In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

Tag: human-rights

  • Successful society of atheists or mostly areligious people?

    Cliff Arroyo informs us:

    I usually describe myself as incapable of religious faith (that part of my brain/mind/soul/whatever is just plain missing). But I do have an attraction to a lot of religious imagery and/or practice.

    I also respect religion and religious belief and it’s clear that human societies function best when some religion is present for the majority. It’s easy for the religious authorities or dogma to become too powerful which is awful but in the other direction there’s no record of any successful society of athiests or mostly areligious people.

    I see no record of any set of cultural templates succeeding indefinitely. As far as any successful society of atheists or mostly areligious people, such a society (if it even exists) is something fairly new under the sun. Atheist literature, for all practical purposes, only goes back a couple of centuries or so. I’ve always wondered what explains this. I don’t think it’s a matter of atheism being a recent invention. I used to think it was simply a reflection of how persecuted, and therefore deeply closeted, atheists were prior to the Enlightenment, combined with the destruction of whatever writings might have existed in spite of that. This doesn’t quite fit, as we know a fair amount about other heresies such as albigensians, etc. I suspect that it may be that people living in a pre-scientific time and place are as incapable of contemplating non-divine explanations of phenomena as Cliff Arroyo is of religious faith. If that is the case (or if the recent arrival of atheism in the marketplace of ideas is due more to persecution) then atheism as a cultural norm is very young compared to rival systems, and it would be premature to dismiss it as patently non-viable. At any rate, secularity’s place in the present-day marketplace of ideas, including ideas about how to “run a society,” is one in which the other side has had a millenia-long head start.

    I have done a little informal public opinion research on the whole question of whether civic religiosity is a prerequisite for civilization. One of the items in my questionnaire was:

    Without widespread belief in the truth of some religion, life would be very unsafe.

    Of course the pattern of responses to this survey item demonstrates a heavy bias indicating the sorts of people with whom I tend to be in contact. The correlation between answers to this item and answers to others raises some questions. If some kind of Fear of God is one of the major strategies for dissuading some types of conduct that are not conducive to civilization, what sorts of baggage might that bring with it? Is there truly no way out of this trap, which has deeply authoritarian implications?

  • Exploring, as always, possible end-runs around market omniscience

    Maybe “letting go and letting the Invisible Hand” is more or less guaranteed to result in an allocation that lies at rather than within the production possibility frontier (PPF), but maybe no point on the present PPF represents the best of all possible worlds. Ideally, the road to there will involve some non-market activity on someone’s part. It’s hard to imagine the best of all currently possible worlds not being on the PPF, but that leaves open certain other questions: Does the pursuit of a better-than-currently-possible world necessarily involve pushing outward the envelope that is the PPF, or are there other avenues? I’ll admit that growth as a prerequisite for everything that is good (human rights, poverty alleviation, a smarter humanity, etc.) is a doctrine I find particularly depressing. It almost implies that to be poor is to be part of the problem, or at least precludes the poor from being part of the solution. Contrast this with sustainability principles, steady-state economics and the kind of thinking around “affluenza,” which actually honor the lean life rather than the mean life. This tonal contrast has played a big role in shaping my tribal and ideological allegiances, and is also why I am rooting for the affirmative in the global warming debate.

    Maybe the ability of the Invisible Hand to solve the calculation problem is definitively superlative when it comes to local optima, but discovery of non-local (but maybe preferable) attractors can be effected by shocks to the system from other-than-market forces.

  • Quotebag #85

    “If freedom means non-frustration of the exercise of one’s legitimate property rights, you can be made perfectly free by being relieved of all property, including the right to your own body and life.”—John Holbo

    “The truth is, frankly, that there is only one war left to fight; the war against our own baser nature, the war against those primitive impulses which compel us to wage war.”—voxcorvegis

    “Libertarians like to suggest great disanalogies between the coercive law-imposing competition of rising and falling states and the seemingly more peaceful and mutually beneficial competition of rising and falling business enterprises.”—Dan Kervick

    “So lorraine you pathetic freaks actually have the occasional “crisis of faith” wow now I really know that leftism is a pseudo religion. So pretty much you guys don’t even believe in your own bullshit? The problem I have with leftism is that it really is a blank canvis there is no structured dialogue all it is is a bunch of retarded miscreants attributing their own personal desires unto this blank canvis. ”—the truth

    “The fungibility of work, the reduction of demand for long-developed special skills, the impossibility of virtuosity in one’s limited job, has made work less and less a source of reliable, positive information about the increasing value of the self — because it has ceased to truly improve people. But people still desire to work at what they love, and to improve themselves. The market will sell them the feeling of this, but will not commonly supply them with food in exchange for pursuing virtuosity.”—Sister Y

  • “Freedom from arbitrary authority is a consumer good”

    So says Gary Chartier. I’m inclined to agree that it’s a consumer good, at least in the actually existing economy. If freedom is doomed always to be an economic good, then there will always be constraints on freedom. Either freedom is impossible, or freed markets are an incremental step toward actual freedom, or freed markets can actually bring the cost of freedom all the way to zero.

  • Quotebag #83

    “Just take anarcho-capitalism, perhaps tweak a few premises, change your semantics, and apparently you’re a ‘left-libertarian’!”—Shenlong

    “Death to the mainstream!”—Summerspeaker

    “Most people who blog on political or social issues, probably, fear what might turn up if the Human Resources Gestapo do a Google on them.”—Kevin Carson

    “♥ Embrace your desires, don’t discipline them.”—Summerspeaker

    “While some anarchists may contest the ideology’s association with criminals, losers, outcasts, queers, and rejects of all kinds, I passionately embrace this designation. I’ve no compunctions about declaring that my lack of status within the existing system goes light-years toward explaining my opposition to it.”—Summerspeaker