Chapter 12. Nightmares of Reason

Unconscious irony has become a hallmark of Late Bookchinism, the Highest Stage of Leftism. Well-known examples include Bookchin’s denunciations of leftists with alluring academic careers just as the then-Director retired from an alluring academic career; his scathing contempt for John P. Clark’s “cowardly” hiding behind a pseudonym the way Bookchin did in the 60s[682]; his personalistic abuse of individuals he accuses of personalism; his vilification of other writers for appearing in the same yuppie publications he’s been published by or favorably reviewed in; his denunciation of the political use of metaphor in a book whose title, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, contains a political metaphor; and his denunciations of anarchists for agreeing with what he used to say. Although inconsistency, not to say hypocrisy, is nothing new for Bookchin, lately the devolution of his reasoning powers is dizzying. Paradoxically — or is it? — his intellectual decline coincides with his increasingly shrill defense of Reason with a Capital R against the Lifestyle Anarchists and the rest of the irrationalist hordes. To borrow one of the ex-Director’s favorite cliches, you might say that his commitment to Reason is honored in the breach.

The Director Emeritus taxes David Watson (that poor “philosophical naif”) for referring “to science (more properly, the sciences, since the notion of a Science that has only one method and approach is fallacious)”[683] — for speaking of Science in the singular. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin, who is never fallacious, or even facetious, nonetheless found it meaningful, not only to speak of Science in the singular, but to say strikingly Watsonish things about it: “Indeed, we have begun to regard science itself as an instrument of control over the thought processes and physical being of man. This distrust of science and of the scientific method is not without justification.”[684] Distrust of Murray Bookchin is likewise not without justification. He has never understood that science is a social practice, not a juristic codification of information or a rulebook.

Someone who admires or pities the Director Emeritus more than I do might like to interpret this as a cautious condonation of methodological pluralism, what the late Paul Feyerabend called “epistemological anarchism.” Alas, it is not so. Bookchin is no more an epistemological anarchist than he is any other kind of anarchist. Elsewhere in the same interminable paragraph, the ex-Director rules out any such possibility: “Watson is free to say anything he wants without ever exposing it to the challenge of reason or experience. As Paul Feyerabend once wrote: ‘Anything goes!’”[685]

In the sequence in which Bookchin places it, the Feyerabend quotation — unreferenced — looks like a summons to freak out. In fact, it was only an endorsement of pluralism in methodology. Feyerabend’s point was that scientific discovery does not necessarily or even normally result from following rules, including the rules of the scientific method (which, Bookchin formerly agreed, does not exist). The tales of Archimedes in the bathtub or Newton under the apple tree may be mythical, but, as good myths do, they express a truth non-literally. In principle, any context may serve as the logic of discovery: religion, drugs, psychosis, chance — anything. “Irrational processes” may sustain the context or logic of discovery, because “there is no such thing as ‘scientific’ logic of discovery.”[686]

According to the Director Emeritus, “mythopoesis” (mythmaking) has a place, but only in art. But the “experience” to whose authority he so selectively appeals confirms a wider role for mythopoesis and nonsystematic sources of insight. As Feuerabend put it: “There is no idea, however ancient or absurd that is not capable of improving our knowledge.”[687] Thus one stimulus to the theory that the earth moves was Hermetic writings (also carefully studied by Newton[688]) reviving that long-discredited Pythagorean teaching. The research of Copernicus, who believed in astrology, was guided in part by “the Renaissance revival of an ancient mystical philosophy which saw the sun as the image of God.” Copernicus saw himself as going back beyond Ptolemy and Aristotle to Plato, Pythagoras and the Pre-Socratics.[689] The earliest explorers of chemistry were alchemists and craftsmen.[690] Kepler and Tycho Brahe, like Ptolemy before them, practiced astrology. “All the great discoveries of modern science,” writes Kropotkin, with only a little hyperbole, “where do all these originate if not in the free cities [of pre-industrial Europe]?”[691] Nor was Bookchin’s beloved Enlightenment as scientific and secular as the Director Emeritus imagines: “The eighteenth century was far too deeply involved with the occult to have us continue to associate it exclusively with rationalism, humanism, scientific determinism, and classicism. Manifestations of irrationalism, supernaturalism, organicism, and Romanticism appeared throughout.”[692]

The ex-Director’s reverence for Reason rises in inverse proportion to his practice of it. He now says that he has “long been a critic of mythopoesis, spiritualism, and religion,” although I have found no such criticism in his extant writings of the 60s and 70s.[693] He also claims to be a longstanding critic of conventional, analytic, instrumental Reason. Much more revelatory, he says, is dialectical reason, “the rationality of developmental processes, of phenomena that self-elaborate into diverse forms and complex interactions — in short, a secular form of reason [there’s a religious form?] that explores how reality, despite its multiplicity, unfolds into articulated, interactive, and shared relationships.”[694]

What, if anything, this means is anybody’s guess. Do all “developmental processes” partake of an inherent rationality? What’s rational about gangrene or cancer? Bookchin died of developmental processes. By definition, relationships are interactive and shared, so what do these adjectives add to whatever the Director Emeritus is blabbing about? Are there no editors at AK Press? Casting about for a dimension of reality which, despite its multiplicity, unfolds into articulated, interactive, and shared relationships, what first comes to mind is capitalism.

In Anarchy after Leftism, I quoted the ex-Director’s admission that his is “a fairly unorthodox notion of reason.”[695] To say the least. His brand of reason, he claims, is dialectical, but only in the sense I once defined dialectics, “a Marxist’s excuse when you catch him in a lie.” Like Nietzsche, “I consider dialectic as a symptom of decadence.”[696] To hear the Director Emeritus talk, what dialectical reason adds to the ordinary variety is the developmental dimension, but none of his bombast makes any more sense diachronically than synchronically. Processes which make sense to the rational mind are precisely what are lacking in his connect-the-dots histories of urbanism (Chapter 13) and of the emergence of hierarchy (Chapter 5).

Bookchin denounces his renegade discipline John P. Clark for mistaking dialectics for functionalism, which is (he says) the notion that “we can identify no single cause as more compelling than others; rather, all possible [sic[697]] factors are mutually determining”:

This morass of “reciprocity,” in which everything in the world is in a reciprocal relationship with everything else, is precisely what dialectical causality is not, unless we want to equate dialectics with chaos. Dialectics is a philosophy of development, not of mutually determining factors in some kind of static equilibrium. Although on some remote level, everything does affect everything else, some things are in fact very significantly more determining than others. Particularly in social and historical phenomena, some causes are major, while others are secondary and adventitious[698]. Dialectical causality focuses on what is essential in producing change, on the underlying motivating [sic[699]] factors, as distinguished from the incidental and auxiliary.[700]

So then what’s so distinctive, so dialectical about it? Every positivist knows that in explaining change, some things are more important than others. Is that what the fuss is all about? As Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have written, “[Marxist] dialecticians have never been able to indicate exactly how they see dialectical relations as different from any of the more complicated combinations of simple cause/effect relations such as co-causation, cumulative causation, or simultaneous determination of a many variable system where no variables are identified as dependent or independent in advance... there is only the word and a lot of ‘hand waving’ about its importance.” Peter Kropotkin, who — unlike Bookchin — was an anarchist and a scientist, dismissed dialectics as unscientific.[701]

Murray Bookchin can kiss my morass.

What the Director Emeritus denounces is not functionalism. As a prominent functionalist explains, “‘function’ is the contribution which a partial activity makes to the total activity of which it is a part. The function of a particular social usage is the contribution it makes to the total social life as the functioning of the total social system.” A social system exhibits functional unity when all the parts work together without persistent, unregulable conflicts.[702] Nothing is assumed about how weighty a particular structure’s contribution is or even that it is necessary to sustain the totality, only that it does in fact contribute thereto. Thus another prominent functionalist, criticizing a different theory, wrote that “a serious limitation to this [other] point of view is that it is bound to treat everything in social life as of equal weight, all aspects as of equal significance.” Functionalism has been heavily criticized, and no one nowadays calls himself a functionalist.[703] “But any attempt at describing the structure of a society must embody some assumptions about what is most relevant in social relations. These assumptions, implicitly or openly, must use some concepts of a functional kind, by reference to the results or effects of social action” (Raymond Firth).[704]

If functionalism cannot explain change, dialectical naturalism cannot explain observed stability and coherence. Thus Bookchin’s criticism recoils on himself. For lack of a systemic dimension, his dialectics, far from elaborating forms, are mired in a formless world of evanescent moments — a Heraclitean “world of Yuppie nihilism called postmodernism.” As Feuerbach said of Hegel, “his system knows only subordination and succession; coordination and coexistence are unknown to it.”[705]

The ex-Director’s phrase “static equilibrium,” used as an aspersion, indicates that his thinking is not remotely ecological. If it is not a tautology, the expression can only refer to a system of unchanging immobility, such as Marx’s Asiatic mode of production, which has probably never existed. Ecology is about systems in dynamic equilibrium. Sir Arthur Tansley, in the seminal article which introduced the word ecosystem, wrote:

The relatively stable climax community is a complex whole with a more or less definite structure, i.e., inter-relation of parts adjusted to exist in the given habitat with one another. It has come into being through a series of stages which have approximated more and more to dynamic equilibrium in those relations.

As leading ecologist Eugene P. Odum explains, the components of an ecosystem “function together”: “The ecosystem is the basic functional unit in ecology.”[706] Ecology, therefore, is broadly functionalist. If Social Ecology is not functionalist, it is not ecology. But wasn’t it Bookchin who, in praising Greek science, stated: “Analysis must include an acknowledgment of functional relationship, indeed of a metaphysical telos, which is expressed by the intentional query, ‘why’”?[707] Why indeed?

Social conflict, as Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser have argued, can be functional.[708] Machiavelli thought that conflict in Republican Rome was functional for liberty: “I maintain that those who blame the quarrels of the Senate and the people condemn that which was the very origin of liberty, and that they were probably more impressed by the cries and noise which these disturbances occasioned in the public places, than by the good effect which they produced.”[709] Edwin R. Leach, while he insisted that the functionalist assumption of equilibrium is an analytical fiction, demonstrated that it was consistent with chronic conflict in highland Burma where the equilibrium operates as a cycle over a period of 150 years.[710] In social change there is always something which persists: “Even a changing system must be seen as structured at a point of time if it is to be called a system at all.”[711]

Objective ethics; the subjectivity and directionality of nature; articulated multiplicity; humanity as second nature; collective consciousness; “the actualizing of rationally unfolding possibilities” (what about irrationally unfolding possibilities? and doesn’t “actualizing” = “unfolding”?) — all this jargon and gibberish mark mucid Murray as mystical. He admits that the source of his untutored visions is intuition: “Indeed, every intuition tells us that human beings and their consciousness are results of an evolutionary tendency toward increasing differentiation, complexity, and subjectivity.”[712] Except that there is no such tendency in natural history. Since humans are part of nature, “their destruction of nature can be seen as a function of natural evolution.”[713] The ex-Director’s doctrine is theistic: “Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God there is no purpose” (G.K. Chesterton).[714] Bookchin’s pseudo-system is exactly what Marx said Hegel’s system was: “logical, pantheistic mysticism.”[715] The ex-Director may not refer to God by name, but his abstract universal principle of directional development is the World-Spirit which Hegel identified with the Christian God. Bookchin’s philosophy resembles that of the Catholic theologian Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[716] If it looks like a God, acts like a God, and (through His oracle, the Director Emeritus) quacks like a God, it’s probably God, up to His old tricks. Calling Him, or It, Something Else makes no difference.

For the Director Emeritus, “there is existent and permeating, on earth, in the air and in the water, in all the diverse forms assumed by persons and objects, one and the same essential reality, both one and multiple ...” It explains “the existence and activities of all forms of being, their permanence and their metamorphoses, their life and death... this principle is present everywhere at once, and yet it is individual in certain persons.”[717] Another of my tricks: Lucien Levi-Bruhl is describing primitive thought (in his terms, “pre-logical” thought) — which is the same as Bookchin’s. The ex-Director’s cosmology is what the Victorian anthropologist E.B. Tylor called animism, a “theory of vitality” which posits a world of spirit beings. Animism “characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity.”[718] The Director Emeritus is basically an animist who believes everything is more or less alive (and life, he affirms, is not an accident) — that there is “a latent subjectivity in substance itself.”[719] In his utopia, as he has written, “culture and the human psyche will be thoroughly suffused by a new animism.” The “animistic imagination” senses the subjectivity of nature.[720]

Animism, after all, is not confined to the worship of a multiplicity of spirits. The Director Emeritus believes that a principle of self-activity is inherent in nature. The natives call it mana, something “present in the atmosphere of life,” “an active force,” an impersonal power which “attaches itself to persons and things.” “Bookchin and others talk about latent potentialities, but what are these? It seems that defining inherent value in terms of such intangible natural properties doesn’t help much.” [721] Bookchin really should trade in his toga for a loincloth.

Even if none of his other doctrines did, the ex-Director’s moralism would discredit his already shaky claim to reason. There is no such thing as an objective ethics: “For these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so” (Hobbes).[722] As Thrasymachus maintained in The Republic, what is passed off in certain times and places as objectively true morality is only the morality which then and there is imposed by power.[723] To say something is good simply expresses approval of it and invites agreement. At one time, Bookchin reported approvingly that “organic societies do not make the moral judgments we continually generate,” instead, they “are normally concerned with the objective effects of a crime and whether they are suitably rectified, not with its subjective status on a scale of right and wrong.” Some disagreements over ethics may be rooted in disagreement about the facts, but not all of them, and insofar as they are not, there is no rational method for resolving the difference in values.[724] The only difference between objective morality and subjective morality is the police.

As John Locke observed, no matter how far you range across space and time, you will never find a universally accepted moral tenet.[725] And if you did, that wouldn’t prove that it was true. Anarchists, of all people, should appreciate that a near-universal belief can be false — such as the beliefs in God and the state — as did Bakunin: “Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo everybody believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Was not everybody mistaken? ... Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd.”[726] Already many of the favorite theories of 20^th century science — tabula rasa behaviorism, nondrifting continents, table climax ecosystems — have turned out to be “ridiculous nonsense.” It is a sobering truth that “all past beliefs about nature have sooner or later turned out to be false” (Thomas S. Kuhn).[727] If that is the fate of the truths of our physics, it is surely the fate of our ethics. The only universal truth about moral propositions is that they express the subjective values of those who believe in them. In the words of the anarchist egoist James L. Walker, “What is good? What is evil? These words express only appreciations.”[728] This is one respect in which Bookchin’s regression to Marxism has not gone far enough, for Marx and Engels noticed early on that morality was not only relative, it was relative to class interests.

As usual with Bookchin’s dichotomies, his moralism/amoralism distinction fails to match up with his Social Anarchism/Lifestyle Anarchism distinction. Some Lifestyle Anarchists, such as David Watson, also subscribe to objective moralism. And some Social Anarchists reject it, such as Emma Goldman. In her essay “Victims of Morality,” anarcho-communist Goldman denounced the unimpeachable “Lie of Morality”: “no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of morality.”[729] For elaborations, look into Stirner, Nietzsche, Benjamin Tucker and Raoul Vaneigem. Bookchin has never even tried to justify a belief which, in our culture, invariably derives from revealed religion. But it is not just that he affirms moralism and falsifies reason — he equates them: “What is rational is ‘what ought to be,’ and we can arrive at that ‘ought’ through a process of dialectical reasoning.”[730]

What Bookchin describes is determinism, not dialectics. It’s what Marx called mechanical materialism. The assertedly distinctive feature of dialectical reasoning is the progressive approximation to truth through the clash of opposites and their supersession: “Truth exists not in unity with, but in refutation of its opposite. Dialectics is not a monologue that speculation carries on with itself, but a dialogue between speculation and empirical reality” (Feuerbach).[731] The ex-Director has never engaged in genuine dialogue with anyone, much less with empirical reality. Faced with empirical reality, the Director Emeritus talks to himself, a habit which long preceded his senility. In action, Bookchin deploys the rhetoric of dialectic as camouflage or cover on those occasions when he does not understand the subject at hand. These arise often, as his self-miseducation ranges all across the sublunary sphere. The mystifications obscure the political ambitions. George Orwell: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” Political language — and it is the only language Bookchin speaks — “is designed to make lies sound truthful ... and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”[732] Like Stalin, his first teacher in politics, Bookchin unleashes the jargon of dialectics to justify his extreme ideological reversals and his opportunistic changes of “line.”

Bookchin’s dialectical naturalism may be restated as follows: nature follows a “law of evolution” consisting of “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”[733] Not to keep you in suspence — it’s Herbert Spencer, high priest of so-called Social Darwinism[734] and laissez-faire capitalism. There’s something developmental but nothing dialectical about Spencer’s “rigid and mechanical” formula.[735] Its political implications are as conservative as Spencer was. Industrial capitalism with its division of labor is the supreme example of definite coherent heterogeneity. In the words of Spencer’s disciple William Graham Sumner, “the sentimentalists have been preaching for a century notions of rights and equality, of the dignity, wisdom and power of the proletariat, which have filled the minds of ignorant men with impossible dreams.” Society must be left alone to work out its destiny “through hard work and self-denial (in technical language, labor and capital).” Should we arrive at “socialism, communism, and nihilism,” “the fairest conquests of civilization” will be lost to class war or mob rule.[736]

As is typical of Stalinist disputation, vulgar determinism in the abstract accompanies an opportunistic voluntarism in practice. In George Orwell’s 1984, one day Oceania would be at war with Eurasia — it had always been at war with Eurasia — the next day, Oceania would be at war with Eastasia, it had always been at war with Eastasia.[737] Do I exaggerate? Am I unfair? The Director Emeritus claimed to be an anarchist for 45 years. “Today,” he writes, “I find that anarchism remains the very simplistic individualistic and antirationalist psychology [sic] it has always been.”[738]

It is the same with John P. Clark, the ex-Director’s Emmanuel Goldstein. Bookchin says that “it is difficult to believe that from the mid-1970s to early 1993, the author was a close associate of mine,” that they “had a personal friendship that lasted almost two decades.”[739] Betrayed and insulted by his erstwhile acolyte, the Director Emeritus asks: “How could Clark have so completely misjudged me for almost two decades?” Clark misjudged him? A better question would be: How could Bookchin the Great have so completely misjudged Clark for almost two decades? How could so penetrating, so principled an intellect as Bookchin’s have failed for so long to detect this snake in the grass?

The ex-Director’s answer, what there is of it, is Orwellian. “Our ideas,” he says, “indeed, our ways of thinking, are basically incompatible”: “I could never accept Clark’s Taoism as part of social ecology.” And yet, he continues pharisaically, “despite the repugnance I felt for some of his ideas, I never wrote a line against Clark in public”[740] — not until he had no further use for Clark, or Clark had no further use for him. Bookchinism is basically incompatible with Clarkism, starting today. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, starting today.

I have no interest in defending Clark, who is at least as much in need of excuses as Bookchin for their long-term relationship. And Taoism is so peripheral to anarchism that how reconcilable they may be hardly matters to most of us (see Chapter 2). But there’s something important, and disturbing, about the way the Director Emeritus is going about discrediting Clark. Clark, says Bookchin, came to anarchism from the right; he was “never a socialist.” As a young man, Clark was a “right-wing anti-statist,” a Goldwater Republican in 1964: “Causes such as the workers’ movement, collectivism, socialist insurrection, and class struggle, not to mention [but mention them he does] the revolutionary socialist and anarchist traditions, would have been completely alien to him as a youth; they were certainly repugnant to the rightwing ideologues of the mid-1960s, who afflicted [sic] leftists with conservatism, cultural conventionality, and even red-baiting.”[741] The Director Emeritus prefers reverse red-baiting:

In any case, 1964, the year Goldwater ran for president, was also the year when the best and the brightest Americans of Clark’s generation were journeying to Mississippi (in the famous Mississippi Summer), often risking their lives to register the state’s poorest and most subjugated blacks for the franchise. Although Mississippi is separated from Louisiana, Clark’s home state, by only a river [the Mississippi is “only a river”?], nothing Clark ever told me remotely suggests that he was part of this important civil rights movement movement. What did Clark, at the robust age of 19, do to help these young people?[742]

What an extraordinary reproach! Probably no more than 650 volunteers participated in Freedom Summer.[743] SNCC turned many volunteers away. If by this demanding standard Clark should be condemned as a political or moral slacker, then so must virtually the entire 60s generation, since only a small percentage participated, and few of them in more than a small way.[744] But Bookchin only began bashing the 60s generation, as he does now,[745] after that became fashionable and when his prospects for recruiting from it dimmed. At the time, the Director Emeritus slobbered all over the New Left and the counterculture in the essays collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. These scornful words are nothing but part of a personalistic vendetta, yet they recklessly censure a generation.

Assuming all Bookchin says to be true, what are the implications for anarchist revolution? Apparently, anyone who has never been an old-fashioned revolutionary leftist can never be, or be trusted to be, a revolutionary anarchist today. Very few living Americans have ever been socialists or social anarchists, and most of them are elderly. Even those who were Old Leftists in the 50s and 60s, when the Director Emeritus competed with them, are by now in their 60s and 70s, and there were very few recruits thereafter. Bookchin, who reflexively accuses Clark and other so-called Lifestyle Anarchists of elitism,[746] is the one who is imposing an extremely exclusionary entrance requirement on the millions of Americans he claims are itching for anarchism. In opinion polls, twice as many Americans identify with the right as with the left. No doubt the prevailing level of political consciousness is a major obstacle for revolutionaries, but to approach almost everybody as a forever damned political enemy is to give up. It is the action of a provocateur. There will be no anarchist revolution unless there come to be more than a handful of anarchist revolutionaries. The Director Emeritus has devoted two books to reducing their numbers still further. So long as ideologues like Bookchin continue to think in terms of left and right, so long as they choose their enemies by these obsolete criteria, the right will always win, or if the left wins, it will make little difference. Bookchin’s nostalgia for the Left That Was is literally reactionary.

Bookchin’s expressed horror for critics of reason (other than himself), insofar as it is not ingenuous, itself reflects an irrational dread of profanation of the holy. He has so far reified and privileged one method of apperception as to turn it into an object of reverence. As such it is beyond criticism, and anything beyond criticism is beyond understanding. Thus for the Director Emeritus, reason does this and reason does that, whereas it is really the reasoner who does this and that by an intellectual process which nearly always involves axioms and shared antecedent suppositions (faith and traditions) and which is psychologically impossible without emotional impetus. His critique of instrumental reason is “unorthodox,” Watson’s is “irrational,” but these adjectives do not disclose the difference, they only judge it. Bookchin claims to surpass instrumental reason so as to divert attention from his inability to master it. Bookchin does not even want to think about whether, as Paul Feyerabend wrote, “science has ceased to be an ally for the anarchist.”[747] The Age of Reason was one thing; the Old Age of Reason is something else again.

Himself a superficial thinker (“not strikingly original”[748] either), Bookchin in his childlike nominalism regularly mistakes words for their objects. To criticize reason as the critic understands it is to criticize reason as the ex-Director understands it, if he did. It is almost as if other discourses, even other people don’t really exist for him. He does not even conceive of the possibility that someone else might have the right to depart from the everyday meaning of a word with the same free rein he does (see Chapter 12). His attitude is all too familiar: “Ecological rationalism merely puts a new, ‘radical’ spin on the old reason supremacy of the Western tradition which has underlain so much of its history of colonization and inferiorization [sic] of those ‘others’ cast as outsider.”[749] Many criticisms in this vein I consider caricatures, but Bookchinism is a caricature, a self-caricature. My previous writings have been criticized as knocking down a straw man. Bookchin is a straw man. He cannot be parodied, only quoted. Perhaps the lesson in all this, if there is one, is what Paul Feyerabend wrote in his last book: “The notion of reality makes excellent sense when applied with discretion and in the appropriate context.”[750]