to found authoritarian communism, a system that contained a Godwinian vision of a government-free natural society at the end of history but that first required setting up a dictatorship of the proletariat. Applied Marxism rarely gets beyond the dictatorship, run not by the proles but by an all-powerful elite indistinguishable in degree if not in kind from the all-powerful elite it overthrew. As an old saying has it, revolution means only that the peasants change the names of their masters. In the film of Dr. Zhivago, one of the Russian soldiers marching on Moscow in 1917 asks a comrade, “Will Mr. Lenin be our new Czar?” Once having seized power in Russia, the communists ruthlessly destroyed their arch-rivals the anarchists, although the funeral of Kropotkin in 1921 was an immense affair, allowed to proceed by the Bolsheviks as the anarchist Prince was a beloved figure to millions of the Russian people, like the gentle Christian anarchist Count Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy and Kropotkin represent “quietist” anarchism, in which government and authority just fade away or become irrelevant, replaced by loose, decentralized social organizations that, operating on the symbiotic principle of mutual aid, look after basic human needs of food, clothing and shelter. This is the kind of anarchism one can see in Thoreau’s Walden (1855) or William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1888). These writers get beyond the Marxist question, “Who are the workers?” to the more profound question, “What is work?” In the old pastoral myths it was roughly equivalent to the activity called “otium,” leisurely but not the same as sloth or idleness, a labour of love instead of the soul-and-body-destroying drudgery it became for the underclass during the Industrial Revolution before some social justice was achieved through a series of reforms avoiding the mass murder that took place in France during the Terror.
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902) is a central text of anarchism, replacing the Darwinian model of a violent struggle for existence resulting in the survival of the fittest (the sacred paradigm of predatory capitalism) with the biological model of symbiosis, wherein every organism naturally seeks to aid, not injure, other organisms. No coercive State is needed, no elected representatives are wanted, as such people always represent vested interests and political oligarchies, never those who voted for them. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of French anarchism and coiner of the slogan, “Property is Robbery,” said: “Whoever puts his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him my enemy.”
The greatest triumph as well as the most pathetic failure of anarchism occurred in Spain. In the 1930s an anarchist union, the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had more than two million members. Led by the factory workers of Barcelona, the peasants of Andalusia, and countless free communes established by villagers in rural areas, the nation voted an anarchist government into power in Madrid. But the forces of reaction, international as well as domestic, organized against it with ruthless efficiency. General Francisco Franco, claiming that the godless anarchists were bent on destroying both the Catholic Church and the monarchy, waged full civil war on the legitimate government of Spain. Often his jackbooted thugs were beaten in street-fighting: their first attempt to seize power in Barcelona was defeated. Everywhere the villagers bravely defended their communes. But Franco, though not idealogically a Fascist himself, had the support of Fascist Germany and Italy. Despite the Non-Intervention Pact that forbade these countries from involving themselves in the Spanish Civil War, the League of Nations debated impotently after Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombed the Basque town of Guernica on a crowded market day: this was sheer terrorism as Guernica was in no way a military target. The Russian Communists who were nominally supporting the elected Republican government often sabotaged it with political intrigues aimed at extending Soviet power at the expense of the Spanish government. Anarchist passion and spontaneity proved no match for militarized totalitarianism and self-serving Soviet duplicity . This tremendous moment in twentieth century history lives vividly in Ernest Hemingway’s great novel of the conflict, For Whom The Bell Tolls.
British radical Tom Paine, who took part in both American and French Revolutions and wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man, made a crucial distinction relevant to today’s anarchists, between a society of co-operating individuals and passive obeyers of government:
“Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices… Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”
The contemporary anarchist seeks to deliver us from the chic nihilism of Postmodernist thought in which nothing means anything. Postmodernism is an intellectual Titanic whose officers constantly deny that icebergs exist even as their ship keeps hitting them. Colliding nationalisms and culture wars, the poisonous incivility of party and identity politics, lead to alienation that the anarchist believes is intolerable to beings who are naturally social. In St. Louis MO a ghetto populated by the desperately poor, a howling wilderness of rage and pain, exists side-by-side with an enclave of million-dollar mansions guarded round the clock by private armies of security guards. The impersonal, bureaucratic, corporate State isolates groups from one another and from any real sense of a larger community not defined by consumerism, commodification, tabloid sensationalism or celebrity cultism, all retailed by the mainstream media along with the fake news called in 1984 (by George Orwell) “prolefeed.“ Those movies about dead people walking around are popular because they are playing to audiences of virtual zombies. It is common for people to feel closer to Oprah Winfrey or David Beckham than to anyone they have actually met. Alienation even occurs within families: each family in a home of its own but unacquainted with neighbours, each person in a room (or remote office) of her own, watching or listening to his own program, children texting to their peers behind a closed door that says to parents, “You’re not the boss of me.”
Today there is a renaissance of anarchism in response to mass alienation: who else is putting up any resistance? The hard Marxist-Leninist Left has collapsed except in North Korea and some university faculties. Neo-anarchists are not in a mood to bargain or compromise, to become collaborators with the dominant system in return for a few concessions as the soft Leftists and Progressives did. They do not form political parties and oppose all political solutions, seeking simply to destroy the State – a popular slogan is “there’s no government like no government.” What they call “the insurrectionist anarchist project” is unconnected with trendy Postmodern theories about “speaking truth to Power”: it consists not in words but in action, “an immediate and total process of self-liberation of each and every person.” This means abandoning the current edition of the social contract myth, the security and reward system offered by the State in return for submission and conformity. Even a shibboleth such as “equality” has been stripped of meaning because when equality is mandated it becomes just another aspect of conformity to authoritarian ideology. Insurrection must be a social process rather than a single definitive event, such as a general strike, because the dominant power structure itself is now decentralized and distributed globally through social media and corporations. Random acts of insurrection will spread when people act out their determination to live their own lives and follow their own desires rather than the synthetic ones fabricated and forced on them by the world market system.
Will anarchism possibly bring violence, immorality and chaos rather than actualizing the benign visions of Godwin, Morris and Kropotkin? The notorious Anarchist Cookbook (1971) suggests that it will. Arguing that the State seeks to disarm the public, it offers simple suggestions about how everyone can fight back: there are detailed instructions on how to garrote a policeman with wire or disembowel a security guard with a broken bottle, or how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher, knowledge that could serve to bring down a surveillance/assassination drone. Some anarchists advocate what they call “intergenerational relationships” a.k.a “the pedo-pleasure issue” which turns out to mean having sex with eight-year-olds in the name of “liberating” them “from the bourgeois prison-construct of childhood.” The 1960s anarchist Abby Hoffman titled one of his publications, Steal This Book. When the lid comes off Pandora’s box anything can happen. There is a very dark side to anarchism when it is separated from Godwinian moral virtue, sociability, benevolence and the myth of human perfectibility. – it offers no way to distinguish good from evil.
To restate anarchist theory within the perfectibility context, it is necessary to assert that when all politics is local, when all governmental organization has become decentralized, voluntary and social rather than mandated by coercive authority, then individuals will discover what freedom and justice are and, even more important, where they are – within ourselves. In words that anticipate the collective unconscious theory of Carl Jung, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man who accepted proudly the label of “Anarchist,” declares that a sense of justice lies deep within our psyches:
“An integral part of a collective existence, man feels his dignity at the same time in himself and in others, and thus carries 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. It constitutes his essence, the essence of society itself. It is the true form of the human spirit, a form which takes shape and grows towards perfection only by the relationship that every day gives birth to social life. Justice, in other words, exists in us like love, like notions of beauty, of utility. of truth, like all our powers and faculties.”
—De La Justice dans La Révolution et dans l’Eglise
III. Utopias and Dystopias
Utopias in the nineteenth century were for the most part cheerful and optimistic, exemplifying that period’s famous belief in the idea of progress, obviously a corollary of perfectibility. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), a utopian romance that was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the best-selling novel of the century, reveals a futuristic Boston in which the capitalist robber barons of Bellamy’s own time have been replaced by democratic socialists who guarantee workers’ rights and redistribute wealth and property fairly. The Christian doctrines of original sin and innate evil have been abolished, replaced by a sort of Rousseauist and Comtian religion of humanity striving for perfection through intelligence. The Pre-Raphaelite medievalist William Morris hated the book despite its general advocacy of his own socialist beliefs because it embraced modern technology. In 1888, he wrote News From Nowhere as a direct reaction against Bellamy’s portrayal of utopia as a meticulously-planned city full of futuristic machines operated by an “Industrial Army.” Morris shows his readers a twenty-first century England that is pastoral and anarchist: government, industry, machines, education, religion, private property and money have vanished, all goods are made by hand and the innocent old agrarian world, with its harvest festivals and dancing round the Maypole, has been restored.
Early in the twentieth century dystopia displaced utopia. Progress, perfectibility and innate virtue seemed increasingly difficult to believe in as the Victorian world sank out of sight no less abruptly and catastrophically than the Titanic, surely its last and best symbol. The Great War of 1914-18 set a new record for massive and largely pointless carnage:
“There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth
For a botched civilization.”
—Ezra Pound
Then followed the Great Depression, Fascism, the Second World War, the murderous horrors of totalitarianism, genocide and atomic weapons, spawning dozens of utopias gone insane. In 1924 the Russian Eugene Zamiatin wrote the first major dystopia, a parody celebration of Soviet collectivism called We. This superb satire, which influenced both Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, depicted a militarized society called The United State in which people have become virtual zombies, with numbers rather than names. Outside the gleaming, technologically and politically perfect urban setting of the story, doomed rebels, constantly hunted down by the State, inhabit a debased pastoral wilderness, choosing freedom and individuality over the hideous comforts of utopia.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is the most sardonic of all the meditations upon perfectibility through intelligence. Huxley stated that the novel deals with “the problem of happiness.” Set in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford or After Freud, the twin deities worshiped in this materialistic and hedonistic society), the novel depicts a unified World State in which science and technology have actually delivered the perfect world earlier writers only imagined. No one grows old, fat, ugly or impotent, gets venereal disease or cancer, feels class envy or sexual jealousy or fears death. There are no childhood traumas or complexes because birth, parenting and family have been replaced by scientific procedures. Babies are decanted in a lab rather than born from a womb. All necessary but boring work is done by a semi-moron underclass bred to do it and programmed to enjoy it, prototypes of clones or robots. People have all the sex they want with any partners they desire. Entertainment is continuous and varied – movies have been replaced by the feelies, which are experienced with all six senses. And should anyone need a little holiday from everyday reality, there is unlimited free soma, a drug that provides sustained euphoria and ecstatic visions with no health consequences, no addiction, not even a hangover. Books have been abolished and the past has been forgotten, in accord with the holiest of Our Ford’s sayings, “History is bunk.”
The serpent in this garden is the fact that happiness is compulsory, and it turns out that not everyone wants happiness. Like Zamiatin, Huxley shows us a debased pastoral world outside the utopia, inhabited by people called Savages. One of them, trapped inside the Brave New World though born and raised outside of it, plays the standard fictional role of visitor/observer who evaluates the utopia; John the Savage confronts a World Controller with these words:
“I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” the Controller replies, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
There is no such right. Shortly after this conversation John commits suicide and a feely is made about his miserable life for the amusement and edification of the Brave New Worlders.
In 1984 George Orwell concentrates not on the problem of happiness but on the problem of freedom, or rather the state of unfreedom conceived as the perfect happiness. Zamiatin’s We opens with these instructions to the crew of the United State spaceship Integral:
“Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically aultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy.”
One of the three principal slogans of the all-powerful Party in 1984 is “Freedom is slavery:“ the others are “Ignorance is strength“ and “War is peace.” When reversed, each of these slogans retains the same meaning. The relentless thrust of this grim book is to destroy absolutely any trace of freedom either in the society of Oceania or in the individual psyches of the rebellious characters Winston and Julia. The Party differs from other ruling elites in utopian/dystopian fiction in that it has no high-minded ambitions to achieve the traditional utopian goal of improving the human condition until everything is perfect. Oceania is a semi-slum in which wartime shortages are continuous and nothing is efficient except surveillance. Its sole aim is absolute power, not to provide enlightened leadership but as an end in itself. “We are the priests of power,” boasts O’Brien, the Party mastermind who tricks and tortures Winston into abject submission to the will of Big Brother. The Inner Party is less like a Fascist or Communist High Command than it is like the Roman Catholic Church of the Inquisition, devoted to eliminating all opposition to itself including private heresies hidden within individual minds. Its aim is simply the perfectibility of the State. Like the Church, it is an adoptive organization whose most influential members need not be of any particular family, class, nation or race as long as they are fanatically loyal to the Party. Its supreme value of loving the godlike Big Brother is however profoundly unChristian, involving constant fear of invasion by the two other superpowers, hatred of everyone and everything outside the Party and hysterical gloating when Big Brother’s enemies are smashed – the “Two Minutes Hate.” After O’Brien’s degradation of Winston is complete, he tells his victim, “you are the last man” and declares that the future will consist of “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” It is not enough that Winston and Julia should be broken and submissive. O`Brien is not satisfied until they actually feel love for Big Brother. Of course this is a travesty of both religious adoration and perfectibility through intelligence but there seems to be no reason in the story not to believe that this sort of perfection will be achieved. Rebellion is impossible. All historical records have been altered to reflect the Party’s views (rewriting documents was Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth), the huge underclass known as the Proles is too ignorant, frightened and degraded to stage an insurrection and the Party makes sure they stay that way by bombarding them with the fake news and trashy entertainment known in Newspeak, the Party’s own language, as prolefeed. As for the Outer Party, of which Winston and Julia are members, they are under continuous surveillance, even in their homes, by the Thought Police. No intercourse with the two other superpowers, Eastasia and Eurasia, is permitted. Following the patterns Orwell identified in his essay Politics and the English Language, language has been systematically impoverished by the phasing in of Newspeak to replace English so that the words and phrases one might use to formulate a politically incorrect thought no longer exist. If Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence were to be translated into Newspeak, it would be reduced to a single word: crimethink.
Margaret Atwood has pointed out that there is one sign in 1984 that the Party must have failed to abolish human freedom or to sustain its absolute power. The novel ends with an Appendix titled “The Principles of Newspeak.” The author is clearly a variant on the outside visitor/observer, a scholar who has studied the Party and this brief section is presumably part of an academic history of Oceania which could not have been undertaken until after the fall of the Party and its failure to abolish Oldspeak, or English, the language in which the Appendix has been written. Atwood borrowed this device for her dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, ending her novel with an academic seminar taking place sometime after the fall of the hateful misogynist tyranny she depicted. Thus, despite the apocalyptic scenarios of these two gloomy dystopias, the authors stop short of nihilistic despair with these subtle affirmations that freedom will survive – as in the old-time religious revival meetings, the preacher’s message is, “Brother, there is still time.”
The pursuit of the Perfect State can be just as murderous in real life as in dystopia, a suggestion evident in the original French title of Pin Yathay’s book about the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, L’Utopie Meurtrière (translated into English in 2000 as Stay Alive, My Son). There is an uncanny resemblance between events in this former Indochinese colony during the years 1975-79 and those in 1984. After the civil war ended with the defeat of Lon Nol by the Khmer Rouge, a shadowy clique, calling themselves Angkar or “The Organization,” seized power and imposed a utopian revolution led secretly by Pol Pot (not his real name); he was also known as “Brother Number One.” By the time this bloodthirsty regime was brought down during a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, as many as three million Cambodians had died at their hands, many at S21, a Phnom Penh school turned into a torture and execution compound similar to the Ministry of Love where Winston and Julia are held. Others died in the notorious “killing fields” just outside the capital; mass murders were carried out in communities all over the country, the bodies dumped in makeshift graves or incinerated at gas stations set on fire. This holocaust, or “autogenocide,” was carried out by austere French-educated Khmer fanatics on behalf of the peasants in the name of national liberation and renewal of long-lost agrarian values. Motivated both by Marxist-Leninist class hatred and Mao’s Cultural Revolution (which their Chinese sponsors never told them had failed as completely as his Great Leap Forward), these pastoral/utopian revolutionaries wanted nothing less than for every Cambodian to become a rice-growing peasant. They abolished money, the calendar, property, education and the traditional Cambodian arts, driving everyone out of cities into the countryside to begin forced labour in rice paddies and various make-work programs devised by Angkar. Inquisitions were carried out to discover all those with connections to the former bourgeois regime: they were sent to prison camps or summarily executed, sometimes in family groups. The cadres implementing these policies were mostly ignorant teen-agers recruited from rural areas and indoctrinated by the Khmer Rouge in the jungle. Some of them shot any Cambodian wearing eyeglasses, thought to be a sufficient proof of bourgeois corruption.
Francois Bizot’s story of the Cambodian holocaust The Gate (2000) has at its heart a relationship and debate between Bizot, a French scholar of Khmer Buddhism whom Angkar had falsely arrested as a CIA agent, and Duch, his prison interrogator who was later to join Pol Pot’s inner circle and become the torture master of S21; he was eventually given a life sentence for war crimes. Bizot, while seeing clearly the horrors soon to follow, nevertheless feels some sympathy and affection for his captor: their resemblance to Winston and O’Brien is striking though doubtless unintentional. Bizot, who hates American, French and Chinese imperialism and distrusts Vietnam’s intentions towards Cambodia, tries to persuade Duch that his utopian idealism will destroy rather than save his war-torn nation. He argues against the mass executions but is told by his French-educated jailer that France owes its nationhood to the guillotine. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Khmer Buddhism, he observes that Angkar has made itself into an ersatz religion, copying from Buddhism its lofty and remote spiritual authority, its purification rites, its insistence that its leaders behave like monks in placing loyalty to Angkar above family and material comforts, its adoption of esoteric mythology and language that no one initially understands, and its hierarchical structure with the mass of “novices” separated from the enlightened ones at the top, the “priests of power” as O’Brien called his caste. Some of the torture methods used at S21 were copied from the Buddhist Hell depicted in friezes at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat. But Duch, not yet thirty, remains the fanatical revolutionary, untouched by Bizot’s arguments. Finally, the Frenchman tells him:
“Your ideas are pure and generous, comrade, but they are frightening. As I told you, I fear that your revolution may pave the way for your worst enemies. You are dreaming of a system intended to make man happy in spite of himself. When will we stop allowing men to die in the name of man?”
Concise List of Sources and Further Readings
Classic Sources for Human Perfectibility and Utopian Literature
Plato, The Republic
Thomas More, Utopia
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Campanella, City of the Sun
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Voltaire, Candide
William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) ed. F.E.L.Priestley (with brilliant introduction, notes and definitive text based on all 3 eds: 1946)
Modern Utopias, Dystopias and Arcadias
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887)
William Morris, News From Nowhere (1888)
Eugene Zamiatin, We (1924)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932); Island (1962)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1946); 1984 (1948)
George R. Stewart, The Earth Abides (1949)
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
Hugh Howey, Wool (2012)
Articles
Utopia, special issue of Daedalus for Spring 1965 with 13 essays by such writers as Lewis Mumford, Frank E. Manuel and Northrop Frye. Frye’s “Varieties of Literary Utopias” is the best account I know of the subject, repr. in his The Stubborn Structure (1970).
Roger C. Lewis, “William Morris’s News From Nowhere: Arcadia or Utopia?” Journal of William Morris Studies Spring 1987.
Steve Mizrach, The Symbolic Invention of America-as-Utopia.
http://www.fiu.edu/~ mizrachs/utopo-amer.html
Anarchism
Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (1978); Anarchist Portraits (1988)
Mikhail Bakunin, “The Illusion of Universal Suffrage” (1907); “Church and State” (1910) in Woodcock’s Reader.
Alexander Berkman. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912); What is Anarchist Communism? (1929).
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93).
Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists 1868-1936 (1977)
Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: the Spanish Civil War (1960)
Joseph Conrad, The Seceret Agent (1906)
Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman (1984)
Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)
James Joll, The Anarchists (1964)
N.Y. Kolpinsky, ed., Anarchism & Anarcho-Syndicalism: Selected Writings by Marx, Engels and Lenin (1972)
Leonard L. Krimerman and Lewis Ferry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy: Writings on the Anarchist Tradition (1966)
Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899); Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (1899); Mutual Aid (1902)
Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (1891)
Anthony Masters, Bakunin: the Father of Anarchism (1974)
David Miller, Anarchism (1984)
William Morris, A Factory As It Might Be (1884)
George Orwell, Homage To Catalonia (1938); Politics and the English Languag (1946)
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776); The Rights of Man (1791)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840); Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849); De La Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise (1858)
Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (1954)
Mary Godwin Shelley, Frankenstein (1817)
Percy Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy (1819)
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
Count Leo Tolstoy, The Slavery of our Times (1900)
H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods (1923)
Oscar Wilde, “Disobedience: Man’s Original Virtue” from The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), repr. in Woodcock’s Reader
George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962); The Anarchist Reader (1977)
Journals: Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed; Libertarian Labor Review; Canadian Dimension