Screeds
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Anarchism, Part One
July 17, 2004
1. Anarchy And Anarchies.
"Anarchy" merely means "the absence of a ruler." Thus, the anarchist proposes that the State be done away with, and not allowed to return.
Joseph Sobran has made the point that in any particular area of human conduct where political authority does not intrude, there is anarchy. This might best be called "situational" or "topical" anarchy, in contrast to the "general" anarchy of a completely Stateless society.
In the United States, we have religious anarchy. One's choice of a religion is unconstrained by political authority. Indeed, that was what lured a lot of the first immigrants to these shores. If we except "incitement to riot" and the odious McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act, we also have speech anarchy. One may say whatever one pleases without concern for legal penalty.
In those markets untouched by regulation, there is commercial anarchy. Vendors may offer whatever product they please, under whatever conditions and at whatever price, to whomever has the desire and the means to buy it. Even within the strictures of regulation, there is a form of anarchy. Once a vendor has met the regulatory standard for a product, he is free to sell anything at all. (This is not an unmixed blessing. If you disagree, try Maxwell House Coffee, Libby's Potted Meat Food Product, or a durian.)
"Free." I like that word, don't you? For that is at the heart of the matter. Anarchy is just another word for freedom.
No, I'm not headed where you think. Read on.
2. Context.
The great questions of human relations are unchanging. The greatest of them all, how to get the benefits of a social order without sacrificing one's individual freedom, is forever being "answered" by opinion-mongers of all stripes in a fashion that says more about their arrogance and intellectual conceit than it does about Man, liberty, or the nature of society.
Having read that, you might well be thinking, "But he's one of them, so how does he exempt himself?" You have every right.
The Great Question above does not change only because the question, as stated, is meaningless. It lacks context. The possibility of freedom and the availability of society are both contextual matters.
The "Robinson Crusoe" model, so often used to examine economic decision making in an entirely unconstrained situation, contains its own context. Crusoe was alone; there was no society to join, and no one to attempt to dictate to him. Neither freedom nor society had a relevant meaning in his circumstances.
At the extreme opposite end, we could consider a nightmare scenario such as J. G. Ballard's "Billennium," where the human race has overpopulated the world to such an extent that each individual is allocated no more than three or four square yards of living space, and is packed in shoulder-to-shoulder with others whenever he leaves his domain. In such a situation, society is overwhelming; it swallows all possibility of freedom whether one's fellows do anything to restrain him or not.
By constraining what is possible, contexts delimit the meanings one can give to freedom and society. Therefore, we must assign a context before we can discuss anarchism, the merits and demerits of an anarchic order, and how they would compare to the available alternatives.
I hope that last statement didn't blow past too quickly. For, as David Bergland has said repeatedly, Utopia is not one of the options. When studying proposed sociopolitical systems, one must compare them to one another, not to some imagined ideal in which there's no crime, no want, no interpersonal nor intergroup strife, and no one ever runs out of disk space.
Context determines what alternatives are truly available. The "Billennium" context eliminates virtually all alternatives except rigid regimentation and rationing of all things; the "Crusoe" context eliminates all alternatives except total freedom and self-sufficiency. Since we live between those extremes, we must consider the alternatives available within our particular parishes, and not be misled by what we might be able to do "if only things were different."
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't study ways to make things different, but that's a separate topic.
3. Government In The American Milieu.
The context of greatest interest to me, and, I would assume, to most Palace readers, is that of the United States as it stands today.
Gross statistics and aggregates can be misleading, but we must nonetheless include them in our assessment of this context. America is a 3,000,000 square mile landmass with a population of approximately 300,000,000 people: about 100 people per square mile. (A more intimate way of stating our population density is one person for every six acres of land -- and if you think that's crowding, you've never had to mow an acre of land.) Its Gross Domestic Product for fiscal year 2002 was approximately $10.4 trillion, or an "indexed productivity" of about $35,000 for every man, woman and child. As only about 65% of the population participates in the labor force, it should more properly be given as $52,000 per worker.
Americans come in all races, colors, ancestries, creeds, and sexual orientations. Members of some of those subgroups hate others "not of our kind" and want to do them harm. Of course, we also have plenty of "non-ideological" criminals, enough to fill 1.4 million state and federal prison billets.
Quite a number of us, estimated from 80 to 120 million, possess firearms. A somewhat smaller subset of us, about 1,030,000 at the last tally, consists of lawyers admitted to the bar. Opinion varies as to which of those groups is more dangerous.
The law books of the U.S. positively bulge. The Federal Register, which contains the "enactments" of federal regulatory agencies, alone sums to nearly 100,000 pages. The compendious United States Statutes At Large is a 220-volume collection that consumes 45 feet of shelf space. The various states and lesser political units all have their own legal milieus. Each of these laws compels or forbids the private citizen to do something, under the threat of punishments as light as a $5 fine or as heavy as death. However, few Americans actually know what the law requires of them in any given situation, with a few highly publicized exceptions.
Despite all that law, there's plenty of crime. Homicides alone average about twenty-three thousand per year. Crimes of violence totaled to 1,431,000 in calendar 1999. Crimes against property summed to a staggering 10,205,000 in the same year.
Plenty of law, plenty of crime...and plenty of government. America's 87,504 governmental units spent $2.8 trillion in 2000, the last year for which I have absolutely reliable figures at hand. That year, federal expenditures came to $1.8 trillion, and the lesser units spent the rest. This year, the federal budget extends to $2.5 trillion; if the states' expenditures have risen in proportion, America's governments will spend about $3.8 trillion in all. Spending that money is the principal function of more than 20 million federal, state, and local government employees.
4. An Eagle's-Eye View Of Political Systems.
Viewed coarsely, there are only three political systems:
- Anarchy,
- Popular sovereignty, whether direct or representative,
- Government imposed without regard to the popular will (e.g., aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, or dictatorship).
There are many ways to structure a non-anarchic political system. America is nominally a constitutional federated republic operated by elected legislators and executives. Britain is a non-constitutional parliamentary democracy hemmed in by various traditions, with a ceremonial monarch to provide continuity with her past. Switzerland is a complex federation with a titular monarch like Britain's. Ireland decides public policy questions by competitive assassination. Italy is a madhouse. And so on.
The overall consensus (if one omits the opinions of dictators and their beneficiaries) is that popular sovereignty is justifiable, whereas imposed government is not. However, these systems are not divided from one another by an impassable gulf. Indeed, the central question of all systems of popular sovereignty is how to keep them from degenerating into imposed governments, which they've shown a regrettable tendency to do over the three centuries behind us.
Strangely and ironically, this is also the most important question asked about anarchy.
5. Performance Is the Issue.
Structural questions could validly be criticized as secondary. After all, "we" don't erect a government because "we" expect it to grow to a certain size, or specifically because of the intrinsic value of constitutionalism, tradition, or oligarchic or monarchic rule. "We" do so because "we" expect it to provide us with certain services.
The problem is that there's a lot of variation concerning the services "we" want.
The great majority of men would agree on the supreme importance of national defense and domestic justice. Most would agree on the high priority of public order and (properly circumscribed) the maintenance of a standard of public decency. A substantial subset would argue for "safety net" services, to prevent the corpses of the less fortunate from clogging up the streets. Others would clamor for the regulation of commerce, to insure that vendors' offerings to the wider public will meet certain standards. A few would argue that the State ought to impose equal economic outcomes on all men, the supposed goal of Communism. And these are only the crudest observable divisions of opinion among us.
A popular sovereignty must deal with these variations. It may choose to do so by majority rule, by apportionment, by rotation of power among the factions, by constitutional constraint, or other means, but it must deal with them. For practical purposes, it is impossible to have a polity in which all men are agreed on everything of public importance.
The occasional praise heard for imposed governments, as for example "the best form of government is benevolent dictatorship -- if you pick the right dictator," is to the effect that these systems have sometimes maintained order -- "quieted the factions" -- and restrained their own excesses better than popular sovereignties. Indeed, in the early years of both Italian fascism and German National Socialism, much praise was lavished on both Mussolini and Hitler for imposing order on societies which had, according to the consensus of the time, become chaotic. Then there are modern autocracies such as Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore, which advanced to the forefront of the Pacific community under his hard and unsparing hand. Despite his despotism, most Singaporeans regard him as the savior of their country.
Even an anarchy would have to deal with such fragmentation of opinion at some level, for some groups would undoubtedly try to impose their desires on others, just as they do under all other schemes. Matters of property are where the most obvious occasions lie. In the absence of a State that defines property rights and the mechanisms for conveyance, what would prevent a sufficiently large and well armed group from expropriating anyone? In the wider view, how would we distinguish between legitimate defensive violence and illegitimate invasions of the rights of others?
An anarchist must respond to such questions by refusing to answer them. But in what sort of context is acquiescence to such uncertainty, which most Americans would deem unacceptable, likely -- or possible?
6. Possibilities And Plausibilities.
To be thinkable in a particular context, anarchy would have to have a prospect of outperforming other political systems that might plausibly be applied to the same context. "Outperforming" has two facets:
- Providing the services a dominant majority wants most urgently from its system;
- Limiting the costs of participation in the system and the society that has adopted it.
Believe it or not, all of political theory hinges on those two standards for evaluation. Political theory, like politics itself, is about the struggle for power: what sort of man will grope for it, what he'll do or promise to get it, and how well or badly private citizens will tolerate what he does with it. Rights and rights theory, the fascinations of many who ponder politics and State action, are unimportant adjuncts to this set of dynamics. Though they're often used to argue for alterations in the power structure, as a practical matter they would only influence the shape of the political system in times of true revolution, an event that's become exceedingly rare.
Political theory scholars call this the authoritarian allocation model. The phrase has two applications:
- The allocation of authority, backed by coercive force, to specific mechanisms within society;
- Authority's allocation of licenses to particular individuals and groups.
A license, of course, differs greatly from a right. It's a frankly practical grant of legal latitude or property, made by political authority, to a particular licensee. The grant might be conditional. It can be withdrawn at any time. The licensee might have to pay for his license in some fashion. The whole affair might be accepted or opposed by other elements in society, with a huge range of possible results. Morality enters into it in no sense whatsoever. All that matters is whether the resulting alteration of the context is politically stable.
Most Americans, even most who are deeply interested and involved in political thought, don't reckon up the huge extent of licensure in our society. Only about a fifth of all government expenditures are for national defense or our domestic police-and-justice systems. The remainder is basically split between two functions: paying government employees and administering various schemes of licensure. Since licensure is an inverted "thou shalt not," whereby non-licensees are forbidden to do the specified thing on pain of legal penalty, this amounts to a couple of trillion tax dollars per year being spent to reduce the freedom of American citizens.
Two conclusions follow:
- Americans could be a lot freer than they are, at least in theory.
- If any significant fraction of government activity could be eliminated, and its cost returned to the citizenry, without upsetting an essential element of the national consensus, we'd be not merely freer but materially better off as well.
Within this context, the question for the proponent of anarchy becomes: If the State were eliminated at this time, would the consequences, after some acceptable settling-out period, be better or worse in terms of Americans' freedom, security, and the cost of the goods and services they desire?
Always keep in mind that the anarchist does not have to guarantee Utopia; he merely has to assure an outcome better than the other systems that could be applied to the context.
7. The Alternatives And How They Might Be Approached.
The generally low performance of the current American political system, as viewed by most freedom-oriented people, has given rise to much discussion of the available alternatives. The alternative most frequently discussed on the political Right is a return to strict constitutionalism, from which the country departed roughly ninety years ago.
There's no question that strict constitutionalism would outperform the current scheme. It did so for 125 years. No development this past century would invalidate the approach. But just as with anarchy, we must determine whether the constitutional system could be erected in our present context.
This raises an important coordinated question: What does it mean to "return to strict constitutionalism"? Do we propose an incremental approach, peeling away State encroachments and usurpations one by one, or do we contemplate a drastic, all-at-once change and whatever consequences it would bring? In the first case, we wouldn't really be proposing an outcome, but a process we expect to produce that outcome. In the second, we would be talking about a major disruption of the existing order, likely to cause great suffering over some settling-out interval whose duration and total casualty count would be very hard to predict.
The major difficulty with incrementally restoring the strict constitutionalist system is the prevalence of interest groups. Each such group demands, and many receive, some special accommodation from the State. All such accommodations are anti-constitutional. Owing to ninety years of clever political maneuvering and the rise of an envy-based ethic of politics, virtually every American is a member of some such group. We are all robbing one another, through the agency of the State, and thinking that we're coming out ahead.
This irony gives rise to an appalling rigidity. Each of us would love to see everyone else lose his special accommodation. All of us fear to lose our own. For example, that standoff has kept an unbelievably complex, fundamentally unworkable and unfair system of income taxation in place for decades. Each of us agrees on the importance of eliminating the complexity of the system, but those who benefit from that complexity -- the political class, the country's highest earners, and the income tax preparation industry -- are able to frighten us into submission by eliciting the fear that our own special subventions will be the ones to go, while everyone else gets to keep theirs.
This makes an incremental reinvigoration of strict constitutionalism highly unlikely. The total overthrow of the system is actually more feasible. But the same is true for anarchy.
8. Impasse And Resolve.
Despite the length of this essay, I've only scratched the surface of the subject. Anarchism has been advanced and defended by some very bright minds. Herbert Spencer, arguably the most penetrating political thinker of the Nineteenth Century, was of the opinion that one day, after centuries or millennia of social advance, the peoples of the world would throw off all government. Others, equally bright and passionate, have argued that the "necessary evil" of government arises from the flaws in human nature, and that a society which needed no government would be peopled by creatures we would not recognize as men.
The central difficulty in comparing anarchy to any other proposed system of government is that it's not a system of government at all, but the absence of one. At this point in the development of political and moral thought, very few persons can deal with a "system" whose only guarantee is that no man's, and no group's, assertion of the right to coerce others would be deemed legitimate, regardless of the reason. Our willingness to believe in human voluntary self-organization is too limited for that. So we continue to entertain concepts that implicitly grant legitimacy to the use of coercive force under certain conditions, by certain persons chosen by a certain process.
He who endorses the necessity of government has a problem fully as difficult as the anarchist who claims that no government at all would be best: he must find a way to guarantee its performance. To this point, no scheme for doing so has been found.
A good friend has suggested that in our present context, wherein some men are endlessly willing to coerce others, whether for a "good cause" or just for the hell of it, anarchy should be regarded as "the eternal loyal opposition": the possibility that waits forever in the wings should we get just too disgusted with politics and government to continue them. From that perspective, the proper approach for the freedom-minded man is to turn the tables: to insist that all promoters of governmental schemes and seekers after the powers of the State somehow guarantee that their concepts would outperform anarchy. If they couldn't do so, what reason would there be to trust them with power over us?
One way or another, the discussion will continue.
| <<- All Other Things Being Equal | Anarchism, Part Two ->> |
