Civilization and Its Destination
1. The Nature of Culture
2. Protestantism and The Destination of History
3. Anti-Capitalism, Degrowth, and Utopia
4. Conclusion
But whither? For how long? And what then?
— Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics
Introduction
Between the years 1811 and 1816, a worker revolt spread across England. What did they oppose? automation. How were they called? the Luddites. Highly organized, they set out to destroy these new machines, hoping to interrupt the tide that was seemingly bringing about their obsolescence.
While this story is often held up as an example of how afraid humans are of change and progress, many disagree with this interpretation. According to them, the Luddites were not anti-progress but anti-capitalism. Assuming the profits generated by these innovations were redistributed to the workers, odds are the revolts would have never happened. Thus, they hold that the Luddite revolt was not about machines but about how profits generated by these machines came at the cost of the workers’ quality of life.
In this interpretation, progress and automation are seen as morally good. The Luddites were not reactionaries; they were revolutionaries, and this interpretation carefully distinguishes one from the other. Those who fight against progress and change are treated as obstacles standing before utopia — that emancipated world of plenty which would lift us from the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. What moral person would oppose this?
But an increasing number of people who have witnessed the triumphs of progress brought by the industrial, scientific, and urban revolutions are coming to terms with the results: progress — not capitalism — has left us unhappy and bereft of meaning.
[…] what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent
What is the point of prosperity and civilization if it makes us no happier than the billions who lived before us, in far more unprosperous conditions? And to enjoy the empty bliss of prosperity, how much of what once sufficed did we destroy? The conflagration of progress burned through the dams that once kept our woes at bay. The goal now is to try and drain that endless ocean once and for all. But not a dent has been made. We are just as well off as we have always been, yet we keep on burning the dams of the past in the name of progress, as though drowning were liberty so long as we get to do it on our own terms, without the impetus of a king or a church.
Capitalism didn’t do it; we did it. Happiness, prosperity, individualism, and freedom — we are getting exactly what we’re asking for. This is it. Capitalism is building what we’re asking for, and in the resulting hell-fire of a faithless world, our prognosis is “more progress”. The issue is not capitalism; it’s us. This is our fault.
So long as we care for progress — the eradication of all necessity, tradition, obligation, alienation, and external imposition—and the emancipation of man from the whips of natural/cultural existence, life will be stripped of its redeeming qualities, one by one, until we have manufactured paradise on earth. How did it come to this?
The Nature of Culture
We cannot look to the past or other cultures for advice. Customs are the product of geographical and historical conditions; reviving them here and now would amount to growing crops in the wrong climate. The values and customs of other people — separated by history or geography — cannot be uprooted from the conditions that warranted them. In Faust, Part 2 (1832), Goethe (1749–1832) illustrates how ancient Greece and medieval Germany — both culturally revered during his time — could not be united or revived; man and society must live and strive, not “linger a while” in withered forms. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels (1820–1895) warns utopians against installing an idealized political program whose design fails to account for the concrete needs and historical/material conditions of the present. Put differently: the past is far behind us; the future doesn’t exist.
In The German Ideology (1846), the then 28-year-old Karl Marx (1818–1883) made the claim that human culture is nothing but the efflux of a society’s material way of life. Custom, belief, ideology, religion, art, etc. are not the choice of men but a reflection of the foster society’s material conditions.
The production of ideas […] is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men […] the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
One can hardly overstate how radical this belief was and still is. Religion is disgraced as nothing more than a reflection of the anxieties, symbols, and beliefs that a people’s environment has conditioned them to have. Customs are not the product of moral and philosophical erudition, but the necessary habits of a people living in a particular material circumstance.
One can easily take this idea to a dogmatic extreme, but it is certainly true to an extent. Let us remain within the bounds of this extent and leave Marx behind so we can come up with our own cultural materialism.
No one would disagree that the environment determines the diet, routines, activities, shelter, tools, etc. of a community. Those who live in the Arctic live very different lives than those who live in the Sahara Desert. This is not controversial. But beyond the simple customs of material activities, it is also easy for us to imagine how heavily the environment will influence a society’s beliefs, ideas, and values. At a very basic level, those who are subject to different conditions will come to value different things.
Robert Sapolsky (b. 1957), in his talk “The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” (2017), explains how the social formation of a community impacts the nature of its religious beliefs. Nomadic tribes worship a wide plurality of animistic gods who are wholly disinterested in the affairs of men. Once men assemble in sedentary settlements where the population is higher and denser, they begin to worship a single God who is quite concerned with the lives of men. Even the shape of God is determined by material conditions.
Does that mean humans are blank slates, wholly defined by environment, with no nature, agency, or disposition? Not quite.
Let’s look at an example: are humans disposed to monogamy or polygamy? Today, it is popular to claim that humans are by nature polyamorous and that monogamy is unnatural. In the state of nature, primitive communities were sexually and romantically indiscriminate; we find no jealousy, no artificial ceremony, and no arbitrary taboos to limit and estrange their libidinal dispositions. Does this not prove that humans are supposed to be like this? After all, we are animals, are we not? These societies are not polygamous by custom; they are closer to nature, and we imprison ourselves in an artificial regime of alienating conventions. This intuition is absurd.
Because of hunting and war, the life of the male is more violent and dangerous, and the death rate of men is higher, than that of women. The consequent excess of women compels a choice between polygamy and the barren celibacy of a minority of women; but such celibacy is intolerable to peoples who require a high birth rate to make up for a high death rate […]
[…] polygamy was well adapted to the marital needs of a primitive society in which women outnumbered men.
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
Here we see polygamy emerging out of a society’s demographic condition. Where the lives of men are perilous, their death rates relative to those of women turn them into a demographic minority. In such a society, it makes no sense — population-wise — to leave a host of child-rearing-aged women without a partner. Polygamy — in this situation — is a customary reaction to a society’s demographic reality; it is not a glimpse into the unfettered nature of man. Durant later discusses how monogamy becomes sanctified when property and inheritance require that parentage be easily traceable, thus necessitating institutional, monogamous loyalty. Both customs are based on the material predicament of a given people. Humans are not disposed to one or the other; they are disposed to that which can be both.
Our model states that men are born with dispositions that are conjugated by their available environment (material and cultural). As we have shown, humans are not monogamous/polygamous, monotheistic/polytheistic, or dominant/submissive by nature; rather, they have a primordial disposition — both evolutionary and individual — that is formulated and chiseled by external conditions. Much like how there is no true version of language before cultural actualization, man is only a locus of formless dispositions until cultural actualization. Thus, culture is a necessary step in bringing man to fruition; man is realized through cultural particularization. Man becomes through culture; existence is nothing without essence.
As our tendency to fetishize primitive communities shows, we think of customs and traditions as irrational, oppressive, and alienating. If only we could free ourselves from norms, conventions, and arbitrary cultural impositions, we could be free at last to be who we really are and do what we really want to do. The implication here is that the real you exists before culture and that you must free yourself from the imposed illusions of culture to discover who you are and begin living for yourself. Our motto becomes: demystify all traditions and free yourself.
This is where our problem becomes evident: by demonizing the conditions of being, we are slowly stripping down culture until we return to that state of primordial pre-definition — and we call that pre-being “freedom”.
Thus, we say that marriage is “nothing but a piece of paper”, discounting the transcendent significance of a sacred ceremony as being nothing more than an irrational illusion — a mere custom. If we lived in a more authentic culture, we would love each other without these made-up, oppressive, old-world customs mediating our lives and experiences. To hell with marriage, conventions, norms, and social constructs — they stand in the way of true, genuine love!
[…] any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny […]
[…] if happiness be the object of morality, […] then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties […]
— Percy Shelley, Queen Mab (notes)
It would surprise many of these free spirits to learn how rare romantic love is in the history of culture compared to marriage. Much to their disdain, it would appear that those “authentic and primitive societies” are more prone to the alienating practices we decry at home.
The notion that a man’s wife is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern notion […]
[Romantic] love is reserved for developed civilizations, in which morals have raised barriers against desire, and the growth of wealth has enabled some men to afford, and some women to provide, the luxuries and delicacies of romance; primitive peoples are too poor to be romantic. One rarely finds love poetry in their songs. When the missionaries translated the Bible into the language of the Algonquins they could discover no native equivalent for the word love.
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
This is not to say that romantic love is unnatural — it is the customary result of conditions both historical and material. As was stated before, many will point to the custom of a particular — often primitive — culture as though it proves humans are “meant” to be this way.
Polygamy is not “natural”, it‘s just another custom. One has to believe in our 19th-century conception of humans as these libidinal creatures — thinly shackled by the veil of civility — to find polygamy to be “more in line” with “real human existence”. One also has to be conditioned by an intellectual atmosphere heavily influenced by Rousseau and Romanticism to look at primitive societies and see in them not another culture but “real humans”. It is easy for us to forget just how tinted with an opinionated cultural upbringing our conceptions are. Scientific rationality does not lend us an objective perspective. We only ever see our culture reflected back at us.
Blinded by our historical perspective, we conclude that their happiness comes from having fewer cultural impositions and more free time. We interpret their happiness as the result of being able to enjoy what we value. Never does it occur to us that they owe their happiness to religion, alienation, tradition, and an overwhelming regiment of arbitrary norms. Most cultures are enamored with their alienating rituals, superstitions, norms, and practices; they have no regard for whether these are brutal, oppressive, or irrational. We are odd for denouncing such things.
The reality is that men are not limited but actualized by culture; alienation under culture is the necessary precondition for the fruition of being that brings men to the culmination of their design. Men are not disposed for bestial savagery but rather a sort of superstitious civility. Culture is not an accident but the optimal condition for the realization of mankind.
[…] a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions of happiness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.
— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
Titles, roles, myths, religion, art, rituals, ceremonies, patriotism, and the cultural universe they are part of allow humans opportunities for meaning that are simply unavailable to the limited palette of secular prosperity. Though we find such irrational customs and beliefs charming (as we sigh out, “ignorance is bliss”), we believe they should be left to voluntary choice — never to be imposed from the top down. But how dull customs become when they are left to individual predilection — when they lack the vitality which only universal adherence can provide.
But existence must prevail over essence, and so — one by one — we rid the world of meaning. Thus, man is left in a pre-definitional state, awaiting fruition, alienated and alone in a colorless world. This, we call freedom.
All our unhappiness and alienation come from the attempt to be an individual above everything else, whereas consolation comes from when one relaxes into a sense of something greater than oneself; that is, one’s species life and also the whole of history and eternity which that represents.
— Roger Scruton, Of Beauty and ConsolationFrom his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence.
The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual’s life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain […]
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Protestantism & The Destination of History
This process of cultural destruction is a custom we acquired during the Protestant Reformation. Luther freed the soul from ecclesiastical authority, making it the locus of salvation and being. Man was no longer an obedient unit of a larger being but being itself. Generations of thinkers followed in the steps of this radical departure and completed the premises laid out by Luther. With the Rationalists (Descartes, Berkeley, Leibniz), the Empiricists (Bacon, Locke, Hume), the Idealists, the Phenomenologists, etc., the mind became not only the seat of knowledge but the seat of existence as a whole. Salvation, knowledge, morality, and politics had to be reinvented according to the rules of this new Protestant epistemology where the self is sovereign. Rationality and sense experience — those verificatory capacities internal to all humans— replaced authority as the measure of all things. With Luther, we observe the birth of what G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) called “the hegemony of self-cognizant thought”.
One often hears it said that Protestantism introduced a new era, radically different from any the world had ever seen before; the era of ‘private judgment’ as they call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every man became his own Pope […]
[…] the enormous French Revolution itself was the third act, whereby all sovereignties earthly and spiritual were, as might seem, abolished or made sure of abolition. Protestantism is the grand root from which our whole subsequent European History branches out.
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes
Once the individual was singled out and made the measure of things, the cogito was made the orbital center of ethics as well. It was now experience that charted the scope of both knowledge and ethics. With the old ethical values that sought their merit in a transcendent order now compromised, the cogito looked into the ready-made structures of experience for ways of individualizing morality; pleasure, freedom, pain, and bondage became the axiomatic ingredients of morality. No longer would our ethical system be concerned with nationality, taboos, and other superstitions invisible to perception. In Descartes’ cogito and in Bentham’s utilitarianism, we find an epistemological shift. Epistemology and Morality — which had once been the domain of authority — had to be recast through the available means of the Protestant self: cogito for knowledge and pleasure/pain for morality.
If pleasure and liberation are intrinsic projects of the cogito, then where does that project lead us? toward a maximization of freedom and sensual welfare — of course! Hidden in the cogito is a utopian project.
[…] we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by Nature.
— René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
This directly follows from that Cartesian relocation. When the cogito is made the master of our values, it initiates an inquisition against every externality. Liberation from ecclesiastical, political, and even natural oppression is mandated by the cogito and comprises its historical project. Progress is embedded in the self, and in taking over the throne, the expansionary drive we inherited from the Nordics and Hellenes is sublated into a Faustian will.
World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed no image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent […]
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1
It is now common knowledge in our public discourse that progress is a fairly recent ethical construct — a Western one, even. However, rarely do we discuss the difference in moral attitudes between historically mobile and immobile cultures. Given that mobile cultures (which we here define as “progress-oriented cultures”) have a single representative — the West — tracing the roots of this distinction should be fairly straightforward.
For one, the Western notion of progress appears around the Reformation — which lends support to our hypothesis of its Cartesian origins. Previously, power and nature were reified into acceptability by beauty and mythology. Life, death, pain, war, disease, evil, suffering, and the ubiquity of misery that is irredeemable to us were accepted. No attempt was made to liberate men from misery. Innovations were not thought of as contributions to an ever-growing body of defense against nature; technology lacked the Gnostic telos of today, where we are trying to transcend material existence.
Humans throughout have been quite happy to live in their superstitions without a trace of material progress taking place in the successive labor of generations, but as soon as the immediate suffering of man is put at the forefront of ethics, material progress becomes necessary.
From the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2
Protestantism puts man at odds with the challenges he once beautified. Demystification is an essential preliminary step in the development of a materially prosperous society of individuals. As long as beauty legitimizes the horrors of life, they cannot be overcome.
From this, it is a direct line to capitalism: a system of individual production with the goal of increasing material prosperity. Simultaneously, we have a direct line to Marx, who saw religion as an opiate, distracting people into accepting their misery rather than taking arms and fighting for their own material welfare (standing up for their cogito).
The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself.
— Karl Marx, 1844 ManuscriptsThe abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of RightWhile the poor solaced life with heaven, the rich sought heaven on earth.
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 4: The Age of FaithAll joy and all happiness derive from the ability to transcend Nature […] Glorification of the natural is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Though it may seem contradictory to associate Marx and capitalism as having a common goal, one can hardly argue that both seek secularism, materialism, empiricism, scientism, progress, and individual liberation. When progress stagnated in the hands of the opportunistic bourgeois, Marx asserted the materialistic ethos of progress as an opposition to capitalism, when he basically slammed capitalism like a jammed printer. His criticisms of capitalism cannot be reduced to this interpretation, but one could hardly disagree that Marx saw capitalism as a stage of progress.
Marx theorized that society emerges from men coming together to increase their material comforts through mutual contributions of labor. In the logic of that premise, society is by design following a path of material and social development that strives toward a sort of utopia — an optimal configuration of civilization. Society goes through various stages as it moves toward this destination, and at the end of this Hegelian process lies communism.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. The entire movement of history, as simply communism’s actual act of genesis […]
— Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts
Marx reified the Protestant ethos of his era in his philosophy; he saw all the transcendent illusions that beautified suffering and nature as chains to be negated and cast off through the evolution of reason in history. They may have been necessary to get humanity to a certain stage of development, but they must eventually be negated for us to move on to the next stage. The goal of progress, in the end, is to eradicate all chains — natural and cultural — such that the cogito of all men can be set free once and for all.
[…] the casting-off of all natural limitations.
From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter […]
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology[…] the insistent emphasis upon freedom from earth’s heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to the art of the Faustian.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1[…] the ego […] experiences each existential condition as a restraint that has to be overcome.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization[…] the subject attempts to preserve its individuality by negating the world around it.
— Robert Stern, Hegel and the Phenomenology of SpiritThe revolutionary project of a classless society […] is the program of a total realization, within the context of time, of communism which suppresses “all that exists independently of individuals.”
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Capitalism is merely a stagnant stage in the history of progress; it must be negated. In Eros and Civilization (1955), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) unites Freud and Marx in order to explain the nature of the cursed system.
We begin in a state of nature where oppression and suffering are abundant. Society forms to organize methods of self-emancipation from this state. However, the organization of such methods requires a level of subjection and alienation. By increasing alienation, we — through piecemeal efforts — develop a kind of prosperity that will eventually free us from all tensions — natural and artificial. Capitalistic tension — in other words — contains its own eventual contradiction. Civilization is an instrument of liberation.
Life in nature is oppressive, life under capitalism is even more oppressive, but life after capitalism is not oppressive at all. Progress is a transitional period of tension before the attainment of a world of everlasting bliss. Capitalism is explained as a stage in a historical trajectory where tension, alienation, and domination are increased to later secure a level of civilizational development in which every human will be able to live freely. Max Weber’s (1864–1920) Protestant Ethic is capitalism’s reality principle — the temporary increase of alienation that seeks to secure higher pleasure.
[…] the transformation takes place in the service of the pleasure-principle; the binding is an act of preparation, which introduces and secures its sovereignty.
— Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure PrincipleLabour in the service of a rational organization for the provision of humanity with material goods has without doubt always appeared to representatives of the capitalistic spirit as one of the most important purposes of their life-work […] It might thus seem that the development of the spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism […]
— Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismCivilization produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its own insufficiency, its own blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and transforming power of Reason.
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man[…] the world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation.
[…] the possibility of a non-repressive civilization is predicated not upon the arrest, but upon the liberation, of progress […]
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
But what does it mean exactly to liberate man from alienation altogether? When is progress “done”? When will necessity be replaced by dear liberty? And when would we be satisfied? When every war has ended? When every social issue has been resolved? When every disease has been cured? When labor has been eliminated? Will we finally be relieved then? Or will we still complain about some currently inconceivable evil plaguing the new world?
[…] the struggle for existence then proceeds on new grounds and with new objectives: it turns into the concerted struggle against any constraint on the free play of human faculties, against toil, disease, and death.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
If the increases in prosperity we have already attained have not made us any happier than any other people in human history, what is the point of progress? Are we simply doomed to beg science to produce a dysfunctional salvation forever? a prosperity that renews its insufficiency with every generation until the end of time?
Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent
What is the goal here? What is at the end of progress? Assuming we do not destroy ourselves in the process of attaining this end, what would utopia look like if progress got its way? a garden or a pleasure machine?
This is where we can use Marcuse’s own language to fully uncover what the answer is. Marcuse defines progress as the historical rendition of Freud’s Reality Principle, the drive moving us away from the pleasure principle — the mother — and toward society, alienation, work, and external devotions.
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse discusses Erich Fromm’s (1900–1980) reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex, which he defines as the wish to return to the womb and to be protected from nature altogether. Conversely, the Reality Principle is the paternal logic of acceptance, discipline, work, and repression; it is the principle of civilization.
[…] the essence of the incest wish is not “sexual craving” but the desire to remain protected, secure — a child. “the foetus lives with and from the mother, and the act of birth is only one step in the direction of freedom and independence.” True — but the freedom and independence to be gained are (if at all) afflicted with want, resignation, and pain; and the act of birth is the first and most terrifying step in the direction away from satisfaction and security. […] the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile desire for the archetype of freedom: freedom from want.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Discussing Fromm’s idea)
It is clear: progress is the historical attempt to restore the womb through civilizational means. The goal is to sterilize the world of both nature and culture until we have recreated the prototype of bliss — until we can watch Infinite Jest and drift away, returning to the beforelife. All of this for this.
How did we come to this?
The Protestant Reformation was a unique event in the history of cultures — perhaps only in its scale and endurance — for relocating the locus of ethics in the individual. We were duped — so the story goes — by a class of elites who kept us ignorant and obedient while they enjoyed riches and power. The revolution sought the radical opposition of everything that reminded us of ecclesiastical domination: centralized power, dogma, authority, and those illusions that called for subordination and self-alienation.
We have been so traumatized by the church that we still imagine — like paranoids — the sinister traces of ecclesiastical-like authoritarianism in everything. Governmental conspiracies, bourgeois mystifications, and anti-authoritarian works like George Orwell’s 1984 capture the imagination of a culture still injured by the feeling of betrayal. We see churches where there are none, and all culture is now seen as the deceptive mask of power. Betrayal made us fear the very thing we need for self-realization: culture.
This we now regard with doubt, derision, and disgust; culture is arbitrary, alienating, and artificial to us. Whereas humans once accepted reality, we want to overcome it; we put ourselves at odds with life itself. All humans are born equipped with a psychic algorithm that handles being betrayed by an authority figure or structure. Our reaction to this betrayal was reified. This reified cultural nihilism we call “freedom”.
To summarize, resistance to culture comes from our Protestant trauma. Out of the Reformation, both knowledge and ethics are hurled into orbit around the cogito. What follows is a march for material progress, seeking to cast off every cultural and natural chain to liberate the cogito in a world without want: a womb. Progress is a psychic virus that makes its host wish for death at the other extremity of life. Either through war or progress, we look for the end of life.
[…] the “trauma of birth” releases the first expressions of the death instinct — the impulse to return to the Nirvana of the womb […]
[…] the death instinct operates under the Nirvana principle: it tends toward that state of “constant gratification” where no tension is felt — a state without want.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and CivilizationAnd it is figured, as the destined end-state of all Faustian “Nature,” in Entropy.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1[…] the organism is resolved to die only in its own way […]
— Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Anti-Capitalism, Degrowth, and Utopia
If progress is a dead-end, then what is the alternative?
Modern history is full of stories of people rallying together against the horrors of progress to preach about primitive simplicity. On the Internet, the unfortunate mascot for this view is Ted Kaczynski (1942–2023), better known as the Unabomber. Though his manifesto has been dismissed as eccentric and simple, the views espoused in it are essentially representative of how a lot of people think; namely, the idea that modern society alienates us from the natural way of life we have evolved to pursue.
But Kaczynski — aside from being a terrorist — is not representative of the greater theoretical discourse surrounding anti-capitalism and degrowth. While it is the opinion of many well-educated and intelligent people that capitalist society and its alienating impositions can only be overcome by returning to a more natural way of life, this side of the discourse sees the primitive world of Kaczynski as being equally oppressive to capitalism.
Here, we must distinguish between (1) Primitive Degrowth, (2) Conservative Degrowth, and (3) Progressive Degrowth. People such as Kaczynski want to recover a more natural way of life because they are of the belief — through a commitment to Freud and Darwin — that primitive savagery is what man is meant for, evolutionarily speaking. Conservatives want to recover a more natural way of life because they believe in customs, taboos, institutions, and religion. Progressives on the other hand find countless emancipatory possibilities in a more natural way of life; they do not regard it as a return to the past but as a radical strategy to transcend the defects of capitalism.
This last model of degrowth has a large theoretical presence in academia. Let us look at two contemporary essays on the subject.
Hannah Manshel, in her essay “Never Allowed for Property: Harriet Jacobs and Layli Long Soldier before the Law” (2022), argues for solidarity between black and indigenous scholars by positing the use of a common theoretical framework. Citing the feminist theologian, Catherine Keller (b. 1953), Manshel suggests we ought to understand the world that preceded the Christian Genesis (tehom) as a gestating world of potential, liberty, and existence — not yet delimited by the ejaculatory inauguration of the logos spermatikos. The pre-Colombian American territories — for example — were not waiting to be shoved into a definitional regiment by some rational masters. The people who lived there were free to evolve, grow, change, merge, dissipate, and roam according to their existential will.
[…] the world was not created from nothing but rather from a dense and meaningful chaos […]
Jacobs uses what we might call a tehomic spirituality to imagine an alternative to a world in which the law transforms the earth into property […]
— Hannah Manshel, Never Allowed for Property
Jared Sexton, in his essay “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign” (2019), takes a different approach but ends up at a similar destination. Sexton does not believe that both indigenous and black scholars should use a common theoretical framework, and would say that Manshel’s goal of pursuing emancipation from colonial capitalist rule through a return to indigeneity is insufficient. Decolonization (expulsing colonial rule) is necessary, settler decolonization (extirpating the very possibility of colonial rule) is essential, but “abolition” is the most important. Instead of seeking indigeneity — which reserves the possibility of unsovereignty within a given area — we should seek landlessness.
Abolition, the political dream of Black Studies, its unconscious thinking, consists in the affirmation of the unsovereign slave — the affectable, the derelict, the monstrous, the wretched […] If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land — landlessness.
— Jared Sexton, The Vel of Slavery
While these two essays are opposed in a meaningful way, they both speak of a similar kind of pre-definitional utopia. Admittedly, their argument is specifically tailored to the particular grievances and oppression endured by indigenous and black communities, but it remains that they are both advocating for a radical and emancipatory kind of degrowth where the living spaces of humans are stripped of law and brought back to a state of gestating existential pre-genesis. In different forms, our utopian ambition for the womb recurs.
But more importantly, what they are saying must not be confused with the naïve degrowth presented by Kaczynski, which leaves open the possibilities for colonialism, imperial conquest, and slavery to return. Thus, what both essays are proposing is a kind of controlled and “Protestantly” intentional degrowth that does not forget but allows the realization of our moral spirit. Rather than a step backward, this material regression must be the vehicle of moral progress.
One must wonder what moral progress we can expect to accomplish by suddenly uncoordinating our civilizational system. What happens to our international chain of production? What room is there for moral progress in the severe and intentional reduction in material prosperity, especially for a culture that regards access to shelter, food, and healthcare? Would we not just be injuring our abilities to provide for such things?
This is a straightforward enough point, and many people have already made it. In Marx’s Ecology (2000), John Bellamy Foster (b. 1953) suggests that we return to Marx to gather better insights on the topic. He explains how many of us are prisoners of the “humans vs. nature” dichotomy, which understands humans as an unnatural plague on the face of the Earth. Marx, however, was a materialist; he saw the material co-existence of humans and nature as the species being of humans. As we said earlier, Marx believed that humans form societies in order to materially benefit from each other’s labor. Rather than a wholesale accusation of mankind, some will restrict their denunciation of humanity to Western civilization following the empiricist movement.
Within contemporary Green thought a strong tendency has developed to attribute the entire course of ecological degradation to the emergence of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, represented above all by the contributions of Francis Bacon. Bacon is depicted as the principal proponent of the “domination of nature” […]
— John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology
Many regard the industrial relationship with nature which was born out of empiricism as the root of the problem. While cultures of the past lived in harmony with nature, this change in perspective led us to think of nature as something we can abuse for our own profit and comfort; it put us at odds with nature and laid down the ground for our inevitable destruction.
But Foster says we must stop thinking that production and prosperity put us at odds with nature. Humans have always produced; the issue is not the domination of nature but rather that capitalist production necessarily desires more than what nature can afford. Instead of vainly utopianizing about a moral return to hunter-gatherer days, we should strive to reconcile our production with nature’s metabolic capacity.
Marx employed the concept of a “rift” in the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth to capture the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence — what he called “the everlasting nature-imposed condition[s] of human existence.”
[…] there is no necessary fundamental contradiction between the mere idea of the “mastery of nature” and the concept of sustainability […]
— John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology
But can such sustainability actually be accomplished? Since our demand for material prosperity is insatiable, even if we divided the total population by a factor of ten, we would eventually reach a similar level of production to what we have now. Progress does not contain an off-switch; it will not suddenly go, “You know what? I think that’s enough.” As long as we see moral worth in providing people with education, food, shelter, healthcare, services, jobs, and standards of living, production will keep increasing to expand the quantity and quality of these provisions.
A return to primitive times is unfathomable to a population ridden with Protestant morals. We must remember that notions of material progress were unthinkable before us. The Muslims in their golden age did not strive for progress, nor did the Romans, the Indians, the Chinese, etc. Technology was invented, but it was never produced as a stepping stone to liberating us from natural existence. It is only following the Protestant Reformation and the appearance of the moral cogito that technology appears with the goal of emancipating man. The hubris of the empirical revolution did not get us here; our revolutionary demands for progress and material welfare did. Whether capitalism is used for progress or greed, it will only result in more ecological exploitation and more alienation as we approach the womb. Progress is the problem, and anti-capitalism is another tool of progress.
Stopping progress in its track is a fantasy; it fails to take into account the root cause of progress, namely the ethical scheme of our cogito. So long as prosperity, secularism, and individualism are valued, we will follow the track of progress. Regression is incompatible with the values of progress.
But, to those who see radical possibilities in pre-capitalism, what are you imagining exactly? Surely, you do not mean the caste system and child marriages of ancient/conservative India; the Shogunate or hara-kiri of ancient Japan; the Confucian patriarchy of China; the pharaohs of ancient Egypt; the despots of Mesopotamia; the theocracies of the Middle East; the empires of South America; the kingdoms and warlords of Africa; or the monarchies of Europe (no — surely not those!)? A return to such societies would please the advocates of traditional degrowth while offending the other two. The progressives decry such cultures as worse than capitalism.
No, usually, what people have in mind when discussing pre-capitalist societies are the noble tribes that were displaced during European colonialism. To suggest that such a world would liberate us from the alienating conventions of capitalist society is an intellectual travesty.
In general the individual has fewer “rights” in natural society than under civilization. Everywhere man is born in chains: the chains of heredity, of environment, of custom, and of law. The primitive individual moves always within a web of regulations incredibly stringent and detailed; a thousand tabus restrict his action, a thousand terrors limit his will. The natives of New Zealand were apparently without laws, but in actual fact rigid custom ruled every aspect of their lives. Unchangeable and unquestionable conventions determined the sitting and the rising, the standing and the walking, the eating, drinking and sleeping of the natives of Bengal. The individual was hardly recognized as a separate entity in natural society; what existed was the family and the clan, the tribe and the village community
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental HeritageAs regards the primitive peoples who exist today, careful researches have shown that their instinctual life is by no means to be envied for its freedom. It is subject to restrictions of a different kind but perhaps of greater severity than those attaching to modern civilized man.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Very often, humans will project fantasies on a suitable object. This is one of these situations. Upon encountering the natives of North America, Europe was immediately fascinated. The stories, angles, and representations it developed around this new subject matter were not objective, they took the form of the West’s cultural neuroses. Our fantasies look like our values.
The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness — it is all Faustian and only Faustian. […] The motive returns with all its profundity in the Easter scene of Faust I “... A longing pure and not to be described drove me to wander over woods and fields, and in a mist of hot abundant tears I felt a world arise and live for me.”
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1
We look at the sexual freedom of a curated selection of primitive cultures and treat it as evidence of man’s intended lifestyle, which just so happens to converge with our own values — as though they are what we are underneath the weight of capitalism. We only see ourselves and we forget that culture exists. This is why we think of native Americans as “what we must recover and are meant to be underneath the oppressive artifice of capitalism” (authentic, sexual, matriarchal, natural, pluralist, without hierarchy, etc.). This is all a projection of cultural spirit; we use them as one does a meaningful dream — as an insight into our own values and aspirations.
The point is this: we think primitive communities are beacons of liberation when they are in fact beacons of tradition, superstition, and acceptance. They owe whatever bliss they enjoy to those things — the very things we want to overcome by transcending capitalism! If one wants to truly thrive in and benefit from the advantages of degrowth, one must pair their ways with material circumstances. Primitive degrowth is barbaric; progressive degrowth leads either to societal decline or — in the best case — the womb. Genuine traditional degrowth — one in which humans naturally regress to systems of beliefs that match their material circumstances regardless of whether they are offensive to the cogito — seems like the only option if we want to escape capitalism: tradition, superstition, and acceptance.
The Fear of Tradition
We do not think of freedom, prosperity, individual rights, equality, and secular rationality as the arbitrary product of our historical upbringing. Rather, we are under the pernicious impression that we came to believe these values out of historical maturity. “Who could possibly disagree with freedom, wealth, and equality for all? Certain cultures just happen to willingly engage in oppressive and irrational activities unbeknownst to them, and we happen to have discovered what is right and good. Out of the vicissitudes of Western history, we have discovered moral truth!”
We do not understand ourselves as culturally conditioned; we really think that our ethical priorities are universal. When we hear of the patriarchal domination that pervades human history and that this was rarely opposed by women, we either try to salvage our ideas by conspiratorially suggesting that those women were silenced or that they were brainwashed. There it is. We think humanity has always valued what we currently value and that we have just now started to put the universal values of mankind into practice. All human history heretofore was just a gestation process, and we have just now left the womb of history. How convenient.
But the past tells a different story. There is more to life than what our cogito consents to. Where we see irrational misery, others see ceremonial bliss. This is a fully legitimate domain of moral affairs; not a poorer version of our Western lucidity. There is more to morality than Protestant freedom. The past is not a haven of hedonistic, matriarchal, anti-capitalistic social justice. There, we will not find refuge from capitalism but only more of exactly what capitalism and progress are deployed at overcoming.
[In Confucian China, the wife] labored in servitude to her mate and his mother, until such time as the normal course of life and death liberated her from this slavery and left her ready to impose it upon the wives of her sons.
[In Vedic India,] Marriage by consent, however, was considered slightly disreputable; women thought it more honorable to be bought and paid for, and a great compliment to be stolen.
There is no record of women objecting to marriage by purchase; on the contrary, they took keen pride in the sums paid for them, and scorned the woman who gave herself in marriage without a price; — they believed that in a “love-match” the villainous male was getting too much for nothing […]
In many tribes of the Congo the initiation rite centered about circumcision; if the youth winced or cried aloud his relatives were thrashed, and his promised bride, who had watched the ceremony carefully, rejected him scornfully, on the ground that she did not want a girl for her husband […]
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
It is practically inconceivable to us that people like you and me could live in societies where such things were not only customary but ethically valued. Surely, we think to ourselves, the women in these societies were physically silenced or brainwashed.
Yet, we rarely notice how such understandings are imprisoned in the walls of our own ethos. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) still — despite dwindling numbers in recent years — is mainly endorsed and continued as a practice by women.
It is evident from the FGD data that men are not instigators in the circumcision of their daughters.
(Gongnia woman, 35–49): “Rivals [a term connoting dysfunctional co-wife relationships] see their uncircumcised colleagues as not being women […] In fact, there are times that a newly married woman cannot go to the backyard garden because there is that belief that when she crosses a calabash plant it would die or it would not bear fruits just because she is not circumcised.”
As mothers, daughters, peers, and co-wives, women are socially invested in the continuation of the FGM/C practice. A mother who influences her daughter to undergo circumcision avoids ridicule of herself and her daughter and insures that her own funeral rites will be performed correctly.
— Source
The paper goes into a great deal more nuance than what I can reasonably fit in this article, so I invite you to read the paper yourself. Hopefully, the passages suffice in giving us pause. Because we rely on a sort of narrative epistemology inherited from culture to understand reality, it is our first reflex to think that this practice is violently imposed on deliberately under-educated women by men, but this is not the case. There it is — a body of cultures that cares for taboos and rules more than it does any Cartesian, secular, and rational prosperity. Are they wrong? Are they brainwashed?
This is where cultural relativism becomes important — not as an exercise in empathy, but as an exercise in intellectual rigor and maturity. While many of us believe in “live and let live”, we have very clear limits — FGM being one. But — inevitably — we at some point encounter a custom so oppressive and vile that we cannot help but say:
What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing?
— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (TED Talk)
Child marriages, human sacrifices, patriarchal domination, superstition, slavery, FGM, and too many other customs are so harrowingly immoral to us that we find our enthusiastic chants of moral relativism faltering in the winds blown by the pages we read. Morality is relative — we say — but only to a certain extent. Most people live there, on that ambivalent dialectical junction where morality is superficially relative but essentially objective.
This is not an article on morality (this is), but we can briefly remember that morality is an instinct that is conjugated by living conditions, habits, as well as historical upbringing. Though this does not mean anything until we understand that we too are subject to that. Our customs and beliefs too are products of our historical upbringing. When we lament the oppression of women, we should know that our lamentations have a historical origin.
While Silvia Federici (b. 1942) does show in Caliban and the Witch (2004) that misogynistic violence accompanies primitive accumulation, evidence suggests that feminist-like movements only ever blossom once a certain stage of industrial development is either reached or colonially imposed. Durant shows, in the first volume of The Story of Civilization, how European colonialism in Japan, China, and India led to a feminist enlightenment.
The transit from country to city, and the replacement of the family by the individual as the legal and responsible unit of economic and political society, has undermined parental authority, and subjected the customs and morals of centuries to the hasty judgment of adolescence. […] The rapid industrialization of women has necessitated a loosening of the bonds that held them to domestic subserviency.
[…] the woman cannot be lured into the factory unless she is persuaded that home is a prison, and is entitled by law to keep her earnings for herself.
(Gandhi): “Away with ancient purdah! Come out of the kitchens quick! Fling the pots and pans rattling into the corners! Tear the cloth from your eyes, and see the new world! Let your husbands and brothers cook for themselves.”
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
There is no reason to believe that these societies would have discovered feminism on their own had the Protestant notion of material progress not been forcefully injected into their culture. Moreover, there is no reason to believe this is an insult. Again, we are under the impression that customs like the Confucian family structure or the Indian Caste system were being violently imposed on an unwilling population of secretly liberal feminists.
Other cultures that have not undergone the same historical trajectory as ours will have a different perspective on the matter. This should not be treated as a “material opportunity that allowed women to do what they always wanted to do”, but rather as another case of values adjusting to material conditions — a change of incentives that led to cultural adjustments.
Once again, we are imprisoned by the lens of our own culture; we can only understand reality as a continuation of our own narrative. The past begins looking more and more like fantasy-reflections of the present; everywhere, humans were sexually free, feminists, and matriarchal. These theories are wishful works of art — paintings reflecting the anxieties and ethos of a time posing as scientific and historical truth.
Most anthropologists hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal.
A belief that women’s rule preceded men’s rule was, according to Haviland, “held by many [19th] century intellectuals”. The hypothesis survived into the 20th century and was notably advanced in the context of feminism and especially second-wave feminism, but the hypothesis is mostly discredited today, most experts saying that it was never true.
— Wikipedia[…] prehistory could have been matriarchal, but it probably wasn’t, and nothing offered up in support of the matriarchal thesis is especially persuasive.
[…] this narrative of matriarchal utopia and patriarchal takeover was surely a myth, at least in the scholarly sense: it was a tale told repeatedly and reverently, explaining things (namely, the origin of sexism) otherwise thought to be painfully inexplicable.
— Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory[..] there have been, occasionally, women rulers among some South American tribes; that in the Pelew Islands the chief did nothing of consequence without the advice of a council of elder women; that among the Iroquois the squaws had an equal right, with the men, of speaking and voting in the tribal council; and that among the Seneca Indians women held great power, even to the selection of the chief. But these are rare and exceptional cases. All in all the position of woman in early societies was one of subjection verging upon slavery.
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
Seeing as we have inherited a line of Protestant, Cartesian, Rousseauean, Lockean, Jeffersonian, Lincolnian, Marxian, Marcusean, Feminist, etc. narratives, we should expect the world to look like those narratives to us. Culture paints the world and we are prisoners of the canvas.
But we are the odd ones out. All of this knowledge has only estranged us from the rest of mankind. Progress creates material distance, but it is the soul of progress that is chiefly responsible for this estrangement. However horrible these customs may seem to us, they co-existed alongside genuine human welfare and lives that were charged with meaning. People believed in these customs. What are the odds that one rogue Protestant branch in the history of human culture found the truth? Looking around, I doubt it.
No, rather than progress or primitivism — which both satisfy our desire for freedom and autonomy — perhaps man is designed for a different sort of life, not a life of arbitrary submission, but one of meaningful obedience to tradition, culture, beauty, order, beliefs, taboos, norms, and ancestry.
The wife addressed her husband humbly as “master,” “lord,” even as “my god”; in public she walked some distance behind him, and seldom received a word from him. She was expected to show her devotion by the most minute service, preparing the meals, eating after they had finished the food left by her husband and her sons, and embracing her husband’s feet at bedtime.”
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1: Our Oriental HeritageFirst came a squadron of Indians dressed in clothes of different colors, like a chessboard. […] Next came three squadrons in different dresses, dancing and singing. […] Among them came the figure of Atahuallpa in a very fine litter with the ends of its timbers covered in silver. Eighty lords carried him on their shoulders, all wearing a very rich blue livery.
— Jared Diamonds, Guns, Germs, and Steel
How revolting! Yet, the records of history are rife with this kind of worship. In our formative century, thinkers such as Theodore W. Adorno (1903–1969) wrote books such as The Authoritarian Personality (1950) in which worship of this kind is pathologized. They were oppressed even if they did not know it. They belonged to a pathological profile that we can only now begin to criticize, condemn, cure, and combat. What we find evil has a basis in science — truth.
The rest of the world is not Protestant. We are different. In our minds, the choice is between fascism and liberty, but this is a Protestant dichotomy. Fascism is not the same as traditional rule — it is anti-Protestant. Fascism is a waste of time — a pantomime of the past, inarticulately trying to recover a low-resolution understanding of the father. My goal is not to justify fascism or to say that any of these cultures are “correct” and should be restored, but rather to try and force us to recognize that our Protestant custom is just a single one in a sea of other customs. Though, much like ants, we too have our own defective and suicidal customs, and Protestantism is one of them. It burns culture — the reality of mankind — wherever it finds it to focus on weaving — one thread at a time — a civilizational replacement of the womb. Atomized, alienated, and atrophied, we call our goals moral and free.
Conclusion
Tradition, superstition, alienation, and an unquestioning acceptance of life are the causes of content. Those who say “If only we could be content with less” are not eager to implement the cultural scheme that allows us to be content with less. As long as we care about sovereignty, secularism, and material dignity, we will never accept the injustices and horrors of reality.
Primitive communities do not owe their bliss to how much free time they have or how much sexual liberty they get to enjoy, rather their bliss comes from their traditions, rituals, ceremonies, and superstitions. It is because they do not care for progress, secularism, prosperity, and secularism that they thrive; it is because they accept life by mystifying its barbs that they seem so peaceful to us. It is precisely through the transcendent, external, and alien schemes that men thrive.
Humans do not reach fruition in the savagery of primitive life. We were meant to live in cultural communities, with art, politics, gossip, religion, philosophy, customs, ceremonies, and rituals. The only viable kind of degrowth is the one we denounce as reactionary: traditional degrowth.
We do not hate capitalism; we hate what capitalism has not achieved yet. The self-effacing worship of irrational traditions is far more subversive to capitalism than rational, freedom-seeking, progress-oriented activism, which unknowingly fuels the very system it confusedly believes it opposes.
And so we colonized countries like China and India, freeing them from the awful customs of their own culture. No longer would women be subjected to abject patriarchal domination, and no longer would people be enslaved to the superstitious justifications of material misery. After all, no one wants to be poor, right? no one wants to be ruled by ecclesiastical or monarchical power, right? We gave them Democracy and freed them from despotism. We taught them how to be free, and in the process extirpated them from the prison of traditional life.
[Chinese Students studying in Western countries] came at an early and impressionable age, before they had matured to the point of understanding the depth and values of their own national culture. They drank in with gratitude and admiration the novel education given in the science, methods, history and ideas of the West […] Year by year thousands of such deracinated youths returned to China, fretted against the slow tempo and material backwardness of their country, and sowed in every city the seeds of inquiry and revolt.
In the schools of England and America the Hindus learned to be free. […] the Westernized Hindus returned to their country disillusioned and sad; a thousand gods had dropped dead from the skies. […] Utopia filled the place of Heaven
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
As tragic as that might be to read, we must remember that we agree with the regime that did this; we agree that individualism, prosperity, feminism, secularism, and freedom are necessary elements of a healthy civilization. When we behold their customs without the fictional sanitizations we impose on them to subdue our urge to colonially “rescue/rehabilitate” them, we condemn them as crimes against humanity.
Thus, we are saddened by such passages until we consider the radical transformation in the rights of women that followed the transition from “heaven” to “utopia”. What I am proposing is that we transcend past these two stages and learn to admire “heaven” as it truly is. We must recognize the validity of non-material modes of happiness. Otherwise, the fields of reality — fertile with meaning — are willingly re-interpreted as wastelands that must be tilled, burnt, and razed, leaving mankind miserable, marching in an unmythologized vale of tears forever until the womb. What a utopia.
For what utopia can we hope for so long as we retain our Cartesian values? Currently, we live under the civilizational ambition that the day will come when prosperity will finally allow us more hours for leisure than for work. We imagine life will be like Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020); the bliss of pre-capitalism recovered through the prosperity of post-capitalism. The hope is that — once we are free from the alienation of capitalism — humans will finally go back outside, tend communal gardens, attend churches, be life-long learners and artists, and return to the authentic ways of our past, which we would love to do if it weren’t for capitalism’s discouragements.
But this belief is ridiculous. The more we feed the desires of our Cartesian instinct, the more our society becomes Cartesian. We already know that increases in prosperity lead to isolation, alienation, addiction, lower birth rates, depression, etc. So long as progress is the servant of the Cartesian experience, then science, technology, and prosperity can only bring about more and more of what we blame capitalism. Alienation is the result of what we want, not what we disagree with, and it’s only going to get worse.
Because we have inherited the Renaissance belief that “the past was more authentic”, that “we are a fallen people”, and that “we are meant to exist in nature”, it is easy for us to think that — underneath the impositions of our current system — we are the same humans as tribal people, and that once we remove that weight, we will be allowed to live like we are supposed to. This is a mythology — a historical narrative. We know that humans are articulated by their cultural circumstances; no authentic customs exist.
The customs of the past are not authentic, they were the product of their material circumstances; they were the result of inconveniences. In our society of convenience, it is simply easier to attend school, work, order food, and entertain yourself from home. The more we Cartesianize our material circumstances, the more deeply we realize Cartesian culture.
The life of a people ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete manifestation of the principle which it embodies.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Thus if we truly understand our problem, we must conclude the following: the solution is not a return to the days of hunter-gatherers, nor it is to try and transcend capitalism. The solution is a rebirth of tradition; a return to a world where pain is legitimized, power is mystified, and life is beautified.
[…] the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity […] but to know, and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God’s World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good; — that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable. I say, this is yet the only true morality known.
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes
Acceptance — is there anything more despised in our culture? Is this not the attitude that progress is desperately trying to shake out of our conscience? Instead of justifying nature and misery, we believe in cleansing life from the wrath of both. But it is precisely in acceptance that life is made worth living; it is precisely through the arbitrary norms of culture that man can overcome the brutish misery of nature by elevating his existence into moral and aesthetic life; it is by weaving over reality a web of narratives and traditions that existence is dignified and made tolerable.
Could we ever accept such a world? of course not. Should we? probably.
If we want to get there, we should not look toward the traditions of the past — which existed as reflections of their material conditions and historical location — we should look for the irrationalities available to us right now and hope that they have the gravity to pull us back. Do not begin with God; begin with beauty, and let self-alienation lure you toward transcendence. Beatrice draws us on high.
At the very least, this is a poetic story that gives us an intentional role in the project of our redemption. Prosperity is not going anywhere, so a material consequence may be the only way to accomplish this return. As we wait, maybe understanding is all we can hope to achieve, and maybe this story can help us to better understand our historical predicament.
We do not need nature; we do not need the future; we need culture.
Conclusion
Let us consolidate all the points we have made throughout this article.
Foster begins Marx’s Ecology with how Marx was influenced by Epicurean (341–270 BC) materialism in his early days. Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on the materialism of Epicurus and Democritus (460–370 BC). The seeds of his epistemological break from “idealism” to materialism were sown at an early age. The ideas that would culminate in the famous sentence from the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which is inscribed on his grave, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” can be traced to his early interest in ancient materialists like Epicurus.
Epicurus was not a sensualist who preached debauchery. He believed that happiness comes not from an exaltation of pleasures but from a limitation of all pains. According to him, humans should strive for peace (ataraxia) and painlessness (aponia). Freeing your soul from prejudice and irrational fears (such as the fear of Gods and the fear of death) and taming your senses’ inordinate appetites for saturated pleasures will promote your consciousness to that most desirable state of tranquility.
When, therefore, we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind.
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus
Foster transposes this onto Marx quite easily.
[Epicurus’s] philosophy was devoted to showing how a materialist view of the nature of things provided the essential basis for a conception of human freedom.
— John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology
Epicurus is called a materialist not because he believed that the source of happiness was in bodily pleasures alone (he didn’t) but because he believed that the world was made of matter and nothing else. Since we can only know what we can experience through the senses, Epicurus believed we could not know anything about the Gods and thus should not presume anything about them. Rather than try and blindly follow religious protocols we could never understand, we should focus on our individual happiness.
We are not too far here from Marx’s idea that religion is the opiate of the people. Marx saw religion and other mystifications as distractions from reality. Instead of trying to improve their lots, workers can be hooked to mystical narratives instead of seeing real and tangible change in the only real reality: empirical reality.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. […] if Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem, it was at least the true setting of it.
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Marx’s materialism was not a break in the ethical tradition of Protestantism — which seeks material emancipation and progress — but a continuation of the Protestant project — a dialectical step forward. Our culture has thrown away myth, spirituality, religion, taboos, and illusions as distracting to the only real source of human happiness: material pleasure.
Most intellectuals disagree with this take — including thinkers who I cite to corroborate my reasoning — by claiming that the history of capitalism is a history of oppression, alienation, subjugation, domination, exploitation, and destruction. At a superficial glance, the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism have produced a great body of works extolling the value of the individual, but the result has been an overwhelming increase in the means of destruction and alienation. If progress is for man, why is it against man?
[…] in the “Age of Reason,” the rising bourgeoisie attempted to remold the subordinate classes in conformity with the needs of the developing capitalist economy. It was in the attempt to form a new type of individual that the bourgeoisie engaged in that battle against the body that has become its historic mark. According to Max Weber, the reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acquisition “the ultimate purpose of life,” instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction of our needs; thus, it requires that we forfeit all spontaneous enjoyment of life.
— Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
Throughout the book, Federici makes the argument that the philosophers of the Enlightenment demystified the body and turned the soul into a supervising authority that is supposed to keep the disgusting body in check. But we can find this line of thinking in Hinduism, Plato, the early church fathers, the Gnostics, etc. Philosophical systems that thought of the body as lesser than the soul did not lead to capitalism. Some specificity of European history must have led to rationality, liberation, and materialism.
If we follow Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, and we understand capitalism as a civilizational rendition of the reality principle, then it is easy to see how domination would exist alongside the project of progress. Discipline, hard work, and rationality are the customs of a cultural spirit that wants to accomplish a recovery of the womb. The goal requires its opposite to be realized; Domination is required to attain true freedom.
And in the dialectical course of human events, we observe a philosophical project being realized; rationality, secularism, liberty, and materialism all appear with a single vision in mind: the emancipation of man from the yoke of culture and nature. Knowledge and manpower are all of a sudden coordinated into a large-scale scheme of production meant to produce prosperity insofar as a mode of production following Protestant principles can be incentivized to accomplish it. The entire scheme is — despite its clear shortcomings — oriented toward the material gratification of the individual.
That is the only civilizational scheme acceptable to an ethically materialist population. If the only pleasure that is known to us is either the concrete and empirically perceivable pleasure of the body or a lack of tension, then we are bound to want to maximize the social conditions that provide both. We like to imagine that our society could be modeled differently, but any system that has to cater to this kind of moral system will require an international chain of production aimed at providing pleasure and release. As long as this is our moral scheme, progress will continue moving us forward, until we manufacture our new Eden: the pleasure machine. Progress is an attempt to realize the Epicurean ataraxia, a state without tension or want; a womb of constant gratification; nirvana; and death.
But there is so much more to morality than mere pleasure and release, but our Protestant trauma will not let us see them. When watching traditional cultures, we can feel the afterimage of our trauma in the moral disgust that makes us say “They are brainwashed!”. We are so afraid of trusting those non-Cartesian, transcendent customs (myths, norms, beauty, power, etc.) and end up believing that our injured paranoia is a symptom of rational wisdom. Never could we imagine that, behind the narratives of our trauma, lies a world of meaning and significance for which our brains are designed.
In the meantime, perhaps learning to acknowledge and appreciate the moral system of those other traditional cultures is a necessary step in our rehabilitation. Maybe we can only hope for a change in material condition to come in and sweep us out of our Cartesian daze, but a story will have to do for now.
Music was once reserved for the concert hall; then, it moved to the radio, the home, the room; and finally, it was played directly in our ears — to the master itself. The freedom we desire is a cage. Cartesianism only leads to more isolation; it makes everything retract toward the self. Our ethics too retracts toward the self. But the self is a terrible guide; the self is meant to be tamed, cultivated, culturally alienated, ordered, and subjected to the scheme of an objective spirit. Cultural alienation of this self is necessary for the realization of man. But this alienating limitation we call a prison.
[…] happy — if that word means anything. Clearly, it means something different from “whatever I wanna do — I wanna take this cup and throw it right now, I have every right to, I should!” We see it with children, that’s not happiness — that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire. It seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such, though.
— David Foster Wallace[the philosophy of being and nothingness] grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness […] At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one […] existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; […] a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.
— Jacques Lacan, The Mirror StageThe law is not the enemy of freedom, but the condition for the possibility of freedom. It’s the law, in fact, that makes us free. […] Freedom means something like this: not self-determination, but rather the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.
— Bishop Robert Emmet Barron[…] the infinite avarice of subjectivity, eager to comprehend and consume everything within the simple and pure I.
Ordinary man believes that he is free, when he is allowed to act capriciously, but precisely in caprice is it inherent that he is not free.
[…] a longing may arise for an objective order in which man gladly degrades himself to servitude and total subjection, if only to escape the torment of vacuity and negation. Many Protestants have recently gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, and they have done so because they found their inner life worthless […]
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of RightPleasure originates in alienation.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (quoting Freud)
