Panarchy and me
Panarchy and me
Wherein I mention things that turn out to be examples foreshadowing themselves, but badly timed, of what is said later. Yes, I guess I always write like that.
Preamble
While across the Tasman sea for two weeks and somewhat out of contact, I read two pieces dealing with a similar issue. One on moral relativism, one on applied philosophy. The issue that connects them, besides a similar focus of subject with a differing lens or filter, is the meta issue, in particularly how our methodologies cope with the gaze from above which can see all the lenses used, while not look through a one of them. And what to do about that.
Daniel Callcut’s “Bernard Williams, Moral Relativism and the Culture Wars” Aeon.co 21 Oct. 2023. https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-williams-moral-relativism-and-the-culture-wars
Polly Mitchell, Alan Cribb, & Vikki Entwistle ‘Truth and Consequences.’”New Work in Philosophy (blog), October 18, 2023. https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/polly-mitchell-kings-college-london
This is a two parter, I’ll deal more directly with the two pieces later about the meta. Here I offer some background, but you can jump to just the recipe below. (Part two is A panarchy of relativism and the meta of me and you)
But for now, just because I may say “applied philosophy = moral philosophy” it does not mean that whales are fishes.
Panarchy and me
In 1986 I attended a centenary celebration/conference of Anarchism, in Melbourne. This was perhaps a high-point of anarchist activity across various dimensions in Australia.
Some of my friends who attended were greatly amused by hearing those who seemed to use a secret password with each other.
“Harry Who”, one would say.
“Harry who!”, my friend asked.
“ ‘Who’ is the name of god.”
Eventually we learned they were fans of Australian Artist & Anarchist Harry Hooton.
I remember complaints about the consumeristic attitudes of some attendees who did not work in with the expectations held at the food stall. This would have included a uselessly messy me but I don’t think I ate anything there. Phew.
I was 21 and had not yet learned to not hang around to the very end of things. Head off when you get tired and before your judgement suffers.
What I most remember about the conference was one speaker, one morning, who would have been about my age (60 or so) as I now write. I can not remember his name. This pains me now.
When I spoke about their talk to my friend, who now stands as a unionist in Victorian elections, [and who is sometimes supported on campaign by the children who are best friends of his own best childhood friend’s children, he who now reservedly banks… anyway] when I mentioned the title of the talk, my friend laughed and did a little anxious dance to perform what they had heard me say.
Panicky anarchism.
When I had said a panarchy of anarchists... and other peeps.
If only all such punningly produced misunderstandings can be so easily fixed.
“No,” I said, “‘P’ ‘A’ ‘N’ ‘A’ ‘R’ ‘C’ ‘H’ ‘Y’.”
“PAN ARCHY?”
So after admiring the dance, I expounded the questions raised by the speaker having clarified this misunderstanding.
Sometimes I use words and I am not understood, sometimes I have not even made them up.
Reading Ursula le Guin’s novel The Disposssed.
This is the type of anarchism I had in my head when attending the celebration. At least in large measure.
I read a paperback copy in 1983 that had been left behind in the “career’s room” at my high school. It was perhaps the fourth novel I had read of hers.
Three years later at an anarchist conference, in a Melbourne still mostly informed by stories which would late feature in the movie Romper-Stomper, while not an outlyer, I became aware of other anarchisms, if not old men, like myself now, given to ruminating about what world to give their grandchildren.
At a certain age, all children look like grandchildren.
They are all your grandchildren.
Panarchy: just the recipe please
Anyway, now most of the context and the foreshadowing about word use is out of the way, what did the speaker on Panarchy say?
If there is no state, and no state to capture or reform, and there is an anarchist society, even though no two agree on what that is, because individuals. Then:
what is to stop some bunch of peeps going off and inventing fascism all by themselves wandering around like a bunch of biker wolf cub viking lads…
valorising that behaviour by being the legends in their own lunchtimes
also, why should they be stopped if anarchism is truly in place and that is what one bunch of peeps what to do?
I won’t go into all the counter-arguments here, not that they are not productive, but because they are often conservative with a small “c” for maintenance and stability. Ursula le Guin’s protagonist Shevek grew up in a conservative anarchist collectivist society, but without the Federation’s Starships and such, were stuck on a desert moon.
I also will not go into all the cyclic notions of the ancients greeks, where the polis cycles through untimely seasons of democracy, oligarchy, dictatorships, and fall, or the more recent ecological-like ideas of social succession in which liberty/liberal/libertarian values are just a season, or worse, a fashion that a truly ordered nature abhors.
The method
I just need to point out that this speaker made me think. And like the comment “You shouldn’t should on people” it has stayed with me a very long time. Possibly because Jerome Small did a dance when I first tried to talk about the “interesting thing” I heard that morning. If he hadn’t done the jig I might not have loaded it into my to-be-looked-at-seriously-later part of by brain. This back-burner effect certainly primed me when reading the work by anthropologist Mary Douglas nearly a decade later, about the same time I was help setting up the Resource Work Co-operative which runs the tip shop in Hobart.
Side note: While Resource Work Co-operative is technically a worker’s co-operative, as an anarchist who disputes identitarian politics, we name the activity of co-operation, and thus the organisation, after what-we-do, and do not make who-we-are based on what-we-do then the name of the organisation.
Identities are abject shit.
My preferred pronoun is a preposition.
Identity politics is some new shell game like the old ones of honour or shame. Identity is a dead end. Respect for others is more important than battling as a disruptive warrior cub seeking glory in a red name. End of side note
I do not know the speakers’ names in either case. Does their identity matter? Not really but I would like to thank them despite their identity. The do is who.
Giving thanks is even more important to me than the drive to provide exacting bibliographical references, which here still frustrates me into pain as a librarian. An unacknowledged source, is an unattributed source, this is not just disrespectful, but forestalls those grandchildren of the future from providing leads for their own work on who they live/are/do/work/world. I am letting all my grandchildren down.
A librarian worlds with books. “Books” represent the work involved in empathy, in providing for the future. Not just lessons one bible records, but resources suporting people to ask their own questions appropriate for their own time, and to again, onwards, provide a nurturing, safe, stable, environment for their own grandchildren, and so on into their future.
Maybe that’s why I like science fiction, it worlds more and better than over-ego-indulgent emo self-sabotaging protagonists in candle-burners written by racists like Dostoevsky. Great psycho-drama but bad worlding.
It would have been helpful before now, i.e. way back when, to have read about the work of Bernard Williams, but perhaps when all children begin to look like grandchildren, the time is now (and this is a goodly while after policeman look about 12 years old).
Wrestling with relativism : Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right by Daniel Callcut
While reading that essay spurred this memory post, I’ll deal with it more directly later, this post is to provide the context for my readings of Mary Douglas in my late 20s.
Post-amble
When the Anarchist conference speaker raised the question of Panarchy, I do not know if he was actively promoting it as anything other than a thought experiment. I remember someone in the room went off on a predictable reaction that he was (in a compulsive rejection-of-what-someone-didn’t-actually-say syndrome) but if he was, isn’t that what we already have, or have had? And must deal with?
Isn’t that the story of Europe before the Roman Empire? Of Ireland before the Vikings and the English? Isn’t that the story of the Vikings? Isn’t the state and its empires born of Panarchy? Don’t Nazis glorify the wandering of nations because it is exactly that mash of slaving and legend? Where nothing is known except the deed?
Don’t wandering traders or warrior bands or shamanic brigands exemplify the original agitators? Isn’t the state in both their successor kingdoms and in imperial collapse a response to this mess?
Anarchists want order without rulers. In anarchism rule is self-organizing and not imposed by force, or otherwise. Panarchy offers none of that. Not even as a hope. What world-building is that? Is that good worlding?
Aren’t bikie or woke biker gangs simply badly informed formations of young ADHD sensate men that spur and police into origin what we call the state, in that glorious process we are want to call Order, but don’t tread on sovereign me.
If panarchy describes where we have come from, where did hope spring from? I know it’s eternal but where does it come from? Anarchism is all about that hope.
Do we not have already a Panarchy?
At the very least Panarchy exists, if not in any one place, at any one time, but across all times and places. It’s a blur of history and peeps who are legends in their own lunchtimes.
In a cycle that returns us to all stages, through all phases, again and again, in rhyme and rhythm, actively different enough to confuse us, blind us, even as we know the search for stability (progress/betterment/tradition/maintenance/preparation for winter) leads to change and revolution? Is that not panarchy?
<insert anxiously little dance here>
Part two is A panarchy of relativism and the meta of me and you