SOCIAL ECOLOGY - SOME CONCERNS -by Philip Winn ------------------------------ Murray Bookchin is unquestionably one of the most interesting anarchist theoreticians to emerge in recent decades. It is impossible in the space given to produce as comprehensive a critique as is required to do justice both to the scope of Bookchin's work and to its inherent problems. I will touch here on only a few concerns. There's not much new about a person in the West taking as their task the discovery of the ordering principles of history, within culture, within reality itself. Just look at Hegel or Marx. The problem arises in the claims these folks make to universal truth. The construction of Truth always represents a massive grab for power - the power of framing, the power of naming, the power of valuing. Marxism is a case in point, surely the greatest act of political chutzpah the world has ever seen. At a time when the very act of creating such similarly ambitious projects are finally being questioned and challenged, Bookchin emerges as a self-described defender of the Western right to present the Grand Truth. His particular version is (politically) Social Ecology or (philosophically) Dialectical Naturalism. So what are the realms of power present in social ecology, what is its particular regime of inclusions and exclusions? Again, there isn't space to deal with them all, but a crucial exclusion is contained in its developmental view of evolution, the "directedness" and "becoming" reflected in dialectical naturalism. Although Bookchin tends to play this aspect down, other social ecologists accept that such a perspective places them firmly in the teleological tradition of Western thinking. What this implies is that evolution has an inherent purpose and direction, it moves towards a predetermined goal. Bookchin views this dynamic as applicable both to the biological world and to the human social world, creating a perspective that lends support to theories of cultural evolution - the idea that human culture moves through stages, from the most basic (often referred to as primitive, or simple) through to the most advanced. It's not surprising to find that the folks who construct schemes which depict culture evolving as a rule tend to put their own towards the advanced end of any sequence. For Bookchin, it is indeed Western culture, its modes of knowledge and world views, its intellectual history which is seen as holding the most promise for fulfilling the purpose of evolution. The vast array of indigenous peoples, their knowledges and world views, their lifeways and struggles do not feature in Bookchin's work except when relegated to the past, as early "organic societies" illustrating past events or previous stages in the course of human history and development. They are universally described as "preliterate" or "primordial", and unfortunately, "flawed" in numerous ways, most notably in possessing features of "nascent hierarchy" - what Bookchin interprets as inequalities based around age and gender, and which eventually give rise to the fully blown hierarchies we are all familiar with. The ethnocentricity and cultural arrogance of such a position is breathtaking but again not particularly new for the universalising Western intellectual. Interestingly, while challenging Marx's theoretical elevation of questions of production and economic exploitation and replacing these with notions of hierarchy and domination, Bookchin ultimately simply reproducers the classical Marxist depiction of indigenous peoples and their static culture left behind in the process of historical advance. Bookchin is unable however to explain in any meaningful sense just how these original inequalities and nascent hierarchies emerged, given the evolutionary impetus (as he interprets it) towards non-hierarchical social and ecological forms inherent in the Purpose Of Nature. Simply saying that things happened a certain way does not make them so, but this is a common problem within Bookchin's work. Additionally, Bookchin draws on an extremely limited range of material for information to support his generalising about indigenous cultures, and exhibits a total lack of appreciation of the current controversies raging in the anthropological world around issues of the authority and legitimacy of past and present ethnographic representation. Not the least of these is the claim that sexism within early, frequently colonial, accounts led to a widespread neglect of the role of women in indigenous societies, problematising the easy accusations of inequality or injustice that are aimed at indigenous people and which continue to be used to justify the destruction of their lifeways and knowledges by those who consider their own morality, ethics civilisation or political purpose as superior. There is a major contradiction at the heart of social ecology. It is committed to diversity as an expression of dialectical naturalism but fails to take serious theoretical account of one of the most evident diverse productions of human beings - culture. If there is inherent, objective value in natural diversity, then the multiplicity of forms of human cultural expression must surely also contain value, must also reflect evolutionary teleos, purpose. If indeed Nature is to find its voice through humans, must this voice take only one form, that of the Western cultural tradition, rather than continuing its dialectic movement towards diversity and complexity through an abundance of human voices? The reality is that those areas of the world with the greatest enduring biological diversity are the remaining homelands of (living, breathing, present-time) indigenous people - the ecological credentials of their systems of knowledge are therefore self-evident. Are Bookchin's? At the same time many of these peoples are actively resisting their forced incorporation into the world economy and its client states - surely any contemporary liberatory social theorist must approach ideas of the global with a great deal of cultural humility. Finally I'd like to pose a more general question: which of the following seems the more anarchic approach, which orientation seems to lend itself to a greater fostering of self determination and genuinely participatory democracy? To attempt to sell the masses yet another 'New Improved' version of universal Truth fresh from the oven of Western Enlightenment ("forget Marxism, Anarchism or Feminism, lets do the Dialectical Naturalism.) Or to develop instead a thorough understanding of the ways in which elements of power and hierarchy operate through the creation and validation of all truth and knowledge claims, and to reach for social visions and practices based on an affirmation and politicisation of difference, multiplicity and diversity? I'll leave it to you. END NOTE - It seems to need repeating as often as possible that the outcome of a position that affirms the partiality of all knowledge claims is not necessarily the embracing of absolute relativity. This accusation is as easy to make as the one about all anarchists wanting chaos, and just as flippantly ill- informed. Creating the discursive space for radical plurality, for the radical democratising of any emancipatory project, is not the same thing as the total absence of any basis for constructing personal or community values. For those who continue to think it is, and for anyone interested in exploring in greater depth some of the ideas underpinning this article, the works of Elizabeth Grosz and/or Anna Yeatman are a good instruction; both women are writing in Australia now and both provide accessible and stimulating accounts of the relation of the postmodern to the political (and feminist).