10. White Man’s Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed
Maria Mies
In the urban centres of the industrialized North may be observed a curious mass behaviour from time to time. Those who apparently consider urban culture and lifestyle as the pinnacle of progress and modernity, for whom the cities are centres of ‘Life’, of freedom, of culture, rush away from these very cities whenever they can. A flight into ‘Nature’, the ‘wilderness’, ‘underdeveloped’ countries of the South, to areas where White Man, they hope, has not yet ‘penetrated’. Originally the targets of this mass exodus were the sunny beaches of Spain, Italy, Greece, Tunisia, later of Turkey and — very occasionally — the ‘unspoilt’ villages of their own countryside. But with the advent of cheap, mass tourism we are increasingly urged by the media to undertake ‘adventure’ travels and tour. To see ‘cave people’, ‘cannibals’, ‘wild headhunters’, ‘stone-age people’ in the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon and so on. Like the fifteenth and sixteenth century adventurers and pirates, affluent, late twentieth century men are urged to experience the challenges of early ‘discoverers’ and to commune with Nature — and suddenly you feel like John Wayne! Man feels like a man again in his confrontation with ‘wild Nature’.1 They, too, want to ‘penetrate’ ‘virgin’ land and open it up for white civilization, which today means tourism and the money economy. In this, writes Klemens Ludurf,2 ‘they destroy what they look for while they find it’.
In what has been called ‘integrated rural tourism’ in, for example, Senegal, European tourists can live in villages in close contact with the ‘natives’ in African-style huts, with minimum comfort, African food, no running water and where European and African children play together. The ‘real’ Africa to be touched!3 The German Association for the Alps organizes trekking tours through Ladakh, where German tourists may not only get dysentery but can also again experience a sense of belonging to the ‘master people’ (Herrenmenschen) and look down upon the local people as Drecksacke (dirty pigs).4 The contradictions inherent in this behaviour were typified by a woman in Cologne who spends almost all her holidays trekking in Nepal. But when it was suggested that, at home she should use public transport instead of a private car for ecological reasons, she indignantly refused: how could she be expected to sit by strangers with their different smells and behaviour? She would rather walk! Unable to tolerate the proximity of an unknown human body she nevertheless sought wild nature in the distant mountains of Nepal, nature to be smelt and touched and physically experienced.
Despair in the midst of plenty
What, then, is actually happening here? People who celebrate their own civilization and the subjection and control of Nature choose to spend their leisure time far away from these beautiful, modern cities. Why? Why this nostalgia, this seeking for untouched Nature? Can it be that white civilization, this apogee of modernity, has ultimately turned out to be ‘a painted desert’? This urban civilization obviously does not make for happiness. Rather it engenders deep feelings of malaise, even of despair and poverty in the midst of plenty. And it seems that as more and more commodities are heaped on the supermarkets’ shelves the deeper the despair and an inarticulate desire for some absent basic element essential for a sense of fulfilment. People are not happy. There is a second aspect. This yearning, this desire for nature is not directed to the nature that surrounds us, even in a city, or of which we are a part. It is rather fixated on the nature which has explicitly been externalized by White Man, which has been defined as colony, backward, exotic, distant and dangerous, the nature of Asia, Africa, South America. This nature is the ‘Hinterland’ of white civilization. It is an idealized, unreal nature — rather like D.H. Lawrence’s ‘sex in the head’, it is ‘nature in the head’.
The same can be said of the nostalgia for things rural. Since the eighteenth century nature, the rural areas around cities, the land of the peasants has been increasingly transformed into mere Hinterland for the cities, or perceived as an aesthetic experience: the romantic landscape. Like the external colonies, the land, where food for the urban population is grown, is not only ruthlessly exploited and destroyed by industrialized agriculture, it is also devalued as backward and unprofitable, like a colony. But paradoxically, this land is also the object of urban longing.
But no one wants to alleviate this feeling by helping with work on the fields as, up to some generations ago, was the urban workers’ normal holiday. These families went ‘home’ to their villages and shared in the farm work. Now adults, some of them still look back on their family farm or village holidays with nostalgia. Today, however, tourists want only to experience nature and the landscape in a purely consumptionist manner, as voyeurs, not as actors, but like visitors to an art gallery or cinema. This has become possible because they have more money with which to buy this experience than did people in former times. Their relationship to the land, as to distant, exotic countries is not a productive one. Instead they use up and consume this wild nature or the land as a commodity, and having consumed it they leave only a heap of waste, as they do when they consume other goods. Therefore the result of this yearning, which they hope to satisfy through consumptionist tourism, is: They destroy what they yearn for.
Violence and desire
The third space for which modern people — modern men — yearn is woman, more precisely woman’s body. Woman’s body is the projection screen for most of men’s desires.
A closer look at this ‘third colony’5 will probably enable us to better understand the interconnectedness between the destruction of Nature and this yearning. But before we analyse this connection let us first look at some examples.
As far as the history of this polarized relationship between Man and Nature and Man and Woman goes, we have to reconsider the holocaust of women in the course of the European witch hunt; an event that took place in those same centuries which are hailed as the beginning of the modern, enlightened era.6
After this orgy of violence against women which continued until the era of Enlightenment, the end of the eighteenth century,7 came a new yearning for the ‘feminine’, the romantic and sentimental identification of women in eighteenth century literature and art.8 It seems that real living, strong and independent women had first to be physically destroyed and subdued before the men of the new bourgeois class could create a new romantic ideal of womanhood. An ideal in which the frail, submissive sentimental woman, one dependent on the man as ‘breadwinner and protector’, woman as the epitome of the world of feelings rather than of reason, plays the main role. As Sheila Rowbotham remarks, throughout the nineteenth century and even until today this romantic ideal of womanhood has been the ‘desired space’ for men’s longings and still largely determines the man-woman relationship. This ideal of womanhood was the necessary complement to the strong, enterprising, bourgeois white man who began to conquer and colonize the world for the sake of capital accumulation.9
Moreover, this cult of the frail, sentimental woman, who supposedly represents ‘nature’ vis-a-vis ‘rational man’, is largely based on fantasy, on symbolic constructions. And men began to project their desire on to these female fantasy figures, rather than on to real flesh and bone.
Pornography and prostitution tourism
Today, a clear example of the connection between violence and desire, yearnings and fantasy, is pornography. Pornography presents men with images of the female body, or rather selected areas — a dissected body. Their desire is centred on these pieces, not on a whole woman, let alone a real living woman. At the same time, these images reflect the violence that characterizes men’s relationship to this body.10 This pornographic gaze, which thrusts together desire and violence, is the basis for much commercial advertising, for the flood of magazines, videos, TV and other films etc. Economic growth, it seems, is increasingly dependent on this type of advertising, based on the pornographic gaze. Like the yearning for nature, the yearning for the dissected, naked female body is wholly consumerist. It cannot be satisfied by interaction with a living person but only by the response to lifeless pictures. Even the psychic activity, usually necessary to conjure up a fantasy, is reduced and replaced by a simple optic stimulus-response mechanism in which not even a relationship to one’s own person exists. An automat reacts to an automat. A further point is that these one-dimensional images in no way threaten the male ego.
Prostitution tourism is another example of the connection between desire and violence. Here, the desire is projected on to an ‘exotic’ woman, a non-white woman, a woman of the colonized, who due to her poverty has to serve the white man. The desire for the subject and colonized woman is related to the desire for the ‘noble savage’. In this case, too, the relationship is not active and loving but consumerist and passive, based on the purchasing power of the D-Mark, the dollar or the yen. This purchasing power also enables Western and Japanese working-class men, from time to time, to enjoy playing the colonial lord and master.11 It seems that for European, Japanese and American men the attraction of prostitution tourism lies largely in the power, the master-servant relationship between man and woman they are able to experience. The psychologist Berti Latza made a study of German men who visited Thailand as sex tourists. She found that they commanded their Thai ‘lovers’ to clean their cottage, feed them throughout the day and serve them as slaves. Sex often played a secondary role, but what the men enjoyed was their absolute power over these women.
Berti Latza also found another type of sex tourist: the regressive male who reverts to the phase of his early infancy. They demand that the Thai women bath and feed them like a baby, and oil and powder their buttocks. They even fall back into a kind of baby language and would like to be even carried to the toilet’, writes Latza.12
It seems that with the little Thai women these adult males may safely abandon their self-image of ‘big strong man’, and afford to indulge in all that has been repressed, negated, eliminated from their image of manhood by white, Western, patriarchal civilization. Thus they must travel around half the globe to find an exotic, colonized woman with whom they feel free to satisfy these regressive needs.
It seems that many of those men who order a Filipina bride from a catalogue or go on a sex tour to Thailand, Kenya or the Dominican Republic are incapable of developing a real human, egalitarian, adult and loving relationship with a woman, but can deal only with women who are subordinated to them; women who are economically, politically weaker, do not know the men’s language, are entirely dependent on them. Such men often have a communication problem in their own society.13 Even those men who marry a Thai woman or a Filipino, are rarely capable of forging a human relationship with them.
Sexuality and nature
Most analyses dealing with sex-tourism and international trade in women focus on the problems in the women’s own countries: Thailand, the Philippines, Kenya. Poverty, military bases, certain local traditions are usually identified as causes for this new phenomenon.14
But it is rarely asked what problem prompts European, American and Japanese men to travel to exotic places to satisfy their sexual needs. Moreover, why do these men want women whom they otherwise do not respect? What is the content of their desire? Why can they not satisfy their sexual needs and desires with their own women, or even with pornography, sex-shops, sex-machines etc? What, apart from the intoxication of power and dominance, do these men want from those poor, foreign, colonized women?
In order to identify the underlying reasons we must ask what eroticism and sexuality mean for men in industrialized societies, because sex tourism only manifests an extension of the relationship that men have to themselves, to women in their own society, to others and to nature.
On average men in industrialized societies have, for most of their lives, hardly any direct body-contact with plants, the earth, animals, the elements. Almost everywhere their relationship to nature is mediated through machines which function as a kind of “distancing weapon’, by which nature is dominated, manipulated, destroyed. The more technology progresses the greater this distance, the more abstract becomes the relationship between man and nature, and the more alienated man becomes from his own organic, mortal body, which, nevertheless remains the source of all happiness and enjoyment. The more modern man interposes machines between himself and nature, the more he dissects nature and women, the more he projects his desire only to these sections of the whole, the greater becomes his hunger for the original whole, wild, free, woman and nature: the more he destroys the greater his hunger.
The satisfaction of this hunger seems to be necessary for survival, irrespective of the fascination which machines have for men. This fascination obviously is not sufficient to make them ‘happ’. I agree with Roger Garaudy who says that the sexual act has become virtually the only direct contact to nature available to civilized man. Ά break has occurred between the very rhythm of production, consumption and the sexual act, disconnected usually from all other dimensions of life, a sexual act which itself becomes entangled in the net of consumption and economic exploitation, or which becomes the sacred refuge, outside ordinary life.’15 The growing sex obsession apparent in all industrial societies is, in my view, a direct consequence of alienation from nature, the absence of a sensual interaction with nature in people’s work life. Sexuality is supposed to be the totally ‘other’ from work, sexuality should not interfere with work, should be strictly separated from the work life. Sexuality is the ‘transcendence’ of work, the ‘heaven’ after the ‘valley of tears and sweat’ of work, the real essence of leisure.
This seems to me the deeper reason for the combination of tourism, sex and sun. The tragedy is, however, that this ‘heaven’ is also a commodity, to be bought like any others. And like the acquisition of other consumer goods, ultimately, it disappoints. The envisioned fulfilment is never realized, is, at the moment of apparent consummation, finally elusive. Therefore, the constantly disappointed striving to attain this ‘heaven’ transforms need into an addiction.
Reproduction technology
Today, men and women who want a child, even if they are infertile, try to satisfy their desire by means of biotechnology. For women this yearning is located in their own body and its generative potency.
The generative potency, or ‘wild fertility’ of the female body has, since the beginning of this century, been identified as one of the most formidable handicaps for women’s emancipation. In an effort to restrain this ‘wild fertility’ it has been fought with mechanical, chemical and biological ‘devices’ or weapons, from contraceptives to sterilizations. This struggle has gone on for decades. It now seems, in many cases, that the female body and its generative potency cannot be switched on again at will. As Renate Klein has shown in her study on women in IVF-programmes in Australia, their infertility was often as a result of their previous use of contraceptives.16 Also, for men and women, sterility is frequently the result of continuous stress and ecological pollution.
Of the many reasons why women want their ‘own’ child, one is the desire to experience their own body’s natural creativity and productivity, to experience that living power in their body which permeates nature. They not only desire the product of this creative process, the child, but the process itself. From time immemorial, women have dealt with pregnancy and childbirth in a creative way. But this creative process, this natural power, was not totally controlled by them, rather to a certain extent it remained ‘wild’. And here, I think, lies precisely the core of this yearning. Because, to create a child is quite different from constructing a car or other machine. The woman does not have a blueprint in her head according to which she makes the child. She may have fantasies, wishes, but the child that forms in her body, in co-operation with nature, which she herself represents and is, is not determined by her will. Ultimately, neither the process nor the ‘product’ are at her disposal. I think it is precisely this unpredictability that constitutes the newness of each child and provides the fulfilment that is being sought. It answers the craving for the diversity, the unexpected, the manifold new possibilities that constitute life and living beings. Newness, spontaneity, surprise are what we admire in children. In the desire to bear a child of one’s own body this seeking for the new, the natural, the spontaneous manifests itself with great power.
The irony is, however, that for those who use reproductive techniques this desire is satisfied by the same external, artificially controlled methods and techniques which formerly may not only have destroyed women’s fertility but are also based on the same philosophy of science employed for the construction of machines. The medical-technical bio-engineers may be able to construct a child for the woman, after they have isolated through invasive methods the necessary ‘reproductive component’ — as this is revealingly called. They may even construct this child, with the help of genetic manipulations, according to the wishes of the parents, but they cannot satisfy this deep longing for the new, the spontaneous. On the contrary. Instead of experiencing pregnancy as a time of ‘good hope’, as it is called in German, most women who have enrolled in an IVF-programme experience this period as one of alternating anxiety and hope, and of fear and disappointment and basically one of total alien control over this creative process in their body. Reproductive technology alienates both men and women from their bodies and from this most intimate process in which they normally co-operate with their own nature, which they want to experience as creative, productive and spontaneous. As for men in the case of tourism, the woman experiences a longing for what has been lost and, in seeking, finds only that it is irrecoverable, namely that their wild, spontaneous, unalienated, organic, untamed generative potency has been destroyed. Renate Klein reports how a woman of whom, after many failed efforts to get a child through the IVF technology, the reproductive doctors had said was a hopeless case, totally humiliated and disappointed she finally gave up trying. Shortly afterwards she became naturally pregnant, without the intrusion of any technical devices.17
There are many similar examples of the connection between violent destruction of living symbioses by modern science and technology, the industrialization of all such processes and the deep longing for these very symbioses.
It may be useful to look more closely at what these diverse desires have in common. Why are they increasingly in the industrialized countries? What are people seeking? It seems obvious that what is sought is exactly the opposite of what the myth of modernity has promised and sees as positive: the total control of nature and natural processes by science and technology, the ‘civilizing’, that is, taming of all ‘wild’ forces of nature for the benefit of man.
There is, for example, this nostalgia for ‘wildness’, for nature not yet dissected, manipulated, tamed for man’s utilitarian purposes. In spite of any fears of nature’s wild, chaotic, threatening and destructive aspects, to experience the potential risks, the uncertainty of this very wildness is the fundamental motivation for this longing. But simultaneously nature is sought as the good, the mother, our friend. In spite of all scientific knowledge and the control over nature there is a deep acknowledgement that, in the last analysis we are an inescapable part of this nature, that we are nature’s children, that we are born of women and that eventually we shall die. And that this is acceptable and as it should be.
Integral to this searching is a nostalgia for childhood. That is, seeking for a simple, spontaneous, open and confidential relationship with our surroundings, with the natural world and with other human beings. This implies the experiencing of love, tenderness, care, warmth as gifts, without the need of prior achievement for reward. In almost all societies these expectations are directed to the mother. Woman as Mother is the social ‘place’ towards which all regressive desires and longings are directed. The psychoanalytical term ‘regression’, however, already has a negative connotation. It implies that healthy adults should not fall back into such infantile needs for ‘a mother’.
The nostalgia for childhood also implies a searching for freedom and adventure. But freedom here means something other than what Western democracies mean when they talk of freedom or liberty, meaning the freedom of choice in the economic and political supermarket. The search for the freedom of childhood is mainly a reaction to the total structural regimentation and ordering of everyday life by the industrial and bureaucratic society. Whereas in former times nature may have been seen as an obstacle to free movement today civilized society itself is experienced as curbing our desire for freedom.
Also the search for adventure is a reaction to modern society with its many technical novelties. Obviously, people’s basic curiosity is not satisfied with ever-newer technical inventions. On the contrary, industrial society, in spite of its affluence and its leisure and entertainment industry, is permeated by a deep sense of boredom and apathy. The modern lifestyle leaves little to people’s own creativity and work, everything is preplanned and organized, there are no more adventures. We are entertained, animated, fed, stimulated by professional experts.
In this society shopping is the only adventure still allowed. But obviously, this adventure, the joy of acquiring something new, soon palls. In many cases the adventure consists only of the act of shopping. People have become shopaholics, because they want to experience this adventure of acquiring something new again and again.18 It is a futile attempt to compensate for the lack of creativity, the sterility inherent in modern, urban lifestyles.
For men, as we have seen, this search for adventure is often combined with the desire to experience themselves again as ‘real men’. In patriarchal civilization this means to experience themselves as the great hero who challenges wild nature, pushing the ‘frontier’ ever further.
The nostalgia for childhood and the search for motherliness are often combined with the search for homeland or home, for belonging, for one’s own place. Strangely enough, this need is often satisfied by travelling away from the cities, to foreign lands, to ‘underdeveloped’ countries, to the countryside, to the village. But cities are rarely seen as homelands or homes. The feelings associated with such terms are centred around closeness, community, a rural habitat, while cities are places of anonymity, homelessness, loneliness, indifference, coldness, atomization.
It seems that the devaluation of rural work, life and production, and the attraction and fascination of urban life have as their counterpart homesickness, not necessarily for a particular village, house, or landscape, but for roots. The exodus from the cities to the countryside during vacation time is an expression of this rootlessness.
Part of this reaching out towards nature in all its manifestations is the search for beauty, for aesthetic pleasure. Obviously, the cities’ consumer paradises, the abundance of man-made commodities fail to answer this desire. The aesthetic promises of the commodities are not fulfilled. They become obsolete, because new ones have appeared and the previous ones now seem ugly, so more and more objects are bought to renew the feelings of owning beauty. The current demand for handmade goods: clothes from natural fibres, real wood furniture, hand-thrown pottery, ‘home grown’ food and so on. Plus the ‘nostalgia’ business — for old things — Victoriana in UK (and US) even the art nouveau of the 1930s; reissues of old ‘pop’ songs et al are manifestations of this nostalgia for things lost. People tire of all these man-made goods and seek something that encapsulates the beauty of nature in all its variety, a symbol of its ever changing rhythms of seasons, of day and night, cold and warmth. Nature is always surprising. We always delight in looking at it, as we delight in looking at a child. Industrial civilization promised to create wealth for everybody, a life beyond mere subsistence, a rich life, not only free of material wants, but providing the means for a fuller life, satisfying the deeper, human, non-material needs. But it seems industrial civilization has failed to fulfil this promise, even for those who benefit from it. It seems that the affluence in goods and money in the industrialized countries has as its consequence not only the pauperization of others (nature, the Third World etc.) but also among the people a growing unappeased want, not only in a psychological but also in a material sense. In the glamorous urban centres today it is the quality of life that is absent, clean air, quiet, clean water, wholesome food; above all, urban life is characterized by a dearth of human warmth, of a sense of belonging to a human community and to the world of nature. Therefore we find slogans at city walls like: We want life! which are an expression of the need for living interconnectedness.
Dissection and the search for wholeness
Industrial civilization’s promise was to enhance life by dissecting all symbioses, biological and social, as well as the symbiosis which the human individual as such represents. These symbioses are also called ecological systems: the interdependence of humans, animals, plants, but there is also the social ecology of people living together, of men and women, children and parents, older and younger generations.
Industrial civilization and its science and technology have disrupted these ecological and socio-ecological systems. The whole was dissected into its elementary parts, which then were recombined in the construction of new machines.19 But life is not the sum of elements put together, life was excised in these processes of dissection, analysis and synthesis. The nostalgia and searching already noted, the goal of the ecology movement, the alternative health movement, and large parts of the women’s movement is the restoration of such ecological and socio-ecological interconnectedness. Within the existing industrial and patriarchal-capitalist society the satisfaction of these desires and needs for wholeness, interdependence, is not typically sought in a renaissance of earlier subsistence relations; instead people hope to satisfy them via the commodity market. Fulfilment of the desire for wild nature is satisfied not by working on the land but by adventure tourism; the search for sexuality and erotic relations is satisfied not by loving real live women but by pornographic magazines or sex-tourism. Satisfaction of the needs for rootedness and ‘belonging’, for warmth, motherliness, freedom and adventure is sought not by working in co-operation with nature but rather by consumerism, by purchasing images. These needs are a very effective motor which drives on the economic growth of commodity production and consumption. The capitalist commodity production system can transform any desire into a commodity.
This means that, although the search is for the ‘real thing’ the ‘real life’, the commodity-producing system can only provide this in a symbolic, sentimental and romanticized form of fulfilment. Thus people have only imagined relationships which they enjoy (if at all) as metaphors of real life, real nature, real women, real freedom, they enjoy them only as consumers not actors or creators. But people within industrial society have no wish to ‘go back to nature’, to reject the project of modernity, or the exploitation of nature and other peoples in the course of commodity production. They do not want to opt out of industrial society but hope to have both: the affluence and abundance of the supermarket and unpolluted nature; further growth of the GNP and a healthy environment; more cars and more quiet and clean air in the cities; more medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and more self-determination of autonomy for women over reproductive processes.
Violence, progress and sentimentalism
Industrial capitalist-patriarchal society is based on fundamental dichotomies between Man and Nature, Man and Woman, City and Village, Metropoles and Colony, Work and Life, Nature and Culture and so on. I call these dichotomies colonizations. The desires analysed are all directed towards that part of these dichotomies which has been amputated, externalized, colonized, submerged, repressed and/or destroyed. This is one reason why the longing for these colonized parts can only be sentimentalized; they must be romanticized and added on to the existing modern paradigm. They are the icing on top of the cake, as S. Sarkar put it,20 they do not replace the cake, which is made precisely out of the exploitation and colonization of these parts.
As modern industrial society is based on the ongoing conversion of Nature into cash and industrial products and since this process is the necessary condition for industrial society to survive, the modern relationship to Nature can only be a sentimental one, it cannot be ‘real.’21 This relationship to nature necessarily depends not only on an — imagined — division between Man and Nature but also on the very destruction of nature. This means the disruption of the various symbioses or living connections which constitute life on this planet Earth.
Therefore it is not enough to speak of ambivalences only, when referring to the changing waves of romanticism and rationalism, which have characterized European history since the Enlightenment. Eder has shown that this twin theme of the modern relationship to nature — fear of nature as the enemy and love of nature as Mother and Friend — has been the dominant one since the seventeenth century, particularly modern science and technology’s domination and objectification of nature as the ‘other’, meaning the enemy. The theoretical curiosity went hand in hand with the ‘lust for nature’, the love, the romanticizing and sentimentalizing of nature. Eder even talks of a zero-sum-game,
There is an increase, at the same time, both of the instrumental and of the non-instrumental way of dealing with Nature. The dealing with the organic, the bodily existence which humans share with animals becomes part of a history of social control. The utilization of the body finds its apotheosis in the medical, criminological, psychiatric instrumentalization of the human body On the other hand this very corporality is being moralized: it is filled with psyche and sentiments. A new sensibility towards nature emerges.22
What is usually omitted from this discourse on nature is the direct and structural violence which has accompanied the process of modernization right from its beginning until today. This violence is not accidental, it is the structural necessity, the mechanism by which Nature, women and other colonized parts are separated from the ‘whole’, that is, the living interconnectedness or symbiosis, and made into an object, or the ‘other’. As the existence of this violence does not appear in the discourse of modernity, it cannot be explained why the search for the ‘other side of reason’23 the sentimental yearning for the originality of nature, the spontaneity of LIFE, based at the same time on the instruments of modern industrial society and its methods, will inevitably lead only to further destruction. The European tourists who flee to the beaches of the Mediterranean at the same time destroy these beaches. The car drivers who flee from the overcrowded cities into the hills and the countryside destroy these landscapes, and forests where they want to find unpolluted nature are destroyed by the fumes from car exhausts. The sex-tourists who flee to Thailand destroy the women there, make them into prostitutes and possibly infect them with AIDS.24 In conclusion therefore, we can say: Before yearning there was destruction, before romanticizing there was violence.
Before the idyll
Women: It is the merit of the New International Women’s Movement that it has made public violence, structural as well as direct, the central mechanism that creates and maintains exploitative and oppressive man-woman relations. This did not develop by way of an academic discourse but through numerous initiatives, campaigns, projects against rape, women battering, pornography, sexism in the media, the public and the workplace and so on. For the first time in contemporary history it became manifest that unpinning this apparently progressive, peaceful, democratic and egalitarian ‘civil society’ — the industrial society — was violence and brutality, particularly against women and non-white people. It became evident that the ‘civilizing process’ which Norbert Elias described as a process of taming aggressive tendencies25 had not only failed to eliminate this violence, but rather was founded on it. In the context of this feminist politics of resistance to male or patriarchal violence the question regarding the history of this violence became urgent.26
This led to a renewed study of the witch-hunt in Europe. This holocaust of women was not, as is usually assumed, an outcome of the dark, superstitious Middle Ages, but was contemporaneous with the beginning of the New Age, of modernity, the era of discoveries and inventions, of modern science and technology.
This mass killing of women has not been paralleled in any of the so-called uncivilized societies in Africa, Asia or South America. Its forms, causes, ideological justifications have been analysed by many feminist scholars, therefore I will not elaborate on them here. But it must be reiterated that this orgy of violence was the foundation upon which modern science, medicine, economy and the modern state were built up. It is the particular merit of Carolyn Merchant that she has demonstrated the direct link between the torture of the witches and the rise of the new empirical scientific method; the destruction of the integrity of both the female body and the body of Nature. Both were to become mere sources of raw material for the rising capitalist mode of production. A similarly violent relationship was established between the core states and the colonies in Asia, South America and Africa.27 Only after the witches had been killed as ‘bad women’ could a new image of the ‘good woman’ emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was, as already noted, the image of the vapid, sentimental, weak, oppressed woman, the woman dependent on a breadwinner and the state. This new ideal of womanhood, based on the women of the bourgeois class, was necessary for the new sexual and social division of labour, the division between production and reproduction, production and consumption, work and life, without which capitalism would not have got off the ground.28
And it is only at this point that the romanticizing of this ‘good woman’ begins. She is the weak woman who must be protected. But she is also the mother, the embodiment of feeling, caring, humane-ness. This image of womanhood was constructed as the counter-image to the new, modern rational man who had to compete with other such men in the world of economics and politics, which became the foundation of modern wealth. This subservient and romanticized woman of feelings became the central figure of the domestic idyll, an idyll that provided the social site to which the new man could withdraw, to relax and restore his humanness after the murderous competition for more profit, wealth, and progress.
This idyll, though longed for, was nevertheless devalued. In fact, it could and should not be included within the world of capitalist valuation, into the world of commodity production. If it had, it would have lost its charm. The veil hiding the reality behind the idyll would have been torn apart to expose the brutality of this new era of reason. Therefore, only after oppression and destruction and ghettoization into this domestic idyll could the new woman become the aim of all longing for unalienated and spontaneous, ‘natural’ life.
This new image of womanhood was not an unintended outcome of the social changes that took place in the eighteenth century. It was, as Leiselotte Steinbrugge has shown, a deliberate construction of the Enlightenment philosophers, who led an extensive discourse on the ‘nature of woman’. Particularly Diderot, Rousseau, and others played a key role in constructing the new woman as ‘the moral gender’, the embodiment of emotionality, human caring, motherliness, a closeness to nature. This woman had to be excluded from the realm of politics and economics, from the public arena, governed by (male) reason. She had to be naturized and at the same time privatized in a society, which, according to Steinbrugge, had excluded certain feelings from its code of public social interaction, particularly consideration of mercy, pity, humaneness, even moral considerations. ‘Woman becomes the “moral gender.’” Femaleness is transformed into the feminine principle. The concern is to preserve at least some humaneness in a society where, after Hobbes, economic reproduction is based on the war of all against all.29
This search for the feminine or the ‘feminine principle’ (not the living woman) accompanies each wave of romanticism, as counter-movement against the Enlightenment, rationalism, industrialism and modernism. Even today it can be observed that some men who despair of the destructions brought about by White Man and his reason, see the only remedy in a renaissance of the ‘feminine principle’.30
The ‘Savages’: We can observe the same mechanism of simultaneously doing violence to and romanticizing the victims of this violence in the case of the European attitude towards people living in the colonies, people who, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even at the beginning of the twentieth century, were called ‘the savages’. The discourse on the ‘good or noble savage’ is as old as White Man’s penetration into these peoples’ lands. That this penetration was a history of violence and brutal repression, of destruction of autonomous subsistence economies, of freedom, and that it led to coercion and dependence everywhere was not made public by the Enlightenment philosophers and their followers. Instead, even today the eurocentric myth is spread that the expansion of European industrial culture over the rest of the world was due to superior intelligence, rationality, science and hence productivity of labour. And yet, there are abundant studies which show the direct connection between the violence and brutality of the European colonizers against tribal people worldwide and the rise of these colonizers to dominant groups, classes and nations. I want to draw attention to the work of H. Bodley who traces the path of destruction of tribal people by industrial civilization which continues even today.31
In numerous accounts Bodley follows the blood-trace of White Man in the colonies. The white colonizers were convinced that tribal people were creatures in a lower evolutionary state than themselves and that the universal law of history demanded their surrender to ‘progress’. It was plain social Darwinism that justified the brutalities against tribal people, and the right of the more ‘advanced’ civilization. In the 1830s tribal people in Africa and America were regarded as sub-humans, as not really members of the human species. In Canada, to kill an Indian was considered meritorious. The attitude towards the ‘Indians’ of white settlers in the USA is epitomized by Sheridan: ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. In South Africa the killing of the native people by the pious Dutch colonists was an everyday affair. One settler supposedly was proud to say that he personally killed 300 natives. In Australia arsenic was mixed with flour to kill the aborigines. Bodley quotes Price (1950: 107-108) who reported that, ‘It was well known that the black fellows were killed like crows and that nobody cared or took notice.’ Things were not different in South America. ‘In Sao Paulo a man reported in 1888 that he had killed 2,000 Kaingang Indians by mixing strychnine with their drinking water.32
But even today the killing of tribal people continues. Bodley tells us that in 1971 many Guayaki Indians were killed by white settlers, including many Germans, who wanted to decorate their houses with Guayaki trophies. Both from Brazil and Columbia are accounts of cattle farmers who used guns, poison and dynamite to annihilate the Indians who lived in areas which they wanted for their cattle.
Typically none of these criminals thought they were doing wrong. ‘I was not aware of having done something wrong’, said one of these murderers.33 ‘I killed these Indians because I knew that the government would not punish us or ask for compensation for the crime.’34
Indians, savages, natives may be killed by White Man because they are doomed anyhow to disappear from history, they cannot withstand the onslaught of progress and white civilization. The logic of the connection between annihilation and progress, brutality and civilization, barbarism and emancipation is the same as it was in the eighteenth century. Annihilation of tribal people is justified simply by the right of the stronger one. After the genocide of the Hereros by the Germans in South-West Africa, the head of the settlers’ commission, Paul Rohrbach said in 1907:
It is obvious…that the natives have to disappear from the land where they grazed their cattle till now so that the White Man can graze his cattle on the same land. If one asks for a moral justification of this standpoint the answer is that people who live on a cultural level similar to that of the South African natives must lose their free, national barbarism. They must be developed to a class of workers, getting wages and bread from the Whites, if they want a higher right of existence. This applies both for individuals and for nations, or tribes. Their existence is only justified in so far as they appear as useful for the general development. There is no argument in the world which can prove that the preservation and maintenance of any degree of national self-determination, national property and political organisation among the tribes of South Africa was a greater gain for humanity as a whole or the German people in particular than making them subservient, and to exploit their former territory by the white race.35
People like Rohrbach saw clearly that the rise of the proletarian masses in the ‘culture nations’ like Germany was possible only if and when the native people of Africa were treated not as human beings with equal rights, but subjected to the iron historical law of ‘development of productive forces’. In 1909 he wrote:
A right of the natives, which could only be realised at the expense of the development of the white race, does not exist. The idea is absurd that Bantus, Sudan negroes and Hottentots in Africa have the right to live and die as they please, even when by this, uncounted people among civilized nations of Europe were forced to remain tied to a miserable proletarian existence, instead of being able, by the full use of productive capacities of our colonial possessions to rise to a richer level of existence themselves and also to help construct the whole body of human and national welfare.36
The savages had to be driven away from their territory before White Man could take possession and exploit it and its resources to generate profit.
The autarchic subsistence economy of the tribes had to be destroyed, because as long as people were able to survive on a subsistence base they could not easily be tempted by the promises of industrial, urban civilization. There are numerous tribes and nations which, till today, fight to preserve their autonomous subsistence.
Only after people have been forcefully separated from their territory, only after the privatization of the commons, after the destruction of clan and tribal structures and relations and culture can a colonial ‘inferiority complex’ arise: the self-devaluation of one’s culture, way of life, one’s own strength and roots. Only then can the new white industrial culture and way of life exert its power of fascination on the uprooted people.
Part of this uprooting process was the denial of political sovereignty to these nations. The territory they inhabited was declared ‘empty land’, ‘virgin land’, ‘territorium nullus’: land that belonged to nobody. It was essential for the new colonial masters to establish their political hegemony over these nations and their territory in order to use the colonies ‘productively’ for the development of industry in their own countries. The European working class supported this colonialism, because they also realized that the improvement of their lives was dependent on maintaining colonies.
Romanticizing the ‘Savage’
Yet, along with this inhuman treatment of the ‘savages’ we find the same type of romanticizing and sentimentalizing that we have already observed in the case of women. ‘Natives’, native peoples’ or ‘Nature’ peoples in contrast to ‘civilized’ or ‘culture’ peoples, were some of the concepts coined. The notion that such ‘natives’ were closer to nature, which civilization had destroyed and subdued, remains with us even today. Simultaneous with the beginnings of brutalities against the ‘savages’ was the start of the Enlightenment discourse about the ‘noble savage’ and his arcadia, the primeval paradise in which man still lived in harmony with nature. The encyclopedian Diderot considered that in the newly ‘discovered’ Tahiti, human nature could be studied in its innocent, primeval state, where neither property nor hierarchy existed, and sexual repression was unknown. Tahiti became the site of the Golden Age upon which were projected all dreams, desires and utopian hopes.
The connection between Tahiti and the desired Golden Age which modernity was supposed to bring about, means that human history becomes part of natural history, as Steinbrugge points out. It was above all Rousseau who ‘historicized’ nature while at the same time he ‘naturized’ women and ‘savages’.37 For Rousseau, women and ‘savages’, as part of ‘nature’, were therefore excluded from the realm of reason, competition, money-making and the rat-race of all against all. But they also represent those attributes such as emotionality, spontaneity, humane-ness, without which modern society with its principles of egotism, self-interest, private property and hierarchy would destroy itself. The ‘savages’ and women, therefore, must be constructed symbolically as complementary ‘other’ to rational modern Man. And they have to be fixed into a kind of state of nature, as representing the second stage of human and social development: the ‘Golden Age’; this is where they are meant to remain so that modern rational, civilized Man maintains his nature base, without which he could not survive.38
However, neither Rousseau nor any Enlightenment thinkers refer to the violence that accompanies this process of ‘naturization’ of women and ‘savages’. The relationship between violence and reason, progress and retrogression, self-determination and subordination, emancipation and enslavement is an unbroken thread that runs through modern, real history since the Enlightenment to the present. To clearly understand the character of this relationship we must go beyond such concepts as ‘ambivalence’, contradiction and even dialectics. Because even a dialectical view of this relationship implies that every respective ‘servant’ (the ‘savages’) will eventually overcome the ‘masters’ (Hegel) and thus arrive at a higher synthesis. The dialectical view of history accepts the creation of victims today as necessary for a better future for all tomorrow. But those who are sacrificed today will never be those who will eventually benefit from this betterment; not even their children will benefit. Because in many cases their sacrifice consists in the sacrifice of their life. The beneficiaries are others than the victims of this process of development and modernization. This is clearly understood by, for example, those tribal peoples who refuse to leave their ancestral lands because the World Bank and governments want to flood their land and forest to build giant dams to generate electricity for the big cities. They refuse this kind of development and want only to continue with their subsistence-oriented way of life.
For them ‘development’ means their destruction, physically, economically, ecologically and culturally, and thus, for them, development cannot be romanticized or idealized. They know that they will be the losers in this process, and that progress means only violence for them. The kind of historic teleology to which Rohrbacher — and many others even today — adheres, namely that white ‘culture’ nations’ violent subordination of the ‘savages’ and their utilization and exploitation to generate surplus value for capitalist industrialism would eventually also lead to a ‘richer’, ‘higher’, more ‘human’, ‘freer’ life for these ‘nature people’ — is a promise that has nowhere been fulfilled. On the contrary, the gap between the ‘culture nations’ and the ‘natives’ has become an abyss. The utopia of ‘catching-up development’, of modernism and progress, the utopia of the Enlightenment has betrayed the ‘savages.’
Romanticizing nature
The nostalgia for Nature is the most general expression of what is sought in the romanticizing and longing for women and the ‘savages’. In fact, the modern concept of ‘nature’ since the Enlightenment is a result of this double-faced process of destruction and sentimentalization which has made up the modern era. This becomes obvious if we look at the modern aestheticism of nature and landscapes and at what then became the movement for the protection of nature.
Lucius Burckhard, in his ‘Travel Map for the Journey to Tahiti’ writes: ‘Only where man has destroyed Nature the landscape can become really beautiful. Only where tanks have left their traces a biotope can come up. Tahiti is not a peaceful place because the lion grazes side by side with the lamb, but because in reality it has been a battlefield.’39
Claudia v. Werlhof points out that this new beauty of nature, the beauty that emerges on the battlefields of modernity, is always the creation of Man. Whatever is there, which has not been created by Man, is not considered beautiful. It may therefore be plundered, planned, ordered, made even and ‘beautified’ in the same way that a dead body is cosmeticized before the funeral. What is now called beautiful was before called ugly. Beautification is preceded and presupposed by destruction.40
There are many examples of this combination of destruction and beautification or protection. For instance, only after peasant farming has been largely destroyed in Germany do we find a campaign to: ‘Make your village more beautiful’. The emergence of landscape planning and environmental protection is related to the destruction of the environment and nature by capitalist-industrial processes. Protection of the environment, landscape planning and so on serve as cosmetics to conceal the identity of those responsible for the destruction in the first place, while the victims of this destruction are themselves identified as perpetrators, the guilty.
This means that the culprits are not the chemical industry with its inbuilt growth mechanism, not the state with its capitalist agrarian policy and incentives for capitalist farming but the farmers and peasants who use chemical fertilizers and pesticides and who have industrialized farming in accordance with the accepted policy. Many urban people now see their task as ‘re-naturalizing’ this landscape ‘destroyed by the peasants’.
The same mechanism of ‘blaming the victim’ is applied in many cases of environmental destruction in the ‘Third World’. Nomadic tribes in Africa are blamed for ecological degradation in the Sahel, because supposedly overgrazing by their herds has largely led to the desertification of this region. Poor women in Africa and Asia are blamed for the destruction of forest areas because they must now search for fuelwood higher and higher in forest-covered hills, cutting trees and shrubs, with no care for regeneration of the forests. Tribes which still practise slash and burn cultivation are blamed for the destruction of forests. In this search for the guilty the loggers, timber merchants, the furniture, sports and paper industries, the cattle farmers and the food export industry, are seldom mentioned. And the consumers of the end products of this ecological destruction are largely absolved from any share in the guilt. The blanket explanation is usually the neo-Malthusian argument that it is the poor who are destroying nature because they breed too many poor, that nature cannot support more people.
Meanwhile, environmentalists in the North demand that the ‘protection’ of nature should no longer be left to the ‘natives’, who they maintain are responsible for environmental destruction. Protection of rainforests, protection of animals, protection even of tribals should become the concern of northern environmental protection NGOs. The Debt-for-Nature-Swaps suggested to help solve the debt problem of many countries of the South, illustrate this.
This victimizing tactic is applied to women who either seek abortion or who accept modern reproductive technologies. The efforts to, for example, frame an ‘Embryo Protection Law’ passed in Germany in 1991, are based on the assumption that women are their embryos’ potential enemies; and that the state must protect the embryo against women’s aggression. Patriarchal men-women relations, a social environment hostile to children, the incompatibility of gainful employment with motherhood, the crass utilitarianism and materialism of modern society, the obsession with growth in this society, are all absolved from responsibility. Women, who so far have been the only protectors of human life, are seen as the worst enemies of this life. The ‘Embryo Protection Law’ is also meant to protect embryos against arbitrary utilization for scientific experiments; the state becomes wary about the various uses and misuses of modern generic and reproductive engineering. But instead of banning this technology — which is still considered as necessary and as contributing to ‘progress’ — the women are defined universally as the potential enemies of the foetuses. It is the same strategy employed in respect of protection of nature, of animals, of rain forests and so on. The state does not intervene in industrial capitalism’s or modern technology processes of destruction of these living symbioses; the state accepts both the destructive technology and the capitalist utilization thereof. But it blames and punishes women — all women — for actual or potential misuse of supposedly progressive technologies.41
C. v. Werlhof rightly asks for whom all these Protection Laws are made. Against whom have nature, the animals, plants, children, embryos, life to be protected?
How come that Nature, plants, animals, women and children and life are still there if they were not always protected? … Why is this special Protection necessary all of a sudden? Protection of Nature begins in the 18th century, in the very Age of Enlightenment, of clarity, of the declaration of Universal Human Rights, of Equality and Freedom and Brotherhood… Who had attacked Nature and human life all of a sudden so that they had to be protected?
… Protection of Nature deals with the results of an intervention of Man into Nature’s processes. This protection necessarily presupposes an aggression. Real Protection of nature should indeed prevent such aggression, remedy its consequences, or turn this aggression into its opposite, namely a kind of caress.42
But this is precisely what contemporary protection movements are not doing. The aggression, the interventions and invasions, the war against Nature, including our human nature, particularly female nature, is not to be finally ended. To do so would mean that White Man’s project, his model of civilization, progress and modernity would be terminated. This project is based on warfare against Nature. The aim is not to create a new and peaceful and harmonious relationship with Nature, but to maintain the beautiful image of nature, a metaphorical nature, not nature as a subject. Man-Nature harmony intrinsic to this aim can only be achieved by an aesthetic voyeuristic simulation of Nature. But these simulations do not change the antagonistic relationship between Man and Nature characteristic of European modernity. Only in the ‘dream of nature’ can modern Man’s independence from Nature — the central idea of modern science — and his imagined lust for Nature be celebrated simultaneously; and, of course, Nature can only be a beautiful illusion, an exhibit or reservation.43 This connection between destruction and exhibition is exemplified by Chernobyl which, after the catastrophe, became inaccessible for the next 1000 years. According to plans of Soviet scientists it should now become an exhibit — a nature museum. Only in this way can nature be translated into an abstract idea, both for conservatives and progressives, neither of which are concerned to end the warfare between man and nature, man and woman, metropoles and colonies. They reach out for what they are destroying. And this reaching out, this searching for the beautiful illusion of nature protects those who organize this warfare in the name of profit from public criticism and conceals the ugly face of modernity: the war of all against all, the insensible machine-like and corpse-like character of the world of commodities. The beautiful illusion of Nature, the simulation of originality and spontaneity, the aesthetic and symbolic representation of Nature makes this world of machines more tolerable. The market opportunities for selling these symbolic representations of Nature grow in proportion to people’s growing frustrations with the hollow benefits of modern civilization.
As we have noted, however, even these illusions cannot be bought unless the symbioses, the living relationships between humans and other natural beings, is disrupted. Progress, since the time of Enlightenment, means precisely this disruption and separation of the modern human ego, the modern subject, from all such symbioses. To begin with, progress means a going away from Nature.44 Since the Enlightenment, this going away, this distancing from Nature has been considered a necessary precondition for emancipation, as a step from Nature to Culture, from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, from immanence to transcendence. This concept of emancipation, based on Man’s domination over Nature, ignores the fact that even modern man is born of woman, that he must eat food that comes from the earth, and that he will die; and further that he can be alive, healthy and achieve fulfilment only as long as he retains an organic connection with Nature’s symbioses. Such symbioses and living interconnectedness once ruptured, cannot be healed and restored by aesthetics, ‘nature’ museums or any kind of protected reservations. Only if Nature is again recognized as a living being with whom we must co-operate in a loving manner, and not regard as a source of raw material to be exploited for commodity production, can we hope to end the war against Nature and against ourselves.
How fascism uses these desires
Since the Enlightenment the discourse on Nature has played a dominant role in the ideological and political camps, dividing the so-called progressives from the so-called conservatives (‘so-called’ because this differentiation is rather superficial). Each camp uses a concept of nature which is apparently different from the other. The progressives — the leftists and liberals — who consider themselves to be the heirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalist movement, see Nature as the enemy to be subordinated and put at the service of Man by the new science and technology; in Marxian terms, by the development of productive forces.
Modern rationality is fighting an embittered fight against the old world, which it wants to subject to its training. The wilderness, non-domesticated Nature that stands at the opposite side of Reason, is the enemy which Reason has to conquer and subordinate.45
The conservatives, on the other hand see Nature as the friend, the good Mother to be protected against industrial capitalism’s crass utilitaristic exploitation. As we saw, however, this protection is possible only in reservations, museums, in art and in romanticizing Nature, not in a fundamental opposition against capitalism. These two concepts of nature correspond to two different types of criticism of capitalism: left and conservative. According to Sieferle, these two types of critique stem from two different social utopias: the left, projected into the future; and the conservative, projected into the past.46
Conservative criticism of modern civilization and capitalism, its romanticizing and idyllizing of pre-modern, pre-scientific times is considered as reactionary and irrational by liberals and leftists, as anti-progress, anti-technology and close to Ludditism.
In Germany, since the historic experience of Fascism, such critique is often denounced as potentially fascist. The left, particularly, clings to the Hegelian and Marxist philosophy of history, according to which the development of productive forces, Man’s progressive domination over Nature constitutes the precondition for political and economic emancipation from obsolete relations of production. This progress, this development is regarded as a kind of natural law, a necessary process, which romantic criticism cannot stop. ‘There is no going backward in history’ can often be heard from this side. The sense of sadness for the destruction of Nature, the lost homeland, fear about ecological destruction, despair, hopelessness and alienation about the cold, indifferent world of machines and factories, recognition of the futility of the work people must do, panic about industrial and ecological catastrophies, mothers’ despair about nuclear and chemical pollution — all these are characterized by the progressives as hysterical and irrational, as merely a continuation of the anti-rationalist, anti-revolutionary, conservative-romantic movement of the nineteenth century. By labelling these themes and the feelings they arouse as reactionary and irrational, the liberals and leftists, using a superficial left-right dichotomy, leave all these feelings to the rightists. But these feelings and longings are found not only among bored middle-class urban citizens, they are also shared by the proletarian masses. Christel Neusss has shown that the discourse on rationalism and rationalization, carried out by the Social Democrats (SPD) in the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s, was opposed by many factory workers. In this debate the SPD took the side of rationalism and propagated the necessity of technical rationalizations and innovations which replaced manual by mental labour and thus made labour ‘more productive’. The workers’ resistance to these rationalizations was not motivated by their desire to get a bigger share of the capitalist cake — this was the argument of the SPD — but a resistance to further alienation of work, of alienation from ‘Mother Nature’, from their own bodies. It was motivated by a sense of sorrow about the loss of a homeland, a village, about their separation from natural, organic rhythms. But both the Social Democrats and the Communists, unable to integrate this complex into their rationalist utopia, either ignored these feelings or labelled them irrational and fascist. In so doing they left this whole psycho-social reality unexplained and indeed, left it to the fascists to exploit for their propaganda.47
The fascists, however, ‘occupied’ these feelings of alienation and yearning and used them for their utopia of an organistic, new society. In my understanding the success of the German national socialists cannot be explained without understanding that they were able to mobilize feelings which were already prevalent among the people, also among the proletarian masses. Without the mobilization and integration of such feelings into their strategy they would have failed to come to power through elections. Of course, all these feelings were then projected onto the great patriarchal leader, who promised to be their saviour. Their policy specifically concentrated on such evocative ‘areas’ as ‘our land’ ‘homeland’ (Heimat), the ‘soil and the blood’ (Blut and Boden), mothers, nature, as the material and emotional base of the ‘people’ as a whole (Volksgemeinschaft).
After the defeat of fascism, these ‘symbolic sites’ and the feelings associated with them have fallen under a moral taboo and subjected to censorship in Germany; this censorship is particularly strong within the German left. The Greens, for example, who did and do mobilize these feelings, were initially criticized — and sometimes still are today — as irrational and pro-fascist. Parts of the ecology movement, such as the ecological-democratic party, were regarded as rightist and excluded from the Green Party. This explicit or implicit accusation of fascism functions as a kind of thought-taboo which prevents people looking at the crucial issues of our time — the ecological crisis, the man-woman relationship, war and peace, the colonial question — from a different perspective. Whoever tries to focus public attention on the ‘land’, the ‘homeland’, peasants, mothers, children, nature is often accused of simply continuing and repeating the tradition of the nature and homeland-protection movements, the life-reform movement, the anti-urban and anti-industrial movements that preceded the Third Reich and were integrated in its strategy.48
In the women’s movement in Germany this sterile left-right thinking is also employed to criticize women who focus on children, on ecological issues, on a concern for nature and rural life. The movement of mothers against nuclear energy, which emerged spontaneously after the Chernobyl disaster, was especially criticized by parts of the feminist movement as being a falling back into the mother-idolatory which the Nazis had propagated. There was a new split in the movement when sections of the women in the Green Party issued a ‘Mother’s Manifesto’, stating that the feminist movement was too much oriented towards the needs of unmarried, childless ‘career women’ and that mothers of small children had no place in this movement. In the passionate debate that followed the publication of this Manifesto the women who had issued it were accused of fascist tendencies.49
A similar critique was expressed in the context of the movement of women against the Gulf War. Women in Germany who had issued a leaflet in which they explicitly said ‘NO TO THE WAR’ because they were particularly worried as mothers, were criticized as ‘mother-pacifists’ which, in this context also was interpreted as anti-semitic. It is this perception of interpreting every new social movement in Germany in the context and against the backdrop of our Nazi past, and within the dualistic framework of rationalism-irrationalism, which makes it difficult to develop a new perspective beyond these left-right schemas.
This kind of thought-taboo around issues like motherhood, land, and so on, and the fear of being accused of fascist tendencies, often leads to merely tactical statements. If women have to be afraid to be put in the rightist corner if they try to think anew about the fact that women can be mothers, they tend to stop thinking publicly about such issues. This thought-taboo prevents a real critique of fascism and its use of women for its motherhood ideology, because those who profited most from fascism were not ‘irrational’ women but rather, in particular, those scientists who were wedded to the rationalist paradigm and the industrialists who used this rationalist science for their war preparations. The more the ‘irrational’ women, peasants, and other such ‘backward’ sections are accused of fascist collaboration, the easier it is for the industrial-capitalist-militarist complex to wash its hands off its complicity with fascism. The left critics of the new social movement, particularly their critique of possible fascist deja-vu phenomena have so far been unable to develop a utopia, a perspective of a new society other than the rationalist one which presupposes irrecoverable destructions of nature. Perhaps, because of this inability to step out of the dualistic rationalism and irrationalism schema, many erstwhile progressives are now, after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, abandoning all search for perspectives and utopias. They rather embrace total relativistic post-modernism, which does not want to project those feelings and hopes on to anything, because, according to this school of thought, all utopias have failed. Thus, all that remains is a kind of nihilistic hedonism and individualism, and a kind of critical criticism for its own sake. This position can always count upon being on the right side because it does not take sides at all.
In the English-speaking world, particularly in the US and Britain, ecofeminists are accused not of fascist tendencies, but of essentialism. This critique stems mainly from the left which considers that not only the social world but nature too is socially constructed, following the constructivist school of thought. They maintain an historical-materialist view of women and nature, and consider that much of what US ecofeminists write to be inspired by a reified naturalism, where socially determined relationships are seen as solely biological or natural, and where reason is being replaced by intuition and imagination. This controversy between ‘essentialist’ and historical-materialist-Marxist views on women and nature is, in my view, a continuation of the same dualistic paradigm of thinking that we criticize in this book. The Marxist or ‘materialist’ interpretation or — as the jargon goes today — construction of nature and women, is in our view not ‘materialist’ enough, in the sense that the reality of our finite globe and of our finite female organic body and that of other animals, is idealistically transcended. Femaleness is and was always a human relation to our organic body. Only under capitalist patriarchy did the division between spirit and matter, the natural and the social lead to the total devaluation of the so-called natural. I agree with Mary Mellor who tries to overcome the sterile controversy between ecofeminists and social ecologists by insisting on a necessary integration of both views; but such an integration would not be possible ‘without reconstructing the whole socialist project’.50
The problem with the ‘essentialism’ vs ‘historical materialism’ discourse, as discussed by Mary Mellor, is also that it remains within the constraints of an academic, and that means idealistic discourse only; it seems to distance itself from the fact that women and men are confronted by urgent problems which need solutions. In view of the ongoing destruction of our ecological life-base, of increasing male violence against women, and of increasing aimless civil wars and Ramboism around the world, the constructivist ‘essentialism’ vs ‘materialism’ discourse seems out of place. It is time that we renounced this fruitless and destructive dualism of ‘good and bad’ nature, ‘rationality vs irrationality’ subject vs object, ‘nature vs society or culture’. Nature is, as the American Indians say, our mother, not a mere source of raw material, she is a subject, animated matter, materializing spirit We forget that what we do to her we do to ourselves. Women, due to their historic experience of patriarchal violence and, despite this, their knowledge of survival are less likely to forget this than are men. And it is women — and some men — who, in the fight against the destruction of their survival base, have begun to develop a new, realistic, vision of another relationship between humans and nature.
Notes
1. Gaserow, Vera, ‘Plötzlich fühlst du dich wie John Wayne’, in Die Tageszeitung, 13 May 1989.
2. Ludurf, K., ‘Sie zerstoren was sie suchen’, in Frankfurter Rundschau, 14 January 1989.
3. Meckel, W. ‘Afrika zum Anfassen’, in Die Tageszeitung, 13 May 1989.
4. Hildebrand, U. ‘Alles nur Drecksäcke’, in Die Tageszeitung, 17 September 1989.
5. Mies, M., V. Bennholdt-Thomsen, C. v. Werlhof, Women, the Last Colony, Zed Books, London, 1988.
6. Mies, M. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Zed Books, London, 1989.
7. Dross, A. Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Hexenverfolgung in Deutschland, Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt, 1988.
8. Rowbotham, S. Women, Resistance and Revolution. A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World. Vintage Books, New York, 1974
9. Rowbotham, S. Woman’s Consciousness, Men’s World. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973, p.39.
10. Dworkin, A. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Pedigree Books, New York, 1981.
11. Mamozai, M. Herrenmenschen, Frauen im Deutschen Kolonialismus rororo aktuell. Reinbek, Rentscher, R. u.a. Ware Liebe. Sextourismus. Prostitution. Frauenhandel. Peter Hammer Verlag, 1982.
12. Latza, B. ‘Most Sex-Tourists have Psychological Problems’, in Bangkok Post, 6 March 1986.
13. Ibid.
14. Than-dam Truong: Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in South-East Asia. Zed Books, London, 1990; and P. Phongpaicit, From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses. International Labour Office, Geneva, 1982.
15. Garaudy, R. Das schwache Geschlecht ist unsere Stärke: Für die Feminiserung der Gesellschaft, dtv. Munich, 1986.
16. Klein, R.D. (ed.) Infertility. Women Speak Out About Their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine. Pandora Press, London, 1989.
17. Ibid.
18. Scherhorn. G., L. Reisch, G. Raab, Kaufsucht. Bericht über eine empirische Untersuchung. Institut fur Haushalts-und Konsumokonomik, Universität Hohenheim, Stuttgart, 1990.
19. Merchant, C. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row. San Francisco, 1983.
20. Sarkar, S. ‘Die Bewegung und ihre Strategie’, in Kommune, No. 5.
21. Eder, K. Die Vergesellschaftung der Natur: Studien zur sozialen Evolution der Praktischen Vernunft. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1989, p. 254.
22. Ibid. p.232.
23. Bohme, H. and G. Bohme, Dar Andere der Vernunft. Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants. Suhrkamp. Frankfurt, 1985
24. Than-Dam Truong, 1990. op. cit.
25. Elias, N. (1978) üben den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process), Vols. I & Π, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
26. Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. (1985) ‘Zivilisation, moderner Staat und Gewalt. Eine feministische Kritik an Norbert Erlias’ Zivilisationstheorie, in: Beitraege zur feministischen theorie und praxis, Vol. 8,1985, No. 13, pp. 23—36.
27. Merchant, 1983. op. cit; Mies, 1991, op. cit.
28. Steinbrugge, L. Das moralische Geschlecht. Theorien und literarische Entwurfe uber due Natur der Frau in der franzö-sischen Aufklärung. Beltz-Verlag, Weinheim, 1987.
29. Mies, 1991, op. cit., p.14.
30. Garaudy, 1985, op. cit.; F. Capra, The Turning Point, Flamingo, London, 1982.
31. Bodley, John F. Victims of Progress. The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co. Inc., New York, 1982.
32. Ibid., p. 41.
33. Ibid., p. 42.
34. Ibid., p. 44.
35. Quoted in ibid., p. 76.
36. Quoted by Mamozai, 1982, op. cit. p. 58 (transl. M.M.)
37. Steinbrugge (1987), op. cit., p. 67.
38. Ibid., pp. 82 ff.
39. Quoted by v. Werlhof. C. Männliche Natur und künstliches Geschlecht, Texte zur Erkenntniskrise der Moderne. Wiener Frauenverlag, Vienna, 1991, p. 169.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., pp. 170 ff. See also V. Bennholdt Thomsen ‘Zur Philosophie eines anderen Umgangs mit der Natur’, in Die Grünen Saar (eds) Naturschutz im Saarland, Saarbrucken, 1989, pp. la-10a.
42. v. Werlhof (1991) op. cit., pp. 165-6.
43. I read today (21.7.1992) that the director of a zoo in Washington has ‘recreated’ a 2,200 sq.m. tropical rainforest in his animal park. Following the ‘preservation’ of animals in museums, now the rainforest, destroyed by patriarchal capitalism is also being put in a museum. Die Tageszeitung, 21 July 1992. See also Frankfurter Rundschau, 29 August 1989.
44. v. Werlhof, 1991, op. cit., p. 171.
45. Sieferle, R.P. Fortschrittsfeinde. Opposition gegen Technik und industrie. Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart. C.H. Beck, Munich, 1986, p. 239.
46. Ibid., p. 256.
47. Neususs, Ch. Die Kopfgeburten der Arbeiterbewegung, oder: Die Genossin Luzemburg bringt alles dirrcheinander. Rasch and Rohring, Hamburg, 1985.
48. Sieferle, 1986, op. cit.
49. Pinl, C., ‘Zum Muttermanifest’, in Die Tageszeitung, 15 January 1990.
50. Mellor, M., ‘Eco-Feminism and Eco-Socalism: Dilemmas of Essentialism and Materialism’ in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism Vol. 3(2) Issue 10, June 1992, pp. 1-20.