God and the State

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This was a surprising book. Bakunin was a 19th century Socialist Anarchist, which seems like an oxymoron. He was a radical atheist. He also thought that Marxism would lead to tyranny. He was, in short, an odd dude.

The north star of his philosophy was opposition to authority of all kinds. In Bakunin's mind, any authority would inevitably lead to a group or class obtaining privilege and power over other people. It's not surprising that he attacked religion on that ground because that has been fairly conventional for leftists for the last three hundred years. In his attacks on religion, Bakunin sounds like Christopher Hitchens, e.g., God clearly doesn't exist, God makes men into slaves, religion is a racket, etc. This is all pretty conventional and I found this only interesting because it made me suspect that Hitchens, who likened Heaven to a “cosmic North Korea,” had studied Bakunin at one time.

Bakunin gets interesting, though, in his discussion of science. Bakunin had great respect and hopes for science, but he emphasizes that science can only deal with abstractions and generalizations and that it must inherently ignore individuals and their fates and conditions. Science and scientists were as capable of being made into an authority as religion - with the difference being that science dealt with truth, which made it more of a danger. As such, science and scientists were capable of being made authorities, which could then be leveraged into making them a priesthood of society. Accordingly, Bakunin was opposed to allowing scientific societies to exist or exalting science as a priesthood of the privilege. His hope was to make science the property of all through education.

Bakunin explains:

“The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending — such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy.”

But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible — namely that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether politically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart. That is a social law which admits of no exception, and is as applicable to entire nations as to classes, corporations, and individuals. It is the law of equality, the supreme condition of liberty and humanity. The principal object of this treatise is precisely to demonstrate this truth in all the manifestations of human life.

A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.

And:

“To sum up. We recognize, then, the absolute authority of science, because the sole object of science is the mental reproduction, as well-considered and systematic as possible, of the natural laws inherent in the material, intellectual, and moral life of both the physical and the social worlds, these two worlds constituting, in fact, but one and the same natural world. Outside of this only legitimate authority, legitimate because rational and in harmony with human liberty, we declare all other authorities false, arbitrary and fatal.”

Here we are in 2020, at the end of our experiment with lockdowns because of Covid, and I have to think that Bakunin was right. His cautions seem prudent. We turned the problem of Covid over to the virologists and they solved the problem, but at what cost? And how many individual traumas were ignored?

Bakunin was also anti-Marxist. He castigates the “doctrinaires” of all ideologies and equates them to the priests of religion:

“The government of science and of men of science, even be they positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or, again, disciples of the doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may say of men of science, as such, what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor heart for individual and living beings. We cannot even blame them for this, for it is the natural consequence of their profession. In so far as they are men of science, they have to deal with and can take interest in nothing except generalities; that do the laws [...]”

For all that keen insight, Bakunin was a kook of his age. He assumed that education could change human nature and cause men to abandon authority. He assumed that his non-authoritarian utopia, no group would simply find pleasure in having power. He didn't account for the type of man George Orwell presented in 1984 who enjoyed degrading others for the joy of degrading others. Nonetheless, this book was worth the read for a moment of history and an enduring mindset.