Crispin On Himself

This post by Crispy is interesting:

my view is that each of those things - specifically because of its status - is extremely likely to be false. and deep inside you know they're false, or you wouldn't need to exempt them from examination. indeed, i take, for example, the inquisition, as a demonstration that no one - least of all the inquisitors - actually did believe catholic theology. well have you ever looked squarely at catholic theology? honestly no one could believe it or even figure out what it could possibly mean to believe it, so simulation had to be enforced. that's why pol pot had to execute you: not because he was a fanatic, exactly, but because deep in his heart he knew marxism was bullshit, and he knew you knew it too.

 I have a great deal of sympathy with this position - that there are a host of unquestioned beliefs most people hold, unquestioned precisely because they are almost certainly bullshit - but I think Crispy is doing here what he accuses Democrats and Republicans of doing to each other in this post. It's obvious, Crispy says, that people who hold mainstream views (the importance of voting, christianity, etc) don't actually hold those views in a considered way! They get them wholesale from the dominant culture and treat them like holy writ, never to be questioned. There are shades here of the infuriating Christian critique of atheists: "atheists don't actually disbelieve in God; in their hearts they know He exists and they deny him out of spite".

Crispy, is this what you're saying? That people who disagree with you know you're correct, deep down? That is the kind of worldview that evokes a rich inner mythology; another way of putting it would be 'conspiracy'.

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I do want to agree that this stuff: "Everything which belongs to Christ - everything which makes Christ Christ ‑ is present in the Blessed Sacrament. This consequently means that Christ is present in His divinity as God and in His humanity as man. Christ is present in the Eucharist with His human body and human soul, with His bodily organs and limbs and with His human mind, will and feelings ‑ "the whole Christ." Latin reads Totus Christus," along with a ton of critical theory and philosophy, can only be believed by fiat since it is so obviously incomprehensible. Indeed the incomprehensibility seems more a feature than a bug - if it were stated in plain English in a way that avoided obvious contradictions (or was at least ashamed of them) it would be much harder to believe.

The Ghost Of IOZ

As a rule, the most unseemly thing about any presidential candidate is his desire to be president. How is it that making zillions in private equity isn't enough? How was it that the ruling over an entire American state did not quench your thirst for power? What insatiable impulse drives your dark ambition to reign over the richest nation on earth? Surely the person put in charge of the sentient drone army should not display a naked desperation for dominance. Surely the answer to this yearning for power isn’t nomination but therapy.

So speaks Kerry Howley over at Slate (oddly enough, in the XXFactor section, misogynistically subtitled "what women really think"). If that first paragraph didn't raise the hairs on the nape of your neck, then perhaps the rest will: Howley writes an impassioned plea to vote for an unpopular third-party Marxist candidate who, even if she were to receive enough votes, would be too young to serve as President anyway. It is the best US election commentary I have read this year, and certainly the best article on Slate ever.

I'm Not Saying We Wouldn't Get Our Hair Mussed

At Balloon Juice, Bernard Finel writes on the increasingly likely prospect of war with Iran:

There has been some debate in strategic studies circles about whether this represented a warning against war or whether it was an effort to diminish expectations of catastrophic consequences in order to justify an attack on Iran. It sounds bad—war on “multiple fronts,” “hundreds of rockets and missiles”—but when you get right down to it, a month of conflict and 500 deaths could easily be seen as a small price to pay to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

 Finel quotes Israeli defense minister Matan Vilnai:

Vilnai said the government has prepared for the possibility of hundreds of rockets and missiles falling on Israeli population centers each day, with the expectation of 500 deaths.
“It could be that there will be fewer fatalities, but it could be there will be more. That is the scenario that we are preparing for according to the best experts,” he said. “The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on a number of fronts.”

Five hundred deaths could easily - easily! - be seen as a small price to pay. Five hundred Israeli deaths, of course, using Matan Vilnai's estimate. There's no need to think about the Iranian casualties, or the victims of hundreds of Israeli rockets and missiles. No, the price of ending Iran's possible nuclear ambitions is five hundred deaths, more or less, depending on the breaks. What other deaths could matter?

Can't You Follow Instructions?

A few days ago I saw a dump truck full of rubble and twisted metal bars inching its way up a small street. Two men in construction gear were involved: one driving the truck, and the other walking in front making sure the way was clear. A few cyclists were heading up the street in the other direction, and as they approached, the man in front of the truck held up his hand and told them in an authoritative voice to go past on the footpath.

The cyclists gave him funny looks. There was plenty of space either side of the truck, after all, and due to the very heavy load it was moving too slowly to be dangerous. Ignoring the red-faced man, they rolled past the truck with a bike-width of clearance on either side.

"What's the matter with you?" cried the driver, incensed. "Can't you follow instructions?"

The cyclists were certainly capable of following instructions, but they were also capable of thinking and assessing risk for themselves. More importantly, they were capable of ignoring pointless and toothless instructions. If there wasn't enough room to pass safely next to the truck, they probably would have jumped onto the footpath.

This is what I mean when I say that anarchism is a thoroughly practical philosophy: quite apart from the question of whether obeying the driver's commands would have been sensible, there's the question of where the driver gets the right to issue any commands at all.

Nietzsche was right about this, at least - following orders does not come naturally, and anybody who finds it second nature to do so has probably been beaten or bullied into it. It's easy (and fun!) to scoff at adolescent rebellion, but beneath the tantrums and petty narcissism is the basic and praiseworthy human instinct to make our own decisions. Smothering this instinct is very difficult, but fortunately we have a similarly powerful drive to make decisions for other people. This is the primary purpose of almost every educational institution, workplace or prison - to mould its inmates into the kind of people who follow instructions.

We've gotten very, very good at it: a long time ago, you needed a constant threat of physical force, made real by reminders like public executions and torture. Now you can do it with a relatively small number of policemen and an array of cameras. The cameras don't even need to all work! The law is ever-present, omniscient, and possessed with a superhuman ability to collate and understand the information it gathers. Disobey legal-sounding orders, and you'll be found out and punished, so in general we obey.

It's good to know that we're capable of not following instructions, though - up to a point. If the man walking in front of the truck had been a policeman, after all, I doubt any of the cyclists would have stayed on the road.

Reagan

The ballot or the bullet, some freedom or some bullshit
Will we ever do it big, or keep just settling for little shit
We brag on having bread, but none of us are bakers
We all talk having greens, but none of us own acres
If none of us on acres, and none of us grow wheat
Then who will feed our people when our people need to eat
So it seems our people starve from lack of understanding
Cos all we seem to give them is some balling and some dancing
And some talking about our car and imaginary mansions
We should be indicted for bullshit we inciting
Hand the children death and pretend that it's exciting

Listen to this. The flow is pretty simple, but it's produced by the absolutely incredible El-P and the lyrics are amazing. 

Gallows Humour

...is funny when one prisoner is telling it to another. It's commiseration, a way to cope with shared hardship. When the executioner is the one telling it, it's just cruelty. This is why jokes about some terrible things, like the general unfairness of the world, work: because we are all in Schopenhauer's words fellow-sufferers. Nuclear war, death, and aging all fall into the same category. When you belong to the group that is statistically far more likely to rape - not to mention the group that benefits from rape culture - telling rape jokes is not funny.

Look at it this way. Police brutality jokes work best when they're being told by members of the groups that suffer the most abuse (say, Dave Chappelle), but they work pretty well in general because most of us exist below the cops in the hierarchy of everyday power. If, on the other hand, a policeman is telling police brutality jokes...

At best it's grossly insensitive. At worst, it's a threat.

(h/t to the Pharyngula commentariat)

Police Motorcycle Boots

I generally don't post search terms that led here, but this one is priceless:

can you jump a fence wearing police motorcycle boots?

Unfortunately, I don't think I've answered that question on this blog. Sorry! But, thinking about it, you'd need either good upper body strength or a fence with really wide links. Motorcycle boots (although I don't know about the police model) wouldn't jam well into chicken wire. However, since the question read 'jump' not 'climb', you should be able to hurdle a low fence easily in police motorcycle boots, assuming you can build up sufficient speed in your run-up.

If you're running from motorcycle police on foot, make sure to pick a fence that's at least head-height - while their boots might not slow them down, motorcycle pants tend to be quite restrictive and hard to climb in.

Capitalism And You

I've written a little, mostly whimsical article about McDonald's restaurants in Melbourne. Given that it touches on capitalism, I figured it might be of some interest to you radical types.

If 'Coca-Cola' is the most recognised word in the world, then McDonald's golden arches would have to be the most recognized symbol. There are McDonald's restaurants in one hundred and nineteen countries, and economist Thomas Friedman once famously said that no country with a McDonald's has ever gone to war with one another.

He was wrong, of course – take the US invasion of Panama, or the 2006 Lebanon War – but McDonald's has nonetheless gained a certain currency among capitalist, free-market types. Even in liberal Melbourne, where 'capitalism' is a dirty word, street corners throughout the CBD blossom with fibreglass-fronted, golden-arched fast food restaurants.

The rest of the article is here.

Jumping Fences

 When I was in high school there was a fence that ran around the entire outside area. It was about chest-high for most students, and covered in chicken wire, so all but the most unfit could climb it easily. A small number of students jumped over and back in every break, choosing to get lunch from a nearby cafe rather than the school cafeteria. Most people didn't, though.

I've been thinking a lot about the schooling system recently - thanks in no small part to Ivan's wonderful series of teaching posts - and what is especially interesting is how empty of real physical authority schools are. Teachers, now more than ever, are restricted with how they can manhandle children, and many parents are on the alert for physical and other abuse. Which is a good thing! But what it means is that teachers are given a strange task: to control and discipline students without any recourse to physical power. Disrespect a cop, and he can arrest or harass you (if not legally, then practically) but disrespect a teacher, and he can - what, yell at you? Send you to a more powerful teacher to yell at you? There's no credible threat of violence to back up the teacher's authority - and yet many teachers somehow manage to control their students.

The fence that surrounded my high school was easily climbable, but fences are never just fences. They're symbols of power, little signs that say: "you will be punished if you cross this boundary". If you fear the associated punishment, even a knee-high fence is impassable - if you don't, you can scale a fence that's twice your height. Even though the punishment was negligible in practice (a stern talking-to or an hour sitting in detention), almost everybody internalized the idea of fence-as-boundary very quickly.

It's not simply the fear of getting caught, either. When you are constantly surrounded by Authority, you develop (as I did) a little teacher in your head, or what the great philosopher Terry Pratchett calls a "policeman in your skull"*. Foucault wrote about the disciplinary powers of the 'panopticon', a prison where each prisoner is under constant observation. To be watched, without knowing exactly when or how, is to be always looking over your own shoulder. In the end, you police yourself; you fall victim to the great illusion that associates Authority with an all-powerful God. You become totally incapable of accurately assessing the actual power that authority figures - teachers, police, etc - hold over you. Even in situations where you know you can jump the fence and get away with it, you don't; or you do so with extreme agitation.

This is how you create and maintain authority over a huge group of people: you catch them young, you monitor them all the time, and you punish the extremely disobedient. It only takes minimal use of force to get people to police themselves - if most of them are already doing it. If you ate your lunch at the back of the oval, where more people jumped the fence, a strange thing happened. You saw people go over, and come back, without anything happening to them. You saw people break the rules and not get punished. You learned that you didn't have to police yourself, and that you could buy or eat your lunch wherever you liked. You broke a part - a very small part - of your conditioning.

The food at the cafeteria wasn't so bad. But food that you buy yourself, at a place you choose, tastes so much better.

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* He put it much better than me, in Thud:
"Coppers stayed alive by trickery. That's how it worked. You had your Watch Houses with the big blue lights outside, and you made certain there were always burly watchmen visible in the big public places, and you swanked around like you owned the place. But you didn't own it. It was all smoke and mirrors. You magicked a little policeman into everyone's head. You relied on people giving in, knowing the rules. But in truth a hundred well-armed people could wipe out the Watch, if they knew what they were doing. Once some madman finds out that a copper taken unawares dies just like anyone else, the spell is broken."

Why Do We Confuse Ethical And Legal?

Last time I posed the question: why are people so keen to conflate questions of ethics with questions of legality? One possible explanation is that the law offers people a ready-made ethics, backed up by social pressure and convincing punishments, so it's easier to just go along with that than put in the effort to think up an ethics of your own. That explanation is very self-congratulatory, though, so for that reason alone I'm inclined to reject it. What other options are there?

Well, you might say that discussing ethics is pointless, since there's no way institutions are going to respond to ethical accusations. They might respond to legal accusations, though, so discussing legality is useful. However, discussing ethics can help you decide whether you support the way an institution is acting - it won't affect the institution, but it might prevent you from taking unethical actions later (say, joining the army).

You might argue that the law, in general, is ethical - that the existence of the law is morally a good thing, despite the problems with it. To obey the law is to maintain it, since the law in part is sustained through constant obedience, so obeying the law is a good thing. This doesn't seem like a major consideration, though. If we're debating whether to drop bombs on some Middle Eastern dictatorship, is general social attitude towards the law really that important?

Legal Is Not Ethical

Conducting interventionist wars is wrong. Whether you agree with that statement or not - and, while I'm confident in my position, there are arguments on both sides - you have to admit it's a statement about rightness and wrongness, not about the law. That is, it's an ethical claim, not a legal one. You might mount a detailed, sourced and accurate argument that interventionist wars, under certain circumstances, are not illegal and are in fact mandated by certain provisions of international law. Spend ten minutes on any political blog's comment section and you'll see a hundred examples of this kind of argument. However, the law is totally irrelevant to the question of whether we ought to use military force (read: kill people) in Syria etc. I think that the irrelevancy is obvious, but I'll argue for it anyway.

Here's the obligatory argument against using the law as a basis for morality. Unlike ethics, which in theory proceeds from empathy, rational thought, conscience and so forth, the law proceeds from political considerations. Even if we conceive of the State as a wholly benevolent entity (which, as an anarchist, I do not) the law is still not a guide for ethical action, but rather a guide for how a far more powerful third party might force people into acting as ethically as possible. That's why we don't have laws against being rude or lying - not because those things aren't wrong, but because it would be wrong to try and enforce politeness with the police. If we conceive of the State as a partially-benevolent or minimally-benevolent entity, then using the law as a basis for morality is laughable. Here are some reasons why, each of which is decisive:

1)  Unethical laws exist in every real-world State. Segregation, protectionism, criminalization of things that should not be criminal. If the law was a basis for morality, this trivial statement would be incoherent.

2) Seeing the law as inherently moral gives us no way to fight back against and change bad laws - which is what defenders of the law generally want people to do.

3) The process of how law is formed is transparently influenced by corruption, compromise and political consideration, none of which are appropriate ways to form ethics.

So while the legal system might help us judge what we ought practically to do, if we wish to avoid the boot and the Taser, it's poorly suited to help us judge what we ought morally to do. The larger question, however, is this: why do people constantly bring legal considerations into discussions of ethics?

Sexism In The Anarchist, Atheist Movements

Check out this article by Angela Beallor on problems with sexism within the anarchist movement. She argues that combating sexism is a difficult, moment-to-moment struggle - not something you do once and are thus purified, but an incessant process of questioning your words and actions. She warns against male feminists who proclaim themselves to be allies so loudly "that they fail to hear the voices of women". And she cautions that, in removing structure, we make it more difficult to protect oppressed groups (women, people of colour) in political organisations.

Here's the key paragraph:

Structurelessness is often a means to perpetuate sexism, racism and class stratification. If men are socialized to be leaders and women are not, then it is not hard to imagine who would develop into leaders in a non-structured organization. A lack of structure provides no means of balancing those with certain privileges with those who are oppressed. We must create organizational structures that inherently guard against these forms of power imbalance.

And the preceding quote from Jo Freeman:

The idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. A 'laissez-faire' ideal for group structure becomes a smoke screen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power. As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to the few, and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.

There's an interesting parallel here to the current kerfuffle in the atheist movement. People, especially women, are speaking out about sexual harassment at atheist conventions, and advocating for explicit sexual harassment policies to be put in place. They're receiving a certain amount of pushback from the convention organizers and other attendees, especially men. DJ Grothe, the man behind The Amazing Meeting, accused the complaining women of spreading rumors and driving other women away from the convention, which sparked predictable (and justified) outrage among many people.

I think there's a clear reason why many atheists minimize or dismiss sexual harassment at conventions. The vast majority of religions are systems for keeping women oppressed, obviously. Atheists comment on this with commendable regularity. However, there's a temptation to go a step further and say that religion is the main or only system for the oppression of women - and that in removing religion, the primary vector for misogyny is removed too. Atheist conventions are theoretically religion-free, so they must be harassment-free as well. If women contradict this by reporting their experiences of harassment, then they must be exaggerating or lying. Those silly, hysterical women. Can't they see we're their allies?

Do you see where I'm going with this? The state is a vast system for keeping women oppressed (men too, but women slightly more so), obviously. Some anarchists comment on this with commendable regularity. However, there's a temptation to go a step further and say that the state is the only system that oppresses women - and that when the state is smashed, misogyny is smashed with it. Anarchists, then, simply can't be sexists. So there's no need to put in place sexual harassment policies in anarchist organizations.

Unfortunately, religion and the state are only lenses; focusing mechanisms which amplify the existing tendency humans have to oppress those weaker than us. A world without guns would be a world with less death, but of course there would still be a horrible amount of violence. Removing the mechanism is desirable, but it won't combat oppression by itself. Solving the problem of sexism is harder than many male atheists and anarchists believe. It's a task that is performed in the heart more often than the courtroom or the houses of government, and it's a task that forces us men to relinquish much of our own power, much of our own privilege.

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Of course, IOZ got here long before I did.

More Dinosaur For The Cadillac

That's Around My Way (Freedom Ain't Free), the new single from the upcoming sequel to Food and Liquor. Lupe Fiasco's previous album Lasers was mostly trash - corporate, bland, meaningless - which, compared to Food and Liquor, was a spectacular disappointment. This track gives me hope, though. Any anarchist who's into hip-hop (especially an American anarchist) should love it, since Lupe's political sensibilities are thoroughly radical.

And we marvel at the state of Ottoman
Then turn around and treat Ghana like a garbage can
America's a big motherfuckin' garbageman
If you ain't know, you're part and parcel of the problem
You say no you ain't, and I say yes you is
Soon as you find out what planned obsolescence is
You say no they didn't, and I say yes they did
The definition of unnecessary-ness manifested
Say that we should protest just to get arrested
That goes against all my hustling ethics
A bunch of jail n***as say its highly ineffective
Depart from Martin, connect on Malcolm X tip

What a delicious shot at civil disobedience.

Non-Voting As Privilege

As a dirty anarchist, I see voting as fundamentally deceptive. Like the button at a pedestrian crossing, it's there to give the illusion of control; the traffic will eventually stop for a moment, but on the city's timetable, not yours. Moreover, I see many state practices - harmful military and economic intervention in other countries, domestic imprisonment of drug users - as immoral, and I feel that by voting I lend legitimacy to those practices. It's a small symbolic act of defiance: I can't impede the functioning of government, but at the very least I can refuse to participate in its PR exercise.

However, I've recently found myself unable to give a coherent response to voters who make this argument:

Yes, both parties are bad, but one is marginally better than the other on particular issues - abortion, women's rights, employment rights - so not voting for the slightly better party causes real harm.


My previous response (and I suspect the response of many anarchists) is this: you're claiming that state-sanctioned foreign murder and domestic slavery is less important than a few bones the political machine tosses its citizens every now and then. I used to think that a symbolic blow to state power is worth more than a few political gains. Here's my current response to that:

Choosing an airy symbolic victory over, say, abortion rights is almost always an act of extreme privilege. If you're a white man, you have the opportunity to weigh up harm to minorities and women against your own involvement with the war machine. If you're a minority yourself - or you're pregnant, or you might be pregnant one day - then you don't really have that opportunity. You've got to protect yourself. People who will never be harmed by anti-woman or anti-gay laws can afford not to really think about them. They can disassociate themselves from the real consequences of such laws and consider the issue from a pure, objective standpoint. However, the problem with an objective standpoint (and here I stand on the shoulders of the Great Dane himself) is that to reach it you have to set aside your own subjectivity, all that makes you human - and by the time you're capable of considering things objectively, you've lost sight of everything of real importance.

Well. You might respond that by not voting, you hasten the eventual fall of the state, which will bring serious long-term benefits to women and minorities alike. Here, in brief, is my response:

You're fooling yourself. Sure, not voting takes away a little legitimacy from the state, but you're still paying taxes. Refusing to vote is an act of hand-washing, cleansing oneself symbolically while simultaneously funding immoral practices. Legitimacy is not primarily conferred by the practices with which it sustains itself; rather, at base it is conferred by the possession of money, guns and lawyers. When the state finally crumbles, it will be because it's run itself into the ground, not because a few anarchists are letting their lives (or one day of their lives every four years) be a negligible friction in the machine.

If you don't vote, your illusion of utopia is harming real people, right now - people without the luxury of enjoying masturbatory survivalist fantasies of an anarchist country. You don't have to like it. In fact, if you like voting, there's something seriously wrong with you. But you're ethically obliged to do it.

Property, Violence and Anarchism

So it's time to tackle a weighty question: is property damage, strictly speaking, violence? Anarchists and assorted radicals tend to say with Proudhon that property is theft, and that property owners deserve what's coming to them. Rich people and centrists tend to say that property damage is as bad as physical assault, and that vandals should be punished harshly. Despite my anarchist leanings, I don't fully agree with my faithful straw anarchists - I find it hard to draw a strong distinction between property and not-property that has my body on one side and my possessions on the other.

Can we say that since property damage causes emotional harm and physical violence causes physical harm, physical violence is worse? I don't think so. Certainly there are kinds of property damage that would cause me physical harm, and kinds of physical harm that would cause me no emotional harm. I've been working on a novel manuscript for the past year. If you destroyed that and all copies, I would consider that you had attacked me - the act of deleting files and burning paper would constitute real physical harm. If, on the other hand, you held me down and cut my fingernails - undeniably part of my body - I would think you were strange, but it wouldn't bother me if I never felt I was in actual danger.

What I am saying is that all harm is property damage. If you consider your body to be your property, then somebody who harms it damages your property. To the extent that you consider an object in your possession to be your property - very much so in the case of my novel manuscript, not much at all in the case of my fingernails - damaging it harms you. A Stoic whose only property is his ability to make moral judgments can only be harmed by that ability being damaged. Beat him, burn him, lock him up and take his money, and he is unperturbed. The only person who can damage his property is himself. A rich man who owns much and considers his houses and cars to be part of his identity is heartbroken at the slightest property damage.

So if you break a shop window, are you committing an act of violence on the shop-owner? Well, maybe not, if the shop-owner doesn't care much about his shop. But this is a terrible excuse. If you punch a random stranger in the chest, that may not be an act of violence if the stranger turns out to be Stoic or Buddhist. That doesn't mean you're justified in doing so - since most people care about their bodies and shops, you are ethically obliged to assume that any person chosen at random will. Protesters who spray-paint buildings and loot convenience stores are not engaged in peaceful protest; they are engaged in violent protest.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that property damage is wrong. Violence in certain cases might be fully justified, such as violence in self-defense or violence against an immediate oppressor. Let's own up about our violent tactics, though, and not use mealy-mouthed arguments to try and make ourselves seem blameless at the very moment the brick hits the glass.

Anarchisn't

Many anarchists use violence. If not against people, then against property, especially in protests. The motivating principle of anarchism, though, seems to be a rejection of coercion. To use Professor Crispy's definition (again), anarchism is the idea that all human associations should be voluntary. When you punch a cop, though, or recommend that crime victims hunt down and hurt their attackers, are you still expressing an anarchist idea?

Don't get me wrong. I think that, in certain situations, vigilante justice or punching cops (not necessarily mutually exclusive activities, mind you) are morally justified - but while I can reconcile those actions with my conscience, I have more difficulty reconciling them with my anarchist principles. Does coercion somehow become not-coercion when you're coercing somebody who's coerced you in the past?

In practice, anarchism comes welded with a libertarian-ish ideal of justice and retribution. Unlike libertarianism, however, anarchism is fundamentally idealistic about human nature and free will. It's also more principle-based than consequence-based, in my opinion: anarchists are more likely than most to say "screw it, let the world burn so long as I have my freedom". Again, I'm not condemning this attitude! Like Hume almost said, it's certainly not irrational to prefer even the total destruction of the universe over the slightest encroachment on your liberty. What I would like to question is how the idealism of anarchism works together with the idea of retributive justice. Because if it's okay to kill a man who murdered your friend, then surely it's okay to pay another man to kill the murderer. And surely it's okay to pay a group of men to kill murderers in general. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Anarchism and Authority

I'm becoming increasingly fascinated with the philosophical questions about 'authority': What is it? Where does it come from? Can it be rationally justified? It seems like anarchism can't answer a trivial 'no' to that last question, since parental authority seems thoroughly rational. So why can some forms of submission to authority be justifiable and some can't?

Habermas tried to rehabilitate the post-Enlightenment concept of authority by claiming that it makes sense to submit one's judgment to a person of superior insight - that, rationally, there are times when we ought to recognize the limits of our own reason and let somebody else think for us. Habermas was no anarchist (in the same essay, he describes the anarchistic utopia as a 'hermeneutically false consciousness', which certainly sounds bad), but can anarchists make use of his take on authority? On the surface, it seems like it might give reasonable criteria for 'justified authority': superior knowledge, for instance, or moral judgment.

And is authority such a necessarily poisonous concept, anyway? If there are forms of it that don't necessarily entail coercion - as the Abonilox suggests in the comments of my previous post - might anarchists embrace some form of authority without any problems at all?

I'm asking a lot of questions here, so I beg your patience. I've got no answers yet.

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One final note: I notice that I'm rehashing a lot of the same ground that Helen Rittelmeyer covered years ago here. I don't want to immediately agree with the claim that authority and individuality aren't at odds - it sounds too similar to the 'freedom through submission' doublespeak of Christianity - but it is an excellent post.

Anarchism and Parenting

Anarchists generally believe that the use of force to coerce others is unnecessary at best and evil at worst. If they deal with the obvious rejoinder - what about murder/bad people/war - at all, they argue that the solution is to change the culture: to create a world where violence is a last resort instead of a constant way of life. To this, I'd respond by asking about parenting.

What about raising children? Here it seems like a degree of coercion is necessary, and even morally praiseworthy. While it's probably true that the less coercion, the better, I agree with Louis CK that you can't always explain everything (relevant part starts at 6:20):

So here's my question: how do you create a culture where coercion is considered unacceptable when you're using coercion as an integral part of raising children? And if coercion is necessary for such a basic part of life, does the anarchist's rejection of coercion make sense at all?

Anarchism As Useless Political Philosophy

People say that anarchism is useless as a political philosophy: whether you hold it or not isn't going to change anything. Leaving aside the question of whether anarchism is, well, correct, I find it interesting that the charge of uselessness is leveled against anarchism in particular and not, say, socialism or a belief in representative democracy.

Political philosophy is practically descriptive, not prescriptive: it has no power to change the way things are. At its most influential, it might be seized upon as a fig leaf to cover up the machinery of power, like how feminism is used to justify the invasion of poor Muslim countries.  Usually, however, the great twin forces of money and violence roll on, forming and shaping our political systems, totally unhindered by the bloviating of philosophers or, god help us, bloggers.

Anarchism Lost, So Go Vote

If we conceive of politics as a struggle between the forces of liberty and the forces of authoritarianism, political events become transparent. This is perhaps the primary advantage of anarchism over standard liberalism or conservatism: it more accurately accounts for the tendency of politicians to accrue more power to themselves. Every time the citizen's right to autonomy is defended, we score a small victory; every time the State enforces another restriction or corporate subsidy, we suffer a defeat.

Let's not shit ourselves, then: we lost. The State isn't winning, it won centuries ago. Is there any route by which we might extricate ourselves from involvement in its bloody machinations? Well, no. Can we meaningfully impair its ability to imprison people and kill people? Again, no. Can we defend ourselves against it, or ensure that we won't be caught up in its next wave of violence? Of course not.

In fact, if we want to involve ourselves in politics at all, we are forced to do so along statist lines: by voting for political parties that, to put it mildly, are not compatible with an anarchist position. I contend that we actually have an obligation to vote according to small differences - slight improvements in domestic policy, like abortion rights, gaymarriage - and ignore the rest. It makes me almost physically sick to recommend this.

Some people argue that we ought not to vote, and that by doing so we lend legitimacy to a dreadful institution. The only appropriate response to this, of course, is a hearty laugh. The dreadful institution will not be legitimized or de-legitimized by our voting; it gains its legitimacy by the simple fact that it has all the guns. If you vote for a political party that goes on to start a war, you are at best only symbolically responsible. Actual responsibility presupposes a chain of cause and effect that, where foreign policy is concerned, is totally absent in the electoral process (as many of the same anti-voting anarchists will happily tell you.) This is the final victory of the State: it restricts our moral choices so that voting for the slightly, slightly less evil party is the right thing to do.