Love Politics: A Case Against Monogamy

Introduction

Let‘s shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the question, Why can‘t people see the obvious? If people could see what is self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush.

Outline of a strategy for human renewal: One: Americans cannot think deeply because the heart is closed. When the heart is closed, then Reason, the mind, becomes a calculator, an instrument, a machine that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is hard-hearted people who are unknowingly supporting world-disaster. True knowledge, wisdom, must be informed by sympathy, feelings, and heart.

Two: The American heart has turned to stone due to sexual repression, stretching back to our Puritan beginning. Everyone in this culture is, as a manner of upbringing, sexually wounded, resulting in fear, shame, guilt, and resentment. The wound festers; self-doubt and self-hatred prevent us from loving others. Generosity, the opening of the heart, begins with the ability to experience sex as a gift. If you cannot do this, then all your good deeds will be wrapped in resentment. The Christian concept of love, which desexualizes it (Agape instead of Eros), leaves the person sick and suffering at the core.

Three: To open the heart so we can think deeply it is necessary to search and find our erotic nature, accept it, and freely express it. This is not something that can be done alone -- through Yoga, Tantra, for example -- but requires a new man/woman relationship. The old relationship -- namely, monogamy (whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly Capitalism which is destroying this planet.

In short, we will not think deeply unless we love, and we will not love unless we practice a free sexuality. Dare to love more than one person! It's a simple idea that's hard to do. Consult your daydreams!

Beginning

The integration of politics and sexuality is the best way to build a social movement for resolving the ecological crisis which is threatening to bring Life on this planet to a crash in probably one or two generations, perhaps sooner? Traditional politics, party-politics, and protest-politics, are necessary for postponing world disaster, for providing time and space for fundamental lifestyle changes, but is not sufficient to heal us from the ground up, according to the original-natural order of things. For this task we need to mobilize a different kind of energy, not negative energy, but positive energy, the energy of Eros.

Sexual love is the prototype of all human happiness. If we let this joy, instead of conscience or duty or protest be the source of our community building, it would bring together and hold together aware people. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, even the primary work of saving the planet and ourselves, will not hold us together because the psychological damage in America is too great.

Americans have a defensive ego-structure -- a system of self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception of the world -- the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair society. This makes us, “as we are”, incapable of forming enduring political communities for social transformation, which is precisely what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy. What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation? Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult task.

But not if the erotic life-force is damned by monogamy. A transforming political community of monogamous couples is impossible because monogamous love places itself first and everyone else second; it produces separation and tension between lovers and everyone else, couples and society. However, by refusing monogamy in favor of a highly discerning free love, there is a chance of knitting a community that will not easily unravel. The pairing process, as far as I can see, will remain the basis of the social structure, but we could all work more easily and much better in a network of loving relationships, pairing without exclusivity, opening lines of deep communication that are presently jammed by jealousy, competition, mistrust, fear and arrogance. The key is not to abolish one-to-one love, but to multiply it.

There is already a manifest hostility between the sexes, which is going to get worse. Much of it is a result of a false morality that prohibits us from knowing one another. Each man is “allowed” to intimately know only one woman, and vice versa. How can we expect to find and work out answers to the critical problems we face, if a vital point of discovery, wisdom and sustainability -- love between men and women -- is so limited!

The age of discovery and togetherness between the sexes has not yet begun, so let it begin now with a few individuals who defy the sacred cow of conventional morality -- namely, monogamy-- in favor of political love, which means loving the “highest” in oneself and others, making one‘s political destiny with a lover clear and binding, creating diverse relationships, loving communities, in which women draw out the best in men (infusing men‘s minds with love), and men draw out the best in women (inspiring them with intellectual theory and global political priorities). Real love is transcendence, beyond the mutual validation of empirical egos, toward a shared commitment or vow, not just between two people, but to a new commonwealth.

The function of these erotic-political inter-relationships is to accelerate evolution, nature‘s effort to become aware of itself as a whole, before an eco-catastrophe resets it back to the stage of the cockroach. Why not affirm sexual love as a vehicle for progressive social change; it is presently misused for every moneymaking purpose imaginable -- with great success. That should tell us something. This retail culture would collapse if people tasted real happiness, instead of being locked in monogamous relationships that cannot satisfy the mass of humanity for a lifetime (even if a few simpletons stick to a single spouse), driving people elsewhere for satisfaction, finding everything but the real thing.

When material circumstances are ripe, an idea, Learn to love more than one person, can be a decisive force in history. It depends on a handful of living examples that prove the reality of the concept, and then thousands and tens of thousands will spontaneously respond to it. Today, the information and organs of communication for world transformation are in place: it is the inner readiness for widening the domain of love that is lacking, as Lewis Mumford said. That is our challenge, for without a positive concentration on love, understood as the integration of sexual desire and political awareness, we will not be able to rescue the planet and its creatures from the growing forces of hate and violence.

Did everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her love life make the wrong choice, or could there be something inherently wrong with monogamy? The American way is to always want to solve every problem with a new and improved technique, rather than consider a bold, new reorganization of life. The solution of the sexual problem, however, takes us to the core of human nature, and demands that we come to terms with the human role in the greater scheme of reality, our place in the cosmos.

According to the German philosopher, Maik Hosang, the logos of love can save us: evolution occurs through qualitative leaps, from matter to life to human life. Love among the parts sets the stage for the emergence of higher reality. The gravitational order of the celestial bodies generated life, and the balance and harmony of living beings gave rise to humankind. A just and peaceful world-order is the next step forward, but we need to untie the knot of monogamy and let the whole of evolution flow through a new and free man/woman relationship, creating loving and lasting human communities, which will rationally regulate our relations with nature.

Frederick Engels' book, The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, argues that “group marriage” is characteristic of hunter-gatherers, whereas horticultural people prefer “pairing marriage”. The later is more hedged around with restrictions, but is not based on any assumption of sexual exclusiveness for either partner. Pre-European America, according to Lewis Morgan on whose empirical research Engels based his theory, is the classic soil of the pairing family. The Iroquois, for example, simply dissolved relationships at will by going back home, and held festivals every year when tribes came together for the purpose of wider sexual enjoyment and cultural enrichment.

According to Engels, “monogamous marriage”, the third historical stage of the man/woman relationship, results from the influence of private property (beginning with the domestication of animals). Its express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity (so women cannot be permitted to have sex with other men), which later come into their father‘s property as his natural heirs. Engels shows what a small part individual sex love played in the rise of monogamy. It has an economic origin. And along with permanent monogamy there soon appeared prostitution (for men) and adultery (for women), with no cure for either one.

According to Engels, women brought about the transition from group marriage to pairing marriage, with its greater equality and joy, but men introduced strict monogamy -- though indeed only for women. In her introduction to Engels‘ great book, Eleanor Leacock argues that it is crucial for women to understand that the monogamous family as an economic unit is basic to their subjugation, calling it, quoting Engels, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn, a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to the conclusion in his book, Ancient Society, that the advanced forms of civilization “will be a repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens.”

Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies, can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and solidarity to make a true beginning.

The Family

The isolation of human beings in America is unprecedented, which makes the futile striving for the romantic ideal (of monogamy) even more attractive. Finding Mr. or Mrs. Right is paramount; otherwise, there appears only loneliness. After the monogamous relationship is established the couple closes on itself, becoming more and more ingrown; it is “sociability reduced to its simplest terms”, said Charles Fourier. Communication with larger social circles atrophies, and like all closed systems, according to the second law of thermodynamics, it tends over time to decline and disintegrate. This romantic ideal of self-sufficient love, the perfect mate, is an illusion that many chase for a lifetime.

The myth continues with the vision of a self-sufficient family in the farmhouse, mountain retreat, suburbia, cut off from the real communities of traditional village and Polis (city-state). Children are retarded in this narrow world, denied exposure to wide and diverse human perspectives from birth, dominated by the worldview of their parents, becoming, for the most part, little replicas of them. The wounds, prejudices and limitations of the parents are visited on the children, which is why generational change is so slow. In order to speed up evolution, according to Rudolf Bahro's little known masterpiece, Avoiding Social And Ecological Disaster, it is necessary to “break the cycle of the neurotic family.” Children need the nurturing presence of a viable community, an intimate group that enfolds them with love and understanding, and adults need communication with the full extent of society and the universe.

The nuclear family is the oldest institution of civilization, and the justification of the oppressive State because in order for competing and antagonistic families not to consume one another, a power standing above them becomes necessary. The institutions of monogamy, private property and the state are parts of a false whole, from which we must distance ourselves. The first man who said, “This is my woman”, making possible the accumulation of private property, was the real founder of modern society. We will not get rid of civilization as we have known it and suffered it, if we are not willing to let go of the nuclear family.

True civilization is a process in the service of Eros, making “one out of many“, unifying humankind, but the family will not give the individual up, making it very difficult for him or her to enter into wider circles of life. Its ideal of unconditional love validates the person as s/he actually is, creating and supporting an inflated ego-image, providing a home for selfishness and greed -- the last refuge of scoundrels. It teaches people, beneath the rhetoric or words, to restrict love, to ignore and disregard others, to divide “us” and “them”, to prioritize interests from the part to the whole (family first, then country, then world), rather than from the whole to the part. The primitive communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children, entrusted to women the management of the household as a public, socially necessary institution. The socialization of children was not a private affair, and the welfare of the village-community was the most important lesson to be learned.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “The clan was torn up and the feeling for family came into existence.” The clan or tribe may be said to be “the family before the family” (Tonnies). Humankind took a false, and potentially fatal step from tribe to nuclear family, instead of pushing forward with the idea of a federation of tribes -- begun by the Iroquois, for example. Modern family feeling is a shrunken reality, a residue of a larger love that we need to recapture as the basis of true civilization. Engels concluded: “Thus the history of the family in primitive times consists in the progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe...” For a long time, the civilization process has been running in the wrong direction, until it has brought us to the present state of extreme social isolation and loneliness - “asocial individualism”. (Bahro)

Nothing kills the female spirit faster than traditional family life, putting her in the small world of house, husband, and children. What a pity to see a young woman, who has not developed her own self, already lost in the life of her child. Children belong, as in primitive societies, on the periphery, learning and waiting to take their place in the center. The term “family” was invented by the Romans, under the influence of the Greeks, to denote a new social organism whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, with the right of life and death over them all.

The economic dependency of women, that the institution of monogamy entailed (by shifting wealth to men), also brought about her emotional dependency, which has taken on a life of its own, so that eliminating the last remains of discrimination against women would, I fear, still leave her unable to enjoy sex, afraid of her own autonomy, a staunch defender of monogamy, the appointed guardian of false morality. Emma Goldman noted, about one hundred years ago, that the whole of woman's emancipation was failing because it concentrated on external factors, like the right to vote and work, rather than internal enslavement to religion and puritanical morality. “True emancipation begins in woman's soul...cutting loose from the weight of tradition and customs.”

The pull of monogamy is strong, and it feels good to sink, or fall back, into established patterns, but the easy path is not always the best path. Woman must not allow herself to be swept away by love, becoming a mere bundle of emotions. Because of her cultural conditioning for dependency on the male, she would greatly benefit from several love relationships. As things stand now, a woman in the company of her man is almost always uninteresting, background. The mould shapes the relationship. It takes courage to resist the many pressures to conform.

A half-century before Emma Goldman the Free Love movement in America, consisting of thousands of followers, rejected family-selfishness, with its “monopoly of affection,” called monogamous marriage a “house of bondage,” in which women succeed only in imposing on men reverse slavery. The origin of the Free Love movement was the writings of the Frenchman Charles Fourier, whose ideas came to America in the 1840s in the form of communal experiments -- the “Phalanx.” Unfortunately, Fourier‘s radical ideas about sexual love were minimized or ignored during this formative period, due to the heavy influence of religion in this country. Fourier‘s idea of free love surfaced in America a decade later in the 1850s under the Anarchist banner of the Sovereignty of the Individual (and the critique of all government), but apart from the context of a Divine/peaceful and cooperative State, as Fourier proposed, free love could not and did not grow and flourish.

Fourier‘s vision has roots far back in western and eastern philosophy. Twenty-five hundred years ago the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, and the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, saw Eros as first principle and prime mover of reality.

Cosmology

According to Lao Tzu, the difference between the sexes is one of the cosmogenic original principles, which means that neither man alone nor woman alone can access universal truth. We need one another. Taoism holds that at the moment of conception (of the universe) cosmic energy split into two halves, which came to be known by the Chinese as Yin and Yang. The man/woman relationship is a microcosm, wholeness regained, a crossing-point where insight and progress occur.

With egos set aside, in the silence and stillness between man and woman, the meeting place of Eros and Logos, the wisdom of nature reveals itself. All we have to do is let it happen. This is, however, not easy because it means inwardly freeing ourselves from thousands of years of monogamous marriage, private property, and society as a mass composed of competing individual families.

The wisdom of the earth is always speaking to us, but it cannot be heard by reason alone. It requires intuition, a right-brain activity. We must re-unite the brain with the organ of the feeling body; learn again to think with our entire body organism. Love is the language of feeling, and teaches us to listen, receive, wait, and allow ideas to ripen. If men and women open to one another, then the river of love, whose source is deep within us, would yield in abundance.

Sexual love awakens the body, the taste, smell, touch, and feel of internal nature. A new culture of love will climb up from the senses to feeling and thinking. The love of water, sky, flora and fauna, the aesthetic enjoyment of life, all this has an erotic basis. Love is the way to access what we need to experience and know in order to resolve the ecological crisis. It enables us to penetrate the secrets of the universe.

Ken Wilber, in his book, “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality” argues that a crucial task facing the modern person is to resolve his or her own “mini-ecological crisis”. The differentiation of mind from the body has gone too far, becoming dissociated, so that the lower (body) is not preserved in the higher (mind), but disconnected, disregarded, and disvalued. We need to heal ourselves within, integrating body, heart, and mind, and evolve a strong community of consensus among integral individuals, so that we are ready and able to do what needs to be done for Gaia. Trying to fix all the problems humans have caused on the outside, without doing this inner-work, and community-consensus building, is endless -- according to the maxim, “as the inside is, so is the outside”.

All this presupposes the acceptance of solitude; for monogamy is only the illusion that one is not alone. Familiarity is not intimacy, not essential contact, not knowledge. The romantic ideal of falling in love, of losing oneself in the other, was promoted due to the fragmentation of human life that escalated with the start of the industrial age in Europe at the end of the 18th century. People who are parts of a genuine community would not grow so dependent on one person. They would be both more individualistic and more communal. Ego and Eros are the twin poles of human existence: beyond this or that ego-personality we are also universal love. If we would open and embrace the universalistic pole of our existence, then we would realize that the whole person is a unique member of a loving community, not one-half of an isolated monogamous unit; otherwise, personal feelings of love cannot stay alive.

Charles Fourier described the “heavens as a vast field of copulation”. The universe pulsates with passions and sexual energies; it‘s a big love affair. Free love, “the secret wish of humankind”, aligns us with nature, the structure and will of the universe. A constellation of open hearts, in which more than one love goes out from each energy-source, coordinates individual, society and cosmos. The current model of love prevents us from fitting into the natural balance; it disturbs the harmony of the world. So long as the established values and institutions go against the Great Harmony we will be disoriented and discontented.

Fourier saw himself following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton. The physical universe is held together by gravity, and the social universe, according to Fourier, is held together by “passionate attraction”. The free play of human passions, especially the power and joy of love, is the key for escaping the civilized order, which is in conflict with our impulses and drives, all of which tend to association and unity. The force of attraction guides the movement of the planets and the suns, as well as the plants and animals. We should let it gently guide us toward social goodness.

According to Fourier, “the earth is sick”, and this sickness - the direct result of civilized oppression and repression of instinctual human nature - has infected the whole universe, even upsetting the equilibrium of the stars. We are no longer able to perform our cosmic function, our purpose in the movement of the universe, which is to establish a harmonious social order consistent with the plan of God/Love, thereby achieving our social destiny of a rich and full life for everyone. Since it is impossible to repress the passions, without taking the joy out of life, despite what the moralists say, we would do better to study the means of changing material circumstances so as to adapt them to the designs of Attraction. The happy and harmonious society must liberate and utilize the passions; complete liberty in love leads naturally to harmony - that is the law of nature and eternity.

“The mistake of all civilized philosophers is that they have always thought of love as something which must be limited to the couple. Necessarily, then, they have been unable to emancipate themselves from egoism, which is the inevitable result of amorous relations which are limited to the couple. If love is to be a source of generosity, we must base our speculations on the collective exercise of love”, said Fourier.

People have been made weak and miserable by civilization: “But there is one passion which retains its original nobility, which keeps the divine fire burning in mortal men, which gives them a share in the attributes of the Deity. This passion is love. Love is a divine flame, the true spirit of God who is love. Is it not in the rapture of love that man reaches toward the heavens and identifies himself with God? Is there any lover who does not deify his or her loved one and who is not convinced that their shared love is a divine happiness?” (Fourier)

One more insight from Fourier: “It is women who suffer most from civilization; it is up to them to attack it. Women can reply to the philosophers: ‘Your civilization persecutes us when we obey Nature; it obliges us to assume an artificial personality, to behave in ways that are contrary to our desires‘”. Unfortunately, according to Fourier, women have embraced monogamy. “They have not even thought of attacking it; and their failure to do so has been unpardonable ever since the discovery of Tahiti... This was the sole problem worthy of occupying women writers: and their indolence with regard to it is one of the causes which have made men scornful of them. A slave is never more contemptible than when his blind submission convinces the oppressor that his victim is born for slavery”.

The strict prohibitions against free love testify to the strength of the desire for it. It is forbidden action, subversive action. To question monogamy is taboo, and the violator of a taboo is himself or herself taboo because s/he has the dangerous property of tempting others to follow. S/he is contagious and must be avoided. The rules of avoidance between the sexes conserve the status quo by preventing us from finding our greater self, our place in the universal harmony that we have infringed on.

Politics

Politics is driven by sexual orientation, which is presently operating unconsciously. Al Gore, instead of George W. Bush, is not in the White House today largely because of Bill Clinton's sexual “transgression”. It was the politics of sexual revenge that defeated Gore, guilt by association. Now we have paranoia in the White House, which has led to war in Iraq: we must destroy our enemies before they destroy us. This outcome was predictable according to the etiology of paranoia given by Freud: the paranoid individual has turned his love away from others and external nature and toward himself in order to neutralize self-loathing (whose origin is hatred of the sexual body), resulting in megalomania. The suffering core of this inflated egoism persists, and according to the paranoid individual, the world denies him the love he needs and deserves, even hates him, and is trying to destroy him. Paranoia, if institutionalized and backed by enough military force, leads to global exterminism; the world must be destroyed before it destroys the entitled ones, the power elite. This is the course that America is now heading, with the rest of the world in tow.

Ecosystems are collapsing everywhere and millions of people and countless nonhuman lives are suffering and dying unnecessarily. The free market gospel that is spreading around the globe cannot be falsified by any amount of evidence; it‘s a secular religion. The Invisible Hand (of God) has without doubt failed to secure the most common good of all - namely, the health and integrity of the planet, but the vicious ideology that the maximum pursuit of self-interest produces the best of all possible worlds will not be given up. Why? People (in the right-wing Republican Party, for example) who hate themselves are unable to be kind to others, and embrace a worldview or belief system - “God, Family and Country” - whose generating source is hatred of sexuality, leaving only merciless self-interest as social regulator for the whole of humanity. What self-torture and terror underlie this American value-system!

Selfishness and greed are indeed killing the planet, but all this selfishness and greed cannot be blamed on human nature: it is mostly the result of what has been done to human nature. The innate predisposition of human nature for a certain degree of egoism can hardly be denied, but the evolution of a non-egocentric self-concept is an historical possibility - Jean Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Rudolf Bahro, are exemplars - in which the ego is not extinguished, but is strong and expanded to include the good of the whole. However, the “egoism of the family” is a stranglehold on Eros, decisively disturbs a possible balance or accommodation between individual and society, makes people enemies of civilization, but fortunately it is a cultural creation, not a biological necessity, that blocks the emergence of true individuality and community.

The world needs people capable of breaking through the boundaries of this culture, risking petty love (based on familiarity and security and biologically over-determined) for jealousy-free intellectual love and lifestyle politics that begins with individuals who refuse exchange relationships or contractual relationships (in which they sell themselves to one another), refuse to make a deal or promise not to intimately/fully love more than one person, refuse to agree to monogamy. “The time of love between man and woman is only now approaching”. (Bahro)

Education is not the primary path for social change because the biggest obstacle we moderns face is not widespread ignorance, but manufactured stupidity, the arresting and distortion of human nature by culture. Americans are arguably the stupidest people on earth, informed and entertained by the infantile and adolescent nonsense of TV and Hollywood. We have forgotten what our tribal ancestors knew, and not (yet?) broken through to high/integral reason that surpasses but also preserves old knowledge. Our knowledge is more and more manipulation of nature and each other, in terms of which we are the very best, the number one country in the world.

Third World people, still under the influence of tribal wisdom, are comparatively sane and mature, having an intact “capacity” to sit quietly, contemplate, converse with one another, and enjoy the here and now of life. Education is decisive in this world, where large numbers of people are ignorant of serious threats to the biosphere. However, Americans are not primarily ignorant, but sick - due to progressive poisoning by ascetic morality - which expresses itself on the mental level as stupidity. Given this modern aliment, education - which has a mental appeal - will always be insufficient.

The simple truth is that the ecological crisis is, at bottom, a human sexual sickness. Americans are easily fooled, tricked, and distracted by the corporate propaganda machine, including the so called “news”, and too stupid to figure out that the rich and powerful are running a planetary business for immediate and short-term interests, at the final cost of death for everyone, because there is major sexual damage throughout the general population that prevents the wisdom of Bios from flowing through the body and into the brain. A few good conversations, and/or a few good books, will begin to enlighten ignorant people, but will have virtually no impact on the stupid and the sick.

In other words, on the political level, the difficulty is that people are not intelligent enough to understand that a ruling class is grasping, hoarding and exhausting everything, but the deeper question is: why are Americans so stupid? Our collective stupidity is the result of “thinking” only with the head, without the contribution or advantage of the human body, the earth and eternity, which is an overgrown one-sidedness that no amount of information on the Internet can balance. Despite all our science, every member of a tribe had better contact with the natural whole than we do. “This message cannot be replaced by any clever, new thought”. (Bahro)

It is futile to argue or reason with brain-starved people, whose minds are not alive to the vibrations, feelings, and messages of the body (the human body and the larger body of nature). When the light of nature is turned off by culture, the mind cannot see what is of true value in life, and, unable to find satisfaction anywhere, humans suffer and become mean-spirited. It is not simply that stupid people don‘t care; rather, they don‘t care because they are full of disappointment and hatred, first of all for themselves, and on the mental-conscious level, for others, and for everything alive, beautiful and joyful. We must be released down deep. “Politics and everything to do with it is only the last latch-key to open gates which must first be unbolted in quite a different way”. (Bahro)

The Republican Party in America has become a gathering place for the stupid, selfish and the sick. It attracts those who think efficiently/mechanically, without feelings, compassion, or kindness, due to serious sexual wounding (especially in childhood) that has filled them with fear and hate, making it nearly impossible for them to love anyone, including themselves. In this world no one is to be trusted; it is “each against all”; everyone is an enemy to be exploited or destroyed. The Right is rising under the name of “homeland security” (H.S. instead of S.S.), toward the Nazi end of world domination and global exterminism. Those who have escaped, to some degree, for various reasons, from this politics of resentment have a responsibility to organize the only force in the modern world capable of containing and defeating aggression (that has become hate), and that force is the deep, rising energy of sexual love.

It is difficult to directly affect the political superstructure, but it is completely in our power to end monogamy, not in the name of promiscuity, but in the name of a carefully deliberating free love with a political intention, which avoids the boredom of monogamy and the loneliness of promiscuity. Monogamy secures neither individuality nor community; it‘s a boring life-routine, an unhealthy arrangement of mutual blocking. Over time it kills or reduces the positive tension between the sexes, which is necessary for progress. The couple stops evolving as a loving pair, even if not completely. We need more than one lover to reach the truth. If an individual is not willing, at least in principle, to refuse monogamy, then s/he is not a candidate for a politics of love, which must involve the integral/whole person - body, heart and mind.

True Love

Married households in couples are the building blocks of our social imprisonment. The single-family house, complete with all the conveniences and comforts, including the automobile, optimizes independence from others and nature, while at the same time supporting a cold, concrete-steel social order that is crushing the planet. The words, “I love you”, are grossly misused if they entail setting up a household economy that reproduces in miniature this worldwide industrial civilization.

In her book, Sacred Sex, Sacred Land, and Relationship, the deep ecologist Dolores LaChapell explains that the romantic ideal keeps the economy of the Industrial Growth Society going very well: “new make-up, new fashions, new appliances, new furniture, and new house, to begin the new life one more time!” She uses the term “serial monogamy” to describe the present fad of devoting all one‘s energy to making monogamous marriage work, one divorce after another, with no attention to the whole of either the culture or the place.

LaChapell quotes a letter from D.H. Lawrence: “It‘s no good talking about it: marriage, like home, will last while our social system lasts, because it's the thing that holds our system together. But our system will collapse, and then marriage will be different - probably more tribal, men and women being a good deal apart, as in the old pueblo system, no little homes. It all works back to individual property, even marriage is an arrangement for the holding of property together, a bore!”

True love is the founding of a new and better world on the personal level. The idea that we could solve the big problems of social isolation, social justice and environmental degradation without freeing ourselves from the economic unit of the family is a fatally flawed strategy for social change, for most of the competition and exploitation takes place for the sake of the spouse and the children. A new loving relationship between man and woman, beyond the single-family home, is the germ-cell for a new and better society. We must make a start with ourselves in this way, upsetting the whole security of life.

True love, a little beginning of a new world, cannot succeed without reflection. Given the crisis, everything needs to be consciously reflected on, including the love encounter. We must choose our lovers with more awareness, with more understanding of the meaning of love. Love must turn political. It is not a question of leaving the body behind, but understanding it as a vehicle for higher levels of awareness. True love ascends: it begins with physical passion, becomes compassion, and finally intellectual consensus. It accomplishes something beyond the mere reproduction of life, and the small pleasures associated with this, or it fails. The most aware individuals have the responsibility to consciously participate in this amorous adventure to see, feel, and think in a different way-- toward global consciousness.

As Herbert Marcuse argued in Eros And Civilization, Eros is striving to form living substance into greater unities so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development. It does not remain fixated on physical pleasure; but rather, under non-repressive conditions, tends toward self-sublimation in lasting and expanding relationships that serve to intensify and enlarge instinctual gratification. The erotic aim generates its own projects of realization, producing high culture. Unless, of course, its path is blocked by oppressive laws, customs, or institutions.

The natural flow is outward and upward, beyond egoism and toward higher levels of complexity, knowledge, community and joy. This is one of the oldest ideas of philosophy, West and East, found in Plato‘s Symposium and the Indian concept of Kundalini-Yoga, Chakra, and Tantra. The erotic life-energy has the tendency to rise from the physical to the emotional to the mental, at each stage undergoing a transformation into greater awareness and deeper possibilities of satisfaction. Logos is Eros becoming aware of itself.

The crisis, according to Bahro, is that Logos has torn itself loose from Eros, which means that the human brain, instead of being the organ of the feeling body, functions as an autonomous thing/machine. Only by re-uniting Reason with its living roots in nature, is there a chance to avoid global disaster. How? Out of the Tao (oneness) come two: male and female. Reason as domination is lodged in the male ego, while woman, remaining closer to the impulses of life, is cut off from higher powers of abstraction. We need one another to become whole again. The connecting tissue is love. “Love, with erotic love at the center, is the way”. (Bahro)

We must balance the masculine spirit with the feminine spirit, which does not mean the feminization of the male, and the masculinization of the female, toward androgyny. Rather, each gender must find and hold its own identity; and live out the polarity of the sexes, which is the motor-force of history, bringing us once again into harmony with the great order of Nature. Unfortunately, today, each sex has lost faith in its own life-flow, and cannot love. To regain our faith in what it means to be a man, or woman, and win all the knowledge concealed in our blood, muscles, and central nervous system, we must pay attention and respond to, rather than shy away from, the erotically charged field of consciousness within which everyone moves and lives. Monogamous couples are, for the most part, sexually asleep, not alive, and not sensitive, to the secret stimuli of Gaia and the dance of the cosmos.

In his essay, “The Real Thing”, D.H. Lawrence said: “Man is connected with woman, forever, in connections visible and invisible, in a complicated life-flow that can never be analyzed. It is not only man and wife: the woman facing me in the train, the girl I buy cigarettes from, all send forth to me a stream, a spray, a vapor of female life that enters my blood and my soul, and makes me me. And back again, I send the stream of male life which soothes and satisfies and builds up the woman. Love between men and women is... part of the very breath, and as ordinary, if we may say so, as breathing. Almost as necessary. In fact, love between man and woman is really just a kind of breathing”.

Under a fear-based mentality the sexual impulse hides, stops its regular breathing, turns inauthentic. Sexual openness and honesty is best. Feel the sex-field, the life-world, instead of fleeing from the opposite sex in shame. Nobody knows what is going to happen; it cannot be figured out in advance. A “libidinal morality” (Marcuse) will come out of the depths of life. Before there are clear ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, there is the voice of feeling, whose source is the original tendency of the life-energy, which strives for joyous expression.

Trying to think our way out of the crisis, left-brain activity, has led to melancholia and cynicism, from which not much good is to be expected. It is, after all, reason working independently of sensibility, and eventually turning against it that has produced this suicidal society. It is not a question of giving up the rational level, for we need more, not less, precise and clear thought. The point is that the instrumental intellect must be connected back to the bodily center and grounded in the earth.

“We can't be right unless we‘re happy”, said Bahro. He meant that any theory and practice of social change that is based on an ethic of renunciation and denunciation will not work. It is not enough to be against things. We need the positive vision that comes from right-brain activity, which is joyous. Sexual love makes us happy because it agrees with the order and evolution of reality: cosmos, earth, body, mind. We feel more strength within us; we feel ourselves to be part of the power and direction of the evolving universe.

The energy thrusting up from below carries important messages. Human beings have the capacity to decipher these messages, and sexual love is the medium for doing so. The intelligence that arises out of sexual love is intuition, a direct, non-verbal apprehension of truth. The next step of evolution requires that we make better use of the intuitive or mystical/mysterious communication between men and women. Either love will remain the satisfaction of little needs, a merely personal affair, or it will accomplish its end of leading us to higher consciousness for the sake of all of life on earth.

America is dead spirit. Commercialization - which is now totalitarian because nothing escapes it - has squeezed the quality and joy out of life. Human beings, hardly visible among the buildings, streets and machines of this society, are stowed in offices, factories, and retail outlets, merely going through the motions of life, without enthusiasm or zest, without much to say to one another, daydreaming of a better life. Even travel, in the past a great escape from routine and drudgery, is fast becoming flat and pointless, mere movement across a repetitive and standardized landscape. Is monogamy to blame for all this? Yes, in the sense that it was the first step, the oldest institution, in the development of the Megamachine. Once Eros is put in the monogamous box, then love may survive for awhile, like a tree torn from its roots in the forest, consuming itself, or kept alive artificially, but it is not what it could be, or should be. Universal love is the tree of life, a growing and flowering reality that unfolds, differentiates, the highest branches blooming with loving couples, forming a crown of community-life, so it is sad to see sweet hearts fall from the tree of life, and rot on the barren ground.

The Call

Monogamy is a principal cause of our suffering, but instead of rejecting it, or criticizing it, we have made it into an explanation, a reason, a justification for our suffering. According to Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Genealogy Of Morals, this is the origin of the ascetic ideal: the weak and cowardly would rather suffer than change or challenge the ruling values, so they turn the cause of their misery into a morality, and claim to be sacrificing themselves for something right and good. Behind every ascetic ideal Nietzsche saw the wounded human animal. The truth is that there is no good reason for monogamy (or ascetic morality); it is refuted constantly by our animal nature, making us the “sick animal”. Those who refuse to go along with the herd in accepting it are considered blameworthy, troublesome, elitist, persecuted by public opinion and the law.

“It is the male project of logos fearfully defending itself against woman, body and nature that is the root of the ecological crisis”. (Bahro) We have torn ourselves apart by means of our own culture. However, a connection can be made where the great split is. The tear between man and woman can be healed. Man will improve himself and his world for woman‘s love, but only if woman, who still knows how to think with the heart, widens her community of concern and understanding (beyond the family) to encompass the whole. Sexual freedom is necessary for the successful union of woman and man, love and logic. That is how co-determination or co-evolution works.

Unfortunately, men and women do not believe that they can learn anything essential from one another. There is suspicion surrounding sex, and little realization that it is the origin of political enlightenment and freedom. Aware men and women need to seek out one another with a clear understanding that love will determine whether or not there will be a liveable future. We must self-consciously guide the path of sexual energy so that the physical impulse is controlled from the heart, and the heart is controlled from the mind.

Refuse monogamy, and begin a little political circle of love. This is not a call for more sex “starting tonight”, but a demand that we recognize a principle: retain and exercise the freedom to love others, whenever and wherever that opportunity presents itself. Love will never be easy, and perhaps always rare, but let's not stop trying when we find one person. Holding ourselves open to the possibility of loving more than one member of the opposite sex will radically alter social dynamics. Over the long haul this will create a growing number of small love circles, a horizontal, multilateral network that stands open to everybody who has recognized the truth about the ecological crisis, and would like to do something about it.

The call is for a free, non-hierarchical union of individuals who want to break the complex habits and prejudices between man and woman that keep us prisoners to the foundations of western civilization, reproducing this whole structure of law and state. A new communitarian experiment: instead of joining together to form living circles of cooperative housing and work, we can make holding-together (rather than moving-together) concrete and workable through free love, connected always with political vision. Let us leave behind the tired, worn-out life, and make a start in laying the foundations of a new culture of love.

It should be clear by now, given our failure to heal the world situation, that we need deeper human ties than shared political values alone. Love allows us to know with organismic immediacy, to know one another as whole individuals, to develop an intensive consensus, to form lasting associations, lifting ourselves above this vote-counting democracy, which is actually a plutocracy that puts economy before ecology.

Plato argued that in order for men to develop strong bonds and devotion to the Polls, there could be no private ownership of women, for that would cause men to compete and become antagonistic to one another. We now know that women also must be guardians of an ideal society, so they too cannot be allowed to own men, for that will cause competition and jealousy among women. We need to leave behind the narrow premises of our cultural identity in order to achieve a new human solidarity.

Free love communities of aware people could eventually organize themselves into a system of tribal councils, from the local to the world level. According to Bahro, an example of this is perhaps the great Indian medicine wheel that directs society by ‘wheels‘ one above the other. The America constitution, representative democracy, was made for the purpose of securing capital a legally free path for unlimited appropriation, so it is completely unable to stop this economic process that is destroying the biosphere. We need a “tribal constitution”. (Bahro)

At the top of this hierarchical arrangement of tribal councils Bahro envisions a world government, “the ecological council”, which functions to keep humans and nature in balance by considering human questions from the point of view of the total earthly context, with command of the situation to subjugate and constrain all particular interests of power. We need to develop a new concept of the State, according to Bahro, beyond the traditional struggles for power, above the Invisible Hand, subordinating the economy to politics, directing it by the higher forces of consciousness. This is where all liberal and anarchistic world-pictures fail: even a giant cluster of communes having only horizontal connections and dedicating themselves to the simple life could be too much for the earth. The vertical dimension, which includes a legitimate comprehensive world-wide authority, belongs also to the way out of our dilemma. “We need a planned economy”, (Bahro) rather than be led into downfall by the logic of capital.

Money is abstract enjoyment, the promise of happiness, but it is an empty promise because capitalist culture turns everything into a means for the accumulation of money, leaving nothing alone to be enjoyed for its own sake. Max Weber argued that the rise of capitalism in 16th Century Europe was subjectively preconditioned by an ascetic morality/religion that opposed the spontaneous enjoyment of life. The Protestant Ethic, according to Weber, condemned people to the permanent postponement of immediate satisfaction, leaving the accumulation of money as the sole purpose of earthy existence.

Before Protestantism and before Christianity, the imposition of monogamy on tribal people was the formative event in the eventual birth of capitalism. Monogamy, for the sake of the inheritance and accumulation of material wealth, was a huge blow to the communitarian nature of human beings, causing a lot of unhappiness, from which we have not recovered. Everything outside this over-restricted little ideal was devalued, and then the larger human community and natural world began to die. The ground was prepared for the economic system of capitalism that treats the planet, and everything on it, as raw material for exploitation and plunder.

Love, confined to a small sphere of reality, with the remainder of reality desexualized, drained of eroticism, is unable to support the burden of satisfaction placed upon it, and no amount of money can purchase it. Still, the hunt for money goes on because it is a symptom of our social sexual sickness and stone-heartedness. We should not be surprised that people numb on the inside, disconnected from vital emotional impulses, without contact with the cosmic whole, deaf to the voice of Reality, as a result of the cumulative historical forces of cultural asceticism - monogamy, religion, capitalism, Megamachine - pursue priorities other than life and love. Human desire has been killed or weakened for everything except commodities, which are the empty shells of life.

Why the Almighty Dollar? Because it epitomizes the empty and lifeless life: “as the inside is, so is the outside”. Deaden enough of the inner-life of the human being and there remains only the possibility of abstract enjoyment - money. It is a means of withdrawing from society, “freedom from” social responsibilities. In the hands of loveless people it becomes “a weapon operating at a distance”. (Bahro) A gun makes it easier than a knife to harm others, and money makes it easier than a gun to injure others, without having to worry about the legal consequences for wiping out the competition, or know anything about the bloody context that produces the wealth.

So much restlessness! Is there “a worm in the heart of being”, as Jean Paul Sartre said: “Man is what he is not, and not what he is?” Except that, if sexual love, as even Sartre acknowledged, brings a moment of rest and contentment (in which “the for-itself is also an in-itself”), then could not a knowing society develop amorous institutions that permit the American Faust to find peace and happiness? Monogamy is not the explanation for all our problems, nor is free love a panacea, but monogamy is the most fundamental or deepest layer in the geology of exterminism, which is why free love is the beginning of a more beautiful life.

Free, intelligent love is sharing on the most personal and intimate level, and a change here will alter the entire pattern of modern society that is built around the monogamous lifestyle. Only this kind of personal experience can break through conformist consciousness. It will heal the core of a culture that is making each couple less and less dependent on the compassion and goodwill of others, and more and more dependent on money and technology. Lovers naturally share all the necessities and treasures of life. So long as love is treated as a scarcity, in which giving to one person means that there is not enough left for others, it will always be a major source of struggle and conflict, regardless of the distribution or re-distribution of other goods and services throughout society.

If we want to get to the root of the crisis, then it is not enough to practice sustainable living, or implement a social plan that abundantly produces and distributes goods; we must also joyfully share one another, or the Megamachine will come back again after the revolution. Fourier noted that the French Revolution failed because it did not abolish the nuclear family: the old values survived there and eventually restored the Ancient Regime. Perhaps this could also be said of the Russian Revolution? And all other failed revolutions?

Dreaming

Monogamy creates jealousy, not the other way around. “If there is one thing certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late”, said Engels. Jealousy is at bottom the fear of abandonment, or loss of love, and it is the sure sign of a weak ego that is threatened by human relationships, unable to trust the full impact of group life. The basis of this feeling disappears when loving someone does not necessarily mean that everyone else is left out in the cold.

Eros would like to continue its journey of uniting everything, building a community of love and friendship, embracing nature and the entire universe, but the ego, especially the western ego, stands in the way, preventing a higher social form from coming into existence. Monogamy is an egoic institution, securing ownership; it has nothing to do with love. On the contrary, it blocks real love because to really love someone one must be free. When monogamous lovers set one another free, then they will dream of one another again. “Only people who have put jealousy at least halfway behind them are capable of bonding as a pair”, said Bahro.

The ‘60s Revolution in America was holistic: peace, justice, ecology, art, philosophy, and love were elements of a new lifestyle, practiced at first by only the most aware people, then entering the mainstream and touching many lives (before becoming diluted). The slogan, “Make love not war”, stood for a new politics of love, which was not Christian, but pagan, emphasizing the important pleasures of the flesh. Women said, “smash monogamy”, and thousands of years of sexual repression was lifted overnight. Unfortunately, free love was soon misconstrued as promiscuity. The happy turn that society might have taken at this historical juncture was missed, but the answer was glimpsed: men will only lay down their arms for sexual love. Much depends on women pursuing the rational level of great ideas, through communication with men, without losing access to the heart as the center of balance for the integral/whole human being.

Wilhelm Reich was correct: politics that does not concern itself with the essential problem of youth - namely, putting their sexual life in order - will not appeal to them (for long). Peace, justice, ecology can seem distant goals to young people who are hemmed in by an ascetic ideal at war with the constant sexual demands of animal human nature. Young people deserve greater opportunities for happiness. Political meetings, social gatherings and events, personal introductions, and greetings must provide time and space for sexual love to unfold, not by making it a duty or requirement, but simply by removing the social pressures and moral barriers that prevent it from happening naturally and spontaneously. Those who would like a warm society can work toward this end by serving as role models, and provide safe gathering places, for others who would also like to attempt something wholly different, a new practice of everyday life. Non-monogamous lovers are the building blocks of a new social body, founded on sexuality as a gift.

Ernst Bloch spoke of the Not Yet Conscious, a state of mind, exemplified by daydreams, in which the creative future, the voice of tomorrow, comes up, but the ego is only dimly aware of it. Among the population, especially young people, free love is Not Yet Conscious. All beginnings are difficult, but the idea of free love as the basis of a joyous new society is not far from what everyone is longing for. Love politics is an experiment at the limits of the ego, which is the birthplace of the new. It releases us from the frantic drive to find, at a very early age, one lifelong partner and live happily ever after, an ideal that continuously and unavoidably disappoints, making people ill due to the amount of frustration and guilt which society imposes in the name of this ideal. Relax the ego; loosen the bonds of monogamy; create the space of receptivity for a world that is dawning.

Bronislaw Malinowsky‘s book, The Sexual Life Of Savages, documents the close participation between human love and the natural world among the Trobriand Islanders of northwestern Melanesia. In this aboriginal culture (without authoritarianism, crime, and violence) a young man simply asked a young woman for a “meeting”, and if she accepted, then they often made love in a field under the stars, or along a riverbank in the moonlight, or in the shade of a tree under the sun. During the ‘60s Sexual Revolution in America, external nature was also an integral part of sexual liberation: a blanket on the grass in the park on a summer day was a love-fest (entailing a new economy of time). Free, healthy, and happy sex opens the heart and links lovers to the earth, sea and sky. A dysfunction of sexuality, due to a serious over-restriction of desire, closes the heart and disconnects us from the rest of nature. It is one and the same energy that links humans to one another and to nature. Edward Abbey said, “Embrace nature as a man desires a beautiful woman, intimately, deeply, totally”.

Nature is an interconnected totality, always and everywhere (simultaneously) communicating with itself. We still belong, participate, resonate, and feel with nature to a significant degree (except perhaps the most hateful humans, who are, alarmingly, a growing segment of the population). We need not and cannot be taught to love nature; it‘s innate. When the human body is rooted and functioning properly, then our bond or kinship with nature is strong. And sexual desire is strong, but if it is not free to upwardly transform itself into love, and rise to global political consciousness, then frustration and blind fury will eventually destroy everything, including the Ground, as is happening now. “We need contact with the world from the ground up”. (Bahro)

Awake and concerned people will preach the love and protection of nature in vain to a sexually stunted and twisted populace, rigid with resentment, and confined to the Platonic cave of the bedroom, watching flickering images of romance on the wall/television. Not even the imperatives of physical survival will appeal to those dying on the inside. The response of the sexually miserable will always be for greater control of circumstances, more security of supplies, and faith in a brutal world market that is destroying everything intrinsically good and beautiful in order to deliver more than 50% of global wealth into the hands of less than 1% of the population. This is not a sane political perspective to be debated, but the horrible symptom of a psychosexual disease that is spreading around the globe. Let those who know what is of true value in life unite with one another as deeply as possible in order to break the social isolation that D.H. Lawrence so astutely observed: “All the world in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, stewing in its own little privacy”. We cannot change social reality individually or as two-atom molecules; it requires a social process driven by the erotic-impulse buried in everyone. Who is ready and willing to lead?

Conclusion

The creativity of the human being is fundamentally erotic, so we must let Eros flow freely among aware individuals - between monogamy and promiscuity -- in order to build an alternative intelligent lifestyle. “If the task of creating a loving culture which realizes itself sensually is avoided, it will then be impossible to formulate and carry out a political program for resolving the ecological crisis, because the fighters (within both sexes) will continue their various substitute projects, by means of which they never satisfy themselves”. (Bahro)

The intelligence of the universe, the wisdom of evolution, extends into us, first, as a physical vibration, then as sexual desire, then as love, and finally as a concept or idea. Whatever or whoever stops this flow blocks the process of enlightenment. In Lady Chatterley‘s Lover, Lawrence depicts the evolution of a man, Oliver Mellors, who has taken refuge in wild nature from the disappointments and despair of social life. Then, Mellors meets Constance Chatterley, which sparks sexual desire, and in the dark woods the flame of love grows until he finds the faith and strength to assume (again?) political responsibility for the larger world. The novel ends with a letter from Mellors describing his political activism and the first stirrings within himself of mystical consciousness.

If those who love nature, and also understand that we cannot disregard politics (that the political realm is real and cannot be forgotten), would learn to love one another, then there would occur a leap to the next level of consciousness -- higher collective consciousness -- in which we would not have to struggle for consensus about the general good -- we would already have it - ”mystical democracy”. (Bahro) Mystical consciousness, as understood here, is transpolitical, which means that evolution, the adventure of consciousness (on the micro and macro levels) traverses the physical, emotional and political realms, carrying experience and knowledge forward, until it arrives at axioms of truth that do not need proof. Reality will again become self-evident.