Cossacks again

Last updated on: August 13, 2007 at 9:20 pm by Fred Clark

Cossacks again 2007-08-13T21:20:14-04:00 Fred Clark

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“Man is born free,” Rousseau said, “but everywhere he is in chains.”

I’m down with that. Free good; chains bad. Yep.

Stands to reason, then, that freer is better. So any boundaries to freedom are worse, right?

Well, not quite.

Boundless freedom cannot be contained. Or sustained. In practice, it works about as well as the skinless balloon. Try to unleash freedom by taking away the rule of law and freedom will not survive. As attractive as the promised anarchist utopia might be, in reality anarchy is, at best, a fleeting transitional period during which the strong assert their rule over the weak. Anarchy, in other words, is not the final blossoming of freedom, but rather the first step towards authoritarianism. That is why I am not an anarchist (or, for that matter, a pacifist ).

I’m not saying anything new here, of course. This is one of the basic dynamics of liberal democracy and liberal economies — figuring out how to maximize freedom without allowing it to spiral into anarchy and thus cease to be. Within that tradition of liberal democracy and liberal economy there’s a broad array of opinion as to how best to strike that balance, and how best to ensure that there are checks and balances and accountability limiting the power of those entrusted with creating and enforcing whatever rules we decide are necessary. There’s plenty of disagreement along that spectrum, but once you get past the hyper-heated hyperbole — e.g., a libertarian troll equating Democratic economic policy with “Maoism” when that policy is well to the right of the Thatcher administration — those disagreements clearly are along that spectrum. They are, in other words, diferrences of degree, not of kind.

What struck me listening to Steven Eke’s BBC report on the Cossacks was that their perspective is not a part of this spectrum. Here was a glimpse of a different world — one in which the idea of maximizing freedom was explicitly rejected: “Democracy doesn’t suit us. We need a firm hand.” Here was a difference in kind, rather than of degree.

It’s worth noting, however, that Eke did not interview any Cossack women for his report. Listening to Eke’s description of Cossack family life —

Cossack family values are simple, rigid, and to a Western eye, seem to come from another era. The men build the home and provide an income; the women cook, clean and give birth to children.

— I couldn’t help but wonder what the women had to say about their role in this hierarchy. My first thought was that they couldn’t possibly be as happy about the status quo as Viktor Vasilyevich was. But then I thought of our friends the Prairie Muffins, who share this rigid, hierarchical approach to gender roles. What Eke writes of the Cossacks is just as true for the Prairie Muffins: “to a Western eye, [they] seem to come from another era.”

In comments to the previous post, Raka suggests I’m misreading the Muffins — that my disagreements with them are simply a matter of degree, not of kind. Our views, Raka says, just fall along different points of that spectrum of freedom, and so this difference is the same as, say, the difference between me and an overheated, hyperbolic libertarian.

That’s possible — others may be better acquainted with the Muffins and their outlook than I am. But I would go back to the comment that originally drew my attention to the Prairie Muffins:

“I would remove women’s suffrage, and I might even consider making voting rights tied to property ownership.”

That may stop short of “We need a tsar,” but it seems headed in a similar direction. However else we might characterize the impulse at work there, I don’t think it can be described as a desire to maximize freedom.

(Mostly unrelated P.S.: I kept typing “cassock” for “Cossack,” so I was pleased to see that Webster’s suggests the words might be related, with the former taking its name from the latter due to the clerical garment’s resemblance of the people’s “usual riding coat.”)

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