The hope of anarchy

Letters to an anarchist - Part 6

This is the sixth installment of a year-long series of letters between myself and

Elle Griffin

exploring anarchy. You can find previous exchanges here:

• Part 1 by Elle Griffin

• Part 2 by Peter Clayborne

• Part 3 by Elle Griffin

• Part 4 by Peter Clayborne

• Part 5 by Elle Griffin

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Dear Elle,

I’m glad we’re in agreement about the complexity of the human experience, which makes it both difficult and unhelpful to sort ourselves into easy binaries. The rich can be miserable; the poor happy.

There’s this lovely poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson that illustrates the paradox of inequality:

“Richard Cory”

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The hope of anarchy is that we don’t have to live like this. There is a deep social poverty that often accompanies material wealth. We know that the wealthier a person gets, the less empathetic they tend to be. The oppressor, in fastening a chain around his fellow man, secures the other end to himself. But it is not necessary to lack either bread or love in order to live well in this world.

Perfection is impossible of course (and undesirable) — there’s no utopia, no promised land, no heaven. There will always be conflict, suffering, and death. But they don’t have to be so self-imposed. We don’t have to destroy the planet with our tools; we don’t have to spend all our lives working; we don’t have to go to war.

On the other side is all the good that exists already. One might reasonably respond to the above with, “well, it’s not all that bad,” and list the beautiful things we still enjoy. And that’s also where we find hope: the best parts of our lives are anarchy already. We can expand those moments so they make up the majority of our life together.

Many retort that this is unrealistic. I think they lack imagination. Often it seems that would-be reformers end up the best defenders of the status quo, because of their insistence on what they see as realistic or pragmatic. Anarchists try to live with the hope that our dreams are not too far-fetched. That a life spent in pursuit of those dreams, even if never fully realized, is a life well-spent.

Shame and sex-offender registries

This topic deserves way more than I can devote to it right now, but in short I’m very much opposed to sex offender registries, and so are countless others whose families have had their lives ruined by them. To my knowledge, the data actually show that registration doesn’t do much to help prevent sexual offense or benefit victims.

The title of the linked article reads, “Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?” with the subtitle, “Laws purporting to protect the public may be increasing sex offender recidivism rates.” They distinguish between mandatory registration and community notification, saying that requiring convicted offenders to register may reduce recidivism, both through deterrence and increased monitoring. But that reduction is matched by an increase in recidivism for those subjected to community notification.

In plainer language: keeping law enforcement informed about sex offenders seems to help, but informing the public about who is on those registries does quite the opposite. It makes sense that if a person undergoes social death, is unable to get a job or maintain housing, is unable to reintegrate into their communities, they might at some point decide they’ve got nothing to lose.

And that’s just one article. Even Wikipedia says evidence for the effectiveness of sex offense registries is limited and mixed. More damning, though, is the effect registration has on the families of those convicted. I’ll just mention two organizations working to reform sex laws in the States: NARSOL, the National Association for Rational Sex Offense Laws, and WAR, or Women Against Registry. Their archives and testimonials are illuminating.

For me, the two most egregious things about the registries are how they criminalize children (the Juvenile Law Center reports that over 200,000 people were registered sex offenders as children), and how they create a scapegoat for society’s ills. Since the sex panic in the 1990s, sex offenders have become the lightning rod for everything we despise. This isn’t to excuse sexual violence. But it’s rare that any person, much less most people convicted under current SORN laws, really deserves the weight of our culture’s contempt. That burden, I’d argue, should fall to those architects of violence that usually end up garnered in medals and accolades. (At least the Kiss Off was a surprising break in that trend!)

I’ll end with the Women Against Registry position statement, which lists the reasons they support full abolition of the registry:

• It is completely ineffective

• It is the direct cause of deplorable and cruel collateral damage

• It is unconstitutional

• In its current form, it is largely the result of fear-mongering and a lack of knowledge about the facts surrounding this issue.

• It is fiscally irresponsible and wasteful

• We believe it to be immoral, unethical, and illegal

As a society, aren’t we better than this?

Dunbar’s number in scale

In bringing up examples of peaceful societies, my point was less about showcasing that they exist and more about saying here are some things we can implement ourselves. In other words, noticing how stark a difference child-rearing practices made between communities otherwise quite similar suggests that what makes one peaceful and another violent isn't their relative size or isolation, but the quality of their relationships.

This might seem obvious when said explicitly, but I noticed your main pushback centered around the idea of scale: that once you pass a certain point (say, groups larger than 150 people), it is no longer possible to use whatever methods were used before to keep the peace. Instead you must organize differently — ultimately, you suggested, ending up with what we have today.

But I don’t see why that has to be the case. First, I’d like to reexamine Dunbar’s number as an effective limit. An article in The Conversation outlines how new research has called into question not only the accuracy of the number itself, but whether such attempts to extrapolate from brain size in other primates to human social organization is even feasible. Using larger datasets and more modern statistical methods, they recreate Dunbar’s measurements and find no basis for his original figure of 150, as well as again hardly any basis for such calculations at all.

Dunbar’s number is popular with business managers and software developers — folks we’d expect to want a formulaic solution to social problems — but not widely accepted in the scientific community. Instead, scientists are busy debating whether primate brain size is primarily influenced by diet, sociality, or both.

Here’s the original study from the Swedish team, and here’s some interesting context from Academic Times on the subject.

Second, I don’t think we needed to organize our larger societies the way we did. I think we could have done it differently (and probably a lot better). If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have much hope for changing things in the future.

Splitting Images

You asked if my vision of an anarchist society is one where the whole world splits into groups of 150. Without the unnecessary numerical limit, I do say yes to the splitting. I imagine a great shattering, a dispersal and disintegration and coalescence, where people come together, not into nation-states, nor a one-world government, nor small isolated communes, but all of them and none of them at once: a state of overlapping, interconnected layers of organization and spheres of influence. We can combine our deeply local and regional pasts with our highly globalized present.

It’s hard to express the picture in my mind; in part because it’s not yet well-defined even for me. But your point about safety and freedom within a larger structure gets at it:

I loved the shoutout to the queer commune dream so many of us have had, but in reality I don’t think we’re any safer or freer in the US. To the extent that this country protects white capital, certainly, but especially now as Christofascism is ascendant I wouldn’t say queer folks have it easy here. More importantly, whenever experiments in free living have sprouted up, the state usually eyes them with suspicion and puts them down if they get too big or successful.

It’s true that right now the continental US is safe from invasion, but that won’t be true forever, and in any case living under a government means already living under a militarized occupying force. At certain moments the peaceful facade slips, as we’re seeing with the crackdown against student protests, echoing similar struggles at various points in our country’s past.

We’d be much safer in a world without borders, where communities were so intertwined that invasion and occupation became unthinkable. And that’s the challenge: how can we weave a social fabric that makes war unthinkable? How can we build systems of production and distribution that make exploitation and extraction unnecessary?

I think it will require us to resemble nature a bit more. There’s a sort of chaotic excess in an old-growth forest, everything bursting at the seams, and yet there’s order there, both spontaneous and intentional, where everything depends on everything else. Sure there’s consumption, but in natural systems death feeds rebirth; everything matters and nothing is wasted. I think freer human societies will look much more like forests than machines.

The desire for change

I proactively admit that this is idealist thinking — but then, I already know you’re a fan of dreaming big and not shying away from the possibilities.

Which is why I think the assertion that we’d just recreate what we have now feels out of step, or maybe I don’t understand why you believe that’s a likely outcome. If nothing changes about how we relate to each other and the land, then yes of course we’ll recreate what we have now, but the hope of anarchy is predicated on the desire for change. If folks just want to keep on like they have been, then anarchy probably isn’t for them, and that’s fine. I think enough of us do want to change that we can make it happen.

I think in this way we have the universe on our side. Not that it bends in a graceful arc towards justice (those illusions have been shattered for me), but that the universe, a wild, unpredictable thing, is full of surprises. That everything dies and is reborn as something else. That’s the hope of anarchy: that we can act as death-doulas for this world that is passing away, and with eyes wide open usher in the world to come.

Grateful to be exploring these topics with you!

Peter Clayborne

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