Efficient cause, removed from the larger ethical matrix of Aristotelian causality, was now conceived as the sole description for natural phenomena in kinetic interaction. The image of nature as a “construction-site,” which even Bloch borrowed, produced its own technological cant. What remained from the past to “explain” the ultimate Newtonian mystery of action at a distance and the troubling facts of gravitation were the terms “attraction” and “repulsion,” terms that still survive in electromagnetism. To evoke nature as the source for an objectively grounded ethics, as I propose to do, requires careful qualification.
Had this doctrine of worldly disenchantment and personal withdrawal drifted off into history with the empire that nourished it, later periods might have seen it merely as the passionless voice of a dying era, like the exotic cults and world-weary poems that intoned the end of antiquity. But Christianity was to rework Stoicism’s quietistic doctrine of personal will into a new sensibility of heightened subjectivity and personal involvement, inadvertently opening new directions for social change. Certainly Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ message to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” leaves https://hookupsranked.com/ the troubled world unblemished by any political and social challenges. Early Christianity had no quarrel with slavery, if we interpret Paul’s injunctions correctly. Yet when Paul persuades Onesimus, the runaway Christian slave, to return to his Christian master, Onesimus is described as “that dear and faithful brother who is a fellow citizen of yours,” for slave, master, and Paul are themselves “slaves” to a higher “Master in heaven.” “Citizen” and “slave,” here, are used interchangeably. Accordingly, Christianity entered into a deep involvement with the fortunes of the individual slave.
Moreover, he rooted the capacity of the Hellenes to form poleis, to “be free,” and to be “capable of ruling all mankind” in their ethnic origins and their existence as the Hellenic genos.[36] Blood, as well as geography, confers the capacity to rule. Aristotle sees the Hellenes as diversified such that “some have a one-sided nature” and “others are happily blended” in spiritedness and intelligence. But to him the ability to form poleis, to “rule,” is a “natural quality” that allows for no social qualifications.
Aside from the energy provided by sunlight (and dissipated by radiation), the system to all appearances is closed. Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be. A predator in the web is also prey, even if the “lowliest” of organisms merely makes it ill or helps to consume it after death. “Holism” evaporates into a mystical sigh, a rhetorical expression for ecological fellowship and community that ends with such in-group greetings and salutations as “holistically yours.” What was once a serious philosophical stance has been reduced to environmentalist kitsch.
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Our technics can be either catalysts for our integration with the natural world or the chasms separating us from it. “Civilization” and its ideologies have fostered the latter orientation; social ecology must promote the former. Modern authoritarian technics have been tested beyond all human endurance by a misbegotten history of natural devastation and chronic genocide, indeed, biocide. The rewards we can glean from the wreckage they have produced will require so much careful sifting that an understandable case can be made for simply turning our backs on the entire heap.
The Greek notion of man’s domination of nature — a notion that was no less real than the modern — could not find fixity and meaningfulness there. In the Greek mind, the polis, which included its well-tilled environs, waged a constant battle against the encroachment of the unruly natural world and its barbarian denizens. Within its confines, the polis created a space not only for discourse, rationality, and the “good life,” but even for the oikos, which at least had its own realm of order, however prepolitical in character.
The covenant of justice — Old Testament law — was transmuted into the covenant of freedom as practiced by the early Christian congregations that apparently existed in ancient Judea before the fall of Jerusalem. Yet the ascendency of the nation-state, the party, and, in more recent years, the highly centralized bureaucratic State did not lack ideological reactions against them. To scandalize has always been the pride of rebels, but much of it may satisfy itself in provocativeness of doctrine rather than of deeds.
The Ecology of Freedom
If the freedom of humanity implies the liberation of nature through humanity, by what criteria and means can we reenter natural evolution? Our very use of the words “humanity” and “individuality” betrays the fact that our answers must be drawn from a very different context than that of the preliterate social world. In fact, “civilization” has broadened the terrain of freedom well beyond the parochial relationships fostered by the blood oath, the sexual division of labor, and the role of age groups in structuring early communities.
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Finally, is it correct to believe that a multitude of spontaneous creations of human “labour,” from cathedrals to shoes, were often guided more by cerebral designs than by esthetic, often undefinable impulses in which art was cojoined with craft? Let me begin my exploration of technics and the contrasting images that shape its form and destiny by examining the ideologies that exist around labor — that most human of all technical categories. Short of sexuality, no subject has been more intractable to a reasonably unprejudiced analysis and more encrusted by highly embattled ideologies. Labor, perhaps even more than any single human activity, underpins contemporary relationships among people on every level of experience — whether in terms of the rewards it brings, the privileges it confers, the discipline it demands, the repressions it produces, or the social conflicts it generates.
Not until capitalism tainted history with a “sense of scarcity,” making its mean-spirited commitment to rivalry the motive force of social development, did so many of these ideals begin to degenerate into brute economic interests. Even the earliest movements for a “black redistribution” seem to be evidence less of great looting expeditions than of efforts to restore a way of life, a traditional social dispensation, in which sharing and disaccumulation were prevailing social norms. Quite often these movements destroyed not only the legal documents that gave the elites title to the authority and property, but also the palaces, villas, furnishings, even the granaries that seemed to embody their power. INhile the kinship tie or the blood oath is a more strictly biological basis for association than any form we know, it is patently too parochial and restrictive, in view of our modern commitment to a universal humanitas. Indeed, it is fair to ask whether the strictly biological is necessarily more “natural” than the human social attributes produced by natural evolution.
His first marriage to Czech model Ivana Trump had lasted about a decade and the couple welcomed three children together. The relationship endured through a string of the estate mogul’s alleged affairs, the one with actor Marla Maples hammering the final nail in the coffin. As Marla told People, she was rueful about the bitterness between her and Ivana, and said she “never had any intention of hurting her.” At the same time, a budding model from Slovenia was cutting through the fashion world in Paris and Milan. Though male attention was never in short supply, Melania apparently made herself scarce around New York’s famed nightlife.
The conviction that God existed in, and only in, material objects and men led them at once to a pantheistic mysticism and a crudely plebian materialism, often incongruously combined in the same person. Their rejection of scripture literalism led sometimes to an entirely symbolic interpretation of the Bible and at others to a blunt and contemptuous rejection. Their belief that the moral law no longer had authority for the people of a new age enjoying the liberty of the sons of God led to a conviction that for them no act was sinful, a conviction that some hastened to put into practice. But from this highly mixed welter of independent, often conflicting or intersecting beliefs, there emerges one figure who bridges the chasm from religious to secular communism. Gerrard Winstanley is perhaps best known as the leader and theorist of the Diggers, a miniscule group of agrarian communists who in 1649 tried to cultivate the “free” or waste lands on St. George’s Hill near London. Actually, these experiments, which were conceived as an “exemplary” effort to promote communal ideals, were ignored in their day.
I am also obliged to recover the authentic utopian tradition, particularly as expressed by Rabelais, Charles Fourier, and William Morris, from amidst the debris of futurism that conceals it. Futurism, as exemplified by the works of Herman Kahn, merely extrapolates the hideous present into an even more hideous future and thereby effaces the creative, imaginative dimensions of futurity. By contrast, the utopian tradition seeks to permeate necessity with freedom, work with play, even toil with artfulness and festiveness. My contrast between utopianism and futurism forms the basis for a creative, liberatory reconstruction of an ecological society, for a sense of human mission and meaning as nature rendered self-conscious.
The chaotic consequences that the “state of nature” must inevitably yield can only be contained by the ordered universe of the State. The apparently noncommercial ambience of this exchange process should not be viewed as mere canniness or hypocrisy. Under what social conditions can direct action be institutionalized as a direct democracy? The answers to these questions, like others we have raised, must be deferred to the closing portions of the work. What we can reasonably ask at this point is what kind of citizen or public self — what principle of citizenship and selfhood — forms the true basis for a direct democracy? The common principle that legitimates direct action and direct democracy is a body politic’s commitment to the belief that an assembled public, united as free and autonomous individuals, can deal in a competent, face-to-face manner with the direction of public affairs.