Toward Wholistic Theory
Column: Re-Thinking the Foundations of Green Politics
Toward Wholistic Theory
Transcending Marxism, Freudianism, and Environmentalism
By Steve Welzer
The radicalism of the 1960s clearly had a different “look and feel” than that of the 1930s. It occurred to many sixties Movement participants that the leftist analysis—on which radicalism had been based for almost a century since the appearance of the seminal writings of Marx—either had been deficient at its core or was no longer fully applicable to the changed circumstances of the late 20th century.
Beginnings toward formulating new theoretical directions were evident during the 1970s and ‘80s. Collectives such as South End, Anarchos, Fifth Estate, Movement for a New Society, and Planet Drum in the United States—as well as Resurgence in Britain, the Situationists in France, the Spontis in Germany—recognized that there were ecological and countercultural elements to the social change ferment of the sixties that were based on a deeper critique of the lifeways of Western civilization than that embodied by any of the disparate 19th and 20th century movements for human liberation.
Essential characteristics of modern life
For the sake of this article I will use the term ‘modernity’ in a broad way, as applying to the radical transition of lifeways following the Neolithic Revolution. Looked at from the perspective of our entire species-history, this ten thousand year epoch constitutes a relatively brief and fundamentally coherent period. I’ll make the case that the essential characteristics of modern life have resulted in pathological consequences in all domains—social, psychological, and ecological. Leftism/Marxism only addressed issues in the socio-economic sphere. Its lack of wholism led it to a number of faulty interpretations and perspectives, most notably a buttressing of the mystique of progressive development.
The Marxist worldview held that class division of society is appropriate to a certain stage of social evolution. There is no class division under “primitive communism” (the whole long aboriginal period preceding the Neolithic) and there will be no class division after the ultimate communist stage of generalized abundance is achieved. But the interim period of development is necessarily riven by all the issues that are the focus of the leftist critique—inequality, exploitation, imperialism, racism, class conflict, power elitism, concentrations of wealth and power. This worldview is challenged by the idea that the above, rather than being viewed as adjunctive phenomena of a progressive historical process, ought to be implicated as sociopathologies attributable to the aberrations of modernity.
Community/Nature vs. Institutions/Technologies
Marxism equated aboriginal lifeways with backwardness. Gary Snyder, on the other hand, sympathetically referred to the “Old Ways” as being characterized by stable, local, familiar relationships (family, extended family, community) in close relation to nature, fostering a sensibility of being part of, rather than alienated from, the web of life.
In the wake of the Neolithic Revolution there was a civilizational trend toward focusing upon (and allocating resources toward) the development of institutions and technologies. Over time the context of human life changed from being embedded in a community/nature matrix to an institutional/technological matrix. Development and productivity became valued over stability and relation-to-place. This process has resulted in what Charlene Spretnak calls our “hyper-modern” condition, wherein institutions and technologies are impressive, even awesome, but their development comes at the expense of ecology and community.
The process accelerated with the onset of industrialism, and now we’ve arrived at a point where the institutions and technologies are grossly hypertrophied; i.e., there is a growing and unhealthy imbalance between the ecosphere and what Barry Commoner calls the “technosphere.” Community has all but withered and people have become radically alienated from nature.
What We’ve Lost ... and the Consequences
The problematic of modernity revolves around what we have lost. In the context of stable community and relation-to-place, there is an inherent appreciation for limits and balances. To the extent that the human experience has lost its grounding in a sane and healthy social habitat, it should not be surprising to observe that the result has been a constellation of pathologies.
The leftist movement for social liberation focused narrowly on sociopathological issues. As the critique of modernity broadened, two alternative, but also narrowly-focused, liberatory movements arose during the 20th century: a movement focusing on the psychopathological aspects of modernity (vide Freud's “Civilization and Its Discontents”) and the environmental movement, which focuses on the ecopathological aspects.
Green Theory Emergent
The importance of the Green movement is that it holds the promise of synthesizing the narrowly-focused social, psychological, and ecological critiques. Emergent Green theory recognizes that our most serious problems flow from the aberrant direction we’ve been going in for millennia—away from sanity, toward lifeways that are unmoored from the community/nature matrix.
This implies that human liberation won't result from changing ownership of the means of production or from psychotherapy/pharmacology or from simple environmentalism. Beyond notions of political revolution or personal liberation, what is required will be a Deep Green transformation of lifeways—renewal of appreciation for limits and balances, revaluation of community, re-establishment of our relation to nature and place. The problems of the epoch of development—imperialism, war, inequality, ecological crisis, mass forms of neurosis, preoccupation with technology—are all symptoms of the fact that we’ve lost our bearings in a headlong rush toward hyper-modernity. Our challenge now is to recover our grounding and find our way home.
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Steve Welzer Co-Editor of GHQ, is a Green movement activitst going back more than 15 years. He was editor of the Jersey Greens Journal for several years which helped lead to the founding of the Green Party of New Jersey in 1997. He lives in East Windsor, N.J. and is currently pursuing a project to establish an EcoVillage.
Readings: Post-sixties efforts to reconceptualize theory
South End collective (Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Holly Sklar, Leslie Cagan, Lydia Sargent) Center: Boston Representative Journal: Z Magazine Representative Book: Liberating Theory (South End Press)
Anarchos group (Murray Bookchin, et. al.) Center: New York Journal: Anarchos Book: Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Fifth Estate (Fredy Perlman, David Watson, Peter Werbe, Marilynn Rashid) Center: Detroit Journal: Fifth Estate newspaper Book: Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
Planet Drum/Bioregionalists (Peter Berg, Jim Dodge, Raymond Dasmann, Freeman House, Gary Snyder, David Haenke, Kirkpatrick Sale) Center: Mostly San Francisco Journal: Raise the Stakes Books: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, Dwellers in the Land
Movement for a New Society (Lawrence Scott, George Willoughby, Bill Moyer, George Lakey) Center: Philadelphia Journal: The New Catalyst (later segued into New Society Publishers, aided by Van Andruss, Judith/Christopher Plant, John/Nancy Jack Todd, Joanna Macy)
Permaculturalists (Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry; also Bill Mollison in Australia) Center: The Land Institute in Kansas Journal: The Land Report Books: New Roots for Agriculture, Permaculture
Green Politics (Charlene Spretnak, John Rensenbrink, Dee Berry, Howie Hawkins, Brian Tokar) Nationwide Early Journals: Green Letter, Green Synthesis Books: Green Politics, The Green Alternative, The Greens and the Politics of Transformation