Anarchist History and Perfectibility

Transcript ~ Anarchist History 

& Perfectibility

To the extent to which man is creative, man is divine.

Raghavan Iyer

A Lecture by Professor Raghavan Iyer

From the Series: Anarchist Thought

University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981

So, Andre showed us how, however difficult a text, it is possible to confront directly certain ideas in Godwin, and of course, he found a natural rapport with ideas in Gandhi, and it is possible to share them and present them. So, I hope there will be a number of people who will follow the example set and make student contributions, because I think it does something for the course. It not only involves participation, but it kind of breaks down the distance between the text and the individual, and it makes you see that you can pick and choose what you want, you can make what use you want; the thing is to be unafraid of ideas.

Now, this is very important if you are going to talk about human nature, perfectibility, and history, because there has been a strong tendency over several centuries to regard human nature as a fixed, constant, and unchanging essence. We found this began in the seventeenth century, and indeed over the last 300 years, the idea emerged that human nature is something that can be grasped, something that can be known, something that can be defined, around which boundaries may be set. And this was, of course, first of all because of the explosion of rationalist metaphysics and philosophy, then because of the exaltation of empiricism in philosophy. But above all, it was because of the impact of the natural sciences upon the social sciences and the concern with method, the discovery of principles, and the discovery of laws.

Now, all of this is certainly valuable, because at least it gets you away from a more simplistic image of man, which was bequeathed and consolidated by the church. Whatever may be the dynamic unpredictability, the freshness, the directness, and the magical impact of great spiritual teachers, subsequently, when religious institutions emerge, they become concerned with creeds, revelation, salvation, working through fear, and stressing sin and weakness. We find this in all fundamentalism—whether it be Islamic, Christian, or any variety all over the world. What really happens is that people exchange something of the enormous sense of wonder and total authenticity that prevailed in the presence of the Buddha, or in the presence of Christ—these were originals, men who never did the same thing in two different situations—and when you replace that, which came out of their lives, by an institutional form of religion, you end up with a certain image of man.

Now, one of the great early thinkers who influenced Marx to see this very clearly was Feuerbach. Feuerbach pointed out that at all times our view of man is based upon two things, and it has to be. One is how we differentiate man from the brute—from whatever we think is below man. On the other hand, it is also based upon whatever difference we care to make between man and whatever is above him; let us call it the divine and the human, the boundary between the two, man and God.

What Feuerbach saw very shrewdly was that to understand human beings and to understand the total species—what he called the "species-nature" of man, human beings in all possible conditions, to understand the commonality of human nature—you have to be able to see clearly in what way man is different from the animal. And here, Feuerbach was aware that different people would do this differently, but in the end, people would come down to saying that because man has the power of speech, and because man also has the power of standing erect (which goes back to the eighteenth-century discovery of Herder and its importance), but above all, because man has the capacity to make himself or herself an object of thought—because of self-consciousness—man is essentially and fundamentally different from the brute.

Now, you could say instead that man is rational. But the moment you say man is rational, you don't want to deny intelligence in the animal kingdom; there is intelligence throughout nature. If you have spent time with an animal, you are certainly utterly fascinated by the latent intelligence, even the germ of self-awareness, in the animal. So, you don't really want to deny intelligence to the rest of nature or to the animal kingdom, but you want to understand how this self-consciousness in the human being, for Feuerbach, works through sociability. That is, through self-awareness, to the degree to which you understand yourself, to that extent you become interested in other human beings. So, for Feuerbach, sociability, love, friendship, and fellow-feeling are directly grounded in self-awareness, and this is what makes man different from the animal. In other words, why Feuerbach wanted to say this was he wanted to show that the human being is really a very wonderful being; human nature has enormous possibilities in it.

And once we recognize this, now let us be more careful in saying what the difference is between man and God, said Feuerbach. Why? Because Feuerbach saw the obvious point that whether there is God or not, one God or many gods, it is man who says that there is or there is not. You see, there could be, as Tillich says, a God beyond God, which has nothing to do with any scripture or text or with any human being's utterance about God. It could be—you could call it Space, you could call it Divine Darkness, the Mysterium Tremendum, the Light of the Logos, and so on. Or you could say that whatever be divine in the universe, if it is to be related to human beings, there must be, in human beings, a capacity to recognize it, the capacity to respond to it, but also the capacity to be able to do likewise.

To the extent to which man is creative, man is divine. Now, this is very important, and it is an unusual idea, but I mentioned it because it has a great bearing, on the one hand upon Feuerbach, and on the other hand, through Marx, upon Bakunin and Kropotkin, and on the other hand upon Gandhi. It is the chapter with the Gandhi book where I actually go a bit further.

Now, Feuerbach, to make his point, created two extreme positions, because he did not want to deny that whatever men don't have, they try to find somewhere else. You might say, to the extent to which man is intelligent and self-aware unlike the brute, man is capable of cooperation with other human beings. But man also has fears, has limitations—not only external physical limitations and mental limitations, but fears about whether these limitations can be changed or not. Therefore, human beings have a strong externalizing tendency, which we know is enormously confirmed in mass society, and enormously confirmed in contemporary, post-Freudian psychology.

So, if man has this tendency to externalize on the basis of his deficiency or her deficiency, then man is going to do the same thing with God. And therefore, God becomes like a huge basket into which you put whatever you think you don't have and no human being has, and you're going to end up with some kind of image of a perfect God, which is only an image. That has no relationship, really, to vast numbers of human beings who may not share that particular image. So, unless you enforce it through dogma and belief by a church which is going to punish you, there is no guarantee that any two people are going to have the same image of God.

Or again, even with so monotheistic and authoritarian a religious institution as Islam, at the core of Islam there is the idea, which you find in the Quran, that there are as many ways to God as there are children of the breaths of men. There are as many ways of seeing and conceiving God as there are human beings. So, see the richness of what the prophets represented and see what the subsequent narrowing does. The subsequent narrowing is replacing the direct impact of the divine upon the human by some authoritative, revealed image of God.

And Feuerbach said this is a dangerous thing, because if you see how it works in society, religion works as a reactionary force. It works through fear, stressing weakness. So, therefore, he did not want to give in to religion, unlike Hegel; he wanted to be very careful. And then he took two extremes. He said, look at Augustinianism on the one hand and Pelagianism on the other hand. Because in Augustinianism you have an all-perfect God, because Augustine was the first Christian theologian to borrow a great deal of philosophical insight from Plato and Aristotle and those before him and to lend it to Christianity, creating a belief structure. The early church fathers did not have such an agreed belief structure; they had the great statements of the Gospels and their understanding of it.

So, with Augustine emerged Christian theology: an official view of God and, so to speak, a view not from the worm's-eye view but from God's-eye view of the world. There was philosophically something flawed in this attempt. But for Augustine, the important thing—why he wanted to stress this image of God as omnipotent, all-powerful, the supreme creator, and so on, and also anthropomorphize it enormously, at the same time stress its transcendence—was because he wanted to bring the full contrast between such a God and man, whom he saw as involved in cupidity, various cravings, rather abject. So, every time you're cynical, and especially if you think you're an atheist cynic, remember what you're carrying is the scars of the victims of medieval theology.

This is why there's a falsity to a lot of modern intellectual posturing. As I've said in Parapolitics, over one thousand years every human being has a million ancestors. So, regardless of whether or not you believe in immortality, even if you only believe in one life in conditioning by heredity and environment, that conditioning is not something recent. We know in terms of contemporary thought that most of it took place in the fetus before your mother even knew that she was carrying you. So, it's too late to really think about it. Unless, of course, you have the kind of unusual situation where two parents are always aware that any minute a baby may come, and therefore try to rearrange their psyches, their spiritual and psychological environment, and actually exercise the privilege of giving a body to a soul—that is something that is very rare, though the ideal is known in the East, and something which is very meaningful in my life. But human beings can't really come to it because, typically, most births are unpremeditated, and therefore most of the influences have already taken place even before the mother knew that she was pregnant, in the very first few weeks.

Now, if this then gives you something that is deterministic, you see what happens. The moment you start determining, it gets very fixed. You could do the same with heredity, with physical environment. But actually, you could do the same also with all human weakness. As Plato says, if you can't top all the weaknesses of man, they are so horrible; he says all the monsters in the world, all the beasts together, cannot give you a picture of the jungle that is in the human psyche. Now, for about a hundred years, man has made—he thinks, you know—a childish rebellion against the Middle Ages, and he's exulting in his knowledge of the jungle. And that's really what's happened, and therefore people have become very bewildered, and it works mostly through modern education, you know, where you upset people's conception of something hopeful and dynamic in human nature, and negativity is passed on like a contagion, like a disease.

So, for Saint Augustine, this was preordained; you could do nothing about it. The more you deify God, the more you have to see man as an object, and the best thing for man then to do is to surrender to God, to fear God—as in the Old Testament, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God—and to surrender to the will of God, and to pray and to contemplate. All of this gave meditation a bad name from which it didn't really recover for a long time. I mean, in the Middle Ages, you really would not be wanting to meditate, because if you meditated, you're going to pay a tremendous disadvantage. You're really going to be totally passive and reconciled to a very static position in the social structure. That's what gave prayer a bad name in the South, and you know, like in Uncle Tom's Cabin. But all of this is historical.

Then you've got the reaction. The reaction came full-flooded with materialism, mechanistic materialism. But long before the reaction came, there was an alternative to the Augustinian view, which was the view of Pelagius, who was the first person in theological language to argue for perfectibility. Because Pelagius argued that it is man who is divine, man who is perfectible. Man is not only intrinsically good, man is divine, and God, if there is a God, is that kind of being who has given proof of divinity by implanting divinity within all human beings. See, this later becomes very important in the process of the Reformation, but it's an idea that is important intuitively. But what Feuerbach is saying is, the moment of course you do this, you end up divinizing man, and when you divinize man, then your concept of God really becomes in practice either irrelevant or it becomes something empty. This is a danger.

Now today, of course, you find a lot of people attacking humanism, saying it deifies man; on the other hand, you find a lot of people who are fundamentalists and others, you know, appropriating morality and saying, you know, if you don't really believe in God, you're not getting anywhere. See, all of this is a very nervous, confused time. It's really because of the economic situation, because of uncertainty. In other words, as long as we don't see this problem clearly—the difficulties in any concept of human nature—we are always going to fall into reactions, but you cannot out of reactions formulate a clear conception of man.

So, now we can begin to see what is the importance of what the anarchists are doing. Godwin is starting with a view that if you can recognize that your mind is capable of not only selection and comparison, choice and control, but also of expansion, and there is no limit to the expansion of the mind, in principle, there is no limit to human improvement. And improvement cannot only be scientific and technical on the basis of knowledge; improvement also involves a moral life, because for Godwin the mind is crucial to virtue, to justice. So, starting in this way, what is he saying? You might like to sum it up in advance: Godwin is saying it's in the head. Gandhi is saying it's in the heart. Kropotkin is saying it is in the head and the heart, and it works through the collective hands of individuals. And Bakunin is saying it is not only specifically in the hands, it is in the fist. You want to show where the bottom line is. So, where is the core?

Now, Godwin is not committing himself to any total view of human nature, but he's saying, at least if we know that in the end we are talking about perception and conception, anything the mind can conceive is possible. It's possible, we would say today in philosophy, in principle. Whether it is possible in practice, we don't know. You can only deny it in those cases where, by definition, it is impossible in practice because of the way you have defined the limits of a situation. So, you could say a person who is five feet tall is not going to become as effective, let us say, a pole-vaulter as somebody who is much taller. That's because we're assuming that you can't change the physical height of the body. But it's really not saying very much. So, in other words, in regard to a lot of statements, we don't really know what the limits are.

Godwin will say, of course there are limits, and then he takes the extreme case. Man cannot be everywhere. As long as man cannot be everywhere, as long as man is limited by space and time, a man cannot see on all sides, a man cannot have an omnidirectional, multidimensional view of everything. That is a limitation. And therefore, he's saying it is even difficult to conceive what absolute perfection would be like. If absolute perfection is equal to omniscience, it is very difficult even to imagine it for man as an incarnated human being in flesh and blood, in space and time. But even though it is difficult to conceive of absolute perfection, it is possible to conceive of so many possibilities and so many directions; and Godwin says this process is very remarkable.

And as was very well pointed out by Andre, for Godwin, its remarkable nature is proved by two of the simplest things we take for granted: language and writing. Because how a complex language structure evolves is one of the most fascinating questions; and he says take any language with its complex rules and its possibilities and imagine it arising over a long period out of human speech and out of human usage. He says there is one of the most extraordinary instances of the possibility of progress and expansion from small beginnings and certain simple rules to highly complex structures, and indeed we really can't set limits upon language itself.

And similarly, he sees in regard to writing how writing is such a tremendous aid in gaining self-consciousness, but also in the transmission of ideas; and for Godwin, the important thing about human beings is human interaction. And as long as human beings are interacting, who is to say in advance that one human being's words cannot make a difference to another human being? Because you can never rule this out. It doesn't matter how limited you think a person is—well, that's because of the situation. You cannot rule out that somebody may come in that situation and say that very thing which is going to make a tremendous change and difference in his life.

If that is the case, you've got to recognize that it is always possible, the more clear and coherent your thinking, the sounder your reasoning, the more truth content there is in what you say, that it can affect other people and change them, change their ways, change their modes, change their very lives. Now, we, of course, know, living today, that most of the time people are passive and they're not readily changed by words because words have lost meaning, because they've got divorced from acts. They don't have the spiritual, logoic power that comes where words become magical because they come out of a life of consecration, contemplation, meditation, firmness of heart, and clarity of mind. We know this.

But nonetheless, we also know that there's nothing static about this, because any time you go to a Shakespeare play, you come back thinking all over again about human beings and human nature. You recognize that language at its height can do something to free you from fixed conceptions. It can open up again the doors in every direction, open up possibilities. So, we have to have an open view of human nature.

And Godwin says which means we've got to clearly distinguish between perfectibility and perfection. There is no way in principle of denying perfectibility, because to deny perfectibility is to say that you know what the limits are. And who is one man to lay down the limits for all human beings? And this is what Godwin is getting away from: Calvinism, teleology based upon theology. Because in medieval philosophy, and especially in orthodox religion, you have the view that whoever is God—and God is a kind of man—God knows the purpose of everything. Everything in the mind of an ant, in the mind of every human being. And the moment you start that way, that everything is teleologically predetermined through the will of one so-called omnipotent, but still particular human being, you have lost something. That is, you have really lost the direct recognition of what is in the realm of facts: the plasticity of the human mind, of the human imagination.

And Godwin says, look, let us stay right here, and let us not take this for granted. So, what he was saying then is now very important because of what we know about the human brain. So, he says if you really know what the possibilities are, don't set limits. There are limits certainly, but don't in advance go and limit human nature, because there is no way in which you can rule out further social improvements, ethical changes, ethical improvements, further heightening of self-awareness, changes in human nature altogether. So, therefore, in this way human beings are perfectible, but for Godwin, for the individual to understand this, he must do something on his own. He must individuate. You can't hand over perfectibility to an automatic historical process.

And that is the danger of the opposite view, which came from eighteenth-century France, where there's a tendency to think—and this is very common sometimes, it's a kind of, it fits in with mental laziness: "Oh, you know what's happening to man altogether? See what human beings altogether are doing." And a whole lot of people, whether in theological language like Chardin, or in secular language, or in the materialistic language like Marx and other biologists today, they talk in terms of something happening automatically. That won't wash with Godwin, because Godwin knows too much about what happens when human beings become automatic: they become creatures of habit, they become slaves to custom, they become slaves to prejudice. So, all that you're going to have is an ossification. So, don't expect this to happen automatically.

Individuation is difficult. It is difficult to seize the truth and to hold it. But if you seize and hold that truth, the truth will triumph. It may not triumph all at once, but over time, there is no way it cannot triumph. So, individuals have to emerge and individuate and incarnate, embody the truth, and become therefore the means by which the potential omnipotence of truth over time is effective in society. So, this is a very powerful teaching, as you can see; it's very powerful, it's much more powerful than it looks at first sight, given, of course, the language that Godwin had to use in his day.

Now, if you turn from this to Gandhi—Gandhi, who has thought a lot about human nature, and he's aware of Darwinism, he's aware of nineteenth-century Victorian emphasis upon the brute aspects of human nature—but for Gandhi also, thinking logically, he says, as long as there is one human being who has ever transcended the limits of the brute, what is possible for one is possible for others. The important thing, then, about a Buddha or a Christ is that they were human beings who showed what the divine can do. They represented soul-force, and their soul-force only works because it acts upon the soul-force in you. There is a germ of the Buddha, there is a germ of Christ in every human being, and because there is, every human being has a possibility of releasing this soul-force, and that means he has to have guts, to put it plainly. He must have courage.

Courage in what? Courage in controlling himself, not controlling others. Courage in controlling his own mind, courage in controlling his own temper. And you can't leave this merely to social customs, to a concept of culture and etiquette, because that gets you into hypocrisy and elitism. No, you have got to test yourself rigorously and all the time, and you've got to put yourself on the line. He's a kind of cowboy of the spiritual world. You've got to put yourself on the line, and that is why Gandhi is very disturbing, but also very appealing. He's very disturbing because he gets right down to the nitty-gritty. Where are you at? What are you doing? And he's quite willing to learn, he's quite willing to acknowledge mistakes. There is a tremendous strength in this thing, and what Gandhi prophetically saw was that this was going to become the mode of the civilization of the future.

There will be a time in the future, in the Aquarian Age, where most of what we do is out of it and obsolete, it's irrelevant. Where to belittle another human being is to belittle yourself. Where human self-esteem will depend upon drawing others out, reaching out to others, because we are enormously victims of competition—the ethos of competition that is so strong in capitalism. And because of market values, we are conditioned by these market values into a very commercial view of success and failure, and we're all alienated from ourselves as creative agents. And therefore, we are objectifying objects, our concept of happiness and wealth and of success, and we're also very much slaves of the money market, which may be one of the best things about what's happening today. Because if the economy really—you know, despite all the attempts to replace Keynesianism by now a different kind of economics, supply-side economics, and this is not the fault of any one man—if economics goes bankrupt, what a good thing it would be.

People would be forced to simplify, forced to think away from 300 years of mechanistic institutions which have been worshipped unduly and excessively and regarded as inevitable. Just because a couple of Scotsmen had a good idea or two, three centuries ago about getting into banking; I mean, banking is quite a good idea, they're smart, you know, based upon the principle of confidence. As long as enough people are putting things in the till and everybody isn't coming straight away to take it, I mean, you can have banking. It's a shrewd and simple idea, and it became a very powerful force in making finance available. And then, of course, we had a whole complex economy dependent upon finance, where the advantages are very unequal, where a few people have access to finance, and therefore you've got inbuilt elitism in economies. And apply this on a world scale, you've got something horrible.

So, of course, people have got to see through it, and if it doesn't happen by some noble, constructive, rational reform, it will come, not even out of some dramatic, violent revolution. It comes out of apathy, anomie, indifference, parataxis, the debasement of the very coinage of human language, the debasement of the currency. And then, of course, it'd be a very different story. People today can't talk so exultingly about capitalism thanks to the oil crisis, you know, thanks to the enormous wisdom, dialectical wisdom of Zaki Yamani, because since they start to use what others have done all along, well, they force people to recognize that a lot of this bluff and bluster of several centuries was simply based upon cheap oil grabbed from some country. And if you don't have it, you see, it suddenly starts to discipline people. You can't make so many claims. And this is very important, what is happening; it's very subtle. It's working in a very subtle way because eventually it's going to teach everybody something. I mean, everybody is going to have to learn something, swallow some illusions in every part of the world, and everybody in a bewildered way has got to start over again.

So, at this kind of time, it's very good to think of what Gandhi says, because what Gandhi is saying is, look, if you're looking at human nature in terms only of what is bad and what is brutalized, you're getting a very distorted view. And this, for him, is very important in his view of world history and human history. History, he says, is only a record of the interruptions of soul-force. Families, human societies, people all the time are living, and you may call it bare survival, you may call it instinct, but actually they're helping each other, they're reaching out to each other. And they do this instinctively, they do this through the eyes, they do this wordlessly, they do this through simple acts. So, nonviolence is going on the whole time, not self-consciously, but if it didn't, life would not be stronger than death, and the forces of growth would not be stronger than destruction. So, this is, of course, what goes on. But what blinds us to what goes on—we can't often see what's at the tip of the nose. So, instead of seeing what we take for granted, we get excited about violence. And we create through history a certain view of dynasties and kings and incidents, and all of this fits in with mass psychology and mass passivity, but it's a distortion.

And then Gandhi said, now look at what Marx said, because he recognized there was something very important in Marx. He says, what is true in Marx is not original; what is original in Marx is not always true. Very perceptive. And yet, Gandhi didn't want to sell Marx short because he said Marx thought in universal terms; he saw humanity as a whole. Therefore, he said Marx is very strong, don't sell him short. But while Marx is very strong because he thought in universal terms, in terms of humanity as a whole, it is also important to recognize that Marx, who borrowed a number of ideas, many of them maybe are not true. And some things which he said about economic interpretation make sense at some level, but don't exaggerate it.

And Gandhi gave examples. Each of you can think of examples of wars, conflicts that don't arise only out of economics, but arise out of human passion, human jealousy. Because if Marx were totally true, that would make nonsense of antiquity, many of the great plays, many of the incidents in human life and human history. When Marx came home and told his wife, "Eureka, I found it, the answer to everything, it's the economic interpretation of history and of all events," she said, "Shut up, you didn't marry me for money." And then Marx says, "Well, you woman, you don't understand," and he went into his study and worked very hard on it.

So, you know, we think well of Kant; Kant was a good scholar, and he did something very important. But one doesn't want to set him up as a kind of omnipotent god who said the last word on human affairs. To Gandhi, this would be as ridiculous as saying that everything is predetermined by some personal god. So, the divine works, but the divine works in a mysterious way. Human beings are mysterious; they're like icebergs, most of it is hidden. So, think in terms of human potentials and think of the divine working upon human potentials. And how do you test it? By strength of mind, nonviolence, and generosity.

What is the mark of greatness in a human being? Why does Casablanca still appeal to so many people? Whenever you see magnanimity, renunciation, you’ve seen the true mark of greatness. It might be even in a warrior, it might be in a soldier, it might be in a simple peasant, it might be in somebody totally unlettered, but it is rare at all times. And what is wrong with modern society is it puts a premium upon being paranoid and mean. It capitalizes on and institutionalizes meanness and pettiness. And therefore, for a person really to be truly generous, the person should get away to the wilds. You know, go to see the wide-open skies in Wyoming, make your own journey; otherwise, you'll be trapped, you will become shrunk pretty soon by social forces. So, therefore, there is always another source of strength in human life and in human history, but it's not given to us by society because society is working upon the opposite premises.

So, therefore, for Gandhi, naturally, then you have to rebel, you have to take a stand, but furthermore, he says, you have to bind yourself by vows. So, this is really a very tough-minded view of history, and there is nothing automatic that is guaranteed here. And it's not going to work overnight globally because Gandhi recognizes that this is related to this profoundly important fact that already over the last, say, hundred years, the moral awareness of human beings has enormously outdistanced their capacity to translate it into conduct. For a hundred years, the disgust with war has been very strong, but it's not just disgust; I mean, people have really seen through a great deal. So, in their awareness, they're able to see through a lot of humbug, but alas, they're not able to translate it, they're not able to make it come alive. And that is because they've all given in to the same universal demon, which says, "I won't do it unless the other person starts," where pride and cowardice combine, and they keep you exactly where you are. So, to be able to say, "No, I'm going to do it, regardless of who else does it," that is where human courage begins. So, you see what Gandhi is saying is not at all incompatible with what Godwin is saying, but it involves an act of moral courage, a releasing of the spiritual will.

Now, this is very important when we come to Bakunin and Kropotkin, because Bakunin was himself, actually as a person, very much influenced and inspired by the things that we like in Gandhi: he liked dynamism, he liked willpower, he was warm, and humanitarian. But Bakunin, an aristocrat who then broke away from the aristocracy, came under the influence of Hegel—not as an intellectual, but a self-educated man—yet unlike Gandhi, involved with intellectuals, and being involved with intellectuals, at different times, he came to be influenced by different things, and finally, Marxism totally took him over. But Marxism without Marx, because he found Marx personally aggressive, bloody-minded, and authoritarian, and Bakunin became his leading opponent in the International. But the Marxist theory of economics—remember when it came, it was like a revelation for people like Bakunin.

Also, Bakunin, coming from Tsarist Russia with his enormous feeling for the peasants, had no use for the church, and he had no use for a father figure in the sky. And now, this is hard to take for some people, but for Bakunin, when you say God, he thinks of the Inquisition. When you say Christ, he thinks of the fact that more blood has been shed in the name of that holy, meek man than of any other human being in history. So, Bakunin isn’t going to buy any ideology cheaply. Who is to account? You see, that's the Russian in him, like Ivan in Dostoevsky's. Why human suffering, he says? Don't sell me a God who is linked up with human tyranny, and injustice, and suffering, who is used to justify the Inquisition, warfare, conscription, and torture. "No," he says, "I want to have nothing to do with such a God. I much prefer matter."

And by matter, of course, he means a new, richer, philosophical view of matter, which again we forget is very different from crude materialism. He was very excited about it: matter in motion. All these atomic theories that were coming out in the nineteenth century in their early form. And he was very excited by all this that we were finding out about the complexity and richness of nature. And therefore, he said, there is great importance to pursuing what science is doing and finding out as much as we can about the processes and laws of nature and drawing conclusions from that which will be helpful to man. Because he said, the world is one, and we can make eventually a unified science of a unified world.

But now comes the important thing for Bakunin: what for a unified humanity? And therefore, just as Bakunin could, you know, use his fist against the church and against the God idea, he also uses his fist against science with a capital S; against scientific academies, elites, scientific elitism, and the misuse of authority by science. And then he says, why is this happening? What is happening in science is wonderful, but there again you're suddenly getting all these experts sitting around, using technology, controlling knowledge, and they are reinforcing the bourgeois system, the capitalist system. They are really looking out for their careers, they are misusing and misappropriating science, and Bakunin has seen this before. What the priests did with the God idea, well, these modern priests now do with science, with a capital S.

And Bakunin won't buy it, because Bakunin says, you bring to the creative free spirits among the peasants—you bring them some knowledge of what is really going on in science, make it available to them, show it to them, don't make it difficult, pass it on. And that, you know, looked extraordinary when he said it, but today, it's true. The only country in the world, bar none, where the common man's language is science is the Soviet Union, like it or not. There's no getting away from that. No Reagan, no Republican administration, no fundamentalist can make any change to the fact that Russia is far ahead of the rest of the human race in that fundamental respect: that the language of science is diffused. So, in Russia, when say ten common people get together and they're talking about satellites, they're talking knowledgeably. That's what scientific education has done, and freedom from the Judeo-Christian myth.

What, of course, they also have had is a tremendous authoritarianism through centralization in the name of politics. But don't think that they're ever going to be stuck in it. Because as Cyril Hinshelwood, president of the Royal Society and leading scientist in England, said when he visited Russia, "When I came to this country, I thought I was visiting a Marxist country. What I found was I was visiting the first country in the world where the Enlightenment has won, where science is a means of liberation and freedom." This is not quite happening in China. It's not happening in Japan, where they've gone in very much for technology and power. This is what some scientists would like to see happen. Well, because there are more scientists in India today than in any country in the world, except for here in America. But they don't know how to take it to the masses. Because so many of the very modes of transmission of science through technology, involving equipment and laboratories, consolidate elitism.

And Godwin says—and Bakunin says—all this plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Before you know where you are, however good a scientist you may be, however honest and honorable, you have already sold your soul to the state, to the devil. You're already working for capitalism, you're working for everything that is unscientific and iniquitous. In other words, he's addressing a moral challenge to scientists, the kind of moral challenge that is worthy of an Einstein, who never stopped asking such questions about himself and about the role of all scientists.

So, there is therefore a tremendous dynamism to what Bakunin is saying, and Bakunin then of course, as a good, true Marxist, with his almost childlike faith in the total revolution, says, "Wait for the revolution, man, then all the peasants will take over, and then there won't be any leadership, everything will be democratic." Well, of course, he didn't realize how very quickly you get the reinforcement after any partial revolution of elitism, of the same structure; he didn't see what Kropotkin lived to see. Because Kropotkin admired Bakunin; he shared all these insights. He was not as extreme a Marxist as Bakunin in theory, but in practice he really did come to believe that the commune is the greatest advance upon what happened before. And therefore, he called himself an anarchist communist.

And Kropotkin said, at all times in history, in society, there are these two forces: one working towards authoritarianism, towards elites. That force looks very impressive, the older, the stronger force. But working quietly, therefore not so visible, is in fact the other force, working through social cooperation, like tribes and clans, guilds, village cooperative councils, and urban cooperative councils. In a variety of ways, human beings come together, and in this way, they have disseminated arts and crafts; they have taught each other, helped each other. This is, according to him, the natural prime moving force in human affairs.

But something unnatural happened 300 years ago, when suddenly the sovereign state emerged. Why? He says because you got a distorted view of human evolution and human society given by intellectuals, as a result of which people came to worship centralization. And here he contrasts Rome and Greece. Because though he's obviously aware of the limitations of Greece, he saw in Greece a healthy search for local self-determination through the polis, even though city-states came and disappeared, but people never gave up on the ideal of collective sharing, collective self-rule. And of course, this was very strong in ancient India. Both ancient India and ancient Greece represented something of this push towards localism, self-reliance, and cooperation, all of this on a voluntary basis, leaving aside centralized authority.

On the other hand, whether it be with Rome or Peking, you got the sanctification of "the city." Each was called the Eternal City, and all roads were supposed to lead to Rome; you got centralization. And for Kropotkin, this was a disaster. This led to Caesarism. And even though Caesarism disappeared, the church took this on, after Constantine. So, once the church learned from the Roman Empire how to centralize power and authority, we have come to take centralization for granted. And then of course after the church and later after Byzantium, you find the same thing happening with the medieval communes. You find dictators emerging—local dictators, local tyrants—and then of course you get all the push towards the expansion of kingdoms and republics and states, you get ruthless individuals, and eventually, you end up with this appalling thing called the modern nation-state, which is like a monster, which represents concentration and centralization, of course.

So, for Kropotkin, this is unnatural. And furthermore, he says this unnatural thing is combined with another distortion in biology, where people are constantly only talking in terms of the struggle for survival of animals. Whereas Kropotkin, from his tremendous love of plants and animals, his studies of nature over a long period, and especially of geography, came to the view, "No, when you really look at the animal kingdom, you find mutual aid working." And what he said with a lot of examples has been enormously reinforced in our time by the work of Konrad Lorenz, who even speaks of something very beautiful, like nonviolence in the animal kingdom. Now, I only mention this in case any of you love animals. If, for example, an animal met its natural prey, its opposition, but the animal were wounded, it would go and do something like prostrating or bowing down, and the other animal would let it alone. Lorenz studied this in many cases; there is something like this working. You might call it the preservation of the species as a whole, whatever, but it is not the case that the animal kingdom is simply a Hobbesian world, even though, obviously, there is a "law of prey," and it is connected with survival, and we know very little about it. There are ancient, of course, magical theories where, through the "law of prey," one animal would transform into another animal.

But whatever it is, to give the story of nature, red in tooth and claw, and to create a kind of social Darwinism out of the struggle for existence, Kropotkin said, is irresponsible, it is unscientific. Now, one of Kropotkin's problems was he kept calling things he didn't like, and things like this which were terrible, as unscientific; but he did, unfortunately, for which you can't blame him, in the nineteenth century. To him, the word scientific was a very noble word. It still is for some people, certainly not for other people like Bakunin, but for Kropotkin, scientific was a noble word. So, he only thought, if only we could be truly scientific. That's like being concerned with the real truth for what is in nature. Well, of course, all words at their root—like the word religion at its core is magnificent, it has got to do with unifying, it has got to do with arousing the innate intuitions of man, going back to what is within. And the word science in its origin has got to do with organizing knowledge, coming closer to truth, reality. That's beautiful.

But Kropotkin thought, well, never mind what's happening, there are all these museums, free libraries, which were also built in the time of the great expansion of the Victorian age in London. There are great museums, free libraries—every kind of knowledge, knowledge for the first time became available to the common man. Without a fee, you could walk into the British Museum, could walk into these great art museums. And even in the nineteenth century, a lot of working-class unions became very involved in working-class education, using the free facilities of the state. And Kropotkin thought, well, that's surely going to be extended everywhere, but it's not going to happen automatically. That's the point, you see.

The whole trouble with determinism is the moment you expect it to happen automatically, then you're going to get very disillusioned. That's what's not happened today. Today they're trying here and there in France and so on. But look at all the knowledge that is available in the world. If it were truly made freely available all over the world with no boundaries and with full free trade, no barriers of any kind, oh, the world today is rich in its know-how, in its resources. It could solve all its problems with great skills. It can be shown again and again what comes in the way of it. It isn't only states and classes and capitalism and communism; it is actually the mental belief that you can't do anything about it. That is much stronger, much stronger than all these things. If you can really get rid of that belief that this is inevitable, that this has to be, that this will never change—that is very hard.

So Kropotkin is really talking of anarchism as freeing creativity. Now Bakunin is also recognizing this creativity, which he says is in the masses. But he says that creativity cannot be tapped unless you identify the enemy, you see how the bourgeoisie works, you understand the force of class struggle, you see exploitation for what it is, and also, you destroy. And at some points Kropotkin also—at different points in his life he changed, but later in life he thought, well, you need violence. And here he disagrees with Tolstoy, who was saying, "No, nonviolence if you want the true anarchist ideal." Kropotkin admired Tolstoy; he didn't like violence. But when he moved away from the cozier atmosphere of Victorian London to Russia, he felt that things are so bad, of course you have to have violence.

But then when he saw what happened after the Russian Revolution, he was horrified. Of course, Bakunin had predicted this. But he kept asking questions as an old man. How, through Marxism, you got, once again, state socialism, no free communes? And you got the setting up of the most repressive regime in the name of universal freedom and equality? So Kropotkin openly said to Lenin, and he was not afraid, that he didn't like what had gone on in the Soviet Union. He thought the revolution had made terrible mistakes, but he did recognize that the revolution was an extraordinary achievement, which it was. Ten years before, twenty years before, thirty years before, you'd have thought it impossible. And that's a very complex story, you know, whether the revolution was inevitable or not.

But certainly the Russian Revolution was one of the most extraordinary, important events, perhaps far more important than the French Revolution. And if it is so, he said, well, it went wrong. Like in the early 19th century the French kept asking, "Why did the French Revolution go wrong?" There must be people asking, "Why did it go wrong? What can be done? Can we move towards an authentic, anarchist ideal of true statehood socialism?"

And here, of course, Lenin—and this is the greatness of Lenin, though he totally disagreed with Kropotkin—he honored Kropotkin, he knew that Kropotkin was much loved by the people. And I am very proud myself that the Russians, despite their communism, their disagreement with Kropotkin, set up this wonderful memorial to Kropotkin, that I've been told at different times by Russian professors and by Russian students, that if only you can go and talk in terms of Tolstoy and Kropotkin, all those things that don't directly come into conflict with contemporary ideology, it would be amazing what the response is.

So it's as if potentially there are vast numbers of people right there who, speaking in the language of science, are on to creativity, or on to self-awareness, or on to the spiritual, again, they don't know what to do about the monolithic party, the monolithic state. So at some point we really come to what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" and the stranglehold it exercises upon capitalism and communism. Now this would be very much in line with the kind of analysis of history which you find in Kropotkin or Bakunin.

So I would say, to understand evil and to understand the momentousness of the opposition to be faced, it is very helpful to read Marx, very helpful to read Bakunin, despite what he says about destruction, because there is a deep meaning to what he's saying; there is latent violence in this monstrous system. It is also very helpful to read Kropotkin. But don't get so obsessed with destruction that it gets to you—that's a mistake. That is Marxism in the brain and in the blood, like sex in the brain, is no good. You want to get it out. You don't want to be carrying with you an intense, angry, impotent violence, because then, you see, you're missing out on opportunities and you're changing your personality. So it's a very subtle thing.

You need the analysis, why? Out of compassion, out of love of the masses, and it's quite legitimate that out of true love of humanity, millions upon millions of human beings all over the world, that sometimes we should get angry and we should stand up in the name of principles and we should be willing to do something about it—perfectly correct.

In that sense we should truly rebel and be revolutionary and leave enough room for moral indignation. But we should never let moral indignation make us victims to those nihilists, those merchants of despair who are playing will games in the name of what even exists. In that sense you've got to set your sights above the plains, you have to look at the mountains, look at the bottomless sky, look at the stars, meditate upon bare space. You have to free yourself from the overwhelming limitations of the perceptual perspective on history, you have to free yourself from infatuation with the facts.

In other words, you would have to do the exact opposite of what Bakunin and Kropotkin are saying. And it is my view that if they were alive today they would be saying the same thing, because they didn't know how much what they said was going to be misused in the name of science and socialism. In other words, they would also recognize the enormous relevance of something like Gandhi. And therefore, you could really say there is something in Gandhi which, without taking you back to the Middle Ages, gets you out of that box, which box you're going to be back in if you confine yourself to the facts.

The only worthwhile important facts are facts that you create by choosing ideals and staying firm. So the most important fact of human nature is the fact that it can be changed. And it cannot be changed automatically; it can only be changed by an act of courage, an act of spiritual will.

And what Gandhi is saying is this, which can be the momentum to greater self-reliance, true spiritual growth, what he calls swaraj and swadeshi, where true freedom makes you self-dependent—that's swadeshi. But it can work through individuals because, and it can go all the way for individuals, right up to the very highest conceivable ideal, because it is latent in the great masses of humanity.

So one thing that's very wonderful about it, I'd say all these anarchists, even Godwin, who didn't talk about the masses as such, because in those days you didn't talk about the masses, but he did have this faith, apart from intellectuals, in the minds of all human beings. But what you find even more explicit in Bakunin, and you find this very much in Kropotkin, I think you find this above all in Gandhi, is a recognition that the vertical growth of the individual, which is unbounded and is a function of the imagination, awareness, moral courage, is linked up to a vast amount of potential, which is lying in masses of human beings who, despite all the evidence, despite the circumstances of their wretchedness, have a tremendous potential soul force.

So if you can both recognize the potential soul force in the great masses of human beings and do your own work without lazily waiting upon events, at some point there may be sparks flying because the two come together. Individuals may come together with groups, and that is one of the most extraordinary, you might say, intriguing possibilities of the future. Never rule it out; anything can happen in eighteen years, but you do need individuals to make changes on their own, regardless of institutions.

But you also need to recognize this potential that is waiting in vast masses of men, and they've got to be tapped in some new ways, and possibly sometimes absurd ways, rather than the old ways of the past, because you can't bring them together by exhortation, not by propaganda, not by symbolic violence, and not by mere psychic excitement, not by false promises about the future, not by guarantees that everything will be solved in a paradise to come. No, you've got to do it in some different way.

It has to have its roots in communes, in things that are shared by human beings when they bake bread together and share water. It has to come out of, you might say, the lifeblood of human interaction. So it would be a tremendous cross-fertilization. Live your life up to a certain point, doing things on your own, then go and live in time, in Arkansas or wherever, among the backwoods, and just merge yourself in the backwoods, but don't despair and escape, to forget the world into condensed cities. No, rather to make come alive what otherwise is wasted potential in many peoples all over the country. So it's somehow the individual and the collective to come together, then you might say what we really have is a possibility of magic.