What's Radically Moderate About Anarchy?

More than you'd think...

I won’t apologize (much) for being well behind on posts this month, given my spring workload, but this is an acknowledgment that I know I’m behind and have plans to catch up. Stay tuned for some fun content in the coming weeks!

The Radical Moderation of Anarchy

All that being said, one intellectual endeavor that *has* gone really well this month is the course I teach on anarchy and technology. The course looks primarily at the decentralizing tendencies of modern technology, but it’s also a fun opportunity to talk with students about innovative and experimental governance and ways in which we could move away from formal state-based governments (and the tradeoffs involved).

One thing that has surprised me this semester is how much the topics in this course have dovetailed with some of the lessons in radical moderation I’ve been playing around with in the blog and in the book manuscript.

This is obviously a *bit* surprising, since it’s not intuitive at first glance how a course on anarchy would mesh with conversations around political moderation, but when you get down to it, there’s a lot of interesting overlap.

In the most basic sense, anarchy exists when there’s no central governing authority with a monopoly on the use of force. Anarchy is therefore the state of being where people have to figure out how to get along or coordinate their actions without a central authority telling them how to do that (or forcing them to). It turns out that a lot of the ways people have done that in the past relate to some radically moderate lessons I’ve been playing with and thinking about for the last few years.

There are lots of examples of anarchy in practice, including human language, the scientific method, common law, prices, international law, and to a certain degree, parts of the internet.

I mentioned the common law and the adaptive nature of law and rules in my last post, and there’s actually a lot that’s radically moderate about how common law itself evolves:

1. rules are only accepted by communities when they resolve current conflicts and prevent future ones (in part by providing predictability);

2. no one can force anyone else to accept a rule, so getting rules that people agree on is crucial;

3. the people who serve as mediators or arbitrators in disputes need to have a reputation of impartiality and therefore have an incentive to preserve that reputation by being actually impartial.

None of this guarantees radically moderate outcomes, but this process does tend to produce outcomes that are consistent with the demands of a 4D moral and political landscape. The results of these complex and adaptive processes are likely to be more moderate both because you need to get everyone on board and because the change is incremental: usually (but maybe not always) this process of incremental change punishes really dramatic departures from the norm precisely because those departures increase conflict and decrease predictability. There’s a reason, after all, that Esperanto never took off as a common language.

Radically Moderate Lessons from a Class on Anarchy:

This process of decentralized rule-making uncovers a lot of pretty radically moderate truths about how humans live together peacefully (or don’t).

1. Tradeoffs exist. We spend a lot of time in class talking about the pros and cons of government vs. anarchy and anarcho-communism vs. anarcho-capitalism, but the common thread in all these conversations is that tradeoffs are real and the choices we make about how to govern ourselves always require tradeoffs between different kinds of desirable goods and the unintended consequences of human interactions.

2. Individuals and communities matter. As social animals, humans need communities and communities need empowered and autonomous individuals. Full collectivism is just as undesirable as full individualism, because the relationship between individuals and their communities is highly interdependent. All good societies will have to find a way to balance community claims against individual claims, which will always be an ongoing process.

3. Everything old can become new again. Humans have had tens of thousands of years to try out a lot of different ways of organizing themselves and we’ve likely hit on some really good ideas that can be re-purposed in new contexts. We discussed the concepts of exile and bonding last week in class, pulled from Tom Bell’s book Your Next Government, and students were surprised how relevant a seemingly archaic idea like exile can be for the modern digital age. Twitter and other social media sites basically rediscovered various gradations of exile as they figured out how to uphold community norms in a voluntary community. Not everyone likes those solutions, but they’re part of the adaptive process of figuring out how to live together online.

There’s a lot more I could point to here, but I’m still pulling ideas together. In the meantime, let me know what you think in the comments!