A caveat to the reader
Today, when environmentalism is under assault by Republican reactionaries in the United States, Tory reactionaries in Britain, and apologists for corporate interests everywhere, I wish to reiterate my emphatic support for all environmentalist tendencies that seek to preserve biotic diversity, clean air and water, chemically untainted foods, and wilderness areas. Much of my life — some forty years as a writer, lecturer, and activist in various movements — has been and remains assiduously committed to these environmental goals. It would be gross demagogery for antihumanists, misanthropes, and primivitists — who in my view are seriously damaging the environmental cause — to identify their own r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Acknowledgments
I cannot sufficiently thank my companion and colleague, Janet Biehl, for her scrupulous reading and copyediting of this book, as well as for her advice at every point in its preparation and her assistance in researching material for certain chapters. Her own unfinished book on deep ecology was one of the major sources for material on which I relied in writing my chapter on ecomysticism. To my editor, Steve Cook of Cassell, I owe a genuine debt for encouraging me throughout the preparation of the manuscript and for his patience in delays that were caused by ill health. I would also like to thank Steven Best and Richard Wolin for reading and advising me on my chapter on postmodernism. Their own work in this area has been im... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Prologue
This book deals with one of the most troubling conditions that afflicts society at the present time: a sweeping failure of nerve. I am speaking of a deep-seated cultural malaise that reflects a waning belief in our species’ creative abilities. In a very real sense, we seem to be afraid of ourselves — of our uniquely human attributes. We seem to be suffering from a decline in human self-confidence and in our ability to create ethically meaningful lives that enrich humanity and the non-human world.
This decline in human self-confidence, to be sure, is not new. The ancient Mediterranean world fell into a period of declining moral stamina and self-worth that contributed to the onset of the so-called ‘Dark Ages&rsq... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 1: Becoming human
Until recently, the belief that the human species is qualitatively different from non-human life-forms has been one of the most abiding notions of nearly all sophisticated civilizations.
The nature of this difference, to be sure, was defined in a great variety of ways. Human beings generally assigned to themselves the possession of souls, moral sensibilities, immense technical powers, and remarkable mental faculties. These traits were often melded into various combinations and ascribed to some social strata by others to distinguish various strata from one another and from the proverbial beasts in the field. Even tribal peoples, who professed to see similarities between themselves and the animals around them, in... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 2: From ‘selfish genes’ to Mother ‘Gaia’
Among the most insidious challenges to human uniqueness today are two self-proclaimed sciences, both of which first appeared in the mid-1970s. One, sociobiology, is a form of biological reductionism that tends to ascribe human agency to our genetic makeup; the other is the planetary Gaia Hypothesis, according to which human beings are ‘intelligent fleas’ that feed on the pristine body of‘Mother Earth’.
That both these challenges wear the mantle of science makes them particularly insidious. Theoretically, the scientific mande should place them at odds with the expressly anti-rational and antiscientific bias held by most antihumanists, yet die... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 3: The new Malthusians
A narrow biologistic mindset that has reduced human beings to gene machines, microbes, and intelligent fleas need make little further effort to view people as the biotic equals of fruit flies, whose high reproductive rates are often adduced by popular writers on demography to warn of the dangers of unlimited human population growth.
A population of fruit flies, however, is very easy to decrease or eliminate. We can swat them, starve diem, or diminish their numbers with pesticides. Such ways of dealing with population problems, as they are called, can give rise to a rather unsavory cast of mind. Viewing human beings as merely another animal species — such as fruit flies — creates an ideal settin... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 4: From ecomysticism to angelology
Sociobiologists, microbiologists, Malthusians, and among the Gaians James Lovelock profess to be scientists who are dealing with facts and statistical projections. As such, their ideas and conclusions are open to critical analysis, to acceptance or rejection based on scientific criteria. If their views and conjectures are found to be incorrect, they may be modified or rejected on the basis of the evidence.
Alas, such intellectual responsibility is absent from religion generally, and particularly in the burgeoning credos of ecological mysticism, or ecomysticism. To attempt to critically explore contemporary ecomysticism is to enter a hall of mirrors, wherein we encounter a host of multiple refle... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 5: The myth of the primitive
There is a perverse irony in the fact that, after a virtual consensus has been reached about the abuses that European colonialists inflicted on aboriginal peoples, the possibility of attaining a realistic and sympathetic view of ‘the primitive’ is being gutted by assorted ecomystics, anticivilizationists, and more generically, self-avowed primitivists who have made ‘the primitive’ into a postmodern parody of the noble savage.
Today Euro-American primitivists have grossly distorted our understanding of the lives and cultures of aboriginal peoples by attributing to them suprahuman, paradisiacal dimensions. By turning ostensibly primitive lifeways into models for ‘simple li... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 6: Technophobia and its tribulations
From the eighteenth century onward, enlightened humanism advanced three basic ideals that it identified with progress.
The first and most important of these ideals was a renewed focus on reason: the use of logical thought in dealing with reality. Since the time of the classical cultures of ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome, reason had been relegated, at best, to a handmaiden of theology. Since that time, social arrangements, not to speak of the natural world, had not been explained in rational terms. Feudal hierarchies and royal power were looked upon as God-given, while social inequities were seen as the unchallengeable dispensation of a deity whose judgment was taken on faith. This o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 7: Postmodernist nihilism
The most academically entrenched attack upon humanism, the Enlightenment, and reason are the highly influential philosophical tendencies that go under the name of postmodernism. It is arguable whether this name adequately encompasses such disparate, even idiosyncratic views as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and a constellation of former French leftists such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, to cite the most well-known to an Anglo-American readership.
Yet certain basic commonalities, I believe, justly designate their work as postmodernist or poststructuralist (the two words are often used interchangeably). To be sure, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 8: Science and anti-science: anything goes
Postmodernism is a concept that has been applied not only to philosophy but to architectural, literary, cultural, and behavioral styles as well. To be postmodern is to be ‘hip’ today, to an extent that the word has become part of the very contemporary culture it professes to criticize. This might render it quite harmless, indeed ludicrous, were it not for its impact on what has been called the sociology of science. In the scientific realm, relativistic moods nourished by postmodernism’s antihumanism are corrosive not only of popular attitudes toward scientific research but, as we shall see shortly, toward reason itself.
By science, let me emphasize, I am referring to t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 9: Re-enchanting humanity
To the extent that space and possibly the patience of the reader allow, I have tried to critically examine an historic shift away from the Enlightenment to an antihumanist oudook that incorporates a postmodernist celebration of mysticism and anti-rationalism, and very significantiy, a subsuming of any social issues, intellectual critique, and moral criteria by a crude biologism of one kind or another.
By no means is my account of this shift complete; diere are far too many antihumanisms abroad for me to include them all. Nor is it clear what forms this shift will take in the years ahead. As we have seen, major antihumanist tendencies seek in varying degrees to reduce human behavior to the morality of th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Epilogue
What alternatives do we have to the antihumanistic moods percolating through Euro-American culture today?
To exude nothing but optimism would be as simplistic as the pessimism I have criticized in this book. Whether a rational choice is possible before the present market society exhausts itself in a frenzy of destruction is certainly debatable; capitalism — whose corrosive workings are abetted, not determined, by an ever more powerful technology — is spreading into the remotest areas of the planet. Europe and North America are not alone in being shaken to their foundations by the system they spawned less than two centuries ago. Today, large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America have also been swept into its fold. ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
[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 Book... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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