Anarchist revelation

An important new book on anarchist thought is now available from Winter Oak Press.

The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We’re Meant to Be is the latest work by activist and writer Paul Cudenec.

Here, he turns his back on contemporary trends of anarchism in a bid to reconnect with the primal force of its root ideology.

Cudenec notes the significance of its refusal of the state and its judicial system, of land ownership and of the need to work for wages in order to live.

But he goes further in suggesting that anarchism represents a whole way of thinking that stands in direct opposition to the blinkered materialism of contemporary society and its soul-stifling positivist dogma.

He writes: “The anarchist does not merely stray outside the framework of acceptable thinking as carefully assembled by the prevalent system – she smashes it to pieces and dances on the wreckage.”

Cudenec explores the fluidity and depth of thinking found in anarchism, in stark contrast to Marxism, and identifies, in particular, a love of apparent paradox that seems to appeal to the anarchist psyche.

He also sees a connection between and anarchism and esoteric forms of religion – such as Sufism, Taoism and hermeticism - whose inner light defies the crushing patriarchal conservatism and hierarchy of the exoteric institutions.

Cudenec provides evidence that anarchism’s roots lie partly in this life-embracing source of inspiration, the bringer of art and poetry as well as of resistance and revolt.

While, he argues, anarchism is incompatible with existing religions, it has the potential to harness its powerful ideology to this universal esoteric current and thus become the religion of the future, the spiritual and political revelation that will save humankind from a grim future of slavery, corruption and destruction.

In making his case, Cudenec draws on the work of anarchists such as Gustav Landauer, Michael Bakunin and Herbert Read. But he also widens the field of enquiry to include the philosophy of René Guénon, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Baudrillard; the existentialism of Karl Jaspers and Colin Wilson; the vision of Carl Jung, Oswald Spengler and Idries Shah, and the environmental insight of Derrick Jensen and Paul Shepard.

With a fusion of scholarly research and inspiring polemic, Cudenec succeeds in forging a coherent and profound 21st century world-view with an appeal that will reach out far beyond those who currently term themselves anarchists.

At the end of the day just kneel and pray

Finishing off the day in the part of the world in which I live - a number I sometimes use to close a gig (in the version of Sunny), and for many a dear memory of Radio Luxembourg 208. A very emotional day, only one aspect of it was that my mother decided not to go back to the house where she has lived for more than a half century. The end of parental home.

Look well at your elders, look well at the preacher.


Maybe the morning, Marian Montgomery
Goodnight and good luck.
If you cannot be careful, be good.

You can hear the number here alongside other tunes.

Well, I've never been to Glasgow...

...but I've been to the site.
Glasgow, the city of Alasdair Gray, of our friend wee beautiful pict and of Alastair McIntosh, on whose enchanted-garden-like site I got lost today by way of Sunday service (it even inspired me to write a poem).

Somewhere in that garden is a complete text of Dom Hélder Câmara's Spiral of violence, as a pdf.

So I am just referring you there wondering what you think of it after wandering around there and wondering...

Dissident discipleship

If you want a good read as an introduction to what we like to call Christian anarchism David Augsburger's Dissident discipleship may be your best start these days. He does not mention Christian anarchism at all, but he writes all the right things about follwing Christ in these times. The author is Anabaptist (Mennonite, I warmly refer to a name derived from a great man from NL) and he simply follows the tradition of this denomination. Which happens to be closer to mine than Dave Andrews' evangelicalism, so I state I like Augsburger's book better as a contemporary introduction.
Augsburger gives many small stories about the Very Great Story and many insightful quotations, many of these are from probably the biggest name in Christian anarchism, Tolstoy. (But puhleeease - why Bono? [1 mention in the link].)

He introduces songs or verses for what he calls peditation, etymologically fitting word for walking medtitation. The walking rhythm is supported by five- or three-syllable verses (which works well in increasingly monosyllabic English, for other European languages this might prove more difficult).
An example:

Good Samaritan
Lone man mugged,
beat and fleeced,
scorned by saint,
passed by priest.

Good men look
other way.
Much to do!
Seize the day!

Alien stops,
sees his hurt,
gives first aid
in the dirt.

Cares, although
not his class,
lifts him on
his own ass.

Picks up check
at the inn,
on return,
checks again.

Jesus asks
critics dim,
"Which of these
neighbored him?"

David Augsburger, Dissident discipleship - a spirituality of self-surrender, love of God, and love of neighbor. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006.

Elective affinity of Jewish mysticism and anarchism

Whoever connects marxism to liberation theology has not understood Marx, and, as Jacques Ellul forcefully and convincingly argues in Jesus and Marx, has not understood the Gospel either. If there are political consequences to Christian belief then they should be found in the anti-politics of anarchism. Michael Löwy has written a popular book on liberation theology, but he should not be dismissed easily.

Projecting back the way of seeing applied in his Rédemption et utopie he finds a Wahlverwandtschaft (elective affinity) between liberation theologians and marxists/ “We anarchists” may shrug about this. But we cannot do that when Löwy states such an affinity between some selected Jewish thinkers (all male) with mystical or messianic character on one side and with anarchism on the other. He may be better equipped to move on this terrain, as a Jew and a seeker of paths to liberation. From the book I cannot conclude whether he chooses for affinity with anarchism (he is politically affiliated to trotskyism). But his taking stock leads the way to thoughts and names which are new to me in this field. Thinkers I think sympathetic but who I would not connect to anarchism are included in his Wahlverwandtschaft company. After reading this book I can connect my predilection for Fromm, Benjamin and the Frankfurter Schule with my own choice for anarchism and my interest in religious anarchism with each other. We may call this synthesis.

The Israeli critical theorist Ilan Gur-Ze’ev once told me that Herbert Marcuse saw the abandonment of linear time as the goal of revolution. This thought can be found in the last writings of Benjamin, and Marcus alludes to it in his contribution to the Dialectics of liberation in an inspired way. The theme apparently emerges in his literary remains. I have not read much of these yet but I willingly believe it. This subjec should be dealt with further. It indeed is a thought fitting to the eschatolgical strivings of (religious) anarchism. And apparently it belongs to the Jewish tradition rather than the Christian.

Löwy does not mention Marcuse at all, and Adorno and Horkheimer only in passing, and it is daring to elect people who have distanced themselves from the "dark" philosophy of anarchism and considered themselves to be marxists for this affinty. Löwy however concludes to this affinity as inevitable, and he does it convincingly. And let’s face it: the Frankfurt School referred to Marx, but they never were in step with one of the parties claiming to represent Marx’ inheritance. Strictly speaking Marx himself, at his best, might be seen as part of the company Löwy brings to the fore. L&oumlwy does not go that far. However, “we” anarchists may wonder whether we should not rescue the “libertarian Marx” from threatening perdition (Seán Sheehan does this in his Anarchism).

That Buber, Landauer and Kafka fit into both a Jewish and an anarchist paradigm is no surprise to me. The same might be said about Toller and Sperber. Heterodox marxists as Bloch and Lukács neither ever fully broke with anarchism nor with Jewish eschatology. And they are not far removed philosophically from the Frankfurters. Then there is Leo Löwenthal. But they were members of a party that considerd itself to be The Party. They may be forgiven with some hesitation. New names to me are Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem, who are distinctly mystics – frankly I never had given a thought to the kabbala, let alone that there would be a treasure of libertarian thoughts to be found there. A world, or a new dimension – how to express this – presented itself when I read the chapters on this subject. (Books by David A. Cooper, especially God is a verb, are a worthwhile read on this – he is a different Cooper from the one of Dialectics of liberation).

I am not convinced by the special Central European character of this combination of Jewish mysticism and anarchism Löwy claims. He mentions a West European exception to the rule of this elective affinity, namely Bernard Lazare. Might not Simone Weil, who was very interested in Christian mysticism – like Fromm, Landauer and others mentioned by Löwy -, but who never changed religious affiliation, and who was an anarchist with a light marxist touch, be a good example? We might even think of popular English radio rabbi Lionel Blue who does not sound much removed from anarchism. And then – my own specialism – the Netherlands have their own Jewish religious anarchists, like S. van den Berg for example.

But these are questions I would not have asked if I had not read Löwy’s book, so let’s not fret... Let’s work! And a the end of the tunnel, cannot I see a vista of broken clocks, heralding the end of linear time?

- Michael Löwy, Redemption and utopia - Jewish libertarian thought in Central Europe - a study in elective affinity. Published by Stanford University Press.

[This is a slightly actualized translation of a review I wrote in 2000. Interestingly, Löwy in his motley company also includes Albert Einstein, whom I did not dwell upon in the review.]

Dancing like an ostracised imp

The paper edition of A pinch of salt contains a piece which I think challenging: Rewilding and the importance of animism in religion. It is an edited verbatim of Rob Mckay's notes from his seminar at "The world turned upside down; Christianity, anarchism, and peacemaking", Sheffield 2008. I was not present at this conference, at which apparently most visitors were different from those gathered in Bradford 2007 or Leeds 2006. So maybe it was all the better I was not there. Yet Rob touches on a subject on which there is a lot to be said and I will try to mention some points:

Religion aims to explain the mysteries of nature and the way human culture relates to it. Civilised religions place human beings as far higher than the rest of life on earth. The acts of categorising and controlling nature alienate humans from the land.

Animism is the religious contention that everything has a soul. Animists consider human community to be equal to the other plant and animal communities - not dominant and alien to them.

If religion is to serve the human community in connecting to the rest of nature it must be based in animism. To animistic cultures their land base will speak its needs as clearly as these words speak to you or I. The myths of an animistic religion are grounded in the land. So in order to make religion more animistic we must weave the written myths back in to the land base to bring it back to life again.

In other words: rewild.

Living in a country where what is called nature is never older than the oldest building in its surroundings I frankly see no opportunity to start rewilding. Unless I am allowed to dwell on one of the few really wild islands, the wildest of which turns out to be even less wild than I still dreamt. There can be no myths relating to a landscape or nature that has a (human) history which can be followed. There can be legends about how certain places came into being, I know some of them. There are ghost stories - I know one which I was told by people independently from each other and not knowing each other, so it was too good not to be true. And there are fairy tales, the English word refers to the presence of fairies or other elementals. Some of these are also too good not to be true. But then, ghosts and fairies, and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night still ask for a good God to deliver us.... They cannot be a foundation for organised religion (they can be part of the original meaning of the Latin word religio, fear of the numinous. but I am not going into that now).

"Religion aims to explain the mysteries of nature" - etcetera. If that is a description or even a definition, I see no difference with science. Maybe it means that for the unexplainable, the ever-mysterious, we need religion. But in the end one has to say about the Mystery, quoting Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

"The acts of categorising and controlling nature alienate humans from the land." That may be true, but there is no way back. I cannot pretend not to know the difference between a blackbird and a fieldfare and not to see they are biologically related as members of the thrushes family. Even less than I am arguing against ghosts or fairies I deny they have a soul. Of course they have. So do all living creatures and even supposedly non-living "things" like enterprises, organisations, cities, states even, houses, ships. Accepting the idea of entelecheia for all this does not make me an animist. It does not even make me a primitivist. I might be a Christian for a'that. By the way, Christ Himself had to do with ghosts and demons, more than He probably will have liked: see for example Luke 8:7-39.

Saying that a religion must be this or that goes very much against what I may call my anarchist instinct. Giving the prescription that we must find myths to reconnect to the land sounds as authoritarian, and may end up in kitsch.

Some sites the reader may consider in connection with the subject(s): Mythic cartography and Pantheism.

Candlemass - a homily of sorts

The Presentation of the Lord, popularly known as Candlemass, only became known to me, grown up as I am in the Reformed tradition, through contact with the Catholic Church. Probably it was too obvious a feast with a pagan background. Being the 40th day after Christmas it marks the bordering of the two different periods of Christmas and Easter.

Apart from the perhaps very syncretist background of the feast - which Christian feast does not have that origin? - the story in the gospel on which it is based is confusing. We read in Luke 2:

[22] And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord;
[23] (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;)
[24] And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.
[25] And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him.
[26] And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.
[27] And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law,
[28] Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,

Nunc dimittis, is what he said, even though Simeon undoubtedly must have spoken Aramaic and behold, his hymn in Scripture is in Greek. The King James Version lets him sing in English. Never mind, that is not a problem. A problem can be based upon Matt. 2:

[11] And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.
[12] And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.
[13] And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.

So after Epiphany, ten days after the day of the Holy Innocents, the couple with the newborn child went to Egypt and stayed there for three years. Still they were in the Temple in Jerusalem on the fortieth day.

Maybe the Reformed Church was embarassed by this illogical incongruity and chose the Egyptian story instead of the Presentation in Jerusalem. It cannot be discarded but you'd better not stress it...
Fortunately, Holland is not as protestant as popular stories would like to tell now, so Rembrandt van Rijn made at least three paintings of the Presentation. There is one at the top of this entry.

Less rationalist traditions still accept the mythical background of Scripture. It was never meant to be read as a railway guide. But accepting it as mythical is becoming more difficult by the day, it seems, to a Church which at the same time is complaining about secularisation.

I would love to see the mythical status of the Bible restored to its rightful place, but this is a wish against a tide which I fear is irresistible. As yet anyway.

But I can give you this thought of Christian anarchist Louis A. Bähler, Dutch Reformed minister, both rationalist and mystic, who called it a blessing that there are so many internal contradictions in the Bible. This way it can only be seen as a democratic book, no-one can claim to be Right in the interpretation. Let this be our reply when we meet people from a certain bus who command us to enjoy our life.

Buzzards circling for spirituality

A remarkable quote from Thomas Merton, the author's note to Zen and the birds of appetite:

Where there is a lot of fuss about "spirituality", "enlightenment" or just "turning on". it is often because there are buzzards hovering around a corpse. This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not what is meant by the Study of Zen....... The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where [Zen] is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing", the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.

Written in 1968, the worst was yet to come as far as the quest for exotic "spirituality" with Northatlantians is concerned. Merton did not live to see it. However, he more or less introduced Zen in benedictine liturgy, notably practiced in several monasteries.

No or yes?

After his death Dag Hammarskjöld's diaries revealed the mystic in him, for which he seems to be more famous nowadays than the function which made him well-known worldwide during his life: secretary-general of the UN.
This quotation from the published journal entries, called Markings in English, sounds beautiful, does not it?

I don't know Who — or what — put the question; I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

It sounds beautiful as long as we abstract from what Hammarskjöld actually did. Not long before his death he probably was complicit in toppling - and indirectly in killing - Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister of the former Belgian Congo, which now bears the scornful name of Democratic Republic of Congo. His responsibility for creating the incredible mess in this unhappy country cannot be measured.

Saying yes about what?
Is there anything worth mentioning being done by the United Nations these days?

Let us celebrate those who said or say No! when it is necessary. This "no" is a more emphatic "yes" to Someone or something, and it is a no to the idea of living with an accomplice to murder or a murderer - yourself.
The no that was said by Die Weiße Rose, by the Underground Railroad, by conscientious objectors like the shministim and others. First of all it takes a no to say yes - you might call that practical mysticism but you do not have to.
Just say no to the State.

Entry inspired by Arthur Silber.