some hypothetical notes

these are some notes that i emailed to a friend who was part of a panel discussion. she was the only person on the panel talking about Anarchy/ism and Religion, and wanted a little input from different voices that she might have to represent. we still want to put together a talk dedicated to just this one topic--but i liked these notes so much that i figured i'd go ahead and post 'em!

What I Would Say on an Anarchy & Religion Panel

1.) some leftist hostility toward religion and religious institutions doubtless emerges from historical cases in which these institutions were complicit in, or participated in, oppression and injustice.

2.) these cases aside, a more general anarchist denunciation of religion (i.e. resistance to religion "on principle") is tied to the emergence in the 17th-19th centuries of a belief in human reason and materialism, in opposition to the religious authority and divinely-sanctioned pedigrees of what was then a rapidly-collapsing Feudalism. the murky "mysticism" which had justified earlier, oppressive periods would finally be demolished through rational criticism, scientific materialism and the construction of an egalitarian world.

3.) but today, in the rain-shadow of the 20th century, many of these "Enlightenment narratives"—which unquestionably revolutionized and reorganized human societies—seem ethically bankrupt or, at least, suspect. supposedly rational, scientific systems have brought us massive bureaucracies capable of producing the Holocaust, arbitrary wars and mass prison complexes (Leninist world included); the development and proliferation of world-ending nuclear arms; and a technological spectacle with little connection to human needs that has pushed wild systems on this planet to the brink of collapse.

4.) the last fifty-odd years have seen uncertainty and skepticism toward these narratives emerge in all areas of human thought. from academic deconstructions of scientism that searches out positivistic "proof" of racist, sexist, genderfascist (etc) constructs (and demands they be "disproven" on its own terms), to poststructuralist investigations of how these discourses came into existence, to a more general "postmodern malaise" that permeates our culture and our sense of possibility, a sea change in our thinking & feeling is everywhere apparent.

4b.) you don't have to be Michel Focault to get these things either—just ask a wild-eyed Maoist to explain how the world works to you, and then reflect on why you're having that sketched-out, critical reaction.

5.) and so religion, which never really disappeared, returns on a number of fronts. while religious traditions undoubtedly make claims at a "meta narrative" similar to those emerging from the Enlightenment, the metaphysical nature of religious belief may ironically allow more space for interpretation, deconstruction and criticism of systemic thought than does the Western scientific and humanist tradition.

6.) hence, postmodern uncertainty in the ability of human reason to encapsulate, explain and master the material world finds a parallel in longstanding religious engagements with the apparent impossibility, yet characteristic desire, of human beings to comprehend ontological truth—be it God, Brahma, the origin and cessation of Suffering, whatever. hence the methods and sensibilities employed by people in religious contexts over the last, oh, three millennia could maybe inform our current existential conundrum.

7.) in particular, religious traditions have been dealing with the deconstructionist tendencies, which only recently appeared in currents of academic and critical thought, for a very long time. Mahayana Buddhism (one example) takes as primary the liberation of beings in a world of constructed appearances—one in which the assertion of thing-ness (read: fetishism, reification, alienation, etc) creates suffering and delusion—all the while acknowledging the absence of any "outside" or "objective" position from which to act or into which to escape. compared with the handful of decades that political theory has had to explore these ideas, Buddhism's twelve centuries offer a treasure trove of tools and sensibilities to help conceive of liberation today. ditto for more marginalized tendencies within Western religious traditions.

8.) in this sense religion doesn't have to be "defended" to anarchism. the challenge that anarchists face today is how to create a world of possibility & liberation when most attempts to systematize and implement those visions from Marx on down have failed or become hideously disfigured. in this situation, anarchists have a choice between searching out liberative techniques from all currents of social / ontological thinking—religion included—or to meet a complicated world of questions with knee-jerk explanations and programmatic notions of freedom. this is exactly we see coming from other political tendencies, from the ANSWER coalition to the Bush administration to the very fundamentalist networks which it claims to oppose.

here's part of an interview with Ashanti Alston, former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, now a prominent black anarchist thinker and speaker. Ashanti, who acts as a kind of wise advisor figure toward APOC, spoke on multiracial solidarity during a recent interview published on Next Left Notes, an online publication of the reconstituted Students for a Democratic Society. I've edited the text a little for clarity.

m(A)tt: Kind of getting back to what you were saying about SNCC, the experience of Northerners working in the South, you think there’s a parallel with that and what we’re seeing with the New Orleans social movements today, particularly the Common Ground Collective.

...

AA: ...but on a deeper level, it’s one of the things that Malcolm and others would always say, and in fact I think it’s just accurate, that white folks who really want to help the struggle should organize in their own communities. Today, you see basically the same thing. A lot of white activists will come to, for example, New York, From Minneapolis and all these other places, to work in a community of color. And we’re like, "yeah, but there’s racism in the white community--how come nobody’s willing to take that work on? Why are you romanticizing us?" And we can do this work in our communities. We need to figure out a better relationship. Your work should be in the communities that you know. But if a person’s been in a community ten, fifteen years, and you’re a part of it, then you need to do it the same way they did in the South, you need to really integrate your life into this community.

The pattern keeps repeating, and it means that the work in white communities is not being done because everybody’s leaving. I think it’s because, yeah, you recognize it’s very hard. And not only very hard, but it’s very dangerous for you young white activists to go into your own neighborhood and say ‘"listen, we’ve got to deal with racism, we’ve gotta deal with neo-liberalism, anti-colonialism, whatever." You know that could be very dangerous. But it’s dangerous for us, there’s all kinds of different dangers. And at some point we really do need to push it, push it, that white activists cannot just keep coming to our communities.

The arrogant ones from the more hierarchical groups who come--and I think it’s just a form of racism--they’re gonna come with an already-made ideology and a plan, and they’re gonna tell us ‘"this is the only way that you can be free, or you can effect change, revolutionary change in your life. Here’s the program. Here’s the way that it can go." For me, I don’t want to even deal with it--get out of my face, in fact, get out of my community. I would love to get to the point where we even stop them from coming to events in our community, pushing that kind of racist dialogue. Don’t tell us that this one guy, who made this analysis a hundred years ago, is the basis of your freedom. Like we don’t have brains, we can’t analyze. But I can at least appreciate more the anti-authoritarian white folks who at least come conscious that they come with racism, but are trying to also be accountable and aware, constantly, at least in trying. But still, the thing is like, someone’s got to do the work in the white communities. You can’t just keep coming to ours.

from Love in the Days of Rage

Here's a section from Love in the Days of Rage, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's whimsical novel set amid the near-revolution in Paris in 1968. The book chronicles a love affair between Annie, an art professor, and Julian, a mysterious anarchist banker; I think it often captures just the right balance between whimsy and verve, love and rebellion. This section is from chapter 14.

Inside the ampitheater, debates were raging twenty-four hours a day, an open tribunal with everyone given the floor, no matter who, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left, militant students demanding democratization of the university and militant nonstudents demanding democratization of everything in society, especially the workplace, so that the amphitheater was becoming what one handbill called “the brain of the cultural revolution,” addressed by Jean-Paul Sartre for an hour and a half, and by seventy-three-year-old Jean Rostand, who was patron of a movement called Jeune Pouvoir that was “against a regime which offered its young neither a future nor liberty.” The hall rocked with Trotskyites, Maoists, anarchists, Situationists, with the statue of Victor Hugo draped in red-and-black anarchist flags, and graffiti quotations everywhere from Lenin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Trotsky, Fourier, Einstein and Che Guevara. Every day the crowd in the amphitheater increased, one paper reporting “10,000 for 5,000 seats.” The Sorbonne had become a free commune with handbills and new journals like Le Pave and Les Revoltes and Le Libertaire. For the spirit of ‘sixty-eight had burst into flame when the rector of the University of Paris called in the riot police to clear the amphitheater, and from that center and from the Nanterre campus in widening circles the fire spread, the revolt spread like a crown fire in a forest, jumping across political lines and boundaries, across class lines and academic distinctions. It was at heart a libertarian revolt of the young, a youth revolt against boring society in general, a global revolt against what they saw as the false values of their elders with their entrenched hierarchies and hereditary authorities backed up by the state and its whole apparatus of control, so that there was a solidarity based not only on youth but on alienation in general, alienation from a fat society that offered its youth no way to enter it. From the university to the factory the “dictatorship of adults” was to be called violently into question, contested at every point, brought to the fire, a contagious and explosive fire that the shock troops of de Gaulle at first knew not how to handle, since they were in fact confronted with the sons and daughters of their own haute bourgoiseie, who were creating their own “open university” as a model for an “open society” where imagination would reign in place of dismal bureaucracy. The special riot squads charged up the Boule Miche with their klaxons and bullhorns and battle gear and tear gas, attacking the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie that supported the regime. This was the fuse that set off “the days of rage,” with thirty thousand in the barricaded smoking streets by the fifth of May.