the health of the state

Mary Harrington:

Decriminalising full term abortion signals a profound moral bankruptcy in England’s leadership class, made all the more grotesque by the thin and (I suspect) bad-faith arguments about compassion to “desperate women” under which this measure has travelled. The same goes for legalising the killing of our old and terminally ill, in a bill that rejected any duty to improve palliative care provision or even give regard to ensuring no one is coerced. This reveals the truth, that the animating desire for these policies of death was never compassion. It was always the political imposition on us all of radical alone-ness: complete liberation for each individual, from the givens of embodiment and our relatedness to one another.

We cannot, in this vision, be fully free until every vestige of human nature and purpose has been scrubbed away by the solvent power of technology and the all-powerful state, leaving only contingent causality and the brute stuff of our flesh.

Randolph Bourne, famously, wrote that “war is the health of the state.” We’re seeing that these days too. The more general truth is: Death is the health of the state. The state magnifies and extends its power through killing — through all the ways of killing. When we empower the state with the idea that it will act to save lives, we are more fundamentally authorizing it to end other lives (and maybe, eventually, the ones it now saves). That’s just how it works.

As I wrote a few years ago,

Proudhon, in the middle of the nineteenth century, asserted that liberty is “not the daughter but the mother of order,” and that “society seeks order in anarchy.” Anarchists do not reject order or rule or governance but insist that in a healthy society these things cannot be imposed from above — from some arche, some authoritative source. Rather they emerge from negotiations between social equals. When complex phenomena arise from simple rules distributed throughout a large population — as can be seen best in social insects and slime molds — modern humans tend to be puzzled. For a long time scientists thought that there had to be intelligent queens in bee colonies giving directions to the other bees, because how else could the behavior within colonies be explained? The idea that the complexity simply emerges from the rigorous application of a handful of simple behavioral rules is hard for us to grasp. Bees and ants demonstrate how anarchy is order. It’s a shame that Proudhon did not know this.

Anarchy is thus the fons et origo of healthy order, and I am increasingly coming to believe that anarchy is the precondition of conservation. Anarchism (in this sense, the sense of order emerging from the voluntary collaborations of social equals) is the true conservatism.

States sometimes do good things, but we can trust the state only to enable killing and to kill. Anything better than killing can reliably be achieved only by civil society, and civil society will thrive only insofar as we practice voluntary collaboration — and it requires practice: voluntary collaboration is something the state has taught us to be bad at.