A recent guest post On the [US] Constitution as a “Counter-Revolutionary” Act by John Venlet (who blogs at improved clinch), and the subsequent discussion, has helped crystallize my objection to anarchism.
This can be summarized as: you cannot get there from here and, even if you could, you could not stay there. When states and rulerships collapse, we do not see anything resembling the stable anarchic orders of anarchist (including anarcho-capitalist) theory. Instead, we see highly chaotic situations marked by rulerships of varying size and stability where economic activity (and thus social possibilities) drop to a much lower level. (This drop often including serious population collapses.)
When we look a periods of sustained economic growth, one of their basic features is stable legal orders. Not necessarily a single legal order but, nevertheless, stable legal orders enforced by one or more effective states or rulerships.
To understand why this is so, and where anarchist theory goes wrong, one of the comments on the above post responding to an “how would it work?” query is an excellent starting point:
An anarchist working from moral principles might say: I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. If the individual is sovereign, then he is sovereign. He isn’t merely sovereign-except-when-it-comes-to-stuff-like-strips-of-asphalt. He has the right to live free from coercion, full stop. Everything else is superfluous detail.
Anarchism is generally based on some sort of natural law concept, since it is based on a notion of rights and liberties that do not require a state to create or enforce them. The above comment makes the classic mistake of natural law theory: it reads a particular set of values into the universe by the process of definition.
Rights do not exist in themselves: they are the creations of human thought and action. The key aspect of a right is some sort of acknowledgment of that right by others. The point of a right, after all, is to restrain the actions of others so as to give the right-holder a specific realm of action. To simplify somewhat: you have the rights that are acknowledged by others.
This acknowledgment can come from a shared system of belief that translates into restraints on behaviour. Or it can come from some system of enforcement. Or both. Given that people vary in both their beliefs and adherence to moral norms, then an effective system of rights needs belief (accepted constraints on behaviour), signalling (telling what rights exist and what their boundaries are) and enforcement (including dispute resolution). An effective legal order provides all of these things. An anarchic order reliably provides none of them—hence the massive levels of rights infringement, or simple non-acknowledgment of rights, that occur when states or rulerships collapse.
How things started off for homo sapiens
Something is a living thing if it has (or is capable of) revealed preference. This what distinguishes living things from non-living things: that they have actions with intent. Both the actions and the intent might be extremely rudimentary, but even a virus [bacteria] acts in a way a rock does not because the virus [bacteria] seeks things while a rock does not.
Thus there is no morality of rocks. Living things may have moral issues towards rocks, but there is no morality for rocks. Actions with intent create a realm for morality, but they do not of themselves create morality. For that, what is needed is some sort of moral sense: the ability to acknowledge other living beings as having purposes and interests that one can help, or at least not hinder and that this should restrain or direct one’s behaviour. Such as, for example, rights to use particular things in particular ways.
Homo sapiens are typically built to acknowledge the concept of property, of rightful control. Indeed, that is what most distinguishes us from our primate relatives. Not tool using per se, not even the capacity to learn, nor some moral sense, but the notion of ownership of things such as tools.
That our ancestors developed the concept of ownership of things greatly expanded the possibility of cooperation. There is not much point in investing any effort in tools, for example, if the tool you create is not acknowledged by other members of your band as being yours.
But once you have such a concept, then the possibility of exchange hugely increases the cooperative possibilities. It is not labour that distinguishes the productive power of homo sapiens from other primates—all animals engage in labour—it is the notion of property, of rightful control, and thus the power of exchange. For all exchange is a change of control of the thing exchanged, and requires the notion of rightful control—of ownership—to work. A species that develops exchange greatly increases its access to resources. An individual or group can have access to resources beyond their own locality or efforts. It also increases the benefits to being able to “read” people, to being able to communicate and to being able to make deals. It rewarded both our thinking and our moral sense.
This process of exchange became part of human pair bonds: the males hunted and the females gathered. The former maximised the use of stronger male upper body strength, the latter female dexterity while enabling them to also suckle and supervise children. Such an exchange gave women more access to proteins, men more access to food plants and both more ability to support children than doing everything themselves would have.
It is in our control of things that economic life exists at all.
Strangers, kin and enforcement
Alas, self-enforcement of one’s control over property and fairness in trade is expensive: hence the importance of kinship connections in providing support in defending one’s life and property. It is perhaps no accident that the one common feature of all human marriage systems is that they create in-laws: wider networks of kin support.* For example, the dynamics of pastoralist (i.e. herding) families, clans and lineages is largely driven by their role in defending life and property. In some ways, their social arrangements are closest to the anarchic ideal of stateless social order.
Yet it is also conspicuous that pastoralist societies regularly created vast empires and competing rulerships. There are two basic problems. First, the gains from controlling trade. Anarchy does not abolish these gains, nor the opportunities to seize them. On the contrary, it encourages a race to effective rulership to do precisely that.
Second, there are dangers and opportunities from populous river valleys. Stationary peasants are even easier to control and fleece, so are particularly easily subjected to rulership. Especially as the river provides both a highway and increased returns from establishing a common set of rules for trade. If there is any high return trade (such as the silk trade) there is an incentive among pastoralists to both combine to gain monopoly control of the trade and to deal with the river valley rulership. That is, the existence of rulerships both creates dangers from not having one and opportunities from having one.
The mobility of pastoralists compared to peasants also created opportunities for theft and raiding. Just as a mobile life-style in itself reduces the costs of theft (since one is less likely to be having repeated interactions with the same people). Both these create pressures for a common protective (including legal) order.
This is deeply connected with another on-going problem: that of out-group and in-group. The notion that people of one’s own group have greater claims on one than people who are not so is very powerful. Indeed, the entire kinship-and-lineage support system rests on it. It creates a legal order, but a distinctly limited one in its ambit. The typical response to a lack of a moderately trusted state or effective rulership (particularly if it persists) is not to broaden one’s sense of a shared moral community, but to narrow it. Connection and knowledge are sources of support; lack of connection and being not-known sources of threat. This both lowers the level of trade and thereby reduces the benefits of out-group cooperation.
The notion of moral universalism is very far from a universal human norm. Consider arguments during the last couple of centuries over granting Jews, women, blacks and queers equal protection of the law. (The last dispute is still going on.)
Moral universalism has typically been spread by religion, notably Buddhism and monotheism. Yet, within monotheism, there has been a persistent pattern of limiting or subverting that moral universalism on the basis of categories deemed to be religiously, and thus morally, significant. The notion of a common moral order is much less common than folk generally realise.
Pressure for autocracy
The existence of rulerships creates pressure for rulership. But even without rival rulerships, the dangers of raiding, or even more serious aggression, by out-groups creates pressure for rulership. Historically, such rulership has overwhelmingly been autocratic, since autocracy minimised coordination problems (including in handing out the extracted goodies). Hereditary autocracy also minimised succession problems and reduced the cost of autocracy by expanding its time horizon so as to extend the commitment of the ruler to the stability and productivity of the rulership. (To put it in game theory terms, interactions between ruler and ruled become a long-term game: though not necessarily so for the ruler’s agents.)
The representative principle (i.e. electing people to represent you) did develop in Latin Christendom, as kings asked for elected merchant delegates to represent the growing mercantile commercial interest. (Contrary to Anglo self-importance, it was actually an Iberian innovation.) Yet it is conspicuous that, by the mid C18th, even in Europe, the representative principle was largely restricted to archipelagos (UK), isolated peninsulas (Scandinavia) and inaccessible mountains (Switzerland). That is, where geography permitted the coordination delays involved in “government by discussion”. Conversely, the liberum veto of the Polish Sejm resulted in the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by its autocratic neighbours.
The geographical “moat” effect provided by separation by seas from major external threats has been very important in the evolution of Anglo-America. It reduces the pressure of the protective imperative. To the extent that people can be quite unaware of the protective imperative’s power in moulding human social and political history.
Culture, using the definition that Douglass North does as:
the transmission from one generation to the next, via teaching and imitation, of knowledge, values, and other factors which influence behaviour
both matters and responds to incentives and circumstances. The classical liberal/libertarian element in Anglosphere culture is a response both to inherent cultural diversity (so dealing with diverse expectations and preferences: there is a reason the most liberal form of economics originally grew up in the reductio ad absurdem of culturally diverse polities, the Danubian Monarchy) and to its insulation from immediate external threats.
Protection against both the unruled and other rulerships is something a rulership can offer. Conversely, ability to move between rulerships—the competitive jurisdictions effect—can be a check on the actions of rulers. (This was important in both European and Japanese—given the extent that daimyo could make the rules for their provinces—institutional development.)
Somali delusions
The collapse of central government in Somalia has led to some libertarian trumping of Somalia as displaying the possibility of a stable stateless order.
This being the stateless order which has brought us warlords, pirates and dumping of pollutants. In other words, we get the modern versions of the violence and predation that a lack of a protective order created historically.
“Stable stateless order” commentary from Michael van Notten, the von Mises Institute, the Independent Institute should be taken with large shovelfuls of salt. Particularly as the CIA Factbook entry makes quite clear that it is more a case of competing statelets than genuine statelessness.
More conventional analysts describe the situation as a power vacuum, which has been filled by Islamic militants. (What’s Somali for ‘Taliban’ I wonder? Remember how the Taliban originally came to power in Afghanistan: by providing a more motivated providers and imposers of public order.)
The Times article makes Somali developments sound like a fairly conventional consolidation of a new sovereign authority: a mixture of armed might and better provision of basic public goods (such as courts), each feeding off the other.
Lack of a central authority does not mean all economic activity ceases. Some can actually flourish—Somalia has effective mobile phone systems. But there are basic issues such as, well, protection against violence, that tend to encourage creation of a sovereign authority sooner or later. Lack of a state does not mean a life free of coercion: it can mean quite the opposite.
The paradox of politics
“Rulership is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.” Ibn Khaldun
The paradox of politics is that we need a sovereign authority to protect ourselves against predators but sovereign authorities are themselves the most dangerous potential predators. This paradox can be managed with varying degrees of success, but never solved. Those who claim that either (1) it’s easy, don’t have a government or (2) there is some form of government that just won’t be predatory, are both equally away with the pixies.
I am reminded of a comment I read some time ago:
I tend to think of libertarianism as an ambiguity translated into a political philosophy. They take the sentence “no government works particularly well” and assume that it means “no government works particularly well”. So to speak.
Though the second madness (there can be some inherently non-predatory government) has generally been much more common than the first (just get rid of government).
The American Revolution was comparatively successful precisely because none of the Founders thought for a moment that government was, or could be, inherently trustworthy. (Contemporary American politics consists of two sides each accusing the other of not getting the American Revolution: they are both correct.) The French Revolution was a failure because Robespierre and his friends thought that a Reign of Virtue could be created.
The fundamental difference in perspective is clear if you read their speeches. Compare Patrick Henry on “Give me liberty or give me death!” to Robespierre announcing the Reign of Virtue.
One Revolution created a constitutional order robust enough to survive a hard-fought civil war. The other slaughtered political opponents in public spectacles, pioneered the savage repression that has come to be associated with its successor Revolutionary Projects and ended up in a militarised autocracy.
Clearly, trust in government as (whether in current practice or future possibility) a realm of virtue is dangerous, arrogant and stupid. Such misplaced confidence comes in various forms. The tyrannies and slaughters of Leninism and Nazism are one extreme, the most extreme manifestations of the tendency of state power to kill.
A much milder, and more common version, is the notion that interests are outside the state’s realm of politics and policy—rather than politics and policy creating, and being open to, being “gamed by” interests—so that the state can be trusted to “manage” and “be insulated from” such interests. (A point nicely made here and, a bit more formally, here.)
But the record of the madness of believing the political paradox can be solved by the “right” sort of “virtuous” government—the arrogant delusion that centuries of wrestling with the problem of containing power doesn’t apply to those who are sufficiently Clever and Virtuous—does not mean that the delusion that the political paradox can be solved simply by not having government is any more correct. Not least because it is a ban that cannot be sustained. As Mogadishu and its environs have been discovering.
But not only is it a ban that cannot be sustained, it is a ban that we should not want sustained. The human possibilities from living in a stable legal order are so much greater than from the lack of it that a surprising amount of political malfeasance is worth the difference. Not only for basic protections, but in massively lowering transaction costs: something that, in itself, hugely increases social possibilities.
If we want a strong system of rights across a significant territory and range of people, we need those rights to be believed in, to be signalled and to be enforced, where the signalling and enforcement thereby strengthens the belief. In other words, a system of acknowledged rights. Only an extensive legal order can do that. An extensive legal order that statelessness does not and cannot provide.
* This is the error that the claim that “marriage is for children” makes. Marriage is for (usually two) people to build a life together. It is building that life together which makes marriage a suitable vehicle for raising children. But a marriage does not have to have children to fulfil its primary function.
Great post, Lorenzo. You sum my thoughts up nicely with “you cannot get there from here and, even if you could, you could not stay there.” I think this applies more generally to any political ideology’s view of Utopia, not just the libertarian/anarcho one.
Thanks! Ah, now a post on why utopianism is evil would be a good follow-up … (I should add that I do not think anarchism is utopian in quite the sense I mean!)
Another way of looking at the difference between treating the doctrine of “natural rights” as “revealed preference” rather than “natural law” is to state that “natural rights cannot enforce their observance, save through imposing fitness penalties on regimes or societies which do not observe them.” It is quite possible for a human organization to institutionally and openly violate natural rights, and indeed all organizations do so to some degree at some time. But in doing so, those organizations ensure that the humans under their control perform less efficiently than they would otherwise — both due to discontent and possibly more direct factors affecting the humans whose natural rights are being violated. The existence of natural rights (indeed, their acknowledgement by the Founders!) did not stop the Americans of the Old South from treating blacks as slaves, and thus grievously violating all their natural rights — but they did impose inefficiencies upon the South, inefficiencies which cost her dear as a society when she was forced to fight for her survival against her more free and hence more efficient Northern sister.
Clearly, a regime or society is acting to secure its rationally-understood best interests when it protects the natural rights of the humans within itself. The problem with Anarchy is not that it intends to violate natural rights, but that — in abandoning almost all of the structural framework holding a regime or society together, it cannot protect anyone‘s natural rights, because it is too weak to do so, even granting it the best of intentions.
Faced with the choice between loyalty to an ideal of Anarchy which completely fails to protect one’s rights and other interests, and to (say) a local warlord who at least will make some effort to protect some of the rights and other interests of his most important subjects, humans will (quite rationally) choose loyalty ot the local warlord. And so Anarchy ends, replaced by a patchwork of local warlords who eventually (if the society is lucky) may form some sort of feudal arrangements with each other and thus restore some sort of general order. (The alternative is that they can’t form any feudal arrangements, and consequently are gobbled up by polities which proved more successful at this).
Viewed this way, Anarchy fails because it is not an Evolutionarily Stable System. Even given a majority of the population which solidly believed in the principles of some particular kind of Anarchy, all it would take would be a rather small but determined minority who wanted to carve out warlordisms to tear it apart: Anarchy has no defense against either terrorism from within or conquest from without.
At this point, most of the anarchists I’ve debated with online claim, generally with no historical evidence or in direct defiance of the historical evidence, that Anarchy can defeat any conceivable criminal or military system. For a good example of a debate of this sort, look here
“Why Anarchy Fails — Or, ‘Slaughter, Plunder, Rinse, Repeat’”
http://jordan179.livejournal.com/140375.html
and
“The Problem With Private Protection Agencies Under Anarchy”
http://jordan179.livejournal.com/141798.html
and finally
“Anarchial Anarchists – Civil War in Anarchia”
http://jordan179.livejournal.com/141831.html#cutid1
The general claim is that professional militaries fight in very stereotyped ways and with very little enthusiasm, and that they can thus always or at least usually be defeated by local militias. Needless to say, actual military history demonstrates quite the opposite — professional militaries usually have a very good understanding of how to fight with the weapons and other equipment at their disposal, and local militias are generally little more than speed-bumps in the path of military advances.
Anyway, that’s my take on it.
Yes, local militias are regularly defeated by professional forces. So much of the evolution of social structures is about developing effective application of force.
Your selection process point applies rather variably. In Europe and Japan you get some selection like as you describe: elsewhere less so.
“Something is a living thing if it has (or is capable of) revealed preference. This what distinguishes living things from non-living things: that they have actions with intent. Both the actions and the intent might be extremely rudimentary, but even a virus acts in a way a rock does not because the virus seeks things while a rock does not.”
So, doesn’t a rock ‘seek’ to move to the lowest point?
You might argue that it doesn’t ‘seek’ such a thing, that instead it’s tendency to act in such a way is just a result of the action of natural law. Your position then requires you to demonstrate how it is that the actions of a virus are *not* just a result of the action of natural law.
You might then try to shift the argument on to the notion that the laws impelling the virus are internal ones, from the interaction of parts within the virus, whereas the rock is merely being acted on from without by gravity. In reality, the virus must be acted on from outside in order for it’s internal interactions to have any ‘meaning’ – it cannot reproduce unless it binds to a cellular wall, which requires being acted on by external chemical bonding, and a whole cascade of external events follow from there.
I don’t think this is a productive definition of life, as generalising the concept of ‘preference’ down to the level that could be applied to a virus has no principled way to stop the same definition from being applied to all natural laws. It’s misplaced anthropomorphism at it’s worst.
“Homo sapiens are typically built to acknowledge the concept of property, of rightful control. Indeed, that is what most distinguishes us from our primate relatives. Not tool using per se, not even the capacity to learn, nor some moral sense, but the notion of ownership of things such as tools.”
So every culture has included the concept of individual property rights? Or can I infer from your use of the word ‘typically’ that you recognise that this is not the case?
“This process of exchange became part of human pair bonds: the males hunted and the females gathered.” also seems quite ahistorical. Hunting amongst chimpanzees is done primarily by males, and you write yourself that property rights and exchange are things that makes humans unique. How can task specialisation in the pair bond develop out of exchange, which comes after it historically?
“It is perhaps no accident that the one common feature of all human marriage systems is that they create in-laws: wider networks of kin support.” suffers the same weakness. Marriage systems express a solidarity that was already there at the point at which humans diverged from their primate predecessors. They do not *create* networks of kin support, they are cultural expressions of kin support networks that existed naturally.
I think when you say “Moral universalism has typically been spread by religion, notably Buddhism and monotheism. Yet, within monotheism, there has been a persistent pattern of limiting or subverting that moral universalism on the basis of categories deemed to be religiously, and thus morally, significant. The notion of a common moral order is much less common than folk generally realise.” you are mistaking the claims that religion has made – that it is the source of a universal moralism – for reality. You yourself identify the actual reality: that religion has been the main suppressor of universal morality. It is only once society has been freed from the influence of religion and other false ideologies (which is still clearly an ongoing process) that the truly universal morality can be expounded. Humans, when not blinkered by indoctrination, can actually agree on most principles, coming from a position of ‘I wouldn’t want this done to me, so I can understand why you wouldn’t want it done to you, and I recognise that if I try to enforce my power to do it to you, you’ll cause more trouble than it is ultimately worth for me”. Enlightened self-interest could be the basis for universal morality, but there are too many obstacles to ‘enlightenment’ that have influence for it to be a reality yet.
For that reason I’d agree with your conclusion “If we want a strong system of rights across a significant territory and range of people, we need those rights to be believed in, to be signalled and to be enforced, where the signalling and enforcement thereby strengthens the belief. In other words, a system of acknowledged rights. Only an extensive legal order can do that. An extensive legal order that statelessness does not and cannot provide.” as currently true, but I think that ultimately reason will drive out all the irrationalities that make the state necessary.
I don’t see that state of affairs as something in the near future though, and I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that a movement of any kind can bring it about any faster.
On life: the notion of acting involves some internal change leading to a different interaction with the rest of the universe. A virus seeks sustenance in order to continue, it reproduces. These are actions in a way a rock does not act: there is no anthropomorphising here. Particularly as it does not require any cognition as such. Merely a certain sort of, albeit minimal, complexity, which seeks certain states of affairs and avoids others for purposes to do with its internal functioning. Seeking and avoiding in that sense is all you need for revealed preference.
On property: every human culture that I am aware of has some concept of personal and family property. It may be limited in its ambit, but it exists. Trade, for example, is likely 10 times older than farming and clearly involves a notion of property. Notions of individual ownership of, for example, land, only develop with farming but that is a different matter. Read Demesetz’s article (pdf) on how property rights develop, it is instructive.
On in-laws and kin networks: marriage does not create kin networks in the full sense, but they do create kin connections that were not there previously, which is my point.
On universal morality: I was identifying a tension in monotheism, but that does not mean religion has not, historically, been the main vehicle for some notion of universal morality (that is why priests and clerics had to work to subvert the implications of their own claims). It is perfectly clear that, with the exception of some Stoics, educated Greeks and Romans, for example, did not believe in a universal morality. As for the notion that only post-religious morality can be universal, that is a bit hard on the Quakers, for example. Or the Jains. Or the Buddhists.
Regarding the operation of reason, there is some historical basis in confidence in an expanding sense of morality (see this TED talk by Pinker) but I do not think it is the operation of reason as such.
Perhaps a culture needs to advance to a certain grasp of “natural rights” before the selection can operate? Though even cultures which normally generate despotisms, such as China, tend to develop a concept of “good” versus “bad” rule, and this is not unconnected to the degree to which the regime respects “natural right.”
For example, the Chinese notion of the “Mandate of Heaven” specifically argues that a regime which is failing to deliver peace and prosperity has lost the right to rule and will be replaced in due time by a regime which will succeed at delivering the goods. This correlates to some extent with the extent to which the regime honors natural right in practice, even if in theory the regime has absolute powers over its subjects.
One would still be better off under the (benevolent) despotism of a “good” Chinese emperor than one would under the random violence of a Chinese time of troubles. Although we only hear the point of view of the chroniclers (who favor imperial rule for obvious reasons – they are creatures of the court and bureaucracy themselves), I can’t imagine that most peasants, artisans, and traders enjoyed the periods of anarchy very much.
Both Confucian and Daoist thought developed some concept of natural right. So, you have a point. I guess I was more concerned about the degree to which selection processes were able to operate.
(If your civilisation is lumbered with a concept of divine law, not much at all, at least not with respect to rules.)
One of the problems of the Chinese was that they have remained by far the largest and most mighty Power in their part of the world for most of the last two millennia. This shielded them from competition until the Chinese emperors of a Dynasty grew really incompetent, at which point a new Dynasty (really, a new Power, but one cloaking itself in the traditions of its predecessors) emerged. In a sense, the competition for fitness by acknowledgement of the natural rights of its subjects extended more in time than in space, and was consequently rather indirect.
In the West, by contrast, the competition could often be very direct. Talented minorities time and time again fled oppressive States for territories ruled by more tolerant monarchs. National economies directly benefitted (in the case of Britain and America) or suffered (in the case of Spain, France and Russia) from such migrations of human capital.
This made the competition fiercer and more conscious. Perhaps in time Oriental despotisms would have evolved Magna Cartas and Glorious Revolutions and Constitutions on their own, but they were in our history outpaced by the Western monarchies, which eventually became the Western parliamentary monarchies and republics.
The West, of course, had Divine Law to justify absolute power, but the demands of cultural competition, occurring at such a rapid pace that any educated man could see it happening, trumped the Will of God
Yes, selection processes in China operated to create developing versions of the same model.
The West, of course, had Divine Law to justify absolute power Not quite right. Christianity has no concept of divine law in quite that sense. All laws, even Canon Law, were human. The notion of ‘divine right of kings’ was more that their authority proceeded from God, not quite the same thing.
You might like to consider this as an impressive contribution to the debate.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/shortreviews/Lester-on-Leviathan.html
Enjoyed your review Rafe, thank you.
Lorenzo, thanks for giving me a heads up in comments at my place to your post. It’s a sound, infomative post. The comments you’ve received to date are also good. I’ve put down a few thoughts on your post at my place in a post titled Anarchism Objections.
Thank you. The conversation continues
Ah, I’m finally well enough to read and appreciate this post.
I have long wanted to write a novel about what happens when an overthrow of government occurs, and I strongly agree that what often happens is that smaller orders assert themselves – often petty warlords spring up unless the revolutionaries are careful. And reigns of virtue are fatal (I am thinking here of the English Civil War too, and the shambles of the Parliament of Saints, for example).
I also like your point about property ownership being a fundamental human quality. As a parent of young children, I think that a concept of “that’s mine, that’s yours” is inevitable. And we want to be able to protect what is ours.
Glad you are feeling better
And that you found my thoughts congenial.
Always the best content from these prodiiogus writers.
On defining life, you say “A virus seeks sustenance in order to continue, it reproduces.”, and you are right on the second point at least. However, a virus does not seek sustenance; it has no internal metabolism. This is precisely the reason that many biologists would argue that a virus is not alive. They recognise that admitting something like a virus into the category ‘alive’ means that there would be not principled reason to stop prions from also being admitted, for instance, or even computer programs. Your argument for internal processes is applicable to bacteria, but not viruses.
On universal morality, you say “As for the notion that only post-religious morality can be universal, that is a bit hard on the Quakers, for example. Or the Jains. Or the Buddhists.”, which is mostly true – currently. It would have been quite hard on the Christians if I had said it before they were in a position of power. It’s quite possible for an ideology to appear quite benign while it is forced to exist in a subservient state, and change quite radically once it becomes the dominant ideology. I suspect there are plenty of Tamils who will gladly explain that to you.
Reproducing things made of proteins which are nevertheless not alive is certainly an odd notion. But if we leave viruses out of the category of living things, then my original point clearly goes through. (Perhaps there needs to be a category of ‘quasi-living things’.)
Your point about ideologies changing depending on how much power they are attached to in no way separates out religious from non-religious ideologies, so my original point holds. That process operating for various religions is something I have written about at length, so I am very well aware of it: in the case of Muhammad and Islam, we can see it operating in the founder’s life time — just compare the Meccan with the Medinan suras.
Somalia was not anarchist as Somalia had capitalism. simple as that.
Anarchism is inherently anti-capitalist as it is a socialist ideology that promotes common ownership of the means of life, the free association of self-governing communes and collectives (as well as confederations of communes) through the uses of grassroots participatory democracy–which is to say, democracy from the bottom up, no hierarchy. Anarchism proposes workers’ self-management and customary law.
THAT’s anarchy.
Which is an ideal which has never existed, and there is no reason to think it can exist.
There is also no reason to think it cannot exist. Actually I have defined such a society at my web site http://www.sarovic.com.
What rot!!
In the first place ‘anarchy’ by definition is NOT a warlike force or institution. Quite the contrary. The credo is ‘Order without law’.
Every living species (including plants) lives according to that credo except Homosapiens. We are the only species which institutes and enforces the concept of governments ~ which often claim ordination by a DIY god invented for that very purpose, since there’s no other possible justification for the enslavement of billions of carbon-units. We’re also the only species which actively and deliberately PERVERTS the intrinsic ‘order’ of nature; we do it by describing it as some sort of ‘law’, as we understand human legislation.
There is no such thing as the ‘laws’ of nature, established by decree and enforced by might of arms. Evolution alone establishes the natural order by selection, whcih is determined by what works best.
‘Morality’, ‘Rights’, ‘Fairness’ and all the other manufactured bullshit has no part of nature. Ask your dog..or the other local wombat.
PS. The claim that ‘local militias are regularly defeated by professional forces’ is a historical nonsense. Determined militias/insurgents/guerrilas/partisans etc. ma`y eveentually become so large that they need to be ‘organised’, but they never become ‘professional forces’, and they’re seldom defeated.
Ask the Russians, the Americans, Chinese and just about every other ‘world-power’ back to and beyond the Roman Empire.
I am not interested in ideal definitions, but in the practicalities.
We are the only species which institutes and enforces the concept of governments
Ants and termites?
The natural order, as in what exists, is quite different from the natural law: a concept that morality is embedded in reality or derivable from human nature.
Most insurgencies fail, so Determined militias/insurgents/guerrilas/partisans etc are often defeated. You fail to notice how long some of those empires lasted.
Great discussion! Still catching up here
Well Lorenzo, I doubt you have even the simplest understanding of anarchism. First off, it’s not intended as a violent transformation, while there can be violence that is the final resort after organization. The collapse of a central power does not lead to anarchy ( in the anarchist sense ie not chaos) it takes organization prior. If nobody is working together of course it will be just warlord vs warlord or whatever. In fact, stateless societies have existed all throughout human history. Somolia is not a true stateless society because the warlords operated as mini states in their own right. They had coercive control over an area of land and there was a clear division between governed and government. Anarchy at its core it’s the the idea of positive vs negative freedoms. Negative being “freedom from” (freedom from oppression etc) and positive being freedom to. Our society only offers negative freedoms, there is freedom from but it you don’t have the time or the means to take advantage of them it’s useless. Freedom of speech is useless if you are a mute. Any interactions with other people create some limitations of “rights”. We do not need a state, rulers, or masters to enforce it. As equals we a just as capable. Ps please dont call that non-statist capitalist theory “anarcho-capitalism”, it can’t be that by definition. Capitalism is inherently oppressive and creates divisions and can never be called anarchist or libertarian. Private tyranny is the same if not worse than oppressive states.
“To understand why this is so, and where anarchist theory goes wrong,” Anarchism is a theory the same way you believing someone writing someones name down makes them your representative (and mine) is a theory.