Stumble it!Anarchy
posted in Philosophy by themaiden |Having long been a strongly Hobbesian socio-political thinker, it was with something like morbid curiousity that drew me to the literature of modern anarchy, and I confess that I read with a fair amount of skepticism.
I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos I
I want to be… Anarchy!
First off,… that’s not it.
Get pissed … destroy !
That’s not it either.
For those of you who don’t recognize those lines, and shame on you, they come from the song Anarchy in the UK, from the Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols by that flagship of old school punk, the infamous Sex Pistols. Despite my love for that first line, and my deep deep affection for the Sex Pistols in general, Anarchy in the UK doesn’t really represent the convictions of the modern, sincere, anarchist. Nor does God Save the Queen.
When there’s no future, how can there be sin?
We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in the human machine
We’re the future, your future
Modern anarchy, in fact, looks nothing like what an old punk would call ‘anarchy’. Truth be told, anarchists have rarely promoted anything that looks like what an old punk would call ‘anarchy’. Anarchy isn’t to be equated with chaos and destruction, as the term is typically used. Its proponents are not typically nihilists, and do not, as a rule, advocate cut-throat human relationships. Anarchy is not a philosophy of brutality. It isn’t a return to the nasty, brutish and short. In fact, anarchists tend to believe that anarchy leads to very much the opposite result.
So now that we’ve got that what it’s not, what exactly is anarchy? Well, that is complicated.
Noam Chomsky starts a very fine paper with a definition of sorts: “There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as “anarchist.” It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guérin does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social change.” As Chomsky hints, anarchy cuts a broad path through social and political thought from feminism to communism, from primitivism to capitalism, from individualistic to collectivistic. There are Eco and Green anarchists. There are even Christian anarchists. And there are, of course, countless permutations, fusions, and factions of these.
Philosophically, anarchy shares its roots with such ideas as socialism, liberalism, and libertarianism; and the various traditions share a stress on the importance of liberty and a “rejection of coercive political institutions and hierarchical social relationships“, which betrays further connections to enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought, such as utilitarianism. Anarchists share, if not a coherent philosophy, a strong conviction that government is by nature a tyrannical force, and human beings would be collectively better off were government to cease to exist. Anarchists argue that should this happen, should government be dissolved, humans would spontaneously organize themselves into functional social groupings. And this is where it gets interesting, at least for me.
It gets interesting because I agree, and so would Thomas Hobbes. Were all government to simply vanish, humans would quickly reorganize themselves, but it is also at this point of agreement that Hobbes and I both diverge from anarchy.
We humans would spontaneously organize ourselves into functional social units. We’d do so because we are terrible loners. We survive better when we survive together, when we cooperate. Cooperation, as everyone knows, means that you can’t always get what you want, but you if you try, sometimes you get what you need. This suppression of desires, this delaying of gratification, implies that people in social groups must operate according to a set of rules, written or unwritten. Why share food or shelter if there is no reason to expect that the favor be returned? From anthropological point of view, this is government.
As soon as we organize ourselves into social groups, we create government. The incentive to cooperate with the greater society my be peer pressure or fear of starvation rather than a police force or a fear of prison, but it is government nonetheless. Anarchist, then, can’t be arguing for a true abolition of government, but for various reduced and decentralized governments, for societies stripped of “coersion” and of “hierarchical social structures”. It is a noble sentiment, but given that even small families experience coercion and exhibit hierarchical structures, a society built on that sentiment doesn’t seem likely to last long.
Even the simplest of human societies, the hunter-gatherer societies, are not devoid of coercion and heirarchy, though these tend to be considerably less pervasive than in some other societal forms. perhaps that is enough. It might be possible, as the anarcho-primitivists promote, to so simplify human life that some near anarchy could function. This would mean, though, a complete de-industrialization of the planet and a return to feeding ourselves on fruit, nuts, and game, and sheltering ourselves with lean-to’s, tents, and, maybe, log or mud houses. It would also mean a staggering drop in human population, perhaps a 99% drop or more from 6 billion to 60 million. The institutions the anarchists would eliminate, are the institutions which allow humanity to support the fantastic population density that we do. While theoretically possible, in practice, achieving such radical results is a long shot. Of course, such radical changes aren’t likely without strict rules and a means to enforce them.
Even if such a goal were achieved, it would remain viable only so long as every group on the planet consistently played by the rules. In a world where technology has been reduced to a bare minimum, communication over even short distances would be difficult, as would communication through time. Communication over long distances would be impossible, especially given that reading and writing would almost certainly vanish. Hunter-gatherers have no need for such things. Under such circumstances, populations will respond to environmental stresses– the need for fresh water, food and shelter– than to ideology; so even were this world populated initially by 60 million devoted anarchists, it isn’t likely that the idealogy would remain strong through many generations. And should a group break the ‘rules‘– should a group begin to grow, for example– it would soon bump into its neighbors and the friction would force more complicated social structure to arise. As population increases, and population density increases, and resources that once supplied fifty must supply ten-thousand, such simple social organizations become untenable. Archeology, anthropology, and history all bear this out. With size and density comes complexity. Anyone who has ever grown, or followed the growth of, a business from one employee to a dozen will confirm the point as well.
Ultimately, my Hobbesian convictions are sound. Government is a beast, but we need it, as Somalia’s state of affairs well shows. The only real question is, “Which government do we want?”
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