Perhaps the most unusual element of my 2022 essay on anarchism is this: I present anarchism not as a political system but as a spiritual discipline. I don’t put the point quite that bluntly, but I come fairly close:
The first target of anarchistic practice ought to be whatever it is in me that resists anarchy — what resists negotiation, the turning toward the Other as neighbor and potential collaborator. I return to Odo’s line, “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice,” but I add this: The responsibility of choice arises when I acknowledge my own participation, in a thousand different ways, in the imposition of order on others. This is where anarchism begins; where the turning aside from the coldest of all cold monsters begins; where I begin. The possibility of anarchic action arises when I acknowledge my own will to power.
You’ll have to read the essay to find out who Odo is.
It should be obvious that if you are delighted with power politics – if you think the purpose of politics is “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” of your victory – then you won’t be worried about your own will to power. You can just turn off your conscience and go on the attack, thinking only about winning (good) and losing (bad). My suggestion that the desire to impose order on others is a desire that needs to be reflected on will seem obviously silly to you. But there’s another way of thinking about the political order that is equally incompatible with the kind of reflection I counsel in that essay: the libertarian model.
Libertarianism doesn’t want to impose order on others, but its most passionate advocates have a strong tendency to assess existence in terms of winning and losing – winning and losing not in the corridors of political power but in the marketplace; the individual entrepreneur controlling the segment of the market in which he works. As Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, it’s all about DOMINATION; just not domination by law. Anarchism, by contrast — this is my argument in that essay — stands between (libertarian) chaos and (seeking to become) the Man. Some of the most thoughtful anarchists like to say that “anarchy is order” – but order that emerges from collaboration and cooperation rather than being imposed by governmental power. I don’t think it’s possible to create an anarchist system, because an anarchism imposed on people by those in power isn’t anarchism.
Here’s what I think can be done: Try, in every way we can think of, to increase the number of situations in our lives in which we are neither dehumanized by an omnipotent state nor engaged in ceaseless competition with one another in an omnipotent marketplace. As Wendell Berry has written, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” We should assume that privilege whenever we can, and take it upon ourselves as a collaborative of equals to determine what, in any given case facing us, justice and mercy are. In other words, what I call the anarchic imperative is an attempt to rebalance what Berry has called “the two economies”:
For the thing that so troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that, moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend. In attempting to criticize such an economy, it is probably natural to pose against it an economy that does not leave anything out. And we can say without presuming too much, that the first principle of the kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it, we may say, whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it. That is to say that the kingdom of God is orderly.
Amen to that. But what is the nature of that order? Eschatologically, it certainly ain’t anarchic: it is the kingdom of the archē, the source of all things, the Lord. But to understand and instantiate that Kingdom here and now – when, as St. Augustine says, the City of God and the City of Man are inevitably and confusingly mixed – we need to collaborate with one another to increase both our knowledge and our ability to act effectively.
I have argued at some length that Christians aren’t pluralists – we believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow” (Phil. 2:10) – but in our current position we should expect, accept, and even embrace plurality. We need to cultivate the virtues appropriate to a plural world, and we can do that by expanding the sphere of voluntary collaboration, negotiation among equals, emergent order, even when such expansion makes life more difficult for us. That’s anarchism as a spiritual discipline.
Since for almost everyone politics is about two questions — “How can I get everything I want?” and “How can I thwart and punish my enemies?” — I have no illusions that this post will find any sympathetic readers. But it’s what I think. Whaddyagonnado.
