Chapter 7. Primitivism and the Enlightenment

In his prime, Bookchin could be a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, or, as he invariably referred to it, “the bourgeois Enlightenment.”[348] Now his only criticism is that with respect to primitive society, it wasn’t bourgeois enough. As he now sees it, the Enlightenment, which fought for reason and progress in its own society, inconsistently tolerated and even celebrated stagnant, backward, ignorant and superstitious primitive peoples. In this as in so many other ways, it is Bookchin’s project to perfect and complete the essentially rational and progressive project of the bourgeois Enlightenment. He always understands what people are doing better than they do.

“There is nothing new,” the Director Emeritus intones, “about the romanticization of tribal peoples. Two centuries ago, denizens of Paris, from Enlighteners such as Denis Diderot to reactionaries like Marie Antoinette, created a cult of ‘primitivism’ that saw tribal people as morally superior to members of European society, who presumably were corrupted by the vises of civilization.” Actually, two centuries before they were both dead. Bookchin makes it sound like they were collaborators. If there was a Parisian cult of the primitive, the airhead Marie Antoinette (d. 1793) had no part in creating it. Her cult of choice was Catholicism. Denis and Marie never met. And, as so often with Bookchin, the quotation marks around “primitivism” do not identify a quotation, they imply disapproval — an abuse, especially rife among Marxists, which I have already protested.[349] Quotation marks could not properly be used here because the English word “primitivism” and its French cognate did not enter those languages until the 19^th and 20^th centuries, respectively.[350] Am I quibbling about dates and details? Doesn’t the Director Emeritus? This guy claims to discern the directionality, not only of human history, but of natural history. How can he tell where history is going if he doesn’t know where it’s been, or even when?

Bookchin misdates the romanticizing of the primitive not by years but by centuries and, in the Garden of Eden version, by millennia. The noble savage wasn’t dreamed up at a Parisian salon. Although it is not quite primitivism, the pastoral ideal goes back to Bookchin’s dream-world, the urban-dominated world of classical antiquity.[351] Hesiod and Ovid wrote of an original Golden Age.[352] Primitivist ideas were expressed in the Middle Ages. The German barbarians of Tacitus are likewise noble and free. European notions of a specifically primitive freedom, virtue and comfort are at least as old as extensive European contacts with primitive peoples, especially in the Americas. They were Columbus’ first impressions of the Indians, and the first impressions of Captain John Smith in Virginia. Neither of these conquistadors was by any stretch of the imagination an Enlightenment humanist. In 1584, a sea captain working for Sir Walter Raleigh scouted the coast of Virginia. He saw it as a garden of “incredible abundance” whose inhabitants were “most gentle, loving and faithful, voide of all guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age.”[353] Peter Martyr (1459–1526) relied on the accounts of his voyages by Columbus in composing an influential account of Amerindian primordial innocence. The Indians remained the locus classicus of the noble savage until the late 18^th century.[354]

Montaigne’s celebrated essay on cannibals (1580) is “one of the fountainheads of modern primitivism.” It influenced Shakespeare, among many others, who even lifted some of its actual words.[355] In The Tempest (1611), the “honest old Councilor” Gonzalo envisages Prospero’s enchanted island — under his own self-abolishing rule — as an anarchist, communist, amoral, libertine, pacific, primitivist, zerowork commonwealth, a place not to repeat the mistakes of civilization.[356] I am not claiming Shakespeare was a primitivist; he is skeptical, perhaps mocking here. But he is also a sensitive witness that one pole of the European perception of primitives was already primitivist in 1611. Serious uopias too, like Francis Bacon’s, “now could be plausibly located in America. In their good order, just government, supportive society, peaceful abundance, and absence of greed, vise, and private property, these happy social constructions, situated by their authors in the New World, served as the antithesis of the Old.”[357] Accurate or not, these impressions indicate an attraction for the primitive which long antedates the eighteenth century.

And is it so unthinkable that some of these early-contact impressions, formed before European aggression and spoliation embittered relations with the Indians, might be true? Several historians — historians, mind you, not anthropologists — believe that they are.[358] That there is nothing new about an idea does not mean that there is nothing true about it. What the Director Emeritus does not appreciate is that the primitivists of the 18^th century, notably Rousseau, believed that mankind could not return to the primitive condition. As Rousseau wrote: “For it is by no means a light undertaking to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man, or to form a true idea of a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist; and of which it is, necessary to have true ideas, in order to form a proper judgment of our present state.”[359]

Of all the things Bookchin does badly, intellectual history may be the worst. He is so balled up with anti-religious rage that he is hardly capable of an accurate statement about the history of religion. At one point — actually, at too many points — he castigates David Watson for thinking that civilization as such represents regression for humanity. The ex-Director makes the obvious comparison to the Garden of Eden story, with which I find no fault except for its banality. He should have left it at that. Everything he goes on to say reveals him as an ignorant bigot.

“This sort of rubbish,” the Director Emeritus continues in his usual dispassionate voice, “may have been good coin in medieval universities.”[360] Medieval universities were urban institutions. Evidently Bookchin is unfamiliar with their curricula. Aristotle is the ex-Director’s favorite philosopher, and “the authority of Aristotle was supreme throughout this [the 12^th century] as well as the later medieval period.”[361] The universities soon taught the Thomist interpretation of Aristotelian teleology, to which Bookchin’s dialectical naturalism is much closer than it is to the mechanistic philosophy of his revered Enlightenment. Official Christianity was never anti-urban or anti-civilization. Christianity originated in the urban-dominated Roman Empire, and its original appeal was in the cities, not the countryside — the word “pagan” derives from the same root as the word “peasant.” Saint Augustine would not have written of the City of God if he thought God had something against cities. Where previous religions had been particularistic, “the Heavenly City — for Augustine, its early voice in the universal Church — melds all diversity among peoples, ‘all citizens from all nations and tongues [into] a single pilgrim band.’” Sez who? Murray Bookchin. After the fall of Rome, “the Christian church preserved the language of the polis ... Even heaven was conceived to be a city-state.”[362]

Christian orthodoxy has never interpreted human history or destiny as the recovery of the primal innocence preceding the Fall. That was the teaching of anarchic heretics like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Adamites, the Diggers and the Ranters. Rather, orthodox Christianity, like Marxism and Bookchinism, is forward-looking, eschatological. The Kingdom of Heaven is not the Garden of Eden restored, it’s the City of God, the ultimate polis, except that a loving Lord as a special dispensation for the saved excuses them from attending town meetings. In the Commune of Hell, attendance is obligatory for all eternity. By the 18^th century, the dominant tendency in religious thought was to regard the Fall as an “episode in prehistory” marking the origin of human society, and not such a bad thing after all.[363]

So here’s the ex-Director’s next sentence: “But in the late Middle Ages, few ideas in Christian theology did more to hold back advances in science and experimental research than the notion that with the Fall, humanity lost its innocence.”[364] Try as I have, I am unable to understand why the notion that humanity lost its innocence should retard scientific progress. So far as I know, no historian has ever said so. And I’m unaware that anyone in the later Middle Ages was even trying to conduct experimental research, aside from the alchemists. That is why it was possible to publish, in eight volumes, A History of Magic and Experimental Science.[365] The distinction is relatively recent.

Presumably, if the fall-from-innocence idea retarded scientific and technological progress in the late Middle Ages, it must have done so throughout the Middle Ages. That nearly reverses the reality. Scientific progress, it is true, was slowed by the prevailing ideology — not by Christianity, but by ideas inherited from pagan classical antiquity, from urbanites like Aristotle, Galen and Ptolemy.[366] On the other hand, there was rapid technological progress, unlike the stagnation of Greek and Roman times. From the standpoint of invention, “the period of more than a thousand years that spans the gap between early Greek and late Roman civilization was, to say the least, not very productive.”[367] The Latin Christian world fostered one innovation after another throughout the Middle Ages. The mold-board plow opened up vast new territories for farming. Three-field rotation greatly increased agricultural productivity. Other innovations included the windmill, the clock, the nailed horseshoe, and advances in shipbuilding and navigation destined to transform the world. Military technology, especially, progressed by invention and adoption: heavy armored cavalry, the stirrup, the longbow, the crossbow, artillery, firearms, stone castles, etc. Kropotkin paid tribute to the inventiveness of the period.[368] Eyeglasses, which the ex-Director wears, were invented by an Italian cleric in the late 13^th century.[369] Architecture surpassed its classical limitations — Bookchin’s beloved Athenian polis could never have built Noter Dame. And it was during the Middle Ages that the foundations of the Scientific Revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were laid.[370] Yet Bookchin can speak of “a nearly Neolithic technology in the late Middle Ages”! That would put Classical Greece in the Old Stone Age — which is going only a little too far: basic Greek technology was fixed early in the archaic, pre-polis period.[371]

Nor is it the case that technical advances were achieved despite superstition and ecclesiastical resistance. On the contrary, the cultural presuppositions of Western Christianity were a cause, arguably the most important cause, of technological innovation:

The Latin Middle Ages ... developed an almost entirely affirmative view of technological improvement. This new attitude is clearly detectable in the early ninth century, and by 1450 engineering advance had become explicitly connected with the virtues: it was integral to the ethos of the West... Medieval Europe came to believe that technological progress was part of God’s will for man. The result was an increasing thrust of invention that has been extrapolated, without interruption or down-curve, into our present society.[372]

As Lewis Mumford says, in technological innovation, “the contribution of the monastery was a vital one. Just because the monks sought to do away with unnecessary labor, in order to have more time for study, meditation, and prayer, they took the lead in introducing mechanical sources of power and in inventing labor-saving devices.”[373]