Single Female Autarky

Sorry. The headline is purely contrived based on the Bender's little parody song in Futurama :

Single female lawyer !
Fighting for her client
Wearing sexy miniskirts and
Being self-reliant !

What in the world am I on about ?

Xenophobia.

Ooo...kaaay....

Right. There was another piece I read recently on Aeon that's entitled : The allure of autarky : Liberal thinkers are shocked that nations are once again isolating from the world. The real surprise would be if they didn’t. 

Hopefully things are starting to make a bit more sense now. If not, they will soon.

The title is certainly interesting enough. The perceived decline in liberalism is a definite cause for concern, although I stress "perceived" : certain electoral results would strongly dispute the notion that the West is doomed to fall into authoritarianism. We can't allow ourselves to think that way, and we shouldn't, because it isn't true. Nevertheless, the return of authoritarian, anti-liberal ideologies is worrying. 

But to me it's also deeply surprising. Why would anyone object to a social system that allows people to live their own lives how they choose, insofar as they don't interfere with anyone else ? Who actually wants other people sticking their noses in and meddling in their own lifestyle choices ? Not me !

That, though, is a very big topic indeed, and best left for another time. Still, one of the main aspects is that covered in the essay of isolationism, or to give it its tactful window-dressing... self-reliance.

I want to start with a quote from near the end of the article. Without this, it would be all too easy to conclude that the author has a very different take on the matter than what they actually do.

Rousseau was mistaken to believe that primitive man was a self-sufficient loner. And the evidence is unambiguous that globalisation – greater trading links, the transmission of know-how and technology, more cross-border investment, the migration of people – has delivered spectacular material benefits for humankind and higher living standards over recent centuries, and especially in the era since the Second World War... Trade and interconnection, whether or not we realise it or like it, is part of who we are – and always has been.

Right, good. We've established that we're in the same moral ballpark and can proceed accordingly. Unfortunately, I still don't think it's a very good essay. You'll get little argument from me that isolationist tendencies, a.k.a. the desire to live in a self-sufficient, self-reliant "autarky", are very old ways of thinking indeed. The problem is that the author seems to try quite hard at excusing this as something more respectable than xenophobia, but doesn't really present any convincing argument for why this should be. They also state several times that this "autarky" has been widely touted as a goal of the progressive left. This I don't get at all : it seems neither progressive nor left, but reactionary and conservative through and through.

From those earliest days of Western civilisation, the moral virtue of autarky was not just a goal for an individual, but an aspiration for the collective too. According to Aristotle, a contemporary of Diogenes, the ideal city state in the ancient world was also self-sufficient, and those inside the polity would have everything they needed to pursue a good philosophical life – unlike those outside it.

Yes, but in Plato at least, everyone would be dependent on each other. The point was very much to live in a harmonious community, which could and would interact with outsiders. The boundaries of Magnesia and Republic feel more to me simply a way of intellectual self-control than anything else, a way to mark the limits of the thought experiment and stop it getting our of hand. They're not a key feature of these early world-building efforts, so far as I can tell.

Aquinas was an advocate for economic, not just spiritual, autarky. He noted that there are two ways a city can feed itself: by growing food on its own surrounding fields, or through trade. ‘It is quite clear that the first means is better,’ Aquinas concluded in De Regno (1265), his book on kingship. ‘The more dignified a thing is, the more self-sufficient it is, since whatever needs another’s help is by that fact proven to be deficient.’ Aquinas also proffered a moral case for autarky when he noted that ‘greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade.’

Yikes ! That sounds... ghastly ? I think the idea we can all coexist in glorious isolation is utterly wrong-headed. We're all interdependent whether we like or realise it or not; we might try and minimise our interactions with others (I generally do) but pretending we can all manage by ourselves is the utmost folly.

A more extreme version is a classic from Japan :

The policy of sakoku or ‘closed country’ was imposed on the islands of Japan in the 17th century by the Tokugawa shogunate, a form of feudal military dictatorship. Western Christian missionaries were banned and those that were already in the country were persecuted. Emigration was forbidden and foreign trade was reduced almost to nothing. ‘The Christians have come to Japan … to propagate an evil creed and subvert the true doctrine,’ proclaimed an edict from the shogunate in 1614.

That's just simple xenophobia though. "Our culture is better and special, but cannot withstand interaction with others" is an age-old attitude that points to a deep-seated psychosis in human nature : our way of life is the best, but everyone will abandon it the moment any of those pesky foreigners show up. Righto then, if people are abandoning your ideal out of their own free will, then how the blazes is your approach better ? If your way is so good, why don't people want to keep to it ?

(That's a problem for liberalism, too of course.)

I should probably add that I don't think self-reliance is a bad thing in itself. It's good to be able to do what you can without bothering others. It's especially good to be able to think for oneself. But not every cry for help points to subservience, and interactions with foreign parts are good for broadening the mind, not for corrupting the soul.

Rousseau conjectured in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) that primitive man had been naturally ‘solitary’, coming together with others only for mating, and was much happier for it. ‘No one who depends on others, and lacks resources of his own, can ever be free,’ he warned the Corsicans in 1765. ‘[P]ay little attention to foreign countries, give little heed to commerce; but multiply as far as possible your domestic production and consumption of foodstuffs,’ was Rousseau’s advice to the Poles in 1772.

This just sounds like he didn't like people at all, really. I can sympathise – many of them are awful. But the thing about interdependency is that it's supposed to be a two-way street : if you're dependent on them then they're also dependent on you. E.g. Europe is dependent on cheap Chinese goods, but China is dependent on Europe buying said goods. 

And the ever-unspoken question here is just how far are we supposed to take this ? Should each man be an island unto himself ? Impossible, unless he scrapes a living from rocks*. For virtually everyone that would be a profound level of suffering and I don't see that as "freedom" in any meaningful sense. A hamlet, then ? A village, city, nation ? A continent ? No, no, this is all wrong-headed. Cooperation affords us more opportunities, not less, and so long as we can opt out of them (e.g. we don't all have to buy the latest fashionable goods if we don't want to) then we can fairly be called free. 

* On a related point, this article discusses a possible organism that might be sort of "half alive" in that it depends on others to sustain some of its basic biological processes. This implies the weirdness of the ultimate extreme implication of this kind of reasoning. Viruses, say some, aren't alive because they can't reproduce without a host, but plenty of macroscopic parasites can't even survive at all without a host. We need our external environment to survive (and we ourselves host our own microbiome), but clearly we're alive. I think this points to a terrible flaw in the whole thing : interdependency is part of our nature even at the biological level, and the only real escape from this is death. There are strict limits as to how far self-reliancy is even possible.

Incidentally, this all reminds me of Private Eye's regular agricultural column, which insists that Britain must make as much of its own food as possible and any environmental consequences be damned. I'm continuously wondering why, but despite many letters from other readers asking similar questions, answers have come there none.

‘In a nation which has closed in this way, whose members live only among themselves and very little with foreigners … a higher degree of national honour and a sharply determined national character will develop very quickly,’ claimed Fichte.

Yeah, right. It's just simple and barely-disguised xenophobia. Living in a self-contained country won't lead to a sense of "national honour". Instead it will just foster closed-minded stupidity.

Jerry Mander, an ecologist... believed that one of the problems with globalisation was that it encouraged ‘voracious consumerism’... Like Fichte before them, today’s Left-wing anti-globalisation activists often argue that free trade disproportionately benefits wealthy nations while harming poorer ones. In this view, autarky becomes the natural path to both domestic and international social justice.... Progressive thought has long carried a current of economic isolationism. Yet, as recent history makes clear, the drive toward self-sufficiency is by no means confined to the Left or to environmentalist movements.

These sound like crazy people, more than anyone I'd normally associate with left-wing activists (excepting the possible "let's all go and live in the trees" types of loonies), let alone progressives. Saying it's "by no means confined to the left" is a mad statement, like claiming that empire-building is by no means confined to the British. Which segues nicely to the next segments.

Then there are some examples of when autarky is at least understandable, but there are heavily extenuating circumstances :

Swadeshi was Gandhi’s antidote to what he saw as the predatory imperial capitalism of the British. And that mindset of India needing self-sufficiency remained long after independence was achieved. 

‘Independence means self-reliance,’ stated Nyerere’s 1967 Arusha declaration. For him, autarky and his distinctive vision of African socialism were inseparable. 

In January 1790, George Washington, the first president of the United States, rose to deliver his first message to the US Congress: ‘A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined,’ he declared, ‘and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.’

Okay, yes, the British have a lot to answer for. Fair enough. Absolutely fair enough. But these seem like such specific examples that they're of no help in understanding the present mood at all. Sure, if you're just thrown off an oppressor, of course you're going to want to be self-reliant ! That's obvious. The problem is that this is happening in countries which have not been subject to any sort of oppression whatsoever, yet the right have, for example, managed to somewhat successfully paint the European Union as some sort of modern-day German (read : Nazi) hegemony. And this difference between true oppression, the legitimate need for freedom, and manufactured oppression – that's what really matters.

To return to the empire-builder's own perspective :

The road to national self-preservation for the former lance-corporal would have to run through a radical programme of building national self-sufficiency. And he believed that Germany’s salvation lay in conquering and exploiting the rural bounty of lands to the east, thus gaining the notorious Lebensraum (‘living space’).

I mean, come on. In what world does "self reliancy" mean "conquest and enslavement of others" ? That's crazy, and I have a very hard time seeing why the author included it. All it does is reinforce the message that it's no more than a presentable version of xenophobia. No noble desire for self-control, just a paranoid dislike of foreigners. It's that simple.

Here, though, is a stranger puzzle :

Mencius Moldbug, the blogging alias of the US computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, is a prominent tech-authoritarian theorist whose influence extends to some Trump-aligned politicians and wealthy backers. Yarvin advocates dismantling US democracy in favour of a monarchy or a national ‘CEO’-like figure. As international travel collapsed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Yarvin saw his moment, not just tolerating isolationism ‘but promoting it’. 

The right-wing tech CEO is something I don't get. Technological breakthroughs require scientific advancements, which are based on cooperation at all scales of society. So just why so many techbros fall prey to this cognitive dissonance is something I struggle with. To me, cool new tech gadgets are the easy selling point for scientific research. That anyone would seek to pervert this into the goal of dismantling democracy and soliciting isolationism is both absolutely bonkers and at the same time viscerally disgusting.

So what makes the autarkic urge so persistent? That protean ability to be moulded and affixed to a seemingly endless host of ideologies is surely key. But perhaps it’s also that umbilical link in autarky – evident since the days of ancient Greece – between personal morality and the question of how we should relate to each other within communities and between communities. To be successful, political movements have to appeal to something fundamental in everyone’s nature. Our innate sense of the virtue of self-reliance is often the foundation stone on which they build.

Nah mate, it's xenophobia. Self-reliance as meaning self-improvement is something everyone endorses (especially if of the sexy miniskirt variety*), but I'm not convinced that the author has at all demonstrated that this is really what's appealing about modern authoritarians. Nor am I convinced that autarky isn't (by far) dominated by the conservative economic right, with any appeal to the progressive left being firmly limited to a few tail-end-of-the-Gaussian weirdos. The author has, I think, both over-thought and under-sold their case.

* Do they count as self-improvement ? Shut up, they do.

This is a shame. It remains a difficulty to explain how the right has succeeded in the face of a liberal society that is/was generally prosperous (however imperfect); we can venture xenophobia, media manipulation, unrealistic expectations, and various others that seem more plausible than an appeal to "self reliance". Still, something unsatisfying remains about the situation in which people keep voting for options which are so, so obviously against their own interests.

 I prefer to end with a much-used and much-needed quote from Tolkien. :

The wide world is all about you. You can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Or possibly, to bring this back to the somewhat anarchic introduction with which this post began, a quote instead from Marge Simpson :

There's no shame in being pariahs.

Autarky is a daft notion. Just look at North Korea.