Gustav Landauer vs / kontraŭ Esperanto (2)

"The State as a Social Relationship: Gustav Landauer Revived" by Dov Neumann, Jewdas (blog), 25 June 2010

This interview with Gabriel Kuhn, a scholar of anarchism and Gustav Landauer, amplifies on Landauer's irrationalism I alleged in my previous post. And Landauer's primitivist, organicist, mystical tendency is exemplified in his attitude toward Esperanto:

DN: Difference is a key word for Landauer. For example he vehemently opposes Esperanto for trying to unite humanity with one language. He makes an almost Tower of Babelesque critique.

GK: That’s a good example of Landauer’s opposition to rationalist measures of bringing people together. I guess Esperanto was to him a cold, mechanical idea of providing some kind of common structure of finding one another. Rather, people best do so through cherishing their own cultural traditions, expressions and language.

The idea of a homogenous socialist utopia was not something that appealed to him. If you’re not able to embrace all cultural forms that human kind has produced: you cannot embrace all of human kind, you cannot establish socialism. His idea of difference goes beyond a mere concept of tolerance. Socialism has to ‘grow’, that’s a word that appears often in his writings, it has to grow from the diversity of human beings and cultures that make up humanity.