We’re back! Like, in real time! Well, not real time, but… same day service? Photos while you wait? Glasses in about an hour? Whatever, we’re back. And we talk (really in depth) about some video game crap. And then about underwear. Yup. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
I realized tonight I know what brand of underwear my sister wears. Is that creepy? –Anonymous
LINKS: I found this the other day. Oh, the memories!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Tony, I saw “The Guard” and would highly recommend it. I haven’t seen “Coventry” but I read enough about it to get the gist and to know that I would probably have a hard time with it (not that it sounded bad, just the kind of plot). From what I know “The Guard” is not as heavy, but still dark.
In the discussion about rural communities as evidence that humans don’t need government in order to behave (if I’m describing that point correctly), I’d like to suggest a different way of defining anarchy (and then explain why).
I think it’s more helpful to think of anarchy as living without coercive political power or hierarchy, rather than living without government. And I agree with Will that we don’t need coercive political power in order to live together without all murdering each other, or stealing, or generally whatever image people have when they think of anarchy as social chaos and unrest.
But the reason I think we can live together is that we are inherently governing. That is, I don’t think there is a gathering of human beings without government. Parenting children, for instance, is a form of government and you don’t get human beings without parenting.
And the reason I like thinking of it that way is that the kind of definition of anarchy that a lot of Americans seem to embrace is this idea that anarchy is “absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual”–which always opposes government as something outside of us and which is inimical to freedom. Freedom is always something that is achievable only at the level of the individual (this idea for anyone who’s interested traces back to Rousseau). Believing in this definition always makes us think we have to trade between behavior and freedom, safety and regulation, security and privacy, and so on. Any behavior that is “social” (that is in ways in which we care for each other, learn from each other, have some kind of awareness, connection and feedback with others) is a giving up of freedom, power, and individuality. And thus we worship as “cool” people who are anti-social or even sociopathic. And we lose any sense that government comes from us–it’s just this outside oppressive force.
Getting back the sense that government comes from us rather than lies outside of us, I think is critical for change. Even though we do lack a lot of power in the U.S. right now, we aren’t at the extreme of living under some kind of dictatorship. Loss of democratic power in this country has a lot to do with how much power of the citizenry has been handed over to corporations. And corporations are not something ordinary citizens have much, if any, influence on. So to me that’s where pressure has to be applied if things are going to turn around.
Of course, I completely agree on a philosophical level, but, on a practical level, I take all of that “self-governing” that we do to mean we don’t need government beyond that small-scale self-governing. We don’t need state or federal level government, for example. (Well, we need them *now* because we’ve had them for so long. But we don’t, as human beings, need them. We could have managed just fine without them and we might, hopefully, manage fine without them in the future.)
Plus, I’ll point out that while I think a world without national, state, or even county government would work just fine, I don’t think it would work trouble-free. There would be problems. Plenty of them. Plenty of serious problems, in fact. The question, though, is would there be more problems than we have now? I don’t see how. And if adding levels of government (which even if it’s democratic is coercive, as the so-called “majority” lords over the so-called “minority”, although it more often works out that a small voting block of something like 30% lords over the other fractured 70%) doesn’t make things better, then you’re adding coercive elements — or even just potentially coercive elements — for no practical benefit.
Well, no practical benefit except to the elites who run such a system.
The corporations can only do what they do with the help of the government. They’re all in this together. Our present situation hasn’t happened accidentally or because the corporation side of things has strong-armed the government. Each side works to help the other. It can’t be reformed to be made better. Systemic factors make this outcome inevitable. It’s the nature of large-scale governance.
“on a practical level, I take all of that “self-governing” that we do to mean we don’t need government beyond that small-scale self-governing.” – Yup, I agree.
I’m not sure what “they’re all in this together” entails. I don’t think everyone in government is completely in the pocket of corporations. And not everything people in government do is because they’ve been strong-armed by corporations or corrupted in some other way. The largeness of government has other negative consequences that don’t have anything to do with corporations. My main point there was that the government is us in a way that corporations are not us. Granted that the larger the government is, the more out of the control of ordinary people it seems to be, but I still think it’s possible to have an impact. But one way in which the corporate mind-set effects even local elections is that people only get all fired up about the “big” races–which to me has a lot to do with all the money wrapped up in those races by corporate interests. We had a dreadful turn-out here in the primary, and there were some pretty clear choices to make.
But, my main point wasn’t really about any of the above, but about a way of seeing the world which I think most people in the US share and which leads to swinging back and forth between believing–hey, it’s OK if the government spies on us, as long as we’re safe, to worshipping hyper-individualism as heroic.
Yeah, we’re on the same page with most of that, actually. 🙂
Especially that last bit. That pendulum swing is a doozy!
My personal experience of a rural community growing up was quite different than Will’s. I grew up on the west coast of Florida when it was still primarily farm and ranch land. My experience was that there was a lot of hostility toward anyone who didn’t fit the religious, racial, or gender norms–ranging from name-calling to life-threatening violence.
I also know that the Middle Ages in Europe (in which most people were living in rural rather than urban settings) were quite violent. One history I read said that the leading cause of death during this time was violence.
My best community experiences have been with very diverse groups who are usually living in urban areas or come from urban areas (though I realize urban areas also have high rates of violence).
This all just makes me wonder about what all the various factors are that go into community make-up and the effects those factors have. Like why was Will’s experience so different from mine?
I’m not sure I can tell you. But I will say that my community wasn’t devoid of diversity. Or hostility. Or hostility that came from intolerance to diversity.
It wasn’t Mayberry.
However, it wasn’t particularly violent, either. And the trend was toward greater diversity and less hostility, and even though plenty of people didn’t like that, the general mood was that the “progressive” trend was a good thing. No county, state, or federal government had to tell any of them that. And, in many cases — probably most cases — it was their religious beliefs that lead them to have more open minds. And perhaps even their patriotic sentiments. (Keep in mind, many people who lived in my community were only second or third generation Americans. My maternal grandfather was a second generation American, in fact.)
Past governments are as much to blame for present prejudices as anything else. And, yes, sometimes a present government can make up for those past government errors with new progressive government programs, and such programs are important when they are well conceived and thoughtfully implemented. But if the goal isn’t ultimately for government to eventually back away and let ordinary folk figure out how they’re going to get along, then one is bound for an endless cycle of large-scale government creating a problem, blaming the “selfishness” and “stupidity” of regular folk for it, then riding in on a white horse to “fix” it. Poor African-American communities are quite familiar with this cycle. US government on all levels has done much more to stir up racism and racial oppression than to relieve it, and yet “protecting minorities” is often touted as a critical justification for the existence of large-scale governments.
It’s as you say… left to their own devices, human beings form small groups and come up with ways for the groups to be governed. That’s our true nature, rather than being “rugged individualists”. But that kind of governing doesn’t scale. If the group gets too big, coercion and corruption can’t be avoided. The sense of “government” on the tribal level just can’t be generalized to any “higher” level. We can’t say, “Well, by our nature we form tribal governance, so governance on all scales is part of our nature.” It just doesn’t work that way.
Likewise, we can’t talk about a corporation or even a large business in the same manner we talk about a mom-and-pop store in a small town. After a certain scale of business, the very term “free market” loses meaning. And yet attacking monopolies is often seen as the same as attacking some family-owned local business. Folks think certain things scale when they really don’t.
But this is mostly just me rambling again rather than responding to specific points, so… I’ll shut up now. 🙂
Oh… and something else I wanted to say…
Just like I think we need nomadic people and rural people around to remind us about certain aspects of human nature, I do think we need city-folk, too. Especially for the lessons of diversity you talked about.
Again, as I mentioned in the podcast, it’s monoculture we really want to prevent if we can.
(As for city governments… well, they can be whatever they like, so long as I don’t have to live in one, or live according to the rules of one. 🙂 I’m content to learn the progressive lessons of city life AND nomadic life from a distance. Agri-culture is where I feel most at home.)
Ah well it sounded like you were saying there was something inherent to rural culture that led people living in rural culture (in general) to–leave their doors open, help others out in the community, welcome strangers–and that rural culture in the United States is a “a pretty peaceful place.” And I was questioning that as a generalization–that was not my experience growing up among farmers and cowboys. So I’m not generalizing either to say that my experience is what rural living is really like. I just don’t think there’s something about rural culture which automatically leads to peaceful, helpful, stranger-welcoming people, and I’d be interested in finding out what the differences were that created your experience in contrast to mine.
Yeah, I’d be interested, too.
I wasn’t really saying there’s something inherent in rural living that makes people good or peaceful or whatever. I was saying that a significant number of people — all the people I knew, really — take the fairly “lawless” circumstance of living in the countryside and respond to it by being trusting and neighborly, and, more to the point, this behavior on their parts contradicts the assertion one often hears from people these days that people can’t be trusting and neighborly in a world without the looming presence of “the law”.
Getting back for a second to where this all jumped off from–the question of how violent the American West was. This is a quotation from a study by Randolph Roth (2010) on Homicide Rates in the West: “Scholars have established that it was not as violent as most movies and novels would suggest. Murder was not a daily, weekly, or even monthly occurrence in most small towns or farming, ranching, or mining communities. Still, homicide rates in the West were extraordinarily high by today’s standards and by the standards of the rest of the United States and the Western world in the nineteenth century, except for parts of the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
I remembered that Rick Santorum made the point in April of this year that the West was not really that violent because there was no gun regulation so everyone carried a gun around. The Washington Post carried a “fact-checker” article that said that Santorum was wrong in that there actually was pretty strict gun regulation in frontier towns. People were generally not allowed to wear guns within town limits.
“When Dodge City residents first formed their municipal government, one of the very first laws enacted was a ban on concealed carry. The ban was soon after expanded to open carry, too. The Hollywood image of the gunslinger marching through town with two Colts on his hips is just that — a Hollywood image, created for its dramatic effect.” (Adam Winkler, “Gunfight, The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms”)
That same article contrasts the cattle towns where gun bans were in effect and which had relatively low homicde rates with the homicide rates in mining towns like Bodie California which had murder rates “three times higher than Miami in 1980.”
A study of cattle towns by Robert Dykstra gives the following homicide rates/100,000 for a period from about 1860-1890:
Dodge City: 50
Bodie Califronia: 116
Leadville, Colorado (mining): 105
Henderson County, Illinois (farming): 4.3
Boston, MA: 5.8
Philadelphia, PA: 3.2
Yep, that all sounds about right.