Much of classical anarchist thought is implicitly rooted in the egalitarian humanist thought of the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the progressive, evolutionary view of history formulated by G. W. F. Hegel and some of the social Darwinists, notably Herbert Spencer. According to this view, human nature is essentially benign but has been corrupted or stifled by less than optimal social institutions or lack of education. As human knowledge increases and social institutions evolve, the benign, benevolent, and cooperative qualities of human nature will, according to this theory, eventually shine through. This kind of uniquely naive utopianism emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of immensely rapid political, economic, and scientific development. The achievements of that era unfortunately led to the foolish belief that virtually anything is possible so long as human beings maintained the proper commitment and applied themselves. Today, when we hear leftists talk about their ideals of a “world without hunger” or a “world without hate,” and their constant rhetoric about “commitment,” “awareness,” and “raising consciousness,” we know that the ghost of Rousseau walks among us. The problem, of course, is that not a shred of evidence exists to support this sort of outlook. There is no indication of human moral improvement, however defined, throughout the ages. The recently expired twentieth century produced some of the worst horrors in history—world wars, genocides, and nuclear weapons. Is this any sort of improvement over the cannibals and perpetrators of human sacrifice of ancient times?
Some anti-statists, such as the disciples of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, attempt to justify their beliefs with some sort of “natural law” theory. This is largely a more consistent and well-developed version of the Lockean philosophy employed by the American revolutionaries. According to this view, the inalienable right of individuals to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness has somehow been decreed by nature. While this may have been a useful myth at the time of the ascendancy of classical liberalism, its seems on its surface to be little more than an arbitrary, quasi-religious, mystical doctrine that simply asserts what it wishes to prove. Historically, natural law doctrines have just as often been used to justify various types of authoritarianism, such as the “natural” superiority of some races over others or Catholic opposition to “unnatural” acts like contraception, than any sort of liberty.
Other anti-statists are utilitarian ethicists who defend liberty on the grounds that it brings about the “best” results. While it is certainly important to be able to demonstrate that anarchism is workable in practice and that free market economics produces results which most people would find favorable, utilitarianism as a moral outlook seems rather arbitrary as well. Why the greatest good for the greatest number? Why not the greatest good for the smartest, the strongest, the healthiest, the most creative, or the most attractive, or the members of some particular racial or religious group? The Benthamite calculus involving the attempt to weigh the overall balance of pleasure over pain seems impossible to measure in the real world. Why prioritize pleasure? What about people who argue that “suffering is good for the soul”? And why should I care if everyone else is miserable so long as I am happy?
Those who attempt to make a religious case for liberty seem to have the weakest position of all. Even if one accepts religious belief as legitimate, this says nothing about the problem of power. No religious denomination that has ever obtained political power has ever created anything even remotely approaching a free society. An occasional religious anarchist or libertarian can be found, but most seriously religious people tend towards theocracy more than anything else. Even those who support formal church/state separation usually believe that the state should legislate or regulate with regards to matters of personal or religious “morality” (abortion, homosexuality, drug use, pornography, etc.). Many espouse statist economic views and/or a militarist/imperialist foreign policy outlook as well.
The natural tendency of nearly all human beings is to favor themselves over others. Most people develop the views on politics, philosophy, ethics, morality, etc., that are most consistent with their own needs and desires and the interests of their peer groups or culture of origin. Most people exhibit very little capacity for independent thinking or moral perception beyond self-interest and the influence of peers and leaders. Because different individuals and groups have conflicting interests and value systems, social conflict inevitably results. Hobbes believed that the only solution to this dilemma was an all-powerful state that would restrain the predatory inclinations of individuals and competing social forces for the sake of preserving order and civilization. The problem with Hobbes’ position should be obvious enough. Who restrains the restrainers? Hobbes saw the choices as either chaos or tyranny. He opted for the latter.
I largely agree with Hobbes’ analysis but I reject his conclusion. There seems to me to be a third way between absolutism and disorder. I am referring to the “spontaneous order” described by Hayek that naturally accompanies freedom and decentralization. Because human beings are predators by nature, no one should ever hold power over another. Freedom allows individuals the means to cooperate with others for the sake of their own mutual self-interest without resorting to force or coercion. Anarchism is the political philosophy most capable of accommodating the greatest diversity of value systems, thereby minimizing the harm generated by social conflict. The idea of dispersion of power inherent in anarchism serves to erect a safeguard against the disasters that typically accompany concentrations of power. The result is a natural, organic order that tends towards the stabilization and harmonization of society. However, I do not regard this realization as grounds for any sort of objective morality. None of this has anything to say concerning the matter as to whether economic prosperity, social peace, and individual freedom are desirable ends in and of themselves. The conservative icon Russell Kirk regarded liberty as defensible only as a means to “virtue,” however defined. Some argue that peace and prosperity breed weakness, mediocrity, and selfishness. Mussolini maintained that war is good because it advances the strong and eliminates the weak thereby contributing to the overall improvement of the species.
Like Bertrand Russell, I tend to regard moral questions as matters of subjective individual emotions and opinions. Ultimately, existence is predicated on Stirner’s amoral war of each against all. Does this absence of any objective morality mean that “everything is permitted” as Nietzsche insisted? While there may be no abstract, metaphysical, cosmic source of moral imperatives, human beings are still bound by natural and physical laws (though some postmodern thinkers seem to deny even this). Means have to be consistent with the ends one wishes to pursue. Machiavelli regarded “morality” as a matter of simple expediency in the maintenance of power. The flip side of this, and a matter of supreme importance for anarchists, involves those who would resist power. Here a type of “reverse Machiavellianism” comes into play where the moral means is that which furthers resistance to power. The implication of this is that our struggle against the state is neither moral nor intellectual but physical. Does this mean that “might makes right”? No, it means that “might makes might” with “right” being an individual value judgment. Those among us who have decided that freedom and anarchism are “right,” for whatever reason, need to acquire the might necessary to achieve our objectives.
This is a question that I struggled with for some years. When I first started out in this fight, I was a much more orthodox leftist that I am now and held views not unlike the Rousseauian-Hegelian perspective described above. When I became interested in free market economics, I was initially attracted to Rothbard’s natural rights theory but eventually dismissed it as wishful thinking. The way I finally worked it out was when I watched a documentary on public television concerning the early 1960s trial of Nazi mass murderer and war criminal Adolf Eichmann. I kept asking myself, what made me right and what made Eichmann wrong? The matter of sheer self-interest? I would not want to live under a Nazi state. Natural sympa
thy? I had a certain empathic regard for those exterminated in the ovens and gas chambers. Logical principles? I could see no basis for the extermination programs as far as matters of expediency were concerned. Yet Eichmann’s self-interest and sympathies were clearly much different from mine and irrationalism is a core tenet of Nazism.
The theologian C. S. Lewis once remarked:
What was the sense in saying the enemy [i.e., the Nazis] were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
Yet, as Noam Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out, the Nazi archives provide ample evidence of the Nazis’ conviction of the rightness of their cause. The key part of Lewis’ statement is “we might still have had to fight them.” Questions of self-interest, natural sympathies, and practical social considerations are in and of themselves sufficient reason to resist phenomenon such as Nazism. No objective morality is necessary.
As mentioned, our struggle against the state is primarily physical in nature. If someone is motivated to fight the state because they believe in “natural rights” or that anarchism will produce “the greatest good for the greatest number,” then more power to them. Myths can be a source of inspiration in any conflict.
However, the real issue involves the need for our anarchist popular organizations, intermediary institutions, citizen militias, economic enterprises, common law courts, and other forms of organization needed to obtain the resources, influence, and raw social power, in the Nockian sense, to bring down the state and prevent its return by violent means if necessary. All of the moral theory and academic analysis in the universe will be insufficient if we cannot physically resist our enemies.
Ernst Jünger: The Resolute Life of an Anarch
Perhaps the most interesting, poignant, and, possibly, threatening type of writer and thinker is the one who not only defies conventional categorizations of thought but also offers a deeply penetrating critique of those illusions many hold to be the most sacred. Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), who first came to literary prominence during Germany’s Weimar era as a diarist of the experiences of a front line storm trooper during the Great War, is one such writer. Both the controversial nature of his writing and its staying power are demonstrated by the fact that he remains one of the most important yet widely disliked literary and cultural figures of twentieth-century Germany. As recently as 1993, when Jünger was ninety-eight years of age, he was the subject of an intensely hostile exchange in the New York Review of Books between an admirer and a detractor of his work.[15] On the occasion of his hundredth birthday in 1995, Jünger was the subject of a scathing, derisive musical performed in East Berlin. Yet Jünger was also the recipient of Germany’s most prestigious literary awards, the Goethe Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Jünger, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 101, received a commendation from Pope John Paul II and was an honored guest of French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Franco-German reconciliation ceremony at Verdun in 1984. Though he was an exceptional achiever during virtually every stage of his extraordinarily long life, it was his work during the Weimar period that not only secured for a Jünger a presence in German cultural and political history, but also became the standard by which much of his later work was evaluated and by which his reputation was, and still is, debated.[16]
Ernst Jünger was born on March 29, 1895, in Heidelberg and raised in Hanover. His father, also named Ernst, was an academically trained chemist who became wealthy as the owner of a pharmaceutical manufacturing business, becoming successful enough to effectively retire while he was still in his forties.Though raised as an evangelical Protestant, Jünger’s father did not believe in any formal religion, nor did his mother, Karoline, an educated middle class German woman whose interests included Germany’s rich literary tradition and the cause of women’s emancipation. His parents’ politics seem to have been liberal, though not radical, in the manner not uncommon to the rising bourgeoisie of Germany’s upper middle class during the pre-war period. It was in this affluent, secure bourgeois environment that Ernst Jünger grew up. Indeed, many of Jünger’s later activities and professed beliefs are easily understood as a revolt against the comfort and safety of his upbringing. As a child, he was an avid reader of the tales of adventurers and soldiers, but an indifferent student who did not adjust well to the regimented Prussian educational system. Jünger’s instructors consistently complained of his inattentiveness. As an
adolescent, he became involved with the Wandervogel, roughly the German equivalent of the Boy Scouts.[17]
It was while attending a boarding school near his parents’ home in 1913, at the age of seventeen, that Jünger first demonstrated his first propensity for what might be called an “adventurous” way of life. With only six months left before graduation, Jünger left school, leaving no word to his family as to his destination. Using money given to him for school-related fees and expenses to buy a firearm and a railroad ticket to Verdun, Jünger subsequently enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, an elite military unit of the French armed forces that accepted enlistees of any nationality and had a reputation for attracting fugitives, criminals, and mercenaries. Jünger had no intention of staying with the Legion. He only wanted to be posted to Africa, as he eventually was. Jünger then deserted, only to be captured and sentenced to jail. Eventually his father found a capable lawyer for his wayward son and secured his release. Jünger then returned to his studies and underwent a belated high school graduation. However, it was only a very short time later that Jünger was back in uniform.[18]
Warrior and War Diarist
Ernst Jünger immediately volunteered for military service when he heard the news that Germany was at war in the summer of 1914. After two months of training, Jünger was assigned to a reserve unit stationed at Champagne. He was afraid the war would end before he had the opportunity to see any action. This attitude was not uncommon among many recruits or conscripts who fought in the war for their respective states. The question immediately arises at to why so many young people would wish to look into the face of death with such enthusiasm. Perhaps they really did not understand the horrors that awaited them. In Jünger’s case, his rebellion against the security and luxury of his bourgeois upbringing had already been amply demonstrated by his excursion with the French Foreign Legion. Because of his high school education, something that soldiers of more proletarian origins lacked, Jünger was selected to train to become an officer. Shortly before beginning his officer’s training, Jünger was exposed to combat for the first time. From the start, he carried pocket-sized notebooks in which he recorded his observations on the front lines. His writings while at the front exhibit a distinctive tone of detachment, as though he is simply an observer watching while the enemy fires at others. In the middle part of 1915, Jünger suffered his first war wound, a bullet graze to the thigh that required only two weeks of recovery time. Afterwards, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.[19]
At age twenty-one, Jünger was the leader of a reconnaissance team at the Somme whose purpose was to go out at night and search for British landmines. Early on, he acquired the reputation of a brave soldier who lacked the preoccupation with personal safety common to most of the fighting men. The introduction of steel artifacts into the war, tanks for the British side and steel helmets for the Germans, made a deep impression on Jünger. Wounded three times at the Somme, Jünger was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. Upon recovery, he returned to the front lines. A combat daredevil, he once held out against a much larger British force with only twenty men. After being transferred to fight the French at Flanders, he lost ten of his fourteen men and was wounded in the left hand by a blast from a French shell. After being harshly criticized by a superior officer for the number of men lost on that particular mission, Jünger beg
an to develop contempt for the military hierarchy whom he regarded as having achieved their status as a result of their class position, frequently lacking combat experience of their own. In late 1917, having already experienced nearly three full years of combat, Jünger was wounded for the fifth time during a surprise assault by the British. He was grazed in the head by a bullet, acquiring two holes in his helmet in the process. His performance in this battle won him the Knight’s Cross of the Hohenzollerns. In March 1918, Jünger participated in another fierce battle with the British, losing 87 of his 150 men.[20]
Nothing impressed Jünger more than personal bravery and endurance on the part of soldiers. He once “fell to the ground in tears” at the sight of a young recruit who had only days earlier been unable to carry an ammunition case by himself suddenly being able to carry two cases of ammunition after surviving an attack of British shells.
A recurring theme in Jünger’s writings on his war experiences is the way in which war brings out the most savage human impulses. Essentially, human beings are given full license to engage in behavior that would be considered criminal during peacetime. He wrote casually about burning occupied towns during the course of retreat or a shift of position. However, Jünger also demonstrated a capacity for merciful behavior during his combat efforts. He refrained from shooting a cornered British soldier after the foe displayed a portrait of his family to Jünger. He was wounded yet again in August of 1918. Having been shot in the chest and directly through a lung, this was his most serious wound yet. After being hit, he still managed to shoot dead yet another British officer. As Jünger was being carried off the battlefield on a stretcher, one of the stretcher carriers was killed by a British bullet. Another German soldier attempted to carry Jünger on his back, but the soldier was shot dead himself and Jünger fell to the ground. Finally, a medic recovered him and pulled him out of harm’s way. This episode would be the end of his battle experiences during the Great War.[21]
Attack the System Page 3
