enlightenment in an age of destruction · 2018. 4. 25. · enlightenment in an age of destruction...

Christopher Britt, Paul Fenn, and Eduardo Subirats

CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL PRACTICE

Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire

ENLIGHTENMENT IN AN AGE OF DESTRUCTION

Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

Series editorStephen Eric Bronner

Department of Political ScienceRutgers University

New Brunswick, NJ, USA

The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpreta-tions of the classics and salient works by older and more established think-ers. A new generation of academics is becoming engaged with immanent critique, interdisciplinary work, actual political problems, and more broadly the link between theory and practice. Each in this series will, after his or her fashion, explore the ways in which political theory can enrich our understanding of the arts and social sciences. Criminal justice, psy-chology, sociology, theater and a host of other disciplines come into play for a critical political theory. The series also opens new avenues by engag-ing alternative traditions, animal rights, Islamic politics, mass movements, sovereignty, and the institutional problems of power. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice thus fills an important niche. Innovatively blending tradition and experimentation, this intellectual enterprise with a political intent hopes to help reinvigorate what is fast becoming a petrified field of study and to perhaps provide a bit of inspiration for future scholars and activists.

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Christopher Britt • Paul Fenn Eduardo Subirats

Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction

Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire

Critical Political Theory and Radical PracticeISBN 978-3-319-70783-9 ISBN 978-3-319-70784-6 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-tional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer NatureThe registered company is Springer International Publishing AGThe registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Christopher BrittGeorge Washington UniversityWashington, DC, USA

Eduardo SubiratsNew York UniversityPrinceton, NJ, USA

Paul FennLocal Power Inc.Comptche, CA, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6

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Propaganda, warfare, and surveillance: these are the pillars of the global democratic system and of empire. A new human arises from the wastelands and skeletons of Western dreams and ideals. No art, no memories, no philosophy, and no poetry: these are its stratagems. Its inner and outer worlds are as flat as Warhol’s portraits. Thinking? It is no longer required. Only the indefinite reproduction of the semiotics of political correctness. The new human lives in a world of farewells and goodbyes: post-history, post-politics, post-philosophy, post-art, post-humans.

Kant wrote: We are not living in an enlightened age, but an age of ongoing enlightenment. Is such enlightenment possible in the midst of the dazzling virtual realities, the radiant flashes of spectacle, the brightness of exploding missiles that characterize our age?

Ignoble academicism has criticized the word enlightenment as synony-mous with prisons, asylums, and death camps. Post-intellectuals and post- artists alike are the avant-garde of a civilizational movement towards the complete evaporation of the historical roots of enlightenment. Are we living in an age of advanced anti-enlightenment?

Remember Orwell: post-humans identify totalitarianism with democ-racy, they call military violence peace, they relabel colonialism using mul-ticulturalist brands, they call slavery freedom.

This book is an essay. It is only an attempt, an unfinished and unfinish-able effort to rethink the loss of humanity’s being-in-the-world, in the full sense of this ancient philosophical concept. It is a literary attempt to remember gods and heroes of ancient enlightenments: Agni, Krishna, Quetzalcoatl, Prometheus. It reconstructs and restores the categories of

Preface

vi PREFACE

philosophical and scientific enlightenments: Ibn Rushd, Leone Ebreo, Goethe, and so on. It also demolishes the hybrid synthesis of Enlightenment and Christianism of the Age of Reason and the Founding Fathers. Additionally, this is an essay, an attempt, to rethink our age positively, redefine a creative praxis, and construct a concrete hope.

Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction has been written by a professor of literature, a municipal activist, and an exiled philosopher.

Washington DC Christopher BrittSan Francisco Paul FennPrinceton Eduardo SubiratsSummer 2017

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1 Redefining Enlightenment 1Eduardo Subirats 1.1 Melancholia 1 1.2 Enlightenment as Spectacle 2 1.3 Let Newton Be! and All Was Light 5 1.4 Negative Dialectics 6 1.5 Technical Enlightenment 9 1.6 An Age of Destruction 17 1.7 Redefining Enlightenment 20References 24

2 Critique of Providential Enlightenment 27Christopher Britt Arredondo 2.1 Perpetual Peace 27 2.2 The Crisis of Enlightenment 31 2.3 Manifest Destiny: America’s Solution to the Crisis

of Enlightenment 36 2.4 Founding a Nation, Dreaming of Empire 39

2.4.1 Imperial Agrarianism in Franklin and Jefferson 412.4.2 Imperial Industrialism in Washington

and Hamilton 442.4.3 Providential Imperialism in John Quincy Adams 46

contents

viii CONTENTS

2.5 Modern translatio imperii 482.5.1 Imperial Darkness 522.5.2 Imperial War 55

2.6 Anti-imperial Imperialism 57 2.7 Ground Zero 63References 65

3 Enlightenment and Power 71Paul Douglas Fenn 3.1 The Reinvention of Energy 71 3.2 Environmentalism and Policy Collapse 75

3.2.1 Energy Fictions 783.2.2 Economics and Price Theory 823.2.3 Activism 853.2.4 Impotent Movements 893.2.5 The Public Intellectual 91

3.3 Democratic Origination 923.3.1 Epistemic Trespass 96

3.4 Positive Dialectics and the Localization of Democracy 1003.4.1 Proto-agonist/Anti-agonist 1013.4.2 Original Concept 1073.4.3 On Occupism 109

3.5 Energy Enlightenment 1103.5.1 Foundational Localism 115

3.6 Conclusion 117References 121

4 Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction 127Eduardo Subirats 4.1 Lumen Luminis 127 4.2 Brighter Than a Thousand Suns 134 4.3 Das Licht des nichtenden Nichts 136 4.4 “Prometheus: Enlightener Par Excellence” 143References 161

Index 165

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Fig. 4.1 Frontispiece. Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671) 138

Fig. 4.2 The ray of Archimedes. Athanasius Kircher: Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671) 139

Fig. 4.3 Lucerna Magica. Athanasius Kircher. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671) 140

List of figures

1© The Author(s) 2018C. Britt et al., Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6_1

CHAPTER 1

Redefining Enlightenment

Eduardo Subirats

1.1 Melancholia

We have experienced successive wars. We have witnessed the military destruction of entire cities. We know there have been hundreds of thou-sands of humans sacrificed. On our screens we have seen concentration camps all around the world for people fleeing desolation and misery. Desperation for millions.

Humanity has never before been confronted by such an imminent end of times: the global biological collapse unleashed by the industrial warm-ing of the atmosphere, the chemical poisoning of the waterways, the mas-sive destruction of biological species and their habitats, the disappearance of languages and cultures, technologies of final destruction, the global expansion of terrorism and war…A final age.

Condorcet’s Tableau historique des progrés de l’esprit humaine, with its exemplary hopeful vision of the future that has dominated the most out-standing artistic and intellectual expressions of the industrial age, has yielded to the icon par excellence of the postmodern age, the Angelus Novus: a historical subject compelled forward by the hurricane winds of progress, which it is incapable of confronting and much less controlling, all the while its gaze is fixed backward to contemplate an immense valley of ruins.

E. Subirats (*) New York University, Princeton, NJ, USA

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But we are immersed in a historical age configured under the providen-tial sign of unlimited economic and technological development. The democratic political system triumphantly lifts up its grammar of liberty urbi et orbi. On all of the political stages in the grand theater of the world, human rights are wielded as invincible. Politically correct linguistics have canceled out, on the virtual webs and worlds, racial and social resentments, and regional and national conflicts. The sacred values of equality and fra-ternity are succesfully campaigned for on public platforms. And women’s rights crown a worldwide architecture of a universally achieved patriarchal reason. Last but not least, we are free. We are subjects of an indisputable and undisputed freedom. We live in a completely enlightened age.

1.2 enlightenMent as spectacle

The spectacle is the system of industrially produced representations of reality and of our existence in this system. It is an electronic, financial, and political reduplication of being. It can be defined as an integral artwork designed, produced, and globally distributed through predefined cogni-tive frameworks and the institutional powers that sanction them. But what distinguishes the spectacle from historical works of art, such as Greek trag-edy or modern opera, is instead a determined pretense of totality and a totalitarian élan that aspires to install its unreality as universal and true. Modern spectacles are the autos-da-fé of the inquisition or the revolution-ary altars to the Goddess Reason of Les Lumières. The theaters of unlim-ited world war, regional and global catastrophes, and the flourishing of the electronic megalopolis are its contemporary expression.

From an ontological point of view, the spectacle is something more than fiction or magical realism, in the sense of Marx’s critique of ideologies. It is ontologically denser than a mere ideology. It is true that it coincides with the fabricated discourses of the corporate media outlets. However, it is not limited to a system of globally disseminated appearances. It includes gram-mars and ideologies, just like the catechisms of the colonial missionaries were a combination of lexicography, grammar, and theology. What onto-logically confers onto the spectacle its character of a primordial and univer-sal reality is the construction of an objective and agreed-upon reality; it does not matter how fictitious its media packaging appears: a coup d’etat represented as a democratic revolution, colonial invasions depicted as wars of liberation, human rights spread out like an electronic screen while the militarization of the planet unfolds right behind it.

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The ontological condition of the spectacle, the premise of its objective system of fictitious reality that is represented as indisputable truth, is the complete aesthetic and intellectual disarticulation of individual experience. Expressed in logical-transcendental nomenclature, it is the deconstruction of self-consciousness and a grammatical reconstruction of individuals as post-subjects. In circles of literary criticism, it has been called the end of the subject, the death of the human, the crisis of self-consciousness. And it has been celebrated aesthetically and ritualistically through a varied rep-resentation of psychotic regression, from the Cartesian autism of Beckett’s clowns to the schizophrenic disarticulation, spiritual agony, and death of self-consciousness of Kafka’s K. and Joseph K.

This process of the disarticulation of human consciousness encom-passes the aesthetic norms of abstract art and post-art, and the processes of the linguistic fragmentation of cultural memory in the corporate system of the humanities. This systemic disarticulation of human experience and consciousness contributes to a series of institutional and cultural phenom-ena: the linguistic and institutional deconstruction of the arts, the frag-mentation of knowledge, the industrial production of literature as fiction, the corporate bureaucratization of the intellectual, and so on.

The principle of reason sufficient for this civilizational deconstruction of human consciousness is the supplanting of the individual categories of the reflexive experience of the real with automatic processes of recogni-tion. A linguistic replacement on one extreme, and a propagandistic one on the other, of the reflexive recognition of reality through automated linguistic registers should not be understood reflexively as the experience of an individual consciousness. The virtual realities of the spectacle can only be read as mute forms of a trans-individual and opaque reality.

Under the linguistic and epistemological premises of this deconstruc-tion of subjects, individual consciousness has become impoverished, it has fractured internally, and its autonomy has dissolved in a large part. Reality itself has also become intellectually and sensorially impoverished, frag-mented, and degraded.

Because of this, the spectacle is much more than a dazzling total sys-tem of propaganda. More specifically, it is the synthesis of a decapitated consciousness and the corporate representation of trans-subjective packages of a prêt-à-porter reality. The superstitious fascination sparked by the blinding lights of its screens instantaneously dissolves the linguis-tic and psychological conditions of all reflexive autonomy, at the same time that it magical-realistically transforms the unreality of its fiction

REDEFINING ENLIGHTENMENT

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into objective truth. Its semiotic universe erases the borders between the real and the fantastic and between what is true and what is false. The poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal expressed its ultimate consequence in The Letter to Lord Chandos: “the words ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘body,’…abstract words…disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms” (Hofmannsthal 2014, p. 40).1

But in the center of this spectacle, which is configured today by the grand global stages of sports, fashion, politics, or war, the concept of sci-entific progress materializes, and the principles of justice and democracy that the Enlightenment philosophers defended are achieved. What reigns supreme in the spectacle, and only in the spectacle, is the hypothesis of sapere aude under which Kant fused the infinite interiority of Protestantism with techno-scientific reason. In this spectacle, which surrounds us like a total universe, we are recognized and we recognize ourselves as legally free subjects in possession of human rights. The spectacle represents an entirely enlightened world.

In his celebrated response to the question, “What is Enlightenment?,” Kant did not recognize our historical era as an enlightened age, ein auf-geklärtes Zeitalter, but rather as an age of enlightenment (Aufklärung) (Kant 1964, vol. VI, p. 53). He understood this enlightenment as an intel-lectual process and underlined the sense of the verbal action of enlighten-ing, emancipating, and constructing the human sense of being. But Kant, at the same time, emphasized this meaning of enlightenment as an action in itself, enlightening, instead of as a proper noun and in opposition to degraded synonyms such as “scientific” and “objective.” The enlighten-ment is an intellectual, existential, active, creative, and transformative experience in an infinite time and space. Its objectification as an achieved reality carries with it the interruption of human existence as a process of development. The spectacle is the representation of an objectified auf-geklärtes Zeitalter, a completely enlightened age.

Its lights are brilliant: the epiphany of a porn star, the revelation of a presidential candidate, the unlimited reproduction of military, paramili-tary, or criminal violence in front of an invisible mass of hundreds of mil-lions of electronically assaulted consumers. Its ethic finality cannot be summed up by Horace’s sapere aude. Nor is it distinguished by Freud’s Wo Es war soll Ich warden. Its linguistic, psychological, and ontological foundation is rather the unlimited repetition of signs without memory, a superlative redundancy of slogans without substance, and the progressive impoverishment of human experience. Debord: “Le spectacle est la inversión

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concrète de la vie… le mouvement autonome du non-vivant… le moment où la marchandisse est parvenue à la occupation totale de la vie sociale… la falsification de la vie sociale…” (Debord 1967, p. 9).

1.3 let newton Be! and all was light

The impulse of the Enlightenment cuts across the history of European modern philosophy like a continuum of definitions and redefinitions of its ethical principles, critical epistemologies, and liberal politics. The spiritual principle of personal emancipation and sovereignty, which Kant formu-lated with his sapere aude, sparks with its sacred fire precisely those think-ers that, like Goethe, Nietzsche, or Adorno, have made manifest the dark side of this Enlightenment, whether its mechanistic reduction of nature, the scientific impoverishment of human experience, or the mythologizing of techno-scientific reason.

But of all the diverse conflicts, themes, and projects of the European Enlightenment, the theoretical work and practical consequences of Bacon, Newton, or Hobbes have prevailed and still prevail: philosophical reflec-tion reduced to a techno-scientific grammar, a mechanical system of uni-versal domination of nature, and, above all, the political reason of capitalist imperialism. The predominant discourses of the European Enlightenment that have privileged its instrumental legacy above its emancipatory legacy have prevailed and still prevail.

Nietzsche and Adorno and Horkheimer have marked two great moments of rupture with the epistemologies that run through this anti- enlightening Enlightenment; this Enlightenment reduced to its techno- scientific epis-temologies, to its mechanistic physics, and colonial politics. Both made manifest the regressive cultural processes that accompany modern prog-ress. Nietzsche underlined the rationalizing and colonizing effect of modern scientific reason on human imagination and intelligence, and he anticipated the dissolution of its mythological ties with the past and the elimination of cultural memory in a future of fanaticism and total war. Adorno and Horkheimer reconstructed the inverse and complimentary process of the transformation of scientific reason into dogma and the sup-planting of the system of individual reason by media propaganda corpo-rations. They both announced a general process of invisible totalitarian controls, of human degradation and biological decay as the necessary con-sequence of capitalist progress.


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1.4 negative dialectics

The negative dialectics of Horkheimer and Adorno, which the scholastic tradition of Marxism and structuralism repudiated as off-the-rails think-ing, marked, however, a crucial moment in the history of the West. Dialektik der Aufklärung is the philosophical expression of the failure of a historical reason providentially achieved under the sign of progress, democracy, and liberty. A historical reason that, in 1776, had forged the anticolonial revolution of the United States of America and, a decade later, the French Revolution against absolute monarchy. However, it is a scien-tific, historical, and revolutionary reason that has culminated in systems of vigilance and manipulation of the electronic masses, in the destruction of the ecological equilibrium of the planet, and in the strategies of total war. The Dialectic of Enlightenment represents the descent of scientific reason, of state reason, and of the historical logos to the hell fires of systems, net-works, and modern bureaucracies.

Horkheimer and Adorno illuminate a logical fundamental nexus that, at the same time, is irreconcilably contradictory. The logos of the empirico- critical revolution, which crystalized in the Instauratio Magna of modern technoscience elevated by Bacon into a principle of universal domination, had gone beyond the limit. Technoscience had been sanctified as a system designed to emancipate the human being from the sweat of his labor, from political domination, and from anguish in the face of his own death. It was called upon to sustain his ethical autonomy against the churches and thrones of his enemies. However, industrial power, productivistic logic, and the technological instruments that make up the system of Western civilization have interiorized and assimilated that same destiny which they attempted to overcome: nature degraded by industry, electronic systems of vigilance, and the anguish of human existence faced with its extinction.

On the fronts of global wars, and in the corporate megamachines, the scientific construction of reality effectively and ostensibly conflates with electronic surveillance and propaganda networks through a violent system of human exploitation. Auschwitz is the visible symbol of this destructive logos. The sacrifice of millions of humans reduced to ashes in the etymo-logical sense of the signifier holokaustos. Its maximal nihilistic expression is the threat of the nuclear genocide of humanity announced in the holo-caust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Under this historical constellation Dialektik der Aufklärung enunciated its first sentence: Die vollends

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aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils—“[Yet] the wholly enlightened Earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, p. 13).

The same consciousness of historical catastrophe runs through Nietzsche’s philosophy of decadence and Kandinsky’s spiritualist aesthet-ics; we find the same vision of a violent dehumanization of life under industrial capitalism in Beckmann and Orozco’s expressionism; a similar negative anthropology underlies Anders’s concept of the “human without world,” or the “renunciation of existence” and the “capitulation to the power of the other” in Binswanger’s etiology of schizophrenia; this same kind of ethical defeat is also made manifest in Beckett’s and Rulfo’s char-acters (Anders 1993, p. XI; Binswanger 1957, pp. 20, 25). The witnesses of this inexorable panorama can be infinitely enumerated. In all of these examples, we find the same fundamental vision: the historical and scientific reason that Descartes’s or Hume’s skepticism held up as a principle of human sovereignty has broken down. They have all foreseen the ecologi-cal and social destruction that runs through modern capitalism. And they have all pointed to the final agony of a scientific reason incapable of reflect-ing on the destructive consequences of its epistemologies on the ethical order of human existence and the living cycles in nature.

Some of the spokespersons for this terminal consciousness, Thomas Mann among others, tried to rescue a last light of that Enlightenment in the European mythological memory. Adorno himself restored its logical principle and gave it the title “Negative Dialectics.” This penultimate intellectual project of Enlightenment rested on a critique of the Western Enlightenment itself, both scientific and modern. It was an enlightenment of Enlightenment. A critique constructed from the circular hermeneutics of reason and myth, from mythology as an enlightening and rationalizing narrative of human existence. A critique of the regression of epistemologi-cal and scientific reason into a mythic principle. But it was also a critique of this dialectics of myth and rationalization and of reason and myth start-ing from this same principle. A negative reason that was directed against its own offspring: the instrumental epistemologies that regulate the tech-nologies of vigilance and destruction in a world that is progressively alien-ated from human existence.

The most elaborate expression of this negative dialectics, and that which, at the same time, includes an attempt to go beyond the epistemo-logical and techno-scientific premises of industrial civilization, is Lewis Mumford’s reconstruction of the pentagons of military and industrial


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power. Mumford’s civilizational panorama extended Horkheimer and Adorno’s negative dialectics, and the historical pessimism of post-war European existentialism, to the corporate megamachines and systems of information control and electronic vigilance of the human masses that we today assume as a fait accompli.

But what distinguishes Mumford from the critical theory of his European predecessors was that he did not veer from the logical or ratio-nal principle that runs through the scientific philosophies of Les lumières. Mumford made manifest the fact that the pentagons and megamachines of modern civilizational power had been predefined by the rationalist and mechanistic tradition of Descartes, la Mettrie, or Newton. And he under-lined the technically totalitarian power of these corporate machines, with complete independence from the enlightened emblems of liberty, human rights, and democracy decreed by modern propaganda. The philosophical horizon that Mumford reconstructed signals the total collapse of the Western logos.

Today, in a world violently overrun by opposing military and financial forces, we passively contemplate the human exodus across a world in ruins. The premonitions of negative dialectics that cut through Western thought since the nineteenth century have fully come to fruition: the concentra-tion of power and capital; financial, industrial, and military megamachines that are immune to any democratic regulation; electronic control systems and propaganda infiltrating all aspects of human life and society; and, above all, unlimited global war and destruction of the biosphere.

Whether through Nietzsche’s critique of abstract human conditions, morals, and existence, of an abstract aesthetics and philosophy of history, and the consequent loss of historical and ontological orientation of mod-ern consciousness, or through the critique of industrial culture as a system of heteronymous configuration of human consciousness on a massive scale, this negative dialectics has been accomplished even in terms of its most catastrophic consequences. It has been accomplished through the destruc-tion of cultural and natural habitats, the expansion of mass famine, and the unlimited propagation of the nuclear and chemical contamination of the Earth. It has been accomplished in the form of the technological advance-ment of instruments of manipulation and vigilance. The prognostications of these modern critical theories have been accomplished in all of their negativity.

No other icon in modern history represents this emptiness of human existence as dramatically as the Angelus Novus described by Walter

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Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. This angel, which rep-resents all of us, is a dazed consciousness. It represents a one-dimensional subject forced to face a past of piled-up ruins and tears, while the hurri-cane winds of progress push it toward an empty future. But it is also some-thing more. This Angelus Novus is a postmodern inversion of Prometheus—the myth that founded a civilization around its farsighted vision and anticipatory gaze, in line with the etymology of his name, pro- methos. However, this negative angel of history now represents the capitu-lation of Prometheus. Its gaze is neither farsighted nor anticipatory. Instead its novelty consists in its complete refusal to open its eyes to the future.

It is a Prometheus without foresight and without a future. It is a trans-vestite Prometheus transformed into Epimetheus: the Titan that is mytho-logically complementary to Prometheus and who only possessed hindsight and the limited vision that, in the instant in which he should have distrib-uted powers and virtues among all beings in nature, forgot about human beings, leaving them “naked, barefoot, defenseless and powerless,” according to the Platonic version of this Greek cultural hero (Plato 2010, p. 321 d).

1.5 technical enlightenMent

The final philosophical expression of negative dialectics has been the exis-tentialist anthropology of a human torn from his natural habitat, an orphan without historical roots and thrown into nothingness. It has been the phi-losophy of an ontologically disconnected existence in terms of human nature, as well as the human community and its memory. A human being without a world and without direction. The synthesis of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften: a being-for-death and for- nothingness as the ontological foundation of absolute liberty and a con-sciousness without substance or attributes.

But this negative dialectic that runs through the history of Western civi-lization also has signaled the transitional paths to a new and affirmative human order: whether it is a happy island of scientists and humanists, as in More’s Utopia, or the effort to construct an egalitarian community in harmony with nature, as in Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. This cri-tique leaves the door open to the creation of something new. It has always and indissolubly been united to the construction of alternative aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and today, biologies and energetics. And it has been


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linked to a praxis that has embraced the intellectual and artistic creation of new forms of perception and understanding of reality, as well as the design and construction of whole metropolises.

Paul Fenn has given the name “positive dialectics” to this constructive turn in modern critical theory. And he proposes the term “technical enlightenment” for the revolution in the concept of techné that is neces-sarily tied to this project. To establish this affirmative dialectics, Fenn has sought out lost pathways or aporias that run through the negative rhetoric in the humanities in academic institutions. I will highlight two such paths: the withdrawal from and uncertainty of negative dialectics in the face of twentieth-century political struggles and its lack of an intellectual project in the face of a totalitarian world system.

Paradoxically, negative dialectics has been an apolitical philosophical and sociological trend. The linguistic distance between critical theory and the praxis of human resistance against adverse reality that distinguished Adorno and Horkheimer has been exemplary in this regard. It was the liberal legacy of Central European academic humanism before World War I. An enlightenment conceived as a matter for the Gelehrte, for scholarly men, just as Kant desired. This apoliticism has not only kept critique hid-den away in academic filing cabinets and libraries, it has also diminished philosophical reflection on the present and the past.

Critical theory has ignored the historical continuum between modern instrumental reason and Western colonial technologies and theologies, beginning with the genocidal military organization of slave labor in American gold and silver mines and followed by the exploitation of indig-enous peoples by the East India Company. Critical theory has also ignored the history of resistance against this process of human degradation, from the anticolonial rebellion of Túpac Amaru against Spanish imperialism to the anticolonial revolutions of twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This historical shrugging off has even allowed for the academic classification of The Dialectic of Enlightenment as an epiphenomenon of National Socialism in Western Europe which the liberalism of the transi-tional nuclear state and its Cold War, or anti-terror strategies has defini-tively overcome under the semiologies of democracy and human rights.

In his essay “Critique of Providential Enlightenment,” Christopher Britt underlines, on the contrary, the logical and historical continuity of colonial and imperial power and the instrumental reason represented by, for example, Franklin’s kite experiment through which he elevated the invention of the lightning rod to a mythical postulate of modern

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technoscience. The common denominator that links both extremes, one of colonial and imperial logic and the other a fetishistic concept of tech-nology and technological power, is providentialism. And Britt calls atten-tion to the fundamental character of this providentialist and Christian construction of history underlying the concept of Enlightenment associ-ated with the Founding Fathers of the United States. What is more: he reconstructs this providentialism as the fundamental transcendental moral category of liberty that crowns the political architecture of North American Independence as the maximal expression of European Enlightenment.

Further, Britt sums up the evolution of this moral and political concept of liberty caught between an enlightened “freedom from tyranny” rooted in the revolutionary origins of the United States and its providential tran-substantiation by Jefferson into the universal “empire of liberty,” as the beginning and ending of his project of Enlightenment. Just as the inven-tion of the lightning rod was providential, so is the empire of liberty. And if the lightning rod destroyed the mythological power that Zeus’s light-ning bolt represented, the empire of liberty was called into being to provi-dentially establish the power of new industrial and military technoscience all over the world.

“Freedom from tyranny,” the negative freedom from domination and repression, was the basic objective under which Kant defined the modern concept of enlightenment as “der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst vetrschuldeten Unmündigkeit” (“the exit of humanity from its self- incurred minority”), in his canonical essay Was ist Aufklärung? The parti-ciple “selbst verschuldet” has been translated into English as “self-incurred,” or “self-imposed,” and in Spanish it has been imbued with the Catholic concept of “self-guilt.” However, an etymological interpretation should reconstruct it as both “self-incurred” and “self-guilt” at the same time, in this way preserving the double meaning of the German word Schuld, which includes as much the meaning of guilt as it does indebtedness, just as Nietzsche made clear in his Genealogy of Morals. In other words, human beings have taken on an autonomous debt, a debt made up of our subjec-tivity and identity under the principle of dependency and serfdom or what Kant calls “Unmündigkeit.”

This last noun, “Unmündigkeit,” currently translates to “under age” or “immaturity.” However, Mündigkeit comes from the ancient German Munt, which is associated with the Latin root manus, the hand. This is to say that what translates for maturity, or “of age,” from a semantic point of view releases itself through the meaning of manumission from the


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conserving and protective hand. The signifier “mündig” includes the exis-tential dimension of an emancipation and manumission and, as a result, includes the essential moral principle of the sovereignty of self- consciousness (Heinrich 2007, p. 24). In summary: enlightenment is the emancipation of humanity from its responsible dependency or subalternity with respect to the constituent power of tutelage and with respect also to the preven-tion, vigilance, and punishment of all enslavement.

However, this manumission and emancipation contained in the con-cept of Mündigkeit are incompatible with the military, political, and lin-guistic predominance that empires and imperialism carry with them. War, torture, and the submission of individuals, cities, and communities are categories that logically contradict any form of liberty. And the “empire of liberty” is a contradictio in adjecto, an absurdity. Its terms, just like the slogans associated with an “anti-imperial imperialism,” or “progressive imperialism,” are ontologically and rationally inconsistent to the extreme point of imbecility.

The logically contradictory categories of empire and liberty can only be reconciled under the teleological-political premise of the providential des-tiny of the world-saving nation, a divine sign and design that effectively identifies liberty with imperialism. Only then can the submission and sub-alternity of the whole world reach the mystical and metaphysical meaning of a virtual, transcendent, and absolute liberty. As Britt concludes: “This, then, is the basic meaning behind the crisis of the Enlightenment in America: the idea of enlightenment itself has been stripped of human agency and replaced by that of an imperial mega-machine that wages per-manent war on a global scale in order to generate enough prosperity at home so as to convince Americans that they have indeed been chosen for eternal salvation.”

This reconstruction of the teleological limits and political ambiguities of the enlightenment of the Founding Fathers means much more than a politically incorrect reconstruction to examine its inconsistencies. The rel-evance of this irrational synthesis of imperialism and liberty is precisely historical and political. It is the logically contradictory and ontologically irreconcilable principle that sustains the global order. The relevance of Britt’s critique is clear in contrast with the postmodern critique of les lumières inspired by Foucault’s Les mots et les choses.

The structuralist critique of the rationalism and logocentrism of the Enlightenment took for granted its unilateral and simple failure as an eman-cipatory project for humanity. This negative critique has been consistent

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with the tradition of existential nihilism defined by Sartre’s La Nausée and L’être et le néant. Effectively, the reason that Descartes elevated to a fun-damental ontological concept of God and the modern sciences was put into question, two centuries later, in the inquisitorial dungeons and luna-tic asylums, and in the disasters of the Napoleonic Wars as painted and recorded by Goya. From the romanticism of the nineteenth century to the expressionism and existentialism of the twentieth, the consciousness of this failure of les lumières left behind a long and truly regressive history. However, structuralism precisely gave this critique of pure and transcen-dental reason, and of logical-transcendental linguistics and scientific tech-nologies, an entirely new turn with respect to the enlightenment of the Enlightenment through modern expressionism from Goya to Adorno. For the structuralists, the positivist reason that runs through the linguistic sciences, the architecture of the panopticon, the systems of classification and control over human beings and over life itself, all of this memory of ruins made manifest in all of its magnificence the fallacy of enlightenment as emancipation.

Instead of historically and philosophically amplifying the concept of enlightenment, and extending it out from the spiritual axis of Paris, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg to Persian philosophies, to mysticism or Islamic rationalism; instead of the conscious evolution of the mythologi-cal, psychological, and philosophical unconscious that defines Karl Kerenyi, or Carl Jung’s modern projects of mythological humanism; and in place of constructing literary theory based on the unity of mythologi-cal and psychological memory developed by Thomas Mann, structural-ism opted for the orthodoxy of the transcendental and scientific logos, now reformed as Cartesian linguistics or as the grammatology of Derrida. And instead of opening up the enlightenment and human emancipation beyond the epistemological borders of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, structuralism reduced them under the rigors of an ascetic semiotic posi-tivism. In short, instead of assuming the humanist tradition of the European Enlightenment that rose with the rationalism of Ibn Rushd, the cabalistic spiritualism of Leone Ebreo, or Giordano Bruno’s cosmol-ogy inspired by Hinduism’s ãtmã mahãn2, and instead of conceptually linking up with the spiritual resistance of Shumann’s music or the Paris Commune, structuralism opted for linguistics and grammar. And it bur-ied the history of the spirit under the nihilistic prophecy par excellence: “l’homme s’effacerait, comme a la limite de la mer un visage de sable” (Foucault 1966, p. 398).


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On the contrary, Britt brings to light the pacts and transactions that the spirit of liberty made with the financial, military, and cultural megama-chines and he denounces the misrepresentations, the falsifications, and the humiliations imposed on the noble revolutionary origins of the United States. And from this dark historical horizon, he formulates the need to redefine the Enlightenment and its project of emancipation.

* * *

Secondly, negative dialectics hasn’t defined the profile of the contem-porary intellectual. Its negativity has either been limited to the autistic and schizophrenic constitution of Beckett’s clowns and Kafka’s anonymous narrators or, even worse still, culminated in the politically irrelevant jargon regurgitated by the academic machine. In Horkheimer, just as in Anders, philosophical reflection has maximized the tradition of critical skepticism of Montaigne or Hume up to the limit of an absolute pessimism. Neurosis, schizophrenia, and autism are the negative signs of this intellectual con-science. Its conclusion is summed up in the final verses of Gesang-Szene by Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Es ist ein Ende der Welt! Das Traurigste von allen…—“It’s the end of the world! The saddest thing of all!”3

Twentieth-century critical theory did not define the consciousness capable of mediating the conflicts and miseries of the demos, on the one hand, and, on the other, the logos and logistics of the corporate megama-chines. It did not formulate the role of the intellectual as the means of renewing the rituals and semiologies of democracy as spectacle. It did not open the door to new, positively emancipating languages and technolo-gies. It did not construct a concept of liberty or sovereign society that could oppose itself to the electronic networks of postmodern democratic totalitarianism. Nor did it discern the possibility of creating an affirmative artistic and spiritual reality that would mean not succumbing to the com-mercial banality of the culture industry.

The intellectual consciousness that has expressed itself in literature, art, and twentieth-century thought, from the mysteries of life, death, and the barbarism of fascism and war as depicted in the paintings of Grosz, Beckmann, or Dix, to the “orphan” poetics of human existence in the modern world of Arguedas, is a substantially empty consciousness alien-ated from reality and divided internally. Its desperate confrontation with bureaucratic powers and being-for-nothingness has ended up degrading minimalist emotional and intellectual expression. And just as Foucault

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imprisoned philosophical reflection in the guarded camps of microanalysis and the micro-intellectual, in essence making it irrelevant, negative dialec-tics has ended up imposing impassable linguistic barriers between the quo-tidian human effort to survive and a critical intelligentsia demoted to the undefined production of politically correct linguistics.

In his essay, Paul Fenn denounces the ethical, epistemological, and technical limitations of this micro-intellectual split between what he is and what he aspires to be. His rejection is unequivocal: it’s a “eunuch!” The logos and negative rhetoric reduce the possibility of activism due to the divisions and subdivisions of corporately organized knowledge. The ulti-mate consequence is the precarious equilibrium between apocalyptic fatal-ism and complicity with the status quo that sustains this micro-intellectual through his professional careers in departmental administrations of knowledge.

* * *

An intellectual project runs through the three essays in Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction. First, it aims to abandon the commonplaces, aca-demic jargon, and the bibliographies sanctioned by the worldwide pub-lishing industry, not to mention the simple intellectual incapability to think about our global reality of war, ecological catastrophe, social injus-tice, and political regression.

We have chosen an elemental path to exit the intellectual cul-de-sac drawn up by structuralist grammar and the revisionism of twentieth- century critical theory. And we have given a name to this project: the concept of enlightenment.

This project is a revision of the concept of enlightenment that breaks down the vigilance of politically correct protocols—which are currently reduced to the category of trickery and gossip in the media. A concept of enlightenment that is simultaneously inspired by Sufi or Buddhist spiritualism assumes the logical rigor of the Aristotelian tradition of Ibn Rushd and is open to the spiritual universe of the Maya and Aztec civili-zations and their gods. An enlightenment that philosophers such as Leone Ebreo, Giordano Bruno, or Baruch Spinoza have metaphysically constructed based on the concepts of substance, nature, and the uncre-ated, creative, and infinite universe. A concept of enlightenment that pays homage to the internal rigor of Kant’s transcendental logic and system of pure reason.


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The first step toward this redefinition of the enlightenment is a double critique of the spectacle and of the transformation and metaphysical inver-sion of the real that runs through the discourses and images of the great worldwide electronic network and the providential political theology that rules over the techno-scientific epistemes of the military, financial, and industrial system. In the chapters that follow, Britt and Subirats examine several elemental categories of this double critique.

The second logical step is a real praxis. It is the construction of a techni-cal model in which is articulated a social democratic organization with a system of energetic self-management that respects Earth’s ecological equi-librium under the principle of exclusive green energy usage. This is Fenn’s contribution.

And a conclusion: the model of enlightenment and human emancipa-tion that is revealed by the myth of Prometheus—in the face of a world bolted down by the maelstrom of a regressive progress of violence and self-destruction.

One of the open and necessary pathways for this reform of enlighten-ment starts with the critique of messianic Christianity and its secularized categories of deism and providentialism, which underlay the enlighten-ment of the US Founding Fathers. And it starts with a critique of the sacred union between instrumental reason and the discourses and weap-ons of imperialism articulated around this technocentric providentialism.

A second open question surrounding this new enlightenment is not any less relevant: the positive definition of the intellectual who, in the face of a world destroyed by political militarization and the unlimited global expan-sion of war, wakes up from her confinement in the culture industry and the academic machine. This second question can be summed up with some queries: what can this intellectual do in the face of a world scientifi-cally controlled under the same systems that pervert and destroy the mate-rial and spiritual creativity of being and of being human? And what can enlightened consciousness do in the face of the corporate organization of the education system that force-feeds a concept of human formation, of Bildung, as commerce?

We could continue to open up other basic questions associated with the formation of a new intellectual consciousness: what is its ethical position toward the logic of commerce and the market? And how is its ethical relationship to the human community defined, with its material and spiritual aspirations, and with the legal and institutional transformation of knowledge,

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technology, and democracy? What are the methodologies that sustain the unitary vision and its construction of a civilizational order that assumes harmony between humans and nature as its real objective? And finally: how should this enlightened consciousness confront the massive extinc-tion of life, and the end of the world, and at the same time affirm a project that effectively sustains human emancipation and biological preservation?

Again, Fenn formulates the epistemological point of view and spiritual center of this twenty-first-century intellectual. His message is as follows: “epistemic trespass from poiesis to techné,” the transference and dialogue between artistic imagination and emancipatory technology, and reflection on the formulation and use of science and technology to benefit all humanity.

1.6 an age of destruction

Of all of the sagas that describe the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic foundations of modernity, the most simple and brilliant, and which in a transparent manner exposes an ideal relationship between knowledge, the power of the forces of nature, and human liberty is Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment. Half game, half scientific experiment, the flight of this kite gave way, according to the myth, to the scientific discovery of the electric nature of lightning and the subsequent technical invention of the lightning rod. As a result, this saga builds a bridge between the scientific enlightenment and the technical imagination that had already been cele-brated in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, and at the same time, it was carried out under the same psychological and metaphysical principle of Spieltrieb, the impulse to play, which Schiller outlined in his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Franklin’s kite experiment brings together the romantic aesthetic of play with the empirico-critical spirit of modern science. The symbol of this union, the lightning rod, coincides in a perfect synthesis of the epistemo-logical premises of Bacon’s science with its beneficial consequences for humans. This is exactly the same symbol that distinguishes Prometheus’s fire conquest and creation of technai. This was probably the motive for Kant to bestow upon Franklin the honorific title Prometheus der neueren Zeiten: “Prometheus of modern times.”

However, Franklin declared himself a deist and throughout his autobi-ography insists on the providential faith that runs through his political


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action as well as his experiments with electricity. In the end, the mysteri-ous nature of lightning together with its implacable destructive power is associated with the power of Zeus. Franklin’s experiment transferred this mysterious power of lightning to the theological and political jurisdic-tion of the goddess Providence and to the tragic destinies blessed by her hand.

Providence does not mean the same thing as foresight. And the myth of Prometheus, in contrast to Franklin’s kite saga, articulates itself around the signifier pro-methos: anticipatory vision, foresight, and provision. It articulates itself around a concept of enlightenment conceived as foresight and the provision of the future of the human community and its collective strength to better the material conditions of life through its emancipation. All things considered, Promethean foresight and provision were filially tied to nature and its mythological representative Gaia, the Great Mother Earth. Franklin, on the contrary, reduced this enlightenment to the limits of a technocratic providentialism, and he subordinated it to the will of an absolute God, the Father.

Foresight and providence come from the same root and the same expe-rience as “to see”: videre. But providence legitimates patriarchal power over erotic, creative, and infinite nature as represented by the earth god-desses (the Sumerian Ki, Isis of Egypt, Greek Demeter, and American Pachamama, etc.) and which, a bit later, philosophically reformulated the cosmological and metaphysical systems of Bruno, Spinoza, or Goethe. The foundation of this providence is not natura naturans, it is not matter that is infinite and eternally creative. On the contrary, it is a finite and pas-sive nature, and, ultimately, it is subjugated to an external power. A dead nature. Kant offered the most drastic definition in his Critique of Pure Reason: nature objectivized and subordinated to the logical- transcendental system of scientific knowledge. In alchemical terms, the assumption of this techno-scientific providential power is the ontological conversion of the creative and spiritual dimensions of materia prima into the industrial defi-nition of raw materials.

Patriarchal providence is the temporal vision of things in nature and human life to the extent they are predetermined according to the divine word. Ultimately, it refers to the grammatological power emanating from the constituent word “being” as its truth in and of itself. It understands faith in a future time unilaterally and constructed upon the foundations of historical reason as the expression of this same divine utterance. It is a

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tautological anticipation of all that is to come according to the indisput-able law of the book of books or the sacred logos. On the contrary, fore-sight is linked to empirical experience and a vision of being that is at the same time mimetic and spiritual. Foresight is also associated with the phil-osophical anticipation of creative power in a biological, magical, and intel-lectual sense.

We survive under the universal power of a providential and technocen-tric enlightenment, not under the regime of a prophetic and provisionary technology in the etymological sense of the signifier pro-methos of Prometheus. We endure at the center of a spectacular and imperialistic enlightenment. The canons that reign over the grammar and providential-ist ideologies, and over the global spectacle, have transformed three fun-damental premises of the concept of enlightenment.

First: The lights that illuminated the democratic ideals of European communities and the colonial subjects of the Americas against the power of monarchy and absolutist empires of the eighteenth century have been transubstantiated into the brilliance of global media screens, into the elec-tric gleam of its political stars and commercial fetishes, into the fluores-cence of media events.

Second: Scientific production has disentangled itself from those ethical ties with nature and with human emancipation and survival, which it was obligated to maintain in line with the concept of reason represented by the philosophical systems of the Western Enlightenment represented by Spinoza or Kant.

Third: The Enlightenment has retreated from the architecture of a crit-ical reason, which unified human emancipation politically and morally with the development of knowledge, toward an endless series of positivist, pragmatist, and structuralist cacophonies of a linguistically and techno- scientifically sanctioned monotonous modernity.

At the same time, the concept of liberty, which is historically associated as much with the struggles for human emancipation, as with the will to pillage, destroy, and impose imperial control, has been merged with the universal expansion of a rationality which is socially, technologically, and ecologically self-destructive. The enlightened flag par excellence of Les droits de l’homme has been instrumentalized as a weapon of propaganda and political supremacy. Rights and freedoms have been degraded to the spiritual condition of idols and fetishes of the media and the spectacle of political power.


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1.7 redefining enlightenMent

The epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic reformulation of the enlighten-ment project necessarily starts with a revision of its history. Up to the pres-ent day, this history has described the development of empirical sciences as a continuum, which has certainly been cut through by crises and political and epistemological revolutions, but the continuity, in the end, of the same transcendent logos and ideal of progress. Its epistemological and hermeneutic model comes from the logical or logical-transcendental architecture of the philosophies of Descartes, Bacon, or Kant. A mathe-matical and geometric scientific model.

The historicist construction of the enlightenment by the philosophers of modern classicism, specifically Descartes, Hobbes, or Hegel, has postu-lated a radical separation between this scientific logos and enlightenment starting with the religions that populated the medieval centers of civiliza-tion from Cordoba to Istanbul or the spiritual centers of Varanasi or Lhasa. And it has fully assumed the presupposed dogma of a metaphysical, epis-temological, and historical separation from the mystical and spiritual con-cepts of enlightenment of Buddha, Pythagoras, or Ibn Arabi, in favor of the scientific enlightenment of Bacon or Newton. This rationalist separa-tion and exclusion of the history of the spirit is completely unilateral. Its destructive effects on the memory of communities should not be over-looked. And it must be revised.

The new philosophical consciousness should question itself about the simple identification of enlightenment and secularization. This so-called secularization has not meant the emancipation of scientific reason from the dogmatic categories of Christian political theology. Baconian empirical science has continued to be patriarchal. Kantian transcendental reason was deistic. Hegel’s concept of the spirit completely coincides with Luther’s theological spirit. The imperial political philosophy of Hobbes elevated Leviathan, the biblical monster that represented the terror of wars and genocide that run through the imperial expansion of the West, to a funda-mental principle of state political power.

What this secularization has meant is an Entzauberung: a disenchant-ment with everything, a spell against the magic in the world, a fading away of the harmony and beauty of being. This scientifically disenchanted world has fatally culminated in a progressive impoverishment of human experience, if one thinks for a moment of the spiritual distance that sepa-rates the European artistic tradition of Florence in the sixteenth century,

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or Saint Petersburg in the nineteenth century, from the “poverty of expe-rience” 4 tied to the abstract aesthetics in modern and postmodern design.

The historical revision of the concept of enlightenment involves a radi-cal break with the dominant systems of secularized providential messian-ism proposed by Kant, Hegel, or Marx. And it has to assume the plurality of civilizations, historical periods, and conceptions of human and world existence, and not in any way align them and exclude them under the teleology of a transcendental progress and the dogma of a singular conser-vative principle of being.

This means contemplating Agni, the Vedic god of light and pleasure (light and delight) and spiritual enlightenment on the same logical and ontological level as Einstein’s scientific enlightenment that opened up the technical possibilities and destructive power of nuclear energy. It means the recognition of temples, cults, and astronomical knowledge dedicated to the sun, in Incan Cuzco, in Teotihuacan of the Mexican valley, or in the solar temples of Konark or Beijing, as an expression of a rational compre-hension of the harmony in the cosmos that is more balanced than our technological indifference toward the transcendental importance of this balance for human survival. It means finding the same spiritual founda-tions in the glowing force of shamanic fire as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Under no point of view is a world historical perspective justifiable if it tries to understand Asian cultures, their spirituality, and technological development; the magic of the shamanic cultures of Asia, Africa, and America; or the spiritual destinies associated with the Mediterranean cults of Isis or Demeter through the strict principles of an ephemeral European episode led by Descartes’s rationalism or Newton’s physics. Nothing obstructs enlightenment more than the Eurocentric constructions of uni-versal history dictated by Hegel at the University of Berlin.

Prior to the siècle des lumières, there was another philosophical, scien-tific, and theological age of enlightenment in the West represented by the Islamic Cordoba of Ibn Rushd. This was a rational enlightenment that was not against the mystical enlightenment of Ibn al-Arabi. To him is owed the foundation of a modern European philosophy based on the concept of an autonomous and reflexive reason, starting with the rigor-ous concept of science, the mathematical and geometric logos, and a rational ethics and politics inspired in the physics, metaphysics, and poli-tics of Aristotle.

There is also an enlightenment that predates that of Medieval Europe: that of the Tantric, Buddhist, and Taoist monks who ran throughout Asian


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cities during the first millennium before the Christian era. And there is also the ethical and aesthetic enlightenment that runs through the Vedas, the Mahabharata, or the Tao Te Ching.

And then there is Prometheus: the ancient Titan that represents the enlightenment as spiritual and material emancipation by means of light and the technics born of fire. He is also the god that presides as a herme-neutic model of enlightenment in and through myth. We should also recall Quetzalcoatl, the founder of Mesoamerican civilizations under the banner of knowledge and the rational architectonic organization of monu-mental sacred cities like Teotihuacan.

In our terminal age, the reformation and renovation of enlightenment cannot ignore the original meaning of spiritual illumination and the mate-rial protection associated with the Vedic hymns to Agni, the shamanic cults of Oro Santo in the Amazonian civilizations, and the theogonies and solar cosmologies of the Incas and Taoists. These mythical enlightenment figures reveal so many other ecological, political, and spiritual dimensions of a new critical concept of enlightenment.

* * *

Secondly, the new enlightenment is a direct descendant of Dialektik der Aufklärung. An enlightenment conscious of the dark side of modern light, from the omniscient power of electronic vigilance and media propa-ganda, to the manipulative power of the pharmaceutical industry. It is an enlightenment that does not hide the catastrophic paths of the West throughout centuries of war and genocide, and the massive devastation of cities, cultures, and ecosystems. It is an enlightenment knowledgeable of the epistemological limitations and corporate controls of postmodern technoscience.

This is an enlightenment sensitive to the administrated repetition of forms and languages, and to automatism and the emptying out of com-munication, and also to the commercialization of all imaginable aspects of human existence. An enlightenment aware of the silence imposed on experience and memory both individual and communitarian and the des-tiny of absolute liberty sacrificed on the altars of war.

An enlightenment of Enlightenment. An enlightenment that neces-sarily confronts the epistemological premises of modern technoscience and its biological, ethical, and political consequences. An enlighten-ment with the historical consciousness of an industrial progress crowned

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by the successive nuclear catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. An enlightenment that should teach us to act against global warming, the continued degrada-tion of ecological balance, and the gradual extinction of animal and plant species as well as human cultures.

* * *

Thirdly, the new enlightenment is essentially and fundamentally techni-cal. It is technical in the same sense as in the myth of Prometheus, which defines technai through fire as an energy source, as a symbol of spiritual illumination through knowledge, and as a metaphor for human flourish-ment. The new enlightenment is technical because its aim is to redefine democratic use of these technologies.

In his Prometheus desmotes, Aeschylus reveals three different classes of technai: the physical technologies related with extraction or intervention in the natural and human processes, like mining, agriculture, or medicine. Secondly, it describes the technologies of pure knowledge, like mathemat-ics or poetry. Finally, it mentions the ethical technologies related to the organization of the human community. At the same time, Promethean techné is born and develops from the filial ties to his mythological mother, Gaia, the symbolic representation of the Earth as the Great Mother of humanity. It also originates from her matrilineal ties with Themis, the goddess that presides over the laws of nature. It is a technology that main-tains a relationship of balance between nature and its law, on the one hand, and the human will toward knowledge and emancipation, on the other.

The North American Enlightenment myth par excellence, Quetzalcoatl, defines a religious, intellectual, and civilizational technology. Quetzalcoatl, the monarch, erected a civilization that represented the spiritual order of the gods. Based, as it was, on the knowledge of mathematics and geome-try that gave form to the Mesoamerican pyramids, this enlightening cul-ture also developed impressive agricultural, astronomical, and sacrificial technologies. Quetzalcoatl, the god, is the unity of the feathers of the quetzal bird and the vital subterranean energy of the serpent. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god, links Earth’s fecundity with the spiritual order of the heavens.

This archaic definition of technics which made possible the survival of civilizations makes manifest the unilateral nature of the slogans and


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governmental programs in the name of progress and technological power, programs that do not establish any conceptual distinction between biologically destructive technologies, such as nuclear and genetic engi-neering, and survival technologies, such as organic agriculture; they do not establish any difference between military technologies of destruction and control, and the technologies of ecological, urban, and psychological restoration. The mythological concept of technology contains material and spiritual objectives that are liberating, together with human knowl-edge and creativity.

This redefinition of techné and the technical enlightenment necessarily breaks from the unilateral nature of the techno-scientific epistemologies of Bacon or Newton, and with the logic and metaphysics of Kant’s transcen-dental reason. It is a redefinition of enlightenment and techné that does not separate the unity of human existence and being, just as in the myths of Quetzalcoatl or Prometheus. Nor does it contemplate the present day climatological, biological, and social catastrophes from the empiricist view of their effects: nuclear and chemical contamination, political corruption, illegal human trafficking, and wars. On the contrary, it understands the phenomenon of the contemporary crisis from the point of view of the historical totality of human life and nature, and the unity of the past and present with the future.

Technical enlightenment is opposed to the unreality of the world of appearances industrially produced as total fiction and absolute reality: the spectacle. It rejects the superstition that envelops the transubstantiation of the human into a spectator of the dissolution of his self-consciousness.

notes

1. “Die Worte ‘Geist,’ ‘Seele,’ ‘oder’ ‘Körper’… die abstrakte Worte… zer-fielen mir im Munde wie mödrige Pilze.”

2. “The great self” or “anima mundi.”3. Verse from Jean Giraudoux’s poem “Sodom and Gomorrah.”4. Reference to “Erfahrung und Armut.” Benjamin 1972, vol. II-1, p. 213.

references

Anders, Günther. 1993. Mensch ohne Welt. München: Verlag CV. H. Beck.Benjamin, Walter. 1972. Gesammelte Schriften. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt a. M.Binswanger, Ludwig. 1957. Schizophrenie. Pfullingen: Verlag G. Neske.

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Debord, Guy. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet Chastel.Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard.Heinrich, Klaus. 2007. Aufklärung in den Religionen. Stroemfeld Verlag:

Frankfurt a. M.Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. 2014. Ein Brief. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1947. Dialektik der Aufklärung.

Amsterdam: Querido Verlag.Kant, Immanuel. 1964. Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung? In Immanuel

Kant Werke in Sechs Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag.

Plato. 2010. Protagoras. In Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras, ed. Malcolm Schofield, Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.



CHAPTER 2

Critique of Providential Enlightenment

Christopher Britt Arredondo

“When republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.”—Thomas Paine

2.1 PerPetual Peace

With the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the nihilistic logic of mutually assured destruc-tion that had dominated the Cold War rapidly gave way to more hopeful views of the future. In the West generally, but particularly in America, such optimism was cast in a triumphant light. Francis Fukuyama gave this victori-ous vision its definitive form when, in 1992, he interpreted the end of the Cold War as the end of history itself. On this view, history had culminated in a final victory of modern science, capitalism, and liberalism over militarism, communism, and totalitarianism. Adding insult to injury, Fukuyama shrewdly couched his celebration of communism’s demise in the same theoretical terms that Marx had once used to foretell the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the establishment, thereby, of a universal communist state. Usurping Hegel’s dialectical analysis of historical progress, Fukuyama argued that the “post-historical world” would be governed by a “universal and homoge-

C. Britt Arredondo (*) The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

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neous state”; only it would not be a communist state but rather a global republic modeled after the example of the United States. Fukuyama’s ulti-mate vision of the “post-historical” era left his would-be “last men” with nothing much to do, except attend to the administration of the global empire and enjoy the resulting prosperity and ever-lasting peace (Fukuyama 1992).

We are reaping the benefits of this peace today: a global war on terror that has no end in sight; an ever-expanding global market economy whose frenetic use of energy is fast pushing the world to the brink of ecological collapse; and everywhere the signs of social and political disintegration associated with a so-called state of exception that has now become the new norm in gover-nance, not just among despotic regimes but also, and more importantly, among democracies the world over (Agamben 2005). Actually, as a result of this continuing global violence, there are now more refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people in the world than at any time since the end of World War II (UNHCR 2013). We are not living in a post-historical era of perpetual peace but in an age of continuing global war and destruction.

And yet, triumphalist historians, from Francis Fukuyama to Niall Ferguson, would have us believe that, if it were not for the global imperium of the United States, the violence that characterizes our age would by now have acquired even more catastrophic dimensions (Ferguson 2004). So we should be thankful, they reason, that the United States won the Cold War, and we should feel relieved, they argue, that the United States is now in a position to provide worldwide leadership. And to those who, like Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, view the rise of American global hege-mony in the twenty-first century as a lethal threat to the survival of human-ity, these imperial apologists reply with the conventional assurances that American imperialists have used for the better part of two centuries: America does not aim to conquer the globe, only to liberate humanity from superstition, tyranny, and poverty (Chomsky 2003; Johnson 2010).

Their assurances concerning the intent and overarching aims of American empire evoke the providential view of history that was common among Protestant colonists in New England, who believed that God had selected them to play a key role in the redemption of humanity and the world. Their assurances also harken back to the enlightened rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, who were the first to envision America as an expansive republican empire. Indeed, from Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” to Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” of conquest and colonization and from Wilson’s “anti-imperial imperialism” to George W. Bush’s “global cru-sade” against terrorism, this mix of historical providentialism and enlight-

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enment rhetoric has shaped most American justifications of empire. We have grown so accustomed to this mix that we now regularly confuse provi-dence with enlightenment, empire with democracy, and war with peace.

A recent bureaucratic formulation of the grandiose idea that only an American-led global empire can “win the peace” is owed to Thomas Barnett, whose “new map” for the Pentagon provides a blueprint for the continued expansion and integration of all modernized civilizations under a US-led global empire. Barnett’s mappa mundi divides the world in two. There is the “functioning core” of fully modernized civilizations and the “non-integrated gap” of pre-modern peoples who either resist or actively combat the core’s military, economic, and political concentration of power (Barnett 2004). The future anticipated by the Pentagon’s post-Cold War policy thus contemplates the progressive expansion of global military technology, capital, and empire into the “non-integrated” regions of the world, such that, in due time, those who live in globalization’s “gaps” will either become fully assimilated or simply eliminated, thus assuring ever- lasting peace and prosperity.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, revealed the profound connections between such providential reasoning and America’s legacy of enlightenment. In response to these attacks, the US government created an intelligence-gathering program intended to achieve “total information awareness” (Horgan 2013). Housed in the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA and headed up by John Poindexter (of Iran-Contra fame), this program essentially involved the development and implementation of a surveillance apparatus capable of policing the electronic communications of the entire world (Johnson, pp. 104–105). The idea was to ensure that the United States would never again be surprised by unsuspected acts of terrorism ensuing from the “non-integrated gap.” Conspicuously, Poindexter’s program developed a logo for itself that purposely confused America’s technologi-cally driven providential empire with the images and rhetoric of the Enlightenment.

The logo in question depicted the all-knowing and all-seeing eye of providence ensconced atop a pyramid, casting radiant rays of light across the entire globe. This image is accompanied by Francis Bacon’s enlight-ened dictum: scientia est potentia. Together, image and motto create the sense that America has both the knowledge and the wherewithal to enlighten the entire planet. This light however represents a gathering of information that is equated with the accumulation and concentration of

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power. In this regard, the all-seeing eye of providence is here depicted as the all-knowing eye of the censor. DARPA’s logo usurps the meaning behind one of the Enlightenment’s central metaphors—that the light of reason frees us from ignorance—and turns its emancipating logic on its head. Rather than represent freedom from ignorance, fear, and arbitrary external controls, the radiant light of enlightenment is here made to rep-resent the freedom to control totally and on a global scale.

The eye of providence, which figures so prominently in this logo, is of course also a key component of the Seal of the United States (which appears, most noticeably, on the backside of the US dollar bill). But in the Seal, this all-seeing eye is not related to the imperialist ideal of total global domination. It rather expresses the deistic belief that when men exercise their reasoning power, they become capable of comprehending the order of the universe and of governing themselves according to the rational laws of nature. In this regard, Joseph Campbell has noted that, in the Seal of the United States, the eye of providence symbolizes how the reasoning mind of man “beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God” (1988, p. 31). At issue, in other words, is the idea that reason frees men from having to submit to the “divine right” of priests and kings, while enabling them to live in rational harmony with each other and nature. The harmonious unity symbolized by the Seal of the United States is thus altogether different from the one depicted in the DARPA logo. It is not the providential unity of technology, capitalism, and imperialism but rather the ethical unity of mind, community, and the cosmos that was formulated in the seventeenth century by Benedict Spinoza and later incorporated, in the eighteenth century, into the deistic philosophy that inspired the Founding Fathers to seek out a rational foun-dation for the new republic (Spinoza 1949).

In our day, this ideal of a rational, harmonious, and cosmic unity has lost much of its original luster. In place of universal reason and of enlight-ened minds deemed capable of reflecting on the oneness of the universe, we now have the epistemological divisions of expert forms of knowledge and the moral limitations of the bureaucratic mind. In place of a rational community of compassionate human solidarity, we now face the divisions and conflicts of unbridled global capitalism. And in place of a harmonious relationship to nature, we now suffer the technological, industrial, and imperial domination of both nature and mankind. Indeed, it is as though the scientists and engineers of today mean to supplant, by means of their

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technology, the same links between knowledge and moral action that the priests of old had once established to God’s providential order. Such is the crisis of our so-called post-historical and post-human age: the enlighten-ing power of reason, rather than set our minds in proper and harmonious relation to our communities and to nature, has splintered our minds, frag-mented our communities, and alienated us from nature. Instead of per-petual peace, providential enlightenment has delivered us all into a seemingly permanent state of imperial war.

Those who stand to benefit most from these multiple crises will of course continue to justify this state of constant war as the ultimate guaran-tee of perpetual peace and prosperity. But there is little if any reason for the rest of us to buy into these salvationist fantasies and militarist delusions of grandeur. War is not peace. Nor has history ground to a halt in some dystopian post-historical age. The calamities of our day are not the unchangeable features of a post-historical era that we are powerless to change. To the contrary, these emergencies are but the most immediate manifestations of an ongoing crisis of civilization that began with the Age of Reason and which has continued uninterrupted to our day. That crisis, our crisis, is the crisis of enlightenment. And the better we understand its philosophical and historical origins, the more likely we are to realize that in order to save the enlightenment from itself, we must extricate it from the double binds of empire in which it has become mired.

2.2 the crisis of enlightenment

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, historians, philosophers, and scientists have identified the Enlightenment with a broad cultural revolu-tion in Europe and the Americas that introduced the novel ideas of natural rights, democratic legitimacy, and human progress aided by science and technology. The Enlightenment, in this regard, affirmed the ability of unaided human reason to comprehend the natural world; it asserted that this scientific understanding enabled mankind to dominate nature techno-logically, and it proclaimed that humans, if they were guided by nothing but their own reasoning conscience, could act in the world intelligently, pur-posefully, and independently (Gay 1966, p. 3). As such, the Enlightenment promised to create a new world in which humans, by means of the exercise of their reason, would finally free themselves, not only from the potentially destructive forces of nature but also from the traditional forms of ignorance


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and despotism that had kept them in the dark, and thus finally become the rightful masters of their own historical destiny.

This triumphant understanding of the Enlightenment as a revolution-ary movement that effectively broadened the domain of human sover-eignty over nature and history is no mere invention of historiography. It is based, to a considerable extent, in the attitudes toward enlightenment expressed by some of the premier thinkers of the Age of Reason. In his essay of 1784 titled “Was ist Auflkärung?” Kant famously proposed Sapere Aude or “Dare to Know” as the motto of enlightenment (1991, p. 54). If people were courageous enough to think on their own and dared to rec-ognize no higher authority than reason, Kant believed that humanity could emerge from its state of self-imposed immaturity and attain enlight-enment. Kant was not alone in his optimism. Enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Voltaire to Jefferson, regarded the liberating power of reason with equal if not greater enthusiasm. They believed that just as reason was able to reveal the laws of nature it could also reveal the laws that should govern human conduct and thus free humanity from the various forms of intellectual, religious, and political oppression that had historically impeded human progress.

In recent years, this conventional definition of the Enlightenment as a revolutionary and liberating movement has been countered by the view that it was not a source of freedom but of tyranny. Associated with post- colonial criticism, this view holds that the Enlightenment was little more than a so-called grand narrative that purported to justify freedom for everyone everywhere, while actually justifying European imperial practices and institutions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Carey and Festa 2009, p. 8). This historicist redefinition of the Enlightenment stresses the spe-cific political and economic interests of empire-building European nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and underscores the sense in which the Enlightenment’s normative celebration of liberty is exclusive to the liberty of Europeans.

The contrast between these two broad perspectives on the legacy of the Enlightenment—the one normative and identified with liberation from tyranny, the other historicist and identified with the tyranny of imperial expansion and domination—makes for a rather crude understanding of enlightenment. This juxtaposition rests on a deceptive dichotomy, one that Michel Foucault has usefully conceptualized as “the blackmail of the Enlightenment” (1984, pp. 32–50). According to this dichotomy, enlightenment must either mean freedom from tyranny or it must mean

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the freedom to tyrannize. As Sankar Muthu has cogently argued, however, the legacy of the Enlightenment throughout the modern world is less an either/or proposition and more an affirmation of oftentimes contradic-tory liberal and imperial schemes and intentions (2003). Thus, through-out the modern era, we find the notion of enlightenment associated with negative liberty—that is, the freedom from tyranny—and with positive liberty, or the freedom to tyrannize (Berlin 1969).

This unsettling contradiction between negative and positive freedoms animates the tortured logic of what critical theorists, from Horkheimer to Marcuse, have called the “dialectic of enlightenment.” It is thanks to the perverted logic of this dialectic that, as Jean Bricmont has recently pointed out, slavery can wind up looking like freedom, empire can replace the republic as the ideal space for democratic sovereignty, and an economy built on permanent war can enthusiastically sell the destruction of entire civilizations as an internationally sanctioned project of “nation building” and “peace keeping” intended to defend the so-called human rights of those whose lives are summarily destroyed (2006).

As first put forth by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the 1940s, the dialectic of enlightenment provides a theoretical critique of the would-be emancipating power of reason and its essentially dehumanizing forms of domination. “Enlightenment,” they write at the start of their seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (2002, p. 1). Horkheimer and Adorno identi-fied this paradox of enlightenment with terror, the industrial mobilization and extermination of millions of people, the propagandistic manipulation and deception of the masses, the degradation of experience, and the era-sure of historical memory. As such, their critical theory defined a philo-sophical concept of enlightenment that identified certain totalitarian tendencies in the Enlightenment (Subirats 2007, p. 92). In this regard, their critique developed two central themes. The first was the loss or elimi-nation of the emancipatory dimension of modern science and its transfor-mation into an instrument of domination. “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. … Technology is the essence of this knowledge” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 2). The second theme concerned the social regression of enlightened society toward primitive forms of authoritarian power and archaic forms of thought (Subirats 2007, p. 93). “Enlightenment stands


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in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 6). It was in this sense that, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment, which had once prom-ised the progressive liberation of mankind from fear, had instead become a terrifying and oppressive force in its own right.

In the 1960s, Lewis Mumford complemented Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique with his own theory of the destructive tendencies of modern industrial life. Mumford identified “megatechnics” as the core problem. For Mumford, this “empire of the machine” is grounded in the mechanistic worldview of early modern and enlightenment science, espe-cially as Bacon and Newton had formulated it. This mechanical under-standing of nature as “clockwork” reduces nature to the status of a closed system that can be controlled and, with the aid of engineering and tech-nology, made to satisfy human needs and desires. However empowering, liberating, and beneficial this mastery over nature may be, it also, as Mumford understands it, imposes a new kind of intellectual tyranny. Megatechnics aspires to “the universal imposition of the megamachine as the ultimate instrument of pure ‘intelligence,’ whereby every other mani-festation of human potentialities [is] suppressed or completely eliminated” (Mumford 1974, pp. 158, 303). Thus, in line with Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason, Mumford’s analysis underscores the sense in which the drive for mastery over nature has led enlightenment to “turn its own logic against the human organism itself. The surprise … visible in the totalitarian triumph of scientific megatechnics is nothing less than man’s own meek submission to the anti-human instruments that the human mind created” (1974, pp. 312–313). Insofar as this military- industrial megamachine empowers “the means of death” and allows them to “outpace the means of life,” it imposes a logic that is nihilistic (1974, p. 301). Thus, for its “effective operation,” reasons Mumford, this megamachine requires “a permanent state of war” (1974, p. 256).

Commenting on the effects of this nihilistic megamachine on contem-porary political culture, C. Wright Mills noted the aloofness and even indifference with which people customarily regarded the suffering of oth-ers. Such indifference, Mills suggested, meant that “man had become an object” and that, insofar as people felt anything at all about the ongoing “spectacle” of death and destruction, they felt “powerless” and “in the grip of larger forces, having no part in these affairs that lay beyond their immediate areas of daily demand and gratification” (Mills 1951, p. 328). Megamachines impoverished experience. The military, industrial, and

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culture industries had taken unto themselves the capacity for experience: “as the world of this mechanically vivified experience was expanded a hun-dredfold, the individual became a spectator of everything, rather than an experiencer” (Mills, p. 329). Thus Mills’ critique of the political idiocy induced by the nihilistic megamachines of enlightenment anticipated one of the central features of what Guy Debord, writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would call the “society of spectacle” (1995). To wit: the impoverishment of experience and the reduction thereby of political life to an administrated spectacle that robs us individually and collectively of our sovereignty and vital historical protagonism.

As these critiques make painfully clear, the Enlightenment has failed to deliver on its promise of emancipation. Rather than free us from fear, it has installed systems of electronic vigilance, mass manipulation, compulsive consumerism, and global war that nurture, cultivate, and feed off of our fear. This tyranny of fear is inextricably bound up with an understanding of freedom that is as crude as it is obscene. On the one hand, there is the tyrant’s freedom to dictate, intimidate, and terrorize. This is the positive freedom of imperial conquest and colonization. It is the freedom of mul-tinational energy corporations to capitalize on their investments in oil, gas, or coal at whatever the cost to local environments and human populations. On the other hand, there is the also crude understanding of freedom as the pursuit of individual happiness. This is the negative freedom of politi-cal idiots everywhere, who accept tyranny, whether at home or abroad, because this combination of idiocy and tyranny provides them with per-sonal security and safeguards their prosperity (Arendt 1993; Tocqueville 1969). This is the freedom of suburban soccer moms and dads who give bottled water (which has been shipped thousands of miles across oceans and interstate highways in bottles made of petroleum by-products) to their thirsty children as they all sit, stuck in traffic, in gas-guzzling SUVs, poisoning themselves. This sickening mix of imperial tyranny and political idiocy designates the moral twilight of the Enlightenment: it is the night-fall of enlightened ethics: the eclipsed dawn of a new age of “Endarkenment.”

Thus, one central question that requires serious consideration is to what extent this moral and epistemological failure of the Enlightenment is due to internal flaws or to the superior power of the entrenched systems of religious, political, and economic privilege that have historically stood in its way. In the aftermath of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique, the trend in the humanities has been to explain the Enlightenment’s historical fail-ures by pointing out its contradictions. Although the critiques put forth


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by post-modern theorists, from Lyotard to Foucault and from Baudrillard to Jameson, have correctly identified certain dogmatic features that under-mine the Enlightenment’s claims to universality, the call that they make for a radical break with the universal moral and political values of enlight-enment ignores the extent to which such ideals continue to provide neces-sary resources for meaningful projects of social and political emancipation. Indeed, by deconstructing the internal contradictions of the “grand narra-tive” of the Enlightenment, post-modern critics have tended to ignore the extent to which the limits of enlightenment are not simply due to discur-sive inconsistency but also to institutional forces that have historically aligned themselves in opposition to it. Consider, in this regard, the success with which the absolute monarchy and the inquisitorial church managed in Spain and Latin America to mutilate enlightened cultural reforms. In the case of the United States, where the Enlightenment is often said to have achieved its greatest success, it is perhaps less obvious what these anti-enlightenment forces might be. And yet, it is not as though we have to venture too far off the beaten path of America’s national mythology to find the culprits.

2.3 manifest Destiny: america’s solution to the crisis of enlightenment

The conventional understanding of the American Revolution suggests that the Founding Fathers conceived the United States as an enlightened repub-lic whose liberty had been justly won in a war of independence against the British Empire and whose democratic sovereignty would serve as a univer-sal example for the enlightenment of the world. Surely, when in 1886 the people of France presented Americans with the Statue of Liberty—whose full name is “Liberty Enlightening the World”—it was this triumphant understanding of the American Revolution that the French had in mind. But this conventional view of the American Revolution as a political move-ment that was exclusively dedicated to the pursuit of negative liberties fails to consider the extent to which, from as early as the time of the Founding Fathers, American independence has also always and already entailed the pursuit of positive liberties: that is, the pursuit of what Hamilton referred to as a “republican empire” and what Jefferson called the “empire of lib-erty.” Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, these two seem-ingly opposed yet conveniently complementary forms of liberty would mesh together to give form to the national myth of Manifest Destiny.

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According to this myth, US expansion across the North American con-tinent and onward into the Caribbean and Pacific obeyed the enlightened designs of divine providence (Zinn 2003, pp. 149–169). As O’Sullivan formulated it in 1845, Manifest Destiny affirmed the nation’s “right … to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of Liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us” (1955, p. 216). This equation of expansive liberty with providential right grew out of the religious reviv-alist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which preached the regeneration of American society in preparation for the millennium and reconsecrated America as the New Israel, ascribing to it the power to inaugurate Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth (McDougall 1997, p. 81). In the nineteenth century, it was this millenarian understanding of America’s role in univer-sal history that helped to justify imperialism in the eyes of many Americans. Indeed, as McDougall has observed, some “radical Manifest Destinarians” even “contemplated ‘liberating’ densely populated foreign countries” in Central and South America so as to “bring them the blessings of American civilization” (1997, p. 84). By appealing to the enlightened political rhet-oric of America’s “experiment of Liberty and self-government” and mix-ing it with the religious rhetoric of God’s divine sanction to conquer and colonize “the whole of the continent,” the national myth of Manifest Destiny mobilized Americans not just for continental expansion but for overseas empire as well.

Considered from a post-colonial perspective, this providential under-standing of America’s so-called Manifest Destiny expresses an unceasing loyalty, on the part of many Americans, to their British colonial heritage. If prior to the Revolutionary War the colonists had willingly participated in the civilizing mission of British imperialism—settling New England in order to further not only their own religious ideals but also the economic interests of the investors in the Plymouth joint stock company—after inde-pendence they envisioned the expansion of the United States across the North American continent as a continuation of that very same civilizing project. Only now, rather than conquer and colonize lands in the name of England’s Christian monarch, they would do so in their own name, under the assumption that they were the appointed bearers of the true Christian mission (Gray 1995). A mere 100 years later, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, US imperialists such as Josiah Strong and Theodore Roosevelt would use similar arguments to justify the extension of American sovereignty over foreign peoples and lands in the Caribbean


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and the Pacific. Ever since, America’s legacy of enlightenment has been inextricably tangled up with empire.

These imperial binds are twofold. To one side, there is the issue of mil-lenarian Christianity, with its belief in special revelation as the only source of true enlightenment, its providential emphasis on judicial and apocalyp-tic interpretations of history, and its identification of America as the New Israel destined to redeem humanity. To the other side, there is the issue of capitalism, with its individualist ethic verging on selfish idiocy, its compul-sive accumulation of private profit at the expense of the public good, and its glorification of science and technology as vehicles of unfettered eco-nomic and cultural progress. At issue, in other words, is that bizarre fusion of Christianity and capitalism, which, in America, has served in much the same way that the absolutist monarchy and the inquisitorial church served in Spain and Latin America: that is, to oppose enlightenment and instead fortify the idea that the nation has been destined to become a global empire and the guarantor of perpetual peace and universal prosperity.

Throughout American history, this synthesis has informed visions of the United States as “a sacred space providentially selected for divine pur-poses” and a “privileged stage” for the exhibition of a new world order, a “great experiment” for the benefit of humanity as a whole (Stephanson 1995, p. 5). Among the Puritans, such apocalyptic visions were intimately married to the doctrine of predestination, which ultimately turned the question of spiritual salvation into a secular and worldly concern (Guyatt 2007). As Max Weber famously argued, this fusion of Christianity with capitalism would transform the “other-worldly asceticism” of the mystics, saints, and martyrs of pre-Reformation Christianity into the “this-worldly asceticism” of America’s modern capitalists (2011, pp. 158–179). This process did not, however, lead only to the secularization of Christian val-ues; it also elevated the secular into the realm of the sacred. Science and technology, which from Bacon and Newton to Franklin and Jefferson had been viewed as vehicles of enlightenment, were thus converted into vehi-cles of salvation. By means of its religious enthusiasm and its technological advancement, America would expand its “empire of liberty” and thus make the world “safe for democracy.”

Lost somewhere in the midst of this salvationist credo are the enlight-ening republican values that had once inspired the more radical thinkers among the Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Paine, to conceive the United States, not as a Jeffersonian “empire of liberty” or a Hamiltonian “republican empire” but as something altogether more original: that is, a

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post-colonial democratic republic. But Paine’s opposition to empire, monarchy, and religion, his insistence on popular democracy, universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and free public education, led most of the other Founding Fathers to regard him as a dangerous radical, a dema-gogue, and promoter of an all-too-genuine form of democracy (Atwood 2010, p. 53). That Paine’s revolutionary vision was never realized in America has less to do with the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment than with the alliance of Christianity and capitalism that replaced his republican ideals with the ideals of empire.

This, then, is the basic meaning behind the crisis of enlightenment in America: the idea of enlightenment itself has been stripped of human agency and replaced by that of an imperial megamachine that wages per-manent war on a global scale in order to generate enough prosperity at home so as to convince Americans that they have indeed been chosen for eternal salvation.

2.4 founDing a nation, Dreaming of emPire

The Founding Fathers were concerned with securing America’s indepen-dence; they were also, however, just as concerned with limiting the scope of democracy in America and ensuring that the new republic would be governed by the prosperous and propertied members of society, such as themselves. In the early years of the republic, popular frustration at the biased power exercised by America’s self-selecting political and economic elites erupted into armed rebellions, such as Shays’s Rebellion in 1786 Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1789 Pennsylvania and Virginia. Once these rebellions were contained, and a Bill of Rights was reluctantly passed, extending political liberties and rights to all citizens, the political elites set about fostering a sense of nationalism that they hoped would redirect popular frustrations away from them and toward the nation’s would-be “real” enemies—the Native Americans, the Spanish, French, and English—that is, all the inhabitants of North America who were not US citizens (Atwood, p. 59). The need to “spread the wealth,” as it were, and permit the lower orders of society a greater share in America’s prosperity, urged the Founding Fathers to open up the vast American hinterland to independent yeoman farmers, as Franklin and Jefferson espoused, and to develop American cities around banking, trade, and manufacture, as Hamilton urged. It encouraged them, in other words, to turn the republic into an empire.


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Significantly, their thoughts concerning empire were drawn from enlightened philosophies of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Montesquieu. From Bacon, they borrowed the utopian vision of empire as a fruitful com-bination of scientific discovery and global exploration that paves the way for a providentially sanctioned civilizing mission of conquest and coloniza-tion (Bacon 1955, pp. 465–564). Surely, most romantic renderings of Benjamin Franklin as a “modern Prometheus” continue to promote this utopian understanding of American empire as a civilizing and progressive mission (Carlo 2012). From Locke, the Founding Fathers borrowed a theory of property that combines negative liberty, which protects individu-als from invasion of their land, with the positive liberty of a Biblical decree to invade, conquer, and colonize lands that have not been sufficiently improved by the labor of others (1996, pp. 271–293). Surely also, most romantic renderings of Thomas Jefferson signing the Louisiana Purchase fail to question the manner in which Locke’s theory of property effectively confuses enlightenment mastery over nature with imperial mastery over foreign lands and people. Finally, in Montesquieu, they found the notion that empire, insofar as it involved the imposition of rule over a vast extent of territory, was also a natural soil for despotism. While most romantic renderings of the Founding Fathers as revolutionaries who risked life and limb in order to break free from British despotism continue to advance this sinister association of empire with tyranny, the truth is that the Founding Fathers either accepted or rejected this idea to their own advantage and in the interest of American expansion (Stourzh 1970, p. 190).

As varied and at times contradictory as these enlightenment philoso-phies on empire were, the Founding Fathers also borrowed some other useful meanings of the term from European history. Since the times of the Roman Republic, imperium had had a double meaning in Europe; it could simply be synonymous with political rule or sovereignty (Immerman 2010, p. 7), but it could also mean Imperium Romanum—Rome’s sway over other peoples (Stourzh, p. 191). Of these two meanings—imperium as republican self-government and imperium as the imposition of external rule—it was the latter conception that lived on in Europe, from the time of the Holy Roman Empire to the Napoleonic Age. But in America, the Founding Fathers rather combined these two conceptions. When it suited their purposes as revolutionaries, the Founding Fathers would of course identify empire with British, French, or Spanish despotism, but as states-men, they would instead use the notion of empire to justify the westward expansion of US sovereignty (Stourzh, p. 191).

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Franklin and Jefferson dreamed of an agrarian utopia that would improve upon the wickedness of the great urban centers of Europe, while Hamilton envisioned an American empire that would be built on the tech-nological mastery of nature, the industrialization of production, and the capitalization of finance. In practice, American political expansion and economic growth combined these two visions of empire. The West would be won, and the northeast would become centrally financed and privately industrialized. By the time that John Quincy Adams was serving as Secretary of State under President Monroe, these two strains of imperial-istic hubris would combine with the convictions of millenarian Christianity to give form to the Monroe Doctrine, which was the first clearly articu-lated view of an American imperial mission whose scope went beyond the nation’s would-be natural continental boundaries.

2.4.1 Imperial Agrarianism in Franklin and Jefferson

Over the course of his career as a scientist, writer, and statesman, Benjamin Franklin’s views of America developed from an initial defense of America as a British colony, through acceptance of America as an independent republic, to the idea that America should become an empire in its own right. Accordingly, we find at work in Franklin the fundamental contradic-tion that lies at the center of America’s legacy of enlightenment. On the one hand, he celebrated America’s liberty from British despotism, while on the other he viewed the expansion of America, understood as an agrar-ian empire of civic and moral virtue, as the ultimate realization of Anglo- Americans’ positive liberty to enlighten and civilize inferior races.

In the beginning, as it were, Franklin held to an expansionist vision of a rapidly increasing American population secured by a durable union of Britain’s North American colonies. In his original scheme, a “United Colonies of America” would be the engine of continental expansion, pro-viding a key market for British manufactures as well as a source of raw materials for British industry (Franklin 1751). These United Colonies of America would be administrated by a new kind of hero, who Franklin called the Founding Fathers (1751). For Franklin, this heroic expansion of Britain’s enlightened imperium across the American continent would exclude slavery. Curiously, though, it is in Franklin’s arguments against slavery that his heroic vision of the Founding Fathers converges with a racial politics that restricts the scope of American empire, preferring to exclude “all Blacks and Tawneys” in order to increase “the lovely White


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and Red” (1751). Thus, from as early as 1751, Franklin’s views on the liberating force of American empire were inextricably tied to a British imperial culture that imposed racial limits on freedom.

Yet Franklin’s vision for American empire was not limited by his racial prejudice alone; it was also restricted by his decidedly agrarian prejudices vis-à-vis the use of the land (Campbell 2000, p. 106). Franklin believed that by means of an economy based in agriculture America would grow into “a powerful and progressive country of happy and virtuous citizens” (Campbell, p. 213). He claimed that “agriculture is the only honest Way; wherein Man receives a real Increase of the Seed thrown into the Ground, in a kind of continual Miracle wrought by the Hand of God in his Favour, as a Reward for his innocent Life, and virtuous Industry” (Campbell, p. 107). Indeed, as far as Franklin was concerned, agriculture was not simply the “only honest way” by means of which Americans could be rewarded for their “innocent way of life,” it also was the only so-called honest way for the American empire to expand. “There seem to be three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth,” writes Franklin in this regard, “The first is by Wars as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is gener-ally Cheating. The third by Agriculture: the only honest Way” (Campbell, p. 113).

Once the United States had won its independence from Britain, Franklin set about defending his notion of America as an agrarian empire destined to realize the British civilizing mission on the North American continent. In this respect, he would work as a statesman and diplomat toward reconciliation with Britain, seeking in his negotiations to secure from Britain, not merely recognition of US independence but also for the British crown to cede Canada, the Floridas, Bermuda, and the Bahamas to the United States. But even as he worked to expand US sovereignty over ever-greater expanses of land, Franklin remained conscious of the tension between such expansion and the need to preserve America’s negative lib-erties. In this sense, he believed that only the federalist principles that had led to the drafting of the Constitution of the United States would allow America’s “diverse, geographically immense political community [i.e., its empire] [to] be held together without creating a sovereign power that would threaten the liberties and rights the Revolutionary War [had] been fought to preserve” (Immerman, p. 58).

Like Franklin, Thomas Jefferson believed that agriculture should be the foundation of the national way of life. In his concept of the “empire of

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liberty,” he united his agrarian egalitarianism with the drive toward west-ward expansion (Stourzh, p. 191). Accordingly, the American West served two purposes for Jefferson. First, the West provided land into which Jefferson’s agrarian society could expand, thus avoiding the decadence that Jefferson associated with the urban, industrial, and commercial cen-ters of New England and ultimately of Europe. Second, westward expan-sion would help to curtail European influence on the continent, thus reducing the need to remain forever on the alert for attacks from the British, Spanish, and French. For these reasons, Jefferson proposed to extend US sovereignty across the entire North American continent: only then would Americans find enough land to cultivate an agrarian life based on enlightenment ideals and avoid the moral and civic pitfalls of modern urban life.

For Jefferson, even more so than Franklin, the agrarian way of life was the noblest; it was therefore also the surest way to extend republican civic virtues across the population and land. Jefferson expressed this view as early as 1785, in a letter to John Jay, where he affirmed his belief that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, & they are tied to their country & wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds” (Thompson 2000, p. 121). As Paul Thompson explains, for Jefferson “[f]armers are better citizens than manufacturers or traders because the basis of their economic interest (land) cannot be alienated from the polity” (2000, p. 121). Indeed, an expansive West would redeem the nation, if its Eastern urban centers ever became as corrupt as Europe’s cities. Jefferson expressed these views succinctly in his pronouncement of 1805, where he affirmed that: “by enlarging the empire of liberty, we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles, at any time, degenerate, in those portions of our country which gave them birth” (1805).

By 1809, Jefferson would commit to a more aggressive and proactive extension of America’s imperial sphere of liberty (Immerman, p. 5). No longer concerned only with avoiding cultural degeneration and moral decline, Jefferson boasted, in a letter to James Madison, that “we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government” (1809). This shift from the empire of liberty toward the empire for liberty was anchored in racism (Thompson, p. 136). Racist pessimism concerning the ability of either


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Native Americans or Africans to become enlightened combined in Jefferson’s thinking with racist optimism concerning the ability of the Anglo-Americans to enlighten the rest of humanity. Jefferson’s racism thus expressed a providential view of the Anglo-Saxon race as God’s cho-sen people and the administrators of his will on Earth. Jefferson’s Anglo- Saxon and Protestant yeomen farmers were destined to liberate, enlighten, and civilize the inferior races. Thus Jefferson’s empire for liberty would become the specter of slavery’s expansion across the southern expanse of the North American continent, anticipating the ideological, economic, and political divisions that would split the Union and subject Americans to the horrors of the Civil War.

2.4.2 Imperial Industrialism in Washington and Hamilton

In a letter of August 15, 1786, which was addressed to the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington refers to America as an “infant empire” that will inevitably mature: “however unimportant America may be con-sidered at present … there will assuredly come a day,” he writes, “when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires” (1786). When Washington used the word empire, he did so according to Montesquieu’s understanding of the term. For him, empire was a “polity that exercised sovereignty over and was responsible for the security of a large expanse of territory that, composed of previously separate units now subordinate to the metropolis … included many peoples of diverse ‘races’ … and nation-alities” (Immerman, p. 8). This notion of empire is also at work in Washington’s farewell address of 1796. In it, he argues that the “weight” of American empire can be assured only by means of “steering clear of permanent alliances” (McDougall, p. 45).

Washington wrote this farewell address with the help of Alexander Hamilton (McDougall, pp. 45–51). It should come as little if any surprise therefore that Washington’s address agrees with Hamilton’s definitions of the United States as a republican empire. In 1787, in Federalist Paper 11, Hamilton first envisioned America’s destiny as an empire capable of fend-ing off attacks from Europe’s empires and vindicating “the honor of the human race” by dictating “the terms of the connection between the old and the new world” (Hamilton 1961, pp. 90–91). If Hamilton, like Washington, justified the independence of the United States from European domination, in the same breath he announced the United States’ ascendancy in the Western Hemisphere. “By a steady adherence to

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the Union, we may hope, erelong, to become the arbiter of Europe in America, and to be able to incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interest may dictate” (Hamilton, p. 87). In this same spirit, he added: “the rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral” (Hamilton, p. 87). Accordingly, for Hamilton, the “greatness” of the American empire was to lie in the ability of Americans to control the seas and trans-Atlantic com-merce (Hamilton, p. 89). As Gerald Stourzh has noted: “To make a sec-ond England of America, eventually to take over Britain’s ascendancy, that was a pursuit of national greatness that Hamilton linked to his own striv-ing for enduring fame” (1970, p. 7).

Unlike Franklin and Jefferson, who looked west across the Mississippi dreaming of an agrarian empire capable of cultivating in the common man the kind of civic virtue and economic prosperity enjoyed by the propertied classes, Hamilton looked east to Europe and its nascent industrialization for examples of how to grow the American empire. For Hamilton, the wealth of the nation and its imperial strength relied on the combined powers of naval control of the seas and the protection of commerce. “If,” Hamilton wrote, as early as 1774, “by the necessity of the thing, manufactures should once be established and take root among us, they will pave the way, still more, to the future grandeur and glory of America” (Stourzh, p. 195). Indeed, throughout his career as pamphleteer and statesman, Hamilton would consistently argue, as Thompson notes, “for policies that would has-ten industrial development, [as] he believed that civic virtue would attach more readily to men of wealth and attainment than to rude farmers, who must of necessity attend to their own interests” (Thompson, p. 137).

In this regard, Hamilton’s ideal of a republican empire built on manu-facturing and trans-Atlantic commerce contrasted sharply with the agrari-anism of Franklin and Jefferson. This opposition did more than merely pit the commercial and industrial interests of the northern States against the slave-based agricultural economy of the southern States; it also set Hamilton’s defense of financial and political elites against those who, like Jefferson, defended a more egalitarian society based in an agrarian way of life. At issue in this dispute was how to determine republican virtue. Their quarrel, as Karl-Friedrich Walling has argued, “was not between virtue and vice, or even between virtue and interest …, but between different mod-ern conceptions of political virtue, vigilance, and responsibility” (Walling 1999, p. 10).


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Hamilton favored an elitist and aristocratic organization of American life modeled after the British Empire. Politically, he believed that because the common people were prone to selfishly look out for their self-interest and often acted foolishly that the right to vote should be limited and that only the rich and educated should govern. As the founder of the National Bank, he favored finance, manufacturing, and trade. He envisioned repub-lican virtues that would permit freedom to capital and finance, while imposing restrictions on individual liberties. Hamilton believed, as Walling has persuasively argued, that because European empires continued to meddle in the affairs of the New World, the United States needed to grow into an empire, but he was always careful to argue that this American empire should be founded by means of consent rather than through force or fraud (Walling, p. 6). To his way of thinking, the establishment of America as an empire was the only political, economic, and strategic pro-gram by means of which the United States could safeguard its independence.

2.4.3 Providential Imperialism in John Quincy Adams

First as Secretary of State, and eventually as president, Adams was primar-ily concerned with the role that the United States was to play, not just in international affairs but also in the realization of a providential plan for universal human history. As William Earl Weeks observes, “John Quincy Adams had no doubts that the United States … had been designated by God as the redeemer nation and that he had an essential role to play in the national mission of global redemption” (1992, p. 17). Indeed, Adams’s belief that America was the redeemer nation prompted him to become one of the most ardent proponents of continental expansion. He conceived the North American continent as “the proper laboratory for the great experi-ment in human freedom” and early on he determined to devote his ener-gies to the expansion of the nation’s limits (Weeks, p. 18). His support of the Louisiana Purchase confirmed this commitment. He viewed it as a manifestation of natural law: “The world shall be familiarized with the idea of considering our proper dominion to be the continent of North America. From the time that we became an independent people it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea” (Weeks, p. 20).

Like Hamilton before him, Adams stressed the importance of com-merce in the establishment of an international community based in equal-

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ity among empires. While he advocated the unlimited expansion of American trade overseas, unilateralism and isolationism nevertheless char-acterized his approach to political and military matters. In this regard, Adams was true to Washington’s rule of non-engagement in the matters of Europe. In an address to congress he delivered on July 4, 1821, Adams stated that the United States was “the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all” and warned that if Americans were to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and seek to become the “dictators of the world,” the nation would “no longer be the ruler of its own spirit” (1821).

In a matter of only two years, in December of 1823, Adams would elaborate on this line of thinking in the Monroe Doctrine, which was, in effect, a statement of hemispheric supremacy (Weeks, p. 180). The Monroe Doctrine, in both form and substance, was based on three prin-ciples. The first declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to “future colonization by any European power.” Accordingly, the United States—as an American power—would expand its hemispheric preserve, only not by colonization. The United States did not aspire, he reassured the world, to become “the dictators of the world.” The second principle of the Monroe Doctrine would help to assure this expansion by putatively defensive means: “We should consider any attempt on their part [the European powers] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dan-gerous to our peace and safety.” This essentially meant that the United States would interpret the attempts of other empires to influence the polit-ical and economic life of the hemisphere as an attack on its imperial domin-ions. The third and final principle of the Monroe Doctrine stated that, in return for their recognition of US superiority in the Americas, the United States would abstain from meddling in the affairs of Europe in Europe.

This doctrine of US imperial dominion over the Americas can also be interpreted as a denunciation of conquest and colonization. As such, Adams’ defense of US imperialism closes in on his idea of the meaning of the US Revolution. The “great colonial establishments are engines of wrong,” wrote Adams, and they “cannot fulfill the great objects of gov-ernments in the just purposes of civil society. In the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them” (Immerman, p. 91). This elimination of the “great colonial establish-ments” would, in effect, expand the realm of liberty. “Thus,” as Immerman has argued, “certain as [Adams] was that continued American expansion was a natural, inevitable, and indeed providentially ordained process, abol-ishing Europe’s colonies was a precondition for the future American


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Empire for Liberty” (2010, p. 91). On this view, the Monroe Doctrine is an essentially supra-regionalist version of American Manifest Destiny.

Considered within the American expansionist tradition, John Quincy Adams’ declaration signaled “hands off” to the Europeans, while permit-ting “hands on” to the United States (McDougall, p. 74). The conve-nience of this “hands off-hands on” policy for the expansion of US imperial interests underscores the extent to which Adams’ notion of America as the redeemer nation is not only grounded in a providential sense of human progress but also in a culture of imperial expediency that allows for American tyranny abroad in order to protect and secure America’s com-mercial prosperity at home.

Adams’ providential imperialism thus helped justify the eventual exten-sion of US sovereignty over Spain’s erstwhile colonies in North America and beyond into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Indeed, the American empire was built on the decline and collapse of the Spanish empire. But US imperialism did not mark the radical break with Spanish tyranny that Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams all assumed it would, by reason of the Anglo-American’s presumed racial superiority, industriousness, and unique status as God’s chosen missionaries. Rather than mark a radical discontinuity with Spanish tyranny, the history of US imperial expansion, which is characterized less by any enlightened notion of republican values than by a providential belief in America’s civilizing mission, represents an historical and logical continuum with Spanish colo-nial beliefs and practices.

2.5 moDern translatio imperii

On April 19, 1898, the Congress of the United States passed a resolution authorizing President McKinley to use the armed forces to help liberate Cuba from Spanish colonial rule. This resolution was conditional, how-ever, upon certain restrictions set forth in the Teller Amendment, which explicitly stated that the United States entered into war with Spain not in order to annex Cuba but rather to ensure the “independence of the peo-ple of Cuba.”1 Notwithstanding these restrictions, by the end of the Spanish- American War the United States had emerged, not as the selfless liberator of Cuba that the Teller Amendment envisioned but rather as a new imperial power with “protectorates” in both the Caribbean, where Puerto Rico and a nominally independent Cuba came under US domin-ion, and the Pacific, where the United States now gained control over the

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Mariana Islands, Guam, and, most notably, the Philippines. Thus what occurred in 1898 was a modern translatio imperii, or transfer of imperial power, from Spain to the United States.

Whereas the medieval concept of the translatio imperii construed such transfers of power from one empire to the next as a linear continuum that was destined, according to the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel, to reach the end of times, in the modern era this catastrophic vision of imperial decline was turned back on itself. Rather than a continuum of successive transfers of power destined for eventual collapse, the modern understand-ing of the translatio imperii was optimistic; it saw this transfer of power as a modernizing, enlightening, and progressive advance of universal history. Accordingly, American imperialists assumed that their empire was superior in kind to both the Spanish and British empires because the American, as conceived originally by the nation’s Founding Fathers, sought to spread liberty, while the tyranny inherent to the British and Spanish modes of imperialism mostly served as an impediment to enlightened self-government.

Apologists for American imperialism used the optimism inherent in the modern understanding of the translatio imperii to depict US sovereignty over distant lands and people in progressive terms. For instance, there were those who, like the evangelist Josiah Strong, preached that the “Anglo Saxon is the great missionary race” and that “the English and American peoples” must be looked to “for the evangelization of the world” (1963, p. 201). There were also those who, like Theodore Roosevelt, understood such expansion in moral and political terms, as an expression of what he called “the strenuous life,” which was not merely a responsible “life of toil and effort, of labor and strife” but also, according to him, “the only national life which is really worth leading” (1904, p. 3–9). Finally, there were those financiers and oligarchs of the Gilded Age who, like William Hearst and John D. Rockefeller, championed US expansion by means of force in order to further the interests of an eco-nomic “open door” policy with Asia.

There were also plenty of influential Americans who opposed US impe-rialism. The politician and magazine editor Carl Schurz, for instance, argued that a democracy could not for long “play the king over subject populations without creating in itself ways of thinking and habits of action most dangerous to its own vitality” (1899). Some anti-imperialists, like the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, at times opposed US expansion for strictly economic reasons: “If we take the Philippines,” he argued, “certainly they


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will be a grievous drain upon revenue if we consider the enormous army and navy which we shall be forced to maintain upon their account,” but Carnegie also opposed American imperialism out of concern for the cul-tural and ethnic integrity of the nation: “I am no ‘Little’ American, afraid of growth, either in population or territory, provided always that the new territory be American, and that it will produce Americans, and not foreign races bound in time to be false to the Republic in order to be true to them-selves” (1901). For his part, the philosopher William James sought to oppose Roosevelt’s call to the empire building of the “strenuous life” with his own call for a “moral equivalent of war,” centered on the heroic sacri-fice of socially conscious industrial labor (Dooley 2009, p. 56). Finally, there were writers such as Mark Twain who used their satirical wit to denounce the economic self-interest hiding behind the religious, racial, and cultural justifications for US imperial expansion that were in vogue at the time.

The complexity of this dynamic and often heated public debate was mostly lost when, in 1900, the two major political parties usurped it for overtly political reasons. The Presidential election of 1900 pitted William McKinley, the Republican proponent of a so-called benevolent imperial-ism, against William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic challenger who viewed empire as incompatible with democracy at home as well as abroad. The respective party platforms for the 1900 Presidential election make the terms of the political debate on American empire abundantly clear.

The Republican Party platform, which backed the reelection of McKinley, stated in regard to US expansion into the Caribbean and the Pacific that:

while the American people, sustained by … Republican legislation, have been achieving … splendid triumphs in … business and commerce, they have conducted and in victory concluded a war for liberty and human rights. … To ten millions of the human race there was given “a new birth of free-dom,” and to the American people a new and noble responsibility.

This construction of a heroic and selfless sacrifice for the liberty of ten million people seeks to equate the United States’ war against Spain with the revolutionary beginnings of the American colonists’ war against Britain. According to this view, the United States’ intervention in Cuba’s War of Independence was an act of solidarity between one profoundly democratic people, that is, the Americans and another people—variously

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the Cubans, the Puerto Ricans, the Filipinos, who would require tutelage in order to someday become truly and fully democratic like the Americans. It is to this civilizing mission that the platform refers when it speaks of the “new and noble responsibility” that the Americans have acquired together with Spain’s ex-colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

For its part, the Democratic Party Platform was organized almost entirely around an anti-imperialist stance.

We declare … that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon the consent of the governed is tyranny; and that to impose upon any people a government of force is to substitute methods of imperialism for those of a republic.

The platform goes even further in its opposition to US imperialism by asserting: “no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.” To back this final point, the plat-form describes US tyranny in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines and concludes with the specter of militarism, which “means conquest abroad and intimidation and oppression at home.” Indeed, as the repression of the Haymarket Square riots of 1886 and the Pullman strike of 1894 made abundantly clear to all Americans at the time, this reference to “intimida-tion and oppression at home” was not merely a matter of political rhetoric but an allusion to the tragic social and economic consequences of the new forms of financial power that America’s great capitalist trusts sought to impose on American society, whether at home in the 50 states or abroad in America’s protectorates and colonies (Hardt and Negri 2003, pp. 172–178).

The outcome of this political campaign was a resounding victory for the Republican ticket of McKinley and Roosevelt. Only two years after America’s “splendid little war” of 1898, Americans went to the polls and voted for empire. They embraced tyranny abroad, while turning a blind eye to its political and economic correlates at home. They did so, hoping to benefit from empire’s prosperity. Unwittingly, though, they helped the so-called robber barons of the Gilded Age legitimate a modern translatio imperii that mostly benefitted the capitalists, while doing little to improve the lot of the working classes. Surely, the overwhelming influence of yel-low journalism, as practiced by Pulitzer and Hearst, helps explain how


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these robber barons were able to dupe the masses. But underlying this political idiocy of economic self-interest, racial bigotry, and mass manipu-lation, there was a still more profound incentive for Americans to favor imperialism: the national providentialism that combined Christianity, capi-talism, and empire into a new synthesis. According to this popular way of thinking, empire was not merely a means by which Americans could attain ever-greater economic prosperity, but a vehicle that could deliver them into an ever-lasting state of salvation. It was precisely this synthesis that lay at the heart of the heated cultural and intellectual debates of the day, as evidenced by Mark Twain’s quarrel with Josiah Strong’s crusading religi-osity and William James’s dispute with Theodore Roosevelt’s bellicose industriousness.

2.5.1 Imperial Darkness

In 1886, the Protestant minister and founder of the Social Gospel move-ment, Josiah Strong, published Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Current Crisis. Strong’s book begins with a portrayal of the closing years of the nineteenth century as a “focal point in history” according to which “Christ’s kingdom in the world for centuries to come depends on the next few years in the United States” (1886, p. 200). In speaking this way of the United States, Strong had in mind a very precise definition of what it meant to be American: Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In a chapter titled “The Anglo-Saxon and the World’s Future,” Strong affirms that “the Anglo- Saxon is the representative of two great ideas … civil liberty [and] pure spiritual Christianity” (1886, pp. 200–201). In regard to liberty, Strong writes: “in modern times, the peoples whose love of liberty has won it, and whose genius for self-government has preserved it, have been Anglo- Saxons” (1886, p. 200). As regards the Christianity of these Anglo-Saxon lovers of liberty, he unabashedly affirms that the Anglo-Saxon is the “great missionary race” (1886, p. 200). Like other US empire builders of his day, among them Mahan and Roosevelt, Strong held an “unapologetic belief in white ascendancy drawn from social Darwinism, which applied the con-cept of the ‘survival of the fittest’ to international affairs” (Grandin 2006, pp. 17–18). Accordingly, Strong argues in his book for the Anglo-Saxon nation of America to become the “keeper” of other inferior “races”: “The Anglo-Saxon … is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper” (1886, p. 200).

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Strong’s culturally and racially prejudiced understanding of American liberties and religiosity informed his sense of America as a country des-tined for global imperial expansion. “Over two-thirds of the Anglo-Saxons occupy lands which invite almost ‘unlimited expansion’” (1886, p. 203). He adds, elsewhere, that another marked characteristic of the Anglo- Saxon “is what may be called an instinct or genius for colonizing. His unequaled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal inde-pendence, made him a pioneer. He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries” (1886, p. 210). In social Darwinian terms, Strong further reasons: “It was those in whom this tendency was strongest that came to America, and this inherited tendency has been further developed by the westward sweep of successive generations across the continent” (1886, p. 212). Strong’s vision of Anglo-Saxon superiority is then inserted into a projected final struggle of civilizations: “the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled.” This final competition is to end with US world ascendancy: “Then this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the repre-sentative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calcu-lated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth.” He concludes his vision of America’s imperial destiny with an expansionist prophecy: “this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond” (1886, p. 214). This is all part of what Strong refers to as “God’s plan to people the world with better and finer material” (1886, p. 214).

In what was to become the most widely disseminated piece of anti- imperialist literature of the time, Mark Twain published a two-sentence article in The New York Herald on December 30, 1900, titled “A Salutation Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Taken down in shorthand by Mark Twain.” It reads as follows:

“I bring you the stately matron called CHRISTENDOM—returning be-draggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines; with her soul full of mean-ness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass” (1992, pp. 12–13). This sharp denunciation of US imperialism as a “Holy War,” a “Crusade” and “Civilizing Project” by means of which “Christendom” aimed to dominate the modern age, supposedly in


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order to lift it spiritually, but actually in order to profit, is as succinct a critique of the synthesis of Christianity and capitalism that can be found anywhere in the literature of this period.

These themes would also be the focus of Twain’s most controversial essay on US imperialism and the Philippine-American War: his essay of February 1901 suggestively titled “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” This essay, as the title suggests, plays ironically on the theme of enlighten-ment. It is addressed to the unenlightened “Person Sitting in Darkness.” Written in a satirical mode, it purports to represent the would-be enlight-ened views on empire held by American imperialists like Strong and Roosevelt. In this sense, Twain portrays imperialism as a monopoly that is known by the moniker “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust,” which plays off of McKinley and Roosevelt’s Republican platform of 1900 where they claimed that the United States had a moral obligation to “confer the bless-ings of liberty and civilization upon all rescued peoples.” The self- congratulatory prejudice inherent in this platform assumes that the people who sit in darkness are the Filipinos. As such, this essay purports to address the “Person Sitting in Darkness” in much the same way that an enlight-ened teacher might instruct his ignorant pupil so as to guide him out of the cave of darkness and ignorance and into the light of reason and truth. The obvious irony here is that imperialism of the sort practiced by US imperialists at the turn of the century and defended and justified by evan-gelical thinkers like Josiah Strong, rather than guide its conquered and colonized subjects toward the light of truth, imposed on them the dark-ness of an American tyranny that brutally enforced submission while imposing a system of economic exploitation. The “Actual Thing” for which the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” was formed, argues Twain, was to cover up, under a veil of hypocrisy, the atrocities committed by the US Army in the Philippines (Zwick 1992, p. 22). By ironically unveiling this truth, Twain would lead his readers to understand that the “Person Sitting in Darkness” was not the Filipino nationalist but rather the American missionary and imperialist.

According to Twain, US intervention in Spain’s war with its erstwhile colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific should have led to the attainment of “not land, not money, not dominion—no, something worth many times more than that dross: our share, the spectacle of a nation of long harassed and persecuted slaves set free through our influence; our posteri-ty’s share, the golden memory of that fair deed” (1992, p. 32). But, as Twain points out, what ultimately prevailed was the arrogance and hypocrisy

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of American Christendom wedded to American capitalism. America decided to “send out an army—ostensibly to help the native patriots put the finishing touch upon their long and plucky struggle for independence, but really to take their land away from them and keep it. That is, in the interest of Progress and Civilization” (1992, p. 34).

Interestingly, Twain’s moral critique of US imperialism coincided with some of the basic themes elaborated by Spanish and Latin American intel-lectuals who viewed America’s imperial expansion as proof, not of progress and civilization but of moral backwardness and decadence. Ramiro de Maeztu, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y Gasset in Spain, together with José Marti in Cuba, Rubén Darío in Nicaragua and José Enrique Rodó in Uruguay participated in a trans-Atlantic, pan-Hispanic cultural movement that, as Fredrick Pike has shown, emphasized the cultural unity of the Spanish-speaking world and affirmed Spain’s right to wield spiritual hegemony over its one-time colonies (Pike 1971, pp. 1–2). As these think-ers understood it, the threat posed by American imperialism was not only political; it was also cultural, even civilizational. US imperialism was funda-mentally driven by base economic concerns, they argued, and therefore threatened to tie up all those who entered into commerce with it, whether by force or out of expediency, into a morally decadent morass. As against the traditionally ascetic and self-sacrificing values of Spain’s conquistadors and Latin America’s heroes of independence, American imperialists were only motivated by “utilitarianism, economic militarism, and modern sensu-ality” (Britt 2005, pp. 187–205). This moral critique would likewise carry over into the dispute between William James and Roosevelt concerning the moral virtues supposedly at work in the American capitalist system.

2.5.2 Imperial War

In an essay titled “Expansion and Peace” originally published on December 21, 1899, Theodore Roosevelt used enlightenment rhetoric and imagery in defense of America’s imperial conquest of the Philippines. US expan-sion, he argues, is an enlightening prospect that promises to “snatch” por-tions of the world’s surface “from the forces of darkness” (1904, p. 33). Empire, in this mode, is literally a matter of enlightening. But in this, as in other representative passages of Roosevelt’s epic prose, he is ultimately less concerned with the enlightenment of those who live in darkness on far-away islands than he is with those among his fellow countrymen who, due to either moral depravity or intellectual obtuseness, simply refuse to see


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the radiant light of American imperialism. Thus, in “Expansion and Peace,” he depicts American anti-imperialists as men who have counseled “national degradation” and “national dishonor” (1904, p. 33).

Similarly, in his famous essay of 1899, “The Strenuous Life,” he would depict the anti-imperialists in still less flattering terms, referring to them as “overcivilized,” “dull minded,” and “timid” (1904, p. 9). Here, in oppo-sition to the anti-imperialists, Roosevelt proposes a new heroic type for America: the imperial civilizer who, in keeping with providence, “brings order out of chaos” by imposing his “masterful virtues” on inferior races (1904, p. 9). In this regard, Roosevelt’s would-be modern hero actually reverts back to the pre-modern forms of heroism celebrated centuries before by Spanish imperial apologists who conceived of their own empire in the Americas as the divinely sanctioned and heroic work of self- sacrificing saints and crusading conquistadors. By means of such heroic rhetoric, Roosevelt sought, not unlike the Spaniards several centuries before him, to elevate the mercenary, the adventurer, and even the criminal to the status of an absolute moral conscience (Subirats 1994, p. 82). This total-izing and absolutist conception of the imperial hero is tainted, no doubt, with the universalism of enlightenment moral and political thought. But Roosevelt’s heroes of American imperialism are not modern-day Prometheans who dare to steal the light of the gods in order to improve the lot of mankind with their modern science and technological know- how; they are rather pre-modern heroes, bent on imposing the tyrannical spirit of their “strenuous way of life” on those unfortunate enough to come face to face with their brutality, from Puerto Rico to Cuba and from Panama to the Philippines.

William James would criticize Roosevelt’s primitive heroic values and seek to replace them with a modernizing enlightened alternative. Rather than engage in expansionist wars against unsuspecting people in distant lands, James reasoned that Americans should engage in the strenuous war against nature that is modern industrial capitalism, by means of which America could rise to new heroic heights of enlightened prosperity. This struggle for mastery over nature leads James to portray a virtuous life of daring and adventure: “human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid.” Accordingly, he dreams up a “conscription of the whole youthful population to form … a part of the army enlisted against Nature.” Industrial labor, and the subsequent advance of man’s technological dom-inance over nature, James reasoned, would allow America’s youth, both

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the working and the affluent classes, to participate in a grand scheme that would “get the childishness knocked out of them” and teach them how to be men “with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas” (1910). What James envisioned was a process of maturation that was to be morally and politi-cally enlightening. Curiously, and problematically, his vision of an enlight-ening industrial war with nature tied the generation of profit and the accumulation of wealth with moral salvation, thus reconstituting the very same fusion of Protestant ethics and capitalism that informed Roosevelt’s heroic concept of civilizing empire.

The limits of Twain’s and James’s critiques notwithstanding, their anti- imperialist arguments did make clear the sense in which US imperialism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was characterized by a fusion of Christianity and capitalism that advanced the salvationist logic of a new global imperium based in financial, techno-scientific, and military might. Rather than constitute a radical break with the Spanish empire that it replaced, US imperialism actually comprised a historical and logical con-tinuum with the pre-modern religious and heroic ideals of Spain’s con-quests in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Pacific. In this regard, imperialists from Strong to Roosevelt essentially reinvented the Spanish discoverer-conquistador and his evangelical task as the adventurer- missionary who is providentially destined to bring the blessings of American civilization to the rest of humanity. Under the guise of this prov-idential heroism, American imperial power would force its subjects—first the Hawaiians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians, and Filipinos but eventually peoples the world over—to either submit to America’s provi-dential destiny as a global empire or face the consequences. In the Philippines, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this meant a genocidal campaign of targeted massacres. In Japan, some 45 years later, it would simply mean nuclear annihilation.

2.6 anti-imPerial imPerialism

At the start of the twentieth century, Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt committed the United States to a foreign policy that advanced American global imperial expansion. By the outbreak of World War I, Americans had largely adopted the providential reasoning that justified this expansion. Such justifications were not merely political. To a considerable degree, they were also based in the millenarian convictions of the Social Gospel movement of the 1910s and 1920s. This movement championed the idea


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that America was destined to realize the Kingdom of God on Earth and to do so by means of domestic social reforms at home and so-called progres-sive imperialism abroad. Certainly, the doctrine of ineluctable progress, applied to the entire human race with the United States in the vanguard, was conventional wisdom in mainstream Protestant America and it informed President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy, which was loosely based on the belief that Americans were “custodians of the spirit of righ-teousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life itself” (McDougall, p. 128).

This providential view of America as the “custodian of righteousness” took the form, in Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, of a defense of America’s enlightened political principles, which for Wilson were also uni-versal political and moral values. “These are American principles, American policies,” insisted Wilson in regard to his Fourteen Points. “We could stand for no other. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must pre-vail” (Ferguson, p. 63). As such, the League of Nations was Wilson’s attempt to codify and institutionalize the ideals of American providential enlightenment. At the end of World War I, Wilson and his contemporaries viewed America’s imperial expansion as a progressive and enlightened movement that aimed to make the entire world safe for democracy. In this, as in so many other considerations, the American conception of empire differed radically from Vladimir Lenin’s critique of World War I as an imperial war that announced the end of empire and, with it, the end of capitalism (Lenin 1989, pp. 88–99).

The idea that US imperialism in the twentieth century favored demo-cratic self-determination was closely tied to the notion that it was histori-cally unique: it was an anti-imperial imperialism, which sought to spread everywhere the so-called blessings of American civilization. In the years leading up to World War II, journalist and publisher Henry Luce summed up this idea when he urged Americans: “to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power … as the Good Samaritan … as the power-house of the ideals of Freedom and Justice” and to fashion a vision of the twentieth century as “the first great American Century” (Ferguson, pp. 65–66). Conceived in this progressive manner, the American Century would introduce to the world a new kind of anti-imperial imperialism, a new kind of American imperialism that would allegedly use its power only

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in order to serve and advance the interests of humanity. Indeed, even though Franklin Roosevelt believed that imperialism was the primary cause of World War II—and not just the imperialism of Japan, Germany, and Italy but also the imperialism of France and Britain—he too embraced the idea of an American Century based in a new American brand of anti- imperial imperialism. As Niall Ferguson has observed, “even as Americans pledged themselves to make war against the empires of their enemies and allies alike, unacknowledged their own empire grew apace” (2004, p. 67).

After World War II, which ended with a harrowing show of the United States’ nuclear military might, the United States emerged as the undis-puted leader of the so-called Free World. But the United States did not, at this juncture, use its overwhelming scientific, technological, industrial, and military power to dominate the world with ruthless tyranny. The United States rather invested strategically in the economic and political reconstruction of the very same countries—notably Germany and Japan—that it had destroyed by means of either conventional or nuclear warfare. Some historians have argued that the reconstruction of both Japan and Germany should stand out as the most successful cases of America’s anti- imperialist imperial rule (Ferguson, pp. 65–67). But what gets lost in this cheerful rendition of the reconstruction of Japan and Germany is that these supposedly anti-imperialist projects in nation building were not car-ried out democratically but rather by imperial fiat, after the dictatorial style of General Douglas MacArthur. This darker side to America’s would-be anti-imperialist imperialism in the twentieth century was easily obscured, however, by the emergence of another empire, in comparison to which, America’s could truly seem, in the eyes of Americans at least, to be an anti- imperial empire. This other empire was the communist empire of the Soviet Union.

The rift with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) over Eastern Europe, and the development of Soviet nuclear arms, led inevitably to the Cold War and to the adoption, by the United States, of new policies of containment. These policies meshed easily with the progressive anti-imperialist imperialism of the early twentieth century, since they validated the projection of US military, economic, and industrial power across the oceans and turned significant portions of the so-called Third World, from Asia to the Middle East, and from Africa to South America, into virtual protectorates. Containment also served these imperial interests insofar as it favored expansionism, opposing both colonial empires and communist empires and thus keeping open the markets and resources of easily half the


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world to US capitalist ventures. It is in this rather dubious sense that, as Tony Smith has argued, during the Cold War “American hegemony con-stituted a form of anti-imperialist imperialism” (McDougall, p. 143).

The Korean War exemplifies the sense in which the United States exer-cised its anti-imperial imperial power with seeming reluctance. This war was, as the Truman administration would insist, the direct consequence of Soviet aggression. The Soviets refused to allow free, UN-supervised elec-tions to go ahead in their zone of occupation and, in 1950, Stalin autho-rized Kim Il Sung to invade the Republic of Korea and overthrow its democratically elected government. When China got involved in the con-flict, General MacArthur denounced the Truman administration’s “lim-ited war” strategy and called instead for an all-out war against China; his plan included, among other things, dropping 50 nuclear bombs on Chinese cities. For having publicly undermined Truman’s diplomacy and policies of containment, MacArthur was dismissed from his post as com-mander in chief of the Korean theater of war, thus setting in place an eventual showdown in Washington between MacArthur’s nuclear imperial hubris and Truman’s reluctant imperialism. Although Truman’s policy of limited war eventually won out over MacArthur’s nuclear belligerence, which Truman and his joint chiefs of staff feared would spell the begin-ning of a third world war, the Korean War did not come to an end until Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, openly considered MacArthur’s plan to use atomic weapons “on a sufficiently large scale,” not only in Korea but in China and the Soviet Union as well (Ferguson, p. 92). This threat of mutual nuclear annihilation effectively drew the Korean War to a draw, with Korea divided in two and the armed forces of each nuclear empire facing each other across a vacant no-man’s-land, where they remain to this day.

The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the United States’ next confrontation with Soviet imperialism. As had been the case with Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the result of Soviet maneuvering. The Soviets hoped to make use of revolutionary and communist Cuba in the same way that the United States, through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), had been making use of capitalist Western Europe: that is, as a place in America’s own so-called back yard from which the Soviets might threaten the United States with nuclear Armageddon. Just as this crisis was devel-oping, in early 1961 John F. Kennedy was elected president.

The crisis in Latin America that Kennedy inherited was much broader than communist Cuba, however. Castro’s revolution had inspired similar

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revolutionary movements in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. Beyond Latin America, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, European imperial powers had by now abandoned many of their colonies, leaving behind impoverished, war-ravaged societies that many pundits in America’s Cold War military-industrial complex feared would fall under Soviet influence. Furthermore, Soviet advances in nuclear arms guaranteed that, if the two superpowers went to war, they would mutually destroy each other. For this reason, at the end of his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower had decided to distance himself from the belliger-ent rhetoric of the early Cold War, arguing that nuclear war should never be seriously entertained as an option and warning the American public against the dangers to the republic of a military-industrial complex bent on perpetual war and perpetual profit from the Cold War. Kennedy, how-ever, had campaigned as a committed militarist, promising that under his presidency America would be ready to “pay any price, bear any burden” in order to ensure the continuance of American global power. Consequently, as Grandin notes, President Kennedy “looked to counterinsurgency and covert operations as a way of both breaking the nuclear deadlock and con-trolling the rise of third-world nationalism” (Grandin, p. 47).

Kennedy had come into office eager to prove that “economic growth and political democracy [could] develop hand in hand” (McDougall, p. 185). To that end, he created in Latin America what was known as the Alliance for Progress. This was an ambitious project that promised, as Kennedy put it “to build a hemisphere where all men can hope for a suitable standard of living and all can live out their lives in dignity and in freedom” (Grandin, pp. 47–48). Kennedy’s republican rhetoric notwith-standing, his administration committed the United States to strengthen-ing the internal security capabilities of Latin American nations to protect against subversion, turning the region into a counterinsurgency labora-tory for America’s anti-imperial imperialism. The ultimate result of these experiments in counterinsurgency was not democracy, as the Kennedy administration insisted it would be, but tyranny (Grandin, p. 48). With his Alliance for Progress, Kennedy claimed to want to “awaken the American revolution” in the Americas; but his real aim was to contain the perceived threat of communist revolution throughout the Americas, and he pursued this goal by arming the military, police, and in many instances even para-military death squads.

Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon did not break with Kennedy’s commitment to counterinsurgency tactics when they took


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charge of the United States’ Cold War struggle for imperial control of the Third World. Indeed, the Vietnam War would be characterized by the use of these same “dirty war” tactics, ultimately undermining support for the war among US military leaders, who preferred an all-out war, as well as among the American public at large, who with growing awareness of the atrocities committed by American troops, vehemently protested against the United States’ imperial war in southeast Asia. The cease-fire that was eventually signed in January 1973 was not only a death sentence for the South Vietnamese regime, which the Americans had originally intervened to save, but an utter humiliation, on the global stage, of America’s would- be anti-imperial imperialism (Ferguson, p. 100). The humiliation was twofold. Inasmuch as it marked the first incontrovertible defeat of US military forces by communists, the outcome of the Vietnam War was a humiliation for the empire’s military-industrial complex. But this war humiliated the republic as well. It did so not so much by reason of its ulti-mate outcome but because of the manner in which the Americans had fought the war: in order, supposedly, to defend and promote America’s anti-imperialist commitment to democracy, US armed forces in Vietnam had committed significant crimes against humanity. The United States’ devotion to counterinsurgency strategies undermined the enlightened principles on which the republic prided itself. As such, the Vietnam War unmasked as hypocritical the idea that American imperialism was an anti- imperial brand of imperialism.

Nixon recognized that the defeat of the United States in Vietnam would not go unnoticed by the rest of the world; so, with the help of Kissinger, he devised “a new policy of détente designed to allow the super-powers to shore up their authority in their respective spheres of influence” (Grandin, p. 58). Cuba aside, Latin America basically belonged to the United States. First under Johnson and then Nixon and Reagan and even-tually also Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the United States would either instigate or otherwise support right-wing military coups in Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Colombia. Notoriously, the United States helped create Operation Condor.

This US-backed counterinsurgency program involved the intelligence agencies of numerous South American military governments during the 1970s and 1980s: namely, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay and to a lesser extent Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. Under Operation Condor these regimes agreed to use their joint resources to round up thousands of people who were suspected of involvement with

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leftist groups and imprison them in camps or secret detention centers. Thousands were interrogated, brutally tortured, and then executed and secretly disposed of, becoming known as “the disappeared.” Those who escaped their own dictatorship’s security services were often captured and tortured in other Condor countries and eventually returned home for execution. Condor agents also located and killed dissidents in operations outside Latin America, in several European nations, and in the United States (Tricot 2013). This operation surely marks one of the darkest moments in American imperial history, as it serves to underscore how, in the name of defending the United States’ imperial interests, America’s political, military, and economic leaders were willing to ignore and even violate the enlightened ideals of democratic self-determination and rights inscribed in the Constitution of the United States of America.

In our own day, these same paramilitary and imperial practices—from the creation of secret prisons to the routine use of torture as a tactic of interrogation to the forced “disappearance” of America’s enemies—have been used yet again by the United States in its global war on terror, from Colombia to Afghanistan to Syria and Iraq (Grandin, p. 148; Johnson 2010, pp. 109–113). The United States and its allies in Europe and else-where in the world have embraced an imperial solution to the threat of terrorism (Calveiro 2012). This would-be anti-imperial imperialism, which fights local acts of terrorism with global terror, obeys a logic that opposes enlightened republican values while doing immeasurable damage to democratic institutions the world over. Visible in the triumph of this globalizing imperialism is nothing less than our meek submission to the imperial ambitions and providential delusions of a scientific and techno-logical culture that conceives enlightenment as a form of liberating mastery.

2.7 grounD Zero

The crusader state envisioned by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, is only the most recent example of America’s providentialist understand-ing of its imperial destiny. Armed with the advanced technology of mod-ern science, the administration set out to “shock and awe” the enemies of America into submission. Significantly, America’s enemies were recon-ceived as comprising an “axis of evil.” So while the overwhelming military power that was brought to bear on these enemies was the product of the


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modern scientific and technological advances made possible by the Enlightenment, the moral and political language that justified the use of this power was decidedly providential. In a speech he delivered on September 16, 2001, President Bush declared that the United States was about to embark on a modern crusade (Bush 2001). It was specifically in defense of the interests of this crusader state that apologists for the Bush administration’s war on terror, such as Paul Wolfowitz, spoke with zealous conviction of the need to cast America’s sovereign power over vast areas of the entire globe and thus create, once and for all, a universal empire of liberty (Immerman 2010).

For its part, the Obama administration demonstrated the truly decep-tive nature of the liberties that this empire helps secure. Whether they be the sort of liberties that financiers, who are “too big to fail” enjoy with aberrant impunity, or the sort that media moguls enjoy when they censor and ideologically spin the news to their own benefit, or the sort that con-sumers enjoy when they unwittingly choose between one genetically mod-ified foodstuff and another, the liberties secured by this self-styled empire for liberty are as morally oppressive as they are politically idiotic. One especially destructive corollary of this deception was the increasingly des-potic liberty with which the Obama administration routinely targeted its enemies, whether foreign or domestic, for surveillance (in the best of cases) or (in the worst cases) for assassination by drones. Indeed, to the extent to which the Obama administration consistently used an anti- imperialist rhetoric of “hope” and “change” while engaging in acts of state-sponsored surveillance and terrorism, it continued to live up to the same standard of contemptuous hypocrisy set by the Bush administration, whose pundits spoke somewhat more openly and brazenly of their inten-tion to wage global war in the name of America’s enduring freedom. The logic at work here was dyslexic, affirming that left is right, peace is war, freedom is slavery. More importantly still, it was nihilistic. It would have us confuse life with death. Such is the tortured logic implicit in the notion that the United States is a republican empire that has been destined by providence to bring an end to empire.

Providential enlightenment justifies US imperial expansion as a means to a noble end: the establishment of a universal republic, which alone will secure a state of perpetual peace and prosperity for all of mankind. Pursuit of this providential ideal has led to a humanitarian crisis the likes of which the world has not seen since the end of World War II. The violence of the global war on terrorism has already displaced more than 60 million peo-

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ple. Add to this the still more massive displacements that have begun to take place around the globe due to industrially induced global warming, and the humanitarian crisis of our day is revealed in all its imperial glory. Continuing blindly down this path, we can be certain that we will reach the only salvation that empire makes possible: the salvation that is obliv-ion: the voided void that is ground zero (Doss 2013, p. 210).

The synthesis of Christian providential thinking and the megamachines of science, technology, and capitalism coincide today with the dissolution of the ideals and values of ethical enlightenment, the integration of all aspects of our individual and collective lives under the rubric of global capitalism, and the celebration of imperial war as the guarantor of an eter-nally peaceful and prosperous end of history. Faced with this unbending and unforgiving nihilism, it would seem that there is not much that is left for us to do but muster the courage to think critically and independently about our imperial past, such that we might encourage others to imagine a fully republican and democratic future: precisely the sort of future that America’s anti-imperialists of the twentieth century, from Twain and James to Mumford and Mills, dared imagine in their own time: the same sort of republican and democratic ideals for which Thomas Paine was ulti-mately censured and condemned. Indeed, it would seem as though that old motto of enlightenment—Sapere aude—still expresses the means by which we can bring a fragile civilization to the otherwise brutal reality of our post-human age of destruction.

notes

1. The Amendment specifically called for “the recognition of the indepen-dence of the people of Cuba, demanding that the government of Spain relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters, and directing the President of the United States to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect” (Congressional Record, p. 4062).

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Weber, Max. 2011. The Protestant Ethic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Weeks, William Earl. 1992. John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire.

Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Zinn, Howard. 2003. People’s History of America. New York: Harper Collins.Zwick, Jim. 1992. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on

the Philippine-American War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.


http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=321

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=321


CHAPTER 3

Enlightenment and Power

Paul Douglas Fenn

“Sometimes the most dangerous man in the room is the one who says everything is going to be alright.”

– Voltaire

“‘God knows,’ exclaimed he, at his wit’s end; ‘I’m not myself – I’m somebody else – that’s me yonder – no – that’s somebody else got into my shoes – I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and

they’ve changed my gun, and every thing’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!’”

– Rip Van Winkle

3.1 The ReinvenTion of eneRgy

The circus-like quality of democracy in America today is at the center of the rot within enlightenment: the pathetic quality of most political life, the illiteracy, the impossibility of cooperation, the incessant posturing of the politically correct, the predominance of borderline personalities in group leadership. The absolute decline and collapse of political literacy in America is due to corporate-owned media and a civil population that is not only uneducated at history but also actively anti-historical, fundamentalist,

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even pagan and narcissistic, to the point of becoming misanthropic and phobic. In effect, the civil population is paranoid, drugged, or actively psychopathic, and the stage of public elections has become a farce beyond imagination: a tunic-wrapped statue of democracy, but not democracy itself. In this cacophony of privacy, the intellectual is urgently needed.

Democracy depends upon the ability of specific intellectuals, with their grand schemes and privileged information garnered from elite sources, to anticipate future events, especially those made possible by the elite conspira-cies that currently constitute legal democracy. By identifying, indeed even lying in wait for, these oligarchic conspiracies, intellectuals can effectively navi-gate the crises within which all great changes occur. Where others are prone to see nothing but the steady and uneventful continuity of the status quo, intellectuals may discern an opportunity for radical and fundamental change.

Indeed, such an opportunity did present itself to me in the early 1990s, when I was informed by elite sources—who ranged in kind from a renowned economics professor at the University of Chicago to the Governor of Massachusetts—that the US electricity industry was about to be deregulated. A “Holy Grail” for neoliberals, who were beside them-selves with glee at the prospect of reinventing the single largest industrial sector as a privatized “Free Market,” this would also prove to be my opportunity not merely to reinvent energy but also, and more impor-tantly, to revitalize democracy at the municipal level. The energy industry was, and still remains, the primary cause behind two of the most intracta-ble challenges facing modern democracy in the world today: greenhouse gas emissions and global nuclear proliferation. So unless we mean to for-feit our chances at democratic self-governance, we must transform the energy industry and free both it and ourselves from Big Government and Big Business. Once I understood that our apparent inability to reinvent energy was fueled by our society’s general disillusionment with democ-racy, I was determined to reinvent them both simultaneously.

At the time, however, I was engaged in the formal study of modern German intellectual history. In particular, I had been studying the prob-lem of racism in trade unions and how this had led to the rise of Nazism. My theoretical premise was, and remains, that “the People” become fas-cists because of the way that Left intellectuals present the world to them antagonistically: as if “the people” were the problem to be solved. During the Cold War, perceiving the horrors perpetrated by Stalin and Mao, Left intellectuals retreated from political agendas and into a position of criti-cism. Under the sway of Adorno’s negative dialectics and the resistance

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theory to which it gave rise, this has continued to be the case even to our day. As a result, negative critique and resistance have become part and parcel of a new democratic fascism: an interminable period of political hypostasis in which the poor vote for neoliberal and imperialistic politi-cians who impoverish them even more: a vortex that has held American politics in place, spinning aimlessly, for over half a century. Breaking this hypostasis through a theoretical project became the focus of my project.

I determined to change my form of writing itself, away from critique, and into a new form. Specifically, I sought a positive form of writing, which I concluded to be the writing of law. I sought to write a law to define and authorize a specific, alternative way of organizing society differ-ent from neoliberal capitalism. I didn’t know what sort of law I should write, nor, obviously, how what it authorized would work.

I was determined to do the opposite, through a protagonistic lens: a “pos-itive dialectic” (Fenn 1991) in which the uneducated common man could see a comprehensible path forward, based not on self- transformation (as in Marx’s class consciousness, Marcusean transformations through sexuality, and many other contemporary variants), but through the constitution of laws to make possible an intuitive comprehension of industrial reality that would lead to the localization of democratic industrial power. My project would create a power that the common, ignorant citizen could hold in his hands.

The result of this intellectual trespass from history and philosophy into politics and energy was Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), which has helped to transform the energy industry across the United States.1 This idea became law first in Massachusetts, then New Jersey and Ohio, and eventu-ally California where, from Humboldt to San Diego, the coast is currently covered with CCAs that have effectively remarried the public and private realms at the municipal level. Facilitating location-based sharing between neighbors—not just a public takeover of energy but a transformation of energy from a centralized supply-side model to a decentralized demand-side model—CCAs assure that infrastructure owners suffer reduced control of decision-making, while “customers” themselves are helped to become owners of their energy. This is a future of energy production and use that is caught between the Cold War archetypes of Big Government and Big Business. It is, however, neither. At scale, Community Choice is achieving a non-incremental transformation of energy economics from central genera-tion to distributed generation, from supply to demand reduction, from fuel to hardware, from state to municipality, and from consumer to owner: in all respects, it constitutes a peaceful revolution in energy and democracy.

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An intellectual reinvention of how energy is owned and controlled has changed the economics of energy and transformed the industry. Originating in a theoretical intention, CCA has involved undertaking a strategy of locutionary and epistemological trespass: a positive dialectics to create laws to give control over energy procurement to local governments, followed by financing authorities to finance citizen-owned local renewable energy and energy efficiency, at so-called distributed scale. By creating these powers, generating political pressure at the local level, fighting bureaucratic inertia, and originating program designs to integrate the components and prove economic and technological feasibility, this posi-tive dialectic has transformed our ability to rapidly reduce carbon emis-sions and progressively green our power supplies.

What is more, CCA has proven new economic possibilities hitherto thought impossible or futuristic by energy industry experts and academic authorities. With no support from academic experts, little from nonprofit foundations, and last of all by industry associations (except a few after it was a fait accompli, and even then regressively-neoliberally),2 CCA has proliferated across thousands of cities and towns based on its intuitive appeal and record of success. An application of philosophy to economics and technology has broken free from the traditional policy options and cost structures of government-owned vs. corporate-owned utilities and suddenly made scaled technological transformations economically feasi-ble. Green power costs that the experts had projected would be higher in fact became lower, with accelerated returns on investment, system cost benefits that were simply never imagined, and social benefits that will redefine utility ownership as local common wealth. Best-case scenarios from economists in the status quo were proven irrelevant, and local gov-ernment action revealed federal and market policies to be superfluous and obsolete.3

Yet, in spite of its evident success, this intellectual and political reinven-tion of the energy industry has met with resistance at every step of the way, from industry specialists to environmental activists, and from economists to local, state, and federal politicians. The success of CCA is not due, in other words, to cooperation, solidarity, and the helping hands of experts. Instead, it owes its success to a positive dialectic that has served to redefine the role of the intellectual in the cultivation of technical and political enlightenment, through a reversal of Adorno’s negative dialectics, starting with a positive act of legislation and followed by a defensive negative dialectic formed around the diachronic localization of policy through implementation of the

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legislation, to which this essay now adds a second negative dialectic toward those same academics, to oppose resistance theory as a form of neoliberal-ism and ultimately imperialism, and academic neoliberals as sleeper cells of a reactionary anti-democratic ideology.

3.2 enviRonmenTalism and Policy collaPse

The “Promethean myth” and the “empire of liberty” produced dysgenic offspring in the variegated crises of the marketplace (Subirats et al. 2017). From climate change to nuclear proliferation, deforestation to species extinction, resistant bacteria to psychotropic drug proliferation, collapsed schools to media consolidation, civic idiocy to identity politics, endless warfare to mounting terrorism—all are extensions of the dialectic of enlightenment into the atmosphere, the ocean, genetic evolution and cul-ture, and so on. At center is a dialectical silence echoing an untenable myth that nation states and the marketplace must define the theater of human history: an empty stage of human culture that has replaced slavery with machines, and democracy with imperialism, knowledge with infor-mation, and political liberty with culture war and overconsumption. As all crises are rooted in a common epiphenomenon, any solution must lie in a transformation of not merely policy but of democracy, economics, and the idea of knowledge as well, as they are practiced throughout our culture. It is up to us: we are today on the cusp of either catastrophe or transforma-tion, the midnight hour at which the Owl of Minerva must finally take flight (Hegel 2001), or every crisis will indeed combine into an epochal, permanent darkness.

Environmentalism, which focuses on the defining epiphenomenon of climate change, is profoundly defensive, dissembling a negative posture toward the world, but falling into it, to a point of myopia. Environmentalists oppose windmills as passionately as a coal plant and smart meters as pas-sionately as nuclear power. Environmentalism is paranoid. Activists run from issue to issue like children at a haunted house, encompassing, ultimately, an existentially passive position: a fixed position in empty time by which the past races ineluctably: Benjamin’s Angelus Novus (1969). Like Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1921), we awaken from a sleep of denial—to regretted oceans, regretted forests, lists of annihilated species, giant indus-trial aberrations, and profoundly undermining trends, as if they had already happened, yet also as if nothing ever happens. Passing seamlessly from denial to resignation, a rising fatalism perceives that an existential condition,


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not actions, condemn humanity to inevitable ruin. Environmentalism is the penultimate pragmatism and utilitarianism, which is to say that it is defined by the absence of theory—by the active trivialization of the idea of nature, which is scaled to the global and inclusive, into the empty concept of “envi-ronment,” which is simply de facto, decontextualized and dehistoricized. Environmentalism is the vision of the dead watching the living in horror. Symbols of a pristine paradise ruined by people regurgitate the Biblical sense of blinded fallen-ness, but with pagan, misanthropic promiscuity.

Energy’s destructiveness is not merely an environmental problem. Ours is a life made intense by compulsive work and consumption, devoted to filling time that has been made empty by systematic social displacements (Gorz 1989). Energy replaced slavery in more ways than one. Big busi-ness, through energy and mineral exploitation, has reinvented the condi-tions of medieval lords, repatriating a new position independent from any democratic government. As with white flight and globalization, under US/UK liberalization and deregulation regimes, corporations have off- shored the wealth of all nations that comply with Pax Americana. Globalization is trade imperialism, and free trade is the global imperialism that it espouses progressively against the slavery-based and metallurgical empires of old.

A financialized feudalism has opposed itself existentially to democracy since World War II: led, ironically, by the United States, which itself is mired in the multiple personality disorder of homeland politics under empire. Free trade agreements have subverted all constitutions and disem-powered all states. Big business, which is the continued force of the de Medici family and the industry that financed the Crusades a millennium ago, has reinvented the medieval land- and violence-centered definition of noble political rights into a contractually centered, financial definition of political rights based on laundered violence. Moreover, Big Business has acquired the Fourth Estate to control political discourse within the democ-racies it has subverted (Bagdikian 1997; McChesney 2004).4

Financial interests represent a new utopia based on commodity fetishism rather than political freedom. Not eliminating slavery, the energy industry has replaced and universalized it as “modernization” with machines and fuels: petroleum, coal, gas, hydro-and nuclear-powered machines. Energy slavery (Illich 1978) defines a new vision of progress erected upon a condi-tion of permanent warfare over fuel resources and imperial corruption of those “cursed” with natural resources (Sachs and Warner, 2001). Energy corporations control the resources in agreements with foreign princes and

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governments. While operating under European and American banners, many are functionally placeless and no longer politically loyal to their mother countries. As with Rome, globalization comes at a price—with new emperors born in the provinces and emergence of imperial disloyalty to one’s somehow reduced homeland (Gibbon 2008).5

Historically, the electricity industry is the hardest industrial sector to change; it is the single largest cause of crises worldwide; and it represents the largest concentration of capital that exists in the world’s economies. Indeed, rather than protect the homeland borders, the control of foreign energy resources and defense of global supply chains defines US military objectives. Nuclear power adds new kinds of domestic and foreign military threats based on the proliferation of nuclear materials in plants and ura-nium enrichment facilities, necessitating a militarization of the homeland, too, where energy is the center of the domestic economy, controlled mostly by monopolies and cartels traded on Wall Street.

The energy industries both cause climate change and actively campaign against anyone who tries to do something about it, leading the Left in a circular dance between bad regulation and criminal deregulation. Resisting or misdirecting technological change for decades, they have corrupted and controlled governments, using extra-constitutional leverage to erect barri-ers to policymakers and competitors who might achieve public technologi-cal objectives inimical to their private interests. This revolt of true elites (Lasch 1996) has produced carbon policy collapse worldwide as well as a rapidly collapsing atmosphere and ocean die-offs from increasing acidity, radiation, and war, and created artificial pressure for nuclear and gas-fired power plant development as “bridge” strategies that are actually off- ramps—political betrayals. Fuel is a destructive business upon which elec-tricity generation was built, but from which local power must now decidedly divorce itself.

Today America is a detritus of failed markets, and Europe continues to imitate American economic policy mindlessly, under the free trade, dereg-ulation, and austerity regimes of the EU. Changes in trade or military policy have become more unthinkable than cultural transformation, world war, or genocide. Facing an eclipse of enlightenment as if suddenly today, Americans and Western Europeans face a crisis in our self-image as cham-pions of freedom and democracy around the world, because we ourselves no longer practice political freedom, nor political democracy (Gilens and Page 2014), at home.


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3.2.1 Energy Fictions

We live within manufactured fictions, and these fictions prevent us from being able to change.

In energy, the predominating fiction is the kilowatt-hour. Samuel Insull (Rudolph and Ridley 1986; McDonald 1962) built the electric industry on selling energy in time—a commodity we have internalized. We pay rates per kilowatt-hour, and regulation of energy costs is focused not on how much we have to pay in our bills but in how these rates are structured and set. When economists assess economic feasibility of technological change, they compare the old with the new in terms of rate savings by the minute. The economics of energy thus rests not on how much energy costs us in our electricity bill each month but on the rates per kilowatt- hour: just one charge or measurement of 8760 hours per year per meter, per building, per block, per substation, per municipal boundary, or per transmission control area. These are nonlinear factors radically impacting actual fixed capital costs: an implicit financialization of need.

Allowing rates to define energy, as if it were paying for gallons, excludes energy efficiency (as unconsumed energy) from the core economic and environmental equations of policymaking and relegates grid energy demand reduction (on-site renewables, efficient appliances) to a mental and administrative ghetto—a welfare program attached by legislatures, but not counting in the customer-facing economics of delivered energy needs. Renewable energy and energy efficiency do not require commodity fuels: reducing demand for energy is not counted in “rates,” which define the supply-side ideology underlying energy economics.

The United States has built a kingdom of fictions upon Insull’s founda-tional fiction. Having a flawed, supply-centric idea of what energy is, all of our concepts and laws concerning changing energy have had to be fictions too. In the fiction that electrical transmission has enabled, we have a time-less concept of energy as something that is omnipresent and constant, rather than the product of a fire that is burning somewhere and fuel extracted somewhere else that is being pumped into that fire—and con-sumed. The kilowatt-hour facilitates this fiction by reproducing the struc-ture of fuel combustion in a charge-per-minute. It is a fiction that obliterates energy literacy and marginalizes fuel-free technologies, particu-larly those that may be installed behind the meter and outside an incum-bent monopoly utility system’s infrastructure. Rates are thus a reification of corporatism itself.

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Throughout the world, green power is defined by two policies: Feed-In Tariffs (or less generous Net-Metering Tariffs) and Renewable Energy Certificates. Both are neoliberal, growth imperative-sustaining fictions designed to accommodate a supply-centric system that will not change but merely be added to. Under such tariffs, utilities pay a consumer who elects to install solar panels on her rooftop for the power that is generated, as if it were to feed into the utility’s electrical transmission grid. Marketing materials say the utility will pay you for your power, that your meter will run backward, which it does, this fiction of supply, like water as it were, this metaphor of physical flow. Intuitively it seems real, yet it is another financial fiction: a mechanistic arms-length effort to cooperate with soci-ety anonymously under engineered conditions of location neutrality, under which actual physical cooperation with community members has been systematically rendered uneconomical (Fenn et al. 2011).

To understand the fiction of price itself, one must acknowledge the challenge. The tariff is inherently cost-imposing on transmission and dis-tribution, but causes no impact upon generation. Tariffs require no changes in the utility system itself, no reduction in fuel procurement, no reduction in spinning reserves or idling power plants that ramp up and down based on fluctuating system demand. It requires no change at all; the random, non-engineered principle of deployment and technology selection has resulted in a machine-gunning of solar panels strewn across the landscape. Not one iota of design was used to match intermittency of capacity, which is utterly predictable for renewable resource technologies like solar photovoltaics, with the known schedule of demand for any given customer at any given location—facts known to both the utility monopoly and the customer. Most solar systems are installed on homes that are empty between 10am and 4pm each day, when solar panels generate power. Tariffs impose a degenerate timelessness under which yet another commodity form supplants actual redesign of the resource (Hopper 2008), with a distorted, ineffective physical impact on known, geographi-cally specific patterns of energy consumption during the night and morn-ing vs. during the day.

The blindness of tariffs results in a double cost: the cost of paying for the solar and the cost of upgrading transmission systems to export on-site solar power. A blind selection of technology and location has de facto forced local phenomena into export transactions that constitute the ulti-mate neoliberal method of “prosperity.” The customer must ultimately pay twice, while the utility has arranged to suffer no loss of revenues from


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reduced sales. The result is an apparent fiction that renewable energy is high cost, and ultimately a decision to discontinue renewables develop-ment, raise rates (Spiegel Staff 2013), or reopen coal mines to close nuclear plants (Le Blond 2015), or vice-versa.

Adding resources in a symbolic, ineffective way is another case of cut-ting the baby in half: give politicians (and voters) what they want, which is sacrificial expenditures on solar panels as spectacles of change, while not actually changing anything at all at the system level—no reduced budgets for substations and transmission lines based on reduced system demand, no reduced fuel sales for gas and coal companies, no degrowth, and no substantial decarbonization of energy. Everyone is happy in this bloated national fiction of greenness: a simulation that ironically represents the greenest strategy available to mainstream policymakers. This is policy col-lapse under an unquestioned regime of naïve economism.

But there is nothing unique in the comforts of fiction. Even solar lead-ers are guilty of solar tokenism or charity—not re-engineering the grid utility to accommodate operational management of intermittent resources, storage, and demand levels, but randomly placing solar panels according to isolated consumption decisions upon a network of raging fire: a spend-ing of money, a statute, or idol, not an integrated resource displacing grid supply. The industry is intellectually trapped in (and dependent upon) this two-dimensional metric universe, siloed in feudal dependencies upon the energy monopolies, each naïvely accepting its trap as a “business model.”6

Western democracies are proceeding with climate change along lines that obey this fiction and pretend a solution may be found that does not require physical change, only piecemeal additionality. We ignore the dif-ference between policies that turn off fossil plants and policies that do not turn them off. We implicitly exclude scenarios where the owners of legacy power plants and transmission infrastructure may be stranded, even bank-rupted, and instead pour billions of dollars on supply-centric schemes of renewables development that only compound the claims of economists that any real change will result in higher prices. It is all an outrageous fic-tion: a political charade, expressing only an inability to make decisions within zero-sum games. Unless something has to give, the rhetoric of change is all much ado about nothing.

The lie is that technology decides our fate, not politics. The lie is that markets exist independently of government, like the water that fish inhabit, and cannot be questioned. Yet research conducted on California cities and counties by this project that analyzed detailed, previously unavailable,

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customer meter data, as well as system-level aggregated demand data, and geographically specific renewable generation data has proven clearly that much greater change is achievable economically, without higher electric bills or even higher rates (Local Power 2008a, b, 2013a). But all of this is possible only with the political adoption of the policy structure based on a determination to bring about real change irrespective of damage to the incumbent monopolies (Local Power 2013b). Given this political will, the energy system of any city or county can be physically transformed over a five-year period without increasing the cost of energy, presenting a scaled opportunity to achieve region-wide greenhouse gas reductions without higher rates or taxes: the two conventional choices that voters and decision- makers face and typically refuse to make.

The fictions upon which policy discourse is constructed also support the fictions that comfort people. The idea of solar power has its appeal in some latent paganism: a desire to return to the sun. The idea that we can power our lives on the sun is symbolically beautiful and elegant. But it is irrespon-sible. Renewable resources are prolific, each with its own temporal pattern of generation and demand levels. Locational energy demand has a corre-sponding, temporal intermittency, and these patterns must be matched by rationally chosen technologies. Some communities have lots of daytime commercial energy use; other communities have a strictly nighttime resi-dential need pattern. Conversely, every location in the world has a unique pattern of renewable resources: some have year-round sunlight; some have windy areas, biomass waste from farms, waste heat from commercial boil-ers, ocean waves, underground geothermal heat, or rivers; and each one of these resources occurs intermittently at different times of any given day. Our transcendent, import-oriented system ignores this problem and oppor-tunity to integrate technologies locally to create benefits at the meter, sub-station, and commodity electricity market cost patterns. In a market equation of producers and consumers, the reality of community is simply ignored. Producers have the prerogatives of ownership and consumers merely of infantile, uninformed “choices”: the Astroturf paradise of neolib-eralism. Whereas tariff programs appeal to the sun worshipper by encourag-ing her to select her favorite goddess, and the utility will pay her a credit to make it seem real, there is no consideration given to the pattern of life in a home or business, a block, a neighborhood, a city—in deciding which tech-nologies are best suited to a place and way of life. Trapped in a fiction of pagan fetishes, there is no enlightenment: only a hermetic symbolism facili-tated by state-sanctioned fictions—a virtual displacement of reason itself.


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Chaos results from even the best-intentioned state-mandated igno-rance. Germany reached its limit of randomly inserted renewables in the mid-20 percentiles, meaning that its ability to afford grid upgrades reached its limit when renewables deployed in this mindless way reached about 25% of the power generation.7 For example, American utilities are demand-ing ratepayers pay for huge transmission upgrades claiming it must have them, and consumers must pay higher rates and new “access charges” if governments insist upon higher levels of renewable supply. It is all a cha-rade of stasis: an oligarchic resistance to change and a failure of democra-cies to force it.

Research indicates that the limit of a designed (vs. marketed) approach that builds portfolios from the ground up rises from 25% to 80% without increasing the cost of service and is achievable in a five- to ten-year period vs. a 50-year period. This is real change: massive greenhouse gas cuts and permanently reduced physical system demand, a leap out of the limited market fictions that cripple energy and climate policy today.

The climate debate pretends that the ability to change is a problem of the cost of technology—the price of solar power vs. the price of coal-fired power. Price is the ultimate fiction, a yawning apology fixed in a naïve rhetoric to the effect that the people, not the corporations, cannot afford change. Our civil society is trapped in an absurd fiction: a protection racket. The extortionist would suggest that you could stop smoking with-out harming the tobacco companies, who must naturally be entrusted with reducing smoking: such is an industry-dominated energy policy. Unless those fires go out, climate change goes on. Yet climate change is a zero-sum game: nature does not lie!

3.2.2 Economics and Price Theory

Price theory is the ultimate fiction at the center of American market fun-damentalism. The moral equivalent of a national religion, it functions as an inquisition of sorts that is determined to root out all heresy. Economists who talk about price are hired cowards paid to model strictly market con-ditions in which government does not participate meaningfully. This ruse governs all energy and climate policy. The economist’s comparison of the price of solar power vs. coal power or wind vs. gas-fired plants presents a myth. Economists are ciphers, like the oracle of Delphi, enforcing their powerful gods, regarding market structures as recreating the conditions of natural species competition, in a mechanical system of perfect balance

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(Mirowski 2002). With Pavlovian optimism, they assume that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds (Voltaire 1991). Naïveté, for this brand of coward, is an acceptable innocence from human responsibility to others. Although governments can accomplish things economically that mere businesses cannot achieve, such as accelerated regional transformation of their energy utility systems, which is the simplest description of climate action, still, economists demur, the market will not sustain these transformations.

Market fundamentalism is intellectually debilitating to experts who analyze the economic feasibility of climate solutions. This fact particularly harms the prospects for change in the energy sector, because it is a trading system that creates artificial, harmful, prejudicial conditions that favor the current owners of power infrastructure. Central to its prejudice is the treatment of “location neutrality” within global or supra-regional market structures as objective conditions that cannot be questioned—the manu-factured culture of globalization designed by governments to eliminate competitive disadvantages (like import tariffs, subsidies, or point-of-origin labeling) to create an artificially level-playing field for non-local competi-tion. Location neutrality is the policy container of incentive mechanisms invented to replace local control and regulation. Following the work of Chicago economist Ronald Coase (Coase 1937) in the 1950s, the federal government legalized the future trading of pollution permits as a policy to incent power plant corporations to reduce pollutions. 8 Sulfur dioxide trading in the 1990s was followed by carbon-trading markets, displacing traditional regulatory proposals to simply cap pollution, or tax carbon, or simply mandate change. Mandates to reduce pollution at home were con-travened by policies to create market economies in China and the Third World, funneling investment into overcentralized, foreign owned, and ecologically destructive technologies like coal power plants and nuclear plants—often with putatively “environmental” intentions.

Emission trading based on Coase’s theories was a leading facilitator of location-neutral structures to reduce pollution within “markets,” followed by Renewable Energy Credits (“RECs”), which allow purchases of certifi-cates to own renewable resources as a trading-based upstream incentive for renewables development. Cap-and-trade systems proposed by Republicans in the 1990s and today championed by Democrats represent the triumph of location neutrality in American political discourse. Pax Americana is a sacrifice of local democracy and local economies for cheap global commodities.


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Location neutrality harms and blocks the economics of carbon reduc-tion. In defining pricing systems for electric utilities, location neutrality has erased the legal and delivery-subsidized difference between green power from huge wind farms transmitted across hundreds or thousands of miles of often newly built steel with fossil backup generators and, in the opposite geophysical extreme of solar power panels, located on business rooftops or heating and light automation standardized in all homes, which are technologies that eliminate the need for grid transmission. Location neutrality thus eliminates the natural economic advantages of being local—of not needing transportation. Economists’ cost comparisons treat both simply as energy supply, comparing the cost of solar power to coal power apple-to-apple. On the pretext of creating a market for green power defined de facto as centralized renewables at greenfield sites that add cost and wealth to the monopolies, rather than reducing demand through localization, demand reduction, locational integration and sharing, renew-able technologies are forced into a monolithic format with compounded costs and profits, built-in. Claiming footprint “scale” is necessary for cost effectiveness, additional transmission is required for centralized solar or wind farms, increasing the need for backup (gas-fired) power to support intermittent renewable technologies on the overall grid systems. Indeed, policies to create markets for demand reduction based on maximizing proximity of load and capacity are deferred or forgotten, in effect creating a protection racket for the grid owners, whose obsolete infrastructure is in fact causing climate change. In short, the economist’s cowardice dictates that we can’t solve our problems until the polluters get (unconsciously) paid for their losses: that is why, ultimately, economists predict higher “costs” for any big switch to green power.

Large corporations win in centralized, extremely complex parallel tracks: they can draft or subvert regulation, corrupt governments and sup-press competition, and do it routinely to benefit their stockholders. Location neutrality in energy policy (same charges no matter if a facility is distant from or close to demand) is globalization: markets redesigned by government to eliminate the advantages that local producers have over foreign competitors, which are redefined as “unfair” or “discriminatory.” Massive government subsidies to importers are, conversely, held as perma-nent and unquestionable.

As an extension of trade globalization, government permit trading mar-kets is, as an ecological solution, simply Orwellian in its dyslexia. Indeed market fundamentalism engenders blithe appropriations of the very values

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it systematically destroys. As with thinkers like Stewart Brand et al. (2015), who applaud nuclear energy, global urbanization and genetically modified crops as the new solutions to our problems, and turncoat ecologists like the Breakthrough Institute (Nordhaus and Schallenberger 2007) encour-age environmentalists to “embrace your monsters,” Renewable Energy Credits, Net-Metering and Feed-In Tariffs, and Carbon Credit Trading have become the ruling (neoliberal) paradigm for American utility regula-tion and policy concerning the need to accelerate green energy and deliver greenhouse gas reductions. Coase’s original concept of a tradable credit mechanism embraced by “Left” politicians in recent decades is a mental prison that reifies deregulated, location-neutral markets as the inevitable and unquestionable provider of global human needs. As this structure becomes ever more reified, the radical transformation of values approaches a crescendo of misanthropic utopianism.

The realm of the possible was defined by the concept of economic (and technical) feasibility, deeply seated in an implicit theory of price, and this situation served to define the deliberate a priori policy of delocalization. The idea of the cost of energy is thus a massively compounded reification of the commodity form, to use a critical concept from György Lukács (1971). Much as governments have long given irrational advantages and subsidies to oil and gas corporations that make fossil fuel prices inexpen-sive, or ignored the military costs of protecting overseas fossil resources and supply chains in their cost analyses, so the rules for measuring the value of solar to the grid are defined in terms of the grid owner’s legacy infrastructure cost recovery. Economists’ energy cost models are defined by financial algorithms of funding streams determined by government subsidy and program guidelines; all of which treat market structure ques-tions as fixed based on extant configurations of supply and infrastructure. Implicitly this assumes the American corporatist model made manifest as a putatively objective technological reality that must wait for corrective measures irrespective of political imperatives such as climate collapse.

3.2.3 Activism

With very few exceptions, activists are the cultural and political corollaries of economists: unconsciously trapped within market fundamentalism since the Cold War discredited Marxism, they have grown anti-theoretical and ahistorical. With profound consequences, the narrowly defined “issue” politics they pursue has broken public discourse into fetish causes and


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identity circuses. Intellectuals must eek out independent moral territory within civil society, moving beyond traditional roles that champion the masses or advise the powerful. In particular, they must learn to navigate the naïve, minnow-filled waters of professional activism.

The separation of sovereignty from property (Anderson 1974) under Pax Americana effectively divided communication from governance and political activism from political theory. In the absence of theory jettisoned by Cold War America, movements have been reduced to sentimental pas-sion plays, defined either by distress and fear or by a religiously centered, utopian hope. Lacking the culture that results from theoretical discourse between intellectual and democratic civil societies, movements (whether they be political or aesthetic) are the fictions invented by activists, to create the appearance of mass behavior. Because the government is conditioned to follow financial interests unless there is mass behavior and an issue appears on the news, activists resort to a diluted form of Sorelian mythmaking9 to simulate the appearance of a mass movement. Ours is firmly a society of spectacle (Debord 2006; Subirats et al. 2017). Each calendar year activists resort to a ritual shadow puppetry of press releases, press conferences, and parades of rotating volunteers at which a show of support will have influ-ence on disembodied political outcomes. This is supposed to pass for par-ticipatory democracy around the edges of a firmly entrenched oligarchy.

Knowing little about the past and clinging like true believers (Hoffer 2010) to whatever issue they have grabbed onto through passion or con-venience, the professional activist is instinctively mistrustful of the intel-lectual as a would-be guru: a de facto heretic or pretender for canonization status. Even the best activists are unreliable under the pressure of any actual decision-making or exercise of power in the tenor of those key final moments of debate that define the making of law. Like the hymn singing of England’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century protestant rebels (Bernstein 1963), only a shared coherent vision could sustain them through battle: sentiments are insufficient. Fatigued with the transcendent epiphanies of political sausage-making and uncurious, they would close their eyes, remain paranoid, caught between their loyalty to a person and their religion-based conception of politics and philosophy. Reduced to consumers, American mass society could not tolerate the words of any man but the TV bigshots, and the university men 70 years after World War II are yet one step further removed from power, because the politician is laughing behind the shield of the activist, the new bishop or monk, who would protect him from the public.

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On the other hand, the activist has lust for conviction, which is the satisfaction of doubts remaining against their latest cause célèbre. The activist triages intellectuals into the process. As long as the intellectual’s ideas are not yet triumphant and widely recognized, the activist will palm the intellectual in friendly genuine intellectual curiosity. There is after all nothing to lose! It is like doing homework with a smarter, scrawnier schoolmate and condescending to the inferior role temporarily in order to avoid any actual work. Given these limitations, the intellectual’s efforts to participate in politics must be channeled through the defensive line of nonprofit corporations that preside over the disasters of our time like rep-resentatives, not of people, but of “issues” or “communities”: the building blocks, that is, of identity politics and postmodernism in modern politics. Worse, identity politics has itself replaced philosophical discourse as the grammar of politics. No longer is a broader vision of any given issue neces-sary. Each issue carries its own vision of the future and is asymmetrically competing with all other issues. Air quality vs. food costs are placed into competition with each other, with retail politics largely defining the flavor of the month. Within the united cause of a Climate March, protestors avoided discussion of fracking, nuclear power, smart meters, and deregula-tion, in order to avoid being divided—but by doing so evacuate their plaintive demands of any specific content or pertinence.10 On the other hand, between different causes that might be called public, a universal segmentation of causes ensues: consumer advocates, environmental advo-cates, race advocates, sex advocates, animal rights advocates, species advo-cates, ad nauseam, compete for predominance in a long line of beggars, and divide the public pie into contending factions. The public must choose between fish and people, security and freedom, unions and schoolchil-dren, and so on. Activists defined by and organized around particular “issues” are the most narrow-minded of priests: the narrow specialty of their issues is like a Latin mass before the peasants, yet their opaque tech-nical authority is a worshipper of relics, absent of any unifying god.

In politics, the activist holds the empty pedestal role of the absent intel-lectual, stripped of any coherent historical consciousness. Representing one insular cause or another, the activist’s work is dedicated in corporate char-ters whose narrowness recommends them to large financial institutions that fund them in return for political reliability and federal tax exemptions, origi-nally created for churches, which they resemble in attitude. The intellectual entering politics interferes with this profession insofar as it involves making speeches or negotiating on behalf of the unrepresented in a legislative or


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government oversight process. Those very few activists who are intellectuals with a coherent theoretical history and pursuit may be ethical and even capable journalistically in forming an opinion about an “issue” (which is always decided a priori, with the activists merely participating like nurses in the emergency room who respond to their patient’s heart attack), and they may be ethically reliable, versed, and wise in their engagement of policy on an issue (being on the radical side for America’s white-bread politics), yet virtually none of them is uniquely committed to historical truth in the man-ner of an intellectual, which is to say, truth as inalienable work. Limited to beliefs and values, and averse to conflicts of interest or other confusing fac-tors that are seductive to many other types of people, activists are another brand of eunuch.

The typical activist’s unique occupational hazard is in direct proportion to his lack of intellectual foundation. Because activists, as a rule, were not taught history early in life, they can only acquire it piecemeal at airport book shops, reading industrially processed bungo-juice thought and leadership- speak—which is to say, they run from ad to ad, chase every ambulance, the latest cause and subcause, grasp and wax eloquent on details of the politics like a government stenographer or born-again preacher. At best a pastiche, in short, they remain fixed in pagan distrac-tion upon the abstract plain that constitutes the battlefield of civil dis-course in Western democracies.

Without theory, there can be no intellectual engagement of politics. Instead, sentimental groups form around so-called issue politics. Because issue politics only involves award of rights and privileges to people, the resulting government actions and programs conform to the limits placed on it by presidentially sponsored free trade agreements. It all stays in the proverbial box. Activism of this sort, while it assumes to be resisting the powers of globalization, is actually promoting the same values that neolib-eral globalization celebrates. Domestic activism within an imperial home-land is inevitably naïve and/or utopian.

At the local level, the confusion of activists is even more obscene. There is a flurry of effort to label or ban genetically modified food or establish democratic control of energy. But while these activists rally around their local, organic, farmer’s market, at the federal level, we have an unending centralization of power that daily circumscribes democracy in the name of empire. Another religious passion during an epochal crisis.

These trade agreements, circumscribing and vetoing fundamental state and local authorities to protect the public, are singularly concerned with

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causing more global economic displacement and accommodating dis-placed, immigrant populations, and normalizing a condition of displace-ment that empire constantly effectuates, both in the territories and the so-called Homeland. The empire holds up the rights of people to be dis-placed and shames the population into accommodating refugees, rather than change the global trade and subservient political systems that dis-placed them. Activism should instead honor the right of return and pro-mote local agricultural and industrial self-reliance, but this runs against the grain of sacredly held imperial aspirations reminiscent of the conquistador priests: freedom is the new universal principle of globalization.

3.2.4 Impotent Movements

The intellectual must stand in a distant and ironic relationship to activists and the so-called masses alike. The idea of a movement is flawed, because it assumes a confluence between the success of an idea to propagate and result in profound or substantive change and the success of its author to inspire the loyalty of followers. If I win, the movement wins. In concept, the world is hardest to influence; but the success of political theorists in politics, while rare, is not nonexistent. Still in reality, it is much harder to command loyalty than it is to influence thought. Like birds, people mimic what they hear, and in America’s empty civil society, a tiny super-minority of Americans participates directly in state legislatures and city halls. Unlike birds, people tend to oversimplify and ruin it. In this environment of pol-icy committee hearings, public interests are routinely represented by a handful of poorly paid people, while a slightly larger cadre of well-paid shills for organized commercial interests quietly dominates. The emptiness of the room is the opportunity of the powerless: a “boredom doctrine” of sorts. Ironically, in the empty room of American politics, the individual has power among the jaded men who hire themselves out to the corporations.

Whereas activists have rallies or meetings with decision-makers and issue press releases, localist advocacy establishes a firmer foundation for political power in state and congressional hearings through pressure on state legislative delegations. If municipalities are brought into state legisla-tive hearings, and bring adopted resolutions on policy matters into forums otherwise dominated by incumbent interests, a second level of public influence is achieved, and local democratic interests can easily (and did) trump the most powerful corporations, even in the largest industrial


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concentrations such as electricity. This does not require a movement, because there is so little civic activity at most municipal and state legislative hearings and meetings, and widespread illiteracy about energy and other large centralized industries.

Our democracy is a theater of the emptiness of Enlightenment. The figure of the Apollonian leader is a Lord of the Flies (Golding 1954)—a figure of faith before true believers who have gone back to the bush but cling to any symbol of their displaced civil conscience. The theater of poli-tics, whether federal, state or local, is a poiesis in which the soul of mankind is lost through sentimental attachment to the priestly power of elected senators and representatives. Greek-style democracy is yet as unrealized as Christianity. Psychologically, these would-be enlightened leaders are invariably extroverts, grasping for normative foundation in the effluvium of daily events. Overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of managing an empire and a republic, elected representatives are like spies behind enemy lines. They are vulnerable to depression, dissociation, sudden con-versions, and outbursts of disorientation and betrayal. The word “leader” is ruined: its exemplars are not unlike the worst memories of the school-yard. They are the eternal ones of the dream (Róheim 1945).

In this cold tarmac of badly shared fate, elected officials loiter through the passport agency of the extroverted soul. Elected officials who pass as progressive in Democratic cities or counties vary in form from the empty cipher to the overambitious megalomaniac. They are hungry for celebrity and popularity. By winning election, they are injected with the paranoid fantasy of the ancient Greek demigod. Those few who have spent decades in isolation preparing complex stratagems of policy are blown across oceans of conviction by the winds of public opinion. It goes to their heads. They say that power corrupts, and yea, power corrupts basely, in the form of the senator selling a vote; but, more fundamental to democracy theory, power corrupts the simple intellectual faculty of curiosity into a gibbering and cowardly pietism: power is too great for just a few men. Overwhelmed by the fatigue of overcentralized power, an objective awe overtakes the opinionated Philosophe or forces higher minds into more specific cam-paigns. For the intellectual, this power is kept remote in the determination to remain independent and to enjoy unrestrained control over one’s pub-lic statements.

This ability to steer the activity of politics toward specific outcomes is as good as it gets for intellectuals. Surrounded by the courtesans of activism, the propagator of political theory on the public stage gathers no supporters,

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only enemies. This is the central irony within the failure to bring about a movement: the people who agree with the ideas, and who are empowered to realize their possibility and project their potential benefits, passively accept the information across the ionosphere of public discourse; yet they fear, even deride, the source of the information. They will repeat his ideas to others, but laundered of its origin. From a traditional concept of move-ments, leadership is simply impossible, underscoring the importance of an effectual local intelligentsia in municipal democracy. To repeat: civil soci-ety is highly susceptible to organized principled effort, but the ideas do not result in loyalty and therefore do not take on the characteristics of a movement. Within a merely sentimental politics, the center does not hold. The intellectual’s role does not depend upon this movement and should not be confused with it. Shunning and punishing leaders, these interlocu-tors would kill the architects of their pyramids, because they want to become the leaders, who are the apologists for and champions of every political outcome. However diluted or worthless, a victory must be announced daily so that platitudes may be kept aloft.

3.2.5 The Public Intellectual

Intellectuals must populate the empty amphitheater of American activism. We must disengage from the nation as a mere part of the empire aka “economy” and redesignate states as the organic and historical municipal foundation of all democracy. We must countermand nations as conquering empires and make empires obsolete.

America11 is a republic of displaced peoples. A social incoherence results from the problem of American loyalty in relation to the practice of political theory, and specifically the problem of civil cooperation in the absence of shared cultural institutions: the American “melting pot” dream of global displacement that was just a commercial for an imperial utopia selling glo-balization as cultural progress. Indeed, the politics of republics today are, as a rule, apocalyptically incoherent. Unreflectingly, the allies of the Philosophe will propagate language in a permanent renaissance of unending novelty forcing a serial amnesia: Eduardo Subirats’s grammatology and propaganda (Subirats et al. 2017). Since the new must dominate politics, changes that take time must be repeatedly reinvented as novel. This is because nothing has ever happened in the Left in our lifetimes, where activists have been conditioned to imitate the boom and bust circular saw of Cold War group dissembling of catastrophe and social revolution.


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Intellectuals must keep distant from those who seek to be leaders, because they are so aggressive and intrinsically dishonest according to their dyslexic, paranoid psychological role in society: a policeman arche-type. The application of theory to contemporary historical phenomena constitutes an action of intellectual trespass that ultimately rubs the world of funded NGOs and government bureaucrats the wrong way, causing them to criminalize and marginalize the trespasser, while they simultane-ously mimic, appropriate, and co-opt his grammar, slowly acquiescing to his architecture. There is no enemy like the political ally, due to the fact that the normative identification of ideas is distinctly paranoid and only semiconscious in a psychologically extroverted process.

Intellectuals cannot be leaders in this environment, and should not seek to become leaders, because leaders do not lead; they are the representatives of the status quo Zeitgeist, intellectually and morally. Like bacteria, they network their way to high positions in order to preside over things as supe-riors whose good judgment qualifies them for leadership. They are as de-barred judges and de-frocked bishops, but they do not have good judgment. So our government keeps failing over and over again in a schoolyard scene of bully and coward. It fails because of leadership battles among the true believers and scoundrel mimickers who become elected officials. Crises occur and new ideas come forward.12 Intellectuals can fill this gap between oligarchy and the demos not merely through critique (which is necessary) but also through the development of a savoir faire or know- how through a radically (dialectically received) interdisciplinary epistemology.

3.3 democRaTic oRiginaTion

The intellectual naturally occupies a third position apart from seeking leadership or serving it. It is not the position of a hero, who sacrifices or risks sacrificing himself for the emperor or for the people (a terrorist). Democracies, being ruled by ideas, are the natural province of intellectu-als. Legislation, the writing of laws, is the prerogative of any citizen, but uniquely dependent upon knowledge exposed to the material and struc-ture of human endeavor: it is all-encompassing, the castles of knowledge for the Renaissance Man, law defines language.

Indeed civil society cannot function without intellectual prompting, interpretation, and criticism. The intellectual’s third position between the mob and state power is ephemeral, anarchic, and individualistic. It results from an independence from power and powerlessness that aligns the soul

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to truthfulness and a clarity of thought and purpose that is independent of consensus or anticipation of agreement from others. In the manner of an artist, the intellectual may govern the metaphysics of politics and may guide and shape its physics as well.

The prejudices of modernism and the naïveté of postmodernism both deny that knowledge formation is paramount in democracy: it is just a process in empty time. The third position of intellectuals between the masses and political and economic elites places the intellectual in a dual negative dialectical relationship with both the powerful and the powerless. The intellectual cannot lead the powerless, whose inherently limited infor-mation makes them immune to theory; the intellectual must undertake an ongoing negative critique of his true believers and shepherd them trau-matically: to watch their parents (government and author) fighting. As Nietzsche said: “(t)he man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends (1883).” His work may be compared to Plato’s cave, except by priests of democracy rather than ciphers of power. In order to provide material for debate, the intellectual must toler-ate social isolation. He must not pat his would-be allies on the back, but offer unrestrained negative criticism of both allies and opponents in the skirmishes of success, when one has won politically and may now govern. The relationship to both the powerful and powerless that an intellectual must have is therefore ambivalent and cannot be consummated by union with the true believers who have taken up his flag. He must remain inde-pendent and negatively critique his own creations, as allies inevitably choose dead ends. This predictably leads to his marginalization by allies even as he must face enemies—alone, progressing in sequence of scriptural production from concept to execution.

The independent intellectual is needed in politics. An elite remnant of the past it is, but without it democratic politics is in a stupor, lacking ideas and ruled utterly by manipulators of Plato’s cave—public relations propaganda, delivered by the media cartel. With intellectuals, political and economic localization becomes possible: specifically, the power of histori-cally relating phenomena in advance of the general population and reshap-ing the immediate future structure of any industry through laws, regulations, ordinances, resolutions, plans, models, designs, contracts. In their absence, the corporations have repurposed the techniques of past intellectuals for domination.

The action of positive dialectics creates needed framing documents of democratic power that can only be invented in the minds of intellectuals,


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and not any automatic process as imagined by leadership-phobic “Occupy” rally choreographers (Fenn 2013). Democracy is founded upon the fram-ing documents of individuals, not group consensus, which apes ancient Greek ideals of participation of which modern citizens are incapable, espe-cially in the increasingly complex technological world that the Enlightenment has brought about. Ideas in politics must be revealed, if they are to be revealed at all, to others out of the know and in a top-down process, admittedly aristocratic in part, but necessary for voters, activists, bureaucrats, and politicians to navigate past the Sirens of Wall Street. Things have to be set up so the people can support or oppose it in undi-luted form.

This third position is, specifically, democratic origination: legislation, or legism. It is a direct action of self-governance. Intellectuals are needed to create the originating documents of a localized democratic polity, and democracies need intellectuals to know how to understand what is going on in politics, and what we should do. A new economy needs a political coefficient. The presence of intellectuals creates the “we” in We the People, and American naïveté and jingoism reflect the intellectuals’ with-drawal into sibilant, acidic, anti-idealistic criticism that is truly religious in its maudlin misanthropy.

Society needs not more criticism but civil self-governance. Without clear origination of new local law, there is no foundation for civil dis-course. Without intellectual ambivalence between powerful and power-less, there is no anchor for civil literacy, truthfulness, and shared technical know-how among the activists and semi-idiotic half-interested majority. It is imbalance that Montesquieu feared: the despotism of republics (1748). Without the aristocratic presence of intellectual demonstration, founda-tion, and context, the common citizenry are but prey to their technically fortified enemies. The consequences are known: bully and coward, slave resentment of masters (Nietzsche 1887), shock and awe (Klein 2007). The obscene absence of intellectuals threatens democracy, and with it the enlightenment itself: Adorno’s nightmare.

The civic intellectual would re-enter society, not as a humiliated plebe-ian but as an elite alienated from and hostile to power: as one who knows the truth and would proceed wisely in self-government. As American soci-ety became focused on climate change and the energy industry that causes it, the people could be easily focused on the idea as a critical mass—the activists, primarily, make up this critical mass, standing in the traditional verbal role of intellectuals in a public speaking environment.

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They are like the Children’s Crusade, wandering off to their deaths in the name of Jerusalem. It is a kind of twilight of the ideals, following the idols, as it were, for a society to render its citizens psychotically incapable of thought. This social inhibition against thought is caused by the absence of intellectuals in democratic self-governance. Thus there is no glue bind-ing the issues into a coherent frame or epiphenomenon that creates per-spective, depth, wisdom: judgment. Critique is in magazines and on television, where discourse is limited to what is talked about: power. Outside of power, criticism is not power itself and has no power. Politics is the forum for intellectual reappearance. But we must reappear with more respect for the limitations of our role. We must not seek to become politi-cal leaders, nor to become influential with public officials, but to partici-pate strictly through dialectical engagement. We must not form or join organizations, but limit our participation to conceptual origination, tech-nical articulation, and propaganda.

However, this writing must employ two other activities in order to make it possible to actually bring about a new alternative future in which US imperialism ends and localized economies and democracies become capable of rebalancing ecology and ending mass migrations. We must learn to manage things locally and eliminate the need for centralized power. The first action is to employ Adorno’s negative dialectics to decon-struct corporate resistance to the proposed change and educate activists to mobilize against them, in the negative manner described also by Elias Canetti (1984). But secondly, following this and often in conflict with it, the intellectual must turn critic of his own followers, the local democra-cies, because their bureaucrats and dependent elected officials inevitably compromise and bastardize implementation of legislation (being complex, connecting multiple knowledges, and requiring savoir faire), as the gov-ernment officials are typically merely using the intellectual as a metaphor by which to achieve something that is … ah, lesser by a long shot—as C. Wright Mills said some 70 years ago in his famous essay on the social role of the intellectual (2008).

This gives the lie to Machiavelli’s Prince: the intellectual can only edu-cate the powerless against the powerful, not advise the powerful. As the supporters of an idea push the intellectual’s vision on the government, they identify with the powers of government as positive, forgetting, as an intellectual would never do, the problematic rationality of government officials in America, and the officious hostility of government officials to intellectuals as (unauthorized) witch doctors. True believers vacillate


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between the idols of the market and government; anxious for moral direc-tion, they depend upon but grow increasingly uncomfortable with intel-lectual criticism of the government that they are in fact seeking to empower. Absent this intellectual agony, policy collapse follows inevitably in a cul-ture of party consensus and infantile morality—intolerant of complexity and fainting toward incoherent compromise.

3.3.1 Epistemic Trespass

Technical enlightenment involves a trespass between poiesis and techne—a philosophical mastering and subversion of technical disciplines—and requires unauthorized, unsupervised, and uncertified field research as an a priori condition of positive dialectics. Intellectual trespass involves a pro-gression through a series of formal areas of expertise, learning and per-forming within technical, exclusive, hermetic specializations.13 The intellectual must sequentially acquire prowess in what are regarded as unrelated specialties in order to be able to define scriptural objects or leg-islations: a constructed coherence of the incoherent upon a complex but intuitive, transparent foundation enables democratic governance. Eliminating industrial firewalls, the positive dialectician retranslates tech-nical complexity into a political meaning that is within the intuitive grasp of the citizen: a service that is sorely missing in a privatized, pay-to-play civil society that has disabled industrial self-governance. Moreover, the intellectual must remain committed to a libertarian-collectivist dialectic, steering technological development toward a new localism.

Intellectual participation in politics a la Benjamin or the circumscribed participation of C. Wright Mills is insufficient for a democratic culture: epistemological innovation must be undertaken in order to re-accumulate the power and authority lost to language in the twentieth century, behind the profile of an immediately achievable, political future. Political art (Benjamin 1969) is too transcendently, comfortably distant. There was a profound error in C. Wright Mills’s warning about intellectuals who for-get the limits of their position (2008). In fact, the epistemological limits must necessarily be jettisoned as the single action of intellectual participa-tion—writing and researching out of bounds of one’s degree being pun-ishable for academics and many professionals. Intellectual trespass in leaps and bounds (not merely “interdisciplinary studies”) is the social instinct of intellectual participation—this joyful science (Nietzsche 1882) is the foundation of a democratic culture and in turn of democracy itself.

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Knowledges are required by the intellectual’s evolving role in legalizing and effectuating technological reform. A basic principle of democracy must be not merely to have good government or publicly interested policy but to increase local democracy itself within the polity. Resistance theory and specifically the postmodernist “post-Marxist” obsession with culture and cultural production also known as the “culture industry” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002) imagined only a negative relation of intellectuals to techno-logical power: whether constructive or destructive. Like the “Unabomber” 50 years later (Kaczynski 1995), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw only the host of technological domination as a one- dimensional edi-fice, rather than the key political question, complex but decipherable by intellectuals and historically subject to philosophical intention.

Lost was acknowledgment of the specific structural debate between the casualties of imperialism—the communist government and national true believers vs. the imperial suspended disbelievers of capitalism, which believes only what is obvious. The same pains brought into negative cri-tique must be brought to the crafting and shepherding of laws and various democratically adopted documents. Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were written by bold positive dialecticians in defiance of a worldwide empire, intellectuals must return to their constitutional responsibilities and recognize the insurmountable limitations of negative critique and cultural revolt to make civil society coherent and purposive.

While the left has turned radically negative in critique and culturally radical, it has also become passive-aggressively imperialist and globalist—constituting, ultimately, a sorry trash heap of Cold War detritus: shards of the vanity of democratic empire and the civilizing mission (evolving from conversion at point of a sword to Christianity way back, then to conver-sion to political correctness at the point of a pill, or bullet, today). Without examples to offer an example-free planet, postmodern critique or ideolo-giekritik reaches a falsetto pitch of desperation and hubristic negative con-viction, forgetting just how ironic and disappointing democracy can be. Forced naïveté of populist rhetoric pretending that the people are inno-cent victims of power, and not willing participants, is, as intellectual behav-ior, part and parcel of imperial populism: if the people are always innocent and good, then only bad apples need changing, and neither tree nor orchard.

The truth is manipulated by the powerful, but the death instinct also comes from within democracy theory: failure, false coherences, and a loss


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of an evaluative sophistication that is reminiscent of paganism: if all truths are equal, all bets are off. The truth becomes a normative abstraction and is lost through the lack of practical political theory by intellectuals. The words lose meaning; in these, as in all “issue” politics, which is a cacoph-ony of imitations of resistance theories from the Cold War period, lost is any basic philosophical coherence. The result is not resistance to power but impotent rage.

Knowledge, as practiced among alienated intellectuals (alienated in the Marxist sense of proletarian, who has lost control over his labor, as most academic intellectuals certainly have), cannot penetrate into the cultural darkness of American empire and the rotten civil society it has caused. In the absence of foundational action by intellectuals, the plebeians are with-out interlocutors; identity politicians are training Americans and Europeans (and everyone else by extension) to downgrade their democratic self- image. We will live private lives under enlightened imperial protection—in this sense, what is at issue is a return to the French Enlightenment’s ideal of “balanced” enlightened monarchs (Montesquieu 1748) rather than enlightened democracies.

With empire, republican rights become obsolete after all: rights are taken, as Carl Schmitt said, by the likes of a Cheney or Kissinger (Schmitt 2004). The courts can do what they like, and Congress can do what it likes, but the powerful will always veto at the last moment through sub-versive, backdoor activities. Ultimately, they will win this game. Human identity and social formation, argued Schmitt, would move out of politics and into another realm such as economics (Schmitt 2004, pp. 22–23). Reflecting this recognition of the hollowness of democracies a couple of decades later, Karl Polanyi observed an expansion of categories of power and value amid the delimitation of sovereignty and property (2001). Yet legislation is an action, not a condition: if intellectuals do not play a role, despondency of promise degrades legislatures into a submission before tyrants: again, that ancient tradition of bully and coward (Nietzsche 1886).

What is needed is a clear demonstration for the people to prove the ability of democracy to protect public interests from the threatening market conditions caused by America’s Cold War trade and military industrial complex. Localization of trade and economies is the positive strategy of a negative dialectics against imperialism, as demilitarization is a negative international strategy for a positive dialectics of political and economic localism. These strands of sentimental recognition form a

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complete theory, with truthful gravity, when they are only combined into a single principle of democratic localism.

Such demonstrations must be inserted into the opportunities created by power: such as changing the structure of energy markets or trade agree-ments; arcane, hermetic negotiations to restructure provide the opportu-nity to draft alternative legislation. If drafted in a political vacuum without any specific historical opportunity, positive dialectics can only result in utopian gestures of the sort proposed by Richard Rorty in his critique of deconstruction or “ideologiekritik” (Rorty 1987). The ability to know that such arcane negotiations even exist is a typical example of privilege—the same privilege I enjoyed when I first conceived the idea for Community Choice, Solar Bonds, and subsequent innovations of increasing specificity and technicity14: knowledge by a lucky, contingent proximity to power is the existential province of all intellectuals. By legislating, the intellectual utterly controls the outcome, the same as any artistic work imagined by Walter Benjamin (1969). But his work is positive in its foundation, his legislation drafted not by consensus or discussion but through inspiration and imagination: these are works of secular art. He does not propose uto-pian ideas about a distant future, but imagines and drafts enabling laws based upon immediate historical inference and a clear philosophical inten-tion. He is taught informally by (largely verbal) encounters with specialists in numerous professional guilds of myriad certifications, rather than by formal study. Any cooperation with others is to confirm technical accura-cies and apply standardized nomenclature to establish technical compe-tency and continuity for mainstream acceptance. This is an art within politics.

Intellectuals are needed to get ahead of their older brothers in primo-geniture, the visibly rich and powerful, through the agency of true believ-ers with a limited knowledge of complex matters: this describes democratic culture. Intellectuals must attach poiesis to techne in order to bring tech-nology to heel. This role, accumulating know-how based on embedded technical and political navigation, is therefore priestly or druidical in the sense that it involves a sacrifice: no power, no career—he is a “mere adventurer”: an epistemological vandal. It is a kind of freedom that you might not survive: such is the self-directed life of a positive dialectician. The intellectual’s position in politics, this third position between masses and leaders, resembles (without the church itself) the priestly vocation: unprofitable but independent. It has no official power and is despised and opposed by the powerful, but holds esoteric power that can displace


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the king among his people or decide matters of policy during “crises.” This power, which is the power of public discourse in a democracy, is the church of the public intellectual. It is the principle of local democracy incarnate.

3.4 PosiTive dialecTics and The localizaTion of democRacy

The crisis of the Left today is unchanged from the crisis of the first socialist governments in the decades leading up to World War I. The positive proj-ect of an alternative structure both proves the concept and injects new literacy into negative critique of incumbent corporations controlling the legacy infrastructure of modern societies—pipelines, mines, fields, lines, burners, power plants. The simple awareness of a new feasibility enrages the citizen, by exposing the fallacy from the media puppet loudspeakers that we need oil, gas, and nuclear fuels and infrastructure. Like Vaclav Havel, we must become aware that, in political economy, we are in a “con-taminated moral atmosphere,” brainwashed by American Cold War ideol-ogy. “We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unalterable fact of life, and thus we helped to perpetuate it…None of us is just its victim: we are also its co-creators….we must accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves” (Havel 1997, p. 5).15

More important than this Benjaminian benefit of cultural radicaliza-tion, however, is the epistemological need for trespass, defined as the crossing of philosophical inquiry out of critique and into the writing of laws, constitutional amendments and charters, financial authorities, as well as interventions into economic data analysis, government restructuring, and industrial design.

It is not merely the action of art in politics but the transformation of policy and industry. These new structures present qualitatively new cost factors and price points to the industrial status quo. Thus trespass reveals financially fea-sible alternatives to “economic” feasibility. It shows the lie of economics and highlights a unique challenge—not a centrism between extremes, but an integration of the extremes into an organic new balance between corporate and government hegemony in the daily survival of all people. An imperially administered “open society” (Popper 1962) is untenable. Localism is thus a marriage of anarchism and socialism (Bookchin 1987).

The purpose in trespass is to realize intellectual participation in politics in order to present new alternative economic structures based on local

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control. The form of writing voice, or narrative locution, moves in the direction of municipal public decisions and actions that bring about a new, different, better future: the naked form of democracy in each place. In other words, the intellectual must write legislation and seek its adoption into laws; this activity causes the possibility of democracy in its local civil form to protect the community against the vagaries of global powers.

3.4.1 Proto-agonist/Anti-agonist

Negative dialectics is the container of positive dialectics in technique but is contained by positive dialectics in this political theory. Modern democ-racy is not to be feared but engendered. The intellectual’s role must be consciously played, and a despecialization of knowledge must be achieved in order for rational dialectic to direct civil society and discipline political discourse during decision-making.

The positive negative results from Nietzsche’s master and slave morali-ties. Both idiotic, they are perhaps separated as a slave taboo against taking on the airs of a colonial master. The fear of intellectuals and disappointing history of philosophers in politics,16 like the great philosopher king Marcus Aurelius whose worthless son rotted out Rome, is the fear of false religion; the great philosopher king can be a bad father: the “great communicator” may be a cipher.17 Somehow the power of persuasion is dangerous, like sparks in a gas station. Religion has the quality of empowering language in a way that becomes political. Kings feared priests and obeyed bishops because, while the bishop was not a competitor for rule, he could always back a king’s competitor—and so, had better be kept happy. Like a priest, the intellectual rules the definition of truth for the society, which does not have much time for truth. Wanting to be good, and obtaining knowledge from an intellectual, they understand, appreciate, and want to bring about what he says. While this happens, they enjoy true democracy because they have a brief alternative to the spoon-fed pablum or outright enmity of their masters. With help, they can get ahead of corporate board strategies and introduce coherent, theoretically framed and worked-out contests for alternative local structures, thus enabling legislation for adoption by municipal governments or if necessary, permission by state governments.

Positive dialectics (Fenn 1989), a theory proposed in a 1991 University of Chicago thesis based on the study of anti-racist propaganda in Austria and Germany during the Revisionist Crisis of Marxism (that may explain the emergence of National Socialism), was a response to Theodor Adorno,


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whose Negative Dialectics recommended a pessimistic strategy for the her-metic preservation of the Enlightenment, which he understood as the actual cultural capacity of enlightened discourse and historical memory of the genuine event from Francis Bacon onward (Adorno 1973). The idea that the power of reason may overcome all other powers on earth—be they religious, military, or other—and the effort to realize this power by the French Revolution had been opposed by Johann G.V. Herder (1966) and others as mere Golems and Frankensteins—the sterile replacement of organic cultures embodied in religion and tribal loyalty, according to which it may be judged today.18

For post-Marxist Holocaust survivor Adorno, a second Dark Age was upon the European millennium. The Enlightenment had lost to technical domination (pure techne), and the only chance of keeping historical mem-ory (the historical phenomenon of enlightenment), which created democ-racy worldwide, had also been lost for good. The most we could hope for in this second Dark Age, reasoned Adorno, was lesser surrogate tactics of resistance. The theory of positive dialectics was determined to prove this assertion wrong within a general agreement with Adorno’s analysis and preferring it to Foucault, Derrida, or even Edward Said.

Adorno’s theory was the entire foundation of resistance theory, which was, in so many words, a desperate effort to preserve the memory of lost Enlightenment knowledge with the rise of Hitler in Germany and the rise of mass culture in America that was exemplified by Disney.19 Walter Benjamin’s related work posed a use of farce in art and spawned a move-ment in felonious political art. But he viewed the change in light of a concept of millennial time, in which people no longer view their lives as empty time being filled with (private) experience, but as a single moment (the present) looking back into the furnace of history—witnessing a recur-ring reverse tragedy. Adorno’s own interest in music also reflects the simulation- oriented trivialization or “lightening” that characterizes all resistance theory. Archaeologically or philologically finding the kinds of practices imagined by Benjamin’s view of time as afterglow and the future as the vision of an angel being blasted backward through time (1969), looking at us standing here in the present, Michel de Certeau identified seeds of “resistance” in criminal ghetto behavior (1984).

De Certeau’s idealization of ghetto violence is frightfully naive, though The Practice of Everyday Life brings resistance theory to its logical conclusion. Greater disgust met Herbert Marcuse’s turn to sexual iden-tity as a source of revolutionary transformation. The common dyslexic

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understanding identifies strength with big muscles, when in fact big mus-cles signify illiteracy and social inferiority. Indeed, the weak aspire to a strength that is their weakness, and the strong aspire to a weakness that is their strength (Fenn 1989, p.12). The strong play weak, and the weak play cock of the walk when they meet on the street. The idea that this was resistance was as maddening as it is mad. Prolific vandals: starting with churches, then newly built houses and schools, drawn into the drama of resistance, such children are lucky to discover that there is no power in such resistance; thus, no virtue either—no assumption of historical sub-jectivity, which is the action of citizenship and political self-government. By means of such resistance, one does not accumulate knowledge or political content; this resistance does instead turn child vandals psycho-logically into a criminal type, unless one understands the lack of virtue that such resistance involves. Criminality is not revolutionary, but reac-tionary. Communism discredited, and the cream of the crop digging around for bones of resistance, back in 1989 when the Wall came down: What was our genre? Could we do something other than critiques and farce? Why be so desperate about theory out of anxiousness over mass power, when we can simply govern directly? Not just by “participating” generally in politics based on the flavor of the month but by strategically applying and making happen a specific, improbable but needed change to the rules of commerce for abstract commercial leviathans that threaten the welfare of local, particular publics. On this field, and given the legal existence of democracy, the individual can compete against a behemoth. Is this not an opportunity for intellectuals? For democracy itself?

Walter Benjamin’s understanding penetrated into the role of time in the imperialist mentality and the need to reverse the concept of time in order to bring about historical consciousness (1969). To the religious right of Benjamin, Martin Buber (1978) observed that life is empty time that you must fill with your experience to maintain distance from actual others; Marcuse (1955) pointed toward the self-programmers; Foucault assaulted schools and psychiatric hospitals, archaeologically holding up the voice of unreason as a repressed revolutionary cultural DNA (Foucault 1995). Ivan Illich would have returned to Aristotelian, pre-Roman Christianity: that is, to cultural liberation by way of a conviviality that is based upon the acceptance and embrace of death (Illich 1976). But these imaginary fragmentary spectacles of resistant poesies shepherded no new agency of history. They merely reflected the turning-inward of cowards hiding among the corpses. Norman O. Brown provided unlived life within


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us that Marcuse would sexually subvert in order to bring about a new form of class consciousness and thus deliver the long-awaited revolution; Wilhelm Reich claimed his “Orgone” machine would free the inner madman to release us from an oppressive and violence-inducing Freudian Victorianism: all variations on Marcuse’s dyslexic materialism. High the-ory bled into street theater. Really, it was a circus of pagan frenzies.

Turning away from these relics and hallucinations of human virtue, without the Athenian (initially loyalist, diasporic) example, how was Enlightenment to proceed? Is this not the dilemma of Adorno’s Dark Age? Civilization needs an example to move beyond imperialism, a scrip-tural success, or demonstration. Imperialism must end: we need to achieve our paradise here at home. This is enlightenment. It is not just Epicurus’s or Jeremy Bentham’s version of reason as a hedonistic engine but a recog-nition that creating local self-government must be our eschatological goal—our desired cultural end game: negatively against empire in devolv-ing imperial and “national” powers to local government, but based upon a positive symbolic action within civil society by intellectuals in the demo-cratic process through foundations and demonstrations of democratic governance, engagements and interventions rather than critiques of ahis-torically undemocratic forces in society that must be surmounted for democracy to survive this age of destruction.

The core concept behind positive dialectics is applying historical, philo-sophical knowledge and know-how to a different activity other than eulo-gies, apologies, tragedies, and farces. It is an attempt to resurrect theory in relation to action, rather than to metaphysics: to go beyond the old grind-stone of praxis (enactment of theory) and into a reconstitution of theo-retical forms as symbolic actions. Positive dialectics is a theory of changed locution, a scriptural practice removed from the outsider’s habit of ideolo-giekritik using the skills and virtues of historical philosophy: a transformed scriptural practice of intellectual history acting upon the present in a con-test about the immediate future otherwise known as self-governance. Legislation makes theory “real.”

This is in part a story of Rip Van Winkle—a lifelong walkabout through the valley of domestic energy policy in the shadow of energy resource- centered American imperialism, trespassing and vandalizing as one goes, to undertake a scriptural practice of direct imminent participation in a strategic industrial corner of contemporary history: to try and make sense of a highly ironic, exaggerated plot, yet which is nonfictional and theoreti-cal, proves a theory. This history would provide direct information as a

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basis for dialectically generating a substantiated transcendent critique of its contemporary path, with secondary polemical force to empower language through foundational acts and thus challenge the conventional wisdom of the powerful. It would also, for historical writing about the present and immediate future, provide original material by which to explain the his-torical past. An engagement, yes, but not praxis separate from theory, nor theory unbridled into poiesie `a la Derrida (1978), nor archaeological assaults from the otherness or so-called alterity—the æther of postmod-ernism—but a history of the present and its immediate future among our local democratic selves.

The practice of virtue and action of character imagined from Cicero to Diderot and Karl Marx (the dismal theory of praxis) would change not just in terms of writing about something different; it would no longer write about, but within, its subject. It would no longer criticize, but legis-late. It would not resist, but protagonize. It would speak across the empty time of public policy, but maintain principles of visionary simplicity and political non-compromise.

Curiously, the origin of this idea is found in the study of worker racism that has haunted the radical left since the Gotha congress of 1875 merged Marx’s transformational revolutionary organization with a political party. The issue of race unwound the massive socialist political movements in Europe and America in the years before the World Wars. Globalization defeated labor politics. As displaced populations of workers immigrated into a newly industrialized economy, racial conflict in trade unions domi-nated socialist theory. As workers gained superficial concessions in parlia-ment in the decades following decriminalization and rapid rise of the Social Democratic Party in 1877, worker alienation appeared to produce not revolutionary proletarian consciousness but a reversion to tribalism and prototype of Nazism. A crisis of the Left commenced, as Walter Benjamin wrote: “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current … factory work was supposed to tend toward technological progress [and this, suppos-edly,] constituted a political achievement” (Benjamin 1969). The intel-lectual Left has a bipolar attraction/repulsion to actual people. In Germany, re-education programs were undertaken with recalcitrant union members accused of embracing the brand of “false consciousness” recy-cled from Bastille Day during the French Revolution, pounding into the heads of German workers that they should not be opposed to allowing foreign workers into the unions or to their being supported by the Socialist


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Party of Deutschland (SPD). This strategy led to union takeover of the party and marginalization of its intellectual leadership, who clung to Marxist ideology and split into the Spartacus League following the “Revisionist debate” with Eduard Bernstein, which in turn led to the par-ty’s renunciation of Marx’s time theory of dialectical materialism and rejection of its revolutionary goals to transform the economy. This essay is concerned with the implications of this (intellectual) failure.

In effect, Bernstein’s SPD was the original “New Labor” movement, but some 90 years before in 1906–7, and in Berlin, not London. The proto-Brownshirt Freikorps murder of Rosa Luxemburg, the champion of dialectical materialism, and anti-militarist Karl Liebknecht, son of SPD founder and one of Marx’s best friends,20 in Berlin, was the end of Marxist theory in mainstream European politics. This end was also a beginning: the beginning of the non-theory that followed it (Bernstein 1993). Democratic Socialist Germany abandoned the economic revolution, and autocratic Russia abandoned democracy (Lenin 1964; Benjamin 1969; Lasch 1996). Never the twain would meet, except perhaps in Austria, where Vienna Socialists Otto Bauer and his associates approached the problem of trade union racism as a legitimate resentment to be redirected against capitalistic trade policies that drove foreign workers to emigrate. This shift in approach was a kind of positive dialectics (Bauer 2000).

The intention of positive dialectics is to provide an alternative to the idea of resistance theory and the identity politics to which it gives rise. Core to the CCA strategy in US energy was a shift from resisting political or economic power to directing and demonstrating alternatives; through a positive intervention into the arena of energy policy and politics, legisla-tion was drafted to restructure the US electricity and gas industry. The alternative to the “customer choice” paradigm of deregulation would be a segue into local “community choice” under democratically governed aggregation of needs. With new laws in effect, a decade-long immersion in municipal democracy followed to implement regional energy transforma-tions at scale using the new law, to debunk price theory through a shift from supply-side to demand-side economics, and indeed “restart” history (Fukuyama 1992) in a critical area of democratic darkness—namely, the bankrupt and collapsed state of renewable energy and climate policy. This project took 20 years to change the structure of energy, to prove feasibility with service to 5% of the US population, to end corporate, centralist hege-mony over US energy policy, and to cause US activists and city govern-ments to adopt a new political and economic localist strategy in urban and

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rural communities throughout the United States that has filtered up into national policy assumptions and criteria.21

Positive dialectics is attracted to localism for its marriage of liberty with democracy. There is a naturalness to localism, because ultimately all true history is local and individual rather than global and collective. Actionable social bonds are local in nature. America had the chance to end all empires, but instead turned into an empire, and so, put simply, the enlightenment appears tragically imperfect. The price of imperialism is the loss of republic that Americans now, incredibly, face.

3.4.2 Original Concept

Carl Schmitt saw that the state of law is merely an interregnum between “emergencies,” when all law may be forgotten or completely changed: “sovereign is he who decides upon the exception” (Schmitt 2004, pp. 10–11). Between crises, the birds return to flock behavior, pretending there is rule of law as if nothing had ever happened. This is the condition of history, which is therefore full of dissembling and amnesia in political life, paranoid and enamored of the “plausible deniability” doctrine (Staines 2009) of Elizabethanism that defined the British Empire. Today this has evolved into the politically correct, which is self-censorship: a cultural behavior peculiar to empires and often presaging great historical catastro-phes such as World War II. Positive dialectics is concerned with ending the Dark Age that began with Hitler, through an improvement upon the the-ory of resistance: idea-based governance.

The political theory is simple. An inversion within the empowerment of common citizens and small business owners would at once broaden the authority of local governments and bring the issue down to scale of intui-tive understanding, the complexity of empire being replaced by the sim-plicity of republic. Whereas the Austrian socialist innovator Otto Bauer would answer racist workers with a call to organize the return of immi-grants through international political organization, a positive dialectician would propose a specific foundation for localist democracies. This action of theory would require a diverse proliferation of innovations, each within a critical sector of public policy, based on familiarity with contemporane-ous democratic machinations, planning, and conspiracy.

As the founding fathers of the United States of America presumed to throw off the Hanoverian monarch of a British empire that started in Norway anyway (if you exclude the Welsh or a few rebels in the highlands)


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to write their own constitution, so must we acknowledge that we are par-ticipants in a democracy rather than outsiders in a monarchy, which is the traditional role and locution of all intellectuals in the broadest definition.

Just as the Enlightenment was the offspring of European appropriation and mimesis of Roman dominion, so American political culture is a prod-uct of enlightenment. American imperialism and technological catastro-phes are the grandchildren of the imperfect structure of the modern democratic idea. This imperfection comes from the idea of mass democ-racy—based on a generic historical subject acting in a uniform manner: not a diverse body of diversely capable classes. As the founding fathers presumed to write and adopt the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and Constitution in 1787, so must intellectuals today presume to legislate and direct implementation of economic and political localization. Economic localism must be implemented, and centralized economic and political power obviated or put in their place. To accomplish this, intellectuals must seek to govern within democratic civil society, not as competitors or man-agers with government, but as interlocutors and protagonists of self- governing democratic republics, in whatever condition they happen to exist.

The advent of democracy humiliates the aristocratic identity of intel-lectuals, who originate in the monasteries of Europe, positioning their caste outside of, and above, society. Lenin called German socialism’s struggle with parliamentary democracy an “infantile disorder” (Lenin 1964). In fact positive dialectics does involve a series of humiliations to intellectual dignity, but these are the consequence of trespass, which is to see all people as naked, and to penetrate through the opaque edifice of power, and suffer the voodoo of a universally lonely crowd (Riesman et al. 2001).

It is indeed humiliating to submit one’s writing into the toilet bowl of politics: hanging, as one must, among subaltern political milieu. There is one consolation, however, namely, a sense of history taking place, how-ever impertinently or psychotically, however corrupt the milieu. It is thus reasonable to state, as Herder did for altogether antagonistic rea-sons in the time of Voltaire, that democratic governance itself is prob-lematic in lieu of a post-traumatic cultural accumulation of governing selves. This skepticism toward the idea of democracy embodied in the American and French Revolutions has been interpreted as self-governing in the sense of self- control,22 but positive dialectics turns away from a mass idea of democracy as mass culture, as if citizenship were one thing,

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generic, average and fungible, and toward a dialectical activity between subclasses: intellectuals, the powerful, and the masses, in culture—with intellectuals as the closest thing to an historical subject or natural citizen to be found for supplying democracy theory itself.

3.4.3 On Occupism

Averse to aristocracy, the revolutionary political tradition has a self-image problem. Fearing elites for their noblesse oblige, they are hostile to any ges-ture of prerogative and actively suppress novel acts of political power as a matter of principle. Yet in a democratic society, this privilege is manifest and real; and furthermore its ability to govern itself depends upon the willingness of privileged elites to share their discipline, competence and consciousness of history, and scientific knowledge gleaned from the last 400 years of European enlightenment, with the ignorant, manipulable, conflicted, distracted, unhappy, medicated, demoralized, and apologetic masses playing the role of jury. Republics need intellectuals to provide the foundation and disciplined dialectical force to localize, bring to scale and decide upon actions in what are otherwise client state environments under management of corporate and imperial leaders.

The foundational act of positive dialectics is a reification in law that initiates a progression of immanent positive critiques interrupted and guided by transcendent negative critiques. With the legislative foundation, there is only the state government’s authorization for a new kind of activ-ity to be implemented. The state government would devolve new powers to local town, city, and rural county governments. It would then remain to be seen whether and how local governments would seek to use their new powers. At issue is not a giving of power, but a conceding of fact that it may be taken.

Following the epistemic trespass from poiesis to techne is a new one from positive legislation into negative critique, which involves efforts to imple-ment the intent of the law in practical political and business environments. This effort to avoid bastardization inevitably and necessarily leads to agony. The intellectual shifts from philosophy to history, then to legislation, but once a law is born, the imagined exercise of new powers must now be defined and made real as the gears and emblems of democratic legitimacy. In order to become real, the idea must be presented in real form, with many small steps of definition from a transcendent critique to an imminent fact that is consistent with and embedded in technical grammar. This articulation is


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highlighted by incumbent resistance, in this case the energy utility industry. A new idea must be translated dialectically into commercially salient nomen-clature at the various levels of governance to enable a balance of authority upon the field of technical savoir faire.

It is in this moment that the light of intellectual endeavor begins to shine through democracy once again. Trespass is thus not merely a tres-pass across knowledges but also, and perhaps more importantly, a trespass of roles in a conspicuous dialectic between propagandist and expert. This places the positive dialectician in a politically ambivalent negativity between corporatists and bureaucrats, both of whom regard him as dilettante and meddler, and activists who regard him as uncompromising and naïve. Yet the positive dialectician may force the bureaucrat to solicit expertise and accept or reject as a whole the original, generative structural components of local democracy and prevent activists from overcompromise.

Unlike Marx, the positive dialectician would not create a political orga-nization to seize political power, but govern indirectly through a scriptural practice. Unlike Machiavelli, he would not seek the esteem of the power-ful, nor like Montesquieu place hope in a monarchical restraint or balance, but rather engage them in an agony of imminent and transcendent cri-tiques on the public stage, forcing consideration of original foundational laws and winning the status of expert to reify and reinforce transcendent intent with imminent technical know-how: in short, participate as a civic intellectual in political life, as opposed to a “leader.”

3.5 eneRgy enlighTenmenT

Energy represents the greatest and hardest theoretical nut to crack, within the admittedly ambitious purview of a theoretical experiment that aims to change scriptural practice from critique to direct governance: to a reinfu-sion of philosophy into technology: technical enlightenment. In theory, if successful with this effort to shift intellectual locution to the legislation and fomenting of an alternative to the incumbent energy industry, then positive dialectics would stand as a politically feasible alternative to resis-tance theory and postmodernism: a demonstration or “proof.” This posi-tive dialectical legism would provide an alternative process by means of which communities could transform any policy area where important fail-ures of democracy relative to business and public institutions have created urgent problems and dysfunction, such as food safety, health insurance, education, and financial security. A principle of localism is essential to this

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way of peacefully reestablishing democratic sovereignty. Municipal gov-ernment, understood not as a subsidiary of state, federal, and international government organizations, but as the natural, organic right of every com-munity to control its government and of every person in that community to control his life: this is the sort of localism that positive dialectics identi-fies as an intellectual opportunity.

Changing this historical disaster will require a reawakening of basic inalienable political power. Municipalities need independence from the tired old institutions of the twentieth century and must rest on a firmer foundation of public wealth. In order for the Enlightenment to avoid kill-ing itself, democracy must be improved upon, not merely defended or circumscribed from transgressions. In order for modern democracy to be realized culturally after 400 years of imperialism, it must deal with serious failures of civil society to participate in self-governance and confront the very real barriers to successful local governance and autonomy imposed by federal control and corporate power. In order for civil society to self- correct and become sufficiently literate to avoid economically caused catastrophes unlike anything it has faced before, municipal autonomy must be affirmed as the constitutional foundation for a new and improved localist democracy.

What stands in the way of these needed changes is the fear that local power competes with personal power. This fear is not new. As early as the eighth century, the venerable Bede identified such fear as the cause and motive force of England becoming so vulnerable to invasion and so inca-pable of self-defense (1991). Similar stories abound in the European inva-sion of the Americas, where cities of millions could not do battle against 20 armed conquistadors, and in Constantinople, where a small group of Franks destroyed the greatest city on earth against an utterly disloyal cos-mopolitan civil society (Villehardouin 1908). The ambivalence of cultural disappointment and isolation in displaced American communities is mir-rored in these series of historical Fromm-like “escapes from freedom” (Fromm 1941).

Affirming local democracy is like giving a job to an ex-convict: necessary, but dubious. One must choose between evils: the corruptibility of the indi-vidual vs. the corruptibility of many. Arithmetically, the demos has better odds against corporations at city hall than at the state legislature, national capitol, or the United Nations. Localization is at the bottom of this new “free socialism” or municipal anarchism as Murray Bookchin called it (Bookchin 1991). This “anarchism” should be understood as a new responsibility or


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dignity. At issue is a reorganization of constitutional power upon first the individual, then the municipal, on which state power must ultimately depend, and finally a federal power that is actively circumscribed by state consent. This will not be easy; but no solution would be easy to undertake. To think that passing voluntarily from the lie of empire to the oath of republic—or solving climate change—would be easy is silly, wishful, and simpleminded. We must embrace the complexity and improbability of our predicament as the fullness and promise of a real life.

This pattern describing the failure of enlightenment in America is decades old, arguably centuries. The motion of positive dialectics is directed toward this maw of history. It is concerned with the idea of prog-ress, of not turning back, while also not collapsing into mass hysterias, like some coup d’état, and the collective amnesia of warfare and technological violence that continues to erase history and empower tyrants, making vol-untary servants of its naïve, ignorant, disembodied, indolent citizens.

The trap that enforces this violence is the Cold War: the last conflict based on political theory in modern history, which has not ended for Americans, because we Americans are the home field display case of Cold War social engineering. The punishment of empire? Loss of the home country. The Cold War, which ended for everybody else in the world in 1989, is still not over in America. Because we “won” the Cold War, we are now stuck in an endless victory lap that has turned into a somnambulant crusade for globalization. The Russians learned their lessons in 1989—how Stalin had killed so many millions and assassinated his political peers, the widespread spying, and so on. Now, a quarter century later, Americans must witness the empty crusade of unhindered liberty, and the social pov-erty of imperial displacement and globalized industrialization on a dying planet, because we are killing it.

Having lost habeas corpus without as much as a whimper under spy states that criminalize activism (Ludlow 2013; Savage 2011), Americans cannot pretend we are sacrificing nature for the sake of human freedom. Behind the failure and disappointment of the Cold War is the fact that both sides were wrong and intellectually bankrupt. So much lying and so much incompetence took power and killed only in order to hold the reins of government, as if this were a worthy achievement. So many intellectu-als were sucked into defending Stalin, then became neoconservatives or neoliberals when their poor judgment came out with the Glasnost and Perestroika of Gorbachev. Some, like Jeffrey Sachs, even went as far as to support the Shock Therapy of Yeltsin (Passell 1993). Today, in the

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growing hostility between the United States and Russia, many mainstream neoliberals remain naïve to Russian resentment of the United States. The integrity of theory goes to mush in the solvent of power: an archetypal program going back to the imperial hubris and disloyalty of Ancient Athens.

Humanity’s lack of seriousness would appear to be its greatest enemy. Bernard Shaw mocked the Salvation Army for pretending to help the masses of poor ejected from the industrial machine, while actually filling their minds with religious fluffy (Shaw 2002). These sentimental fools want the experience of politics and the thrill of respect but have not a clue what to do when they are in power: are they to be taken seriously? People can starve and still they cynically claim to care. But with climate change and the other horsemen of enlightenment’s dialectic, there is simply no room for such shenanigans. Time is up. Global warming is the great equal-izer: a philosophical brick wall. The quick encounter of the American way of life with biological reality is the ultimate container for human endeavor. No cheating allowed.

The ecological collapse indeed redraws the horizon of a limited pro-vider. The envelope of the biosphere is our opportunity, as a society, to end the practice of human sacrifice on the political stage: millions killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Levant, and North Africa.

To overcome the Cold War intellectually and culturally, we must over-come not just the mania of market fundamentalism; we must also over-come the vagaries of collectivism—the perilous waters of hideous government agencies, triple-jeopardized bureaucrats, dissembling and borderline psychotic professionalism, corruption/rackets and extroverted psychopathic elected officials; the hollowness of such “comrades” must also be remembered. The next move forward must jettison the moral sim-plicity of the Cold War (good vs. evil, inferior vs. superior, rich vs. poor) with a more serious intent and scriptural practicing of democratic power—to achieve a circumscription and localization of commercial power in politics and a liberation of the small, whether individual people or small business, from the big.

Moreover, we have to stop thinking of this as a mass movement and think of it as an intellectual opportunity: not merely to rethink possible worlds or remember a lost world but to directly “trespass” across systems of knowledge, cross from ideas into activist participation, into direct legis-lation, into direct implementation. We must overcome the devastating bureaucracies of American government and supersede the disheartening


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mediocrity of America’s elected officials. Americans cannot go back to a traditional Leftist position of true believer in simply putting the govern-ment in charge, because big schools, big institutions, big militaries, big power plant operators are depressing, resolute failures. Bigness itself is ugly and evil: centralization and concentration are inimical to democracy and must be roundly abandoned.

Size matters when it comes to creating civil societies capable of self- governance, people equal enough to coexist and give each other regards; similar enough to agree on basic principles of conduct and good manners, idioms of distinction, and standards of judgment and proximate enough to scream at our leaders. America, and the world, must jettison the indus-trialist scale-fetishism of corporate America, yes—but it must also jettison America’s military might. We must jettison gigantism of every kind—industrially and governmentally. Small is beautiful indeed, as Schumacher proposes, but a city, not a village (Schumacher 1973). We must place the scale of municipality above individual, tribe, nation, or people.

To achieve this, localism must be incorporated into political theory and action. This involves a deliberate rejection of centralized state and military power alongside a deliberate rejection of concentrated commercial power. Localization is a re-establishment of the traditional tribal idea of the municipality as the original and fundamental democratic power founded on the sacred consent of individuals. Thus, municipal power is not subsid-iary to, but a constituent power of, states. The United States exists only as an extension of the consent of its 50 states, with no other valid imperial sanction. And the same goes for each of these 50 states: they exist only as an extension of the municipal consent of constituent municipalities. Imperial remnants must be circumscribed and reduced.

Positive dialectics faces both Cold War factions adversarially; it is neither for corporations nor for governments. Specifically, localization is, at bottom, a libertarian principle: to eliminate exploitative tax and regulation regimes that overregulate small businesses and overpolice individual citizens and families and underregulate the huge corporations that control both public and private life like puppet masters. The elaboration of a coherent democ-racy theory, and decentralist theory of regulation, builds municipal political localism upon an anti-statist, libertarian principle that small is beautiful, and moreover that protection of the small is the purpose of all governance and indeed all human culture, and particularly culture of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Human life is small, and all living things are small. This would be honored and respected by any real republic worth its name.

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Our republic must rest upon municipality. Positive dialectics must pave a course for a republic that is conscious of human venality—based on the failures of capitalism and Marxism. This is a new balance: not the balance of Montesquieu and Lycurgus within states, but a balance between states and municipalities, between abstract power and lived life. In this case, it is not energy deregulation we need, because capitalists will form cartels and corrupt democracy; nor do we need more regulation municipal ownership of the means of production, because bureaucrats will form oligarchies, and protection rackets will subvert democracy. To create space for enlighten-ment within republics, a separation of the ownership and control of pro-duction is needed in law, and a new control used to extend trade and ownership to local businesses and residents. Enlightenment of energy calls for a local, municipal aggregation of local human needs, and control of infrastructure development over corporations, which must be made to compete for the privilege of designing and building new community energy assets. Ownership should be directed away from governments and corporations, and toward the citizens themselves. Moreover, through the extension of organic democratic power to individuals, city councils create a forum for formerly ignorant citizens to think through how to change their energy supply. Local power creates the condition of political and industrial literacy.

If the Cold War dialectic of American capitalism vs. Eurasian commu-nism is the impasse and threshold of a post-postmodern political philoso-phy, this political philosophy must be termed “localism.” A localist manifesto and localist platform have been prepared (Fenn 2011).

3.5.1 Foundational Localism

Constitutional power must be placed back upon a local—that is, a munici-pal—pedestal. It must be relocalized to build municipal democratic power to protect the people against concentrated commercial and national power. State power must be made to depend upon municipal consent: this is the cornerstone of a new constitutional principle. Within the current context of their subsidiarity to states, municipalities must at once rebuild their traditional commercial powers while recognizing the limits of, and cir-cumscribing, bureaucracy, to constitute new local markets. Such relocal-ization must not imitate or recreate the central planning monstrosities and gigantism that America shares with the Soviets, our prison-like schools littering the land, dismal public housing ghettos. Localization must be


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extended to the freedom of the street vendor and jaywalker and carefully attend to a new division of public and private roles in local economic activity.

Federal power must be reclassified as imperial. No longer equal repub-lics in the United States, today the US government calls this unity of 50 states the US “Homeland,” meaning even the continental United States is no longer regarded as the republic. Just as Constantinople abandoned Rome, this imperial federal government now has other lands to look over, too. We, here in the United States, are just one of them. Like US corpora-tions, which under 25 years of globalization have become global players, Americans are treated as another subject population of a larger global order. Our politics, also, are now global contests, with American public opinion manipulated as a showcase for Pax Americana, where dark tech-nologies like genetically modified food must be embraced without ques-tion, and the presence of radiation in the air accepted as the “new normal” (Obama 2011; EPA 2013).23

Localization is, in this sense, a return to the original focus of democracy as it was exercised by pre-Christian European peoples, or by the ancient Greeks, whom they later imitated. In both cases, democracy was naturally local. Pax Americana has ceded the powers it took from municipalities and states to corporate power, in order to unleash a commercial crusade built upon preemptive trade agreements the whole world over. This is the economic remnant of colonialism. While robbing all communities of con-trol of their local economies, this global commercial crusade will continue to drive war and terrorism, fanning the flames of war in the context of mounting ecological crises that the technologies of enlightenment, held by tyrants and traitors, are causing: the specter of an epochal catastrophe, not merely of the atmosphere, but of civil society, of our society’s ability to act morally and philosophically, and the undoing, finally, of a thousand years and the greatest known period of human history. The loss of Enlightenment is no academic matter, but a fundamental threat that civi-lization will collapse and that we will be going, as they say, back to the bush: the true meaning of the acronym “World War III.”

By undoing the retrogressions of imperial America, we go not forward but merely punish marked failures. We must undertake to reinvent the economic power of cities and counties. We must eliminate municipal and state predation of citizens, from the federal income tax to mass state incar-ceration to the exorbitant municipal parking ticket. We must turn from the poverty of the local political ghetto to assert a new municipal liberty,

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upwardly, toward state power, while conceding new liberty to the common citizenry and small enterprise. This foundation will enable civil ennoble-ment and needed enlightenment of local democracy, requiring an improved level of local self-governance and less policing, less surveillance too.

3.6 conclusion

The absence of intellectuals has a moral dimension and an epistemological dimension. The moral treason of intellectuals early in the twentieth cen-tury, which appears to have been a reaction to democracy itself, has atro-phied into an actual disability or impairment. Whereas specialization in science consisted of a fragmentation of science into technological research of the military industrial complex, specialization in the humanities was achieved through the reduction of philosophy and literature, via resis-tance, to cultural reproduction. In both cases, the knowledges imparted to micro-disciplinary specialists resulted in disintegrated forms of knowledge. Reduced to cultural specialists, many humanists are of no use to civil soci-ety or political discourse. The inability of scientists to decide what to do, and the inability of humanists how to do it, has created the academic pro-letarian: as alienated from his labor as any blue-collar worker. Lacking valences between knowledges, civil societies have been denuded of intel-lectual actors prepared to contribute to political discourse other than lick-ing stamps or marching in demonstrations. Thus, a revolt against both specialization and military industry servility are indicated for intellectuals to effectively re-enter political life. Theory, also known as logos, must be re-embraced in order for this to happen (Fenn 2018).

But this is in itself not sufficient as long as the nation remains our the-ater of democracy. The self-image of the national democrat is a society in which “the people” want something and “the government” should do it. Municipal governments appear in this view as subsidiary, inferior layers of government entrusted with perfunctory, routine, non-ideological func-tions authorized from above. Thus, the people are presumed to talk up to national governments and national governments to talk down to local governments. This is a top-down vision of democracy in which the hori-zon of Rousseau’s General Will occurs as an abstraction defined by a cir-cumscribed, multiple-choice voting ritual. Socially, local government is a mediocrity, lacking the prestige of higher levels—a mere stepping stone for politicians to climb their way higher to real power. American democ-racy shares this in common with Soviet communism.


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We are trapped in the nation, and it has made us cynical, pessimistic, and inhuman. Resistance figures in this jaded fairy tale as an archetypal, tragic heroism. But it is pathetic, not tragic. It is the pathetic heroism of the priest. In rare cases, resistance might mitigate or limit the damage, but not the overall direction of the drift of modern politics toward catastrophe.

Political localization is the necessary context for the enunciation of a democratic logos. What is democracy? The municipality: it is an abandoned political ghetto, an empty stage that is there for the taking in civil societies mesmerized by national media spectacles. The republic must be erected on the ruins of empire to gain new strength without fear of the democratic power it will create. By jettisoning the imperial violence and social schizo-phrenia of the nation state, localization creates a safe zone for the logos and systemic thought and therefore the empowerment of language to create coherent political theory and resilient democratic law.

Decentralization is as sterile a concept as neoliberalism. It is yet another system handed down from above, without a cultural basis. It is insufficient merely to give state powers to local bureaucrats. Localization must be understood not merely as a decentralization of extant powers to local gov-ernments but as a theater of scriptural practice—the invention of newly circumscribed powers between the municipality and the individual—in order to awaken, discipline, protect, and expand the moribund, mediocre “sleeping giant”: the republic. Municipalities need new sovereignty within municipal administration for this idea to work.

Democracy consists not in formal decision-making in empty time, but in the cultural creation of new knowledge. A “positive dialectic” is there-fore indicated within Left political theory and practice: an epistemological trespass. It is not a new system that is needed, but a new conception of knowledge to bring democracy to life, not as a formal system, but as a cultural practice based upon intellectual action. This is not Machiavelli’s whispering into the ears of the Medici in Florence, nor Lenin’s seizure of political power in the name of the proletariat. Trespass builds upon the arrogant tradition of the lawgivers—the Spartan Lycurgus and the Athenian Solon—with an unencumbered appropriation of juristic and technical nomenclature that seeks to reintegrate philosophy and technol-ogy. Thus, positive dialectics requires a broad revolt against disciplinary boundaries and professional roles, and a contextualization of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics within a clear philosophical intent or “agenda”: the municipal republic and economic localization. Imminent and transcen-

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dent critiques are thus applied within the envelope of building local soli-darity based on community survival and exerting local power upwardly against centralized and concentrated power of all kinds.

In order to cultivate enlightenment, foundational actions of legislation must be followed by two negative dialectics: ambivalently inward and out-ward, a transcendent critique to protect against attacks by incumbent interests from outside the municipality, and an immanent critique to over-come bureaucratic resistance, corruption, and mediocrity within the municipality. There is no time to go to school in a positive dialectic. One does not merely research and write, but position oneself for a reception in the pressure points of a societal change, such as energy restructuring. It is “shock doctrine” in reverse: emancipation based upon the recognition of and familiarity with contemporary history in its relation to previous his-tory. It is in this sense the natural province of intellectual history. The subjects to be studied and knowledges to be appropriated for use are not chosen but rather yielded by the dialectic itself: the embodied civil response of the Zeitgeist.

noTes

1. For an historical overview, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Choice_Aggregation.

2. An illustrative example being the role of Professor Severin Borenstein in San Francisco-region energy politics. “Can local governments play in the complex and competitive energy market? More importantly, is cheap green power a reality? Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute, says the answer to both questions is a resounding no (San Francisco Chronicle Staff 2008).” On the positive side, Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson ignores market structures like CCA and flatly presents 100% renewables scenarios nationally, which promotes an ideal concept but misleads and reifies neoliberal (presumed Free Market or monopoly market structure) Renewable Energy Credits as the paradigm of green power and assumed cost and technology configurations and associated cost thresholds in his modeling (Lacey 2017).

3. San Francisco CCA documentation of results is available at http://local-power.com/CleanPowerSF.html.

4. Media consolidation in the past quarter century has resulted in a shocking homogenization of newspapers, books, and electronic media; in the United States, six corporations control 90% of all media as of 2015 (Lutz 2012; Bagdikian 1997; McChesney 2004).


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

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

http://localpower.com/CleanPowerSF.html


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5. Thus Rome and the Empire of the West were abandoned to the Goths and Lombards by the emperor in Constantinople during the Great Migration.

6. The solar finance industry is utterly dependent upon Net-Metering Tariffs and federal tax breaks for its business model and collapses without annual continuations of these arrangements in order to avoid bankruptcy (Gatlin 2016).

7. The German government has recently grown more aware of this problem and is beginning to focus on demand controls.

8. Coase personally encouraged my project in the early 1990s based on a rejection of his own theories—University of Chicago, 1992.

9. Georges Sorel posited a propaganda of event mythmaking, in which calling a (nonexistent) General Strike would mobilize trade unions into violent confrontations with authority, specifically in order to bring about other-wise unachievable political revolt—relative to which György Lukács’s the-ory of reification is a kind of negative inversion. By calling a General Strike, thought Sorel, syndicalists could actually cause them to occur (Sorel 2004).

10. A paradigmatic example of this can be found on KWMR FM Radio com-mentary on the September 21, 2014, march in New York City (The Local Organon 2017).

11. The term “America” is used here despite that being a continent’s name, because the United States chose this name instead of “Colombia,” taken by a South American country, though it also could apply to most South Americans.

12. This implies a comparison between Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism with Carl Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. (Schmitt 1985).

13. In my case these have been: (1) history, (2) theory (3) journalism, (4) legism, (5) electoral politics and lobbying (6) government agency design and organization, (7) financial origination and design, (8) industry analysis & cost modeling, financial modeling, technology selection and configura-tion, database mapping and design, (9) program design, organizational theory and process engineering, and (10) legal and regulatory analysis. A broad, informed concept grew to scaled implementation by municipalities.

14. I was tipped off on electricity industry restructuring in 1991 by Ronald Coase at the University of Chicago and helped to find a position in the Massachusetts Senate Energy Committee by former governor Michael Dukakis and assisted by various experts, in particular Scott Ridley.

15. Unfortunately, Havel turned out to be a neoliberal true believer.16. Particularly Lenin, Mao, Castro, and many others who need not be named.17. US Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are prime modern

examples.

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18. Feudalism was obviously an invention of the German Empire, its loyalties imposed artificially, which Herder appears to ignore in his critique of the Philosophes.

19. Adorno’s turn to music theory was reflected in Herbert Marcuse’s regres-sive turn to cultural transformation—an early variant of identity politics, however superior in origin.

20. Wilhelm Liebknecht, co-founder of the SPD.21. California AB117 (Chapter 858, 2002), Massachusetts Senate 447

(1995—Chapter 164, 1997), San Francisco H Bond Authority (Proposition H, Charter Section 9.107.8, 2001), and so on. CCAs now exist in 1400 US cities and produced 9.3 million MWH of renewable energy in 2013 (O’Shaughnessy et al. 2014).

22. Bruce R. Pollard, Puritanism and Modern Democracy, unpublished manu-script, 1978.

23. A good example is President Obama when the Fukushima fallout arrived in California a week later: he told Americans not to be worried, assuring us that we were safe (Obama 2011).

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CHAPTER 4

Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction

Eduardo Subirats

4.1 Lumen Luminis

4.1.1 1

Fire, the sun, and light constitute a primordial trilogy in the most ancient human religions. This archaic trinity possesses both a cosmogonic and enlightening function. In the sutkas to Agni, the god in the Rig-Veda who represents the light of universal intelligence, fire is utilized for rituals of illumination and purification. Agni brings to light vision and knowledge of the world, but his light is also a vital energy inherent in this same world. “Seeker of the truth,” “Vision of whom is brighter in the night than in the day,” and “universal life holder” are only a few of the uncountable titles attributed to this fire god (Aurobindo 1998, p. 71). In the religion of Zarathustra, Ohrmazd creates the universe inside of an infinite light, and at the same time he himself is this same light. “For boundless time He was ever in the light. That light is the space and place of Ohrmazd. Some call it the Endless Light… Ohrmazd fashioned forth the form of His creatures

Translated by Danielle Carlo.

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from His own self, from the substance of light—in the form of fire, bright, white, round, visible afar…” (Boyce 1990, pp. 45, 47).

In the Torah, the creation of light and the creation of the world are fused together in a singular primordial act. This original light is a meta-phor for the dawn of human consciousness and the discovery of earthly divinity, which is expressed by the prophetic wisdom “in the beginning” (bereshit). In the Zohar the following can be read: “It is written, ‘And God said, Let there be light. And there was light’…And this light has no role in the world, except on the first day; and then it was concealed and no longer used… But it was concealed and sown, like the seed that produces off-spring, seeds and fruit, and by it the world is sustained …” (Zohar 1980, vol. I, p. 441).

In the cosmogonies of the Amazon, fire, linked to the smoke from a demiurgic cigar, is the creative principle of Grandmother Earth (Ki’mâro 2004, p. 21). The Amazonian shaman is always a master of fire, which is understood as a cosmogonic force and as a tool of purification, compara-ble to the Vedic priest of the cults of Agni. Lawrence E. Sullivan writes to this effect: “For the shamanic master of fire, the symbolism of fire centers the world. The axis mundi, the means of connecting all realms of the uni-verse, is an expression of burning desire—the cosmic process of consump-tion contained and controlled by human culture.”

Just as in the alchemical arts, or in the cosmology of Giordano Bruno, this shamanic fire is an ardent desire, a vital energy (Bruno 1955, p. 223). The fire ritual signals the profound transformation that accompanies the first acquisition of fire, a transformation that signifies the separation between the human world and the natural one, the awakening of the reflective consciousness, and the subsequent recognition of the universe as an order at once physical and spiritual. Karl Abraham connected the fire rituals in Oriental cults with the origin of divine nectars and ambrosia, and with sexual energy (Abraham 1969, vol. I, p. 302). Carl G. Jung revealed the sexual origin of fire symbolism in the ancient Vedic and Greek mythol-ogies, as well as in native American cultures. Furthermore, Jung made clear the deep relation between erogenous oral pleasure, the sexual and spiritual fire of Agni or alchemy, and the illuminating function of speech (Jung 1985, vol. VII, pp. 151–3; 166–7). Shamanic fire is in itself a trans-formative fire of the real, a fire that reveals the existing nexus between all living beings and their configuration as a total universe. “The shaman mas-ters this process of mystical transition that constitutes human life and maintains the universe” (Sullivan 1998, pp. 414–5).

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4.1.2 2

The cosmologies of the Andean and Amazonian civilizations correlate gold and its mysterious brilliance with the radiance of the sun and its cos-mic significance. In these cultures, the cults of gold are inseparable from the cults of the sun, just as the magic order of the cosmos is bound to the rituals of fire and light. This link between a metaphysical concept of being, the cults of the sun, and rituals involving gold is revealed in the myth of feminine gold fertilized by the phallic solar ray in a sacred space chosen by the community for the consummation of this magical union. The Spanish- American “oro santo” (blessed gold) designates the result of this cosmic fertilization, which materialized in the plaques forged by ancient Andean goldsmiths that have survived successive colonial and post-colonial genocides.

Halfway through the past century, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff recon-structed a ritual in which this union of solar light with sacred gold was celebrated as the mystical enlightenment of the small community that par-ticipated in this cult. “The process of mutual adornment lasts for several hours and is carried out in the presence of four more priests personifying the Lords of the Cardinal Points. Finally the fires are extinguished and everyone remains silent in the darkness. It is at this point that the two personages impersonating the sun and the moon, and the four Lords of the Cardinal Points, simultaneously consume a hallucinogen, whereupon, it is related, the temple becomes lit up inside with a great light coming not from the fires but from the inner individual illumination produced by the drug. ‘This is when the gold begins to shine,’ say the Indians. ‘The gold fangs of the masks, the bracelets and the pendants are seen to shine.’ The vision fades away after a while, and in the ensuing darkness and silence a solemn dance is begun, accompanied by an almost inaudible humming, and con-tinues until dawn” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 2005, p. 34).

Some aspects of the Amazonian ritual that Reichel-Dolmatoff describes coincide with the Cabala-inspired Neoplatonic philosophies, which con-ceived the universe as a dynamic, harmonious order founded on the sexual union between heaven and earth, or between the stars, the angels and humanity, under the auspices of Eros. This was the ultimate meaning of the metaphysics of Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and, especially, Leone Ebreo. In any case, the central question is not the harmonious cos-mic order contained within these rituals. Beyond the formal parallelism between the myths of an erotic, radiant cosmos, the mystical and


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metaphysical conception of a universe illuminated by the presence of Shekinah, or the luminous beauty and wisdom of the god of the Zohar, it is important to underline the central aspect of this ritual experience. The ingestion of the hallucinogenic drug in the darkness of night transforms the mimetic perception of oro santo into the brilliant vision of a universe illuminated by a cosmic, invisible light.

4.1.3 3

The spiritual vision of fire and sacred light in Amazonian and Andean shamanic rituals can be compared to the vision of a universe illuminated by an assortment of lights or fires in perpetual movement and interac-tion, and cut across by various intensities and different levels of luminos-ity as described by the Sufi mystics. “You will know that the world in its entirety is filled with both manifest, visual lights and nonmanifest, ratio-nal light,” wrote Al-Ghaza lı in his text The Niche of Lights (Al-Ghaza lı 1998, p. 18).

In the Torah, Yahweh appears to Moses repeatedly in the form of fire, and sacrificial fire is the means by which the people of Israel reconcile themselves time and again with Yahweh. In the Kabbalah, this fire is iden-tified with “lightning that produces… all the lights,” and in the seventh hall of mystical ascension to the “mystery of mysteries,” one finds the light that illuminates the inner halls of the world and unites its spirits “in a sin-gle bond” under “the throne of glory” (Zohar 1980, vol. II, pp. 608, 612–5).

In his Dialogues of Love, Leone Ebreo called attention to the fact that light not only illuminates objects, but it also lights up the human eye mak-ing objects visible to its gaze. At the center of this light, at once internal and external, human eyes and beings converge in a dynamic unity that is sensible and super-sensible. The poetics of light and color developed in Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and also in the work of Goethe and the great colorists of modern European painting, Kandinsky and Klee among them, are derived from an intuition about this fundamental unit of the gaze and things that are illuminated (Subirats 2009, pp. 131–40). In line with Ebreo’s philosophical treatise, solar light and the light of intelligence illuminate and reveal the world and human consciousness as an indissolu-ble unit that is physical and, at the same time, divine: “So it is evident that in the corporeal and visible world the sun is the simulacrum of the divine intellect in the intellectual world” (Ebreo 2009, p. 179).

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Paracelsus’s pansophism also contemplated the creative word of the biblical God as an “authentic light in the darkness.” This light is the life and the spirit of all created beings that are illuminated and preserved pre-cisely through this light, which “is the light of God himself, and the Sixth Principle and the way of all things.” For this reason, Paracelsus defines God as an “invisible fire.” He also defines this fire as the inner principle that animates all things. “God has created an invisible fire at the center of all primal matter.” Similar to Sufism, this philosopher, physician, social reformer, and alchemist also contemplated the angels and the human spirit as a part of that same secret fire that is God (Paracelsus 2010, vol. V, pp. 25–6; Al-Ghazalı 1998, p. 56). Light and fire are the cosmic creative principle, the force that illuminates and preserves living beings and the energy that brings to light a sacred universe.

4.1.4 4

The Brahmanic hymns of the Rig-Veda invoke Agni as “the vital force of the radiance of light,” associated with the brilliance of the sun, lightning, and fire. At the same time, they define him as an “inventive intelligence.” These hymns describe Agni as a “visionary” and “prophet” in the same etymological sense as pro-methos, the “foresight” which gave the name of the Titan Prometheus. Agni represents universal wisdom. He is the “son of the Earth who knows all things,” which is exactly the same filial bond that Hesiod, in his Theogony, establishes between the god Prometheus and his mother, Gaia, Mother Earth. The Vedic hymns insist as much on the filial relationship between Agni and “the heavens and earth,” as on his protective and alimentary function for humanity. One of his names is go, the nourishing figure of the cow and, at the same time, the illuminating symbol of light (Misra 2002, p. 104). But there still exists another aspect that reinforces the significance of Agni as the “enlightener of darkness with poetic vision”: he is the “messenger of gods and mortals and (tran-sits) with (his) light between both”—another motif that anticipates the enlightening significance of the Prometheus myth (Rig-Veda, II-1, 12–13; 7–9; III-2, 3; I-31, 18; III-25, 1; X-4, 2).

This mediation between the human and divine worlds distinguishes the function of Agni as the intercessor in the cosmogonic sacrifice in a similar sense to that of Prometheus. However, it is necessary to highlight the distance that separates the Vedic concept of sacrifice (yajna) from the sac-rifice that Prometheus disobeys and transgresses. This in itself should


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point to the subsequent difference that distinguishes Prometheus’s revo-lutionary reform of sacrifice from the notion of sacrifice derived from the Christian crucifixion.

The yajna of the Vedic cults is associated with the creation of the cos-mos, the purification and transformation of human existence, and its ulti-mate purpose is individual perfection, not renunciation, expiation, or suffering, and definitely not self-immolation (Misra 2002, pp. 103–5). Sri Aurobindo defines yajna in the Agni cults as a “traveller moving towards the truth, the light or the felicity” (Aurobindo 1998, p. 68).

4.1.5 5

“There is above the Celestial Fire an Incorruptible Flame, always spar-kling; the Spring of Life, the Fountain of all Being, the Original of all things! This Flame produceth all things, and nothing perisheth but what It consumeth… This Fire cannot be contained in any place; it is without body and without matter… Nothing subsisteth but by this Fire, which is God Himself”—chants an Avestan canticle (Garstin 1932, p. 24). This undefined and infinite light that manifests in solar and astral light and also in fire is, at the same time, a primordial light. The mystery of this light is the same as that of the ancient sacred fires and of the temples and cults that were dedicated to fire in Iran, India, Mesopotamia, and Greece. It is the mystery celebrated in the Zoroastrian cult of Ohrmazd, in the Vedic hymns to the god Agni, and in the torch processions in honor of the Titan Prometheus. This luminous force is associated with starlight. However, just as in the Guaraní mythologies of South America, the mystical philoso-phy of the Sufi, the Cabalistic teachings, or in alchemy, it transcends side-real light.

The philosopher and mystic Suhrawardi distinguished seven forms of light. The first is a sacred light. That same eternal and substantial light from which the Zoroastrian god Ohrmazd created living beings reappears, in Suhrawardi’s treatises, as the “lumen luminis” identified with Allah, the pneumatic principle of illumination and radiance that manifests in all that exists. The six luminous forms that follow constitute the six stages of a purification process that progressively liberates the human spirit from the contaminated reality of the world, until it reaches the ecstatic pleasure of a consciousness of the divine, which makes possible the attainment of that ultimate cosmic radiance: “When we cleanse ourselves from the relation-ships and concerns of our flesh and submerge ourselves in the reflection of

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the magnificence and might of our Creator…we find our essence beauti-fied and shining with the enlightenment and divine illumination and man-ifestation of Allah…” (Suhrawardi 1998, p. 80).

Islamic light mysticism constitutes, together with the Cabala, one of the principal sources of the baroque Christian mysticism epitomized by Teresa de Ávila or Juan de la Cruz. Following them, the ascetic concept of the configuration of the modern subjective consciousness as an abso-lute and divine “I” surfaces in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and then in Descartes, and from him, in turn, it was inherited by modern epistemo-logical rationalism. Meister Eckhart referred to a “natural light of reason”—“daz natürlich lieht der vernünfticheit”—that god pours into the human spirit and that is distinguished from the light of grace (Gnade), and through which the union with the divine is established (Meister Eckhart 1993, vol II, pp. 90–1). The Enlightenment, Les Lumières, or the Aufklärung, which crystalized in More’s Utopia, in Rousseau’s pedagogy and political theory, or in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, also appropriated this mythological principle of light as a spiritual energy in order to bring to light a world subordinated to the system of reason and to the subjective instances co-established in its logical-transcendental networks.

4.1.6 6

In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus defines the mythical fire as didáskalos téchnes: teacher of every technique (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, 110, 254). Since Plato, this Promethean fire has been identified with the energy sources necessary for the preservation of the human species and the development of civilization. This civilizational and technological function of fire as the indispensable element that provides nourishment and makes human survival possible was already as present in the Zoroastrian religion as it was in the Vedic hymns to Agni. Nevertheless, with the advent of the industrial age, this civilizing fire came to represent a force that generates conflicts and wars centered on the consumption of gas, petroleum, and uranium. Confronted with this techno-industrial diminution of Promethean fire, it is important to remember that the myth and the cult of Prometheus signified something very different from the unlimited energy consumption that currently threatens human survival on a global scale. Its significance as the basis of the arts was linked to its function as a tool of intellectual enlightenment, political


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emancipation, and spiritual illumination. Prometheus installs a civilizing fire that institutes a critique of sacrifice and, at the same time, establishes a reflexive relationship between the human and the divine.

4.2 Brighter than a thousand suns

4.2.1 1

“The light of a thousand suns”—the metaphor that the cultural hero Arjuna uses to describe “the splendor of that exalted Being,” Brahma, the foundation of being and emptiness—announced a new age. S. Radhakrishnan interpreted this sentence in the Bhagavad Gita as “a revelation of the potential divinity of all earthly life” (Radhakrishnan 2004, p. 274).

“Brilliantly as a thousand suns” is also a tenet of ancient Buddhist wis-dom: Pra-jana. The brilliance of these suns emanates from an autono-mous light source, which is at once material and part of the inner consciousness of the Hindu Brahma. It is the same light, or more precisely, the same glow that is metaphorically described as “the glorious body of Buddha.” The concept of a radiant Buddha defines the core of dharma, and dharma encompasses the meaning of the eternal cosmic cycles, the infinity of the human spirit, and supreme wisdom, according to the defini-tion that was put forth by Edward Conze. In the Laotian iconography of Buddha, this substantial principle that irradiates luminosity and enlighten-ingly illuminates the world is represented symbolically by a flame over the head of “The Enlightened One,” the same symbol that was later incorpo-rated into the medieval representations of the Christian apostles (Conze and Waley 1951, pp. 34–36).

But “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” was also the slogan pronounced by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to exalt the glory of the first nuclear explosion which he personally supervised as the technical director of the Manhattan Project—and which culminated in the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” effectively announced a new historical era.

4.2.2 2

The poem in the Bhagavad Gita reads: “If the light of a thousand suns were to blaze forth all at once in the sky, that might resemble the splendor

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of the exalted Being.” The destructive consequences of radiation from nuclear fallout caused by the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki can-not be fully accounted for up to the present day: they are infinite in terms relative to human life given that their radioactive half-life can last for as long as 50,000 years. The genetic mutations provoked by nuclear radia-tion are also limitlessly transmitted across generations. The discovery of nuclear energy, its industrial and military production, and the resulting radioactive wastelands left in the wake of these projects define the deeply fractured conscience of our age. “The physicists who participated in forg-ing the most formidable and dangerous weapon of all times are harassed by an equal feeling of responsibility not to say guilt”—stated Einstein at the Fifth Nobel Anniversary Dinner celebrated in New York City four months after the bombs were dropped. He added: “fear has increased tremendously since the termination of the war” (Einstein 1954, pp. 115–6). An age of obscurity had just begun.

The thousand suns of the Bhagavad Gita glorified “the splendor of the exalted Being,” the One in the many and the many in the One supreme, Brahma, the principle of all being and emptiness. He was exalted under the same cosmogonic and esoteric meanings that light and fire have had for the Zoroastrian and Vedic religions, Buddhism, and the magi in the ancient world. These are the same significations of the mysteries of primal light, the light of divine intelligence, and the creative light of being throughout religious history.

Oppenheimer, who contemporary historiography has consecrated as a twentieth-century Prometheus, transformed this creative vision of the cos-mos into the litany of an archaic human holocaust.1 “Utter destruction” was the military slogan announced in the pamphlets that rained down upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a warning just hours before those cities would be reduced to a field of radioactive ashes: an annihilation incompa-rably more radical than the etymological meaning of the Greek holokaus-tos—the total incineration of the sacrificial victim.

4.2.3 3

The thousand suns that symbolically describe Buddha are the light of an enlightenment as brilliant as the gold that, in countless temples in China and Southeast Asia, covers his glorious body. The thousand suns of the radiant Being shine on throughout the transformations of the “I” up to the overcoming of the “I” in favor of a universal consciousness. Brahma


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and Buddha define, respectively, an absolute and infinite being, and the path toward the dissolution, at once magical and rational, of self- consciousness in this being. Both describe the divine perfection of a har-monious, infinite, and dynamic cosmos, and of an absolute spirit that reposes in kindness, peace, sympathy, and the unity of all beings.

The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki installed a new industrial, military, and technological rationality whose ultimate thrust is sacrificial—the holocaust of all humanity as the constituting prin-ciple of the bleeding spirit of universal history. Oppenheimer formulated his doctrine: primordial light as the instrument of total annihilation.

4.3 das Licht des nichtenden nichts2

4.3.1 1

Athanasius Kircher formulated the concept of a light that is both super-natural and instrumental, divine, and destructive, for the first time in 1671. In his work, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, he presents this concept through a series of technical devices that treat light both as a theological and a technological principle. The frontispiece of this treatise demon-strates the theological, technical, and philosophical system that presides over these light machines. The engraving consists of two approximately equal parts, separated by the mythological representatives of earthly light: Apollo, from whom solar rays radiate, and Diana, the moon. At the top center of the frontispiece, the primordial light of Yahweh spreads across the composition. Immediately beneath this divine light, and separated by a choir of angels and a chain of clouds, the two fundamental sources of wisdom appear in accordance with the Christian Renaissance canon. To the left, directly below the representation of divine light and the inscrip-tion “Auctoritas Sacra,” a hand holds up the Bible, which receives lumi-nous rays directly from Yahweh. On the opposite side, an incorporeal eye directs its autonomous light to a hand crowned by the philosophical owl. This is “Ratio.”

The lower half of the engraving represents the earthly realm. Gardens, a city, hills, the ocean…The two principles that govern the world below are the senses, which receive Apollo’s light through a telescope, and from the “Auctoritas Profana,” which is situated below the clouds veiling the divine light. This profane authority also illuminates with its own, some-what tenuous, light the book of scientific and philosophical knowledge.

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Finally, two solar rays, one that proceeds directly from Apollo, the other from its reflection in Diana’s shield, descend on earth. They are the rays that will make possible all of the instruments and different technological uses of light that are exhaustively described in Kircher’s treatise.

One of these instruments stands out. It is called the “Mirror of Archimedes,” a giant optical device designed to concentrate and direct solar light as a destructive power. Kircher discovers or believes to have discovered that only an elliptical mirror, and not a parabolic one as had formerly been understood, was capable of condensing solar rays upon its lethal objective (Fig. 4.1).

Under the title of “Magic Catoptrics,” the same treatise presents an analogous artifact: the “lucerna magica.” The invention of this apparatus, falsely attributed to Kircher himself, dates back to antiquity (Safford 1990, pp. 161–165). Structurally, the lucerna magica is the artifact that is anti-thetical to the camera obscura. In this device, the images from the external world are reflected and then imprinted on the interior space of the camera. Its construction is a mechanical replica of the human eye, and it anticipates the modern photographical camera. On the contrary, the lucerna magica does not obey a principle of duplication, but instead a projective one, simi-lar to elliptical projections of solar light. Its optical mechanism concen-trates and emits a variety of simulacrae or idolae onto an exterior surface, holograms artificially created inside a system of optical lenses installed around the autonomous light source of a flame. The Kircherian artifact of the lucerna magica anticipated the deceptive quality of the “fabrication of spectacles,” as Edison himself disparagingly called the first experiments with cinematography. Kircher was accused of necromancy by the Roman church, and he was condemned for the “sophistic” aspects of his invention (Subirats 1999, pp. 129–135) (Fig. 4.2).

Light is the symbolic and instrumental center of both apparatuses. It is a light explicitly defined as divine and identified with the human faculty of reason. Like sacred light, it illuminates, on the one hand, the divine wis-dom of the Bible, and, on the other, the sacred images of infernal tor-ments: respective metaphors for the dogma and propaganda of the Christian church. The technical device of the illuminated tube and the projector of simulacra exhibit complimentary functions. If, from one point of view, solar light is concentrated as a destructive force, from another, it is the source material for the production of simulacra and the basis of a false magic. Kircher represents the birth of an unenlightened technosci-ence under its two dominant dimensions in the twenty-first century: the


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Fig. 4.1 Frontispiece. Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671)

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corporate production of knowledge with an explicitly destructive final purpose, and the subordination of this knowledge to the demands of the market and the rhetoric of the spectacle. His treatise, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, epitomizes those idols of the market and the theater, and of the human cave and tribe, which Francis Bacon had already unveiled, several decades prior, as fallacies of a false science (Fig. 4.3).

4.3.2 2

The discovery of the electrical nature of lightning by Benjamin Franklin and the subsequent development of electricity as an industrial energy source reiterates a similar ambivalence to Kircher’s divine and instrumental light. Franklin harnessed the destructive force from the ray of lightning, which is associated with the mythological power of Zeus, and put it at the service of humanity under the banner of the colonial emancipation of North America. No one in the modern world has represented, in such a

Fig. 4.2 The ray of Archimedes. Athanasius Kircher: Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671)


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consistent manner, the synthesis of scientific reason, technological power, and political emancipation. “Prometheus der neueren Zeiten” was the title that Kant granted him, in line with the mythological historiography of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

It is meaningful to note that Kant’s comment was not celebratory, but rather skeptical. It reticently referred to the “Prometheus of the new era,” but only to follow up with an allusion to a “Mr. Franklin who attempted to disarm thunder” (“Hrn. Franklin, der den Donner entwaffnen wollte…”). In the obscure article about earthquakes in which these com-ments appear, written by a young Kant, Franklin was not elevated to the category of a technological inventor in the sense of that freedom which the Critique of Pure Reason would later define as the absolute objective of scientific knowledge. Nor was Franklin put on the altar of Promethean technai. Kant did not associate the kite experiment that allowed Franklin to control the destructive force of lightning with the mythical theft of sacred

Fig. 4.3 Lucerna Magica. Athanasius Kircher. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671)

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fire, but rather with the destructive weapon that Zeus attained from the Cyclopes. What is more, he judged this type of aspiration as “proof of human audacity” (“Beweisthümer von der Kühnheit des Menschen”). His conclusion to such a dilemma is moral: it appeals to the Greek sofrosyne against the technocentric nemesis. But it is not less enlightening: “…wobei er billig anfangen sollte, dass er doch niemals etwas mehr, als ein Mensch sei”—“one should more equitably begin with the fact that (the human being) can never be anything more than human”—neither a Titan, nor a god armed with the power of lightning and thunder (Kant 1867, vol. I, p. 456).

This is a minor article that is not included in the current editions of Kant’s collected works, and it has not been translated in any well-known English editions. Franklin was in no way a central component of Kant’s definition of Aufklärung. But this is not the case in the work of Herder or Goethe. Franklin is the luminous ray that runs through the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity. When these letters appeared, between 1793 and 1797, four decades had already passed since the publication of Franklin’s essays on electricity and two since the Declaration of Independence. Herder compared Franklin to Socrates and Montaigne. For him, Franklin’s work represented the “healthful reason of reflection, the calculation, and the equitable and variable general order of human negotiations…” and signified “ein Bund der Humanität”—“a unifying bond for Humanity.” Goethe expressed the same high considerations of Franklin in a work that is central to European cultural history, Dichtung und Wahrheit. But he didn’t quite see the rebellious strength or the Titanic power of a Prometheus in the American inventor and revolutionary. Instead, he exalted the “spirit,” the “understanding,” the “humor,” the “free-dom,” the “taste,” and the “hope” that his political and scientific life rep-resented (Herder 1991, pp. 14, 313; Goethe 1985, vol. 16, pp. 631, 750).

The permutation of Prometheus’s enlightening fire into the power and violence of Zeus’s lightning, which Franklin’s saga concealed, inevitably has consequences that greatly affect the normal definitions of technosci-ence in the contemporary world, just as much as it affected the political and civilizational project of the Founding Fathers. Danielle Carlo develops this critique through a series of compelling constellations. First, she recon-structs a foundational genealogy of Franklinian technai. She shows the harmony of imagination and play in the kite experiment, which transforms the dreamlike levity of a flying kite into a technological instrument that domesticates the destructive potency of the lightning bolt and transforms


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it into electrical energy that benefits humanity. Following this, not failing to highlight the libertarian spirit, the trickster-like cunning, and the phi-lanthropy that distinguished Franklin’s work, her hermeneutic chronicle reveals the complicity of his discovery with Puritan principles of sacrifice and punishment cleansed of all traces of cruelty and violence: the electric chair. Finally, Carlo illustrates the transition from the hypocritical moral-ism of the electric chair to the epistemological cynicism of nuclear exter-mination (Carlo 2012).

Technological and divine providence converge in Franklin’s project of universal organization whose historical culmination, the day after the nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was and is the constitu-tion of a singular techno-industrial civilization and a sole global state founded upon the power of utter destruction. It was Bertrand Russell who, in 1945, explicitly formulated this ultimate consequence of that which he denominated “scientific warfare”: the global nuclear state. Such a coronation of modern technoscience places Prometheus’s enlight-ening fire and technai in the hands of that same totalizing power repre-sented by Zeus against which he had rebelled. Prometheus no longer stands for the liberating god who loves humanity and is fraternally tied to the earth; instead he has become a Titan at the service of Zeus, that demiurgic organizing principle of the cosmos which the founders of Christianity identified as Yahweh. In the words of Tertullian: “…there is one God only who made all things, who formed man from the dust of the earth. He is the true Prometheus who gave order to the universe…” (Tertulian 1889, p. 55).

Financial and scientific positivism, which has financed the titanic con-quests and spectacles of industrial technology from Kircher’s lucerna mag-ica to Franklin’s kite experiment, has reduced, diminished, and falsified the variety of aspects that come together in the figure of Prometheus. It has ignored the genealogical filiation with Gaia, Mother Earth and bio-logical mother of all, which is the foundation of his “philanthropy.” It has amputated the essential link between his technai and the laws of nature and human customs represented by Themis, another aspect of and name for the Great Mother Gaia. It has also equated the Promethean technai with the production-focused and corporate tools of modern technosci-ence. Industrial positivism has trivialized the concept of emancipation from labor that Prometheus symbolized, identifying it instead with the incessant production of gadgets, whether drones or iPhones. And it has reduced Promethean foresight—which is precisely the power that defines

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his name—with development that is epistemologically and administra-tively immune to its devastating social and ecological consequences.

This positivist pragmatism has cast aside the central aspect of the Promethean saga: his rebellion against Zeus’s tyrannical power. It also fails to recognize his solidarity with Mother Earth, “mother of all,” and with her children, which is to say, us. It has stripped the Promethean fire of its bond with the sacred order of the cosmos. It has separated it from the beauty and harmony of nature. It has deprived it of its enlightening func-tion for all humanity.

4.4 “Prometheus: enLightener Par ExcEllEncE”

4.4.1 Mythos and Logos

From Parmenides to Lucretius, the logos, as a reflexive discourse on being, trespasses on to the territory of mythos, the word linked to the origins of being itself. The Platonic myth of the cave is the telling of a primordial situation in which fire and darkness, shadows and light crystallize into a singular unit. In Symposium, this unit binds together the epopteia of the Eleusinian Mysteries with the laws of the polis and consciousness. But this relationship breaks down at a crucial moment: the foundation of Christianity.

Origen Adamantius wrote: “We would reply to the Jew: The myths you have quoted we regard as such; but we certainly do not consider as leg-ends the stories in our Bible which we and you share in common, which not only you but we also hold in reverence”(Origen 1980, p. 111). Starting with the New Testament, the myth includes that universe which is resistant to the theos en logos, the word of God. This first Christian exci-sion of myth and logos was then surpassed by their epistemological separa-tion in Bacon’s Instauratio Magna. Under the colonial and financial power that defined this new “scientific reason,” the mythological experi-ence was lost in the realm of dreams and fantasy. Its final refuge has been works of art, artistic and literary hermeneutics, and the psychology of the unconscious.

In a next step, the critical theory of Marx or the sociology of Durkheim revealed the presence of myth and a ritual order at the heart of modern scientific rationality. Exchange value revealed itself as the secularization of the myth of Christian transubstantiation. The integral function of tran-scendental reason revealed itself as the rationalization of the mana princi-


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ple. “Myth becomes Enlightenment,” wrote Horkheimer and Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 6). But their unveiling of the myth at the center of logos did not only signify its negative determination in the sense in which it was conceived by the theological and epistemological critique of false idols. Freud, Rank, Abraham, Ferenczi, Jung, or Neumann revealed the function both of logos as the rationalizing system of human conflict that only myth is able to enlighten and of the mythological mem-ory as the point of departure of a process of enlightenment.

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We express ourselves through a language bereft of myth. We live in abstract spaces and we are subject to abstract laws. We recognize and construct everyday life from rational codes. World civilization is governed by scien-tific logos that is released from any kind of mythological memory. Nevertheless, in this universe of abstractions and logos we see the blos-soming of a multitude of myths. That same thirst for mythology that Nietzsche attributed to the abstract condition of modern human existence and the absence of historical and ontological roots, sates itself with the growth of communication media and commercial and political propa-ganda: myths of salvational powers, myths of holy war, myths of techno-logical and industrial titans, apocalyptic myths of total destruction. We live in a world of images whose mobilizing power of mass electronic culture resides in the emotional and intellectual intensity of ancient myths.

In a well-known letter to Karl Kerényi, written in the context of World War II, Thomas Mann wrote: “It is essential that myth be taken away from intellectual Fascism and transmuted for humane ends” (Mann and Kerényi 1975, p. 103). On the one hand, Mann was radicalizing the critique of myth as false representation or as a false idol—the myths of “intellectual Fascism;” on the other, he was incorporating a hermeneutic tradition that, from Vico to psychoanalysis, looked to mythological memories as the means for the psychological, religious, and literary enlightenment of mod-ern consciousness.

In his Dahlem lectures, Klaus Heinrich radicalized this perspective. His concept of enlightenment in world religions “dates back to those documents of the history of mankind that we designate as cosmogonic, as creation myths” (Heinrich 2007, p. 43). But the model for his repre-sentation of myth as enlightenment and enlightenment through myth was Prometheus, the “Enlightener, par excellence.” However, this was

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not simply about highlighting the way that myth as power and false con-sciousness “trespasses” on Baconian epistemology and Newtonian phys-ics, which historically have flowed into the transcendental models of the consciousness industry that were questioned by Adorno and Horkheimer, or the rationalism of the asylum analyzed by Foucault, or the industrial and military megamachines examined by Mumford. For Heinrich, this was about the understanding of Prometheus as the mythological and philosophical definition of enlightenment vs. the mythification of the logos of industrial civilization as both a sacrificial principle and an abso-lute power.

4.4.2 Philanthropy

Plato’s concept of techné did not originate from a patriarchal principle of domination like that formulated in the book of Genesis, which Francis Bacon conceived as the foundation of his Instauratio Magna of modern technoscience. It was not born of a biblical will to subjugate and domi-nate, a meaning contained in the Hebrew verb radah, nor did it come from the desires and impulses associated with kadah, a word which incor-porates the meaning of subordinating and dominating through violence “and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Techne is not based on the masculine principle of sexual and political potentia, and its productio, on the “fruits” of a feminine Earth, subjugated and passive under the fetishistic principle of capital interests (t. I, & 1, 9, 116, 117, etc.; Heinrich 1981, pp. 112–15).

According to Plato, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus created humanity together with all of the species in the animal kingdom. With the lack of forethought that etymologically distinguishes him—what is really a retrospective vision that compliments pro-methos, just as hindsight compli-ments foresight—Epimetheus distributed among the beasts all of the qual-ities and faculties that were available to him until he ran out of them. When he remembered the human beings, he no longer had any resources left for them, leaving them “naked, barefoot, defenseless, and powerless.” In order to compensate for this biological oversight, Prometheus then decided to steal from Hephaestus and Athena the technon sofian, “techno-logical wisdom” (Protagoras, 321 d). This technical wisdom elevated Prometheus as the emblem of the age of techno-scientific discovery, titan of the industrial revolution, and divine principle of its colossal enterprises of planetary domination.


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The first word that Kratos and Bia, sons of hate (styx) and agents of the violent force and oppressive power of the tyrant Zeus, pronounce in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound is “philanthropy.” In the bitter dia-logue they carry out with their prisoner and victim, Prometheus, while Hephaestus, god of fire and the forge, chains him to Caucasus, Kratos incriminates him repeatedly of his “love (philia) towards man” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, 11, 18, etc.). Zeus reprehends and con-demns this philanthropy with a hatred and violence that compels Prometheus to steal the illuminating fire of “all arts” (pantechnon) and to disobey the word of the supreme father-god (patros logos).

Philanthropy is a human action that exceeds the juridical rationality of a civilization that has been defined by political philosophy, since Machiavelli and Hobbes, as a pack of ferocious wolves in a battle to the death of all against all. This philanthropy goes beyond the rationality that defines human beings as agents in an unlimited process of monetary accumulation in accor-dance with the capitalist anthropology of Adam Smith and Ricardo. The human bonds that establish the archaic “potlatch,” the “obligation to give” in the economic system of honor and reciprocity by the indigenous peoples in regions of Alaska and Vancouver, and the Hindu principle of dan-adharma, which designates a form of life based on the shared enjoyment of nourishment, are certainly closer to this anthropophilic “excess” than the Christian virtue of charity, and the Western moralizing category of philan-thropy or that are usually associated with it (Mauss 1990, pp. 39, 54).

In any case, this philanthropy has brought to light successive demo-cratic, anticolonial, and socialist revolutions. It is significant that Charles Fourier would identify it with the principle of universal erotic sympathy that had set apart the ancient cosmologies, from the Upanishads to Lucretius and Leone Ebreo. From this philia or cosmic sympathy, Fourier constructed the logic and logistics of the Phalanstère as the stem cell of a civilization humanized around the harmonious relationship between humanity and nature. It should be noted that Peter Kropotkin, and Russian as well as French anarchism, conferred upon this philanthropy the character of an organizing principle for social equality and solidarity.

There is hardly any need to highlight the fact that these versions of anthropophilia have not survived in modern society. Both its mythological significance as a gift and reciprocity, and the suspension and overcoming of institutional violence and the self-interest of its subjects, just as much as the Promethean meaning of philanthropy as human solidarity, were sup-planted by the Christian agape and caritas.

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The Christian agape does not establish an economic system of reciproc-ity that comprises the human community and nature, in contrast to Hindu danadharma or the potlatch of the indigenous peoples. It is neither the ethical basis of a system of economic exchange, nor of social organization, and much less of a cosmic order. It is a moral virtue, the most moral of all Christian virtues, more important than faith and hope, according to Saint Paul. Its attributes are the “enduring” and “kind” comportment that “is not jealous,” “pompous,” or “inflated.” Furthermore, agape “does not rejoice over wrong-doing,” but rather it “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (I Corinthians: 13, 4–7).

The Greek philia designates an affect of sympathy, just as in a close, hospitable, and friendly relationship. It can even include an erotic ele-ment. Philios is a friend. And in its Latin derivation, filius and filia desig-nate a filial alliance. Prometheus’s philia entails a parental tie with Gaia, Mother Earth, and with her children, the Titans, and with the children of her children, we humans. It is not a moral action of altruistic hope, patience, and suffering. And it does not involve a principle of sacrifice and transcendence. Instead, it encompasses filiation, the bond of affection, emotional sympathy, and existential brotherhood.

These linkages do not configure a system of moral norms or legal nexus. On the contrary, they define an historical and ethical order that comes before these norms and laws. For this reason, they also include the primor-dial gods and goddesses that are connected to the elemental forces of nature and human instincts. In Aeschylus’s version, Prometheus’s filial bond with Gaia, the Titans, and human beings additionally assumes an explicitly political dimension, since it includes a resistance of solidarity against the tyrannical power of the Olympic corporation and its president, Zeus. Although moral laws are not unknown here, it is precisely these laws that Aeschylus’s Prometheus invokes against the violence of the father of the gods and against his genocidal plan for all humanity, these moral laws are not derived from a transcendental moral and logical power, but from the genealogical bond with Gaia and the natural order that this bond entails.

Promethean anthropophilia is neither patient, nor complacent, nor can it be considered selfless. Prometheus did not “offer himself to be burned alive for human charity”—which Paul puts forth as the highest example of Christian philanthropy. Promethean love can never crystallize in martyr-dom. On the contrary, Aeschylus’s tragedy broadly repudiates the torture that Zeus infringes on Prometheus. And if, in those versions by Hesiod


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and Aeschylus, Prometheus comes across as a tragic hero, it is not because he has to fatally confront the sacrifice the tyrant eternally imposes on the organ which represents vital energy par excellence: the liver. He is not tragic because he is unjustly mortified by Hephaestus’s technological fire and the wound opened by the imperial eagle.

Prometheus is tragic because he upholds his solidary alliance with the earth and humanity, which consists of the gift of sacred fire and the rejec-tion of sacrifice, up to its ultimate consequences, and in spite of foreseeing his illegitimate punishment, all of which is clearly expressed in Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 101, 263).

Aeschylus places an intriguing remark in Prometheus’s mouth. He declares himself son of Gaia and adds: “she is one but her names are many” (Prometheus Desmotes, 210). Four are mentioned: Ge, Gaia, Kton, and Themis. Themis is a personification of Earth and she represents its pro-phetic power. At the same time, she stands for the elemental and instinc-tual impulse that gives shape to the collective consciousness, similar to the social sanctions generated in and through the alliance between humans and nature and the ethics of custom. She embodies the primordial link that binds humans in a familial, tribal, and communitarian order that pre-cedes and anticipates their bond under the abstract principle of the law (dike) (Harrison 1974, p. 485). She comprises a natural state and natural laws in the sense in which Spinoza’s political theology was conceived: an ethical principle that maintains the balance capable of guaranteeing the collective survival of both human and nature.

In his interpretation of the Promethean myth, Karl Kerényi underlined an explanatory concept of this ethical and natural order represented by Themis: pera dikes—“beyond the law” or “beyond all rights.” In his sen-tence against Prometheus’s anthropophilia, Hephaestus pronounces the following words: “For you, a God, feared not the anger of the Gods, but gave honors to mortals beyond what was just.” In his protest against Zeus, which he directs to the chorus composed of Ocean’s daughters, Prometheus himself recognizes his “excess” of love or philia toward humans, an excess or profusion that, a bit later, the chorus reiterates (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 29–30; 123, 542; Kerényi 1953, p. 99). This filial and fra-ternal “plethora” or “surplus” is in no way the moral transcendence of the egoistic interests of Augustinian anthropology, or of the economic and juridical subjects of modern capitalism. On the contrary, it is a physical and intellectual overabundance, the plethora that emanates from the filial alli-ance ante legem of Prometheus with the earth, with the instinctual order

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tied to nature, or with the human and ecological balance represented by the goddess Themis.

Prometheus’s anthropophilia is a link beyond the law that emerges from natural forces and human instincts. It is the alliance ante legem between humans and the greater community of living beings, under the principle of one and the same genetic and generic origin, which is to say, Gaia. What is essential in the myth of Prometheus is this filiation between earth and human-ity, and his filial and fraternal—not charitable, or sacrificial—gift of fire from which mortals “can learn many techniques (technai)” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, p. 254).

4.4.3 Industrial Titan

If Agni, the Vedic god of fire, represented human divinity and perfection in a cosmic and civilizational sense, and if Aeschylus elevated Promethean fire as the basis of the development of civilization, Francis Bacon restricted its function to the requisites of the industrial revolution. “Prometheus made haste to find out fire… fire deserves well to be called the succour of succours, or the help of helps, which infinite ways affords aid and assis-tance to all labours and mechanical arts, and to the sciences themselves.” At the same time, Bacon was omitting Prometheus’s political rebellion against the tyrannical power of Olympus and ignoring the affront of total sacrifice. He was also casting aside the enlightening function of the intel-ligence and spirit associated with the ancient sacred fires of Ohrmazd, Agni, or Prometheus. However, Bacon compensated for this epistemo-logical reduction of the meaning of Promethean fire—and with it modern consciousness represented by the industrial exhibitions of the nineteenth century or the conquest of space in the twentieth—under a new signifier: anthropocentrism. Bacon supplanted Promethean anthropophilia for the anthropocentric teleology of industrial reason: “Man is the centre of the world, in respect of final causes, so that if man were not in nature, all things would seem to stray and wander without purpose… for all things attend on man, and he makes use and gathers fruit from all creatures” (Bacon 1884, pp. 395–7).

This conversion of Prometheus into an anthropocentric and techno-centric titan forced Bacon to go a step further: the transformation of fore-sight into providence. “Prometheus doth clearly and eminently signify providence” (Bacon 1884, pp. 395–7). The anthropocentric definition of science in Bacon’s Instauratio Magna is founded on the biblical precept of


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divine providence. In the same instant that Elohim expels Adam and Eve from Eden, he also orders them to be fruitful, to multiply, and to fill the earth. But he adds the commandment of “kabash”—to submit, to force, or to dominate it—and “radah”—to have power over it (Genesis 1:28). The providential program of technoscience hearkens back to the Calvinistic redefinition of the providence of Elohim, God, or the Supreme Being: “by which, as keeper of the keys, he governs all events.” Baconian technosci-ence is providential in a subjective sense because it is the expression of the power that God bestowed upon human intelligence as the governing prin-ciple over all things. It is providential because it assumes divine supremacy over these things. This science is the manifestation of a “greater provi-dence” (Calvin 2006, vol. I, pp. 202–5).

Plutarch defined Promethean foresight as “the prophetic art [that] concerns the future that is to result from all things present and past” (Plutarch 2005, p, 213). The difference between this enlightened concep-tion of Promethean prescience and prediction, and Christian providence and its empirico-critical secularization is the same as that which mediates between the auguries of prophets, sibyls, and shamans, and the Christian concept of logos en theos and its secularization under the category of logos of the historical progress of humanity (John 1:1).3

Promethean prescience is illuminated, enlightening foreknowledge. The providence of Bacon, Calvin, or Franklin is the consummation of and compliment to a pre-established order of the universe and the apocalyptic logos of history, in the sense of diathe ke, testament or covenant of the historical theology of Saint Paul or Saint John, or in the sense of postmod-ern posthistoricism.

Bacon converted Prometheus’s matriarchal anthropophilia into patriar-chal anthropocentrism and industrial technocentrism. In order to do this, he had to transmute Prometheus’s prophetic, illuminating foresight into a providential teleology of technological and industrial development, which, from a moral perspective, has been as politically absolutist as Calvin’s providentialist determinism. The ostensible consequences of this teleology today are destructive for that natural and ethical order symbolized by Themis, the mother of Prometheus and one of the names of the Great Mother Earth.

The providentialism of Baconian and modern technoscience has had a still greater consequence. It has robbed the meaning of the enlightening fire from the Promethean rebellion against the sacrifice and totalitarian power represented by the Olympic enterprise, and it has supplanted

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Promethean anthropophilia with a final, radical idol: the conception of history as a salvational event. “Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia” (“Many shall pass through and knowledge will increase”)—states the leg-end under the frontispiece for Bacon’s Novum Organum. This is a quota-tion from the Book of Daniel (Daniel, 12: 5). This pronouncement was formulated in an eschatological context. “Many will range far and wide and knowledge will increase.” But the wisdom or science of the Book, to which Daniel’s prophecy alludes, is now displaced by the discovery enter-prise and the empirico-critical rationality of a productive science linked to the commercial and military expansion of industrial civilization. In accor-dance with the new Baconian prophecy, only the unlimited expansion of the productivity and domination of technoscience can confer upon the earth the meaning of a true final cause; only technoscience can transform the cosmos into a divine reality.

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Last but not least, Baconian science does not only displace and conceal Prometheus’s foresight, rebellion, and emancipation. It also allows for one of the founding myths of occidental misogyny to be reintroduced into the new scientific conception of human progress: Pandora.

In Goethe’s version, Pandora represents divine perfection, eternal beauty, and a complete work of art, all of which compliment his stylization of Prometheus as an industrial Titan (Goethe 1985, vol. 9, pp. 171–2). In Hesiod’s saga, the creation of Pandora was already an organizational model of those same industrial technics. From Athena to Hermes, and from Aphrodite to Hephaestus, all of Olympus participated in the process of her creation under a rigorous division of labor. But one of the most fascinating aspects of this production resides in the fact that the final assembly of this robot, Pandora, takes place in Hephaestus’s forge. Her origin is fire. And once again, Bacon reduces its significance. If, on the one hand, he diminishes Promethean fire to its strictly technological functions, on the other, he transmutes the primordial erotic power of Pandora’s fire into an entirely negative force. “And it is a common but apt interpretation, by Pandora to be meant pleasure and voluptuousness, which is engen-dered, as it were, by the efficacy of fire…”

However, Bacon does not resign himself to this simple moral condem-nation. In addition, he devalues the voluptuousness, the seduction, and the sexual pleasure represented by the primordial woman and reduces her


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celebrated jar, symbol of the uterus and its creative capacity, to the primary cause of the “infinite miseries” that afflict the bodies, spirits, and fortunes of human beings. It is not the alliance of Promethean technai with com-mercial and industrial expansion, and colonialism and its multiple military and political expressions which is responsible for the conflicts, wars, and infinite miseries of the human family throughout recorded history. It is Pandora who is guilty…“for from this fountain have wars, and tumults, and tyrannies derived their origin” (Bacon 1884, pp. 402–3).

4.4.4 “Enlightener, Par Excellence”

In Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, it is Kratos, the representative of the violent power of Zeus, who defines the two constituting principles of Promethean philanthropy. Right from the beginning of the tragedy, this tormentor denigrates Prometheus as a “sophist,” and he labels him “inven-tor” (sofistés, euretés) (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 59, 62). At the center of Prometheus’s rebellion one encounters divinatory capabilities, rational judgment, critical understanding, and enlightenment, along with the invention of the arts. None of these categories can be reduced to the terms of techno-scientific power and productivity, and much less to the principle of “prudence” and “providence,” which obligates the empirico- critical “scholars” of Prometheus to renounce “many lawful pleasures and divers recreations,” according to the Baconian deflation.

Klaus Heinrich remembered that, in the biography of the Greek phi-losophers by Diógenes Laertius, the word “sophist” was not identified with rhetoric understood as a political technology, as it was in Plato’s Protagoras: “The sophists were enlighteners par excellence.” They repre-sented the intelligence capable of substituting social relations of domina-tion and the logos based on the appeal and the command, for “the aspiration towards enlightenment through question and answer” (Heinrich 2007, p. 180). Prometheus is a sophist—Hermes reiterates this at the end of Aeschylus’s tragedy—and it is precisely this enlightening intelligence of the sophist that he offered as a gift to humans, when they were “infantile” and “though they had eyes and ears they could make nothing of what they saw and heard” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 447–8). Prometheus is a sophist in the same sense as Kant’s “Sapere aude!”—a sophist in the sense of the intellectual freedom that Kant defined in his article Was ist Aufklärung?: “Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen”—“Have courage to use your own understanding” (Kant 1996, p. 54).

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Aeschylus defines this enlightening function in line with a rigorously modern, or “Copernican” principle of understanding: “seeing more than what is manifest” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, p. 843). This is the anticipatory and preventative vision that semantically defines his name, pro-methos: an intelligence that does not obey, but rather questions, and can see beyond mere appearances; the intelligence capable of transforming those first “infantile” human beings who saw without seeing and heard without understanding into a conscious, autonomous humanity. The fun-damental motive of the Prometheus myth is this reflexive vision and antici-patory prevision.

A third characteristic distinguishes Prometheus as “enlightener.” The Titan god delivered the “gift,” honor, and privilege (géras) of technai to humanity. Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound exhaustively names those “tech-niques”: in the first place, numbers, the wisdom that comes above all oth-ers (exochon sophismaton), followed by writing, and then the domestication of animals and the cultivation of plants. Aeschylus also dedicates ample space to medicine. In addition, he enumerates architectonic techniques and materials. He mentions the knowledge of mineral resources hidden within the earth. He indicates that Prometheus taught the art of reason and divination. “All the techniques that mortals have come from Prometheus” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, p. 506).

Prometheus represents a modern concept of enlightenment as the abil-ity to see beyond mere appearances. Further, the integration of literature, philosophy, medicine and mathematics with architecture and mineralogy put forward by Aeschylus does not presuppose the segregation of these technai from the disciplines that the medieval European universities included in the Trivium and Quadrivium and which the modern aca-demic corporations have extended under the category of liberal arts. Neither is it a modern or Baconian concept of technoscience because its meaning is not productivity and domination. Its point of departure is the rebellion against oppression and the solidarity with the earth and her chil-dren. The center of his technai is human development and freedom.

4.4.5 Prometheus-Khristos

Christianity has redefined the myth of Prometheus under a singular aspect: his martyrdom. The great oil paintings of Jordaens and Rubens are spec-tacular monuments to this conversion. Their symbolic center is not con-figured by the stolen fire, or the taunting of sacrifice, or much less the


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discovery of the arts, but instead by the imperial eagle with wings extended tearing with its beak at the Titan’s liver. Both works of art dramatically insist upon the devouring of the organ that represents his vital force. In both paintings, Prometheus lies dejected upon the rocks and his body writhes in agony beneath his chains. In both oils, he is turned over on his head. Both highlight an iconographical nexus with the imagery of Christian martyrs. Far removed from the aesthetic dignity of the nude exalted in the pictorial humanism of Michelangelo or Dürer, the Baroque painter detains himself in the micropolitical depiction of torture. Jordaens and Rubens relish in the suffering and desperation of a god degraded to sacrificial victim.

This transformation of Prometheus into a Christian martyr or a cruci-fied Christ is a modern invention. The patristic and medieval Christian theological allusions to the Greek god, from Tertullian to Saint Isidore, identified him with the creator of the first man and organizer of the uni-verse, as well as with “the one and only God” (Tertullian 1889, p. 55). It is during the height of the twentieth century and to Simone Weil that we owe one of the most drastic formulations of this mythological fusion of Prometheus with Christ: “The story of Prometheus is like the refraction into eternity of the Passion of the Christ. Prometheus is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Weil 1957, p. 70). The Christianization of Prometheus has fatally crowned itself with the hybridization of the proto-misogynist myth of Pandora and the Christian saga of a naked Eve seduced by the diabolical serpent of Eden, and the misfortunes that humanity is obligated to bear due to her concupiscent sin.

These versions convert Prometheus into the martyr of human emanci-pation from its primitive state of intellectual infantilism and subordination to the tyrannical power of the Olympic corporation. One can even speak of a Christological Prometheus submitted to eternal torture for the redemption of the original human debt/guilt (Schuld) contracted by the ineptitude of his counterpart, or brother, Epimetheus.

4.4.6 The Critique of Sacrifice

Prometheus brought fire to humanity. But in contrast to the gods Agni or Ohrmazd, he didn’t create that fire himself. He stole it from Zeus. This theft of fire does not set him apart only, or in the first place, as a trickster. Prometheus exhibits the skullduggery of a trickster when he disguises the ox bones with gleaming fat in order to give them as a sacrifice to the gods,

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reserving the meat for human sustenance. He is also a trickster because he steals the sacred fire that Zeus would not allow humans to use for enlight-enment and the creation of the arts necessary for their development. Nevertheless, his theft and his schemes are different than the ruses and pilfering of Hermes, the god of roads, travelers, and thieves, and the Greek trickster by antonomasia. “But Hermes’ deception springs from a creative art, which enriches the divinity of the world with playful magic. In the original deception of Prometheus, a basic flaw in the character of Prometheus is the source of grave shortcomings in man,” wrote Karl Kerényi, to this effect (Kerényi 1953, p. 46). This difference explains how Zeus could laugh, according to the Homeric Hymns, at Hermes’s theft of his brother Apollo’s sacred cows, and of the tall tales he would try to con him with, when he was just a recently born child. On the contrary, Prometheus’s theft of Olympian fire and his sacrificial scam possess all of the gravity of a profane transgression and political insubordination. Prometheus is not only a trickster. He is, before all else, a revolutionary.

Hermes and Prometheus share a close relationship to fire and the sacri-fice. Both figures transgress their respective rituals. But Hermes invents fire and on his sacrificial altar the immolated victim surrenders himself completely to the gods. His carefree trick consists in dividing the divine offering into 12 parts, one for each of the other 11 gods, and reserving for himself the 12th, as he too was an Olympian. Prometheus, on the other hand, reserved the most substantial part of the sacrificial animal for human survival.

Both are tricksters. And in each of them cunning and theft are tied to creation and invention, and to the development of human intelligence. But Prometheus does not invent sacrifice, nor does he establish a total sacrifice for the gods. Quite the opposite, he transforms and reforms it. He transforms the sacrifice into a ritual tied to nourishment and human neces-sities. He reforms it in such a way that subverts the subordination of humans in relation to the gods, by introducing into his sacrificial rituals the principles of reflection, critique, and resistance. Aeschylus radicalizes this difference by contrasting a rebellious Prometheus with a subaltern and servile Hermes.

The political context of this rebellion is also sharply described in Prometheus Bound: “New rulers wield the helm on Olympus, and Zeus governs arbitrarily by new-made laws; what once was mighty he now casts into oblivion (astoi)”—astoi, a word whose root is related to annihilation, concealment, and oblivion (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 149–51).


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The Titan Okeanos is more explicit still: he denounces the “tyranny” of those gods and tries to persuade Prometheus to negotiate, alleging above all the violence that sets Olympian power apart (Prometheus Desmotes, p. 310). Such bitter warnings combine with the protests of the chorus and of Prometheus himself against the unjust punishment that Zeus inflicts upon him. These protests culminate with an extreme accusation: Zeus has no concern for the “wretched” mortals. Even worse: his intention is to “obliterate the race altogether and create another new one.” This protest is crowned with the affirmation that Zeus “…will not be ruling the gods for long,” a conspiratorial allusion to the fatal destiny in which the “young” rule of Zeus will fall with the same haste and severity with which he top-pled Kronos’s reign (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 233–35; 907–43). The Promethean theft of Olympian fire is a political rebellion whose final purpose is to destroy the tyrannical laws of Zeus. It is also a theological revolution against the God-Zeus installed as the one and abso-lute power over the entire universe.

The genealogy of this Promethean revolution hearkens back to a golden age in which humans lived alongside the gods. “The gods and mortal human beings came about from the same origin,” writes Hesiod, in this regard, in Works and Days (Hesiod 2006, p. 108). This primordial unit splits up in the instant in which the “new rulers [who] wield the helm on Olympus” dethrone Kronos—according to Aeschylus. This new power establishes a separation and, with it, the need for a new transaction or agreement between humans and the gods (Hesiod 2006, p. 535). It is at this exact moment that Prometheus intervenes. This intervention does not mean the introduction of instrumental fire, as opposed to Hephaestus’s fire and forge. Nor does Prometheus discover fire to introduce the divine sacrifice, as does Hermes. The Titan god sacrifices the ox to Zeus. He hides the meat in the belly of the animal, and he philanthropically reserves it for the mortal humans. To Zeus he offers, in exchange, the bones cov-ered under the hide of the victim and dressed in gleaming fat. These are the two great hallmarks of the Promethean enlightenment as a critique of sacrifice: a new set of protocols in the relationship with the gods that turn out to be beneficial to humanity, and the liberation of sacred fire as the enlightening and creative energy of the arts.

In his analysis of the Prometheus myth, Heinrich reconstructed this situation starting with the word that defines the separation between the new Olympian gods and humans, and the subsequent transaction or agree-ment that the Promethean sacrifice establishes between them both: “The

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word at the center of the Promethean critique of religion is ekrinonto, which is related to krinein, ‘to sort,’ ‘to separate,’ ‘to judge,’ and ‘to con-demn,’ and it is from this word that the ‘critical’ voice originates with these same nuances… And as you already know (the side that Prometheus choses in that ekrinonto): through his form of founding the sacrifice, he forms what is a critique of sacrifice. That Prometheus introduces the sac-rifice against sacrifice is the crucial point that I would like to stress with the greatest emphasis. It is not that he establishes the sacrifice in a world free of sacrifices. How could Zeus punish him if that were the case? But what he does do is break with the total sacrifice that the gods imposed upon humanity long before and, in its place, he gives way to that which from this time forward will be a particular sacrifice that consists of offering the fat and bones to the gods, and the nourishing flesh to the humans” (Heinrich 2007, pp. 194–5).

Prometheus establishes a new balance of power between the gods and humanity, which is beneficial for the latter. He does this to the extent that the sacrifice is transformed into a reflexive action of “separating” and “judging,” and divine fire is given to humanity as the generative principle of technai.

4.4.7 The Promethean Civilization

The double spiritual and technological function of fire is not new in the history of world religions. In the Avesta is written: “(He created) Fire, whose radiance is from Endless Light, the place of Ohrmazd. And He distributed Fire within the whole creation. And He commanded Fire to serve mankind during the Assault, preparing food and overcoming cold” (Boyce 1990, p. 48). The enlightening dimension that Prometheus intro-duces in the sacrifice ritual is not new either. In Sanskrit, the word to designate the sacrificial offering, dãsema, literally means distribution and possesses a connection with the root das, which means discernment. “The sacrifice,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “is essentially an arrangement, a distribution of the human activities and enjoyments among the different cosmic Powers to whose province they by right belong” (Aurobindo 1998, p. 279).

The Brahmanic hymns of the Rig-Veda invoke many features of Agni that also anticipate the characteristics of the Titan god Prometheus described by Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Plato. Agni is “the vital force of the radiance of light,” associated with the brilliance of the sun, and defined as


158

the “enlightener of darkness with poetic vision” and the cure for all ills. The Vedic chants celebrate him as a “visionary” and “foreseer” and, last but not least, as the mediator between the rest of the gods through sacri-fice. Agni is associated with the human will, creative energy, and the drive for perfection (Rig-Veda, II-2, 8–9; II-1, 12–13; I-1, 7; I-12, 7–9; I-31, 18; I-77).4 “The god in human beings, the immortal in mortals” (Aurobindo 1998, p. 66).

In his interpretation of Zoroastrian theology, M. Nusservanji Dhalla underlined the fact that Zarathustra represents “the active saint who lives in the world of joy and sorrow, without separating himself from the world of activity,” and “whose mission for the advancement of the world is to live in society and to minister to the wants and grievances of the less for-tunate of mankind” (Nusservanji Dhalla 1914, p. 15). Prometheus is also the god that represents human beings in an immediate sense, linked to their survival and development.

But there exists an aspect that not only distinguishes the Greek Prometheus but also, furthermore, acquires a special relevance in an age of the mass industrial destruction of human cultures and earth’s biological equilibrium. In accordance with Hesiod, Prometheus is the son of Iapetos, the oldest of the Titans, and the Oceanid Klymene. But Aeschylus reduces the divisions that the Theogony establishes between Gaia’s Titan children, the grandchildren of Tethys, and the children of Klymene. Instead, he introduces a direct connection between Prometheus and Gaia, and he does so by presenting him as the son of Themis, who he identifies as “my mother…also called Gaia…” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, pp. 875, 209–10). This genealogy binds Prometheus to the destiny of Gaia, Mother Earth, and to his brothers, the Titans and the natural powers that they represent, as well as to the first human beings (Kerényi 1953, p. 100).

An aspect of this genealogy should be highlighted. Its announcement is usually introduced in the following way: “…my mother Themis, also called Gaia—one form (morphe) under multiple names” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Desmotes, 510). Heinrich’s commentary on this passage is relevant: “The law introduced through a Themis identified with Earth is a natural law that is founded on one relevant form, that of the maternal reality…mean-while the philosophical concept of forms is dissolved in amorphous and abstract categories, laws and ideas. What is astonishingly new here resides in the conjuring up of a material morphe connected to a natural law which the son of Themis-Gaia tries to validate through his enlightening enter-prise…” (Heinrich 2007, p. 158).

E. SUBIRATS

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Prometheus is not only identified with the cosmogonic fire that illumi-nates the universe and enlightens humane existence. He is not just the symbol of the energy necessary for human survival and physical growth. Nor does he solely introduce the development of the arts or technai. Furthermore, Prometheus’s civilizational function is indissolubly tied to the conception of a forming material and a material form. In juridical terms, this refers to a form, or an order ante legem, that is distinct from the abstract dike, and opposed to nomos and kratos, the violent force of Zeus’s laws. It is a material form or natural order that, in line with Aeschylus’s description, is mysterious (kton) and comprises the just, balanced, and pacific order represented by Themis and Gaia’s maternal protection. This forming matter or Gaia-Kton-Themis is the ontological foundation and the mythological root of the civilization that Prometheus establishes with his technai. By this measure it is distinguished and counterpoised to the conception of a form, morphe or eidos, exteriorly imposed upon matter as an epistemological, juridical, or grammatological system of domination.

The Promethean civilization includes writing, science, intellectual astuteness, and political rebelliousness, and derives from a bond of solidar-ity with Gaia and Themis, with the earth as the biological and ethical foundation that is logically and historically prior to the abstract form of human laws. But the “techniques” that Prometheus symbolizes are defined by their enlightening and emancipating objective in a sense that is as intel-lectual as it is existential. Here, techne is linked to human autonomy, to our forecasting of the future, and to our spiritual and material develop-ment. For this reason, it distinguishes itself from the instrumental concept of technology and the industrial concept of civilization symbolized by Hephaestus, the god of fire and the forge, at the service of the tyrant Zeus.

* * *

The sacrificial conversion of Prometheus into a martyr has evaporated his civilizational function. The instrumental reduction of Promethean fire has eliminated its enlightening purpose. The third degradation of Prometheus has been his simple identification with Olympian power and his corporate hybridization in the name of the father-God. Precisely at the origins of Christianity, Tertullian defined Prometheus as the creator of the first man and organizer of the universe with “the one and only God.” The seculariza-tion of this identity has confused the cosmogonic and enlightening fire of Ohrmazd, Agni, or Prometheus with an absolute and universal power, as did


160

Athanasius Kircher, and with Zeus’s destructive thunderbolt and the techno-scientific providence of God, as did Benjamin Franklin. This has reduced the vital, illuminating significance of Promethean fire to the logic of the indus-trial, scientific, or military megamachines, as did Robert Oppenheimer. The consequences of this misinterpretation have already been announced: “human sacrifice and mechanical salvation… priesthood of the secret knowl-edge… mechanization of the World picture… technological exhibition-ism… the all-seeing eye… the technique of total control… the organization man… encapsulated man… barbarism… organized destruction… geno-cide… biocide… the cult of anti-life… post- historic culture…”—to recall the forgotten Lewis Mumford (Mumford 1970, pp. 261–280).

Does hope exist for a Prometheus chained by the fire and forge of Hephaestus, placed at the service of the totalitarian, violent, and genocidal power represented by Zeus? The hope of a Prometheus crucified on the rock of Golgotha? Does hope exist for a Prometheus that descends the Caucasus Mountains as the Sisyphus of a civilization vanquished by its own conquests? Is there Promethean hope for a terminal historical age?

The accounts by Hesiod and Aeschylus expose two different concepts of hope. “Blind hope” is the gift that Prometheus gives to humans in Prometheus Bound. This hope is connected with fire in its vital dimension, its divinatory and enlightening significance, and its creative function in the arts. In Hesiod’s version, hope is inseparably united to the first woman, Pandora, a manifestation of the same fire that Prometheus represents. But if in Agni, Ohrmazd, and Prometheus this fire is a vital and creative prin-ciple, in Pandora’s saga it acquires the character of a perverse and destruc-tive sexual energy. Hesiod named this kalon kakon, the “dazzling evil.” And, among its distinctive features, elpides, the hope associated with the vices and curses of humanity, stands out as a vain hope. Hope as a false illu-sion, as a deceptive and annihilating simulacrum (Neumann 1956, p. 168).

Originally Pandora was a chthonic kore tied to the creative potency of the earth, life, and death. The jar or pythos is one of her most important symbols. In all of the ancient religions, these vessels are related with the maternal womb. And in all of the ancient cultures, humans were interred in vessels shaped like pregnant bellies (Harrison 1991, pp. 283–5). The hope that Hesiod introduced into this pythos together with the evils that devastate humanity is a misogynistic deformation of elpis, which is linked to the implantation of the human embryo in the maternal uterus, and to the eternal cycles of life and death that are symbolized by the goddesses of fertility.

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Our historical hope, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is not the Christian spes; it is not the visio et fruitio dei consummated in the mys-tical act of spiritual communion with any object of consumption; it is not the hope of the worshiper on his knees before the high-profile temples of the corporate, academic, and political power structures, waiting for pro-tection, or favor, or grace from his gods and leaders. Nor is it the redeem-ing hope for the apocalyptic event of a civitas dei or a totalitarian global state. Instead it is the hope that holds back the growth of the military megamachines on the planet, that puts a stop to the contamination and destruction of the biosphere, that interrupts the process of material and spiritual impoverishment of humanity, and that puts an end to ethical dis-order and the violence that it generates. It is a hoped-for return of Promethean fire as a source of human civilizational development in har-mony with the eternal cycles of a creative Nature. It is a hope bound to the cosmogonic significance of the light of lights, hope in the enlightening power symbolized by fire, hope in human creation.

notes

1. American Prometheus. The Triumph and Tragedy of J. R. Oppenheimer is the title of a recent best seller by K. Bird and M. J. Sherwin.

2. “The light of the annihilating nothingness.”3. “En arche en logos/logos en pros theos/logos en theos” (“In the begin-

ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”).4. Rig-Veda, II-2, 8–9; II-1, 12–13; I-1, 7; I-12, 7–9; I-31, 18; I-77, 3.

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165© The Author(s) 2018C. Britt et al., Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6

Index1

AActivists, 74, 75, 85–89, 91, 94, 106,

110, 113Adams, John Quincy, 41, 46Adorno, Theodor W., 5–8, 10, 13,

33–35, 72, 74, 94, 95, 97, 101, 102, 104, 118, 121n19, 144, 145

Aeschylus, 23, 133, 146–149, 152, 153, 155–160

Age of Reason, 31, 32Agni, 21, 22, 127, 128, 131–133,

149, 154, 157–160Agrarianism, 41–45Al-Ghaza lı, 130, 131Alliance for Progress, 61America, 10, 12, 21, 71, 77, 132, 139,

140American Century, 58, 59American Revolution, 36, 61Angelus Novus, 1, 8, 9, 75Anglo Saxon, 44, 49, 52, 53Anti-historical, 71Anti-imperial imperialism, 12, 28,

57–63

Aufklärung, 4, 6, 11, 22, 133, 141, 152

BBacon, Francis, 5, 6, 17, 20, 24, 29,

34, 38, 40, 102, 139, 143, 145, 149–152

Bauer, Otto, 106, 107Beckett, Samuel, 3, 7, 14Bede, the Venerable, 111Benjamin, Walter, 8, 75, 96, 99, 102,

103, 105, 106Bhagavad Gita, 134, 135Big Business, 72, 73, 76Big Government, 72, 73Bookchin, Murray, 100, 111Boredom doctrine, 89Borenstein, Severin, 119n2Brand, Stewart, 85Bricmont, Jean, 33Bureaucrats, 92, 94, 95, 110, 113,

115, 118Bush, George W., 28, 62–64

1Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers to notes.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6

166 INDEX

CCabala, 129, 133California, 73, 80, 121n23California Energy Institute, 119n2Canetti, Elias, 95Cap and trade, 83Carbon trading, 83Castro, Fidel, 60, 120n16CCA, see Community Choice

AggregationCheney, Dick, 98China, 60, 83, 135Chomsky, Noam, 28Christ, 154Circus, 71, 86, 104Climate change, 75, 77, 80, 82, 84,

94, 112, 113Coal, 35, 75, 76, 80, 82–84Coase, Ronald, 83, 85, 120n8,

120n14Cold War, 10, 27, 28, 59–62, 72, 73,

85, 86, 91, 97, 98, 100, 112–115Commodity fetishism, 76Community Choice Aggregation

(CCA), 73, 74, 106, 119n2Consciousness, 3, 7–9, 13, 14, 16, 17,

20, 22, 73, 87, 103–105, 109, 128, 130, 132–135, 143–145, 148, 149

Constitution of the United States, 42, 63, 97

Counterinsurgency, 61, 62Criminality, 103Crusade, modern, 64Crusades, The, 76Cuba, 48, 51, 56, 60, 62, 65n1Cuban Missile Crisis, 60

DDARPA, see Defence Advanced

Research Projects AgencyDebord, Guy, 4, 5, 35, 86Decentralization, 118

De Certeau, Michel, 102Declaration of Independence, 97, 108,

141Defence Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA), 29, 30Delocalization, 85Democracy, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, 29,

38, 39, 49, 50, 58, 61, 62, 71–73, 75–77, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96–98, 100, 110, 111, 114–118

Democratic origination, 92–100De Montesquieu, Baron, 40, 44, 94,

98, 110, 115Deregulation, 76, 77, 87, 106, 115Derrida, Jacques, 13, 102, 105Descartes, Renée, 7, 8, 13, 20, 21,

133Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6, 10, 33,

75Displacement, 65, 76, 81, 89, 91, 112

EEbreo, Leone, 13, 15, 129, 130, 146Eckhart, Meister, 133Ecological collapse, 28, 113Economists, 74, 78, 80, 82–85Einstein, Albert, 21, 135Eisenhower, Dwight D., 60, 61Elected officials, 90, 92, 95, 113, 114Elites, 39, 45, 77, 93, 109Empire of Liberty, 11, 12, 28, 36, 38,

42, 43, 64, 75Energy, 16, 21, 23, 28, 35, 53, 71–85,

88, 90, 94, 99, 104, 106, 110–117, 119, 127, 128, 131, 133, 135, 139, 142, 148, 156, 158–160

Energy business model, 80Energy cartels, 77Energy cost models, 85Energy efficiency, 74, 78Energy monopolies, 80

167 INDEX

Energy slavery, 76Energy utility deregulation, 115Enlightenment, 1–24, 27–65, 71–119,

127–161Enlightenment and mythology, 7Epimetheus, 9, 145, 154Epistemic trespass, 17, 96–100, 109Europe, 10, 21, 31, 40, 41, 43, 45,

47, 59, 60, 63, 77, 105, 108European Union (EU), 77

FFeed-in-Tariffs, 79, 85Financialization, 78Foresight, 9, 18, 19, 131, 142, 145,

149–151Foucault, Michel, 12–14, 32, 36, 102,

103, 145Founding Fathers, 11, 12, 16, 28, 30,

36, 38–41, 49, 107, 108, 140, 141

Fourth Estate, 76Franklin, Benjamin, 10, 17, 18,

38–41, 45, 48, 139–142, 150, 160

Freedom, 2, 11, 19, 30, 32, 33, 35, 42, 46, 47, 50, 58, 61, 64, 76, 77, 87, 89, 99, 111, 112, 116, 140, 141, 152, 153

Free market, 72, 119n2French Revolution, 6, 102, 105Freud, Sigmund, 4, 144Fromm, Erich, 111Fukuyama, Francis, 27, 28

GGaia, 18, 23, 131, 142, 147–149,

158, 159German Socialist Party, 106Germany, 59, 82, 102, 105, 106Gigantism, 114, 115Global War, 6, 8, 28, 35, 63, 64

Global warming, 23, 65, 113Globalization, 29, 76, 77, 83, 84, 88,

89, 91, 105, 112, 116Gotha Congress of 1875, 105Ground Zero, 63–65

HHabeas corpus, 112Hamilton, Alexander, 36, 39, 41,

44–46, 48Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, 14Havel, Vaclav, 100, 120n15Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 20,

21, 27, 75Heidegger, Martin, 9Heinrich, Klaus, 12, 144, 145, 152,

156–158Herder, Johann Gottfried, 102, 108,

121n18, 141Hermes, 151, 152, 155, 156Hesiod, 131, 147, 151, 156–158, 160Hoffer, Eric, 86Horkheimer, Max, 5–8, 10, 14,

33–35, 97, 144, 145Humboldt, California, 73

IIbn Rushd, 13, 15, 21Identity politics, 75, 87, 106, 121n19Ideologiekritik, 97, 99, 104Illich, Ivan, 76, 103Imperialism, 5, 10, 12, 16, 30, 37,

46–63, 75, 76, 95, 97, 98, 104, 107, 108, 111

Imperial populism, 97Imperium, 28, 40, 41, 57Insull, Samuel, 78Intellectuals, 1, 3, 4, 7, 10, 14–17, 19,

23, 32, 34, 52, 55, 72–74, 86–101, 103–106, 108–113, 117–119, 130, 133, 144, 148, 152, 154, 159

168 INDEX

Irving, Washington, 75Issue politics, 85, 88, 98

JJacobson, Mark, 119n2James, William, 50, 52, 55–57,

65Japan, 57, 59Jefferson, Thomas, 11, 28, 32, 36,

38–41, 45, 48Jung, Carl Gustav, 13, 128, 144

KKafka, Franz, 3, 14Kant, Immanuel, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15,

17–21, 24, 32, 133, 140, 141, 152

Kennedy, John F., 60, 61Kerenyi, Karl, 13, 144, 148, 155,

158Kilowatt-hour, 78Kircher, Athanasius, 136–140, 142,

160Klein, Naomi, 94, 120n12Korean War, 60

LLasch, Christopher, 77, 106League of Nations, 58Legal democracy, 72Lenin, Vladimir, 58, 106, 108, 118,

120n16Liberty, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19,

22, 28, 32, 33, 36–44, 46–50, 52–54, 64, 75, 107, 112, 116, 117

Liebknecht, Karl, 106Light, 3–5, 7, 14, 19, 21, 22, 27, 29,

30, 54, 56, 84, 102, 110,

127–137, 139, 143, 146, 157, 161

Localism, 96, 98–100, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114–117

Location neutrality, 79, 83, 84Locke, John, 40Logos, 6, 8, 13–15, 20, 21, 117, 118,

143–146, 150, 152Loyalty, 37, 86, 89, 91, 102Lucerna magica, 137, 140, 142Luxemberg, Rosa, 106Lycurgus, 115, 118

MMachiavelli, Niccolò, 95, 110, 118,

146Manhattan Project, 134Manifest Destiny, 36–39, 48Mann, Thomas, 7, 9, 13, 144Marcuse, Herbert, 33, 102–104,

121n19Market fundamentalism, 82–85, 113Marx, Karl, 21, 27, 105, 110, 143Massachusetts, 39, 73Massachusetts Governor Michael

Dukakis, 72, 120n14Mass migrations, 95Master/slave, 101McKinley, William, 48, 50, 51, 54, 57Medici, 76, 118Megamachines, 6, 8, 14, 34, 35, 65,

145, 160, 161Messianism, 21Micro-intellectual, 15Military industrial complex, 61, 62,

98, 117Military threats, 77Mills, C. Wright, 34, 35, 65, 95, 96Minority (Unmündigkeit), 11Mirowski, Philip, 82Monroe Doctrine, 41, 47, 48

169 INDEX

Movements, 32, 36, 37, 52, 55, 57, 58, 61, 86, 89–91, 102, 105, 106, 113, 130

Mumford, Lewis, 7, 8, 34, 65, 160Municipal anarchism, 111Municipal level, 72, 73Municipality, 73, 114, 115, 118, 119Myth, 7, 16–18, 22, 23, 36, 37, 75,

82, 129, 131, 133, 143–145, 148, 149, 153, 154, 156

Myth of the General Strike, 120n9

NNaïveté, 83, 93, 94, 97Nazism, 72, 105Negative dialectics, 6–10, 14, 15, 72,

74, 75, 95, 98, 101, 118, 119Negative Dialectics, 102Negative Freedom, 11, 33, 35Neoliberalism, 75, 81, 118Net-Metering Tariffs, 79, 85, 120n6New Jersey, 73NGOs, 92Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 7, 8, 11, 93,

96, 98, 101, 144Nixon, Richard M., 61, 62Nordhaus, Ted, 85Nuclear energy, 21, 135Nuclear proliferation, 72, 75, 77Nuclear war, 61

OObama, Barak, 62, 64, 116, 120n17,

121n23Occupy rallies, 94Ohio, 73Oligarchic, 72, 82Operation Condor, 62Oracle of Delphi, 82Oro Santo, 22, 129, 130

PPaine, Thomas, 38, 39, 65Pandora, 151, 152, 154, 160Paracelsus, 131Patriarchal order, 150Paul, Saint, 147, 150Pax Americana, 76, 83, 86, 116Philanthropy, 142, 145–149, 152Philia, 146–148Philippines, 49, 51, 53–57Philosophe, 90Polanyi, Karl, 98Political literacy, 71, 115Politicians, 49, 73, 74, 80, 85, 86, 94,

98, 117Popper, Karl, 100Positive dialectics, 10, 73, 74, 93, 96,

98–112, 114, 115, 118, 119Positive freedom, 33, 35Potlatch, 146, 147Praxis, 10, 16, 104, 105Price theory, 82–85, 106Privatization, 72, 96Privileged information, 72Prometheus, 9, 16–18, 22–24,

131–135, 141–161Protestant ethic, 57Providence, 18, 29, 30, 37, 56, 64,

142, 149, 150, 152, 160Providentialism, 11, 16, 18, 28, 52, 150Puerto Rico, 48, 51, 56

QQuetzalcoatl, 22, 23

RRates, 78, 80–82Reichel-Doltamoff, Gerardo, 129Reich, Wilhelm, 104Renaissance man, 92

170 INDEX

Renewable Energy Certificates, 79Renewable Energy Credits (RECs),

83, 85, 119n2Resistance, 10, 13, 72–75, 82, 95, 97,

98, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110, 117–119, 147, 155

Right of Return, 89Rome, 40, 77, 101, 116, 120n5Roosevelt, Theodore, 28, 37, 49–52,

54–57, 59Russell, Bertrand, 142

SSachs, Jeffrey, 112Sacrifice, critique of, 134, 154–157Said, Edward, 102San Diego, 73San Francisco, 119n2Schiller, Friedrich, 17Schmitt, Carl, 98, 107, 120n12Schumacher, E. F., 114Shamanism, 21, 22, 128, 130Shock doctrine, 119Shock therapy, 112Solar Bonds, 99Solar photovoltaics, 79Solon, 118Sorel, Georges, 120n9Spectacle, 2–5, 16, 19, 24, 34, 35, 54,

80, 86, 103, 118, 139, 142Stalin, Joseph, 60, 72, 112State of exception, 28Strong, Josiah, 37, 49, 52–54, 57Suhrawardi, 132, 133

TTechne, 10, 17, 23, 24, 96, 99, 102,

109, 133, 145, 159Technology, 1, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17,

19, 23, 24, 29–31, 33, 34, 38, 63,

65, 74, 78–84, 99, 110, 116, 118, 119n2, 120n13, 142, 152, 159

Techno-science, 6, 11, 22, 150, 151, 153

Theater of politics, 90Theogony, 131, 158Third World, 59, 61, 62, 83Totalitarianism, 14, 27Trade imperialism, 76Translatio imperii, 48–52Trespass, 73, 74, 92, 96, 100,

108–110, 113, 118, 143, 145Trickster, 154, 155True believers, 92, 93, 95Twain, Mark, 50, 52–55, 57, 65Tyranny, 28, 32, 34, 35, 40, 48, 49,

51, 54, 59, 61, 152, 156

UUS empire, 28, 40–42, 44–46, 48, 50,

52, 98US imperialism, 37, 47–50, 53–58,

62, 104, 108Unabomber, 97Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

(USSR), 59United States of America (USA), 6,

11, 14, 27–30, 36–64, 65n1, 72, 73, 76–78, 95, 102, 105–107, 112–116, 120n11

University of Chicago, 72, 101, 120n14

VVienna socialists, 106Vietnam War, 62Voltaire, 32, 83, 108Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 18,

130, 141, 151Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 4

171 INDEX

WWashington, George, 44, 47, 60Weber, Max, 38We the People, 94Wilson, Woodrow, 58Witch doctors, 95World War I, 10, 57, 58, 100World War II, 28, 58, 59, 64, 76, 86,

107, 144World War III, 60, 116

ZZeitgeist, 92, 119Zeus, 11, 18, 139, 141–143,

146–148, 152, 154–157, 159, 160

enlightenment in an age of destruction · 2018. 4. 25. · enlightenment in an age of destruction...

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