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Normally, it was to Caesar and the feudal monarchs, not to local satraps and lords, that the oppressed turned for justice. Neither freedom nor justice were prevalent as principles in European manorial society; rather, a fairly precise system of rights and duties was established between ruling and ruled classes, based on highly modified customs and traditions that derived from tribal times. Territorial lords were to be compensated for their military prowess in defending their lands and subjects from “barbarian” raiders — and from the dynastic conflicts generated by feudal society itself. Villeins, peasants, and serfs were also to be compensated for the material support they gave to secure safety and peace in a very troubled era.[41] In effect, compensation for inequalities had been denatured into privilege. The word “freedom” initially appears in a Sumerian cuneiform tablet that gives an account of a successful popular revolt against a highly oppressive regal tyranny, thousands of years ago. The classical world is preoccupied with justice, fair dealings, individual liberty, and enfranchisement of the outsider in the world city, rather than with freedom’s equality of unequals.

Work will be rotated, eliminating monotony and one-sidedness in productive activity, because technology will have simplified many physical tasks. Competition, in turn, will be curtailed because the scramble for scarce goods will become meaningless in an affluent society. The phalanstery will be neither a rural village nor a congested city, but rather a balanced community combining the virtues of both. At its full complement, it will contain 1,700 to 1,800 people-which, to Fourier, not only allows for human scale but brings people together in precisely the correct number of “passionate combinations” that are necessary to satisfy each individual’s desires. Domination now enters into history as a social “need”-more precisely, a social imperative-that entangles personality, daily life, economic activity, and even love in its toils. The myth of contractual “trust,” with its sanctimonious seals and archaic language, is built on the persistence of contractual mistrust and social estrangement, which the idea of “contract” continually reinforces.

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If the individual bear is merely an epiphenomenon of an animal spirit, it is now possible to objectify nature by. Completely subsuming the particular by the general and denying the uniqueness of the specific and concrete. The emphasis of the animistic outlook thereby shifts from accommodation and communication to domination and coercion. At a low subsistence level and in a fairly primal community, both divisions of labor are needed for the well-being, if not the survival, of all its members; hence, the sexes treat each other with respect. Given the woman’s de facto role in the early community’s social arrangements, our obsessive preoccupation with “primitive monogamy” seems almost preposterous — if it weren’t so plainly ideological and obfuscatory. There may have been a period in humanity’s early development when interest had not yet emerged to replace complementarity, the disinterested willingness to pool needed things and needed services.

Nearly two centuries later, this kind of rationality was to horrify a less credulous public as a form of thermonuclear ethics in which varying sums of bomb shelters were to yield more or less casualties in the event of nuclear war. But what, after all, was this common good in a society that celebrated the claims of self-interest and naked egotism? And what redemption did onerous toil provide for a humanity that had been summoned to surrender its spiritual ideals for material gain?

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What may seem to us like a linguistic atavism that reflects a long-gone era when social life was matricentric and nature was its domestic abode may well be an on-going and subtly viable expression of man’s continual violation of woman as nature and of nature as woman. The remainder of the population — its farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, who have “bronze” or “iron” souls — are hardly mentioned. But their lifeways do not appear to be very different from that of the commoners in Plato’s day. The philosopher-rulers are free to blatantly (or “nobly,” in Plato’s words) lie to the entire populace in the interests of social unity and purge the polis of “ignoble” ideas and literature. Here, Plato notoriously includes Homeric poetry and probably the contemporary drama in his day that he viewed as degrading to humanity’s image of the gods. Characteristically, the biblical notion of creation “is not a speculative cosmogony,” Rudolph Bultmann observes, “but a confession of faith in God as Lord. The world belongs to him and he upholds it by his power.” This world is now pervaded by hierarchy, by ruler and ruled, over whom presides that nameless abstraction, the Lord.

Actually, he is idealizing it — possibly beyond the degree of “ideality” that every generalization requires to transcend its clinging welter of particulars. Thereafter, Winstanley faded into the oblivion that ultimately devoured the revolution itself. But more than many proponents of like views, he has received from posterity “the roses of rebels failed.” As it turned out, when Tabor and the entire Bohemian national movement were crushed by Sigismund, “it was the peasant communism of the Hutterites and Brethren which survived.” They linger on with us as parochial colonies that still preserved their Reformation traditions and language as the archeological remains of a long-lost world. These social ideals were to find their culmination in the Taborites of Bohemia, a movement that appeared a century or so after the defeat of the English Peasants’ Revolt. The Taborites were an offshoot of the quasi-Protestant Hussites who, in 1419, rebelled in Prague against German and Papal sovereignty.

The all-pervasive sweep of Christianity over the European world, followed more recently by Marxism, has interred an invaluable body of social ideals and insights. Science, while less demanding in its attacks upon its own heretics, exhibits an equal degree of fanaticism in its intellectual claims. To defy science’s metaphysical, often mystical, presuppositions that are rooted in an eerily passive “matter” and a physical concept of motion is to expose oneself to accusations of metaphysics and mysticism, and to an intellectual persecution that science itself once suffered at the hands of its theological inquisitors. What is highly attractive about the new vitality that appeared in medieval technics is not simply the sense of innovation characterizing its development; rather, it is the sense of elaboration that marked the adaptation of the new to the social conditions of the old. Contrary to popular images that read our own values back into the medieval world, the technical “utopians” of that time were far removed in spirit and outlook from the technocratic “utopians” or futurists of the present era.

Even more than Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, Henry’s work traces the evidence of mutualistic relationships from the interspecific support relationships of rhizobia and legumes, through plant associations, behavior symbiosis in animals, and the great regulatory mechanisms that account for homeostasis in planet-wide biogeochemical relationships. Margulis has argued and largely established that the eukaryotic cells consist of highly functional symbiotic arrangements of prokaryotes that have become totally interdependent with other constituents . Eukaryotic flagella, she hypothesizes, derive from anaerobic spirochetes; mitochondria, from prokaryotic bacteria that were capable of respiration as well as fermentation; and plant chloroplasts, from “blue-green algae,” which have recently been reclassified as cyanobacteria.

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To imply a sense of direction in causality — a “why” rather than merely a “how” in nature — was redolent of theology. Medieval scholasticism had so thoroughly Christianized Aristotelian nature philosophy and causality that the Renaissance mechanicians viewed them as little more than a system of Catholic apolegetics; even Hobbes’s vision of a “social mechanics” veered sharply into a critique of Aristotle’s final cause. To be sure, this conflict was unavoidable and even freed Aristotle’s own thought from the inquisitorial grip of the Church. The most fundamental difference between classical nature philosophy and modern science lies in their radically different concepts of causality.

The “work song,” a genre that still lived a century ago in nearly all preindustrial occupations, is the historic echo of the primal chant, itself a technics, that elicited spirit from substance and inspirited the artisans and their tools. The degree of “abstraction” that Marx makes from a commodity’s “use value” — from the “material elements and shapes https://loveconnectionreviews.com/ that turn the product into a use-value” — is so far-reaching in terms of what we know about the anthropology of use-values that this very theoretical process must itself be socially justified. In effect, Marx has removed the commodity from a much richer social context than he may have realized, given the scientistic prejudices of this time.

One can take issue with the emphasis Bloch gives to human sovereignty in the interaction with nature and the structural phraseology that infiltrates his brilliant grasp of the organic nature of that interaction. Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) was written in the early 1940s, a grim and embattled period, when such a conceptual framework was totally alien to the antinaturalistic, indeed, militaristic spirit of the times. His insight beggars our hindsight, redolent with its “pop” ecological terminology and its queasy mysticism. Today, together with Bloch, it would be valuable to shift our emphasis to the commonalities of nature and society, provided we are wary enough to avoid those mindless leaps from the one to the other as though they were not related by the rich phases of development that authentically unite them.