The Ecology of Freedom

Epilogue
Epilogue In this book, I have tried to "turn the world upside down" in a form more theoretical than the efforts of the Diggers, Levelers, Ranters and their contemporary descendants. I have tried to shake out our world and explore the conspicuous features of its development. My efforts will succeed if they demonstrate how profoundly the curse of domination has infused almost every human endeavor since the decline of organic society. Hardly any achievement — be it institutional, technical, scientific, ideological, artistic, or the noble claims to rationality — has been spared this curse. In contrast to highly fashionable tendencies to root the origins of this curse in reason as such or in the "savage's" attempts to "wrestle" with nature, I have sought them out in the sinister endeavor of emerging elites to place human beings and human nature in a condition of subjugation. I have emphasized the potentially liberating role of art and imagination in giving expre... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 12 - An Ecological Society
12. An Ecological Society After some ten millennia of a very ambiguous social evolution, we must reenter natural evolution again — not merely to survive the prospects of ecological catastrophe and nuclear immolation but also to recover our own fecundity in the world of life. I do not mean that we must return to the primitive lifeways of our early ancestors, or surrender activity and techné to a pastoral image of passivity and bucolic acquiescence. We slander the natural world when we deny its activity, striving, creativity, and development as well as its subjectivity. Nature is never drugged. Our reentry into natural evolution is no less a humanization of nature than a naturalization of humanity. The real question is: where have humanity and nature been pitted into antagonism or simply detached from each other? The history of "civilization" has been a steady process of estrangement from nature that has increasingly developed into outright antagonis... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 11 - The Ambiguities of Freedom
11. The Ambiguities of Freedom The technics and the technical imagination that can nourish the development of a free, ecological society are beset by ambiguities. Tools and machines can be used either to foster a totally domineering attitude toward nature or to promote natural variety and nonhierarchical social relationships. Although what is "big" in technics may be very ugly, what is "small" is not necessarily beautiful. Great despotisms have been based on a technology that is Neolithic in scale and form. The criticism of "industrial society" and "technological man" which erupted in the 1970s is testimony to popular disenchantment with the hopes of earlier generations for growing technological development and the freedom it was expected to yield — a freedom based on material plenty and the absence of debasing toil. Perhaps less obviously, the same ambiguities also becloud our attitudes toward reason and science. To Enlightenment thinkers two centuries a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 10 - The Social Matrix of Technology
10. The Social Matrix of Technology Just as serious as the extent to which we have mechanized the world is the fact that we cannot distinguish what is social in our lives from what is technical. In our inability to distinguish the two, we are losing the ability to determine which is meant to subserve the other. Herein lies the core of our difficulties in controlling the machine. We lack a sense of the social matrix in which all technics should be embedded — of the social meaning in which technology should be clothed. Instead, we encounter the Hellenic conception of techné in the form of a grotesque caricature of itself: a techné that is no longer governed by a sense of limit. Our own, thoroughly market-generated conception of techné has become so limitless, so unbounded, and so broadly defined that we use its vocabulary ("input," "output," "feedback," ad nauseam) to explain our deepest interrelationships — which consequently are rendere... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9 - Two Images of Technology
9. Two Images of Technology In trying to examine technology and production, we encounter a curious paradox. We are deeply riven by a great sense of promise about technical innovation, on the one hand, and by a thorough sense of disenchantment with its results, on the other. This dual attitude not only reflects a conflict in the popular ideologies concerning technology but also expresses strong doubts about the nature of the modern technological imagination itself. We are puzzled that the very instruments our minds have conceived and our hands have created can be so easily turned against us, with disastrous results for our well-being — indeed, for our very survival as a species. It is difficult for young people today to realize how anomalous such a conflict in technical orientation and imagery would have seemed only a few decades ago. Even such a wayward cult hero as Woody Guthrie once celebrated the huge dams and giant mills that have now earned so much o... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Introduction This book was written to satisfy the need for a consistently radical social ecology: an ecology of freedom. It had been maturing in my mind since 1952 when I first became acutely conscious of the growing environmental crisis that was to assume such monumental proportions a generation later. In that year, I published a volume-sized article, "The Problems of Chemicals in Food" (later to be republished in book form in Germany as Lebensgefiihrliche Lebensmittel). Owing to my early Marxian intellectual training, the article examined not merely environmental pollution but also its deep-seated social origins. Environmental issues had developed in my mind as social issues, and problems of natural ecology had become problems of "social ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

1. The Concept of Social Ecology The legends of the Norsemen tell of a time when all beings were apportioned their worldly domains: the gods occupied a celestial domain, Asgard, and men lived on the earth, Midgard, below which lay Niffleheirn, the dark, icy domain of the giants, dwarfs, and the dead. These domains were linked together by an enormous ash, the World Tree. Its lofty branches reached into the sky, and its roots into the furthermost depths of the earth. Although the World Tree was constantly being gnawed by animals, it remained ever green, renewed by a magic fountain that infused it continually with life. The gods, who had fashioned this world, presided over a precarious state of tranquility. They had banished their enemies, the... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

7. The Legacy of Freedom The most triumphant moment of Justitia does not occur in her apotheosis as "bourgeois right," when the marketplace gives materiality to the rule of equivalence. Rather, it occurs in those times of transition when justice is extricating itself from the parochial world of organic society. This is the heroic moment of innocence, before the materiality of equivalence in the form of the commodity reclaims an early idealism. At this time, justice is emergent, creative, and fresh with promise — not worn down by history and the musty logic of its premises. The rule of equivalence is still loosening the grip of the blood oath, patriarchy, and the civic parochialism that denies recognition to individualism and a common ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

6. Justice — Equal and Exact The notion of "freedom" does not seem to exist in organic society. As we saw earlier, the word is simply meaningless to many preliterate peoples. Lacking any institutionalized structure of domination, they have no way of defining a condition that is still intrinsically part of their social lives — a condition into which they grow without the elaborate hierarchical and later class structures of the late Neolithic and of "civilization." As "freedom" and "domination" are not in tension with each other, they lack contrast and definition. But the very lack of distinction between "freedom" and "domination" leaves organic society unguarded against hierarchy and class rule. Innocence exposes the community to... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Acknowledgments This book stands on its own ground and projects a coherent theory of social ecology that is independent of the conventional wisdom of our time. But we all stand on the shoulders of others, if only-in terms of the problems they raised and we are obliged to resolve. Thus, I owe a great deal to the work of Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Polanyi, who all so brilliantly anticipated the problems of domination and the crises of reason, science, and technics that beleaguer us today. I have tried to resolve these issues by following intellectual pathways opened by the anarchist thinkers of the previous century, particularly Peter Kropotkin's natural and social mutualism. I do not share his commitment to confedera... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)