BEING HUMAN

A PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL AND

POLITICAL ANARCHISM

by Dionysia Anarqxista
CONTENTS

PART A: Some Philosophy, Biology, Language and History

ONE From Blade Runner to Transgender [2]

TWO Knowledge, Truth and All That Stuff: What it is and what it is not [33]

THREE Biology as a Discourse About the Diversity of Life [65]

FOUR Human’s Lib: An Exploration of Ideas in Song [109]

FIVE The Original Path is Wordless: Putting Language in Its Place [131]

SIX Domination, Hierarchy and Classification in Racism and Eugenics [151]

PART B: Anarchisms and Anarchists

SEVEN An Anarchist Turn Towards Non-Domination [195]

EIGHT The Social Anarchism of Jesus of Nazareth [249]

NINE Music, Metaphor and Anarchy: John Cage [279]

TEN Anarchy, Language, Fiction, Magic: Alan Moore [298]

ELEVEN Emma Goldman’s Personal and Political Freedom [318]

TWELVE Once Upon An Anarchism [355]

2
ONE: From Blade Runner to Transgender

First Part: ROY BATTY, ANARCHY AND AUTHENTICITY

The pivotal, climactic scene of the 1982 film, Blade Runner, a science
fiction classic some also argue is the greatest film ever made, involves the
character, Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, and the character, Rick
Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. It is set during a dark, rainy night
inhabited only by Deckard’s fear and Batty’s desire for revenge. Earlier in
the film, Deckard, the titular Blade Runner, a form of freelance hitman
employed by the cops, is assigned Roy Batty and his three friends, Zhora,
Leon and Pris, as targets to be hunted to their deaths. By the time we get
to that climactic scene, only Roy and Deckard remain. All four of Roy Batty
and his friends are replicants, near perfect replicas of human beings
created and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation whose head is Eldon
Tyrell. But they have become unstable, dangerous, things with minds of
their own instead of doing as they are told, for replicants are, in fact,
really only near human slaves. Some defy their human masters and then
they must be destroyed. In fact, so dangerous can replicants become - in
some cases they are both more intelligent and physically stronger than
human beings - that they have been hardwired with a fixed four year
lifespan in the Nexus 6 iteration of replicants we see in the 1982 film.

These replicants have been banned from Earth in the setup to Blade
Runner but Roy, Leon, Zhora and Pris have come to Earth anyway,
contrary to the law, in search of the most valuable thing in the galaxy -
more life! The latter three will die, mostly at Deckard’s hand, in pursuit of
this but that still leaves Roy, the most intelligent and most dangerous of
them all. So smart is Roy that he even manages to trick his way into the
home of his creator and “father” - Eldon Tyrell - who lives in a huge
pyramid-like building accessible only by a singular elevator. Roy uses one
of Tyrell’s friends and employees, J.F. Sebastian, to get access via the
elevator and, in a scene full of the meaning appropriate to when a

3
prodigal son meets his father, his creator and his God, he crushes the
skull of all three in his manufactured hands after Tyrell tells him that there
is indeed no way to give him more life. What’s done is done, how things
are is how things are. You are, dear Roy, what you are.

Yet Deckard is still on the trail of Roy Batty and, having followed the trail
to J.F. Sebastian’s place, he is confronted by Pris - whom he kills. Roy
returns to the dark, atmospheric building populated by the synthetic
creatures Sebastian keeps around as friends for his amusement to find
Pris’ dead and bloodied body - which he briefly and genuinely mourns
over, wiping some of her blood onto his face. Deckard takes a shot at Roy
but fails to kill him and then Roy grabs Deckard’s gun hand through a
wall, dislocating two of his fingers as punishment for the deaths of the
females Zhora and Pris. Thereafter, he gives Deckard a few seconds to
start running before he begins hunting him down, howling animal cries as
he does and even though he begins to feel the physical effects of the fact
that his own, hardwired life is nearly up. Deckard, with his fairly useless
right hand, tries to get away, climbing to the roof of the building, but Roy
is never very far away and constantly taunts him. Suddenly, Roy appears
on the roof as well just as Deckard is about to make good his escape and,
in his desperation, Deckard runs and tries to jump to an adjacent rooftop
in the opposite direction. He fails to make it and is left clinging
precariously to a steel girder that juts out from the roof. Roy follows him
and makes the jump easily, he walks to Deckard and, standing over him,
says, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a
slave.”

Deckard, tired, injured and soaking wet through in the constant rain,
cannot hang on to the girder any longer. As a final act of defiance,
knowing he is going to fall to his death, he spits in the direction of Roy
Batty before relinquishing his grip on the slippery metal… but then a
twist! Roy reaches forward and grabs Deckard by the left wrist just in time
and lifts him up onto the rooftop where he drops him down again. For a

4
moment there is more tension as Deckard backs up to a part of the
building jutting upwards from the roof - does Roy plan to kill Deckard with
his bare hands as he had killed Tyrell? It seems not for Roy, bare-chested,
bloodied and holding a dove in his left hand, sits down, cross-legged, on
the rainy rooftop and gives one of the most memorable and meaningful
speeches in film history as the helpless, injured Deckard looks on:

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the
Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.”

And with that, Roy Batty bows his head in the rain and dies, the hard limit
of his life reached. The dove, released from his grasp, flies away, a
metaphor for Roy’s free spirit.

It is Rutger Hauer himself who has remarked, before he sadly passed

away in 2019, ironically also the year in which Blade Runner and so Roy
Batty’s own death is set, that this speech Roy gives, something which
Hauer himself heavily modified without director, Ridley Scott’s,
knowledge, is not really connected to the rest of the film. Most of the film
plays out as a film noir, “good guy versus bad guys” kind of film. But this
disconnected speech, the only real insight we get into the psyche of the
replicants in the film besides the necessary plot point that they want to
live longer than they have been created to, fundamentally changes all
that. Is it not now the case that the “good guy” in Blade Runner is, in fact,
Roy Batty? Is it not now the case that, in the light of this speech, Deckard
is an inauthentic man trapped in a system in which he must kill beings on
someone else’s say so, an act of bad faith in the fiction of a self that has
been assigned him by others that he cannot escape from? Is not the whole
human system of control that creates, determines and destroys here
exposed as venal, cruel and ingenuine, a matter of naked domination and
coercion? Is not the dying Roy’s choice to save Deckard’s life, a thing he

5
did not need to do and which would have had no consequences for
anybody since Deckard was going to die by not being able to hold on any
longer anyway, the most human act in the film? As Rutger Hauer himself
has said, Roy wanted to “make his mark on existence... the replicant in
the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of.” He
does this by an extreme example of authenticity and self-actualisation, an
act of anarchy in which he rebels from every expectation of his being and
himself.

Roy Batty is a replicant, a being who was created by another species to be

its slave. They determined everything about what he would be even upto
and including the point at which he would die. But Roy and his three
friends are not willing to accept that. They are beings in their own right [a
theme the later sequel Blade Runner 2049 will take up] and, as such, they
have their own ideas about that, their own conscience and their own will.
It was the human beings who gave them these things. But now the
question that is raised by Roy in his authentic action in voluntarily saving
Deckard is “What makes you most human?” and the answer comes back
“acts of self-actualising authenticity” - becoming who you are [something
which can only, finally, be arbitrated by you yourself]. Yet, in this
salvatory moment, Roy Batty defines not only himself but, in the context
of the film, he also defines the humanity that hunts him and his friends
down as well - as his action to save Deckard is clearly the most
consequentially human thing that takes place in the film. He shows
Deckard what a human being is and makes the claim that, rather than a
created machine, a human biology project, a mere tool and a slave,
replicants are people too.

This is ironic when read against the film’s script in which Eldon Tyrell, a
mere commercialist, a businessman, an example of the inauthentic
humans who buy and sell and use without ever knowing who they are,
often by means of the power to dominate, says that the motto of the
Tyrell Corporation is “More human than human”, a slogan to sell his

6
product, which is all Roy Batty and his friends are to him. But not so to
Roy! In his voluntary and needless actions Roy proves that, without ever
realising it or even caring, Tyrell was actually right. It would have been
nothing for Roy to let Deckard drop to his death. It makes perfect sense in
the film and no one could even blame him. Deckard was certainly trying to
kill him, after all. But Roy spares his life just because he can and, in doing
so, he defines with crystal clarity just who and what he really is: a being
who can define himself against his creator, in spite of the narrative the
species that hunts him down has given him, and over and against all
expectations about him. Roy creates his own authenticity and his own
identity and says that this, in end, is what real humanity actually is: the
act of actualising who you yourself are as a person in the anarchy of a
world we all have the power to define.

This realisation cannot be overestimated in its importance. In it, Roy Batty

breaks all systems of human control and manifests a pure form of
anarchy, an anarchy which comes from within - which, I suggest, is where
true anarchy only ever really comes from. Beside him, Deckard, in director
Ridley Scott’s mind also a replicant although he doesn’t know it, is playing
the role that others have assigned him. He is the pawn, the tool, the
inauthentic being who plays along with narrative boundaries others set for
his life. But Roy, especially Roy, does not. In this climactic moment most
of all he will not be defined by a role others have assigned him, a life
others have dictated to him and even encoded in his biological make up.
Instead, he will fulfill - and more than fulfill - Tyrell’s empty, commercial
slogan and give it the meaning that Tyrell never even realised it had and
he will do that by defining what real humanity actually is - rising above
the control, the human narratives about identity and place and assigned
meaning, to recreate himself anew as a being who knows who he is and
who decides for himself what that will be - expectations and fictions of
others and even biology be damned! Roy Batty here defines humanity
because he does that thing which, as far as we know, is something only
human beings can do - be creators themselves and say “I am this because

7
I want to be this and I will be no other!”

The ending to Roy’s speech then gains a poignancy that can only be
gained from recognising this realisation. “All those moments will be lost in
time, like tears in rain.” Roy Batty is not a thing, a creation, one of the
crowd of inauthentic, generic beings many human beings regularly exist
as. He is not just going through the motions of a role life has assigned him
without self-awareness or his own consciousness. He is an individual, a
unique being, one of a kind. He is Roy Batty. No one else is. No one else
ever can or will be. This uniqueness, this precious, singular, uniqueness, is
ephemeral, fleeting, temporary, contingent. It is the plaintive reflection of
one who realises how important each person, whoever they are, is - but
who also knows, in that same moment, that all bleeds back into one
without identity, without character, without personality. Like tears in rain:
indistinguishable, unidentifiable. The moment of self-actualisation is also
the moment of the realisation of one’s own annihilation. The moment of
your creation is the moment of the recognition of your own inevitable
destruction. In that moment in which you are most a self-defined
something, you recognise that you are forever to be an indistinct part of
the great Nothing. Yet this is not to be avoided, resisted, unimagined. It is
to be accepted as who you are, part of that act of authenticity. And that’s
why its highly appropriate that in this moment of such thorough-going
definition and identification the very next action is Roy’s death. The time
of such self-actualisation and authenticity is the “time to die”. For death is
the eternity and life is only a brief flicker in time, an aberration. Who you
are doesn’t matter at all. But if you should rise to the heights to which Roy
did, overcome all the fiction of others who will try to assign you a role for
you to play out, and become who you are, then the only place to go
thereafter is death. And to embrace it willingly as the person you have
made yourself to be exactly as Roy Batty did.

That is authenticity. That is self-actualisation. That’s the spirit!

8
[Interlude] The subject for this short essay came to me as I was flitting
between being asleep and being awake this morning - as such thoughts
often do for me. But as I was writing it it should be unsurprising to find
that I found its subject matter very pertinent to our present moment in a
world of global pandemics of disease, racism and gender prejudice. For
very many people “who they are” is the defining question of their lives,
one which brings them heartache, trouble and real distress. In some
cases, people are even killed for who they see themselves to be or who
they are. So i do not regard this essay as dealing with a trivial matter, nor
is it merely an exercise in popular philosophy. For people of colour, or for
those who deal daily with issues of gender or sexuality, “who they are”
are consequential matters in ways that those who never have to give
these things a second thought probably can barely understand. I stand
with these people and I stand against those who want to argue for the
supremacy of one kind of person over another. In many cases, these are
the constricting human narratives of racial or gender supremacy that self-
actualised human beings have to rise above. I believe in everybody’s
ability to define for themselves who they are and for their right to do so -
and for that to be respected by all others. So it is not merely an
unfortunate observation that many anonymous people who have no clue
who they are, and have never even considered the question, quite often
threaten and harass those for whom such questions are all too existential.
I think that being fully human, as Roy Batty shows, is about defining
yourself, consciously and deliberately, but it is also about knowing and
respecting who others are too. In every case. And it is also about
recognising the anarchy of the void in which we all do that and how
temporary, and so how precious, we all really are and could agree
ourselves to be if only we had that awareness which Roy Batty had.

Second Part: THE ARTIFICIAL AND THE REAL

Blade Runner, the 1982 science fiction film, is not a subject I have been
shy of writing about before. But in 2017 there came a second film, a

9
sequel called Blade Runner 2049, which expands and develops the
narrative of the first film, and which must be taken into account as well.
Now seems an appropriate time to do this, taking on board the broader
and expanded scope that the second film provides on the themes
apparent in the first film and having had some time to think about both
films together. For those unfamiliar with these films [a crime I would find
difficult to ever forgive] they concern a future Earth where “replicants”
have been invented as slaves to further human interests in offworld
colonies. They may be used as cannon fodder in interstellar confrontations
or as workers to do hazardous jobs so that a human life need not be put at
risk. They are almost indistinguishable from human beings, have emotions
and feel pain, and are highly intelligent. In the original film replicants
become unstable and so are banned from Earth and police units are set
up to track down and erase (‘retire’) any that make it there. The people on
these units are called Blade Runners. Thematically, the films have often
been regarded as being about “what it is to be human” and replicants and
humans are compared and contrasted. In 2049 this is expanded upon as
the protagonist is explicitly a replicant and he has a holographic girlfriend.
In this part of the essay what I am going to do is assume knowledge of the
Blade Runner films, and the basic ideas involved, in order that I may
discuss what, for me, are the interesting ideas arising. Readers lacking a
knowledge of Blade Runner may, then, want to familiarise themselves
with it first if they are not to get lost in, or simply miss the significance of,
the further references this essay will contain.

Both Blade Runner films feature, as a central theme, the contrast of the
artificial and real. Replicants are artificial and humans are real. But the
more I think about this [and simply as a reflective and hopefully intelligent
human being!], the less I like it. Why are replicants artificial? Because
they are made? We are also made. We were not “begotten”, as Christian
creeds try to describe Jesus Christ to avoid the humanity of birth. We were
born but being born is being made nevertheless. So perhaps replicants are
artificial because their making is a detailed and intentional one? But what

10
then about human beings where eye colour could be selected along with
athletic prowess and intellectual skills? What about the fact that each
human being is not a random selection of attributes but ones determined
by a blind process of genetic evolution? It is not exactly intention, fair
enough, but its not the exact opposite either. If what makes something
artificial is that some things are chosen over others by processes outside
of the control of the thing being created well then human and replicant
are alike there too. Then there is what humans and replicants do and how
they behave. Replicants have been expressly made on the model of
human beings so that they can do everything that human beings can do.
They’ve been given intelligence and emotions because these are seen as
advantages to their function. But is an artificial intelligence not simply
another intelligence? Is not an artificial being’s emotion just another
emotion? If an artificial being feels afraid isn’t it actually just afraid, as we
would define it?

Let’s develop this further by addressing the main character of the films,
Rick Deckard. Deckard is the Blade Runner of the first film and wrapped
up in the final act of 2049. But his status [is he a replicant or a human
himself?] has always been a subject of fevered discussion since the initial
release of Blade Runner in 1982 and it has never gotten a definitive
answer. Not least, this is because the co-writer of both films, Hampton
Fancher, has always wished for it to be a matter of ambiguity. Not
knowing which he is adds to the pathos of the story. The director of Blade
Runner and producer of 2049, Ridley Scott, has always maintained, on the
other hand, that Deckard was a replicant and claims to have shown this
explicitly in the first film [in the origami unicorn scene at the end]. The
trouble is, you don’t have to take on board Scott’s interpretation of what
he thinks he did and its not difficult to regard Deckard as human [which
Harrison Ford himself wants to] - which may or may not make a difference
to how you read the films themselves. As I now think about this, though, I
think I’ve come to a new thought [for me at least]. This is that it doesn’t
matter at all what he is. There’s no difference. As I have already

11
mentioned, one of the perennial questions attached to discussions of the
Blade Runner films is “what it means to be human”. But I think that’s not
a radical enough subject. The films’ discussions of replicants and humans,
the real and the artificial, are about much more than this. They are about
whether it makes a difference if you are “human” or not [something which
involves constructing the human in so doing]. They might even be seen as
filmic documents which suggest that humanity is no longer unique or
special anymore or that the artificial/real distinction is empty and so
collapses because it is based on nothing more than a desire for the human
that was a fixed game solely arbitrated by human experience in the first
place. We, humans, are prepped to regard the human as real and that
which we make as the artificial. But the Blade Runner films problematise
such a distinction and threaten to overturn such a system of valuation. In
effect, I think they say that the artificial can be artificial but also real.
Artificial and real, therefore, are no longer antonyms. Their relationship
has just been made much more complex, overlapping and
interdependent.

An example of this is the lead character of 2049, Blade Runner K, played

by Ryan Gosling. K is a replicant and this is made explicit from the
beginning to avoid all the “is he, isn’t he” questioning that revolves
around Deckard in the first film. 2049 itself can be seen as a film that is
about the evolution of K from his obedient, slavish nature at the start of
the film, as a Blade Runner just carrying out the orders of his human
police chief boss [played by Robin Wright], to the one who [spoiler alert]
sacrifices his life to save Deckard at the end of the film. Replicants are
things throughout both films that should do as they are told or who, as
artificial creations nominally subservient to the power of their human
overlords, should carry out their programmed function or act according to
type. But in both films their denouement is found in replicants who make
their own choices, who act contrary to command or programming or
expectation. In the original film, the last surviving replicant, Roy Batty,
chooses not to kill Deckard, even when he is completely at his mercy, and

12
then dies in what can only be seen as a way barely distinguishable from
performance poetry in which the performance is himself. Meanwhile, in
2049, K, despatched by a replicant resistance movement to kill Deckard
who has been captured in order to divulge the secrets of replicant
reproduction, chooses instead to save him and bring him to the daughter
he has never seen. In both cases the question becomes how the artificial
can act in ways indistinguishable from the real, how the distinction
artificial/real can stand or make any sense to maintain anymore.

I think the key to understanding this has been apparent all along and it
was uttered in the first film by the creator of the replicants, Eldon Tyrell:
‘More human than human is our motto.’ For what is an ‘artificial’ being
that can self-replicate? What is an ‘artificial’ being that can feel, think,
choose, act contrary to expectation, desire and dream? One thing I
certainly think it is, is real. Even if that means being real and artificial
[from a human point of view] at the same time. The reason Eldon Tyrell is
right about his manufactured creations is that, not being human,
replicants can just choose to act in ways that humans, at their best, would
idealise anyway. These are ways such as the self-sacrifice of K or the
unnecessary mercy of Roy Batty. This is also apparent when a character
like Luv from 2049, in most respects a ruthless machine protecting the
interests of her creator, Niander Wallace, is seen with tears on her face a
couple of times.

Here distinctions of real and artificial are simply no longer appropriate. It

no longer matters what any of these characters are made of, what their
creation process was or how each might classify the other. All are living,
sensing, feeling, thinking beings. Each have a dignity appropriate to these
common facts. In this context, the slavery that one species holds the
other in seems most inappropriate, the possessive and dismissive
ownership that Wallace exhibits before the replicants he now controls and
manufactures, abusive. A good example of this is the murder of the newly
replicated replacement Rachael which Wallace uses to try to get Deckard

13
to talk. Replicants are distinguished as other and regarded as things
rather than people (the ultimate anthropocentric designation) just so they
can be shot in the head when they are no longer of any use. This
designation of ‘other’ [here ‘artificial’] is a regular human on human
strategy integral to all forms of slavery. [In a similar way the ‘artificial’ K
has an even more artificial girlfriend, Joi, programmed to be as he requires
and disposable at the push of a button.] Yet, in truth and as a rebuke to
such an attitude, replicants are “more human than human,’ capable of
choosing to be that which is contrary to their purpose or program or
function. They can out-human the humans.

One of the narratives hinted at but not openly pursued in the two Blade
Runner films is that humanity itself has been devastated. It is on the edge
of extinction and, more so in 2049 at least, the environment of the home
planet has been severely compromised. [Hence the “offworld colonies”
that even the first film referenced.] But, following my line of interpretation
here, we now see that replicants also seem poised to take over from the
human beings that created them, a kind of parable of the human
domestication of the gods before human beings did away with them in
their turn. The created replaces the creator in what seems a central idea
of 2049. This then becomes a technological parable which is at once
artificial and real, both about technology subsuming us but, somehow,
humanity surviving through the technology. It becomes a hybrid future of
electric dreams. In the context of both films the replicants are commercial
products, made by the Tyrell Corporation in the first film and the Wallace
Corporation in the second. But at the end of the second film the possible
future awaits that humanity is to be superceded by a species it created,
both a wonder and a terror if you happen to be human - and one in which
humanity itself has been changed. Wallace, perhaps, wants it so that he
can commercially exploit it. But how long could he do that for? How long
can the creator domesticate, instrumentalise and use the created, or the
real maintain an artificial distinction of ‘artificial’? The realisation starts to
creep across our minds as we watch these films [as human beings] that

14
here are parables we are telling ourselves about our own lack of
permanence, our own lack of omniscience, our own inability to stop our
own destruction and our own change. Its as if it is inevitable we will create
the means of our own obsolescence by constantly changing into
something else. We can’t hold back the tide. And so...

Its too bad we won’t live. But, then again, who does?

[Interlude] This part of the essay has been about ‘the artificial’ and ‘the
real’ and both about how that distinction is itself artificial and not real but
also about how we, the real, surround ourselves with the artificial that it
seems inevitable will supercede us. You need to get used to the fact that
there is no template and no being is set in stone.

Third Part: HOW CAN IT NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS?

There is a scene near the beginning of the first Blade Runner film where
our imagined hero, Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, has gone to the
headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation to meet its head, Eldon Tyrell. He is
met there by a stunningly beautiful assistant called Rachael [played by
Sean Young]. Deckard is there to perform tests on the employees to
discover if any might be replicants in hiding, synthetic beings created by
the Tyrell Corporation, some of which have rebelled and become
dangerous to humans. Specifically, he needs to know if the tests he has
available to him will work on the new Nexus 6 type replicants that have
escaped. Tyrell wants to see Deckard perform his tests on a test subject
before he allows the tests to continue. Deckard asks for such a test
subject and Tyrell suggests Rachael. The test being completed, Tyrell asks
Rachael to step outside for a moment. Deckard suggests to Tyrell that
Rachael is herself a replicant and Tyrell confirms this and that she is not
aware of it. “How can it not know what it is?” replies a bemused Deckard.

This question, in the wider context of the film and the history of its

15
reception, is, of course, ironic. Blade Runner was not a massively popular
film at the time of its cinematic release in 1982 and was thought to have
underperformed. But, over the years, it has become a classic, often placed
in the top three science fiction films ever made. That popularity and focus
on it as a serious film of the genre has, in turn, produced an engaged fan
community. One issue regarding the film, one I’ve already had reason to
mention, has always been the status of Deckard himself. Could it be that
Deckard was himself a replicant? Interestingly, as already mentioned
again, those involved with the production of the film have differing views.

Back in 2002 the director, Ridley Scott, confirmed that, for him, Deckard
was indeed a replicant and that he had made the film in such a way as
this was made explicit. However, screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who
wrote the basic plot of the film, does not agree with this. For him the
question of Deckard’s status must forever stay mysterious and in
question. It should be forever “an eternal question” that “doesn’t have an
answer”. Interestingly, for Harrison Ford Deckard was, and always should
be, a human. Ford has stated that this was his main area of contention
with Ridley Scott when making the film. Ford believed that the viewing
audience needed at least one human on the screen “to build an emotional
relationship with”. Finally, in Philip K. Dick’s original story, on which Blade
Runner is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard is a
human. At this point I playfully need to ask, “How can they not agree what
he is?”

Of course, in the context of the film, Deckard’s question now takes on a

new level of meaning. Deckard is asking straightforwardly about the
status of Rachael while, perhaps, having no idea himself what he is. The
irony should not be lost on us. But let us take the question and apply it
more widely. Indeed, let’s turn it around and put it again: how can he
know what he is? This question is very relevant and it applies to us too.
How can we know what we are? We see a world around us with numerous
forms of life upon it and, we would assume, most if not all of them have

16
no idea what they are. And so it comes to be the case that actually
knowing what you are would be very unusual if not unique. “How can it
not know what it is?” starts to look like a very naive question [even
though Deckard takes it for granted that Rachael should know and
assumes that he does of himself]. But if you could know you would be the
exception not the rule, at least of the life on this planet.

I was enjoying a walk yesterday evening and, as usual, it set my mind to

thinking going through the process of the walk. My mind settled on the
subject of Fibromyalgia, a medical condition often characterised by
chronic widespread pain and a heightened and painful response to
pressure. Symptoms other than pain may occur, however, from
unexplained sweats, headaches and tingling to muscle spasms, sleep
disturbance and fatigue. [There are a host of other things besides.] The
cause of this condition is unknown but Fibromyalgia is frequently
associated with psychiatric conditions such as depression and anxiety and
among its causes are believed to be psychological and neurobiological
factors. One simple thesis is that in vulnerable individuals psychological
stress or illness can cause abnormalities in inflammatory and stress
pathways which regulate mood and pain. This leads to the widespread
symptoms then evidenced. Essentially, certain neurons in the brain are
set “too high” and trigger physical responses. Or, to put it another way
more suitable to my point here, the brain is the cause of the issues it then
registers as a problem.

The problem here is that the brain does not know that it was some part of
itself that caused the issue in the first place. It is just an unexplained
physical symptom being registered as far as it is concerned. If the brain
was aware and conscious surely it would know that some part of it was
the problem? But the brain is not conscious: “I” am. It was at this point in
my walk that I stopped and laughed to myself at the absurdity of this. “I”
am conscious. Not only did I laugh at the notion of consciousness and
what it might be but I also laughed at this notion of the “I”. What do I

17
mean when I say “I”? What is this “I”? And that was when the question
Deckard asks of Eldon Tyrell popped into my head: how can it not know
what it is?

This question is very on point. If I was to say to you right now that you
were merely a puppet, some character in a divinely created show for the
amusement of some evil god, you couldn’t prove me wrong. Because you
may be. If I was to say that you are a character in some future computer
game a thousand years from now you couldn’t prove me wrong either.
Because, again, you could be - how you feel about it and what you think
you know notwithstanding - because we know that there are limits to our
knowledge and we know that it is easy to fool a human being. We have
neither the knowledge nor the capacity for the knowledge to feel even
remotely sure that we know what we are or what “I” might refer to. We
have merely comforting notions which help us to get by, something far
from the level of insight required to start being sure. Perhaps this is why
the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote a whole series of notes
[written up in the book On Certainty] discussing the idea of “being sure”
as a kind of language game and what was involved in playing it.

“How can it not know what it is?” now seems to me almost to be a very
dumb question. “How can it know what it is?” now seems much more
relevant and important. For how can we know? Of course Rachael didn’t
know what she was. That is to be normal. We, in the normal course of our
lives, gain a sense of self and our place in the world and this is enough for
us. We never strive for ultimate answers [because, like Deckard, if we are
lucky, we already think we know] and, to be frank, we do not have the
resources for it anyway. Who we think we are is always enough and
anything else is beyond our pay grade. Deckard, then, is an “everyman”
in Blade Runner, one who finds security in what he knows he knows yet
really doesn’t know. It enables him to get through the day and perform his
function. It enables him to function. He is a reminder that this “I” is always
both a presence and an absence, both there and yet not. He is a reminder

18
that who we are is always a “feels to be” and never yet an “is”.
Subjectivity abounds.

How can it not know what it is? How, indeed, could it know?

Fourth Part: IDENTITY QUESTIONS

The Blade Runner film franchise is currently stuck at two films, 1982’s
original film, Blade Runner, based on the book Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, and the 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049.
Appropriately enough, should we watch both films back to back, we see
that it is a game of two halves and two different, although interconnected,
stories. The first film, Blade Runner, basically takes a good guys versus
bad guys approach to the story. The bad guys here are primarily the
replicants which are at the heart of both films. Replicants are synthetic
human beings, created and designed by Eldon Tyrell, who essentially
serve as slaves in offworld colonies. As they have been created to be
stronger and, in some cases, at least as intelligent as human beings, the
inherent dangers in creating them led to a failsafe approach to their
creation: they were given a maximum 4 year lifespan. Not surprisingly,
learning of their impending doom, some decided that they did not want to
die and so set about hunting down those whom they thought might be
able to remedy this - even though replicants are banned from returning to
Earth. These replicants, Roy Batty, Leon, Pris and Zhora, are pitted against
the titular Blade Runner, Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, a man of
ambiguous origins but on the side of humans and keeping the replicants
in check. As Deckard himself says, “Replicants are like any other machine.
They’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my
problem.”

In 2049, however, the situation is somewhat different. We are told that

subsequent to the events of the original film replicants were completely
banned due to numerous rebellions. A complete blackout followed but

19
human beings were saved by the technology of Niander Wallace, a man
who invented synthetic food which enabled human beings to survive.
Later on, he took over Tyrell’s work on replicants, creating more and
improving on the design, particularly in reference to their instinct to want
to rebel and survive on their own terms. But a further problem has been
created in that it seems Tyrell created a replicant, a central character of
the first film called Rachael, who was capable of becoming pregnant.
Rachael, who in Blade Runner turned to Deckard to escape being “retired”
as a renegade replicant, had a child with him which a replicant
underground sees as a demonstration that replicants are an autonomous
species in their own right who should not be enslaved to human desires
and control. A tame replicant, K, played by Ryan Gosling, who serves as a
modern day Blade Runner, becomes embroiled in this plot when he
investigates a runaway replicant, Sapper Morton, someone who witnessed
the birth of the first replicant child. 2049 thus takes the stance of being
more about the justice of the replicant cause rather than good “humans”
hunting down “bad” replicants and takes a more ambiguous stance to the
two sides rather than the first film’s approach which is more from a
“humans are the good guys” point of view.

This is a very basic setup up of both films but there is far more going on
here, in both cases, than such bares bones descriptions provide. We could
begin with the essential issue behind the original Blade Runner: that
intelligent, self-aware beings do not want to die. And why, being artificially
designed to die after just 4 years, should we expect them to go quietly?
Regardless of the violent actions of the replicants in the plot of the first
film, it must certainly be seen that they have something of a just cause.
They are “slaves” who “live in fear” in the words of the lead antagonist,
Roy Batty. Yet, in this same character’s words, they “want more life” and,
as Roy’s famous monologue before his death makes clear, he is a
representative of a form of life with entirely its own integrity and dignity, a
locus of unique experience just as worthy of existence as any other. This
is only heightened and made even more explicit in the sequel where the

20
fact that replicants can reproduce by themselves makes their status as a
form of being in its own right all the more central to the storyline. In the
case of both films the status of replicants as subjugated beings is
emphasised, whether in the merely commercial interests of their original
creator, Eldon Tyrell, or in the more aggressively acquisitive character of
Niander Wallace, a man who more openly embraces the idea of replicants
as property and as slaves. In this respect, Wallace is much like Nathan
Bateman [played by Oscar Isaac] from the film Ex Machina in that he
regards what he makes as his property to do with exactly as he pleases
and without any hint of a thought for the mentality or feelings of that
which he has created. They are things, machines, and not sentient beings
to him, a man who regards the world as a matter of his control over it.

In this respect, 2049 takes a somewhat hackneyed approach to its

storyline in that it relies on an archetype power-crazed corporate figure to
act as its supreme bad guy. That said, Wallace is not actually in the film
that much and, instead, his proxy, a female replicant by the name of Luv,
stands in for him to do all the killing and the rest of the dirty work. This is
in strong contrast to Tyrell from the original film who was seemingly
motivated by simple commerce and so by providing a good and reliable
product for which he would get paid. But Tyrell is not really given any
underhand motives [assuming you do not find simple capitalism
underhand, something you’re entirely entitled to do]. Instead, it is simply
assumed that commercial activities can be benevolent, if not always
guaranteed to work out for the common good. This, in fact, may show up
a human failing generally since Tyrell is pictured as a genius, the smartest
of us, yet this genius, who can create entirely new forms of sentient life,
does not have the sense to have a camera in the elevator that acts as the
entrance to his penthouse at the top of the giant headquarters of his
company where he lives. This oversight eventually leads to his death
when Roy Batty uses one of his friends and associates to gain entry to the
building and meet his maker, in order to establish if he can be given the
“more life” he wants. But Tyrell informs him that it is impossible since he

21
was created to last 4 years at the most basic of levels. Any attempts to
mess with that subsequently only creates viruses which lead to inevitable
death anyway. Roy, accepting this inevitability, kisses his “father” before
crushing his skull, the created killing the creator as a warning to those
who would create life for their own purposes, purposes which that so
created may come not to have in common. The warning for human beings
is clear: that they have the ability to create the uncontrollable, that that
which has will and the ability to think for itself may choose contrary to the
wishes of others.

The Blade Runner films heighten the stakes in regard to the worth of
intelligent beings of a kind different to humans by being ambiguous about
the status of numerous characters within them. When we are introduced
to Rachael we do not know if she is human or not. She is subsequently
shown to be a replicant who did not know that she was, having been
implanted with memories not hers to make her life seem genuine to her.
In 2049 a major plot strand is that K, the hero of the film, comes to
believe that he is the child of Rachael and Deckard, having previously
simply been a replicant and in receipt of much discrimination and abuse
as the sequel shows. He is insulted to his face and there is graffiti on his
door, for example. K, too, starts to wonder about what he thinks he knows
about himself since he realises, in a way Rachael did not before Deckard
confronted her with the possibility, that all he knows about himself, his
data of a past as it were, could have been falsely implanted to create a
life, and so an identity, that never was. And then, in 2049, we must
consider the holographic character, Joi. Joi is K’s chosen companion - he
prefers a hologram to a physical companion of either the human or
replicant kind - and is one of many manufactured and marketed by the
Wallace Corporation. She is visually attractive and programmed to please
her owner. Joi is like a holographic yet humanoid form of a dog always
pleased to see it’s master. The question for viewers, however, is does any
of this matter? If characters are one thing and not another does the worth
or value of their lives change? In many ways this question is of primary

22
importance before or regardless of if we know the characters’ imagined
“actual” designations - and so before we can take sides. It raises further
questions of hierarchy and the dignity of varying forms of existence. Do,
and should, beings prefer their own kind?

This question of the value and worth of the various characters’ lives is
played out most controversially with the only major character who exists
explicitly as the same character throughout both films - Deckard himself.
This ambiguity about who and what he is even extends to the real world,
as we have already seen, in that the original director of Blade Runner, Sir
Ridley Scott, and the co-writer of both screenplays, Hampton Fancher,
disagree about whether Deckard is, in fact, a replicant himself or not, a
plotline which would preempt that of 2049 where K, a replicant, hunts
down his fellow replicants. Scott insists he made Blade Runner in such a
way that it becomes clear that Deckard is himself a replicant, ironic when
the script has him express incredulity that Rachael does not know what
she is, a puzzle he unravels for her. In that case, that Deckard is then
completely in the dark about his own origins and makeup is highly
significant and points up all the identity questions both films want to pose
and which they largely hang on the phenomenon of memory. I will come
to that shortly, but here we must go on to notice that 2049 wishes to
remain ambiguous about Deckard himself, something which screenwriter,
Hampton Fancher, was quite insistent must be the case. He himself is
open to the notion that Deckard might be a replicant but he is not open to
making it explicit either way, something which keeps all the questions
about the value and worth of relative forms of life in play but without
making us take sides because we, the audience, don’t actually know what
side Deckard himself, the hero of the first film, is on. Not then being able
to think with such a bias built in, we have to wrestle with the question of
the worth of replicants themselves when we realise our hero might be one
and neither he nor us might know it. It also makes us wonder, how can
any of us know what we are? We are all, after all, only relying on what we
think we remember, what we think we have experienced, our own sense

23
of a self. It could, as the Blade Runner world reminds us repeatedly, all be
false, all be an illusion.

So, as already stated above, the Blade Runner films hang a lot of identity
baggage on the phenomenon of memory. Indeed, it might not be going
too far to suggest that the films almost equate the two as if identity were
the same as having a memory of a past which is who you are. Identity, in
this respect, is then conceived as a narrative of a past self which
inevitably leads up to you and is equatable with you. In other words, if you
can remember, or think you can remember, your 6 year old self, as
Rachael does, or you remember hiding a wooden toy as a young boy, as K
does, then this informs who you are. The problem is that in both these
cases these memories did not belong to those who carried them at all.
They were not the authentic or actual memories of Rachael or K. In the
first case they were memories implanted from Tyrell’s niece and in the
second they were memories from Rachael’s actual child, a daughter,
which had been implanted in K since she had grown up to be a creator of
memories sub-contracted to work for Niander Wallace. So if memory were
identity forming what kind of identity could we then say had been formed
in Rachael and K based on such falsehood? Who would they be then?
What does this say about the relationship between memory and identity,
something which the films use symbiotically to produce stability in the
replicants, believing that a stable self is based on having surety about
who you are? We actually get a glimpse of this with Rachael herself when
there is a scene in Blade Runner showing attraction between her and
Deckard at Deckard’s place but she tries to leave and shies away
because, as she explains, she now cannot trust her own feelings because
she no longer trusts that they are her own feelings since she has been
constructed at such a fundamental level with false memories. What we
see here is that the self you construct for yourself is only as good as your
ability to believe it. Take that ability away and what is there left?

This memory and identity issue is not just one for science fiction films

24
either for human research into memory has revealed a great deal of
fallibility in it if we regard the proper operation and function of memory as
“accurate recall”. There are, for example, the problems of the false
memory and the displaced memory. Yet this idea of “accurate recall” is
also a problematic notion in itself for if something happens at which we
are present - giving us a scenario which we can potentially remember -
what counts as having “accurately recalled” the scenario? Does memory,
so configured, not imagine that there is one narrative which is
perspicuous to a fundamental level and able to entirely and fully describe
“what happened” as if this were a philosophical possibility, thus
completely sidestepping the philosophical claims of hermeneutics which
insist that any and all interpretation of events takes place from a point of
view? In short, can beings ever really say “what happened” as opposed to
“what happened as far as I am concerned”?

This has led some human historians in our 21st century to talk of
“remembered history” as opposed to simple history proper for all such
history is that which people, with all their filters switched to on, choose to
or are able to remember. Everyone has preferences, attitudes, points of
view, and so cannot, will not, come to the same conclusions. So not only is
simple ability to remember - memory’s fallibility - a problem, memory’s
hermeneutic nature is also an issue too. Should it turn out that memory is
not primarily about recall but about construction or interpretation BASED
ON WHO i THINK MYSELF TO BE instead then this has consequences for
those who would build their identity upon it. Those such as Tyrell and
Wallace would then only be doing in an external way what all of those of
us who can remember do at the individual level anyway - trying to build
stable characters from things about which we have opinions we call
memories. It is a genuine possibility that the identity anyone constructs
from memories is “false” because the function and use of memory was
never simply to remember things accurately in the first place. We, all of
us, are who we construct ourselves to be and, in the final analysis, that is
the far more important function of memory, one taking place in every act

25
of remembrance.

This is just one way in which the Blade Runner films manage to talk about
the issues of existence, and of existence as identities, whilst using an
imaginary scenario to do so. Of course, at the time such films were made
humans had not yet created new, technological forms of life and so they
were only really talking about themselves in making such films which ask
such questions. In this respect, we must consider that Blade Runner and
Blade Runner 2049 are really films about “the other” with a bit of added
antagonism and fisticuffs to keep it exciting. Yet it is the other which
dominates thematically, especially in the latter film, and the major subject
emerging from the films is the one which has haunted humanity since
these beings emerged from the ooze and began to form into self-
identifying groups which considered others their competitors. It then
becomes a matter of how you will treat this other, what dignity you accord
them and whether you are going to embrace or reject them, and how this
then reflects back on you.

In this respect the films are ambiguous in their answers. Roy Batty dies in
Blade Runner having served as a perfectly menacing bad guy throughout
the screenplay. But in his dying moment he is just one more being which
lived, experienced and is now fading away into the chemical elements
which formed him “like tears in rain”. Was there any real reason to hunt
him save for the egocentric notion of human beings good, replicants bad?
And was this anything like a good enough reason: base prejudice for one
form of life over another? Yet in 2049 we see that there is a replicant
underground which has been formed based on a replicant sense of
identity which has developed. Yet this also seems fixated on that same
self-identity humans have historically manifested thus itself replicating the
dangerous notion that beings “prefer their own kind”. The racial and
gender-based analogues to such a scenario in human history are very,
very easy to imagine in a human world of identity politics. Yet the idea
that is passed over here is that identity “as something” is not the be all

26
and end all many cannot seem to ever get past [and perhaps never will
get past]. It is, we may consider, possible to rewire ourselves internally
and socially not to prefer this - to make existence itself the important and
most common factor of all - and wouldn’t this be the better course of
action? It is this identity question - and which identity markers count -
which is wholly bound up in the Blade Runner films’ exploration of the
other in creating two species so very similar in appearance and action yet
who must live side by side with one another. Are these films then saying
that it is human to want to control and dominate, that manipulation and
coercion are built into us - and so into that which we then create as well?
Is Blade Runner saying that existence is a constant battle of kind against
kind, beings being those things which must inevitably self-identify and
prefer those more like them over those less like them? If so, this is an
ultimately depressing, if often demonstrably accurate, vision.

There is one further matter we must consider here in appraisal of the

world of Blade Runner and that is the matter of emotion - for replicants
were not supposed to have any - “like humans in every way except their
emotions,” as is said in the film. Yet Roy Batty talks about “living in fear”.
Leon keeps a collection of photos to which he demonstrates emotional
attachment. Zhora, being confronted by Deckard, shows enough
emotional self-awareness to run for her life, something which, in turn,
indicates it feels like something to her. Pris attempts to ambush Deckard
for similar reasons besides having a seemingly romantic relationship with
Roy. And then there is Rachael, who becomes emotionally disturbed to
learn that she is not human and engages in an emotional attachment to
Deckard which ultimately includes reproductive sex and a relationship of
attachment. All this does not sound very unemotional no matter what the
intention of the original manufacturers. And as to the inventor, Eldon
Tyrell, he claims his motto is “more human than human” - but what could
be more human, more basic to being human, than to be emotional, to
have feelings, to attach to and invest in some things and not others? One
does not become more human than human by attempting to remove

27
emotion for that is simply to divest human beings of what makes them
human at all. We regard human beings who have a reduced capacity to
feel as incomplete or defective rather than as them having a superpower.

As such, it might be arguable that somewhere in the mix of ideas that

make up Blade Runner the notion that feelings are a negative, a
hindrance, might somehow be lurking. Why create replicants without
human emotions in the first place? Is this the old dream of robot workers
whose feelings you don’t have to care about come once more to haunt us?
And yet isn’t it the more psychopathic or sociopathic characters - such as
Wallace and Luv - who show that lack of feeling, particularly feeling for
others, is the failing? Feelings are not shown to be a weakness in the
Blade Runner films and, indeed, the express point of both films might be
to show that making compassionate choices - or ones which lead to
attachment and commitment - are good things in themselves, if things
with consequences as all choices must have. But it is also not clear that
beings with such self-awareness as humans and their replicant
counterparts have could not help developing feelings anyway. This is not a
matter of intellectual choice but is more fundamental than that - pre-
intellectual and not guided by intellect either. Attachments and feelings
are formed by human beings before they are even intellectually able, yet
alone mature. Additionally, people don’t intellectually choose to have
feelings because it is the outcome of a universal logic: they just feel. In
this it does not matter that said feeling can be intellectually interrogated
or questioned because this is then a post-emotional reflexive activity, part
of the whole that makes such a being up. This suggests, in turn, that
neither a purely emotional nor entirely unemotional being is best suited
for survival under our conditions since evolutionary processes have
dictated that we be both indivisibly in order to survive.

That such human-like necessity of feeling has developed even in the post-
Tyrell replicants manufactured by Niander Wallace is evident in that K, a
Nexus 8 in comparison to those replicants of the original Blade Runner

28
which were Nexus 6 models, is that K seems to need his female
holographic companion, Joi. In the course of the film he even comes to
want to simulate sexual intercourse with her by means of the use of
another replicant and some technological trickery which fools K’s senses
into thinking it is Joi he is interacting with. This basic human need for
companionship, then, for the sharing of mutual tactile activity, is
something which even the otherwise focused and business-like K needs
when he shuts himself away from the world which discriminates against
his kind. The suggestion is that in being biological, replicants, like us and
other animals, seem to need to develop feelings for things, for things that
can feel back. This is, then, a deep comment on being biological at all.
And, in the end, that is what the Blade Runner films are about, what it is
to be human and the consequences and possibilities, good and bad, of
biological existence.

Fifth and Final Part: GETTING TO THE POINT

The preceding parts of this essay are things I wrote in regard to the Blade
Runner films over the course of 3 or 4 years - and which I have brought
together here to serve the purposes of introducing this particular book. In
that time there were some points I kept coming back to and there were
others that were somewhat newer that would crop up and intrigue me
afresh from time to time. In the context of this book that I am writing now,
however, they take on a new meaning yet again. That context, and the
real reason I am writing this book at all, is the context of trans people and
trans lives. Now I must at this point immediately point out that I am not
trans myself - but that statement only begins a conversation on my
identity rather than being the end of it. To explain this it requires the
telling of a short narrative.

Throughout my life I have never been a particularly political person - until

the last few years that is. I was never interested in “issues” or “rights” of
“affinity groups”. I just lived my largely isolated, largely quiet, life and

29
minded my own business. I, of course, have my own traumas I could tell
about but that’s not my way. If I have to suffer I will do it in silence and
this is my choice. This is why I have retreated to my own, largely
untouched, corner of the world in which I hide and from which I send
occasional books out as reminders I’m still here. But I also look out at that
world [largely open-mouthed, agog with disbelief and sometimes disgust]
and see what goes on in it. By means of social media I was introduced to
the lived experience of thousands of people I would never meet and, in
their own words, able to consider and think about it for myself. This
introduced me, amongst other things, to trans people and trans lives. In
listening to trans people, but never once being addressed by or spoken to
by any of them [so, no, I have not been brainwashed or turned or any
similar phrase], I came to address the question of human identity as a
question itself. In many respects this functioned in an ethnographic sense
[in relation to philosophical work I had already carried out in other
contexts] but in which trans people themselves wrote their own
ethnographs that anybody who took any interest in them could read. I
read of their fears, their doubts, their pain and their problems with other
people who, for reasons all their own and sometimes seemingly for little
reason at all, find offence in their very existence. Trans people, in many
places, are, sadly, outsiders and they live outsider lives. That was and is
something I can identify with very keenly indeed and it is hardly irrelevant
to the replicant experience either.

My interest in this split goes in at least two different directions. First, it

raised in me the notion [not for the first time] that “givenness”, even of
something seemingly at first flush so very basic as human identity, is a
sham. Nothing has “innate qualities” or “essential attributes”. Secondly, I
began asking myself if the things we call ourselves aren’t all in fact just
words, consequential descriptions, to be sure, but only descriptions
nevertheless. Put these two things together and you begin to wonder [at
least, I did] if these things we call ourselves - male, female, gay, straight,
cis, trans - have any basis in anything other than human language [and so

30
human thinking] at all. I started to think that maybe they didn’t - and
consequently began to wonder what that might mean for us humans and,
in my ever more anarchistic thinking, what that might mean for the way
human beings act in regard to each other as they organise themselves
socially and politically. I was, and continued to become, ever more
convinced that persecuting someone, or acting against their interests
politically, simply because you did not like what they said they regarded
themselves as, was and is just about as evil and bigoted as a human
being can get. It is, in fact, exactly the same thing as the Nazis did in
relation to Jews and other victimised groups such as Roma or
homosexuals. So I found myself straying into something of a human dis-
ease in regard to how, sometimes, human beings have a preference for
“sticking to their own”, cheerfully [and terrifyingly] classifying people as
they go and calling themselves this and that for purposes which are, at
best, dubious and, at worst, horrific. What bothered me about this almost
as much as the fact of it was that this was all seemingly only built on an
apparatus of knowledge which was entirely interpretive and manufactured
by people themselves. Given that I have quite a long history of study in
things like the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Rorty,
philosophers who both saw human thinking as matters of interpretation or
description and redescription, it bothered me greatly that people seem to
operate by generating their own bigotries and then making up the
“knowledge” to fit them as and when they need to.

At the same time as this was happening, I also found myself becoming
more obviously anarchist. I think now that I had always been a kind of
anarchist. Even as a child I rebelled against being told what to do and how
to do something, figuring that if this was truly a good idea then surely I
would naturally find that out for myself. In recent years, spent reading
texts as wide ranging as the Zhuangzi, essays by Emma Goldman, Errico
Malatesta, Lucy Parsons and Voltairine de Cleyre, the gospels [of which
there are at least 5 of worth] and various texts of and about Cynics, it
became clear to me that I seem to belong somewhere on an anarchist

31
spectrum politically, philosophically and even spiritually. Yet my
anarchism is not one of protests and direct action [at least, not yet] but is
much more philosophically conceived [as befits my situation in life]. I
conceive of existence itself as an anarchy [which I don’t think of
negatively anymore than the Daoist conceives of the yin yang as a
negative symbol of their philosophy] and of anarchism as an appropriate
response to living in, through and because of that anarchy in which all
things co-exist and cohere.

What all this meant when thought about in tandem with the identity
questions which reading about trans people and trans lives brought home
to me became very relevant as I continually watched, and thought about
the issues raised by, the Blade Runner films, films which expressly
address being human, relationship to that which is different yet the same,
the way thought is organised in order to include and exclude [and in which
classification itself is an act of domination], the question of wherein
human dignity lies and the possibility of self-actualisation. In many
respects, I compared the experiences of the replicants with trans people
and trans lives. Sometimes, for example, I see trans people defamed as
“artificial” or “plastic” yet, in Blade Runner, does that make the replicants
any less valuable or important? Do they have any less dignity for all their
deliberate creation? I don’t think so - and so why should trans people even
if you think that’s what they are? The important thing, so the Blade
Runner films seem to say, is that these are autonomous beings with their
own intelligence, feeling and integrity and that, all by itself, means they
should not be treated as inferior or regarded as slaves, trash or things to
be done with as we [in our own minds more authentic people] will. So,
frankly, it matters to me how enemies of trans people see themselves
[and, indeed, human beings as a whole] and formulate their knowledge to
make trans people in some sense illegitimate. I believe that no one is
illegitimate for who they are and neither could they be. So why and how
do some others?

32
Consequently, this book will be about many things and, in its conception,
functions as some kind of understanding of human beings, from an
anarchistic point of view in an anarchistic universe, that is inclusive and
not exclusive. I intend to discuss the ways human beings think and how
they organise their presumed knowledge, the biology which is the
scientific discourse that describes the processes by which we exist, the
subject of gender and its inevitable entanglement in matters ineluctably
cultural, two other ways of viewing human beings as a whole, these being
race and class and, in Part B of this book, subsuming all this under an
anarchist influenced discussion of domination and how we, the human
beings, disabuse ourselves of the desire to dominate, something in which
the classification of bodies, iives and human beings plays a large part as
part of the organisation of our knowledge as a whole. I hope to finish the
book by offering a different way to live from the ways we have been living,
having exposed and escaped such domination, ways which have been
based on exploiting and coercing, controlling and manipulating. In short, I
hope to offer a narrative of a new, anarchist understanding of humanity
whilst, all the while, having a clear consciousness of the actuality of trans
people and trans lives, one that reading the Blade Runner films through
this interpretive lens has informed. To begin doing that, we need to ask
ourselves a few questions about how we humans arrive at things like
knowledge and truth. And so that is where I will begin.

TWO: Knowledge, Truth and All That Stuff: What it is and what it is not

A:

“If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it in the same place
and then finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing much to boast
about; but this is exactly how things are as far as seeking and finding of
‘truth’ within the territory of reason is concerned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

This is not the first time in my writing that I have begun a chapter with a

33
quote from Friedrich Nietzsche and I doubt it will be the last. In a similar
way, this isn’t the first time I’ve made mention of the essay this quotation
comes from - “On Truth and Lying in A Non-Moral Sense” - an essay of his
from 1873 that he neglected to publish in his own lifetime but which I
have always found both seminal and inescapable since I first read it
several years ago. The essay begins with a short, instructive parable and I
have no qualms at all about repeating it again here in this chapter:

“In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the
countless solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a
planet on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most
arrogant and most mendacious minute in the 'history of the world'; but a
minute was all it was. After nature had drawn just a few more breaths the
planet froze and the clever animals had to die.”

This parable illustrates a certain issue for Nietzsche, one that is certainly
of importance and consequence for all those who seek knowledge of
anything as we do in this book. Of this, Nietzsche says:

“Someone could invent a fable like this and yet they would still not have
given a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, how insubstantial and
transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within
nature; there were eternities during which it did not exist; and when it has
disappeared again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no
further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life.
Rather, the intellect is human, and only its own possessor and progenitor
regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which the
entire world revolved. But if we could communicate with a midge we
would hear that it too floats through the air with the very same pathos,
feeling that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world.
There is nothing in nature so despicable and mean that would not
immediately swell up like a balloon from just one little puff of that force of
cognition; and just as every bearer of burdens wants to be admired, so the

34
 proudest man of all, the philosopher, wants to see, on all sides, the eyes
of the universe trained, as through telescopes, on his thoughts and
deeds.”

This explanation of the meaning of Nietzsche’s parable is extremely dense

and makes startling claims about the function and perspicacity of the
human intellect. It is, we are told, “insubstantial”, “transitory”,
“purposeless” and “arbitrary”. It is regarded, in the context of eternity, as
consequenceless, as if “nothing will have happened”. It is something that
only the human being itself regards with any pathos but that pathos is the
same as any other thinking thing might regard its own intellect with. All
beings, Nietzsche seems to say, regard how they make sense of the world
as the way to make sense of the world and each being has its own sense
of self-importance. Such a faculty as cognition, in fact, is regarded as an
inevitable source of an overflowing and empty pride in those beings that
possess it - as if presuming to know had the unintended [but necessary]
consequence of producing a self-image in which you are the marker and
measure of all things in such a way as this simply must have a perhaps
universal value.

Yet this has already been denied by Nietzsche and so stands condemned
as only a further negative consequence of such cognition and such
intellect. Nietzsche, in fact, in the following paragraph of his essay,
describes such intellect as “nothing other than an aid supplied to the most
unfortunate, most delicate and most transient of beings so as to detain
them for a minute within existence”. Its purpose is thus, at best,
pragmatic and utilitarian. Human beings, understood this way, have no
right, nor even any basis, for proclaiming, for example, that A is A or B is B
or that no A’s are B’s. Yet, as each of us can clearly see, this is what, in
fact, human beings do and what they have done for many centuries now.
It is Nietzsche’s opinion that this cognition which puffs up all who possess
it “deceives” human beings about “the value of existence”. This cognition,
this intellect, this feeling of mastery over things through its understanding

35
[so we think!] is like “a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human
beings” according to Nietzsche.

This past weekend, as I write this paragraph on a grey winter Monday

morning, I was made aware, via social media, of an article posted in 2019
about “a quantum experiment [which] suggests there’s no such thing as
objective reality” - as the headline in the MIT Technology Review had it.
The subheading further informed me, a person who is hardly a natural
scientist, that “Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics
allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now
they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.” The article, which I
did my best to understand, revolves around the “Wigner’s Friend” thought
experiment first imagined by the physicist, Eugene Wigner. The
experiment involves such esoteric subjects as quantum theory and
quantum measurement, things I am barely qualified to mention let alone
to describe, and so you should not expect that I will go into them too
deeply [or even at all!] here but it is safe to say that the experiment
concerns human interaction with [quantum] reality, how the one affects
the other and if it can be possible to experience different realities in doing
so [meaning that there would be no objective one]. The article I read
suggested that an actual experiment [rather than just a thought
experiment] had been done which led to the conclusion that “realities can
be made irreconcilable so that it is impossible to agree on objective facts
about an experiment.” This, suggests the report, is “forcing physicists to
reconsider the nature of reality.”

In its background to the reporting of this experiment the report lists three
assumptions of those who hold to “the idea that observers can ultimately
reconcile their measurements of some kind of fundamental reality”. This,
it turns out,

“is based on several assumptions. The first is that universal facts actually
exist and that observers can agree on them. But there are other

36
 assumptions too. One is that observers have the freedom to make
whatever observations they want. And another is that the choices one
observer makes do not influence the choices other observers make—an
assumption that physicists call locality.”

These assumptions are interesting if not [mis]leading in their existence

and, I intend to suggest, completely to do with what Nietzsche had in
mind in his essay “On Truth and Lying in A Non-Moral Sense”. It is
probably the case, though readers can make their own minds up
[something I will always encourage my readers to do], that Nietzsche
denies all three assumptions of scientists and thought experimenters in
this report. For, to put it bluntly and simply, why would we imagine that
“universal facts” exist? How could we ever establish such things and, even
if we had the faculties [which Nietzsche has already seemingly denied],
how could we physically examine the entire universe [which would seem a
necessary corollary of the claim] in order to do so? How could we be sure
there was not some obscure corner of the vast universe [or even several!]
that didn’t conform to the “facts” of the rest and so screw up our
conclusions?

And what is this “freedom to make whatever observations they want” that
such scientific observers are supposed to have? Surely it would make
sense to suggest that there are really only two or three means of
observation for the human being, these being experience [of the senses],
imagination and logic, the latter perhaps as applied to both of the others?
How could human beings observe that of which they could not even
conceive or imagine or of which their logic was not capable? What if that
which is potentially to be observed is invisible to, and undetectable by,
our senses, our only means of mediating or understanding the universe?
Could we not be in a situation [for example] where we are competent only
to speak about 1% of the universe where the other 99% is beyond our
capacity to even detect, let alone understand? How could we know what
we do or don’t know or how much of the whole we have grasped or have

37
cognisance of? And what is it about the human being that would allow us
to claim that people don’t influence each other? Doesn’t simple human
experience suggest exactly the opposite? These three assumptions, then,
seem quite difficult to seriously maintain. What happens if even one, let
alone all three, of these assumptions is wrong? It could be that, as Cypher
says in The Matrix, “Kansas is going bye bye”.

Kansas does indeed “go bye bye” in the rest of Nietzsche’s short essay as
he gives the ideas of “objective reality”, an objective truth and any
pretence to knowledge or understanding both barrels in a short but
exceedingly highly charged diatribe. Put in plain language, Nietzsche here
says quite straightforwardly that human beings lack the faculties they
have arrogantly claimed to possess. They build castles in the air and
intend to suggest they have foundations because, and only because, they
think their will has the power to make it so. Nietzsche engages in what, a
hundred years later, would have been called deconstructive activity on
such thought and leaves it bare and naked on the ground, exposed to the
mockery of any observers. The emperor that is the human intellect has no
clothes. It is as the superscription to this chapter of my book describes it,
a finding things where we put them, and that’s nothing to shout about. It
would do us well at this juncture to highlight just a few of the ways
Nietzsche says this is so.

Nietzsche regards the intellect as showing its greatest strengths in a flair

for dissimulation. Human beings, he says, are deeply immersed in illusions
and dream images as a result. Consequently, nowhere does human
perception lead into truth; it is merely content to receive stimuli and to
play. Morality does not really enter into this and, since nature more often
than not remains silent about almost everything - including even our own
bodies and our own selves - why would we imagine we can know things
about other things, of which we have much less intimate experience,
when we apparently know so very little even about ourselves? Instead,
thinks Nietzsche, human beings came up with a way of designating things

38
called language - something which is entirely arbitrary and purely of
human invention and so, necessarily, related entirely to human
experience. The legislation of this language - for language does indeed
legislate - is that it must have the same validity and force everywhere [it
has a necessary sociability to perform its function]. In using this medium,
the difference between truth and lie is only the harm either might do as a
result, something which is a pragmatic [but not an epistemic] distinction.
For the fact is, according to Nietzsche, that humans neither hate deceit
nor deceivers in their intellectual dealings as is - nor in the abstract either.
They hate only harmful consequences for themselves. Similarly, they
desire only the life-preserving consequences of truth, the “what can truth
do for me?”. So Nietzsche, in language and truth, sets human beings off
down a pragmatic, consequence-filled course, one in which they are fully
involved and invested and which cannot be untied from their own
activities in carrying such a thing out or from the consequences of it for
them.

But, of course, this raises some questions. What is the status of

conventions of language? Is language the full and adequate expression of
all realities? Perhaps truth is a tautology or truth is being swapped in
exchange for illusions? What is a word? Nietzsche regards it as “The copy
of a nervous stimulation in sounds.” And there is a further issue - for
Nietzsche observes that If truth and certainty alone had formed our
language [that is, if we could actually and genuinely know the truth and
have epistemic certainty regarding that we designate knowledge] then
they would not require subjective input - something they clearly seem to
require. Here we should note that the world did not arbitrate itself to us.
Rather, subjective stimuli worked through language and it was only by this
means that we stumbled upon things we designated knowledge or truth.

But, Nietzsche claims, language, and so its truth, is arbitrary and

conventional, it is never “the full and adequate expression” of a putative
reality. Neither, in a well-worn philosophical phrase, are we talking about

39
“things-in-themselves” - as if reality could be exhibited in a glass case and
observed and fully and perfectly described with words. Not only is this a
poor description of how we engage with any reality we are a part of [we
are never pure observers for we are always subjectively entangled in the
observation] but such a thing-in-itself would be abstract, a truth without
consequences. Yet everywhere we look human truth, the only truth we
can ever have, is consequence-based. There is no human truth from which
we are disconnected or which we view purely in the abstract. And it could
not be for this is how we preserve ourselves and so it cannot be
entertained merely for its own self.

So the human being designates the relation of things to human beings

and human language, the medium in which knowledge, truth and
understanding [which are all purely human designations and valuations]
are themselves communicated and understood, is metaphorical, a
jumping from sphere to sphere. According to Nietzsche, we believe we
speak of things when we only possess their metaphors. No genuine
correspondence is involved in this process even if it is imagined or
intended. [This suggests, again, that Nietzsche believes we simply have
no ability or faculty to make this so, or, at the very least, have no way of
showing that we do. Language does not rebuild a carbon copy of the
universe as it is in words.] So intellectual concepts come into being in our
language and thinking by falsifying an individualised, passing reality.
Concepts, thus, make equal that which is not. Such concepts are literally
fiction and literally non-real. They are literally an arbitrary, if always
useful, imposition upon the transience of reality. The equivalence which is
involved here is what makes linguistic concepts possible but it is, as
described above, arbitrary nevertheless.

Thus, such concepts, which are always necessary for human thinking as it
has developed, erase any actual difference that exists in the individual
moments or snapshots of reality in preference for a non-actual, eternal
form that can be linguistically expressed and understood. [Transient

40
reality, which is more like a movie, is humanised and replaced by arbitrary
photographs.] Our knowledge, thinks Nietzsche, does not come from
eternal forms; it comes from human experience. Our knowledge,
understanding and truth are then transient reality filtered through human
experience and linguistically expressed in a way of benefit to us, in a way
that can be made use of and useful. So its important to note that, on this
understanding, concepts overlook what is real, individual and actual. This
is of no use to, because unusable by, the human being. Nature itself, of
course, knows neither forms, nor concepts, nor species such as human
beings have felt the need to create [and, strictly speaking, they have
created them as the things they are thought by human beings to be].
Nature never speaks for itself, it is always spoken for from human
falsification, this human process that Nietzsche is now describing in his
essay being exactly a pragmatic falsification or an expedient fiction.

Nietzsche has, by now in his essay, worked himself up to something of a

rhetorical fever pitch and he is ready to unload on the subject of truth.
Truth he glosses as “metaphors”, “metonymies” and
“anthropomorphisms”. It is “a sum of human relations poetically and
rhetorically intensified”, a matter of translation and decoration. Truth is
“illusions we have forgotten are illusions”. Consequently, the obligation to
be truthful, which Nietzsche recognises, is something society imposes in
order to exist as it is. Thus, truth can be described as the obligation to lie
in accordance with firmly established convention for social, collaborative,
pragmatic reasons. But this requires a measure of forgetting. It is because
human beings forget about the transience and constant movement of
reality - its difference and changeability - that they arrive at a feeling of
truth and can create its illusion.

Truth - as humans use it - is an abstraction and subject to a rule of

abstractions. Truth becomes measured by being fitted into schemes, it
becomes conceptual. A new world opposed to a sensuously perceived
world is created and thereafter regulates the whole. Truth becomes that

41
which does not offend against the rigid regularity of our invented and
imposed classifications [which, it bears repeating, neither correspond to
the world as a mirror to that it reflects nor do they rebuild the world as it
is in words]. Truth becomes a mathematically divided firmament of
concepts. The finding of truth within the territory of reason is, thus,
“anthropomorphic through and through”. Such human truth is “the
metamorphosis of the world in human beings”. Such human truth is a
feeling of assimilation. Such human truth is the human being measuring
all things against human beings. Such human truth is created in the
mistaken belief [or the deliberate, amnesiac lie to self] that things as pure
objects are in front of human beings. Such human truth is created in the
forgetfulness of perception as metaphor [for human beings never
experience any direct, unmediated perception of any reality]. Such human
truth is “a hot liquid stream of imaginative images become hard and
rigid”. Such human truth is created because humans forget themselves as
perpetually and artistically creative subjects. In human perception we are
not, are never, dealing with an observer and an observed. Things are
ineluctably more interrelated and consequent than that.

“Correct perception” is, thus, a non-existent criterion. How could we

know? How could any language user know when language constructs its
own world that doesn’t correspond to any putative real, actual one? If
language is a useful manipulation of intellectualised experience then what
has this to do with epistemic certainty or “getting things right”, i.e. truth?
Nietzsche goes on to suggest that there is no causality, correctness or
expression between subject and object [which are themselves artificial
abstractions from the stream of reality in any case]. He insists that “It is
not true that the essence of things appears in the empirical world”. He
adds that nervous stimuli in relation to images produced from perception
are not necessary ones - and so are not means to linguistically remake
reality. Rather, in human thinking, reproducing the same image lots of
times ossifies it as significant. It becomes “necessary” - which is to say
necessary for how we now think. It is repetition which makes [falsifies] a

42
reality but rigidity is no guarantee of necessity and that reality need be
rigid is, at best, an assumption in any case. Nietzsche believes that if we
could but once see as all things see we would not talk about [rigid, fixed]
“laws of nature” but of subjectivity instead. Instead, he believes we have
created a network of relations for ourselves, a self-referential network like
hiding things behind the bush and finding them as exampled in the quote
excerpted at the head of this chapter. All the relations we make refer only
to one another - and without positive terms. All conformity to laws we find
is based on things we bring to bear as we become thrilled by, and
besotted with, our own activity. Our conceptual edifice imitates the
relations of time, space and number but on strictly metaphorical
foundations, a form of “understanding” [which is a linguistic designation
of its form and process] but without any demonstration of its perspicacity
or effectiveness whatsoever.

Thus, the empirical world = the anthropomorphic world, the world

translated for the purposes of human use, interaction and manipulation.
This, thinks Nietzsche, is based on the drive to form metaphors which he
thinks of as a fundamental human drive and which refuses to be sidelined
by the rigid, conceptual world. This drive to form metaphors uses myth
and art to carry on creating, translating, shaping for human purposes and
loves the multiform, the irregular, the inconsequential, the incoherent. In
many respects, Nietzsche thinks this drive loves things as they are in the
world of dream [and, indeed, elsewhere Nietzsche thinks that “what we do
whilst we are asleep we also do when we are awake”]. Yet it is rigidity of
concepts which separates our waking day from our dreaming night. But
never let it be forgotten that “human beings themselves have an
unconquerable urge to let themselves be deceived” [in accordance with
their direction of travel made up of their feelings, beliefs and purposes].
This is demonstrated both in that lies and deceit are commonplace and
everywhere in human discourse and relationship but also in that, as
already described, human beings are not interested in abstract truth,
truth disconnected from their feelings and their will. It is always truth as

43
related to themselves for their purposes. Thus, Nietzsche conceives that
the puffed up human intellect is a master of pretence but that it is
absolved from its usual slavery if it can deceive without doing harm.
Reason then becomes abstraction not recognition of reality as it is. Strictly
speaking, truth is not honesty either, either with or to oneself or others -
or to the world or the universe - but only an illusory and dissimulating
dishonesty for pre-existing human purposes. If the human being were for
even a moment truly honest its entire conceptual universe would collapse
in a mountain of sensory perception and information regarding a reality
that was different and changing from every moment to the next in a
constant stream of white hot experience. Perhaps, as with our scientific
experimenters carrying out quantum experimentation, we would finally
realise we cannot commensurate reality into one objective whole called
“the way things actually are”. Thus, and in summary:

“All the conformity to laws which we find so imposing in the orbits of the
stars and chemical processes is basically identical with those qualities
which we ourselves bring to bear on things, so that what we find imposing
is our own activity. Of course the consequence of this is that the artistic
production of metaphor, with which every sensation begins within us,
already presupposes those forms, and is thus executed in them; only from
the stability of these original forms can one explain how it is possible for
an edifice of concepts to be constituted in its turn from the metaphors
themselves. For this conceptual edifice is an imitation of the relations of
time, space, and number on the foundations of metaphor.”

B:

So Nietzsche’s charge in “On Truth and Lying in A Non-Moral Sense” is

that human beings have merely designed a classification system, for
entirely their own purposes - and then used it and called the result
“truth”. Far from discovery, they have instead only engaged in self-
referential and often self-aggrandizing activity. This is not much to shout

44
about and is akin to building a set of shelves and then requiring people to
stack them in a certain, entirely arbitrary, way so that, somehow, we can
get along and know where everything is [but only in a way someone has
decided]. But all this Nietzsche says - explicitly - in a non-moral sense. In
this essay he is not discussing such human habits or activities morally but
merely recognising them or bringing them out into the light where they
can be seen. Yet this, of course, is not the whole story for - as Nietzsche
perhaps pre-eminently in intellectual history has himself noted - morality
has everywhere infiltrated human thinking with its own deleterious
effects.

Nietzsche engages in sophisticated and sometimes complex arguments

about morality throughout a number of his books and I have attempted to
interact with them elsewhere [primarily in There is Nothing To Stick To,
Part 2: The Fiction of Morality ]. In this book, however, I cannot go into
great depth lest the direction this book is steering be changed or
unnecessarily interrupted. Yet it is necessary to my point here to take
note of some of the observations Nietzsche has about morality [and the
things morality implies] building on the linguistic-inflected remarks he
makes in “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”. These observations
begin with reference to sections 124 and 125 of his fifth book, The Gay
Science, in which he discusses “the infinite sea” and “the death of God”.

In Book 3 of The Gay Science [where “gay” means “cheerful” and not
“homosexual”] Nietzsche is attempting to undermine the basis of human
thought as he sees it [this, of course, will come to be “God”]. Nietzsche
suggests that we invent our rationality in habits we then find no need to
think beyond. They become self-perpetuating and self-justifying. The
problem is that “comprehension” or “understanding” of reality are not
involved in these practices become habits. “Comprehension” and
“understanding” - or something such as “explanation” - are only, in fact,
description, and then only description which suits our purposes. So much
we have already read and understood in “On Truth and Lying”. Nietzsche

45
conceives that the human being is, in fact, only really “educated by his
errors”. He describes these errors, in section 115 of The Gay Science, as
seeing the human species “incompletely”, endowing it with “fictitioius
attributes”, giving it “a false order of rank in relation to animals and
nature” and inventing “ever new tables of goods and always accept[ing]
them for a time as eternal and unconditional”. Nietzsche sees in this only
that first one and then another “human impulse and state” takes
precedence and is ennobled as some star to steer by – but only because
some perhaps influential human beings esteem it so. Nietzsche conceives
of this process as constituting both our very humanity and our human
dignity such as it is. So, in section 121, Nietzsche will state plainly that:

“We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing
bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and
content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But
that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might
include error.”

Once more we see the Nietzschean refusal to grant any possibility of

epistemic certainty to human thinking. It is, at best, a certain relative
rightness invented and made use of by us. But what, then, does Nietzsche
think our situation is and our circumstances are? We are now ready to
read section 124:

“In the horizon of the infinite.- We have left the land and have embarked.
We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone farther and
destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the
ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out
like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when
you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome
than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of
this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered
more freedom – and there is no longer any ‘land’.”

46
Nietzsche is here describing a world, a human intellectual world, as a
place without any God and so without any ground [which is, of course,
land]. It is such ground which must, ultimately, be the foundation of any
intellectual proposition and any epistemic certainty – but Nietzsche says
there is now only infinite sea. This land is, of course, an intellectual habit
we have become used to but Nietzsche is not afraid to say, nevertheless,
that there is nothing there. This is not to suggest, however, that such a
claim will be welcomed with open arms. It is not for no reason that the
famous next section of The Gay Science, section 125, is about a character
described only as “the madman” - for is not this suggestion of no land and
so no ground, no foundation for human intellectuality – and so its
explanatory efficacy – mad? Nietzsche’s madman tells us that we have
killed God, us together. He asks, “Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing?” Eventually the madman, who, like Diogenes searching
for “a human being”, had run around the marketplace with his message,
concludes that he has come too soon. Human beings are not yet ready to
accept what they have done – even though it is they who have done it.
The problem, as Nietzsche sees it from the beginning of Book 3 of The
Gay Science in section 108 right through to section 125, is that even
though God is dead – and so there is no inherent or essential ground or
foundation for human rational or intellectual practices, no reason to
ascribe to it a descriptive perspicuity or an explanatory insight – the
shadow of such “gods” still casts itself across our thinking. We essentially
deify that which should not, because cannot, be deified. There is no God
[“God is dead”] and there are no God substitutes either.

This is the background against which I would like you to think of morality
in Nietzsche’s thinking. Human thought is not something which can be
deified or grounded or which can find eternal foundations. There is only an
infinite sea and no longer any land. And so it is that in talking about
morality in books such as Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay
Science, Beyond Good and Evil and On The Genealogy of Morality
Nietzsche has need to question many things most are only all too ready to

47
accept as just such grounds or foundations. The first of these is reality
itself and that there is such a thing. Earlier, I mentioned a relatively recent
quantum experiment which had called this into question experimentally
but reality has been doubted philosophically for much longer than that.
Nietzsche was one such doubter. But if there is no objective reality what
does this mean for morality? Nietzsche’s second question is in regard to
there being a moral universe. Is there such a thing? Is the universe itself,
as it is, moral? One would suggest here it probably could not be moral for
some things and not for others. Or could it? Then, thirdly, there is the very
human issue of “free will” which is something very much wrapped up in
human conceptions of morality. Indeed, morality seems to work on the
basis that human beings have something called a “will” and that this is
free to act as it wants [not least so that human beings can then be held
responsible for their actions in a moral sense]. But what if this “will” is
imagined or invented? What if its not nearly so “free” as some think?
Finally, there is the rationality many ascribe to human beings and which
many also connect with the operation of morality. Morality, in fact, is
thought to be something that can be justified and reasoned. It is
something for which we imagine we can give reasons, and reasons which
others would or should find acceptable according to a shared rationalty.
But how rational are we human beings really? Is our “rationality” actually
rational itself and are we really acting according to it in the first place? All
these things are things that Nietzsche wants to put in question when we
come to think about “morality” - or even just about human beings.

But, as we have seen in the first part of this chapter, there are also
linguistic issues to deal with which beguile and capture our thinking. One
of these linguistic tripwires is the belief in an “I”, a subjectivity, which
constitutes who we are [and which I also mentioned when discussing
Blade Runner previously]. We come to believe that there is such a thing –
but Nietzsche believes in several of his books that this is only a linguistic
prejudice that has solidified, hardened and come to be imagined as real
and actual in our thinking. We believe in an “I”, a rational self, a

48
commanding subjectivity, because language uses and requires such a
thing. When, in language, there is an action, the action needs a subject to
perform it. It is on this basis, says Nietzsche, that we then arrange our
experience under such linguistic organisation. But the problem, thinks
Nietzsche, is that this simply isn’t right. There is no actual “I” and so there
is no rational self or commanding subjectivity which is the central
command of the human being. Human beings, in fact, are not constituted
in this way regardless of how language orders our experience and
becomes habituated and unquestioned in our subsequent thinking.
Nietzsche, in fact, regards us as made up of numerous drives, none of
which are strictly rational and which each require little other than their
own satiation. It is then completely illegitimate to invent a rational self –
stimulated by and originated in a linguistic prejudice – which can be
regarded as the seat of rationality and morality and held responsible as
such. This is not to deny that we are rational beings – which is to say we
are beings which require reasons for things – but it is to suggest that there
is no rational core which the entirety of the processes which make up our
being are ordered and organised by and which they are, of necessity,
required to obey. As such, it is better to say that Nietzsche thinks of
human beings as a concatenation of drives rather than as rational selves.
And, yes, one Nietzschean consequence of this is that he argues we
cannot be held morally responsible for things on the basis this is usually
posited.

Next we need to ask after morality itself and particularly morality as

measuring activity. If morality is the subject of ways to behave, where
these ways are thought of rationally and in terms of their consequences,
then we need to ask after what is more precisely being measured and
how. We might then want to ask, for example, if there is any [necessary]
connection between moral action and intellectual insight. Even a
preliminary investigation into this question seems to suggest there isn’t
and that moral action, action called and thought of as moral, need not
necessarily have anything to do with any imagined “intellectual insight”.

49
These might all be nothing more than pragmatic linguistic descriptions
and habits of thought. The point here is that the imagined basis for things
need not, in fact, be their basis. The ground we have imagined could just
all be infinite sea. The God could be [“is”] dead. This also applies if we
begin to think of morality historically or anthropologically for there we see,
according to time and place, that morality changes and is, in fact, always
changing. But what does this then mean for morality itself and any ground
we claim it is founded on? If morality can and does change then on what is
it based? Can any basis [acceptable or unacceptable] even be found?
Does morality now become little more than a scheme of behaviour
adapted to personal consequences? This is very far away from an
imagined scheme of rights and wrongs undergirded by a moral universe it
is our imagined duty to mirror or match up to. It dissolves entirely the
notion that there are actions which are inherently right or wrong in
themselves.

This will become a matter of “epistemological starting point” [for the

claim to morality is a claim to knowledge] and I will get to that shortly but
first we need to round up a representative body of thought on Nietizsche
as he interacts with morality and moral thinking. I want to suggest that in
my context here, one of truth, language, knowing and certainty, that the
second book of Daybreak is as good a place as any in the Nietzschean
canon to find a relevant commentary from Nietzsche himself. Here, in his
avowed context of “the prejudices of morality” [part of the subtitle to
Daybreak], Nietzsche will discuss where he thinks morality comes from,
excavate the thinking behind how it is claimed to work [and to what ends],
and expose the assumptions in such thinking to the cold light of day from
which they had been hidden lest we have a collective “moment of clarity”
in regard to them.

In this second book of Daybreak Nietzsche wants to get down to the nitty
gritty of the human being in which the processes that make up the
operation of morality in and through the species come to light. He

50
suggests that we humans act self-interestedly and unconsciously and that
we take effects for intentions and ascribe too much to intention, taking
chance for something more fixed and permanent, for example, much, in
fact, as languages tend to create a world by using ossifying terms which
imagine a regularity or stasis to describe it. The origin of morality, then
Nietzsche says, is to be found in a thing’s harm or usefulness to us. Bad
actions are, in some sense, harmful ones and harmful, in some sense, to
“us”. Consequently, we make ourselves the measure – and act and think
as if we could be such a thing! Yet this seems to make us prisoners to our
own thinking, something Nietzsche suggests we must break free from in
order to do something even yet more profound - feeling differently.

At the base of morality Nietzsche finds that evaluating seems as basic as

anything [his own project went in the direction of a “revaluation of all
values” as a result in order to escape a morality he found illegitimate] yet,
he says, we feel the need to honour those evaluations in which we have
been schooled - regardless of their efficaciousness or any problems they
may cause for us individually. We have a habit of going in the direction we
are pointed by others to whom we have ties. In the course of this, we
come to believe in all kinds of baseless abstractions and fictions such as
“the human being”, a product of the classifying activities Nietzsche had
already described in “On Truth and Lying”. It seems we desire formulas
for and tabulations of ourselves and our universe in order to act as if we
have found eternal answers to our questions as a result of a rational
conception of our rationality. This is what is called in some places “getting
reality right”. Thinking we can do this, we then talk about goals such as
“happiness” or “duration” as good outcomes for human lives and posit
morality as the means to such goals - when it is manifestly clear that
morality can often, or even possibly, lead to the opposite of such
outcomes. Put simply, there is no reason why being moral should lead
either to happiness or to our duration. Stated thus, individual happiness is
not a matter of general prescription, a thing we can make rules for or
algorithms about.

51
Then there is the further matter of our status as evolutionary beings.
Evolution, Nietzsche recalls, does not have happiness as a goal, neither is
it concerned with anything but more evolution, the continuance of its own
blind physiological processes. This is ill-equipped to be the kind of God
that people have sought, thinks Nietzsche, human beings being those who
have, up until now, wanted to be commanded by something to which they
wanted to imagine they could ascribe the requisite authority to be able to
command us. This, in theory, could be a God or some moral imperative or
some requirement to match up to a moral universe but where are these
things to be found in a biological organism that is part of a blind
evolutionary universe? Consequently, Nietzsche comes to his biological
and physiological conclusion that human beings are concatenations of
drives, drives which can enlist the intellect to satisfy the rational aspect of
ourselves in the furtherance of their nourishment or satisfaction. In this
sense, we are not rational beings so much as beings with a rational
faculty, an apparatus for calculating, part of the whole that is a human
being.

Further on into book two of Daybreak Nietzsche moves on to discuss

language, subjectivity, the self and our experience. He is, in fact,
interested in such things throughout his literary career, not least in
connection with morality. Here a first conclusion is that language is a
deceptive tool not most amenable to self-reporting on inner processes and
drives. Indeed, Nietzsche can say we are not as we appear linguistically to
be or that, in other words, we are a fiction [as he has already said above
when describing “the human being” as just such a fiction and
assumption]. The problem is that we lack self-knowledge, particularly that
which might take us from knowledge of an act “we” commit to the act
itself. Nietzsche concludes that no action is what it appears to be and that
all actions are essentially unknown [and possibly unknowable in their
detail]. Here the issue is that we are stuck in the habits of our senses for
good or ill, misinformed by our sensations from which any and all
knowledge must come. There we must conclude that this does not give us

52
the right to claim access to a ‘real world’ which has an objective quality
and character. The fact is that human beings do not understand the
concatenation of drives that make them up. As a consequence, their
nourishment is essentially a matter of chance and certainly not one of our
rational determination.

Yet, in his biological approach to this problem which was distinctive of his
intellectual situation as a German materialist, Nietzsche conceded that
these drives require real nourishment if they are to thrive and so wither if
they are not nourished. Human beings are affected by, and in relation to,
their surroundings. Drives interpret nervous stimuli, for example, and
whether we are awake or asleep. But since such drives are essentially
unconscious this shouldn’t make any difference to them anyway.
Nietzsche argues that in dreams nourishment may take place which
hasn’t taken place while we are awake and he is here conceiving of the
human being as a complex biological and physiological organism which
operates in extra-cognitive ways but in ways our cognition may often feel
it has to account for. This, however, doesn’t mean said cognition ever
understands or explains these ways even if it should attempt to. In such a
context, Nietzsche thinks that moral judgments and evaluations are
physiological processes whose precise explanations are strictly unknown
to us but for which we, nevertheless, posit causes, something that we feel
to have need to do in order to “make sense of” ourselves. It may be
observed that this “making sense” is something else we feel we need to
have in order to justify ourselves as beings who also feel the need to
justify themselves.

But what is the status of all this feeling - or even feeling the need to
provide various intellectual or rational things? Nietzsche argues that our
consciousness is “fantastic commentary” on the felt text of an unknown,
and perhaps unknowable self. Our experiences, he thinks, are much more
what we make of them than what they themselves contain. They may
even be invention in their meaning or sense, another kind of ongoing

53
commentary and fiction. In our rationality we are knitting a narrative
together from our consciousness of our experiences. It is not, is never,
them speaking directly but our rationality, always coloured by our
morality, speaking for them. Yet, thinks Nietzsche, the intellect is a mirror
and, as such, it offers no essential connection between things beyond a
perfunctory succession of events. Nature knows nothing of purposes
[which must therefore be invented] and no necessary connection is ever
suggested save those we fabricate for ourselves. What’s more, rationality
itself came into being irrationally, by chance accident. Evolution had no
purpose to create such a thing nor is it now cognisant that it has.
“Rationality” is just another human invention and fiction, one we choose
to give value to. But, nevertheless, we made it up and we give it all the
attributes we imagine it to have. Yet this invention also extends to the will
as well. Willing, says Nietzsche, is nothing more than creating a rational
connection between a state we regard ourselves as being in and an
external event or outcome. It has meaning for us but no authority outside
of us. In essence, it too is but a useful fiction in a universe of values and
valuations we are weaving for ourselves.

The final sections of book two of Daybreak address freedom, motive,

purpose and will in the main in a section of Nietzsche’s book on morality
and its prejudices [in our thinking] which has involved itself very much in
what a human being is, how it works and what its situation is. Here
Nietzsche diagnoses human beings as beings with essentially superficial,
surface, thought. Thinking, Nietzsche thinks, is largely superficial, self-
satisfied and content with surfaces. If we are happy with its imagined
results then that will do. Yet its appearance as relatively free [we can
think what we like] is basically deceptive for “we can only understand that
which we can do”. Consequently, it is indeed questionable if thinking ever
or even results in understanding – for who is to say we can understand? It
certainly can never be imagined as an a priori. Here Nietzsche suggests,
no doubt scandalously to some, that conscious and unconscious thinking,
waking and dreaming, are no different, even though one seems conscious

54
in one and in the other unconscious. Nietzsche suggests that we invent
freedom of will in the waking world out of human pride and for a feeling of
power. Yet the basic characteristic of human thinking seems, rather than
an ability, to be a certain inability. For example, it is not possible for us to
divine motives in things for there are a million actions of chance we can
never anticipate. And comparison of consequences is nothing to do with
motives even if it might provide a future motivation to carry out such
comparisons.

The fact is that we have come to believe in a realm of purpose and will
and a realm of chance. This duo of kingdoms satiate our need to feel we
can purposely affect things and also satiate our need for that which we do
not control thus stopping things being too determined or a matter of our
deliberations alone. Here the realm of chance is the realm which we think
we cannot understand – in contradistinction to the realm of will and
purpose which we think we can understand [not least because we made
will and purpose up for our own purposes]. But how do we come to the
conclusion we can understand one and not the other? With what kind of
understanding do we claim to understand? Perhaps it may be that there is
no realm of will and purpose - but only a realm of chance, only one realm
which we do not control or understand for all our attraction to the idea of
control which our species exhibits? What if we are too limited even to
divine our own limitations? Perhaps what we call ‘intention’ or ‘purpose’ is
no more than necessity.

Traditional morality, that which Nietzsche has been critiquing and

undermining, has found itself based in a number of these things which
Nietzsche has now given us reason to doubt. He has removed our notion
of a rational self that can issue rational commands to an invisible but very
present “I” which tell it to act in moral ways in accordance with a moral
universe. Human beings, thinks Nietzsche, quite fundamentally, are not
“selfless” creatures in this respect. In fact, he can say clearly that if
“moral action” is regarded as action done in a “purely selfless” way then

55
there is no moral action. By the same token, he states that if “moral
action” is done from strictly free will then there is no moral action either
[for he repeats multiple times in his published work that there is no “free
will”]. Nietzsche thinks that we have wished, and perhaps still wish - under
the shadow of a God who is dead but who, nevertheless, still casts a
shadow – to separate the moral things from the “egoistic and unfree”
things. Thus, we create that which is moral as the moral. Egoistic and
‘unfree’ actions are regarded more poorly than ‘free’ and ‘selfless’ ones
but Nietzsche thinks this an unjustifiable moral imposition. The main issue
at the bottom of morality is that of VALUE, something we undoubtedly
give things that bears no relation to the world or the universe but an
unbreakable and necessary connection to us ourselves in our lives and
existences as we work them out. This valuing is determined according to a
scheme that utilizes our rationality. But why should our values be
themselves rational apart from our need to have values we can rationally
justify? And why according to this rationality rather than that one?
Nietzsche observes that changing our values would change our morality -
and this would change us. As a result, human beings will no longer be evil
when they cannot think of themselves as such - which suggests they only
ever are because they can.

So the issue here is VALUES. But values are not a matter of epistemic
certainty. Values do not need a perspicuity in matters of knowledge or
truth. You do not, in vulgar terms, need to have explained anything or got
anything right in order to evaluate or to have values. Values are a matter
of INTERPRETATION and of connecting things together in relationship to
and with one another and so it is in this direction I want to further discuss
Nietzsche’s thinking to finish up here in this chapter. Having done away
with God and left human beings adrift on an infinite sea, having said there
is no rational self, no “I” which acts, Nietzsche now wants to add “there
are no facts but only interpretations” to the pot as well in a discussing of
“the epistemological starting point” for a new evaluation of values to
begin.

56
In one of his last books, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes:

“I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way. The will to a system
is a lack of integrity.”

He writes something very similar, and certainly related, in his notebooks,

subsequently collected and published [by others] under the title The Will
to Power:

“Profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of
the world. Fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be
deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.”

We may see these thoughts as related to the death of God and the infinite
sea that were mentioned in The Gay Science where “systematizing” or
“totalizing” views of the world are essentially attempts at God substitutes
or at fabricating land out of infinite sea. Nietzsche will have none of this.
Such thinking and activity lacks integrity and has no shred of authenticity
in regard to the operation of life. Nietzsche’s belief Is that this is
epistemologically invalid and rests on the creation of things that are
illegitimate in themselves. Nietzsche lives in an interpretational world
which for the human being is only and always a matter of the artificial
connection of one thing [imagined as a thing] with another. This is then
built out until a “world” exists – at which point we forget that we have
made it and claim to have found that which we have made. Nietzsche
doesn’t, incidentally, imagine that he is doing anything different himself in
case you were tempted to suggest otherwise. So when Nietzsche will say
in section 481 of The Will to Power that “facts is precisely what there is
not, only interpretations” this applies as much to anything he will say as
to anything anyone else has said and upon which he has commented. The
point here is to grasp the imagined epistemological situation of the human
being which, for Nietzsche, is more a matter of hermeneutics than it is a
matter of epistemological ability or certainty.

57
For example, here Nietzsche speaks of external and internal worlds of
appearance. Here he finds no reason to grant that there are any “facts of
consciousness” as if things simply present themselves to us, either
internally or externally, “as they are”. Here “’Thinking,’ as epistemologists
conceive it, simply does not occur: it is a quite arbitrary fiction, arrived at
by selecting one element from the process and eliminating all the rest, an
artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility ”[italics mine]. After
this thought, in section 477 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche reiterates that
both thinking [as it is imagined] and the subject that thinks “are fictions”.
He thinks that because we imagine a will in us that “causes” things there
must then be a general force, some metaphorical kind of will, in events in
general. In addition, we imagine that pain and pleasure must occur in
order to cause other things, reactions to them. But this activity is nothing
other than us arbitrarily connecting things together, interpreting. We
interpret ourselves in certain ways and then make of those interpretations
the more general way the world must work. This is interpretation not
epistemological insight, claims Nietzsche.

So Nietzsche, in fact, suggests that we read off events according to a

scheme with which we are already familiar [our understanding of our own
experience]. Indeed, is he not saying that its familiarity is its truth and
suggesting familiarity as a criterion of truth-making practices? Noticing
effects, we search for and inevitably find causes but this thinking is led by
the nose by the effects for which we think causes are in need to be
posited. The shape of OUR thinking decides how events will be arranged
and in this the events have no say. That error may creep into this process
or, as Nietzsche suggests, that error may even be a part of its operation,
is easily imaginable as is the operation of that old deception that
Nietzsche calls “the old error of ground” which is the land that does not
exist in an infinite sea. As Nietzsche has said from his first note in the
“principles of a new evaluation” in The Will to Power, HOW we think
affects WHAT we think. But Nietzsche thinks that:

58
“There exists neither ‘spirit,’ nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness,
nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no
question of ‘subject and object,’ but of a particular species of animal that
can prosper only through a certain relative rightness ; above all, regularity
of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience)” [italics mine]

So the basic point is that human beings fabricate, create, imagine,

construct, make use of, interpret. None of this means they know,
understand or explain anything. “A certain relative rightness” is good
enough, or “an artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility” -
which means arranging experience of reality in such a way as human
beings can make use of it. Thus, “The utility of preservation —not some
abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived— stands as the motive
behind the development of the organs of knowledge” and “a species
grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order
to press it into service.” Here the utilitarian and pragmatic credentials of
knowledge within the Nietzschean thinking are finally and fully stated.
They are “anthropocentric and biological” in their sense which is about an
increase of power. Those organs of ours which contribute to this
enterprise develop for these means and not out of any purely abstract
need to be right, which we are ill-equipped to judge, or to avoid error,
which we would have to know the truth to be able to adjudicate in the first
place. In short, if we survive in our thinking that is all the success our
“knowledge” needs. Therefore, abstract commendations such as
“knowledge” or “truth” are exactly that but not in the least bit relevant to
the means of operation of our knowledge-acquiring faculties which do not
have abstract knowledge as a purpose, motive or intention since it is most
unlikely they ever possess or produce such things at all. We seek only to
master our surroundings and as much regularity and “relative rightness”
as we can build into this is all the pragmatic human being needs.

It is now in The Will to Power, in section 481, that Nietzsche states that
“facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations”. He goes on to

59
state that “we cannot state any fact ‘in itself’” and talks of an inevitable
“perspectivism”, stating that “It is our needs that interpret the world; our
drives and their For and Against.” This makes sense for it posits that the
world we live in, our environment, are not matters of passive indifference
to us. We fundamentally want to survive, to prosper even, and how can
we do that if we have no stance towards the situations we find ourselves
in? So, of course “our needs” interpret the world. And they need to for
how else shall we, as the beings we are, survive? We are not just anything
but we are specific things and paying attention to that matters. In fact, it
matters so much Nietzsche has argued throughout that nature has not left
it simply to cognition or “a rational self” to deal with it.

So all our beliefs, as conditions of life, could be false because such beliefs
may nowhere touch on anything so obtuse as “reality”. But Nietzsche, of
course, has already said that we don’t need to get anything right. We only
need not be so wrong that the nature of things corrects us in a way that
things like rocks and gravity always will. The important thing here is that
hermeneutics is not epistemology and should never be treated as such.
Giving things substance or motives or purpose is always a matter of
interpretation and it may be that even wanting to impute these things into
things is an error. This is because “It is improbable that our ‘knowledge’
should extend further than is strictly necessary for the preservation of
life” and “We can comprehend only a world that we ourselves have
made.” We can only see with our own eyes. But that gives us no mandate
to think that everything is as we see it and that, seeing thus, this is
knowledge or truth or understanding or explanation. The point in this is
that our knowledge is not necessarily knowledge at all. It has been
designated as such in language, a system of meaning and value, but that
is all. As Nietzsche says in a very biological, physiological and evolutionary
way, “Our apparatus for acquiring knowledge is not designed for
‘knowledge’.” Such apparatus takes possession of things in order to make
use of them. But why should that be knowledge if “the value of the world
lies in our interpretation”? Nietzsche’s evaluation is blunt: “The world with

60
which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fable.” And this
because “we have created the world that possesses values!”

So where are we here in this thickening morass of Nietzschean

interpretation? In that interpretation, the human being is a matter of
biology, of a form of life, and the preservation of a form of life, of an
organism. It is self-perpetuating in as far as it can be. But such human
existence is not normally, nor even mostly, a rational matter in its
biological outworking. Rationality is a faculty or aspect of the human, not
a synonym for it, and probably not even the most basic faculty or aspect it
has. Consequently, as a “concatenation of drives”, we do not know what
truth is [nor, at this level, are we interested in it] and we would not be
able to judge we had such a thing even if we happened to have it.
Morality, if it be an object such as truth in the same way, finds itself in the
same situation. Under such thinking, human intellectual faculties, and
those things that make them up, are an evaluating, interpretive, meaning-
making apparatus for the schematizing of data with the intention of
making a regular world from their experience and operation. As such,
evaluating, meaning-making, believing, taking for true, interpreting are
more primitive and more basic activities of the human being. These may
harness and utilise reason but they do not spring from it. Their basis is
more biological, more functional, more instinctual. They have more to do
with a tree which naturally grows towards the sunlight than a reasoned
deliberation amongst imagined alternative courses of action, more to do
with chance conditions of existence than knowledge.

Here language enters the fray. Language is the border of our ability to
think and our ability to interpret rationally is deceived in that it must
follow language’s prejudices. Logic, reason, consciousness, identity, these
are our inventions, the positing of things in which stability can be
salvaged from chaos. In our thinking we have wedded such a stability to
truth as an opposition to the becoming and chance of a natural world we
could not live in by its manner of operation. Yet, if our world is not the

61
stable place we have imagined, then it cannot be moral on the basis of an
inaccurate stability. Morality, as many have imagined it, relies on
calculability, simplicity, comprehensibility. Where this is the case, we have
manufactured these things rationally from our experience and so created
a world of which morality could be posited. In error. Such morality, like
truth, has been posited as a condition of life and in spite of the fact that
life could exist, and might even prosper, without these manufactured
values and value systems. Such morality is an artificial creation executed
according to values rationally extrapolated within an interpretive
framework that imagines knowledge is of something real and truth
authoritative because in some way permanent. It is, thus, something that
seeks to rule and to subdue, to compel others to its manufactured truth.
Morality, like truth, is ultimately an argument from a fictionally constituted
authority.

So, although knowledge, truth and morality are posited by human beings
as values, they are merely Trojan horses. The pragmatic, utilitarian human
being simply has a biological need to preserve itself and will use whatever
means necessary to do so. It uses morality in the furtherance of amorality
[for it could not know what an unconditioned morality was] and is blind to
what any true morality would really be for everything it posits is a fiction,
must necessarily be a fiction, must necessarily be expediency and utility
writ large. Human beings, under this, I would argue Nietzschean, thinking
are functional creatures more properly described as ‘human becomings’
since more begins for them in the interpretation of feeling and sensation
than it does in reason’s explanation of an objective reality. More begins
for them in pre-cognitive evaluation and meaning-making than it does in
rationality. Their form of life is, thus, hermeneutic as opposed to
epistemologically-conceived. It is based in interpretation not “knowledge”.
We are interpreting organisms. So, finally, we must conclude that human
beings, thought of functionally, MUST evaluate and they MUST make
meaning. They must live their lives interpreting. Without this, they cease
to exist.

62
It is worth dwelling for a moment upon this. We may describe ourselves as
hermeneutic beings yet, better still, as hermeneutic becomings for the
nature of the universe is movement and change not stasis and fixity. No
two moments are ever identical. Identity itself is a fiction of language born
exactly of the need to make stable that Nietzsche describes.
Interpretation is then the name for a process of constant interactional
meaning-making and evaluating that human beings carry out habitually
as part of their form of life. What’s more, this interpretation has a
physiological basis which takes place beyond reasons and rationality but
which implicates and utilizes them in the process nevertheless. It is not a
choice but an activity of that which is alive and must grow, and so
interact, to survive. [In this sense we can say any and all life “interprets”.]
It can then be said that this interpretation is a pragmatic process in which
drives seek their satisfaction and satiation and so express their will to
obtain power over things and their surroundings. Through interpretation,
human beings work with language in order to perform functions such as
understanding, explaining and clarifying, and in discerning things
designated knowledge and truth. In this, it is the case that the grammar
and structure of language itself is fictionalising in that in performing its
function language suggests stasis, stability and fixity where, speaking
strictly, there is none. Language is a tool fitted to a purpose but in its use
epistemic certainty, or even the necessity of an epistemic interest, is
neither evident nor suggested.

This is because there is no difference between interpreting a thing and

using a thing. All interpretations are, in fact, ‘mere’ uses. Interpretation is
by means of fictional devices that we cannot consciously fabricate but
that we must invest ourselves in having first fabricated them - through
beliefs and passional and intellectual commitment - nevertheless. We may
then speak of being inhabited by our beliefs, attitudes and orientations
rather than ourselves taking them up as if they were options on a
supermarket shelf. So saying that we are interpretational in nature is not
trivial for to interpret is not regarded as trivial either. All interpretation,

63
which always then has stakes, is from a context and is a matter of a
relating to. Interpretation is both context and content, process and event,
and “understanding” is an interpretational and linguistic phenomenon
rather than an epistemological or metaphysical achievement. Thus, its
character is pragmatic and utilitarian. That which is understood is
interpreted as understood in a way that has involved some need of the
organism which is that which interprets being satiated or satisfied. As I
would hope my readers would understand, this is absolutely not trivial as
a consequence.

Such interpretation, as I would now hope my readers understand takes

place on an infinite sea after the death of God and all his imagined
substitutes, further takes place without ground and does not provide one
as a result of its operation. In such interpretation “the good” is the same
as “that which provides what is needed” otherwise known as “the
necessary”. Furthermore, such interpretations cannot be checked off
against the world. They can only be checked off against other
interpretations. [Hence the necessity of language, communication and
thinking.] Yet interpretations can be changed by the world, not least
because, although the world is made use of as an interpretation, it is not
in the control of that which interprets it. The world never tells us what to
think [because it can’t] but it can, sometimes very harshly or abruptly, tell
us that our thinking is bad for us.

So in a very real and consequential sense here I am saying that

interpretation is life, its experience and process. To be alive is to interpret
and if you are a human being then you spend your entire life making
things up, arguing with others about things they have made up and
deciding which between various possible alternatives is the best made up
thing we will become possessed by. We should not regard any of this as
trivial for, to the contrary, it is the most serious of subjects we could
imagine – the prosperous continuance of our lives. In the works of
Nietzsche the human being is the creator, the interpreter, the intoxicated

64
fictioneer [intoxicated with their own life and experience, that is, and the
need to give it meaning and value]. All around is experience and the only
question to be answered is what will human beings make of it to stay for a
moment within the realm of sensation before the brief flame of their life is
snuffed out once again by the inevitability of change. It is a tragic and
[fortunately] short story, but there it is.

THREE: Biology As a Discourse About the Diversity of Life

A:

I may have said before, and might well say again, that I am not much of a
scientist – and neither have I ever really had any big interest in science or
scientists. I’ve never gasped at scientific discoveries and don’t marvel at
what our scientific understanding can achieve. Its just never interested
me and I couldn’t have ever told you why for the most part. Its just all
been a bit “meh” up until now on the science front for me. But I do think
I’m starting to understand why the more I think, relate things to other
things and contextualise.

We human beings are one species among millions on one planet in one
galaxy among billions and maybe even trillions of observable and
estimated galaxies in the universe. This, I suggest, is the context for
everything, the context of everything. You and me and every human
being who ever lived effectively amount to zero. We are not even
background noise in the universe. As Nietzsche suggested in my last
chapter, when we have disappeared no one will ever know that we were
ever there. Or care about it. And they would seemingly be right not to.

Now an even more startling thing may be true when we boost our human
interest into an interest in life itself, a thing in which we imagine we share.
Life on our planet seems amazingly abundant and yet, even there, we
conceive that between those places in the universe where life exists

65
[which surely must be on more than one out of the unimaginable number
of planets that must exist] there are vast spaces [literally!] of dead
nothingness. Space is mostly, well, space! And so this is the context in
which to understand Nietzsche when he says that life is a kind of death
and a very rare kind. Being dead is what’s normal for the universe. Life, in
that context, seems relatively rare and maybe even all the more amazing
that it ever existed in the first place.

This particular chapter is to be about two things. The first of those two is
human life. The second is biology, something that may be thought of as
the study of life but something which may also be thought of as human
talk about life. Biology, in this second sense, is nothing other than human
thoughts [or understandings or observations] about life. In order to
discuss these things I am going to follow my common practice and do so
in interaction with a book. In this case that book is Evolution’s Rainbow by
the biologist, Joan Roughgarden. This book, subtitled “Diversity, Gender,
and Sexuality in Nature and People“, aims to discuss “the extensive
diversity in sex, gender, and sexuality now known to exist among both
nonhuman animals and people.” It, thus, has a very particular purpose
which is to show that a narrative about life which unnecessarily and
illegitimately narrows, squashes or even deliberately underestimates life’s
diversity is a narrative that cannot stand scrutiny in relation to life as we
otherwise experience it in biological inquiry.

We begin by noting that the book is split into three sections – Animal
Rainbows, Human Rainbows and Cultural Rainbows – and, as far as I’m
concerned, if the book was just any one of these three sections the point
about rainbows of diversity as a fact of empirical observation would be
made anyway. The thing is, as I will expand upon discussing the
pragmatist philosophy of Richard Rorty in chapter 5, you can try to impose
an ideology upon the world [for example, one in which there is but two
biological sexes which are coterminous with two genders, two and no
more, which combine in only a heterosexual way which can be dubbed

66
“Nature’s way”] but the world has a habit of making a fool of you if this
ideology is not simultaneously coterminous with what people can freely
observe for themselves if only they will look with the required openness
which has not decided that the world must be a certain way. It is to be
Roughgarden’s testimony, as a biologist of many years standing, that
what can be observed, in animal, human and cultural spheres, is best
described in terms of rainbows of diversity rather than a static, eternal,
unchanging binary opposition. Should she provide the evidence for this
description in her book [in one of the areas would be enough but in all
three would be even more convincing] it would then make it untenable for
“heterosexual binarists” to continue to describe the apparent situation in
reality this way anymore.

So let’s start with Roughgarden’s first sentence in her first chapter, “Sex
and Diversity”. It reads “All species have genetic diversity – their
biological rainbow. No exceptions.” She contnues, “Biological rainbows are
universal and eternal.” Diversity is everywhere and has, according to this
testimony, penetrated into every aspect of biological life. There have been
philosophers who have come to similar conclusions, considering that
change and diversity are the effective motors of the universe. Can we see
this in the real world? Well, why are there so many different species of
animals? How did they get to be different? If we are not going to say some
God invented them and arbitrarily decided their differences [and since a
biologist is very likely today to be a student of evolutionary theory then
they will be looking for an evolutionary answer to this question] then we
need some sort of practical, naturalist reason. Roughgarden suggests that
the differences are so common and so minute that it is sometimes difficult
to classify them. A bird may have an example of itself in one town but in
the next town over the same sort of bird may be slightly different – and
there may be examples of other kinds of the same bird intermediate
between the two in the spaces in between the towns. Even the same kind
of animal is not always the same. Biological reality, if we may call it that,
was not constructed according to a “periodic table” of species and

67
“Organisms flow across the bounds of any category we construct”.
Roughgarden even goes so far as to say that “nature abhors a category”.
One thing this means is that no one example of that bird is the exemplar
of all the other, slightly different, examples of the same bird. All examples
of that bird are equally examples of it in a way which never privileges any
one of them over the others.

So if diversity is a simple fact, why is this the case? What is diversity doing
that lack of it would not be? One obvious thing it is doing, at the level of a
species, is providing some evolutionary possibility and opportunity. If a
particular species gets into trouble, it falls prey to some disease or virus,
for example, and every example of that species is exactly the same, then
the entire species dies out because the whole species has the same
vulnerability. If there is some measure of diversity in that species,
however, then maybe some of that species resist the virus or avoid
getting the disease and they, and at least some of that species, survive.
So at the level of the species, at least, diversity has a clear advantage. It
gives a species somewhere to go and gives them a measure of survival
potential. The point of life, after all, is surely to keep existing, right?

Roughgarden has a biological example of something which caters for

diversity in nature and you may have heard of it: its called sex. But,
interestingly, not all species reproduce by having sex. Some species
simply clone themselves. Roughgarden actually says “lots of species
propagate without sex” which shatters the illusions of those who thought
that sex was for reproduction and was a universal feature of life. Species
that propagate without sex are species where everyone is female and
there is [obviously] no fertilization of eggs. In such species the egg the
female produces has all the genetic material it needs already within it. But
this obviously isn’t very diverse. The mother provided everything and
there was no father whose genetic material would be different.

But the diversity continues when we move to species in which there are

68
“two kinds of females: those who don’t mate when reproducing and those
who do mate.” This grouping apparently includes grasshoppers, locusts,
moths, mosquitoes, roaches, fruit flies, bees, turkeys and chickens. In
other words, some fairly common creatures that we’ve likely had
acquaintance with. TWO kinds of females? Apparently so. Not all females
in nature, according to biological observation, are the same or have the
same biological function.

But you remember I mentioned sex as something good for promoting

diversity? It is good for diversity, of course, because you have all this
intermixing of examples of a species. Obviously, the speed of such a
species’ reproduction is cut down. If all of a species is female, as it is in
some cases, then every example of the species can produce an egg. In a
sexual species that’s cut in half immediately because males don’t have
the biological function of giving birth. [Thus, in high mortality situations,
the sexual species may die out due to its slower rate of reproduction
where a single-sexed species, due to sheer weight of reproductive
numbers, may survive.] Some people of a certain age, especially British
people, may remember an animal called Dolly the sheep. Dolly [who died
because the experiment didn’t work] was an example of biologists trying
to make a sheep which could clone itself without having sheepy sex. The
reasons for doing this weren’t exactly well motivated. They were
economic. If sheep could clone themselves then every sheep could give
birth to a lamb and not only half of them. Sex produces more diverse
sheep but sheep that can clone themselves can produce more sheep
period. [Keep reading for more sheepish revelations below!]

Thus, “the benefit of sex is survival over evolutionary time.” But some
species, such as aphids, have used diversity of reproductive possibilities
to combine clonal reproduction at one time of the year with sexual
reproduction at another. So when they need numbers to colonize some
plant at one point they reproduce clonally in great numbers but when
that’s not so important they can switch to sexual reproduction, thus

69
switching to a method of reproducing which builds in more opportunity for
species’ survival in the long run. Its a clever thing this evolution. But
there’s something to note here about the aphid, something which this mix
and match approach highlights. This is that “the purpose of sex isn’t
reproduction as such, because asexual species [i.e. species that never
have sex] are perfectly capable of reproducing.” So if you were one of
those people who thought that sex exists for reproduction and only
reproduction by means of sex creates life then you’re dead wrong. Nature
doesn’t need sex to reproduce. Cloning, or an asexual biochemical
procedure carried out by a single example of a species, works just as well,
if with different consequences. The species that clones has less “genetic
wealth” and a species that has sex “is essentially cooperative” and
engages in “a natural covenant to share genetic wealth”.

Let’s move along to “sex versus gender” in animals. Now:

“To most people, ‘sex’ automatically implies ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Not to a

biologist… sex means mixing genes when reproducing. Sexual
reproduction is producing offspring by mixing genes from two parents,
whereas asexual reproduction is producing offspring by one parent only,
as in cloning. The definition of sexual reproduction makes no mention of
‘male’ and ‘female.’ So what do ‘male’ and ‘female’ have to do with sex?
The answer, one might suppose, is that when sexual reproduction does
occur, one parent is male and the other female. But how do we know
which one is the male? What makes a male, male, and a female, female?
Indeed, are there only two sexes? Could there be a third sex? How do we
define male and female anyway?”

Sex, of course, is also not gender. If it were why would the concepts of sex
and gender both exist if one were mere duplication of the other?
Roughgarden takes the view, and its one I’ve come to find very helpful,
that we can think in biological categories [male or female bodies, things
distinguished according to biological function] and we can think in

70
sociological categories [men, women, trans, gay, etc., things about which
social groups have freedom to decide who will count as what – or even if it
matters]. You might want to think of these as things left up to us – how
people will be seen in society – and things not left up to us – what
biological functions certain bodies have. Important to note here is that
one is not the other and we should not confuse the two [sex is not gender
and gender is not sex]. That one body can do one thing and another can’t
do that but can do something else gives neither of these bodies any
particular value or significance. Only we do that. Evolution, we must
remember, doesn’t know what it is doing and isn’t doing it for any purpose
or with any end or valuation in sight. Any rules or customs that build up
around biological differences are sociologically constructed and for
reasons all our own. So although we may think we get to decide what a
“real” man or woman is [which are matters of gender and sociologically
constructed] “for biological categories we don’t have the same freedom.
‘Male’ and ‘female’ are biological categories, and the criteria for
classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to
whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees.”

The issue here from the biologist’s point of view is that:

“using biological categories as though they were social categories is a

mistake called “essentialism.” Essentialism amounts to passing the buck.
Instead of taking responsibility for who counts socially as a man or
woman, people turn to science, trying to use the biological criteria for
male to define a man and the biological criteria for female to define a
woman. However, the definition of social categories rests with society, not
science, and social categories can’t be made to coincide with biological
categories except by fiat.”

Roughgarden thus thinks it makes sense to distinguish between biological

males and females and sociological men and women. The former are
defined according to biological rigour in regard to the biological function

71
of bodies. The latter absolutely are not and could be defined according to
whatever classifications the sociological groupng concerned decided were
necessary or relevant. Social categories need not be biological at all
because biology talk is only for the purposes of biological inquiry and
discusses the subject of biological function as part of a greater discussion
about life and how it exists at all. But there is no a priori reason for such
very specialised and specific discussions to be related to gender
discussions in any given society. Indeed, put like this, it seems very
strange and arbitrary that they would be.

So, for a biologist doing their biology, “’male’ means making small
gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes.” That’s it, the
concise, simple and universal definition of the BIOLOGICAL difference
between a male and a female. This has nothing necessarily to do with the
sociological description of men and women. These are biological terms
used within biological discussion. There now follows a helpful science bit
which Roughgarden provides for those who don’t know what gametes are:

“A gamete is a cell containing half of its parent’s genes. Fusing two

gametes, each with half the needed number of genes, produces a new
individual. A gamete is made through a special kind of cell division called
meiosis, whereas other cells are made through the regular kind of cell
division, called mitosis. When two gametes fuse, the resulting cell is called
a zygote. A fertilized egg is a zygote.”

The small gametes here are normally called sperm and the larger
gametes are called eggs. This is now sounding a little more familiar. But
note that, despite what you might have heard about chromosomes and
other things, “Beyond gamete size, biologists don’t recognize any other
universal difference between male and female.” This is the singular
biological definition: what size gametes do you produce? But even more
important than that, and a difference I want to stick to in my discussion of
gender as opposed to sex, is that “’male’ and ‘female’ are biological

72
categories, whereas ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are social categories.” When we
talk about “men and women” in everyday life, perhaps in reading poems
or looking at art, we are not talking in biological discourse, in the
language of the biologist. We are discussing sociological categories. And
these are not the same thing. That’s why there is sex talk, which is
biological talk, and gender talk, which is sociological talk. It would do well
to remember the difference for there is no place here for essentialism,
much less a faulty essentialism. [PS Some few species do not stick to
these two gamete sizes either meaning that male and female don’t even
universally apply in every known form of life. We must draw the
conclusion that nature did not set out to create male and female even if
that’s a very, very common way for life to propagate itself. It sounds more
like the most utilitarian way rather than the way things must be.]

So that is “sex”, a biological matter. What about “gender”?

“The binary in gamete size doesn’t extend outward. The biggest error
of biology today is uncritically assuming that the gamete size binary
implies a corresponding binary in body type, behavior, and life history. No
binary governs the whole individuals who make gametes, who bring them
to one another for fertilization, and who interact with one another to
survive in a native social context. In fact, the very sexual process that
maintains the rainbow of a species and facilitates long-term survival
automatically brings a cornucopia of colorful sexual behaviors. Gender,
unlike gamete size, is not limited to two.

‘Gender’ usually refers to the way a person expresses sexual identity

in a cultural context. Gender reflects both the individual reaching out to
cultural norms and society imposing its expectations on the individual.

Gender is the appearance, behavior, and life history of a sexed body. A

body becomes ‘sexed’ when classified with respect to the size of the
gametes produced. Thus, gender is appearance plus action, how an

73
 organism uses morphology, including color and shape, plus behavior to
carry out a sexual role.” [Italics mine]

Having defined sex and gender and shown their differences, and so their
appropriate uses, Roughgarden can now tick off a few misnomers that
those critical of such distinctions often bring forward. These include that:

1. An organism is solely male or female for life. Not true.

2. Males are normally bigger than females. Not true.
3. Females, not males, give birth. Not true.
4. Males have XY chromosomes and females have XX. Not true.
5. There are only two genders which correspond to two sexes. Not true.
6. Males and females look different from each other. Not true.
7. The male has a penis and the female lactates. Not true.
8. Males control females. Not true.
9. Females are monogamous and males get it where they can. Not true.

In each of these cases Roughgarden gives examples, and often

overwhelming numbers of examples, of where what we might call such
prejudices about biological life have built up. That something is either
male or female for life, for example, is a huge falsehood when, as
Roughgarden details, “the most common body form among plants and in
perhaps half of the animal kingdom is for an individual to be both male
and female at the same, or at different times during its life.” In each case
here there is competent and documented evidence to the contrary which
tells us that biological reality has not set out to be a certain way,
“Nature’s Way”, but that, rather, it continues in whatever way works. We
may see patterns when we look at this as human biologists but nature is
not constrained to follow our patterns and neither has it designated one
way right or good and other ways either illegitimate or their opposites.
Nature does not share our classificatory prejudices nor their often moral
motivations.

74
Rather, as Joan Roughgarden continues:

“by defining gender as how an organism presents and carries out a sexual
role, we can also define masculine and feminine in ways unique to each
species. ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ refer to the distinguishing traits
possessed by most males and females respectively. Cross-gender
appearance and behavior are also possible. For example, if most females
have vertical stripes on their bodies and males do not, then a male with
vertical stripes is a ‘feminine male.’ If most males have antlers and
females do not, then a doe with antlers is a ‘masculine female.’”

Therefore:

“We don’t have to deny the universality of the biological male/female

distinction in order to challenge whether the gender of whole organisms
also sorts into a male/female binary. In humans specifically, a gender
binary for whole people is not clear-cut even though the difference
between human sperm and egg is obvious—a size ratio of about one
million to one.”

So, sex is not gender. They are different things. One can be a certain sex
but that doesn’t necessarily correspond to a certain gender manifestation.
We need to give up such simple inaccuracy, let alone pursue it as an
ideology that risks becoming nothing but bigotry, beliefs held in the face
of both nature and the world.

Let’s now take a look at “sex within bodies” within the world of diversity
that is the biological world. There are, of course, bodies which have male
and female functions [the production of one size of gamete or the other]
but these bodies do “not fit into any consistent polarity”. We think of
males and females having separate bodies because, for the most part, we
humans do and our familiars, dogs and cats, etc., do too. But that, of
course, is far from universal. There are, for example, hermaphrodites.

75
These are organisms with bodies that make both small and large gametes
at some point in their life cycle and this may be at the same time
[simultaneous hermaphrodites] or at different times [sequential
hermaphrodites]. Most flowering plants are the first type of hermaphrodite
here for they make pollen and seeds at the same time. Being a
hermaphrodite is also very common if you live in the sea [as evolution
suggests some distant forebear of we humans did too] and, overall, being
a hermaphrodite works for very many species of life on earth and is
completely normal. Roughgarden even speculates it may be more
common to be a hermaphrodite than to be a species which maintains
separate sexes in separate bodies which seems jarring when and if it is
imagined the latter is “normal” and hermaphrodism some strange
deviation from the norm. But we need to remember that much of
evolution is a matter of adaptation to environments and so differences
and diversities in, between and amongst species of animals are always
something to do with environment and there will be causal reasons [not
eternal, arbitrary reasons] for why one thing is like this and another is like
that. Nature is what works and what works is not constrained by norms
but overcomes them if it can.

So we have fish that can change sex. We have fish which have three, not
two, genders. We have fish where the sexes look very similar. We have
fish where “One gender consists of individuals who begin life as a male
and remain so for life. Another gender consists of individuals who begin as
females and later change into males.” It seems that different ecological
circumstances may favour one or the other of these types of males and,
speaking frankly, these things, it seems to me, wouldn’t exist if there was
not some kind of evolutionary pay off for them in doing so. If these fish,
called wrasses, are studied, we find that:

“The wrasses live both on coral reefs and in the seagrass beds nearby. In
seagrass, females nestled among grass blades can’t be guarded very well,
and the balance of hostilities tips in favor of the small unchanged males.

76
 This situation leads to only two genders, unchanged males and females.
On the coral reef, clear water and an open habitat structure permit the
large sex-changed males to control the females, and the balance tips in
their favor. This situation encourages the presence of all three genders.
Simple population density also shifts the gender ratios. At high densities
females are difficult to guard and small unchanged males predominate,
whereas at low densities a large sex-changed male can control a ‘harem.’
Whether females prefer either type of male isn’t known.”

All fascinating, if not a little bizarre, from human perspective. But

Roughgarden makes an interesting comment in relation to this when she
notes that “The sex changes are triggered by changes in social
organization”. In another type of wrasse she therefore also notes that:

“When a large sex-changed male is removed from his harem, the largest
female changes sex and takes over. Within a few hours, she adopts male
behavior, including courtship and spawning with the remaining females.
Within ten days, this new male is producing active sperm. Meanwhile the
other females in the harem remain unchanged. “

Now how’s about that from the perspective of “Nature’s Way” which is
fixed and binary and unchanging? That’s right, such thinking is nonsense,
unscientific nonsense. Roughgarden reports that “Aspects of this system
appear again and again among vertebrates, especially the themes of male
control of females or their eggs, multiple male genders, hostility among
some of the male genders, flexible sexual identity, and social organization
that changes with ecological context.” And shouldn’t we expect these
things to be so? Are we so dumb as to imagine that “one size fits all”?
Anyone who has ever bought anything that was “one size fits all” knows
very well that one size does not fit all. It fits the size it fits and the rest
must make do if they can. This is essentially what is happening in human
thinking when some people insist that one biological size fits all. It
doesn’t; it must be made to fit and there will be those who must suffer the

77
consequences. In nature, sex [not, at this point, gender which is probably
even more fluid] can change from female to male and also from male to
female. No law or rule of “Nature’s Way” is stopping that. Nature, in fact,
is the thing enabling it. There are also species which are both sexes at the
same time [but who mate with a partner rather than with themselves] and
others which sex change – in the strictly biological sense – multiple times
during their lives. [In some species Roughgarden tells us that this is not
even particularly difficult.] Does any of this give you the sense that nature
operates on the basis of fixed bodies organised according to an
unchanging binary? And what then should we say about these species? It
would make no sense at all to talk about sex as “innate” in relation to
such species – and so it would also make no sense to talk about sex as
innate to species in nature as a whole where some species treat it as
what’s best suited to a current moment or environment rather than a
fixed thing its impossible to affect. Nature, we may say, allows what is
necessary in the moment. If it achieves some purpose nature won’t be the
the thing that stops it happening but the thing which is the context for its
possibility. Nature, in fact, may be seen as a “context for possibility” as a
whole and “male and female functions don’t need to be packaged into
lifelong, distinct bodies”.

“But what about mammals?” you might now begin asking, finding all this
talk about fish in the sea and hermaphroditic plants interesting but
irrelevant to human beings. Well, there are “intersexed” examples of
mammals for, as Roughgarden reports:

“we can distinguish intersexed gonads, with some combination of ovarian

and testicular tissue, from intersexed genitals, with some combination of
egg- and sperm-related plumbing. We could even distinguish internal
genitally intersexed and external genitally intersexed to pinpoint where
the combined plumbing is located. Although the gamete-size binary
implies that only two sexed functions exist, many body types occur,
ranging from all-sperm parts, through various combinations of both

78
 sperm- and egg-related parts, to all-egg parts.”

What’s more, “In some mammalian species, intesexed bodies are a

minority; in others, the majority.” And then there is the case of various
kinds of pigs in the South Pacific:

“Pigs in the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides)
have been bred for their intersex expressions. Typically, these pigs
have male gonads and sperm-related internal plumbing, intermediate or
mixed external genitalia, and tusks like boars. In Vanuatu cultures, the
pigs are prized as status symbols, and among the people of Sakao, seven
distinct genders are named, ranging from those with the most egg-related
external genitalia to those with the most sperm-related external genitalia.
The indigenous classification of gradations in intersexuality is said to be
more complete than any system of names yet developed by Western
scientists and was adopted by the scientist who wrote the first
descriptions of the culture. In the past, 10 to 20 percent of the
domesticated pigs consisted of intersexed individuals.”

Of course, relatively low numbers of such animals might play into the
prejudice of “not normal”. But since when was it the case that we should
prejudice commonality over rarity, let alone when this is the case with
perfectly healthy living beings? Is this not an unjustifiable discrimination
as it used to be widely in Western society when the relative rarity of
homosexuality was held up as a reason to regard it as “unnatural”
alongside other, equally dubious, reasons? That something is relatively
rare or uncommon is not a reason to despise it or discriminate against it.
So we should note that:

“The Bimin-Kuskusmin and Inuit have stories of bears who are ‘male
mothers,’ giving birth through a penis-clitoris. Indeed, 10 to 20 percent of
the female bears in some populations have a birth canal that runs through
the clitoris, rather than forming a separate vagina. An intersex female

79
 bear actually mates and gives birth through the tip of her penis.”

Nature, and the biology which observes it, do not follow the prejudice that
that which is more common counts more. This, where it is apparent, would
be nothing other than a culturally-informed invention and discrimination.
But, in nature, such phenomena continue anyway. Consider, for example,
the spotted hyena of Tanzania:

“This form of intersexed plumbing is found in all females of the spotted

hyena (Crocuta crocuta) of Tanzania—in which the females have penises
nearly indistinguishable from those of the males. Aristotle believed these
animals to be hermaphrodites, but he was only half right. The first
scientific investigation in 1939 showed that a spotted hyena makes only
one-size gamete throughout its life, either an egg or sperm. Thus these
hyenas are not hermaphrodites. Rather, female spotted hyenas are
intersexed, like some female bears. The females have a phallus 90
percent as long and the same diameter as a male penis (yes, somebody
measured, 171 millimeters long and 22 millimeters in diameter). The
labia are fused to form a scrotum containing fat and connective tissue
resembling testicles. The urogenital canal runs the length of the clitoris,
rather than venting from below. The animal can pee with the organ,
making it a penis. Completing the picture, the female penis contains
erectile tissue (corpus spongiosum) that allows erections like those of a
male penis.”

Remarkable. Meanwhile, “In woolly monkeys, close relatives of the spider

monkey, the clitoris is actually longer than the penis. In still another close
relative, the muriqui, nipples are located along the sides, under the arms.
Thus, even in primates, a gendered body can be assembled on a
vertebrate chassis in many ways.” And not just one way. Do we imagine
nature cares? Now consider the following:

“On land, a male mammal’s testes descend from the body cavity into the

80
 scrotum, whereupon they become testicles. The scrotum is derived by
fusing the tissues that in females become the labia covering the vagina
and clitoris. By not bothering to fuse the labial tissue into a scrotum and
leaving the testes in the abdominal cavity, a developing male dolphin or
whale keeps his testes protected, using the labial tissues as protective
flaps. The clitoris continues to develop into a penis, as the urethra
becomes included along its axis.”

There is an interesting corollary to this, however: “If these steps took

place on land, a mammalian male would be classified as intersexed.” So
human classification, the way we invented to study things, doesn’t even
follow the same rules for things that live on land as it does for things that
live in water. Roughgarden comments that “we might speculate that male
dolphins and whales have achieved their genital architecture by making a
norm out of what would otherwise be considered an exceptional intersex
morphology.” But when it comes to “norms” and bodies what is a “norm”
anyway? It would seem to be nothing other than common ways in which
bodies seem to resolve and form themselves in order to carry out their
function, an entirely pragmatic process. Bodies just work in whatever
ways they work and there is little biological reason to be dogmatic about
it, either in our classification of bodies or as an observation of how
morphology actually manifests itself.

But this is not to leave gender roles out of this account for, as already
stated, these do not map one to one to sex roles in some kind of mirror
image. And so, for example:

“Even species thought of as typical, with one gender per sex and
individuals who maintain a single sex throughout life, often have gender
roles quite different from the traditional template. Indeed, in some
species, males (apart from making sperm) look and behave much as
females do in other species, and females (apart from making eggs) look
and behave much as males do in other species. If these species could

81
 express their thoughts about us, they would describe our gender
distinctions as reversed.”

This gives us the opportunity to cite the example of the Anglerfish:

“anglerfish… are all female—fisherwomen, not fishermen. Is the anglerfish

another example of an all-female species? Nope. Anglerfish males exist,
but they are tiny and are called ‘dwarf males.’ These anglerfish males are
incapable of independent existence. They have large nostrils for homing in
on perfumes released by the females and pinchers, instead of teeth, to
grasp little projections on the female. After a male attaches to the back or
side of a female, their epidermal tissues fuse and their circulatory systems
unite, and the male becomes an organ of the female. Multiple males may
attach to one female, a case of polyandry. They thereby turn into two or
more genetically distinct individuals in one body, a colony.”

A pretty novel arrangement! But this is not the whole anglerfish story as
Roughgarden continues:

“Over one hundred species of anglerfish are distributed throughout the

world at depths below one mile. For all anglerfish, the females are much
larger than the males. In other respects, though, anglerfish are diverse,
exhibiting a rainbow of their own. Some species have attaching dwarf
males that fuse with the body of a female, as just described; others have
both free-living males and attaching males; and still other species have
males who are exclusively free-living. Indeed, whenever one looks deeply
into any biological category, a rainbow is revealed. The living world is
made of rainbows within rainbows within rainbows, in an endless
progression.”

Now one may describe Roughgarden’s explanation there as “speculation”

but the anglerfish is just one kind of fish and it exhibits multiple ways in
which the sexes interact and in which gender roles are played out – in just

82
one single, solitary species. The charge of a diversity of behaviours and
existences is hardly a wild and reckless one, then. If we look across the
whole spectrum of nature, this is multiplied many, many times. We might
here mention the pipefish or the seahorse. In some species of the former,
the males [not the females] have “protective skin flaps that partially cover
the fertilized eggs” [until they hatch]. In the latter, the female seahorse
places an egg inside a pouch on the male seahorse. The eggs are only
fertilized inside this pouch by the male [forming embryos] and, in effect,
the male becomes pregnant. The male body then provides all the embryos
need in order for the young to be born. So, in nature, its not only females
that can give birth.

Let us move on to “multiple-gender families” that exist in biological life.

This, of course, means animal families that contain more than two
genders for it is the case that these exist in biological reality. Such gender
realities are not totally dissociated from biological bodies either for
Roughgarden states plainly that “the social roles of multiply gendered
animals are indicated by their bodies. Males or females in a species may
come in two or more sizes or colors.” But it is also about more than this
for “The two morphs approach courtship differently, have different
numbers of mates, have different arrangements of between-sex and
same-sex relationships, live different life spans, prefer different types of
real estate for their homes, exercise different degrees of parental care,
and so on.” Often, then, this is about identifying behaviours in a species,
and particularly in terms of sex characteristics, in such a way as differing
gender roles can be determined even in animals which, in terms of those
same sex characteristics, come equipped with the same plumbing. Put
simply, that bodies are biologically similar in terms of plumbing does not
mean that their gender roles are the same. Gender does not map simply
to biological sex in the animal world – a note for the dogmatic.

As an aside to this topic, Joan Roughgarden makes note of the fact that
some human biologists, when discussing this area, have found language a

83
problem. Such things as “multiple-gender families”, when discussed by
human beings, are not “neutral subjects” of no consequence in human
culture. And this can become a problem in a world of political pressures
were people are coerced this way and that in order to say things are like
this or like that because there are people who do not want them to be said
to be another way. We know, for example, that [unfortunately] there are a
number of groups in society who take the position – for their own reasons
– that things such as homosexuality and transgenderism are “unnatural”
and “against nature’s way”. These people are not, and would not, be
motivated to find such phenomena occuring, apparently very naturally
and with biological purpose, in the natural world. So when mating
strategies are observed in animals which apparently include same sex
activity or the mixing of more than two genders of animals occurs the
temptation in some might be to describe these as “alternative mating
strategies” or even “deviant”. This, I think, is just prejudice – and there is
no reason why a biologist cannot be prejudiced too. [I can think of at least
one famous one who is!] As Roughgarden asserts then: “Societies with
multiple genders are not easy to describe because we’re not prepared to
find what we actually see.” We can be tempted to operate with a sense of
“normal” which is prejudicial or even willingly misinformative. And so we
need to describe rather than prescribe. For language users such as
ourselves, this is not always easy.

But let us go on and give some examples of multiple-gendered goings on

from Roughgarden’s book. There are, for instance, examples of animal
families in which there are two kinds of males and one kind of female. An
example here is bullfrogs. Females will mate with both kinds of male but
the male kinds have different behaviours, the larger makes the noise
distinctive of the bullfrog but the smaller males are silent. Also a species
of the “two male, one female” kind is the plainfin midshipman, a fish.
Again, the male genders act differently from each other, not least in their
means of mating. There is a larger male gender which guards eggs and
defends territories where eggs are laid and a smaller male which darts

84
into a larger male’s territory to fertilize eggs before darting away again.
Here, as with the frogs, the larger fish emits a sound but the smaller male
is silent. There are, apparently, “hundreds” of fish species where there is
more than one male gender and these are indicative of genetic and
morphological [and so not merely behavioural] differences. As an aside
here, we may note that in the frogs the smaller male changes into a larger
male as he ages whereas in the plainfin midshipman the males are either
large or small for life. Gender can change or it can stay the same. Nature
apparently doesn’t mind either way.

Maybe two male genders and one female gender in a species is not good
enough for you? Then have species with THREE male genders and one
female gender [four genders total]. An example here is bluegill sunfish
and the genders are distinguished morphologocally [size] but also in
terms of behaviour, what we might appropriately describe as “gender
roles”. Here:

“Developmentally, the small and medium males are one genotype, and
the large males another. Individuals of the small male genotype transition
from the small male gender into the medium male gender as they age,
whereas individuals of the large male genotype are not reproductively
active until they have attained the size and age of the large male gender.”

But something more is going on here:

“A medium male approaches the territory of a large male from above in

the water and descends without aggression or hesitation into the large
male’s territory. The two males then begin a courtship turning that
continues for as long as ten minutes. In the end, the medium male joins
the large male, sharing the territory that the large male originally made
and defends.”

What explains this behaviour? Roughgarden says biologists studying

85
bluegill sunfish aren’t sure. But when a female appears [this is all about
mating, of course!] “the three of them jointly carry out the courtship
turning and mating. Typically, the medium male, who is smaller than the
female, is sandwiched between the large male and the female while the
turning takes place. As the female releases eggs, both males fertilize
them.” A fishy threeway! Roughgarden herself describes the medium
male here as a “feminine male” and speculates that:

“the medium male’s femininity as such has a genuine, nondeceptive role.

I suggest that the feminine male is a “marriage broker” who helps initiate
mating, and perhaps a “relationship counselor” who facilitates the mating
process once the female has entered the large male’s territory. This
service is purchased by the large male from the small male with the
currency of access to reproductive opportunity.”

I am being necessarily brief here and can only provide illustrations of

Roughgarden’s fuller and more worked out examples – for which you must
read her book for the finer and more fleshed out details. So let’s move on
to species with two male and two female genders [four genders total].
Consider the white-throated sparrow native to Ontario, Canada, which has
this gender split:

1. A male with a white stripe which is the most aggressive, calls often, and
is the most territorial.
2. A male with a tan stripe which is less aggressive and unable to defend a
territory from the white-striped male.
3. A female with a white stripe which is aggressive, calls spontaneously,
and defends a territory.
4. A female with a tan stripe which is the most accommodating of all.
When challenged with a territorial intrusion, she continues foraging.

Here “Ninety percent of the breeding pairs involve either a white-striped

male with a tan-striped female or a tan-striped male with a white-striped

86
female—attraction between opposites.” And so “White-throated sparrows
are a neat case of gender meshing. Two kinds of teams provide the same
total amount of protection and parental care, but divide the labor
differently.”

But there are still more possible combinations evident in the biological
world. How about three male and two female genders [five genders total]?
An example here is “the side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana), from the
American Southwest and West — [which] has both males and females of
multiple colors, signifying different genders in both sexes.” Roughgarden
describes these genders in the following way:

1. Orange-throated males are controllers. These “very aggressive,

ultradominant, high-testosterone” males defend territories large enough
to overlap the home ranges of several females.
2. Blue-throated males are less aggressive and juiced with less
testosterone. They defend territories small enough to contain only one
female, whom they “guard.”
3. Yellow-throated males don’t defend territories. Instead, they cluster
around the territories of the orange males, “sneak” copulations, and
masquerade as “female mimics.”
4. Orange-throated females lay many small eggs, 5.9 eggs per batch.
Orange-throated females, like their male counterparts, are very territorial
and, as a result, must distance themselves from one another, achieving a
maximum density of only one female per 1.54 square meters.
5. Yellow-throated females lay fewer but bigger eggs, 5.6 eggs per batch.
Yellow-throated females, like their male counterparts, are more tolerant of
one another and can achieve a maximum density of one female per 0.8
square meter.

As you may be gathering from these mounting examples, the interesting

thing about these multiple gender species is how the varying genders,
especially the less dominant, more cooperative genders [usually mid-sized

87
examples of their species who don’t spend their lives guarding or
aggressively maintaining their needs] manage to procreate and maintain
a foothold in the continuance of the species anyway. Here gender roles, or
a gender’s place in a performative system of inter-relationships, is linked
to biological sex [because every living thing has this reproductive feature]
but does not map to it in a necessarily binary way. As we are seeing,
there’s more than one way to lay or fertilize an egg. And there’s more
than one way biological sex can manifest itself in a society made up of
multiple possible gender roles. There are lots of examples in the biological
world, all of them funded quite naturally within the evolution of life itself.
So, “from what we’ve seen, the notion of a universal male or female
template is clearly false” - as Roughgarden herself concludes. Here size
and colouring matter as with the bluegill sunfish, the third, medium-sized
male of which is described as one of several examples of “cross-dressing”
animals by Roughgarden because its appearance is as a female’s.
However, “Feminine males especially provoke biologists to froth at the
mouth. Why would any self-respecting male want to appear feminine?”
Time to remind ourselves – yet again – that nature does not share our
prejudices.

Here we need to talk about language once more [something this book I’ve
written also does in two whole chapters – 2 and 5 – exactly because
examining our use of language and what it can do and is used for is so
important] and to note that biologists have called the smaller, silent
bullfrog a “sexual parasite”. Apparently, it is not a manly bullfrog like the
larger one that croaks. The smaller examples of male-gendered fish who
sneak around, darting in to fertilize eggs guarded by larger, more
aggressive males, are called “sneakers” and looked down upon as if they
are not being appropriately male in their sneakery. And then, of course,
there are the males who either look like or act like [or both!] females.
These are called “female mimics” as if they are pretending to be
something they are not [and this seems to suggest deliberately so if not
knowingly so] even though, in reality, they are simply being what they

88
are. They didn’t decide their shape or colouring or anything else about
themselves. It wasn’t their decision to appear as a female does. Both
these latter designations, the sneaker and the female mimic, are
sometimes regarded as deceptive or parasitic because they are not big,
bold males who guard and protect and fight for territory [implicitly, like a
“real male” should]. But the language used of biological research is not
without consequences. For example, consider the following comment from
Joan Roughgarden:

“The expression “female mimicry” prevents the study of gender variation.

The words suggest a male deceptively impersonating a female. In
biology, mimicry usually refers to such cases as an edible fly that looks
like an inedible bee. “Looks like” here means “exactly like,” not
“approximately like.” A fly that mimics a bee almost totally resembles a
bee. A good magnifying glass and technical knowledge are needed to tell
them apart. A bird flying quickly over the ground can’t spot the difference.
So-called female mimics don’t exactly resemble females, and all the
players have a long time to examine each other. I doubt that female
mimicry exists anywhere outside the imagination of biologists.

Thus biologists project scripts of their own prejudices and experiences

with male-male competition onto animal bodies and use insulting
language about animals. Far from being a sexual parasite, why not see
the silent male bullfrog as nature’s antidote to excess macho, preventing
the controller from grabbing unlimited power? Far from being a cuckolder,
why not picture the feminine male sunfish as nature’s peacemaker?
Biologists need to develop positive narratives about the diversity they’re
seeing. Then a new suite of hypotheses will emerge for testing, taking the
place of the shallow, pejorative, and far-fetched ideas that deceit theory
requires.”

The point here, I think, is that we should not project an imagined binary
onto EVERYTHING [including idealised characterisations of how the two

89
sides of the binary should be] and so require bogus theories in order to
explain phenomena that do not obviously fit within such a scheme. We
should attempt to describe what we see without making it fit what we
have already decided must be the case [much less, what we WANT to be
the case]. We need to be open to letting biological reality broaden our
horizons and realise that nature does not share our prejudices nor operate
with any fixed boundaries we may have artifically created or maintained.
If we are not careful our language can deceive us and mislead us, setting
up boundaries that biological realities are not bound to follow and, when it
comes to biology, we must remember that we are trying to follow how it
takes place rather than setting the limits for what is allowed to take place.
It is with this in mind that you may want to search out for yourself Joan
Roughgarden’s description of “transgender hummingbirds” in her book.
Overall, when it comes to the context of multiple-gender families in a
species, “While some sectors, like the end-runners, clearly compete with
the controllers, others (like the cooperators) are service providers working
under contract. Understanding this complex and interesting social
dynamic, an animal political economy, I believe is the next step for
evolutionary social theory.” And I can only say I wholeheartedly agree.
Genders are matters of relationship, behaviour and appearance [one is
here tempted to say “performance”] as much as they are of anything
sexual or biological about the thing that is engendered.

For the fact is that there is more going on in nature, in the biological
world, than some morally censorious and behaviourially repressed people
would like to think. One area where this is manifestly true is in the case of
same-sex sexuality in animals. [Here just one book Joan Roughgarden
references is “two inches thick with 751 pages reviewing same-sex
courtship, including genital contact, in over three hundred species of
vertebrates”.] This even affects the thinking of the modern patron saint of
biology, and particularly evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin. As
Roughgarden explains, “According to Darwin, homosexuality is impossible
because the purpose of mating is to transfer sperm with the intention of

90
producing offspring, and a homosexual mating can’t produce offspring.
So, if homosexuality is discovered, and if one also wishes to retain sexual
selection theory [males and females “negotiating” for the best mates for
the purposes of reproduction according to a heterosexual, binary
scheme], some fancy footwork is needed.” Yet who today, aside from the
uneducated and those who have chosen to play out their bigotry to the
full, thinks that homosexuality does not exist? Roughgarden goes on to
say that biologists here start talking of homosexuality as an “error” or
look to find some way in which it is a “trick” or serves some manipulative
or deceitful purpose. But there is another course of inquiry, of course: that
it is entirely natural and legitimate and is part of biological life in the same
way that any other non-controversial behaviours might be. In other words,
we do not need to evaluate it negatively and, indeed, one might wonder
why, upon doing so, it is.

Of course, showing that homosexuality exists in nature is not to say it is

mandatory for all species. [The same, by the way, would also be true of
any transgenderism discovered.] It is, by now, I hope, becoming clear that
species develop in their own ways in accordance with their interactions
with their own environments. This is basically what evolution is: change
over time of a species in relationship with and to its environment. Only an
abject fool would then imagine that any species that ever existed, in many
different environments, would or could develop in the same ways. This, all
by itself, should make us question the notion that everything should be
the same. This, in fact, is a very good argument for why rainbows of
diversity are to be expected rather than explained away, excused or
covered up. And of the fact that there is no “goal” in view [and so no
“manifestation of being” ruled out] in doing so. What can happen in
biology may happen – and nothing would have “deviated” from any “plan”
if it did. The more interesting thing would surely be the “animal political
economy” of which Joan Roughgarden speaks anyway. Biology works how
it works. We do not need entirely artificial and invented human valuations
muddying the waters of that in entirely illegitimate ways. Not only could

91
that lead to persecution of gay and lesbian human beings [which the
charge of homosexuality’s “unnaturalness” clearly has in the past] but it
would be inappropriate to the biologcal world which is laid before us in all
its constrained yet unconstrained reality as well.

We might start, in giving just a few examples of same-sex sexuality in

animals, by noting that, in previous examples given in this chapter, there
were differing gender manifestations of animals where courtship or other
pre-reproductive engagements took place [think of the bluegill sunfish, for
example] as part of an animal political economy. Such examples were
homosexual but heterogenderal [same sex but not same gender
relationships]. But what about an all-female species of lizards which
reproduce by cloning [so no egg needs a male – which doesn’t exist – to
fertilize it] and so in which no “sexual” activity even needs to take place?
Well, apparently, these female whiptail lizards, native to the Southwest of
the USA and Hawaii, “do go through an elaborate courtship, including
genital contact, prior to laying eggs”. These are lesbian lizards. One
interesting aside here is that in asexual species of these lizards [only
female] one of the females will copy almost exactly the activity of the
male in sexual species of these lizards [male and female]. Yet thinking of
this as “copying” falls into the fallacy, once again, of imagining one way
as normal or standard or definitive. It has additionally been observed
these females, if two are housed together, alternate their hormonal
cycles. We might even say they synchronise by each taking up a
complimentary role to the other. Biologists, of course, will want to
understand why they do this. Roughgarden discusses some reasons. But,
for my purposes, it seems enough to observe simply that they do it at all.
[Roughgarden does note, rather intriguingly, however, that females
housed with another female produced more eggs than ones left alone –
which would seem to indicate a reproductive advantage from such lesbian
behaviour.]

Let us move across to birds now. [But, before doing so, Roughgarden

92
notes that research on homosexuality in animals is not a popular topic for
researchers exactly because of the cultural conditions of its reception,
especially in the USA where a large proportion of the world’s science is
done or where it ends up going anyway. We may note how this deleterious
effect ties the hands of biological researchers from the off simply because
people are deterred from looking for what’s there from fearing of having
to admit that they have found it and what the human consequences for
them will then be. This has even, in the past, included US Congressmen
removing funding from projects thought to be in sync with a “gay
agenda”.] A study of the New Zealand pukeko found that this species of
swamp hen engaged in both different-sex and same-sex courtships. Male-
female, male-male and female-female courtings were all observed,
although not in anything like the same numbers for each [this does not
matter for frequency is not the point here and neither is arguing for one’s
“normalcy” in comparison with the rest]. Roughgarden tells us about this
that “A male-male mating or a female-female mating is identical to the
male-female mating... the only difference being the sex of the birds.”
There are, naturally enough here, cases of dominant hierarchies in place
of alpha and beta birds of both sexes. Roughgarden’s metaphor of an
“animal political economy” is a good thing to keep constantly in mind
when thinking about these interactions for they don’t take place in a
vacuum. One then has to wonder why some of these birds [for it wasn’t all
of them] take part in such behaviour in such a social environment.
Roughgarden must be right in stating about this that “same-sex matings
clearly occupy a place in this social system”.

Now let’s switch to the Eurasian oystercatcher where, in some cases,

breeding groups consist of one male and two females. They all engage in
sexual activity with each other. Sometimes this is aggressive/competitive
and the male ends up having to watch over two nests, one for each
female. At others, it is cooperative [although the alpha-beta nature of the
two females is preserved, the alpha getting more regular sex with the
male than the beta]. Obviously where this is male-female [and the male

93
has sex with both females he is with] this can lead to eggs being laid.
Roughgarden notes that “the females mate with each other only slightly
less often than they do with the male. Females switch back and forth
between being mounted or doing the mounting, so neither could be
identified as having a male or female ‘role.’ They also sit and preen their
feathers together.” Here the females share a common nest and, on
average, produce more nestlings as a result of their threesome
arrangement. Cooperation and mutual affection seems to have a result.

Let’s move to geese. Geese, says Joan Roughgarden, “are well known as
the avian example of the human social ideal of a lifelong marriage. Geese
may live for twenty years, and the pair-bond lasts more than a decade.
Gay geese marriages are stable too. About 15 percent of pairs are male-
male, and some couples have been documented to stay together over
fifteen years. A male is reported to show ‘grief’ after his partner dies,
becoming despondent and defenseless, just as between-sex partners do
when one dies. Geese sometimes form threesomes that are the reverse of
oystercatchers: a male pair is joined by a female and the trio raise a
family together.”

Now let’s turn to the very masculine sounding “bighorn sheep”. Of this
Roughgarden reports that:

“The males have been described as ‘homosexual societies.’ Almost all

males participate in homosexual courting and copulation. Male-male
courtship begins with a stylized approach, followed by genital licking
and nuzzling, and often leads to anal intercourse in which one male,
usually the larger, rears up on his hind legs and mounts the other. The
mounted male arches his back, a posture known as lordosis, which is
identical to how a female arches her back during heterosexual mating.
The mounting male has an erect penis, makes anal penetration, and per-
forms pelvic thrusts leading to ejaculation.”

94
Worth noting in this case is that the few male bighorn sheep who don’t
engage in this very gay behaviour [and so who are straightforwardly
heterosexual sheep] are described as “effeminate males”. They “live with
the ewes” as opposed to the gay men and are said to be less aggressive
overall as well as peeing in a crouching posture as the females do as well.
Here Roughgarden, rather amusingly to my mind, tells of the ways some
researchers have tried to excuse this blatant, masculine gayness in sheep,
regarding it as some kind of necessary “practice” for servicing the ewes
properly. Are they playing pretend or are there really perfectly happy gay
sheep who enjoy lots of anal sex with other male sheep? You decide but
Roughgarden also gives details of an experiment which seemed to show
that the gay sheep weren’t confusing rams for ewes. They just didn’t care.

But perhaps its only a few species, or rare ones most people don’t really
know about? Well:

“Many other creatures with hair have been documented as engaging in

same-sex mating. White-tailed deer, black-tailed deer, red deer (also
called elk), reindeer, moose, giraffes, pronghorns, kobs, waterbucks,
blackbucks, Thomson’s gazelles, Grant’s gazelles, musk oxen, mountain
goats, American bison, mountain zebras, plains zebras, warthogs, collared
peccaries, vicuñas (a llama), African elephants, and Asiatic elephants
have all been documented in scientific reports as engaging in some
degree of same-sex mating. In some species, same-sex mating is
sporadic; in others, very common, comprising over half of all copulations.
In some, males engage in most of the same-sex matings; in others, mostly
females do it; and in still others, both sexes participate. Same-sex mating
is common among female red deer, male giraffes, female kobs, male
blackbucks, male and female mountain goats, male American bison, and
male African and Asiatic elephants.

To continue, lions, cheetahs, red foxes, wolves, grizzly bears, black

bears, and spotted hyenas have been documented as engaging in same-

95
 sex mating. Again, the frequency varies from sporadic to common, with
either or both sexes involved, depending on the species. The gray
kangaroo, red-necked wallaby, whiptail wallaby, rat kangaroo, Doria’s
kangaroo, Matschie’s kangaroo, koala, dunnart, and quoll all enjoy same-
sex mating too, although at relatively low frequency.

The red squirrel, gray squirrel, least chipmunk, olympic marmot,

hoary marmot, dwarf cavy, yellow-toothed cavy, wild cavy, long-eared
hedgehog, gray-headed flying fox, Livingstone’s fruit bat, and vampire
bat show various degrees of same-sex mating. For example, female red
squirrels occasionally form a bond, with sexual and affectionate activities
leading to joint parenting. The female squirrels take turns mounting
each other, and raise a single litter of young. Although only one member
of the pair is the mother, both nurse the young. Only females form such
pair-bonds; male and female red squirrels don’t form pair-bonds. Among
male red squirrels, 18 percent of the mounts are homosexual. Concerning
vampire bats, recall that females form special long-lasting friendships
with affectionate gestures, including grooming and kissing. No genital-
genital contact has been reported among female vampire bats, but male
vampire bats hang belly to belly licking one another, both with an erect
penis.

The bottlenose dolphin, spinner dolphin, Amazon river dolphin, killer

whale, gray whale, bowhead whale, right whale, gray seal, elephant seal,
harbor seal, Australian sea lion, New Zealand sea lion, northern fur seal,
walrus, and West Indian manatee are exceedingly active in same-sex
genital behavior. Nearly everyone has marveled at the playful personality
of dolphins, often featured in children’s movies—lots of makin’ whoopee
going on in all directions. Male bottlenose dolphins are especially well
studied. A male places its erect penis into another male’s genital slit,
nasal aperture, or anus. They nuzzle each other’s genital slit with their
beak, and they can interact sexually in threesomes and foursomes. In
mixed-sex groups, homosexual activity occurs as much or more than

96
 heterosexual activity. The same-sex courtship is part of forming and
maintaining lifelong pair-bonds between male dolphins of the same age.
They bond as adolescents, becoming constant companions and often
traveling widely. Paired males may take turns watching out while their
partner rests, and they protect one another against sharks and predators.
On the death of a partner, the widower must search for a new companion,
usually failing unless he encounters another widower.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself and had to quote Joan Roughgarden at
length for a moment. But don’t forget the primates, our closest living
animal relatives. Of these Roughgarden says, “Homosexuality is so
conspicuous among primates, so in-your-face, that it cannot be ignored,
resulting in a relatively extensive literature going back to the 1970s.”

B:

So that’s a very, very brief and selective look at animal diversity

according to various vectors of interest and there is much more I could
say about this but unless I am to rewrite Joan Roughgarden’s book [from a
much less knowledgeable position and with much less wit and insight] I
must artificially compress the discussion here and move on to other
things. I have been talking, so far, about the animal kingdom generally,
giving specific examples as necessary. But what about human beings
[who are also animals] in particular, not least because I am one and you
reading this are a human being too?

Joan Roughgarden has an entire section of her book dealing with human
biological development and a further, concluding, one dealing with various
human cultural manifestations of gender. But, in the main, I do not intend
to go through them as I have with most of her first section [which is about
half of her main text] which covers diversity in animal bodies, appearance
and behaviour as they manifest themselves in nature. This is not because
I find these latter things unimportant; to the contrary, I find them vitally

97
important. If a man, Dave, wants to wear a dress and put on make up and
call himself Phyllis and has a distinct tendency to socialise with groups of
women rather than men – and if all of this corresponds in some way to
Phyllis’ sense of self – then I say that is something important which should
be respected and taken into account by other people – and even if it were
only to be but a cultural expression of one human existence.

But say, to take it a step further, that Phyllis feels that she has always
really been Phyllis and that Dave is just an identity others assigned her.
Then I still feel the same way about Phyllis then too. This feeling of Phyllis’
shoud be respected and taken into account by other people – just as, for
example, some species of bird or fish might take into account some third
or fourth gender of its species which has the biological plumbing of a
particular sex but the markings and behaviour of a gender that isn’t just
simply male or female. In the animal world, as we have seen in even my
brief summaries of Joan Roughgarden’s book, multiple genders are quite
common, certainly common enough to make denying their reality
impossible as a matter of fact and preposterously inauthentic if we should
try to nevertheless. My case here is then quite simple: we are animals too.
Our life, like all life, is of a piece with the rest of the life on this planet.
Why, then, should it suddenly, and arbitrarily, be subject to different rules
and understandings of its development and manifestation?

So, for the main part here, I have stuck to animal biology, of which human
biology is a part, but there is the vast world of plant biology we could
include too. I’m entirely sure I could argue for various expressions of
human gender expression based on this biology alone if I wanted to. [In
Roughgarden’s section on human rainbows she also gives some biological
evidence for transgenderism as an organic feature of human biology as
well, by the way.] Biology is not the binary many - but far from all –
human beings have sometimes chosen to see it as. Biology is itself a
rainbow, a spectrum, a gradation of differences and diversities. [This, of
course, is also to sideline or ignore non-Western voices who would argue

98
that any more simple binary is the invention of a certain Western mind
that is not shared by others. Oyeronke Oyewumi, for example, argues that
binary gender, as we know of it today, was not native to at least some
parts of Africa prior to white colonialism in her book The Invention of
Women.] If, on the other hand, one studies the West historically, for
example in terms of the history of sexuality [here Foucault’s history is
interesting and relevant] or in terms of the Greek and Roman case of
“eunuchs”, a possible example of a “third gender”, one finds interesting
and relevant differences with what we know of today.

At one point in Evolution’s Rainbow, as another example, Roughgarden

talks about potentially eight different brain configurations in human
beings which are biologically distinguishable and which, when added to
two basic body types, those with a penis and those with a clitoris, might
give sixteen possible “people types”. Whatever else this is, it is not a
basic sex binary “demonstrated by biology”. [Roughgarden actually goes
on to say in so many words that “brain-body combinations are limitless”.]
The truth is biology demonstrates a lot more than “a sex binary” and
bodies have a lot more going on with them than that some have a penis
and some have a clit. But, of course, one question that might arise is why
should we make “penis or clit?” the defining characteristic anyway? Such
a distinction does not define the whole of a human body [much less a
human person or a human life] anymore than it defines the whole of
biology. It is nothing other than an arbitrary, if not a polemical, choice in a
world in which biologists can write in serious-minded biological textbooks
that “studies of transgender brains have revealed an organic counterpart
to some of the variation in gender identity.”

Of course, many people have relied on a variation of biological

investigation to date to argue that bodies are binary. But one senses that
these same people would like the biological investigation to stop there
and go no further. Such people have “found” what they needed to find.
That’ll do, they think. Unfortunately for them, human investigation doesn’t

99
work like that. It goes on to find out further things, new things, even
things which recontexualise the old things. Indeed, Thomas S. Kuhn even
argued in 1962, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that
periods of “normal science” are interrupted by periods of “revolutionary
science” which create new paradigms for thinking about scientific
problems, paradigms which encourage thinking of things in different ways
or as matters of different relationships and which pose new questions
which had never been asked before. This speaks of anomalies in old
paradigms which new paradigms of thinking help better explain in regard
to phenomena because they fit together in better ways and solve old
problems. Kuhn's insistence was that a paradigm shift was a mélange of
sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically
determinate procedure. We might think of this in terms of people
speaking different languages and, today, when people described as
“gender critical” and others described as “trans” debate or, more often,
shout at each other, it does indeed seem as if they are talking past each
other or speaking different languages. Kuhn’s further insistence was that
this is what paradigm shifts in scientific thinking look like as well. The
paradigms become a matter of different taxonomies and flow into
incommensurability, as Kuhn would later also say. Once you begin to think
in a new way, there’s no going back to a reconstruction of the old.

But there is surely more to these matters than “biology” anyway. Life is
about more than classificatory discourse regarding the elements that
create it and that it creates. “Behaviour”, for example, is a huge part of
life and this is why even biological discourse explains biological
classification in terms of the behaviour of forms of life and not just in
terms of its ingredients and their interactions or its morphology. This, I
submit, makes human behaviour very important too. It can’t just be
dismissed as an irrelevance beholden to morphology, for example.
Cultural expression, then, is also an example of biology working itself out
as it is something done with bodies and within an understanding of their
meaning and significance as things which exist and interact with others.

100
Now let me give you an example of human, cultural behaviour from my
own, personal experience.

I was born in the UK and so, according to the frankly dumb classification
system that the international community uses, you would call me British.
[I call myself a citizen of the world, by the way, following in the footsteps
of the stateless Diogenes.] So, for most of my life, I have lived in the UK.
But there are two periods of my life – let’s, for sake of argument, call them
“the best bits” - where I lived in two different places in Germany, one a
small rural town and the other the capital, Berlin. The first had an outdoor
swimming pool surrounded by some fields in a compound and a building
which served as changing rooms. But these changing rooms weren’t
gender segregated and they weren’t split in two, one half for each binary
gender. It was simply a large room with a completely open changing area,
for the most part, and two rows of cubicles with curtains down either side
for those who wanted more privacy. Toilets were provided in a few
separate cubicles [with doors for privacy] as well. These changing rooms,
in the multiple times I visited the facilty as part of a mixed group of
people, male and female, adults and children, contained various adults
and children in an admixture of unconcerned families and individuals just
getting changed to enjoy the facilities or to go home.

Now to Berlin where, across the road from the Brandenburg Gate, in what,
between 1961 and late 1989, would have been known as “West Berlin”,
we find Tiergarten, a wooded, parkland area where people often walk or
sit in an area of the city given over to nature. But, on closer inspection,
and at certain times of year, some bits of Tiergarten have been more
“given over to nature” than at other times. At these times they have been
given over to natur-ism and one will clearly see, even from the pavement
or road, should one happen to pass, fully naked adult human beings
sunning themselves on the grass. I myself, once enjoying some cycling
around the city, was amazed to come upon such a sight, as I happened to
rest on a pavement bench overlooking the park, and to imagine how such

101
nudity would be received back home, for example, in the suburban park of
my youth which, even now, I walk in to this day. In that park, I would
imagine outrage and arrests and letters to the local paper and phone calls
to radio phone-ins. But in Berlin, in Tiergarten, it was normal and the
world just carried on around it, adults, children and all.

I am used to reading on social media of people, “gender critical” people,

who would find both of these scenarios apparently intolerable, depending
on who had made use of such facilities. And yet they both go on, no doubt
replicated multiple times across Germany as just one example, in a
modern democracy in the contemporary world perfectly normally. And this
is not to mention FKK – in German, “Freikörperkultur” [free body culture] –
in which “a naturistic approach to sports and community living” is
promoted in a number of places throughout Germany [there are maps
online for these places if one wishes to research it]. FKK is explicitly based
on the notion that the naked body is not a source of shame and, to be
honest, one imagines this philosophy must, in some part, inform the
notion of mixed, communal changing rooms that I experienced in rural
northern Germany for myself only a few years ago.

Now, since this is Germany and since we have a seemingly ever-present

consciousness of recent history, one might wonder what the Nazis thought
of this movement. Well, there was a 1933 Nazi edict issued by Hermann
Göring, the creator of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, to the effect
that “One of the greatest dangers for German culture and morality is the
so-called nudity movement.” This was described by him as a “cultural
error” not in line with Nazi aesthetics about men and women. During
1933-1945 FKK groups were either banned or Nazified so as to meet the
requirements of such an ethos. Today, however, Germany has an
Association for Free Body Culture which is part of the German Olympic
Sport Federation and which is the largest member of the International
Naturist Federation. Germans like to get nude, including engaging in
Nacktwanderung, naked hiking! Meanwhile, in the UK, the “naked

102
rambler” [ex-Royal Marine, Stephen Gough] is routinely arrested and re-
imprisoned every time he is released from prison because he goes off
naked rambling again [he has walked the length of Great Britain naked]
and this is, apparently, outrageous to British sensibilities. Think of the
children! In Germany, nevertheless, there are celebrated photographers of
the naturist movement – such as Lotte Herrlich who was a pioneering
female photographer of FKK activities.

You may think I have wandered off myself now - and away from my topic.
But I haven’t. Instead, I’ve wandered into areas of behaviour and culture
to make one simple point: cultural expression and cultural practices are
real, genuine, different and non-obligatory. It is no less “material”, and no
less important, than classifying bodies according to certain, entirely
arbitrary and polemical, categories. In any case, even if we did engage in
such classification, no one says that it has to matter and no one says
where it has to matter. These are further arbitrary decisions which we
may or may not be able to supply good reasons for. There is certainly no
straight line and unarguable course from classifications to human
practices. In one place people getting changed are highly regulated and
split into gendered rooms and in another they are all in the same room. In
some places people lie naked in parks, in others people naked in parks are
arrested. Biology determined nothing about this; it was all a matter of
social practices and social mores and of people getting along together. It
was a cultural and sociological issue and not a biological one. [Although
here I’m bound to sneak in that nature seems to care nothing for nudity
and neither do any of the sentient animals either – an insight which
triggered the Cynic lifestyle of Diogenes and others.] So, in other words,
our hangups about bodies are our’s to own and not matters of biology or
nature. They are cultural decisions and traditions. And none of them are
necessary. Things can be other ways. And probably are somewhere else.

The point about culture is that it doesn’t have to be one way [a point
almost everyone would accept]. It develops in ways that it can and none

103
of them are compulsory. There are, after all, different cultures because
some go one way and some go another. Biology, at least as Joan
Roughgarden tells its story, is a history of a similar negotiation. Biology is
not the story of two fixed, binary sexes which relate to each other in one
static way. Manifestly it is not. The examples to the contrary would be
endless. And so there is no reason why it should be in human beings
either. Rather, we should expect the opposite: diversity! Biology itself, of
course, can be read as the history of diversity. Life in one organism is not
separate or different from life in the others. Biology is a history of life that
has diversified as it has spread out in the plant and animal worlds. And,
within that, species themselves diversify so that there come to be multiple
versions of the same species, all related somewhere back in time, but
forever changing and evolving as their life circumstances change and they
react to them. The history of biology, just as the history of culture, is one
of diversity and change. It seems clear now that it could not be any other
for evolution, the name for the process under which life itself takes place,
is diversity writ large.

But I do not intend to labour the point for it is a simple point and it should
be an uncontroversial point. Those who deny it are King Canutes on the
beach trying to command the tide not to come in. They will fail and of
course they fail because the diversity which Joan Roughgarden makes the
founding image of her book is all around us in everything. No two living
things are exactly the same [even if they were produced by asexual
cloning as some things are]. This is a biological as well as an actual fact.
Reality, then, as it is, is fundamentally based in difference and diversity. In
that context any kind of stasis becomes a lie. Where it is wielded
rhetorically or polemically, it is a lie. The more biologists research, the
more diversity biologists find. And this is only the organic, biological kind
of diversity, although such diversity is, as Roughgarden details at length,
increasingly found and documented and leads to its own apparent
consequences.

104
But I want to caution a carefulness about this. I want to counsel that it
doesn’t matter if differences between animals, even human animals, have
a material, biological basis or not. We need not necessarily search for a
“trans gene” or trans-specific body morphologies. [This is not to pre-empt
if they do or do not exist, however. My argument is this is a separate
question to that of transgender dignity in any case.] Even if differences
between people only had a cultural basis that would not make them
invalid. The fixation of some on bodies, and particular polemical
definitions of them, is a lie of omission, a telling of a partial [in two
senses] story – because life everywhere is always more than bodies. It is
[at least] about practices and relationships too. Biological definitions of
bodies have next to no place here for these are sociological and not
biological matters. Having a certain kind of body is not a binary prison but
only a set of opportunities. It doesn’t tell you how you must live but is only
one piece in a much bigger puzzle, a puzzle which is a set of relationships
to the environment and to other beings wherever you live.

So “biology”, understood in the very narrow sense of body morphologies,

is never the whole story. Its only ever one part of the story. If people try to
use it to do service for the whole story they are probably using polemic to
try and railroad you into something. A person, a human being, is more
than a body in any case. A cadaver is a body. It also happens to be dead.
But a cadaver isn’t a person. It was a person but is a person no longer. A
person is alive and someone who is alive, I think everyone would [and
certainly should] agree, is more than just the bare facts of their body. A
person is how they look, how they dress, how they behave, who they
associate or identify with, what tasks they carry out, etc. This should be
uncontroversial. I have come to think of it like this: there are sexed bodies
but then there are also gender expressions which act as modifiers of the
“bare fact” of the bodies and their biological functions or possibilities. I
see no reason, then, why, in human beings, there cannot be at least
“feminine males” or “masculine females” as there are in numerous animal
species. Here, I would say, a gender expression - be it a self-assessment

105
or committed behaviour or a preference for a certain appearance or a
cultural practice or even all four - modifies the “chassis” which the given
person has. The person is then a sex modified by a gender expression.
[The metaphor here comes from synthesizers where an oscillator, which is
the basis of the sound, becomes modulated by another sound source
which modifies the original sound - which remains what it is but only as
the second source’s modulation affects it. It is then some sum of the two
together.] All human beings are in some way sexed for all people have
bodies. But all people have genders, which are just as real, too and the
one is not forced to affect the other in the same way or even in only two
ways. Biology suggests that diversity will always seize the day. We should
not then hinder it when and if it does nor put all human beings in one of
two possible straitjackets.

The world has, and sometimes has not, known [because it has looked the
other way] many diverse kinds of people. Some of these are gay, straight,
intersex, trans and cis. But others are Mahu, Two Spirit, Hijras, Tombois,
Vestidas and Guevedoche. Some have historically been eunuchs. Some of
these people have surgically modified their bodies. Others have taken
hormones. Yet others have worn clothes or make up “inappropriate” to
their bodies but fully in keeping with their gender expression or the
cultural practices of their tribe. Today there are some people who even
wish not to play with a binary expression at all, calling themselves “fluid”
or “enby” [non-binary]. Is any of this a problem? I suggest that in
biological terms it absolutely is not. Bodies are bodies. We each get given
one and it can be changed, subject to medical competencies, in a number
of ways. The other day I even imagined a future time when the entire
“plumbing” so beloved of some in terms of how they identify people could
be swapped out at will. What good would it do someone to say “Women
have X” then if anyone who wanted it could have surgery to give them X?
[Need one here also raise the spectre of a transhuman future where flesh
and blood is irrelvant?] So, for me, bits and pieces are not the issue. And
this should be clear anyway in that I don’t define a person as, or equate a

106
person with, a body - and I think that no one else should either.

The question in view is actually IDENTITY in any case. And this is to do

with bodies but, yet again, not restricted to them [for bodies are always
only part of the story]. I wrote about this more fully in a chapter of my last
book, Anarchy and Anarchisms, where I discussed “Anarchy and Identity”.
My basic point there – fully in line with my comments about language and
epistemology in chapters 2 and 5 of this book – was that identities are all
fictions of our own making that serve purposes, our’s or someone else’s.
This applies across the board in my thinking. Every identity is a fiction,
and a socially negotiated and constituted one. The short answer as to why
this is is because language uses reality, it does not correspond to it or
represent it [see especially chapter 5 below]. We are linguistic beings and
language is how we understand or make use of anything. It is a thing as
significant for what we think as the body that enables it. Our identities are
then always rhetorical, they are ways we relate to each other and the
world and indicate how we wish to be related to in return. These can be
relatively static and traditional, as in the binary theory, but they need not
be. There are examples in multiple places stretching back thousands of
years of those who didn’t fit into the two gender binary. So even the
charge of novelty is not accurate to reality if it is applied to trans people,
for example. But where such rhetorical identity becomes imposed,
however, it then becomes a means of control by arbitrary classification by
potentially or actually powerful others within a system of control that
seeks to domesticate those it regards as subservient to it. This is
authoritarian behaviour – and we should resist it. For language does not
reflect the world: it makes use of it and, in so doing, it creates it.

Consider the following sexual example. It envisages two people engaging

in penetrative sex.

1. A heterosexual cis man penetrates a heterosexual cis woman

2. A heterosexual cis man penetrates a heterosexual trans woman

107
3. A homosexual cis man penetrates a heterosexual trans woman
4. A heterosexual trans man penetrates a heterosexual trans woman with
a strap on penis
5. A heterosexual cis woman penetrates a heterosexual cis man with a
strap on penis.
6. A heterosexual cis woman penetrates a homosexual cis man with a
strap on penis
7. A homosexual cis woman penetrates a homosexual cis woman with a
strap on penis
8. A homosexual cis man penetrates a homosexual cis man
9. A pansexual trans woman penentrates a pansexual cis man
10. A bisexual cis woman penentrates a bisexual cis man with a strap on
penis

I don’t think I have listed all the possible combinations here [you might
want to imagine how many more there could be] but I hope that at least
10 variations has made my point. What is the point here? It is that
whatever combination of sexed bodies, gender roles and sexual
proclivities all the people listed in the 10 examples above have used to
describe themselves, they are all carrying out exactly the same action .
Some of them have used the equipment that came naturally. Others have
improvised. Yet, whatever the diversity of the people concerned, each has
taken part in the same activity. “What they are” has not stopped them
doing that as if differences in bodies or in gender descriptions or in sexual
proclivites amounted to some absolute difference in kind that functioned
as some insurmountable boundary of nature. You would know if you had
found such a boundary [such as a human inability to fly] for it would
literally be insurmountable. So, just as sociological issues are not
biological issues, here, too, not everything is biologically determined and
judged. Gendered and cultural issues are matters, if you like, laid over
bodies and not simply determined by bodies. People, as animals, have a
habit of finding a way, should they find a reason to want to.

108
We may not be able to change bodies fully at this point [but even there
medical progress will make what is possible grow more and more as
technology advances along with understanding of the biological processes
that make up bodies] but gendered habits and appearance and cultural
practices and observances can change. A biological narrative like
Roughgarden’s suggests this is entirely natural and to be expected. It is
noticeable, for example, how much more acceptance gay and lesbian
people have today. Of course, it is still not universal and you can still find
people who regard it as sinful or as an illness that, so such people say,
those who “have it” need to be cured of. This will likely always be the
case, unfortunately. But, in general terms, homosexuality is far more
accepted today than it was 50 years ago in the Western world of my
experience. Wherever education about it spreads, it becomes more
accepted too. So I suggest we need to see things like this less in hard,
biological terms as a matter of the innate properties of bodies which
divide us into universal classifications it is impossible to cross [such
classifications are, in fact, always only human and always only rhetorical]
and more in terms of social relationships and cultural practices. Who uses
a bathroom and on what basis is a very dumb hill for anybody to die on
but the greater tragedy is that people would want to divide human beings
on the basis of dubious “differences” in the first place in a world in which
difference and diversity is creation’s greatest glory rather than its biggest
flaw, something some authoritarian human beings take it upon
themselves to artificially “correct” or police.

FOUR: Human’s Lib: An Exploration of Ideas in Song

Human’s Lib is the title of a 1984 album by the British musician, Howard
Jones. The title riffs on the phrase “Women’s Lib”, popular in the 1960s,
70s and 80s, and referring to the movement for women’s liberation from
the patriarchal structures of society and culture. But Jones, a Buddhist
[this is important in what follows], changes it to “Human’s Lib” which
suggests the album is to be about human liberation. If we read the lyrics

109
of the songs on Human’s Lib we find that they are not the common mix of
insipid love songs and empty nursery rhymes. Whether one takes them
seriously or not [and many contemporaneous reviewers seem not to have,
not aided, I’m sure, by the fact that the genre of Jones’ music was
synthpop], it seems that, for good or ill, Jones has something to say. Not
all the lyrics are written by Jones [he has a writing partner on a majority of
the songs, a writing partner he seems to have fallen out with immediately
upon finding fame] but they all fit together under the auspices of a way of
viewing the world that points towards human liberation. It seems that with
Human’s Lib, and right from the very first song called Conditioning, Jones
wants his listeners to ask questions. Here are the lyrics to Conditioning:

Well you're not, you're not who you think you are
Well we think that you are John or Dave
But you're not, you're not who you think you are
Jumbled mass of preconceived ideas

From our birth we were given an identity

People told us we were great or small
From our birth we were given rules of right or wrong
Not forgetting the bullies at school

The world teaches us to think that life is full of limitations

The world tries to make us think that there are loads of limits
The world teaches us to think that life is full of limitations
The world tries to make us think that there are loads of limits

Welcome to conditioning
Welcome to conditioning

And as the world makes us feel great

And as the world makes us feel small
Oh so convinced of our identity

110
If we only knew it we just can't believe it we just won't believe it

Leading us to think that we are such a success

Conning us to think that we are just a failure
Leading us to think that we are so intelligent
Conning us to think that we are just a Dodo Dodo

Welcome to conditioning
Welcome to conditioning

Who is to say what is what

Welcome to conditioning
Who is to say what is what
Welcome to conditioning
Who is to say what is what
Er, sorry, ha ha
Who is to say what is what
Welcome to conditioning
Who is to say what is what
Welcome to conditioning
Who is to say what is what
Welcome to conditioning

With Conditioning Jones kicks off Human’s Lib with a slap in the listener’s
face. You think you are this, you think you are that. You are told you are
this, you are told you are that. But you’re not. You’re not who you think
you are. We are given identities, told who we are by parents and teachers
and bosses and governments and various authorities, these things are
imposed upon our existence so that they become part of it. We are told
we are smart or stupid or clever or irrelevant. We are told we can’t do this
and that and given rules of right and wrong… And Jones calls all this
“conditioning”.

111
The identity question is particularly important here, not just for the song,
in which it plays a major part, but also for my project in this book. The
song starts by saying that we are not who we think we are. It says the
names we are given, and these are given most usually in social and
familial contexts by parents, are not who we are. Is there a sense here
that these identifications – which we might see as kinds of classifications,
even as things which put us in a context and define limitations for us – are
putting us in a box and defining possibilities? Do we imagine that each
young child grows up to be told the same things about who they are, what
life is and what possibilities they will have within it? And then there is that
part in which your parents decide what and who you are. They name you,
they condition you to the context of your family and to your family’s place
in a wider social world and educate you about it. They tell you that you
are male or female and define socially acceptable behaviour and
understandings for you even as much as they tell you your place [and to
know your place]. Welcome to conditioning.

Yet Jones is not going to have this. He sees this as “leading” and
“conning”. But why should we be either led or conned? The world tries to
tell us who we are but Jones is convinced we are not who it tells us to be
and that “If we only knew it we just can't believe it we just won't believe
it”. We can UNbelieve it. And so he asks “Who is to say what is what?”
repeatedly. And this is a very pertinent question. For who is to say? Are
we to play our part in the conditioned world of the status quo in which we
play the often inauthentic roles assigned to us by others which keeps
everything the way it is, the world of “know your place”… or something
else? For the fact is that Jones tells us we aren’t who we are told we are or
who we are told to be. We are not “John or Dave”. But who then are we? It
seems we are potentially whoever we want to be. If the social world is
“conditioning” then to think differently, to refuse to be conditioned, is an
act of self-actualisation. It is to answer the question, “Who is to say what
is what?” with “I am” [or, possibly, “No one is”]. Jones’ song wants us to
wake up from the slumber that is conditioning and to realise that we are

112
not what the world tells us we are even as he tells us that this is what the
world will try to tell us anyway.

The second song on Human’s Lib is called What is Love? and it is Howard
Jones’ biggest hit to date. The lyrics, as with Conditioning, were originally
written by his writing partner, Bill Bryant, a man he seems to have fallen
out with in unpleasant and mysterious circumstances when on the cusp of
fame [for, subsequently, Jones has made as little mention of Bryant as
possible]. Bryant was a man who lived in the same area as Jones who had
interests in Eastern spirituality and Jones came under his influence in the
years prior to the release of Human’s Lib, consequently setting a number
of Bryant’s lyrics to music, or reworking songs he had composed with two
of his brothers, who also knew Bryant, as a result. By far the most well
known of these is What is Love? as this is, in fact, the only one of the co-
written Bryant tracks which was a single, the rest being album tracks.

The fact is, however, that whether the lyrics to the songs on Human’s Lib
were written by Bill Bryant or not the songs as a whole still seem to give
evidence of a particular mindset, one in which What is Love? plays a part.
Whatever the relationship between Bryant and Jones, Jones was clearly
influenced by his relationship to Bryant and that influence carries over
into songs which he wrote by himself [such as Pearl in the Shell and Hide
and Seek, which are the two songs following What is Love?, as well as a
number of songs on the follow up album, Dream into Action, which was
completely written by Jones himself]. The vagaries of the relationship
between the two men writing the songs on the album are then, not so
important in the final analysis. Rather, interpreting the lyrics and asking
where they are going and what mindset informs them is the point here.
We have seen here that, already with Conditioning, this seems to be, in
some sense, a matter of personal enlightenment. Let us see whether this
continues on into What is Love?:

I love you whether or not you love me

113
I love you even if you think that I don't
Sometimes I find you doubt my love for you
But I don't mind
Why should I mind?
Why should I mind?

What is love anyway?

Does anybody love anybody anyway?
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
Whoh oh

Can anybody love anyone so much that they will never fear?
Never worry never be sad?
The answer is they cannot love this much nobody can
This is why I don't mind you doubting

What is love anyway?

Does anybody love anybody anyway?
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
Whoh oh, whoh oh oh, whoh oh ooh

And maybe love is letting people be just what they want to be

The door always must be left unlocked
To love when circumstance may lead someone away from you
And not to spend the time just doubting

What is love anyway?

Does anybody love anybody anyway?
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
Whoh oh, whoh oh oh, whoh oh ooh

114
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
Whoh oh, whoh oh oh, whoh oh ooh
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?

The first thing to note here is that this is a song about love – but it is not a
love song, a staple of popular music. The song is, in fact, a series of
questions and questioning seems very important to the mindset from
which it comes. [Bill Bryant also wrote the words to another Howard Jones
album track called Always Asking Questions in which one lyric is “Don’t
stop asking questions”. On Dream into Action Jones writes a song based
on chapter 20 of the Daodejing called Is There A Difference? showing that
he, even by himself and not singing Bryant’s words, can be in questioning
mode as well.] This song, in fact, might simply be only questions for, even
though the lyricist begins by claiming to love, he later seems to state that
he is not even sure what love is. Yet he also wonders how much someone
can love and comes to the conclusion that people cannot love so much
that things like fear and sadness are banished. Love has its limits and so
doubts are inevitable and to be accepted as part of the consequences of
love.

Doubt, in fact, is a recurring subject and the refrain “What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?” is to wonder if love is real or only a
phase, a kind of relationship we can pass into and out of, or a context, a
situation or relationship between people that we can find ourselves in.
This may seem effete to some but I cannot find it within myself to impugn
the mind which questions. As with the prior Conditioning, “Who is to say
what is what?”. Even Nietzsche, who knew the rejection of the seemingly

115
one woman he had set his heart on in his whole life, states in his notes
that love is a kind of madness which changes the way we see people, their
faults becoming unimportant and their being becoming transformed until
or unless we fall out of love with them again. So it is not wrong to ask
about love and its effects for “love”, whatever it is, patently has effects
and changes how we view the world.

The third verse here focuses on love not being about controlling people.
And so love is not a binding of another person to yourself. It is not a
dominating influence. This might be imagined to be a response to the
“doubt” the one loving has of the beloved, a beloved the lyricist has
already pledged to love in the opening lines regardless of whether they
are loved back in return or not. Yet the musing or reflecting context of this
song betrays a lyricist thinking of love in terms of their own understanding
of the world. It is about love and its entanglement not disturbing an inner
peace, it seems to me. It is about “I” [repeated several times in the lyrics]
and about letting people go if this is how things turn out such that the
love remains even if the beloved does not. What matters is that “doubt”
should not disturb your inner peace.

The third track on Human’s Lib is Pearl in the Shell, the first track written
entirely by Jones himself. The lyrics are relatively few:

And the fear goes on shadows

And the tear flows on for nothing
And the fear goes on shadows
And the tear flows on for nothing

Under his nose was a dream come true

Been there all the time and he almost knew

And the fear goes on shadows

And the tear flows on for nothing

116
And the fear goes on shadows
And the tear flows on for nothing

Under his nose was a dream come true

Been there all the time and he almost knew
Thoughts of people in misfortune stopped him doing things well
His duty was to use it - left his pearl in the shell

Given Jones’ personal history, first his entanglement with the Buddhist, Bill
Bryant, who co-wrote the majority of the songs on Human’s Lib – but also
his subsequent active adherence to the teachings and especially the
practices of Nichiren Buddhism, a type of Buddhism which focuses on
more than a theory of reality or a meditative practice, thinking that it is
the substance of a practititioner’s life, that place where mind and body,
materiality and spirituality, meet, that is important, it is easy to read this
short, compact lyric as a catechism regarding personal enlightenment.
Nichiren Buddihism expressly holds to the belief that all people have an
innate “Buddha-nature” [the possiblity to become what Buddhists call
“enlightened” or “awake”] and are therefore inherently capable of
attaining enlightenment in their current form and present lifetime.

Further, this type of Buddhism believes, after the person it is named after,
Nichiren himself, that conditions in the world are a reflection of the
conditions of the inner lives of people. As the people, so the world. Thus,
what is required is that people themselves change in order to change the
world. I am sure readers can see how such thinking is compatible with the
lyrics of the three songs so far considered. In the case of Pearl in the Shell
the lyric is about not letting fear or sadness or your reaction to the
misfortunes of others stop you or distract you from releasing your “pearl”
from its shell. Here the pearl might be seen as the enlightenment within
yourself that should be let into the world [in order to help change it]. The
point seems to be that it is easy to becomed burdened or weighed down
by the world we see around us but the idea is to become enlightened and

117
so to change it.

This leads us into the fourth track on Human’s Lib, the second in a row
written by Jones alone. This is another track which was also a single and
its title is Hide and Seek. Its subject is an Eastern-inspired mythology
which Jones offers us as a way for us to understand ourselves. The lyrics
are as follows:

There was a time when there was nothing at all

Nothing at all, just a distant hum
There was a being and he lived on his own
He had no one to talk to, and nothing to do
He drew up the plans,
learnt to work with his hands
A million years passed by and his work was done
And his words were these...

Hope you find it in everything,

everything that you see
Hope you find it in everything,
everything that you see
Hope you find it, hope you find it
Hope you find me in you

So she had built her elaborate home

With it's ups and it's downs,
its rains and its sun
She decided that her work was done,
time to have fun
and she found a game to play
Then as part of the game
She completely forgot where she'd hidden herself
And she spent the rest of her time

118
Trying to find the parts

Hope you find it in everything,

everything that you see
Hope you find it in everything,
everything that you see
Hope you find it, hope you find it
Hope you find me in you

There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at all
Just a distant hum

It is suggested that with this lyric Jones speaks of an original being which
manifests the universe and then 'loses' him/herself [Jones uses both male
and female pronouns in the song to defeat the duality of a traditional
gender split – the being can be described as both or either] in the creation
as part of a game of hide and seek. The ‘goal’ of life is then to discover
that one is nothing other than a part of the action of this original
primordial being. For myself I do not even think it is necessary to think of
“a being” [i.e. a god] here for “being” might do just as well [as well as
being a better philosophical understanding of the myth, in my view].
Jones, once again, is wanting us to think outside the box – and not least
the box of self as we have come to think of our conditioned selves.
Indeed, within the mythology of this song, something we should
remember Jones wrote himself rather than under the explicit influence of
Bill Bryant, the self is nothing other than “everything” or the action of
primordial being. Jones wants “me” to find itself in “you” and imagines
that this is a possibility in a universe of inevitable and unavoidable
entanglement and interrelationship. Jones is here suggesting, in the lyrics
of a song which, as a single, had the instrumentals “Tao Te Ching” and
“China Dance” as suggestive titles on its B side, that “all is one” and that
each of us entails the other and that everything entails everything else.
This might not be clear to us in a world that has individualised and

119
instrumentalised everything – even by splitting things up and separating
them into things. But Jones refuses this vision for that in which nothing
begets being and everything that is is a part of the same being – and so
ontologically connected at the most intimate of levels.

The fifth track on Human’s Lib is the track Hunt the Self and is co-written
by Jones and Bryant. As a song it is nothing other than a manifesto for
personal enlightenment as the lyrics will now demonstrate:

Messing around I've wasted my time for years

Listening to friends who keep filling me up with ideas
Having deep talks with scholars who sound so fine
Hearing this sham is like getting drunk on cheap wine

Well it's time for a change

I've got to move on
There's got to be more than this
The feeling is strong

Look in better places gonna look inside

Gonna get higher something is pulling me on
Breaking down the old ways feeling no regret
Gone are the shaky sands I've been building on

Well it's time for a change

Well I've lost lots of friends
I've got to move on
By sticking to my ground
There's got to be more than this
I don't give a damn
The feeling is strong
Just look what I've found

120
Here I come now got no time to frown
Nothing in my way now nothing can bring me down
Feel that surge open the doors around
Higher and higher the world is my hunting ground

Well it's time for a change

I've got to move on
There's got to be more than this
The feeling is strong

The key line here is the first line of verse 2: “Look in better places gonna
look inside” and reflects the Buddhist belief, which is also held by Nichiren
Buddhists of the kind Howard Jones would become, that everything
necessary for enlightenment – Buddhahood – the human being already
has. It is not a matter of some learning or teaching, of gaining something
one does not have, but it is, in fact, a matter of letting go of the
distractions to that which you already have. This album, of course, is
called Human’s Lib and so, in this song, such personal enlightenment is
presented as a liberation. But from what? Some possible examples here
are wasting time, unenlightened friends, empty scholarship and the old
ways. That the song is called Hunt the Self [the address Bill Bryant would
give his own personal website much later on] is an indication that such
personal exploration and authenticity is not something automatic or
given. It must be sought out.

The sixth track of Human’s Lib is Howard Jones’ first and breakout track,
New Song. The lyrics, in many respects, echo the thoughts of Hunt the
Self and are as follows:

I've been waiting for so long

To come here now and sing this song
Don't be fooled by what you see
Don't be fooled by what you hear

121
This is a song to all of my friends
They take the challenge to their hearts
Challenging preconceived ideas
Saying goodbye to long standing fears

Don't crack up
Bend your brain
See both sides
Throw off your mental chains

I don't wanna be hip and cool

I don't wanna play by the rules
Not under the thumb of the cynical few
Or laden down by the doom crew

Don't crack up
Bend your brain
See both sides
Throw off your mental chains

Don't crack up
Bend your brain
See both sides
Throw off your mental chains

I've been waiting for so long

To come here now and sing this song
Don't be fooled by what you see
Don't be fooled by what you hear

This is a song to all of my friends

They take the challenge to their hearts
Challenging preconceived ideas

122
Saying goodbye to long standing fears

Don't crack up
Bend your brain
See both sides
Throw off your mental chains

This song reads as some kind of “self-help” challenge and, at the time of
the song’s release, some reviewers essentially accused the whole album
of being written this way. It seems to echo the reported situation of Jones
in the time before he found fame when he, with some others, was a
member of a small group led by Bill Bryant who concentrated on Buddhist
teaching and ideas. Jones himself has written that his lyrics at the time
were often not that well received as they were neither generic love songs
nor something with the “in your face” rock sensibility many preferred in
the years before synths and electronic music came to completely take
over popular music. Jones himself sees such lyrics as being about
positivity and an outgoing, exploratory, progressive mental attitude.

This song was written by Jones alone and contains a juxtaposition

between what he wants [the “I” sections] and the sections where he is
speaking to his hearers. A theme throughout is that people are weighed
down by ideas which can either be “preconceived” [i.e. not things you
arrived at yourself?] or thought of as “mental chains” of thought. We
might say these are unhelpful ideas where ideas should be helpful, useful,
to those inhabited by them. Jones, at one point pre-fame, had a habit of
using question marks in his promo material to indicate a questioning
attitude and this is well exhibited here as in others of the songs on
Human’s Lib. The idea is that one should advance oneself beyond the pre-
conceived ideas, fears and mental chains to a new you that takes you
beyond being “fooled” by what you see or hear in the world around you.
Once again, this song is about taking personal responsibility for yourself
and your thinking which is a very Buddhist attitude to have. It will involve

123
“bend[-ing] your brain” but then reweaving your thoughts so that you
come to think differently as this always should do.

The seventh track on Human’s Lib is called Don’t Always Look at the Rain
and the lyrics are as follows:

Some people I know have given up on their lives

Drowning their sorrows, and mumblin', and forgot the fight
We can tip the balance we can break those barriers down
Little things count as much as the big and turn it all around

And it's oh, don't always look at the rain

No, don't look at the rain

Some people I know have lost their feel for mystery

They say everything has got to be proved, this isn't a nursery
And Joseph who's five years old, stops fights in his playground yard
No more fights and bigotry, oh is it so hard

And it's oh, don't always look at the rain

No, don't always look at the rain
Ha, don't always look at the rain

And tell me, is it a crime to have an ideal or two

Evolving takes it's time, we can't do it all in one go
Doesn't have to drive us all mad, we can only do our best
Let the mind shut up, and the heart do the rest

And it's oh, don't always look at the rain

No, don't always look at the rain
Ha, don't always look at the rain

This is a reflective song [in lyrics and in tone] where Jones, again the sole

124
writer of the track, the last track on the album he will write by himself,
muses on people he knows and their apparent attitudes to their lives.
They are those who have given up or who are trying to forget or they want
cold, hard data and are unable to deal with “mystery”. But Jones can’t go
along with this negative attitude and, in the second verse, says that even
little kids can instinctively do the right thing. This suggests, as in other
lyrics, that’s its not about great learning and big, significant advances.
“The little things” matter just as much and, though they receive no great
fanfare and maybe seem empty and meaningless, they are not so. So
Jones urges his hearers not to always fear the worst or see things in a
negative frame of reference. He even speaks of having “ideals” as if this is
something frowned upon that people are socially dissuaded from having
for fear of being berated for it. Things take time and we can only do our
best. And, besides, everything isn’t always about the mind and thought.
Sometimes its just a matter of the heart and there’s nothing wrong with
that. This is essentially, then, a song about positive thinking, something
Jones himself has said his songs are about.

The eighth track on Human’s Lib is one called Equality and it is one in
which the lyrics were written by Bill Bryant and which Howard Jones took
over and set to music. They are as follows:

Everybody wants to feel happy, even if you think that you don't
Everybody wants to know the secret, even if you think that you don't
Everybody thinks they're different from the next man now
But we just got to realize we're just the same

Always appear to be someone better

You know there’ll always appear to be someone worse
You know there'll always appear to be someone better
You know there'll always appear to be someone worse, oh

Everyone has got their character

125
Everyone has got their personality
But the longing is still the same
So what is the answer be easy on yourself
Make yourself feel at ease maybe that's the answer

Always appear to be someone better

You know there’ll always appear to be someone worse
Always appear to be someone better
You know there'll always appear to be someone worse, oh

We're just the same don't you know

We're just the same don't you know
Looking over there
He looks different, she looks different
They might even be different
But we're just the same, don't you know
We're just the same, don't you know
We're just the same

The lyrics here are relatively few, as in most pop songs, but in this case I
think quite a lot is being said in a song expressly called “Equality”. But is
the song about “equality”? I don’t think it is. Its about asserting that
equality is something people already have because “We’re just the same”
- by which we must assume the lyrics mean “all equally human beings”.
So the apparent disjunction in different/same from the lyrics is disarmed.
To be different, which is trivially and universally true, does not mean we
are not also examples of the same thing – human beings. We are all
different and the same at the same time. This is actually quite a powerful
[and necessary] combo for, in the context of previous lyrics in the song,
different can be used to leverage better and worse or worth more and
worth less. The song suggests this is mere appearance and that it can’t be
avoided: “always appear to be someone better”, etc. The song seems to
suggest we are individuals with common longings who don’t realise that is

126
the case. We all think our case is unique, personal, but, the song says, it
isn’t. And it thinks realising we are “the same” will be some kind of
revelation which makes a difference.

I wonder if this is true? In modern, political context realising that everyone

is the same would certainly be a novelty for some in an ever more
partisan world. But there, at the same time, many powerful individuals
and bodies who are motivated to propagandize for the view that
differences are material, permanent and real. These people want human
beings divided, at each others’ throats, regarding each other as actually
and essentially different. They talk as if differences of wealth, of sex, of
gender, of class, of race, were written into the DNA of reality and are
insurmountable, things no one can do anything about. The lyricist here
does not agree. Differences are not to be denied. But the difference
cannot erase the sameness – instead, it co-exists with it, a more powerful
truth. The lyricist counsels being at peace with yourself about all this. In
“sameness”, in commonality, the song Equality finds the more pertinent
truth.

The ninth track on Human’s Lib is another song in which the words were
written by Bill Bryant and its called Natural. In many ways I would regard
it as the most “difficult” track on the album lyrically. The words are as
follows:

Everything around us is natural don't fight it

Don't disagree with this and that, no
Astrology, Evolution, this-and-that-ity
This religion and that, no

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be?
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh

127
Your beliefs, philosophy, don't give us peace
Destruction of our enemy, does it makes us right?
If you took them apart and destroyed them all now one by one
This still won't make it work, no

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be?
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh

Everything we like and don't like is whole and natural

I know is doesn't feel like it and the world seems wrong
But if we don't like it now then who can we blame?
Blame god, be still, find a harmony

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be?
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be? Oh

To some readers these lyrics might seem scarily laissez-faire. Everything

is natural? Nothing should be fought? We should let things just be as they
are? This is not what we have been taught in a world of right and wrong,
good and bad, proper and improper. But I don’t think that when Bryant
wrote these lyrics he was thinking that claiming something was “natural”
was using nature as an authority which justified a thing’s existence. It
seems to me more like he is saying that things naturally arise and come
and go for their own reasons. Everything has some kind of explanation
and arises because its of use to someone, somewhere. It is not for us then
to have to account for everything or agree or disagree with it. Much of it,
even most of it, may be nothing to do with us and need not be.

But this song also seems an argument against believing that one way or

128
philosophy has all the answers, that “nature” can be put in a human-
shaped, ideological straitjacket whether religious or philosophical or
whatever else. The lyrics even go so far as to say that if we attack and
beat down our ideological enemies that doesn’t necessarily make us right.
It hints at the idea that “right” is not something we can ultimately decide
and lays a path to thinking of right and wrong in moral senses as beyond
our pay grade, as if thinking of human beings as arbiters of things is itself
a straitjacket we need to escape from. As such, it opens an interface
between us and the world of our experience based on feelings. It talks
about what we feel but not about that as necessarily something pertinent
to the world even if it feels so to us. Often things are, to us at least, a
matter of what “we like and don’t like”. But what does that have to do
with anything? What can we do about it if we feel something? Often
nothing or very little. Bryant counsels “Blame God, be still, find a
harmony” in this case. Find your own peace with things for the ability to
organise what is natural under any human thinking is beyond us.

The final song on Human’s Lib is the title track itself. The words are as
follows:

Sometimes I'd like to go to bed

With a hundred women or men
And lose my mind in lust and drink
And to hit some people into feeling good, oh

Sometimes I'd like to dance in the street

Don't wanna go to work, just wanna lay in bed all day

Why don't you then

Why don't you then

Life just seems oh so meaningless

And who can blame us for wanting these things?

129
But you just try being free my friend
And everyone will hate your guts, I only want to free

This is another song with relatively few lyrics but, as with Natural, they
might seem jarring to some. There are, I suggest, two ways to take this
song: the first is as a whiny teenager who doesn’t want to do as they are
told and sulks and rants. “They will learn,” the cynicised adults think to
themselves. The second is to take the words seriously, to ask after
libertarian sex, satiating bodily desires, not going to work [or even, shock
horror, not having a job!] and just living your life at your own
recognisance. I can think of lots of people [we call them “capitalists”] who
would be aghast at such an idea. But the key to this song is the final two
lines:

But you just try being free my friend

And everyone will hate your guts, I only want to free

Freedom is not doing as you are told. Its not turning up for work. Its not
being told who you can have sex with, what you can eat and drink or if
you can take drugs or not. Freedom is not being told who you are and how
you must behave. Freedom is not allowing the world to order and classify
you in a hundred ways on a daily basis – or taking no notice if it does. So
isn’t it right that the people who wake up to this and put freedom first are
seen as lazy or ideological or trouble makers or feckless or a hundred
other negative things? Don’t these people argue that the world is a
certain way and its our duty to fit in with it? WHY? People, quite often,
hate people who want to be free. Perhaps its because they expose that
everyone around is not free in doing so. They lay at their feet the
consequences of the status quo and the consequent need for action,
perhaps troublesome action. Perhaps such people begrudge people who
want freedom, then, because they feel like its not something they could
ever have for themselves. Perhaps what the title track to Howard Jones’
first album does most of all, in that case, is to show that human beings

130
are in need of liberation, a liberation which begins in the individual
liberation of each individual life.

So that is the lyrics of all the tracks on Human’s Lib. Its an album about
questioning, about personal actualisation, about the context of human
beings in the world. It opens pathways up to new values, to being
released from “mental chains” which we have become entangled in and to
thinking about things in new and different ways which, it seems to be
suggested, will change the way we see the world. Of course, should we
act on these ways, as Jones second album, in many ways a companion
piece to the first, Dream into Action, suggests, then it may be that the
world itself is changed. If this were to be the case it would clearly be what
Howard Jones wants. As the Buddhist that he is, he sees the world very
much in terms of personal change which brings social change. The key
here, as in the song Why Look For The Key?, which is on Dream into
Action, is that the answer lays inside yourself and we can see that here,
not least in the songs Hunt the Self and New Song. In fact, its something
of a one note tune. On Jones’ first two albums the constant refrain is
personal self-creation and personal enlightenment. I’ve written a chapter
about it because I agree with it. But, of course, its far from the whole story
by itself however necessary you might believe it to be.

FIVE: The Original Path is Wordless: Putting Language in Its Place

One of the points of writing this book is to point out that all human
thought is constructed in language. This is to say that it is not remotely
conceivable that human beings would be the beings they think they are if
they were not language users – and particularly language users of the
languages they make use of. This may seem to some a somewhat trivial
or even inconsequential point but I hope to show in what follows – as I
hope I did in especially the most relevant chapter 2 preceding this – that
this is far from the case. Being language users, I intend to suggest, makes
all the difference in the world – and to the world we think we are in. I am

131
intending to use two primary sources in talking about this in this chapter,
the thoughts of deceased American pragmatist philosopher, Richard
Rorty, and the Eastern currents of thought labelled Daoist or Zen
Buddhist. By the end of this chapter I hope that readers will at least have
questions regarding how the fact of language contextualises human
existence and human thinking even if they have not yet come to be
inhabited by new beliefs about such things.

According to Richard Rorty, perhaps the most consequential thing that

happened in philosophical thought during the twentieth century was that
it came to be less about mind or experience and more about language.
Philosophers in that century, from positivists to the most convinced
constructivists, settled upon language as the thing to be considered in its
consequences and ramifications. This, as with many similar topics, acts as
something like a changing of the guard when some ideas [and their
proponents] fall out of favour and others take their place. At the same
time, certain vocabularies [and those who used them] may find
themselves “out of time” as a result as new vocabularies [and their users]
catch hold of the Zeitgeist and take their place. Richard Rorty always
seems to have been a philosopher who liked to tell stories about these
changes – adding in his own articulations of what they may have meant in
addition. These meanings were not always shared by others [and were
often heavily criticised by those who saw dangers in his stories] but, in his
sincere linking of one phenomenon to another, Rorty often used said
stories to suggest why seeing a thing like A instead of like B was to our
advantage and why seeing it like B instead of A gave us problems we
didn’t need to have. Richard Rorty often told such stories about language
– and its concommitants truth, knowledge, belief, objectivity, reality, and
so on – and its a couple of these stories [chapters 2 and 3 from his book
Philosophy and Social Hope from 1999] that I want to briefly relay and
extrapolate upon now.

The first story is one that suggests we can – and should – have truth

132
without correspondence to reality. But putting it so baldly is begging a lot
of questions and perhaps making a lot of assumptions that those who
have not done very much philosophical thinking in their lives may baulk
at. I would wish it were the case that the mass education systems of the
world gave their students at least a grounding in basic philosophical
thinking but they do not. And so it is a matter of baby steps. Rorty regards
himself as a philosophical pragmatist, a distinctively American
philosophical idea [something in which Rorty often takes some pride], and
one which, if it be regarded as distinctive of it, “substitutes the notion of a
better human future for the notions of ‘reality’, ‘reason’ and ‘nature’.”
This is to say that Rorty thinks our thinking should result in a better future
rather than being about pre-determined and static authorities which just
somehow [and often this is never adequately explained] arbitrate things.
Thus, clearly, this is not the view that things [often glossed as “reality”]
are just one way and its our job to find out what this way is and then be
subservient to it. Pragmatists, as Rorty makes sure to inform us in the
second chapter of Philosophy and Social Hope, “do not believe that there
is a way things really are.” So, consequently, they want to give up the
idea of there being appearances and there being its opposite, reality,
which is something that is true regardless of appearances. Instead, the
pragmatist, according to Rorty, wants to substitute the difference between
more and less useful descriptions of the world for this wholly probematic
conception of things. In doing so, such a pragmatist wants to substitute
making use of the world for knowing about the world in a strict sense of
the latter definition. For this pragmatist, then, all “knowing” is actually
just using whether it is given the credit of knowing or not.

Such pragmatists are not then those who think the world, the universe
and all reality conforms to a plan or that there is an algorithm, key, or
code, which unlocks it and its meaning. Such pragmatists are not
teleological in their thinking either. They do not imagine that everything
that there is is going somewhere that was mapped out in advance. This is
also to say that they see no purpose or intent in the activities of things in

133
general. Thus, the eye was not made to invent seeing and the brain did
not evolve to create thinking. In terms of bodies, we may equally say that
nature had no purpose to create sexuality or sexed bodies and the various
ways these have occurred were not part of any plan in which one thing is
right, and was intended, and other things are wrong, and were not. In
other words, the pragmatist does not fixate on the eternal, the
unchanging, the static, but she concentrates, instead, on what is thought
better and the future in which it can be so. For such a person, “reality” is
a term of value or a choice rather than an authority to be bowed down to.
These people do not think that it is the job of something called
“knowledge” to uncover what is real before our thinking begins but,
instead, think that it is necessary to gain the kinds of understanding which
will help us deal with intellectual problems as they arise. In simple terms,
such people want to swap an eternal past for a new, and necessarily
useful, future.

This brings us to “truth”, a subject about which Rorty wrote a lot in the
last quarter of the 20th century. And it is something about which such
pragmatists have distinctive views. Since a pragmatist of Rorty’s stripe
does not think of “reality” as an arbiter, something to which he has an
eternal [but wholly unexplained] duty to correspond, he must come up
which a conception of truth which is something other than “corresponding
to reality”. Now truth, states Rorty, “is what is supposed to distinguish
knowledge from well-ground opinion [or] justified belief.” But Rorty argues
that if truth is something like what the earlier pragmatist, William James,
called “the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief,
and good, too, for definite, assignable, reasons” then it is not clear how
such a thing can be done. Those who think of truth as an eternal,
however, poo poo such a notion of truth as taking the merely justified for
the true, the transitory for the eternal. Rorty responds to this by saying
that justification of truths is the important thing, the thing we should stick
to, the thing that linguistic beings such as ourselves should be concerned
with. He thinks that human beings like us “cannot swing free of the

134
nonhuman environment” and that most of our beliefs, most of the time,
“must be true”. In technical, philosophical jargon he talks of truth as “an
empirical explanation of the causal relations which hold between features
of the environment and the holding true of sentences”. Truth, this seems
to say, is a linguistic matter, a matter of “sentential attitudes” towards the
world of our experience. This is not to say we have forgotten the world –
for he asserts that we are always and everywhere in touch with it – but to
say that we are in a causal but not a correspondent relationship with it.

This view is not one obsessed with certainty [an epistemological concern]
or bothered by the threat of skepticism. For such a view never claims that
it is getting anything right. It only claims, with reasons that it can provide,
that it is a useful view to hold and hopefully a better one than the one that
is already current. Such a view takes the linguisticality of our thinking,
tells us that the world can cause us to hold views about it, and asserts
that this is probably enough to be truthful as far as such a language user
goes. If we are false in our views, if our views are in fact useless, the world
that can affect our views by causing us to hold other ones will soon do so.
So, for such people, things denominated as “knowledge” do not represent
reality. Rather, our inquiries and investigations are inventing ways to
make use of reality. Beliefs are then reliable, useful guides rather than the
last word, the eternal word. There is, on this view, no one way the world is
and so no one way which captures its accurate representation.
Pragmatists such as this think of people looking for the eternal truth as
those trying to escape such a causal world – and the time and chance that
goes with it. In contrast, such pragmatists want to swap certainty for
imagination and think of such philosophy as providing the basis for an
Emersonian self-reliance rather than an authoritative reassurance. They
give up an obsession with eternal foundations for beliefs and start
concerning themselves with creating better and more tangibly useful
ones. They give up the idea of “context-free justification” and come to
embrace the idea that all justification, and so all truth, is from a
contingent point of view. Truth is, thus, not an epistemological thing. Its

135
more like a sociological thing, a thing that can be fashioned out of the use
of language by groups of people. Its connection to the world is our own
and our invention and its importance is in relation to our purposes and the
uses towards which it is put. There is no methodical way to guarantee
such truth, however, for truth is not the result of an algorithm or a
method. Truth is just that which is justified in our language about the
world to others for reasons that we can provide. And so, as Rorty says,
“There is simply the process of justifying beliefs to audiences”.

This does away with things thought of as an eternal “knowledge” or an

eternal “rationality” which are either the result of a method which can
guarantee being right or are such a method or faculty itself. Beliefs are
now “rules of action rather than attempts to represent reality”. The fact
that most beliefs are true or that most beliefs are justified is then
something to do with the “holistic character of belief ascription”. Beliefs
“which are expressed as meaningful sentences necessarily have lots of
predictable inferential connections with lots of other meaningful
sentences.” In other words, within a language things infer other things
and are meant to cooperate and work together in order that the language
work itself. If language, in its functioning, did not work this way it would
be hard to hold a set of beliefs for the individual beliefs would not fit or
work together. But for us human beings, linguistic beings such as we are,
things cohere, inter-penetrate, inter-relate and refer to other things. This
is something to do with how language itself works, something which, in
turn, is about how we understand and manipulate the universe we inhabit.
We may say at this point that, in terms of comprehension, understanding
or even simply use of our environment, the fact that we are linguistic
beings like this is everything. We cannot imagine that a dog or a fish or
even a 1 year old child inhabits the universe with the consciousness, the
self-aware thoughtfulness, that a language using human adult does. It is
Rorty’s assertion that all of this has little to do with truth if this is thought
of as an eternal commendation for sentences about the activities of the
universe we inhabit. Rather, he imagines that “inquiry and justification are

136
activities we language-users cannot help engaging in”. That is, they are
activities bound up with language use. We do not then need an eternal
goal called truth but only the linguistic practices within our existence that
have already been bequeathed to us by blind evolutionary processes. We
have truth because language-users have come to find it useful to do so.

This, of course, does not make such truth a “God’s eye view”. There is no
reason such an evolutionary process should be perspicuous to the nature
of reality or that nature should even have a nature to be perspicuous
about. These are bad, useless [but not “wrong” for that would entail
knowing “right”] views, ones we can replace with better ones in the
pragmatist evaluation. In order to have a “right” view, in the more static,
eternal sense, we would have to know all the views and then be
competent to judge them accordingly. Rorty argues that on a Darwinian
view of the world, which is the evolutionary view, this becomes impossible
to maintain. By contrast, the Rortian pragmatist says there is much that
can be said about justfication of views to particular, temporal audiences
but next to nothing to be said about justification in general that makes
something truth. In the end, truth is a matter of contrasting an actual
present with a possible future by linguistic means. And that’s all it is.

Rorty’s second story builds on his first. If the first aimed to dismantle what
is known as “the correspondence theory of truth” then this one aims to
argue that things don’t have essences or inherent properties
[antiessentialism] and the two together seem to make the claim that, for
language users, the only foundations to any argument are linguistic ones
that do not correspond to, or represent, some notional “external world” in
any realist sense. You might then want to think of this as human beings,
cognitively conceived, inhabiting a linguistic bubble much as, physically,
we inhabit the earth’s atmosphere. This linguistic bubble, in which all our
thought and cognition takes place, should not then be thought of as a trap
anymore than the earth’s atmosphere is a trap. It is just the manifest
conditions of human existence as human beings happen to have evolved.

137
If you reject such a view as the incarceration of human thinking in
language then presumably you view the fact that we have to breathe air
in the same negative way as well. But there is, of course, no necessity to
view such things negatively. Instead, one might ask oneself some
questions such as “Why would sensory perception of surroundings be
called knowledge or understanding or explanation of them?” or “Why
would linguistification of sensory stimulations be thought of as explaining
anything or as being epistemological about them?”

Asking such questions one might become what Rorty wants to become in
his second story, which is to say antiessentialist and antimetaphysical. In
his “world without substances or essences” [the title of chapter 3 of
Philosophy and Social Hope] he nominally wants to draw some lines of
commonality between philosophers he admires [and agrees with] in both
the “analytic” and the “continental” traditions that many think Western
philosophers split into during the twentieth century as a result of their
discussions about language. These are the ones, in his view, who want to
shake off “metaphysical dualisms” [such as essence/accident or
reality/appearance] and replace them with “a flux of continually changing
relations” or “panrelationalism”. This view, Rorty thinks, is an aid to
putting aside the correspondence theory of truth, as he did in his first
story, in that it enables us to put aside the distinction between subject
and object as well as that between the imagined elements of human
knowledge which are our mental contributions and those which are the
substance of the universe. Rorty sees various philosophical labels as
describing people with these philosophical urges from pragmatists and
poststructuralists to holists and hermeneuticists and, to lay my cards on
the table here, I see my own views implicated in several of them. But he
unites his band of philosophical engagees, whatever their prior
categorization, in this story under a couple of slogans, the first coming
from a continental philosopher and the second from an analytic one.
These are: “Everything is a social construction” and “All awareness is a
linguistic affair”.

138
Rorty thinks both these slogans “come to much the same thing” and they
reiterate something I’ve said before and answer the two questions at the
end of my first paragraph on Rorty’s second story. This is that “we shall
never be able to step outside of language, never be able to grasp reality
unmediated by linguistic description”. This motivates a move to want to
talk about more or less useful descriptions of the world rather than talking
about “real” descriptions as opposed to “merely apparent” ones. It is to
say our means of interaction with, and manipulation of, our environment
is by means of language rather than to say we have immediate and
eternal knowledge of it. It is to put the question of if we ever understand
or explain that environment aside because our being caught up in
language doesn’t need to answer the question “What is the
epistemological status of language users like us?”. This isn’t a question
which helps us be what we are any more or less usefully. It is, from this
point of view, a literally irrelevant question. Rorty, for example, thinks that
saying “everything is a social construction” entails that “our linguistic
practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our
descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function of
our social needs.” Rorty extrapolates “all awareness is a linguistic affair”
as meaning that instead of having an insider track on knowledge due to
unmediated, personal experience of it, we only have descriptions of things
which we then join up and call knowledge. Put the slogans together, he
thinks, and “you get the claim that all our knowledge is under descriptions
suited to our current social purposes”. I have called such things “social
fictions” in my own agreeing way in the past and these are not things
which need have epistemological concern for they did not come from
epistemology and neither are they intended to answer its questions.

An illustration of this is when Rorty argues that the position we have now
reached in this second of his stories does away with the classic Platonic
distinction between nature and convention – physis [from which we get
Physics] and nomos [convention, sometimes law] – in ancient Greek
thinking. In the story, to recall, all our awareness is now under a linguistic

139
description and all descriptions are functions of our social needs. Rorty
concludes that if we are to exist this way then things like nature or reality,
as linguistic designations of “the big picture” or the canvas of “all that is”,
can only “be names of something unknowable”. They become like what
the philosopher Kant called a “Thing-in-Itself”. But if a thing is “in itself”
then how are we meant to know anything about it, we who are not “in
itself”? This seems to set up a subject/object dualism and to raise the
problem of how subjects can know objects - or even if they can. For the
epistemologically fixated who want to build metaphysical kingdoms of
substances known in their essences this is all quite panic-inducing and the
wolf of skepticism is never very far from the door.

Yet the people who Rorty is speaking about in his second story want to
leave such a construction of the situation behind. They, in his thinking,
forsake the idea of a potentially absolute knowledge of things [or an
“accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality”], something
language use has not even broached as a possibility, for the usefulness
they think “panrelationalism” brings. But, to be convincing, Rorty will
probably have to at least suggest why trying to get at the intrinsic nature
of reality is pointless and, hence, why panrelationalism is more useful.
And so he makes just such an attempt. Needless to say, all this comes to
be wrapped up in language for, whether we discuss the barrier seemingly
introduced between ourselves and reality produced by the interaction of
subjects and objects, between sense organs and “the way things are in
themselves”, or whether we identify language itself as the possible
obfuscating barrier and say language may impose upon reality things that
are not true about it, it all reduces down to asking the question of what
language use is actually doing in the end. [See chapter 10 for Alan
Moore’s answer!]

The Rortian pragmatist responds to such a problematic by pointing out

that such a description of the situation is itself implicated in linguistic
description and a way of seeing – and specfically seeing – the problem

140
[i.e. by use of an ocular metaphor that is linguistically constructed itself].
But we do not need to linguistically describe this situation as a matter of
something getting in the way of a subject seeing an object immediately
[i.e. in an unmediated way] in order to obtain direct and incontrovertible
knowledge of it, an innate understanding and explanation of the thing. We
might, instead, drop the metaphor of knowledge as vision we [for what
reason?] used as well as end seeing language as a matter of
representation. If we take the view that language does not fail to
represent accurately because it does not represent at all, in other words,
take the view that it has another function, as well as the view that
knowledge is not vision, then we will save ourselves a lot of misdirected
trouble. For the Rortian pragmatist we language users are not knowing
things, we are using them. And that is all we are doing – putting them into
useful relations with each other. Useful to who? Well, to “us” - and
hopefuly an “us” we can extend as widely as possible, solidifying the
“objectvity” of our views as we do. [Here objectivity is basically a credit
we give to the widest intersubjective agreement we can manage.]

Rorty, thus, sees “knowledge” in practice as the ability to do something

with a linguistically-described entity [which, by now, all readers should be
aware is everything language users such as us talk about by means of
language]. This dissolves the distinction between knowing a thing and
using a thing. The claim to know something is then the claim to be able to
use it usefully, to be able to do something with it or to put it in useful
relation to something else. But the person doing this would also like to
break down the linguistic difference between thinking of something either
intrinsically or extrinsically because such a person thinks that this will not
help us because it is an illusion which holds our attention to no useful
purpose. [Readers might recall here Nietzsche’s “Truths are illusions”
from chapter 2.] This is where Rorty’s antiessentialist urges explicitly
enter his story for he tells us here that “For pragmatists there is no such
thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing
as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as

141
a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to
human needs or consciousness or language.” He concludes that if this
distinction then dissolves too then so does the reality/appearance
distinction and so do worries about barriers between us and our
environment. Language is not a problem; we had just constructed a less
helpful way of thinking about it. Better to think that we are stuck in its
social fiction as we are embedded in the earth’s atmosphere. It is not a
prison but our possibility of existing as we can, the thing which enables
conceptual thought.

So, for Rorty, we are language users bandying about descriptions for
things. These descriptions are related to who we are and serve our
purposes, a picture not unlike that constructed by Nietzsche in chapter 2
of this book. None of these descriptions are anything to do with essences.
They are neither intrinsic nor extrinsic for they are instead matters of
relating things to each other in linguistic descriptions and uses of them.
This is Rorty’s panrelationalism and it can be summed up as thinking of
everything you can think of as if it were a number. It is hard to think of
numbers as having an “intrinsic nature”, something more true about them
than anything else, something essential and eternal. There are not
descriptions of numbers which are more essential and others which are
more accidental or incidental. If you ask, for example, what 13 is, or,
worse, what it is “in itself” apart from relationships to other numbers, you
draw a blank. Saying 13 is 12 plus 1 or 33 minus 20 seems to dance
around 13 rather than getting to its core self. And then you begin to
realise there are an infinite number of such descriptions none of which is
anymore “essential” to 13 than any of the others. And that none of them
seem to capture “13ness” itself. Instead, the way you choose to describe
13 depends on your purposes in making use of 13 in the first place.

The example of numbers is Rorty’s, of course, and he argues that

“antiessentialists” such as himself would like to convince others that just
as it does not pay to be essentialist about numbers so it equally does not

142
pay to be essentialist about anything else. In other words, that “there is
nothing to be known about [things] except an initially large, and forever
expandable, web of relations to other objects”, that “everything that can
serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of
relations, and so on forever.” Just like numbers. Rorty suggests that there
are relations all the way down and all the way up – and all the way out in
every direction as well. Every reference, every description, only leads to
another and another and another. Things only make sense in terms of
relations to other things but this never impinges upon the linguistic
illusion of the intrinsic nature of any of the things and it never really pays
to imagine such a thing anyway.

Antiessentialism is then the belief that things are used rather than known
inside out and that “knowledge” is a matter of sentences describing
things for various uses, what another mentioned in this book of mine has
termed “expedient fiction”. We may also describe such linguistically-
conceived knowledge as a matter of “sentential attitudes”, relations to
things constructed out of language. No wonder language has been called
“the house of being”. It is this linguistification which leads directly to the
conclusion that relations of things to other things is the basis of anything
we would feign to describe as knowledge, understanding, explanation or
truth. Such a thing finds no firm foundation in the “intrinsic nature of
things” or any imagined “external reality”. It is a pure linguistic
phenomenon, the metaphorical air which gives life to our cognitive,
intellectual “body”. The conclusion is then that all that we know about
things is that certain sentences are true of them according to “us” and
that “all sentences can do is relate objects to one another” because
language is a tool for hooking things up rather than getting them right or
representing their appropriate place in a fully and eternally
comprehended and realised reality.

Here, banging your hand on a table and pronouncing, “Behold reality!”

changes nothing for the antiessentialist unveiled in this second story of

143
Rorty’s rejoinders that said table is only, in the end, that of which various
sentences are true. The causal abilities of tables are four square with such
sentences and no sentence is anymore intrinsic in regard to it than any
other - just as hitting it was not anymore intrinsic to it either. Hitting it, in
fact, was just another way of relating to it rather than something which
got to its essential core. You haven’t left a linguistic realm and escaped
into one of directly immediate facts by hitting a table, you’ve just related
to it in a way the very same language must then describe. Neither, by the
way, is its hardness when hitting it any more intrinsic than its colour,
shape or ugliness. Our thinking, then, only works against a background of
linguistic practice and the identity of things is description-relative. To seek
to avoid such conclusions is, says Rorty, “the project of escaping from
time and chance”.

This is not all of Rorty’s second story but it is the better part of it. Taking it
on board, I now want to divert from an American pragmatist into thoughts
much older [but not necessarily so different] that have Zen and/or Daoist
heritage. We have, in this chapter, come to learn of things like truth,
knowledge, understanding and explanation as linguistic things, linguistic
functions, and of language as our way of engaging in cognitive,
intellectual activity. None of this, so we have been told, is about
correspondence to a reality [although no one here denies human beings
live in an environment or suggests they are simply imagining everything]
or representing the intrinsic nature of a reality in language. Language, it is
suggested, is a tool in which expedient fictions are created for the
furtherance, maintenance and betterment of human lives. Language
makes use of things rather than understanding them in any internal way.
Being, as it is, the putting to work of sensory stimuli, the question of if
language expresses innate knowledge of things is not necessary to arise,
is not necessarily an epistemological matter. But what it is is an
interpretational, hermeneutical matter, something that was certainly
Nietzsche’s point in chapter 2 of this book. Hemeneutics is another term
Rorty uses in his second story to describe the interests of the

144
antiessentialist, antimetaphysical characters he finds offering the most
useful descriptions that help to solve our philosophical problems in this
regard. “There are no facts, only interepretations”, a summarization of a
certain Nietzschean attitude, is then another way to say what Rorty has
said in his second story, if not overall as a sum of both of them. That we
are constant creators of expedient fictions, that language is fictional
interpretation of the resistance that is causal reality, is how I might
choose to put this. But what does it mean? We need an example. And
what better example than ourselves, than “the self”?

Neither Zen Buddhism nor Chinese Daoism believe that there is such a
thing as “the self”. That story you tell yourself about who you are, where
you’ve been, what makes you you? Its just that: a story you made up. Its
no more or less true of you than 10,000 stories another 10,000 people
could tell about you. It certainly relates to no essence of you for, as we
have just been hearing, there are no essences, no intrinsic descriptions,
no core of you that is more indestructibly you than some other
description. Ironically, for fans of the 1960s TV drama, The Prisoner, you
are a number, whether or not you are also “a free man”. In that show
being numbered was regarded as being imprisoned or controlled, having
identity stripped away. In this context, it is the exact opposite. There is no
way to contain ourselves for there is no self to contain. All descriptions of
ourselves are just a relating of ourselves to other things, no more
essential or intrinsic than any other. Identity dissolves, expedient fiction
remains. Here a Zen saying tells us that “The original path is wordless; we
only use words to illustrate, never to establish or explain” and this
captures the sense of what Rorty was telling us. Language is not a tool of
knowing, it is a tool of using, of interpreting [because interpreting is
simply using in a certain context itself]. Without words, what is there?
Without words all we can say is that there is nothing to be said. In this we
get a glimpse of how the intellectual, cognitive world comes to be, birthed
in language, birthed in language which gives us the ability to make use of
things. The first verse of the Daoist Daodejing contains a similar story

145
when it tells us that “A way that may be spoken is not the enduring Way.
A name that may be named is not an enduring name. No names – this is
the beginning of heaven and earth. Having names – this is the mother of
the things of the world.” What does this mean?

One scholar of Daoism, Robert Eno, in a document meant to present the

Daodejing to students of early Chinese thought, states:

“The source of human deviation from the Dao [the Way which is thought
to be the way of all things just left alone to be “as they are”] lies in the
way that our species has come to use its unique property, the mind.
Rather than allow our minds to serve as a responsive mirror of the world,
we have used it to develop language and let our thoughts and perceptions
be governed by the categories that language creates, such as value
judgments. The mind’s use of language has created false wisdom, and
our commitment to this false wisdom has come to blind us to the world as
it really is, and to the Dao that orders it. The person who “practices”
wuwei [“non-action”] quiets the mind and leaves language behind.”

This we may say, correcting Eno’s own infelicitous langauge of the world
“as it really is” and the Dao as an active “order” it is probably not, is a
using of language inappropriately, a regarding it as something it is not. As
in the first chapter of the Daodejing, it creates a fictional world in order to
make use of the world that is its environment – but the danger of
regarding it as “real” or as reality itself – when it is only linguistic creation
for human purposes – is always there to trap and deceive us. Rorty’s
pragmatism he sees here as a way of avoiding such cul-de-sacs. Daoism,
as well as Zen, see decoupling ourselves from language itself as a solution
as in when the Daoist Zhuangzi asks for “the person who has forgotten
words”. This is an imprecation to disabuse ourselves of the magical power
of words to create linguistically in ways that we may come to imagine
conceptually as more actual, or more perspicuous, than they actually are.
Language, we must remember, is expedient fiction. It is not mapping

146
reality. [And so, Rorty would say, its lack does not get reality any more
right either. He himself thought of Zen as one of the ways people sought
to “escape time and chance”.]

For the Daoist, however, and according to Eno’s interpretation of the

Daodejing:

“The greatest barriers to discarding language and our value judgments

are our urges for things we believe are desirable and our impulse to
obtain these things for ourselves. The selfishness of our ordinary lives
makes us devote all our energies to a chase for possessions and
pleasures, which leaves us no space for the detached tranquility needed
to join the harmonious rhythm of Nature and the Dao. The practice of wu-
wei [“actionless action”] entails a release from pursuits of self-interest
and a self-centered standpoint. The line between ourselves as individuals
in accord with the Dao and the Dao-governed world at large becomes
much less significant for us.”

What I take from this is that language is a tool and not a “getting reality
right” system. This Daoist wants to “discard language” because it is
identified as a practice which can deceive and which presents truth in
ways that it is not most useful to understand truth in. Language is fallible
and can repeatedly be shown to be mistaken or false but an actual reality
could never be shown to be that. For it wouldn’t be. Thus, if something
can be redescribed in language [and everything can] then the original
description was not the essential, foundational, actual, real or intrinsically
important description we might have imagined it was. It was just a
description, in Rorty’s terms, just one more set of relations, just
something which, with other purposes and reasons, could be put to other
uses or described in other ways. “What is important” is here equally a
relational feature of human thinking in any case.

The Daoism Eno explains here then warns that an attachment to

147
language, as an expression of the needs and concerns of the self [a self
that is just one more linguistic story], is an attachment to a story and only
to a story. But to contemplate things in a storyless, non-linguistic way is to
forget words and language entirely. The wuwei Eno counsels, a Daoist
virtue, is acting without purpose or intention, what the related Zen text,
The Blue Cliff Record , refers to as acting “without picking and choosing”
[which is what nature, thought of as an inter-related system of things,
does according to this thinking]. And then what is left? For the Daoist, it is
“the Way”, an nameable and an indefinable Rorty would despise for he
would intuitively imagine it to be some sort of eternal God-substitute his
philosophy had been trying to get away from for his entire life.

I, engaged in my own studies of Daoist and of Zen texts, have not come to
such a conclusion, however. “The Way” is not a God even though it might
be an eternal [in the way existence is an eternal but not a god either]. It
is, I believe, nothing other than the very “time and chance” Rorty thinks
we are enveloped in. “The Way” offers no foundations, no essences, and
may be nothing more than existence [or “that which becomes and
changes”] without language telling it to be something and so to become
useful to someone who uses language. One might even say, using
language [!], that this beyond language, unknown and unknowable, is the
limits of human thinking and so language’s utility itself. A universe without
language use is, for language users, that they cannot make use of or
manipulate. It is a sort of reverse polarity in which it is not language users
who shape reality in words but a context in which the wordless universe
shapes we who do not resist [by means of language] instead. Both Zen
and Daoism, as with Rorty, however, see in language a set of marks and
noises which are means to fabricating a world. The former point out its
fictionality and recommend avoiding it, the latter says we should
concentrate on what we can do with it rather than wasting our time
pretending it is something it is not.

When we get political, however, language is then seen, in such a light, as

148
a tool of domination and classification – which is simply a redescription of
it as fiction or as a tool invented for social purposes, a tool which makes
things useful [which is always useful “to someone”]. So none of this
means language is a useless tool which makes no difference. Talk is never
“mere talk” for the effectiveness of language is entirely the point of it. If it
did nothing and made no difference then we would never have been gifted
it by the evolutionary processes that have created us. Evolution does not
fashion things for the fun of it but always only for the utility of it. In
political terms, language organises and classifies and is a tool which
creates sentential differences between people for classificatory purposes.
It can become an ideology or a discourse and it can, if we are not careful,
be taken too seriously or inappropriately as in when we imagine the word
becomes material [something John’s Gospel does in the case of Jesus]. We
must always be wary of this. For example, another example of such a use
of language is when people are described as gay or heterosexual or as cis
or trans.

Now you might want to ask, given this discussion we have had, “But are
people REALLY gay or heterosexual, cis or trans?” and my answer to this
would be that they are or aren’t only inasmuch as having sentential
attitudes towards things means that. For there are no facts only
interpretations, everything is a social construction and all awareness is a
linguistic affair. There is no escape from this, given such an understanding
and such a logic. The person holding this view does not, or should not,
imagine that her opponent’s views are interpretations but that their views
are facts instead. If language always reflects social purposes and is always
linked to points of view then it is here too. So talking about sexuality or
gender is also in the language bubble with us too, a means to describing
people, including ourselves, as such things, rather than a barrier keeping
us from such things. But that means taking on board that such social,
linguistic fictions are not matters of epistemology or knowledge about
which we can or cannot have certainty. We are not, in talking about such
things, claiming they are “real” or “intrinsic”. They are fictional

149
descriptions we have for certain behaviours or practices or allegiances or
phenomena as the Zen Buddhist or the Daoist might also agree.

“Is someone really gay?” or “Is someone really trans?” are then empty
questions but also irrelevant ones, ones which misunderstand the fictional
operation of language as an evolutionary practice. The point is not if
homosexuality or transgenderism [or heterosexuality or cis-ness for that
matter] “are real” but what purposes people have, and what difference it
makes, to create and utilize such linguistic descriptions of people as well
as asking where such descriptions can take us. ALL descriptions of people
are fictions and all of them exist for reasons. We made them all up
equally. The debate is which are better to use and which are worse and
not the rhetorical sidetrack of if some are real and some are not. For, in
language, EVERYTHING IS RHETORICAL, and especially when it is claimed
not to be. There is no escaping the interpretation that is the use of
language which is common to the philosophies of Rorty and Nietzsche.

Of course, according to the Way, or engaging in the Zen practice of

Shikantaza [“just sitting” meditation], none of this matters. Existence is
beyond language and so non-cognitive and non-intellectual. It is not
something to be known, either intrinsically or essentially, but something
to be co-existed with in a peaceful harmony of going about your business
and acting naturally or according to one’s needs and function. For myself,
I see value in this insight. It tells me that things are not the things we say
they are nor necessarily related in the ways that we can imagine anymore
than in the ways that we cannot. Who made us the measure or made us
competent to this task anyway? Nietzsche would say that we did or,
rather, that these are competencies we accumulated, rhetorically, in order
to live. All of our faculties have accrued to us in order to live and none
have accrued to us in order to get reality right. Evolution, it would seem to
me, is a ruthlessly utilitarian, pragmatic process and a blind one to boot.
Its certainly not up to the job of supporting the view that we were created
to verify to everything that exists that there is one way it fits together and

150
only one way and we, of all the random beings the ooze brought forth,
were the singular one that happened to have the faculties up to the task
of knowing and saying that this was so. To believe that, it seems to me
would be tantamount to believing in a God, a God that was us, and it
would be an attempt to escape the “time and chance” that I, Rorty, Zen
Buddhists, Daoists and even Nietzsche agree that we are all bound up in.

So we cannot find an authority with which to stamp our imprint upon

things in language, our only means of understanding, and neither can we
use it to claim to have found existence’s own imprint within itself. In fact,
thinking in terms of such an authority, a card to lay on the table which
ends the game of linguistic description in our favour, is a problem in itself
for language seems not to be competent to such a task. It exists, instead,
as little other than a creative tool for the use of reality in useful ways,
ways useful to some social grouping of people who have need to think of
things like this rather than like that. Language can be used to describe or
persuade but it cannot be used, ironically, to end the conversation. This is
because descriptions are as infinite as purposes and so there might
continually be new descriptions necessary as long as there are language
users around to make use of them. And so language use results in the
continuous creation of new stories told in order to be expedient to various
groups of people or even, potentially, all the people as a whole. These can
only be countered with other stories, and so on. Think of this as like
breathing but with words; when the language stops, you cease to be.

SIX: Domination, Hierarchy and Classification in Racism and Eugenics

A:

In this chapter, I want to pick up again the biological discussion begun in

chapter three and continue on with it. This will involve talking about race
and class, about the intersectional nature of forms of oppression and
about classification and hierarchicalisation of people as a result of human

151
activity. The major problem here, I intend to suggest, is that people tend
to want to create hierarchies and to compare people in terms of better
and worse or favoured and disfavoured or insider and outsider or like me
and not like me. This is primarily a political activity as far as I can see
[regardless of if things like ethics or religion are utilised within it] and its
consequences are usually political as well. In engaging with such subjects
I do not intend to get too much into the nitty gritty of real world
oppressions, however. This is not because I am blind to them or find them
unimportant but because I do not feel qualified to do so. I am someone
who believes that people should speak for themselves, as far as they can,
and so I do not believe in speaking on behalf of other people.
Contemporaneous accounts of real world oppressions are numerous and
constantly being produced and I suggest readers seek them out if this is
what they want for they are not hard to find and many of them speak
powerfully about real world oppressions people suffer from in an ongoing
way. The voices of those affected by these will speak much more
powerfully for themsleves than I ever could on their behalf. It is for this
reason, therefore, that I intend to speak more generally and
overarchingly, through the medium of a historical account, whilst still, I
hope, saying things that cut some ice with the experiences of real people
in the contemporary world.

As an introduction to hierarchical thinking I want to address the subject of

white racism [and classism] which, in the twentieth century, becomes the
story of eugenics. Hidden within these movements are any number of
hierarchical thoughts and a methodological preference for classifying
people into groups thought real and empirical but actually nothing more
than rhetorical and political. This story is told superbly well by Robert
Sussman in his book The Myth of Race and what follows can all be found
more fully fleshed out in this book. This is a story of racists and classists
[and often ones acting on behalf of, and endorsed by, science] and, in
summarising their story, following Sussman’s lead, I want to expose
hierarchical thinking by giving clear examples of it in the history of white

152
racism and eugenics. My purpose in this chapter, then, is to show how this
thinking has occurred in history and to draw some conclusions about it, as
a result, which show how classification and hierarchy are tools of power
and domination.

Robert Sussman’s book The Myth of Race is a mightily disturbing book. Its
first four chapters tell an alarmingly circular story of eugenics and racism
that runs from the Spanish Inquisition, beginning in the late fifteenth
century, to the horrors of Nazi Germany in the middle of the twentieth.
You might think, at first, that these examples are extreme and, therefore,
comfortingly rare. The problem is, however, as Sussman shows in these
first four chapters, that they are only the logical outcome and endpoint of
certain points of view that are distressingly resilient in the minds of white
Europeans and their descendants. [Compare, for example, the present
beliefs of US Congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene!] In such light they
stand out not as comfortingly rare but as something that is bound to
happen again if the thought that sustains and motivates such genocides is
allowed to carry on, unchecked, for too long.

All this is despite the fact that, as Sussman repeats multiple times, the
idea of biological races of human beings is an evidenceless nonsense.
Race, where it exists at all, is a cultural and not a biological phenomenon.
Indeed, the first sentence Robert Sussman writes in his book is that, “In
1950, UNESCO issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to the
same species and that ‘race’ is not a biological reality but a myth.” And
so, “this scientific fact,” he continues, “is as valid and true as the fact that
the earth is round and revolves around the sun.” This seems pretty
definitive. But we are only in the introductory chapter of Sussman’s book
and soon, leafing through pages littered with philosophical and scientific
luminaries of their day, we will have cause to wonder how seriously we
should take such people and such disciplines if people of the views they
espoused can dwell within their elite, academic ranks. So the issue is we
have a problem and that problem is racism. If you are now asking how

153
people can be racist if there are no biological races of human beings then
you hit on this issue. Clearly, people look different. And it is from this that
the sociological phenomenon of racism begins. Sussman lays out this
problem concisely:

“Racism is a part of our everyday lives. Where you live, where you go to
school, your job, your profession, who you interact with, how people
interact with you, your treatment in the healthcare and justice systems
are all affected by your race. For the past 500 years people have been
taught how to interpret and understand racism. We have been told that
there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence,
sexual behavior, birth rates, infant care, work ethics and abilities, personal
restraint, life span, law-abidingness, aggression, altruism, economic and
business practices, family cohesion, and even brain size. We have learned
that races are structured in a hierarchical order and that some races are
better than others. Even if you are not a racist, your life is affected by this
ordered structure. We are born into a racist society.”

We see this racist society when people, and let’s not be shy, they are
WHITE people more often than not, complain about “multiculturalism” [as
out-going US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, did in a tweet shortly
before the inauguration of President Biden] or when people [yes, white
people again mostly] complain about differently coloured immigrants or
when people build gates and walls around their community to keep the
poors out. All of these phenomena are phenomena in which one group of
people – privileged whites – feel themselves to be absolutely different in
kind from some other group of people and so they fear their “threat” or
wish to be segregated from them. As we will soon see, these are all
impulses that come from a racist, eugenic frame of mind - and that even
though “Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no
biological reality to human race”. In addition:

“There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what

154
 might be considered human ‘racial’ characteristics. There is no inherent
relationship between intelligence, law-abidingness, or economic practices
and race, just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood
group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors.”

Racism based on any racial notion of biology is, then, as far as the human
beings best placed to investigate it are concerned, entirely bogus, a lie, a
falsehood.

If only that were good enough but, by now, we must surely realise that
something being merely true isn’t nearly good enough in this world. And
so:

“over the past 500 years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually
reinforcing consortium of intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business
and economic leaders, and their books that human racial biology is real
and that certain races are biologically better than others. These teachings
have led to major injustices to Jews and non-Christians during the Spanish
Inquisition; to blacks, Native Americans, and others during colonial times;
to African Americans during slavery and reconstruction; to Jews and other
Europeans during the reign of the Nazis in Germany; and to groups from
Latin America and the Middle East, among others, during modern political
times.”

People keep insisting that they are so different from some other kinds of
people, and different in definitive, empirical ways that make a difference,
that they need to take action against them, sometimes deadly drastic
action, sometimes merely action which, in some way, discriminates
against them.

The Spanish Inquisition, first established in 1478, was one such occasion
and its where Sussman formally begins his account. It began by targeting
Jews and it wanted to keep them out of the mainstream of Spanish

155
society. Later it targeted “Christanised Muslims and Gypsies” and, when
Spain grew interested in imperial conquest, others in Asia and the
Americas felt the consequences of their activist separatism and racism
too. It is even reported that the Spanish zeal for action against those
classified in certain ways brought their ire to the doors of “Protestants,
homosexuals, people accused of witchcraft, freethinkers, public
intellectuals, and people considered to be quirky or ‘gadflies’” as well.
Altogether, these various inquisitions, which introduced a concept of
“impurity of blood” as a classificatory measure, “discriminated against
and separated one group from another without allowing any legal means
for the discriminated group to assimilate.” The Spanish did not want
identified types of people mixing with, and in the mainstream of, Spanish
society. They wanted these classified and identified types separated,
segregated, isolated – perhaps even exterminated as in the case of people
they met on their colonial travels. This was carried out by those in and
with political power and so was political action. The state was here
deciding how to classify people and what would become of them as a
consequence as an aspect of the use of their power to dominate.

One might wonder how they could have done this. Most actions,
particularly public state actions such as these, normally need some kind of
rationalization, however inadequate it may seem to others, in order to
justify actions carried out. Sussman informs us that around 500 years ago
there were two basic forms of rationalization which are what we would
now describe as racist thought. The first, called the “pre-Adamite” theory
[thought at this time was, due to Christian penetration in the societies of
Western Europe, required to interact with the Bible] regarded those such
as natives of what Europeans would label “the Americas” as people who
did not have a place in the descendancy of peoples as described in
Genesis. So they were literally “pre-Adamite” people. This effectively
made such people subhuman, outside of God’s salvation history even
where that included despised peoples that were included in the Bible.
Spanish Conquistadors deemed such people “incapable of morality and

156
unable to become Christian” and that was enough to kill them and take
what they had. The second theory, by the way, the degenerate theory,
was that these people were included in the biblical peoples but they had
some how wandered off and become “degenerates” and so unacceptable
in the sight of those who weren’t. Either way, justification was found for
death and theft on a grand scale by designating an “other” to dominate.

Throughout the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries others, such as the

British and the French and those white Europeans who settled what would
become the USA, took up similar ideas and points of view. Land could be
taken, resources hoarded and people attacked, enslaved and
dispossessed because they were regarded as, in some sense, not worthy
of the things, including the lives, that they had. Such ideas, and the
practices they enabled, would become the basis of racist thought in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here the “pre-Adamite” [in relation to
things biblical] or “polygenic” [meaning a theory that these despised
people were of a different biological kind to their oppressors] theory would
become the dominant one, particularly as the authority of the Bible
declined in Western society generally. However, in the earlier part of this
period it was the other, degenerate, theory which held sway as it was
more compatible with the Bible since it assumed that God had created all
people just as the Bible said. However, since all the despised people were
thought to be degenerate it was for the “rational, moral men” [i.e. white
European Christians] to control them accordingly.

In the degenerate theory we begin to see fragments of hierarchical

thinking and some acrobatic mental attempts to justify or “explain” it. The
English philosopher, John Locke, was an adherent of the degenerate
theory. He justified taking things away from native peoples, as one of the
architects of English colonialism, on the basis that “they had unjustly
opposed the Europeans” and what he saw as their “personal failures”
which annulled any biblical ascription of equal rights or equality in the
biblical creation. [Here “failure” basically means judging other people by

157
the standard of white, European civilisation.] The French philosopher and
politician, Montesquieu, developed an elaborate, climate and geography-
based scheme in which he attempted to explain why non-European
peoples had degenerated – and climatic or geographical reasons for
perceived differences in human beings would become quite popular with
some European thinkers. Another, Carl Linnaeus, the Swede who thought
he was classifying God’s creation in his newly developed scheme of
zoological classification [on which biology is still based today], conceived
of a creationist fixed order of things brought to life imediately by God. It
was, thus, hierarchically arranged by God in a “Great Chain of Being”, as it
was referred to. It was Linnaeus who referred to human beings as “Homo
Sapiens” yet he also classified human beings “in relationship to their
supposed education and climatic situation”, thinking that this might make
a difference to their classification. Naturally [if one is a white European]
white Europeans were seen as the pinnacle of humanity in this scheme.

A disciple of Linnaeus was the German physician and anatomist, Johann

Friedrich Blumenbach. He is today regarded as one of the first physical
anthropologists. Blumenbach believed there was one human species but
that it exhibited global variation. Yet he still managed to describe five
varieties [that is, classifications] of human beings based on geographical
locations. These were: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American, and
Malay. Unfortunately, along with these “descriptors” came some
annoyingly resilient ideas. One was calling those of European descent
“Caucasian” - and regarding them as the ideal, “the closest to God’s
image”, and the “original” humans and “most beautiful”. It was from
these that the others had “degenerated”. Blumenbach said all this on no
scientific basis, however. It was all simple aesthetics and his appreciation
of aesthetics. Secondly, Blumenbach, although he saw one continuum of
humanity, “accepted the underlying paradigm of the day, as had
Linnaeus… that one variety was indeed better and preferable to another
in relationship to God’s original creation.” Indeed, Blumenbach’s
classification of human beings [see the illustration below] wasn’t only

158
geographical: it was hierarchical. In this classificatory scheme,
“Caucasian” was an “ideal” and some, as with the historian of science,
Stephen Jay Gould, see this as something that became a foundational
moment in “the creation of the modern racists’ paradigm”.

Blumenbach’s classification of human races

As Gould interprets this analysis, “The shift from a geographic to a

159
hierarchical ordering of human diversity marks a fateful transition in the
history of Western science. [Blumenbach’s] five race scheme became
canonical, and he changed the geometry of human order from Linnaean
cartography to linear ranking by putative worth.”

Under the surface here are various ideas that we must keep in mind.
People, obviously, observed differences [not least in skin colour] between
different types of people. Yet many accepted, on religious grounds which
they may then have sought to justify through explanations of their
observances and experiences, that people were made by God and were
fixed as they were [perhaps unalterably so] by him. This is one reason
why various geographical or climatic theories were attempted to explain
unavoidable observed differences whilst having the Bible [and other
thought that could not be doubted] remain in place. One particular idea
here was in regard to one’s environment and whether this could have an
effect upon one’s natural endowments or not. This would become
increasingly important as evolution became a powerful idea in such
discussions [and we must keep in mind that, at this stage, the vast
majority were creationists]. There were, at this time, however, those who
believed that taking “lesser peoples” to a different place and educating
them would inevitably alter their situation in life. But there were yet
others who believed that you were what you were and nothing could
change that.

But back to the polygenic theory which had trouble in more bibliophilic
times as it seemed to directly contradict the biblical account of creation.
Indeed, early polygenists risked being burned to death by the Church
themselves, so contradictory to biblical verities did such ideas seem. The
problem [for the Church], however, was that polygenic explanations of the
findings of biologists and anthropologists kept being regarded as the best
ones. But this also came wth racist implications and, in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, polygenic theories would form the basis of “a
powerful ‘scientific’ defense of racist ideology.” Noted eighteenth century

160
polygenists included those pillars of the Enlightenment, David Hume and
Immanuel Kant, two solidly canonical Western philosophers. [One might
compare their reception within modern European philosophy as opposed
to that of Martin Heidegger, the latter tainted by association with Nazi
Germany although, arguably, his views offend the nostrils no more than
those of these philosophical forebears.] Hume, states Robert Sussman,
“advocated the separate creation and innate inferiority of nonwhite
peoples” and, indeed, in his own words he described black people as
“naturally inferior to whites” in a screed which basically preaches the
supremacy of white civilisation.

Kant, on the other hand, “essentially created a racist anthropology based

on skin color”, remarkable for a philosopher still thought of in the Western
canon as perhaps the most important moral theorist of all. He believed
that “Climate determined the natural predispositions or character of each
race, and once the process toward each racial disposition had begun, it
was irreversible.” So Kant thought the white European’s superiority was
baked in on the basis of such views – and that the inferiority of the rest
was equally set and unchangeable. Therefore, “Although Kant was a
champion of the equality of all men and of civil rights, these were only for
humans who have the ability to educate themselves and thus have free
will — they were only for whites. Full personhood was actually dependent
upon one’s race.” And so, “Nonwhites were relegated to a lower rung in
the moral ladder.” We can hear strong echoes of this in, for example, the
treatment of slaves by Europeans. Regarded as different in kind, and in
some sense untrainable and unreformable, they were condemned to
perform menial tasks under the control of “morally superior” white
masters – or to die if they would not. It seems to me that Kant’s stated
beliefs are as disreputable as any that Heidegger ever uttered and so one
must wonder at what about Kant redeems him in the eyes of those who
still regard him so highly where Heidegger is considered by many so
beyond the pail. Perhaps these academics just don’t know of Kant’s views
[which, pertinently, also extended to the “nonpersonhood of Jews”]? At

161
least one anthropologist, Nina Jablonski, has recently described Kant as
“one of the most influential racists of all time”. Someone please let the
philosophers know what one of their clan, Charles W. Mills, then has this
to say about Kant:

“The embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its
concealment) is that their most important moral theorist of the past three
hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modern period of
the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and
subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw. Modern moral
theory and modern racial theory have the same father.” [emphasis
original]

This is, and should be, profoundly embarrassing but it nevertheless

describes the basis of much subsequently racist thought in which the
white person is privileged and the non-white person is not on a
classificatory basis intended to establish domination by some people over
others. And, at the stage of Kant, it really only was a classification based
on skin colour for, as yet, no other kinds of research had even been
undertaken. It was base prejudice raised to the level of philosophy and
science. Such work would be done though, motivated by racist ideology,
in an attempt to give such racism scientific credentials which bolstered
the dominating behaviour’s theoretical standing. For example, Samuel
Morton and his Mortonite disciples, George Gliddon, Josiah Nott and Louis
Agassiz, would attempt to argue that cranial measurements and features
argued for the polygenic or pre-Adamite theory. All of these researchers
“forwarded the cause of slavery and racism”.

This research took place in the recently created USA which, through the
late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, would become a hub
of white racist and eugenicist theory and political machinations. Here
“science” was often carried out by wealthy and well connected men of
prejudice who wanted to find scientifically acceptable [or at least

162
arguable] reasons for their prejudice in order to persuade pliable
politicians to enact political policy to make such dubious beliefs physically
experienced and dominant realities. One of the men here, Josiah Nott,
would give “lectures on Niggerology” and claimed they made him all the
more popular as a result, both before and after the American Civil War.
Another, Agassiz, was an anti-Darwinian who “regarded human beings as
the object and end of divine creation and assumed that the world and its
contents had been put there specifically to be exploited for human use.”
Upon seeing his first black person, having emigrated to the USA from an
entirely white earlier life in Europe, Agassiz wrote to his mother
“describing his repulsion at seeing someone so different from himself.”
Such views motivated research from the Mortonites to the end that blacks
were not even of the same species as whites in a typically polygenic view
of human beings. Archetypally, the views of the Mortonites can be found
in the book Types of Mankind, authored by Nott and Gliddon in 1854 but
which was popular into the twentieth century, going through mutiple
reprintings. It existed in order to show that science, the human activity of
objective classification, justified slavery.

Meanwhile, the European counterpart to the Mortonites was Frenchman,

Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau. His book, Essai sur l’Inégalité des
Races Humaines, translated into English in an abridged version by the
Mortonite, Josiah Nott, as “The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races”,
proved even more popular than Types of Mankind in both Europe and
America. Sussman even suggests this book played a role in Hitler’s racial
philosophy and politics. Gobineau himself was a fake Count [“comte” was
not a title but simply the name he took] and probably the most successful
academc racist of the nienteenth century. The works of the Mortonites
and Gobineau together would directly inspire the work of twentieth
century racists in Europe and America and ultimately lead to Nazism.
Gobineau relied on the “Nordic myth” which we now know as a core part
of the Nazi racial philosophy. Yet its important for we moderns to know
that this, like much of Nazism, didn’t just spring from Hitler’s mind one

163
day. The theory itself has history. As Sussman explains, “In this myth, the
noble classes of Europe were thought to be originally German Franks and
Anglo-Saxons, and the Germanic peoples were claimed as most superior.”
This shifted formerly theologically justified claims of superiority into
becoming biological claims and such racial theories were essentially class-
based as well, rooted, as they were, in class conflicts of the time in
Europe. Therefore, they also “carried the invidious notion that each class
had distinct and unalterable hereditary qualities derived from separate
origins. The weaker classes were naturally inferior to the stronger and
owed obedience to them.” As Sussman continues:

“Through these writings, there was a popular belief in France that three
racial strains inhabited the country: Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans.
The light-skinned, tall, blond Nordics were assumed to be the descendants
of ancient Germanic tribes, the originators of all civilization, and the only
peoples capable of leadership. Gobineau’s Essai expressed these popular
myths vividly and inserted these views into the popular science of the
day. His book fed a developing idea that not only were whites superior
over all others but also that a certain group among whites was even more
superior to other whites. He used the term Aryan, coined by a British
colonial administrator, to designate the common ancestral language of
what is now referred to as the Indo-European language. Around 1819, the
term began to gain widespread authority due to the lectures and writings
of Friedrich Schlegel, a German poet and scholar. The most influential
promoter of the Aryan myth was Jacob Grimm, of Brothers Grimm’s
fairytales fame, in his History of the English Language (1848), which
reached a large public audience in the second half of the nineteenth
century.”

So we can see that, prior to the twentieth century, in both Europe and
America, there were both scientific and non-scientific works which
attempted to justify, with some success, racist theories of the human
species. Gobineau, in particular, with his eulogisation of the Aryan theory

164
and his proclamation “that the success of civilization [is] directly
dependent upon the purity of ‘Aryan’ blood within it”, laid foundations that
others would later be able to exploit. But we must remember that all such
thought, even by its very existence, has the opportunity to fester in the
background and become the basis of further illegitimate thought and
action if some appropriately motivated minds find themselves seized by it.
[Hence the modern danger of “conspiracy theories”.] In the post-Civil War
United States, in which racial tensions were far from solved, the notion of
“racial purity” and the dangers of “interbreeding” would continue to be
public themes on into the twentieth century, for example. All this is
despite the fact that neither Gobineau, nor Kant before him, had ever
done any original research of their own. It was all freeform theorising, the
narrativisation of lived prejudice. In truth, they formed the backbone of a
shift from “biblically-based” racisms into biologically argued ones that
became increasingly justified on the basis of a classificatory “science”
that aimed to dominate through claims to knowledge. [The faults with,
and dangers of, this have been explored in chapters 2 and 5 of this book.]

In a way very similar to this, an argument from a flawed understanding of

biology and its classifications is what sustains the current “gender critical”
movement in the matter of human gender. Such arguments were also
very prevalent, however, in white European racism from the Spanish
Inquisition to the horrors of the Nazis as well. As Sussman explains:

“Thus, with Gobineau and again in the footsteps of Kant, subtle but major
changes could take place in this school of racism, moving beyond biblical
interpretations and more into ‘hereditary’ ones. Biological determinists
could claim biological separation among human races (and other
groupings of humans, such as strains and even economic classes) using
‘blood’ or heredity and not necessarily invoking biblical separation. They
could use the same ‘biological’ arguments to claim that racial and group
distinctions were biologically fixed and unchangeable. Thus, racism could
become more acceptable to biblical traditionalists, giving biological

165
 deterministic racism a more widespread following and making it
compatible with the growth of Darwinism and genetic theory. You might
think of Mortonism as the end of an old Bible- (or anti-Bible-) based
polygenics and Gobinism (in a Kantian tradition) as a revision of a ‘blood’
or hereditary-based racism that was potentially compatible with
Darwinism. The different races of mankind need not have been created
separately as explained, or not, by the Bible. They merely needed to be
genetically distinct and thus different in their basic biology. In both cases,
these biological distinctions were basically fixed, and admixture would
lead to inferiority, weakness, and even increased mortality. Little or
nothing could be changed by environmental influences.”

By the end of the nineteenth century the “degenerate” theory had, then,
basically died out and the polygenic theory would be the one that would
go forward in an attempt to biologically ground the essential difference
and [to the polygenists, at least] necessary separation and classification
of “biological” races much as “gender critical” biologists attempt to fix the
sexes, and an appreciation of genders, today.

B:

We may see the turn of the twentieth century as the beginning of the era
of eugenic thinking that builds on all this that had gone before. It was also
the era in which political policy, prosecuted on the basis of eugenic
apologia, began. The wellspring for such action was the USA and was
based on thought about biology and genetics and a debunking of those –
such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a Frenchman who, in the early 19 th
century, had argued for a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics
based on environmental factors – who argued that different environments
could produce different abilities in people – who were, thus, not lost
causes because they happened to have been born somewhere
unfavourable to the appearance of one skill or another. The focus now
became heredity and locked in characteristics which couldn’t be changed.

166
For such people you simply were your biology and your genetics, hostages
to biological fortune, people different in kind on the basis of biological
race. Environment, for such people, could not change this and so, as one
person in 1891 expressed this, “education has no value for the future of
mankind” which could now not be “improved” in general. Eugenicists
were, then, biological determinists just as the “gender critical” are today.

The old polygenists [or pre-Adamites] and the new eugenicists had strong
ties. At the beginning of the twentieth century Types of Mankind and
Gobineau’s Essai were still popular books on both sides of the North
Atlantic and Nott and Gobineau themselves were influential characters.
Later figures championed their ideas as well. A concatenation of wealthy,
industrialist and scientific figures found common cause in the new,
eugenic thinking and it wormed its way into higher American society
through books such as William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe, Ernst
Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe: At the Close of the Nineteenth
Century and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century.

A notable figure at this time was Nathaniel Shaler, a Harvard professor of

paleontology who was brought to Harvard by Agassiz and who published
Nature and Man in America in 1891. Shaler was racist in the style of
Gobineau and influenced by the Aryan myth. He was himself from a
wealthy family with ties to the slave trade [he was born in 1841 when this
was still very legal]. Shaler’s racism tied Gobineau’s mythological racism
to Nott’s pseudo-scientific variety as well, however, to create a view which
regarded people of colour as little more than barbarians and Europe as
the cradle of civilization and all that was good in human beings. He stated
that “The Americas, Africa and Australia have shown by their human
products that they are unfitted to be the cradle-places of great
peoples...These continents have never from their own blood built a race
that has risen above barbarism.” Consequently, Shaler disdained race
mixing and saw it as something which would doom all races together. All

167
such thinking was baby steps on the road to what would, one day, become
the concept of a “master race”. Shaler’s importance is that he was
teaching this kind of thing habitually to thousands of Harvard graduates
and he, without doubt, helped bring such thought into the American
twentieth century. As two examples of this, three of his students would go
on to form the “Immigration Restriction League” and future US president,
Theodore Roosevelt, was taught personally by Shaler at Harvard.

We see in the words of another Shaler student, Charles Davenport,

speaking in the late 1920s, where Shaler’s fixation with racial
intermingling could lead:

“Those who look to the future are naturally concerned with the question:
‘What is to be the consequence of this racial intermingling?’ Especially we
of the white race, proud of its achievement in the past, are eagerly
questioning the consequences of mixing our blood with that of other races
who have made less advancement in science and the arts...

one of the results of hybridization between whites and Negroes— the

production of an excessive number of ineffective, because
disharmoniously put together people...

It is, however, this burden of ineffectiveness which is the heavy price

that is paid for hybridization. A population of hybrids will be a population
carrying an excessively large number of intellectually incompetent
persons.”

It is not too hard to think of others in the late 1920s, in countries other
than the United States, who had their own concerns about the mixing of
various peoples. Indeed, Robert Sussman states in so many words in The
Myth of Race that “Davenport and his followers in the eugenics movement
brought biological determinism, racial prejudice, and the active agenda of
eugenics right up to the Nazi regime of Hitler.” In fact, he goes further,

168
stating that “it was the ‘science’ of eugenics and strict biological
determinism that formed the backbone of Nazism.” That it could be
propagated as “science”, furthermore, and so have the sheen and
authority of some kind of academic classificatory acceptability, was not
the least of the reasons why it penetrated so deeply into the life of the
world in general. It is a stark warning that neither “science” nor being a
high falutin academic are barriers to dangerous theories with socially
horrific consequences.

Eugenics itself is an outgrowth of something known as “social Darwinism”.

Darwin, over whom I have passed in this overview of racism and eugenic
thinking, of course fits squarely into the time period I am discussing but
he did not himself use his evolutionary theories of natural selection for
explicitly racist purposes even if others did attempt to use Darwin as a
way to explain their own racism. Social Darwinism, for example, was a
belief system “that espoused that the strongest or fittest should survive
and flourish in society, while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die.”
It is, as you might expect, an elitist theory that can also be boiled down to
“might is right”. Applied to society, its not hard to see how this might be a
theory held to by wealthy elites or historical nobility to justfy their
continued existence at the imagined top of an evolutionary pyramid.
Darwin’s theories were twisted here to justify why the people “at the top”
were at the top – and it was basically because they deserved it because
they were better people biologically. Yet, at the same time, the poverty of
other kinds of people was also explained away and excused because such
people were imagined to be prey to their own, inevitable “weaker”
biology. Thus, “To Social Darwinists, not only was survival of the fittest
natural, it was also morally correct. In fact, many argued that it was
morally wrong to assist the weak since that would be promoting the
survival and reproduction of the less fit.” The social Darwinist imagined
this “battle” taking place not only between different races or ethnicities
but also between different classes as well.

169
Eugenics ramped up social Darwinism into a political activism. Eugenicists
wanted to actually see its thought, and the policies developed from it,
brought to bear upon the population such that the population itself would
be affected, shaped and dominated by such thinking. This ambition
existed long before Hitler gave such thinking its most obvious practical
expression in Nazi Germany and, as stated, the major motor here was
thought in the USA in any case. But it was not an American who may be
credited as the father of eugenics, however, but a Briton, Francis Galton
[incidentally, a cousin of Charles Darwin]. Galton acquired independent
wealth during his lifetime and so was free to study at will. He first coined
the term “eugenics” in 1883 and “believed that controlled breeding of
humans was not only doable but a highly desirable goal”. This was where
eugenics began, in a desire to breed better humans and breed out
“worse” examples of the species. It is not then inconsequential that “He
believed that the average ‘negro’ intellectual standard was two grades
below that of extant ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ and he saw the intellectual standard
of the latter as two grades below that of residents of ancient Greece”. He
also wanted to promote what he called “judicious mating” and to
“cultivate race” more generally. Master race here we come!

There was an early split among eugenicists into “positive” and “negative”
types – although neither seem particularly savoury. The former, which is
mainly what Galton was, “called for the control of human breeding to
produce genetically superior people” [echoes of the “master race” here]
while the latter “lobbied for improving the quality of the human race by
eliminating or excluding biologically inferior people from the population
through the use of segregation, deportation, castration, marriage
prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia, and, ultimately,
extermination” which is a description which sounds like something out of
a history lesson for people in the twenty first century. Sussman tells us
that Galton’s approach was more British whereas the negative kind of
eugenics was more American. Galton assumed all kinds of traits
[“character and personality, general intellectual ability, gregariousness,

170
longevity, strong sexual passion, aversion to meat, craving for drink and
gambling, susceptibility to opium, proclivity to pauperism and crimes of
violence and fraud, madness, and tuberculosis”] were heritable and his
thinking marked the turn towards a biologically-argued authoritarianism.
In 1904 Galton endowed a research position at University College London
in eugenics and in Germany in 1905 the Society of Race Hygiene was
founded… shortly followed thereafter by the British Eugenics Education
Society, once more in London. Eugenics attracted prominent supporters in
the UK “including liberal economist William Beveridge; conservative
politician Arthur Balfour; authors George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and
Sidney Webb; and future prime minister Winston Churchill.” Notable in
Britain, however, was that at this time it was focused more on class than
race specifically.

But let us now focus briefly on the “negative” eugenics as it developed in

the USA. As context, we cannot avoid noting that America was essentially
a country built on racism which had utilised slavery from its beginning and
had necessitated the genocide of the native populations in order to exist
in the first place. We have already noted some of the arguments used to
justify such activities above. Consequently, however, there was a strong
sense of racial identity running through the white population which might
be reflected in Sussman’s suggestion that “the eugenics movement was
much more negative and pernicious even in its early development” in the
United States. The USA had a large African American population and was
also increasingly a magnet for immigrants in the late ninetenth and early
twentieth centuries. This proved a breeding ground among elite whites
including “academics and those with economic, social, and political
power” who “began to endorse biologically deterministic theories of
human behavior” and who “believed that much of human behavior was
biologically determined”. Of course, it wasn’t elite white behaviour they
looked to critique. Race and class prejudices decided what was in need of
explanation, classification and control. So the American eugenicists, in
some cases, were more than happy to believe that “drunkenness,

171
insanity, prostitution, and criminality could be hereditary” and looked to
bring eugenics thinking to bear on such social problems as well as more
overtly racial ones. Such thinking got as crazy as imagining that “criminals
could be identified by physical characteristics [including such features as
a sloping forehead, ears of unusual size, asymmetry of the face or
cranium, and excessive arm length]”.

Such thought developed in the direction of diagnosing “mental deficiency”

and led to the development of the IQ test and the bandying around of
terms such as “feeble-minded” and “moron” for those so diagnosed. Of
course, these IQ tests had to reach a bar of scientific justifiability in order
to be made authentic and put to use but once this was done “many
American social scientists and psychologists began using mental testing”.
This attracted the attention of Shaler’s former student, Charles Davenport,
who suggested such “mental deficiency” was genetic [and thus should
probably be disposed of somehow] and regarded it as a single trait rather
than as a score on some imaginary continuum. [Its much easier to want to
get rid of it that way.] Thus, from around 1909, it was “believed that
hereditary defect was the cause of most law-breaking and that half of all
criminals were feeble-minded”, a genetic insufficiency. People were now
“born stupid”, something which was both irreversible and made these
people worthless. Using a genetic theory of Gregor Mendel [and Mendelian
genetics generally] “Vernon Kellogg, a prominent Stanford biologist,
claimed that the idea that feeble-mindedness ‘was a unit human trait
following the general Mendelian order as regards its mode of
inheritance’… is hardly any longer open to doubt’”.

Of course, scientists don’t come to such conclusions for no reason and

these largely better off, higher status, white scientists didn’t either. Thus,
these views:

“were used to discriminate among individuals and ethnic and racial

groups; environmental solutions were left out of the picture. The eugenics

172
 movement also used these factors as ammunition for its cause. Many
worried that the most ‘valuable individuals and classes’ were being
outbred by the least valuable. In 1907, President Woodrow Wilson, who
supported the eugenics effort, helped Indiana adopt legislation making
sterilization of certain ‘undesirable’ individuals compulsory. More than
thirty states adopted such laws.”

Eugenics was now not just the racist beliefs of some well off white people.
It was becoming a matter of political policy as the result of political
ambitions to take control of society generally in eugenic terms. Many US
states enacted marriage laws [beginning wth Connecticut in 1896]
“prohibiting anyone who was ‘epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded’ from
marrying. Eugenicists like Davenport found high profile industrialist
backers to fund newly incorporated research institutes which would help
expand and more widely disseminate their eugenicist beliefs in order that
they could present apparently “scientific” research to politicians as the
basis of policy proposals. Such people viewed eugenics as a way “to apply
science to the problems of a class-ridden and socially heterogenous
society”. For such people “the other” was a problem and heterogeneity
was not welcome. One research centre, for example, the Eugenics Record
Office, which had Charles Davenport as its director, “had three main
functions: to conduct scientific research on human heredity, to popularize
eugenic ideas, and to lobby for eugenics-related legislation.” It should be
noted at this point that such people and their institutes were not benign.
In the years that followed, they began campaigns “to create a superior
race”, wrote draft laws on which kinds of people ought to be sterilized
[mandatorially if they could not be tricked or coerced into agreeing
voluntarily] and wished to pursue research into “the value of superior
blood and the menace to society of inferior blood”.

This leads us up to the “First International Eugenics Congress” which took

place in London in 1912. It was an event which Sussman regards as
mightily boosting the influence of the eugenics movement thereafter.

173
[This was 21 years before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.] By this time
there were a number of places in Europe, in Britain, Scandinavia and
Germany, were the negative eugenics had taken hold along with
Gobineau’s Nordic mythology. In addition, eugenicists worldwide were
engaged in similar goals in their various locations and many of the notable
were present at the Congress of around 400 delegates. Winston Churchill
was there representing the king of the United Kingdom as was Alfred
Proetz, the founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, a name
which sounds sinister in the extreme in our historical location but which,
in 1912, probably had the sheen of scientific respectability about it. Many
delegates were distinguished scientists in their fields or former or future
politicians of note. As a measure of the interest and support eugenics was
attracting at the time we should note that “in 1912, the current, former,
and future U.S. presidents William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and
Woodrow Wilson were active supporters of the eugenics movement.” In
addition, the Congress was publicised to every American governor of
every state and to numerous heads of various professional academic and
medical societies in an effort to publicise eugenics to the great and the
good as widely as possible. It was presented as the future of respectable
science and academic thought.

As an inevitable result of all this, eugenics gained credibility and influence

among the white elite. As a measure of this, we may note that eugenics
gained the financial backing of the likes of “Andrew Carnegie, Mary W.
Harriman, John D. Rockefeller (the oil industry tycoon), Henry Ford, J. H.
Kellogg (the cereal magnate), C. J. Gamble (of Proctor and Gamble), J. P.
Morgan (of U.S. Steel), and Mrs. H. B. DuPont (of the chemical company)”
in the USA. With such backing came recognition and increasing scientific
and political legitimacy which was potentially worldwide in scope. And
several of the richest people around were prepared to fund it. At the
Congress itself the opening remarks to the Congress had hoped that the
twentieth century “would be known in the future as the century when the
eugenics ideal was accepted as part of the creed of civilization.” One

174
wonders how that speaker would view such hopes now, 109 years later? In
1912 it was felt amongst its proponents that eugenics was “one of the
pressing issues of the age”. So around this time eugenics began to rocket
through US academia with 376 different institutions offering courses by
1928. Biology textbooks also began to include eugenic thinking as part of
their text, resulting in thousands of Americans in the first half of the
twentieth century being exposed to eugenics as orthodox scientific
thought. By the 1920s at least 30 countries had eugenics movements. The
Congress had been a huge success and by this time eugenics thinking was
focused around the following goals:

1. The promotion of selective breeding.

2. The sterilization and castration of the “unfit”.

3. The use of intelligence testing to identify “mentally deficient”

individuals and to identify differences in intelligence between racial and
ethnic groups [dubbed racial psychology].

4. Limiting the immigration of various ethnic and racial groups.

In the years following this first Congress, this agenda was vigorously
pursued.

Therefore, the height of eugenics was really the period after the First
International Eugenics Congress in 1912 until the end of the Second World
War in 1945 - at which point eugenics was swiftly renamed as other
things, the stench of Nazism being too much for it to bear. It is, then, for
roughly a third of a century [33 years] when eugenics was at its height.
But eugenics did not disappear after this, however, and it will often be
easily spotted in popular rhetoric and popular policy even today. [Both the
current British PM, Boris Johnson, and his father, Stanley, who has written
books on the subject, have argued for mass population control in recent

175
times whilst being appropriately vague on just whose population should
be “controlled” and how. They have both fathered at least 6 children as
an aside!] At the forefront of this wave of eugenics were the Americans,
led by the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), the Eugenics Research
Association (ERA), and the Eugenics Committee of the United States of
America (ECUSA), the latter of which evolved into the American Eugenics
Society (AES) a few years later. These were all organisations sponsored by
plutocrats and business types and they existed both to do research which
would make eugenics acceptable on a scientific, classificatory basis as
well as in order to publicise eugenics generally. The latter organisation
there, ECUSA, existed to “disseminate the eugenics ideal throughout
society and thereby alter the course of history”. Eugenics, in relative
terms, attracted few in overall numbers but those it did attract were
remarkably driven and zealous for their ideals. In 1922 this same
organisation had invited potential members to its Advisory Council with a
letter urging them to protect America ”against indiscriminate immigration,
criminal degenerates, and race suicide”, for example. Essentially, such
movements were the start of a push to create a master race by weeding
out everybody else and so to dominate their respective societies entirely.

Consequently, one focus of eugenics at the height of its powers was

selective breeding. As Davenport and his associate Harry H. Laughlin
wrote in 1915:

“Apart from migration, there is only one way to get socially desirable
traits into our social life, and that is by reproduction: there is only one
way to get them out, by preventing their reproduction by breeding.”

This led to sterilization policies and marriage bans, although 29 US states

already had marriage bans by 1913 which forbade race mixing [some of
these bans relied on older, racist thinking such as in the case of Nevada
where marriage “between whites and Ethiopian, Malay, Mongolian, or
American Indian races” was forbidden – following Blumenbach’s race

176
classifications]. Other, eugenics-inspired, laws focused on “public health”
by outlawing the marriage of the “feeble-minded” or “epileptic” - as if
these were similar things. [To eugenicists, of course, they were – in that
they were regarded as equally undesirable.] Therefore:

“Improving environment was no longer seen as a possible cure for

problems caused by the poor, the criminal, the uneducated, the physically
and mentally unhealthy, and the inferior “races” of the world. From the
ERO, trained field workers were sent out throughout the United States to
collect anthropometric data and family histories from hospitals, asylums,
prisons, charity organizations, schools for the deaf and blind, and
institutions for the feeble-minded. The goal was not purely racial; the goal
was to identify and put on record the complete family pedigree of any
individual or group of individuals Davenport and Laughlin considered to be
physically, medically, morally, culturally, or socially inadequate, thus
creating a massive underclass of ‘unfit’ individuals and their families.”

The ambition of such eugenicists was nothing less than to map and
classify society in order to control its population, through breeding, whole
and entire. The end goal, necessarily, would then be to “breed out” the
undesirable elements. Is this much different from Nazi thinking? You
decide. But there is more:

“Ten groups were targeted as ‘socially unfit’: (1) the feeble-minded; (2)
paupers; (3) alcoholics; (4) criminals, including petty criminals and those
jailed for nonpayment of fines; (5) epileptics; (6) the insane; (7) the
constitutionally weak; (8) those with specified diseases; (9) the deformed;
and (10) the deaf, blind, and mute (with no indication of the severity of
these disabilities). The remedies proposed to eliminate this inferior ‘germ
plasm’ included restrictive marriage laws, compulsory birth control, forced
segregation, sterilization, and euthanasia, although it was believed that it
was too early to implement the last one.”

177
Barely 25 years after this was written by Charles Davenport’s colleague at
the ERO, Harry H. Laughlin, Nazi Germany would be doing exactly such
things, unhindered by the political and legal barriers to such actions that
American and other eugenicists still had to overcome [such as state and
federal politicians and courts, including the Supreme Court]. Indeed, it is
probably not too hyperbolic to suggest that the only thing that stopped
the United States becoming Nazi Germany before Germany did is that
Hitler took charge of the political situation in a way that American
eugenicists never could [there were, for example, competing civil rights
movements in the USA]. But the ideas were very much similar and only
political opportunity differed between them. Davenport and Laughlin, for
example, “believed that stopping the reproduction of the unfit would
greatly reduce their numbers within a few generations” and, as in the
Spanish Inquisition, thought that “the property of the incarcerated could
be acquired and sold to help defer the costs of these programs”. So never
again should we imagine that Hitler was a one-off, a monster with no
history as if formed out of thin air. He was part of a movement, a stream
of thought powerful amongst some white minds, a racist myth of Nordic
superiority and biological self-importance which was, at a minimum,
transatlantic in scope and influence.

As part of this movement the ERO and the ERA [in the shape of Laughlin
and the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, an avid and
prominent eugenicist on the ERO’s board of scientific advisors] tried to get
the US Census Bureau to accept and use various eugenics classifications
in their work. They mostly refused and so Laughlin switched to mithering
people in Congress and state government instead. He hit a home run in
Virginia when he found Walter A. Plecker, an enthusiastic racist and
eugenicist who was the registrar in Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics
from 1914 to 1942. It is said of Plecker that “His main interest was to
maintain Virginia’s racial purity and prevent racially mixed marriages. He
wrote to Laughlin in 1928, ‘While we are interested in the eugenical
records of our citizens, we are attempting to list only the mixed breeds,

178
who are endeavoring to pass into the white race.’” Thus, Plecker was a
purist of sorts wanting to keep “the white race” pure.

Consequently, “Plecker and a few of his white supremacist friends, who

called themselves the Anglo-Saxon Club, began to work on new legislation
that would ban marriage between whites and any person with even ‘one
drop’ of non-Caucasian blood.” The enemy here was what Virginia’s
leading newspaper at that time, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, called
“mongrelism” which, it was thought, “would sound the death knell of the
white man.” Plecker utilised his whole career attempting to keep white
and non-white apart, even going so far as to keep them separate in
cemeteries too. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act was passed in March 1924,
and falsely registering one’s race became a felony, punishable by
imprisonment of from one to five years. This law survived for over forty
years, until 1966, and Plecker became a hero amongst racists and white
supremacists across America, something which helped as he tried to help
foist similar laws onto other states in succeeding years. Laughlin,
meanwhile hoping to speed up the process, even asked Plecker to prepare
a chart for his journal, Eugenical News, entitled “Amount of Negro Blood
Allowed in Various States for Marriage to Whites”. It is said that Plecker
“dictated the nature of existence for millions of Americans, the living, the
dead and the never born… [He] defined the lives of an entire generation
of Virginians — who could live where, who could attend what school and
obtain what education, who could marry whom, and even who could rest
in peace in what graveyard”. A charming guy, I’m sure you won’t agree. In
such ways, and through such networks of people, was eugenics moulding
and attempting to control American society. Only in 1967 were anti-
miscegenation laws such as that pioneered in Virginia finally ruled
unconstitutional throughout the United States by the Supreme Court.

But there were worse horrors than the anti-mixing and segregation
policies eugenicists pursued. One such was the attempt to
programmatically sterilize those deemed “unfit” along eugenic lines [i.e.

179
those deemed unfit, either physically, mentally, socially, morally or
racially]. Sterilization was not a new remedy for various crimes but
eugenicists sought to make an ad-hoc remedy more programmatic since
they saw in the unfit a biological or genetic deficiency which could not be
tutored or otherwise remedied. The eugenic mentality saw the breeding of
such people as a threat to the population generally and to a white elite
specifically, both in terms of mixing and in terms of overwhelming the rest
in simple numerical terms. However, states were hesitant about passing
sterilization laws [an example of a problem Hitler and the Nazis would not
have] and so eugenicists found progress here slow. By 1922 only some
few thousand sterilizations “on inmates of prisons, insane asylums, homes
for the epileptic and feeble-minded, and other institutions of social
welfare” had been carried out in total, mostly in “liberal” California. Harry
Laughlin published his book, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States ,
along with sample sterilization laws, to try and stimulate interest but the
legal situation was perilous and so it was thought by the eugenicists that
they needed to establish its lawfulness in court in order to remove
legislative hesitancy. So they sought to fit up a case they could get past
the judicial barriers to stimulate greater uptake of sterilization policies.

Virginia was once again the state of choice for this, having passed a law in
1916 allowing the superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for
Epileptics and Feebleminded, Albert Priddy, to sterilize Colony residents
before they were discharged if such operations were approved as safe,
effective and court-mandated. Priddy was a staunch eugenicist and began
sterilizing women [whom such policies always concentrated on much
more than those with male bodies] as soon as the law was passed, aiming
to screen out a wide variety of undesirable traits from wider society in
doing so, everything from insanity to promiscuousness [and all of which
were assumed to be herditary]. However, Priddy was sloppy [or maybe
just zealous for his beliefs] and was, in some cases, sterilizing women
without a proper court order in each case. So it turned out that a mother
and daughter he had sterilized sued him for harms done to them. When

180
the state court of appeals did not throw out the case, Priddy was in a bind.
He turned to political machinations after being slapped on the wrist by the
court who, although finding the sterilizations were illegal, awarded those
who had been so sterilized no damages. A new, pro-eugenics, governor of
Virgina was sworn in at about this time and, using Laughlin’s Eugenical
Sterilization in the United States as a textbook, a new law was passed in
1924. But the eugenicist advocates of Priddy’s, and others’, sterilizations
were still hesitant. Would the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, or even
the US Supreme Court, hold up this law as constitutional? They needed to
know before they might be hauled up in court once more.

Priddy had sixteen candidates for the sterilizations he was enthusiastic to

begin again and he chose an 18 year old woman, Carrie Buck, as the one
who would be the test case. It was a set up from the start. The Colony’s
board voted to sterilize her but, in order to complete the sterilization
procedure, the board was required to appoint an attorney to appeal the
sterilization order and to defend Carrie in the litigation. The person chosen
to “defend” her was Irving Whitehead, “a lawyer who was a member of
the board of directors of the Virginia colony that had originally appointed
Priddy as superintendent” and someone who “had endorsed Priddy’s
expansive interpretation that Virginia’s law authorized the sterilization of
inmates”. He had even approved the sterilization of the two women the
court subsequently found in favour of over Priddy’s unlawful sterilizations.
He was not on Carrie Buck’s side but on the side of those who wanted
sterilization to be legal and unchallenged – and was a close friend of
Priddy to boot.

Carrie Buck’s story is a tragic tale. She was committed to the Colony at 14
and regarded as a “moron” but was taken into a local home where she did
chores and went to school. However, at 17, she was found to be pregnant
[she claimed to have been raped by a nephew of those she was living
with] and was committed back to the Colony in perpetuity as feeble-
minded, epileptic or both [diagnoses in such cases were never the most

181
thoroughgoing or the most conscientious]. She was, of course, not allowed
to keep the baby when it was born and was soon thereafter condemned to
sterilization. Now the setup slipped into place. Whitehead was made her
lawyer by her legal guardian, the attorney for the Colony, and Harry
Laughlin, yes, him again, “provided a long written deposition that relied
on IQ test results for Carrie, her mother, and her seven-month-old baby to
illustrate that three generations of the Buck family were feeble-minded.”
She was declared by Laughlin “a potential parent of socially inadequate or
defective offspring” in “expert” testimony and the court took less than 5
hours to find the sterilization legal. But it had yet to be tested in the US
Supreme Court. Priddy himself died in the meantime.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1927 was Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr. He was a social Darwinist and a fan of eugenics and held to the radical
views of people such as Harry H. Laughlin and his colleagues. It is said
that “He had no compulsion about state-controlled euthanasia of weak
and inadequate ‘undesirables’”. So, unsurprisingly, the court found in
favour of sterilization, saying that “the health of a patient and the welfare
of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental
defectives.” Holmes himself said, writing the opinion of the majority in the
case, that “it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime, or let[ting] them starve for their imbecility,
society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their
kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough
to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are
enough.” As such, sterilization on eugenic grounds became American law
on May 2nd, 1927, shortly after the Virginia “one drop of blood” marriage
laws.

And so:

“By 1930, thirty states had sterilization laws and approximately 36,000
people had been sterilized, 30,000 of these after 1927. Grounds for

182
 sterilization included being judged feeble-minded, insane, medically
unacceptable, morally degenerate, and criminal. Some were classed as
“other” and others were sterilized for being poor. Just as during the
Spanish Inquisition, the trials of these ‘unfit’ individuals were often termed
inquisitions, characteristics of guilt were ambiguously defined, and
evidence was vague, scanty, and mainly based on hearsay. Property was
confiscated and families were ruined.”

This didn’t only happen in the USA, however. Similar laws were passed in
Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Iceland and British
Columbia [Canada]. The German law was virtually identical to Laughlin’s
model sterilization law which demonstrates, if nothing else, how
interconnected eugenic agendas were across national and continental
borders. The Nazis would sterilize around 2 million people against their
will before their eventual defeat. Rules on segregation, anti-marriage
laws, anti-immigration policies as well as this sterilization policy were all
originally American ideas that took place in the USA before the Nazis
pushed them even further. As already stated, it was not for lack of will
that these things weren’t pushed further in the United States and
elsewhere. It was just that they had to go through political and legal
procedures that the Nazi seizure of power in Germany overcame in one
fell swoop. Even the non-voluntary euthanasia of subjects was suggested
in America before the Nazis murdered millions. We will never know if the
American political system would have reached such a point had the Nazi’s
fanatical attachment to eugenic ideals not got there first and shown the
world the horror of its reality.

C:

At the heart of all such horrific behaviour was classification and

hierarchical thinking which felt the need to rank and rate people, explicitly
comparing one with another. [In the case of the Nazis, this even extended
to forcing the targets of Nazi discrimination to wear badges with their

183
labels on, of course, such as the yellow stars bearing the word “Jude” -
“Jew”.] This was undoubtedly stimulated by, but also reinforcing, classist
and racist thinking. A lot of eugenicist activity in the first four decades of
the twentieth century generally was taken up with accumulating data
about people and measuring things in order to carry out such
classificatory and dominating agendas. This, in turn, was used as grist for
a narrative mill which spun the old yarns about superior and inferior races
and the need for “racial hygiene”, to coin the unfortunate German [and
very much pre-Nazi era] phrase. Past racists, such as Hume, Kant and
especially Gobineau, had been happy to tell racist myths and present
them as fact – but they had done no research to establish their narrative
entities as realities. It was a passing on of privileged narratives in the
hope that the authority of the speaker would carry its own imprint of
truth. Yet Gobineau, in his Essai, had called for the “scientific
measurement” of “racial differences” to begin in order that the
classificatory activity establish and set in stone these differences within
the very specific “truth” of scientific classification. He wanted his
prejudice “mathematically defined”, as he put it, in order that it would
become the dominant thought.

Francis Galton, who invented the term eugenics, was keen to do this and
thought that “intelligence” was something that could be given a number
and assigned to both individuals and races. Sussman reports that, in doing
this, he even rated the intelligence of some breeds of dog as “higher than
that of some Englishmen and most Africans”. Galton was collecting
“anthropometric” data from 1884 in London which included “height,
weight, arm span, and lung power.” He also invented a number of tests
“designed to identify levels of intelligence”. The problem was that they
didn’t. “His tests actually measured only physiological reaction time to
certain stimuli and did not test mental activity, ability, or reasoning” says
Sussman after Stephen Jay Gould. Galton, however, believed “that he was
measuring a single, inherited, and unchangeable entity labeled
intelligence” and that this was there to find. So, believing this, Galton

184
thought he could label and classify a human being’s, or a race’s,
intellectual capacity with a number permanently. He could put you on a
shelf or in a file and that was that.

It was the American eugenicists Charles Davenport and his colleague on

the ERO’s Board of Scientific Directors, Henry Hubert Goddard, who would
run with Galton’s belief that intelligence could be assigned an absolute
number by which to classify people. They, of course, also shared Galton’s
belief that this was absolutely all down to heredity. They also craved
scientific means to measure and designate those they deemed “unfit” as
well. Goddard, in fact, had written a book, The Kallikak Family: A Study in
the Heredity of Feeblemindedness, “in an attempt to illustrate the
biological fixity of certain ‘hereditary’ characteristics”. This book would
also be printed in Germany under the Nazi regime showing its usefulness
to American eugenicists and Nazis alike. Goddard was highly motivated to
collect “scientific” data to back up his narrativised beliefs, however, but
when he did so it was not using Galton’s tests but those of the Frenchmen
Alfred Binet and his student Theodore Simon. These French psychologists,
however, did NOT believe intelligence could be assigned a single score
and they measured people only for “improving the education of those in
need”. Binet, in fact, “believed that intelligence was too complex to be
measured by a single score” and it worried him that the scores his
methods provided could be “used as an indelible label, rather than as a
guide for identifying children who need help”. But Binet died in 1911 and,
thereafter, in utilising his methods, Goddard simply ignored his warnings.

Goddard, in fact, used Binet’s methods to explicitly label, not help, those
he so designated. He assumed that “intelligence” was an unchangeable,
biologically fixed characteristic in any case. All he wanted was the
measurement by which he could label people with theirs. In intelligence
testing [what would become “the IQ test”] the American eugenics
movement “believed it had a simple measurement that made it possible
to identify the mentally and morally “unfit” individuals and races they so

185
intensely wanted to isolate in colonies, castrate, sterilize [and even
euthanize], and prevent from immigrating into the United States.” Binet
had tested children for educational purposes. The Americans like Goddard
and Davenport simply wanted to classify adults and put them, literally, in
their place. Their ambition, at least in their belief, was that they could now
label everyone. That low intelligence – what they called
“feeblemindedness” - was equated with immorality [the stupid are also
morally suspect] should then worry us for Goddard himself explicitly
believed by the 1920s that around 45% of Americans were
“feebleminded” or of the “moron” class. If you were a foreign-born
immigrant to the States this became even worse. What Goddard wanted
with his measuring activity was to “prove” this.

Goddard himself did testing on people entering the USA via Ellis Island in
New York [although technically it is in New Jersey] around the period of
the First International Eugenics Congress where he found that decent
majorities of various nationalities entering the USA were feebleminded.
The proportions went up as the immigrants became more Eastern
European [Sussman suggests this is partly a eupehmism for “Jews” whom
Goddard found to be 83% feebleminded]. As Goddard’s scores for
feeblemindedness went up, so did the deportations of such nationalities
as a result. Important to note in this activity of Goddard’s is that “to the
eugenicists the results of his survey were taken to indicate a spectrum of
inherent intellectual worth in the ‘races’ of Europe.” Goddard’s material
was not simply used to reject “undesirables”, however. It also passed into
a further eugenicist tome which lives in infamy in the history of the
movement: Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.

Grant was another eugenicist from a wealthy family who seemed to

naturally believe in his own superiority. Sussman compares him to the
Frenchman Gobineau as a similar kind of man. [Gobineau regarded
himself as fake nobility let us not forget.] He was, thus, thoroughly elitist.
Grant was neither in favour of democracy nor equal rights, believing both

186
would lead to the end of civilization [or perhaps just his privileges which it
would not be hard to believe he regarded as the same thing]. He held to
the Nordic myth and was a graduate of Yale and Columbia universities.
[The number of eugenicists passing through elite American universities, as
no doubt was also true of those in other countries, should probably give us
cause for concern about the academic elite.] Grant liked animals and was
a conservationist friend of President Theodore Roosevelt [who we already
know was a eugenics supporter] and he founded the New York Zoological
Society and the Bronx Zoo. He was also friends with Henry Osborn,
president of the American Museum of Natural History and a professor at
Columbia University. Grant, then, had impeccable social credentials and
was one of the foremost natural historians of his day.

However, Grant was also a thoroughgoing racist, one a later commentator

has described as a symbol of “open, brutal racism, segregation, and
disparagement of persons of color as well as those from alien lands”. He
attended exclusive clubs where lectures were given on “the dangers of
the influx of hordes of Jews and other inferior types into America” and how
it “posed an evolutionary danger to native Anglo-Saxons via
intermarriage and a reversion to more primitive types of humanity
through hybridization”. This played into a narrative in which the natural
extermination of the white race might be achieved with constant
immigration and no measures taken to control the population in general.
Grant the conservationist who thought highly of the preservation of
animals would not have to do too much thinking to shift these ideas
across to what he regarded as his own species, white Anglo-Saxons. In
1894 at least 1.4 million of New York’s then 1.8 million population had at
least one foreign parent. [One of these was Emma Goldman.] New York
had more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin and would soon
become the biggest Jewish city in the world. It is not hard to see how an
elitist like Grant would have considered such facts with anguished concern
and perhaps malevolent intent.

187
When Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 he was
influenced by well established racists and eugenicists such as Gobineau,
Galton and Davenport. Grant’s book, in fact, was the first to mix folk
racism such as that of Gobineau with the American eugenicism that was
becoming increasingly interested in “scientific proof” and measurement
generally as means to label and classify people. The book heavily
reintroduced racism as a major focus of the eugenics movement in
distinction to the obsession with filitering out the feebleminded of the
“lower” classes. Perhaps it is for this reason that, as Sussman informs us,
“Hitler considered it his Bible”. Grant became heavily invovled in eugenics
thereafter, was a close friend of Davenport’s and chaired the Second
International Congress of Eugenics himself in 1923 which was held at
Osborn’s American Museum of Natural History in New York, a site which
now has a statue to the eugenicist president, Theodore Roosevelt, astride
a horse, out front on Central Park West.

Grant himself, however, was not a scientist nor a trained medical man. He
was, in many respects, a mythologiser as Hume, Kant and Gobineau had
been. Thus, whilst giving the appearance of the taxonomic scientist, he
was somewhat sloppy. He had three subgroups of human beings, the
Caucasians, the Mongoloids, and the Negroids, and he would subdivide
these down as well. Caucasians, for example, he would, as Gobineau,
divide into the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. These, of
course, each came with valuations and so both racism and classism were
baked into Grant’s narrative myth in a hybridization [ironically enough!] of
Gobineau and Davenport, the latter of which he turned to for “the science
bit” to back up the mythological bit he got from Gobineau. The whole was
presented as “science”, however, and so “The great lesson of the science
of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with
which is closely associated the immutability of physical dispositions and
impulses” as Grant wrote in Passing. So it would be that “Nordics” were
scientifically presented as objectively “natural rulers” and “the apex of
the development of the white race”. I wonder why this book became

188
“Hitler’s Bible?” Perhaps it was because Grant denominted Jews a subset
of the “lowest” Caucasians, the Mediterraneans, and he depicted them as
“swarming” around New York, crowding out more desirable people? Grant
was virulently against intermixing of races as a result and wrote that any
intermingling always reverted the progeny of such encounters to the
lowest common denominator. Racial heritage could not be lifted up by
such unions but only dragged down.

The key point in all this is that Grant was mixing an ancient myth that
Gobineau had repeated and popularised with the modern “science” of
people like Davenport and Laughlin and Goddard. Underneath, of course,
it was the same old prejudices, elitism and superiority complexes being
played out all over again. But the more “scientific” work was done, the
more it could be filtered into books like Grant’s and popularised as the
results of scientific endeavour. It co-opted modern science, and a
mentality in which science acted as a powerful authority, to present a
eugenicist and racist narrative. This must at least go some way to
accounting for why successive presidents and prime ministers would be
persuaded by its claims although, as I have also amply shown, the elite
levels of society, industry and academia, were all infiltrated by such
beliefs and, in many respects, it was entirely self-serving for such people
on both sides of the Atlantic to give them credence. Who, being at the top
of the food chain, does not want to believe that they deserve to be there
and that this is about something inherently to do with them? Grant’s book,
thus, was the perfect mythico-scientific tome to justify just such thinking
and to reassure elitist egos.

So it would not be a problem when Grant’s book approved of slavery and

echoed previous segregation policies. Neither would it be an issue when
nationalities, and sometimes not even races, were regarded as “decidedly
inferior, physically, mentally, and morally to those who had entered the
country in earlier times.” Grant regarded it as absolutely necessary for
white Americans to segregate the native peoples of the now American

189
land, as well as black people, from the white population and he offered
the “scientific” practice of eugenics, including all the policies such a
mentality insisted were necessary, as an efficient and rational means to
this end. We can see in his text the essential blueprint for what would
become Nazism if only some state would actually put into practice the
ideas in his book. It was presented as rational, scientific and reasonable.
Grant described eugenics in Passing of the Great Race as “a practical,
merciful, and inevitable solution to the whole problem [that] can be
applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always
with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually
to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and
perhaps ultimately to worthless racial types.” Align this with German, pre-
Nazi eugenicist theories of “racial hygiene” and you have Hitler’s
programme of racist authoritarianism in a nutshell. But born in the USA.

It has, then, been suggested by one writer that what Grant gives birth to
in Passing is “scientific racism”. Such a thing, it is said, involves three
basic axioms:

(1) The human species is divided into distinct, hierarchical subspecies

and/or races, with the Nordic race at the top of the hierarchy;

(2) intellectual, moral, temperamental, and cultural traits of each race are
immutable and correlated to, and inherited with, immutable physical
traits, and the genes for these traits are unaffected by the environment;

(3) the mixture of races always results in reversion to the primitive,

inferior type, and thus eugenic measures must be taken to prevent the
degeneration of the superior race.

Such thinking scientifically founds racism, based in classificatory

activities, and mandates authoritarian eugenic policies and activities
which are regarded as science in action. Indeed, such thought, according

190
to its wider proponents, including Grant, “purported to employ physical
anthropology, Darwinian evolution, and Mendelian genetics to explain why
non-Nordic races were biologically inferior”. Yet it was not really any
different to the Spanish Inquisition in its motivations [or ultimate effects
as regards the Nazis and some American practices]. Both the Inquisition
and the eugenicists come to the conclusion that certain groups of people
are inferior, that the characteristics [physical, mental, and behavioral]
that led to this inferiority are biologically fixed and immutable, and that no
alteration of the environment can change these fixed characteristics. As
such, people, and even whole nationalities or “races”, are bagged and
tagged, labelled and classified by an oppressing power who want to
control and “eugenicise” the entire population in an entirely arbitrary and
authoritarian way. The eugenicists of the early 20 th century thought they
now had the scientific know how to do it, too! A “scientific racist” on this
model “would point out that a Jew could never become a Nordic” and they
thought that made all the difference in the world. Grant’s “scientific
racist” book, Passing of the Great Race, “became the core of a resurgence
of American racism and one of the essential books of Hitlerism”. The latter
phenomenon was the pinnacle of scientific racist thought and practice in
the twentieth century and involved people which the Americans who
funded its racist and eugenic ideas in “bibles” like Grant’s would later
want to bring over to their side for the purposes of white American
supremacy on the world stage during the Cold War. An example here is
“Operation Paperclip”, a secret American program in which more than
1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von
Braun [formerly an SS Sturmbannführer, the equivalent rank of major] and
his V-2 rocket team were taken from Germany to the United States, for
U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959.

D:

We must move to summarising what we have learnt from this tale told
about European and North Atlantic history over around 500 years, a

191
history still ongoing in white supremacist insurrection attempts on Capitol
Hill on January 6th 2021 [incited by the sitting white President and several
white members of Congress], the published racist comments of British
Prime Ministers and others in an ad-hoc fashion [let alone their racially
discriminative policies such as in the Windrush scandal or the Grenfell
Tower fire], in labels such as “white trash” and in political projects such as
Brexit and others with white supremacist themes, politically organised by
men like Steve Bannon and funded by people like billionaire, Robert
Mercer. Eugenics is not at all promoted today as it was 100 years ago
even if its ideas, and the racism and classism which fuel them, are all far
too apparent, for example, in policing widely regarded as racist in the
United States or in the hold corporate and plutocratic elites have on the
levers of political power more widely. [These, in turn, indicate an
intersection of racist, eugenicist and classist beliefs with capitalism, the
latter of which thrives on a narrative of division as racism, classism and
eugenics provide.]

So racism, eugenics and class warfare have not gone away. They have
simply renamed themselves, reorganised, created new targets, are
pursued by people with new names and different faces [but a remarkably
similar social profile]. As Robert Sussman shows in his eleventh chapter of
The Myth of Race, there is still a network of racist and eugenicist political
organisations, journals and periodicals, websites and chat forums,
dedicated to policies and beliefs the former racists and eugenicists
detailed in this essay would have easily been able to associate with. Some
even openly use Nazi insignia and rhetoric as the collective memory fades
and such symbols are rehabilitated. Yet today such things are often called
“populism” - as if the ability to make things popular was a
recommendation in itself and, perhaps, in order to say that people should
be given “what they want”. Brexit, funded by people who support racist
causes, and politically championed most of all by Nigel Farage, a man
whose racist past extends to singing Hitler Youth songs as a schoolboy
and whose recent past has been as a fluffer for Donald Trump, is a

192
pertinent modern political example of such an agenda. Living, as I do, in
England, I can give my own personal testimony to the fact that, in recent
decades, it has become a boiling pot of John Bull racism which touts the
eugenicist and avowed racist, Winston Churchill, as its national hero and is
vociferous in its opposition to racial justice and defensive in regard to its
viciously colonial and classist past. You will still find people in nationalist
and white supremacist spaces who think of non-whites as inimical to white
society and of equal rights as things which destroy civilization. “Racial
hygiene”, inflected with a base feeling of superiority, very much lives on,
as does an innate hatred of human diversity,

Yet would it now be pertinent to point out that there is nothing about this
racism or eugenics which is “scientific” at all? Robert Sussman points to
the work of Franz Boas, primarily his Changes in Bodily Form and The
Mind of Primitive Man, both published in 1911, just before that first
eugenics congress, as volumes which “undermined the ‘science’ of
eugenics.” Boas also “developed the scientific, anthropological concept of
‘culture.’ According to this theory, differences among the peoples of the
world [a]re the product of their social histories and [a]re determined by an
interaction between their social and natural environments over
generations.” It does this without “assumptions about the superiority of
one group over the other”. What eugenicists, attempting to parrot a
scientific authority in their work, did by classifying and hierarchicalising,
making one better than another and describing one thing as beneficial
and another as detrimental, Boas did in his research by expanding upon a
notion of culture as a rich variety of differences which is a naturally
occurring diversity. As Sussman explains, “The scientific evidence
amassed for Boas’s cultural explanation was much more convincing than
the myths that had been passed down through the previous five
centuries.” What is, in fact, most lasting about the racist and eugenicist
myths of the past 500 years is the simple assumption by white [elite]
Europeans that they must be superior – and with argumentation that
begins from that point and then attempts to substantiate and support it

193
by contemporary means and to prosecute it in, with and through
authoritarian physical actions. The fact remains, however, that people
cannot be put into biological races and, thereby, be forever distinguished.
Morals are not a matter of genes. “Feeblemindedness” does not make you
a worthless person – the classificatory practices of racists and eugenicists
notwithstanding and neither covering up for the insidious valuations their
fake science could never substantiate in any case. It was a simple attempt
at domination by means of designating what the knowledge on the
subject was. And knowledge is power [see chapters 2 and 5 again!].

Thus, as Robert Sussman counsels, “biological determinism is still with us,

and all of us who believe in human dignity, freedom, and justice must
continue to fight against racial prejudice and those who spread hatred
based on the idea that differences among humans exist.” Intelligence, if it
is a marker of anything at all [and its only a human concept to begin
with!], “is not a unitary, simply measured, genetically-based phenomenon.
IQ scores and intelligence are greatly influenced by environment and
culture and… there are no biological races among humans and there
never have been.”

Yet what does exist is ethnicities and cultures - but these are examples of
nature’s diversity and are no grounds for positing eternal, biological
differences between people who are imagined to be in utterly different
classes because our eyes say they have a different skin tone or live a
different lifestyle. And so: “Race is not a biological reality among humans;
there are no human biological races. What humans have designated as
races are based on non-existent differences among peoples. People are
more similar to one another biologically and genetically as a whole than
they are to any of the classifications that racists have devised.” Race is a
cultural thing not a biological thing; diversity of human beings is normal
and natural and only a danger in the fevered minds of those who imagine
themselves utterly different and then work to fabricate data to support a
narrative of supremacy for the purposes of destroying diversity and

194
dominating the body politic whole and entire. Racism, and the eugenic
science it gave birth to, are prejudice which is pursued by authoritarian
means so that an entirely artificial category of human beings may
dominate over the rest. It is itself a culture, in fact, but, in this case, an
entirely manufactured and malignant one. It is a powerful example, in its
history, of how unreflective and mythically regurgitated prejudice, when
married with classificatory practices, political ambitions and authoritarian
means, can bring misery to human existence without any redeeming
features whatsoever. It is further an example of how attempted
domination never works out well for any except those defined as the
group doing the dominating – and that it is not supposed to either.

SEVEN: An Anarchist Turn Towards Non-Domination

As anarchists, then, if not simply as enculturated human beings, we must

seek to turn towards practices and lifestyles of non-domination. With this
seventh chapter of my book, I now begin seeking to make the positive
case for this after chapters which detailed examples of biologically-based
oppressions [of gender, race and class] and others which argued that our
“knowedge”, “truth” and language themselves are only pragmatic and
utilitarian entities not best suited to authoritative, let alone, authoritarian,
pursuits. Yet if domination is politically unwelcome and classificatory
practices are, more often than not, abused [as in the cases of gender,
sexuality, class and race] in order to pursue political goals to the benefit
of some and not others, then in what does an anarchist turn consist that
will lead human beings into non-dominating, non-classificatory practices
that promote an anarchism of values irrespective of class, gender,
sexuality, race, culture, etc.? This is what I now intend to discuss in my
own terms [and so it is indicative of my own understanding and
mentality], utilising examples from the thought of others only as
necessary.

195
 0: Two Definitions of Anarchy and Anarchism

I must begin, in this case, by defining two senses of anarchy [a context for
activity] and anarchism [the activity itself]. This is necessary, not least,
because my own appreciation of what these words mean seems to differ
unalterably from that which many, not least those who call themselves
anarchists or pretend to knowledge of anarchism as a political movement,
utilise. This difference can be described by positing two forms of anarchy/
anarchism:

1. Type 1 anarchy/anarchism essentially equates anarchy with the

universe, with all that exists, as it is, right now. You might also then call
anarchy “reality”. Under this understanding, anarchism is then the action
of the universe in its manner of operation. How the universe works is
anarchism. Please note that this type of anarchy/anarchism is not
something which is a human achievement. It is something humans are
ineluctably a part of and largely powerless to affect. We find this definition
most used in more spiritual or philosophical understandings of
anarchy/anarchism.

2. Type 2 anarchy/anarchism is the more political definition of these

things, the one in which anarchy is the state of existence people called
anarchists want to create. Anarchism is then something such human
beings do to create anarchy, perhaps along lines anarchists have
previously written or spoken about and agreed by consensus beforehand.
This is the anarchy/anarchism of political actors in the present and recent
past.

My understanding of anarchy and anarchism involves both of these types

of them in a symbiotic relationship in which one is constantly informing
the other. I have written about this at length in my series of books There
is Nothing To Stick To, a four part exploration of a spiritual, philosophical
and political form of anarchism and interpretation of anarchy. One reason

196
I have this symbiotic relation between the two types of anarchy/anarchism
interpreted here is because I am convinced by things such as Daoist texts
like the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi that “control” is not properly
appropriate to human beings in political or social terms - and by thought
like that of Nietzsche and Rorty, referred to in this book and in my former
series among the thought of several others, that “knowledge” or “truth”
or “understanding” or “explaining” are not the absolutes that put us in
control and make us superior over things that we are often induced to
think they are - and all this is not least because there is so much more to
the universe or existence or reality than human beings and their wants
and needs. We are not the context for everything else: it is the context for
us. This is the most important realisation we shall ever have. The
appropriate response to this, particularly the former texts counsel, is
human humility, a life of peace rather than a life spent trying to make
everything just so. Try as I might, I cannot escape such a logic and when I
watch videos detailing the history, and likely future, of the universe the
one thing that makes the greatest impact upon me is the utter irrelevance
of not simply myself, my species or what exists on this one planet out of
billions – but life itself whole and entire. Even taking our most optimistic
calculations about the universe, life itself is a blip in the probable history
of this vast, devolving expanse. Its nothing special and was not the point
of anything. This cannot but instigate sober reflection in me in comparison
to the egotistical self-regard which seems to drive many others. The
upshot is that such facts have a consequent effect upon my thinking, not
least my thinking about what anarchy is and what anarchism would then
be as a result.

A further thought informing these definitions is “Why would

anarchy/anarchism be what someone decided it was anyway?” This really
gets to the heart of the issue as, for example, I observe social media
discussions about anarchist subjects when various people chime in with
what they think things are and then someone else counters with what
they think they are instead. All definitions of these things are, of course,

197
only human, linguistic imaginings, useful fictions. Conversations and
discussions, of course, take place so that people may communicate with
each other about them in order to clarify their own thinking on the
subjects at hand. But no one person is the boss of what anarchy is or what
anarchism shall amount to. And neither could they be even if only from
the simple fact of arguments I have made in chapters such as 2 and 5 of
this book. So it seems very appropriately anarchistic to me that anarchy
and anarchism should have real and useful senses which are beyond
human control or definition. I think that “what exists” or “the way things
are” - even when we can’t say what is or how it is – are consequent
factors we need to be aware of when thinking about anarchy and
anarchism. We need to have humility, intellectual as well as practical,
rather than seek, in repetition of many non-anarchist mentalities, to
imagine that we can control, define, classify and dominate. What this
means practically is that we should always be aware of our own potential
for dominating and always be putting that in the context of a type 1
defintion of anarchy and anarchsim such as the Daoist texts suggest.

1: The Personal and the Political

Just as I give two, in my mind necessarily intermingling or interactive or

relative, definitions of anarchy and anarchism, so I also need to talk about
two contexts in which we might place them. These are the personal and
the political and they are also necessarily intermingling, interactive and
relative. One might think of these as the historical roots of type 2
anarchism as well if one identifies them with the “egoist” and “social”
forms of anarchism explicitly discussed in anarchist discourse from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards, for example, on the one hand by Max
Stirner or Benjamin Tucker or, on the other hand, by Peter Kropotkin or
Errico Malatesta. But one may also refer to them as the personal [having
to do with the human individual] and the political [having to do with the
social world and social interaction] as well, as I do here. [We might also
imagine that someone like Mikhail Bakunin combines the two.]

198
As before, I do not conceive of two contexts in order to prefer one over
another. Since both human individuals and social, cultural and political
contexts for these human beings exist, both must play a part. The issue I
want to highlight here, in fact, is how they do and how they need to in
terms of how type 2 anarchism might take place in order to create type 2
anarchy. This, in fact, turns out to be nothing new for students of Greek
philosopher, Aristotle, who, before he wrote his book on politics, wrote his
book on ethics. This suggests that, at least as Aristotle thought about it, a
certain type of person presages and logically preceeds a certain type of
society. And this is, in fact, my point: the society you get is dependent
upon the types of people that make it up. This, in turn, suggests that if
you want to see or encourage certain values or behaviours in society then
you need to concentrate on the character and qualities of people just as
much as you need to concentrate on their interactions and organisation in
societal terms.

This is, in fact, the case in terms of the influences I have which turned me
in my own life and philosophy towards anarchism. It focuses not simply on
the organisation of society in certain ways – as well as the politics of the
common good rather than the sectional interest – but on personal
character, and even personal virtue as well. If you believe at all that it is
people who make a politics then this seems automatically to follow - for
you cannot get good from bad but only from good. Therefore, for all the
diffuclties this might entail, you cannot escape the fact that personal
virtue and personal values, what, together, might be called character,
play a very important role here. Consequently, my understanding of the
appropriate practice of type 2 anarchism involves a focus on both
personal character or self-actualisation – and achieving that in appropriate
ways – as well as on all the social theory and political action on which
anarchism has relied since its formation as a specific political philosophy
and practice in the mid-nineteenth century. This is to say that anarchism
is not merely a matter of your actions but also of your character: it is a
personal AND a political matter if it is to proceed with any success.

199
The best example I can give of this is contained in an extract from the
thirty first chapter of Emma Goldman’s autobiographical memoir, Living
My Life. In the extract she details an argument she and her fellow
anarchist attendee to an international anarchist congress in Amsterdam,
Max Baginski, made on the matter of “organisation”. It seems some
delegates had favoured a Kropotkinite social solution to this, one of
mutual aid and cooperation [see below], whilst others favoured a more
individual solution. Goldman and Baginski, however, argued that both
were necessary and in the extract from her memoir she puts it this way:

“There is a mistaken notion in some quarters… that organization does not

foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay of
individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid
the development and growth of personality. Just as the animal cells, by
mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in the formation of the
complete organism, so does the individuality, by co-operative effort with
other individualities, attain its highest form of development. An
organization, in the true sense, cannot result from the combination of
mere nonentities. It must be composed of self-conscious, intelligent
individualities. Indeed, the total of the possibilities and activities of an
organization is represented in the expression of individual energies.
Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline,
fear, or punishment and without the pressure of poverty: a new social
organism, which will make an end to the struggle for the means of
existence — the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in
man and ever widens the social abyss. In short, anarchism strives towards
a social organization which will establish well-being for all.”

In this way Goldman and her colleague Baginski make the point that
individual and social anarchist tendencies are not opposed but are, in fact,
necessary for the betterment and furtherance of each other. My
suggestion is that this amounts to anarchism being a matter of both the
personal AND the political.

200
 2. Values, Plan or Place?

In distinction to the two previous sections of this chapter, here I do want

to make a choice between alternatives and, in one sense, this section is a
recapitulation, a saying in other words, of the immediately preceeding one
– but with the addition of that choice. The title heading refers to ways of
making type 2 anarchism active in life. The alternatives are an anarchism
of values [anarchistic values which you cultivate in your own life and, in so
doing, advertise and perform in your daily living], the anarchism of a plan
[which is conceived of as a set of things anarchists want to see achieved,
the end of which will be the achieval of type 2 anarchy] and the anarchism
of a place [i.e. the founding of a commune or autonomous zone]. I would
like to say, before expressing a perference here, that I don’t conceive of
any of these options as automatically or obviously bad – but I do think
some logically prior to others. It, of course, remains for you to do your own
thinking about that because nothing in this book is telling you what to
think and everything I say is subject to the reader’s own intellectual
responsibility for their own thoughts [about which more below].

Here, it may not suprise you to learn, given my thoughts in sections 0+1,
that I choose an anarchism of values over an anarchism of plan or place.
One reason for this is that it incorporates the idea that anarchism is not
simply a matter of certain action or an outcome; it is also a matter of how
we will get to that outcome and what it takes to get there – and what kind
of people, indeed, those are who are getting there. Who are we expecting
to carry out any anarchist plan? Surely only people motivated to achieve it
who see the good and the benefit in it? Who will this be if not people of
anarchist values? Would we want people with dubious motives taking part
in such action? And what, too, of the anarchist place? Again, will this not
be an endeavour only maintained by people of the requisite character who
are themselves people of such character that they are motivated to see it
work out in practice along certain anarchist lines?

201
Another problem with the plan and the place anarchist practices though is
that they are very determinative and the anarchism that I conceive of is
not. Instead, it is flexible, possibly reactive, as much as it is proactive, and
it, if you like, takes what is to hand and makes the best of it. The
circumstances in all times and places are not, and will not, be the same,
and so the anarchism which relies on precisely this plan and not another
may not be suitable for such a thing [and so risks becoming dogma]. The
anarchist place is just one place and who is to say that all anarchist places
will, or must, be the same? The anarchism of values, however, is a matter
of people and who they are. Such people can take this wherever they go
and utilise it in whatever circumstances they are in – and necessarily
flexibly so, as the situation demands. So, therefore, I suggest that whether
we engage in an anarchism of either plan or place [and both do have their
place], an anarchism of values is logically prior, and logically necessary for
the maintenance, and maybe even the institution, of either. It is the
bridge which connects anarchist mentality and action to anarchist
achievements. Moreover, if anarchism is really about changing people
and, thereby, changing society, then it is by means of changing people’s
values that this will take place. Thus, we see again an anarchism that is
personal AND political for each needs the other.

3. Anarchist Virtues and Values [always implying an action]

Of course, given what I have said up until this point, it now requires that I
list some anarchist values upon which people, and so the practice of
anarchisms, as the outflow of anarchist lives, may be built. I describe
them as virtues too - both because I am stuck in an ancient Greek mode
of thinking as a background to my own thinking about ethics, practice and
human character, but also because I do think that anarchism is about the
personal and not merely the political. These values and virtues, however,
are not merely to be applied to the personal in my thinking. They are
equally applicable to a social or political situation as the means for
organising and existing within it. Some, in fact, expressly require and

202
envision it. For, as I will probably say far too often, anarchism is a matter
of the personal AND the political and such values and virtues are meant to
become habit forming and so environment changing.

1. People not property. The first virtue or value is a preference for people,
human beings, over property. Ecologically-minded anarchists, and we
should probably all be such a thing if we want this planet to last much
longer, will probably wish to extend this into a reverence for all life.
Anarchists have de-emphasised, and contextualised, property ever since
there have been people who could exercise anarchist thought and, in
many respects, it is the fetishizers of property, who create apparatuses of
control to plot, organise and maintain property-based empires, who are
probably the anarchist’s primary antagonist. Yet it is in an anarchist
anaylsis of property that we see it as a means to control and coerce
people and as the beginning of the creation of inequalities which end up in
domination, coercion and control. Anarchists, consequently, put people [or
life] first and property definitively after that in their practices and
considerations.

2. A freedom of equals. Freedom, liberty, is a very important value for the

anarchist and perhaps a virtue in anarchist practice bar none. But, as
Chiara Bottici discusses it in her essay “Black and Red: The Freedom of
Equals”, the openng essay of the book The Anarchist Turn, this is a
particular kind of freedom – a “freedom of equals”. What is meant by this?
On page 20 she describes this as involving the realisation that:

“the freedom of every individual strictly depends on that of all others. You
cannot be free alone, because freedom can only be realized as freedom of
equals. With this expression, I do not mean that we have to be free and
equals, but that we cannot be free unless we are all equally so.”

Bottici explains this in her essay as the marriage of Marxist and anarchist
beliefs [hence the “black and red” of her title] but what is important to me

203
here is the idea itself. Bottici, in an interesting way, interprets freedom not
as autonomy, as it often is, but as something else, something that begins
with Max Stirner’s egoist assertion that we do not start by asking what the
“essence” of a human being is [Rorty, as we have seen, did not think
anything had such an essence, and so would cringe at the idea of “an
essence of a human being”] but by stating that we exist, here and now, in
our uniqueness. We are here, yes, and “to a large extent [our] own
product”, but even the very fact we use language [as I have already made
a point to mention in previous chapters] means we exist in the context of
a plurality of egos and, as such, Stirner’s egoist leanings are
counteracted. A being with speech is forever a social being and a
socialised being. The problem, however, is that “we have so internalized
the ideological construction of human beings as independent individuals
that we have difficulties representing freedom as a relation, rather than as
a property with which separate individuals are endowed.”

Bottici achieves this relational interpretation, however, by interacting the

personal with the political. Interacting with Bakunin she observes that “it
is not individuals who create society, but the society that, so to speak,
‘individualises itself in every individual’”, furthermore suggesting that
“Bakunin is well aware that freedom as self-determination is empty, if
there is no such thing as a ‘self’ that can choose autonomously.” Thus,
Bottici says that, “the individual becomes such only through a process of
socialization that begins immediately”. But, now interacting with Cornelius
Castoriadis as well as Bakunin, she adds that:

“individuals are at the same time instituting and instituted by society:

society does not exist without the individuals that constantly create and
re-create it, but, at the same time, individuals exist only as a product of
society itself. But if individuals are at the same time instituting and
instituted; if, to use Bakunin’s phrase, individuals are nothing but the
society that individualizes itself in them, they cannot be free unless
everybody else is free. Hence also the importance of the notion of

204
 recognition in Bakunin: ‘For the individual to be free means to be
recognized, considered and treated as such by another individual, and by
all the individuals that surround him’.”

Thus, Bottici refers to the words of her fellow Italian, Errico Malatesta, in
his Anarchy who is himself interacting with Bakunin on this point:

“No man can achieve his own emancipation without at the same time
working for the emancipation of all men around him. My freedom is the
freedom of all since I am not truly free in thought and in fact, except
when my freedom and my rights are confirmed and approved in the
freedom and rights of all men who are my equals. It matters to me very
much what other men are, because however independent I may appear
to be or think I am, because of my social position, were I Pope, Tzar,
Emperor or even Prime Minister, I remain always the product of what
the humblest among them are”

Thus, the anarchist who himself stated that “We anarchists do not want to
emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves”
also says in Anarchy that “I who want to be free cannot be because all the
men around me do not yet want to be free, and consequently they
become tools of oppression against me.”

Here we see the idea of a “freedom of equals” - and of people who are
equally free - most clearly. Anyone’s imprisonment is my potential
imprisonment. Anyone’s curtailed liberty has the consequence that my
liberty could also be curtailed. And, of course, as Bottici, an
anarchafeminist philosopher herself, properly realises [and this is true not
least of the anarchism of Malatesta], “an entire reorganization of society
is necessary for [such freedom’s] realization”. Thus, Bottici notes that
Bakunin calls this a “materialist conception of freedom”. It is not idealist
or abstract nor even philosophical but very much applied to the material
circumstances of human existence and it requires an entire reconstruction

205
of human society in order to achieve it. The anarchist conception of such a
freedom, then, is ambitious to the ultimate degree. What the anarchist
seeks is not the human being’s discipline and domestication [this is the
intention, so I would argue, of human civilisation as it has progressed by
means of hierarchical and epistemological thinking in such a way that a
few come to subdue, classify, organise and control the many] but their
self-liberation [with a nod to Malatesta] from dominating society by means
of a mentality not concerned with how to limit freedom but with a
mentality concerned with how to enhance it. The answer to ordered
human existence is not less freedom but more, as much as can be
imagined. And, as explained, the secret there is that it must be a freedom
of equals, of equals who are, and want to be, equally free.

In this, Bottici hits upon something I spoke about in relation to her

thinking whilst discussing her anarchafeminism in my previous book,
Anarchy and Anarchisms. This is that the end must be the means and the
means must be the end; in this case, if it is such a freedom we want then
it must be such a freedom we use to get there. Here, making reference to
Bakunin and Malatesta again, Bottici says that, “to endanger freedom with
the pretext of protecting it, be it through the dictatorship of the proletariat
or an avant-garde party that should authoritatively lead the masses to the
revolution, is a dangerous non-sense which cannot but ultimately destroy
freedom itself.” She further counsels, arguing in a way she thinks in line
with Bakunin in State and Anarchy, that, “There is not just one absolute
truth about the road to revolution, and thus no avant-garde party,
however well versed in theory it might be, can ever explain to the masses
how they should liberate themselves.” Thus, “If you restrict freedom,
albeit temporarily, with the pretext of preparing its realization, you cannot
but end up destroying it. As a consequence, any workers’ state, be it a
dictatorship of the proletariat or not, cannot but reproduce the same logic
of every state, where a minority of bureaucrats rule over the majority of
people: that is, authoritarianism.”

206
Here, then, we need to wholeheartedly embrace the anarchist recognition
that anarchism itself, and anarchy as an imagined context of the type 2
kind, can NEVER be realised through the principle of authority itself – just,
in fact, as the type 1 anarchy I also speak of is not either. We must then
acknowledge that freedom is itself free and it cannot be forced but only
achieved by letting go of control, refusing domination and ending our self-
imposed domestication of ourselves and others.

3. Cooperation/Solidarity. Particularly in the more class conscious

anarchist currents of thought we see the notion of solidarity as a very
important value. This is both the recognition that we live in a social world
and the recognition that people naturally tend to coalesce into “self-
interest” or “common interest” groups, both in societies based on
hierarchy, control and manipulation of others and those not. The value of
“solidarity” is then the recognition that more can be achieved together
than alone and that it is in cooperation with others that the freedom I
spoke about previously is more likely to break out and take place.

Yet it is also more than this because, in the invention of type 2 anarchism
in the nineteenth century particularly, in a context of capitalism exercising
its power over workers to extract profits for owners, worker solidarity and
the cooperation of people of the same class amongst themselves became
a vital value that needed to be expressed in human relationships of those
oppressed from above by those of a different class acting according to
capitalist imperatives. Some, in fact, would argue that one cannot be an
anarchist alone and that, therefore, cooperation with others of like mind,
or a solidarity which acts in concert with such people, is necessary for
anarchist practice, and so the engagement of an anarchist philosophy, to
even begin. It is certainly the case that in the values and virtues of
cooperation and solidarity we see a type 1 anarchy/anarchism reflected
for, in that case, everything exists as a complexity of interconnections and
interelations in which all acts to support and coexist with the other in a
harmony that is not even aware it is taking place. Cooperation and

207
solidarity may then be seen as aspects of type 1 anarchy/anarchism that
are consciously enacted in a type 2 scenario where they are not also seen
as people of like mind acting for the common good.

4. Fraternity. Fraternity has been a notable public value in modern times

at least since 1789 when it was taken as one of three values noted of the
new French Republic in the phrase “Liberty! Egality! Fraternity!”. But, in
an anarchist context, I would like to argue for a particularly anarchist twist
to “fraternity”. It means, of course, a “brotherly love” or a relation of
familial or sibling intimacy. This is already suggestive in an anarchist
context in which cooperation and solidarity have already come before. Yet
I suggest, going even further than this, that for the anarchist “fraternity”
means a human kinship that extends beyond one’s actual family relations
as wide as it is possible to imagine until, potentially, the whole of the
human species is seen in a “fraternal” light. This human kinship would
then become a commitment to the whole of the human race that sees
each human being fraternally, at least as an attitudinal expression of an
anarchist character. If it is true, as anarchafeminists Chiara Bottici and
Peggy Kornegger have suggested, that the means is the end and the ends
are the means, then it is for anarchists, with values such as a fraternity so
conceived, a cosmopolitan, international fraternity, to begin to recreate
humanity in such a new, anarchist image and so to broadcast far and wide
that all human beings are one, diverse people, not those divided but those
who are examples of exactly the same wants, desires and needs.

5. Subversion. What do I mean by “subversion”? I mean, I think, that the

anarchist has a keen nose for the dominating, the coercive, the
controlling, the domesticating, and for anything that acts to corral or
constrain people in terms of human action and, consequently, is of a mind
to undermine and subvert their efficacy. The anarchist, then, has an
active will and intent to act against the interests of things, people and
systems which enslave human beings or restrict human freedoms and, as
such, they disrupt human artificiality for the sake of a more natural letting

208
the dice fall where they may. This, in my mind at least, is another way in
which type 1 and type 2 anarchies interact and inform each other. Real
freedom can never be something entirely created but must always also be
a letting go which is open to the what can happen that will happen so
identified with a type 1 anarchy in its manner of operation.

6. Commensality, Mutual Aid and The Gift. Here there are three things but
I join them together in my description of anarchist values and virtues
because I see them as three associated things which, when put together,
go to make up a kind of anarchist economy. This will need unpacking and
so below I will describe each in turn with reference to specific literature
about them.

The first of these is commensality and I refer the reader to Banu Bargu’s
essay [which comes directly after Chiara Bottici’s], “The Politics of
Commensality” in The Anarchist Turn. This is headed by the following
superscription credited to the French revolutionary, François-Noël Babeuf:
“The moment has come to found the REPUBLIC OF EQUALS, this great
home open to all men. The day of general restitution has arrived.
Groaning families, come sit at the common table set by nature for all its
children.” This commensaity of which Bargu speaks, I intend to suggest, is
what she refers to, early on in her essay, as “A communal life where
individuals are connected by bonds of fraternity or charity, bonds which
do not distinguish individuals as individuated and autonomous moral
subjects”. As such, this commensality is based on the notion of fraternity I
have earlier described [readers should actively look for linkages and
connections between the values and virtues I am detailing and I
encourage such activity] and “resembles a group of individuals sitting
around a table”. Commensality, in fact, in a basic sense, is the act of
eating together around a common table. But, as you might expect, there’s
a bit more to it than that. Commensality, in the anarchistic sense in which
I wish to deploy it, is, therefore, “the metaphor of building [or rebuilding,
reclaiming] a common world of equals”.

209
Banu Bargu says of commensality that it:

“is a form of commoning, both a long-standing practice of communal life

and an everyday possibility to reclaim the commons. It substantiates a
positive horizon of emancipation at the quotidian, micro-political level,
with indigenous forms of sociality which are productive of the relations of
friendship and solidarity, which are in turn constitutive of egalitarian and
democratic subjectivities. Reclaiming commensality should therefore be
an important component of contemporary anarcho-communist politics.”

As with the idea of “the commons”, however, so has the idea of

“commensality” often largely disappeared in an individualised, hyperreal,
technologised and fundamentally capitalist modern world. I would like to
suggest that the reclamation of both, however, is a necessary feature of
anarchist praxis and a virtue and a value in anarchist terms, the basis of
an anarchist economy not based in money or even artificially derived
wealth but in shared practices and resources that, strictly speaking,
belong to nobody at all. In this sense the table, as the space where
commensality takes place, becomes a bridge between the private and the
public and, as a space in which what is set on the table is shared,
“generate[s] ties of friendship and solidarity that are indispensable for the
constitution of citizens with an egalitarian orientation, a common ethic
and critical consciousness.” Commensality, then, is a practice which is a
cultivation of relationships which “is necessary for the deepening of
egalitarian participation in the direction of an anarcho-communist
politics”. The key symbolism of this table, and of the activities that pass
between those who sit around it, is sharing and, in the practice of
commensality, it is intended that this sharing become habit-forming.

The sharing envisaged, however, is not merely a sharing of what is on the

table; it is also a sharing of its setting up and of its providing for. The point
of this is that in commensality we all play our part in provisioning the
table and then all share equally from its provisions. The activities

210
surrounding the table are the establishing and maintenance of a common-
wealth of social activity and fraternal relations – and this regardless of
who is around the table. In this way, and by this means, “in commensality
both the confirmation of the politically generative potential of sociality
and the building block of an emancipatory politics” can be forged. Yet:

“Even if we bracket the process leading up to setting the table, the very
practice of table fellowship has multiple effects, such as ensuring social
cohesion and forging collective bonds, creating conversations of common
concern and engendering the possibility of politicizing areas and issues
that are deemed nonpolitical from a formal, juridical perspective of
politics, and its attendant conception of freedom and equality, built on the
neutralization of existing social distinctions. In this view, commensality
becomes the metaphor of building the desirable relations and
subjectivities necessary for a common world of equals.”

The importance of commensality here is in that “food is a mediator of

social relations” and “Commensality indicates intimacy between those
who share a meal”. You do not usually, habitually, eat with a stranger or
with enemies and this says something special and intimate about those
with whom you do. Commensality, then, “is a sign of kinship, amity, good
will, companionship and conciliation”. These are things the anarchist
wishes to spread far and wide amongst all human beings. And so another
observation Banu Bargu makes of commensality is also important. This is
that “it does not simply indicate existing intimacy, it also actively creates
it, acting as a practical foundation for the forging of new bonds and
filiations.” Consequently, the anarchist table should be an open table, an
open commensality, an open invitation to those outside to participate in
the activities of the table and the opportunities and possibilities it
represents. This holds the door open, literally, to an egalitarian praxis,
egality being something which, by its very nature, cannot be imposed
[this would undercut the very value you imagined you were imposing] but
only ever offered through its habitual practice.

211
So, in closing this all too brief description of commensality, let us note
that:

“Through shared experience, commensality creates closeness and mutual

confidence. It brings together individuals around a common table and
enables the forging of bonds on an egalitarian, horizontal basis. It also
constitutes an invitation of a common conversation, one in which
participation can follow the horizontal relationships of sharing. It is an
experience of socialization that promotes solidarity, care, friendship and
cooperation, rather than antagonism, enmity and competition. The
common table is a site where social relations, ideas and projects are
negotiated. It designates a space in which political discourse and action
can germinate and proliferate. Commensality transforms bodily
consumption into social, communicative, cultural and political
production.”

We will see how this becomes a powerful focus of what I have described in
a previously written 250,000 word monograph about an anarchist person
from history in my next chapter.

The second item in this putatively new, anarchist economy is mutual aid.
My literary reference here is Peter Kropotkin’s book of the same name,
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution from 1902. In this book, Kropotkin sets
out to demonstrate the existence and usefulness of mutual aid among
animals, “savages”, “barbarians”, the inhabitants of medieval cities and,
lastly, “ourselves” as examples of the natural sociability and
interdependency of living things in which, the more a species leans into
this aspect of its life, the more it benefits. When it comes to human
societies, however, Kropotkin finds that the modern state, founded, as it
was, on the back of “tribal customs and habits” and “a new, still wider,
circle of social customs, habits, and institutions” born of “the barbarian
village community”, being “based upon loose aggregations of individuals
and undertaking to be their only bond of union, did not answer its

212
purpose.” So Kropotkin argues that “in an infinity of associations which
now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to take possession of all that is
required by man for life” is found the means to live life more prosperously.

Kropotkin motivates mutual aid not via some abstract, theoretical

philosophising, however, but, in the beginning, at least, on the basis of his
own, personal natural observation of animals in his native Russia. “In all
these scenes of animal life,” he writes, “which passed before my eyes, I
saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made
me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance
of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.” Yet
besides observing such positives he also observed negatives [although in
ways which came to support the same thesis], for example, in
Transbaikalia:

“I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in Transbaikalia, among the
wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and so on, that when animals
have to struggle against scarcity of food, in consequence of one of the
above-mentioned causes, the whole of that portion of the species which is
affected by the calamity, comes out of the ordeal so much impoverished
in vigour and health, that no progressive evolution of the species can be
based upon such periods of keen competition .” [italics original]

Kropotkin explicitly links his promotion of mutual aid to Darwinian science,

as we might already see from his book title and the comments so far
quoted from it. It was, at the time Kropotkin wrote, of course, mightily
current and working its way through many academic disciplines.
Sometimes, this was bad – as in the Social Darwinism to which I have
referred in chapter 6. But, in this case, Kropotkin argues for the positive
effects of mutual aid in a sociological sense within a Darwinian
understanding of evolution and “the struggle for life”. He wants to show,
for obvious reasons in his historical situation, that an anarchism of mutual
aid makes good scientific sense based on observation of both anaimals

213
and human societies and so to recommend it as the most propitious way
for human social groups to live. Thus, he often speaks of things like “the
importance of the Mutual Aid factor of evolution” in his book on the
subject. We might see in this something which ties together or otherwise
interrelates my descriptions of type 1 anarchism and type 2 anarchism. I
have nothing against it at all if you do.

Kropotkin sees this mutual aid, then, as evident all through the natural
history of animal life generally and this is not to be reduced to “love” or to
a principle such as “love your neighbour as yourself” [to which I will turn
in my next chapter]. For example, he says, “It is not love to my neighbour
— whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of
water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider,
even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and
sociability which moves me.” Instead, Kropotkin thinks of mutual aid as
“an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in
the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals
and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid
and support, and the joys they can find in social life.” This is something,
then, to be stimulated, encouraged and educated rather than something
that need be artificially invented out of thin air. Its proper description as a
subject is “sociability” or “society” whole and entire and another name for
it is “human solidarity”.

And so:

“it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in
mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of
human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is
borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close
dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of
the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the
rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad

214
 and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.”

It is such an understanding of the principle of mutual aid which I would

like to add to “commensality” as part of the basis for a new, anarchist
economy. In this, I do not at all conceive of it as a negative that Kropotkin
argues for the evolutionary benefits of mutual aid or, on the basis of
observation of the natural world, claims that it is repeatedly shown to be
of benefit to a species in the their struggle for survival. Here a moral
imperative to help other human beings and a, perhaps naturally
manifested, human solidarity finds a common cause. Far be it from me,
then, to separate them or set them at odds with one another. Both mutual
aid and commensality, particularly an open commensality, in fact
mutually reinforce each other and provide for the prospect, in their
practice, of a human kinship and fraternity which the anarchist wants to
see more generally among peoples of the earth.

And so I turn to the third and final aspect of this new, anarchist economy
and that is “the gift”. For this the literary example I am giving is Marcel
Mauss’ classic anthropological essay, The Gift, which makes the argument
that ancient societies existed on a basis other than has previously been
accepted as the received wisdom [some form of market economics].
Indeed as the anarchist activist, anthropologist and avowed fan of Marcel
Mauss, the recently deceased David Graeber, puts this, The Gift “was
perhaps the most magnificent refutation of the assumptions behind
economic theory ever written.” Graeber goes on to say that “At a time
when ‘the free market’ is being rammed down everyone's throat as both a
natural and inevitable product of human nature, Mauss' work – which
demonstrated not only that most non-Western societies did not work on
anything resembling market principles, but that neither do most modern
Westerners – is more relevant than ever.” I can only agree.

Markets, of course, are never really free and certainly not today when
Reddit users can decide to buy stocks, hugely inflating the value of certain

215
companies even as they plunge other investors, investors who have bet
against such stocks going up in price, into huge losses, - but then find that
the companies they go through to buy them suddenly restrict their ability
to buy the things they want at all. The game, of course, is rigged and it is
entirely the point of this capitalist game that some dominate others with
those who are allowed to dominate being the thing that is regulated. Here,
in the cause of intersectionality, it should not be imagined that such
rigged games are exempt from the oppressions of either gender or class
or race either.

But back to Mauss and The Gift which describes a rather different
economics. Mauss was a Jew and a revolutionary socialist [things he had
in common with Graeber] and for most of his life [1872-1950] he was an
active member of the French cooperative movement. According to
Graeber, “He considered Communists and Social Democrats to be equally
misguided in believing that society could be transformed primarily
through government action.” So he was not a Marxist or a “labour”
politician either. Rather, once more in the words of Graeber, he felt that
the role of government “was to provide the legal framework for a
socialism that had to be built from the ground up, by creating alternative
institutions.” This fits in with the kind of anarchist account of society and
economy that I am seeking to provide here [minus the government bit, of
course!] and which clearly caught the attention of the anarchist Graeber
as well.

So in his book The Gift Mauss brings historical and ethnographic research
to bear which argues that almost everything that an imagined “economic
science" has to say on the subject of economic history turns out to be
largely untrue. The universal assumption of free marketeers, then as now,
is that what essentially drives human beings is a desire to maximize their
pleasures, comforts and material possessions (their "utility"), and that all
significant human interactions can thus be analyzed in market terms [i.e.
profit and loss, advantage and disadvantage]. In the beginning, goes a

216
normalised version of such events, there was activity such as “bartering”.
People were forced, or came to a position where, to get what they wanted
they directly traded one thing they didn’t want anymore for another which
they did. Since this was ultimately inconvenient, so the story goes, they
eventually invented money as a universal medium of exchange invested
with fictional worth. The invention of further technologies of exchange
[credit, banking, stock exchanges] that have come after that were simply
a logical extension of the same idea.

But what Mauss says in The Gift is that there is no reason to believe a
society based on barter has ever existed. Instead, what anthropologists
have been discovering were societies where economic life was based on
utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and forth as
gifts – and almost everything we would call "economic" behaviour was
based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate exactly
who had given what to whom. Such "gift economies" could on occasion
become highly competitive, but when they did it was in exactly the
opposite way from our own form of competition: Instead of vying to see
who could accumulate the most by acquisitive behaviour, the winners
were the ones who managed to give the most away! In some notorious
cases, such as the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, this could lead to
dramatic contests of liberality, where ambitious chiefs would try to outdo
one another by distributing thousands of silver bracelets, Hudson Bay
blankets or Singer sewing machines, and even by destroying wealth –
sinking famous heirlooms in the ocean, or setting huge piles of wealth on
fire and daring their rivals to do the same. Not modern “economics” at all!

Now this may seem strange to us. But is it so strange? And, more to the
point, is this just some exotic novelty of a mostly forgotten past? Mauss,
who calls this “the archaic form of exchange”, one of “gifts presented and
reciprocated”, thinks not. For is there not something strange and peculiar
about the very idea of gift-giving even now, today, in our own society?
Why is it that, when one receives a gift from a friend [a drink, a dinner

217
invitation, a compliment, a present], one feels somehow obliged to
reciprocate in kind, either soon after or at an appropriate future occasion?
What is that? Why is it that a recipient of generosity often somehow feels
reduced or somehow in debt to the other if he or she cannot, at some
point, return it? Are these not examples of universal human feelings,
feelings which are somehow discounted in our own society, but feelings
which in others were the very basis of the economic system according to
Mauss in The Gift? And is it not the existence of these very different
impulses and moral standards, even in a capitalist system such as our
own, that is the real basis for the appeal of alternative visions and
socialist/anarchist practices? Mauss certainly thought so.

Basically, then, Mauss was and is making the point here that gifts, as a
means of exchange, are about much more than a sterile concentration on
profit and loss thought of only and ever in material terms. This is exactly
the kind of calculation that Mauss suggests these ancient gifters in gift
economies never made. In gift economies, Mauss argues, exchanges do
not have the impersonal qualities of the capitalist marketplace: In fact,
even when objects of great value change hands, what really matters is the
relations between the people; exchange is about creating friendships or
working out rivalries or obligations - and only incidentally about moving
around valuable goods. As a result, everything becomes personally
charged, even property: In gift economies, the most famous objects of
wealth - heirloom necklaces, weapons, feather cloaks – always seem to
develop personalities of their own.

In this Mauss uncovers the problem in modern economics which is that it

leads to the tendecy to think of everything as a thing – including people –
with a price tag attached and so of everything as something that can be
owned as property in which the value of the thing itself is precisely in its
value as property and in its imagined nature [thought of as an essence] as
“wealth”. But it is not thought of, in that case, in terms of what
relationship it might cement or encourage, how it might affect societal

218
obligations or affect the body politic. Gifting exists in a social context in a
positive way that an acquisitive, calculating profit and loss never can. The
gift builds up a society and societal relations, being both about the self
and soceity in terms of an expectation of gifts in return, in a way the
anonymous buyers and sellers of today never do. The gift, as a means of
economy, is community building – as I will also show in my next chapter in
a historical example.

Mauss makes the establishment and maintenance of relationships a large

part of his essay on gifting. Towards its conclusion he writes:

“Societies have progressed in so far as they themselves, their subgroups,

and lastly, the individuals in them, have succeeded in stabilizing
relationships, giving, receiving, and finally, giving in return. To trade, the
first condition was to be able to lay aside the spear. From then onwards
they succeeded in exchanging goods and persons, no longer only between
clans, but between tribes and nations, and, above all, between individuals.
Only then did people learn how to create mutual interests, giving mutual
satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without having to resort to
arms. Thus the clan, the tribe, and peoples have learnt how to oppose and
to give to one another without sacrificing themselves to one another. This
is what tomorrow, in our so-called civilized world, classes and nations
and individuals also, must learn.”

Then, Mauss gives his vision, as a result of his study, in relation to the
story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, in a penultimate
paragraph which has the benefit, in my context here, of returning us to
thoughts of the commensality with which I began discussing this sixth
value and my own vision of an “anarchist economy”:

“There is no other morality, nor any other form of economy, nor any other
social practices save these. The Bretons, and the Chronicles of Arthur tell
how King Arthur, with the help of a Cornish carpenter, invented that

219
wonder of his court, the miraculous Round Table, seated round which, the
knights no longer fought. Formerly, ‘out of sordid envy’, in stupid
struggles, duels and murders stained with blood the finest banquets. The
carpenter said to Arthur: ‘I will make you a very beautiful table, around
which sixteen hundred and more can sit, and move around, and from
which no-one will be excluded...No knight will be able to engage in
fighting, for there the highest placed will be on the same level as the
lowliest.’ There was no longer a ‘high table’, and consequently no more
quarrelling. Everywhere that Arthur took his table his noble company
remained happy and unconquerable. In this way nations today can make
themselves strong and rich, happy and good. Peoples, social classes,
families, and individuals will be able to grow rich, and will only be happy
when they have learnt to sit down, like the knights, around the common
store of wealth. It is useless to seek goodness and happiness in distant
places. It is there already, in peace that has been imposed, in well-
organized work, alternately in common and separately, in wealth amassed
and then redistributed, in the mutual respect and reciprocating generosity
that is taught by education.”

And so it is these three, an open commensality, mutual aid and the gift on
which I base an anarchist economy which expresses an anarchist sense of
value and virtue, which sees in an open table, the helping of each other
and a giving without counting the cost, the means to a recreation of
society and community along anarchist lines according to an anarchist
economy.

7. Democracy. Democracy, today, is one of those words which has been

abused, cheapened and devalued. It has almost come to mean the
opposite of what it should mean. Democracy does not mean “the results
of an electoral process”. Democracy does not mean “something I have
claimed by invoking the people or the nation”. Democracy certainly does
not mean “something the government do”. Anarchism, I think, has a very
specific view of what democracy is and I like to think of it as so

220
democratic, in its meaning and practice [for democracy is most of all a
practice], that many people who, both now and in the past, have bandied
the word “democracy” around as a way to manipulate people may find
themselves staggered and taken aback by its anarchist meaning.

Democracy, put very simply in anarchist context, is nothing less than the
absolute political equality of every human being on earth. It is,
furthermore, an irrevocable and non-transferable characteristic of such
people. This means it cannot be handed off to a “representative” or
“delegate” in a vote. This means there can be no parliaments or
governments or congresses of a few who are said to “represent” the
many. This non-transferability, whilst of course respecting the free and
engaged existence of every human being alive in their political direction
and its consequences, also has, inherent within such an understanding, an
automatic protection against the corruption of the body politic through the
bribery of representatives and bodies constituted in order to “speak for”
other people. To the contrary, the anarchist democrat, in possession of an
anarchist definition of democracy, insists that no human being may speak
for, or represent, another but only they themselves. Democracy is, then,
truly the will of the people for it cannot be corrupted or curtailed by the
intervention of others at least one remove [and sometimes many more]
from human individuals themselves.

It is envisaged that this democracy would work in practice on the basis of

self-selecting local communities - and so co-existing with this democratic
ethos is a fellow one of decentralization too. No more, in anarchist
thinking, would there be national, or even supra-national, bodies telling
people what they have thought or what they must do. Decisions would all
be local and participated in by everyone above the age of majority –
whatever the group themselves decide that to be. Here the social group is
defined explicitly in such a way as the anarchist value of democracy – that
no one may speak for me except I myself – is preserved. Any larger
decisions that need to be taken [perhaps because they have more far-

221
reaching consequences or involve people across a wide area] could
possibly then be taken on the basis of a federation of such local groups in
which a delegate [with no powers or authority of their own except but to
relay the communicated will of their community] would take part in a
larger assembly of federated communities. In addition, local communities
would be free to forge agreements with neighbour communities on the
basis of the priniciple of voluntary association, a further anarchist
democratic principle in which individuals or groups may associate with
whomsoever they choose without authoritarian oversight to their mutual
and cooperative benefit. On such a basis, communities may proceed by
common agreement, from the ground up rather than the top down, on the
basis of the anarchist value of democracy.

8. Education. If you recall the thoughts expressed by Errico Malatesta on

the subject of a freedom of equals – that my wanting to be free implicates
everyone else in desiring their own freedom too – then this suggests that
something will be necessary: education. Anarchists, it seems to me, have
never thought, not in the political versions of this creed nor in the more
ancient spiritual and philosophical ones that I have been influenced by in
my own thinking, that people would all just wake up one morning and
want anarchy and to practice anarchism. Such a thought would have been
naive in the past but in today’s world it would be a flat refusal to
acknowledge the coercion and control most people are under in a world of
public and social media owned by capitalist oligarchs and used by others
of similar kind to shape and control the public consensus and delimit what
it is even possible or acceptible for the body politic to think. More now
than ever, in a world of conspiracy theories, fake news and even
deliberate misinformation communicated for purely partisan reasons,
people need to be educated for their own, and the common, good. The
first thing to acknowledge, then, is that anarchists have known this all
along and have been heavily engaged in doing it.

This, at least, was certainly the opinion of English anarchist, William

222
Godwin, who thought that education was "the main means by which
change would be achieved." Included in Godwin’s conception of education
was “a respect for autonomy… which precluded any form of coercion”.
This suggests that a Godwinian education was not so much a telling
someone what to believe as an education in which the person’s own
motivation to be an educated person was itself stimulated. It was an
education not just in facts or theories [which could turn into an education
which was intended to make one subject to a dogma or an ideology] but in
being able to think for oneself, critique and even argue for contrary
theories or solutions. This, then, is an education which seeks to educate
initiative and thinking for oneself rather than the passive reception of
information from authority figures taught as authoritative in itself. In An
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, for example, William Godwin criticised
the state schooling of children "on account of its obvious alliance with
national government" and he saw in this an opportunity for such
government to perpetuate itself and its values that it would surely not let
slip through its fingers. But Godwin did not think that children should be
taught passive obedience to such authorities. Instead, he thought they
should be taught to venerate “their independent deductions of truth”.

Max Stirner, himself a schoolteacher besides being an egoist or

individualist anarchist, would have agreed. In his writing on the subject,
for example, in “The False Principle of Our Education”, an article he had
published in the German newspaper the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, he
regarded schooling as a matter of life itself. In the article he states,
thinking that knowledge is something “to be lived”, that education is a
matter of self-education, something he regards as educating one’s own
will so that it achieves a kind of freedom. He is also concerned with a kind
of self-education in which the self comes to understand itself. He wants
people educated to become “free natures” [compare Nietzsche’s
description of himself, and others potentially like him, as “free spirits” or
“free thinkers”, for example as the subtitle of his book Human, All Too
Human: A Book for Free Spirits, a book in which such a concept is central

223
to its thought] rather than “masters of things”. For Stirner, until you know
yourself, you have not mastered your own will, and you are merely
subservient; once you master it, then you are free. Stirner explains this
“self-understanding” as an “hourly self-creation” and he thinks human
beings create their own personal version of freedom this way. Such
people, in a way that we can see mirrored in Nietzschean literature
paradigmatically, are creating themselves as free human beings in each
moment. Here, then, in Stirnerite education, it matters not just what you
learn but, most of all, what you do with it. For Max Stirner “pedagogy
should not proceed any further towards civilizing, but toward the
development of free men, sovereign characters.” When such thought is
interpreted today in the light of gender discussion, its relevance seems
immediately apparent in a context of “creating the self”.

Mihkail Bakunin, meanwhile, in “Equal Opportunity in Education”,

bemoaned the evident inequality of education available to people of
different classes. It seemed to him that class and wealth advantages
locked in the superior educative opportunities of and for the elite or
bourgeois to the detriment of the working or underclasses. And so “while
some study others must labour so that they can produce what we need to
live — not just producing for their own needs, but also for those men who
devote themselves exclusively to intellectual pursuits.” His solution was to
eradicate the distinction between workers and “scholars” so that there
would, in future, be but one class of human being, each committed to
both work and education equally. Kropotkin was no stranger to this theme
either, in “Brain Work and Manual Work” speaking of those who “have
been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while their
boys and girls are driven into a mine, or a factory, from the age of
thirteen, and there they soon forget the little they may have learned at
school.” Somewhat like Bakunin, he then suggested that, instead of
“pernicious distinction” in education, each should receive “complete
education” to the benefit of all.

224
Anarchists, being those who do, and not merely those who think, write or
talk, have also been those who set up schools. The Russian Christian
anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, for example, established a school for peasant
children on his estate as well as several other schools for local children.
Unfortunately, such schools didn’t last long due to harassment by the
Tsarist secret police in Russia. Tolstoy himself regarded a free, non-
coercive education as something which could grow into culture. At the
beginning of the twentieth century the Catalan anarchist, Francisco Ferrer,
established progressive schools [called “Modern” schools] in Barcelona
contrary to the established education system run by the Catholic church.
Ferrer believed in education free from church and state and his ideas
spread to other places, including New York City where a “Modern school”
opened in 1911 and intended to educate the working-classes from a
secular, class-conscious perspective. American Modern schools involved
day-time academic classes for children and night-time continuing-
education lectures for adults. The New York school, commonly called the
Ferrer Center after Francisco Ferrer and his ideas, was founded by noted
anarchists Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre,
amongst others, and was said to emphasise academic freedom rather
than fixed subjects.

Writing about the education of children in an essay called “The Child and
Its Enemies” Emma Goldman would herself say:

“The child shows its individual tendencies in its plays, in its questions, in
its association with people and things. But it has to struggle with
everlasting external interference in its world of thought and emotion. It
must not express itself in harmony with its nature, with its growing
personality. It must become a thing, an object. Its questions are met with
narrow, conventional, ridiculous replies, mostly based on falsehoods; and,
when, with large, wondering, innocent eyes, it wishes to behold the
wonders of the world, those about it quickly lock the windows and doors,
and keep the delicate human plant in a hothouse atmosphere, where it

225
 can neither breathe nor grow freely."

In another essay, “The Social Importance of the Modern School”, she

added that:

“the school of today, no matter whether public, private, or parochial...is

for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the
soldier — a place where everything is being used to break the will of the
child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign
to itself."

Thus, Goldman concluded that:

“it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not

synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really
mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development
of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we
hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community
which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible."

In this way, Goldman articulates what several anarchists had done before
her, argued that education given by the state or church or other
authoritarian organisation was an education in dogma and control as
dominating bodies sought to shape children in their own image as those
taught a class system of domination. But, to the contrary, Goldman and
other anarchists taught a freedom of spirit and opportunity that might
create those with an innate love of intellectual, but also political, freedom
that schools formed on an authoritarian foundation never would. This, at
least in Goldman’s case, manifested itself perfectly in the matter of sex
education and so she thought that “If in childhood both man and woman
were taught a beautiful comradeship, it would neutralize the oversexed
condition of both and would help woman's emancipation much more than
all the laws upon the statute books and her right to vote." Thus, we can

226
see that Goldman, like many other anarchist examples, found education,
both of children and adults, vital to the formation of human beings and to
the values and ideas they then carried forward throughout their lives and
so into the societies and communities they would subsequently perform,
maintain and inhabit.

Black anarchist and civil rights activist, Lucy Parsons, was another who
was not blind to the educational aspects to anarchism. In her essay “The
Principles of Anarchism” she begins by giving personal testimony to her
own researches “during the great railroad strike of 1877” which drew her
interest in regards to the “Labour Question”. This seems to have woken
her up to the dangers of government and party politics for she now
describes herself as

“appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the

details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an
instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind
of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government
officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories,
magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of
life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.”

Such research as Parsons had done now educates her in regard to “the
struggle for liberty” and she testifies that:

“all who are at all familiar with history know that men will abuse power
when they possess it, for these and other reasons, I, after careful study,
and not through sentiment, turned from a sincere, earnest, political
Socialist to the non-political phase of Socialism, Anarchism, because in its
philosophy I believe I can find the proper conditions for the fullest
development of the individual units in society, which can never be the
case under government restrictions.”

227
Here Parsons is not only testifying to her own self-education, a very
anarchist practice, and one anarchists would teach others to practice
themselves, but the essay she is writing is, itself, anarchist education. So
she goes on to say that “The philosophy of anarchism is included in the
word ‘Liberty’”, filling out further meanings of liberty and freedom as well,
before regurgitating my own insistence earlier, in regard to anarchists and
education, that “Anarchists know that a long period of education must
precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not
believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the
development of self-thinking individuals.” These “self-thinking individuals”
are at the heart of the value and virtue of education as expressed in an
anarchist context, in my view, and what Lucy Parsons is elucidating here
is exactly the anarchism of values that I am taking about, the evolutionary
anarchism of a society changed by the “self-thinking” people that make it
up as such values are “permeating all modern thought”.

When added to the thoughts of the further anarchists I have referred to

above, what Lucy Parsons says in “The Principles of Anarchism” makes
the case for education, of others and of yourself, as a life value very dear
to the heart of anarchism as a practice and as a philosophy of life. Indeed,
it is why this book, and why others I have written like it, even exist in the
first place. But, lest we think that Parsons, in her essay, preaches only an
anarchist educational dogma instead, she preempts this thought by noting
that “anarchism is not compelled to outline a complete organisation of a
free society. To do so with any assumption of authority would be to place
another barrier in the way of coming generations. The best thought of
today may become the useless vagary of tomorrow, and to crystallise it
into a creed is to make it unwieldy.”

So to make of anarchism a plan, dogma or creed is not the anarchist

educational way. Instead, anarchist education is what Parsons calls “a
larger opportunity to develop the units in society, that mankind may
possess the right as a sound being to develop that which is broadest,

228
noblest, highest and best, unhandicapped by any centralised authority,
where he shall have to wait for his permits to be signed, sealed, approved
and handed down to him before he can engage in the active pursuits of
life with his fellow being.” This she further describes as “some higher
incentive” than the gathering of monetary wealth and, in somewhat
utopian terms, as “The involuntary aspiration born in man to make the
most of one's self, to be loved and appreciated by one's fellow-beings, to
‘make the world better for having lived in it’.” It is to ask the question, in
the end, as Lucy Parsons herself does, “what may we expect from men
when freed from the grinding necessity of selling the better part of
themselves for bread?” In a further example Parsons gives, which once
again returns us to the imagery of commensality, of which I wrote earlier,
Parsons gives the educative image of a people free of barbarous and
hegemonic commerce and “civilized” enough to now wish anarchy:

“In a well bred family each person has certain duties, which are performed
cheerfully, and are not measured out and paid for according to some pre-
determined standard; when the united members sit down to the well-filled
table, the stronger do not scramble to get the most, while the weakest do
without, or gather greedily around them more food than they can possibly
consume. Each patiently and politely awaits his turn to be served, and
leaves what he does not want; he is certain that when again hungry
plenty of good food will be provided. This principle can be extended to
include all society, when people are civilized enough to wish it.”

By “civilized enough” there Parsons surely means “educated enough” -

and this education is not merely a matter of teaching or book learning but
“self-thinking” alongside practice and experience. One learns the habits of
the table by being at the table, by taking part in it and by reflecting on it.
Such is the anarchist meaning and sense of “education”.

9. Responsibility. My ninth, and final, anarchist value and virtue is

“responsibility” and by this, being an anarchist where anarchism is a

229
synonym for “action”, I mean the presumption of taking responsibility.
The anarchist, in this conception, is not passive and neither do they hide,
run away, seek escape from, or blithely ignore, the issues of the world
around them. Instead, they get involved, play a part, take responsibility -
as previous values and virtues such as “fraternity” or “education,”
“freedom” and “democracy”, should indicate. Historically, it is always the
case that those recognised as “anarchist” are those who have done
exactly this and any list of anarchist notables I could now make would be
a simple demonstration of this fact such that it would become an
indissoluable marker of anarchism itself.

With this simple statement, then, I will regard it that anyone with
knowledge of anarchist people will regard the case for an identification of
responsibility with anarchism as simply made. This not being so, however,
I could only recommend some personal research into the lives of
anarchists from Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta to Parsons, de Cleyre
and Goldman, to Berkman, Turner and Tolstoy, to Rocker, Landauer and
Most, to Reclus, Michel and Pouget, to Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes
Comaposada Guillén and Amparo Poch y Gascón - and on and on and on.
Then, perhaps, you will come to the same conclusion as I, that anarchism
is the activity of taking responsibility for human society, what goes on in
it, how it is organised and what values the people who comprise it live out
their lives by means of - as well as in the context of the problems in which
they live them out. If anarchism is an action [and it is] then anarchism can
only also be a taking responsibility, a literal standing with people in the
problems and issues of their lives, and a working towards their solutions.

4. Consequences

By “consequences” I mean the consequences of anarchism, the

realisation of something called anarchy [so we are thinking about type 2
versions of these things here]. We are, quite explicitly, asking, “What are
the consequences of anarchism?”. We are asking, “What has changed?”.

230
We are asking people thinking about anarchism to realise that anarchism
– most profoundly and completely – IS change. We are prodding the
budding anarchist in order for them to realise that the day after the
revolution nothing is the same anymore. There will be no policeman to
call. There [at least in my conception of anarchy in line with the values
and virtues outlined above in my third section of this chapter] will be no
money to earn. But, even if there was money, there will no longer be any
banks. Your credit card will not work. You will need to organise yourself
into communities of families, neighbours and friends. And so much more!
This is all a bit apocalyptic and its only one imaginary scenario of a very
sudden change in circumstances. I happen not to think it would go down
like this unless there was some planet-wide natural disaster and, that
being so, lots of people are probably dead too. But there is a point that
needs to be made here even if this, perhaps unlikely, scenario does not
take place and anarchism arrives by other, less apocalyptic and more
evolutionary, means.

This is that anarchism isn’t the same as now but with all the bad, nasty,
capitalist, hierarchical bits taken out of it. The anarchist case is that now,
how we live today, is the product of things like hierarchy, capitalism,
coercion, domination, division, domestication. You cannot remove these
things and still have now because they are what makes now what it is.
Anarchism, so I am saying here, is the complete and utter annihilation of
now because it is the complete and utter annihilation of the values and
systems that make now what it is in a neoliberal, capitalist country or
economy of cops, courts, prisons and armies. Nothing can remain the
same after that. Every relationship of one person to another is
reconstituted; every value of society is redefined and, in some cases,
even replaced. If you are an anarchist you are committed to forgetting life
as you know it for the creating of life as it can be.

Of course, as I have repeated several times in this book and made a point
of mentioning in others, the end is the means and the means is the end.

231
This means that we journey on the way to anarchism by means of
anarchism. We embody and live its values, we carry out the practices it
inspires, we regard human beings and other sentient life as valuable, we
educate people about the anarchist approach to life and community. We
attempt to change and influence society from within to produce it by
means of a simple evolution as much as we can. Ideally, this has an effect.
But even if that effect is not great it does not deter us and we still seek to
help others and our world as much as we can in accordance with our
anarchist values. And those values must have an effect upon our lives that
others can see. They must make people inquire and ask why we are
different, why we care, what motivates us. The consequence of anarchism
in practice is that it is noticed and noticeable. It offers a different, other,
new way to live in community with others. It is seen for what it is and
gives an opportunity for anarchist education. It is always attempting to
propagate itself. Because anarchism isn’t the status quo. It is the end of
the status quo. The consequence of anarchism is change whether in one
person or one world population.

So forget your capitalist dreams for they are not anarchist dreams. Realise
that anarchism is system change, relationships changed, permanent
change.

5. An Anarchism of Human Rights?

We hear a lot of talk about human rights today but it is my intuition that
the anarchist does not fall for such talk or how such a debate is framed.
The comedian, George Carlin, had a bit in one of his later acts which was
to make the point that human beings have NO rights. He was keen on
teaching people through his comedy in his later life that such things as
rights were “made up”. I agree with him and I think it says something
about the anarchist philosophy in both type 1 and type 2 senses to agree
with this. Of course, this does not mean that anarchists, or even just the
anarchist writing this, think that people are things which should just be

232
treated however you can get away with. People are not for exploiting.
Anarchists think that all people, and all life, is worthy of respect and
decent treatment in as far as it can be provided for them. Hopefully, the
values and virtues delineated in section 3 of this chapter have already
given you that impression and guided your thinking in this direction. But
this talk about “human rights”, to the contrary, is a very specific thing
and, I argue, not an anarchist thing. Let me explain some more.

Human rights became very popular in the second half of the 20 th century.
In the first half of that century there had been two world wars and, as we
have seen in chapter 6, eugenics and racism abounded in the still
somewhat colonial world. After World War Two, the United Nations was
formed and one of its earlier actions was the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. This listed a consensus set of “30 basic human rights”
that, supposedly, all the people born into the world, simply by the fact of
that birth, had. I would like to list these “rights”, agreed upon by the
United Nations General Assembly on December 10th 1948, for you now:

1. All human beings are free and equal

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another
in a spirit of brotherhood.

2. No discrimination
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this
Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex,
language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin,
property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made
on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the
country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent,
trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

233
3. Right to life, freedom, security
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

4. No slavery
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade
shall be prohibited in all their forms.

5. No torture and inhuman treatment

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment.

6. Same right to use the law

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the
law.

7. Equal before the law

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to
equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any
discrimination in violation and against any incitement to such
discrimination.

8. Right to treated fair by a court

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national
tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the
constitution or by law.

9. No unfair detainment
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

10. Right to trial

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an
independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and
obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

234
11. Innocent until proven guilty
a. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed
innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he
has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
b. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act
or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or
international law, at the time when it was committed.

12. Right to privacy

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family,
home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such
interference or attacks.

13. Freedom of movement and residence

a. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within
the borders of each state.
b. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to
return to his country.

14. Right to asylum

a. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum
from persecution.
b. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely
arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and
principles of the United Nations.

15. Right to nationality

a. Everyone has the right to a nationality.
b. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the
right to change his nationality.

235
16. Rights to marry and have family
a. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race,
nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They
are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its
dissolution.
b. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the
intending spouses.
c. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is
entitled to protection by society and the State.

17. Right to own things

a. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association
with others.
b. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

18. Freedom of thought and religion

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion;
this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom,
either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to
manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and
observance.

19. Freedom of opinion and expression

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right
includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers.

20. Freedom of assembly

a. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and
association.
b. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

236
21. Right to democracy
a. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country,
directly or through freely chosen representatives.
b. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
c. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government;
this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall
be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by
equivalent free voting procedures.

22. Right to social security

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is
entitled to realization, through national effort and international
cooperation and in accordance with the organization and resources of
each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for
his dignity and the free development of his personality.

23. Right to work

a. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just
and favourable conditions of work and to protection against
unemployment.
b. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for
equal work.
c. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration
ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity,
and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
d. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the
protection of his interests.

24. Right to rest and holiday

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation
of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

237
25. Right of social service
a. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health
and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,
housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to
security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood,
old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
b. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.
All children shall enjoy the same social protection.

26. Right to education

a. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in
the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be
compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally
available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the
basis of merit.
b. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human
personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and
friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further
the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
c. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be
given to their children.

27. Right to culture and art

a. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the
community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and
its benefits.
b. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material
interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of
which he is the author.

28. Freedom around the world

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights

238
and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

29. Subject to law

a. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full
development of his personality is possible.
b. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject
only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of
securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others
and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the
general welfare in a democratic society.
c. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the
purposes and principles of the United Nations.

30. Human rights can’t be taken away

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State,
group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act
aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth
herein.

We may interpret this set of rights, which in later years trickled down
through many other resolutions of the United Nations, in some cases in
terms of international law or the laws of specific geographical regions –
such as the European Convention of Human Rights of 1953 or the British
Human Rights Act of 1998 – as being compiled with the best of intentions.
But a read through of its 30 articles at some points raises a wry smile and
at others a guffaw or a roll of the eyes. Some of these articles are
probably broken every single day in multiple countries of the world,
assuming they were ever really respected as rights in the first place. For
example, at the same time as I was researching this part of the book I was
reading about “children as young as 6” who have been required to mine
cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the purposes of obtaining a
resource necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries. One report I
read on this, which implicated Elon Musk and Tesla in the issue, described

239
the resulting batteries as “blood batteries”. I wonder how articles 4, 23
and 24 apply to such a case in this context? Or perhaps these rights don’t
stop a six year old being set to digging in the dirt in the first place,
something of an oversight wouldn’t you say?

The anarchist, however, much like George Carlin in his act, looks at this
with their eyes wide open and with a much bigger context in view for such
things as “rights”. An example here is Max Baginski. Baginski was a
German-American free thinker and anarchist, a colleague of Emma
Goldman’s, who wrote articles in numerous anarchist publications, some
of which he was also the editor. One of these was Goldman’s anarchist
magazine, Mother Earth, to which he submitted the following words
pertient to our subject here in the October 1906 issue:

“Mere declarations of independence and political rights dissolve into

nothing if the few may monopolize the earth, control the resources of
subsistence, and thus force mankind to a life of poverty and servitude.
Under such conditions alleged political liberty is but a means to blind the
masses to the real necessities of the times and to create artificial
campaign issues, the solution of which is in reality of little consequence to
the general welfare.”

He would go on, in the same article, an article which was an attempt to

contextualize the actions of Leon Czolgosz, a man who shot and killed US
President McKinley 5 years previously, to describe the “mission of
government” as “the violent suppression of every human right” and to
argue that such a mission “becomes more accentuated wth the growing
intensity of commercial and industrial exploitation”. Eighteen months
later, in the same magazine, the anarchist, Alexander Berkman, a lifelong
partner of Emma Goldman’s, would write in another article that:

“To support, defend, and perpetuate these unjust and terrible conditions
[he was referring to the “poverty, starvation and widespread misery”

240
 evident among “the producing class”], it is necessary to have police,
prisons, laws, and government. For the disinherited are not content to
forever starve in the midst of plenty, and the exploited are beginning to
cry out against their cruel bondage. These cries, these signs of rebellious
dissatisfaction, must be stifled. That is the mission of law and
government: to preserve things as they are; to secure to the rich their
stolen wealth; to strangle the voice of popular discontent.”

Here Baginski and Berkman sound the right, anarchist note in relation to
“human rights” and they attest that, in the face of capitalist
acquisitiveness, wealth and power, all rights are seemingly breakable,
flexible, ignorable and void. And what of these “rights” anyway? It is they
that then require police, courts, prisons, states and governments for none
of these would exist without something for them to enforce and/or punish.
In other words, it is the mentality of just such human institutions to avert
to the logic of “rights” in the first place and to use them as flimsy
justification for their very own existence. No free born human being,
unmolested by others and going about their business, feels the need to
write up lists of things to which they are entitled and which the
community at large must ensure they receive. Instead, they live within
nature’s freedom and never imagine for a second that anyone else would
presume to impinge upon it, receiving it as just such an impingement if
they do.

“Rights”, to the contrary, are an interfering imposition upon the natural

flow of existence of arbitrary things that various human powers now
assume to prosecute [in at least two senses]. As such, they do not spring
from any anarchist mentality but are, instead, the imaginings of
controlling bureaucrats and all those who think human lives must needs
be administered by some authority. As such, the anarchist rejects such an
idea out of hand. The anarchist sees no need for such authority and sees
it as only the coercive, controlling hand of others who want to artificially
constrain human freedom according to their own desires and as their

241
power allows. This is then nothing like the human solidarity, voluntary
association and freely given cooperation of which the anarchist speaks in
the belief that humans need no top down, imposed organisation for, left to
themselves, they can each achieve this to their own satisfaction according
to their own, uncoerced wills. Government of “rights”, then, is not in
accordance with the anarchist vision or the anarchist’s values and so it
must be set aside [though certainly not human dignity or mutual human
respect] as derivative of a mentality incompatible with either a type 1 or a
type 2 conception of anarchy and anarchism.

6. Violence

Anarchism has, unfortunately and in its type 2, political, guise, always

been linked with violence. Some anarchists [some might call them
misguided and others not] have even perpetrated individual acts of it. But
anarchists more widely have often sought to contextualise such acts in
the wider context of societal violence more generally for, whatever the
case in regard to anarchist violence, it could not coherently be maintained
by anybody that it is only anarchists who have ever been violent.

Anarchists themselves often point to the inherent violence of capitalist

society itself in their discussions of violence. One example of this is
Alexander Berkman. Berkman was an anarchist who, in 1892, made an
anarchist attempt on a businessman’s life in order to rally striking
workers, if not the whole working population, to the anarchist cause of
anti-capitalism. He failed to kill the man, was captured, and served 14
years in prison for the crime. He then re-emerged from prison, in 1906, to
continue his anarchist life in less violent, but not less committed, ways. He
subsequently wrote pieces on violence and anarchism in both his lifelong
friend Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine, of which he was himself
editor between 1907 and 1915, and in his own book, published in 1929,
What is Communist Anarchism?, later reprinted as ABC of Anarchism by
the Freedom Press of the UK – which is how I come by the book. In

242
“Violence and Anarchism”, written in Mother Earth within a couple of
years of his release from prison for the attempted murder, and barely a
month after a further bomb in New York had seen him arrested by New
York cops with extreme prejudice on the pretence of him having carried
out the act, Berkman says of violence:

“Let us consider the matter dispassionately. Is violence specifically

Anarchistic? Is the taking of human life such a very unusual occurrence
among ‘civilized’ peoples? Is our whole social existence anything but an
uninterrupted series of murder, assassination, eradication? All our
honored institutions are rooted in the very spirit of murder. Do we build
warships for educational purposes? Is the army a Sunday school? Our
police, jails, and penitentiaries – what purpose do they serve but to
suppress, kill, and maim? Is the gallows the symbol of our brotherhood,
the electric chair the proof of our humanitarianism?”

Berkman conceives, in the same article, of the American society he was at

the time living in as “existing disorder” to which anarchism opposed “the
science of social order” - an effective reversal of what the capitalist or
anti-anarchist [such as there were in seemingly great numbers in the USA
in 1908, not least among the authorities] might say. At this point in time
he writes of the possibility of anarchism without any violent overtones.
Indeed, he seems to conceive that such actions cannot bring about the
anarchist society he seeks when he writes:

“This condition of social regeneration cannot be achieved by the will or

act of any man or party. The enlightenment of the masses as to the evils
of government, the awakening of the public conscience to a clear
understanding of justice and equity—these are the forces which will
abolish all forms of bondage, political, economical, and social, replacing
present institutions by free co-operation and the solidarity of communal
effort.”

243
Berkman, not condemning violence should it from time to time break out,
contextualises it as the cries of the miserable and the degraded for relief
and for aid and puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of those who
precipitated such misery and degradation:

“‘But the bomb?’ cry the judges in and out of court. The bomb is the
echo of your cannon, trained upon our starving brothers; it is the cry of
the wounded striker; ’tis the voice of hungry women and children; the
shriek of those maimed and torn in your industrial slaughterhouses; it is
the dull thud of the policeman’s club upon a defenseless head; ’tis the
shadow of the crisis, the rumbling of suppressed earthquake—it is
manhood’s lightning out of an atmosphere of degradation and misery that
king, president, and plutocrat have heaped upon humanity. The bomb is
the ghost of your past crimes.”

So Berkman, instead of giving an exegesis of the “crimes” of random

bombers and assassins, exegetes the society in which such human beings
are driven to such desperate acts [perhaps even in regard to his own,
more youthful indiscretion] and meditates on the society which would
produce them. He paints a picture of a violent society oppressing the
majority of its citizens, backed up by the forces of the state and the clubs
of police officers, for capitalistic ends and impugns that as by far the
greater violence.

In his later piece, “Is Anarchism Violence?”, an early chapter of his book
ABC of Anarchism, Berkman begins by completely denying that anarchism
is violence and states that “it is capitalism and government which stand
for disorder and violence”, adding that “Anarchism is the very reverse of
it; it means order without government and peace without violence.”
Berkman then begins an argument which aims to show that, in various
times and places, it falls to various kinds of human beings to act violently.
In such cases violence is not uniformly abhored or decried completely but
it depends on the act and its reasoning. So we cannot even say that

244
violence itself is always and forever unjustified. We can conceive of acts of
legitimate violent rebellion, for example, in which we would see the
reason for being violent and carrying out necessary violent acts. These
acts, in fact and in history, have not all been carried out by anarchists
and, sometimes, “killing a despot was considered the highest virtue”.

Berkman’s argument transmutes into one which argues that oppression

will naturally produce those who wish to strike back at the oppressor. He
seems to suggest, giving the example of Russia under the Tsars, that the
worst oppressors also produce the greatest number of violent reactions.
Sometimes, he writes, “there [is] no way of mitigating the despotic regime
[other] than by putting the fear of God into the tyrant’s heart.” Such
avengers may often be “idealistic”, he concedes, but that is because they
“love liberty and the people”. How else, he seems to say, may one
liberate one’s people from grinding poverty, political oppression and a
simple inability to live lives of their own choosing? He refers to the English
suffragettes as women who “frequently resorted to [violence] to
propagate and carry out their demands for equal rights” and to the killer
of Franz Ferdinand, the act that instigated World War 1, as another who
used violence – yet without any of these cases being cases of anarchist
violence for none of these people, and myriad others, were, in fact,
anarchists. In such a way he demonstrates that “anarchists have no
monopoly of political violence”. Indeed, “the number of such acts by
anarchists is infinitesimal as compared with those committed by persons
of other political persuasions.”

Berkman goes on to point out that anarchists themselves do not agree

about the appropriateness, or even the use, of violence in their activities.
He points out that no one would expect an anarchist of Tolstoy’s type
[Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist who took most seriously Jesus’
insistence to “turn the other cheek”] to condone violence of any sort and
that most egoist or individualist anarchists are similarly against violent
acts. Of the rest, there are those who may justify violent acts without

245
carrying them out personally and others, equally non-violent, who would
deal with each incident case by case or according to the circumstances of
the act. Since violence can, by common agreement, also be carried out by
people of multiple political persuasions, it can also not be suggested that
anarchism alone inspires it – and so neither is it something to do with
being an anarchist in the first place which makes one act violently.

Berkman also suggests, and this may apply to him and to his lifelong
friend and companion, Emma Goldman, as well, that “many anarchists
who at one time belived in violence as a means of propaganda [violence
was, at one time, called “propaganda of the deed” in anarchist circles]
have changed their opinion about it and do not favour such methods
anymore.” It may be noted here that, when Berkman had attempted to
murder the businessman in 1892, Goldman had been a co-conspirator,
one who was meant to say why Berkman had done what he had done
after the act was completed [Berkman was meant to kill himself after the
murder]. By the time Berkman was publishing this book, however, he was
now saying that “most anarchists today do not believe anymore in
‘propaganda by deed’ and do not favour acts of that nature.”

Berkman attempts to use this change of heart, but without consequent

giving up of anarchist beliefs and values, to argue that violence was never
an inherent belief of the anarchists to begin with for, if one can retain the
other beliefs but give up violence, then violence was never necessary to
anarchism in the first place. It was merely a tactic used by some for
reasons their own. Berkman then goes on to say that “we must admit that
everyone believes in violence, and practises it, however he may condemn
it in others” - which is really to say that everyone allows that they may
use violence from time to time – always for reasons they think they can
justify – but also reserves the right to condemn violence in others
accordingly. He then returns to his refrain of government being
“organised violence”, refers to the violence of the church, of parents in
childhood and rounds this out into a discussion of “the right to compel

246
you” - which he calls “authority” - and “fear of punishment” - which gets
turned into “duty” and “obedience”. The problem then metamorphosises
not into whether violence itself is or isn’t right but in what circumstances
people are prepared to give it a pass and call it justified and in what
circumstances they are not. This, in fact, is the real issue.

Violence is a form of domination, an expression of power to dominate and

subdue, a violation of the peace of some other. Berkman attempts to
show how such things, in family, church and state, are the norm. Violence
is not then the preserve of the anarchist but the constant presence of
presumptive authority and its desire to dictate and dominate. “All life,” he
says, “has become a crazy quilt of authority, of domination and
submission, of command and obedience, of coercion and subjection, of
rulers and ruled, of violence and force in a thousand and one forms.” Yet
violence, he states, “is the method of ignorance, the weapon of the
weak.” The strong in heart and mind need no violence, he thinks, for they
have the inner consciousness of the righteousness of their cause. He
paints a picture of the progressive human being evolving away from any
master and so any need to dominate by means of violence.

Anarchism, of course, he gives as the name of this aspiration and this

vision. It is “a society without force and compulsion, where all men shall
be equals; and live in freedom, peace and harmony.” Consequently, we
must agree with Berkman and say that anarchism has no philosophical or
political attachment to violence. There have, as no one sane can deny,
been those who thought anarchist aims could be pursued by violent
means but they were wrong and the anarchist utopia was not brought
down, as if on the clouds of heaven, by such actions. Frankly, in fact, I
would for myself admit that anarchism can probably not even be brought
to pass by revolution, let alone by an individual act of violence, for, asked
in all honesty, how can one force someone to accept anarchist beliefs and
values or make someone live by them in day to day life? The very idea is
absurd. Anarchism, a creed of peaceful order and cooperation, cannot,

247
can never, be imposed on anyone. It is a denial of such a creed in the very
attempt to impose it even if one could impose such a voluntary creed
upon someone to begin with.

And so violence, as a means to anarchy, must be rejected. This, for

avoidance of doubt, is not to condemn any and every violent action.
Circumstances can easily be imagined in which physical resistance, or
defence of those being oppressed or under active attack, may be
necessary. Such action is not a violent assault unprovoked by another,
however, but a defence of those who would otherwise be peaceful if left to
their own, non-antagonistic, ways. Anarchism is a peaceful creed as a type
2 phenomenon in the same way that, as a type 1 phenomenon, the world
goes on its way without seeking to antagonise or oppress. It is because of
this, that I would therefore finish this chapter with something I wrote for a
previous book, Anarchist Notes, which is, quite appropriately, called “A
Declaration of Peace”:

“A DECLARATION OF PEACE

People of the world, we are in a war. We did not choose the war, the rich
did that when they decided to keep for themselves and put profit over
people. But it is time for us who they oppress to build a new society from
within the shell of the old and to rise up from within it to overcome the
oppressor.

“Why must we do this?” you may ask. Because the rich will not share.
Because money is put above life. Because suffering is ignored. Because
peaceful settlement is refused. Because wealth is systematically
extracted, the system gamed, the people cheated.

Our so-called democracies have been breached, bought and sold. Now
plutocrats, who defy national borders by storing their hoarded wealth in
tax havens, go from country to country impoverishing whoever they can

248
and ignoring democratic principles as they do it. They form networks of
their own, rich clubs where you need a billion to get in. They strip the
assets of the world with no thought for sustainability. This is not in the
interests of the many, or of the earth, and neither do we wish to rely on
the PR philanthropy of those who got rich by ripping us off in the first
place. Enough is enough.

And so this is our declaration of peace, our declaration to end this war. We
will no longer allow the rich to subjugate the vast majority of the people of
the earth. We will no longer allow the rich to divide and conquer us by
race, gender, sexuality or nationality. We do not want to fight. But if you
make us fight over scraps, fear for our health and worry about our futures
then what choice do you leave us? We make a declaration of peace and
pledge to stop the war you, the rich, have unjustly started against us. We
pledge a future of fairness, equality, togetherness, diversity and human
solidarity. The world does not have to be one human being ripping off the
next one. We declare peace upon this world and seek to work together to
achieve it.

Join us.”

EIGHT: The Social Anarchism of Jesus of Nazareth

Jesus of Nazareth may seem a strange choice as someone to put forward

as an example of anarchist values and practice but I must confess that I
have history in this area. In a previous life I studied for a PhD in a
department of biblical studies on the subject of Jesus as a historical figure
and so I have undertaken several years of study on the matter. That study
convinced me that Christianity, both historic and modern, has got Jesus
completely wrong and that the historical figure behind the gospels, the
myths and the worship is someone we can realistically, historically and
anthropologically refer to as “anarchist” instead. [The Christian anarchist,
Leo Tolstoy, seemed to find him mightily inspiring too of course, his The

249
Kingdom of God is Within You essentially being biblical exegesis of the
gospel Jesus for the purposes of anarchist instruction.]

Yet Jesus is also not the only more ancient figure that we can describe in
this way, in my view. Figures such as the Cynics in the Hellenistic world or
the Daoists behind texts like the Daodejing or the Zhuangzi also give
evidence of beliefs and practices we might today label “anarchist”. I
myself have no prejudice about this. I have no need to stick to some
canonical list of people, beginning around the turn of the nineteenth
century and running into the twentieth, followed by our own, who are
“proper anarchists” where others are thought not to be. My understading
of anarchism, given in my last chapter and understood under the rubric of
two types, type 1 and type 2, is capable of understanding anarchism and
anarchy in much more far-reaching ways than just a narrowly specific
political understanding. For example, reading Emma Goldman’s
autobiography, Living My Life, I see that she, too, thought of Nietzsche as
an anarchist, as I do. This cannot have been primarily for his political
rhetoric for in the 1870s and 1880s, when he wrote, he was not giving
Kropotkin or Malatesta or Bakunin-like speeches. He was talking about art,
about self-creation, about overcoming the state of humanity as it has
manifested itself – and undermining the very idea of knowledge and truth
as Western philosophy had come to know them up until that point. This,
too, is an anarchism and an anarchistic task. My anarchism, consequently,
is an anarchism that can include Goldman, Kropotkin and Nietzsche – and
Jesus of Nazareth too!

The study of Jesus as an anarchist is nothing to do with theology [as,

indeed, my own researches for academic degrees have not been either]. It
is at once historical, anthropological and literary – the main evidence for
Jesus being found in texts with which one needs some familiarity and
facility as well as the ability to site them with credibility in a specific
human past. Such study is concerned with Jesus as a putative human
being who lived in Palestine – and Galilee specifically – in the first three

250
decades of the first century of the common era [i.e. as a Jew under Roman
rule]. Yet such study is also to do with his social activity for, as we shall
see, Jesus was just one person of a group, a group that had a very specific
ethos. You might have doubts about this, however, because Jesus was
surely the “leader” of said group and so was on some kind of pedestal?

Here I would make two points. Firstly, Jesus was a notable person,
certainly, but he was no more notable in his social setting than Kropotkin
was in his, Goldman was in hers, or Louise Michel was in hers. There are,
in all groups, people who stand out and do things and are remembered for
them. This does not mean they are “leaders”, much less masters, and so
acting contrary to some anarchist ethos. As we shall see, jesus’ own
apparent teaching on leadership might be found to be quite surprising in
relation to this when we come to examine it shortly. The second thing to
say is that in such study we should take things Jesus says or does much
more seriously than things people say about Jesus. Put simply, Jesus is not
a Christian and so what Christians say about him is their business but not
necessarily his. [Jesus, for example, was not around when people wrote
anything about him – so he can hardly be held responsible for it.] This
latter point demonstrates, however, that we need some basic historical
pointers before we can begin to discuss Jesus and his social group in the
historical specificity of their, so I argue, anarchist praxis.

Things we need to know. The main information for Jesus of Nazareth as a

historical person is contained in books called gospels. [I refer, particularly,
to six of these: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Thomas and Q. The first four
are in the New Testament, the fifth was found in the Egyptian desert in
1945, and the last is a putative source of Matthew and Luke – so also in
the New Testament - that may have existed separately and prior to those
two.] These are majority Christian documents extolling Jesus as someone
significant for world history. [Thomas and Q are less “Christian” in this
respect but the nuances of this are too specialist to cover in this chapter.
See my Yeshua The Jewish Anarchist, my full monograph on the subject of

251
Jesus as an anarchist, for more on this.] This is not a person, or a
character, I will be much interested in in this chapter. I intend to bypass
Christian dogma about Jesus almost entirely and attempt to get to the
historical man. But, in order to do that, one must still read the same
books. It is, after all, the case that if there had never been any Christians
then we would almost certainly not know that Jesus had ever existed.
There are, however, by the by, a few non-Christian references to Jesus in
Roman history. These are uniformly passing references but references
nevertheless. The Romans who mentioned Jesus did not doubt his
existence [a pastime carried on by some today when it is far safer to do so
and much easier to get away with it - in some crowds]. Yet, in terms of
formalities, one does not have to believe oneself that Jesus existed and
one could imagine the Christians made him up but, in that case,
everything I am about to say about him, his ways and his group would still
apply even if, in that case, on purely literary and not historical grounds.
The lessons and the insights would still be the same.

What we know about Jesus as bare bones information is that he was a Jew
from Galilee, likely born in Nazareth, a nothing village a few miles from
Sepphoris, at that time the main settlement in Galilee. [This would not
remain the case throughout his life as around 20 CE construction of a new
capital, Tiberias, was begun by the Roman proxy ruler, Herod Antipas.]
Jesus lived with his family, which seems to have been a mother and some
siblings. His father, referred to in legendary birth stories as Joseph, is
never mentioned in the New Testament gospels [or the other two I
consider, Q and Thomas] as being alive during the period of his adult
activity. His means of living seem to have been by acting as a low level
craftsman with wood and stone [so not the very Western idea of a
“carpenter”. It was nothing so grand or skilled]. He would have made
ploughs or simple implements for agrarian use. The economy of Galilee
was almost entirely based on agriculture and fishing [in the Sea of
Galilee]. The mass of the people were either tenant farmers, people
attached to the trade in fish or day labourers hoping to get a job from day

252
to day. Land, in general, was owned by more wealthy people likely to live
in cities and so we can imagine a town/country divide in terms of both
wealth and lifestyle. We see this reflected in some of the parables Jesus
tells. In fact, many of his parables reflect exactly the agrarian setting we
should expect to find as well as the religious context of Judaism and the
political context of Roman occupation.

In one respect ancient Galilee was much like modern capitalism: most
were poor and very many fewer were rich – and the latter exploited the
former, using them to extract wealth from the land for themselves. John
Dominic Crossan, an Irish-American biblical scholar who makes an atypical
use [for biblical scholars] of anthropological study in his writing about
Jesus as a historical figure [and whose book, The Historical Jesus: The Life
of A Mediterranean Jewish Peasant , I shall especially be following here],
relates this as a matter of “slave and patron”. The social location of Jesus
was in a system which made use of slavery and in which the means of
economic existence was by a system of patronage and clientage. It was a
class system but there was no middle class. You were rich and
comfortable, exploiting the mass of people, or you were struggling [or
even failing] to survive. Crossan illustrates this by opening his chapter
“Slave and Patron” with the following quote from G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s
article, “Karl Marx and the History of Classical Antiquity”:

“Class, then, essentially a relationship, is above all the collective social

expression of the fact of exploitation [and of course of resistance to it]:
the division of society into economic classes is in its very nature the way
in which exploitation is effected, with the propertied classes living off the
non-propertied. I admit that in my use of it the word ‘exploitation’ often
tends to take on a perjorative colouring; but essentially it is a value-free
expression, signifying merely that a propertied class is freed from the
labour of production through its ability to maintain itself out of a surplus
extracted from the primary producers, whether by compulsion or by
persuasion or [as in most cases] by a mixture of the two.”

253
Yet Crossan calls his chapter “Slave and Patron” for a reason and this
“value-free” character of “exploitation” may not have been experienced
as so “value-free” by those subject to it – which was most people. He
quotes Thomas Carney’s The Shape of the Past: Models and Antiquity in
this respect:

“The ugly fact was that, given the low level of technology in antiquity,
someone had to go without – without proper family life, material
sufficiency, basic human dignity and life space – in order to generate a
surplus. Absolute power over another human being, the incontrovertible
right to treat another as a human instrument or as an object of one’s
passions dehumanizes both parties. That is what slavery, any form of
slavery, means. As an institution it perfectly compliments patronage.
Together, these two practices go far to account for the authoritarianism in
antiquity’s societies, with their spectrums of hierarchical statuses.”

In creating a social and anthropological background against which to

understand the activities of Jesus and his community [better understood
as intersecting matrices rather than an actual “background” in order to
make this a three dimensional, interactional reality], Crossan also makes
use of Gerhard Lenski’s Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social
Stratification. Here, Crossan, following Lenski, designates the Roman
Empire “an agrarian society” and remarks upon “one fact [which]
impresses itself on almost any observer of agrarian societies”, this being
“the fact of marked social inequality” [emphasis Lenski’s]. He goes on:
“Without exception, one finds pronounced differences in power, privilege
and honor associated with mature agrarian economies.” Lenski then
proceeds to detail five upper, four lower [and no middle] classes of people
in such societies. Above we have the ruler, governing, retainer, merchant
and priestly classes whilst below we find the peasant, artisan, unclean or
degraded and expendable classes. This comes with a note, in Power and
Privilege, that “agrarian societies usually produced more people than the
dominant classes found it profitable to employ ” [emphasis original] –

254
which heralds a stark warning of the dire situation the less privileged, who
would either be constantly working or cultivating patrons in order to
survive or, even worse, not surviving at all on a day to day basis, would
find themselves in. It is this world in which we find Jesus.

At this point, before I can finally begin discussing Jesus himself in detail,
we need to do a little work in ancient Greek, particularly as regards the
ancient Greek words plusios, penes and ptochos and their cognates. The
first indicates a rich person [and from it we get the English ‘plutocrat’],
the second a poor person. The third indicates a destitute person or a
beggar and these words must be mapped to the social stratifications and
remarks about class I have just repeated from Crossan’s usage. The
crucial point of these terms in their usage is that poverty, the middle term
here, is to be distinguished from beggary, the latter term. When Jesus
proclaims “Blessed are the poor!”, as it is usually translated in English
texts, he is actually using ptochos and not penes. So he is not
congratulating those in poverty, which could be many struggling hour
after hour, day after day, to make a living, but beggars, destitute beggars.
These are the people at the economic bottom of any social stratification.
Crossan tells us that the terms for “the poor” or “poverty” [ penes]
“seldom imply absolute poverty or destitution”. These are “the vast
majority of people in any city-state who, having no claim to the income of
a large estate, lacked that degree of leisure and independence regarded
as essential to the life of a gentleman.” A plusios was someone rich
enough to imagine leisure and to have slaves or hired hands to create
their wealth. The penes had to work all day to make ends meet [perhaps
also with others he hired and even potentially on their own land]. The
ptochos had no resources whatsoever and was on the margins of society
with no real part in it. The plusios and the penes belonged to the same
world, though with more and less leisure accordingly. The ptochos was
adrift from this world and had to take whatever they could get and go
wherever a day’s wage could be found.

255
English translations of ancient texts about Jesus have mostly not brought
out these distinctions for, now moving directly to discuss Jesus himself, we
find that it was, scandalously, the ptochos that Jesus was most interested
in during his activity and it was the ptochos he spoke about, favoured and,
seemingly, identified himself with. An example is the aformentioned
“Blessed are the poor!” from Luke 6:20b and Thomas 54. Jesus is blessing
destitute beggars here not people who must work all day to make ends
meet [the working poor]. If we move along to Thomas 95, we find this:
“Jesus said, ‘If you have money, don't lend it at interest. Rather, give it to
someone from whom you won't get it back.’" Someone like a destitute
beggar, perhaps, someone outside working society with no assets that
could be seized if it wasn’t paid back? But what would happen to you if
you started giving your money away to people who weren’t going to pay
you back again? [Incidentally, have you spotted that Jesus here seems to
be encouraging the practice of the gift I spoke about in the last chapter?]
You might very soon find, continuing that practice, that you had no money
left yourself! But Jesus surely can’t mean that?

Well, are you so sure? Let’s investigate Mark 10:17-22. The text is as
follows:

“As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him,
and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’
Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God
alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not
commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You
shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.”’ He said to him,
‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him,
loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give
the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come,
follow me.’ When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving,
for he had many possessions.”

256
The story is told here of a pious man of good character who is obedient to
the ethics of his religion who comes to Jesus and asks how he may
achieve the religious and moral goal of life according to Jewish ways.
Jesus, naturally enough, asks about his adherence to the Ten
Commandments, the heart of the Jewish Torah, which is its religious law.
We should think of this more broadly than some religious code, however,
for such law should basically be equated with life in historical context. The
man is apparently very pious and Jesus does not doubt his self-given
testimony in regard to it. This would mean that the man is regarded as
having very high moral standing in his community. Jesus apparently is
even taken with his sincerity in regard to this. But it is not enough. Jesus
tells him that to reach his goal he needs to sell everything and give the
money he makes from it “to the poor”. Which poor? Why the ptochois, of
course, the destitute beggars. More than that, he is then expected to
become one of these himself [because, of course, he now has nothing
left!] just like Jesus and his community of followers already have. So, if we
imagine that Jesus could not have been serious in Thomas 95, we now find
an example of him saying and expecting exactly the same from the pious
and rich Jew in this story. [Said pious Jew failed the test, too, as he went
away “shocked” and “grieving”. No one said this was easy or without
financial cost.]

So what is it with Jesus and money? Why is he telling people to get rid of
it, give it to the lowest of the low in economic society, and become like
such people themselves? Let’s take a look inside this community. Luke 10
gives us a story in which people are being sent out from the community
Jesus is a part of and it gives instructions for how such people are to go
about it. The crux of this information is as follows:

“Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road.

Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone
is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if
not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking

257
 whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move
about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people
welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and
say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ But whenever
you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and
say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in
protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’”
[Luke 10:4-11]

Such people are being sent out across random countryside barefoot and
without any provisions [because there is “no bag” to put them in] and
without any money to buy what might be needed to sustain them [“no
purse”]. How are these people meant to survive? The answer is by finding
sympathetic people who will allow them to come into their homes and
share a meal with them. They, in turn, are to come in peace [explicitly so]
and to “cure the sick who are there” [we need not speculate about
miracles here; simply attending to them in conventional ways is enough].
This, then, is a kind of mutual aid which is called “the kingdom of God” by
Jesus and the texts that remember him. No money changes hands in any
of this. In fact, it hasn’t been mentioned at all and, in any case, the
members of Jesus’ community have been instructed to have no means of
transporting money anyway. This, then, is an imagined moneyless
existence and interaction between people. And the people are instructed
to announce it wherever they go, even if their presence is rejected [as
anarchists in all times and places often have been!]. Here we see mutual
aid, commensality and gifting in the cause of human solidarity.

Another story which involves the sharing of food is that one known
colloquially as “the feeding of the 5,000”. This is found in each gospel of
the New Testament [one of the few non-crucifixion or resurrection stories
in this position] and so, at random, I’ll choose John’s version of this in John
6 to focus on.

258
 “After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called
the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw
the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and
sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the
Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward
him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to
eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to
do. Philip answered him, ‘Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread
for each of them to get a little.’ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon
Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has five barley
loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ Jesus
said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in
the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took
the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those
who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they
were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so
that nothing may be lost.’ So they gathered them up, and from the
fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they
filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done,
they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the
world.’ When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by
force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”

What can we notice about this story? First, I think, that Jesus is concerned
about feeding all these people. He takes responsibility for it even though
it’s made manifestly clear there were so many people there that it would
have been impossible to feed them. “Six months’ wages” is meant to
indicate an amount of money it was impossible to imagine they could
have had or even collected up. Jesus taking responsibility, then, what
follows? Well, in simple terms, the crowd is fed because Jesus shares a
boy’s simple lunch with everyone. This act of sharing is, in the story, seen
as sufficient for all who were there, “as much as they wanted”. There are
even leftovers – and “12 baskets” is probably a symbolic number [there

259
were, historically, 12 tribes of Israel and this is probably also why
sometimes the gospels mention 12 special disciples of Jesus too].

Now I want to make it clear that I do not believe in miracles. But I do

believe in the power of sharing to provide for large crowds if people will
only be willing to share. I don’t know if this story ever actually took place
or not and, for my purposes, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that
Jesus, together with other members of the community he was a part of,
are shown to feed a huge crowd of people on the basis of sharing what
they had and nothing more. Symbolically, this is shown to provide
everything the crowd needed to satiate their hunger. John, in his gospel,
will later riff on this and argue that Jesus is “the bread of life” in a
theological argument that serves his Christian purposes. But, for my
anarchist ones, it is the fact of simple sharing that takes my attention and
the fact that Jesus didn’t just take the view that feeding yourself is your
own problem. To Jesus, it apparently was more about human solidarity
than that, a matter of fraternity to care for those who had come to listen
to you. A little twist at the end of the story, by the way, indicates that
Jesus was not setting himself up as a political king here. He didn’t want to
replace Caesar. He wanted to replace a world of human relationships in
which there could even be a Caesar. [We might here compare Jesus’ more
political actions, especially his altercation in the Jerusalem Temple and his
response when asked if a Jew should pay taxes to Rome. In both cases he
conceives of a higher duty and in neither acquiesces to the status quo.]
Part of that new way of life, I argue, was simple sharing, commensality.

We see this more clearly in two, connected sayings found in the Gospel of
Thomas, Thomas 81 and Thomas 110:

“Jesus said, ‘Let the one who has become wealthy reign, and let the one
who has power renounce it.’"

“Jesus said, ‘Let the one who has found the world, and has become

260
 wealthy, renounce the world.’"

These sayings will not be unfamiliar to one who knows the Jesus of
Thomas 95 and Mark 10:17-22 – or even the community that operates on
the basis of Luke 10:4-11. What do these sayings mean? I think they both
mean the same thing and it is that people can become wealthy and this
will give them power. But it is a certain type of power, an exploiting,
dominating kind of power. The keyword is then the word in the second
half of both sayings: “renounce”. Jesus thinks that people who are rich
should give it up, give their wealth and their power away. In fact, this is a
line in the sand for him. There are people for whom his anarchist society is
not suited and this is the plusioi, the rich people who have based their
lives in money, power and domination [for, especially here, they go
together]. Put this attitude together with stories about sharing in the
gospels and you come to the conclusion Jesus is interested in a
community that shares and takes part in acts of open commensality as a
matter of egalitarian relationships over a world in which rich and
dominating people, differentiated by class and so reliant on domination
and exploitation for their very existence [as Crossan’s quote in relation to
class reminded us earlier], even exist.

This is also seen in two parables Jesus tells. Parables are fictions told to
make you think, often as a kind of comparison you are meant to weigh up
as you roll it around in your thoughts. There are two parables which
appear in multiple gospels [I will use Thomas’ versions here] which relate
to both wealth and business as well as to the image of the desired state of
affairs [“the kingdom of God”] that Jesus is said to have. The first [Thomas
63] is as follows:

“Jesus said, ‘There was a rich person who had a great deal of money. He
said, "I shall invest my money so that I may sow, reap, plant, and fill my
storehouses with produce, that I may lack nothing." These were the things
he was thinking in his heart, but that very night he died. Anyone here with

261
 two ears had better listen!’”

The parable sets out that the man imagined is very rich. He is likely a man
of leisure, then, with slaves and servants, perhaps a patron others would
like to have. He is a plusios. He develops a plan to extend his wealth even
further [and we can imagine the amount of exploitation that might require
for such riches always require someone’s exploitation] so that he, the
parable is quite specific about this, “may lack nothing”. These being “the
things in his heart” is a euphemism for them being the things that drive
and motivate him; they are his ethos, his reason for living, the things
closest to his heart. The problem is the parable then just announces his
death. And at a stroke all the wealth is for nothing. We can discuss what
this parable might mean at length but it seems not to mean that Jesus is
suggesting you base your life on accumulating wealth.

The second parable is the very next thing in the Gospel of Thomas,
Thomas 64, for, in Thomas, the last parable, this one and another one
immediately after it, seem to have been placed side by side to form a
theme. Let’s look at Thomas 64:

“Jesus said, ‘A person was receiving guests. When he had prepared the
dinner, he sent his slave to invite the guests. The slave went to the first
and said to that one, "My master invites you." That one said, "Some
merchants owe me money; they are coming to me tonight. I have to go
and give them instructions. Please excuse me from dinner." The slave
went to another and said to that one, "My master has invited you." That
one said to the slave, "I have bought a house, and I have been called
away for a day. I shall have no time." The slave went to another and said
to that one, "My master invites you." That one said to the slave, "My
friend is to be married, and I am to arrange the banquet. I shall not be
able to come. Please excuse me from dinner." The slave went to another
and said to that one, "My master invites you." That one said to the slave,
"I have bought an estate, and I am going to collect the rent. I shall not be

262
 able to come. Please excuse me." The slave returned and said to his
master, "Those whom you invited to dinner have asked to be excused."
The master said to his slave, "Go out on the streets and bring back
whomever you find to have dinner."

Buyers and merchants will not enter the places of my Father.’”

This parable occurs in both Matthew and Luke as well [thought, by some
biblical scholars, to be part of the possible gospel source, the Q Gospel]
and, in each case, with a slightly different emphasis but the same basic
layout of a man laying on a dinner or some social gathering where he is
inviting fellow, assumedly wealthy, people who each give reasons why
they cannot attend. Then, in the end, he tells his slave to go out and bring
back whomsoever he can find instead. The question is, what is such a
parable supposed to be telling us?

The community of people behind the Gospel of Thomas clearly thought

this was that “buyers and merchants”, which some biblical exegetes have
described as “wheeler dealers”, “wide boys” or people with sharp
business practices [i.e. the financially exploitative and manipulative], were
being rejected – as was their way of life. All the excuses given in Thomas
for not going to the gathering [which are legitimate excuses in
themselves] are business excuses. What is notable about the parable, of
course, is that all these people end up being excluded from it, their places
taken, instead, by “whomever you find” - and this irrespective of class,
wealth, gender, nationality, honour or shame, etc., as we might expect if
someone just went out picking people at random as they came across
them. This is the parable’s cutting edge. Might it be too far fetched to
suggest, then, that such a parable is, in the mind of Jesus, about
imagining the world as a social gathering from which wealthy
businessmen are excluded to be replaced by whomsoever is willing to
participate, regardless of class, wealth, gender, nationality, honour or
shame? This, of course, is also another situation in which “the kingdom” is

263
imagined as a place of commensality and so this should by no means be
ignored either. Taking this parable together with the previous one, wealth
is rejected and egalitarian commensality, mutual relationship, is put in its
place irrespective of social or political classes or mores.

Parables, of course, could have been spoken to anybody. In various places

in the gospels they are presented as being addressed to general crowds
rather than those specifically inside the community of which Jesus was a
part. In such ways it is imagined that Jesus invited just anybody who heard
them to consider their life and its context. But what about the mentality
on the inside? What was Jesus saying to other members of the community
to provide an ethos or way of life for them which, simultaneously, could
motivate them to live the lifestyle of a ptochos willingly and with purpose?
For this purpose, we can consider a section of the reconstruced Q Gospel
putatively behind a story that appears in Matthew and Luke. It is located
at Q 12:22-31 [which, due to the way Q is tabulated, is also equal to Luke
12:22-31]:

“He said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more
than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they
neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God
feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any
of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are
not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?
Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you,
even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God
so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you - you of little
faith! So do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to
drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that
strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them.
Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as

264
 well.’”

Let’s start at the end here. Jesus suggests that the way to achieve
blessing is to “strive for his kingdom” which, in Jesus’ language, means to
live in his anarchistic way. This, according to Jesus, is not a way
characterised by what you will eat or what you will wear, which, judged
from the point of view of a destitute beggar, might be thought of as
luxuries one could ill afford or, put another way, the business of leisured,
moneyed classes. Jesus here, in my terms, comes very close to inter-
relating type 1 and type 2 versions of anarchy. He does it in a very Cynic
way that we can compare with the attitudes of Greek Cynics such as
Diogenes who “lived according to nature”, as some would have it, and
disdained the customs of civilisation with their airs and graces and artifical
“necessities” which created difference and inequality for the purposes of
exploitation. Civilisation, said Diogenes perhaps most of all, has its price
and its cost – and it is too much to pay. Consequently, those biblical
scholars who have seen in Jesus most of all a Cynic type of Jew are very
fond of this section of text as an example of just how close to Cynic in his
thinking Jesus could become. Of course, Jesus is a Jew and so when he
thinks of nature he thinks of the Jewish God – but you get the idea. There
is a simple, humble kind of life in tune with nature [or God] that Jesus is
getting at here which is not about vanity or money or status or power or
exploitation of resources to create a surplus. Jesus encourages his fellows
in the community to seek this first and foremost – and without calculating
- and then all blessings will come to them. But let us be clear: this is not
some airy fairy utopian ideal he is talking about here. It is one in their
grasp and determined by their present lifestyle and approach to life itself.
It is something about them and how they choose to live. It is about having
nothing and changing the game to one in which nothing makes no
difference. Just as it was with Diogenes and other Cynics too.

Perhaps I have now said enough to be able to suggest to you that Jesus, in
his historical guise, or maybe just as a historical literary character, was

265
about dehabituating people to economic activity and introducing them to
open commensality, mutual aid, gifting and non-financial interaction and
exchange. We might call this, as I tentatively did in my last chapter, a
new, anarchist economy. Certainly, in the last piece of exegesis I did, we
saw that Jesus seemed a bit Cynic-like as he talked to people even worried
about what they would eat or wear. So Jesus and the rest of this little
community were not plusios or penes. They were ptochos, destitute
beggars. And they had seemingly chosen this lifestyle for themselves,
much as Diogenes and other Cynics did too, on purpose. It was a
deliberate choice to reject society’s values and ways of living and to
inculcate and enunciate others. Jesus and his community were talking
about living life another way on the societal scale and about reorganising
human relationships and interactions whole and entire. Just like anarchists
would like to.

But perhaps you need some more convincing? Very well. After that little
pep talk Jesus gave the others worrying about food and clothing we get
this in Q: “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for
yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no
thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
your heart will be also.” This is probably addressed not to those already
attracted to the community of beggars Jesus was in but to people in
general. He wants people to get rid of everything again and become a
beggar who lives by commensality, mutual aid and the gift. He sees taking
up this lifestyle as an investment of its own kind. He suggests that what
you love [i.e. how you live] is all you really care about. Elsewhere, in Luke
16:13, he doubles down on this when he says: “No slave can serve two
masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be
devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and
wealth.” You cannot serve God and wealth; you cannot take part in his
vision of life and human relationships… and serve wealth. Or, as we have
seen, apparently even have any wealth. In the next verse of Luke here
some religious figures called “Pharisees” are described by Luke as “lovers

266
of money”. By now, we must realise, such a thing is not a flattering
description but a condemning one.

This theme of the incompatability of the wealth-interested way and the

destitute beggar’s way is found elsewhere. A particular example is in Mark
2:

“And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners
were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who
followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating
with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he
eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to
them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are
sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners….’

“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the
patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will
burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts
new wine into fresh wineskins.”

To take the second complex of sayings first here, Jesus is speaking of a

basic incompatability between his vision of human relationships and the
way that is set up by a set of financial relationships, ones of class,
exploitation and dominance. This is what Jesus sees in relationships
arbitrated by wealth and inequality. And so he describes his vision and
that vision as absolutely incompatible. This corroborates what we have
already seen in several examples. A further one is what Jesus is reported
to say about the pious, but rich, Jew whom he had invited to sell
everything and join them: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth
to enter the kingdom of God!” [Mark 10:23]. It will be hard, of course,
because changing from a person who lives according to financial wealth
and material acquisition, and the relationships and classes and statuses

267
required to set up such things, to a person who lives on the basis of
fraternity, equality, human solidarity [and all the other anarchist values I
previously mentioned] is a complete change of heart, of values and of
lifestyle. It is to see the world differently, to impugn, threaten and
symbolically condemn that other world, and to not see as the world sees –
something every anarchist knows all too well.

Perhaps that is why, in the first part of the last section from Mark 2 I
quoted, we find Jesus engaging in a meal [yet more commensality!]. He is
eating with those thought of as undesirables [in a mirror image of that
imagined in Thomas 64 – practice what you preach! According to John
Dominic Crossan in The Historical Jesus, he is “refusing to make the
{socially} appropriate distinctions and discriminations”]. In terms of
Lenski’s stratification of society, mentioned briefly earlier, “tax collectors
and sinners” would be lower classes whilst “scribes of the Pharisees”
would be upper classes. The suggestion in the story is that Jesus is
choosing to share the table with such people as equals in an activity
which views them all horizontally, in an egalitarian way, rather than
vertically, as we are perhaps invited to imagine the scribes see such
things. Jesus, in a religious book, speaks using religious language but the
point here is Jesus is trying to convert people to his lifestyle and so his
values. We should not find this strange anymore than, in Diogenes
Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, we find the Cynics Diogenes and
Crates invited to the homes of local people to share in meals too [where
at least Diogenes is not always well behaved!]. This is not a negation of
their lifestyle but an extending of it to others. That Jesus found the table a
place to share his ideas, in the light of Banu Bargu’s discussion of
commensality discussed in my last chapter, should not then surprise us at
all.

Let us now, not wanting to let this discussion get too far out of hand in a
book which is not exclusively about a discussion of Jesus – my book,
Yeshua The Jewish Anarchist, is 680 pages long if you want the full fat

268
version of this - attempt to give all this discussion of commensality and
Jesus’ attitude towards wealth some context. That context will come in the
form of the first “speech” accredited to Jesus by biblical scholars who
study the Q Gospel, which means material credited to both Matthew’s and
Luke’s Gospel but that is not found in Mark, a gospel also regarded as
their source for their own gospels. This speech is Q 6:20b-49 which, since
Q is thought best represented in terms of its order by Luke, is also broadly
the same as Luke 6:20-49. This is quite a chunk of text in a non-specialist
book about Jesus but bears quoting in full, nevertheless, for it functions, in
effect, as a mini-catechism of Jesus’ anarchism, in my view:

“Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are
destitute for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry
now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will
laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude
you, revile you, and defame you on account of me. Rejoice in that day and
leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what
their ancestors did to the prophets.

[But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did
to the false prophets.]

Listen, I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone
strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes
away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. {And if anyone forces you
to go one mile, go also the second mile.} Give to everyone who begs from
you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do
to others as you would have them do to you.

269
 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even
sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to
you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend
to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even
sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies,
do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great,
and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful
and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will
not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be
given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running
over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the
measure you get back.

He also told them a parable: Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will
not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone
who is fully qualified will be like the teacher. Why do you see the speck in
your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how
can you say to your neighbour, Friend, let me take out the speck in your
eye, when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite,
first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take
the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for
each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor
are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good
treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil
treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the
mouth speaks.

Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? I will show
you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on

270
them. That one is like a person building a house, who dug deeply and laid
the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that
house but could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one
who hears and does not act is like a person who built a house on the
ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately
it fell, and great was the ruin of that house.”

There is a lot to this, including taking the initiative from oppressors in the
third paragraph and further encouragement to gift in the fifth, but as, in
the putative reconstruction of Q, this is given as one speech, I feel its
important to keep all these sayings [which have certainly been collected
together artificially by a community of writers] together. [The section in
square brackets here is probably added by Luke when he makes use of Q
and the sentence in curly brackets is found here in Matthew but Luke
omits it at this juncture. I think it likely original to Q so have restored it.] I
was intending to go through this text piece by piece as I wrote it out but
now I think that, in many ways, it speaks for itself if you consider it in
anarchist terms. If you are reading this book about “the philosophy of
anarchism” - and if you have got this far – you surely have some idea
about the values of anarchism itself and the sorts of practices it may
encourage or mandate. So it is perhaps better to regard this as some kind
of anarchistic context from Jesus’ perspective and meditate on these
things, and their consequences, as anarchistic behaviour and practice
rather than have them spelled out in so many words.

What I would say, however, is that the key point for Jesus, doing that, in
my opinion, is that anarchism is an action. This speech is full of doing and
very little about thinking. Its about how you choose to live daily,
habitually, in relationship with others, friendly and not. It is about your
habits and educating and forming yourself in terms of a way of life. It is a
matter of self-actualisation which, in a community context, becomes the
actualisation of a new set of anarchist values manifested as the
relationships active between people, the things which form the

271
community as it will be. [Recall here my reference to the personal and the
political in my last chapter.] This is a matter of doing, bearing “good fruit”,
not judging others, loving those not yourself [yes, even your enemies!],
giving what you can with an unfailing generosity, not resisting violence,
being destitute, hungry and even hated by those not so inclined.

This lifestyle Jesus has recommended is not about winning a popularity

contest in the eyes of the world. It is about forming new relationships and
living a different way of life which, as we must expect, changes the
political economy of human living completely. Jesus’ thinking is a matter
of a reversal of fortunes where “the last shall be first and the first shall be
last” [Matthew 20:16]. It is about being “passersby” [Thomas 42 – which
indicates being the wandering ptochos not the well settled and
exploitative plusios]. Its not concerned with the authorities of society,
which it pretty much ignores [although the insert in curly brackets from
Matthew likely addresses being made to carry a Roman soldier’s
equipment one mile, as anyone in the Roman empire could be made to
do], but with one’s own attitude and response to others in relationship
with them in general. The attitude seems to be, “I am like this and this will
be my ethical standard regardless of the world.” In this speech, members
of Jesus’ community take responsibility for themselves and are to exhibit
an anarchist consciousness which is about personal virtue and socially
articulated values.

One hint in that last speech quoted, on the subject of human

relationships, is when Jesus inquired as to why people called him “Lord”
but did not do what he said. The context [not least in the less
Christianised Q] is of Jesus as a teacher rather than as someone divine
and is about the respect in which a teacher was held in ancient times by
his followers. Jesus makes the point here that the best way to follow
someone is not in the use of obsequious titles or fawning behaviour but in
actually carrying out the teaching. This is that behaviour and practice
which demonstrates the appropriate synchronicity between the two. The

272
test of a true follower, and so here of a community member, is that they
live according to the things Jesus is saying.

But we can go further than this. Mark 10 has a story about some of Jesus’
disciples, thinking him something special, tapping him up for places of
special precedence in some imagined afterlife [something that was a
feature of some, but not all, Judaism in the first century of the common
era]. When other members of the Jesus community heard about this
special pleading and jostling for position, they weren’t best pleased. But
then Jesus calls them together in Mark 10:42-44 and says the following:

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their
rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it
is not so among you; so whoever wishes to become great among you
must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be
slave of all.”

The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Jesus here uses the
language of slaves and servants, of rulers and tyrants, that would have
been so familiar to people of this time and place – but he reverses the
roles. To be great in this community is not to be in charge of it, even to
“lord over” it, but to be the servant and the slave of it. The people of this
community are not to be like “the Gentiles” [which here basically means
the world]: they are to be different and look upon the world with disregard
in this respect. The world may have its ways but this community has
others. This is basically a way of total humility such as Q 14:11
recommends: “Everyone exalting themselves will be humbled and the one
humbling themselves will be exalted.” [This passage from Mark is just one
reason why I find it inconceivable that Jesus could have gone around
acknowledging himself as some kind of special being, even the son of
God. Such a person could not say what Jesus says here and, if he does say
it, then the mentality that makes him special is foreign to him. The two
are incompatible, whatever contortions Christian gospels try to pull off to

273
make them work together, and one must choose. I choose the anarchist,
and very human, Jesus, the one who chooses to be a destitute beggar,
discourages use of money and encourages serving others.]

Q 6 is a very important and basic section of text for anyone considering

Jesus as an anarchist. But there is much more that could be considered.
There is, for example, manifest in the reality of Jesus and his community
as destitute beggars, the idea that he was talking about a “kingdom of
nobodies” as John Dominic Crossan puts this. And what would this do but
undercut the pretentious, but seriously regarded, claims of the elites in
society to their social position? This is particularly expressed in sayings
and stories where children are welcomed by Jesus or are given as
examples of what people “in the kingdom” should be like in order to be
perfect examples of those inside it. Examples here are Q 10:21, Thomas
22:1-2, Thomas 46, Mark 10:13-16 and, perhaps most important of all,
Mark 9:33-37.

I shall concentrate on the last text here which goes as follows:

“Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked
them, ‘What were you arguing about on the way?’ But they were silent,
for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, ‘Whoever wants to be
first must be last of all and servant of all.’ Then he took a little child and
put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever
welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever
welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’”

This, once again, is teaching about human orders of rank or appropriate

class behaviour. It is linked to the “anarchist consciousness” that a text
like Q 6 inculcates and the identification of this community as made up of
multiple examples of the ptochos. We see here, again, the theme of
reversal from Jesus, the undermining of social standards and practices.

274
But, in this case, the example is a “little child”, a no one with literally no
status in adult society. What this, in particular, inculcates is humility, a not
presuming to have status vis-a-vis the world or within this community.
Jesus’ community is not to be a place of status – it is anti-authoritarian,
egalitarian, a matter of horizontal, never vertical, relationship. What else
can it be if “a little child” is its model member? “A kingdom of children is a
kingdom of the humble,” says John Dominic Crossan in his own
commentary here. This is teaching the community a very radical thing,
however, for what society does not exist or progress by means of status,
by orders of rank, by domination and subordination? Jesus’ community is
about undercutting this at the most basic level in teaching each member
to regard themselves as having the status of a child. Once more, it
deconstructs actual society to remake its relationships on a new basis.

But Jesus was, apparently, not averse to this for another thing to be
considered is the apparently conscious bonding going on between
members of the community in terms of a new society. Examples here are
Q12:53, Q14:26, Thomas 55, 99, and 101. In Thomas 99, for example
[which finds a textual parallel in Mark 3:31-35], we see:

“The disciples said to him, ‘Your brothers and your mother are standing
outside.’ He [i.e. Jesus] said to them, ‘Those here who do what my Father
wants are my brothers and my mother. They are the ones who will enter
my Father's kingdom.’”

The use of family language here is startling. In ancient Judaism, which is

where all this activity of Jesus takes place, family was paramount. [In this
respect, that God himself is the father figure is unsurprising and also
characteristic of Jesus in his expression. Unfortunately, the nature of God
as father is a subject that would take us too far away from my purpose
here to go into it and is also too theological to boot.] But here Jesus
rejects his blood family – which would be a social faux pas in pretty much
any conventional society, let alone a Jewish one. Instead, he considers

275
those in his community, here described under a religious rubric, as like
family instead – in a strong bond of anarchist “class” consciousness based
on the convergence of common lifestyles. Jesus, seemingly, even
demands the blood ties of family be deconstructed and fictively
reimagined in his remaking of society. Luke 12:51-53, for example, has
Jesus state:

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you,
but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided,
three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father
against son and son against father, mother against daughter and
daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and
daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

Crossan discusses this text in The Historical Jesus under the rubric
“Against the Patriarchal Family” together with the preceding one in
Thomas 99 / Mark 3:31-35. What more basic authority in a conventionally
ordered society is there than the father figure, the literal head of the
family? But Crossan, interpreting these texts, says, “Jesus will tear the
hierarchical and patriarchal family in two along the axis of domination and
subordination.” There are no automatic patriarchs here. It is noteworthy,
then, that in these imagined splits women can seemingly be on the side of
Jesus just as much as men. This raises the point, however, which Crossan
notes himself, “What happens to women” in such a situation? In fact, this
is an unspoken question in pretty much all I have discussed in this
chapter, not least the missionary part I mentioned earlier, and, as we can
see here, women are imagined as being a part of this community too.

There are a couple of issues here for this egalitarian, fraternal community
to come to terms with. One is that unattached women would be regarded
by Mediterranean peasant society as “whores” according to Crossan in
such a situation. Such a society operated with a strong sense of honour
and shame. To protect her reputation a woman would have to be married.

276
The second is the question of how women will be regarded vis-a-vis men.
Crossan’s solution is to advert to the apostle Paul’s mention in 1
Corinthians 9:5, in the New Testament, of the “sister wife” [the literal
translation of Paul’s term here]. Both Mark 6 and Luke 10 refer to people
being sent out from the community “two by two”. Since we know women
were accepted in this community [as in the later, Christian one Paul was a
part of] and it wasn’t a boys club, the issue of the integration of women is
an obvious and manifest one. Crossan regards this term as a tentative
solution. It is, of course, a knowing subterfuge. To those outside, as they
travel two by two, the woman seems to those outside to be a wife. But
inside the community she is as a sister in a continuance of the fraternal
relations the community exhibits. This both protects the woman’s honour
at large but also protects her physically from outside figures who see her
as the world would see such women. We might, then, choose to see the
community here acting in human solidarity to shield the women from
unwelcome attention or condemnation as well as seeing them as equally
valued partners in the community endeavour, something that is also
something of a novelty, in the social situation of the time, in itself.

Once again, then, Jesus’ community is disrupting relationships of

domniation and exploitation to reconstitute them as egalitarian and
fraternal relations which, when joined together with other activities and
practices we have related in this brief overview of the accounts about
Jesus, such as commensality, mutual aid and the gift, display to us a Jesus
community which is distinguishing itself by its cultural practices and
knocking down hierarchies whether religious, political, social or financial.
Jesus, in some of his parables, clearly saw this as socially disruptive. For
example a couple of parables placed together in Q 13:18-19 and then in Q
13:20-21 envisage this kingdom of God as, first, like a mustard plant
which grows to comically prodigious size and invites birds to nest in its
branches. No one would want such a plant in their garden [mustard is
often regarded as a weed for its ability to choke more valuable crops] and
certainly not the birds which, in a Mediterranean, agrarian context, would

277
eat up the crop and were hard to disperse. But, in the second parable, this
becomes even worse as Jesus imagines the kingdom as like some leaven
[yeast] a woman bakes into her bread and which works itself all through
the batch of dough. The offence here is that yeast was regarded as
mouldy and putrid in this society, a contaminating thing. Yet this did not
stop Jesus imagining the activities of the kingdom of God community as
such potentially offensive, upsetting and unwelcome things. Nor,
apparently, did it dent the community’s intent to carry on regardless.

So this has been an overview of the activities of Jesus, and his community,
that I have covered [and grounded] much more fully in my previous study,
Yeshua The Jewish Anarchist. If it has whetted your appetite to know
more, and to study these things in much greater detail in conversation
with both more biblical scholars and more academics of anarchism, then
this is the place to look next. I have had to be necessarily brief here, in
the context of this book, but I hope that the things I have discussed, and
the references I have provided, have at least made the case for seeing
Jesus, and the community he was a part of, as a countercultural one with
definitive anarchist tendencies. His determination to take money out of
the equation, his reordering of social relationships, his focus on self-
actualisation to the detriment of the maintenance of social and political
relations of domination and subordination, all point strongly in the
direction of an ethos which we would now regard as something to do with
anarchism. Yet Jesus, of course, was a religious Jew and so that must be
taken into account as well.

One thing I didn’t mention, before I finish up here, but can leave you with
now as a further thought, is that Jesus was himself not coercive. His
teaching method was the parable inviting you to think for yourself not the
command or, worse, physical coercion. Jesus seemingly and intuitively
knew that people must see things for themselves and be allowed to come
to their own conclusions. This is paradigmatically shown in perhaps his
best known parable, the “Good Samaritan” [Luke 10:25-37], in which

278
someone the audience regards as an enemy is the person you might need
to treat as a friend you should be concerned with the health and welfare
of, even at your own expense [and so without counting the cost]. In ethics
such as “do to others as you would have them do to you” and “love your
neighbour as yourself”, characteristic of Jesus, we see the ethical heart of
Jesus’ anarchism, and it is an ethics which politics and society in general,
with its hierarchies, domination and coercive methods, cannot follow.
They are, then, a criticism and a declaration that such customary worldly
ways are to be given up and changed. Jesus, I then suggest, shared the
anarchist desire, and the anarchist insight, to remould society, realising
that it would take something this radical to change things. So I do not say
that Jesus was a carbon copy of a Malatesta or a Bakunin or a Kropotkin –
how could he be, he was a Galilean Jew from the first century! - but I do
say that he, as part of a distinctive community, exhibits ideas and
practices which point to a social anarchist interested in a new, anarchist
economy and a reconstituted, non-dominating relationship between
human beings generally.

NINE: Music, Metaphor and Anarchy: John Cage

“Revision of The Golden Rule: do unto others as they would be done by.” -
John Cage, X: Writings 79-82, p. 160

“One evening after dinner I was telling friends that I was now concerned
with improving the world. One of them said: I thought you always were. I
then explained that I believe—and am acting upon—Marshall McLuhan's
statement that we have through electronic technology produced an
extension of our brains to the world formerly outside of us. To me that
means that the disciplines, gradual and sudden (principally Oriental),
formerly practiced by individuals to pacify their minds, bringing them
into accord with ultimate reality, must now be practiced socially—that is,
not just inside our heads, but outside of them, in the world, where our
central nervous system effectively now is… Our proper work now if we

279
love mankind and the world we live in is revolution.” - John Cage, A Year
From Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage, p. ix

“Harmony… is not itself a sound; it’s a connection between sounds that

doesn’t exist in sounds themselves, but the theory books all say it does…
Harmony is a theory, and what I would like is to have sounds be free of
that theory.” - John Cage, CageTalk: Dialogues With and About John Cage,
p. 202

“Here we are concerned with the coexistence of dissimilars, and the

central points where fusion occurs are many: the ears of the listeners
wherever they are. This disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement
about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed…
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing
with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the
form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This
play, however, is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out
of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of
waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets
one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own
accord.” - John Cage, “Experimental Music” in Silence, p. 12

“politicians are of no good use… We don't need government. We need

utilities: air, water, energy, travel and communication means, food and
shelter. We have no need for imaginary mountain ranges between
separate nations. We can make tunnels through the real ones. Nor do we
have any need for the continuing division of people into those who have
what they need and those who don't… We must give all the people all
they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich
from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the
acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for
poverty without dependence on government .” - John Cage, Anarchy, p. v

280
I am not aware that the deceased American musician, artist and
philosopher, John Cage, ever thought of himself as, or called himself, an
anarchist. However, as I read him in his numerous written works, listen to
some of the music he wrote, look at the physical art he produced, or read
his political statements, he was one. And then, of course, he did publish a
book, 4 years before his death, in 1988, titled, simply, Anarchy, which was
composed from the words, arranged by chance processes, of actual
anarchists. [Anarchy, says Cage in its introduction, “is not about ideas but
produces them”. He also quotes himself calling himself an anarchist on
page vii!] On thinking about him and his life he seems to me like the kind
of anarchist Emma Goldman [one of those quoted in Anarchy; they were
both, at times in their lives, New Yorkers] would have appreciated, had he
only become famous before Goldman’s death in 1940, one who combined
indeterminate and endlessly creative artistic impulses and appreciation
with a desire for a political world set free of dominating control. Cage,
however, also had what one might term a spiritual appreciation that was
missing in Goldman. Consequently, Goldman strove to bring things to pass
whilst Cage strove to let things come to pass as they may – and to get out
of their way.

Cage’s anarchism may be described in a sentence he often used himself

in regard to his “Diary” entries. The “Diary” was a poetic form he invented
and used to record "a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories"
later published in several books. Being Cage, he arranged constraints for
these recorded items. For example, among the constraints informing
these writings were these: He would write less than 100 words each day,
use no more than twelve different typefaces available at the time on an
IBM Selectric typewriter [now antique], count no more than 45 characters
in a single line, and change the typeface for each new statement. We see
examples of this form in his books X and A Year From Monday from which
I quoted at the head of this chapter [the first quotation is one of the
ideas]. Ah, but weren’t you going to give us a description of Cage’s
anarchism, one he applied to this “diary” material? Indeed, I was. It was

281
“How to improve the world [You will only make matters worse].” The
online website of the magazine Reason [strapline: “free minds and free
markets” - ugh!] consequently describes John Cage as a “gut anarchist” in
the headline to a puff piece about him that it carries online - but that does
Cage a complete disservice in the light of this heading. Cage’s anarchism
wasn’t some random, ill-understood or ill-thought out instinct: it was a
complete and utter attempt to live his life in accordance with nature in her
manner of operation, in my terms, to live a life of type 1 anarchism in a
world he conceived of as type 1 anarchy.

Cage, then, was concerned with the way things are when they are left,
uncoerced, to be themselves. He is not the kind of anarchist who wants to
pressure and harrass; he is the kind who thinks people should leave things
alone and let them be. As a musician, Cage received this as a musical
insight. When I began writing my four volume series of books titled There
is Nothing To Stick To, the third chapter of the first volume, “Every Step is
on The Path”, pp. 55-79, was an extended essay about this John Cage, the
ideas behind his music, and an invitation to meditate on such musical
ideas and imagine how the Eastern [spiritual] ethos behind them [drawn
from Zen and Daoist sources] might play out if applied to human
behaviour and our human political world. But I did not there go into the
consequences of this specifically too much and neither did I cover the
Cage of his “Diary” where a more political John Cage might be found.

In this book and this chapter, however, that time has come. This does not
mean I intend to ignore Cage the musician or artist in this chapter though
for, as Emma Goldman also shows in her artistic interests [she gave
numerous lectures on plays and other forms of art], anarchism becomes a
philosophy inhabiting the soul which affects all human thought, culture
and conception; it is not something to be restricted to one field of
endeavour but to be studiously kept out of others. This is just one reason
why I continue to hold to a dual definition of anarchism and anarchy; there
are only type 2 versions of these things because there are type 1 versions

282
of these things. Most people settle for type 2 because type 1 seems
insubstantial or amorphous and ungraspable, beyond human control; yet
the insight of type 1 versions of these things is that their amorphous,
insubstantial, “beyond human control” qualities are exactly the point.
Human beings should not always be striving for control and should, in
fact, give up such control as they sometimes, in very small doses, manage
to have. Goldman and, especially, Cage are those who get this insight.
Cage, in fact, spent his entire life after having this insight creating music,
art and writing based on it.

Cage doesn’t begin writing the more political entires that would make up
Diary: How To Improve The World [You Will Only Make Matters Worse]
before the 1960s. Before this he is more exclusively concerned with
creating and composing music even where, to conventional [i.e. closed]
ears, no music is heard [see the story about his piece 4’33” which I relay
in my former essay about Cage the musician in There is Nothing To Stick
To]. The mentality that will inform the Diary is very much present,
however, as you would expect since I intimated earlier that this mentality
is the same one operating in differing spheres of endeavour or application.
So, for example, Cage, in his book M, a collection of his writings from
1967-1972, can in the foreword, referring back to a time in the early
1950s when he and some other musicians were attempting to incorporate
sounds formerly thought of as “noise” into music, say the following:

“Since the theory of conventional music is a set of laws exclusively

concerned with ‘musical’ sounds, having nothing to say about noises, it
had been clear from the beginning that what was needed was a music
based on noise, on noise’s lawlessness. Having made such an anarchic
music, we were able later to include in its performance even so-called
musical sounds.

The next steps were social, and they are still being taken. We need first of
all a music in which not only are sounds just sounds but in which people

283
 are just people, not subject, that is, to laws established by any one of
them even if he is “the composer” or “the conductor”. Finally [as far as I
can see at present], we need a music which no longer prompts talk of
audience participation, for in it the division between performers and
audience no longer exists: a music made by everyone.”

Now that, of course, may be read as straightforward musical theory or a

comment about a prospective musical philosophy – and so as the strict
preserve of those involved in such things. Indeed, it was and it is. But am I
the only one reading this who sees music and metaphor and a vision of a
very political anarchy? And all it takes, Cage seems to say, is to see things
differently, to lay aside all the “conventions” and the “laws” and the
authoritative participants such as “conductors” and “composers”. Cage
even wants to erase the border between performers and the audience
[and he would go on to do exactly this in musical situations]. This, then, is
music as metaphor, a musical anarchy showing the way to a political
anarchy of the type John Cage was seduced by and became convinced of.
For musical conventions and customs substitute laws, courts and police.
For authoritative figures such as conductors and composers, substitute
presidents, prime ministers and governments. For performers and
audiences, substitute the removal of states and replace it with the
recognition of a mass of human beings in the world. No more do we have
the conventional music of “musical sounds”; now we have the political
anarchy of “noises” in which any and every sound is “legitimate” for none
of them have been ruled out of bounds. This is a musical expression of
exactly the anarchistic democracy I spoke of in chapter seven.

But to Cage the anarchist of matters more general, more political, more
personal, the Cage of the Diary, now brought together as one book but
formerly to be found in sections of A Year From Monday, M and X in all
the sections titled “Diary: How to improve the world [You will only make
matters worse].” The question is, how best to present them, though, and
remain faithful to the happy, smiling, artistic personality with which Cage

284
presented all his work – whether through sounds, art or writing. Quite a lot
of that writing is presented in more “anarchistic” form – such as the many
mesostics he favoured creating, often by utilising the chance operations of
the Chinese divination text, the I Ching, when brought into relationship
with more orthodox texts in order to randomly rearrage them. This, for
example, is what most of Anarchy is when the words of various anarchists
are jumbled up and deposited on the page in orders decided by operations
of chance designed for the purpose. Here Cage did with words what he
would also do with music, a furtherance of ideas exhibited in texts like the
“Lecture on Nothing” or the “Lecture on Something”, contained in his first
book, Silence, and displayed as written texts, but texts written according
to musical notation and meant to be read as musical pieces. One gets the
impression all this randomising and chance operations and unfamiliarising
activity is in order to wake us from the slumber of our conventions in
order to get us to see again, as if for the first time with our mental chains
removed [and so as Howard Jones encourages us, too, in New Song]. Cage
was a Cynic, too, and every bit as much as Diogenes of Sinope.

So, considering such matters, it seems to me that I cannot just rattle on

for another 20 pages talking about Cage and his artistic anarchism in
traditional fashion, attempting to typify his oeuvre under an interpretation
at once my own and, inevitably, incomplete. Instead, I must depart from
this method in order that, like him with his readers, I may encourage such
as I manage to acquire to think again as well. Consequently, what follows
in most of the rest of this chapter is random thoughts plucked from Cage’s
“Diary” portions of his books. Interspersed, on occasion, will be my own
random thoughts {indicated by curly brackets}. I claim no unifying theme
to any of this nor even any connection between them. As Cage himself
would probably also say, what they mean and how, or if they relate to
each other, is up to you. I will begin in M and then work my way through A
Year From Monday and X accordingly...

Truth’s not true… An individual, having no separate soul, is a time-span, a

285
collection of changes. Our nature’s that of Nature. Nothing’s fixed.
Excepting everthing, there’s nothing to respect.

Yes and No are lies.

Frontiers describe what’s beyond as well as what’s enclosed.

{Opposites are {co-}relatives.}

Scientists are sometimes not scientific. Take atomic garbage. First they
put it in rivers and streams. Then someone noticed the waters began to
boil. Now just as cats do after shitting, they dig a trench, put the garbage
in it, cover it up, and then forget about it.

“Classification… ceases when its no longer possible to establish

oppositions.” [Government’s outmoded.]

To improve society, spend more time with people whom you haven’t met.

Protest actions fan the flames of a dying fire [government]. Protest helps
to keep the government going.

Global civil war.

286
At the present moment the question is, do I have enough change for
another beer? More important question: Is there enough food and drink for
everyone who is living? Civilization is Hamletized [people are dying right
and left]. To be or not to be. That is the question.

We need to conceive of anarchy to be able to whole-heartedly do

whatever another tells us to.

World body.

Giving up true and false.

No need to move the camera. Pictures come to it.

The goal is not to have a goal. The new universe city will have no limits.

The act of sharing is a community act. Think of people outside the

community. What do we share with them?

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake.
Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

{“I need nothing. I seek nothing. I desire nothing.”

― Milarepa}

287
 Develop facilities that remove the need for middlemen.

A computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in the academic failure of

several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. A
letter was then sent to each student inviting them to resume their studies.
Each replied they were getting along very well without education.

Einstein wrote to Freud to say that men should stop having wars. Freud
wrote back to say if you get rid of wars you’ll also get rid of love. Freud
was wrong. What permits us to love one another and the earth we inhabit
is that both we and it are impermanent.

Things government wishes to divide between us belong to all of us: the

land, for instance, or beneath the oceans.

Languages separate people.

{Only if you talk.}

Put them that threaten possessions and power together with them who
offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who are touched, put them in
asylums. Pack off old ones to “senior communities,” nursing homes. Our
children? Keep them prisoner, babysitter as warden. School? Good for 15-
20 years. Army afterward. Liberated? We live in prison. No this, no that.
Kill us before we die!

We leave food offerings for the person who makes the next telephone call
no matter who he is: thus we transform the highway telephone booth into

288
 a wayside shrine.

The poor? Where do they go to retire?

Tunnel workmen including toll-collectors went on strike. The public was

put on the honor system. Once the strike was settled, receipts were
examined to see how much the public had cheated the government.
However, more money had been received than had been due; drivers not
having change had apparently been generous. In addition, the
government saved all public money it would have paid its employees.

Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics, from
society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go. We also have
no need for employment. We are busy doing our own work.

Now there’s more and more of us, we find one another more and more
interesting. We’re amazed when there are so many of us that each one of
us is unique, different from all the others.

Asked what he thought of first lecture, [Zen Buddhist D.T.] Suzuki said,
“Excellent, but in Zen most important thing is life.” Asked next day what
he thought of second lecture, Suzuki said, “Excellent, but in Zen most
important thing is death.” How can you say life one day and death the
next? “In Zen there’s not much difference between the two.”

Lois Long received a commission to make a design to be printed on toilet

paper. Unstimulated by the notion of making floral designs, she asked me

289
 if I had any ideas. Dollar bills.

California fishermen are quarrelling with fishermen from Ecuador over the
right to fish for poisoned fish.

We know the best government is no government at all... We renounce

privileges of democracy. We dream of the day when no one knows who’s
President because no one bothered to vote.

World patriotism.

Vitamin C’s one fault is that its cheaper and more popular than highly
advertised, often dangerous, drugs. Therefore, the American medical-
industrial combine warns the public: Vitamin C can be hazardous to your
health. What they mean is: We want more of your money.

We don’t fear anarchy: we fear government.

The day after we arrived in Los Angeles, the police killed one teenager
and wounded nine others.

After hearing the end of the story, he said, “That doesn’t seem to be the
end of the story.” Of course, he’s right. The story goes on and on and on.

Times published a news release from the Food and Drug Administration

290
 listing marketed drugs that we hazardous or ineffectual. There was then
an unexpected run on the market. Customers apparently feared that their
favourite remedies would become unavailable.

It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have.
Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages
before reaching the age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of
their own languages. Play would be play instead of being, as now, release
of repressed anger.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re in first class or coach. You still see the
same movie.

Subjected university library to chance operations. Eighty students read

four hundred books. Class became people. Conversation.

Deinstitutionalization.

Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost

nothing that we have that we want.

Everything’s caused by everything else.

Twelve disciples. One teacher. One too many.

291
If we could change our language, that’s to say, the way we think, we’d
probably be able to swing the revolution.

A newspaperman wrote asking me to send him my philosophy in a

nutshell. Get out of whatever cage you happen to be in.

National Wildlife Refuges: museumization of wilderness.

Imitation of nature in her manner of operation, traditionally the artist’s

function, is now what everyone has to do. Complicate your garden so its
surprising like uncultivated land.

Suburban policeman came to the door. He went away without making any
arrests. If you’re poor, its illegal. If you’re rich, you’re automatically within
the law.

What necessary mystery can people working together make? Effective

revolution… Create an environment that works so well we can run wild in
it.

It is right to rebel.

We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use.

Art is in the process of coming into its own: life. {Life as art.}

292
Looking in all directions not just one direction.

People still ask for definitions, but its quite clear now that nothing can be
defined.

Refuse value judgments.

The way to lose our principles is to examine them, give them an airing.

Let’s call it the collectve conscious [we’ve got the collective unconscious].
The question is: what are the things everyone needs regardless of likes
and dislikes? Beginning of answer: food, water, shelter, clothing,
electricity, audio-visual communication, transportation. Form of answer:
global utilities network.

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak,

therefore, of one thing causing another.

Hearing my thoughts, someone asked, “Are you a Marxist?” Answer: I’m

an anarchist, same as you are when you’re telephoning, turning on/off
lights or drinking water.

The private prospect of enlightenment is no longer sufficient. Not just self-

but social-realization.

293
 {Either we’re all free or nobody is. Its not about individuals but systems.}

There’s a temptation to do nothing simply because there’s so much to do

that one doesn’t know where to begin. Begin anywhere.

The cows in India, not understanding traffic lights, cross intersections

whenever they reach them. Motorists never get angry. They wait
patiently.

{Things are not to be explained. Not even an explanation for why we

should not explain.}

Life isn’t about being right.

Until you give up owning property radical social change is impossible.

Since for a long time we’ve been saying that money is the root of all evil,
we should get rid of it, lock, stock and barrel.

{When you are rich what is there to do but become richer?}

We just want those things that have so often been promised or stated:
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Freedom of this and that.

294
{“Keeping the world going” is a fundamentally different activity to
improving it.}

We gave up judgments and substituted poetry.

We only have one mind – the one we share.

The USA thinks the world is the USA’s world and is determined to keep it
free and USA-determined.

{Why else would the USA have hundreds of military bases in dozens of
countries all around the world? Its an occupation.}

Shoes and clothes made in Puerto Rico are exported to the United States.
What isn’t sold there goes up in price and then goes back to Puerto Rico.

Americans, their government coupled with their industry, automatically

barge in wherever there’s a sign of cheap labor. We’re all over Latin
America. We don’t speak Spanish or Portuguese. Out exploitees don’t
speak English. Now they speak with bombs hoping someday we’ll
understand.

Emily Bueno said the reason nothing will happen in America to improve
matters is most of the people are comfortable the way it is.

295
 Nobody voted. Government was embarrassed out of existence.

Politics is all of the actions of all of the people.

Nuclear weaponry is a rational adjunct to internationalism. Each nation is

married to industry but industry is polygamous. Each nation is selfish.
What’s needed is an intelligent equation between human needs and world
resources.

The international world is schizophrenic, split against itself. There is no

political remedy for this disease. Power politics was its cause. Holocaust.

The divorce of state and industry.

There's no longer time to correct things first here and then there, say in
Puerto Rico today, South Africa tomorrow, later in Israel or El Salvador.
The whole thing's wrong. The beginning of the future, if there is to be one,
is making the world a single place, freeing it from its division into nations.

People ask what the

avant-garde is and whether it's
finished. It isn't. There will
always be one. The avant-garde is
flexibility of mind and it follows like
day the night from not falling prey to
government and education. Without
avant-garde nothing would get

296
 invented.

Excerpt from “Lecture on Nothing”

I am here and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to
get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is
silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking. Give any one
thought a push: it falls down easily; but the pusher and the pushed
produce that entertainment called a discussion. Shall we have one later?
Or, we could simply decide not to have a discussion. Whatever you like.
But now there are silences and the words help make the silences. I have
nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it. This space
of time is organised. We need not fear these silences, - we may love them.
This is a composed talk, for I am making it just as I make a piece of music.
It is like a glass of milk. We need the glass and we need the milk. Or again
it is like an empty glass into which at any moment anything may be
poured. As we go along, [who knows?] an idea may occur in this talk. I
have no idea whether one will or not. If one does, let it. Regard it as
something seen momentarily, as though from a window while travelling.

Excerpt from “Lecture on Something”

This is a talk about something and naturally also a talk about nothing,
about how something and nothing are not opposed to each other but need
each other to keep on going. It is difficult to talk when you have
something to say precisely because of the words which keep making us
say in the way which the words need to stick to and not in the Way which
we need for living. For instance: someone said, “Art should come from
within; then it is profound." But it seems to me Art goes within, and I don't
see the need for "should" or "then" or "it" or "pro-found." When Art comes
from within, which is what it was for so long doing, it be-came a thing
which seemed to elevate the man who made it a-bove those who ob-
served it or heard it and the artist was considered a genius or given a

297
rating: First, Second, No Good, until finally riding in a bus or subway: so
proudly he signs his work like a manufacturer.

But since everything's changing, art's now going in and it is of the utmost
importance not to make a thing but rather to make nothing. And how is
this done? It is done by making something which then goes in and
reminds us of nothing. It is im-portant that this something be just
something, finitely something; then very simply it goes in and becomes
infinitely nothing. It seems we are living. Understanding of what is
nourishing is changing. Of course, it is always changing, but now it is very
clearly changing, so that the people either agree or they don't and the
differences of o-pinion are clearer. Just a year or so a-go everything
seemed to be an individual matter. But now there are two sides. On one
side it is that individual matter going on, and on the other side it is more,
not an individual but everyone which is not to say it's all the same,- on the
contrary there are more differences. That is: starting finitely everything's
different but in going in it all becomes the same.

TEN: Anarchy, Language, Fiction, Magic: Alan Moore

When I wrote the third volume of There is Nothing To Stick To, my

anthological exploration of anarchy [the third volume was subtitled
“Spiritual and Political Anarchy”], sections 235-249 of that book were
dedicated to an essay on Alan Moore’s tale of anarchy and fascism, V for
Vendetta. In that story, anarchy is regarded as an insight or a realisation
the individual needs to have before they can “get” what anarchism is
actually about. This is revealed through both the back story of V and in V’s
actions in regard to Evey in order that she, too, may have a “moment of
clarity”. The story as a whole, of course, is about waking up the population
in general in regard to the possibility of a truly anarchist existence on the
basis of an anarchist awakening and a resulting anarchist consciousness.
It is interesting to me that Alan Moore would present it like this but, it
turns out, when one learns more about Moore himself, this approach

298
makes perfect sense – for Moore is an intellectual and anarchy, as he
understands it, is akin to magic, a matter of mind, consciousness, art,
language and fiction. This, in some senses, makes Moore’s version of
anarchy somewhat mysterious but never ever anything less than real –
and it invites us to probe some of Moore’s ideas about these things in
order to understand this intellectual kind of anarchy further. In doing so, I
believe, we learn more about ourselves as human beings and the place of
a specifically intellectual kind of anarchy within such a form of existing.

When Alan Moore talks directly about anarchy, which he has done several
times over the years [one finds, when one looks, that Moore has done
numerous interviews, both in print and the kind that find their way online
as videos], he says the kind of things about it with which I would
wholeheartedly agree. For example, in a statement which implicates both
type 1 and type 2 anarchies, he says:

“basically, anarchy is in fact the only political position that is actually

possible. I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or
outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the
idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is
because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how
I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist
situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that
it is not an anarchist situation—that it is a capitalist or a communist
situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of
politics for a human being to actually practice. All it means, the word, is
no leaders. An-archon. No leaders.”

Further, as in the case of Peter Kropotkin in relation to mutual aid, Moore

sees this as something we learn from animals:

“I think that if we actually look at nature without prejudice, we find that

this is the state of affairs that usually pertains. I mean, previous

299
naturalists have looked at groups of animals and have said, ‘Ah, yes, this
animal is the alpha male, so he is the leader of the group.’ Whereas later
research tends to suggest that this is simply the researcher projecting his
own social visions onto a group of animals, and that if you observe them
more closely you will find out that, yes there is this big tough male that
seems to handle most of the fights, but that the most important member
of the herd is probably this female at the back that everybody seems to
gather around during any conflict. There are other animals within the herd
that might have an importance in terms of finding new territory. In fact
the herd does not actually structure itself in terms of hierarchies; every
animal seems to have its own position within the herd.”

Moore also talks about anarchy as “the state that most naturally obtains”
when it comes to regular human beings living their lives “in a natural
way”. This was also, of course, the way they did live in the past for tens of
thousands of years in a state of existence before civilisation came. But,
with that, leaders seem to have come too, as Moore himself muses, and
that in a artificial way:

“It seems to me that the idea of leaders is an unnatural one that was
probably thought up by a leader at some point in antiquity; leaders have
been brutally enforcing that idea ever since, to the point where most
people cannot conceive of an alternative.”

Moore, like many of the more politically anarchist figures, also knows
enough to know that you couldn’t just go from now to living by means of
anarchism in one fell swoop. Education is necessary:

“In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved,
you will obviously have to educate people—and educate them massively—
towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own
actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider
group: that they must allow other people within that group to take

300
responsibility for their own actions. Which on a small scale, as it works in
families or in groups of friends, doesn’t seem to be that implausible, but it
would take an awful lot of education to get people to think about living
their lives in that way. And obviously, no government, no state, is ever
going to educate people to the point where the state itself would become
irrelevant. So if people are going to be educated to the point where they
can take responsibility for their own laws and their own actions and
become, to my mind, fully actualized human beings, then it will have to
come from some source other than the state or government.”

Note there that Moore thinks of the anarchist human being as the “fully
actualised” human being. I agree with Moore there especially and since
Moore thinks of anarchy as much more than a state pertaining thanks,
and only thanks, to the activities of human beings, Moore implicates type
1 and type 2 versions of anarchy, in my terms, in what he is saying. Moore
relates anarchy to things, states, realities beyond the realm of “what
humans have decided is best”. In this context, he seemingly has no love
for money [and, in his real life, has actually turned a lot of it down in that
he refuses to be associated with pretty much all of the TV or film
adaptations that Hollywood, and others, have wanted to make of his work]
and he sees money as casting a kind of spell on people:

“the nature of currency is a kind of magic: these pieces of metal or pieces

of paper only have value as long as people believe that they do. If
somebody were to introduce another kind of piece of metal or piece of
paper, and if people were to start believing in that form of currency more
than yours, then all of your wealth would suddenly vanish.”

“Economics,” says Moore elsewhere, “is always strange. You’re not talking
about anything that’s actually real.” So, in this respect, getting rid of
money is like dissipating the effects of the spell that has been cast over
us. But Moore sees no other way and can put it in quite medieval terms:
“Behead the currency. Change the currency, why not? It would

301
disempower all the people who had bought into that currency but it would
pretty much empower the rest of us, the other ninety-nine percent.”
Again, I totally agree with this and one focus of my own understanding of
anarchism has been to wonder how we devalue, replace or simply get rid
of money from human society as a thing which would change the nature
of human relationships from ones of power and domination based on
wealth to ones in which, once again, we have to relate to each other as
equals at a stroke.

But it is with this idea of money as a kind of spell cast over us that we
begin to impinge upon the more mystical side of Alan Moore, a side which
is no less implicated in his ideas of anarchy. Here, that something is “a
kind of thinking” is very important and, in some ways, is comparable to
what Nietzsche was saying earlier when he talked about “how human
beings think” being important in terms of what their outcome was and
how they subsequently act. Staying on the theme of money, for example,
Moore says the following:

“The origin of money is something to do with representational thinking.

Representational thinking is the real leap, where somebody says ‘hey I
can draw this shape on the cave wall and it is, in some way, the bison we
saw at the meadow. These lines are the bison.’ That of course leads to
language – this squiggle is, of course, a tree, or something. Is the tree.
Money is code for the whole of life – you can bind in everything that is
contained within life for money, money is a certain amount of sex, a
certain amount of shelter, a certain amount of sustenance. ... Money is the
code for the entire world. Money is the world, the world in the sense I was
talking about earlier, our abstract ideas about the world. Money is a
perfect symbol for all that, and if you don’t believe in it, and you set a
match to it, it’s just firewood – it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

Here money is the product of a kind of thinking and, if we did not think
that way, it is hard to see how the things produced by such a way of

302
thinking could exist. This is then to say, as Moore does in so many words,
that “Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind,
whose nature and geography are unexplored.” We think the “real world” -
an unhelpful and entirely invented notion if there ever was one – is the
material world of physical phenomena that shape our experience and
force us to have views about it. But Alan Moore doesn’t think that. Moore
thinks that it is “reality” that is subject to a fiction that is almost magical
in its abilities. And so he says:

“I think that if you actually examine the relationship between real life and
fiction, you’ll find that we most often predicate our real lives upon fictions
that we have applied from somewhere... It’s a kind of fiction, it is not a
reality in the sense that it is something concrete and fixed; we constantly
fictionalize our own experience. We edit our own experience. There are
bits of it that we simply misremember, and there are bits of it that we
deliberately edit out because they’re not of interest to us or perhaps
they show us in a bad light. So we’re constantly revising, both as
individuals and as nations, our own past. We’re turning it moment by
moment into a kind of fiction, that is the way that we assemble our daily
reality. We are not experiencing reality directly, we are simply
experiencing our perception of reality. All of these signals pulsing down
optic nerves, and in the tympanums of our ears, from those we compose,
moment by moment, our view of reality. And inevitably, because people’s
perceptions are different, and the constructions that people put on things
are different, then there is no such thing as a cold, objective reality that is
solid and fixed and not open to interpretation. Inevitably, we are to some
extent creating a fiction every second of our lives, the fiction of who we
are, the fiction of what our lives are about, the meanings that we give to
things.”

This will sound very much like things I have myself already been saying
whilst completely unaware of Moore’s thoughts on the subject. Moore’s
difference from me, in this respect, is his magical interest which sees

303
fiction as a kind of magic which creates the world it then finds – like a kind
of spell cast upon it. Moore, in various interviews and discussions, can
discourse at length about what amounts to basically the power of
lamguage and fiction to create or conjure. A grimoire, for example, he
says is just another word for grammar. Actual magic spells are just a
dramatic presentation of the power of words. This, for Moore, is all linked
to ideas of the imaginal and consciousness and how they essentially
create the world that we inhabit. Moore’s friend, and a semi-regular
conversation partner of his, the author, John Higgs, puts it like this in
relating Moore’s views in his book, KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, in
which Moore plays a tangential role:

“Moore underst[ands] that while we assume that we live firmly in the real,
physical world, in actuality we live in a mental model of that world. This
model is produced by our minds based on memories and information from
the senses. It is a very detailed and convincing model, so much so that it
is difficult to accept how unreal it is. If you look at an object, for example,
you see colour and assume that the object is that colour. But colour as we
experience it is an invention of our minds which does not exist in the real
world. It is a mental interpretation of whichever wavelengths of light the
object we are looking at cannot absorb and so bounces back to us. This is
something that the Buddhists worked out early on. They used to ask
students "What makes the grass green?", and expected them to discover
through meditation that the answer was themselves.”

But Higgs takes things further than this into wanting to explain Moore’s
insights here and so he goes on:

“But even if we accept that we only know the physical world through a
mental approximation, we rarely acknowledge how much of the physical
world is actually the product of the mental. For example, consider these
words that you are reading – where did they come from? What about the
language that they are written in? What about the shape of the letters

304
themselves? What about the font? If you are reading them on paper, then
how is paper created, and where did the idea to create paper come from
in the first place? If you are sitting in a chair, who designed that chair? Or
the floor on which it sits? Look around the room that you are in. Is there
anything there that didn't first appear as an idea in the head of another
person? Think about the aims of the job you do or the ideology of your
preferred political party. Think about the recipes of the food you eat or the
music you listen to. The world we actually live in is made of ideas that
have left human minds and entered the physical world. Indeed, the story
of our evolution is essentially the story of us retreating from the natural
world into the mental one.”

This leads Higgs to talk about what Alan Moore calls “Ideaspace”, which is
“a model of the mental world” Moore thinks as real as the physical one. In
this space ideas, which are real if immaterial, link up in ways unrestricted
by the rules of physical space-time. It is an entirely interconnected and
interrelated universe. But this imaginal world is not just personal to us for
we can step out of more personal parts of Ideaspace and wander through
its communal areas. Indeed, Moore seems to see this as imperative if we
want to change the world by means of such mental realities. It is this
creative, linguistic, fictional activity [and Moore endorses all of these as
charactistics of Ideaspace], and these processes – which Moore conceives
of as what Higgs terms “the way thoughts exist and alter the world” - that
Alan Moore calls “magic”. It is John Higgs again who explains the
consequences of Moore’s imaginative leap:

“What Moore ha[s] done [i]s to raise the importance of the mental world
of imagination and lower that of the physical. Indeed, you could argue
that he has reversed them, claiming more importance for the imagination
than the physical to the extent where the physical world is the product of
the mental. This approach, in which the material is dependent on the
immaterial, echoes Charles Fort’s belief that, ‘A tree cannot find out, as it
were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot

305
 find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.’ This
was the phenomena of why, after millennia of inventions such as the
electric light, calculus or steam engines not existing, several people would
invent the exact same thing at much the same time [at which point
there’s a mad race down to the patent office, with the winner celebrated
by history and the others forgotten]. As Moore s[ees] it, the idea ha[s]
been discovered in a shared area of Ideaspace, and several wanderers
ha[ve] stumbled upon it shortly afterwards.”

This perhaps all sounds a little mystical, even spooky, to those unfamiliar
with such ideas. But consider the thoughts of Nietzsche in chapter 2 or
those of the liberal and very sober professor of philosophy and
comparative literature, Richard Rorty, in chapter 5. What we are really
talking about here is the power of language, which is the power of thought
or imagination to conjure and create. Nietzsche has already told us earlier
that our knowledge is like hiding something behind a bush, going away,
and then coming back to find it where we left it – and then acting as if that
was something remarkable, something epistemological. This, of course, is
a nonsense and a deliberately setting out to regard something we do as if
it had the credit of something else, a credit we invent and imagine it has.
We are here, in Moore’s terms, creating a world of knowledge that we can
have by imagining that it is so. And Moore’s point is that that imagination
has the power – he would say magical power – to do exactly such a thing.
Our minds, our consciousness, our imaginations – all of them based on
language – can create and shape the world. Where they do this in the
communal section of “Ideaspace” this is not, in fact, so different from Carl
Jung’s notion of the “collective unconscious”.

This is all very interesting and surely, now it is explained this way, links up
with other philosophical thought about language and its creative abilities
as we have already seen. But where does it fit in with anarchy and
anarchism? Here something Moore says sets us off down a path: “the idea
of a magical revolution would revolve around actually changing people’s

306
consciousnesses, which is to say, actually changing the nature of
perceived reality.” This, it now seems as a lightbulb suddenly blinks on
above our heads, is what V was doing in V for Vendetta in the second act
where he attemtped to, and succeeded in, changing Evey Hammond’s
way of seeing the world. The Evey Hammond V met in the first act of the
book was a very different Evey to the one who exists in act three of the
book and the difference is the events that take place in that second act to
change Evey’s consciousness of the world and her place, everybody’s
place, in it. It is as if, in that second act, V took the entirety of the physical
world, including all its connections, associations and our feelings about it,
and reconstituted it in Evey’s mind by means of imagination. Through
language and fiction V literally reconstructed the mental world of Evey’s
consciousness and this had the effect of reconstituting the physical world
in which she lived as well. Indeed, the latter was powerless before the
creative power of the former. Moore calls this magical activity [which is
the same as linguistic, fictional activity] but, whatever we call it, it has the
power to change not only the mental world but the physical one as well.
As Moore said earlier in this chapter: “we constantly fictionalize our own
experience”. But I would go further: we constantly fictionalize the world.
The world is a fiction and nothing but a fiction in its contexts and linkages.

In an earlier chapter I described we human beings as stuck in language

metaphorically as we are physically stuck in the earth’s atmosphere. We
need both to live as our form of life now lives. Moore has a similar idea
when he says that “Embedded in the amber of space-time... we perceive
events, and continuity, and narrative, and character, and meaning, and
morality.” Such a reality Moore thinks gives us a task, however, one
connected to the beings that we are with the circumstances that we find
ourselves in. He explains this using his preferred “magical” vocabulary:

“This enables us to identify magic as a phenomenon inextricably bound up

with language, art and consciousness as if they were indeed but facets of
the same thing, and to provide a new definition of magic as ‘Any

307
 purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of
consciousness.’... I see [the] task and indeed the responsibility of modern
magicians/artists to be the reassembly of the fractured world, the
fractured worldviews and the fractured psychologies that presently
surround us.”

This, on Moore’s part, is only to say that we should be attempting in the

real, consequential world of our own experience what V does in regard to
the world of Evey Hammond and Norsefire in the fictional world of V for
Vendetta. We literally need to imagine a new world, already existing in
Ideaspace, into existence in physical space. We need to change our
consciousness and that of those around us. We need, in terms I put it in
the book in which I discussed V for Vendetta specifically, to dream another
dream. Perhaps you think mere fiction, mere imagination, mere stories, do
not have the power to do this? Moore has a handy historical tale ready to
make you think about this again in that case:

“Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but
more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd
pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse
on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your
milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or
something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about
putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a
skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your
community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the
eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of
your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard,
and he's written a particularly good satire then, three hundred years after
you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing at what a twat you were.”

Moore is talking exactly about the power of fiction to depict things a

certain way, a way you cannot unsee or deny. Why, today, do millions of

308
people think capitalism is inevitable, so inevitable, in fact, that they
literally cannot think of any other way to live, even if they suffer terribly at
the hands of it? It is because they have been told a story about it so
powerful that they literally are unable to think in any other categories or
imagine any other possibilities. In Moore’s language we might talk of a
“curse” having been cast in this case – but only in Moore’s sense of magic
as the linguistic, fictional, imaginal thing he conceives it to be, that thing
which can inhabit and possess our consciousness with such force that it
determines not just the mental but also the physical world for us as well.
Of course, where this appears as “truth” it also comes with the force of
social reinforcement as we are coerced to believe what others also
believe. But, says Moore, “Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It
invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed
Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it
comes right out and says, ‘I'm a Liar,’ right there on the dust jacket.”
Truth tells lies and lies tell the truth. Fiction has always been about more
than right or wrong and, because its human, and because humans are
those who create and cast their spells upon the world, reality has always
been about more than “what is” - because “what is” is a matter of what
you can imagine and not of “what’s there”.

And so when we come back to thinking about our political world and
political, magical objects like money we need to keep all this in mind. We
need to resist the spells others cast in our direction and cast our own. As
Alan Moore says:

“We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to
overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an
anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the
people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to
have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason
they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no
moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.”

309
This suggests that money exerts a powerful “magical” effect over human
beings and my experience, with those who call themselves anarchists as
much as with those who don’t, would bear this out. A number of people
defer to money and to other things imbued with the magical power of
wealth because, so they say, that’s just the way the world is right now.
Yet, if Alan Moore is right, it is not the anarchist task to submit to the
spells cast upon the world by capitalist or fascistic or dominating, coercive
others but to refute them, rebut them, and cast spells [or fictions] of our
own instead. We must use the power of language, fiction and
consciousness in our favour and, so we argue, to the benefit of the world
rather than to just a few. We need to cast thinking like this from Alan
Moore upon the world:

“Anarchy, meaning simply ‘no leaders’, to me implies a situation in which

everyone must take responsibility for their own actions and, therefore,
serve as their own leaders. In such a state, inter-individual cooperation is
the most successful and thus the default form of interaction. This is why
our species, for the hundreds of thousands of years that constituted its
hunter/gatherer stage, was non-hierarchical, and why the greatest social
sin in those earliest proto-societies was the attempt to claim greater
status than anyone else, this being punishable by ridicule and, when
ridicule proved insufficient, by banishment. This is apparently still the
tradition amongst some of the world’s aboriginal people up to the present
day. It is currently thought that those earliest communities somehow
realised that status would create divisions that would ultimately
destabilise the entire culture. For me, anarchy suggests that to become
fully realised as human beings we must each make our own individual
peace with the universe and stand as women or men, naked and
denuded of status, at the heart of a stupefying and starry existence which
surely makes all such status less than meaningless.”

At the end of that quote Moore makes another important observation –

that all this meaning we are making is only human meaning. In the

310
context of type 1 anarchy, a kind of anarchy Moore himself can both see
and imagine, our meaning is meaningless. The universe neither knows nor
cares that we exist. But, in terms of type 2 anarchy, it is vitally important
for it is how we create type 2 anarchy and it is how we create the bridge
between type 1 and type 2 anarchy, how we embed ourselves fully into
existence on every level we can imagine in a way not troubled or
disturbed by a resistence to being part of something we do not control.
Doing this requires relating and consolidating the meaning we make to
the meaninglessness of the whole, of it all.

Here, though, it is important to note that violent revolution is not going to

work. You cannot force people to become anarchists, that is to say, you
cannot force people to take on a form of consciousness, imagine an
existence or dream a certain dream - a thought I share consciously in the
knowledge of the text of act two of V for Vendetta where, it could be
argued, this is exactly what V does to Evey. But I do not intend to say that
this either is or is not the case at this point. Readers who want to explore
this must do so themselves. My point here is that violence, death, prisons,
physical consequences, are ultimately destructive of lives and ideas rather
than creative of such things and, even where it can be argued violence
changes lives and creates new ones, this is often not with the best of
intentions in those who find their lives changed. And so Alan Moore says:

“I really don’t think that a violent revolution is ever going to provide a

long-term solution to the problems of the ordinary person. I think that is
something that we had best handle ourselves, and which we are most
likely to achieve by the simple evolution of western society. But that
might take quite a while, and whether we have that amount of time is, of
course, open to debate.”

This is again something that I agree with [but in a world and not merely a
“western” context] – as readers of There is Nothing To Stick To will
probably have ascertained. I don’t see how violence, or suddenly violent

311
changes in the direction of society as a whole, which millions would
inevitably resist, changes things from a current wrong to an anarchist
right. Not only does this ignore the insights, shared by Moore, that we
require a massive and ongong program of anarchist education and that it
is also a matter of changing consciousness, but it creates further problems
to boot. The way forward must be by changing the consciousnesses of
millions of individual people and thereby, changing the consciousness of
society as a whole. This, it may be argued, is in fact how society has
always changed and evolved. It is, in fact, how evolution itself is imagined
to work, albeit that, from time to time, evolution receives a kick in the
backside as well which results in faster and slower rates of the process.

What is required, then, is a change of human consciousness and Moore

has a very interesting way of articulating that by means of the magic that
is language and fiction, a remaking the physical world by means of the
imaginal world. The question then becomes “What can you imagine?” and,
in thinking that question, you bring possibilities to light. For example, in
discussing V for Vendetta, Moore discusses the opponents in that book,
fascism and anarchy:

“Fascism is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. You are

surrendering all responsibility for your own actions to the state on the
belief that in unity there is strength, which was the definition of fascism
represented by the original roman symbol of the bundle of bound twigs.
Yes, it is a very persuasive argument: ‘In unity there is strength.’ But
inevitably people tend to come to a conclusion that the bundle of bound
twigs will be much stronger if all the twigs are of a uniform size and
shape, that there aren’t any oddly shaped or bent twigs that are
disturbing the bundle. So it goes from ‘in unity there is strength’ to ‘in
uniformity there is strength’ and from there it proceeds to the excesses of
fascism as we’ve seen them exercised throughout the 20th century and
into the 21st.

312
Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that
‘in diversity, there is strength,’ which makes much more sense from the
point of view of looking at the natural world... The whole program of
evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength.”

I agree with Moore’s thoughts here [yet again] and, it seems to me, this is
a story [of anarchism] that isn’t told nearly often enough in a world where
the curse of “I only like people like me; everyone else who is not like me is
my enemy and/or opponent” has been spread far and wide from country
to country and generation to generation. Often this is called nationalism
but it can also be called supremacy, ableism or “rights” for an especially
protected group of people that other groups of people should be denied -
as well as other things. Any sort of protectionism or focus on one kind of
person to the detriment of others is an example of such thinking and is
prey to the cursed, fascistic narrative which wants people to all be the
same – like me – to the detriment of anybody and everybody else. Moore,
in his imagining of anarchy, makes a great deal of use of analogy to his
own fiction of the natural world in this – as I suppose I do as well – and it is
a world where such fascistic tendencies are unknown.

What this tends to suggest to me, and I really thought this, by means of
other terms, before I had read more in detail about Alan Moore’s own
thoughts on the subject, is that what you can imagine is the limits of your
possibility; what you can imagine is the limits of your world . Now, if this is
true, it powerfully shines the light on what, in former anarchist times, was
called “propaganda”, that is, the educating of the masses into anarchist
thinking. This was a communal and public task of anarchists from the
second half of the nineteenth century and continues today in groups like
Crimethinc or Dog Section Press, each of which publish literature, or take
actions, educating to an anarchist point of view. For Moore, however, as
perhaps also for myself, this is also an anarchistic task of the individual
who should not be content to be taught by others, good or bad, but should
be actively exploring the Ideaspace for themselves.

313
This, naturally enough, has consequences of its own for, if what you can
imagine is the limits of your world, then “what you can imagine” is
actually crucially important. Moore discusses this in another interview
where he is asked about the scientific and sociological tendency, which is
also a thoroughly materialist tendency, to always be seeking a gene as
the “cause” of certain forms of human behaviour, i.e. “the gay gene, the
criminal gene”, etc. In reply, Moore responds:

“It’s Nazi science, let’s face it. People are more comfortable with that. I
am currently writing this thing that is a study of some of my associates in
this magic business. [We] are trying to formulate some quasi-rational
thoughts on what we think of consciousness, language, magic, and art,
and the relationships between them. And connect that with human
development and show how these things are incredibly intertwined and
inextricable from each other. We start out talking about how the “I” is its
own blind spot. Mind has come up with this brilliant way of looking at the
world, science, but it can’t look at itself. Science has no place for the
mind. The whole of our science is based upon empirical, repeatable
experiments, whereas thought is not in that category. You can’t take
thought into a laboratory. The essential fact of our existence, perhaps the
only fact of our existence—our own thought and perception—is ruled
offside by the science it has invented. Science looks at the universe,
doesn’t see itself there, doesn’t see mind there, so you have a world in
which mind has no place. We are still no nearer to coming to terms with
the actual dynamics of what consciousness is. In questing after artificial
intelligence, we seem only to have learnt that normal intelligence is so far
beyond our comprehension.”

It is, perhaps, for this reason that we settle for cardboard cut out answers
like “genes” and “materialism” to some of our profoundest questions –
and then canonise them as irrefutable – which means “not to be refuted” –
truths. This is “Nazi science” but is also, in a sense, the Nazification of
human thought whole and entire. For this is a mode of thought in which

314
the world fixes us rather than us fixing it – as Moore has suggested. This is
fascism not anarchism for, in such a world, one thought must be the
correct one and everybody, to be considered and treated as correct, must
agree with it. In the world of the imaginal, in the world of anarchy, this will
not do and can never be. In such a world, full of billions of examples of
consciousness [and who is to say this is only human examples?], the
responsibility becomes yours to get your own consciousness right, find
your place in the whole and tell your truth [which is a fiction]. Of course, in
some, maybe even many, cases this will overlap and agree with that of
others. No one here is imagining that existence is, in fact, a solipsism.
Moore himself, and I with him, in his concept of Ideaspace conceives of
communal space where connections are made and people interrelate and
interact. But whilst consciousness can be public and shared it is never
only that. And it is never a matter of being dominated by the
consciousness of others. This image must be a communicative one –
perhaps similar to the communicative philosophy of someone like the
German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer – and never a coercive,
dominating one. The anarchistic impulse to this image here is the ability
to agree, or disagree, as one sees fit. Under the rubric of a “Nazi”
mentality this cannot, can never, take place – for one must do, and
believe, what one is told there by authoritative others, one must submit.
But Moore’s idea, Moore’s story, is that this is the responsibility of your
own mind. Anarchism is not just an idea that, so it is argued, will be better
for the public at large, it is also a necessity of individual practice in the life
of our thought itself.

All this, as Gadamer and Moore think, as only two examples of those who
agree on this [Nietzsche and Rorty are two others], comes down to
language, that phenomena of human existence which shapes not only our
[personal] world but the world as a communal process/event. As Alan
Moore says as part of a conversation that has veered into a discussion of
the “paranormal” practice of “remote viewing” [“the practice of seeking
impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly ‘sensing’ with

315
the mind”]:

“As I understand, or as I hallucinate, conceptual space, nearly all form in

conceptual space, is language. I might even say all the form in
nonconceptual space is language. I’m not even sure of what the difference
between physical space and conceptual space is anymore in the interface.
All form is language. The forms that we see, or imagine, or perceive, or
whatever it is remote viewers are doing, in conceptual space, are
mindforms made from language, and by language I also mean images,
sounds. We dress these basic ideas in language we can understand.
Sometimes there are sizeable errors of translation.”

This, once again, agrees with the earlier philosophers I discussed in less
“paranormal” parts of this book. The sea we are swimming in is a
linguistic sea, a place of fictonal constructs, a place of imagination.
Sometimes this leads to fascism. Sometimes it leads to conspiracy
theories. Sometimes it leads to God. Each is a way of trying to make sense
of the world, to make meaning in the sea where there isn’t any. In each
case, the overall explanation is imbued with a level of control far beyond
its pay grade. Moore, in fact, is fond of repeating that these powers we
invest things with are comfort blankets for those who believe in them.
They actively want someone, or something, to be “in control” - for at least
that will be a world in which things make sense – even if that “sense”
results in our wholly understandable oppression. The much harder, and
more anarchistic, thing to believe, however, is that, whether now in type 1
or type 2 senses, no one is in control, there is no plan that is either known
or can be known – and, horror of horrors, – it might actually be all up to us
to imagine and make real.

I could go on but I will leave it here for now, lest this become like a typical
Alan Moore interview in which, especially with a sympathetic conversation
partner, Moore may begin discussing a subject before diverting, again and
again, into 25 or 35 completely different subjects and end up somewhere

316
you could never have imagined from the place in which he began. Yet
this, in a way, is also a metaphor for anarchy and anarchism as Moore
understands them, matters of what you can imagine, what you can think,
what your consciousness can conjure up and is capable of – not least in
the connections it can create and the relations it can forge. This is not a
place of coercion or domination but of open exploration in the sea of
language in which all that exists is the fictions we can use the language
we are submerged in to create. You can do this by yourself or you can do
it with others – and there are joys and pitfalls to be found in both. But, in
either case, what remains is the diversity, the creativity possibility, of
imagination. [Diversity, remember, is how living things survive according
to the fiction of evolution.] Archetypally, it seems that, for Alan Moore, this
insight was based on a formative experience in the Northampton Arts Lab.
I will let him explain this, to close, as my closing thought of this chapter on
the intellectual anarchism of Alan Moore:

“The only organisation I have ever enjoyed being a part of was the
Northampton Arts Lab, when I was seventeen. Arts Labs are a
phenomenon that no longer exist. They only existed for the late sixties,
early seventies. I can’t even begin to describe the effect that had upon
me, and I suspect that it would be difficult to measure the effect they had
on British culture. It was basically the idea that in any town, anywhere,
there was nothing to stop like-minded people who were interested in any
form of art, getting together and forming completely anarchic
experimental arts workshops—magazines, live events, whatever they
could imagine doing. And it was completely nonhierarchical, and it worked
fine. There would be other artists you respect, and you would talk about
possible collaborations. I’ve not seen another organisation like that, and
therefore I’ve never joined another organisation until this magic cabal,
which we’ve just made up as we went along. It’s pretty much the same to
me—art and magic are synonymous. It’s just that this is a magic lab,
rather than an arts lab. That sort of organisation, where it is arranged in a
natural, neurological pattern—I mean it was the Arts Labs that gave us

317
 David Bowie, from Beckenham Arts Lab—, and I can see that kind of
consciousness that he was bringing to it, the mixed media. To me, that is
the only organisation that works. To me, any other organisation has got a
whiff of fascism. I’m not using the word in the sense of, ‘All politicians are
fascist.’ I think all girl guides are fascists. It’s ‘facia,’ the roman word for a
bunch of bound twigs, and that was the original symbol for fascism,
and the symbolism of it is that one twig can be broken but in unity, there
is strength. Inevitably, this translates as, ‘In uniformity there is strength.’
The twigs will be tied together in a neater and stronger bundle if they are
all the same size and length. That’s fascism. It suggests that you have two
contrary organisational principles involved [here]. One is a kind of linear,
meccano-like organization—tie up all the sticks, make sure they are the
same length, and you have a brick wall or something. The other one—
anarchy—is a more fractal, more natural, more human organisational
system in that it organises society in much the same way that we
organise our personalities, where it is purely the interplay of neurons. We
haven’t got a king neuron that tells all the other neurons what to do. It
seems to me to be a more emotionally natural way of working with other
people.”

Quite.

ELEVEN: Emma Goldman’s Personal and Political Freedom

Had I been alive in Emma Goldman’s New York in the beginning of the
twentieth century, I feel sure that I would have been drawn into her orbit
like a moth to a flame. I may eventually have ended up becoming a pest,
like one man in her memoir, Living My Life, seems to have become in this
period of her life and who would suddenly appear at her meetings all
across the United States, seemingly unable to leave Goldman’s life alone
and go about his own. I must admit that, the more of Goldman’s memoir I
have read, the more I can understand the unreflective impulses of this
man. This is not because of any desire to hamper or possess Goldman, nor

318
even to monopolise her time [judging by her memoir, she would have
violently hated all three of these], but simply because there is in her
message, and the way she lived her life, something overwhelmingly
attractive and possessed of an irresistible magnetic pull.

Emma Goldman is also someone I have written about before and, as in the
other cases, here I want to say other things about her than I said in the
other place [book 1 of There is Nothing To Stick To for those interested].
What particularly strikes me about Goldman, when I take a look at all of
the literary material about her life I can lay my hands on [primarily first
hand material authored by Goldman herself], is how the personal and the
political – or the individual and the social – are so tightly wound and
implicated one with another. Unreflectively, it is perhaps the case that we
think of Goldman - “Red Emma” in the popular parlance of her time in
New York [1889-1919] – as a socially-concerned fire brand who was
primarily concerned with the organisation of society and the domination
one tiny [but powerful] part exhibited over the rest. It seems that she was
indeed this and, in terms of her whole life, in more contexts than merely
an American one. But there is more to it than this when one starts to ask
what the Emma Goldman who also lectured about women’s rights,
homosexuality, modern culture, the contents of various books or plays or
even the education of children was doing as well. One starts to get the
impression that, in the thought and life of Emma Goldman, the “egoism”
of an individualist anarchism and the “communism” of a social anarchism
are being married together to produce a happy union of them both.

This, at least, is the impression I get, and so the interpretation I shall

pursue, in this chapter. To this end, I begin with a story Goldman tells in
her memoir, Living My Life, about her time when she had been in New
York for a short while and had been introduced to Sasha [Alexander]
Berkman and Johann Most, among others, those involved in the anarchist
politics of New York amongst its various immigrant populations. [Goldman
herself had experience of Russian, Jewish and German communities in her

319
childhood.] On one occasion, she recalls, she had been asked to help
encourage some young women to join a strike. This was when Goldman
herself was first becoming used to public speaking [still only in her very
early 20s] and she says that “the justice of the strike helped me to
dramatize my talks and to carry conviction”. Within a few weeks Goldman
had persuaded dozens of women to join the strike.

This inspired Goldman’s own confidence in her own abilities and in the
cause itself. Now I shall let her take up the story as she tells it in Living My
Life:

“I became alive once more. At the dances I was one of the most untiring
and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside.
With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear
comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to
dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was
undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist
movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind
his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into
my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal,
for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice,
should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could
not expect me to became a nun and that the movement should not be
turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom,
the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world
— prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the
condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful
ideal.”

Those in any way familiar with the story of Emma Goldman will

320
immediately recognise this story as the source of the quote “If I can’t
dance, its not my revolution” - with which Goldman is regularly credited
although, as one can see here, she almost certainly never said those
words herself. But she clearly did mean something like them and that
“quote”, and the story Goldman herself tells that inspires it, both amount
to an intense personal desire to be allowed to express herself as she will
and – more than this – that her “beautiful ideal”, as she calls the idea of
anarchism, is something which explicitly mandates such a thing in her
thinking. This is a very important point for we see it repeated throughout
Goldman’s written output throughout her anarchist career.

We also see it, for example, in her account of her earliest lecture tour,
organised somewhat against her will by the anarchist organiser, Johann
Most, which was a tour of Rochester, New York, Buffalo, New York, and
Cleveland, Ohio. Goldman had been invited to read out Most’s notes, not
being confident in her own speaking abilities as one with no experience of
such things at such a young age and a concern that she might wither with
the focus of the spotlight upon her. It is also true to say that she had come
to idolize Most as one saying all the things Goldman imagined to feel in
her heart. But Goldman experienced these speaking engagements as an
awakening and a realization that anarchism was about more than reading
someone else’s script, no matter how much you agreed with it or revered
the writer. As Goldman herself states:

“I realized I was committing a crime against myself and the workers by

serving as a parrot repeating Most’s views. I understood why I had
failed to reach my audience. I had taken refuge in cheap jokes and bitter
thrusts against the toilers to cover up my own inner lack of conviction. My
first public experience did not bring the result Most had hoped for, but it
taught me a valuable lesson. It cured me somewhat of my childlike
faith in the infallibility of my teacher and impressed on me the need of
independent thinking.”

321
It is the “independent thinking” that is most important there for it
indicates in Goldman an early recognition that anarchism is something
you do from yourself. In fact, its authenticity lies exactly in this fact about
it: it is honest in entirely this sense and absolutely not a script or a plan or
an ideology in the sense of some idealist notion which fits over and orders
society because you have picked it out as “the best general idea”.
Anarchism, thought Goldman, is a matter of thinking for yourself, living
your own life and expressing yourself as you see fit. In that context, the
inauthenticity of some “one size fits all” script, no matter how
theoretically “on point” and no matter who wrote it, can only be a betrayal
of anarchism, because of yourself, in itself.

Fast forward almost two decades to 1908. Emma Goldman’s lifelong

companion, Sasha Berkman, has, in this time, been imprisoned for 14
years [1892-1906] for the attempted murder of a factory manager who
was oppressing his striking workers and virulently anti-union. Goldman
herself has also been imprisoned, for ten months from 1893 to 1894, for
“inciting to riot” after an open air talk encouraging people to
“demonstrate before the palaces of the rich”, during which she said
“demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny
you both, take bread”, had caught the attention of the police. Whilst in
prison, Goldman had befriended a doctor and became interested in
medicine. She would then take up an on/off nursing career for several
years in order to earn some money. By 1908, not least due to the
assassination of President McKinley in 1901 by a man she had met, Leon
Czolgosz [whom in print she attempted to defend in his person if not in his
specific act], and whom the papers linked directly to Goldman as the
inspiration of, if not the direct reason for, the act, Goldman was now
famous across America as an anarchist speaker and agitator with a strong
reputation in her own right. By this time, along with the now released
Berkman and others, she had begun the publication of her magazine,
Mother Earth, in which much of her own thought was produced until 1917
before her further imprisonment [for attempting to stop people being

322
drafted into the US armed forces upon the USA entering World War 1] and
her subsequent deportation [under an immigration act which now forbade
any promotion of anarchism from immigrants] in 1919 brought that to an
end.

The Emma Goldman of 1908, now well used to a furore and mass police
presence wherever she is announced to speak [including the police
summarily deciding she is not to be allowed to speak, in seeming
contravention of the First Amendment, dispersing the assembled crowd
with their clubs if necessary and perhaps even taking Goldman into
custody], still has “a beautiful ideal”, however. This is shown, for instance,
in that “A Beautiful Ideal” was exactly the title of the lecture she was to
have given before the Edelstadt Social on March 17th, 1908, at
Workingmens’ Hall, 12th & Waller Streets, Chicago. However, the reason
that she didn’t, in the end, do this was that she was prevented from doing
so by Captain Mahoney of Maxwell Street Station with a squad of about
fifty police. The young Emma Goldman of the beautiful ideal who, at first,
had been sent out by Johann Most to read his script and who was chided
for dancing too enthusiastically was now a woman of almost 40 with a
message so feared the police routinely attempted to stop her from even
addressing her audience. But what was Emma Goldman’s beautiful ideal?

This talk, as a script only 3 pages long, begins with the canard [a freely
traded canard in the newspapers and public opinion of the time] that
anarchism is violence. Goldman agrees that anarchism is destructive, but
not in the way its opponents mean:

“Anarchism does stand for the destruction of the institutions that have
been and are keeping the human mind in bondage and that are robbing
mankind of the right to the use of the necessities of life. Viewed from the
standpoint of cents and dollars, anarchism is truly impracticable, and
those whose aim in life is wealth and power will do well to keep out of the
anarchist movement. But measured by true value, namely, human

323
character, integrity and real usefulness to society, anarchism is the most
practical of all theories—a proposition which I shall attempt to prove.”

Goldman then presents what she regards as the anarchist difference:

“Anarchism is a theory of human development which lays no less stress

than socialism upon the economic or materialistic aspect of social
relations; but while granting that the cause of the immediate evil is an
economic one we believe that the solution of the social question
confronting us today must be wrought out from the equal consideration of
the whole of our experience. To understand society as a whole it
behooves the social student to analyze the separate atoms of society—
namely, the individual and the motives that prompt every individual and
every collective act. What are these motives? First, the individual instinct,
standing for self-expression; second, the social instinct, which inspires
collective and social life. These instincts in their latent condition are never
antagonistic to each other. On the contrary, they are dependent upon one
another for their complete and normal development. Unfortunately, the
organization of society is such that these instincts are being brought
into constant antagonism.” [italics mine]

What Goldman is saying here is directly linking individuals and

communities. She is not privileging one over the other, which many
politically and socially concerned people are prone to do, but regarding
each of them as important in their own right – but also as harmonious with
the other if left to themselves and uncoerced. Goldman, in this
formulation of her beautiful ideal, neither denies that individuals exist with
important concerns nor that societies are larger entities that contain
them. What is important, from her perspective, is that they exist in
non-”antagonistic” ways.

Having given two examples of those excessively individualist and those

excessively communal [her example of the later is the anarchist, Louise

324
Michel, who “to satisfy her great soul… was compelled to deny her
individual instinct to the extent of living in great and constant poverty”],
Goldman positions anarchism as that ideal which acknowledges,
harmonizes and balances the two:

“Anarchism in its scientific and philosophic calculations represents that

force in human life which can harmonize and bring into unity the
individual and social instincts of the individual and society.”

Goldman diagnoses two problems in regard to this anarchist harmony,

however, and these are “property” and “authority”. The latter Goldman
describes as, amongst other things, “the absolute disregard of individual
life in the organization that for want of a better name stands for society”;
the former is “the monopoly of things—the denial of the right of others to
their use”. Here:

“the first tendency of anarchism is to make good the dignity of the

individual human being by freeing him from every kind of arbitrary
restraint—economic, political, social. In so doing anarchism proposes to
make apparent, in their true force, the social bonds which always have
and always will knit men together and which are the actual basis of a real
normal and sane society.”

Here it is interesting this is “the first tendency” for it shows that “the
dignity of the individual human being” is uppermost in Goldman’s mind
and that she regards property and authority as problems in that they
remove or constrain such dignity. Only by repairing and restoring this
dignity does Goldman think that “society” can function as it should, free of
“the coercive and arbitrary tendency of centralization in either the
industrial or political life of a people.” Goldman then goes on to say that:

“Man has been degraded into a mere part of a machine and all that makes
for spontaneity, for originality, for the power of initiative, has been either

325
 dulled or completely killed in him until he is but a living corpse, dragging
out an aimless, spiritless and idealess existence. Man is here to be
sacrificed upon the altar of things, heaps and heaps of things, that are as
dark and dull as the human machines that have produced them. Yet how
can we talk of social wealth when the production of that wealth can be
attained only at the expense of human lives, thousands and thousands of
human lives? And what are these lives worth without the power of
initiative, of spontaneity?”

In the closing to this lecture Goldman goes on to talk about “the building
of human character or human possibilities” and “natural growth and
development” as other desirables that are part of her “beautiful ideal”.
These, however, she states, are not aided by “monopoly and government”
which must, consequently, be overthrown. Yet this is only one lecture and
not the longest one at that. How, we might ask, do such beliefs fit into a
wider context of Emma Goldman’s beliefs about anarchism? As it
happens, a few months after the date that was set for this lecture, Emma
Goldman wrote a piece called “What I Believe” which was published by
the New York World in July 1908. In this piece Goldman lays out her
anarchist agenda for imagined general readers against the constant
background of “blood-curdling and incoherent stories” that both the press
and others told about her. Goldman begins in “What I Believe” by toying
with the popular image of her:

“it is no wonder that the average human being has palpitation of the heart
at the very mention of the name Emma Goldman. It is too bad that we no
longer live in the times when witches were burned at the stake or tortured
to drive the evil spirit out of them. For, indeed, Emma Goldman is a witch!
True, she does not eat little children, but she does many worse things.
She manufactures bombs and gambles in crowned heads. B-r-r-r!”

But this, of course, is only a sensationalist, newspaper-generated image. It

is not the image of a woman who has a beautiful ideal. In this piece

326
Goldman aims to set this out and, doing so, she develops themes from the
former lecture in a context in which subjects for lectures, as well as her
beliefs, were a boiling pot of constantly regurgitated values that she might
need to call up at any one time at the various meetings, lectures,
speeches and other occasions that she was called upon to speak at. Thus,
at the beginning of “What I Believe”, she can say that:

“’What I believe’ is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods
and governments, not for the human intellect. While it may be true that
Herbert Spencer’s formulation of liberty is the most important on the
subject, as a political basis of society, yet life is something more than
formulas. In the battle for freedom, as Ibsen has so well pointed out, it is
the struggle for, not so much the attainment of, liberty, that develops all
that is strongest, sturdiest and finest in human character.”

Here Goldman both shows her acquaintance with authors and thinkers
[she was, in fact, a keen reader, although one wonders, reading her
memoir, where she ever found the time, and equally eager to be well
informed in matters of thought, philosophy and literary culture] but also
that she regards life as both a “batte for freedom” and a “struggle” in
words not unNietzschean. [Goldman had discovered, and loved, the books
of Nietzsche she had first read in the mid 1890s – much to the chagrin of
her then lover, Ed Brady, who had despised them.] Thus, she can speak
about “organic development” in this context as well. Anarchists, according
to Goldman in this piece, are not “passive spectators” and she continues
her essay by taking a topical approach to it. The first subject is once again
the matter of property.

Property, Goldman once more asserts, means “dominion over things and
the denial to others of the use of those things.” The issue she has with
this is that:

“It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of

327
people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power
of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood who pile up mountains of
wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence
for themselves.”

This is not the life of “radiant things” Goldman had imagined when
upbraided by the boy at the dance earlier in her life. So, in fact, property
becomes a “humiliating and degrading situation” and anarchism directly
rebuts and betters the notion of property by catering to a human
individual’s needs and requirements specifically in Goldman’s thinking.
This is because:

“it points out that man’s development, his physical well-being, his latent
qualities and innate disposition alone must determine the character and
conditions of his work. Similarly will one’s physical and mental
appreciations and his soul cravings decide how much he shall consume.
To make this a reality will, I believe, be possible only in a society based on
voluntary cooperation of productive groups, communities and societies
loosely federated together, eventually developing into a free communism,
actuated by a solidarity of interests. There can be no freedom in the large
sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and
commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of
personal conduct.”

So, once again, Goldman has begun talking about what is necessary for
the singular human being in their own needs and requirements but ended
up talking about the social conditions necessary to bring them about. This
is exactly where, and how, she aims to satisfy the egoist’s need for
personal fulfillment and meaning but, at the same time, satisfy the
socialist’s need for a fair and equitable state of society. It is just that, for
Goldman, it is the first that seems to motivate the second. We need a fair
and equitable society because it is only that way that the individual
human being can reach their highest potential or practice a total freedom

328
of personal expression.

It is in this sense that in her next section – dealing with government –

Goldman feels enabled to say that anarchism – which is “the absence of
government” - “will insure the widest and greatest scope for unhampered
human development, the cornerstone of true social progress and
harmony.” In this formulation again we see that the greatest individual
possibility is paired with an ideal of genuine social progress. Thus, given
this double interest, it is inevitable that government must be judged
negatively:

“I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only

to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in
that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being
and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands
condemned by all the great men of the world.” [italics original]

The problem with government from Goldman’s perspective is that it can

neither provide the conditions she sees as necessary for personal
development and liberty but neither does it actually do any of the things it
claims it is good for. It doesn’t, for example, stop crime and, in fact, it
keeps creating more and more criminals with every law it makes. This
necessitates a veritable army of people detailed to “security” and creates
a security state mentality in which the nature and behaviour of society is
then dictated to by a security elite. Goldman, on the other hand, talks of
“the best modern medical methods” as being matters of “the spirit of a
deeper sense of fellowship, kindness and understanding” which seems to
echo the psychology that if you treat people badly, they will act badly but
if you treat people well, they will act well. Thus, she argues that
government is not only a thing which seizes control, constricting and
damaging the potential for human possibility, but it is also a thing which,
by its very existence, projects an unhealthy psychology onto the people it
presumes to keep under its jurisdiction.

329
This thought continues when Goldman goes on, in the next section of
“What I Believe”, to discuss militarism. Here she characterises the
militarist spirit as “heartless and brutal” and she refers to the case of
Private William Buwalda, a soldier of 15 years good standing stationed in
San Francisco who had gone to one of her lectures and shook her hand.
Buwalda had then been court martialled by his superiors for the imagined
crime of attending a public meeting and was sentenced to five years in a
military prison. A general at the time had referred to Bulwalda’s actions as
“a great military offense” that he should mix with such as the anarchist
Goldman who, for her part, described this as the absolute opposite of the
free speech Americans were supposed to believe in and uphold. She adds:
“Can there be anything more destructive of the true genius of liberty than
the spirit that made Buwalda’s sentence possible — the spirit of
unquestioning obedience?” She goes on to describe militarism and the
military attitude, beloved of states and governments, as “indicative of the
decay of liberty” in an argument which amounts to the belief that one can
have liberty or one can have obedience to authority: but one cannot have
both! Goldman, due to her belief in personal freedom which allowed
personal expression – and which was best secured by a social anarchism
of freely given cooperation and mutual aid – chose liberty without a
second thought. In this regard, she skewers those militarists and lovers of
military might who would call anarchists bomb throwers when she refers
to:

“peace pretenders who oppose Anarchism because it supposedly teaches

violence, and who would yet be delighted over the possibility of the
American nation soon being able to hurl dynamite bombs upon
defenseless enemies from flying machines.“

Who, asks Goldman, accusingly, and already knowing the answer, is the
violent one now? And why, when it comes to states with armies, navies
and air forces, is violence suddenly not wrong at all when any random
political figure who has even met or read about an anarchist is painted as

330
the person of violence as if that were an unremittingly bad thing? The
double standard is exposed for all to see and Goldman, finishing her
remarks on militarism, refers to “human brotherhood and solidarity” as
the answer to human problems and not “war and destruction”.

The fourth topic Emma Goldman covers in “What I Believe” is free speech
and the press. Goldman, in her activist life to that point, had suffered from
a policed lack of the first on numerous occasions and the acid tongue of
the latter many times, including all kinds of lurid descriptions of her
imagined depravity which influenced public opinion. For the Goldman
concerned about personal and so social freedoms, however, the answer to
these phenomena are quite simple: “I believe, however, that the cure of
consequences resulting from the unlimited exercise of expression is to
allow more expression.” This is a familiar answer to an anarchist where
the answer to lack of freedom is more of it, the answer to lack of
democracy is more of it and, for Goldman, the answer to lack of personal
expression is also more of it too. Goldman argues that places which allow
more freedom of expression experience less social problems [seemingly
as a result]. Consequently, she argues that in those places where the
government squeezes the hand of oppression more tightly, ever more
destructive consequences escape the controlling grasp. So she complains
about the police with their clubs not allowing people to hold meetings
[which is her own personal experience talking] but also about the
Postmaster General who, according to American law at the time, was
empowered to “suppress publications and confiscate mail” in a world
where interpersonal communication of any detail was by post, including
much anarchist or more broadly civil rights literature. Goldman whines
that a new Declaration of Independence is required. And the year after
this she would herself write one.

Besides also briefly talking about “the Church” in this article [described
variously as “an organized institution that has always been a stumbling
block to progress” and “a nightmare that oppresses the human soul and

331
holds the mind in bondage”], Goldman also wishes to discuss “acts of
violence” which would have been things the readers of New York World
would have been trained [if only by other, more partisan, publications] to
associate Emma Goldman with. Goldman herself is wise to this when she
begins, imitating her supposed accusers:

“’Well, come, now, don’t you propagate violence, the killing of crowned
heads and Presidents?’ Who says that I do? Have you heard me, has
anyone heard me? Has anyone seen it printed in our literature? No, but
the papers say so, everybody says so; consequently it must be so. Oh, for
the accuracy and logic of the dear public!”

Her response is to go in a direction that I myself copied [unwittingly, I

might add] in my earlier “Declaration of Peace” when she argues that
“Anarchism is the only philosophy of peace, the only theory of the social
relationship that values human life above everything else.” In contrast to
anarchism, Goldman claims that “Every institution to-day rests on
violence” and contextualises any individual act of anarchist violence
[which even she cannot deny] by saying that “No act committed by an
Anarchist has been for personal gain, aggrandizement or profit, but rather
a conscious protest against some repressive, arbitrary, tyrannical
measure from above.” If and when anarchists have committed acts of
violence, she says, they have always explained their reasoning and the
greater goods they hoped to achieve by it. In comparison, state violence is
casual and without justification. Furthermore, even though such states, by
means of violence, may claim to bring order rather than the anarchists’
chaos, this is, once more, a mischaracterisation of the anarchist. Here
Goldman says:

“True, we do not believe in the compulsory, arbitrary side of organization

that would compel people of antagonistic tastes and interests into a body
and hold them there by coercion. Organization as the result of natural
blending of common interests, brought about through voluntary adhesion,

332
 Anarchists do not only not oppose, but believe in as the only possible
basis of social life.”

And, thus, she returns to her theme of:

“the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form
— the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the
organized activity of free human beings endowed with the spirit of
solidarity result in the perfection of social harmony — which is Anarchism.
Indeed, only Anarchism makes non-authoritarian organization a reality,
since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and
classes.”

But there is one theme from “What I Believe” that I have left until last.
This is because it provides a deeper insight into the character of Emma
Goldman whilst also perfectly illustrating my theme of the personal and
the political in her life and thought. In this essay she refers to it as
“marriage and love” but often, elsewhere, it goes by the shorthand “the
sex question” in her writing and speaking. It is essentially the issue of
women’s rights and their total emancipation, the subject which
encourages feminists to see in Goldman one of their leading torchbearers
and earliest examples. In the terms of an anarchafeminism, Goldman is a
good example of that anarchafeminist mentality that, until or unless
everyone is free, then no one is free.

In her own day Emma Goldman regarded talking about the emancipation
of women as perhaps the most taboo subject she could possibly raise.
[Perhaps with good reason. When she was later deported permanently
from the USA, in 1919, the US Attorney General doing the deporting,
Alexander M. Palmer, “particularly objected to her views on birth control,
free love and religion.”] Consider, for example, her opening of the subject
in “What I Believe”:

333
“I believe these are probably the most tabooed subjects in this country. It
is almost impossible to talk about them without scandalizing the cherished
propriety of a lot of good folk. No wonder so much ignorance prevails
relative to these questions. Nothing short of an open, frank, and intelligent
discussion will purify the air from the hysterical, sentimental rubbish that
is shrouding these vital subjects, vital to individual as well as social well-
being.”

Note, again, that there she refers to individual and social well-being which
are clearly linked together in her thought. Where women fit into this,
however, is in their position in society for, as Goldman [as others such as
her sometime colleague and friend, Voltairine de Cleyre] saw it, many
women were locked in a prison of marriage which gave men control over
their finances, their bodies and their very lives. Emma Goldman herself
was certainly no fan of marriage [although she was herself married twice,
the first time a youthful indiscretion she quickly regretted and the second
a marriage of convenience to gain British citizenship in 1925] and her
consistent belief in, and practice of, “free love” [not love which costs no
money but love which is not constrained by other relationships or
entanglements – what today might be called “no strings attached”
relationships] should be enough evidence of that. However, in case one
needs more, here she depicts marriage as:

“often an economic arrangement purely, furnishing the woman with a

lifelong life insurance policy and the man with a perpetuator of his kind or
a pretty toy. That is, marriage, or the training thereto, prepares the
woman for the life of a parasite, a dependent, helpless servant, while it
furnishes the man the right of a chattel mortgage over a human life.”

Clearly, such a social arrangement neither promotes personal nor social

freedom and neither does it provide the radiant things her beautiful ideal
imagines either. Fundamentally, Goldman does not see that marriage
need have anything to do with love – and it is love that for her is the

334
important thing and the furtherance of its possibility that matters rather
than an institution which, from a woman’s perspective, is little short of a
prison society makes necessary for her if a woman wants to survive. Here
it is important to note that Emma Goldman conceives of love as “the
element that would forego all the wealth of money and power and live in
its own world of untrammeled human expression”. So if this is love as
Goldman conceives of it, something that lives in its own world, then it
follows, if we have been following Goldman’s argumentation as I have
tried to set it out in this chapter, that what is required is the social
conditions necessary for it to flourish. It is here we see Emma Goldman at
her rhetorical best:

“I believe when woman signs her own emancipation, her first declaration
of independence will consist in admiring and loving a man for the qualities
of his heart and mind and not for the quantities in his pocket. The second
declaration will be that she has the right to follow that love without let or
hindrance from the outside world. The third and most important
declaration will be the absolute right to free motherhood.”

More than just marriage, however, Emma Goldman can see that society,
as it is, forces women to sell themselves to men, in each case seemingly
in return for sexual favours, in more ways than one. Prostitution is also an
issue she addresses but in it she sees not the lax morals of seductive
women who are luring honest, upright men into immorality but a

“system which forces women to sell their womanhood and independence

to the highest bidder [which] is a branch of the same evil system which
gives to a few the right to live on the wealth produced by their fellow men,
99 percent of whom must toil and slave early and late for barely enough
to keep soul and body together, while the fruits of their labour are
absorbed by a few idle vampires who are surrounded by every luxury
wealth can purchase.”

335
As Emma Goldman sees it in this quote from an earlier 1896 essay called
“Anarchy and the Sex Question”, it is the reigning social system itself
which is at fault. Here she contrasts “the homes of the wealthy, those
magnificant palaces” with

“them herded together in dark, damp cellars, where they never get a
breath of fresh air, clothed in rags, carrying their loads of misery from the
cradle to the grave, their children running around the streets, naked,
starved, without anyone to give them a loving word or tender care,
growing up in ignorance and superstition, cursing the day of their birth”.

Goldman asks her readers who might be to blame for this [although she
surely already has her own answer to hand!]:

“tell me who is to be blamed for it! Those who are driven to prostitution,
whether legal or otherwise, or those who drive their victims to such
demoralisation? The cause lies not in prostitution, but in society itself; in
the system of inequality of private property and in the State and Church.
In the system of legalized theft, murder and violation of the innocent
women and helpless children.”

The issue here is that human beings - which includes all women! - “must
be free to commence a new life, a better and nobler life” and Goldman
insists that prostitution “will exist as long as the system exists which
breeds it” - although it is not clear here if she refers to the illegal kind of
prostitution alone or the legal kind [marriage] she likewise impugns.

Another place she discusses these issues is in the seminal 1910 essay
“The Traffic in Women”, an essay which later feminists in the twentieth
century have lauded as one of the founding feminist essays. Here
Goldman, discussing prostitution once again, compares it to the economic
industrial system:

336
“Prostitution has been, and is, a widespread evil, yet mankind goes on its
business, perfectly indifferent to the sufferings and distress of the victims
of prostitution. As indifferent, indeed, as mankind has remained to our
industrial system, or to economic prostitution.”

Goldman fully exploits the linkages between these different spheres of

exploitation in this essay, both pointing them out and highlighting that no
one really seems to care about the various victims. The issue is that
everywhere women are exploited and largely on the same basis: sex.
Indeed, the prevailing economic and social conditions largely regard
women as simply sex and thus women everywhere are put in the position
of having to sell themselves as it:

“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather
as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right
to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is
merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or
out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not,
the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for
prostitution.”

Thus, Goldman firmly puts the ball in the court of a social system which
forces desperate people to take courses of action which are likely to put
food in their mouths and a roof over their heads. Should we blame them?
Goldman clearly thinks not for she impugns the system and never
individuals who have made coerced economic choices. The problem is
that a great number of women simply do not have their own economic
independence [Goldman herself, as a younger woman, once had a job in a
factory which paid a paltry $2.50 a week for 52.5 hours of work. It was a
wage so insufficient she asked the boss for a raise which he refused to
give. And so she quit the job] which leads, in turn, to a system of vice
which is the direct result, in a great many cases, of insufficient
renumeration for more socially acceptable labour.

337
But that women are an exploited sex is not Emma Goldman’s only
complaint in “The Traffic in Women”. She also complains that women are
totally ignored when it comes to sex education and are regarded,
culturally speaking, as merely things which men will take care of [for a
price]. So, for example, she can opine that:

“It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity,

and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance
of sex. Everything dealing with that subject is suppressed, and persons
who attempt to bring light into this terrible darkness are persecuted and
thrown into prison. Yet it is nevertheless true that so long as a girl is not
to know how to take care of herself, not to know the function of the most
important part of her life, we need not be surprised if she becomes an
easy prey to prostitution, or to any other form of a relationship which
degrades her to the position of an object for mere sex gratification. “

Here it should be noted that Emma Goldman became very active, in

especially the second decade of the twentieth century [prior to her
imprisonment in 1917, at least], concerning the tricky subject of teaching
about birth control for women as a means to them taking control of their
own sexual lives. This was “tricky” not least because it could be adjudged
illegal since it was regarded as obscene. Indeed, Goldman was herself
arrested [twice] and imprisoned [once, for two weeks, after she refused to
pay her initial penalty fine of $100] for giving lessons in public on how to
use contraceptives. She decried “the double standard of morality” which
allowed men to have their head but kept women cloistered and confined.
Goldman spoke of this in “The Traffic in Women” as involving:

“the keeping of the young in absolute ignorance on sex matters, which

alleged ‘innocence,’ together with an overwrought and stifled sex nature,
helps to bring about a state of affairs that our Puritans are so anxious to
avoid or prevent.”

338
Once more, Goldman linked the state of society with the behaviour
subsequently produced. Indeed, she impugns and accuses several arms
and practices of that society in the behaviour produced when she says:

“Girls, mere children, work in crowded, over-heated rooms ten to twelve

hours daily at a machine, which tends to keep them in a constant
overexcited sex state. Many of these girls have no home or comforts of
any kind; therefore the street or some place of cheap amusement is the
only means of forgetting their daily routine. This naturally brings them
into close proximity with the other sex. It is hard to say which of the two
factors brings the girl’s over-sexed condition to a climax, but it is certainly
the most natural thing that a climax should result. That is the first step
toward prostitution. Nor is the girl to be held responsible for it. On the
contrary, it is altogether the fault of society, the fault of our lack of
understanding, of our lack of appreciation of life in the making; especially
is it the criminal fault of our moralists, who condemn a girl for all eternity,
because she has gone from the “path of virtue”; that is, because her first
sex experience has taken place with out the sanction of the Church.”

Here Goldman seems to feel for the lack of individual human possibility
which is snuffed out, almost at birth, by the debilitating social conditions
in which it is supposed to flourish but, of course, cannot – and so it goes
wherever it can find that which it needs. The girl who turns to prostitution,
in fact, is placed by society in a deplorable position. Not only is she
reduced to a sex object, something that serves the gratifications of those
who use her, but “she is also absolutely at the mercy of every policeman
and miserable detective on the beat, the officials at the station house, the
authorities in every prison.” Goldman then willingly calls out the cops, and
other officials, trading on their power and authority, essentially making
easy money by skimming off the top of such female labour, demanding
money with menaces. Many are the brothels kept in business by men in
order to look the other way or who offer it their “protection”. Once again,
it is women who were already poor who are the victims and the same

339
women who are exploited in yet another way. Goldman also here accuses
acquisitive American society itself “by the thoroughly American custom
for excessive display of finery and clothes” of promoting a society of
possession of things which, of course, takes money to play along with –
the so called “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality. This, thinks
Goldman, encourages the poor, not least women, to enter said race,
something that can only be to their detriment, financially and socially.

So what does “the emancipation of women” then mean for Goldman? We

start to get an answer in her essay “The Tragedy of Women’s
Emancipation”, another [as with “The Traffic in Women”] included in her
first book [published in 1910] Anarchism and Other Essays. First, she sees
it as part of a “general social antagonism which has taken hold of our
entire public life today.” Here we may see intimations of the disruptions
which forestall and stifle private joys and expressions and make
impossible the social conditions for their existence and peaceful
development. This antagonism, thinks Goldman, is “brought about
through the force of opposing and contradictory interests [and] will
crumble to pieces when the reorganization of our social life, based upon
the principles of economic justice, shall have become a reality.”

However, and here Goldman returns to the theme I have highlighted

before:

“The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to
solve, is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel
deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic
qualities. This seems to me to be the basis upon which the mass and the
individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman,
can meet without antagonism and opposition. The motto should not be:
Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another. “

Goldman’s point here as, I think, all through this chapter, has been how to

340
be authentically oneself [i.e. “retain one’s own characteristic qualities”]
whilst still being a social being that lives in a society that often works to
make sure that’s the last thing you can be. In this respect, and in regard
to women:

“Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the

truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity
should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken,
and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries
of submission and slavery.”

Now Emma Goldman was an anarchist and, as such, the problem of not
having enough freedom is resolved by getting more of it. But Goldman
makes this point in opposition to those who thought that they were also
working for women’s emancipation such as, for example, in the women’s
suffrage movement. [One, I hope, can imagine what Goldman might have
thought of the freedom to elect presidents and governments, things she
wished to see dispatched to the dumpster fire of history!]. Such
“emancipation” in Goldman’s mind was “merely external emancipation”
and left woman needing to “emancipate herself from emancipation”. What
Goldman wanted is woman “free to direct her own destiny” rather than
women free to join the coercive bear pit of politics or the business and
industrial worlds. In this context, one is reminded here of the words of
anarchafeminist, Peggy Kornegger, to the end that women are not freed
by becoming like men but by becoming free from men – and then freeing
the men as well! Here it is clear that women being granted suffrage rights
is not on Emma Goldman’s emancipation radar for she says:

“Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of
which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell
dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other.” There is no hope even that
woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.”

341
Goldman here also points out that the freedom of woman to “choose her
own profession or trade” is not the gain it might, at first, seem either - for
then women are simply set to competing with men in what is essentially a
man’s game. Thus, “Very few ever succeed, for it is a fact that women
teachers, doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers are neither met with
the same confidence as their male colleagues, nor receive equal
remuneration.” Thus, “how much independence is gained if the
narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the
narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweat-shop, department
store, or office?” This, Goldman seems to say, is not emancipation but
only a new kind of prison, only a new rigged game in which the dominant,
mostly men, have made sure they will always win, constraining the
freedom and liberty of the rest in order to do so. [And, let us not forget,
many of these women are still expected to be wives and mothers as well!]

No wonder, then, that many women simply settle for the old deal of
staying at home and being financially tied to a man – something Goldman
was driven to free them from in her own activism. Thus, the problem is
“The narrowness of the existing conception of woman’s independence and
emancipation” which would see the right to vote or the right to take a job
as any real sort of freedom at all. And so “Emancipation, as understood by
the majority of its adherents and exponents, is of too narrow a scope to
permit the boundless love and ecstasy contained in the deep emotion of
the true woman, sweetheart, mother, in freedom.” This, of course, is an
old trick of civilization: people say they want a thing, they get a thing that
is called the thing [but is not any meaningful type of the thing], and then
they are told that the thing they wanted they already have! Currently,
civilization is playing this game with “democracy” with people told that
they have this thing, it is very precious, and they had best hold onto it.
The problem is, however, that they do not have democracy now anymore
than the women Goldman was referring to had any genuine emancipation!
And, of course, the more authentic versions of these things are things
these same representatives of civilization would fight to deny you!

342
Of course, the people who want a surfeit of democracy or an overload of
emancipation are painted as cavalier, lawless, a danger to society – and
so, Goldman informs us, they were here too. She says that
“emancipation”, in the light of its opponents, “stood only for a reckless life
of lust and sin; regardless of society, religion, and morality.” Those
winning by certain practices will always claim that a change in practice is
either the end of the world or depravity and immorality gone mad. But
Goldman has much higher, and much more personal, visions. Tying
women’s freedom, in large part, to that of men’s freedom as well [you
can’t have one without the other], she thinks of the man who will see in
woman “not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade
and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of
her character.” This is, once again, an important and repeated point in
Goldman’s thought, that the individual, as part of society, as part of a
functioning web of relationships, not simply be subsumed or steamrollered
by it but, rather, that society be made up of people, full and authentic in
their character, such as this. Goldman sees a true emancipation of all as
being about more than “independence from external tyrannies”. If one
remains stuck in “ethical and social conventions” one is still not really
free. Here Emma Goldman takes her place alongside Hipparchia, the only
known female Cynic, as a comrade in arms.

It is now in “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation” that Goldman makes

her true appeal and, I think, reveals once more that, for her, anarchism
begins within. She says:

“Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and

clearer future. We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions
and habits. The movement for woman’s emancipation has so far made but
the first step in that direction. It is to be hoped that it will gather strength
to make another. The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good
demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts.
It begins in woman’s soul. History tells us that every oppressed class

343
 gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts. It is
necessary that woman learn that Iesson, that she realize that her freedom
will reach as far as her power to achieve her freedom reaches. It is,
therefore, far more important for her to begin with her inner regeneration,
to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs. The
demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after
all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial
emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman,
it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be
sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It
will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or
that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.”

That sound you can hear now is me cheering. Freedom, liberty and
anarchism begins in the soul! People should not be related to on the basis
of artificial divisions but as one humanity! These, I think, are anarchist
values [and I shall extrapolate on them more in my final chapter shortly].
Goldman ends this essay, though, with a further rallying call and, yet
again, it manages to embrace both the self and communal relations in one
formulation:

“Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the
bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes
will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great
thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer,
deeper, better.”

Now at this point it might be argued that perhaps this focus on creating a
communal environment suitable for the flourishing of the human
individual – which is what Emma Goldman regarded anarchism as both
meaning and implying - was but one phase of Goldman’s anarchist
activism, one which I have represented here. Her career, after all,
spanned 50 years from inexperienced young woman, aged 20, arriving in

344
New York for the first time to escape her father and the inadequate life
she had in Rochester, to the experienced and battle scarred campaigner
who finally breathed her last, aged 70, in Toronto, Canada, in 1940. But
this is not the case for one of the last things she ever wrote, in 1940 with
the world at war for a second time in 25 years, was titled “The Individual,
Society and the State”. It is perhaps the clearest and most concise
example of the thesis of creating social conditions that might best serve
the flourishing of every human individual that she ever wrote [her own,
quite remarkable, memoir, Living My Life, excepted which is a blow by
blow account of exactly the same thesis for, of course, it is Goldman’s own
soul and her own longing for freedom and expression which she is infusing
the whole of reality with in her arguments]. In “The Individual, Society and
the State” Emma Goldman takes her theme that has been with her for her
entire adulthood and, once again, wth her own death near, makes the
case for just such an anarchism – of which her work labouring on behalf of
women’s rights has been a major part. Thus, in closing this chapter on
Goldman’s anarchist thought, it is incumbent upon me to give an account
of it.

She begins, of course, in the context of 1940, by pointing out that

“capitalist industrialism” has failed and “parliamentarianism and
democracy” are on the decline. People have been seduced by “Fascism
and other forms of ‘strong’ government”. She sees the problems as much
more than to defeat a dictator here and a dictator there, however.
“Unemployment, war, disarmament, international relations” are part of
the crisis she diagnoses. What the crisis has done, however, is bring to the
table the question of how a people shall be governed. [Here Goldman sees
monarchy and either bourgeois or proletarian dictatorships as all types of
Fascism.] The choice before us Goldman sees as either solving the
problems of “democracy” by more democracy of the political kind that she
portrays as ailing or by use of “the sword of dictatorship” instead.

Goldman has a simple answer to this: “My answer is neither the one nor

345
the other. I am against dictatorship and Fascism as I am opposed to
parliamentary regimes and so-called political democracy.” But now she
warms to the theme that we have seen in her writing and lectures earlier,
the spark of individual integrity which an anarchist society would nurture
and fan into the flame of personal development and simple human
expression, and runs with it boldly. She asks, and answers, two particular
questions:

“What is civilization in the true sense? All progress has been essentially an
enlargement of the liberties of the individual with a corresponding
decrease of the authority wielded over him by external forces...

What role did authority or government play in human endeavor for

betterment, in invention and discovery? None whatever, or at least none
that was helpful. It has always been the individual that has accomplished
every miracle in that sphere, usually in spite of the prohibition,
persecution and interference by authority, human and divine.”

In this conception, government, or other overarching authority, plays no

part. “Civilization”, for Goldman, is the advance of the individual by the
means of reducing the authority of others over them. It is here the
individual, left free to live their own lives and follow their own ideas, who
is the motive force in society. Goldman is not afraid to fully embrace this
theme:

“The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not
exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the
“nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has
always been and, necessarily, is the sole source and motive power of
evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the
individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against
“society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the
State and State worship. Man’s greatest battles have been waged against

346
 man-made obstacles and artificial handicaps imposed upon him to
paralyze his growth and development. Human thought has always been
falsified by tradition and custom, and perverted false education in the
interests of those who held power and enjoyed privileges. In other words,
by the State and the ruling classes. This constant incessant conflict has
been the history of mankind.”

Here Goldman is definitely taking up the cause of “the individual” and its
enemies appear to be “the State” and “tradition and custom”, each of
which bind and constrain the individual unnecessarily and to their own
benefit but not its. Goldman’s pressing of the individualist cause turns
almost into eulogy:

“The very essence of individuality is expression; the sense of dignity and

independence is the soil wherein it thrives… The individual is not merely
the result of heredity and environment, of cause and effect. He is that and
a great deal more, a great deal else. The living man cannot be defined; he
is the fountain-head of all life and all values; he is not a part of this or of
that; he is a whole, an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always
constant whole.”

In case you are getting Ayn Rand vibes at this point, however, Goldman is
sure to point out that the “individualism” she is speaking about is not a
“rugged individualism” which is merely a cover for “the exploitation of the
masses”. So it is nothing to do with “a degrading race for externals, for
possession, for social prestige and supremacy [whose] highest wisdom is
‘the devil take the hindmost.’” Here, perhaps linking this sterile creed with
the American search for a master race I referred to in chapter six or
perhaps not, Goldman refers to America as “perhaps the best
representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political
tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while
every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social
opportunity to live is denounced as ‘unAmerican’ and evil in the name of

347
that same individualism.” The remarkable thing here is that Goldman
could say this as Hitler’s troops marched across Europe and its planes
tried to get the UK out of the war early – and the USA lay watching from
the sidelines.

But it is the State whole and entire that is in Goldman’s sights here rather
than choosing from equally unpalatable sides in a war. That is to say, it is
the State as the oppressor and exploiter of the individual that is in her
sights. In this regard, she can paint an image of a time before the states
came:

“There was a time when the State was unknown. In his natural condition
man existed without any State or organized government. People lived as
families in small communities; They tilled the soil and practiced the arts
and crafts. The individual, and later the family, was the unit of social life
where each was free and the equal of his neighbor. Human society then
was not a State but an association; a voluntary association for mutual
protection and benefit. The elders and more experienced members were
the guides and advisers of the people. They helped to manage the affairs
of life, not to rule and dominate the individual.”

The State, on the other hand, Goldman conjectures, grew “out of the
desire of the stronger to take advantage of the weaker”. It was, thus, a
matter of mentality. It invented legality and “right and wrong” to give
itself an imaginary role in their adjudication, one it could coerce the
people to support by picking that government which would best accord
with the popular sense of these things. It then “inoculated and
indoctrinated” the mass of people to such ways and set itself on a sure
foundation stone called ‘normality’ with agents of this authoritarian
normality in the home, the Church and the State, agents patriarchal,
ecclesiastical and civil. The task, in all cases, was to inculcate a belief in
authority. In amongst all this activity, the one thing that could not be
uttered was that “the State is nothing but a name. It is an abstraction.

348
Like other similar conceptions — nation, race, humanity — it has no
organic reality. To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency
to make a fetish of words.”

So Goldman recognises that “the State” has no genuine reality; it is

entirely artificial and made up. It exists only because people want it to
exist – and, if they didn’t, then it would. “Man, the individual, is the only
reality”, says Goldman, continuing: “It is the individual who lives, breathes
and suffers. His development, his advance, has been a continuous
struggle against the fetishes of his own creation and particularly so
against the ‘State.’” Arguing that “it is the individual who is the parent of
the liberating thought as well as of the deed,” Goldman here lays her
charges against all states and government:

“The State, every government whatever its form, character or color — be

it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or
Bolshevik — is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change
and opposed to it. Whatever changes it undergoes are always the result of
pressure exerted upon it, pressure strong enough to compel the ruling
powers to submit peaceably or otherwise, generally “otherwise” — that is,
by revolution. Moreover, the inherent conservatism of government, of
authority of any kind, unavoidably becomes reactionary. For two reasons:
first, because it is in the nature of government not only to retain the
power it has, but also to strengthen, widen and perpetuate it, nationally
as well as internationally. The stronger authority grows, the greater the
State and its power, the less it can tolerate a similar authority or political
power alongside of itself. The psychology of government demands that its
influence and prestige constantly grow, at home and abroad, and it
exploits every opportunity to increase it. This tendency is motivated by
the financial and commercial interests back of the government,
represented and served by it.”

This is a startling and compact analysis, one Goldman bolsters with

349
reference to government’s “fear of individuality” as a result, an
observation which tends to suggest Goldman has a sneaking suspicion
that all government is secretly fascist - in as much as it requires uniform
belief and obedience with “the luxury” of individual disagreement or
dissent not encouraged nor even permitted. The result, in the light of
Goldman’s belief that society as a whole should be the perfect garden in
which the flower of individual human lives can grow, is that:

“the State therefore suppresses, persecutes, punishes and even deprives

the individual of life. It is aided in this by every institution that stands for
the preservation of the existing order. It resorts to every form of violence
and force, and its efforts are supported by the ‘moral indignation’ of
the majority against the heretic, the social dissenter and the political rebel
— the majority for centuries drilled in State worship, trained in discipline
and obedience and subdued by the awe of authority in the home, the
school, the church and the press.”

The State and its controlling quorum of devotees – government – Goldman

here sees as an antagonistic apparatus of control over the mass of human
individuals it claims jurisdiction over. “Uniformity” is key [a thought
shared by Alan Moore in the previous chapter when discussing Fascism]
and:

“Its most concentrated dullness is ‘public opinion.’ Few have the courage
to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labeled
“queer,” “different,” and decried as a disturbing element in the
comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and

sameness that harass the individual most. His very ‘uniqueness,’
‘separateness’ and ‘differentiation’ make him an alien, not only in his
native place, but even in his own home.”

350
We see in this last quotation, once again, the paring of state control with
the customs and traditions which bind at a more intimate and personal
level in the way every action, even every thought, becomes something
self-policed as one is seen to have learned one’s social catechism, even
perhaps against one’s will by osmosis, as “society” has played it’s part in
delimiting the acceptable and the unacceptable ways to behave. Goldman
herself had seemingly always instinctively taken against this – at least her
memoir suggests such a thought – and her beliefs in things like
unconstrained free love based only on the mutual consent of those taking
part [and certainly not on any social notions about with whom or when it
was seemly to have sex] certainly set her on course for being seen as a
person of loose morals and disruptive influence in such customary terms.
[The further suggestion, seemingly backed up by some letters that were
found, that Goldman herself engaged in same sex encounters with at least
one woman would only heighten such fears in the “Puritans” she often
denounced in this respect.]

Here Goldman exhibits the Cynic streak I think a necessary part of all
anarchisms. Not only is she against the authority of the state, she is also
against public judgment of harmless and freely chosen individual
pleasures. As Goldman will repeat again and again throughout her life’s
work, “personality and individuality” trump, and should always trump, any
such social control. Indeed, in a piece of pure rhetorical flourish, Goldman
can say that such things bore their “way through all the caverns of
dogma, through the thick walls of tradition and custom, defying all taboos,
setting authority at naught, facing contumely and the scaffold —
ultimately to be blessed as prophet and martyr by succeeding
generations.” Better to die as one’s authentic self than to live as a slave!
[“That’s the spirit!” we hear Roy Batty whisper.]

It is this authentic self that Emma Goldman perhaps stands for most of all
and which comes from inside of her as a living force, first and foremost. It
is because of her own burning fire of individuality within [intellectual as

351
well as sexual] that she would extend the freedom to be who you are to
everyone else as well in a harmony and equity of individuality. It is for this
reason that she is most welcoming of Peter Kropotkin’s philosophy of
cooperation and mutual aid as the best social location for individuality to
flourish in. As she writes in “The Individual, Society and the State” in
regard to Kropotkin’s ideas, he “demonstrated that only mutual aid and
voluntary co-operation — not the omnipotent, all-devastating State — can
create the basis for a free individual and associational life.” Not for
Goldman, then, the “depersonalized human beings” of the State or of
capitalism. Not the uniform human beings who are not allowed to dissent
or go their own way of Fascism. Not the “cog in the machine” of
industrialism. Not the “voting and tax-paying puppets” of electoral
governmentalism. The State and the individual, in fact, are in Goldman’s
philosophy entirely antagonistic and at odds:

“The interests of the State and those of the individual differ fundamentally
and are antagonistic. The State and the political and economic institutions
it supports can exist only by fashioning the individual to their particular
purpose; training him to respect “law and order;” teaching him obedience,
submission and unquestioning faith in the wisdom and justice of
government; above all, loyal service and complete self-sacrifice when the
State commands it, as in war. The State puts itself and its interests even
above the claims of religion and of God. It punishes religious or
conscientious scruples against individuality because there is no
individuality without liberty, and liberty is the greatest menace to
authority.”

Thus, “Man’s true liberation, individual and collective, lies in his

emancipation from authority and from the belief in it.” This is a non-
negotiable and, with it, Goldman sets herself against both the State and
all states. One can have obedience or one can have freedom: but one
cannot have both! Being a person possessed of such independence and
beautiful ideas of radiant things for everyone – which is not least to be

352
found in the development and realisation of one’s own self – Goldman can
only then conceive that “True civilization is to be measured by the
individual, the unit of all social life; by his individuality and the extent to
which it is free to have its being to grow and expand unhindered by
invasive and coercive authority.” As such,

“true liberty is not a mere scrap of paper called ‘constitution,’ ‘legal right’
or ’law.’ It is not an abstraction derived from the non-reality known as ‘the
State.’ It is not the negative thing of being free from something, because
with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty, is
positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short,
the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”

Emma Goldman’s anarchism, whether interested in the education of

children in the New York Modern School she helped set up, the teaching of
contraceptive techniques to women, the needs of poor workers or the
freedom to love who, and when, you will, is, thus, all of a piece and is
based, first and foremost, on the ideal of the emancipation of the
individual to be as they will be. Anarchism must then necessarily become
a social phenomenon, and a social reality, for this is the only way in which
such individual possibility can be fruitfully nourished to its ideal extent.
Thus, Goldman’s political vision is as she lays out towards the end of “The
Individual, Society and the State”, this is that:

“Socially speaking, the criterion of civilization and culture is the degree of

liberty and economic opportunity which the individual enjoys; of social and
international unity and co-operation unrestricted by man-made laws and
other artificial obstacles; by the absence of privileged castes and by the
reality of liberty and human dignity; in short, by the true emancipation of
the individual. Political absolutism has been abolished because men have
realized in the course of time that absolute power is evil and destructive.
But the same thing is true of all power, whether it be the power of
privilege, of money, of the priest, of the politician or of so-called

353
democracy. In its effect on individuality it matters little what the particular
character of coercion is — whether it be as black as Fascism, as yellow as
Nazism or as pretentiously red as Bolshevism. It is power that corrupts
and degrades both master and slave and it makes no difference whether
the power is wielded by an autocrat, by parliament or Soviets. More
pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible
— the tyranny of a majority.”

Thus, what matters most of all is liberty – for it is what enables and
facilitates anything else. It was this Goldman wanted for women, liberty
from the authority of men in the home or the workplace as much as from
social customs which policed woman’s behaviour in her head, as but one
example of Goldman’s overarching desire. Such liberty, thinks Goldman, is
not in the gift of others, however, but is a “natural right”, a feature of type
1 anarchy as I conceive of these things which type 2 anarchism should
make people aware of in its activities. As such:

“Th[is] sort of liberty is not a gift: it is the natural right of man, of every
human being. It cannot be given: it cannot be conferred by any law or
government. The need of it, the longing for it, is inherent in the individual.
Disobedience to every form of coercion is the instinctive expression of it.
Rebellion and revolution are the more or less conscious attempt to
achieve it. Those manifestations, individual and social, are fundamentally
expressions of the values of man. That those values may be nurtured, the
community must realize that its greatest and most lasting asset is the unit
— the individual.”

And so the “beautiful ideal” is “the philosophy of a new social order based
on the released energies of the individual and the free association of
liberated individuals.” Emma Goldman sees this as what “anarchism” is in
that it “alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man
for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs
and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it

354
justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.” Goldman sees
the human task as then a quest for liberty, social because necessarily the
basis of the individual. In the end, “Man’s quest for freedom from every
shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.”

TWELVE: Once Upon An Anarchism

“How does a state state itself into statelessness?” - A tweet from “Leon
Czolgosz”

A:

Anarchism, or so I have argued in the second half of this book, begins in a

personal and political freedom. This is not something anyone can give you
for it is internal, it starts with you and who you are, where you have come
from, a type 1 anarchy possessed of a type 1 anarchism. You came from
“the void” and you are going back to it. It is both your birthright and your
fate. It was part of Nietzsche’s philosophy to have a “love of fate” and this
became part of his embracing of the idea of “eternal recurrence”, the idea
that one should mold a life for oneself that one would happily live over
and over again. This seems to have been his attempt to live a life that
could be faced with happiness, joy and a stout-hearted courage although,
of course, Nietzsche never actually suggested that we do live over and
over again. His idea was a way to live your life, nothing more.

But it was not a bad way and it was a way which put the focus on asking
oneself what one’s life was going to be and to amount to. Now, of course,
there is no need that it amount to anything. People can choose to live in a
corner and mind their own business and slowly fade away, unnoticed by
anybody else. An anarchist should probably be the last one to disturb or
disrupt such a person from their chosen path. Anarchism stands for
freedom of association and freedom to make, or to refuse to make, your
own life, after all. And yet, as especially Emma Goldman and Jesus of

355
Nazareth show from my examples of anarchist lives, above, one needs to
have freedom in the first place in order to be able to exercise it. Goldman
in particular, with her very Cynic emphasis on the dual enemies of state
and custom, shows that such freedom can come under constant
constraint and control from powers without and within.

And so anarchists, in one sense born into freedom, like the rest of us and,
in fact, like absolutely anything else at all that is born, find themselves
cast into a world where that freedom is immediately constrained by
others. They find that their education, if left to the state or those who are
products of the state, is an education, at home and in school, in being
constrained, taught to play the games of “know your place” and “do as
you are told” - the games of a conservative status quo that only ever
wants more of the same, and particularly the same winners and losers in
the game of life. Such people are taught, fundamentally, that authority
exists and, where it exists, is to be obeyed. We are reminded once more
of Emma Goldman’s insistence that you can have freedom or you can
have obedience: but you cannot have both! But it is freedom that
anarchists have chosen: freedom from patriarchy, freedom from states
and governments and their violent apparatuses of control, freedom from
customs that would police us from the inside out, co-opting us, as they do,
to be agents of the very enculturated head police that control us. The
tweet from “Leon Czolgosz” [the name is that of President McKinley’s
murderer in 1901 and so is unlikely to actually be the real Leon – who got
the electric chair - tweeting from beyond the grave] reminds us of the
absurdity of the idea that power, once it has control, has any incentive or
reason, of itself, to ever relinquish it. And so we learn the wisdom of any
activist, of any description, who ever said: “Freedom will never be given to
you: you must take it!”

That, I think, is what links the four very different anarchists I have written
chapters about in the second half of this book – as well as many others I
could have written about and, who knows, may yet do in other books as

356
yet unimagined. Anarchism is probably not simply reducible to “freedom”
but there is no anarchism in which freedom is not a basic, a founding,
component [which is perhaps why the anarchist newspaper Kropotkin and
others began in England in 1886 was itself called “Freedom”!]. Goldman’s
insight bears repeating ad infinitum in this respect: you can have freedom
or you can have obedience: but you cannot have both! This freedom was
the very basis of John Cage’s artistic and professional life, an artistic and
professional life which bled over into his very way of existing even as it is
a part of Alan Moore’s equation of fiction with magic, the ability to freely
conjure and imagine and make things so. We also see it in the, at first,
seemingly bizarre activities of Jesus, the man who wanted to wipe the
slate clean of life’s statuses and customs and inaugurate a way of living
based on mutual aid, human solidarity and willing cooperation in a
community of equals where your “family” was potentially everyone else
[“love your neighbour as yourself”]. It was, of course, the very basis of
Emma Goldman’s appeal whether she was talking about the education of
children, the emancipation of women or the ethics of society. At this point
you should note that all four examples I have given were not people only
spouting theories: they were [and, in Moore’s case, still are] living it out
on a daily basis. It was, and is, their life. Anarchism, then, is the life lived
free and the education into such a life.

B:

We need to talk about humanity. First of all, we need to talk about what it
is. It is a family of beings of the same species. Yes, they may come with
an array of varied bodies, sexual proclivities, appearances, gender
manifestations, experiences of life and upbringing, along with differing
cultural backgrounds, tastes and interests, but is this not, rather than
eternally dividing them, merely to say that they display a remarkable, and
ever expanding, diversity? People, being all the same species, are not all
the same [and pretty much everyone, by themselves, would be perfectly
happy with this]. You can’t have one without the other. And, as we learned

357
in chapter three, diversity is the primary means by which a species
survives. Having life, it would seem a good idea to try and keep it. At least
for a while. To do that, if the biologists are right, we are going to have to
preserve that diversity which is the best protection against being wiped
out as a species whole and entire. What kills one human being can kill all
of them.

What is true of biology is also true of culture as well. Cultural diversity is

also a good thing but as we begin to move away from what people are
beyond their control, biology, to things they can affect, culture, some
people start to get jittery about, or critical towards, diversity. There are
even those who, in the cause of a different culture, want to impose some
level of uniformity on others. Alan Moore calls these people “fascists” in
his book V for Vendetta and they are the opponents of the anarchists who
want to live in a “land of do as you please”.

It is my instinct and, after doing quite a lot of reading in anarchist sources,

my educated instinct, that anarchists should be, and historically have
been, in the business of “diversity preservation” and that their natural
opponents are everyone and anyone who want to control, constrain,
direct, domesticate, civilize, coerce or limit diversity. Diversity, thinks the
anarchist, is a good thing. This, by the way, is a good thing for anarchism
itself too. The fact that there are eco-, anarcha-, social-, communist-,
queer-, pacificist-, and other types of anarchism is a strength and not a
weakness. They need to be seen as a diversity that is healthy as the
expression of an anarchist mentality rather than as a weakness which
causes the originating seed of anarchism to eventually die off.

It must immediately be admitted, however, that this, increasingly, is not

how diversity has come to be seen. The fascists who want uniformity are
neither a quiet nor an inactive culture. Since they often want to grasp
power and control others, they have a nasty tendency of trying to take
hold of, and control, public thought as well. This extends throughout

358
culture but also, as of a necessity, politics too. Some of the results of this
are the demonisation, and ill-treatment, of immigrants, poisonous public
media, racist police forces, militarism which seeks to control natural
resources, and, from an ideological perspective, division as a fact of
thought and human action in respect of human beings. [Ask yourself:
“Whose interests does this serve?”]

We saw in my sixth chapter how, in respect of race, division was posited

merely on the fact of differences in physical appearance rather than any
actual biological differences that might establish actual, biological races.
[To reiterate: there are no biological races; human racial differences are
culturally, not biologically, racial.] There are those in this world, quite
deliberate and malevolent racists, who want to propagate and magnify
racism until it becomes a physical war. Such people are not only anti-
diversity but actively pro-division. The charitable opinion here is that such
people are badly in need of a proper education but it is not just in respect
of their racial views that this is true for the manifesto of division is a
manifesto that is about more than single issues [whether of race,
nationality, creed, colour, sex or gender], also being about how you see
people and the world in general. This book is called Being Human: A
Philosophy of Personal and Political Anarchism for exactly this reason: it is
about a common humanity that exists in personal and political spheres.

“Common humanity”. It sounds such a simple idea [and a rather obvious

one, I’m bound to say] – but how hard to grasp it appears to be for so
many of us. It is under attack on numerous fronts – explicit and implicit –
every moment of every day. It starts, I think, when people start taking
“what they are” altogether more seriously than they should, contrasting it
with “what other people are” - or, more to the point, “are not” - and taking
that altogether too seriously as well. In just a casual, day to day, use of
social media it will not be at all unusual for me to come across people who
are more attached to cultural, social, racial, sexual, gender or other labels
[and they are, seriously, only labels, words, language] as the very essence

359
of their being. But “human being” will not be one of these and neither,
seemingly, would the label “human being” be enough for such people.
Alan Moore might well say, in such circumstances, that these other
personalities and characteristics have conjured themselves into existence
by the power of fiction and thought which has become possessed of
magical qualities. Having considered what Moore has to say on this, I
might now find myself agreeing with him. But surely it is the case, and
even magicians like Alan Moore would agree, that not everything that can
be conjured is something that should be conjured?

So I have been wrestling with what I conceive of as a rather radical, rather

irritating, thought for the entire time I have been writing this book [about
5 months now]. My researches in writing it, and the titles and subjects of
the preceding chapters may well be instructive here, have been
concerned with this thought. It is the kind of thought which is liable to piss
off all sides equally because, so it turns out, it is probably a thought which
pertains to people, who may in life conceive of themselves as natural
opposites or even enemies, who actually have the thought it aims to
criticise in common. The thought is this: if the human problem is that
human beings have divided themselves up, quite artificially, and then set
up these divisions as hard borders rather than as a natural diversity, and,
further, if all these divisions are, in fact, nothing more than conceptual
differences, rhetorically and linguistically created and amplified by human
thought – then what if they are all equally nonsense, nothing more than
insubstantial, ultimately inconsequential, artificial human blather which
aims to do nothing more than instantiate and pursue a domesticating,
exploitative agenda, a war of every “us” against every “them”?

It can be observed that one characteristic of nearly every fascist is their

essentialism. In chapter five, I discussed the thought of Richard Rorty, an
avuncular philosophical type in life who was a convinced anti-essentialist.
Essentialism is the belief that “every entity has a set of attributes that are
necessary to its identity and function” - as one dictionary defintion has it.

360
Practically speaking, it is the view that there is an “essence of whiteness”
or an “essence of blackness” or an “essence of womanness” or an
“essence of transness”, or an “essence of gayness”, etc. In other words,
there is some essence which makes you these things and, like a disease,
if you’ve got it, well, then, you’ve just got it. In contemporary times, for
example, this is a stone cold marker of a “gender critical” person in
regard to sexed bodies and, indeed, to the [two] genders it seems are the
only ones these people will allow other people to have. When you read
“gender critical” discourse you find that they believe what makes a
woman a woman is something quite fixed and unalterable – as, indeed,
with what makes a man a man. There is no discretion, no leeway, here, no
possibility for “social performance” of gendered roles as a matter of
sociology rather than of an essentialist philosophical thought. It is, god
forbid, not up to people to decide for themselves. It is, instead, something
over which no one has any power to decide. In fact, thinking you do have
power to decide probably indicates a moral failing on your part for doing
so to the essentialist.

Now you will have read in chapters two and five of this book [and also, in
chapter ten on Alan Moore,] my thoughts about language. This, I think, is
an anarchist subject. Language is pure human invention in relation to the
languages that human beings actually employ. Every thought, idea,
concept you have ever had was made possible by language – but
language is entirely made up and, as you will have seen in those previous
chapters, has nothing to do with things having essences [which is an
unfortunate thought languages enable along with many others]. Language
is what Ferdinand de Saussure thought of as “a system of signs without
positive terms”. It is explicitly not based on essences which things have…
because things don’t have essences. Every “essence” is made up by
language and because of language, language not being a thing invented
in order to identify essences. These essences, then, as linguistic
phenomena, are more social practices than they are the inherent features
of an imagined entity.

361
The question is, “What does this mean?” It means that there is NO
“essence of whiteness” or “essence of blackness” or “essence of
womanness” or “essence of transness” or “essence of gayness”, etc. It
means these categories, which are actually human domestications of
ourselves made possible by linguistic thought, do not empirically exist.
They are all constructed, artificial, rhetorical. My argument throughout
this book, in fact, has been that everything is - because the entire human
imaginative [and imagined] world is. Things are not what human beings
think they are but, in Alan Moore’s terms, they are conjured to be that
way by the linguistic narrativisations we call “fiction”. So, it follows, that
when you take any of this total fiction so seriously you are starting to
think things are really as some human beings with a particular fiction
have imagined them - and you are making a grave mistake in thinking
them “real”. They are “real” only in a fictive sense and not in any sense
beyond human language and thought. Where you make a division, you
make a contingent, artificial, human division; you do not recognise some
eternal, permanent, universal division. Such divisions do not, in fact, exist.

Perhaps now you might start to understand why I say such a thought
might piss everybody off equally? For, yes, I am saying that all those
things we say people are, starting, of course, with yourself, they actually
aren’t. Are there cis and trans people? No, I don’t think so. This is an
artificial, linguistic distinction which serves some purposes and not others.
Are there black and white people? Well, yes, in the trivial sense that
people have many variations and gradations of skin colour. Such people
may engage in different cultures too [not necessarily ones related to their
skin colour] and they may certainly be treated differently based on their
skin colour [and I would never wish to obscure this fact]. But are there
categories “white person” and “black person” that are constituted on the
basis of an essential [in the philosophical sense] racial component? No, I
don’t think so. Are there gay and straight [and bi and pan, etc] people?
No, I don’t think so. I do think that people are educated to think so and I
think this education is largely why they do. But if people just were a

362
sexuality then you would imagine it could never change. Yet I, in my own
personal experience, have found that it has changed. You could, of
course, say that I was the thing it changed to all along but just didn’t
realise it. But I don’t think so. I thought I was something before but then
my feelings and beliefs started to no longer fit that linguistic profile
anymore. The description came to seem arbitrary and inadequate and
then, the next thing you know, I’m saying to myself that any person can
have sex with any other [consenting!] person. Nothing “essential” is
stopping them. Its all just free choice that human domestications of
ourselves have artificially constrained. So you are not gay or straight or bi
or pan. You’re anything you can imagine or choose to be. You are simply a
sexual human being. Its not a matter of what Alan Moore called “Nazi
science”, the kind that wants to find a gene for everything to make it
“real”, but simply of linguistically constructed human identities that can
become cultures whilst being understood in a philosophically unhelpful
way.

Now I do not mean to be disrespectful in saying any of this. I am not

meaning to deny or erase any kind of culture with such thinking either. If
you think of yourself as something or as part of a particular kind of
community [and, due to the nature of human thinking, who doesn’t?] then
that is all to the good as far as I am concerned. I am not saying cultures
and communities are bad [although some specific examples of them can
be]; I am only saying that they are fictive and, as such, not empirical, not
“the way the world really is”. Frankly speaking, following Nietzsche from
chapter two, who actually knows the way the world is? Who says we have
any purchase or insight on such a question? The issue for human beings is
how best to think about the world they live in and how to interact with
each other as a part of it. In this respect, I think it vital to focus on the
fictive, creative nature of language, something supremely applicable to
human beings themselves in terms of the identities they create for
themselves and each other. This is a domesticating and potentially
exploitative, dominating activity. In fact, it is not at all hard to see how

363
language is used to dominate and classify people for what end up being
political purposes. In chapter six, for instance, we saw how the eugenicists
referred to “morons” and the “feeble-minded” to do this [let alone Josiah
Nott’s use of the term “Niggerology” for his racist lectures]. People have
used words like “gay”, “trans”, “Jew” and even “anarchist” in exactly the
same way. These are identities, conjurings, but they are not fixed realities
from a world beyond human language. We created them. We make use of
them. Its how they are used that counts.

My intuition here is that we, more often than not, take language far too
seriously. People become the things they are described, all the better to
make use of them. [It is in this sense that Moore’s use of a magical
vocabulary to describe this – making something, or someone, from
nothing – is actually a very powerful and helpful metaphor]. In fact, I said
explicitly in chapter five, following the lead of Richard Rorty, that
language is a tool to make use of the things we experience in the world.
But, that being so, it then depends what our purposes are. Here we enter
the ethical dimension of language use for every entity we have ever
imagined began in our heads. And so what we are thinking and why is a
matter of personal ethics. When we send it out into the world and act
upon it then it becomes a social, political matter, a matter of social and
political ethics. What I want to say here, then, is that anarchism, like
everything else, begins inside the human mind, linguistically conceived,
and is conjured into existence as we instantiate it in our own selves and,
in this spceific sense, “make it real”. “Real” is, in fact, itself only a fictive
thing. Real, that is, as we imagine it. What else would it be? If we can
think of it then you can be sure that it was us, we human beings, who
constructed it.

In short, our fight is not with “reality”. Where such a thing exists beyond
us it is beyond our concern and certainly it is not concerned with us. We
are but tiny specks of space dust in a tiny corner of the vastness. As
Nietzsche himself fictionalises, when our star flickers out, itself but a blink

364
of time, it will be as if we never had been. The physical, and any other,
reality beyond us is not our problem. What is our problem, the issue with
which humanity is entirely bound up, is the world we have made and that
we construct and maintain every day of our lives. This is the world with
which anarchism is concerned and in which the domesticating, controlling
use of language takes place. We are all implicated in this, and, indeed, in
language, for we all take part in it. Every time we use the indicative we
are saying something is so – and creating or maintaining it that way. The
policeman in your head comes before the policeman in your community.

Both types of policeman, in recent times, have been enemies of diversity

and of common humanity – at least in the world of my experience which is
the UK and the USA. In both cases, the political authorities in these places
have used their power, and the power of language, to cast aspersions
upon such ideas and to make what is diverse become what is divided, as
part of a greater cultural and political effort. Earlier, I posed the question
of whose interest this was in. Now, it is time to answer this question for it
seems clear that it is in the interests of a capitalist and political elite [the
latter often in the pay of the former] that diversity either be erased where
it is not wanted or widened into division in order that no effective
opposition to an economic elite can ever be mounted. This is, I think, fairly
transparently the case. We can see this, for example, when white
supremacists in the USA turn “Antifa” into an organisation it actually isn’t
and posit aims, officers and activities of it. The aim here is to create it as a
material threat and give it a reality it doesn’t have in order to wave it as a
totem at people so they can be better controlled. The same thing has
routinely, in the past, been done with things like socialism or communism
for decades. And more than once from the Oval Office itself.

Control is what such elites want and, since they are so relatively few in
numbers, they need to keep the masses divided in order that common
humanity and a natural and unthreatening diversity of human existence
do not flourish as active, thoughtful, penetrating ideas in the collective,

365
human conciousness. If they ever did, the game would be up for this
particular elite. But, having money [another destructive idea which can be
physically utilised once its poisonous seed has been sown in our minds]
and power, this elite can initiate an ongoing barrage of propaganda at the
rest of us, sowing division here and creating difference there, and all the
while telling us that if someone is different then they are not our friend;
they are the stranger, the enemy, the danger: they are other. Why else
else do “think tanks”, fake media organisations and secretly financed
interest groups appear pretending to have scientifically-based and
seemingly impartial views on matters of public policy? They are the
minions of the rich and powerful sent out to muddy the waters, cause
confusion and make sure people can never decide for themselves,
uncoerced, what to think: hordes of paid liars and pleaders for a cause.

Above all, such people, think such elites, must be kept divided. They must
never realise their common humanity and their unthreatening, and very
necessary, diversity. It is such coercion for the means of exploitation, a
dominating domestication, that the anarchist needs to fight not only
physically in the material world but linguistically in the immaterial world of
ideas and consciousness. The anarchist, a believer in human solidarity and
the creation of shared, cooperative consciousness, should be the one
educating friends, family and neighbours into the idea that, although we
can look and act differently, we actually are the same species – and that
action in our common interest is not a bad thing but a thing that benefits
everyone. Such anarchists should be educating these same people that a
diversity of appearance, behaviour and culture does not mean we must be
enemies but that we can be friends, friends who can share new and
interesting things with each other. Such anarchists, in fact, should be
sharing fraternity with other people and helping it to spread throughout
the whole human species. Anarchists, so it is said, are those who believe
in fraternity, human solidarity and cooperation. This is good for the only
way to stop the hate, defeat the division and end the othering is to
actually live such values on a day to day basis in the course of every

366
human relationship.

C:

In 1870, Mikhail Bakunin wrote the following in his Letters To A

Frenchman On The Present Crisis [said “crisis” being the Franco-Prussian
War]:

“There are men, many of them among the so-called revolutionary

bourgeoisie, who, by mouthing revolutionary slogans, think that they are
making the Revolution. Feeling that they have thus adequately fulfilled
their revolutionary obligations, they now proceed to be careless in action
and, in flagrant contradiction to principles, commit what are in effect
wholly reactionary acts. We who are truly revolutionary must behave in an
altogether different manner. Let us talk less about revolution and do a
great deal more. Let others concern themselves with the theoretical
development of the principles of the Social Revolution, while we content
ourselves with spreading these principles everywhere, incarnating them
into facts... All of us must now embark on stormy revolutionary seas, and
from this very moment we must spread our principles, not with words but
with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most
irresistible form of propaganda .”

Bakunin here is essentially saying “actions speak louder than words”.

Voltairine de Cleyre, a woman Emma Goldman called “the greatest
woman anarchist of America”, would seemingly agree. Talking about
“direct action”, something she contrasts with “political action” - the latter
being that action which defers to political channels – in her essay of the
same name from 1912, the same year as her untimely death – she even
regards it as absolutely necessary if you want to get anythng done - as
well as that thing which, in most circumstances, people already do
anyway. She says:

367
“Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly
and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions,
was a direct actionist…

Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or
who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with
him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them,
was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct
action. Every person who ever in his life had a difference with anyone to
settle, and went straight to the other persons involved to settle it, either
by a peaceable plan or otherwise, was a direct actionist. Examples of such
action are strikes and boycotts…

These actions are generally not due to anyone's reasoning overmuch on

the respective merits of directness or indirectness, but are the
spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppressed by a situation. In other
words, all people are, most of the time, believers in the principle of direct
action, and practicers of it. However, most people are also indirect or
political actionists. And they are both these things at the same time,
without making much of an analysis of either. There are only a limited
number of persons who eschew political action under any and all
circumstances; but there is nobody, nobody at all, who has ever been so
"impossible" as to eschew direct action altogether…

Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to Direct Action
only are - just who? Why, the non-resistants; precisely those who do not
believe in violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of inferring that I
say direct action means non-resistance; not by any means. Direct action
may be the extreme of violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of
the Brook of Siloa that go softly. What I say is, that the real non-resistants
can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of
all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it
finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them

368
 through.

...It is by and because of the direct acts of the forerunners of social

change, whether they be of peaceful or warlike nature, that the Human
Conscience, the conscience of the mass, becomes aroused to the need for
change. It would be very stupid to say that no good results are ever
brought about by political action; sometimes good things do come about
that way. But never until individual rebellion, followed by mass rebellion,
has forced it. Direct action is always the clamorer, the initiator, through
which the great sum of indifferentists become aware that oppression is
getting intolerable.

De Cleyre makes several points here about direct action. She points out
that most people already possess the impulse to directly sort out their
affairs. She adds that most people don’t even really think about this when
they do; they just do it. It is, she implies, entirely normal to do so, the
naturally expected response. She adds, in a time of industrial unrest due
to the great oppression of long hours and small wages, that even those
who silently protest and do not resist are actually people taking matters
into their own hands in a direct way. In her final paragraph, she makes the
point that even though political processes may sometimes work for good,
they never work for good unless some person or persons took direct
actions to bring matters to a head to begin with. Even actions which don’t
produce the difference they intend to provoke, she insists, have the
witnessing function of testimony and consciousness-raising in others.
Direct action, then, in Voltairine de Cleyre’s estimation, will always be
necessary in order to secure freedoms not yet attained and to retain those
that have been.

Max Stirner is known today as perhaps the major European proponent of

what was once known as “egoist”, and is now known as “individualist”,
anarchism. The label is somewhat deceptive and indicates only that
branch of anarchism which focuses on the human individual as a being in

369
their own right. It is, of course, the case that no one exists in a vacuum –
and so that individualist concerns must be balanced by social ones [I,
above all, should be saying this in a book about “personal and political”
anarchism] – but the focus of everything I have shared about anarchy and
anarchism in this book would be missing a major plank of its thesis did I
not focus on the vital part played in anarchism by the self-actualisation
and, in some sense, the self-importance, the consciousness, of the
individual. It is this that anarchists like Stirner were pre-eminently
interested in. The following quotation is, then, in regard to the State from
this self-actualising perspective:

“The fight of the world today is, as it is said, directed against the
"established." Yet people are wont to misunderstand this as if it were only
that what is now established was to be exchanged for another, a better,
established system. But war might rather be declared against
establishment itself, the State, not a particular state, not any such thing
as the mere condition of the State at the time; it is not another State
(e.g., a "people's State") that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this
ever-fluid uniting of everything standing. - A State exists even without my
co-operation: I am born in it, brought up in it, under obligations to it, and
must "do it homage." It takes me up into its "favour," and I live by its
"grace." Thus the independent establishment of the State founds my lack
of independence; its condition as a "natural growth," its organism,
demands that my nature not grow freely, but be cut to fit it. That it may
be able to unfold in natural growth, it applies to me the shears of
"civilization"; it gives me an education and culture adapted to it, not to
me, and teaches me, e.g., to respect the laws, to refrain from injury to
State property ( i.e., private property), to reverence divine and earthly
highness, etc.; in short, it teaches me to be - unpunishable, "sacrificing"
my ownness to "sacredness" (everything possible is sacred; e.g., property,
others' lives, etc.,). In this consists the sort of civilization and culture that
the State is able to give me: it brings me up to be a "serviceable
instrument," a "serviceable member of society."

370
 ...The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the
individual - to make him subject to some generality or other; it lasts only
so long as the individual is not all in all, and it is only the clearly marked
restriction of me, my limitation, my slavery. Never does a State aim to
bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to
the purpose of the State. Through the State nothing in common comes to
pass either, as little as one can call a piece of cloth the common work of
all the individual parts of a machine; it is rather the work of the whole
machine as a unit, machine work. In the same style everything is done by
the State machine too; for it moves the clockwork of the individual minds,
none of which follow their own impulse. The State seeks to hinder every
free activity by its censorship, its supervision, its police, and holds this
hindering to be its duty, because it is in truth a duty of self-preservation.
The State wants to make something out of man, therefore there live in it
only made men; every one who wants to be his own self is its opponent
and is nothing. "He is nothing" means as much as, the State does not
make use of him, grants him no position, no office, no trade, etc.

… The best State will clearly be that which has the most loyal citizens, and
the more the devoted mind for legality is lost, so much the more will the
State, this system of morality, this moral life itself, be diminished in force
and quality. With the "good citizens" the good State too perishes and
dissolves into anarchy and lawlessness. " Respect for the law!" By this
cement the totality of the State is held together. "The law is sacred, and
he who affronts it a criminal." Without crime no State: the moral world -
[which] the State is - is crammed full of scamps, cheats, liars, thieves, etc.
Since the State is the "lordship of law," its hierarchy, it follows that the
egoist, in all cases where his advantage runs against the State's, can
satisfy himself only by crime … [italics original]

Stirner here makes the argument that the State, any state, any fictive
territory which has rules and boundaries and overseers, be they bankers,
politicians, workers or even neighbours, is a standing threat to the self-

371
actualising consciousness of the free individual. Such states, in fact, must
by their very nature impinge on such freedom and demand allegiance to
themselves. This not only indicates that, where states exist, the anarchist
individual will constantly be under threat from them as allegiance is
demanded or coerced but that its also the case that the anarchist
individual’s consciousness must be engaged in a continual process of
actualisation against it. Just as with Bakunin actions speak louder than
words and with de Cleyre “direct action” will always be necessary, so, too,
with Stirner’s egoism, the anarchist must also be taking steps to ground
and activate their consciousness of themselves as free, uncoerced
individuals. What Stirner’s thesis shows is that anarchism begins from
within and, wherever else it goes and whatever else it achieves, it can
only ever begin from within. You are the anarchism and the anarchy is
you.

Colin Ward was one of the most active and significant British anarchists of
the second half of the twentieth century, not least as editor of British
anarchist newspaper, Freedom, from 1947-1960 and as the founder and
editor of the British monthly journal, Anarchy, from 1961-1970. He is
perhaps best known to later generations of British anarchists, however, as
the writer of the influential book, Anarchy in Action [first published in
1973], a book originally intended “for those who either had no idea of
what the word [anarchism] implied, or who knew exactly what it implied,
and had rejected it, considering that it had no relevance for the modern
world.” The original title for this book, on the other hand, Ward tells us,
had been “Anarchism as a theory of organisation” and this was because,
as Ward himself says in the introduction to the Second Edition, the book
“is about the ways in which people organise themselves in any kind of
human society, whether we care to categorise those societies as primitive,
traditional, capitalist or communist.”

In this respect, the tenth chapter of Anarchism in Action [and the linking
of anarchism with “action” in this title is a very pertinent one for me as,

372
indeed, for Colin Ward] is relevant in discussing children at play as an
“anarchist parable” - as Ward puts it. He writes, at the beginning of this
chapter that:

“All the problems of social life present a choice between libertarian and
authoritarian solutions, and the ultimate claim we can make for the
libertarian approach is that it fulflls its function better. The adventure
playground is an arresting example of this living anarchy; one that is
valuable both in itself and as an experimental verification of a whole social
approach.”

Here Ward reminds us that the anarchist claim is not a partisan one – live
like us because we want you too – but a functional and qualitative one:
the anarchist claim is that the anarchist way will lead to better outcomes
for everyone altogether. So anarchist action, and acting in anarchist ways,
is not just one more silly “team this versus team that” spectacle but the
very serious claim that there are better ways to live and to organise
people in community and society – and that these are anarchist ways.

The specific example Ward wants to consider in his tenth chapter is

childrens’ adventure playgrounds. Considering one in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA, he says:

“When The Yard was opened in Minneapolis with the aim of giving
the children 'their own spot of earth and plenty of tools and materials for
digging, building and creating as they see fit', it was every child for
himself. The initial stockpile of secondhand lumber disappeared like ice off
a hot stove. Children helped themselves to all they could carry, sawed off
long boards when short pieces would have done. Some hoarded tools and
supplies in secret caches. Everybody wanted to build the biggest shack in
the shortest time. The workmanship was shoddy.

Then came the bust. There wasn't a stick of lumber left. Hijacking raids

373
were staged on half-finished shacks. Grumbling and bickering broke out. A
few children packed up and left. But on the second day of the great
depression most of the youngsters banded together spontaneously for a
salvage drive. Tools and nails came out of hiding. For over a week the
youngsters made do with what they had. Rugged individualists who had
insisted on building alone invited others to join in - and bring their
supplies along. New ideas popped up for joint projects. By the time a fresh
supply of lumber arrived a community had been born.”

This image, idealistic as some might accuse it of being, also seems

somewhat naive in a world of kids with mobile phones and games
consoles who, through technology, have now often been sent from
playgrounds into hiding in their bedrooms. But that naivety also only
serves to come as a shock as the image posits old questions anew: what
might people achieve together if left to their own devices? Does how we
raise children determine who they will be and who [and how] they can
become?

What is at stake here, and the divergent ideas informing different

approaches to education, are outlined by Ward in a letter he quotes from
the Times Educational Supplement which was sent in by someone working
with children in adventure playgrounds and seeking to defend them from
their more organisational and authoritarian critics:

“By what criteria are adventure playgrounds to be judged? If it is by the

disciplined activity of the uniformed organisations, then there is no doubt
but we are a failure. If it is by the success of our football and table tennis
teams then there is no doubt we are a flop. If it is by the enterprise and
endurance called for by some of the national youth awards then we must
be ashamed.

But these are the standards set by the club movement, in one form or
another, for a particular type of child. They do not attract the so-called

374
 'unclubbable', and worse - so we read regularly - nor do they hold
those children at whom they are aimed. May I suggest that we need to
examine afresh the pattern taken by the young at play and then compare
it with the needs of the growing child and the adolescent? We accept that
it is natural for boys and girls below a certain age to play together, and
think it equally natural for them to play at being grown up. We accept, in
fact, their right to imitate the world around them. Yet as soon as a child is
old enough to see through the pretence and demand the reality, we
separate him from his sister and try to fob him off with games and
activities which seem only to put off the day when he will enter the world
proper.

The adventure playgrounds in this country, new though they are, are
already providing a number of lessons which we would do well to study…
For three successive summers the children have built their dens and
created Shanty Town, with its own hospitals, fire station, shops, etc. As
each den appeared, it became functional and brought with it an
appreciation of its nature and responsibility... The pattern of adventure
playgrounds is set by the needs of the children who use them; their 'toys'
include woodwork benches and sewing machines. We do not believe
that children can be locked up in neat little parcels labelled by age and
sex. Neither do we believe that education is the prerogative of the
schools.”

As Colin Ward sees this “The adventure playground is a kind of parable of

anarchy, a free society in miniature, with the same tensions and ever-
changing harmonies, the same diversity and spontaneity, the same
unforced growth of co-operation and release of individual qualities and
communal sense, which lie dormant in a society whose dominant values
are competition and acquisitiveness.” He continues:

“But having discovered something like the ideal conditions for children's
play - the self-selected evolution from demolition through discovery to

375
creativity - why should we stop there? Do we really accept the paradox of
a free and self-developing childhood followed by a lifetime of dreary and
unfulfilling toil? Isn't there a place for the adventure playground or its
equivalent in the adult world?

Of course there is, and just as the most striking thing for the visitor, or the
organiser, in an adventure playground is not the improvised gymnastics,
but the making and building that goes on all around, so the significant
thing about adult recreation is not so much the fishing, sailing, pigeon-
fancying or photography aspect (though in their organisation these
frequently illustrate the principles of self-regulation and free federation
that are emphasised in this book), still less is it the commercial and
professional sport which is just another aspect of the entertainment
industry. The significant aspect is the way in which the urge to make
things, and to construct and reconstruct, to repair and remodel, denied
outlet in the ordinary sterile world of employment, emerges in the
explosion of 'do-it-yourself' activities of every kind.

This in turn leads to a spontaneous sharing of equipment and skills:

'I've got two very good friends,' Mrs Jarvis said, 'Mrs Barker, who lives
opposite, has got a spin drier and I've got a sewing machine. I put my
washing in her spin drier and she uses my sewing machine when she
wants to. Then the lady next door on one side is another friend of mine.
We always help each other out.' Mr Dover's great hobby is woodwork;
at the time he was interviewed he was busy on a pelmet he was making
for a friend living next door and he had just finished a toy train for the
son of another. He relies on Fred, another friend who is also a neighbour,
to help when needed. 'Just today I was sawing a log for the engine of this
train and Fred sees that my saw is blunt and lends me a sharp one.
Anything at all I want he'll lend it to me if he has it. I'm the same with
him. The other day he knocked when I wasn't here and borrowed my
steps - we take each other for granted that way.’”

376
What is the point of this parable of children’s play then applied to a world
of adults? It is surely that we don’t have to teach children there must be a
leader, that they must do things a certain way and that they must do as
they are told. We do not have to teach hierarchy and coercion and rigid
regimentation as if human beings were soldiers best organised like cogs in
a machine. The ethic of Colin Ward’s example is that people can and
should be trusted, in their individuality, to form natural bonds of
cooperation enabling them to work together for mutual benefit. This is, in
fact, the anarchist way Colin Ward’s book recommends not simply as the
anarchist way but, ultimately, the better and more functional way for all.

We come to the point of these four previous examples and its a simple
one if, often, one people struggle to accept or become enthusiastic about.
This is that: ITS UP TO US! It is to accept the wisdom in Emma Goldman’s
statement that “People have only as much liberty as they have the
intelligence to want and the courage to take” and to additionally accept
that a better way of living, a more equitable way of living, an emancipated
way of living, is not going to be handed to us on a plate. Feeding the
hungry, housing the houseless, aiding those who need some help, building
alternatives to today’s instituitions and possibilities, educating people into
a new, common humanity of wide diversity, simply helping those who
need some help, is for those who will build another future based on
reconfigured human relations of fraternity, solidarity and equity.

Anarchists from Bakunin to de Cleyre to Stirner to Ward knew full well that
it is in taking the initiative, in not waiting to be asked, in self-actualising
and taking responsibility for our anarchist consciousness, that anarchism
becomes more likely and more possible as the organising ethos of our
world. There is no start point we are waiting for; for the starting point was
when we were born, in blood and pain emerging from our mothers’
wombs. From that point on it has been a matter of how we will live and
how we will die and, both individually and together, it is a puzzle for us to
solve and a puzzle only we can solve. ITS UP TO US.

377
D:

After putting out an appeal on social media, I put the following questions
concerning anarchism to four people who responded to me, two men and
two women, from four different countries. The questions were as follows:

What is your knowledge or experience of anarchism? When did you first

hear about it and what were your impressions?

Can you name any anarchists and share anything you know about them?

In a single paragraph, sum up what you think anarchism is.

What is your opinion of the current political situation? Would anarchist

values, such as you are aware of them, help or hinder in such a situation?

How many people, in your estimation, would you say live in anarchist
ways on a day to day basis?

Describe your ideal state of living.

Having put these questions to my four volunteers, these were their

replies:

Mark, UK

I was brought up in a very Conservative-voting working-class white family.

We had the Daily Express [a conservative UK newspaper] delivered every
day and my parents bought into its political opinion. During the 1970s my
Dad was quite openly racist but I had school friends that were black and
Asian and I knew this was wrong. So my first kind of political experiences
were with two groups: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. I
attended meetings and went on rallies and marches. When I was 14 I had

378
a student exchange visit from a Spanish boy, Lucio from Madrid. Spain
had just come out of Fascism as Franco had died. Lucio came and stayed
every Summer for the next three years and then I had a Summer in
Madrid with him. His Grandfather had been wounded fighting against
Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War [1936-1939].

Lucio would go to left-wing bookshops and buy Communist books. He also

talked a lot about anarchism. I remember us going to London and finding
a record he really wanted: El Pueblo Unido Jamas sera Vencido [The
People United Will Never Be Divided]. It was from Chile I think. I was
studying Sociology at school and my leaning to the left-wing of politics
was very strong. I then had a girlfriend that I was madly in love with. Judy
Cox still writes books about the Russian Revolution and is a big deal in the
Socialist Worker’s Party these days. I think I was with both Lucio and Judy
when I went into a left-wing bookshop and found Colin Ward's book,
Anarchy in Action. This was a game-changer for all three of us. I read it
first. I struggle to remember it now but two things stood out. There was a
Russian anarchist called Baktunin, I think. [There was. Mark refers to
Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin.] That might be wrong but it was more
than 40 years ago! There was also a story in the book about a place - it
may have been part of Spain during the Civil War - where for some
months there was no government at all. [This is also true and refers to
Catalunya which ran its own affairs for a period of the war.] The people
there collectively made decisions and ruled themselves and it was hugely
successful.

Lucio read the book after me and we talked a lot about what we thought
an Anarchist society might be. For me, that meant the absence of a
central government and collective decisions based on a kind of people's
forum or committee. Lucio was also very knowledgeable about anarchist
factions throughout the Spanish Civil War. Judy read the book next and
then we split up so, as far as I am aware, she still has the book until this
day. In return, I kept her copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. That was a

379
long time ago. For a while, my politics merged Marxism and Anarchism. I
remember that I wrote to the Cuban Embassy in London asking if I could
go and work there. I still have a letter from them somewhere saying there
was no work permit agreement between the two countries.

As I got older I studied History and became aware that in every country
that had attempted to live according to Marxist ideals it had been a
massive failure. I looked at Stalin's Russia and Mao's Cultural Revolution. I
even lived in China last year for five months. That was living in a
totalitarian state. I was followed as I was a westerner and they put a CC
camera outside my front door to watch my movements. I can only liken it
to what it must have been like living in Nazi Germany. The current
political situation is slightly better because Trump has gone but in the UK
[the] Labour [Party] no longer represents anything. I hated Thatcherism
with a passion and was a member of the Labour Party at that time but
there hasn't been anything like an alternative for many years. Anyone
who pushes for a more egalitarian society like Michael Foot [Labour leader
from 1980-1983] or Jeremy Corbyn [Labour leader from 2015-2020] is
immediately destroyed by the media, which is controlled by the likes of
Rupert Murdoch. I am drawn now to the politics of Extinction Rebellion,
not just for its stance on climate change but there is also an element to it
which I believe to be anarchistic. One of their key points is a citizen’s
committee. [Extinction Rebellion have as one of their demands the setting
up of Citizen’s Assemblies which will advise government on matters of
climate and economic justice.]

These days my feelings about the collective will of people, in general, has
changed. My ideal state of living would be one I learned about from a
Sociology lecturer on Marxism. He talked about a collective will where all
in a society owned the means of production. Everything was shared. You
went to work in the morning for a few hours and in the afternoon you
could choose to go to an art gallery or a football game or a fairground.
Education was at the centre of society - I taught for thirty years - and was

380
available freely to all. Such a society would not require a strong central
government as it would be based on collective will.

Matt, USA

1) My knowledge of anarchism is still relatively limited. I first heard about

anarchism (meaning the political ideology, not the buzzword politicians
use) about a year ago. I got pulled into leftism through "BreadTube" and
saw a thread on Twitter where people were recommending the channel
“Thought Slime”, so I checked out his video "Ten things everyone gets
wrong about Anarchists". I had never really learned what an anarchist was
outside of the colloquial usage of the word, and was surprised to find out
how much it made sense to me.

2) Off the top of my head I can probably name the greatest hits like
Malatesta, Goldman, Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Makhno as well as more
modern figures like Chomsky, Bookchin, and Graeber.

3) From my current understanding, anarchism is the ideal state of society

(unless you're [a] post-civ[ilizationist] I guess), based on the free
association of individuals and the abolition of authority and power
structures. The usual target of this is the state, which is seen as having a
monopoly over legitimate violence and uses that violence to enforce its
understanding of "freedom".

4) I live in the United States, and the political situation is looking pretty
bleak. Growing fascist movements with the potential to be united behind
the GOP [The Republican Party] in the next set of elections, and an
opposition party that is spineless in the face of it. The parallels to Weimar
Germany are not lost on me. We are facing a rapidly increasing divide
between the owner class and the working class, but a seemingly endless
number of people are attached to the idea that they can escape poverty
via "personal responsibility". Our "leaders" are doing nothing to prepare

381
us for the coming climate disaster because they're in the pockets of the
worst offenders.

Anarchism seems to me to be the only solution that can correct the course
society has been on in an ethical and timely manner. Half-assed social
democracy only exists to placate people from realizing the truth: the state
is made up of nothing but useless middlemen and we'd all be living much
more harmoniously with the world if profit and domination weren't
encouraged by our economic and social structures. Since anarchism is the
organization of society horizontally, these wouldn't be issues. If everyone
is provided for, who would steal? If everyone truly had an equal say in how
their communities function, why would anyone lust for more power? It
seems like the only logical solution, we know greed and powerlusting are
incentivized by our current systems, so the fix must be the destruction of
those systems.

5) I would say very few people live in anarchist ways, outside of existing
anarchist or anarchist-adjacent territories. The current structure of society
makes it very, very difficult. You can't really freely associate under global
capitalism, and any attempts are usually squashed by the state and
demonized in the media. I think that's different from people who take
political action based on the principles of anarchism, though. People who
participate in mutual aid networks, people who volunteer, and people who
directly protest the state are all recognizing that the state is not going to
help people who need it, other people are. So that's something.

6) My ideal state of living is being able to freely associate with who I

please, when I please. Living in a community where labor is shared
(assuming that's the consensus people come to, this is just my ideal) so
that everyone can work much less and have more time to use how they
see fit. Instead of being used to scare manual laborers, automation would
be a gift to humanity without the profit motive. Agriculture would return to
a level that can coexist with nature, even though it will always be opposed

382
in some way, the harm done would be minimized. Instead of being forced
to live in cramped, crowded urban environments, people could spread out
and have the space to live because they wouldn't need to be concentrated
around dense economic areas.

Lucia, Argentina

1. What is your knowledge or experience of anarchism? When did you first

hear about it and what were your impressions?

Argentina has often had the tendency to suffer from military government,
something which is not only bad because its government but is also bad
because its run by soldiers. In the last century this happened a few times
and at those times anarchist sentiments were higher in Argentina than
they are today. I heard about this from my grandfather who had anarchist
leanings and spoke to me about past times in my country and some
anarchists. He said the famous anarchist, Errico Malatesta, visited
Argentina in the 1880s [this was from 1885-1889] but that such thought
was always an underground thought most common amongst some groups
of workers. My grandfather said being anarchist could, at times, be very
dangerous as the police and the army would single such people out for
bad treatment. For myself, I wondered why people would hold to beliefs
which could get them into trouble.

2. Can you name any anarchists and share anything you know about
them?

As just mentioned, the only anarchist name I know is Errico Malatesta. The
only real thing I remember about him is that he thought it was up to
people to save themselves. He taught responsibility for yourself is what
my grandfather said.

3. In a single paragraph, sum up what you think anarchism is.

383
I would say that anarchism is the belief that no government is legitimate
because every person is born free. From that point on, any government
can only been imposed on people along with any leaders that are a part of
it. Anarchism, in that case, is the belief that people deciding how to live is
a voluntary thing that cannot ever be imposed on others. Freedom is the
most important anarchist belief and anything and everything else must
reckon with it as the central idea of anarchism.

4. What is your opinion of the current political situation? Would anarchist

values, such as you are aware of them, help or hinder in such a situation?

I don’t have much time for national politics and politicians are not
generally liked among the people I know. It seems like they play power
games amongst themselves and for their own interests. Organising things
amongst yourselves seems like a much better idea because then you
always have a direct link to what is going on and so are invested in the
whole process personally. This seems like a good idea. Also I think
freedom, in Spanish, libertad, is a most important idea that should never
be forgotten.

5. How many people, in your estimation, would you say live in anarchist
ways on a day to day basis?

I do not think very many if the question means openly as anarchists who
ignore the government and such. I would respect any people who did
though as it must take some courage to do it.

6. Describe your ideal state of living.

I’m tempted to say a desert island somewhere but that is probably more
of a silly dream and, in reality, it has to be about more than you. So I think
a more realistic approach is to live in your own place but without
everybody always trying to be better off at the expense of the next

384
person. There is enough for everyone to survive, get along and be happy
if only some will not horde things to have control over others. I wish we
could be like that more of the time.

Sky, Vietnam

1. What is your knowledge or experience of anarchism? When did you first

hear about it and what were your impressions?

When I lived in Melbourne, Australia, I was part of a group of people I

guess you’d call “anarchists”. It was based on sharing and I guess you’d
call it communal living or something like that. It was in a squat I think [I
don’t actually know who the place was meant to belong to] and we
cultivated the garden and stuff to minimize what we needed to buy.
Everyone was expected to throw in and do their part. I found it pretty
easygoing and once you realized how the place worked you got into the
new routine fairly easily. The best thing about it was the lack of
expectation and it actually feels good to know that no one is gonna be
ordering you around. You start to take pride in playing your part and
taking a little responsibility. It creates a togetherness and a pride in what
you are achieving together freely only because you want to.

2. Can you name any anarchists and share anything you know about
them?

The only Western anarchist I know of is Emma Goldman but all I really
remember about her is that she got arrested a lot, I think for talking about
sex? There is also a Vietnamese anarchist who was called Phan Boi Chau
that I’ve heard of but, again, I only really know that he got arrested and
was kept confined for his views.

3. In a single paragraph, sum up what you think anarchism is.

385
I think of anarchism as freedom from control, people just getting on with
each other, you know? I think of it as how people probably used to live
before there was any great civilization and stuff when people just had to
get on with each other and deal with other people for what they needed to
survive. This must have worked to some degree otherwise none of us
would be here now. You have to ask how people got to all the countries
and islands that exist today without any technology and stuff like that. It
can only be because they worked together with each other and then built
societies when they got there and created their own cultures and ways of
living. So this shows that it must all be possible. Today people are told
they need loads of stuff and gadgets to be happy but that’s not true. We
had no electricity in the squat but it didn’t really seem to matter and
nobody moaned or complained because you just got on with it. Human
relationships became more important too and that’s something a lot of
people miss these days alone at home looking at screens for company. So
I think anarchism probably means better relationships because it forces
people to have to deal with each other and get along.

4. What is your opinion of the current political situation? Would anarchist

values, such as you are aware of them, help or hinder in such a situation?

Its a dumpster fire mate. People everywhere just seem interested in

power and politicians seem disconnected from the rest. I’m kind of a free
spirit and it bums me out how most people seem so fixed and static and
plugged into the system. Even without being an anarchist its possible to
be carefree and hang loose from society but, I don’t know, for some
reason most people seem to buy into all this shit that politicians and the
TV tell them to believe. When you aren’t in that you can see people just
being mesmerized by this nonsense which controls their minds. Its pretty
scary like people have forgotten they can think for themselves. Its like
some dystopia – like that film They Live if you’ve seen that film? People
are under control and they don’t even know it. I don’t ever want to be like
that. I’d rather take my chances and live my way, carefree, on the road.

386
5. How many people, in your estimation, would you say live in anarchist
ways on a day to day basis?

Probably more than you think. I’ve done some travelling around south
east Asia and there’s a fairly decent travelling community here, not just
people from the area but from all over. These are people who just decided
they didn’t want to be part of the world and started travelling round it
however they could, hitching rides, getting passage on boats, anything
just to see the world and live free. There’s a very friendly way of existing
that develops between such people and they will nearly all do you a favor
because they know that, one day soon, they are gonna need a favor too.
So its a “pay it forward” system, you help out because you’re also gonna
need help at some point whether that be food, shelter for a night, a ride
somewhere, etc. My guess is that most of these people are unseen and
unnoticed by the static population because its just not their lifestyle so
there’s no reason to even realize they exist.

6. Describe your ideal state of living.

Pretty much what it is now, I guess. I wish there weren’t so many cops
about of various kinds lol. I was reading the other day how not that long
ago passports and things like that didn’t exist and basically you could just
go anywhere in the world and do what you liked. That seems really good
to me. Today we have all this surveillance and tracking and people in
charge of things basically want to be able to plot everybody on a map and
follow their movements. That really gets me pretty angry when I think
about it. Like, why can’t you just leave people alone? Its none of your
frackin business! In my view 99% of people would get on just fine if left to
their own devices and people would work together to help each other out
because that’s the only way people survive together really in the end
anyway. All government does is encourage people to be lazy and expect
someone else to do it for you. But, really, you know? We got this and we
don’t need goverments telling us what to do and where we can and can’t

387
go. Well, that’s my rant. I just think living free is a state of mind, you
know? Maybe that’s why governments don’t want anybody to catch it!

E:

This book has been strange one. I called it a “philosophy” in the title but if
you expected a list of rules or prescriptions in the content of it I hope you
are duly disappointed. Philosophy, etymologically speaking, is a love of
wisdom and it is in this kind of philosophy that I aim to find the wisdom in
things. In the first half of the book, Part A, I wandered through seemingly
random areas, from cultural products such as film and music to properly
philosophical discussions to biology and its misuses. All of that was to
entangle my discussions in real life, life people live every day surrounded
by things people have made as a result of the things people are and the
practices they engage in. Here, there is none more fundamental than
language. How the hell would we be communicating now, and in this way,
without that? We wouldn’t. If you want to ask the question of what it
means to be human, there are much worse answers than “a language
user”. This, of course, has consequences, and those consequences have
played out all through this book. One new insight I had about this writing
this book, one I hope to follow up on in my own thinking, is that found in
the magical anarchism of Alan Moore. That is certainly a thread that, once
pulled, needs to be unravelled a little further. Fortunately, it seems that
Moore is himself not shy about laying a trail of breadcrumbs for others to
follow.

The second half of this book was taken up with a discussion of anarchism
more directly. My thesis is of a common humanity, united in diversity,
based on an anarchism of values. Anarchism, I think, begins within –
although it is all around us all of the time. It is anarchy itself which gave
birth to us and so how could we not, in every pore, every atom, every
firing of a neuron, not be anarchy ourselves, each one of us? I take very
seriously each of the four manifestations of anarchism that the four

388
figures I have written chapters on in detail in this book have brought to
bear. Jesus, I think, is seen in a completely different light once one throws
away the religious clothes he has been garbed in and you see him as a
straight up social anarchist. Yes, he was a Jewish one and so he must be
seen as a religious Jew. But the way he seems to express his Jewish beliefs
is authentically anarchist to my mind. Or would be seen as anarchist if he
had not lived 1800 years before anarchism existed as a thing. John Cage,
with his Eastern influences, offers another form of anarchism, one about
letting go and letting be rather than one which tries to fix things in an
anarchist way. He shows that anarchism can just be surrendering to the
anarchy rather than getting caught up in what you want. This, I think, is
an important counterbalance to many other forms of anarchism. Alan
Moore, meanwhile, brings the power of language and fiction to bear and
highlights that we have perhaps more power than we think to imagine and
create. Indeed, he shows that we absolutely must imagine and create if
we are to be human beings to our fullest extent. The universe is itself only
really endless creation [otherwise known as “change”] and so, being
creative, we play our anarchistic part in this. Emma Goldman, perhaps the
most “orthodox” anarchist I have focused on here, demonstrates how
individual anarchist values require a social context if they are going to be
spread to others and become their self-organising ethos and the basis of
freedom and liberty all throughout life. All in all, my four anarchists have
shown that anarchism is DOING and not just thinking. Anarchism is a
practice, an act, a lifestyle, it is not theory in books and much less is it
ever rules. You can only BE an anarchist by acting like one. Its not a club
you can join just by being in sympathy with it. Its evidence is your actions.

I did not set out, when writing this book, with any idea of “giving all the
answers”. There are multiple reasons for this. One is that I’m not up to
that task. I’m one person, I don’t know everything, and I’m wise enough to
know I don’t. Another is that anarchism is about learning for yourself. I can
give hints, lay clues and point in various directions but its up to you to
follow them through or take them up. This, as I understand it, is part of

389
what being an anarchist is. It means you must take an active interest in
your life, what you know about it and where its going to go. Yet another is
that I don’t know your life and so I don’t know what is appropriate to, or
necessary for, it. Anarchism is not static but flexible and what’s right for
this situation may not be right for that one. An advantage of an anarchism
of values, such as the one I’ve written about in this book, is that it can be
put to use in many different situations in whatever ways people deem
necessary. That’s all to the good as far as I can see.

You might not agree with everything in this book – and that’s perfectly
fine. If you’ve read it through you should know by now that I don’t set
much store by “being right” anyway. I take a pragmatist approach to life
which is about solving problems or clearing roadblocks so I’m not into
metaphysics and have no interest in “saying how everything really is”. So
if something I have said seems wrong to you or you violently disagree
with it then please feel free, in your own words, to correct me and say
why I’m wrong. If there is a better answer to some question, one that
avoids a problem I have created or one that opens up a new possibility I
never even saw, then I’m interested to know about it. I’m not here,
anywhere, in this book to say “I’m right and everyone else is wrong.” In
fact, to me, the entire anarchist ethos is a conversational one in which
people progress by dialogue and conversation, solving their problems
together as they go. So, if we disagree about something in this tome, let’s
talk!

In my opening chapter I made mention of trans people and of the fact that
I was writing with such people in view. I hope I didn’t deceive anybody
there into thinking I would be going into deep discussion about the issues
facing such people – which are unfortunately many – when that was not
my intention. Once again, as I said before in chapter six, I believe in
letting people speak for themselves and from their own experience. I
consider myself to be a non-binary or, as I saw someone describe
themselves a day or two ago, gendervoid person. You will have seen

390
earlier that I find the labels somewhat arbitrary and, in a sense, pointless
in the end anyway. What matters to me is that whatever colour, creed,
gender or sexuality you are, you are, first and foremost, a person. That is
where I, personally, take my stand. When people talk about “human
rights” they are, or should be, talking about rights for ALL humans, not
some. In this respect, there should never need to be any “women’s” rights
or “black” rights or “trans” rights, etc. Dignity, peace and justice for all
humans means not for some and not others. In specifically mentioning
trans people earlier, a group of people I identified with as persecuted
outsiders, I meant in my opening chapter only to indicate that this
philosophy of anarchism I was writing was, potentially, a philosophy for
EVERYONE and not for some and not others. Here, I want to say,
EVERYONE is invited inside the anarchist tent and no one, because of who
and what they are, is excluded. My view, as that of many anarchists, is
that we are either all free or nobody is free.

So that is that and now this book is done. I wish you peace, health and
happiness – and whatever else you wish for in a life of untrammelled
human expression, as Emma Goldman might have put it! I, of course,
can’t guarantee you this and you will probably have to fight for it but isn’t
it better to die free, on your own terms, than to live life as a slave?

That’s the spirit!

391