Kopytin, A.; & Gare, A (2023).: Ecopoiesis: A manifesto for ecological civilisation, Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice ,4(1) [Open Access internet journal]

• URL: http://en.ecopoiesis.ru

This short paper – ‘…the basis for a scenario for the development of culture and various public institutions, recognising the potential of people to control their own destiny, to take effective steps to preserve life on earth.’ – is not short of contention. 

The opening sections introduce ecological civilisation in its ontological and geopolitical context, in opposition to industrial civilisation. This is instructive, building on writings from the late soviet period in Russia but also drawing in a much wider cast – notably in accord with what Tim Flannery had set out in “Here on Earth” concerning the division between the Gaians and the Medeans, the followers of Lovelock and Huntington, but with echoes from the much longer disputes among European philosophers on the place of humans in nature and the nature of knowledge. Roszak had typified this titanic tussle through the influence of Descartes and Francis Bacon in the 17th on the rise of ‘scientism’, its challenge by the naturists of the late 18th and its triumph in the 19th and 20th centuries. Kopytin and Gare largely reprise Roszak’s analysis 50 years on, and link this with events since.

The trailing part of the paper lays out a statement of conviction, core axioms and values, and steps and avenues (to create an ecological civilisation). This can best be summarised by a subheading: “Reorganising science and putting ecology and human ecology in the centre of knowledge”. It is of lesser interest from a scholarly point of view, apart from picking up Roszak’s attention to aesthetics and his focus on a particular triad of aesthetes – Wordsworth, Goethe and Blake – defying the Newtonianism that had powered the 18th-century enlightenment. Blake’s vision of a New Jerusalem certainly stands beside the manifesto’s championship of eco-humanism.

While Blake was recoiling from industrialisation, Kopytin and Gare recoil from globalised unipolar liberal democracy with attendant consumerism (‘global corporatocracy..catastrophe of war of all against all…’). On the positive side they can draw on sound environmental policies surviving the soviet experiment, notably championed by Lenin and Gorbachev; and ecological civilisation’s incorporation in the PRC’s constitution as a core belief in 2007, reinforced twice since (latest in 2017).

So there are plenty of pointers to this being beyond the pale of public policy debate in the West – the manifesto published in Russia in a journal dedicated to this brand of eco-socialism, denouncing the new world order, free trade(!) and global corporate capitalism.

For all that Gare as a professor of philosophy at Swinburne has been making serious contributions to cultural studies for some years, is conversant with various lineages of Western thought and writes usefully on developments outside the suffocating analytical tradition. 

In particular, he has assimilated and advanced debates in theoretical biology and the implications for theories of culture and philosophy of science. These revolutions in the scientific imagination translate to human biology, human ecology and political theory. 

The manifesto wraps these ideas in an ethical framework, no more surprising than that of the humanists in pre-revolutionary France – Rousseau and Paine; or of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or their predecessors. 

Ecopoiesis is an awkward term. It is difficult to assimilate into public discourse on the environment, now openly regarded as ‘under threat’. Yet we do not have a way of thinking about the challenge this presents us, beyond asking our governments to face up to what we are not prepared to acknowledge ourselves, and our scientists to continue to measure environmental deterioration we can now experience without the need for sophisticated measuring devices. 

A manifesto presents one level on which we can accept actions demanded of us as individuals and of our institutions and systems of government. Its utility is in making sense of disparate phenomena until now wrapped in ideas such as conservation, air quality, indigenous rights, health self-awareness, and well-being (Kopytin is after all a professor of psychology). It demands of us that we shift our faith from outworn beacons of progress: development, industrial advancement, material wealth, security: all of which are dangerously counter-effective in the variety of global crises and disruptions experienced and the dysfunction of institutions and systems of government built around them. Is this statement indeed controversial? see for instance Ahmed (2022).

The arguments for rethinking progress in terms of an ecological civilisation are straightforward, even if the ‘steps and avenues’ offered strike me as unrealistic. The revolution heralded is in how we, humans, see ourselves in the environments we have largely created for ourselves, and the environment beyond – the biosphere; other peoples; the future; and systems that make life possible, enjoyable and to be celebrated. The first step may be to abandon the folly of material progress, embrace humanity in the least of our fellows and in ourselves, and the infinite beauty of creation beyond us and our control.   

References

Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends – politics and transcendence in post industrial society (1972) Faber and Faber, London

Tim Flannery, Here on Earth, an argument for hope (2010) Text, Melbourne

Nafeez Ahmed, Defence Agencies ‘Accelerating’ Risk of ‘Hothouse Earth’, US Military Study Warns, Byline Times, 23 June 2022 – reviewing reports by Dr Elizabeth G Boulton (Australian Army) appearing in the US Marine Corps University Press’ digital journal and in the Spring 2022 edition of Journal of Advanced Military Studies, based on her PhD Thesis.

The Rise and Fall of Empires, Peter Turchin 2006

Turchin’s ‘radical new theory of world history’ is as bold as the various encomiums on its covers – although that from the THES: – “Turchin’s view…promises a great deal..“- or from Anatol Lieven who the author quotes at some length – “Excellent” – in their terseness perhaps suggest that the publishers were somewhat desperate in finding kind things to say.

For my part “[e]loquently argued, W&P&W is a rich pageant of crucial historical stories ..” sort of captures it, minus the crucial

So what is this new perspective? Again end cover remarks claim this is from the author’s expertise in evolutionary biology.  This is not true; it is much more likely to be found in the author’s ‘technical’ book, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, from 2003, which has the equations this volume eschews. Indeed, sprinkled through are terms like psychohistory: “the branch of mathematics which deals with reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli” ; Cliodynamics; imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis, the last three seeming to have been coined by the author to clothe his rather interesting hypotheses. I am not sure how this relates to evolutionary biology. Jared Diamond’s rival tome Guns, Germs and Steel is more closely rooted in biology. The two perspectives are not compatible, as Turchin admits.

If anything, Turchin’s work follows that of economic historians – Kondratiev’s long waves come to mind. His book is enlivened with statistical constructs showing extremes of wealth in the ruling classes sustained over the course of empires, and the role of capital in funding wars of conquest or absorption. The key element he brings to the table is the centrality of social capital – or asabiya – a term he borrows from Ibn Khaldun from the 12th century, an astute commentator on world affairs.

Turchin argues that asabiya determines the tide of imperial success and downfall measured by relative equality in wealth distribution on the one hand, and on the other by tribalism in the face of existential threat. As evidence, for instance, he cites the defeat of a large force of Romans in the Danube valley through guile and cooperation among the otherwise warring Gaulish locals. This is attractive writing and, for those not familiar with the late Roman era beyond the marches, fascinating and informative.

The other hypothesis he employs with effect concerns where old empires are challenged and where new empires arise. This he attributes to the vitality of a barbarian frontier, where world views clash. This is appealing to enthusiasts for geography of the ancient worlds before the congealing of nations around fixed borders. Rapine aside these frontiers – visible as river highways or in the extreme by monumental fortifications crossing the countryside, mark the barrier between protection by the hegemon, and the ungodly beyond the pale.  

What they disguise though is the great drifts and lightning advances of peoples moving through Europe in these early times, taking advantage of the low asabiya of countries under sway of large empires. Caesar’s conquest of the Gauls was never complete, the Gauls remained a present danger throughout the Roman period; but it was their sacking of Rome that created the martial empire of the early Christian era, drawn together finally by this shock of confronting an enemy with no respect for the Roman arts and sciences of war, that had served them until then so well against their local rivals and the Greeks.

Peace gets short shrift in this account of world history: asabiya is good if you are fighting for your survival; or in the stratified societies that produced the generals and the mercenaries. It may be applied to small communities sustaining a life outside the benefits and costs of the protection of imperial rule. Indeed it may be amplified in societies built around the belief in the dignity of ordinary people and their aspiration for the good life. But at the end of the day these isolated stands of social capital are easy pickings for a well-organised empire builder who can count on the disaffection of people on the frontiers, without attachments, whose cultural identity congeals around the memorilessness of imperial largess. 

Turchin has assembled an impressive array of economic statistics to back his theory, not just (we are assured) for the cases he presents in this book as illustrations. This leaves the reader adrift on the wider ocean of his expansive thesis.  Basing history on fluctuations and differentials of social capital begs measurement questions of its own. 

The ordinary currency of history is in documents, places, beliefs, symbols, timelines and memory of the participants. Social capital is incorporeal, observed in its fracturing or its potency in contests of will or survival. It is attractive to the psycho-historians as it strips history of its cultural clothes in favour of more primal biologically referenced impulses. It makes of history a blank surface with rises and falls, colour and light, and of all human endeavour something complete, and very dark in its implications. Whatever our aspiration we will be brought down by our incoherence. Peace is an interval of little consequence; only the contest of wills as groups compete for space, influence and power ultimately matters.

This is Social Darwinism with a twist: the good parts of human nature – our inclination to cooperate and to act selflessly on behalf of others in our sphere of comprehension – crystalise into a tradeable substance that can be harvested by outsiders for purposes external to our humanity. Our lives become submersed in this supra human medium; our endeavours condemned to the tides of a monstrous counter history. 

Eternal peace or eternal war: both have been used to explain the march of history, and both states have adherents among the thought leaders of our time. Both seem to relate to the wider conceptual space of human evolutionary psychology, and how we can conceive history to justify the present, to excuse, or ignore, or glorify in, the past, and to prepare for the future. 

But this must be a case where morality trumps metaphysics. War is never inevitable; empires are not the only model of tolerant coexistence; social stability can rest on more natural harmonic principles than fear or dread or ignorance. While we are indeed slaves to our evolutionary natures and whatever super-narrative this imposes, the austere truths of scholarship, with counterparts in public life, exemplify our common humanity, free of the mirage of domination and control.

References

Peter Turchin, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Empires, 2010

Abbe de St. Pierre, Eternal Peace, 1660

Jarrod Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

Other Reading

Barbara Tuchman, The March of Time

A.J.P. Taylor, Course of German History

E.H. Carr, What is History

Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph, 1977    

Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack! London: Hogarth Press, 1935.

My copy of this book was a hand-me-down at one remove from Rose Dornbush, who had arrived in Australia from Germany in 1889 at the age of six. She had been a concert pianist and later a music critic writing for the newspapers. As an adult she had lived at times in England and on the continent. She was at least acquainted with Olaf Stapledon, a prolific author in various modes of what might be called philosophical science fiction – the book is inscribed as swapped with Stapledon for another book. This may place her in the Bloomsbury set presided over by the Woolfs (Leonard and Virginia) trading as the Hogarth Press Tavistock Square, or at least moving in literary circles in London may have provoked her interest in this polemic, or there was indeed no thread of connection beyond that of author and reader. For the purposes of this essay, I connect (one time) book owner with its contemporaneous author.

Music education seems to have been Rose Dornbush’s central avocation: she had been a music teacher in leading girls’ schools, and gave numerous lectures on her educational theories, which she published in 1947 under the title “The Art of Listening to Music”).

In conversation, she was stricter than her pedagogical writings might suggest. She defended the classical tradition, which she believed had been undermined by syncopation, notably at the hands of Beethoven. She was one of the “lame ducks” – typically single women of high intelligence cut loose from professional life – who were welcomed in our suburban home. She was handicapped by poverty, old age, and a shortage of social support. Her domestic arrangements were shambolic. She had an aura of serious cultural intellect, or perhaps just strong opinion, out of sorts with Sydney in the 1950s.

As to Quack, Quack!, it is unlikely to have had a large run, with its target audience probably not extending far beyond Tavistock Square. Hogarth Press was an outlet for Woolf’s literary work: (auto) biography, poetry and tracts, to begin with a cottage affair, but grew into a commercial publishing house under Woolf’s control. Quack quack! appeared while Woolf was writing a major trilogy ‘After the Deluge’, on the back of writings from 1917 on war and empire, economics and politics, The last published in this line is ‘War for Peace’ (1940). His contribution to English letters appears overshadowed by writing by and about his wife, and particularly surrounding her mental illness and suicide in 1941, yet he kept writing into late old age with a succession of autobiographical works, the last appearing in 1969, the year of his death. His memory is kept alive in Sri Lanka – where he served as a judge in the 1920s, and in North America, where his papers, notably extensive correspondence with public figures in England, can be consulted

Quack, quack! is an entirely serious diatribe, mixing anthropology, psychoanalysis, polemics, and modern history. Its centrepiece, for those not prepared to navigate its limpid prose, is 2 pairs of juxtaposed photographs showing a sober, uniformed and belt-tugging Herr Hitler, and a capped Mussolini in full oratorical flight each with a mimicking image of the Hawaiian War-God Kūkaʻilimoku, the one reproducing the famous scowl, the other a full set of teeth and a crest.

While a polemic, the book – in 1935 when war was seen as increasingly likely – builds a case around the nefarious use of language to justify war, to motivate an otherwise peaceable and indifferent population to support the total destruction of others; in effect the betrayal of public discourse by forces that saw war as a rational and desirable end.

This intellectual atmosphere had allowed the rise of totemic movements to power, and justified the crushing of humanistic values in the name of higher beliefs, and for Woolf not a far removed historical remnant, but an emerging danger for self-consciously civilised or liberal societies.

He builds this argument around archetypes – and labels. There is quack quack history and metaphysical quack quack. This percussive invention captures the nonsensical or fraudulent nature of underlying concepts and stretched beliefs. When translated to mass audiences, and with skilful and entirely ruthless operators these same ideas and diction become dangerous.

What is striking is how fertile this framework is when applied to current events. A state of being at war sustains a permanently dislocated system of government that will resist settlement of claims and the forward movement of society. This was as true for Bismarkian Germany as it is now with the leadership of the West challenged by shadows out of imperial pasts; as it was in 1935 as imperial plates shifted and power began to leak through to ordinary folk. Woolf is chiefly interested in what is driving events in Germany at that time, and sheets home blame for its descent into totalitarian war lust to 19th century influential thinkers, in fact to just one:

Spengler… may justly claim the honour of being taken as the archetype of this new European breed of intellectuals who, betraying the traditions of two thousand years, place their learning, their minds and their souls at the service of the political quacks, magicians, witch-smellers, persecutors and scapegoat hunters. He has an international reputation as the most considerable historian and philosopher now providing a theoretical basis for political magic and policies of war, violence, intolerance, persecution, mass fear, and mass hatreds… [pp159-160]

German historiography post war, through the influence of Fischer, has paid close attention to the same line of intellectual descent from Spengler. Woolf elaborates on this argument, 25 years ahead of such agonised repositioning.

Woolf then moves on to the character of those beliefs: “by metaphysical quackery I mean the abandonment of and contempt for reason as a means to truth in non-political speculation and the substitution for it of so-called intuition, magic and mysticism.” And furthermore, “the more difficult the truth is to supply, the more passionately have people insisted that it should be supplied in the most absolute and indisputable form” [p161].

For his demolition of quackism of the metaphysical kind, Woolf undertakes to unpick the magical thinking in their respective repertoires of three arch-quacks of his day: Hermann von Keyserling, Henri Bergson and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. He does not dismiss intuition or magical thinking, or religious belief per se, but aims at the wielders of false certainties who exploit, or refrain from questioning, the seductive destructiveness and falseness of the resultant programmes.

He is careful to point out that systems of knowledge based on science could be as dangerous and backward looking as systems of belief focused on absolute truths. Modern quackery did not offer room for scepticism or doubt; it is as hard edged and miraculous as cosmologies of the past that explained the place of people in the world, who they should marry, what they should look like, what was important and not to know. The caricatured indoctrination through symbols, shapes, mass orchestrated events, chants and so on, translate to more familiar manipulative language of present times. We have not left such charlatanery behind.

Metaphysicians of the past – he cites Socrates, Plato and Jesus – gave people reasons to believe in the merely imaginable. They argued from what people understood of their immediate worlds of which they were the master, to another world beyond their power, whose awfulness could crush the spirit otherwise, substituting for panic, despair, rage, violence or confusion a potent imaginary order, infused with benevolence, grace and reason.

The realities offered up in scientific advances: in fantastic cosmological narratives; in the existence of unrepresentable atoms and the dawning knowledge of their properties, in the dispersion of doubt in the triumph of the fittest offered by neo-Darwinism: gave platform for a new metaphysics, a belief in destiny around securing transformational sources of power – at the head of armies; harnessing properties of materials; securing access to mass consciousness through emerging media, inventing and deploying weapons of mass destruction, operating systems of mass and targeted surveillance, controlling the flow of trade.

The intellectual backing for this project relies on quack quack metaphysics, just as political quack quack clothes its delusional justification, and defends against detected dissent. While Keyserling’s systems will collapse under their own weight, and Radhakrishnan sold rubbish mysticism in a revival of academic philosophy for the man in the street, Woolf traces a more subtle thread in dismissing Bergson. It is, nevertheless, the latter, ‘a civilised man’ of whom he warns:

In a time like the present, when there is a struggle in the very heart of a civilisation and a savage reaction towards savagery, when a wave of superstition and unreason sweeps through men’s minds, victory and defeat depend ultimately ..not on the savages in our midst but upon the civilised. If the civilised stand firm for reason, tolerance, scepticism, the savage and his superstitions and his absolute truths is powerless. It is only when the civilised men begin to yield often unconsciously to the wave of unreason that the end is near. … Civilisations are not destroyed by the … Herr Hitlers; they are destroyed when the M. Bergsons have to be numbered among intellectual quacks. [p193]

The book, in its tatty brown paper wrapping is a reminder of the delights and traps of the life of the mind, and an example of economical prose wielded with accuracy. Its incisiveness is echoed in James Meek’s review of How Civil Wars Start – and How to Stop Them, by Barbara Walter (London Review of Books, vol44 Number 10, 26 May 2022). There is indeed these days much humbug around, much of it originating in universities – in this case the University of Chicago, but really almost anywhere.

1 June 2022

Dornbush, Rose.  (1947).  The art of listening to music.  Sydney :  Les Editions du Courrier Australien

http://www.pianola.co.nz/public/index.php/web/dornbush

Woolf, Leonard. (1935). Quack, Quack!, London: Hogarth Press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Woolf

Complementing the work of the so-called “house” artists, G.H.Horton & Co Ltd. also engaged the services of a wide variety of local and visiting celebrities. By the time Mastertouch took over the QRS label in Australia the list of eminent recording artists was a most impressive one – Lindley Evans, Frank Hutchens, Alexander Hmelnitsky, Paul Vinogradoff, Henry Penn, Ernest Truman, Rose Dornbush Victor Arden, Frank La Forge, and Howard Brockway are but a few names selected from the original recording schedules. Frank Hutchens and Lindley Evans, duo-pianists, are best remembered now in association with the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music and the famous ABC Community Singing Concerts held at the Sydney Town Hall. Lindley Evans also endeared himself to many children as the Musical Director for the Argonauts on ABC Radio. Ernest Truman was the second and the longest serving City of Sydney Town Hall organist. His rendition of “The Storm” on the mighty Town Hall organ used to rattle the pressed metal ceilings and rumble the windows throughout the entire building, much to the delight of the packed audiences who attended his “Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Concerts”! Rose Dornbush was an expatriate Australian who had spent a considerable time in Germany before the First World War. She was employed by the company because she became the victim of the “anti-German” feeling prevalent in Australia after the war, and so could not get any work at all, despite her great talent.

from https://mastertouch.bookproduction.org/the-artists-of-mastertouch.htm