#david watson

Who could ever understand the world? Its four-leaved clovers? Wasn’t the world itself monstrous, weren’t we its glorious rotting abscesses?

The revolution remains beyond our reach. Our revolutionary desire must squarely face the fact that disaster itself tends to fuel the system that generates it, which means that we must abandon the pathetic hope that perhaps this latest horror will be the signal that turns the tide (as Chernobyl was supposed to be, and Bhopal). In Where The Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak points to “the great paradox of the technological mystique: its remarkable ability to grow strong by virtue of chronic failure. While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions for disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technical expertise”.

“Bookchin’s attitude about writing is particularly uninformed. ‘Inasmuch as a written language did not appear until well into historical times,’ he says, ‘the languages of early peoples were hardly “conceptually profound.”‘ (SALA; 39) But the anthropological record is abundant with testimony on the complexity of language and significance among primal peoples encountered by explorers. Darwin was astonished to discover that the Patagonian indigens he encountered, who had few tools and went nearly naked, had an involved language with some thirty thousand words. Perhaps Bookchin doesn’t consider the Australian notion of songlines of the Dreamtime to be as conceptually profound as Aristotelian entelechy, but that is only a preference.