Chapter 9

Chapter 9. The Rule of Law versus the Order of Custom

Sir Alfred Zimmern, Murray Bookchin’s favorite historian, intended some derision when he wrote that “the modern anarchists have reinvented ‘unwritten laws,’” but Sir Alfred, unlike the Director Emeritus, was right in spite of himself.[452] Malatesta expressed the anarchist view of custom: “Custom always follows the needs and feelings of the majority; and the less they are subject to the sanctions of law the more are they respected, for everyone can see and understand their use.”[453] So did George Woodcock: “Customs and not regulations are the natural manifestations of man’s ideas of justice, and in a free society customs would adapt themselves to the constant growth and tension in that society.”[454] Custom (it is better to avoid the confusionist expression “unwritten laws”) is a basic ordering institution in primitive society which anarchists appreciate as a way to replace the law of the state with acephalous order. Where custom prevails, it expresses common values “although no common political organization corresponds to them.”[455]

That’s exactly why the Director Emeritus condemns “unthinking custom” as irrational, “as a dim form of inherited tradition,”[456] although that’s not why he says he condemns it. His Commune may grudgingly tolerate the out-of-doors “personalistic” expression of values by dissident, discreditable “individualists” because their values cannot find social expression — in other words, they cannot influence life — until the assembly municipalizes them. The directionality of life is a municipal monopoly. But custom is implicit, insidious, extra-institutional and, scandalously, democratic. It is the only decision rule which really rests on universal suffrage. It is how affairs arrange themselves when everybody minds his own business. It is democracy when there is no hurry. If there is any social process in which democracy and anarchy coincide, it is consensus, not assembly majoritarianism, and custom is tacit consensus.

Bookchin defines custom as “behavior that is unreflective, that is practiced unthinkingly as though it were an instinctive rather than a learned heritage.” By now we are alert to the fact that the Director Emeritus never proffers a definition of his own unless it departs substantially from what the word really means. The dictionary definition is: “A habitual or usual practice; a common way of behaving; usage, fashion, habit.”[457] Reflection is irrelevant. Custom is not by definition unreflective. The ex-Director’s definition is both overinclusive and underinclusive. Overinclusive, because much, perhaps most unreflective hehavior is not custom. It is when we act in an unusual way, and regret it, that we are wont to say, “I wasn’t thinking.”

Most unthinking behavior is not customary behavior, although some of it is habitual behavior. Compliance with law is an important example. Most motorists obey the traffic laws, if they obey them at all, unthinkingly. If they paused to reason out their every decision, they would never get out of the driveway. Activities like riding a bicycle, tying your shoes, swimming, and even breathing may actually be impeded if you think about doing them: “Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it” (George Bernard Shaw).[458] Customs are obeyed — or rather, observed — far more willingly, or rather, more spontaneously, than laws.[459] The traffic example further shows that the definition is defective because it fails to distinguish custom from law, as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski may have been the first to notice.[460]

The definition is also defective because it is underinclusive. To follow a custom is not necessarily unthinking. Most of the customs which anthropologists identify for a particular people are expressed in “emic” or native categories of thought, which must be reflected upon in order to be articulated to the ethnographer.[461] It is unlikely that the first time aborigines think about their customs is when they are debriefed by an anthropologist. It can even happen in our own always aberrant society that people have to look up and learn customs not previously familiar to them, as parents may do, for example, when they set out to provide a traditional wedding for their child. By Bookchin’s defective definition, such matters are customs if you don’t have to look them up, but they’re not customs if you do.

The justification of many a custom is that it was thought through once, it worked, and nobody has to think about it anymore.[462] So it is not necessarily an objection that “custom prescribes how one does certain things in a certain way but offers no rationale for doing it that way except that that is how things have ‘always been done.’” Despite Plato, Rousseau and Bookchin,[463] rarely does any law come provided with a justification either. And when it does, the preamble (the explanation) is not to be trusted: it does not control the interpretation of a statute.[464]

Custom is recurrent social behavior. Custom is collective habit. Custom is not something apart from social organization. Custom is implicit in social organization, any social organization. And “even in supposedly advanced societies, behavior is governed more by custom than by law in the usual sense of that word.”[465] Custom is not something we could choose to do without, not without reversion to that state of nature in which the ex-Director disbelieves. Like some of the ex-Director’s other anthropological insights, the notion of custom as quasi-instinctual seems to have been gleaned from the Tarzan movies where, usually egged on by witch-doctors, the natives act out insane rituals like zombies. The Director Emeritus is the only person who believes it is literally true that “Custom is King.” But that is precisely what it is not.

The difference between custom and law, as everybody else knows, is coercion.[466] Bookchin conceives custom to be as coercive as command, if not more so. But whatever the force of custom is in modern states, that is not how it is in primitive societies, according to the Bookchin-vetted anthropologist, Paul Radin: “But customs are an integral part of the life of primitive peoples. There is no compulsive submission to them. They are not followed because the weight of tradition overwhelms a man. That takes place in our culture, not in that of aboriginal man. A custom is obeyed there because it is intertwined with a vast living network of interrelations, arranged in a meticulous and ordered manner.” There is no society in which rules are automatically followed. Thus anthropologist Edmund R. Leach scoffs at “the classic anthropological fiction that ‘the native is a slave to custom.’”[467]

It does not occur to the Director Emeritus that in denouncing custom he is “unthinkingly” obeying the most fundamental of all customs: language: “All speech is a form of customary behavior.” Thus Bishop Berkeley wrote of “common custom, which you know is the rule of language.”[468] Every society, ours included, is riddled with customs (concerning child-rearing, for example), more than could ever be reduced to law. As the anarchist Herbert Read said, customs cannot be eliminated, only replaced. We already have laws which once were customs, such as driving on the right side of the road.[469] A rule can be arbitrary (driving on the left side works just as well in other countries) without being irrational.[470] What would be irrational in a case like that is not being arbitrary. Custom as such can even be incorporated into law: for instance, a legal rule may prescribe that a contract may be interpreted in light of the “usage of trade” in the industry.[471]

There is nothing inherently irrational about custom. A regular theme in anthropology is the discovery that superficially irrational customs serve positive functions. That may even be the case with such food taboos as the sacred cow or the Jewish and Muslim abstention from pork. Most Americans have their own taboos about what animals, and what parts of animals to eat.[472] The Director Emeritus, too, is a “victim of unthinking custom.” Murray Bookchin does not eat the insects in his garden.

Presumably falling under the rubric of custom is the most mysterious phrase in Bookchin’s dyslexicon, “the blood oath.” He deploys it freely, almost always without defining it, as if all the world already spoke his private language. The term is unknown to anthropology and to the dictionary. I finally located an explanation of sorts: “The loyalty of kin to each other in the form of the blood oath — an oath that combined an expression of duty to one’s relatives with vengeance for [sic] their offenders — became the organic source of communal continuity.” Thus he refers to “the archaic group cemented by the blood oath.”[473] That’s funny, because it’s generally supposed that kin ties themselves — what the Director Emeritus would call “mere kin ties” — provide the organic source of communal continuity. As we shall see later (Chapter 10), Bookchin considers family relations biological, hence organic. Tribal peoples, he believes, have not emerged from animality. But the blood oath is not biological or organic, it is juridical. It has nothing in common with animal behavior, but very much in common with the oath of a witness or juror in court; and, like them, it’s a component of legal systems. It represents a step in the direction of culture from biology, from kinship toward polity, and from status toward contract. (Indeed, according to the Athenian democratic politician Lycurgus, “what holds democracy together is the oath.”[474])

That is, the blood oath might represent all these things if it existed. It doesn’t. It is a dark fantasy concocted out of Bookchin’s own family life — with the father breaching the blood oath of his marriage vows by desertion[475] — compounded with misremembered scraps of 19^th century anthropology and maybe more Edgar Rice Burroughs. On the ex-Director’s account, the blood oath should be a general if not universal feature of tribal life, in which case many fieldworkers would discuss it. I can find no text or monograph which even mentions it. This is no surprise, since the notion is sociologically (if not quite logically) self-contradictory. It supposes that in a society defined by kinship, family feeling is insufficient to provide assistance or revenge, but that a voluntaristic tie, not in principle kin-based, more successfully motivates relatives to furnish help which they were already obligated to give anyway. The blood oath may be possible, but only as an anomaly, irrelevant to the rise of civilization where kin ties are supposed to weaken in cities and perhaps need ritual fortification there.

Ah, but the wily Director Emeritus has an explanation for the universal absence of something which should be universally present. “The blood-tie and the rights and duties that surround it are embodied in an unspoken oath that comprised the only visible unifying principle of early community life.”[476] How can an unspoken oath be visible? It isn’t even audible! Unfortunately for the Sage, an oath “is oral by its very nature”; in the ethnographic record, only in rare instances are there silent oaths.[477] How can anybody rely on a silent oath?

As a matter of fact, the only example of a blood oath known to me or cited by Bookchin is the one taken by the aristocratic extended families of medieval Italian city-states around 1200 A.D.:

Drawing upon a strong sense of clan and consanguinity, noblemen clustered into tight-knit associations and built fortified towers so as to defend themselves or to expand their rights and privileges. Each such consortaria was a sworn corporate grouping, consisting of males descended from a common male ancestor. It was therefore a male lineage, although, when extinction threatened, the line might be transferred via a woman. In time the consortaria entered into sworn association with other like neighborhood groups. [478]

Here is libertarian municipalism literally with a vengeance: confederations of sovereign neighborhoods in arms. And here is kinship with the oath superadded. These communes are so many counter-examples to the theory that city loyalty necessarily supplants kin loyalty (see Chapter 9). Otherwise, the use of blood to solemnize an oath with blood through the “oath sacrifice” is best known among — Bookchin’s classical Greeks. From Homeric through classical times, oaths were accompanied by animal sacrifice and blood libations, involving immersion of the hands in the blood, and dismemberment of the animal followed by squeezing or trampling upon its testicles. This gory procedure was used to confirm contracts and treaties as well as in court.[479] So much for urban Greek rationality.

Oddly, Bookchin never says why the blood oath is so bloodcurdling. He relies instead on provoking the unreasoning qualms of the squeamish such as myself. The blood oath has, after all, nothing to do with blood; it is a political metaphor, something the Director Emeritus denounces almost as often as he uses one.[480] Once again I am constrained to invent an argument for Bookchin’s bald conclusion. By the time I finish this book, I may have invented more arguments for Bookchin than he has.

The assumption that “blood vengeance” is “unreasoning retribution” is gratuitous and parochial, as well as forgetful of the prominent role capital punishment played in ancient Athens and in the history of Europe. What the ex-Director has in mind is some celluloid image of prehistoric McCoys and Hatfields trapped in an endless cycle of retribution.[481] That’s not how it worked. A feud — three or more alternating homicidal attacks — is not necessarily endless, although it may occasionally last a rather long time: on the South Pacific island of Bellona, one counterattack came after 225 years![482] As Lewis Henry Morgan explained (with particular reference to the Iroquois), clans did avenge the murder of their members, but it was their duty first to try for an adjustment of the crime through apology and compensation.[483] Among the Nuer of the Sudan, where killings are common and the blood feud is obligatory for a lineage, compensation is usually arranged through the mediation of a leopard-skin chief. Even the headhunting Jívaro, the most warlike group in South America, accept compensation when a killing is unintentional.[484] Among the German barbarians, according to Tacitus, the blood feud was an obligation, “but the feuds do not continue without possibility of settlement,” since even murder was atoned for by payment of a specific number of cattle and sheep. In the Iliad, Ajax reminds Achilles that even the slaying of a brother or child may be compensated by a blood price.[485] Thus, even in the exceptional situation, like this one, where the Director Emeritus is not making up all of his ethnological insight, he follows sources long obsolete.[486]

Bookchin’s argument requires that the blood feud be a universal feature of kin-based primitive society. Most such societies, however, do not engage in blood feuds. In a cross-cultural study of the institution, feuding was frequent in 8 societies, infrequent in 14, and absent from 28. It was argued that certain social structural features favored feuding, specifically, patrilocal societies with “fraternal interest groups,” groups of related men who live near one another. They proved to be positively correlated, although even in 10 out of 25 patrilocal societies, feuding was absent.[487] Thus urbanization is not necessary to avert the blood feud in most primitive societies, because it is not a feature of most primitive societies.

The 19^th century evolutionists propounded the thesis that primitive justice was a punitive and automatic duty in order for there to be something for our enlightened justice — compensatory and forgiving (as we all know) — to evolve out of.[488] Actually, the Jívaro distinction between unintentional homicide (tort, compensation) and intentional homicide (crime, punishment) is not that far removed from where American law is today, and closer still to what it used to be. Nuer custom also distinguishes unintentional from intentional homicide, both of which are compensable, but intentional homicide requires higher damages. Indeed, we (in the United States) have in many areas gone back to the strict liability rules of primitive jurisprudence (e.g., strict liability for defective products, workers’ compensation, and no-fault automobile insurance). The correspondence between primitive/punitive and complex/compensatory breaks down at the outset. The most primitive peoples, according to the Director Emeritus and the old evolutionists, are hunter-gatherers. Among them the blood feud, if it exists, tends to be less punitive and automatic, and more compensatory and discretionary than among tribal peoples (herders and agriculturalists): “Indeed, legal ethnologists demonstrate little sympathy for an evolutionary scheme in which principles of collective responsibility and strict liability are considered hallmarks of primitive legal systems while doctrines of justice are thought embodied in civilized legal institutions.”[489]

The passage from Lewis Henry Morgan also, it turns out, looks like the remote source of Bookchin’s misconception, because it was closely paraphrased by Engels, but not closely enough. Engels wrote: “From this — the blood ties of the gens [clan] — arose the obligation [Verpflichtung] of blood revenge, which was unconditionally recognized by the Iroquois. If a nonmember of a gens slew a member of a gens the whole gens to which the slain person belonged was pledged [schuldeten] to blood revenge.”[490] The first sentence, which is correct — at least for one tribe, the Iroquois — speaks of an obligation arising out of the family relation itself. Read correctly, so does the second. “Pledged” is a mistranslation of the past tense of schulden, a word properly rendered as “owe; be indebted to.” The German words (transitive verbs) for “pledge” are not schulden but verphaenden or verpflichten.[491] No word like “pledged” appears in Morgan, and there is no doubt that all Engels does here is repeat Morgan, or try to.

No primary sources, including a classic monograph by Morgan, and no secondary sources say that the Iroquois swore blood oaths. In fact, Iroquois practice rebuts the supposition of a reflexive, automatic resort to vengeance. Crime was almost unknown. Iroquois ideology idealized the “stern and ruthless warrior in avenging any injury done to those under his care,” but the kinfolk of a murder or witchcraft victim were usually expected to accept compensation from the killer. Or they might kill the offender — with impunity, if the offender’s family admitted his guilt. Thus there was scope for discretion on both sides.[492] Even Engels must have known as much, since he wrote that “blood revenge threatens only as an extreme or rarely applied measure.” Morgan wrote that “a reconciliation was usually effected, except, perhaps, in aggravated cases of premeditated murder.”[493] In any case, nothing can be generalized about prehistoric behavior from the custom of a single modern-day tribe. The evidentiary void is typical of Bookchin’s inept, pretentious generalizing.

The ex-Director has perhaps confused his imagined blood oath with the institution of blood brotherhood, also known as blood pacts or blood covenants, whereby unrelated individuals swear mutual loyalty after an exchange of blood. If so, he has again been confounded by irony. Bookchin is forever carrying on about “the stranger,” how he is feared by primitives but welcomed in the city. Blood pacts are often entered into precisely to protect the stranger — specifically, the trader, when he ventures to distant lands where he has no kin.[494] A well-known essay on the subject is “Zande Blood-Brotherhood” by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who himself entered into the relationship. Among the Azande of central Africa, the principal purpose of the relationship is often business, not justice: to secure for traders a safe-conduct through, and to, hostile territory. Kinsmen never formed a blood pact: “A man cannot exchange blood with his own kin,” for the obvious reason that “they were already bound to one another by the social ties of kinship.” Among the Tikopia, too, where the covenant does not involve exchange of bodily fluids, the primary function of bond friendship is to give a man a trustworthy confidante outside the circle of kin. Indeed, strangers are frequently taken as bond-friends. Among the Kwoma (New Guinea), a “pseudo-kin relationship is established with the young men whose blood is mixed with his at the time of adulthood.” The two are always unrelated by kin ties.[495]

“The Stranger” is Stranger than most of Bookchin’s tropes. He has already appeared, a solitary figure wandering in from the woods, among the big man’s “companions” (Chapter 5). Like the tall taciturn Stranger riding into a wary town in the Westerns, the ex-Director’s Stranger evokes “the primitive community’s dread of the stranger.” The primitive community hates and fears the Stranger, who is viewed as an enemy and may be slain summarily.[496] The problem, see, is that “tribal and village societies are notoriously parochial. A shared descent, be it fictional or real, leads to an exclusion of the stranger — except, perhaps [!], when canons of hospitality are invoked.”[497] Among tribesmen, the Stranger is in danger because he has no kin to protect him. Happily, history came to the rescue in the form of the city, “the shelter of the stranger from rural parochialism.” The emergence of cities began to overcome the self-enclosed tribal mentality. “As ‘strangers’ [why the quotation marks?] began to form the majority of urban dwellers in late classical and medieval times,” kin-based life became limited to urban elites. In the city, “the suspect stranger became transformed into the citizen.”[498]

It is difficult even to imagine the tableau. Who the hell is the Stranger and what is he doing in an alien community? Is he a tourist, a hitchhiker, a backpacker? Seemingly not. If he has no apparent business there, it might not be unreasonable to suspect he is a thief or a spy. But while he might inspire distrust, it is hard to imagine why the villagers should feel fear or dread. After all, they heavily outnumber him, and so, as Bookchin says, he might be killed with impunity, or simply sent on his way. Logically, then, the Stranger should be the fearful one. Needless to say, the Director Emeritus adduces no evidence bearing on this eminently empirical question, and hedges by saying that “perhaps” customs of hospitality might protect the Stranger.

Why “perhaps”? They do protect the Stranger in many societies, for example, among Bedouins or the Kabyles: as Kropotkin wrote, “every stranger who enters a Kabyle village has right to housing in the winter, and his horses can always graze on the communal land for twenty-four hours. But in case of need he can reckon upon an almost unlimited support.” Among pastoral Arabs in northwestern Sudan, when a traveler arrives they throw a party for him. Among peninsular Arabs, according to T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), the law of the desert was to offer three days’ hospitality. Among the Tikopia the taking of bond-friends, just mentioned, “is done partly from the tradition of caring for the welfare of visitors.” Eskimos welcome the unfamiliar Stranger with a feast, as in many parts of the world. Among Montenegrin tribesmen (white men can jump), “generous hospitality and honesty were prime moral values for men.”[499] And there is no better example, according to Morgan, than the Iroquois:

One of the most attractive features of Indian society was the spirit of hospitality by which it was pervaded. Perhaps no people ever carried this principle to the same degree of universality, as did the Iroquois. Their houses were not only open to each other, at all hours of the day, and of the night, but also to the wayfarer, and the stranger. Such entertainment as their means afforded was freely spread before him, with words of kindness and of welcome... If a neighbor or a stranger entered [an Indian woman’s] dwelling, a dish of hommony, or whatever else she had prepared, was immediately placed before him, with an invitation to partake. It made no difference at what hour of the day, or how numerous the calls, this courtesy was extended to every comer, and was the first act of attention bestowed. This custom was universal, in fact one of the laws of their social system; and a neglect on the part of the wife to observe it, was regarded both as a breach of hospitality and as a personal affront.[500]

Among the ancient Greeks, guest-friendship was an effective substitute for kinship; but any visitor, guest-friend, ambassador or Stranger, was fed before he was asked his business. For Homer, “all wanderers/and beggars come from Zeus,” and “rudeness to strangers is not decency”; for Aeschylus, “Zeus protects the suppliant,” “Zeus the God of Strangers.”[501] Although inhospitable tribes (such as the Dobuans) do exist, ordinarily, “savages pride themselves in being hospitable to strangers.”[502]

Although Bookchin’s attitudes announce their own emotional, personalistic essence, a basic intellectual error enters into several of his fallacies, namely, a childish literalism. He takes everything at face value. If the rules say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, to him that must mean real eyes and real teeth in pairs. People of the same blood are not merely related through descent, the same blood, the same fluid, flows in their veins, and somehow they know this. If the rule of “blood revenge” requires the retaliatory killing of a man in another clan which “owes blood,” such a killing by the same rule requires another, and so forth. Feuds must be endless. But in tribal Montenegro (whose terms I am using), that is not what usually happened. By a variety of mechanisms, homicides were composed, if not immediately, then sooner or later, despite the ideology.[503] There is always a difference, in Roscoe Pound’s phrase, between the law on the books and the law in action.

The first generation of anthropologists to go into the field often returned reporting conceptually elegant clockwork kinship systems. Departures from the system on the ground were minimized, explained away, or adjudged deviant, even if they went unsanctioned. Eventually, anthropologists began to see the rules as somewhat flexible, and above all open to interpretation. They might be invoked selectively and tactically, perhaps as bargaining counters, just as in our criminal justice system the legal definition of a crime enters into plea negotiations, but as only one factor. In application to particular situations, custom may be negotiable. Raymond Firth, who was in that first generation, was also one of the first to appreciate that the idealized native rules usually provide for options for action.[504] Thus the blood feud is not perpetual, the Stranger is often not the enemy, custom is not programming, shamans are not theocratic terrorists, and rules are made to be broken.

The reality of large-scale, long distance intertribal trade among contemporary, historic and prehistoric primitives reveals the ex-Director’s fears for the Stranger as neurotic projections. “Interlocked regional exchange systems have been in existence since the Neolithic,” indicating extensive permanent dealings between strangers, so that Danish amber ended up in Mycenaean tombs, and faience from Egypt is found in Poland and Britain. Amber circulated in the Baltic zone from the early Neolithic (3500–2500 B.C.); by the late Neolithic (2500–1900 B.C.) it reached Germany and northern France; and by the early Bronze Age (1900–1600 B.C.) it reached Britain, southern France, Hungary, Romania and Mycenaean Greece. Circulation of goods was a basic precondition of Neolithic societies. Large volumes of luxury goods moved more than several hundred kilometers. Flint mines were up to 15 meters deep. Peasant communities were not self-sufficient.[505] It was the same all over the world. Prehistoric primitives regularly interacted with middlemen, i.e., Strangers. So do contemporary primitives, the most famous example being the Trobrianders, but also, as previously mentioned, even the lowly San.

In real life, the Stranger “as such” is usually not hated, feared or murdered, because he has business, literally, in the village after all. “Usually” is not “always”: in Fiji, for example, the Stranger is someone you can eat.[506] Bookchin has unwittingly conjured up the protagonist of a famous essay in sociology, “The Stranger” by Georg Simmel. Unlike, say, our relation to the inhabitants of Sirius — the comparison is Simmels’ — our relation to the Stranger is part of the interaction system of a community which he is simultaneously inside and outside of. The Stranger is “an element of the group itself,” so related to it that “distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near.”[507] If that was a bit abstract, this is not: “Throughout the history of economics the stranger everywhere appears as the trader, or the trader as stranger.” His position is actually accentuated if he settles in the place of his activity. He comes in contact, sooner or later, with everyone, but he “is not organically connected, through established ties of kinship, locality, and occupation, with any single one.” And in a way, the Stranger really does anticipate urban social relations. One relates to the Stranger, unlike persons to whom one is organically connected in particularistic relationships, on the basis of more abstract, more general qualities or interests in common. In this respect too he is both near and far.[508] The relationship with the Stranger is the first alienated, the first estranged relationship (Simmel uses the word, the same word Marx used).

The story about the elites retiring to brood about their bloodlines while Strangers crowd into town and take over is funny but false. That never happened anywhere, including Athens, the one city you might think the Director Emeritus knows a little about (but you would be wrong). Intermarried aristocratic or patrician oligarchy is the norm in the pre-industrial city, be it Babylon or Barcelona, Alexandria or Amsterdam, Tours or Tenochtitlan (Chapter 9). As discussed in Chapter 14, as Athenian democracy reached its apex under Pericles (an aristocrat, by the way), access to citizenship became more restricted as an influx of Strangers vastly increased the population. In fact, on the proposal of Pericles, the assembly made citizenship hereditary, i.e., a privilege of blood. Citizenship remained the zealously guarded prerogative of an endogamous caste until Macedonian and then Roman hegemony made it meaningless.

It is, in fact, the city — until relatively recent times usually huddled behind its walls — which is historically the epitome of the exclusivist community. And that is as true, probably more true of the supposed urban democracies which Bookchin claims as harbingers of his Communes in Switzerland, Italy and New England. In the New England towns, for example, “strangers were discouraged or denied permission to settle.” In fact, they were “warned out”: “towns could legally eject ‘strangers’ and have constables convey them from town to town until they were returned to the town where they legally belonged. Society had to be an organic whole.” These covenanted communities — “tight little islands” — took urban exclusivism to an extreme. Between 1737 and 1788, Worcester County in Massachusetts warned out 6,764 persons: “Thus the system discriminated against unfortunate strangers.” As late as 1791, the selectmen warned over 100 persons out of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Primarily directed against the poor, warning out also served “the purpose of keeping out persons whose political or religious opinions were unsatisfactory to the towns.”[509]

It requires no great psychological insight to realize that the Stranger is Bookchin himself. The fear he projects onto the communities of alien Others expresses his estrangement from them, just as his utopian Commune reflects a yearning for the lost community he imagines from his childhood. He is, like the exiled Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, nowhere at home — in internal exile, in his case. The explanation is straightforward sociologically and begins, again, with Simmel: trade is “the sphere indicated for the stranger, who intrudes as a supernumerary, so to speak, into a group in which the economic occupations are already occupied — the classical example is the history of European Jews.” The Stranger is the Jewish peddlar anxiously approaching a Gentile village; “in the Pale of Settlement of Czarist Russia peddling was an important means of livelihood up to 1917.” Only the economic division of labor brings Jew and Gentile together. “Each distrusts and fears the other”: “Beyond this surface dealing, however, [is] an underlying sense of difference and danger.”[510]

The Director Emeritus was born, as he relates, in the then-Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side soon after his leftist parents arrived from the chaos of revolutionary Russia. His first language was Russian, and the new ghetto his family inhabited was Communist as well as Russian-Jewish: “In a sense, they remained a part of the Russian workers’ movement even after they came to the United States.”[511] The relevant influence is not Judaism — his parents were secular leftists — but rather the insular community of the shtetl, the “townlet” in which Jews abided, or sojourned might be a better word, since “a long history of exile and eviction strengthens the tendency to regard the dwelling place as a husk.” The Jews and the goyim are near, yet far: “In a small stetl the Jews and the peasants may be close neighbors. In a large one, most of the Jews live in the center and the peasants on the outskirts, near their fields... The non-Jew, the goy, is a farmer. The Jew, officially proscribed from owning land, is urban.”[512] Here is the origin of Bookchin’s urban antagonism to the country. The stetl, however humble, is a seat of Talmudic learning, set apart from and better than the surrounding illiterate, animalistic peasantry. The Commune is not only a glorified polis, it’s a glorified stetl, inhabited by culturally superior Strangers of well-defined exclusivist status.

That these themes really do illuminate Bookchin’s mentalite is suggested by an unexpected source: The World of Sholem Aleichem, by Maurice Samuel. In one of Aleichem’s stories, a Jew named Tevyeh drives his wagon through the vast Russian forest on his way back to the shtetl: “The man on the driver’s seat, a little, bearded Jew in a ragged capote, keeps his eyes half closed, for he has no inclination to look on the beauties of nature.” Like the Director Emeritus, the urbane Tevyeh is indifferent to First Nature, or even afraid of it. As it grows dark, “he thinks of the demons who haunt the forest.” Described as a “wage-slave,” Tevyeh has been, in fact, engaged in the ecologically destructive activity of logging. Like Bookchin, he is impatient with animality: he kvetches to himself about the slowness of his horse, a “wretched beast.” Like Bookchin, he tries to conquer his fear of the natural world with words: “Tevyeh tries to spin the thread of rational discourse.” Finally, Tevyeh — Second Nature — tries to impart directionality to First Nature by talking to his horse: “Here I am at least talking, while you are dumb and cannot ease your pain with words. My case is better than yours. For I am human, and a Jew, and I know what you do not know.” According to Bookchin, “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, wayward unfolding.”[513] Here too he echoes a Hellenic theme: “In ancient Greek culture, the image of horse and rider represented the victory of reason in the eternal battle of civilization with anarchy. Horsemanship had a spiritual meaning as the discipline of our animal impulses” (Camille Paglia). The shtetl is tiny but crowded amid the vast Russian expanse: its ethnohistorians ask: “What are they shrinking from? Perhaps the loneliness and formlessness of space, perhaps the world of the uncircumcized, perhaps the brutalizing influence of untamed nature. They fear the bucolic.”[514]

So, the next time you think of Tevyeh, the Fiddler on the Roof, think of Murry Bookchin, the Fiddler With the Truth.