People require no protection or rule; their every desire can be satisfied without technics or the need to bring other human beings into personal or institutional subjugation. In the sheer splendor of this plenty and the givingness of nature, the “pleasure principle” and “reality principle” are in perfect congruence. Pleasure is the rule, abundance enables desire to replace mere need, because every wish can be fulfilled without exertion or technical strategies. Freedom’s equality of unequals had never totally disappeared as a principle of “compensation,” if only because this principle could be used to provide credibility for privilege as well as equality. Where justice assailed the inequities of class rule or its claims to status as a matter of birth, the notion of “compensation” reinforced these inequities by according to “unequals” a greater “compensatory” increment in power, wealth, and authority. “Compensation” acknowledged the “superiority” of the slave master and feudal lord over their slaves and serfs; it accorded the ruler the authority and means to live according to the norms of rulership.
How ever sweeping these objective changes toward class society may have been, they are not nearly as challenging as the changes that had to be achieved in the subjective realm before classes, exploitation, acquisition, and the competitive mentality of bourgeois rivalry could become part of humanity’s psychic equipment. We gravely misjudge human nature if we see it only through an epistemology of rule and domination, or worse, class relationships and exploitation. Howard Press has observed that “separation is the archetypal tragedy.” But there are different ways to separate. Although this “tragedy” may be necessary to allow the individual to discover his or her uniqueness and identity, it should not have to assume the socially explosive form of rivalry and competition between individuals.
That this civil sphere was free of coercion and command is indicated by our evidence of “authority” in the few organic societies that have survived European acculturation. What we flippantly call “leadership” in organic societies often turns out to be guidance, lacking the usual accoutrements of command. Chiefs, where they authentically exist and are not the mere creations of the colonizer’s mind, have no true authority in a coercive sense. Whatever “power” they do have is usually confined to highly delimited tasks such as the coordination of hunts and war expeditions. Hence, it is episodic power, not institutional; periodic, not traditional — like the “dominance” traits we encounter among primates.
Moon rocks and Meteorites
No system of age hierarchy has a more overbearing content, a more repressive mode of operation. In the earliest form of the patriarchal family, as we have seen, the patriarch was answerable to no one for the rule he exercised over the members of his family. He was the incarnation, perhaps the historical source, of arbitrary power, of domination that could be sanctioned by no principle, moral or ethical, other than tradition and the ideological tricks provided by the shaman. But organic society, despite the physical limitations it faced (from a modern viewpoint), nevertheless functioned unconsciously with an implicit commitment to freedom that social theorists were not to attain until fairly recent times.
The influential role that the elders were to play in forming hierarchies is intermingled with their more modest role at earlier periods of social development, when they actually exercised comparatively little social influence. In this situation I am faced with wildbuddies the need to clarify how the elders constituted the earliest “seeds” of hierarchy. But, owing to my mode of presentation, some readers might assume that the rule of the old over the young existed during periods of human society when no such rule really existed.
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The cosmic nature of equivalence could be validated by the most dramatic features of life. “Heaven and hell . . . hang together,” declare Horkheimer and Adorno — and not merely in the commerce of the Olympian gods with the chtonic deities, of good with evil, of salvation with disaster, of subject with object. Indeed, equivalence is as ancient as the very notions of heaven and hell, and is to have its own involuted dialectic as the substitution of Dike for Tyche and Justitia for Fortuna. Here, one does not voice a demand for goods, compare prices, and engage in the market’s universal duel called “bargaining.” Rather, etiquette requires that the exchange process begin gracefully and retain its communal dimension. It opens with the serving of beverages, an exchange of news and gossip, some personal chit-chat, and, in time, expressions of admiration for the wares at hand.
This multipurpose character of medieval prime movers stunningly illustrates the extent to which unity in diversity is a correlate of ecological technics. Watermills, known as early as Greek times, had been used almost exclusively to mill grain; windmills, already in use in Persia as early as the eighth century, had probably been confined to the same limited uses. The new interest in machinery, as yet small in scale and fairly simple in design, led to a highly variegated use of cams, cranks, and pumps, and of an ingenious combination of gears, levers, and pulleys. It also fostered the triumphal invention of the mechanical clock, which lessened the need for arduous toil and greatly increased the effectiveness of craft production.
To imply a sense of direction in causality — a “why” rather than merely a “how” in nature — was redolent of theology. Medieval scholasticism had so thoroughly Christianized Aristotelian nature philosophy and causality that the Renaissance mechanicians viewed them as little more than a system of Catholic apolegetics; even Hobbes’s vision of a “social mechanics” veered sharply into a critique of Aristotle’s final cause. To be sure, this conflict was unavoidable and even freed Aristotle’s own thought from the inquisitorial grip of the Church. None of the modern images of nature offers a compelling vision of a wholeness that is permeated — as a result of its wholeness — by a larger sense of subjectivity, which we normally identify with human rationality. Each illustrates not so much the need to “resurrect” nature as the need to “resurrect” human subjectivity itself. The flaw in Horkheimer and Adorno’s works on reason stems from their failure to integrate rationality with subjectivity in order to bring nature within the compass of sensibilité.
Much that we would call the ideological, moral, cultural, and institutional “superstructure” of medieval society was deeply intertwined with its economic and technical “base.” Both “superstructure” and “base” were enriched and broadened by the wealth each brought to the other. Economic life and technical development existed within a wide-ranging orbit of cultural restraints as well as cultural creativity. That capitalism was to distort this wide-ranging orbit and virtually destroy it has already been emphasized but can bear some repetition. The era that separates the Middle Ages from the Industrial Revolution was to be marked by a terrifying deterioration of community life, by a reduction of highly cherished popular ideals to brazen economic interests, and by a disintegration of individuality into egotism.
It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the “inferiors,” and pleasure and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their “superiors.” The objective history of the social structure becomes internalized as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day — not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold.
Deep ascent processes, including decompression, bubble nucleation and early growth of bubbles were similar among the four main phases, regardless of style or column conditions. Uniformly high vesicle number densities (8.0 × 108 to 2 × 109 cm− 3) suggest that magma degassing throughout the eruption was a disequilibrium process with very high nucleation rates; power law distributions of the subpopulations of small bubbles on cumulative number density plots suggest continuous nucleation of bubbles. Shallow processes of bubble growth and magma ascent were at times decoupled from deep ascent processes; at the onset of each phase, the erupted magma appears to have a mature vesicle signature, suggesting extended residence times in the shallow conduit, irrespective of decompression or magma ascent rate. During each phase, the textural and density data suggest more uniform conditions of ascent and shallow degassing.
Man staked out a claim for the superiority of his work over woman’s; later, the craftsman asserted his superiority over the food cultivator; finally, the thinker affirmed his sovereignty over the workers. Hierarchy established itself not only objectively, in the real, workaday world, but also subjectively, in the individual unconscious. Percolating into virtually every realm of experience, it has assimilated the syntax of everyday discourse — the very relationship Between subject and object, humanity and nature. Difference was recast from its traditional status as unity in diversity into a linear system of separate, increasingly antagonistic powers — a system validated by all the resources of religion, morality, and philosophy. I do not mean to imply that any existing “primitive” communities can be regarded as models for early periods of human social development.