The association of a claimed spiritual impulse with sexuality is a mystery in two senses - it is a mystery in the religious sense that it is present but inexplicable and it is a mystery in a second sense that most people just do not get that it is possible.
This is not just because most people in the West have grown up within a cultural tradition that firmly separates spirit (or mind at its most transcendent) from matter (or body at its most functional).
Many Westerners understand body as brute and often inconvenient matter but they are now unsure whether spirit exists except as illusion, a derangement of the neurons.
To cope with the very concept of sexual mysticism or of a sexual spirituality requires that we struggle with two very different ways of seeing.
There is the personal privileging of sexuality as a means of expression and that process by which 'transcendence', the experience of existing beyond the immediate self, has meaning in and of itself. Not everyone gets either of these concepts, let alone their integration.
The privileging of sexuality is deeply counter-cultural because that privileging is wholly associated with simple gratification of desire, with the sin of lust. A 'swinger' is more comprehensible to most people than a sexual mystic because the former are simply acting out a common desire without restraint.
Most people sit on a continuum between a-sexuality and radical desire that has little room for the numinous.
On the other hand, transcendence is also problematic because it is associated with external forces, mostly God but often today with a more vague sense of the divine or perhaps of some essential reality beyond reality.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I position transcendence as a materially-based experience that is valid in itself (as experience) but not validly described outside the experience except in materialist terms. This does not make the experience invalid, merely additional explanations invalid.
Whatever God, the divine or reality beyond reality are to individuals, they are set apart from matter for most people and so, sex being associated with desire that is seen as 'material', they are not seen as sexual. Indeed, the sexual may be so associated with matter that it becomes associated with 'dirt'.
The sexual mystic is a liminal figure, an absurd figure in many people's eyes, even more so than the 'mulatto', the bisexual and the transgender have been in the past - and all those other figures in society who partake of both or neither of the binary components of our conventional thought.
Black/white, light/dark. good/bad. But these figures between the boundaries are not liminal at all, They are at the point of convergence of binaries. They represent ambiguity. Either/or. Neither/nor. Most people are uncomfortable with ambiguity. Yet dealing with ambiguity is central to individuation.
Why the discomfort? Because ambiguity is often the first step to anxiety and anxiety is the first step to coming-to-terms with the actually existing human condition. For some of the highly sexualised, the introduction of the numinous confuses things - why add obfuscation to a 'natural' act?
There is no reason why the swinger is necessarily a psychopath in this. Their unspiritual sexuality is consensual and many swingers will have strongly monogamous relationships when it comes to affection and property. There is no intrinsic superiority in the numinous.
For the highly spiritualised on the other hand, the sexual is just so, well, 'dirty' - literally, in the exchange of body fluids and the mess - and deriving from the lack of loss of self in the god-head or in the eternal because of the association of the act with the body and the material .
Even where texts have not demanded that a person treat sexuality as a highly regulated and non-spontaneous activity, the psychology of formal religion appears to demand that sex be avoided as sin or distraction.
Yet, for a small minority, the linkage between the sexual and the mystical is logical and healthy. In some personalities, the experience of orgasm excites mental visions of the eternal, the infinite and the numinous.
The entire experience of sex is, to such persons, deeply magical or spiritual (the terms are not quite interchangeable).
The real puzzlement to these people is why an innocent, private, consensual and deeply personal association of the link between sex and the divine is the cause of so much fear, anxiety, horror and oppression in the majority.
But I must go back to being honest here. I accept the experience of the transcendent but I do not accept the experience of the divine as something taking place beyond the mind of the subject.
Those who have experienced intense transcendence through religious experience, drugs or sex - or even contemplation of art or nature - can find the experience so overwhelming that all reason flees. The experience is embraced as true-in-itself, as an absolute.
There is no arguing with such persons - nor are they wrong in their noble illusions. The experience is true because it 'is'. Sex, like drugs, is highly specific, though, in giving us a path way from experience to this felt illusory (objectively) but real (subjectively) transcendence.
Both involve chemical transformations within the body, whether instigated by the introduction of chemicals or through forcing chemical change within the body through (say) touch ... but the essence of the matter is the same, the triggering of transcendence through radical chemical and neuron adaptation.
The objection of the religious and post-religious secular community to sex and drugs is 'moral' on the spurious basis that no external force other than, successively, God's grace or pure reason should intervene between man and the transcendent.
This is the gap, however, into which priests and intellectuals have insinuated themselves. But God is now either dead or very personal indeed to post-modern man. Reason is on its last legs as adequate explanation for our conditions of existence.
This is not to say that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll should be put in their place (far from it - these are often evasions) but only that there is a hole which people are having to fill without paternal or maternal guidance and each person will have their own right way of filling it.
This raises many issues of 'value' that can be boiled down to the simple unconscious acceptance of a person as either an existential being (experiencing things as a material being in relation to the world) or essential (attaining knowledge of hidden things in the world that actually exist 'out there').
This is the occult of the inner soul in conceptual competition with the occult of the universe.
Hitherto all discussion of sexuality in a spiritual context has centred either on the impossibility of sexuality or narcotics (as opposed to reason or ascetic discipline) permitting access to the divine or, alternatively, of sexuality and narcotics being the most natural pathway to a divinity that exists above and beyond humanity.
In other words, both the majority of believers who deny a link between sex and spirit and those few who assert a direct link between the two share an assumption that there is 'something out there' which rejects or accepts the gift of sex.
But once the divine is lost conceptually in a secular society (as it has largely been in ours), the only sex that is left is the sex that is no longer denied (as it is by the deniers of the link) but which also has no transcendent quality.
From this point on, it is just, more or less, pleasure - unpleasant, erotic, brute, playful or whatever - but just pleasure without meaning except, at best, as personal bonding.
This last statement might shock but most people in the modern world can now only see sex as a matter of brute pleasure or personal bonding. This leads us to the dichotomous cultural relationship between sex as commodity and sex as personal development and as a relationship tool.
This clearly creates its own binary structure of dark and light, good and evil, with advocates on both sides.
Perhaps we might now re-think this in the light of science and of the fact of sexual mysticism in the past (such as that of the Greek mystery tradition and Gnosticism) by suggesting that, while the sex of pleasure and of commodification and the sex of bonding are real phenomena, there may be a third phenomenon of sexuality as felt transcendence that requires no God or divinity at all.
Such an existentialist sexuality is liminal and so disturbing by its nature. It exists not just to release tension or excite (as in the pleasure model) nor is it designed to be 'social', to build bonds.
It might just as well exist as an individual act of transcendence with participants who share the same ends and who replace the divine as external with the divine as internal, as an inner transformative power.
This, of course, relates to spiritual alchemy. We might argue that the alchemical, a chemical process within the body, was falsely related to the external and to a ladder of perfection.
An existential sexual mysticism might be interested not in 'rising' towards divinity but in finding moments of Dionysiac purity which are internally transformative within existing reality.
Instead of union with God or the external divine, the sexual process would now be directed at individuation, a more Jungian concept, but one which is not merely imagined but is actuated.
And not only through sexuality - we have mentioned sex and drugs but these are of no greater consequence than art, higher mathematics, ritual and performance, asceticism, deep meditation or long walks!
There is no intent here to throw the baby of technique out with the bathwater of essentialism - for, if we think long and hard about it, it becomes clear that, though the sexual mystics of the past were unable to separate the experience from the theory, their methods were often finely tuned towards achieving the actuality of a felt transcendence.
We can envisage a Western sexual mysticism closer to the mentality of the Taoists or the more radical Tantrics, by which transcendence in order to effect transformation and individuation becomes a form of science in its own right.
Even symbolic notions such as the alchemical idea of 'as above so below' or that of archetypes, as developed by Jung, can be used in a scientific way, much like higher mathematics, to transmute the leaden life of conformity and easy acceptance of a constructed social reality into a dynamic and revolutionary critique of the 'given', far more focused than the cynicism of the Chaos Magicians.
Needless to say, such thoughts will disturb those who really do believe that there is a divine 'out there' instead of inside ourselves. It will also unnerve those who cannot think in these terms at all but only in terms of the laws of physics.
Those who are interested in neither God nor science but only in pleasure will be equally puzzled at why anyone should be mad enough (in their eyes) to add bells and whistles. But these 'platonists', positivists and hedonists are not being asked to become like the new alchemists.
They are merely being asked to be more tolerant of a different way of seeing than their ancestors have been.
In the past,control, repression, contempt or ridicule have been the natural modes of society towards all three styles of approaching sexuality, all tending to indicate fear and anxiety rather than understanding.
To conclude, it is likely that the 'sexual mystic impulse', a component of what might be the 'new alchemy', is always going to be for the few - but not because the few want to keep it to themselves but because the many simply cannot get sexuality as anything more than pleasure and power.
There is nothing elitist about this new alchemy. On the contrary, it is for anyone who wants it. To remove the pleasure and the power of sexuality from the social, from constructed social reality, and return it to individuals as individuals in direct communion with each other, may be the most profoundly revolutionary act of our time.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Tuesday 15 July 2014
Thursday 10 July 2014
Empires & Resistance
Around 425 BC, Athenian imperialism turned on the small city-state of Melos. The Melians wished to stay neutral but this was not good enough for the leading 'democracy' of the day fighting its own 'evil imperial adversary' Sparta.
The Melians decided to resist despite the superior military resources of the Athenians. This is what they said: " ... to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect ..."
The Melians relied on action as 'hope' but not much better than that. The sentiment is one familiar to those who have studied the Amerindian resistance to the white settlers - an appeal to the essential rightness of their world because it has always been so but awareness deep down of the futility of it all.
Needless to say, there were no gods to trust in and they were crushed. For their resistance, despite fighting bravely, the men were all slaughtered and the women and children were all enslaved. Thus, the glorious conduct of a democracy that has acted as beacon for the modern world's sentimental liberals.
The Athenians had serious ideas about freedom and justice, of course, but they were ideas only for themselves or to be imposed on others for their own ultimate convenience - an attitude of mind familiar to us today. Imperialists can never leave things alone. They must meddle.
Putting Ideas into Rebel's Mouths
Half a millennium later, the Roman historian Tacitus almost certainly created the Calgacus who may or may not have been a genuine Celtic chieftain defeated by the Roman Empire around 80-83AD when Rome was busy thieving the British Isles from its indigenous peoples.
Tacitus 'invents' or reports a statement of resistance to imperialism that stands alongside those that emerged later from North American indigenous tribes.
"To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has up to this time been a defence ... there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission
"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches."
And then these famous lines: "To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire: they make a desert and call it peace." I suppose, if anyone asks, this provides the basis for a reasonable answer to the question of what the Romans did for us ...
You may compare this again to another alleged speech, this time of Hatuey, Chief of the Tainos, who led the guerrilla resistance against the Spanish in what was to become Cuba and who was captured and burned alive at the stake in 1511:
"Here is the God the Spaniards worship ... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of Peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves.
"They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they steal our belongings, seduce our women, rape our daughters. Incapable of matching our courage in battle, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break."
Again, the speech strikes one as constructed for literary purposes by the conquerors but the sentiments were inspiring to Cuban revolutionaries as perhaps one day what Calgacus said might inspire the people of Britain in their struggle against European bureaucracy.
Still, they could be seen as a bit of a futile whine from the losers in life's race if one was so inclined.
And, of course, the 'real' savages of the Celtic North and North America were not averse to a bit of tribal violence, rapine and thievery against their weaker tribal neighbours (the Tainos no doubt warred with the Caribs as the Wichita with the Comanches). Nor did Melos' wealth come without slaves.
But for Hatuey's God, read Calgacus' Rome and the iron horse is an analogue to the superior organisation of the Romans or the Athenians but what the writers really see through is the use of ideology as cover for rapine.
For the savages, thuggery is just what they do, for us civilised ones, it has to be justified.
In the first case, pagan 'virtue' is implicit rather than stated but, in the second, the reference to the God of the Christians is explicit. Ideology is part of the machinery of theft. The violence and brutality, as each ages passes, gets cloaked in more layers of essentialist guff.
At least in these cases, some people within the imperial systems knew that bad things were being done in the name of the good and were prepared to ask questions but, whether Roman bureaucrats or Spanish monks, the critique is always elliptical.
Tacitus and our anonymous Hispanic chronicler have the resigned air of the fearful intellectual within the system who wishes the world could be different and then goes back to his laden table. We know the type - the op ed columns of our contemporary media are filled with such sentimentalists.
Slave Revolts
But empires are not only about the business of acquiring land and agricultural and mineral resources, they are also about acquiring labour resources.
Globalisation today is about the re-allocation of labour resources for the profit of the imperiums of our day as much as capture of slaves by armed force has been the central dynamic of past empires. In the past, this meant a far more overt commitment to slavery. But not now.
Today, empire is defined by its enabling of free movement. The defining of slavery has become the cleverly constructed differentiator of 'good' and 'bad' imperialism ever since British evangelicals took the moral high ground and made use of the British Navy to sink slavers. If only it were all so simple.
Periodically, the enslaved found a rare opportunity to resist on their terms and to 'make themselves'. Between 73 and 71BC, a major slave revolt took place within the Roman Empire led by a former gladiator of now legendary status, the Thracian former soldier Spartacus.
The revolt was put down bloodily. Despite the claims of Hollywood, Spartacus probably died in battle rather than on the cross. He should not be over-romanticised - his probable interest was to grab the spoils of Italy for a new ruling order rather than anything truly liberatory.
According to the Roman historians, he mounted one of the earliest prison break-outs in surviving history with 70 others from the slave-training school in Capua. From this perspective, whatever his motives, he can count as a figure of resistance to the Man or as a 'most wanted' criminal to taste.
Initially, he was little more than a brigand but his mere presence on and around Mount Vesuvius drew others to him and he proved a good leader of men. Local police actions were easily defeated.
A second, more determined, police effort was still underprepared, not taking this brigand seriously enough, and a Roman General (the Chief Constable, if you like) was humiliatingly lucky to escape capture.
But, in the end, when the system wants to crush you and there is no one at home base with the authority to demur, you will be crushed. And so he was.
We might compare this with the slave uprising of Ali Bin Muhammad, one of a series of such revolts of East African slaves around Basra under the Abbasids between 869 and 883 AD.
Ali was captured and executed in 881 but such revolts could involve up to 500,000 slaves, indicating the degree to which the Arab Abbasids depended as much on stolen human labour as the Romans - and as much as did the foundation of the British Empire for that matter.
The Abbasids, often praised, like the Romans, for their cultural achievements, drew in East African blacks into the marshlands in order to reclaim them for agriculture and feed their teeming Baghdad. These are the same territories that Saddam Hussein granted to his top officers for services rendered.
As with Spartacus, Ali appeared out of nowhere and began liberating slaves in batches ranging from 50 to 500 until he had accumulated a formidable force that was promised property (since many uprooted slaves might not be enamoured of a freedom that was hunger).
Nor was he a liberationist in the modern sense for what he promised the slaves was - their own slaves, of course.
He positioned himself (according to the legend) as a servant of Allah and was allegedly merciful to the slave traders and owners insofar as he spared their lives and freed them but only after a thorough beating from which some might well not have survived.
Today, Spartacus and Ali whose moral compasses were very limited might certainly be regarded as criminals and terrorists. The system that enslaved them in the first place made the law and revolt against that system became the crime. Again, a familiar ideological stance today.
Perhaps America's jails are holding places for psychopaths but they may also be holding places for free men enslaved when the 'crimes' are social constructs. Who is it that decides that trading in alcohol in one decade and drugs in another or engaging in consensual sex trades between equals is a 'crime'?
The last word on slave revolts come from Korea and three hundred years later, showing the ubiquity of slavery in space and time - and that what has existed once may exist again. This is from Manjok's slave rebellion which was planned but discovered and Manjok was killed - murdered, we might say.
He is said to have said:
"Are generals and ministers born to these glories? No! For when the time is auspicious anyone can hold such office. Why then should we work ourselves to the bone and suffer under the whip? ... If each hereditary slave kills his master and burns records of his status, thus ending the system of hereditary slavery in our country, then each of us will be able to become a minister or a general."
The Lessons For Today
There was no justice for the Melians, the Celts or the Tainos while the leaders of slave and peasant revolts invariably died alongside their many followers.
The 'iron' of superior organisation and technology - the sheer inertia of the few having a stake in an unfair society that gave them the resources for domination - would overwhelm any resistance to expansion or internal revolt from exploitation.
The lesson would appear to be that there is no hope in revolt under such conditions unless you just want to make a point and then die - or are just so desperate that even the risk of death is better than servility. Perhaps this lies at the heart of the suicide bomber's decision..
The only chance for the common man in the past was to tie yourself to a warlord arising on the margins of a flailing empire and hope that he wins his battles and becomes secure on his territory so that you can gain land - and slaves - of your own.
Or perhaps you could join a legion or regiment and fight the fuzzy-wuzzies for a small slice of the action ... and is this not the set of choices (revolt, warlordism or becoming an agent of state force) that is all that is left for many men in a world without economic security or personal respect.
Perhaps this is why the barbarian warlord and the insurgent are often marginally more attractive, for all their stupidities and barbarities, than the systematic exploitation of millions and then billions through a system that serves the few and not the many and then engages the many amongst its few, its own working people, in an elaborate ideological cover-up to ensure the machinery of exploitation.
There was always a link between expansion and exploitation because, then as now, servile labour could be transported across seas to keep down the price of indigenous labour and excess human production at home could be siphoned off to work the land stolen from those defeated in battle.
A strange dynamic of economic growth through atrocity built the modern world. This dynamic in its most brutal form has, of course, ended with the end of the frontier. Or has the frontier closed after all? Perhaps we have been seduced by an American internal narrative and not seen the frontiers of today.
Nearly all land has been captured for the imperial market system in theory and that which has not belongs to somewhat authoritarian states of resistance or what are called 'failed' but which might equally be called 'free' if violent, anarchic and communitarianly oppressive states.
Yet there are many 'frontiers' of asymmetry emerging once again as globalisation fails to deliver economic prosperity at the speed required to match mass aspirations and expectations - there are migration frontiers, market frontiers, frontiers where traditionalism resists commodification.
The revolution in the means of production that originated from the unique properties of the slave-based British Empire not merely enabled slavery to be replaced with 'free' labour but scored that empire an ideological lead in terms of its claims about freedom and democracy.
But these changes saw scarcely a jot of difference to the actual holding of wealth in terms of its proportions between mass and elite. It worked because the total amount of wealth rose and spread for those within the total system.
The mass could feel it was always getting richer. This in turn could lead to a reasonable working class conservatism because concern for those who were truly exploited much further down the line might disrupt the ability to survive yourself.
No doubt the Roman working classes who enjoyed free bread and circuses would quite rationally have felt the same.
However, modern elites have became far more fluid, based on innovation, but perhaps much less than we are led to believe - landholdings in the UK are still highly concentrated on surprisingly few people. What they do have is control over organisation and culture.
This whole system (today) depends on continuing trickle-down but we know that the relative benefit to (say) the American middle classes started to decline from approximately the 1970s.
What will the 'few' do when the many start to face severe economic pressure and there is no money left in the kitty for hand-outs because the 'imperial system' is running down?
They will, of course, have to rely on 'security' - superior force - as they have done whenever the mass of the population starts to get a bit itchy - and that requires an ideology of threat to justify it. It requires surveillance, cultural control, fear and quasi-gulags.
Thus it is in the logic of history that the US Administration now leads in creating an ideology of fear within the West and makes demands for high defence and security spending to counter the coming effects of relative pauperisation.
Fear amongst the old and propertied then affects the young populations of both the West (as the old become a dead weight of expenditures on the young) and the South (as its young start to press on the borders of the West from desperation).
Youthful resentments in the West and youthful desires for a better life outside the West make for a potentially volatile cocktail that must worry those who manage the wealth on which the older generations expect to rely for their pensions.
Two and a half thousand years after the destruction of Melos, we are still seeking to crush smaller players for profit and coating our passion for power with fine rhetoric and nonsense. Two thousand years after Spartacus, we are still puzzling on how to deal with the revolts of the damned.
[The quotations are adaptations from 'The Verso Book of Dissent', 2010 ]
The Melians decided to resist despite the superior military resources of the Athenians. This is what they said: " ... to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect ..."
The Melians relied on action as 'hope' but not much better than that. The sentiment is one familiar to those who have studied the Amerindian resistance to the white settlers - an appeal to the essential rightness of their world because it has always been so but awareness deep down of the futility of it all.
Needless to say, there were no gods to trust in and they were crushed. For their resistance, despite fighting bravely, the men were all slaughtered and the women and children were all enslaved. Thus, the glorious conduct of a democracy that has acted as beacon for the modern world's sentimental liberals.
The Athenians had serious ideas about freedom and justice, of course, but they were ideas only for themselves or to be imposed on others for their own ultimate convenience - an attitude of mind familiar to us today. Imperialists can never leave things alone. They must meddle.
Putting Ideas into Rebel's Mouths
Half a millennium later, the Roman historian Tacitus almost certainly created the Calgacus who may or may not have been a genuine Celtic chieftain defeated by the Roman Empire around 80-83AD when Rome was busy thieving the British Isles from its indigenous peoples.
Tacitus 'invents' or reports a statement of resistance to imperialism that stands alongside those that emerged later from North American indigenous tribes.
"To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has up to this time been a defence ... there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches."
And then these famous lines: "To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire: they make a desert and call it peace." I suppose, if anyone asks, this provides the basis for a reasonable answer to the question of what the Romans did for us ...
You may compare this again to another alleged speech, this time of Hatuey, Chief of the Tainos, who led the guerrilla resistance against the Spanish in what was to become Cuba and who was captured and burned alive at the stake in 1511:
"Here is the God the Spaniards worship ... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of Peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves.
"They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they steal our belongings, seduce our women, rape our daughters. Incapable of matching our courage in battle, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break."
Again, the speech strikes one as constructed for literary purposes by the conquerors but the sentiments were inspiring to Cuban revolutionaries as perhaps one day what Calgacus said might inspire the people of Britain in their struggle against European bureaucracy.
Still, they could be seen as a bit of a futile whine from the losers in life's race if one was so inclined.
And, of course, the 'real' savages of the Celtic North and North America were not averse to a bit of tribal violence, rapine and thievery against their weaker tribal neighbours (the Tainos no doubt warred with the Caribs as the Wichita with the Comanches). Nor did Melos' wealth come without slaves.
But for Hatuey's God, read Calgacus' Rome and the iron horse is an analogue to the superior organisation of the Romans or the Athenians but what the writers really see through is the use of ideology as cover for rapine.
For the savages, thuggery is just what they do, for us civilised ones, it has to be justified.
In the first case, pagan 'virtue' is implicit rather than stated but, in the second, the reference to the God of the Christians is explicit. Ideology is part of the machinery of theft. The violence and brutality, as each ages passes, gets cloaked in more layers of essentialist guff.
At least in these cases, some people within the imperial systems knew that bad things were being done in the name of the good and were prepared to ask questions but, whether Roman bureaucrats or Spanish monks, the critique is always elliptical.
Tacitus and our anonymous Hispanic chronicler have the resigned air of the fearful intellectual within the system who wishes the world could be different and then goes back to his laden table. We know the type - the op ed columns of our contemporary media are filled with such sentimentalists.
Slave Revolts
But empires are not only about the business of acquiring land and agricultural and mineral resources, they are also about acquiring labour resources.
Globalisation today is about the re-allocation of labour resources for the profit of the imperiums of our day as much as capture of slaves by armed force has been the central dynamic of past empires. In the past, this meant a far more overt commitment to slavery. But not now.
Today, empire is defined by its enabling of free movement. The defining of slavery has become the cleverly constructed differentiator of 'good' and 'bad' imperialism ever since British evangelicals took the moral high ground and made use of the British Navy to sink slavers. If only it were all so simple.
Periodically, the enslaved found a rare opportunity to resist on their terms and to 'make themselves'. Between 73 and 71BC, a major slave revolt took place within the Roman Empire led by a former gladiator of now legendary status, the Thracian former soldier Spartacus.
The revolt was put down bloodily. Despite the claims of Hollywood, Spartacus probably died in battle rather than on the cross. He should not be over-romanticised - his probable interest was to grab the spoils of Italy for a new ruling order rather than anything truly liberatory.
According to the Roman historians, he mounted one of the earliest prison break-outs in surviving history with 70 others from the slave-training school in Capua. From this perspective, whatever his motives, he can count as a figure of resistance to the Man or as a 'most wanted' criminal to taste.
Initially, he was little more than a brigand but his mere presence on and around Mount Vesuvius drew others to him and he proved a good leader of men. Local police actions were easily defeated.
A second, more determined, police effort was still underprepared, not taking this brigand seriously enough, and a Roman General (the Chief Constable, if you like) was humiliatingly lucky to escape capture.
But, in the end, when the system wants to crush you and there is no one at home base with the authority to demur, you will be crushed. And so he was.
We might compare this with the slave uprising of Ali Bin Muhammad, one of a series of such revolts of East African slaves around Basra under the Abbasids between 869 and 883 AD.
Ali was captured and executed in 881 but such revolts could involve up to 500,000 slaves, indicating the degree to which the Arab Abbasids depended as much on stolen human labour as the Romans - and as much as did the foundation of the British Empire for that matter.
The Abbasids, often praised, like the Romans, for their cultural achievements, drew in East African blacks into the marshlands in order to reclaim them for agriculture and feed their teeming Baghdad. These are the same territories that Saddam Hussein granted to his top officers for services rendered.
As with Spartacus, Ali appeared out of nowhere and began liberating slaves in batches ranging from 50 to 500 until he had accumulated a formidable force that was promised property (since many uprooted slaves might not be enamoured of a freedom that was hunger).
Nor was he a liberationist in the modern sense for what he promised the slaves was - their own slaves, of course.
He positioned himself (according to the legend) as a servant of Allah and was allegedly merciful to the slave traders and owners insofar as he spared their lives and freed them but only after a thorough beating from which some might well not have survived.
Today, Spartacus and Ali whose moral compasses were very limited might certainly be regarded as criminals and terrorists. The system that enslaved them in the first place made the law and revolt against that system became the crime. Again, a familiar ideological stance today.
The last word on slave revolts come from Korea and three hundred years later, showing the ubiquity of slavery in space and time - and that what has existed once may exist again. This is from Manjok's slave rebellion which was planned but discovered and Manjok was killed - murdered, we might say.
He is said to have said:
"Are generals and ministers born to these glories? No! For when the time is auspicious anyone can hold such office. Why then should we work ourselves to the bone and suffer under the whip? ... If each hereditary slave kills his master and burns records of his status, thus ending the system of hereditary slavery in our country, then each of us will be able to become a minister or a general."
The Lessons For Today
There was no justice for the Melians, the Celts or the Tainos while the leaders of slave and peasant revolts invariably died alongside their many followers.
The 'iron' of superior organisation and technology - the sheer inertia of the few having a stake in an unfair society that gave them the resources for domination - would overwhelm any resistance to expansion or internal revolt from exploitation.
The lesson would appear to be that there is no hope in revolt under such conditions unless you just want to make a point and then die - or are just so desperate that even the risk of death is better than servility. Perhaps this lies at the heart of the suicide bomber's decision..
The only chance for the common man in the past was to tie yourself to a warlord arising on the margins of a flailing empire and hope that he wins his battles and becomes secure on his territory so that you can gain land - and slaves - of your own.
Or perhaps you could join a legion or regiment and fight the fuzzy-wuzzies for a small slice of the action ... and is this not the set of choices (revolt, warlordism or becoming an agent of state force) that is all that is left for many men in a world without economic security or personal respect.
Perhaps this is why the barbarian warlord and the insurgent are often marginally more attractive, for all their stupidities and barbarities, than the systematic exploitation of millions and then billions through a system that serves the few and not the many and then engages the many amongst its few, its own working people, in an elaborate ideological cover-up to ensure the machinery of exploitation.
There was always a link between expansion and exploitation because, then as now, servile labour could be transported across seas to keep down the price of indigenous labour and excess human production at home could be siphoned off to work the land stolen from those defeated in battle.
A strange dynamic of economic growth through atrocity built the modern world. This dynamic in its most brutal form has, of course, ended with the end of the frontier. Or has the frontier closed after all? Perhaps we have been seduced by an American internal narrative and not seen the frontiers of today.
Nearly all land has been captured for the imperial market system in theory and that which has not belongs to somewhat authoritarian states of resistance or what are called 'failed' but which might equally be called 'free' if violent, anarchic and communitarianly oppressive states.
Yet there are many 'frontiers' of asymmetry emerging once again as globalisation fails to deliver economic prosperity at the speed required to match mass aspirations and expectations - there are migration frontiers, market frontiers, frontiers where traditionalism resists commodification.
The revolution in the means of production that originated from the unique properties of the slave-based British Empire not merely enabled slavery to be replaced with 'free' labour but scored that empire an ideological lead in terms of its claims about freedom and democracy.
But these changes saw scarcely a jot of difference to the actual holding of wealth in terms of its proportions between mass and elite. It worked because the total amount of wealth rose and spread for those within the total system.
The mass could feel it was always getting richer. This in turn could lead to a reasonable working class conservatism because concern for those who were truly exploited much further down the line might disrupt the ability to survive yourself.
No doubt the Roman working classes who enjoyed free bread and circuses would quite rationally have felt the same.
However, modern elites have became far more fluid, based on innovation, but perhaps much less than we are led to believe - landholdings in the UK are still highly concentrated on surprisingly few people. What they do have is control over organisation and culture.
This whole system (today) depends on continuing trickle-down but we know that the relative benefit to (say) the American middle classes started to decline from approximately the 1970s.
What will the 'few' do when the many start to face severe economic pressure and there is no money left in the kitty for hand-outs because the 'imperial system' is running down?
They will, of course, have to rely on 'security' - superior force - as they have done whenever the mass of the population starts to get a bit itchy - and that requires an ideology of threat to justify it. It requires surveillance, cultural control, fear and quasi-gulags.
Thus it is in the logic of history that the US Administration now leads in creating an ideology of fear within the West and makes demands for high defence and security spending to counter the coming effects of relative pauperisation.
Fear amongst the old and propertied then affects the young populations of both the West (as the old become a dead weight of expenditures on the young) and the South (as its young start to press on the borders of the West from desperation).
Youthful resentments in the West and youthful desires for a better life outside the West make for a potentially volatile cocktail that must worry those who manage the wealth on which the older generations expect to rely for their pensions.
Two and a half thousand years after the destruction of Melos, we are still seeking to crush smaller players for profit and coating our passion for power with fine rhetoric and nonsense. Two thousand years after Spartacus, we are still puzzling on how to deal with the revolts of the damned.
[The quotations are adaptations from 'The Verso Book of Dissent', 2010 ]
Thursday 26 June 2014
Iron Age Legends, Mid-Life Crises and the New Sexual Politics
Both of these cultures are very different from those of the West, even if the Judaeo-Christian allegedly patriarchal approach to monogamy grew out of a 'two-wife' (or more) approach that is found in many nomadic cultures from the Arabian desert to Mongolia.
The South Asian legend was almost modern in its assumption of freedom and of a negotiated settlement between equals. Perhaps it is now time to look at the tension between the enforced monogamy of the new faiths that emerged across the Ancient World and the wild instincts of the lone male.
With Germanic and Celtic legend (similar but not identical) we add a different element to the pot. Here the increasing assumption is of a marital convention where wives matter. The Greek tragic tradition also introduces the monogamous family as battleground.
Prior to the chivalric re-formulations of the Middle Ages, there is no sense of love that might be multiple as in South India and even the chivalric model ensures that active sexual expression remains monogamous in a pale version of the Burmese model where the household sits to the right and an unrequited love to the left.
However, there is a basic underlying equality in the potential for women to decide their own destinies once they are in charge of a household but only in the household. Patriarchy may be regarded as ideologically dominant before betrothal but a degree of matriarchy (in the household) to be dominant after it.
If the male ethic (the lone heroic wolf or member of a pack) dominates before marriage, he gives way to a separate but equal status after it. A woman can become de facto head of a household, with rule over men, such a servants or sons, in her own right. The matriarch with her 'boys' long precedes Ma Barker.
Assets to be deployed by fathers and carried off by heroes first, women can then be micro-economic warrior queens in their own right, nurturing sons to challenge the father and daughters to trade for power and security.
Nevertheless, the single hero-girl Atalanta and the rare Queen Medb or Boudicca (Celt) tend to raise the possibility of strong political women but little more. The strength is in the household and not in the public person. But then is that not also so with the King once barbarian struggles are over?
Brunnhilde and Kriemhild in German culture are better understood not as decision-makers but as fateful manipulators of a drama. Their passions, demand for love on their terms in the first case and passion as cause for revenge as a matter of honour in the second, set in motion the deaths of heroes.
The relative powerlessness of women in terms of brute force and warrior camaraderie here leads to a culture of psychological manipulation of the conventions that protect their status in a way that has become a trope of Western culture. But this is much more than simple 'women and slave' subversion of 'natural order'.
Even today, feminism has not fully come to terms with the strange mix of biological and cultural drivers for 'woman as necessary manipulator of others' - society and family alike. The alleged propensity to manipulation is often presented as a case of weakness or victimhood. Manipulation as alternative to strength.
However, if, as I suggest, the conventional culture of the West has shifted power from males as lone wolves to males as protectors through 'betrothal', then the male is as often a victim of the conventions (in terms of his inner aspirations) as a participant in an equality of enslavement before the social and habit.
He is 'victim' as much, in these cases, as the woman, especially given the resource constraints and wider risks and brutalities of pre-modern society. It could be argued that what we think of patriarchalism could be a late decadent form in which weak males make illicit misuse of 'Viking' conventions of shared responsibility.
It is as if the Germanic male (in the legend cycles) is fated to 'die' by the honour implicit in monogamy - a miserabilist view but an inevitable one, once a highly-sexed alpha male considers his emotional position in a stable family-based society. Negativity towards full sexual expression becomes a victory against his nature.
So, although we have Cuchulainn and the Greek 'heroes' all playing a successful 'sexual rascal' role in Indo-European legendary cultures, they are seen in the context of a Western culture in which the family has been conventionalised or otherwise within codes of vengeance and honour.
The Greek, Irish (Cuchulainn) and German tragedies are all built around vengeance, honour, loyalty and right behaviour and often have at source the expectation that a man must do something against his natural instincts because this is what is required (there is something of this in the Japanese samurai code).
The 'blonde beast' is actually a creature not of Nietzschean freedom but of obligations and duties that have simply been shifted from the household to honour. If the thesis is household and the antithesis is honour then the synthesis is the Western aristocratic cultural tradition - or at least the code of the mafioso.
An expectation is from others but also from within oneself as a social construction. God has nothing to do with it. Whatever he is, the man observing the legend is now no longer a free animal but a tribal creation even when, like Cuchulainn, his hero is presented as going beyond convention by his very nature.
Alhough the 'normal' male desires to be heroic in his imagination (expressed in a hundred video games), he fears his own ability to match the exemplary hero and so falls back into compliance with the given order.
The ideology of family and marriage is thus a necessary compromise that takes place when a man is faced with the fact that heroism will be denied him not by others but by his very nature as an ordinary man. He can blame no one - he chooses that the the costs of the unconventional are far too great to bear.
This is probably at the heart of the famous 'mid-life crisis' which takes place when the prime duty of convention (progeny and economic security) has apparently been achieved and the last chance of 'heroism' (or rather 'being true to one's nature') appears before the hair goes grey and the limbs bow.
Although expressed sexually in many cases, it is really, as always, about power - an attempt to return power to the self after conceding it to the demands of a convention that is seen, rightly or wrongly, as largely geared to the needs and desires of the 'mate' and the progeny.
She, of course, rarely sees it quite like that. In our modern world, even when there is no enforcing Church or tribe and men are still fit when they would have been 'old' in pre-modern times, the rebellion is usually brief. It is generally absurd, A 'not going gently into that dark night' of old age. Balloons are soon burst.
We may see a shift to another conventional relationship (serial monogamy only because that is what women will put up with in general) or a type of adjustment which is simply acceptance that the man will never be a hero or an animal again - if he ever was beyond his imaginings.
The honour system is in its degenerate phase but it is still the base for convention (as ideal) in the Western family yet it is a falsehood to call such an ideology 'patriarchal'. It is a misdirection to do so. It is a system of power relationships where all elements are equally circumscribed and equally bound.
Women were critical to the creation of an ideology whose primary purpose (under the resource-poor conditions of the time) was to protect them materially and tame the male.
Women are not victims of the ideology any more or any less than the men. They are equal victims and equal beneficiaries under appropriate conditions.
If women have found this system often to have become monstrous, it is largely because it is 'unnatural' for many men (who might prefer to be wolves or adopt the strategies of the South Asian St. Sundarar or the Burmese King) and some men, too weak to do otherwise, turn inward and monstrous because the system gets too rigid.
These men, not having the language for their unhappiness, become introvert, break the rules regardless or become nasty under the pressure. The worst become exploitative, sexually deviant in the worst of ways, molest their own kin. They communicate through acts of cruelty and domination. Others are just miserable.
Because the convention appears sanctified by God and society (more by the latter than the former nowadays), those committed to it (including men who have no instinctive hero or animal in them) moralise on its value instead of treating it as a functional ideological tool for maintaining wealth and stability. THey do not consider the possibility of adapting the structures to permit freedom.Marriage nevertheless can encourage though does not predict love. This is why, against all Western assumptions, arranged marriages can become imbued with love. If it involves coming to terms and not resisting the given, this can result in two persons collaborating well on managing the social and the problems of the material.
New economic conditions have made this system extremely unstable. The acquisition of wealth is now a matter of equality between partners but each is engaged in a separate system of gathering outside the home. And the costs of breaking the system apart are no longer ones of shame but economic loss.
In other words, the calculations that surround love have changed. The social has not boxed people into either enforced love and respect or misery and hate but has created a volatile and insecure negotiation with no boundaries.
Male and female aspirations are now set in a cultural context where very fine calculations are being made as to the costs and benefits of 'being who one is' rather who one is socially dictated to be.
This is not an argument for a turn back to traditionalist forms (because they are no longer truly functional) but to a greater understanding of the adjustments that the ideology of love must take if it is to meet the three primary requirements of those involved:
- collaboration in wealth creation and maintenance or, more negatively, security against accident
- a safe and secure environment for children and other loved ones
- the healthy adaptation of persons from youth to old age in conformity with their inner natures
The old ideology, using the threat of Hell, shame and the law, bound people into fixed property relations, treated children as part of the asset base (because of their role in providing support in old age) and subjugated persons to compliance with collectivism. Individuals could not survive outside their community.
The new ideology (such as it may be) is an unlearning process because it suggests that persons are primary (whether adults or children) and that property value lies as much in the creative and educated potential of persons as in the house they live in.
An iron age mentality was adaptable to industrialisation but not to the new internet world. The modern Western family, tamed by Judaeo-Christianity in ways well if polemically explained by Nietzsche, still existed in these pre-modern codes of conduct.
These have added, alongside the religiosity of texts interpreted by elites, yet another Iron Age level to our modern mind-set. The central point is that families have been or are in transition from structures designed for survival and a relationship with power to associations of persons where power is diffused.
As new technologies liberate us intellectually and emotionally, the imagination and equality of aspiration in the developed world becomes a matter for more direct negotiation (as in the South Asian legend).
But it also suggests that different models for maintaining household prosperity based on 'new traditions' (as in the Burmese legend) may also emerge. This is why we are seeing the lively debates about sexual freedom and alternative lifestyles maturing into a language of responsibilities.
Although traditionalism not only remains in place but intensifies its demands under threat, super-modernity is pushing through new sexual forms and solutions to exploitation simply by abandoning Iron Age texts and ancient legends and inventing structures that actually fit what we are. This should be interesting.
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