Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE FINAL YEARS 191

Moreover, his depiction of the world as a single developing organism no longer appears so strange as it perhaps did a generation ago. The development of the science of ecology has brought into focus the ways in which human beings constitute an integral part of not only human society but of a society that embraces all living things. Ecology has brought to many of us the awareness that we are part of a global system in which the integrity of the whole and of the parts that constitute the whole are mutually dependent. Indeed, the environmental scientists James Lovelock and Sydney Epton have depicted the planet as a giant system which seems “to exhibit the behaviour of a single organism, even a living creature.”27

One contemporary commentator, Theodore Roszack, has gone so far as to posit an organic linkage between humanity and the planet, “a single organic network, a pattern of life within which it is our special role to be the planet’s risky experiment in self-conscious intelligence.”28 Roszack maintains that it is not by mere chance that the search for an authentic personal identity which is currently manifested throughout the industrialised world has grown at the same time as the ecological study of the interaction between culture and nature. He argues that the need of the person and of the planet are the same insofar as they are both threatened by “the bigness of things.” The same institutional leviathans that inhibit the autonomous growth of individuals also endanger the life of the planet. Thus, he observes that,

in the very heartland of urban-industrial society, a generation appears that instinctively yearns for a quality of life wholly incompatible with the giganticism of our economic and technological structures. And the cry of personal pain which that generation utters is the planet’s own cry for rescue, her protest against the bigness for alternatives to that person-and-planet-crushing colossalism. We search for ways to disintegrate the bigness—to disintegrate it creatively into humanly scaled, organically balanced communities and systems that free us from the deadly industrial compulsions of the past.?9

Roszack locates himself in the tradition of Bubar, Landauer and the French Personalists. He makes no mention of Mitrinovi¢, but the linkage is clear.3 Of course, for many people Mitrinovié’s depiction of the world and humanity as a developing organism will seem totally untenable: the notion of the world as “one great mind in process of becoming self-conscious,”3! seemingly nothing more than mythology, the outpourings of a man with a “home-made messiah complex,” to use Janko Lavrin’s description.2? However, one thing would seem to be clear: unless we do succeed in developing an approach to the injustices and dangers of the world which