[1] Whatever its chronology, the use of ‘humanism’ to mean a crude anthropocentric and technocratic use of the planet in Ntrictly human interests (often socially unspecified) has its contemporary origins in Martin Heidegger’s Brief uber den Humanismus (Letter on Humanism), written in 1947, which gained favor among t he postwar French philosophes of the existentialist and later postmodernist vintage. Heidegger’s very flawed and sinister Brief is a masterpiece of misinterpretation and irresponsible reasoning. The humanist—antihumanist dichotomy has its historical roots primarily in the postwar cynicism and nihilism of the 1950s and 1960s.

[2] Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982; republished, with new introduction, by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991).

[3] The accusations within the antihumanist camp that their own members are enveloped in the very rationalism they denounce persists to this very day, as witness Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche as a captive of rationalism and humanism and charges by certain postmodernists, in turn, that Heidegger was no less a product of the rationalists and humanists whom he for a time denounced. See my discussion of Jacques Derrida in Chapter 7.

[4] David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

[5] Ibid., p. viii.

[6] Ibid, pp. 5–6.

[7] E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 138–9.

[8] Ibid., p. 139.

[9] Michael D. Lemonick, ‘How Man Began’, Time, 14 March 1994.

[10] The word eco-communities is used quite deliberately. I have deep reservations about the word ecosystem, except when a systems analysis of the energy flow between plants and animals is involved. Systems theory has little if any applicability to qualitative as distinguished from quantitative discussions of ecological issues. However popular it may be in mechanistic views of the natural world, systems theory cannot exhaust our knowledge of plant-animal and human interactions.

[11] An argument equating the ‘navigational skills’ of birds with the intelligence of human beings has actually been advanced by a deep ecologist in a serious academic journal. See Robyn Eckersley, ‘Divining evolution: The ecological ethics of Murray Bookchin’, Environmental Ethics, vol. 11 (Summer 1989), p. 115.

[12] Ehrenfeld, Arrogance, p. viii.

[13] In a 1994 documentary series, Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins, on NOVA. The book accompanying the documentary is Donald Johanson, Lenora Johanson, and Blake Edgar, Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins (New York: Villard Books, 1994).

[14] Australopithecus ramidus, discovered in north-central Ethiopia by Gen Suwa, is believed to be some 4.5 million years old. According to Suwa in the October 1994 issue of Nature, this hominid was bipedal and lived in a forested area; if this is true, it raises problems for theories of bipedalism as an adaptation to Savannah lifeways. Some experts have reportedly declared that the fossil remains are the ‘missing link’ between apes and hominids. More data must be made available before the role of ramidus in human evolution becomes clear.

[15] See also Derek Joubert and Beverley Joubert, ‘Lions of Darkness’, National Geographic, August 1994, pp. 35ff.

[16] E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

[17] Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

[18] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

[19] Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 3. How ‘new’ this ‘synthesis’ is can be argued at considerable length. Many of Wilson’s notions were previously advanced by the quasiromantic biologistic movements of central Europe during the 1920s, movements that took an exceptionally reactionary form between 1914 and 1945 and that fed directly into National Socialist ideology.

[20] Ibid., p. 3, emphases added.

[21] E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

[22] Ibid., p. 2, emphases added,

[23] Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).

[24] Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 2, emphases added.

[25] Ibid., pp. 2–3.

[26] Dawkins, Selfish Gene, p. 2, emphasis added.

[27] Ibid., pp. 2–3.

[28] Ibid., p. 203.

[29] Ibid., p. 215.

[30] Ibid., p. 206. Here Dawkins explains the origin of the word meme as follows:
‘We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene”. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.’

[31] Ibid., pp. 207–8.

[32] Ibid., p.209.

[33] Ibid., pp. 210–11, emphasis added.

[34] Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added

[35] Ibid., p. 25. We are also warned by Dawkins on page 95 that he is exercising license’ in ‘talking about genes as if they had conscious aims’ and in an earlier passage on page 59 he tells us that ‘drey do not think at all’. But much of Dawkins’ account is couched in words like selfishness, loyalties, aims, and goals, so that a few disclaiming sentences here and there barely serve to support his contention that he has not attributed unwarranted intentionality to his ‘immortal coils’.

[36] Robert L. Trivers, ‘Foreword’, in Ibid., p.v.

[37] Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 167, emphasis added.

[38] Ibid., p. 167, emphasis added.

[39] Ibid., p. 213, emphasis added.

[40] Ibid., p. 149, emphasis added.

[41] Ibid., p. 213.

[42] Ibid., p. 149.

[43] Ibid., p. 150.

[44] Ibid., p. 151.

[45] For an eminently readable critical review of the primatological material that is being inflicted on the public by researchers like Goodall, the reader would do well to consult Lord Zuckerman’s caustic ‘Apes R Not Us’, in The New York Review of Books (30 May 1991), pp. 43—9.

[46] Wilson, On Human Nature, pp. 152–3.

[47] Ibid., p. 152, emphasis added.

[48] Ibid., p. 153.

[49] See Christopher Wills, The Wisdom of Genes: New Pathways in Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

[50] Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 153.

[51] Ibid., p. 153, emphasis added.

[52] Ibid., p. 196.

[53] Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 221.

[54] David Erdal et al, ‘On Human Egalitarianism: An Evolutionary Product of Machiavellian Status Escalation’, Current Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 2 (April 1994), pp. 169–70. In a laudatory account of Wilson’s achievements in the Boston Globe Magazine, Scott Allen aptly describes sociobiology today as ‘a fast-growing field of science’ . Today, indeed! In the 1970s, when progressive social sensibilities still had a voice in the United States, Wilson was justly criticized by a wide spectrum of scientists and political activists for speculating that ‘even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to play a disproportionate role in political life, business, and science’ , as Wilson said in The New York Times in 1975.

[55] Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

[56] Ibid., p. 228.

[57] Ibid., pp. 66–7.

[58] Ibid., pp. 95–6.

[59] Ibid., pp. 193, 195, 214.

[60] Ibid., p. 236.

[61] Ibid., pp. 238–9.

[62] Ibid., p. 262.

[63] James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Planet (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). On human beings as ‘intelligent fleas’, see p. 155.

[64] Ibid., p. 19.

[65] Ibid., p. 40, emphasis added.

[66] Ibid., p. 19, emphasis added.

[67] Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added.

[68] Ibid., p.211.

[69] Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added.

[70] Ibid., p. 210.

[71] Ibid., p. 212.

[72] Ibid., p. 212.

[73] Ibid., p. 212.

[74] Ibid., p. 217.

[75] Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

[76] This opening paragraph was deleted in later, revised editions of The Population Bomb ,

[77] Ehrlich, The Population Bomb pp. 15–16.

[78] Ibid ., pp. 66—7.

[79] Ibid., p. 83.

[80] Ibid., pp. 135–6, emphsis added.

[81] Ibid., p. 136.

[82] Ibid., p. 139.

[83] Ibid., pp. 138–9, emphases added.

[84] Ibid., p. 159.

[85] Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 160.

[86] Ibid., pp. 160–1. Happily, the Paddocks’ book has been completely forgotten. 1975 came and went with no famine that could be attributed to population size and fertility rates.

[87] Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 165–6.

[88] Recent declines in the world grain harvest, which the ‘population bombers’ have been only too quick to celebrate as evidence of lasting food shortages, seem to be due mainly to weather conditions in the United States, which resulted in a heavy loss of corn. Per capita availability of grains have been fairly steady, generally hovering around 323 kilograms. Meat and fish output has also held steady. Aquaculture, still relatively marginal, holds enormous promise as a source of food if serious attempts were made to develop it.

[89] Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 177.

[90] Ibid., p. 150.

[91] Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, originally published in 1798. Except where indicated, all references herein are to the original 1798 version as republished in Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed. On Population (New York: modern Library, 1960).

[92] Ibid., p. 64.

[93] Ibid., p. 66.

[94] Ibid., pp. 59–60.

[95] Ibid., p. 9, emphasis added.

[96] Ibid., p. 17.

[97] Ibid., p. 38.

[98] Ibid., pp. 51–2.

[99] Ibid., p. 160.

[100] T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1803 edition, ed. Patricia James, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 127.

[101] Malthus, Population, p. 367.

[102] Ibid., p. 506.

[103] Ibid., pp. 506–7.

[104] Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 3.

[105] Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell, Human Breeding and Survival: Population Roads to Peace and War (New York: Penguin Books, 1947)

[106] Ibid., p. 97.

[107] Ibid., p. 99.

[108] William F. Vogt, The Road to Survival (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948).

[109] Ibid., p. 47.

[110] Ibid., pp. 186, 224—5,

[111] Ibid., pp. 281–2.

[112] Ibid., p. 48.

[113] Ibid., p. 211.

[114] Garrett Hardin, Biology: Its Human Implications (1949), as cited in Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (1975; Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

[115] Ibid., p. 372.

[116] Ibid., p. 375.

[117] Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).

[118] Garrett Hardin, ‘To Malthus’, in Garrett Hardin, ed. Population, Evolution, Birth Control: A Collage of Controversial Readings, (San Francisco: W. H, Freeman & Co., 1969), p. 88.

[119] Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, vol. 162 (13 December 1968), pp, 1243–8.

[120] John Noble Wilford, ‘A Tough-Minded Ecologist Comes to Defense of Malthus’, The New York Times, 30 June 1987.

[121] The New York Times, 3 January 1994; the data are based on a report by Bryant Roby et al. of American Demographics magazine.

[122] Steven W. Sinding and Sheldon J. Segal, in ‘Birth-Rate News’, The New York Times, 12 December 1991.

[123] See especially my The Limits of the City (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1979; reprinted by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986); Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1990); and From Urbanization to Cities (formerly Urbanization Without Cities ) (1986; London: Cassell, 1995),

[124] Naess’s lecture was published as ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement’, Inquiry, vol. 16 (Spring 1973), pp. 95–100.

[125] Ibid., p. 95.

[126] For my own part, I had made a distinction between environmentalism, which I respectfully regarded as single-issue but often socially unsophisticated and instrumentally oriented struggle against pollution, nuclear power plants, road-building, and the like, and ecology, which located environmental dislocations in ‘the very constitution of society as we know it today’. I presented this distinction in a lecture at the University of Buffalo in 1971, which was published first in a small periodical called Anarchos in 1972 under the title ‘Spontaneity and Organization’ and republished in my collection Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), pp. 270—2. In 1971, to the best of my knowledge, neither Arne Naess nor the phrase deep ecology was known to most environmentally oriented people. My own lecture and subsequent related articles like my 1973 ‘Toward an Ecological Society’ (in the anthology of the same name) called for a radically different sensibility toward the natural world and the need for a total remaking of society, in which I rooted the environmental crisis.

[127] Our Synthetic Environment, under the pseudonym Lewis Herber (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); and ‘Towards a Liberatory Technology’ , republished in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971).

[128] Naess, ‘Shallow and Deep’ , p. 95, emphasis added.

[129] Ibid., p. 96, emphasis added on the word intuitively.

[130] Ibid., p. 96.

[131] Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1990), p. 58, emphasis added.

[132] Ibid., p. 59.

[133] Ibid., p. 60. Fox’ s account of deep ecology and its development is among the most serious to appear in the ‘movement’ — regardless of whether he himself is a member in good standing.

[134] Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks; 1991), p. 26.

[135] Fox, Transpersonal, p. 66.

[136] Ibid., pp. 66–7.

[137] Michael Tobias, ed., Deep Ecology (San Diego: Avant Books, 1985). At the time, I protested the use of this title for an anthology containing my article, ‘Toward a Philosophy of Nature’ , only to be reassured by Tobias that the anthology contained many people who were not deep ecologists, including Garrett Hardin!

[138] Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985).

[139] Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 66, emphases in the original.

[140] Ibid., p. 66.

[141] Ibid., p. 66, emphasis added.

[142] Ibid., p. 67.

[143] Ibid., p. 67, emphasis added.

[144] Ibid., p. 67, emphases added.

[145] Robyn Eckersley, ‘Divining Evolution: The Ecological Ethics of Murray Bookchin’ , Environmental Ethics, vol. 11 (Summer 1989), p. 115.

[146] Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 66. Actually, this quotation from Fox comes from a criticism of deep ecology in The Ecologist, vol. 14, no. 5–6 (1984), pp. 194—200 and 201–4. Which does not prevent Devall and Sessions from bringing it to the service of deep ecology.

[147] Ibid., p. 68.

[148] Richard Watson, ‘Eco-Ethics: Challenging the Underlying Dogmas of Environmentalism’, Whole Earth Review (March 1985), pp. 5–13.

[149] Harold Fromm, ‘Ecology and Ideology’, Hudson Review (Spring 1992), p. 30.

[150] Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1990), pp. 147–8.

[151] Ibid., p. 148, emphasis added.

[152] Ibid., p. 147.

[153] Ibid., p. 71, emphasis in the original.

[154] Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1990), p. 176.

[155] Ibid., p. 177.

[156] Ibid., p. 189.

[157] Ibid., p. 189.

[158] Sessions and Devall, Deep Ecology, p. 46.

[159] Ibid.

[160] Bill Devall, ‘A Spanner in the Woods’, interview with David Foreman, in Simply Living, vol. 2, no. 12 (c. 1986–87), pp. 3–4. Simply Living is published in Australia.

[161] Edward Abbey, letter to the editor, Bloomsbury Review (April-May 1986), p. 4.

[162] Edward Abbey, ‘Immigration and Liberal Taboos’, in One Life at a Time, Please (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1988), p. 43.

[163] Murray Bookchin, ‘Social Ecology Versus “Deep Ecology’”, Green Perspectives, no. 4–5 (September 1987). Earth First! (1 November 1987), pp. 17—22. For an exchange between myself and Edward Abbey, see Utne Reader (January-February 1988), pp. 4–8, and (March-April 1988), p.7.

[164] George Bradford was another early critic of Foreman’s interview, in ‘How Deep is Deep Ecology?’ initially published in Fifth Estate (Fall 1987) and republished under the same title as a pamphlet (Ojai, CA: Times Change Press, 1989), p. 49. But Bradford was by no means unsympathetic to deep ecology’s wilderness cult. More opposed to technological innovations than even most deep ecology theorists, he wrote: ‘Deep ecology loves all that is wild and free, so I share an affinity with deep ecologists that has made this essay difficult to write.’

[165] See Bill Devall, ‘Deep Ecology and Its Critics’; George Sessions, ‘Ecocentrism and the Greens: Deep Ecology and the Environmental Task’; and Arne Naess, ‘A European Looks, at the North American Branch of the Deep Ecology Movement’, all in Trumpeter, vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 1988). See also Warwock Fox, ‘The Deep Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels’, Environmental Ethics, vol. 11 (Spring 1989), pp. 20—1, note 38.

[166] My debate with Foreman was published in book form, entitled Defending the Earth (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

[167] George Sessions, ‘Radical Environmentalism in the 90s’, Wild Earth (Fall 1992), p. 66, emphasis added.

[168] See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); and George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).

[169] Lynn White, Jr, ‘The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science, vol. 155 (10 March, 1967), pp. 1203–7.

[170] Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 157, emphasis added.

[171] Naess, Ecology, Community, p. 157, emphasis added.

[172] Andrew Greeley, ‘Mysticism Ges Mainstream’, American Health (January-February 1987), pp. 47–9.

[173] Katinka Matson, (The Psychology Today* Omnibook of Personal Development (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1977).

[174] Ned Zeman, ‘Who Let the Inner Child Out?’ Newsweek, 28 December 1992, p. 67.

[175] Sam Ellis et at, ‘The Angels Among Us’, Time, 27 December 1993, pp. 56–5.

[176] Alma Daniel, Timothy Wyllie, and Andrew Ramer, Ask Your Angels (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

[177] Edward Abbey, ‘A Response to Schmookler on Anarchy’, Earth First!, 1 August 1986, p. 22.

[178] Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1990), p. 237.

[179] Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

[180] Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness, Table 1, ‘Conjectures on a Paleolithic Idea of Wilderness’, p. 12.

[181] Margaret Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 75.

[182] Richard E. Leakey, The Making of Mankind (London: Abacus Books, 1981), p. 180.

[183] The very old sculptures of human heads can be seen vividly in National Geographic, vol. 174, no. 4 (October 1988). The engravings can be found in Michel Lorblanchet, ‘From Man to Animal to Sign in Paleolithic Art’, in Howard Morphy, ed., Animals into Art (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 136.

[184] Max Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness, p. 12.

[185] Lynn White, Jr, ‘The Historical Roots of OurEcologic Crisis’, Science, vol. 155 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203–7.

[186] It should be obvious that I am speaking, here, of late Paleolithic people — Homo sapiens sapiens — not Neanderthals, Homo erect us, Homo hablis, and any remaining Australopithecines, who can also be regarded as Paleolithic ‘people’, but who left no artistic remains behind.

[187] Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough, 1890 edition (New York: Avenue Books, 1981), p. 120.

[188] A belief in the existence of spirits should not be equated with ‘spirituality’, a word that can mean anything from the shared features that make a particular culture distinctive to a belief in a variety of ineffable, indeed metaphysical phenomena, be they the product of philosophical speculation or religious vagary. My own use of this word is primarily philosophical and, to some degree, cultural; I never use it to denote ‘spirits’, ‘spiritualism’ (a belief in spirits of various kinds), or religion of any kind unless in quotation marks.

[189] I use the word supernatural with reference to aboriginals advisedly. The spirit world — the dream world — may have seemed quite ‘natural’ to diem, and the distinction between sleeping and waking would have been understandably problematical.

[190] Kaj Arhem, ‘Dance of the Water People’, Natural History, January 1992, p. 51.

[191] Edward Tylor, Primitive Cultures (London: Murray, 1873); excerpted in V. F. Calverton, The Making of Man: An Outline of Anthropology (New York: Modern Library, 1931), p. 646.

[192] See Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1945).

[193] A. Irving Hallowell, ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View’, in Stanley Diamond, ed., Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 19–52.

[194] Edward Abbey, ‘A Response to Schmookler’, Earth First!, 1 August 1986.

[195] Clifford Geertz, ‘Life on the Edge’, The New York Review of Books, 7 April 1994, P-3.

[196] See Richard B. Lee and Irven Devore, ed., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968).

[197] See Edwin N. Wilmsen, Land Filled With Flies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[198] See Allyn Maclean Stearman, Yuqui: Forest Nomads in a Changing World (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989).

[199] Robert J. Blumenschine and John A. Cavallo, ‘Scavenging and Human Evolution 1 , Scientific American (October 1992), pp, 90–6.

[200] See Donald Johanson et at. Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins (New York: Villard Books, 1994).

[201] Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 71.

[202] Paul S. Martin, ‘Prehistoric Overkill’, in P. S. Martin and FI. E. Wright, Jr, ed. Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 75.

[203] All cited in Brian Fagan, ‘Bison Hunters of the Northern Plains’, Archaeology (May-June 1994), p. 38.

[204] Anthony J. Legge and Peter A. Rowley-Conwy, ‘Gazelle Killing in Stone Age Syria 1 , Scientific American, vol. 257 (August 1987), pp. 88–95.

[205] Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New York: Clarion/Simon and Schuster, 1961), pp.101–2.

[206] Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

[207] Robert A. Brightman, ‘Conservation and Resource Depletion: The Case of the Boreal Forest Algonquians’, in Bonny J. McCay and James M. Acheson, ed.. The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), p. 131.

[208] Ibid., p. 132, emphasis added.

[209] C. LeClerq, First Establishment of the Faith in New France (1691), p. 125; cited in Brightman, ‘Conservation’.

[210] E. B. Maple, ‘The Fifth Estate Enters the 20^th Century. We Get a Computer and Hate It!* Fifth Estate , vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 6–7.

[211] Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), p.248.

[212] Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 6.

[213] Ibid., p. 10.

[214] Ibid., pp. 54, 55.

[215] Ibid., pp. 177–8.

[216] Mander, Absence of the Sacred.

[217] Ibid., p. 32.

[218] Ibid., back cover.

[219] Ibid., pp. 33.

[220] Ibid., p. 11–24.

[221] Ibid., pp. 28–9.

[222] Ibid., p. 29, emphasis added.

[223] m, p. 381.

[224] Ibid., p. 121. In fact, Chapter 7 of the book is entitled ‘Corporations as Machines’.

[225] Ibid., p. 129.

[226] Ibid., pp. 129–30.

[227] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. xxv.

[228] Ibid., emphases added, p. xxviii.

[229] Ibid., p. xxvii,

[230] Ibid., p. 428.

[231] Ibid., p. 428.

[232] Ibid., pp. 46, 47.

[233] Ibid., p. 48–9.

[234] Ibid., p, 54.

[235] Ibid., p. 54. The clumsiness of Ellul’s argument has to be read to be fully appreciated.

[236] Quoted in Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 4.

[237] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 38.

[238] Ibid., p. 39.

[239] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in David Farrell Krell, ed, Basic Writings, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 294.

[240] Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, p. 296.

[241] Cited in Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach Heidegger (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1983), p. 25. This mean-spirited and unrepentant passage appears in English translation in Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 287. Farias’s extraordinary, brilliantly researched study of Heidegger covers his repellent ideas, career, and attempts at subterfuge after Hitler’s collapse-and the academic enterprise of his acolytes to see this self-anointed Fiihrer of National Socialist philosophy as more than an ideological miscreant. No less is Farias’s book an indictment of Heideggerian mandarins, big and small, in the academy today.

[242] For an excellent account of the French thinkers who directly influenced the student movement of May-June, the reader should consult pages 139–56 of Arthur Hirsch, The French New Left (Boston: South End Press, 1981). Hirsch goes a long way in describing the ideological sources of the uprising-although he notably omits the influence of the Noir et Rouge group, with whom Daniel Cohn-Bendit was associated, and the Situationists.

[243] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, from The Portable Nietzsche , edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Portable Library, 1959), pp. 46–7.

[244] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 267.

[245] Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie’, p. 42.

[246] I made two fairly lengthy visits to Paris in the autumn of 1967 and in mid-July 1968, when street fighting occurred throughout the capital on the evening before Bastille Day. During that time I interviewed several student activists in great detail, most of whom played leading roles in the March 22^nd Movement, which spearheaded the student struggle. When I asked about their philosophical and political influences, they made frequent references to the Socialisme ou Barbaric group, the anarchist Noir et Rouge group, and even to the Situationists, whom they viewed with a certain measure of disdain because of their withdrawal from the movement. But no one I interviewed mentioned Foucault. Eager as I was to explore the ideological influences on the student movement, I did not even learn of Foucault’s existence until he became fashionable in the United States years later.

[247] On the multilayered ‘genealogy’ of Foucault’s ideas and all their convolutions, see James Miller’s superb The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), a respectful but critical account that in many respects contains an implicit criticism of our times and explores the philosophical milieu in which Foucault’s views were developed.

[248] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972—77, trans. Colin Gordon et at (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 1–2.

[249] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 385. The editor of the series in which Foucault’s work appeared was R. D. Laing.

[250] Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 131.

[251] In Iris last works, particularly the brief essay, ‘Subject and Power’, Foucault declared that ‘it is not power, but the subject, which is the general themes of my [current] research.’ For him this shift was meant ‘to expand the dimensions of a definition of power if one wanted to use this definition in studying the objectivizing of the subject.’ Did this change in focus denote any emancipatory intention? ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. ,.. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this [dominated and domineering] kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.’ These passages are cited in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 209, 216. Foucault’s call for a ‘refusal’ to be what the system wants us to be and to resist its hold upon us while promoting ‘new forms of subjectivity’ arose early in the 1960s, only — alas — to be subsequently absorbed into the prevailing order as a cult of narcissism. Hence the crucial need for changing society, not ourselves alone.

[252] Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 123–34; and Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[253] Stefan Schimanski’s description of the ‘master’ is all the more interesting because it is written by a swooning disciple. After celebrating the fact that Heidegger ‘never left’ Messkirch, in which he was born, even after receiving an invitation from the Fiihrer to visit him in Berlin in 1935 (actually, he traveled widely, both on his own and for the Nazis), Schimanski tells us that to meet with Heidegger he had ‘to drive for an hour to the small town of Todtnau in the Black Forest Mountains’ and then to climb a path to the top of a mountain, where he lived under ‘primitive conditions’ with ‘few books’ and a ‘stack of writing paper,’ The philosopher was ‘dressed in the costume of a Swabian peasant, a dress he often also used to wear when he was Rector of Freiburg University. His heavy, squarish skiing boots (it was summer) emphasized still more strongly his relationship to the soil ... and his brother still farms in the region.’ More than one writer has alluded to Heidegger as a peasant-philosopher-with-out stressing the provincialism this implies. As to whether wearing ski boots in the summertime was sheer affectation or evidence of Heidegger’s ‘relationship to the soil’, the reader will have to decide. See Stefan Schimanski’s foreword to Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1949), pp. ix-x.

[254] Fritz Stem, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. xxvi. See also George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).

[255] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p, 175.

[256] Karl Marx: ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 398.

[257] Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 436, 437, emphasis added. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation renders Heidegger’s world Volk as ‘people’, which is usually how Menschen is translated. In view of the deeply ethnic implications of Volk, especially in the context of Heidegger’s ‘historicizing of the [German] community’, the use of ‘people’ softens and neutralizes Heidegger’s disturbing meaning.

[258] Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 46.

[259] Wolin, Politics of Being, p. 147. Wolin’s quotation is of an appraisal by Karl Lowith in Heidegger: Denker in durftiger Zeit published in 1984. At the time of writing, Lowith’s book has not been translated into English, but some of his important accounts of his former teacher are translated in an invaluable selection of Heidegger’s texts and comments by critics and former students of the ‘master’, under the tide: The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Wolin’s preface and introduction are compelling commentaries on Heidegger and one of his foremost French admirers, Jacques Derrida.

[260] Martin Heidegger, * Nurnoch ein Gott kann uns retteri [‘Only a god can save us’], interview by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, 23 September 1966. The interview was published in Der Spiegel ten years later, on 11 May 1976, shortly after Heidegger’s death. The English translation is in Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), pp. 56–7, emphasis added. The book is a collection of documents and comments by apologists and critics of Heidegger.

[261] Charles Spinosa, ‘Derrida and Heidegger: Iterability and Ereignis\ in Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Flail, eds. Heidegger: A Critical Reader, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 270–97. Neither Spinosa’s essay nor the book as a whole seems intended for the general reader, both presuppose a considerable familiarity with Heidegger and the topics that the various authors take up.

[262] Martin Heidegger: ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, in Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger, p. 11.

[263] Ibid., p. 9.

[264] Luc Ferry and Akin Renault, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago and London; University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 2.

[265] Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 31—46.

[266] Ibid., p. 39, emphasis added.

[267] Richard Wolin has examined the regressive implications of Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘humanism’ with detail that I cannot duplicate here. See Wolin, Politics of Being, pp. 156–60.

[268] Jacques Derrida, ‘ Differance ’ (1968), in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 11, emphasis added.

[269] Spinosa, ‘Derrida and Heidegger’, pp. 274, 275, emphasis added.

[270] Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 163–8; Jacques Derrida, ‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (1972; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 25.

[271] Derrida, ‘Semiology and Grammatology’, p. 24.

[272] Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 160.

[273] David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), pp. 125–7.

[274] Ibid., pp. 125–7.

[275] Gilles Deleuze and F61ix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977).

[276] Ibid., p. 293.

[277] Ibid., p. 348.

[278] Gilles Deleuze and F61ix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. ix.

[279] Ibid.

[280] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeofFBennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 10.

[281] Jean-Frampois Lyotard, ‘Lessons in Paganism 1 , in Andrew Benjamin, ed. The Lyotard Reader, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 126. Cronstadt is a reference to Kronstadt, the site of the Red sailors’ revolt against the Bolsheviks in 1921.

[282] Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 207.

[283] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext[e], 1987), p. 58, emphasis added.

[284] Jean Baudrillard: ‘On Nihilism:’, On the Beach, no. 6 (Spring 1984); cited in Douglas Kellner, fean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 118, 119.

[285] Baudrillard, ‘On Nihilism*.

[286] Kellner, Baudrillard, p. 119.

[287] Hence I do not use the words sociology or psychology as more than theoretical speculations. Like philosophy, they clearly have a place in the development of knowledge, but sciences they definitely are not. My respect for theoretical speculation, which also occurs in the ‘hard sciences’, is immense and I would not want to deflate its importance. What is disquieting, however, is the pretension that social theorizing can produce the kind of compelling laws that physicists and chemists formulate. Doubtless sociometrics, like Emile Durkheim’s study of suicide, closely resembles a scientific endeavor and occupies a gray zone between the natural sciences and social theories. But the more sweeping claims to certainty made by so-called ‘social scientists’, such as Karl Mannheim or Talcott Parsons, are actually a form of speculative theoretics that cannot claim to have the kind of rigor demanded of a physicist.

[288] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962; enlarged 1970).

[289] Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Recotistructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S . Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. xv.

[290] Kuhn, Structure, p. viii.

[291] Ibid., p. vi.

[292] Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2^nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); originally published in 1979.

[293] Ibid., p. 27.

[294] Ibid., p. 28, emphasis added.

[295] Ibid., p. 243, emphasis added.

[296] Ibid., p. 257.

[297] Ibid., p. 284.

[298] Ibid., p. 285.

[299] Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 258.

[300] Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 58. The word academic should be emphasized in the tide of this book; neither of the au thors, a biologist and a mathematician respectively, seems to be launching yet another wearisome attack upon the left as such but basically its well-heeled, postmodernist mutation of the 1990s. However, they do tend to drift toward conservative positions, even singing the praise of Martin Lewis — a former radical ecologist who is now an apologist for capitalism — in reaction to the idiocies of the pseudo-‘leftist* postmodernists in the American academy.

[301] Mary Anne Campbell and Randall K. Campbell-Wright: ‘Toward A Feminist Algebra*, paper presented to the Madiematical Association of America (n.dL); cited in Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition, p. 120.

[302] Ibid., p. 120.

[303] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).

[304] Ibid., p. 295.

[305] Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975).

[306] Ibid., pp. 18–19.

[307] Ibid., p. 51.

[308] Ibid., p. 81.

[309] Ibid., p. 289.

[310] James W. Jones, The Redemption of Matter: Toward the Rapprochement of Science and Religion (Lanham, MD, and London: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 131–2.

[311] Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Inquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science (Ipswich, Suffolk: Golgonooza Press, 1987), p. 53.

[312] Ibid., pp. 63–4.

[313] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975).

[314] E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1923).

[315] Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 190.

[316] Paul Feyerabend, Fareu>ell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987), p. 296.

[317] Feyerabend, Against Method, pp. 27–8, emphasis added.

[318] Ibid., p. 21, note 12.

[319] Ibid.

[320] Ibid., p. 274.

[321] Ibid., p. 275.

[322] Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason, pp. 301–2.

[323] Paul K. Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 8, emphasis added.

[324] Ibid., pp. 8–9.

[325] The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 40.

[326] To gain an appreciation of this developmental logic or form of reasoning, the interested reader can turn to G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic, which assembles all the logical categories known to the eighteenth century in an eductive continuum of truly magnificent proportions. The work has haunted — and perturbed — philosophy for nearly two centuries. See also Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays in Dialectical Naturalism, rev. ed. (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995).

[327] The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Ennis Rees (New York: Modern Library, 1960), p. 139.

[328] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 83,

[329] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 320.

[330] Cultural or institutional hypertrophy is by no means unique to Mesoamerica or any single region of the world. It occurred throughout ancient, medieval, and clearly modern history where capital accumulation is completely out of control and threatens not only to tear down social life as such but the natural world as we know it today.

[331] V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1942).

[332] See Gerhard Lenski, Jean Lenski, and Patrick Nolan, Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology , 6^th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). Where Foucault’s ‘genealogies’ are structured around stories, Lenski and his colleagues face the more demanding challenge of generalizing great quantities of data into a meaningful sequence.

[333] Linda Scheie and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story.of the Ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 18, emphasis added.

[334] Ibid., p. 19, emphasis added.

[335] If these remarks seem Eurocentric, so be it. I have an immense respect for cultural creativity wherever it exists — whether in Asia, Africa, Polynesia, or Australia. But the fatalistic religion of the East is not on a level comparable to revolutionary Puritanism, nor are Taoism and Buddhism — particularly as filtered through California’s Mystical Zone — comparable to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and socialism in its various forms, let alone to such great social eruptions as the English, American, and French revolutions.