LOVE POLITICS: A Case Against Monogamy
by Glenn Parton
Introduction
Let's shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the
question, Why can't people see the obvious? If people could see what is
self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon
follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply
demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush.
Outline of a strategy for human renewal: One: Americans cannot think
deeply because the heart is closed. When the heart is closed, then
Reason, the mind, becomes a calculator, an instrument, a machine that
knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is
hard-hearted people who are unknowingly supporting world-disaster. True
knowledge, wisdom, must be informed by sympathy, feelings, and heart.
Two: The American heart has turned to stone due to sexual repression,
stretching back to our Puritan beginning. Everyone in this culture is,
as a manner of upbringing, sexually wounded, resulting in fear, shame,
guilt, and resentment. The wound festers; self-doubt and self-hatred
prevent us from loving others. Generosity, the opening of the heart,
begins with the ability to experience sex as a gift. If you cannot do
this, then all your good deeds will be wrapped in resentment. The
Christian concept of love, which desexualizes it (Agape instead of
Eros), leaves the person sick and suffering at the core.
Three: To open the heart so we can think deeply it is necessary to
search and find our erotic nature, accept it, and freely express it.
This is not something that can be done alone -- through Yoga, Tantra,
for example -- but requires a new
man/woman relationship. The old relationship -- namely, monogamy
(whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now
co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock
value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly
Capitalism which is destroying this planet.
In short, we will not think deeply unless we love, and we will not love
unless we practice a free sexuality. Dare
to love more than one person! It's a simple idea that's
hard to do. Consult your daydreams!
Beginning
The integration of politics and sexuality is the best way to build a
social movement for resolving the ecological crisis which is
threatening to bring Life on this planet to a crash in probably one or
two generations, perhaps sooner? Traditional politics, party-politics,
and protest-politics, are necessary for postponing world disaster, for
providing time and space for fundamental lifestyle changes, but is not
sufficient to heal us from the ground up, according to the
original-natural order of things. For this task we need to mobilize a
different kind of energy, not negative energy, but positive energy, the
energy of Eros.
Sexual love is the prototype of all human happiness. If we let this
joy, instead of conscience or duty or protest be the source of our
community building, it would bring together and hold together aware
people. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, even the
primary work of saving the planet and ourselves, will not hold us
together because the psychological damage in America is too great.
Americans have a defensive ego-structure -- a system of
self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception
of the world -- the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair
society. This makes us, “as we are”, incapable of forming enduring
political communities for social transformation, which is precisely
what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along
well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must
be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no
longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy.
What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation?
Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of
mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult
task.
But not if the erotic life-force is damned by monogamy. A transforming
political community of monogamous couples is impossible because
monogamous love places itself first and everyone else second; it
produces separation and tension between lovers and everyone else,
couples and society. However, by refusing monogamy in favor of a highly
discerning free love, there is a chance of knitting a community that
will not easily unravel. The pairing process, as far as I can see, will
remain the basis of the social structure, but we could all work more
easily and much better in a network of loving relationships, pairing
without exclusivity, opening lines of deep communication that are
presently jammed by jealousy, competition, mistrust, fear and
arrogance. The key is not to abolish one-to-one love, but to multiply
it.
There is already a manifest hostility between the sexes, which is going
to get worse. Much of it is a result of a false morality that prohibits
us from knowing one another. Each man is "allowed" to intimately know
only one woman, and vice versa. How can we expect to find and work out
answers to the critical problems we face, if a vital point of
discovery, wisdom and sustainability -- love between men and women --
is so limited!
The age of discovery and togetherness between the sexes has not yet
begun, so let it begin now with a few individuals who defy the sacred
cow of conventional morality -- namely, monogamy-- in favor of
political love, which means loving the “highest” in oneself and others,
making one's political destiny with a lover clear and binding, creating
diverse relationships, loving communities, in which women draw out the
best in men (infusing men's minds with love), and men draw out the best
in women (inspiring them with intellectual theory and global political
priorities). Real love is transcendence, beyond the mutual validation
of empirical egos, toward a shared commitment or vow, not just between
two people, but to a new commonwealth.
The function of these erotic-political inter-relationships is to
accelerate evolution, nature's effort to become aware of itself as a
whole, before an eco-catastrophe resets it back to the stage of the
cockroach. Why not affirm sexual love as a vehicle for progressive
social change; it is presently misused for every moneymaking purpose
imaginable -- with great success. That should tell us something. This
retail culture would collapse if people tasted real happiness, instead
of being locked in monogamous relationships that cannot satisfy the
mass of humanity for a lifetime (even if a few simpletons stick to a
single spouse), driving people elsewhere for satisfaction, finding
everything but the real thing.
When material circumstances are ripe, an idea, Learn to love more than one person,
can be a decisive force in history. It depends on a handful of living
examples that prove the reality of the concept, and then thousands and
tens of thousands will spontaneously respond to it. Today, the
information and organs of communication for world transformation are in
place: it is the inner readiness for widening the domain of love that
is lacking, as Lewis Mumford said. That is our challenge, for without a
positive concentration on love, understood as the integration of sexual
desire and political awareness, we will not be able to rescue the
planet and its creatures from the growing forces of hate and violence.
Did everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her love life make the
wrong choice, or could there be something inherently wrong with
monogamy? The American way is to always want to solve every problem
with a new and improved technique, rather than consider a bold, new
reorganization of life. The solution of the sexual problem, however,
takes us to the core of human nature, and demands that we come to terms
with the human role in the greater scheme of reality, our place in the
cosmos.
According to the German philosopher, Maik Hosang, the logos of love can
save us: evolution occurs through qualitative leaps, from matter to
life to human life. Love among the parts sets the stage for the
emergence of higher reality. The gravitational order of the celestial
bodies generated life, and the balance and harmony of living beings
gave rise to humankind. A just and peaceful world-order is the next
step forward, but we need to untie the knot of monogamy and let the
whole of evolution flow through a new and free man/woman relationship,
creating loving and lasting human communities, which will rationally
regulate our relations with nature.
Frederick Engels' book, The
Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, argues
that "group marriage" is characteristic of hunter-gatherers, whereas
horticultural people prefer "pairing marriage." The later is more
hedged around with restrictions, but is not based on any assumption of
sexual exclusiveness for either partner. Pre-European America,
according to Lewis Morgan on whose empirical research Engels based his
theory, is the classic soil of the pairing family. The Iroquois, for
example, simply dissolved relationships at will by going back home, and
held festivals every year when tribes came together for the purpose of
wider sexual enjoyment and cultural enrichment.
According to Engels, “monogamous marriage”, the third historical stage
of the man/woman relationship, results from the influence of private
property (beginning with the domestication of animals). Its express
purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity (so women
cannot be permitted to have sex with other men), which later come into
their father's property as his natural heirs. Engels shows what a small
part individual sex love played in the rise of monogamy. It has an
economic origin. And along with permanent monogamy there soon appeared
prostitution (for men) and adultery (for women), with no cure for
either one.
According to Engels, women brought about the transition from group
marriage to pairing marriage, with its greater equality and joy, but
men introduced strict monogamy -- though indeed only for women. In her
introduction to Engels’ great book, Eleanor Leacock argues that it is
crucial for women to understand that the monogamous family as an
economic unit is basic to their subjugation, calling it, quoting
Engels, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”
Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy
a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human
association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn,
a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but
the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to
recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love
relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to
the conclusion in his book, Ancient
Society, that the advanced forms of civilization “will be a
repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty,
equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens.”
Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for
building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory
consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community
that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us
strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required
socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic
adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead
spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and
hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do
not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal
energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by
allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies,
can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and
solidarity to make a true beginning.
Family
The isolation of human beings in America is unprecedented, which makes
the futile striving for the romantic ideal (of monogamy) even more
attractive. Finding Mr. or Mrs. Right is paramount; otherwise, there
appears only loneliness. After the monogamous relationship is
established the couple closes on itself, becoming more and more
ingrown; it is “sociability reduced to its simplest terms”, said
Charles Fourier. Communication with larger social circles atrophies,
and like all closed systems, according to the second law of
thermodynamics, it tends over time to decline and disintegrate. This
romantic ideal of self-sufficient love, the perfect mate, is an
illusion that many chase for a lifetime.
The myth continues with the vision of a self-sufficient family in the
farmhouse, mountain retreat, suburbia, cut off from the real
communities of traditional village and Polis (city-state). Children are
retarded in this narrow world, denied exposure to wide and diverse
human perspectives from birth, dominated by the worldview of their
parents, becoming, for the most part, little replicas of them. The
wounds, prejudices and limitations of the parents are visited on the
children, which is why generational change is so slow. In order to
speed up evolution, according to Rudolf Bahro's little known
masterpiece, Avoiding Social
And Ecological Disaster, it is necessary to "break the cycle of
the neurotic family." Children need the nurturing presence of a viable
community, an intimate group that enfolds them with love and
understanding, and adults need communication with the full extent of
society and the universe.
The nuclear family is the oldest institution of civilization, and the
justification of the oppressive State because in order for competing
and antagonistic families not to consume one another, a power standing
above them becomes necessary. The institutions of monogamy,
private property and the state are parts of a false whole, from which
we must distance ourselves. The first man who said, “This is my woman”,
making possible the accumulation
of private property, was the real founder of modern society. We will
not get rid of civilization as we have known it and suffered it, if we
are not willing to let go of the nuclear family.
True civilization is a process in the service of Eros, making "one out
of many," unifying humankind, but the family will not give the
individual up, making it very difficult for him or her to enter into
wider circles of life. Its ideal of unconditional love validates the
person as s/he actually is, creating and supporting an inflated
ego-image, providing a home for selfishness and greed -- the last
refuge of scoundrels. It teaches people, beneath the rhetoric or words,
to restrict love, to ignore and disregard others, to divide “us” and
“them”, to prioritize interests from the part to the whole (family
first, then country, then world), rather than from the whole to the
part. The primitive communistic household, which comprised many couples
and their children, entrusted to women the management of the household
as a public, socially necessary institution. The socialization of
children was not a private affair, and the welfare of the
village-community was the most important lesson to be learned.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, "The clan was torn up and
the feeling for family came into existence." The clan or tribe
may be said to be "the family before the family" (Tonnies). Humankind
took a false, and potentially fatal step from tribe to nuclear family,
instead of pushing forward with the idea of a federation of tribes --
begun by the Iroquois, for example. Modern family feeling is a shrunken
reality, a residue of a larger love that we need to recapture as the
basis of true civilization. Engels concluded: "Thus the history of the
family in primitive times consists in the progressive narrowing of the
circle, originally embracing the whole tribe...” For a long time, the
civilization process has been running in the wrong direction, until it
has brought us to the present state of extreme social isolation and
loneliness —“asocial individualism”. (Bahro)
Nothing kills the female spirit faster than traditional family life,
putting her in the small world of house, husband, and children.
What a pity to see a young woman, who has not developed her own self,
already lost in the life of her child. Children belong, as in primitive
societies, on the periphery, learning and waiting to take their place
in the center. The term "family" was invented by the Romans, under the
influence of the Greeks, to denote a new social organism whose head
ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, with the right of
life and death over them all.
The economic dependency of women, that the institution of monogamy
entailed (by shifting wealth to men), also brought about her emotional
dependency, which has taken on a life of its own, so that eliminating
the last remains of discrimination against women would, I fear, still
leave her unable to enjoy sex, afraid of her own autonomy, a staunch
defender of monogamy, the appointed guardian of false morality. Emma
Goldman noted, about one hundred years ago, that the whole of woman's
emancipation was failing because it concentrated on external factors,
like the right to vote and work, rather than internal enslavement to
religion and puritanical morality. "True emancipation begins in woman's
soul...cutting loose from the weight of tradition and customs."
The pull of monogamy is strong, and it feels good to sink, or fall
back, into established patterns, but the easy path is not always the
best path. Woman must not allow herself to be swept away by love,
becoming a mere bundle of emotions. Because of her cultural
conditioning for dependency on the male, she would greatly benefit from
several love relationships. As things stand now, a woman in the company
of her man is almost always uninteresting, background. The mould shapes
the relationship. It takes courage to resist the many pressures to
conform.
A half-century before Emma Goldman the Free Love movement in America,
consisting of thousands of followers, rejected family-selfishness, with
its “monopoly of affection,” called monogamous marriage a “house of
bondage,” in which women succeed only in imposing on men reverse
slavery. The origin of the Free Love movement was the writings of the
Frenchman Charles Fourier, whose ideas came to America in the 1840s in
the form of communal experiments -- the “Phalanx.” Unfortunately,
Fourier's radical ideas about sexual love were minimized or ignored
during this formative period, due to the heavy influence of religion in
this country. Fourier's idea of free love surfaced in America a decade
later in the 1850s under the Anarchist banner of the Sovereignty of the
Individual (and the critique of all government), but apart from the
context of a Divine/peaceful and cooperative State, as Fourier
proposed, free love could not and did not grow and
flourish.
Fourier's vision has roots far back in western and eastern philosophy.
Twenty-five hundred years ago the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles,
and the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, saw Eros as first
principle and prime mover of reality.
Cosmology
According to Lao Tzu, the difference between the sexes is one of the
cosmogenic original principles, which means that neither man alone nor
woman alone can access universal truth. We need one another. Taoism
holds that at the moment of conception (of the universe) cosmic energy
split into two halves, which came to be known by the Chinese as Yin and
Yang. The man/woman relationship is a microcosm, wholeness regained, a
crossing-point where insight and progress occur.
With egos set aside, in the silence and stillness between man and
woman, the meeting place of Eros and Logos, the wisdom of nature
reveals itself. All we have to do is let it happen. This is, however,
not easy because it means inwardly freeing ourselves from thousands of
years of monogamous marriage, private property, and society as a mass
composed of competing individual families.
The wisdom of the earth is always speaking to us, but it cannot be
heard by reason alone. It requires intuition, a right-brain
activity. We must re-unite the brain with the organ of the
feeling body; learn again to think with our entire body organism. Love
is the language of feeling, and teaches us to listen, receive, wait,
and allow ideas to ripen. If men and women open to one another, then
the river of love, whose source is deep within us, would yield in
abundance.
Sexual love awakens the body, the taste, smell, touch, and feel of
internal nature. A new culture of love will climb up from the senses to
feeling and thinking. The love of water, sky, flora and fauna, the
aesthetic enjoyment of life, all this has an erotic basis. Love is the
way to access what we need to experience and know in order to resolve
the ecological crisis. It enables us to penetrate the secrets of the
universe.
Ken Wilber, in his book, Sex,
Ecology, Spirituality argues that a crucial task facing the
modern person is to resolve his or her own “mini-ecological crisis.”
The differentiation of mind from the body has gone too far, becoming
dissociated, so that the lower (body) is not preserved in the higher
(mind), but disconnected, disregarded, and disvalued. We need to heal
ourselves within, integrating body, heart, and mind, and evolve a
strong community of consensus among integral individuals, so that we
are ready and able to do what needs to be done for Gaia. Trying to fix
all the problems humans have caused on the outside, without doing this
inner-work, and community-consensus building, is endless -- according
to the maxim, “as the inside is, so is the outside.”
All this presupposes the acceptance of solitude; for monogamy is only
the illusion that one is not alone. Familiarity is not intimacy, not
essential contact, not knowledge. The romantic ideal of falling in
love, of losing oneself in the other, was promoted due to the
fragmentation of human life that escalated with the start of the
industrial age in Europe at the end of the 18th century. People who are
parts of a genuine community would not grow so dependent on one person. They would be both more
individualistic and more communal. Ego and Eros are the twin poles of
human existence: beyond this or that ego-personality we are also
universal love. If we would open and embrace the universalistic pole of
our existence, then we would realize that the whole person is a unique
member of a loving community, not one-half of an isolated monogamous
unit; otherwise, personal feelings of love cannot stay alive.
Charles Fourier described the "heavens as a vast field of copulation."
The universe pulsates with passions and sexual energies; it's a big
love affair. Free love, "the secret wish of humankind," aligns us with
nature, the structure and will of the universe. A constellation of open
hearts, in which more than one love goes out from each energy-source,
coordinates individual, society and cosmos. The current model of love
prevents us from fitting into the natural balance; it disturbs the
harmony of the world. So long as the established values and
institutions go against the Great Harmony we will be disoriented and
discontented.
Fourier saw himself following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton. The
physical universe is held together by gravity, and the social universe,
according to Fourier, is held together by “passionate attraction.” The
free play of human passions, especially the power and joy of love, is
the key for escaping the civilized order, which is in conflict with our
impulses and drives, all of which tend to association and unity. The
force of attraction guides the movement of the planets and the suns, as
well as the plants and animals. We should let it gently guide us toward
social goodness.
According to Fourier, “the earth is sick,” and this sickness -- the
direct result of civilized oppression and repression of instinctual
human nature -- has infected the whole universe, even upsetting the
equilibrium of the stars. We are no longer able to perform our cosmic
function, our purpose in the movement of the universe, which is to
establish a harmonious social order consistent with the plan of
God/Love, thereby achieving our social destiny of a rich and full life
for everyone. Since it is impossible to repress the passions, without
taking the joy out of life, despite what the moralists say, we would do
better to study the means of changing material circumstances so as to
adapt them to the designs of Attraction. The happy and harmonious
society must liberate and utilize the passions; complete liberty in
love leads naturally to harmony -- that is the law of nature and
eternity.
“The mistake of all civilized philosophers is that they have always
thought of love as something which must be limited to the couple.
Necessarily, then, they have been unable to emancipate themselves from
egoism, which is the inevitable result of amorous relations which are
limited to the couple. If love is to be a source of generosity, we must
base our speculations on the collective exercise of love,” said Fourier.
People have been made weak and miserable by civilization: “But there is
one passion which retains its original nobility, which keeps the divine
fire burning in mortal men, which gives them a share in the attributes
of the Deity. This passion is love. Love is a divine flame, the true
spirit of God who is love. Is it not in the rapture of love that man
reaches toward the heavens and identifies himself with God? Is there
any lover who does not deify his or her loved one and who is not
convinced that their shared love is a divine happiness?” (Fourier)
One more insight from Fourier: “It is women who suffer most from
civilization; it is up to them to attack it. Women can reply to the
philosophers: ‘Your civilization persecutes us when we obey Nature; it
obliges us to assume an artificial personality, to behave in ways that
are contrary to our desires.’” Unfortunately, according to Fourier,
women have embraced monogamy. “They have not even thought of attacking
it; and their failure to do so has been unpardonable ever since the
discovery of Tahiti…This was the sole problem worthy of occupying women
writers: and their indolence with regard to it is one of the causes
which have made men scornful of them. A slave is never more
contemptible than when his blind submission convinces the oppressor
that his victim is born for slavery.”
The strict prohibitions against free love testify to the strength of
the desire for it. It is forbidden action, subversive action. To
question monogamy is taboo, and the violator of a taboo is himself or
herself taboo because s/he has the dangerous property of tempting
others to follow. S/he is contagious and must be avoided. The rules of
avoidance between the sexes conserve the status quo by preventing us
from finding our greater self, our place in the universal harmony that
we have infringed on.
Politics
Politics is driven by sexual orientation, which is presently operating
unconsciously. Al Gore, instead of George W. Bush, is not in the White
House today largely because of Bill Clinton's sexual “transgression.”
It was the politics of sexual revenge that defeated Gore, guilt by
association. Now we have paranoia in the White House, which has led to
war in Iraq: we must destroy our enemies before they destroy us. This
outcome was predictable according to the etiology of paranoia given by
Freud: the paranoid individual has turned his love away from others and
external nature and toward himself in order to neutralize self-loathing
(whose origin is hatred of the sexual body), resulting in megalomania.
The suffering core of this inflated egoism persists, and according to
the paranoid individual, the world denies him the love he needs and
deserves, even hates him, and is trying to destroy him. Paranoia, if
institutionalized and backed by enough military force, leads to global
exterminism; the world must be destroyed before it destroys the
entitled ones, the power elite. This is the course that America is now
heading, with the rest of the world in tow.
Ecosystems are collapsing everywhere and millions of people and
countless nonhuman lives are suffering and dying unnecessarily. The
free market gospel that is spreading around the globe cannot be
falsified by any amount of evidence; it's a secular religion. The
Invisible Hand (of God) has without doubt failed to secure the most
common good of all -- namely, the health and integrity of the planet,
but the vicious ideology that the maximum pursuit of self-interest
produces the best of all possible worlds will not be given up. Why?
People (in the right-wing Republican Party, for example) who hate
themselves are unable to be kind to others, and embrace a worldview or
belief system -- ”God, Family and Country” -- whose generating source
is hatred of sexuality, leaving only merciless self-interest as social
regulator for the whole of humanity. What self-torture and terror
underlie this American value-system!
Selfishness and greed are indeed killing the planet, but all this
selfishness and greed cannot be blamed on human nature: it is mostly
the result of what has been done to human nature. The innate
predisposition of human nature for a certain degree of egoism can
hardly be denied, but the evolution of a non-egocentric self-concept is
an historical possibility -- Jean Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and
Rudolf Bahro, are exemplars -- in which the ego is not extinguished,
but is strong and expanded to include the good of the whole. However,
the “egoism of the family” is a stranglehold on Eros, decisively
disturbs a possible balance or accommodation between individual and
society, makes people enemies of civilization, but fortunately it is a
cultural creation, not a biological necessity, that blocks the
emergence of true individuality and community.
The world needs people capable of breaking through the boundaries of
this culture, risking petty love (based on familiarity and security and
biologically over-determined) for jealousy-free intellectual love and
lifestyle politics that begins with individuals who refuse exchange
relationships or contractual relationships (in which they sell
themselves to one another), refuse to make a deal or promise not to
intimately/fully love more than one person, refuse to agree to
monogamy. “The time of love between man and woman is only now
approaching.” (Bahro)
Education is not the primary path for social change because the biggest
obstacle we moderns face is not widespread ignorance, but manufactured
stupidity, the arresting and distortion of human nature by culture.
Americans are arguably the stupidest people on earth, informed and
entertained by the infantile and adolescent nonsense of TV and
Hollywood. We have forgotten what our tribal ancestors knew, and not
(yet?) broken through to high/integral reason that surpasses but also
preserves old knowledge. Our knowledge is more and more manipulation of
nature and each other, in terms of which we are the very best, the
number one country in the world.
Third World people, still under the influence of tribal wisdom, are
comparatively sane and mature, having an intact “capacity” to sit
quietly, contemplate, converse with one another, and enjoy the here and
now of life. Education is decisive in this world, where large numbers
of people are ignorant of serious threats to the biosphere. However,
Americans are not primarily ignorant, but sick -- due to progressive
poisoning by ascetic morality -- which expresses itself on the mental
level as stupidity. Given this modern aliment, education -- which has a
mental appeal -- will always be insufficient.
The simple truth is that the ecological crisis is, at bottom, a human
sexual sickness. Americans are easily fooled, tricked, and distracted
by the corporate propaganda machine, including the so called “news,”
and too stupid to figure out that the rich and powerful are running a
planetary business for immediate and short-term interests, at the final
cost of death for everyone, because there is major sexual damage
throughout the general population that prevents the wisdom of Bios from
flowing through the body and into the brain. A few good conversations,
and/or a few good books, will begin to enlighten ignorant people, but
will have virtually no impact on the stupid and the sick.
In other words, on the political level, the difficulty is that people
are not intelligent enough to understand that a ruling class is
grasping, hoarding and exhausting everything, but the deeper question
is: why are Americans so stupid? Our collective stupidity is the result of “thinking” only with the
head, without the contribution or advantage of the human body, the
earth and eternity, which is an overgrown one-sidedness that no amount
of information on the Internet can balance. Despite all our science,
every member of a tribe had better contact with the natural whole than
we do. “This message cannot be replaced by any clever, new thought.”
(Bahro)
It is futile to argue or reason with brain-starved people, whose minds
are not alive to the vibrations, feelings, and messages of the body
(the human body and the larger body of nature). When the light of
nature is turned off by culture, the mind cannot see what is of true
value in life, and, unable to find satisfaction anywhere, humans suffer
and become mean-spirited. It is not simply that stupid people don't
care; rather, they don't care because they are full of disappointment
and hatred, first of all for themselves, and on the mental-conscious
level, for others, and for everything alive, beautiful and joyful. We
must be released down deep. “Politics and everything to do with it is
only the last latch-key to open gates which must first be unbolted in
quite a different way.” (Bahro)
The Republican Party in America has become a gathering place for the
stupid, selfish and the sick. It attracts those who think
efficiently/mechanically, without feelings, compassion, or kindness,
due to serious sexual wounding (especially in childhood) that has
filled them with fear and hate, making it nearly impossible for them to
love anyone, including themselves. In this world no one is to be
trusted; it is “each against all”; everyone is an enemy to be exploited
or destroyed. The Right is rising under the name of “homeland security”
(H.S. instead of S.S.), toward the Nazi end of world domination and
global exterminism. Those who have escaped, to some degree, for various
reasons, from this politics of resentment have a responsibility to
organize the only force in the modern world capable of containing and
defeating aggression (that has become hate), and that force is the
deep, rising energy of sexual love.
It is difficult to directly affect the political superstructure, but it
is completely in our power to end monogamy, not in the name of
promiscuity, but in the name of a carefully deliberating free love with
a political intention, which avoids the boredom of monogamy and the
loneliness of promiscuity. Monogamy secures neither individuality nor
community; it's a boring life-routine, an unhealthy arrangement of
mutual blocking. Over time it kills or reduces the positive tension
between the sexes, which is necessary for progress. The couple stops
evolving as a loving pair, even if not completely. We need more than one lover to reach the
truth. If an individual is not willing, at least in principle,
to refuse monogamy, then s/he is not a candidate for a politics of
love, which must involve the integral/whole person -- body, heart and
mind.
True Love
Married households in couples are the building blocks of our social
imprisonment. The single-family house, complete with all the
conveniences and comforts, including the automobile, optimizes
independence from others and nature, while at the same time supporting
a cold, concrete-steel social order that is crushing the planet. The
words, “I love you”, are grossly misused if they entail setting up a
household economy that reproduces in miniature this worldwide
industrial civilization.
In her book, Sacred Sex,
Sacred Land, and Relationship , the deep ecologist Dolores
LaChapell explains that the romantic ideal keeps the economy of the
Industrial Growth Society going very well: “new make-up, new fashions,
new appliances, new furniture, and new house, to begin the new life one
more time!” She uses the term “serial monogamy” to describe the present
fad of devoting all one's energy to making monogamous marriage work,
one divorce after another, with no attention to the whole of either the
culture or the place.
LaChapell quotes a letter from D.H. Lawrence: “It's no good talking
about it: marriage, like home, will last while our social system lasts,
because it's the thing that holds our system together. But our system
will collapse, and then marriage will be different -- probably more
tribal, men and women being a good deal apart, as in the old pueblo
system, no little homes. It all works back to individual property, even
marriage is an arrangement for the holding of property together, a
bore!”
True love is the founding of a new and better world on the personal
level. The idea that we could solve the big problems of social
isolation, social justice and environmental degradation without freeing
ourselves from the economic unit of the family is a fatally flawed
strategy for social change, for most of the competition and
exploitation takes place for the sake of the spouse and the
children. A new loving relationship between man and woman, beyond
the single-family home, is the germ-cell for a new and better society.
We must make a start with ourselves in this way, upsetting the whole
security of life.
True love, a little beginning of a new world, cannot succeed without
reflection. Given the crisis, everything needs to be consciously
reflected on, including the love encounter. We must choose our lovers
with more awareness, with more understanding of the meaning of love. Love must turn political. It is not
a question of leaving the body behind, but understanding it as a
vehicle for higher levels of awareness. True love ascends: it begins
with physical passion, becomes compassion, and finally intellectual
consensus. It accomplishes something beyond the mere reproduction of
life, and the small pleasures associated with this, or it fails. The
most aware individuals have the responsibility to consciously
participate in this amorous adventure to see, feel, and think in a
different way-- toward global consciousness.
As Herbert Marcuse argued in Eros
And Civilization, Eros is striving to form living substance into
greater unities so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher
development. It does not remain fixated on physical pleasure; but
rather, under non-repressive conditions, tends toward self-sublimation
in lasting and expanding relationships that serve to intensify and
enlarge instinctual gratification. The erotic aim generates its own
projects of realization, producing high culture. Unless, of course, its
path is blocked by oppressive laws, customs, or institutions.
The natural flow is outward and upward, beyond egoism and toward higher
levels of complexity, knowledge, community and joy. This is one of the
oldest ideas of philosophy, West and East, found in Plato's Symposium
and the Indian concept of Kundalini-Yoga, Chakra, and Tantra. The
erotic life-energy has the tendency to rise from the physical to the
emotional to the mental, at each stage undergoing a transformation into
greater awareness and deeper possibilities of satisfaction. Logos is
Eros becoming aware of itself.
The crisis, according to Bahro, is that Logos has torn itself loose
from Eros, which means that the human brain, instead of being the organ
of the feeling body, functions as an autonomous thing/machine. Only by
re-uniting Reason with its living roots in nature, is there a chance to
avoid global disaster. How? Out of the Tao (oneness) come two: male and
female. Reason as domination is lodged in the male ego, while woman,
remaining closer to the impulses of life, is cut off from higher powers
of abstraction. We need one another to become whole again. The
connecting tissue is love. "Love, with erotic love at the center, is
the way.” (Bahro)
We must balance the masculine spirit with the feminine spirit, which
does not mean the feminization of the male, and the masculinization of
the female, toward androgyny. Rather, each gender must find and hold
its own identity; and live out the polarity of the sexes, which is the
motor-force of history, bringing us once again into harmony with the
great order of Nature. Unfortunately, today, each sex has lost faith in
its own life-flow, and cannot love. To regain our faith in what it
means to be a man, or woman, and win all the knowledge concealed in our
blood, muscles, and central nervous system, we must pay attention and
respond to, rather than shy away from, the erotically charged field of
consciousness within which everyone moves and lives. Monogamous couples
are, for the most part, sexually asleep, not alive, not sensitive, to
the secret stimuli of Gaia and the dance of the cosmos.
In his essay, “The Real Thing,” D.H. Lawrence said: “Man is connected
with woman, forever, in connections visible and invisible, in a
complicated life-flow that can never be analyzed. It is not only man
and wife: the woman facing me in the train, the girl I buy cigarettes
from, all send forth to me a stream, a spray, a vapor of female life
that enters my blood and my soul, and makes me me. And back again, I
send the stream of male life which soothes and satisfies and builds up
the woman. Love between men and women is…part of the very breath, and
as ordinary, if we may say so, as breathing. Almost as necessary. In
fact, love between man and woman is really just a kind of breathing.”
Under a fear-based mentality the sexual impulse hides, stops its
regular breathing, turns inauthentic. Sexual openness and honesty is
best. Feel the sex-field, the life-world, instead of fleeing from the
opposite sex in shame. Nobody knows what is going to happen; it cannot
be figured out in advance. A “libidinal morality” (Marcuse) will come
out of the depths of life. Before there are clear ideas of right and
wrong, good and bad, there is the voice of feeling, whose source is the
original tendency of the life-energy, which strives for joyous
expression.
Trying to think our way out of the crisis, left-brain activity, has led
to melancholia and cynicism, from which not much good is to be
expected. It is, after all, reason working independently of
sensibility, and eventually turning against it, that has produced this
suicidal society. It is not a question of giving up the rational level,
for we need more, not less, precise and clear thought. The point is
that the instrumental intellect must be connected back to the bodily
center and grounded in the earth.
We can't be right unless we're happy,” said Bahro. He meant that any
theory and practice of social change that is based on an ethic of
renunciation and denunciation will not work. It is not enough to be
against things. We need the positive vision that comes form right-brain
activity, which is joyous. Sexual love makes us happy because it agrees
with the order and evolution of reality: cosmos, earth, body, mind. We
feel more strength within us; we feel ourselves to be part of the power
and direction of the evolving universe.
The energy thrusting up from below carries important messages. Human
beings have the capacity to decipher these messages, and sexual love is
the medium for doing so. The intelligence that arises out of sexual
love is intuition, a direct, non-verbal apprehension of truth. The next
step of evolution requires that we make better use of the intuitive or
mystical/mysterious communication between men and women. Either love
will remain the satisfaction of little needs, a merely personal affair,
or it will accomplish its end of leading us to higher consciousness for
the sake of all of life on earth.
America is dead spirit. Commercialization -- which is now totalitarian
because nothing escapes it -- has squeezed the quality and joy out of
life. Human beings, hardly visible among the buildings, streets and
machines of this society, are stowed in offices, factories, and retail
outlets, merely going through the motions of life, without enthusiasm
or zest, without much to say to one another, daydreaming of a better
life. Even travel, in the past a great escape from routine and
drudgery, is fast becoming flat and pointless, mere movement across a
repetitive and standardized landscape. Is monogamy to blame for all
this? Yes, in the sense that it was the first step, the oldest
institution, in the development of the Megamachine. Once Eros is put in
the monogamous box, then love may survive for awhile, like a tree torn
from its roots in the forest, consuming itself, or kept alive
artificially, but it is not what it could be, or should be. Universal
love is the tree of life, a growing and flowering reality that unfolds,
differentiates, the highest branches blooming with loving couples,
forming a crown of community-life, so it is sad to see sweet hearts
fall from the tree of life, and rot on the barren ground.
The Call
Monogamy is a principal cause of our suffering, but instead of
rejecting it, or criticizing it, we have made it into an explanation, a
reason, a justification for our suffering. According to Friedrich
Nietzsche's Genealogy Of
Morals, this is the origin of the ascetic ideal: the weak and
cowardly would rather suffer than change or challenge the ruling
values, so they turn the cause of their misery into a morality, and
claim to be sacrificing themselves for something right and good. Behind
every ascetic ideal Nietzsche saw the wounded human animal. The truth
is that there is no good reason for monogamy (or ascetic morality); it
is refuted constantly by our animal nature, making us the “sick
animal.” Those who refuse to go along with the herd in accepting it are
considered blameworthy, troublesome, elitist, persecuted by public
opinion and the law.
“It is the male project of logos fearfully defending itself against
woman, body and nature that is the root of the ecological crisis.”
(Bahro) We have torn ourselves apart by means of our own culture.
However, a connection can be made where the great split is. The tear
between man and woman can be healed. Man will improve himself and his
world for woman's love, but only if woman, who still knows how to think
with the heart, widens her community of concern and understanding
(beyond the family) to encompass the whole. Sexual freedom is necessary
for the successful union of woman and man, love and logic. That is how
co-determination or co-evolution works.
Unfortunately, men and women do not believe that they can learn
anything essential from one another. There is suspicion surrounding
sex, and little realization that it is the origin of political
enlightenment and freedom. Aware men and women need to seek out one
another with a clear understanding that love will determine whether or
not there will be a liveable future. We must self-consciously guide the
path of sexual energy so that the physical impulse is controlled from
the heart, and the heart is controlled from the mind.
Refuse monogamy, and begin a little political circle of love. This is
not a call for more sex “starting tonight,” but a demand that we
recognize a principle: retain and exercise the freedom to love others,
whenever and wherever that opportunity presents itself. Love will never
be easy, and perhaps always rare, but let's not stop trying when we
find one person. Holding
ourselves open to the possibility of loving more than one member of the
opposite sex will radically alter social dynamics. Over the long haul
this will create a growing number of small love circles, a horizontal,
multilateral network that stands open to everybody who has recognized
the truth about the ecological crisis, and would like to do something
about it.
The call is for a free, non-hierarchical union of individuals who want
to break the complex habits and prejudices between man and woman that
keep us prisoners to the foundations of western civilization,
reproducing this whole structure of law and state. A new communitarian experiment:
instead of joining together to form living circles of cooperative
housing and work, we can make holding-together (rather than
moving-together) concrete and workable through free love, connected
always with political vision. Let us leave behind the tired, worn-out
life, and make a start in laying the foundations of a new culture of
love.
It should be clear by now, given our failure to heal the world
situation, that we need deeper human ties than shared political values
alone. Love allows us to know with organismic immediacy, to know one
another as whole individuals, to develop an intensive consensus, to
form lasting associations, lifting ourselves above this vote-counting
democracy, which is actually a plutocracy that puts economy before
ecology.
Plato argued that in order for men to develop strong bonds and devotion
to the Polls, there could be no private ownership of women, for that
would cause men to compete and become antagonistic to one another. We
now know that women also must be guardians of an ideal society, so they
too cannot be allowed to own men, for that will cause competition and
jealousy among women. We need to leave behind the narrow premises of
our cultural identity in order to achieve a new human solidarity.
Free love communities of aware people could eventually organize
themselves into a system of tribal councils, from the local to the
world level. According to Bahro, an example of this is perhaps the
great Indian medicine wheel that directs society by ‘wheels’ one above
the other. The America constitution, representative democracy, was made
for the purpose of securing capital a legally free path for unlimited
appropriation, so it is completely unable to stop this economic process
that is destroying the biosphere. We need a “tribal constitution.”
(Bahro)
At the top of this hierarchical arrangement of tribal councils Bahro
envisions a world government, “the ecological council,” which functions
to keep humans and nature in balance by considering human questions
from the point of view of the total earthly context, with command of
the situation to subjugate and constrain all particular interests of
power. We need to develop a new concept of the State, according to
Bahro, beyond the traditional struggles for power, above the Invisible
Hand, subordinating the economy to politics, directing it by the higher
forces of consciousness. This is where all liberal and anarchistic
world-pictures fail: even a giant cluster of communes having only
horizontal connections and dedicating themselves to the simple life
could be too much for the earth. The vertical dimension, which includes
a legitimate comprehensive world-wide authority, belongs also to the
way out of our dilemma. “We need a planned economy,” (Bahro)
rather than be led into downfall by the logic of capital.
Money is abstract enjoyment, the promise of happiness, but it is an
empty promise because capitalist culture turns everything into a means
for the accumulation of money, leaving nothing alone to be enjoyed for
its own sake. Max Weber argued that the rise of capitalism in 16th
Century Europe was subjectively preconditioned by an ascetic
morality/religion that opposed the spontaneous enjoyment of life. The
Protestant Ethic, according to Weber, condemned people to the permanent
postponement of immediate satisfaction, leaving the accumulation of
money as the sole purpose of earthy existence.
Before Protestantism and before Christianity, the imposition of
monogamy on tribal people was the formative event in the eventual birth
of capitalism. Monogamy, for the sake of the inheritance and
accumulation of material wealth, was a huge blow to the communitarian
nature of human beings, causing a lot of unhappiness, from which we
have not recovered. Everything outside this over-restricted little
ideal was devalued, and then the larger human community and natural
world began to die. The ground was prepared for the economic system of
capitalism that treats the planet, and everything on it, as raw
material for exploitation and plunder.
Love, confined to a small sphere of reality, with the remainder of
reality desexualized, drained of eroticism, is unable to support the
burden of satisfaction placed upon it, and no amount of money can
purchase it. Still, the hunt for money goes on because it is a symptom
of our social sexual sickness and stone-heartedness. We should not be
surprised that people numb on the inside, disconnected from vital
emotional impulses, without contact with the cosmic whole, deaf to the
voice of Reality, as a result of the cumulative historical forces of
cultural asceticism -- monogamy, religion, capitalism, Megamachine --
pursue priorities other than life and love. Human desire has been
killed or weakened for everything except commodities, which are the
empty shells of life.
Why the Almighty Dollar? Because it epitomizes the empty and lifeless
life: “as the inside is, so is the outside.” Deaden enough of the
inner-life of the human being and there remains only the possibility of
abstract enjoyment -- money. It is a means of withdrawing from society,
“freedom from” social responsibilities. In the hands of loveless people
it becomes “a weapon operating at a distance.” (Bahro) A gun
makes it easier than a knife to harm others, and money makes it easier
than a gun to injure others, without having to worry about the legal
consequences for wiping out the competition, or know anything about the
bloody context that produces the wealth.
So much restlessness! Is there “a worm in the heart of being,” as Jean
Paul Sartre said: “Man is what he is not, and not what he is?” Except
that, if sexual love, as even Sartre acknowledged, brings a moment of
rest and contentment (in which “the for-itself is also an in-itself”),
then could not a knowing society develop amorous institutions that
permit the American Faust to find peace and happiness? Monogamy is not
the explanation for all our problems, nor is free love a panacea, but
monogamy is the most fundamental or deepest layer in the geology of
exterminism, which is why free love is the beginning of a more
beautiful life.
Free, intelligent love is sharing on the most personal and intimate
level, and a change here will alter the entire pattern of modern
society that is built around the monogamous lifestyle. Only this kind
of personal experience can break through conformist consciousness. It
will heal the core of a culture that is making each couple less and
less dependent on the compassion and goodwill of others, and more and
more dependent on money and technology. Lovers naturally share all the
necessities and treasures of life. So long as love is treated as a
scarcity, in which giving to one person means that there is not enough
left for others, it will always be a major source of struggle and
conflict, regardless of the distribution or re-distribution of other
goods and services throughout society.
If we want to get to the root of the crisis, then it is not enough to
practice sustainable living, or implement a social plan that abundantly
produces and distributes goods; we must also joyfully share one
another, or the Megamachine will come back again after the revolution.
Fourier noted that the French Revolution failed because it did not
abolish the nuclear family: the old values survived there and
eventually restored the Ancient Regime. Perhaps this could also be said
of the Russian Revolution? And all other failed revolutions?
Dreaming
Monogamy creates jealousy, not the other way around. “If there is one
thing certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively
late,” said Engels. Jealousy is at bottom the fear of abandonment, or
loss of love, and it is the sure sign of a weak ego that is threatened
by human relationships, unable to trust the full impact of group life.
The basis of this feeling disappears when loving someone does not
necessarily mean that everyone else is left out in the cold.
Eros would like to continue its journey of uniting everything, building
a community of love and friendship, embracing nature and the entire
universe, but the ego, especially the western ego, stands in the way,
preventing a higher social form from coming into existence. Monogamy is
an egoic institution, securing ownership; it has nothing to do with
love. On the contrary, it blocks real love because to really love
someone one must be free. When monogamous lovers set one another free,
then they will dream of one another again. “Only people who have put
jealousy at least halfway behind them are capable of bonding as a
pair”, said Bahro.
The ‘60s Revolution in America was holistic: peace, justice, ecology,
art, philosophy, and love were elements of a new lifestyle, practiced
at first by only the most aware people, then entering the mainstream
and touching many lives (before becoming diluted). The slogan, “Make
love not war,” stood for a new politics of love, which was not
Christian, but pagan, emphasizing the important pleasures of the flesh.
Women said, “smash monogamy”, and thousands of years of sexual
repression was lifted overnight. Unfortunately, free love was soon
misconstrued as promiscuity. The happy turn that society might have
taken at this historical juncture was missed, but the answer was
glimpsed: men will only lay down
their arms for sexual love. Much depends on women pursuing the
rational level of great ideas, through communication with men, without
losing access to the heart as the center of balance for the
integral/whole human being.
Wilhelm Reich was correct: politics that does not concern itself with
the essential problem of youth -- namely, putting their sexual life in
order -- will not appeal to them (for long). Peace, justice, ecology
can seem distant goals to young people who are hemmed in by an ascetic
ideal at war with the constant sexual demands of animal human nature.
Young people deserve greater opportunities for happiness. Political
meetings, social gatherings and events, personal introductions, and
greetings must provide time and space for sexual love to unfold, not by
making it a duty or requirement, but simply by removing the social
pressures and moral barriers that prevent it from happening naturally
and spontaneously. Those who would like a warm society can work toward
this end by serving as role models, and provide safe gathering places,
for others who would also like to attempt something wholly different, a
new practice of everyday life. Non-monogamous lovers are the building
blocks of a new social body, founded on sexuality as a gift.
Ernst Bloch spoke of the Not Yet Conscious, a state of mind,
exemplified by daydreams, in which the creative future, the voice of
tomorrow, comes up, but the ego is only dimly aware of it. Among the
population, especially young people, free love is Not Yet Conscious.
All beginnings are difficult, but the idea of free love as the basis of
a joyous new society is not far from what everyone is longing for. Love
politics is an experiment at the limits of the ego, which is the
birthplace of the new. It releases us from the frantic drive to find,
at a very early age, one lifelong partner and live happily ever after,
an ideal that continuously and unavoidably disappoints, making people
ill due to the amount of frustration and guilt which society imposes in
the name of this ideal. Relax the ego; loosen the bonds of monogamy;
create the space of receptivity for a world that is dawning.
Bronislaw Malinowsky's book, The
Sexual Life Of Savages, documents the close participation
between human love and the natural world among the Trobriand Islanders
of northwestern Melanesia. In this aboriginal culture (without
authoritarianism, crime, and violence) a young man simply asked a young
woman for a “meeting,” and if she accepted, then they often made love
in a field under the stars, or along a riverbank in the moonlight, or
in the shade of a tree under the sun. During the ‘60s Sexual Revolution
in America, external nature was also an integral part of sexual
liberation: a blanket on the grass in the park on a summer day was a
love-fest (entailing a new economy of time). Free, healthy, and happy
sex opens the heart and links lovers to the earth, sea and sky. A
dysfunction of sexuality, due to a serious over-restriction of desire,
closes the heart and disconnects us from the rest of nature. It is one
and the same energy that links humans to one another and to nature.
Edward Abbey said, “Embrace nature as a man desires a beautiful woman,
intimately, deeply, totally.”
Nature is an interconnected totality, always and everywhere
(simultaneously) communicating with itself. We still belong,
participate, resonate, and feel with nature to a significant degree
(except perhaps the most hateful humans, who are, alarmingly, a growing
segment of the population). We need not and cannot be taught to love
nature; it's innate. When the human body is rooted and functioning
properly, then our bond or kinship with nature is strong. And sexual
desire is strong, but if it is not free to upwardly transform itself
into love, and rise to global political consciousness, then frustration
and blind fury will eventually destroy everything, including the
Ground, as is happening now. “We need contact with the world from the
ground up.” (Bahro)
Awake and concerned people will preach the love and protection of
nature in vain to a sexually stunted and twisted populace, rigid with
resentment, and confined to the Platonic cave of the bedroom, watching
flickering images of romance on the wall/television. Not even the
imperatives of physical survival will appeal to those dying on the
inside. The response of the sexually miserable will always be for
greater control of circumstances, more security of supplies, and faith
in a brutal world market that is destroying everything intrinsically
good and beautiful in order to deliver more than 50% of global wealth
into the hands of less than 1% of the population. This is not a sane
political perspective to be debated, but the horrible symptom of a
psychosexual disease that is spreading around the globe. Let those who
know what is of true value in life unite with one another as deeply as
possible in order to break the social isolation that D.H. Lawrence so
astutely observed: “All the world in couples, each couple in its own
little house, watching its own little interests, stewing in its own
little privacy.” We cannot change social reality individually or as
two-atom molecules; it requires a social process driven by the
erotic-impulse buried in everyone. Who is ready and willing to lead
Conclusion
The creativity of the human being is fundamentally erotic, so we must
let Eros flow freely among aware individuals -- between monogamy and
promiscuity -- in order to build an alternative intelligent lifestyle.
“If the task of creating a loving culture which realizes itself
sensually is avoided, it will then be impossible to formulate and carry
out a political program for resolving the ecological crisis, because
the fighters (within both sexes) will continue their various substitute
projects, by means of which they never satisfy themselves.” (Bahro)
The intelligence of the universe, the wisdom of evolution, extends into
us, first, as a physical vibration, then as sexual desire, then as
love, and finally as a concept or idea. Whatever or whoever stops this
flow blocks the process of enlightenment. In Lady Chatterley's Lover,
Lawrence depicts the evolution of a man, Oliver Mellors, who has taken
refuge in wild nature from the disappointments and despair of social
life. Then, Mellors meets Constance Chatterley, which sparks sexual
desire, and in the dark woods the flame of love grows until he finds
the faith and strength to assume (again?) political responsibility for
the larger world. The novel ends with a letter from Mellors describing
his political activism and the first stirrings within himself of
mystical consciousness.
If those who love nature, and also understand that we cannot disregard
politics (that the political realm is real and cannot be forgotten),
would learn to love one another, then there would occur a leap to the
next level of consciousness -- higher collective consciousness -- in
which we would not have to struggle for consensus about the general
good -- we would already have it -- “mystical democracy.” (Bahro)
Mystical consciousness, as understood here, is transpolitical, which
means that evolution, the adventure of consciousness (on the micro and
macro levels) traverses the physical, emotional and political realms,
carrying experience and knowledge forward, until it arrives at axioms
of truth that do not need proof. Reality will again become self-evident.
©2004 Glenn Parton
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