The Art of Not Being Governed

Once upon a time humanity created the state and pulled themselves up out of the primitive and backward mountains, jungles, and swamps; away from nomadic life, slash and burn agriculture, and gatherer-hunter economies. Cities and nations replaced bands, clans, and tribes. Everyone benefited.  Wise and benevolent kings and legislators led in the creation of “civilization”; saving us all from lives of savage barbarism.

But some resisted, or continued on in ignorance of the abundance being enjoyed by people like themselves in other parts of the world. They continued on, enduring nasty, short, and brutish lives, always afraid of the future, and looking back to a mythical past. Even when they didn’t realize it, they were longing for what civilization would one day bring to them.

Like all stories that begin with “once upon time” this story is a fairy tale. The Fairy Tale of Civilization overlooks the fact that the inhabitants of those first states were usually there unwillingly.  It was not at all unusual for them to try and run away.  Even the Bible (the Bible!) warns that living in a “state”, under a king, will mean taxation, conscription, forced labor, and for most a condition of servitude that supports the state’s militarism.  Whether this is an actual improvement over the tribal confederacy is an open question in Scripture (see 1 Samuel 8:10-18).

James C Scott, in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia ¹, points out that people have always sought to escape from territorial states, creating “zones of refuge” on their periphery.  In these refuge zones, on the margins of civilization, people do not live like their pre-civilized ancestors.  Mutual exchange and communication with those within the state continues.  But as refugees from the state’s hegemony they create ways of life that make it difficult for states to reabsorb or control them.  They are less accessible, hard to tax, hard to enslave, and therefore hard to rule.

Scott writes that the agriculture, social structures, and religions of these people should not be seen as “primitive” but “as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation. They are, in other words, “political adaptations of nonstate peoples to a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening.”  These non-primitive, non-state peoples did not fail to develop a state (the view from a civilizational standpoint); rather, they succeeded in preventing the development of a state!  Effective resistance to state development is intuitively based on an understanding of the needs of the state.

For example, Scott observes that rulers are not interested in Gross National Product but in the “State-Accessible Product”. States therefore discourage forms of agriculture that are hard for them to appropriate (e.g. slash and burn methods). States seek resources that are easy to identify, modify, and count (e.g. storage crops like rices and grains).  Massive cultivation and storage requires centralized populations and that requires a continual supply of people power, and that requires military conquest and enslavement, and that required the organization of large armies, and so on and on it goes.

State power expands where the topography is most favorable. That is, political control functions more easily where the terrain is flat and the “friction of distance” is least.  Political control “runs of out of breath” when the state faces the challenge of distance, altitude, rugged terrain, dispersed populations, or mixed cultivation. Resistance to the state is most effective where populations scatter in remote, inaccessible regions.

Scott’s book focuses on the upland region of Southeast Asia he calls “Zomia” (from a term for “highlander” in the Tibeto-Burman languages).   Scott calls this region a “shatter zone”.   The term “shatter zone” originated in geology referring to fissured, cracked rocks filled with mineral deposits.  After World War II it was used to refer to borderlands, especially those inhabited by refugee populations where people are escaping the pressures of the state or the economies of the state.²

For Scott, these shatter zones are places of resistance to the most destructive aspects of state-making and state-rule. They are found wherever people have been driven to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places.  Shatter zones can be found in other regions such as the Caucasus Mountains, the Balkans, West Africa, South America; or, closer to home, in Appalachia and the Great Dismal Swamp along the Virginia-North Carolina border.

Scott’s observations on peasant populations in southeast Asia pose provocative questions to those of us in servitude to civilization, living near the center of empire. In an earlier book Scott described the “arts of resistance” practiced by dominated peoples throughout history (e.g. slaves in the American South) as they enacted a “hidden transcript” which, on the surface, resembled compliance with the state’s demands, but underneath created spaces for dissent, nonconformity, and resistance.³ I believe the “church” (in a form drastically altered from any we are familiar with) could become such a site of resistance; a place where the counter-imperial narrative of Jesus can be enacted in everyday resistance.

However, our geographical proximity to the state should modify our expectations of freedom from the state.  Few of us will be able to find refuge in remote areas or live off the grid away from government observation, monitoring, and control. Our “zones of refuge” and “shatter zones” will often be found in dense urban-suburban environments.

Also, our proximity to control makes it unlikely that the state will ever “run out of breath” in Scott’s terms. However, there may perhaps be strategies for inducing the state’s shortness of breath – reducing it’s oxygen. Scott warns against the possibility of evading Leviathan, but does believe in the possibility of “taming Leviathan”.

How might we better organize our lives around not being governed?  Scott borrows the phrase “not being governed” from some recently published lectures of Michel Foucault.⁴ In those lectures, originally given from 1976-1984, Foucault describes the notion of “counter conduct”.  Like many of Foucault’s concepts, “counter conduct” is not easy to represent briefly; but the central idea is that of actions which are not so much resistant to state power, as uncontrolled by state power.  Notice the difference.  An act of resistance against power may still be explained only by its relationship to the abuse of power that prompted it.  An action of “counter conduct” refuses this dialectic altogether.  It is an action that according to the state’s rationality would not make any sense.  Foucault draws upon Anabaptist history for one set of examples.

Therefore, where we cannot escape the state we can perhaps live lives that decenter the state – we can live outside the story (i.e. the fairy tale) that the state would have us believe.  This would require not only a deeper understanding of the nature of state power (where Scott provides us substantial assistance ⁵), but also a deeper understanding of the counter conduct required by followers of Jesus.  A counter conduct which will enact the logos of God and confound the logic of the empire.

Conflicts over the playing of the national anthem at Goshen College can seem trivial until they are examined from this perspective.  But the conflictual nature of Christian discipleship must find embodiment in other contexts as well. Communities of Christian counter conduct will need to pray, reflect, and experiment with other relevant expressions of our internal exile.  Perhaps, under Scott’s tutelage and others, we can begin to reconsider the politics of Jesus as the art of not being governed.

Tagged as: Anarchism, foucault, james c. scott, the art of not being governed