The Ecology of Freedom

…freedom has no “founding fathers,” only free thinkers and practitioners…

Murray Bookchin’s 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom introduces a most revealing distinction, that between equality of unequals and inequality of equals. Its elaboration might yield the following: freedom-based solidaristic/compensatory equality of the de-facto-unequally-endowed vs domination-based de-facto inequality of the ostensibly-equal-(“rights equality”)-but-in-fact-increasingly-not-so.

It broadly parallels the vagaries (or perhaps an inevitable trajectory) of homo sapiens’ social development, from a forager/hunter-gatherer stage – an “organic” society largely grounded not so much on communal property as on usufruct; through an agricultural/feudal one; to a capitalist society culminating in a (neo)liberal order that disingenuously tries to redeem itself by the introduction of subterfuges such as equality of opportunity and equality of rights.

Alternatively it could be described as a movement from an egalitarian community united by a sense of solidarity, through the introduction of a hierarchy, that development leading in turn to forms of social domination, and eventually to social exploitation, then doubling back somewhat via largely ineffective efforts that try to blunt the cruel edge of what human society has become in the process for so many.

But the term equality of unequals is also a beacon that might guide us beyond the current social convulsions. Apparently spanning millennia of social development, it might lead us to build conscious versions, both ecological, mutualistic and libertarian, of a community type that one starts to encounter upon the onset of man’s hominization – ones that, like their early model, are egalitarian, non-hierarchical (cf. e.g. cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s oeuvre), non-coercive, and – crucially – bonded by a sense of solidarity, despite their heightened complexity and enhanced diversity. The latter should be welcomed, says Bookchin: a dynamic unity in diversity is what makes for an ecosystem’s wholeness; diversity not only contributes to communal well-being, it also assures ecological stability.

Bookchin envisages voluntary confederations of such ecocommunities – firmly rooted in their ecosystem – as a fitting culmination of a line of human social development that may lead to a truly “ecological” society. His prospect of non-authoritarian decentralized confederal networks of Communes, composed of small communes based on direct democracy, is not a bad vision to guide us forward, one that apparently gives the fullest scope possible to a sense of freedom that is not egotistical and “proprietary.”

There is also a Christian parallel referred to in the book, perhaps surprisingly for a strictly “ecological” thinker, albeit rather unorthodox, as elaborated in a chiliastic vision of mystic Joachim of Fiore: the Age of the Holy Spirit as the final point of humanity’s development. Its characteristics, especially its “reign of freedom” (supplanting the “reign of justice” of the previous era), are not unlike those proposed by Bookchin for his confederal Communes.