Читать книгу Demanding the Impossible - Peter Marshall - Страница 53

Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, anarchism exerted a considerable influence amongst radical literary circles. British intellectuals and artists were undoubtedly influenced by the liberal tradition of individualism found in the work of John Stuart Mill and Spencer, but their response to the triumph of capital and empire led them to a deeper analysis of exploitation and a more radical remedy. The clamour of the growing anarchist movement on the Continent also crossed the English Channel, and some of the more distinguished exponents like Prince Kropotkin took political refuge in the comparatively tolerant atmosphere of Britain.

Although the poet Edward Carpenter did not call himself an anarchist, his highly personal form of libertarian socialism comes very close to it. Kropotkin was the leading anarchist spokesman in Britain at the time, and Carpenter contributed to his journal Freedom, but the poet perceived in him a ‘charming naïveté which summed up all evil in one word “government”’. Nevertheless, Henry W. Nevinson, to whom this remark was made, wrote about Carpenter: ‘By temperament, if not by conviction, he was a complete anarchist, detesting all commandments, authority and forms of government.’ He believed moreover that ‘external law’ must always be false and only acknowledged the internal law of self-expression.³¹

The key to Carpenter’s libertarian socialism is to be found in his attitude to personal affections: he wanted a society in which men and women could be lovers and friends. He wanted to release what he called ‘The Ocean of Sex’ within each person. To this end, he urged the creation of ‘The Intermediate Sex’, a new type of being combining the male and the female, which would appear in Love’s Coming of Age (1897)—dismissed predictably by Bernard Shaw as ‘sex-nonsense’. Like many anarchists at that time, Carpenter turned to anthropology to back up his call for a new kind of humanity and he wrote a study of social evolution entitled Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk (1914). While he was far more radical than Spencer, he shared his evolutionary outlook and belief in social progress.

In his analysis of the causes of modern civilization, Carpenter followed Rousseau and Shelley in thinking that it corrupted and disintegrated natural man. The institution of private property in particular broke up the unity of his nature and drew him away from his true self and made him prey to every form of disease. Civilization founded on property had introduced: ‘slavery, serfdom, wage-labour, which are various forms of the domination of one class over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and the policeman’.³² Having destroyed the organic structures of earlier society, the institution of property had thus given rise to strong central government which was ‘the evidence in social life that man has lost his inner and central control, and therefore must result to an outer one’.³³ Crime moreover is a symptom of social illness, poverty, inequality and restriction.³⁴

But all is not lost and there is a cure for civilization. If every person were linked organically to the general body of his fellows, then no serious disharmony would occur. Carpenter thought it possible for a free and communist society to exist without external government and law which are only ‘the travesties and transitory substitutes of Inward Government and Order’. Anarchy could therefore exist with no outward rule as ‘an inward and invisible spirit of life’.³⁵

Carpenter returned to this theme in his Non-Governmental Society (1911), a work which deeply impressed Gandhi and Herbert Read. Like Kropotkin, Carpenter was convinced that human societies can maintain themselves in good order and vitality without written law and its institutions. Indeed, he felt that custom, which takes a gender form and is adaptable to the general movement of society when exerting pressure on individuals, is far superior to law. A study of ‘native races’ showed that the competition and anxiety of modern society need not exist if people were left to themselves. A ‘free non-governmental society’ could then emerge which would be practicable because it was vital and organic:

a spontaneous and free production of goods would spring up, followed of course by a spontaneous free exchange – a self-supporting society, based not on individual dread and anxiety, but on the common fulness of life and energy.³⁶

Work would be based on voluntary choice according to taste and skill and there would be common property. A non-governmental society would therefore be a free and communal society.

But while Carpenter put forward his case in reasoned arguments with careful evidence in his pamphlets, he was primarily a poet. As a young man, Shelley’s libertarian world had been his ideal. When he came across Walt Whitman at twenty-five, he felt a great surge of joy. To these influences was added a deep reading of the Bhagavadgita. Carpenter went on to express his own vision of a free world in his extraordinary rhapsody Towards Democracy (1883) which embraced the sexual revolution, direct democracy, vegetarianism and pacifism. Whatever his contemporaries thought of him, he refused to still his song:

O Freedom, beautiful beyond compare, thy kingdom is established!

Thou with the thy feet on earth, thy brow among the stars, for ages us thy children

I, thy child, singing daylong nightlong, sing of joy in thee.³⁷

In place of existing civilization, which pressed on people and left them ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d’, Carpenter called for a simple life in a decentralized society of fields and workshops in which every person would have a cottage and sufficient land. Freedom emerges once the people love the land:

Government and laws and police then fall into their places – the earth gives her own laws; Democracy just begins to open her eyes and peep! and the rabble of unfaithful bishops, priests, generals, landlords, capitalists, lawyers, kings, queens, patronisers and polite idlers goes scuttling down into general oblivion.³⁸

The individual would then live in harmony with himself, his fellows, and his natural environment. Carpenter hoped moreover that he would develop a higher form of consciousness in which the personal self is experienced as part of the universal Self in ‘The Everlasting Now’. But the Self can only find expression in Democracy – equality or freedom – for they come to the same thing.

Carpenter was no idle poet or mystic. He inherited a small independent income after being a teacher, but he tried to realize his ideal by building his own house, living off the land, and making sandals. It is for trying to practise what he preached that Carpenter has rightly been called the ‘English Tolstoi’.³⁹ And while he remained on the fringes of the anarchist movement, and felt private property was more important than government in bringing about the downfall of humanity, his decentralized vision of free society without law is entirely anarchistic.