In this short essay, Classical Liberalism versus Anarchism, Mike Rappaport tries to shift the focus in a debate about anarchism vs. classical liberalism. He quotes Robert Higgs, an advocate of anarchism:
My difficulty arises not so much from a dissatisfaction with government’s being charged with protecting the citizens from force and fraud, but from a growing conviction that government (as we know it) does not, on balance, actually carry out these tasks and, worse, that it does not even try to carry them out except in a desultory and insincere way—indeed, as a ruse.
Truth be told, government as we know it never did and never will confine itself to protecting citizens from force and fraud. In fact, such government is itself the worst violator of people’s just rights to life, liberty, and property. For every murder or assault the government prevents, it commits a hundred. For every private property right it protects, it violates a thousand. Although it purports to suppress and punish fraud, the government itself is a fraud writ large—an enormous engine of plunder, abuse, and mayhem, all sanctified by its own “laws” that redefine its crimes as mere government activities—a racket protected from true justice by its own judges and its legions of hired killers and thugs.
Rappaport, a legal scholar and supporter—in a manner of speaking—of the idea that the Founding Fathers of the United States did give us a Constitution which can be the foundation of a workable and morally acceptable government, concludes:
Even though I believe actual governments regularly take harmful actions—and this includes governments in the freest and most prosperous countries—I also believe it is very likely that the absence of government would be worse. Whether I am right or wrong, however, to me that is the question.
Rappaport is right to deny the anarchist position but he’s a little off on the reason, or at least he misses the bluntest and most undeniable reason to accept the existence of government: they appear and develop and fall and disappear and then re-appear in history. They are a fact of human communal life.
To deny the roles, good and bad, which governments have played in history strikes me as one form of what Melville described as a moral insanity, a basic part of the American moral character: we’re in rebellion against a Creator who didn’t do work which was quite good enough for us. Melville said that Ralph Waldo Emerson (an ardent individualist) had some good things to say but he struck Melville as believing he could have had some good advice for the Almighty if he’d been present at the moment of Creation. Nowadays, we even have trans-humanists, who think to re-shape our race to higher standards, and computer geeks expecting the Technological singularity when the computers develop intelligence so superior they simply replace us or maybe we merge with them. Anarchists seem a bit more sane largely because their rougher edges have been worn off a bit by decades of public debate.
But anarchy, as a political un-organization, is no more sane than any other doctrine which tries to design a new human being or a new form of human community, each being in conflict with what has emerged from the complex processes of evolutionary and development processes. We can do better and we should be moving forward but the denial of some fundamental behavior which has emerged again and again, always and everywhere, is a denial of the genetic and other inherited stuff which forms, to play off an insight of E.O. Wilson, both the theorists of economics and politics and morality and also the communal relationships which they analyze or deny. This is not to be fatalistic, to accept as inevitable governments such as those Americans seem prone to form, though we might have to accept some monstrosities during the processes of evolutionary selection and development of what is selected. Think of the Bush and Obama administrations as being some sort of equivalent to the upside down creatures whose remains were found in the Burgess Shale or perhaps some horrible parasite that eats other creatures from the inside out.
The metaphysics underlying this form of moral insanity, the attempt to impose metaphysics upon the empirical realm rather than drawing metaphysics from concrete being or using this concrete realm to test our metaphysical beliefs, strikes me as strange. For years, I’ve been presenting in various ways and at various stages of development, a worldview in which empirical knowledge is structured according to Christian beliefs: a `Christian anarchist’, if such be truly possible, could only reject God’s Creation while pretending to accept God. Metaphysical principles emerge as what’s necessary to hold empirical reality together as God’s story and governments, the organizing institutions of political communities, are part of our empirical reality, not some ephemeral mistake we can simply eliminate without harming our communal beings.
We men of the modern West tend to view the world is our enemy to the extent it doesn’t behave according to one or another human scheme. Against this, I’ve tried to update a Thomistic insight, consistent with modern knowledge of the human being, including the mind which forms—so to speak—through the brain but rests upon the entire human being. To a Christian thinker of my sort, it is truly insane to try to beat the thoughts God manifested in Creation into a shape where they fit into our minds formed to human schemes which have ghostly origin. To be sane, to have a properly formed mind, indeed a proper formed human being both individual and communal, is to encapsulate some coherent understanding of God’s Creation, of the thoughts He manifested in this realm of concrete being and in all the realms of abstract being from which our universe is shaped.
We human beings seem defective in multiple ways in our individual and communal beings, but we have to work with what we are and be careful not to turn legitimate critiques, such as those directed against governments, into a pretense that we improve ourselves by trying to become something different from what we’ve been shaped to be, from what is buried in our genes and our soma and what is found in our relationships with our environments, including our social environments which are really our communal beings.
For a description of my writings which try to develop this worldview which respects both empirical knowledge and Christian revelation, download Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.