A.D. Gordon today

Summary

Sometimes, as you wander among ‘rounded’ philosophical systems, ‘waterproof’ ideological constructs, novel schemes for the improvement of society and the State, you find yourself taking down a volume of Gordon from the shelf, and occasionally you discover that he can be more nourishing than even the most ‘up-to-date’ and ‘sophisticated’ thinkers. It is a good question why young people today do not find him interesting. Is it really only his style that is against him? Or is there something in my gut feeling that in a few years from now, when the wheel has come full circle, Aharon David Gordon may become a kind of trendy guide for enquiring youngsters?

Gordon distances himself with a certain irony from ‘scientific socialism’, because he fights shy of any tendency to mechanical, schematic formulation. The root of evil, he says, lies not in the structure of society but in the deformations of the individual psyche. For example, if all the trouble in the world flowed from the contrast between exploiters and exploited, it would have been resolved long ago, because the exploited would have risen up against the exploiters and put an end to all exploitation. But the enslaved do not dream in their hearts of hearts of being liberated: no, they dream of becoming exploiters and enslavers, and doing to others what was done to them.

Between us and the teaching of A.D. Gordon stands the barrier of the ‘romanticism of the hoe’, which is what is responsible for the view that the whole of his thought is passé: what is the point of hoes in an age of sophisticated computers? But we need to distinguish between what is essential in Gordon and what is merely incidental.