Anarchism and Mysticism.

Paul Cudenec, The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We're Meant to Be Sussex: Winter Oak Press, 2013; 144pp; ISBN 978-0957656604.

As I opened this present book, with a cover embellished with an anarchist symbol, two thoughts came to mind. One was that I noticed the book was prefaced with a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, implying that humans were 'immortal' beings. What on earth, I thought, had such nonsense to do with anarchism? A second thought was evoked by the memory of a banner hung at the recent anarchist bookfair; it read: 'Religion is stupid; murderous, bigoted and sexist crap'.

Why then was a book purporting to be about anarchism trumpeting Hindu mysticism?

This book, in fact, consists of two quite separate themes, or rather, it is about two ideologies that the author Paul Cudenec seeks to promote and unite, namely anarchism and mysticism. The first offers his reflections on anarchism as a political tradition and movement which, quite misleadingly, Cudenec tends to equate with primitivism, thus heralding a blanket dismissal of 'civilisation' in all its aspects. The second is on religious mysticism to which he aligns Jung's psychology and thoughts on existentialism, mostly of religious existentialists such as Karl Jaspers and Colin Wilson. The work purports to forge a new and profound philosophy for the twentyfirst century. In reality Cudenec simply regurgitates, with endless quotations, a rather sterile version of medieval religious mysticism--otherwise known as 'traditionalism', 'perennial philosophy', 'theosophy' or 'esotericism'--a mysticism that entails a 'metaphysical' account of some 'divine reality' that transcends our earthly existence. Cudenec thus outlines and advocates a form of religious mysticism associated with such reactionary scholars as Rene Guenon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (who doesn't get a mention), Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, none of whom can really be described as anarchists, although they may have been associated with the cultural avant-garde.

Anyone who is conversant with the history of the real anarchist movement, welldescribed in Michael Schmidt's recent book, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (2013), will recognise that there has hardly been a connection between anarchism and mysticism. Although, of course, many mystics may have expressed an anarchist sensibility--Lao Tzu, William Blake, Nicolai Berdyaev, Aurobindo Ghose and Leo Tolstoy are examples. Indeed over thirty years ago (1981), my essay on 'Lao Tzu and Anarchism' was published in the pages of the Freedom magazine (see my Ecology and Anarchism, which also includes essays on the mystics Tolstoy, Aurobindo and Gandhi. (1))

This book is well-researched and written in a lively style. It is thus highly readable and engaging, and being a kind of manifesto, it reads rather like a religious tract out to convert people, who, according to the spiritually enlightened Cudenec, are still living in a state of social malaise. But the book does not advocate an ecological world view, for nature takes a back-seat to the purported 'universal spirit'. What Cudenec promotes therefore is not our empirical engagement with a 'fecund and grubby earth' but, on the contrary, a 'pure and lofty esotericism' (p 15). All power is therefore given to a divine reality, with respect to which everybody and everything is but an impure manifestation. All this is just a replication or re-invention of Plato's religious metaphysics.

Cudenec's lively discussion of anarchism and his critique of industrial capitalism and the state are very worthwhile, and full of interest. He gives us an array of quotations from a wide range of anarchists to make his points, from Godwin and Bakunin to Herbert Read (who is clearly a favourite). But he seems to equate anarchism with primitivism and thus in totalising fashion completely repudiates anything to do with 'civilisation', oblivious to the fact that 'esotericism' itself is largely a product, not of some divine spirit, but of scholars living and researching within a civilisation. It is problematic, however, to completely conflate modernity (the era of mechanistic science, industrial capitalism and the modern state) with Western civilisation (or culture).

For Western culture, like all other civilisations throughout history, is complex, extremely diverse, multifaceted, with many competing ideologies, and is continually evolving. He seems rather oblivious to the fact that esotericism, particularly in the form of Christian neo-Platonism, was an intrinsic part of Western civilisation (culture)--as his own intellectual icons Nasr and Guenon always acknowledged. Indeed one has to recognise that philosophical materialism is a minor tradition in Western culture, and that all the major philosophical figures of the culture--Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and his own beloved Jaspers, were not only pro-state but essentially religious thinkers--that is, acknowledging the reality of some spiritual realm that Cudenec extols throughout this book. Describing the 'Modern World' in completely monadic fashion is unhelpful to say the least. And to describe contemporary Western people as brain-washed, as alienated from the natural world and as completely 'supine' (p 27) before the forces of the modern state and industrial capitalism, let alone describing them as all 'insane' (following the ardent primitivist Derrick Jensen) is arrogant and elitist and insulting towards ordinary working people.

Completely lost on Cudenec is the fact that ordinary mortals in Western societies have their own forms of social life independent of the state and capitalist corporations and that in their thoughts and in their diverse interactions with the natural world, they give meaning to their lives that has very little connection either with capitalism or with religion or any 'divine reality'. The notion that without some belief in a spiritual being or in some divine reality (of one sort or another) human life has no meaning (nihilism) is just the kind of propaganda continually put out by religious clerics and mystics. Neither meaning, nor morality, nor the development of one's own unique personality, depend on religious mysticism--as anarchists like Kropotkin, an evolutionary naturalist, emphasised long ago.

Religious institutions are fundamentally social phenomena, as I argued in my book Religion and Anthropology (2006). They do not therefore--as Cudenec and the mystics contend--have their 'origin' or 'source' in some transcendent divine reality. Religious beliefs and their accompanying rituals are the creation not of the divinity, but of human beings through their social practices. Thus setting up an opposition between spirituality and religion--a favourite ploy of Cudenec--is pure obfuscation. They are two sides of the same coin. Beliefs in ancestral spirits, or in some deity or in a world spirit have no reality apart from the social practices in which they are embedded, while religious practices have no meaning apart from the spiritual beliefs they express. Throughout human history religion as a social institution has always had an intrinsic relationship with political power--as Cudenec acknowledges, and then chooses to ignore--for all political regimes, even the most tyrannical, seek to sanctify their rule through appeals to some divine--spiritual--order. Spirituality, state power and capitalism are intrinsically linked, as is exemplified by fundamentalist religious movements throughout the world.

Paul Cudenec's stimulating but rather flawed text is almost one long rant--and in this he simply mimics the esoteric philosophers--against materialism which he perversely conflates with positivism, industrial capitalism and consumerism. The only choice we are given is between positivism and esotericism, between mechanism and mysticism as if these were the only alternatives available to us.

Cudenec seems blissfully unaware of the profound impact of the eighteenth century Enlightenment as an intellectual and political movement. This movement not only gave rise to anarchism, as well as several other political currents of thought (such as socialism, liberalism and nationalism), but also initiated a fundamental change in our understanding of the natural world and the place of human social life within it. Thus during the nineteenth century several currents of thought emerged which completely undermined both the cosmological world-view of esotericism, and the mechanistic philosophy and positivism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is worth briefly noting four of these currents of thought.

Firstly, among geologists and palaeontologists there emerged a conception of the earth not as a recent divine creation, nor as some kind of cosmic divine organism (as with proponents of esoteric philosophy), but as a material entity that was continually changing in complex and diverse, non-linear ways.

Secondly, there developed among students of thermo-dynamics a conception of the physical world very different from that of Newtonian physics. It stressed the emergence of 'order out of chaos', as Ilya Prigogine expressed it, and it undermined the emphasis on 'prediction' and 'determinism' that was intrinsic to classical physics. Like Heraclitus and the Buddha, for whom all things are in a state of flux, thermodynamic theorists emphasised that time was an irreversible process--the 'arrow' of time as they expressed it. Thus the sun that rises at dawn is not the same sun that rose the day before! Cudenec's discussion of time, in terms of cyclic versus linear time, is thus completely inadequate.

Thirdly, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of evolutionary biology, associated specifically with the writings of Charles Darwin. As Ernst Mayr and many other scholars have insisted, evolutionary theory not only made esotericism completely anachronistic--though Cudenec still wants to resurrect it--but it also completely undermined the mechanistic philosophy and positivism of the seventeenth century. What Darwin, an uncompromising philosophical materialist, initiated was a completely new ecological and evolutionary world-view--evolutionary naturalism. He introduced the idea that humans were not the special products of divine creation but evolved according to principles that operated throughout the natural world. He stressed the intrinsic organic--not spiritual--links between humans and nature, thus completely undermining (long before deep ecology and feminist eco-philosophy), the mechanistic world picture associated especially with Descartes, along with its anthropocentrism and its associated dualisms--specifically those between humans (culture) and nature, and between body and mind. Darwin's evolutionary naturalism emphasised the importance of openness, chance and probability, and the subjective agency and individuality of all organisms in the evolutionary process. He heralded a way of understanding that was both historical and naturalistic, not theological, a complete contrast with Cudenec's appeal to esotericism.

Finally there developed in the nineteenth century among German historicist philosophers, anthropologists and many other social scientists an understanding that social life was fundamentally a historical process. Scholars--as diverse as Karl Marx, Lewis Morgan, Edward Tylor, Wilhelm Dilthey and Herbert Spencer--came to envisage an understanding of the human life-world that combined a stress on our shared humanity (emphasised by Immanuel Kant) with an equal stress on the social and cultural diversity of human life (emphasised by Johann Herder and the romantics). What emerged was an understanding of humans that combined humanism and naturalism, hermeneutics and science.

All these developments emphasised that humans were an intrinsic part of a natural world; that this world was not an organism or a machine but an historical process; and thus the recognition of the historicity not only of nature but of human beings and human social life and culture. Both esotericism and Cartesian mechanistic science therefore came to be seen as limiting perspectives for the understanding of human social life. All this is, of course, completely lost on Cudenec who, in his attempt to promote esotericism (theosophy), seems to be stuck in the medieval era.

During the twentieth century many scholars, of diverse intellectual traditions, and drawing on the theoretical insights of the nineteenth century, developed philosophical systems that attempted to go beyond both religious metaphysics (esotericism) and mechanistic science (positivism). Among such 'images of thought' we may note the following: the empirical naturalism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead; the evolutionary naturalism of Roy Sellars; the historical anthropology of Franz Boas and Marcel Mauss; the existentialist Marxism of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, who combined the important insights of Marx and Sigmund Freud--both historical materialists; the organic philosophy of Lewis Mumford; the emergent materialism of Mario Bunge; and the dialectical naturalism of Murray Bookchin.

All these philosophical systems, it seems to me, are far richer in content (as forms of evolutionary naturalism), and thus (as conceptual resources) far more relevant to anarchists in formulating their own philosophy to complement and support their anarchist politics, than the esotericism advocated by Paul Cudenec in this engaging but deeply problematic text.

Brian Morris, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College London

(1) Brian Morris, Ecology and Anarchism (Malvern, UK: Images Publishing, 1996), pp 37-52.

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Author:	Morris, Brian
Publication:	Anarchist Studies
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Mar 22, 2015
Words:	2026
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