Screeds
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Anarchism, Part Two
August 1, 2004
Before I launch into this long-awaited essay, may I request that you read today's top emission at Eternity Road? I put it there for reasons that are obscure even to me, but a number of Palace readers will find explanations they've been awaiting patiently...or not so patiently, as the case may be.
The anarchist is never motivated by fundamentally utilitarian considerations. Even the great David Friedman, arguably the foremost anarcho-capitalist theorist now writing, who claims that the basis for his convictions is purely a matter of what works best, must at some point confront the question: "What do you mean by work?"
It's insufficient to speak of economic efficiency. No one, however materially minded, would countenance a society in which all of us were rich at the expense of a single enslaved person who toiled to keep us that way.
It's insufficient to speak of a better adjusted production of public goods. Why are they "goods?" Why aren't they "bads," and how does one discriminate between the two?
It's insufficient to speak of a more objective or reliable administration of justice. You must first define justice, an enterprise with many traps and pitfalls. You must decide whether you'd prefer to defend a state of society, or a process with defined characteristics. Then you must tie your preference to a conception of rights.
Anarchism, if it is to produce results preferable to those available from a limited government, appears to have some prerequisites:
- It requires a high and near-uniform degree of "buy-in."
- To prevent the spawning of a new government, it requires a near-uniform distribution of lethal power.
- In keeping with the points above, it requires a near-uniform agreement on rights.
There's room for reasonable men to disagree about what would constitute sufficient unanimity of allegiance, or an adequately uniform distribution of the ability to wield force. However, under conditions of anarchy, the margin of tolerable dissent on what a right is and how it might justly be defended approaches zero.
Regardless of all other considerations, there must be a definition for a right on which all participants will agree. The definition need not lay out a blueprint for discovering rights and discarding other sorts of claims, but it must delineate the objective distinction, as a society goes about its business, that it makes between accepted and rejected claims of rights. Only one definition fills the need:
Thus, we have a bright line that divides accepted claims of rights from rejected ones. Society, acting through whatever mechanisms are available to it, will wield, or permit the individual to wield, lethal force to acquire or defend accepted rights. Conversely, it will wield, or permit the individual to wield, lethal force against claims it finds un-righteous.
Rights theory, the body of thought that's accumulated around the concept and its implementations, has three major outcroppings:
- Natural rights,
- Civil rights,
- Distributive rights.
There are several disturbing conflicts among the consensuses in those three branches. For example, the Lockean natural rights scholium holds that the right to life is the source of all other just claims. From there, it elaborates a theory of property rights that's logically inseparable from the right to life. However, starting from the very same right to life, the devotees of Distributivism, the tenets of which were first asserted in the nineteenth century by Proudhon and Louis Blanc, argue for a right to that which will sustain life -- a claim which, if accepted, makes a hash out of all notions of property rights.
Another irresolvable conflict arises when civil rights -- those rights of procedure that obtain when one petitions government for some claim -- fail to return the result that would objectively agree with natural or Distributive rights. For example, in the case of a jury trial, it is possible that the jury is swayed more powerfully by an attorney's rhetoric than by the facts and merits of his case. Thus, it produces an unfair verdict, a miscarriage of justice. But the procedure itself is supposed to protect the rights of the parties to the controversy, whether civil or criminal, and indeed some procedure for settling incompatible claims must exist in any political order. To set it aside because of a specific verdict is to point a gun at the administration of justice.
Things get messier when one considers neo-Distributivist theses such as that of John Rawls. Rawls is best known as the promoter of the Difference Principle, which asserts that gains that accrue to the best-off in society are only legitimate if they reduce the difference between the status of the best-off and that of the worst-off. Put another way, the elite shall not be permitted to profit as a group at the expense of the poor as a group. There's absolutely no philosophical justification for such a stricture, yet it's the practical premise of every social democracy on Earth. It makes individual claims of justice impossible to settle according to an objective standard, for a verdict that penalizes one man and rewards another might constitute a "gain to the best-off at the expense of the worst-off" counterbalanced by no other effect.
For the purposes of achieving the necessary unanimity about rights, theory is worse than useless.
The most enduring pragmatic conceptions of rights are:
- What you can acquire and defend successfully (the "test of arms"),
- What you can get away with (the "philosophy of power").
Their clarity and simplicity, however, is more apparent than real. Both neglect the element of time and those processes that require it for their development. Neither addresses the innate sense of justice, against which both would be pitted in an infinite number of cases.
A third, rather horrifying conception of rights originated with novelist Eric Harry, and appears in his novel Protect And Defend:
"Rights are an archist concept. Rights have no meaning except when confronted with superior power. They are what is left to the people after the government has taken all its wants. Your country's Bill of Rights defines your most cherished freedoms how? By limiting the legal power of government to encroach upon them."
As the character arguing for this concept of rights is himself the leader of an anarchist uprising, one can easily discern the structure of thought behind it. In his view, rights are meaningless in a statist order, since whenever the State decides that our rights stand in its way, it will have the power to abridge them, and will do so to whatever degree it deems necessary.
But there's no need for a State to bring about massive, unopposable incursions upon rights in any formulation. All it takes is a gang with a coherent agenda and a preponderance of coercive force. That such a preponderance appears incompatible with one of anarchism's other prerequisites does not guarantee that one wouldn't arise of its own -- especially since that's how States arose in the first place.
Under statist conditions, interest groups arise, formulate agendas, claim rights, and attempt to persuade the State to enforce them. Note that no interest group in America could enforce its will upon the country at large without the collaboration of the federal government. As matters stand, government's overwhelming coercive power is indispensable to the creation of an assertive right -- that is, a right whose fulfillment requires the active cooperation of others, rather than just their passive tolerance.
Assertive rights don't appear in the natural-rights formulation; indeed, they're antithetical to it. But both civil rights and Distributive rights theorists allow them, and many, perhaps most, accept their existence. They're frequently combined with theological exhortations of various kinds, such as the Christian doctrine that mandates charity toward the less fortunate. When they've been accepted widely enough, they become indistinguishable de facto from all other claims of rights.
Anarchist theorists who hold to the natural-rights view see this as an argument in anarchism's favor. They maintain that without the State to compel dissidents to bend to claims of assertive rights, such claims would get no consideration. But this is a case of affirming the consequent. The sole strong statement one could make is that, in the absence of a State, imposing assertive rights would require other coercive mechanisms. That doesn't mean that such mechanisms would not become available.
Political beliefs aren't the only ones that guide human social behavior. Many are willing to put their private convictions above the pronouncements of political theory. How many free-market advocates have accepted government welfare or subsidies for one thing or another? How many nominally live-and-let-live types are incensed to the point of violence by drug abuse, prostitution, or pornography? Any such deviation from a strict Lockean ethic constitutes a willingness to abridge a defensive right in favor of an assertive one. Coercion-minded majorities have a way of forming around such positions.
This makes it plain that the ability of a minority to resist such impositions is critical to the endurance of a Stateless society. But by definition, a minority is less numerous than the majority. Therefore, under uniform-distribution-of-force conditions, it will be less powerful, and possibly unable to resist a sufficiently large majority that's convinced that justice is on its side.
This is a problem for anarchist and limited-government advocates both, but it's terribly unclear which system would come off better when powerful passions, such as that over drug abuse or abortion, rise to the top of society's consciousness.
The prospects for a convergence around a single conception of rights appear very poor. There's no indication that a uniform understanding is possible through any of the logical paths put forward by rights theorists. There's ample evidence that the incentives to seek rent from the political system, for instance by forming interest groups, are stronger than ever, certainly more than strong enough to divert politicians and jurists from pronouncing a State-mandated common code of rights. Though it sounds paradoxical, such an action by the State would be the best possible foundation for an anarchic future.
Education is not the answer. Concepts of rights as we practice them have much more to do with the routines of ordinary human interaction, and the operation of our innate senses of justice and fellow-feeling, than with rights theory. Symmetry principles such as the Confucian and Golden Rules deserve more credit for our contemporary respect for rights, in any conception, than does any train of logic, Lockean, Rawlsian, or otherwise. In that sense, rights of any kind are an evolutionary product, a concomitant to other aspects of a society's development. Though Americans pride themselves on our society's respect for rights, and frequently point to that as the basis for our other achievements, it could well be more valid to say that our practical and material achievements are what make it possible to uphold any notion of rights.
Evolution must be understood in the proper sense for this application. It doesn't operate in a predictable or uniform fashion. How could it, when so many details of context affect what time will select for and what it will leave behind? If ideological evolution were deterministic despite context, the same conceptions of rights would have developed in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as emerged in Europe, but that was not the case. European ideas about rights, when they were imported to those other lands, were at violent odds with the prevailing beliefs there.
Robert Axelrod has explored the evolution of rights-respecting behavior and has found it to be massively perturbed by slight changes in mores, or in the "profit margins" available through certain forms of antisocial action. Survival, and the protection of one's family under difficult circumstances, will always trump any more abstract consideration.
Since the prospects for acceptable anarchy are so tightly coupled to the prospects for a uniform understanding of rights, we must conclude that the preconditions for successful anarchy will not be met in the near or intermediate future. The dedicated anarchist can improve his chances of having the sort of political arrangements he prefers in one way only: getting away by himself, or perhaps with a bevy of the like-minded, where his convictions will be guaranteed to hold sway and his claims will be respected by his neighbors. Perhaps, when technology advances far enough to permit long-term-viable settlements on the other bodies in the Solar System, or perhaps in space itself, we will see anarchies of an attractive and enduring character. Don't bet the rent on seeing them on crowded, quarrelsome, State-ridden Earth.
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