I offer these examples not to show that all anarchists share
the same view of their doctrine's relationship with the
scientific method, but rather to gainsay what I suppose is
an assumption held in common by many who read this. None of
the standard prevailing caricatures about anarchists are any
more accurate in characterizing them than are similarly
uninformed Reader's Digest versions of other
philosophical persuasions. There are, to be sure, anomalous
and unrepresentative nutcases and genuine criminals
circulating among the ranks of all the various "-isms," yet
special derision is reserved for anarchists.
But again, why? Market anarchists simply believe that
relationships between people ought to be consensual and
based upon a foundation of mutual respect, that a true free
market means that no person or group has special privileges
fashioned by coercion and violence. Details vary among
anarchists ‒ and are as fiercely and thoughtfully debated as
in other circles ‒ but all harbor a conscientious objection
(if I may borrow the phrase) to the state's actual, physical
domination and displacement of voluntary society.
The state is merely an idea, one way of thinking about given
social questions, and one that would appear to be as true
and as unavoidable today as, for instance, the geocentric
model in astronomy. But while history has vindicated the
likes of Copernicus and Galileo with respect to their
judgments of that model, we nevertheless think it impossible
that anarchists could be correct in their criticisms of the
current system.
The anarchists I know, quite contrary to the conventional
wisdom, do not oppose the state out of some erratic,
unformed reflex reaction against authority. Indeed, the
natural instinct in favor of freedom that I believe humans
possess has been meticulously trained out of us from the
time we enter the total state's K-12 propaganda mills.
Anarchism is for its advocates, in the words of Edward Abbey,
"not a romantic fable but [a] hard-headed realization," an
embrace of empirical reality rather than an avoidance of it.
The protesters of the Occupy movement are yearning for an
alternative; anarchism is the scientific one, the
substantive argument against politics and economics based on
violence and oppression. The death of the state is no
scarier or more dangerous than the death of the idea that
the earth is flat.
|