The concept of utopia, used to express the yearning for a better world
especially for progressive political groups of the last two centuries,has a much longer life, dating its "invention" back to the beginning of
the sixteenth century. It must be clear that it was a new concept that
sought to express a reality that until then had been "unthinkable": the
possibility of imagining a social situation where there were neither
masters nor servants. I am aware of how difficult it is to accept this
statement, closely linked to the universalization of our reality,
attributing to other societies, both past and present, our own
conceptions and sensibilities. In fact, each society expresses its own
sensibilities even on such important aspects as power relations or the
repression of women.
In this sense, it was not very rare for medieval "serfs" to rebel
against the oppression of their feudal lords, but it was rare for them
to imagine a situation without masters, so much so that we can cite
enough cases in which, freed from their baron, they asked another feudal
lord to take them under his tutelage. Evidently this way of thinking,
common in that peasant world, was induced by the dominant groups and,
above all, by the church that defended and justified the unequal
organization of society with the metaphor of Menenius Agrippa on the
need for the various parts of the body to collaborate, each with its own
function; so that society functioned to the extent that the peasants
accepted their subordinate role and the need to have leaders. However,
during the second half of the fifteenth century we witness the crisis of
the feudal system and a progressive change in the economic and social
structure of some European regions, as in the case of the independent
cities of northern Italy: consolidation of urban artisan corporations,
creation of new financial exchange systems (it should be remembered that
the Medici were above all bankers), migration from the countryside to
the city, etc. These changes must also be associated with a creeping
malaise in religious life, with increasingly frequent criticism of Rome,
which will lead to the great schism of Christianity and the Protestant
Reformation, with a questioning of the very concept of salvation after
death, modeled on the example of the earthly paradise.
In this historical and cultural context, an epochal event bursts in that
splits the history of the world in two: the "discovery" of a new
continent at the antipodes of the world known to medieval Europe,
inhabited by men who "went naked" and lived like "Adam and Eve in
paradise before sinning" (Las Casas). The dominant image emerges from
the descriptions of the two great travellers who first "discovered" and
described them: Christopher Columbus, who already during his first
voyage concluded that they were people "without religion, property and
politics" (concluding that it would be easy to subdue them); and Amerigo
Vespucci, who visiting the Caribbean natives on the coast of South
America, came to the conclusion that "they do not have the custom of a
Captain nor do they go in order, that each is master of himself". These
descriptions of the social life of the "savages", free and without
constraint, spread throughout Europe through printed "pamphlets" that
circulated in sixteenth-century Europe, also being sold in popular
markets, giving impetus to the writing and publication in 1516 of the
book Utopia by Thomas More, inspired precisely by those Caribbean and
Amazonian societies of South America. In this way, in the religious and
political discussions about power and social control that nascent
modernity proposed, breaking with medieval religious and philosophical
thought, a new subject was inserted, the American natives, influencing
thinkers such as Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and then Hobbes,
Montaigne and Rousseau, within the Enlightenment movement of the
eighteenth century.
European modernity, with its industrial revolution, was meanwhile
discovering new forms of production of material life (capitalism) and
more sophisticated systems of social control (the State), increasing the
pressure on workers, farmers and artisans, who were losing the old
social systems tied to the land, in which they had encountered some form
of protection, without fully understanding what new world of work they
were dramatically moving into, but still hoping for better worlds: the
"demonstrated" existence in some place on the planet and the hope of
being able to move there, thus came to replace the more evanescent one
of the Christian paradise post mortem, constituting itself as an ideal
model that a few centuries later would continue to push great masses of
desperate people towards America. In the intellectual world, meanwhile,
the myth of the happy "natural man" encountered detractors and opposing
political theories such as, for example, the Hobbesian idea of homo
hominis lupus, from which it was derived that it was precisely being in
society that allowed us to control the primordial aggressiveness of the
human being. These propositions seemed to find a demonstration also in
the reports that travellers and missionaries brought back from the
American world, showing the daily life of the natives as less than
idyllic and insinuating the existence of a "dark side" of their
existence, cannibalism, which had already appeared in the early days of
the conquest of the New World.
The importance of these themes and controversies will mean that during
the nineteenth century a specific "social science" will be established
to study these small and distant societies, thought of evolutionarily as
"simple", also to understand the roots of European society (see
Durkheim's book, Elementary Forms of Religious Life). Thus, in the
conflictual political scene of the second half of the nineteenth century
and the first half of the twentieth century, when the great European
liberation movements arose, the use of ethnographic reports produced by
the nascent anthropology on the indigenous American and African peoples,
of the present and the past, still served as an example of possibility,
as in the case of the work of Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State (1884) or of Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in
Evolution (1902), where the concept of "collaboration" of local groups
was insisted upon as a desirable model for orienting the struggles
against the dominant classes.
In reality, the mythical egalitarian life of the indigenous Americans
must be considered the fruit more of the hopes of Western modernity than
of the ethnographic reality of those populations. However, there is no
doubt that many aspects of their daily life are based more on community
agreement than on individualism, as is the case with land ownership and,
above all, the way of dealing with social and power relations, as the
anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres has shown for the case of
Amazonian indigenous societies. In this case, what has allowed the
realization of this type of social conquests has been to have maintained
a small number of members in the various communities, also through
careful birth control, but it has not avoided, for example, the relative
subordination of the space occupied by women. I say this above all
because I suspect that the myth of the "noble savage" still lurks among
the roots of our libertarian utopia, and this may not be entirely useful
for thinking about the society we want to create. To build the future,
perhaps the time has come to finally free ourselves from the past.
Emanuele Amodio
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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