Category Archives: Politics

The Middle Way to Anarchy

Recently I’ve been writing educational materials on anarchism, which has made me think again about this raft of ideological approaches. It is possible to make all kinds of claims for anarchism, depending on how one defines or understands it: for example, either that it is aSpread anarchy threat to a peaceful society, or the reverse that it is the most peaceful ideology in existence; that it is the only true road to human freedom, or that it is the ultimate threat to freedom. It also seems to me that defined in one way, everyone is an anarchist, and defined another way, nobody is. If you think of anarchism as a gradual intention to minimise unnecessary interference by the state in people’s lives, with no government merely as an remote ultimate goal, then virtually everyone is an anarchist. If on the other hand you think of anarchism as a revolutionary wish to immediately destroy all coercive sources of order, then really nobody is an anarchist, least of all those who call themselves anarchists when their wishes are more closely examined.

All this sounds familiar to me from my philosophical explorations of the function of metaphysical ideas, like those of God, freewill, determinism, materialism etc. Anarchism can be seen as just another of those remote idealisations that have no genuine connection with people’s experience. Our experience is actually of societies in which there are varying degrees of coercion going on, not of a society with final and complete freedom, absolute equality, and no more government. In the mixed up context in which we live, the only function of such idealisations is to support dogmatic actions that are ill-adapted to their environment.

This can be seen, not only from the remote and idealised nature of the conception of anarchy itself, but from its degree of abstracted adaptability. Like God, anarchy can be all things to all people. Every other ideology has its own version of anarchy: there are anarcho-capitalists at the ultra-extreme end of libertarianism, tribal anarchists who are ultra-conservative, anarcho-syndicalists and mutualists who take socialism as their departure point, anarcho-ecologists, and anarcho-communists who offer a slightly more coherent account of communism (than Marx) without the determinism. For all of these ideologies, the appeal to ultimate anarchy is little more than the source of an extra dogmatic edge to their libertarianism, conservatism, socialism or whatever. I suppose out of all the range of anarchisms, it is mutualism that earns my respect most, because it is largely concerned with directly constructing communities or institutions that actually help people to support each other without an appeal to authority, such as credit unions or workers’ co-operatives.

At the same time, again like God, I don’t think that the idea of anarchy is meaningless. It is symbolically important precisely because, for some people at some times, it does stand for or evoke important experiences. It seems to stand symbolically for integration, particularly as understood socially and politically. The final state of society that so inspires anarchists is one in which there is no conflict, and therefore no reason for intervention by authorities. However, to bring about a lessening of conflict, as I have argued a good deal elsewhere, it is integration that is required, with psychological integration meshing with social integration. Our ability to avoid conflict with others depends on our ability to avoid conflicts within ourselves.

So here is perhaps the biggest naivete in Anarchism: it is often described as “having an optimistic view of human nature”, such that, when the imposition of authority from outside is removed, human beings will “naturally” start to behave in a peaceful and co-operative way. This is not naïve because it’s impossible: I don’t think it is impossible, but there’s nothing “natural” about it. For people to co-operate (i.e. be integrated) in such a way, they need to be integrated in themselves, and their integration is a matter of degree, rather than a matter of being “naturally” good or bad. So the state of anarchy could only be achieved, as a matter of degree, by a similar degree of integration amongst all the individuals in the world. We could only work towards achieving it by the practice of the Middle Way. So the way to work towards an ideal state of anarchy involves avoiding metaphysical beliefs such as ones about human nature being “naturally” rational or “naturally” corrupt, or any other such absolutist dogmas.

So, along with pretty much everyone else, I’m an anarchist in a sense. I don’t expect that we will ever reach a state where stable anarchy without the need for government will occur, but I’m happy for that idea to have archetypal importance so long as people don’t start believing in it and using it as the basis of dogmatic judgements. That’s when the harm starts creeping in, whether its from the Angry Brigade or from the free-market egoism of Ayn Rand. I think there is a possible road to such a state of virtuous anarchy through gradual integration, just as there is to enlightenment or God or any other such idealisation. And everyone could be an anarchist in this sense without it making much difference to our political judgements, as political judgements are about what we do, now, in experience, not about such remote ideals.

 

This is a repost of a blog I posted on middlewayphilosophy.wordpress.com in July 2013. The picture is of unknown origin, but seems to have been used by various anarchist blogs that probably have no respect for copyright law! If it violates any copyright, please get in touch and I’ll remove it.

The limitations of secularism

The group of people who first agreed to set up the Middle Way Society in 2013 came in contact with each other in the context of ‘Secular Buddhism’. But one of my personal motives in wanting to create a society distinct from Secular Buddhism was considerable dissatisfaction with that label. The best things I found in the Secular Buddhist movement seemed to me neither distinctively Buddhist nor distinctively secular; and the worst were both, somehow managing to combine two types of dogma in unholy alliance. The label was both unhelpfully ambiguous and incoherent, and instead I wanted to put forward a clear and positive account of the best of the values that I found under it, in the form of the Middle Way. Middle Way Philosophy is not Buddhist because, however much it may owe to the Buddhist tradition (which is probably less than instant pigeon-holers assume), it does not accept any authority from it and is far from culturally defined by it (see recent video). But the question of in what ways it is not secularist is an even more vexed one. What does secularism mean? For some people (such as Stephen Batchelor) it seems to mean something similar to the Middle Way, whilst for others it evokes figures like Richard Dawkins and the metaphysical certainties of scientism.Secularism march Andrew West CCSA4-0

My thinking on this point has been stimulated recently by reading this article about the efforts of the French education minister to overhaul the principle of secularism in French schools. The French principle of laicité, often translated as ‘secularism’, means the separation of church and state, so that the state is neutral and religion a matter for the individual. The French minister is concerned that the principle is being misinterpreted by Muslim students as an anti-religious attack on them and their beliefs, and that this is contributing to Muslim radicalisation amongst French young people. French secularism is innocent of contributing to such reactions, the narrative goes, because it is actually there to protect religious minorities and has just been misunderstood. However, I think there are two kinds of problems with this narrative: one concerns the meaning of ‘secularism’, and the other the idea of state neutrality.

The philosopher Charles Taylor helpfully distinguishes three senses of the term ‘secularity’. Secularity 1 is the separation of church and state, as constitutionally required in both France and the US since the eighteenth century. Secularity 2 “consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church” (A Secular Age, p. 2). In this second sense the UK is a much more secular society than the US. Secularity 3 is a social transition “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others”.

Secularism, then, could probably be similarly divided, as the belief in the value of each of these respective types of secularity. The French minister’s laicité is Secularism 1. The promotion of atheism and anti-religious sentiment, as in the work of Richard Dawkins, is Secularism 2, which probably in most cases also encompasses Secularism 1. Secularism 3, however, seems to simply mean support for an open society where metaphysical beliefs are not imposed by the group – in that third sense, then, I’d be happy to count myself a secularist (along with most people, including most religionists, in Western society). But the dogmas that threaten open societies are by no means limited to religious ones, making ‘secularism’ possibly a misnomer for this third form. The USSR and other Communist regimes, for example, were probably not secularist in this third sense, given that there were no alternative possibilities, even though they were in the first and second.

The problem encountered by the French minister of education is the association of Secularism 1 with Secularism 2. She argues that keeping religious symbols such as the hijab out of French schools or other public places is not anti-Muslim. However, to me it doesn’t seem so surprising that people often have trouble telling the difference between Secularism 1 and Secularism 2. In practice they may look very similar.

The problem here lies in people’s assumptions about boundaries and about the possibility of neutrality. In official and legal terms the state is neutral, but the state is in practice represented by people, and people are not – indeed cannot – be neutral. Nor can the Secularism 1 of the Republic as a whole necessarily dictate the motives of the flesh-and-blood people who enforce the rules, which may well stray a long way into Secularism 2. The civil servant or other public employee is obliged to try to force neutrality onto herself by repressing her individual beliefs, when these are contrary to the role she has undertaken, and these are very likely to manifest themselves in terms of the body language, tone and whole approach of the ‘neutral’ person. Rather than unsuccessfully attempting to be neutral, the state should be much more selective in its fights and firm in maintaining values that will benefit all, and these may also be easier for the state employee to fully support: but the principle of division of church and state may interfere with that needful discrimination.

In the UK, of course, we also have plenty of problems with this type of false neutrality, associated as it is with bureaucratic managerialism, where paperwork replaces trust, and conceptual ideas of desirable goals are often substituted for informative experiences about how far they are actually occurring. But in matters of religion in the UK, the population has largely been able to persist in its steady drift away from the Church without usually needing to pretend neutrality in religious allegiances. There are up-sides to having an established church, when it is so broad and tolerant. So, broadly I think we have an incrementality about religious commitment that, although riddled with inconsistencies and political hypocrisy, has allowed Secularism 3 to emerge without as much conflict as is found either in France or the US.

So, the trouble with secularism in general could be summarised thus. The separation of Church and State (Secularism 1) is difficult to achieve in practice without anti-religious secularism (Secularism 2). Anti-religious secularism creates conflict, not just in society, but also in the individual, who may repress the religious dimension of their experience and fail to integrate the archetypes that are still powerful even in the strongest atheist. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some degree of separation between Church and State, particularly so as to try to avoid discrimination against religious minorities: but the absolute neutrality of the state is a fiction. Secularism in the sense of the open society (Secularism 3) is desirable and achievable, but hardly controversial in the West. To call oneself a secularist in the third sense when it is so strongly associated with the first and second senses doesn’t seem to be useful.

Instead, of course, I think the Middle Way is the answer here. Rather than committing itself to an unattainable neutrality, I think the state should recognise and promote the importance of Secularism 3 as the key to a harmonious and progressive multicultural society. Except that there’s really no need to call it secularism and thus antagonise the religious – it’s a Middle Way approach, and can be associated with agnosticism rather than atheism. A Middle Way approach requires us to recognise where we start, including the metaphysical beliefs that we may start with. At the same time, though, it is both more decisively anti-dogmatic and more even-handed than secularism usually is, in recognising that absolute beliefs are not desirable whether they are positive or negative. With students in school, one needs to recognise their beliefs fully and allow them to be expressed, but at the same time challenge them through a critical and psychological education that undermines both absolute belief and its denial. The riches of a student’s religious tradition at no point need to be denied, but their absolute interpretation of that tradition can be legitimately challenged at every point, and it is the state’s duty as educator to promote such challenges. What is the point of banning the hijab, when in some cases it may be merely a symbol with no practical implications, and yet leaving the underlying absolutist beliefs unchallenged?

The motives behind secularism are often ones that recognise the damaging effects of absolute belief, but secularism can too easily become an absolute belief itself, not only by denying claims that lie beyond human experience, but also by erecting absolute conceptual boundaries between church and state (or between public and private life). It seems to me that many secularists, if they were to look more closely at these issues, might well arrive at a Middle Way position. But it is important to keep the Middle Way separate from secularism so that it remains a basis on which people from any background can find common ground in experience.

Related pages:

Middle Way for Atheists

Religion resources indexed

Review of ‘The Moral Landscape’ by Sam Harris

 

Picture: Secularism March by Andrew West (CCSA 4.0)

The MWS Podcast 81: Amelia Womack on Ecocide and Environmental Law

We are joined today by Amelia Womack, who is a British politician and deputy leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. Following a BSc in Environmental Biology, Amelia completed an MSc in environmental technology at Imperial College London in 2013, with a thesis entitled Who’s afraid of Environmental Law? – How the law of ecocide can secure our environment for business resilience. She has been an active campaigner on this issue since then and this will be the theme of our discussion today.


MWS Podcast 81: Amelia Womack as audio only:
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Breaking down the Walls of Fortress Europe

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should write something here about the refugee crisis that has been stirring up passions in the media and social media in Britain (and I suspect in Europe and the US too) in the last few weeks. I have been struck for some time by the dogmatic features of a lot of discussion about immigration (though not all), so what I really want to do here is just point out some of the dogmas that I think need to be avoided if we are trying to apply the Middle Way to the issue. Beyond a certain point, in such a complex issue, the Middle Way doesn’t give us specific answers to the dilemmas involved. Questions like exactly how many refugees to admit, how exactly they can be accommodated, or how to avoid encouraging criminal gangs from people-trafficking operations are all more detailed questions of policy on which I’m going to try to avoid being too prescriptive. Instead, I want to reflect on the effect of frontiers on our thinking

Syrian_refugees_in_lebanonNational frontiers are political absolutisations of differences in geography, history, language, culture, religion, ideology etc that would otherwise be incremental. If I travel overland from England to Mauritania, say, I will pass through only 3 other countries (France, Spain, and Morocco), and as I go the climate and culture will gradually but imperceptibly change. By the time I reach Mauritania I will be in a poverty-stricken, Islamic, desert land where slavery is still common: a starkly different place from England. However, since national boundaries in the Sahara are extremely difficult to police, and under the Schengen agreement France and Spain share an open zone, that whole difference has become concentrated at the Straits of Gibraltar (and to a lesser extent at Calais). There migrants and refugees try to scale the fences of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Mellila, just as they try to cross the sea between Libya and Italy or between Turkey and Greece. All European fear of the Other has become concentrated on those borders, with ‘home’ extended to one side of them and the Shadow lurking on the other side. The British tabloid newspapers have exacerbated this kind of reaction by using consistently negative or dehumanising language about the ‘swarms’ (a word used even by David Cameron) on the other side of it.

Whatever judgements we make need to avoid that absolutisation. Of course, when people of very different cultures are brought together (particularly when they have to share resources), difficulties of communication, adaptation and adjustment will follow. We can’t ignore that condition, but it is an incremental condition, a matter of degree. The ‘swarms’ on the other side of the wall not only share our basic humanity, but are like Europeans in lots of other ways too. Probably to list such ways would be patronising: anyone who has heard refugees interviewed on the media will have an impression of how much refugees are often not very different from us. Indeed, many people who have been refugees in the past are now settled citizens of Britain, the US, and other such countries.

It’s striking how the British tabloid Daily Mail, particularly, moved suddenly from dehumanising refugees to sympathising with their plight, after the shift in public mood that seems to have been triggered by pictures of drowned refugee children. But to blame them for that inconsistency (rather than for their previous negativity) is fallacious: we are all moved by such pictures, for we are embodied humans, not rational automata, and if those emotions help us to address conditions we were not previously addressing, that is helpful.

Frontiers also give us a sense of protective and egoistic ownership over ‘our’ land on this side of them, and this protectiveness can extend to worries about employment, the shortage of housing, and strain on welfare systems. But if we incrementalise such concerns, rather than absolutising them, we may be able to see them in better proportion: perhaps minor inconveniences or drops in service provision for us, and a major help to refugees. Perhaps if refugees did enter Britain in the kind of numbers they have been entering Turkey (where there are 1.9 million, according to UNHCR), we would see a noticeable increase in the strain on housing and welfare (employment is perhaps a different matter, as enterprising people can create their own jobs). But why should Turkey take that strain rather than Britain? How much difference would it really make to everyday life in Britain? Even if some British people would suffer to some extent in some ways, how would that suffering compare to the suffering of the refugees?

Yes, there are all sorts of practical difficulties that stand in the way of breaking down the walls of fortress Europe. I was in a local Green Party meeting the other day that brought some of those difficulties home to me: for example, currently a town in the UK that wants to host refugees will only be funded by central government for the first year to help the local authority meet their needs. Many councils are rejecting the prospect, because they fear that their overstretched budgets will be stretched still further by responsibilities for traumatised people that go on beyond that year. One can hardly blame local council officials, who have to make it all work, from being concerned about such points.

But we also need to keep in mind the big picture that such objectors neglect: that Europe cannot forever maintain a fortress policy. Exactly the same point applies to other developed countries, such as the US and Australia. How many refugees do there have to be, and how desperate do they have to be, before such policy becomes impossible to maintain? No border is absolute, not just in philosophical terms, but in terms of practical maintenance. If climate change produces a great many more refugees, as is often predicted, how will we deal with this? You cannot shut off a large portion of the world’s conditions behind a wall and pretend it is not your business – or if you do, you are engaging in repression, and that repression has a habit of springing back in the future with unexpected and often violent effects. Other social, economic and technological forces are also making the world more integrated, not less. It has been remarked that one of the drivers of the current wave of migration is the internet, where migrants can easily find out about their dreamed-of destinations.

How we precisely address these conditions is another matter. An open-door policy might actually produce a lot less conflict and suffering in the long-term. Of course we shouldn’t neglect the possibility of social conflict that might be created by such a policy. The details of where the right balance lies can only be worked out by those responsible, with all the practical information. But for those of us on the sidelines the general best policy seems clear: we need to work on the basis of the big picture, and that also means opening our hearts – not indulging our projected archetypal fears about the shadowy people on the other side of the border.

Picture: Syrian refugees in Lebanon (public domain)