Chapter 6: Reason and Revolution

The Dean denounces lifestyle anarchists for succumbing to the reactionary intellectual currents of the last quarter century, such as irrationalism (1–2, 9, 55–56 & passim). He laments the Stirnerist “farewell to objective reality” (53) an the disdain for “reason as such” (28). With his usual self-absorption sans self-awareness, Bookchin fails to notice that he is echoing the right-wing rhetoric which since the 60’s has denounced the treason of the intellectuals, their betrayal of reason and truth. There was a time when Bookchin “dismissed out of hand” the way the “bourgeois critics” condemned 60’s youth culture as “anti-rational” (1970: 51). Now he joins the neo-conservative chorus:

The sixties counterculture opened a rupture not I only with the past, but with all knowledge of the past, including its history, literature, art, and music. The young people who arrogantly refused to “trust anyone [sic] over thirty,” to use a popular slogan of the day, severed all ties with the best traditions of the past (Bookchin 1989: 162).

(“Trust no one over thirty” (to get the slogan right) — imagine how much that must have irked Ye Olde Dean!)

Essentially identical elegiac wails well up regularly from the conservative demi-intelligentsia, from Hilton Kramer, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dechter, James Q. Wilson, Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, George Will, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, William Safier, Clarence Thomas, Pat Buchanan and the Heritage Foundation crew. Every generation, once it senses that it’s being supplanted by the next one, forgets that it was once the upstart (the right-wing version) or insists that it still is (the left-wing version).

The lifestyle anarchists are afflicted, charges the Dean, with mysticism and irrationalism. These are words he does not define but repeatedly brackets as if they had the same meaning (2, 11, 19 & passim). They don’t.

Mysticism is the doctrine that it is possible, bypassing the ordinary methods of perception and cognition, to experience God/Ultimate Reality directly, unmediatedly. In this sense, it is likely that Hakim Bey qualifies as a mystic, but I can’t think of anybody else on the Dean’s enemies list who even comes close. There is nothing innately rational or irrational about mysticism. Reason-identified philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Aristotle (the latter cited 30 times in the Dean’s magnum opus [1982: 376]) maintained that there is an Ultimate Reality. If they’re right, for all I know it may be accessible to what Hakim Bey calls non-ordinary consciousness (1991: 68). The “epistemological anarchist,” as philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend calls himself, takes great interest in experiences “which indicate that perceptions can be arranged in highly unusual ways and that the choice of a particular arrangement as ‘corresponding to reality’ while not arbitrary (it almost always depends on traditions), is certainly not more ‘rational’ or more ‘objective’ than the choice of another arrangement” (1975: 189–190). All I can say for myself is that, for better or for worse, I have never had a mystical experience and, furthermore, that I do not consider the notion of ultimate or absolute reality meaningful. As I once jibed, mystics “have incommunicable insights they won’t shut up about” (Black 1986: 126). Mysticism is arational, not necessarily irrational.

The Dean’s fervent faith in objective reality (53) has more in common with mysticism than it does with science. As mystics do, Bookchin believes there is something absolute “out there” which is accessible to direct apprehension — by “reason as such” (28) on his account, by other means according to theirs. Scientists have been disabusing themselves of such simplism for about a century. The hard sciences — starting with physics, the hardest of them all — were the first to abandon a metaphysical positivism which no longer corresponded to what scientists were really thinking and doing. The Dean was at one time vaguely I aware of this (1982: 281). The not-quite-so-scientific soft sciences with lower self-esteem were slower to renounce scientism, but by now, they have, too — they have too, because they have to. The rejection of positivism in social thought is no post-modernist fashion. This too began a century ago (Hughes 1961: ch. 3). The glossary to a classic contemporary textbook on social science research methods could not be more blunt: “objectivity. Doesn’t exist. See intersubjectivity” (Babbie 1992: G6). Settling for intersubjective verifiability within a community of practicing scientists is actually the most conservative post-objectivist position currently within the range of scientific respectability (e.g., Kuhn 1970).

History, the maybe-science which has always had the most ambiguous and dubious claim to objectivity, held out the longest, but no longer (Novick 1988: ch. 13). Objectivity in any absolute sense is illusory, a cult fetish, a childish craving for an unattainable certitude. Intellectuals, neurotics — i.e., in a political context, ideologues — “have to do with the invisible and believe in it,” they have “always kept before their eyes again an intrinsically valid importance of the object, an absolute value of it, as if the doll were not the most important thing to the child, the Koran to the Turk” (Stirner 1995: 295). In contrast, the anarchist “does not believe in any absolute truth” (Rocker 1947: 27). Nor does the scientist. Nor does the mature adult. In the novel Seven Red Sundays, the anarchist Samar says, “This effort to stop thinking is at base religious. It represents a faith in something absolute” (Sender 1990: 253).

If Stirner bid “farewell to objective reality,” if Nietzsche held “that facts are simply interpretations” (53), they were far ahead of their times. It is by now almost trite to remark that there is “no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’” (Kuhn 1970: 206; cf. Bradford 1996: 259–260). Scientists dispense with objective reality for the same reason the mathematician Laplace, as he told Napoleon, dispensed with God: there’s no need for the hypothesis (cf. Bookchin 1979: 23). Reviewing two recent anthologies, Rethinking Objectivity (Megill 1994) and Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge (Hastrup & Hervik 1994), anthropologist Jay Ruby relates that no contributor to either volume argues that “an objective reality exists outside of human consciousness that is universal” (1996: 399). Intending no humor, but unwittingly providing some at Bookchin’s expense, he continues: “It is unfortunate that Megill did not seek out proponents of this position, for they can easily be found among journalists — print and broadcast, documentary filmmakers, Marxists, and the political and religious right” (ibid.).

Bookchin is not the first left-wing rationalist to be outraged by this idealist, subjectivist (etc., etc.) betrayal of muscular rationalism by what one Marxist lawyer called “fideism.” But this polemical predecessor of Bookchin’s — a certain Lenin — had at least a nodding acquaintance with the content of the then-new physics which was undoing fundamentalist materialism (Lenin 1950). There is no indication that Bookchin has any real grounding in science, although thirty years ago he did an adequate job of popularizing information about pollution (Herber 1963, 1965). The true believers in objectivist, matter-in-motion rationalism are usually, like Lenin and Bookchin, wordmongers — lawyers, journalists (Ruby 1996: 399), or ideologues (Black 1996a) — not scientists. They believe the more fervently because they do not understand. They cling to objective reality “with the same fear a child clutches his mother’s hand” (ibid.: 15). As Clifford Geertz says, the objectivists are “afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it” (quoted in Novick 1988: 552). Lenin could hardly be more indignant: “But this is all sheer obscurantism, out-and-out reaction. To regard atoms, molecules, electrons, etc., as an approximately true reflection in our mind of the objectively real movement of matter is equivalent to believing in an elephant upon which the world rests!” (1950: 361). Either these impenetrable particles are bouncing around off each other down there like billiard balls on a pool table (what a curious model of objective reality [Black 1996a]) or they are fantasy beings like unicorns, leprechauns and lifestyle anarchists. It’s appropriate that the lawyer Lenin’s critique of the physics of scientists like Mach (Lenin 1950) was answered by a scientist, a prominent astronomer who was also a prominent libertarian communist: Anton Pannekoek (1948).

Ecology is a science, but Social Ecology is to ecology what Christian Science is to science. Bookchin’s academic affiliations, undistinguished as they are, and his scholarly pretensions have made some impression on some anarchists, but then again, some anarchists are all too easy to impress. According to the (Bookchinist) Institute for Social Ecology, its co-founder is an “internationally acclaimed author and social philosopher” (1995: 6). The Ecology of Freedom (Bookchin 1982), according to a Bookchinist, is “a work of sweeping scope and striking originality” which is “destined to become a classic of contemporary social thought” (Clark 1984: 215). How is Bookchin’s scholarship regarded by actual scholars? I decided to find out.

I looked up all reviews of the Dean’s books listed in the Social Sciences Index from April 1981 to date (June 1996). I appreciate that this is a crude and incomplete measure of his reception — it fails to pick up, for instance, two notices in the academically marginal journal Environmental Ethics (Watson 1995; Eckersley 1989) — but it canvasses every important journal and most of the less important ones.

There were all of two reviews of the first edition of The Ecology of Freedom, his Das Kapital, “the most important book to appear so far in the history of anarchist thought” (Clark 1984:188 n. 2). The one-page review in the American Political Science Review, after summarizing Bookchin’s contentions, asked: “Can humanity simply be integrated into the whole [i.e., Nature] without losing its distinctiveness, and can solutions to the problems of the modern world emerge in the relatively spontaneous fashion Bookchin anticipates (pp. 316–317), much as problems are dealt with by ants, bees, and beavers?” (Smith 1983: 540). There’s nothing on the pages cited which has anything to do with the relatively spontaneous solution of social problems which Smith claims that Bookchin espouses. The reviewer could hardly have misunderstood Bookchin more profoundly. The Dean is frantically insistent on distinguishing humans from animals and “animality” (47–48, 50, 53, 56), especially “four-legged animality” (39) — four legs bad, two legs good! Smith — whoever he is — clearly had no clue that he was reviewing a giant work of political theory.

The seven-paragraph review in the American Anthropologist was surprisingly favorable. Reviewer Karen L. Field wrote:

The Ecology of Freedom unites materials from many disciplines, and no doubt specialists from each one will take Bookchin to task for occasional lapses of rigor. But despite its shortcomings, the work remains the kind of wide-ranging and impassioned synthesis that is all too rare in this age of scholarly specialization (1984: 162).

In other words, the best thing about the book — and I agree — is that it thinks big. On the other hand, “the scenario he constructs is not wholly persuasive”:

The description of “organic” society draws largely on materials by Paul Radin and Dorothy Lee, and paints an overly homogenized — even sanitized — picture of preliterate peacefulness and egalitarianism; it evokes !Kung and Tasaday, but not Yanomamo and Kwakiutl. Attempting to distance himself from traditional Marxian versions of the emergence of class society, Bookchin downplays the importance of technoeconomic factors, but the corresponding emphasis he places on age stratification as the key to domination is unconvincing and suffers from such a paucity of empirical evidence that it reads at times like a “Just-So” story (ibid.: 161).

That the Dean is taken to task for romanticizing the primitives by an anthropologist is truly matter for mirth. Nowadays he takes the anthropologists to task for romanticizing the primitives (Chapters 8 & 9). Either the Dean has reversed himself without admitting it, or else the most favorable review he’s ever received from a non-anarchist, bona fide scholar rested on a serious misreading of Bookchin’s magnum opus.

And it was all downhill from there.

The one specific point brought up by Field — the Dean’s unsubstantiated contention that gerontocracy was the original form of hierarchy (and still the best!) — was contested, not only by Field, but subsequently by anarchist L. Susan Brown. As a feminist, she thinks it’s more plausible that the sexual division of labor, whether or not it was necessarily hierarchical, eventually turned out to be the origin of hierarchy (1993: 160–161). I tend to think so too. That she dared to criticize the Dean, and in a book from his own main publisher Black Rose Books, probably explains why she got rounded up with the unusual suspects (13–19) although she doesn’t seem to have much else in common with them.

If the academic reception of The Ecology of Freedom was less than triumphal, the Dean’s other books have fared worse. There were no reviews in social science journals of Post-Scarcity Anarchism and The Limits of the City when they were reprinted by Black Rose Books in 1986. There were no reviews of The Modern Crisis (1987), or Remaking Society (1989), or The Philosophy of Social Ecology (1990), or the revised edition of The Ecology of Freedom (1991), or Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (1993), or To Remember Spain (1995), or, for that matter, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995).

There was exactly one notice of The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987a) in an social science journal, and everything about it is odd. It appeared — all two paragraphs of it — in Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, a right-wing, spook-ridden foreign policy journal, although the Dean’s book has nothing to do with international relations. According to the anonymous, and condescending, reviewer, Bookchin’s “method is to ransack world history — more or less at random — first to show how the rise of cities has corresponded to the erosion of freedom at different times and places, then to point out how some communities have fought the trend.” It’s not scholarship, “scholarship, though, is not his point, or his achievement.” (That’s for sure.) The reviewer — as had Karen Field — expresses satisfaction at reading a book with “a real idea” for a change, even if the idea is a “slightly twisted one” (Anonymous 1988: 628). This falls somewhat short of a rave review, and it reverses the Dean’s understanding of urbanism, although it comports with the title of his book (later changed to Urbanization Without Cities, not obviously an improvement). The reviewer takes Bookchin to be arguing that the tendency of urbanism is to diminish human freedom, although here and there communities have managed to buck the trend for awhile. But what Bookchin really contends is the opposite: that the tendency of urbanism is liberatory, although here and there the elites have managed to buck the trend for awhile. The reviewer is right about urbanization but wrong about Bookchin. He did the Dean the favor of misrepresenting him.

The Dean’s own conception of reason — dialectical reason — would have been dismissed “out of hand,” as he might say, as mystical by objective-reasonists back when there were any. Like technophilia and defamation, the “dialectical approach” (Bookchin 1987b: 3–40) is a feature of Marxism to which he has always clung stubbornly. The late Karl Popper, at one time the most prominent philosopher of science of this century, denounced dialectical reasoning, not only as mystical gibberish, but as politically totalitarian in tendency (1962). He denounced “Hegelian dialectics; the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’” (ibid: 1: 28). I bring this up, not because I endorse Popper’s positivism — I don’t (Black 1996a) — but as a reminder that people who live in the Crystal Palace shouldn’t throw stones.

I myself veto no mode of reasoning or expression, although I think some are more effective than others, especially in specific contexts. There’s no such thing, for instance, as the scientific method; important scientific discovery rarely if ever results from following rules (Feyerabend 1975). Religious forms of expression, for instance, I’ve long considered especially distorting (Black 1986: 71–75), but I’ve also insisted, as opposed to freethinker simpletons, that important truths have been expressed in religious terms: “God is unreal, but [He] has real but muddled referents in lived experience” (Black 1992:222). Bookchin was formerly aware of this (1982: 195–214).

The Dean’s dialectic is more than a mode of reasoning: he has a “dialectical notion of causality” (Bookchin 1989: 203). The Universe itself exhibits “an overall tendency of active, turbulent substance to develop from the simple to the complex, from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous, from the simple to the variegated and differentiated” (ibid.: 199). To evolve, that is, from primal glop to us: “Humanity, in effect, becomes the potential voice of a nature rendered self-conscious and self-creative” (ibid.: 201; cf. 1987b: 30). We are one with nature — provided we follow his package directions — and at the same time we are more natural than nature has hitherto been. Out of the evolution of consciousness emerged the consciousness of evolution and now, rational self-direction. By and through this social “second nature” — conscious humanity — the dialectic actualizes the “immanent self-directedness” (1987b: 28) of the cosmos. An “immanent world reason” is the “inherent force,” “the logos — that impart[s] meaning and coherence to reality at all levels of existence” (Bookchin 1982: 10). Humanity’s duty and destiny is to inscribe the Word on the fabric of reality. The Deanly dialectic represents the most advanced thought of, say, the fourth century B.C.

In appearance, it’s the same old story of man’s God-given mission to dominate nature (Genesis 9: 1–3): the directed evolution of an objective “ecological ethics involves human stewardship of the planet” (Bookchin 1987b: 32). But in essence, second nature is a moment in the development of

...a radically new “free nature” in which an emancipated humanity will become the voice, indeed the expression, of a natural evolution rendered self-conscious, caring, and sympathetic to the pain, suffering, and incoherent aspects of an evolution left to its own, often wayward, unfolding. Nature, due to human rational intervention, will thence acquire the intentionality, power of developing more complex life-forms, and capacity to differentiate itself (Bookchin 1989: 202–203).

(Query: Why is it a moral imperative to make the world more complicated than it already is?) Even today, when an unemancipated humanity “is still less than human” (ibid.: 202), we are well on our way to rationalizing the “often wayward” course of evolution. Thanks to biotechnology, “thousands of microorganisms and plants have been patented as well as six animals. More than 200 genetically engineered animals are awaiting patent approval at the Patent and Trademark Office” (Rifkin 1995: 119). This would seem to he fully in keeping with Bookchin’s program (Eckersley 1989: 111–112). Nature finds freedom at long last in submission to its highest manifestation: us. Just as we not-quite-humans find freedom in submission to rational direction from the first fully human being: Murray Bookchin. To paraphrase Nietzsche, not-quite-man is something to be surpassed: a rope stretched over the abyss between all the rest of us and Murray Bookchin.

Is everybody with me? Bookchin is saying that nature isn’t actually free when it’s really free (where really means “what it is”), when it’s out of control. That’s just “negative freedom” — “a formal ‘freedom from’ — rather than [positive freedom,] a substantive freedom to” (4). We are no longer to let Nature take its course. Nature is actually free when it’s really controlled by its highest manifestation, humans. Humanity is essentially natural (nature for-itself), the rest of nature isn’t (nature in-itself).

Perhaps a political analogy will help. Workers aren’t actually free when they’re really free, i.e., uncontrolled. The working class in-itself is actually free when it’s really controlled by the class for-itself, the class-conscious vanguard — workers like Bookchin was, back when he was a worker.

When he tells it the way it is, the way it “actually” is, Bookchin is irrefutable. Insofar as the evidence supports him, he is “really” right. Insofar as it does not, that is because he is, to that extent, “potentially” right. (I am using these words throughout exactly as Bookchin does [1987b: 27J.) Reality “is no less ‘real’ or ‘objective’ in terms of what it could be as well as what it is at any given moment” (ibid.: 203). Ancient Athens might not have been a genuine direct democracy “at any given moment” or indeed in any of its moments, but if it ever had the potential for direct democracy, then it was always actually, objectively a direct democracy. To divine this mystery is “to comprehend the truth of the Polis” (Clark 1982: 52; 1984: 202–203). The fact that the potential was never realized when Athens was real doesn’t matter. “An oak tree objectively inheres in an acorn” (Bookchin 1987b: 35 n. 22) — thus the acorn is actually an oak — even if a squirrel eats it. To call this an “idiosyncratic use of the word I objective” (Eckersley 1989: 101) is putting it mildly.

You can make this same trick work for the city in the I abstract, and thus for any city: “Civilization, embodied in the city as a cultural center, is divested of its rational dimensions [by anti-civilizationists], as if the city were an unabated cancer rather than the potential sphere for universalizing human intercourse, in marked contrast to the parochial limitations of tribal and village life” (34). No matter how devastating a case is made against civilization, “to malign civilization without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for self-conscious freedom” is “to retreat back into the shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellectuation [sic] was only an evolutionary promise” (56). (At least the brutes didn’t use big words that don’t exist.) Democracy “lies latent in the republic” (59), any urban republic, as it has for thousands of years (and for how many thousands more?).

With characteristic understatement, the Dean concedes that his is “a fairly unorthodox notion of reason” (1982: 10). It’s Hegel’s philosophy of history with an abstract Humanity replacing the World-Spirit, roughly the point reached by Feuerbach. Murray Bookchin is the world’s oldest Young Hegelian. God, taught Feuerbach, is merely the essence of Man, his own supreme being, mystified. But abstract Man, countered Max Stirner, is also a mystification:

The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as “God,” or find it in him and call it “essence of man” or “man.” I am neither God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me (1995: 34).

Hegel’s Christian philosophy is developing-humanity-as- supernatural. Bookchin’s Marxist philosophy is developing-humanity-as-supranatural. The difference is only terminological.

Whenever Stirner says “I” he refers to himself, Max Stirner, but only as an example. Whenever he refers to the unique one or to the ego he refers, not to an abstract individual, but to each and every individual, to himself, certainly, but also to every Tom, Dick and Murray. This is why accusing Stirner of elitism (7) is bogus. Bookchin thinks that real Humanity is still less than actually human (1989: 202). Stirner thinks that every real human is more than human(ity): “‘Man’ as a concept or predicate does not exhaust what you are because it has a conceptual content of its own and because it lets itself stipulate what is human, what is a ‘man,’ because it can be defined... But can you define yourself? Are you a concept?” (1978: 67).

Positing a human essence is unnecessary for the practice of any art or science. The indwelling essence is not discoverable by observation, experimentation, or any rational mode of inquiry. To be sure, there are those who claim to have apprehended essence directly, by non-ordinary consciousness. They’re called mystics, and Professor Bookchin professes to despise them. More likely he envies the qualitative superiority of their visions. Municipal socialism has got to be as mundane as mysticism gets. As Hakim Bey writes: “In sleep we dream of only two forms of government — anarchy & monarchy.... A democratic dream? a socialist dream? Impossible” (1991: 64). The Dean is indignant at this supposed denigration of “the dreams of centuries of idealists” (21) but neglects to indicate by what muscular rationalist faculty he is privy to the dreams of the dreamers of previous centuries — a ouija board perhaps? But he may be right that Bey has underestimated how far the colonization of the unconscious may have proceeded in the case of a lifelong, elderly political militant. Bookchin may well be a counterexample to the claim by a Nietzsche commentator that “there is no such thing as a dull unconscious” (Ansell-Pearson 1994: 168). Do androids dream of electric sheep? Or as Nietzsche put it: every “thing in itself’ is stupid (1994: 81).

Whether mystical or merely mystifying, Bookchin’s conception of reason is as unreasonable as so many of its results. His latest polemic is so foolish that it invites reexamination of his previous books which mostly escaped critical attention from radicals. The accolades of liberal journalists (and they’ll forget him soon enough) won’t avert the serious devaluation he’s called down upon himself. I once defined dialectics, unfairly, as “a Marxist’s excuse when you catch him lying” (1992: 149). In this sense alone is Bookchin’s reasoning dialectical. After decades of talking down to eco- hippies who disdain “all muscularity of thought” (Bookchin 1987b: 3), his own mental musculature has atrophied. This time he’s bitten off more than he can gum.