In my new role as LPA Regional Rep for Region 3 (the Selma-Montgomery-Auburn tier), I’ve created a webpage and Yahoo group; check them out.
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Afghanarchy
I received an email today asking why the anarchic situation in Afghanistan hasn’t evolved toward a peaceful system of protection agencies as market anarchist theory predicts. Here’s the answer I sent back:
For one thing, anarchy doesn’t fully exist in Afghanistan; the u.s. is desperately trying to prop up a government, and they’re importing plenty of money and guns to make it happen. (Ditto for Somalia, mutatis mutandis; though Somalia’s been working out better because the population has a longer history of polycentric law.) For another, so long as everyone shares the default assumption that there’s going to be a monopoly state sooner or later, then everyone strives mightily to make sure their gang rather than some rival gang is in position to control that state once it materialises. Now a relatively peaceful anarchy can sometimes emerge even from a situation like that (there are some medieval examples), but it’s a lot easier when that assumption is given up.
A good analogy is the wars of religion that ripped Europe apart during the 16th and 17th centuries. The common assumption that fueled those wars was the assumption that every territory had to have a single monopoly religion. Obviously that generates a zero-sum game where everyone strives to make their religion the monopoly one – since if one religion is going to have the monopoly, everyone would rather have that be their own rather than the other guy’s. What brought religious peace to Europe was the idea of religious toleration – or in other words, the realisation that something other than a single victorious monopoly religion might count as a peaceful resolution of religious differences. Once people realise that the same thing applies to political toleration, it’ll be a lot easier to develop and maintain a polycentric legal order. (This is also a good example of how politics depends on culture. Just as governments end up better or worse depending on the prevailing cultural assumptions, so do anarchies.)
Any further suggestions, O readership? If so, I’ll send my questioner to the comments section here.
Update and Various Animadversions
The LPA convention was held last weekend. The “business as usual” faction put up an opposition slate at the last minute and won the field; since the rebel slate’s supporters had assumed (despite our warnings!) that we would be running unopposed, most of them didn’t show up to vote. (The entrenched establishment is largely located in Birmingham, where the convention was held; our supporters were mostly located elsewhere in the state.) We did get one member of our slate, Matthew Givens, elected (his opponent having failed to show up), plus I was chosen as the Regional Representative for the Selma-Montgomery-Auburn tier. Well, you win some, you lose some.
This was my first visit to Birmingham in years, so it was nice to see the art museum again. Though I have to grump about some dubious labeling in the Asian Art section; for example, bodhisattvas are not “Buddhist deities” (unless St. Francis is a Catholic deity). I initially thought the translation of lingam as “pillar” was another such error (or more likely censorship), but apparently there’s controversy as to whether lingam actually means “phallus” after all.
In other news, Olbermann’s at it again. Either last night or the night before, I saw him lambasting Joe the Plumber for saying that America’s founders had rejected socialism and communism. The concepts of socialism and communism, Olbermann explained, weren’t formulated until about 50 years after the American founding, so the founders couldn’t have rejected them. Now Joe the Plumber deserves lambasting for a good many things, but this isn’t one of them. The founders were well aware of the debate between Plato and Aristotle on the subject of communism, and took Aristotle’s side; see the Jefferson-Adams correspondence, for example.
I also saw an odd headline: “Sanford Mistress Breaks Silence, Says Nothing.” Did she belch?
LeviathAnarchy
Gary Chartier offers an interesting challenge to the Hobbesian: namely, to identify at what point along the spectrum between Leviathan and free-market anarchism we supposedly lose whatever it is the Hobbesian claims is essential to social order.
Argentina and Beyond
It seems my prediction has been confirmed. (Well, admittedly my prediction wasn’t entirely random.)
Breaking News = Broken News
OK, Michael Jackson is dead, very sad – but Jesus Christ! Last night virtually every single news program was entirely devoted to hours and hours and hours of what was essentially, given the relative paucity of details, a five-minute story. Endless footage of people milling around outside Jackson’s home with nothing happening, combined with endless footage of the outside of the medical center containing his body, as overvoices intoned endlessly that yes, he is dead, and no, we don’t yet know much about why he died or who found him or whether there were drugs involved or who will get custody of his kids, and yes, he is still dead – all while a big red sign declares, hour after hour, “BREAKING NEWS,” a phrase which has long since lost all meaning.
Why has this story pushed all other news aside? I mean, they’re treating it like it’s 9/11 or something. (I’ll bet Mark Sanford wishes that Jackson had died a few days earlier ….) I couldn’t find a single reference to events in Iran, for example, on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CNN-HL, PBS, or FOX. And with my home computer currently on the fritz I was stuck with tv. Thank God for BBC News, which finally provided me with some actual news.