Wendell Berry on Homosexual Marriage

Wendell Berry's views on the issue of "homosexual marriage" displays an anarchist approach to the issue, that is a questioning of the role of the state. Homosexuals he argues, (perhaps paradoxically given the history of state involvement that has been significantly to the disadvantage of homosexuals):

... have invited the government to make a public judgement about people's sexual behaviour, which ought to be none of the government's business, so long as the behaviour of the people is not abusive of other people. Government approval of anyone's sexual behaviour is as inappropriate and as offensive to freedom as government disapproval. The government's interest in people's living arrangements should go no further than "domestic partnerships" which ought to give the same legal protections to widowed sisters or bachelor brothers or friends, or "partners" living together as married couples. Justice, and (with luck) compassion, should be the government's business. Let sacraments, such as marriage, be the business of religions and communities. ("Letter to Daniel Kemmis" in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays p.145)

Cultural meanings, Berry is suggesting should not be the business of government. This is an issue which has not yet been seriously debated. Neither those in favour of government legislation for homosexual marriage, nor the churches who wish to cling to their situation of relative legal privilege in their opposition to this initiative with respect to marriage and its meanings seem to have explicitly addressed this issue.

Anarchist history - getting away from the state in Southeast asia

James C Scott's latest work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009) is fascinating for the way it opens up the possibility of a fresh take on political theory as well as providing an analysis of the history of upland Southeast Asia.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, a self consciously “anarchist history,” examines the huge literature on state-making in a frame of mind that questions the accounts offered by the states themselves.

The author evaluates why people would deliberately remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.

James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” 

This is an engaging read and offers fresh perspectives for all those who are suspicious of the self agrandising and claims to self evidence offered by theorists of the emergence of the state.

Churches, barbeques anarchy - getting out from under Christendom

Currently preparing to teach a course pm Christianity and Australian Society and looking at the demographically gloomy future of the mainstream churches - I came across the following proposal from Robert Capon an Anglican priest who displays subversive, nay anarchist tendencies that might finally get us out from under the long shadow of Christendom.


... since I find that when I spoke earlier about death and resurrection I said everything I had to say in principle about the marginal church (only a dead church can rise), let me simply add a word here about how such a church might achieve that happy outcome in practice.

My program would be this. Whoever was in command over the dying institution at the next highest level of the corporate church ... would take the bull by the horns and kill it: close the church, dissolve its board, sequester its endowments, and sell off its property, putting the proceeds in escrow just in case the corpse ever rises and finds a use for them. Then the managers would explain to the remaining members of those churches that they were free to do anything they could think of (or nothing at all, if they so chose). A suggestion would be made, however, that they might think about holding a kind of wake on the next Sunday, perhaps in one of their homes, or in a restaurant or bowling alley that didn't open until 1:00 p.m. And if they took that suggestion . . .

Well, they might sit and stare blankly at each other to begin with. But with any luck, some free spirit (young or old) among them would break the ice with the questions they had never before been able to ask - namely: "Who are we?" "Why on earth are we here?" And, most important of all, "What do we think we'd actually like to do?" Having no model at all to meet the upkeep on and no known shape to whip themselves into, they would for the first time be open to looking for really new answers - honest answers - that could range anywhere from "We haven't the foggiest notion, but let's get together again next Sunday and see if anything's occurred to us in the meantime," to "We're here to be the church, I suppose - whatever that means," to "How about for openers we just try to stick with fellowship, breaking bread, and saying prayers? - maybe God will take care of the rest, if he wants any."

Those answers wouldn't sound like much of a start, of course; but then, a bunch of Galileans twiddling their thumbs in Jerusalem for nine days after the Ascension didn't seem like a grand opening, either. The operative fact is that a start can only occur after a stop. As Isaiah reminded Israel, the church's strength is to sit still: all the power, all the resources, and all the hope of the defunctly marginal lie hidden in the terrifying reality of their death. Only out of that can they live. But, having accepted that, they can model their life in any way that strikes their fancy: AA style, family style, support-group style, whatever. The only thing they need to guard against is the temptation to stop being dead, the longing to be alive and kicking again. Alive and kicking may be nice, but it's not astonishing. Dead and kicking, though . . . that's astonishing. That, in fact, is resurrection - and it's the only thing that can bring out the best in the church.
"The Church in the Marketplace of New Models" chapter 8, The Astonished Heart
Robert Farrar Capon (Grand Rapids, Michigan. Eerdmans, 1996) p.103