* 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

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." (http://www.towards-a-new-culture.org/uploads/media/Towards_a_New_Culture__free_download_.pdf)

The secularization of salvation

Dieter Duhm:

"The emergence of a new culture contains in some sense a theme of political theology. A political or rather a societal concept needs to be developed that, in its depth and existential meaning for the individual, is equivalent to the religious ideas of the past. What were once steps towards inner individual transformation are now steps towards a metamorphosis of the social fabric in which we live. In this social fabric – in our work, our social institutions, and our human relations – we must one day be able to occupy and truly know ourselves to such an extent that we need no other comfort and no other home outside it.

At some point in the development of man, the human mind deemed it necessary to go against the body and its sensual needs. Cultural development thereby took a path that led the human away from the entire organism of nature, to which he wholly belongs. Since then, history has resembled a dance around an unknown centre.

I.

Religions have tried to uphold a vision of a better afterlife to compensate for earthly misery. Salvation lay in freeing the soul already here on Earth as much as possible from the physical world, for it was identical with sin, a prison, or maya. The goal was thus to conquer the body, to conquer sensuality, and to conquer earthly misery through mental-spiritual exercise. We find this fundamental idea in all the religious leaders of the past, from Buddha to Aurobindo, Plato to Rudolf Steiner, and from St. Paul to Pope John II. The idea was by no means a false one. Since the soul is truly an independent entity that can actually free itself from the body (as has been done, for example, by old cults of initiation, in religious ecstasy, in LSDexperiments, in peak experiences or in near-death situations), this healing concept was realistic. But it led the healing interest away from everyday life on Earth and away from earthly human longing. The atrocities on Earth continued unabated.

II.

Next to the religious impulse towards liberation, we find the political one, a much later phenomenon that is still today in its early stages. It has so far found its most unequivocal philosophical formulation in Marxism. Marx’s epoch-making idea was to annul (and redeem) religious ideas of liberation through political practice (the class struggle). Salvation was no longer to be erected in heaven, but in the most materialistic point in the physical world: in material production. “The criticism of religion” said Marx, “ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for mankind, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which the human is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, and contemptible being.”

By creating a new order for human labour without class domination and alienation man was expected to find his centre and home in his everyday social practice. This mutational leap in the history of ideas was the most revolutionary feat so far achieved by the human Prometheus. It acts as a signpost from which there is no road back. But Marxism was not yet capable of thinking and formulating its idea of political selfliberation at a deep enough level. Its political-economic theories did not truly offer a full equivalent to the religious ideas of salvation: the human had not yet been fathomed deeply enough, his alienation and ultimate longing not yet understood deeply enough.

III.

The next fundamental impulse towards a secularisation of salvation, as profound and as worldly as the Marxist approach but arising from an entirely different point, came through psychoanalysis (we leave Nietzsche aside, who is not so easy to fit in here, and whose work had almost no social impact, because a discreet understanding of his “heroic philosophy” will probably be grasped by later generations). Owing to its authentic humane motive, psychoanalysis was first of all an act of honesty. The puritan Sigmund Freud recognised in himself the overkill of sexual impulses present in the hypocritical culture of the Victorian era. He immediately saw the cultural universality of this situation. He noticed that here, in the libidinous realm, matters of happiness and misery were determined in an area that lay entirely outside official consciousness. He thereby pulled the question of salvation from the afterlife into the “basest” aspects of life on Earth, namely into the domain of sexuality. But, as with Marx’s work, sexuality turned out to be in a condition of utmost misery and perversion, as it had for so long led a repressed, insulted, exploited, and hypocritical existence. Freud recognised that the moralistic sexual barriers and sexual structure of the family led adults to live in deep captivity of the soul in a world of subconscious drives and fears, constructed from projections, fixations, and unfulfilled fantasies. He knew that this psychic underground would have to be redressed, if man ever wanted to be free.

Freud’s discoveries could have contained the seeds for a prodigious cultural revolution, had he not stopped it himself through his faint-hearted theory of culture and sublimation. In the struggle between needs and society, he finally came down on the side of society, presumably to save his societal position. We are entitled to view that as a barrier of his time and to pursue those unfinished truths beyond this barrier.

IV.

The next great pioneer who drew back the veil still further was Freud’s successor, Wilhelm Reich. An unusual path of discovery led Reich to realise the identity of sexual energy and universal life energy. In the sexual orgasm he found the prototype and the key to an understanding of fundamental biological functions in all body tissue. In processes such as pulsation, peristalsis, tension and release, charge and discharge, and contraction and expansion, he saw the fundamental activity and functions of life energy itself. These modes of functioning are of a universal nature, that is, they are a part of the universal order of life. But in our culture’s human they are considerably disturbed through inner blocks and congestion, obstructions caused by society and morality. Reich termed this “body armour”. This discovery of a universal order of life in the dynamic realm of drives and urges made way for a new vision of liberation.

It consisted of a conscious reunion of the human with his most elementary functions of life. The possibility of salvation that Reich found here he called simply health. If the fundamental biological functions can flow freely then the organism, including its aspects of soul and spirit, is connected with the universal order of life and is healthy at its core. But if they are blocked and disturbed, then the organism is disconnected from the universal order of life and is sick at its core. Correspondingly, a society in which the biological currents of energy can flow freely is healthy at its core; a society where they are blocked is sick.

To base healing on the free flow of life energies in the human organism – would that be too one-sided, too narrow, too “biological” a concept? Perhaps. But let us never forget that “biological” does not refer only to what the mechanistic view of nature in the materialistic era has limited it to. In the unsolvable context of Bios and Psyche, life energies are also always of a soul and spiritual nature. Correspondingly, the mode of experiencing the world that spontaneously arises in a fearless and freely flowing organism is of a specific soul and spiritual nature. The world becomes alive. The landscape that I see is no longer purely an image, it is part of creation. One realises that being alive means taking part in creation. It is like an elementary encounter with the world. It leads to new and more intense perceptions, of sight, touch, taste, and smell, a new way of walking and of putting one’s foot on the ground. One suddenly understands animals, their elasticity and calm, their way of pointing their ears, and the power in their readiness to leap.

The organism becomes impressively strong, light, and transparent, almost musical. In this experience and mode of being there is an element of animal vitality, of soft power, and also an element of intensity and celebration that points towards a new sensual and vital kind of sacred perception. It is the religiosity of universal love that now flows by itself from its biological sources. Reich’s descriptions show that he knew this state. To him it was simply the autonomous functioning of life in the unarmoured human.

Reich’s advances into the realm of life were a pioneering feat that cannot be overlooked if we today want to lay a realistic foundation for a new culture. Marx’s great political thought, to cast off all conditions through which the human is demeaned, could now be thought through radically to its conclusion. All conditions means the working conditions and the psychicenergetic-biological conditions in emotional and sexual human relations. A remodelling is needed both in the organisation our working life and in the organisation of our love life!

The entire libidinous and intimate emotional texture of human society must be able to develop anew without restriction and prohibition, without fear and compulsion towards emotional lying. The ecological movement was the first political group to make life itself and the protection of life its main political theme. In this context Reich’s thoughts need to be updated.

Today it is not possible to realise an ecological humanism without taking into consideration bio-energetic and sexual-psychological interrelations." (http://www.towards-a-new-culture.org/uploads/media/Towards_a_New_Culture__free_download_.pdf)

Towards the Creation of a Ecological and Humane Alternative Culture

Contents

Contents

1 INTRODUCTION

2 THE EXISTENTIAL QUESTION

3 THE TRUTH OF THE LIVING

4 BIOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW CULTURE

5 POSTSCRIPT

Summary

PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD

Excerpts

BIOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW CULTURE

The secularization of salvation

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