No
one likes doing homework, but the non-compulsory alternatives are autonomous,
non-alienated illiterates
Soon after al-Bab, a rural town just north of Aleppo,
was liberated from the Assad regime in the summer, citizens and off-duty Syrian
rebels took to the streets and started cleaning up. They swept the sidewalks in
the absence of any municipal sanitation, picking up chunks of concrete rubble
left over from a punishing artillery assault that had ended just days earlier.
For four decades, anything spontaneous required permission from the regime.
This was an assertion of individual autonomy against a totalitarian
state—destructive creation as its noblest.
The scene, which I witnessed on a trip to Syria in
August, would have put a smile on James Scott's face. In "Two Cheers for
Anarchism," his intriguing but occasionally silly book, Mr. Scott doesn't
pretend to abide by a utopian antigovernment philosophy or to renew the
prescriptions of 19th-century Russian anarchists who wanted to overthrow the
czarist state. Rather, he argues for a return to "mutuality" and
organic human cooperativeness. The bulk of his book is thus dedicated to
criticizing the niggling little tyrannies of everyday life in free-market
democracies, from superstores that have replaced more humane mom-and-pop
enterprises to the attempts of agribusiness to impose factory-like
standardization on nature itself. As if to account for the bagginess of such a
project, Mr. Scott divides his book into a series of essay fragments loosely
bound together by themes rather than a linear thesis.
As the author sees it, "politics, conflict, and
debate, and the perpetual uncertainty and learning they entail" are in
danger of being supplanted by the brute determinism of social sciences that
reduce everything and everyone to statistics. He defines his case negatively,
filtering all the shortcomings of the best- and worst-laid plans of CEOs and
town councils through what he calls the "anarchist squint." The
squint works best when it is trained on especially absurd instances of
rule-making, which in turn prompt elegant rebellions. Thus Parisian taxi
drivers not long ago resorted to an inventive "work-to-rule" tactic after
being confronted with new regulations. They brought traffic—long premised on a
studied disregard for by-the-book driving—to a standstill by blindly following
all the rules.
Mr. Scott has a lot fun with the sort of
"standardized" metrics that measure successfulness rather than actual
success. He hates academic indexes that confer prestige based on the number of
mentions a scholar's work receives in peer-reviewed journals. These take no
account of whether the mentions are positive or negative, or if the work in
question is brilliant or ridiculous. Yet tenure in the academy is often decided
by such "objective" criteria. Or consider the serially revised SAT,
which determines a student's educational future yet gauges very little because
the basic formula was long ago "gamed" by Stanley Kaplan, who founded
the eponymous test-prep program.
A running critique of quantitative
analysis would have been more persuasive, however, if Nate Silver's algorithm,
used to predict presidential elections, had been a flop. Indeed, it is when Mr.
Scott abandons his squint in favor of wide-eyed nostalgia for a pre-standardized
age that his critique veers off course. Consider his comment on coercive
education in general: "The fact that attendance is not a choice, not an
autonomous act, means that it starts out fundamentally on the wrong foot as a
compulsory institution, with all the alienation that this duress implies."
Well, sure, no one likes doing homework, but the alternatives are autonomous
and non-alienated illiterates.
Or take Mr. Scott's celebration of
children's playgrounds built exclusively by children, wielding their own
hammers and nails, as metaphors for the emancipatory effects of joint human
endeavor. The archetypal playground was built at the Emdrup housing cooperative
in Copenhagen in 1943, when kids in Europe had bigger things to worry about
than poking their own eyes out. Apparently these "adventure
playgrounds" have since been replicated in Sweden, Switzerland and the
United States with minimal adverse incident and minimal adult supervision. All
well and good, but I still prefer Leviathan to junior with a buzz saw.
If "Two Cheers for Anarchism"
has a protagonist, it is the petty bourgeoisie, that enormous class of property
holders loathed by the Marxist left for the simple fact that their modest
ambitions—to get a bit of land and run their own small businesses—are what the
proletariat really aspired to instead of the overthrow of capitalism. Mr. Scott
is a celebrated historian of peasant uprisings, and it is no surprise that his
finest chapter is a study of the relative virtues of the local shopkeeper or small-time
inventor over Wal-Mart or Big Pharma R&D departments. "While it is true that the petty
bourgeoisie cannot send a man to the moon, build an airplane, drill for oil in
deep water, run a hospital, or manufacture and market a major drug or mobile
phone," he writes, "the capacity of huge firms to do such things
rests substantially on their ability to combine thousands of smaller inventions
and processes that they themselves did not and perhaps cannot create." Mr.
Scott's touchstones are more Tocqueville and Jefferson than Bakunin or
Kropotkin. He advocates an anarchism that is more cultural than political. (Nor
is he a libertarian, disavowing the philosophy in his introduction for its
inherent economic inequality.)
At times Mr. Scott sounds more dire and
pessimistic than he needs to, especially when his thesis about the inanities of
postindustrial society has run away with him. Still, several times throughout
the course of his narrative, I found myself mustering a low-decibel third cheer
for anarchism, such as in a section titled "Pathologies of the
Institutional Life," in which Mr. Scott examines the nature of modern
hierarchical and authoritarian organizations, ranging from the family to the
school to the workplace. He asks: "Is it reasonable to expect someone
whose waking life is almost completely lived in subservience and who has
acquired the habits of survival and self-preservation in such settings to
suddenly become, in a town meeting, a courageous, independent-thinking,
risk-taking model of individual sovereignty?"
Yes, in fact, it is reasonable to expect
that. The will to rebel is at least as strong as the will to obey. Just ask the Syrians of
al-Bab.
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