sursa IDEIIN DIALOG

Presiunea rusa n-a fost niciodata un anexionism clasic. Spre deosebire de alte imperialisme, expansiunea rusa are loc in numele unei anume filozofii nationale supreme. Rusia practica imperialismul, dar urmareste rusismul (si cu atit mai penibila e performanta „studiile coloniale‘‘ occidentale care ignora Rusia si rusismul, cele mai grave si extinse cazuri de colonialism cunoscute in istorie). Rusismul nu e simpla ocupatie, insotita de jaf si impozitie politica. Rusismul e rasismul care miceste deopotriva polonezi turbulenti, declaseaza gruzini si ceceni, vede in romani un neam imprecis si inferior, ii refuza existential pe ucraineni, face din baltici popoare fara rost si considera ca toate aceste neamuri intimplatoare sint rusificabile. Atit de inradacinata e aceasta convingere ultima in rolul istoric mesianic si in obligatia aproape divina a expansiunii prin rusificare, incit formele politice au o importanta minora. Asta il explica si pe Dostoievski, geniul spiritual care n-a incetat vreodata sa fie un mistic al rusismului, si pe Soljenitin, titanul anticomunist de viziune prorusista. Caci Soljenitin, autorul unei gigantice opere de constiinta, a fost si a sfirsit marturisitor al rusismului. Postum, Soljenitin pare din ce in ce mai mult omul care a distrus sansa de expansiune a comunismului in lumea extra-sovietica, iar asta inseamna ca Soljenitin a lovit mortal eurocomunismul, dar nu a reusit sa provoace divortul societatii ruse de etimonul comunist. Mai bine spus, de acel amestec de eroism, masochism, violenta, spiritualism, colectivism si robie consimtita pe care rusii il practica si divinizeaza, cu adincime existentiala. Comunismul insusi nu a putut si, de fapt, nici n-a incercat in mod serios sa contrazica acest curent profund, ci, mai degraba, l-a desavirsit in forme de umilinta, violenta si grandoare fara precedent. De la hecatomba stalinista la brejnevismul care l-a exilat cu forta pe Soljenitin, rusii au venerat neintrerupt rusismul. Ultimul interviu acordat in Occident (cotidianului britanic The Independent, in vara lui 2007) de Alexandr Soljenitin contine citeva marturisiri halucinante. Soljenitin vorbeste despre „ingratitudinea europeana‘‘ , exact in termenii in care vorbeste si gindeste, solidar si convins, marele cor social rus, de la omul de pe strada la activistul de partid, ofiterul KGB, militarul veteran sau alte intruchipari ale omului istoric rus. Soljenitin crede, de pilda, ca est-europenii „sint foarte fericiti sa acuze Moscova, din care au facut o tinta convenabila. Toti se poarta ca si cum viata noua pe care o duc a inceput dupa ce s-au eliberat singuri, eroic, in timp ce Moscova a ramas prizoniera a comunismului‘‘. Iata-l, deci, pe ultimul Soljenitin, repliat viguros in mistica grotesca a rusismului si a Rusiei eliberatoare de popoare. Ce poate deforma intr-atit spiritul unuia din cei mai mari oameni ai secolului XX si ce poate alinia, in acelasi orizont de convingeri, un reptilian autocrat ca Putin si un mare preot al demnitatii ca Soljenitin? In nici un caz secolul XIX.

autor Traian Ungureanu

Adevărata democraţie, pentru Schmitt, înseamnă suveranitatea poporului, pe când democraţia liberală şi parlamentul liberal limitează puterea poporului. Schmitt susţine că dacă identitatea democratică este luată în mod serios, numai oamenii ar trebui să decidă asupra destinul său politic, şi nu reprezentanţii liberali, deoarece “nici o altă instituţie constituţională nu poate să se împotrivească criteriului unic, ce desemnează dorinţa poporului, oricum nu ar fi exprimată. “Democraţia liberală, argumentează Schmitt, nu este altceva decât un eufemism pentru un sistem care provoacă decadenţa politicii, distrugând în acest fel adevărata democraţie. Dar aici apare o întrebare: De ce, oferindu-i liberalismului o istorie a toleranţei şi tendinţa spre a împăca diferite grupuri, Schmitt respinge categoric democraţia liberală? Nu dovedeşte liberalismul, în special în lumina experienţelor recente cu “ideologiile puternice”, natura sa umană şi superioară?
Momentul crucial în atitudinea lui Schmitt reprezintă faptul că conceptul de “democraţie liberală” este o absurditate semantică. Astfel, Schmitt pare să sugereze atât o definiţie nouă pentru democraţie, cît şi pentru politică. Conform lui Schmitt, “democraţia necesită mai întâi omogenitate şi apoi - dacă este nevoie - eliminarea sau extirparea de neomogenitate.” Omogenitate şi, concomitent, eliminarea de neomogenitate sunt cei doi piloni ai democraţiei lui Schmitt, care contrastează puternic cu sistemele partidelor liberale şi fragmentarea statului. Omogenitate democratică, conform lui Schmitt, presupune o memorie istorica comună, rădăcini comune, şi o viziune comună cu privire la viitor, toate din aceste ar putea continua să existe numai în acea situaţie politică în care oamenii ar vorbi în acelaşi glas”. Atât timp cât poporul doreşte ca politică să existe,” scrie Schmitt, “aceasta ar trebui să rămână mai presus de orice formulări şi credinţe normative… Modul cel mai firesc prin care oamenii îşi exprimă direct dorinţa lor politică este realizat prin aprobările sau dezaprobările făcute de mulţimea adunată, de exemplu, aclamaţia.” Pentru a fi sigur de definiţia sa dată democraţiei omogene, ce rezultă din dorinţa poporului, Schmitt se prezintă în calitate de susţinător al valorilor comunităţii tradiţionale mai presus de societatea civilă care, pentru ultimul secol, a constituit marcajul democraţiei liberale. Prin urmare, cineva poate să se întrebe în ce masură democraţia „organică” a lui Schmitt poate fi aplicabilă societăţilor extrem de defragmentate din vest, ca să nu mai vorbim de fragmentarea etnică al Americii.

Schmitt susţine că “elementul central al democraţiei este poporul (Volk), şi nu populaţia [Menscheit]… În cazul în care democraţia preia un aspect politic - putem sa vorbim numai despre o democraţie a poporului, dar nu o democraţie a populaţiei [Es gibt eine Volksdemokratie und keine Menscheitsdemokratie]. “În mod firesc, această viziune a democraţiei “etnice” vine în contradicţie cu democraţia modernă liberală, unul dintre ale cărei scopuri este trecerea dincolo de diferenţele etnice din societăţile pluraliste. Democraţia “etnică” a lui Schmitt trebuie să fie perceputa ca reflecţie a unicităţii ce este stabilită de acei oameni ce se împotrivesc imitării democraţiei lor de către alt popor sau rasă omeneasca. Dat fiind că democraţia lui Schmitt poartă o asemănare cu democraţie greacă antică, criticii trebuie să se întrebe cît de realizabilă poată să fie această democraţie astăzi. Transpusă în secolul douăzeci, acest anacronism democratic va apărea nu mai puţin deranjant, deoarece aceasta va reaminti de corporaţiile fasciste şi de asemenea statele din Lumea a Treia, cu legile lor exigente pentru omogenitatea etnică şi culturală. Schmitt confirmă aceste nelinişti când se exprimă că “o democraţie îşi demonstrează puterea politică prin abilitatea de a refuza sau de a ascunde la ananghie ceea ce este străin şi inegal şi poate ameninţa omogenitatea acestuia. [das Fremde und Ungleiche... Zu beseitigen odă fernzuhalten.]“. Orice susţinător al democraţiei liberale din societăţile culturale moderne poate să obiecteze că democraţia lui Schmitt exclude pe acei a căror naştere, rasă, sau pur şi simplu afiliere religioasă sau ideologică este incompatibilă cu o democraţie restrânsă. Ceva extern poate să fie o idee straină ce poate să ameninţe democraţia, şi un străin poate sa fie cineva care este considerat incapabil de a participa în politică din cauza rasei sau credinţei sale. Cu alte cuvinte, s-ar putea bănui că Schmitt susţine acel gen de democraţie care este aproape de „toate statele.”Schmitt nici nu tratează principiile liberale de legalitate cu multă simpatie. În eseul său ” Legalitat und Legitimitat,” Schmitt argumentează că democraţia liberală creează iluzia libertăţii acordării fiecărui grup politic sau opinii contradictorii o anumită cantitate a libertăţii de expresie în calitate de metodă garantată de lege pentru realizare unor scopuri prin mijloace paşnice. O astfel de atitudine faţă de drepturile legale este contrară definiţiei democraţiei şi, în cele din urmă, duce la anarhie, argumentează Schmitt, deoarece legalitatea într-o democraţie adevărată trebuie întotdeauna să fie expresia voinţei poporului şi nu expresia intereselor de facţiune”. Legea este expresia voinţei poporului (lex est quod populus jubet),” scrie Schmitt, şi în nici un caz legea nu poate să fie o manifestare a unui reprezentant anonim sau a unui parlamentar ce doar urmăreşte interese circumscripţiei pe care o reprezintă. Într-adevăr, continuă Schmitt, un popor etnic omogen şi cu un trecut istoric are toate condiţiile esenţiale pentru a accepta dreptatea şi a ramâne democratic, dacă aceasta întotdeauna susţine voinţa lui. Desigur, cineva poate să afirma că Schmitt militează pentru o democraţie populistă evocatoare a dictaturii plebiscitare a anilor 1930, care a dispreţuit atât partidele parlamentare, cât şi alegerile organizate. In “Verfassungslehre”, Schmitt atacă alegerile libere parlamentare, pledând pentru creare, prin intermediul unui buletin de vot secret, un mecanism care “transformă cetăţeanul ( citoyen), care este, o figură democratică şi politică specială, într-o persoană particulară care doar îşi exprimă părerea sa proprie şi îşi oferă votul său”. Aici Schmitt se pare să fie consecvent cu observaţiile sale ulterioare despre omogenitatea etnică. Pentru Schmitt, prea lăudata „opinia publică” pe care liberalii au egalat-o cu definiţia toleranţei politice, este de fapt o contradicţie de termeni, deoarece un sistem care este obsedat de individualitate, cu siguranţă, va evita sinceritatea politică. Democraţia organică, cea adevărată, conform lui Schmitt, este ameninţată de buletinul de vot liberal secret, “al cărui rezultat este suma părerilor particulare”. Acele “metode pentru alegeri politice din prezent [Volkswahl] şi referendumurile [Volksentscheid] în democraţia modernă, în nici un caz nu presupun procedura alegerilor autentice de către popor; în schimb, ei organizează o procedură pentru alegeri individuale, ce sunt bazate pe suma totală a buletinelor de vot independente”.Probabil, concepţia lui Schmitt despre egalitatea democratică este bazată pe ideea că democraţia necesită omogenitatea socială, Schmitt dezvoltă mult mai complet aceasta idee în „Verfassungslehre” şi în „Crizele Democraţiei Parlamentare”. Deşi democraţia liberală aprobă egalitatea legală a indivizilor, ea ignoră egalitatea cetăţenilor baştinaşi. Democraţia liberală doar susţine egalitatea indivizilor autonomi a căror etnie, cultură, sau legături rasiale sunt slăbite sau diluate încât nici nu pot fi consideraţi în mod egal moştenitorii unei memorii culturale comune, cu o viziune comună asupra viitorului. Fără îndoială că egalitatea şi democraţia, pentru Schmitt, sunt inseparabile. Egalitatea într-o democraţie organică autentică întotdeauna decurge printre “egalii din aceeasi categorie (Gleichartigen)”. Aceasta corespunde cu afirmările ulterioare ale lui Schmitt “Egalitatea de drepturi are sens doar acolo unde există omogenitate” Poate cineva să deducă din aceste descrieri scurte despre egalitatea democratică faptul că într-o societate fragmentă din punct de vedere etnic sau ideologic, egalitatea nu poate fi realizată? S-ar putea afirma că, transferând discursul politic egalitarist în sfera juridică, democraţia liberală mascheaza cu eleganţă inegalitatea evidentă în altă sferă - cea economică. Democraţia liberală în aceeaşi măsură trâmbiţează despre “drepturile omului” şi egalitatea legală, aşa cum laudă şi “egalitatea (economică) de şanse”, care stimulează diferenţele considerabile. Într-adevăr, inegalitatea în democraţia liberală nu a dispărut şi, în ceea ce priveşte schimbările din sfera politică, “o altă sferă, în care prevalează inegalitatea substanţială (astăzi, de exemplu sfera economică), va domina arena politică. Paradoxal este că, ţinând seamă de apropierea contradictorie de ideea egalităţii, democraţia liberală s-a aflat pe linia de atac din partea radicalilor de stânga şi de dreapta.În concluzie, Schmitt respinge democraţia liberală din următoarele motive: 1) democraţia liberală nu este “demo-krasia,” deoarece nu sprijină identitatea guvernată şi guvernatorii, 2) democraţia liberală îngustează arena politică şi astfel creează o societate apolitică, şi 3) odată ce susţine egalitatea legală, ca urmare a acumulării de capital, cu ajutorul căruia se obţine sprijinul acesteia, democraţia liberală generează inechitate socială evidentă.

Daniel Barrigan(preot catolic si pacifist) 
Tariq Ramadan(filosof  si profesor musulman moderat) 
John Dear(preot catolic si pacifist)
Dora Lessing(premiat Nobel pt literatua)
Garcia Marquez(premiat Nobel pt literatura)
Boy George(cantaret britanic) 

Debord biographer Anselm Giap¹ referred to the puzzle of the present, “where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity itself,” recalling a question posed nearly 50 years ago by Joseph Wood Krutch: “What has become of that opportunity to become more fully human that the ‘control of nature’ was to provide?”²

The general crisis is rapidly deepening in every sphere of life. On the biospheric level, this reality is so well-known that it could be termed banal, if it weren’t so horrifying. Increasing rates of species extinctions, proliferating dead zones in the world’s oceans, ozone holes, disappearing rainforests, global warming, the pervasive poisoning of air, water, and soil, to name a few realities.

A grisly link to the social world is widespread pharmaceutical contamination of watersheds.³ In this case, destruction of the natural world is driven by massive alienation, masked by drugs. In the U.S., life-threatening obesity is sharply rising, and tens of millions suffer from serious depression and/or anxiety.⁴ There are frequent eruptions of multiple homicides in homes, schools, and workplaces, while the suicide rate among young people has tripled in recent decades.⁵ Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other “mystery” /psychosomatic illnesses have multiplied, vying with the emergence of new diseases with known physiological origins: Ebola, Lassa fever, AIDS, Legionnaires’ disease. The illusion of technological mastery is mocked by the antibiotic-resistant return of TB and malaria, not to mention outbreaks of E coli, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, etc. Even a cursory survey of contemporary psychic immiseration would require many pages. Barely suppressed anger, a sense of emptiness, corrosion of belief in institutions across the board, high stress levels, all contribute to what Kornoouh has called “the growing fracture of the social bond.”⁶

Today’s reality keeps underlining the inadequacy of current theory and its overall retreat from any redemptive project. It seems undeniable that’s what’s left of life on earth is being taken from us. Where is the depth of analysis and vision to match the extremity of the human condition and the fragility of our planet’s future? Are we simply only with a totalizing current of degradation and loss?

The crisis is diffuse, but at the same time it is starkly visible on every level. One comes to agree with Ulrich Beck that “people have begun to question modernity…its premises have begun to wobble. Many people are deeply upset over the house-of-cards character of superindustrialism.”⁷ Agnes Heller observed that our condition becomes less stable and more chaos-prone the further we move away from nature, contrary to the dominant ideology of progress and development.⁸ With disenchantment comes a growing sense that something different is urgently needed.

For a new orientation the challenge is at a depth that theorists have almost entirely avoided. To go beyond the prospectless malaise, the collapse of social confidence so devastatingly expressed in Les Particules élémentaires (Michel Houlebecq’s end-of-the-millennium novel)⁹ , the analytical perspective simply must shift in a basic way. This consists, for openers, in refusing Foucault’s conclusion that human capacities and relations are inescapably technologized.¹⁰

As Eric Vogelin put it, “The death of the spirit is the price of progress.”¹¹ But if the progress of nihilism is identical to the nihilism of progress, whence comes the rupture, the caesura? How to pose a radical break from the totality of progress, technology, modernity?

A quick scan of recent academic fads shows precisely where such a perspective has not been found. Frederic Jameson’s apt formulation introduces the subject for us: “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”¹²

Postmodernism is the mirror of an ethos of defeat and reaction, a failure of will and intellect that has accommodated to new extremities of estrangement and destructiveness.¹³ For the postmodernists, almost nothing can be opposed. Reality, after all, is so messy, shifting, complex, indeterminate; and oppositions are, of course, just so many false binarisms. Vacuous jargon and endless side-stepping transcend passé dualisms. Daniel White, for example, prescribed “a postmodern-ecological rubric that steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed…”¹⁴

In the consumerist realm of freedom, “this complex node, where technologies are diffused, where technologies are chosen,” according to Mike Michael,¹⁵ who can say if anything is at all amiss? Iain Chambers is an eloquent voice of postmodern abjectness, wondering whether alienation is not simply an eternal given: “What if alienation is a terrestrial constraint destined to frustrate the ‘progress’ introjected in all teleologies?…Perhaps there is no separate, autonomous alternative to the capitalist structuring of the present-day world. Modernity, the westernization of the world, globalization, are the labels of an economic, political and cultural order that is seemingly installed for the foreseeable future.”¹⁶

The fixation on surface (depth is an illusion; so are presence and immediacy), the ban on unifying narratives and inquiry into origins, indifference to method and evidence, emphasis on effects and novelty, all find their expression in postmodern culture at large. These attitudes and practices spread everywhere, along with the technology it embraces without reservation. At the same time, though, there are signs that these trivializing and derivative recipes for “thought” may be losing their appeal.¹⁷ An antidote to postmodern surrender has been made available, largely through what is known as the anti-globalization movement.

Jean-François Lyotard, who once thought that technologized existence offered options, has begun to write about the sinister development of a neo-totalitarian, instrumentalist imprisonment. In earlier essays he pointed to a loss of affect as part of the postmodern condition. More recently he has attributed that loss to techno-scientific hegemony. Crippled individuals are only part of the picture, as Lyotard portrays social effects of what can only be called instrumental reason, in pathological ascendance. And contra Habermas, this domination by instrumental reason is in no way challenged by “communicative action.”¹⁸ Referring to global urban development, Lyotard stated, “We inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable. Otherwise, we are just lodged there.” Also, “with the megalopolis, what is called the West realizes and diffuses its nihilism. It is called development.”¹⁹

In other words, there may be a way out of the postmodern cul-de-sac, at least for some. Those still contained by the Left have a much different legacy of failure to jettison—one that obviously transcends the “merely” cultural. Discredited and dying as an actual alternative, this perspective surely also needs to go.

Hardt and Negri’s Empire²⁰ will serve as a classic artifact of leftism, a compendium of the worn-out and left-over. These self-described communist militants have no notion whatsoever of the enveloping crisis. Thus they continue to seek “alternatives within modernity.” They locate the force behind their communist revolution in “the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labor on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies.”²¹ The leftist analysis valiantly upholds the heart of productionist marxism, in the face of ever-advancing, standardizing, destructive technique. Small wonder Hardt and Negri fail to consider the pulverization of indigenous cultures and the natural world, or the steady worldwide movement toward complete dehumanization.

Claude Kornoouh considers monstrous “the idea that progress consists in the total control of the genetic stock of all living beings.” For him, this would amount to an unfreedom “that even the bloodiest totalitarianism of the 20th century was not able to accomplish.”²² Hardt and Negri would not shrink from such control, since they do not question any of its premises, dynamics, or preconditions.

It is no small irony that the militants of Empire stand exposed for the incomprehension of the trajectory of modernity by one of their opposite number, Oswald Spengler. As nationalist and reactionary that Spengler was, The Decline of the West is the great masterwork of world history, and his grasp of Western civilization’s inner logic is uncanny in its prescience.

Especially relevant here are Spengler’s judgments, so many decades ago, concerning technological development and its social, cultural, and environmental impacts. He saw that the dynamic, promethean (“Faustian”) nature of global civilization becomes fully realized as self-destructive mass society and equally calamitous modern technology. The subjugation of nature leads ineluctably to its destruction, and to the destruction of civilization. “An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do everything in mechanical terms.”²³ Civilized man is a “petty creator against Nature.” “…This revolutionary in the world of life…has become the slave of his creature. The Culture, the aggregate of artificial, personal, self-made life-forms, develops into a close-barred cage … ”²⁴

Whereas Marx viewed industrial civilization as both reason incarnate and a permanent achievement, Spengler saw it as ultimately incompatible with its physical environment, and therefore suicidally transitory. “Higher Man is a tragedy. With his graves he leaves behind the earth a battlefield and a wasteland. He has drawn plant and animal, the sea and mountain into his decline. He has painted the face of the world with blood, deformed and mutilated it.”²⁵ Spengler understood that “the history of this technics is fast drawing to its inevitable close.”²⁶

Theodor Adorno seemed to concur with elements of Spengler’s thinking: “What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”²⁷ Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment²⁸ has a critique of civilization at its core, with its focal image of Odysseus forcibly repressing the Sirens’ song of eros. Dialectic’s central thesis is that “the history of civilization is… The history of renunciation.”²⁹ As Albrecht Wellmer summed it up, “Dialectic of Enlightenment is the theory of an irredeemably darkened modernity.”³⁰ This perspective, now continually augmented by confirming data, tends to render irrelevant both sources of theory and the logic of progress. If there is no escape from a condition we can understand all too well, what more is there to say?

Herbert Marcuse tried to lay out an escape route in Eros and Civilization,³¹ by attempting to uncouple civilization from modernity. To preserve the “gains” of modernity, the solution is a “non-repressive” civilization. Marcuse would dispense with “surplus repression,” implying that repression itself is indispensable. Since modernity depends on production, itself a repressive institution, redefining work as free play can salvage both modernity and civilization. I find this an implausible, even desperate defense of civilization. Marcuse fails to refute Freud’s view that civilization cannot be reformed.

Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents that non-repressive civilization is impossible, because the foundation of civilization is a forcible ban on instinctual freedom and eros. To introduce work and culture, the ban must be permanently imposed. Since this repression and its constant maintenance are essential to civilization, universal civilization brings universal neurosis.³² Durkheim had already noted that as humankind “advances” with civilization and the division of labor, “the general happiness of society is decreasing.”³²

As a good bourgeois, Freud justified civilization on the grounds that work and culture are necessary and that civilization enables humans to survive on a hostile planet. “The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against nature.” And further, “But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all to strive for the abolition of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to bear.”³⁴

Possibly civilization’s most fundamental ideological underpinning is Hobbes’ characterization of the pre-civilized state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Freud subscribed to this view, of course, as did Adorno and Horkheimer.

Since the mid-1960s there has been a paradigm shift in how anthropologists understand prehistory, with profound implications for theory. Based on a solid body of archaeological and ethnographic research, mainstream anthropology has abandoned the Hobbesian hypothesis. Life before or outside civilization is now defined more specifically as social existence prior to domestication of animals and plants. Mounting evidence demonstrates that before the Neolithic shift from a foraging or gatherer-hunter mode of existence to an agricultural lifeway, most people had ample free time, considerable gender autonomy or equality, an ethos of egalitarianism and sharing, and no organized violence.

A (misleadingly-named) “Man the Hunter” conference at the University of Chicago in 1966 launched the reversal of the Hobbesian view, which for centuries had provided ready justification for all the repressive institutions of a complex, imperializing Western culture. Supporting evidence for the new paradigm has come forth from archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, Adrienne Zihlman, and many others;³⁵ these studies are widely available, and now form the theoretical basis for everything from undergraduate courses to field research.

Archaeologists continue to uncover examples of how our Paleolithic forbears led mainly peaceful, egalitarian, and healthy lives for about two million years. The use of fire to cook tuberous vegetables as early as 1.9 million years ago, and long distance sea travel 800,000 years ago, are two findings among many that testify to an intelligence equal to our own.³⁶

Genetic engineering and imminent human cloning are just the most current manifestations of a dynamic of control and domination of nature that humans set in motion 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants. In the 400 generations of human existence since then, all of natural life has been penetrated and colonized at the deepest levels, paralleling the controls that have been ever more thoroughly engineered at the social level. Now we can see this trajectory for what it really is: a transformation that inevitably brought all-enveloping destruction, that was in no way necessary. Significantly, the worldwide archaeological record demonstrates that many human groups tried agriculture and/or pastoralism and later gave them up, falling back on more reliable foraging and hunting strategies. Others refused for generations to adopt the domestication practices of close neighbors.

It is here that a primitivist alternative has begun to emerge, in theory and in practice.³⁷ To the question of technology must be added that of civilization itself. Ever-growing documentation of human prehistory as a very long period of largely non-alienated human life stands in stark contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity.

In the context of his discussion of the limitations of Habermas, Joel Whitebook wrote, “It may be that the scope of and depth of the social and ecological crisis are so great that nothing short of an epochal transformation of world views will be commensurate with them.”³⁸ Since that time, Castoriadis concluded that a radical transformation will “have to launch an attack on the division of labor in its hitherto known forms.”³⁹ Division of labor, slowly emerging through prehistory, was the foundation of domestication and continues to drive the technological imperative forward.

The challenge is to disprove George Grant’s thesis that we live in “a world where only catastrophe can slow the unfolding of the potentialities of technique,”⁴⁰ and to actualize Claude Kornoouh’s judgment that revolution can only be redefined against progress.⁴¹