 his analysis. Notably, he takes great exception to the concept of “nature”, which he regards as the outcome of humanity’s separation from the world around it: on one hand there is humanity, the subject, and on the other hand there is an external object called “nature”.
While this is indeed one way in which the word is currently deployed, it does not have to be interpreted in this way – take, for instance, the slogan much loved by French eco-activists which declares that they are not defending nature but are, instead, “nature defending itself”.
Do we have to invent an alternative “acceptable” word to describe life on the planet, of which humankind is a part? For me, it makes sense to reclaim the use of the word “nature” in its fullest sense rather than throw it away because it has become somehow contaminated by misuse.
Lapierre extends his antipathy to the word “nature” by rejecting the concept of human nature, which he says is used to “enslave man”. For him, the human being is characterised by “a brain practically empty of all content at birth” and he adds: “The human being is a concept”. For Lapierre, society is everything, it seems, and the cosmovision of the mercantile society of today completely shapes human beings living within it, in the same way that the cosmovisions of other cultures past and present shape those living in them.
This does not ring true to me. If absolutely all our thinking comes from the society in which we are raised, how can we ever come to think outside of that society’s mindset? How did Georges Lapierre, for instance, ever manage to find himself on the outside of the mercantile cosmovision, criticising it so effectively?
If I was born as pretty much a blank piece of paper and mercantile culture’s assumptions were subsequently written all over me, how was it that at a certain point when I was young I realised that something was badly wrong with that same mercantile culture? Even if my initial response was unfocused, what exactly was there inside me which had remained distinct from the culture in which I had been raised and which enabled me to view it critically, to sense that it did not correspond to what I regarded as “right”?
Here, we return to the idea of the attainment of knowledge as being an unveiling of truths already known. Why do thinkers of the left (including Lapierre, evidently) have such a problem with the idea that human beings are born with certain innate qualities, potential and expectations? We don’t find it impossible to understand that a bird is born with the innate ability to build a certain type of nest, for instance, but the idea of equivalent capacities in human beings seems to alarm people.
Obviously, human beings are not bound by their instincts in the same way that other animals are – and this is a significant difference. But this does not mean that those instincts are not still there, even if often buried by cultural requirements.
Is it not possible that there is such a thing as human nature – not a falsely universal version imposed on people by centralising colonisers, but a real, living, organic, indefinable one? Is it not possible that this authentically universal human nature includes the instinct to live co-operatively, freely, without the wage-slavery, exploitation and misery of the money prison-world?
Couldn’t this be why you “do violence to yourself” if you submit to the present system in contravention of your natural inclinations? Couldn’t this be why people like Georges Lapierre and millions of others within the mercantile world continue to reject the inhuman anti-values of industrial capitalism, of the global mercantile culture, and to insist that another world is possible? And wouldn’t it be a good thing if this was the case, rather than a reason for ideological anxiety or evasion?
* I have a new book on the way! Nature, Essence and Anarchy is currently in the Winter Oak production process and will be out fairly soon, all being well.