Towards the Creation of a Ecological and Humane Alternative Culture
* Book: TOWARDS A NEW CULTURE. FROM REFUSAL TO RE-CREATION. OUTLINE OF AN ECOLOGICAL AND HUMANE ALTERNATIVE. By Dieter Duhm. Meiga,
URL = http://www.towards-a-new-culture.org/ pdf
Contents
1 INTRODUCTION
Established Insanity 9
The Timeliness of the Concrete Utopia 10
Cultural Centres for New Basic Experiences 13
A New Consciousness of the Living 14
Overcoming Fear 17
Humaneness 18
The Bankruptcy and Rediscovery of Geist 21
2 THE EXISTENTIAL QUESTION
Behind the Ideological Façades 25
Wanderers in the Desert 26
A Different View of Suffering and Its Consequences 32
3 THE TRUTH OF THE LIVING
Fear as A Biological Disease of Culture 40
Life Research as the Science of the Future 41
Contact and Truth 43
The Technological Wonderland of the Living 44
The human in the Entire Organism of Nature 46
Functional Principles of the Living 48
A New Mental-Spiritual Attitude 53
4 BIOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW CULTURE
The Concept of Biological Humanism 55
Three Steps towards a Realistic Humanism 58
An Ecological Relationship to all Living Beings 63
The Idea of Science 66
Evolution and Growing Freedom 68
A Culture without Sexual Repression 71
The Meaning of Sexuality 75
A New Social Organisation of Sexuality 80
The Question of Non-Violence 86
The Question of Democracy 90
Building a Humanely Functioning Community 95
Emotional Cleansing and Dissolving the Character Armour 98
5 POSTSCRIPT
Concerning Tradition 102
That All This Does Not Remain Mere Words
Summary
PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD
Monica Berghoff:
"How will life go on after the collapse of the globalised political and economic systems? How will it survive the large-scale disruption of our planet’s ecological and climatic systems? And what will become of the immense systems of belief, love and thinking as they start to shake within?
The answer to these questions has to persist in the face of so many failed attempts in the past. The world stands on the brink of an abyss.
The youth from Cairo to London, from Greece to Chile, from Rothschild Avenue, Tel Aviv to Wall Street, New York are looking for new ways out of the crisis. If the mass protest and revolt movements rising up all over the world today intend to combine their revolutionary power and take off together, if life is to win over violence and war, we need a direction, an image, an idea of what might be our common goal.
This book offers an idea of how a future worth living could be. It was written and published more than thirty years ago in Germany and we believe that its time has now come. We left it in the political context in which it was written. Through this we want to show that names change, yet the underlying problems remain the same … until we discover how to solve them. How this can be achieved is what this book is all about. It is more relevant today than ever.
The author, Dieter Duhm, has given a voice to life itself here. He has tracked it behind false morals and dogma, and has opened up ways for it through the walls and armour surrounding heart and mind that we all needed in order to survive an epoch hostile to life under patriarchal rule. But all this could be over now.
The system change that is taking place today, is the most profound and fundamental that has happened in thousands of years. It is a change from the power to destroy life to the power to care for and protect life. This is the only way for this planet Earth and all its inhabitants, including the human being, to have a chance for a future.
We wish for this book to meet open ears and hearts, and that its seeds of humaneness and compassion will bear fruits worldwide.
This is more than a book. It is an idea of how a future worth living could be. The author has taken himself at his word and set out together with comrades and friends to put this idea for the future into practice. The new edition – published for the first time in English – includes an appendix section that shows in brief, what now has resulted after thirty years of pioneering work. A dream is becoming reality …
May this undertaking succeed, because “if life wins, there will be no losers”
Excerpts
BIOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW CULTURE
THE CONCEPT OF BIOLOGICAL HUMANISM, Dieter Duhm:
"Throughout history attempts to improve the world with morality and religion and to conquer man’s savagery by appeals to reason and conscience have failed. Men are humane to the degree that they recognise and fulfil their bodily, emotional, and spiritual needs in a social way (that is, in living together with others). The philosophy of the new culture does not appeal to any morals but to the deepest and most conscious “egoism”.
The necessary cultural change will not come through appeals or sacrifices but by changing our life practice, our way of working, our human contacts, our sexuality, and so forth, in a way that fulfils our needs. A new cultural concept can only be realistic to the extent that it presents a model for a better and truer self-realisation and fulfils a greater number of basic needs.
A culture based on true needs would, of itself, have a great ecological advantage. A community with loving communication, fulfilled sexuality, and creative work would no longer be dependent on vicarious satisfaction through the products of industrial society, as is the case today. It could, therefore, develop a new consumer model that would avoid wasting goods, energy, and other resources, thus saving the environment from destruction. The new consumer model needed by the ecological society of the future, is first and foremost, a new model of human self-realisation.
Humanism is a spiritual impulse towards liberation that entered history in the early Renaissance and has persisted through the eras of humanism, enlightenment, science, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Slowly man begins to see the world as something to be observed, grasped, analysed, and changed.
He frees himself from the old order based on authority, religion, and society, and on taking the reality of a situation for granted. By constantly using his own reason to enter into new realms, he creates the necessity to re-organise and re-form his world. This is the essence of the genuine humanistic tradition: to wrest control from formidable old power structures in order that the human steps into self-management and responsibility. On this historic path to autonomy, humanity can tolerate no pre-ordained limits and no moral ones, for it follows evolutionary laws of development. Morals themselves become the object of analysis and change. Nietzsche, so far, dealt most consistently with these matters. Through Copernicus the power of thought entered into the religious world-view; through Marx it broke into the bourgeoisie; through Nietzsche it broke into the moral world-view; and through Freud it entered into sexuality. Every new breakthrough opened a new dimension in human social life that needed to be dealt with, assimilated, and integrated.
The dimension that now needs to be discovered and integrated is the dimension of life itself with its special principles of holistic and ecstatic ways of functioning (see previous chapter). The forgotten biological basis in which all control mechanisms are embedded must be laid open. The organic system of body and soul with its drives and emotions (that has an evolutionary and therefore historically changeable character) must regain its natural ways of functioning. We can only break the alienation of our age by reconnecting the human forms of action and development to the universal processes of the living world.
Biological humanism strives for the maximum integration of the human social world into the overall realm of living nature (I do not know whether there is also “dead” nature or whether what is called dead is in reality only a special case of the living world). Such an integration will realise the ideas of “organic environmental design”, like that developed by Hugo Kükelhaus, and will also achieve a fundamental reorientation of man in relation to his own nature. The nature of man consists not only of his anatomy and his physiological processes – here we share Teilhard de Chardin’s concepts of nature – but also of all his emotions, drives, instincts, and energies. One of the central inner drives of the human is the sexual drive. In this area there is a common denominator running through almost all cultures, religions, morals, philosophies, and political ideologies of the Occidental world, and that is the secret or admitted capitulation in front of Eros. Show an upstanding theorist a picture of a well-proportioned female with an inviting cleavage and he grows pale. If the destiny of the Earth and our culture is to be put in the hands of adults then these must be people who have free access to their erotic powers without suppression. This is the only way that the living world can be “controlled”.
The same evolutionary lines of development, instincts, and drives that are present in the animal realm come together in humans at a higher level. Becoming human is, in its most farreaching sense, a progressive spiritualisation and sublimation of all animalistic forces into a human culture. This process of sublimating has not yet succeeded because instead of accepting, cultivating and refining his animalistic strengths, man has tried to suppress and ignore them. We can perhaps see it as the “basic error” in the course of the history of consciousness that the process of cultivating the human animal was carried out as a battle of the spirit against the “beast in man” instead of through the union and reconciliation of the two. It was a fight against nature itself, which naturally could not be won. Instead of a sublimation of the whole human with all his drives, a dangerous split occurred, into an official and a repressed part that has so far obstinately resisted all attempts at humanisation. In this psychological ambiguity of the human lies the principal illness of our age. The conscious exposure and reintegration of repressed material and the “acceptance of the shadow”, which C.G. Jung formulated as a therapeutic principle, must be taken from the therapeutic level to the social and cultural levels, if man is to become whole again.
The human must become a conscious fellow creature on Earth, if not, he will senselessly destroy it. He can only achieve this if he accepts the authority of life and submits to it. Humanisation is the humanifying of the Earth, the penetration of the human into deeper and higher realms. But this penetration means mental-spiritual transformation resulting in a non-imperialistic domination. There is a law of the living world that only allows spiritual expansion through spiritual transformation.
We cannot control natural forces by fighting and conquering them – through that their unpredictable nature runs out of control and leads to earthquakes and floods, also on the soul level. Seen in this light, the history of our culture has largely been a puppet theatre, directed by the strings of the repressed, “conquered” natural forces and life energies. If one seeks control in the living world one must unite with it, get to know its rules, and follow them. It is a totally new kind of control, no longer dependent on contest and suppression, but on ecological harmony."