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John Moore: Anarchy and Ecstasy
Within mainstream discourse, and particularly in texts like the one by Matthew Arnold whose tide I have deliberately appropriated here, the terms "culture" and "anarchy" are regarded as antithetical. Any putative tendencies toward anarchy become a pretext to entreat authority to intervene and reestablish order and culture. But for proponents of anarchy this polarization clearly remains unacceptable. For the latter, the primary aim becomes the development of a culture of anarchy. Unfortunately, however, this project has been poorly served by anarchist thinkers who for the most part have remained mired in politics. Little seems less anarchic than jejune fantasies, presented with evident yet rather pathetic glee, of a future peopled with wholesome types whose entire raison d'être and greatest pleasure resides in orderly discussion and voting at neighbourhood or communal assemblies. I am not referring here to the visions of Utopian dreamers à la Morris, but to the prevailing impressions which exude through major anarchist texts, including those by contemporaries such as Murray Bookchin. In such works, many shibboleths are discarded, but not the one designated as politics; the future emerges as a place freed from all governance, except the rule of politics itself. Of course, communal decision-making processes should not be denigrated, and must play an important role in any future anarchy. But to envision a fresh culture around such a dessicated structure remains absurd, and fuels the popular suspicion that militants are only interested in recreating humanity in their own atrophied image, with a greatly distended political consciousness, but merely a rudimentary capacity for existential experience and appreciation. Given that anarchism has partly relied upon the vibrancy of its ideas and the exemplary actions of its adherents to transform popular praxis, its marginal appeal remains hardly surprising. Frankly, whatever vigour inheres in certain features, its notions of a politicized future are bland and unappetizing, and its conception of an adequate basis for a culture of anarchy remains almost nonexistent. And yet the anarchic tradition retains a crucial element, a key attitude, which could help to recover this essential foundation. Proponents of anarchy habitually regard with nostalgia a halcyon period from the past. Depending upon individual perspectives, this mythopoeic era can be discerned in neolithic villages, primitive Christian communities, Medieval communes, pre-Columbian Amerindian life, and so on. In each instance, however, these idylls are flawed in two respects. On the one hand, their inhabitants failed to foresee and prevent their forcible suppression. And, on the other hand, all are compromised through defects - e.g., militaristic elements or disparate gender evaluations - of various magnitudes. Whilst not perfect nor ideal societies, however, they do provide basic paradigms for a regenerated future. A primary task of contemporary anarchic visionaries thus consists of amending the deficiencies in a primal pattern by synthesising it with insights derived from an imaginative, informed and empathic holistic sensibility. However, these mythopoeic excavations are in turn inadequate through lack of profundity. They are insufficiently radical because they fail to unearth the root issue. No past society can be ideal, but all of these proposed paragons are to varying degrees contaminated by an immemorial sociopathic virus, a contagion so insidious and entrenched that it poisons even the most benign or revolutionary disposition. Nowadays it has become so deeply embedded that it has assumed a biopathic and biocidal character. But the analytic instruments wielded by the vast majority of anarchists are insufficiently searching, incapable of penetrating to the root cause. Various elements - the State, capitalist relations of production, hierarchy, technological domination, patriarchy, or a combination of these factors - have been proposed as the source of oppression, but each fails to account satisfactorily for the inceptive motivation. Certainly these factors are facets of the global control complex, but what induced a section of humanity to desolate the earthly paradise and set the authoritarian process in motion? Frequently, anarchist writers displace the problem by focussing on free communities who were invaded and enslaved by extraneous forces. But this merely begs the question of what actuated the expropriators. In my view, only a vast tectonic cataclysm, whose reverberations are still experienced today, can account for this malificent transformation. This upheaval - the Ice Age - necessitated the implementation of extreme emergency measures to ensure survival. But as the crisis became prolonged, sensibilities became lethally deformed and vested interests in deprivation developed amongst emerging control groups. We have all lived in a permanent state of emergency ever since. In order to discern the basis of a future culture of anarchy, it remains essential to journey beyond the cataclysm which initiated history to the genuinely halcyon days of the primeval era. During this passage, I shall draw on Henry Bailey Stevens's remarkable but neglected text, The Recovery of Culture. Stevens was not an anarchist per se, but he was a visionary -- something immediately apparent in his magnum opus, where the joins between vision and ideology are all too evident. His reconstruction of primordial human modalities remains unparalleled, but the accompanying remedial plans are marred by an incompatible Carlylean emphasis on Great Men as the motivators of social change. In what ensues, these extrinsic elements will be disregarded. Stevens's basic theses are as follows. Before the Ice Age there existed a "Total Culture," a holistic "integration of ethics (cult), art (culture) and soil fertility (agriculture)." [1] This total culture centred on the garden or more precisely the orchard, an informal enclosure best denoted by the Avestan word pairidaeza, paradise. Such spaces should not be confused with the walled gardens of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, those sites of total control. Rather, as centres of barrow culture, they were only separated from the wilderness by functional trenches which prevented wild animals from ravaging the produce. This cultivated product was the Aval, a word whose modern derivative is apple, but which was originally a generic term for fruit. Through etymological investigation, Stevens establishes that the Aval-culture ranged from its source in Java as far as Avalon and beyond. And throughout this region horticulture remained the basis of culture. Cultivation was not undertaken for profit, but for ecological, communal and characterological nourishment. It was not an extractive industry: the plant-human relationship was symbiotic, and the activity involved - hardly onerous by the most stringent reckoning - was more like a vocation or play than labour. The orchard was not a factory but a temple, a word which originally denoted a sacred grove. It was literally the seedbed of primate spirituality and culture. Hence, it remains unsurprising that the global symbols of human spiritual experience - the arbor vitae, the axis mundi, the golden apples, the coiled guardian serpent or dragon, the kundalini energy (originally snakes, Stevens suggests, domesticated to deter other creatures from ravaging the fruit) - derive from this empirical reality. These nonviolent, communalistic, matrifocal yet variegated anarchies of abundance were veritable earthly paradises, where toil and want were unknown and there were ample opportunities for celebration, conviviality, ritual and creativity. But, Stevens avers, there was a third crucial aspect to this integrated "art-ethics-soil culture." [2] The ethical component was derived from a profound ecological sensibility and reverence for the natural. The arboriculturists may have undertaken complex experiments in seed selection, improvement and hybridization, but they did not regard this as abusing so much as cooperating with nature. They did not conceive of themselves as separate from the latter; essentially, theirs was still a "primate culture." [3] And their ethical conceptions derived from this acceptance. At the basis of their ethics lay a respect and affection for other species which emanated from their own physiological structures. Diet - a strictly frugivorous diet - lay at the foundation of their fundamental ethical principle: namely, that cousins, whether they assume animal or human form, for no firm ontological distinctions can be made here, sihould not be harmed, exploited, killed or eaten. "There are many indications that diet played an important part in such ethics and that the garden settlements took an absolute stand for the frugivorous culture of the primate family." [4] For in assuming this stance, the orchardists resolutely asserted their simian heritage. Non-human primates are not noted exploiters, rarely kill except in self-defence, and share with humans a physiological structure which suits them for not a carnivorous or omnivorous or herbivorous but a frugivorous diet. [5] The human contribution to this "natural" ethic was to render it totally egalitarian by weeding out any lingering relics of the bestial pecking-order. As intimated above, these paradisal life ways were literally subjugated by marauding bands of hierarchical, patriarchal militarists. But ultimately the responsibility for their suppression must be attributed to the cosmological energies which precipitated the Ice Age. This in itself should provide a topic of contemplation for those who glibly assume that the Earth Spirit automatically supports such endeavours. But the main issue lies in examining the effect of the tectonic shift on contemporaneous communities, and in particular its role in forming the basis of the biocidal mentality. According to Stevens, when the glaciers descended from the north, humanity underwent a fatal bifurcation which remains at the basis of the current global crisis. Whilst most communities retreated south in search of more propitious climatic conditions, scattered tribes who were unwilling or unable to abandon their settlements became caught in continental traps or peninsulas or between mountain ranges and the ocean. Rather than abundance, they now encountered conditions of extreme scarcity. Horticulture was no longer a viable practice and so drastic alterations in lifestyle, including diet, were necessary to ensure survival. In these harsh and exceptional conditions, there originated a hunting-fishing economy, where humans hunted and killed their animal cousins for food and clothing. In evolutionary terms, such practices constituted a vast atavism, justified perhaps in extreme circumstances and for a limited period. But in this instance the period became prolonged, and gradually the profound mutations effected in every aspect of these tribes' lifeways became inveterate. Even after the extraordinary situation had disappeared and such practices were no longer justified, they persisted through internalization, the influence of vested interests, and cultural deprivation. They are still with us today, perverting and vitiating any attempt toward total liberation. Amongst these northern tribes, the integrated culture developed by the arboriculturists was fragmented, and devastated in each of its three aspects. Plant cultivation was abandoned, ethical sensibility was debased through animal (and consequently human) exploitation, and opportunities for the development of a communal-spiritual-artistic culture vanished. This traumatic cultural deprivation, with its attendant disfiguration of sensibility, constitutes the foundation of the biocidal mentality. The human physiological structure does not possess the capacity to digest flesh properly. The toxic properties in decomposing flesh, which cannot be assimilated or dissipated, enter the human organism and act as an irritant. This physiological factor, combined with the shame resulting from violation of the cardinal ethical principle, was sufficient to produce a generalized disposition toward ill-feeling - both an inner sense of disease and of being ill at ease, and an outer ill-tempered belligerence - in the northern tribes. This constitutional degeneration was gradually compounded by other environmental factors. In a context of scarce resources, competition - rather than the mutual aid characteristic of the orchardists - became inevitable. Work, rather than ritual play, became the primary occupation, and with it slowly came a division of labour, a demarcation of responsibilities and power, hierarchical control. Given that hunting was the basic task, and that men were physically more suited to this role, the matricentric focus of these communities was increasingly displaced by patriarchal structures. This gradual shift in orientation produced enormous changes in the area of spirituality. As they became less reliant on agricultural produce, and hence less connected to any particular locale, the northern tribes became nomadic, following the migrations of their prey. This continual motion disrupted the spiritual and cultural potency of women, which remained rooted in the earth and germinant processes. [6] Patriarchal ideology, which exalted a deracinated, linear masculine sexuality above earth-centred female menstrual cycles, overthrew the delicately balanced polarities of matrifocal spirituality and replaced it with a hierarchical, priestly religion which stressed the celestial at the expense of the chthonic. The sky gods replaced earth spirits, the sun god displaced the moon goddess, animism became animalism, menstrual-centred mysteries were distorted into blood sacrifices. The "Age of Blood," which continues to the present day, had begun. [7] And the slaughter of animals soon extended to the murder of humans. Competition for scarce resources amongst nomadic groups inexorably resulted in conflict, and in its train the institutions of war and militarism. Hunting and warfare both demand tools for killing, hence the origins of the arms trade. The need to coordinate these diverse activities in a firm command structure under the control of a ruling elite eventually led to the formation of a prototypical State. Hence, it can be seen that the essential elements which comprise the contemporary control complex - or Civilization - were assembled in prototypal form amongst the northern tribes during the Ice Age. Stevens discerns two phases in the development of the northern "Blood Culture," both centred on the treatment of animals and the natural world in general. [8] The hunting phase considered above was superseded by a tellingly entitled period of animal husbandry. The latter commenced with the withdrawal of glaciation: As the ice receded and plant food became again abundant, the capacity of the middle lands increased. Into a region accustomed to the hunting economy moved growers of crops. Thus the ultimate population of these lands was exposed in the Stone Age to two distinct types of culture -- one the handax culture of the south, of primate character, symbolized by the tree; the other, the spear culture of the north, of carnivorous character, symbolized by blood. [9] One might imagine that this reconvergence of two by now almost totally disparate cultures would produce bloodshed, with the warlike nomads effortlessly exterminating the growers whom they perceive as invaders of their territory, and hence proceeding to subjugate the southern heartlands. The fact that generations passed before the barbarians felt sufficiently confident to operate in this manner testifies to their relative weakness in the face of the arboriculture's resilience. But the northerners' seeming acquiescence in peaceful coexistence lulled the orchardists into a false sense of security which made their ultimate enslavement all the more effectual. The latter were drawn into a fatal compromise: The philosophic contrast between the cultures is sharp; but the conflict seems to have remained latent until the domestication of animals in the neolithic period. There is no evidence of warfare between the hunters and the horticulturists. Economically their interests were not at variance. Indeed, the hunters by reducing the number of wild animals performed the same service to food growers as did the beasts of prey; it was easier to grow crops successfully when the wild creatures were kept in abeyance. So the hunters and fishers, though they were at war with most of the animal kingdom [sic], were at peace with their fellow man. [10] Stevens speculates that animal domestication originated amongst the orchardists, arguing that they tamed creatures not for farming and slaughtering, but as helpmates and crop protectors against wild birds and rodents. The barbarians, however, converted this benevolent symbiotic practice into the exploitative mode of livestock breeding -- something more congenial to their carnivorous nomadic lifestyle. Cattle, goats and sheep were farmed for their milk, hides and flesh; horses were broken in to become implements of war and domination. And the arboriculturists failed sufficiently to oppose this development, or if they did so it was always too little and too late. Stevens suggests the Cain and Abel story records this conflict: the frugivorous grower kills the carnivorous herdsman in retaliation for the latter's livestock overrunning his garden. But the retribution remains inadequate because the proliferation of herders continues apace. The dwindling hunting and fishing subsistence economy acquires a zombie-like resurrection, ironically through the agency of a technique adapted from the arboriculturists, whose subjugation it now effects. Private property, rather than community of goods, now slowly becomes predominant. The aryan term for war literally meant "a desire for more cows." The war on animals became a war on humans and thence a war on nature, a war ultimately against all life waged in the name of total domination and disconnexion. Abattoirs, concentration camps, gas chambers and nuclear weapons all originate in the same complex. The ground for the arboriculture's violent subjugation was prepared through infection, both literal and symbolic. The orchardists, with their intuitive notion of cosmic equilibrium through reciprocity, had long recognized the significance of sacrificing the first fruits -- i.e., allowing the initial crop in a season to fall and remain unharvested. This bloodless offering repaid the Earth by mulching and enriching the topsoil, which in turn yielded bigger fruit and larger crops. With the advent of animal domestication, however, it was discovered that spreading animal excrement under the branches of the trees resulted in an even more prolific yield. But the nitrogen in fecal matter which promotes plant growth, the slaughtering herders unwittingly discovered, is even more profuse in animal blood. Stevens surmises that the effect of this revelation on the arboriculturists was devastating, for the trees' positive response to blood seemed to indicate divine approbation for slaughter in general and animal sacrifice in particular. Cosmological perceptions were transmuted and Mars, initially a vegetation god, became God of War. The orchardists were ideologically undermined before they were militarily subdued. This demonstration of a seeming veracity in the theology developed by the barbarians' specialized priesthood (in contrast to the generalized spirituality and random shamanism amongst the orchardists) initiated a fatal strain of degeneration amongst their frugivorous neighbours. In the hunting-fishing phase, the northerners had already begun their biocidal activities, rendering numerous species, such as the mammoth, extinct. This tendency seemed to have been reversed, despite the mass animal slaughter, by their transition to livestock breeding. But the appearance was deceptive. The apparent short-term gains were overwhelmingly outweighed by long- term environmental depredations. The arboriculturists, fatally compromised by this time, were unable to counter the forces which were literally blighting their lifeways: The overgrazing of the land by the herds of domestic animals sapped the fertility of the soil. The crops then became more susceptible to the host of blights which had always been a menace. When the season was favorable to those invisible fungi, dark spots would appear upon the leaves and spread from tree to tree. Then the foliage would wither and droop, and the spots would spread to the fruit. And the priests interpreted this to mean that the tree needed purer blood. So we took no more... unclean beasts.... And when the blight still came on, spreading from tree to tree; and the earth seemed barren and the sands began to come; then the wizards came to us with hard faces, for they were certain of the efficacy of blood. The gods, they said, were angry with us, and there was only one way to propitiate them. [11] So murder became sanctified. Crop offerings, replaced by animal sacrifices, augmented by ritual killing of humans, tumefied into the systematic mass slaughter practised by the Aztecs, the precursors of contemporary totalitarianism. The synchronous subjugation of the arboriculture set the "essential pattern" of Civilization: the chain of oppression, the vicious circle of ongoing degeneration which, allowing for socio-economic changes and developments in control techniques, remains operational today. [12] The military state enforces its domination through economic exploitation and its attendant class distinctions, gender and ethnic differentiations, educational and religious indoctrination, the imposition of a monetary system, and so on. Its vassals in turn hunt and enslave animals, deliberately breeding a surplusage for exploitation and slaughter which eventually exhausts the land, causing dearth and famine. Still, amongst privileged classes or regions, animal flesh remains the staple dietary element, but this "unprimate food" corrupts "the inner organs, causing dull wits, foul diseases and great demands for medical help". [13] In short, it reinforces dependence upon and support for authoritarian control structures, creating a predisposition toward stupefaction. The cycle of degeneration remains complete. Ecologically, socially, and characterologically, the infestation of the flesh virus ultimately remains the catastrophic source of contemporary biocidal totalitarianism. Given this horrific onslaught, it remains hardly surprising that the arboriculture disappeared and the lifeways it embodied became otherworldy. Atlantis sank beneath the waves, Avalon evaporated, paradise became enskied and could be hoped for only in an afterlife. But for those of us who wish to reverse this process and renew the earthly paradise, such consolation remains insufficient. Regeneration can become possible only through actions based upon an incisive awareness of the full nature of primeval transcultural conflict. In order to recover culture, to discover the basis for a culture of anarchy, it remains essential to revive the primal total culture, the holistic integration of art, ethics and horticulture. From this perspective, anything less remains severely tainted and compromised through its infection by the biopathic virus. The best of the present culture - a culture in the pathological sense only - points beyond itself toward the recovery of primate lifeways. But for anarchists to seek inspiration in the strictly limited emancipatory attempts of the Paris Commune, the Spanish Revolution or May 1968 remains absurd. In these instances, the participants demanded so little and - not surprisingly, given their embattled situations - made only minimal moves toward recovery. It might be more congruent for anarchists to redirect attention toward the Adamites, the radical section of the dissenting Medieval commune of Tabor: The majority of the Taborites were extreme puritans in their personal conduct, but a minority, influenced by the Free Spirit doctrines of the Pikarti, believed that the millennium had already arrived. They were the kingdom [sic] of the elect, and for them all laws had been abolished. Four hundred were expelled from Tabor in 1421 and wandered through the woods naked, singing and dancing, claiming to be in the state of innocence of Adam and Eve before the fall. Acting on Christ's remark about harlots and publicans, they considered chastity a sin and seem to have spent their time in a continuous sexual orgy. [14] The nomadic, non-earth-centred nature of this venture indicates its limitations as a recovery endeavour, but it remains a far superior example of liberation than those listed above. In contrast to the latter, it contains an explicit recognition that Civilization constitutes a vast aberration and transgression of natural law -- a perceptual basis upon which the Adamites founded alternative modes of conduct (a rudimentary form of culture). For Matthew Arnold, the philistines were the precipitants of anarchy, insurgents against whom authority wielded the weapon of culture. But he was wrong: by definition, the culture of authority remains philistine. Current mainstream culture, and the majority of its fringes, remain implicated, permeated by the stench of putrefying animal flesh, the source of totalitarian biocide. To become its antithesis, the shift toward total revolution must be founded upon, characterized by, and aspire toward a regeneration of total culture. Only thus will a culture of anarchy maintain its validity. Notes 1. Henry Bailey Stevens, The Recovery of Culture (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 166,198. 2. Ibid., 198. 3. Ibid., 165. 4. Ibid., 85. 5. For additional evidence, see Jon Wynne-Tyson, Food for a Future: The Complete Case for Vegetarianism (London: Centaur Press, 1979). The distinction between human and animal creatures is not ontological, but epistemological. Humans know and communicate things in different and more diversified, although not necessarily more complex, ways than animals. 6. Three points should be made at this juncture. First, the generative capacities attributed to women here should not be understood merely in the narrow sense of parturition, but in the wider sense of creativity and inventiveness in general. Secondly, I am aware that the picture I am painting of the northern "blood culture" remains stark, even exaggerated. It is certainly true that in certain instances - e.g., in some Amerindian tribes - patriarchal/hierarchical elements have been accommodated within wider egalitarian structures. War then becomes the sport of counting coups, whilst opportunities for the development of a rich culture still remain available. However, whilst these societies are far preferable to their Western counterparts, they remain tainted by the same sanguinary virus which flared up amongst their central American cousins, the Aztecs. And, anyway, this stark depiction clearly remains applicable to the Western path of development. Thirdly, it should be borne in mind that the developments deliberately telescoped here for purposes of coherence, actually took hundreds or thousands of years to take shape. 7. Stevens, 106, 8. Ibid., 153. 9. Ibid., 33. 10. Ibid., 34. 11. Ibid., 121. 12. Ibid., 157. 13. Ibid. 14. Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 89. 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