WEBVTT NOTE Women and the Invisible Fist: How Violence Against Women Enforces the Unwritten Law of Patriarchy 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.600 Before I begin, I also want to pause very briefly to send my best wishes to David Gordon, 2 00:00:03.600 --> 00:00:08.880 who graciously agreed to comment on the papers, who was unable to attend due to illness, and 3 00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:15.040 so I hope he will be feeling better soon. Feminist social theories hold that history 4 00:00:15.040 --> 00:00:19.440 and society are marked by widespread sex inequality, by systemic privileges for men and systemic 5 00:00:19.440 --> 00:00:24.560 burdens inflicted on women. Radical feminists, in particular, as a tendency, hold that sex 6 00:00:24.560 --> 00:00:28.680 inequality is not only widespread, but that it's deeply rooted in self-sustaining, that 7 00:00:28.680 --> 00:00:33.880 casual sexism, misogynistic double standards, gender gaps in wages and social position, 8 00:00:33.880 --> 00:00:37.120 political assaults on women's sexual freedom and other harms inflicted on women should 9 00:00:37.120 --> 00:00:41.760 all be understood as interlocking components in a system of class power, usually called 10 00:00:41.760 --> 00:00:49.600 either patriarchy or male supremacy. Most radical feminists focus especially closely 11 00:00:49.600 --> 00:00:55.000 on the role that pervasive male violence against women plays as a foundational source and a 12 00:00:55.000 --> 00:01:25.000 Radical feminist theories account for forms of mass violence against women that have been centrally organized and directed by male political authorities, such as lethal abortion laws, the use of rape as a weapon of war, or the mass torture and execution of women during the early modern European witch craze. But they often concentrate especially closely on pervasive but diffuse forms of violence, forms such as rape, domestic violence, harassment and other forms of interpersonal intimidation. 13 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:55.000 Feminist accounts of these forms of individualized violence have at least three key features in common. First, they characterize the violence as pervasive rather than abnormal, citing, for example, empirical research confirming that one in thirteen men in the 14 00:01:55.000 --> 00:02:04.000 in the U.S. as attempted or committed rape, that one in six women has been raped in her lifetime and that about one in four women has been either raped or physically battered by a husband, boyfriend or date. 15 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:12.000 Second, they characterize pervasive violence as systematically structured by sex that is overwhelmingly committed by men against women and rarely vice versa. 16 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:17.000 Third, they argue that systemic male violence must be understood as structural or political in nature. 17 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:22.000 In addition to the physical and psychological harms that are inflicted on individual victims of violence, 18 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:26.480 The violence has further powerful ripple effects for all women's social freedom and material 19 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:31.080 well-being. To insist on this point and to protest the common tendency to write off violence 20 00:02:31.080 --> 00:02:35.960 against women by hiding it in the so-called private sphere as a merely personal problem, 21 00:02:35.960 --> 00:02:39.460 radical feminists often challenge the common dichotomy between the private and public sphere, 22 00:02:39.460 --> 00:02:44.960 so-called, often quoting Carol Hanisch's famous declaration that the personal is political. 23 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:47.920 Radical feminist theories of sexual violence also have a fourth feature in common. They're 24 00:02:47.920 --> 00:02:52.080 are commonly misunderstood or even wildly distorted by their critics. 25 00:02:52.080 --> 00:02:55.760 For an example of all four points, consider Susan Brown-Miller's Mermudon Theory of 26 00:02:55.760 --> 00:02:59.720 Stranger Rape as presented in her book Against Our Will, a groundbreaking historical and 27 00:02:59.720 --> 00:03:02.360 theoretical discussion of rape as a political force. 28 00:03:02.360 --> 00:03:05.860 At the end of the first chapter, Brown-Miller famously writes that, quote, from prehistoric 29 00:03:05.860 --> 00:03:09.160 times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing 30 00:03:09.160 --> 00:03:13.380 more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state 31 00:03:13.380 --> 00:03:17.440 of fear. In these long block quotes, I'm going to have to skip through a bit so the full 32 00:03:17.440 --> 00:03:24.920 Anti-feminist critics have slammed Brown-Miller for supposedly slandering all men as rapists. 33 00:03:24.920 --> 00:03:28.560 She does not actually say that. The verb in the sentence is not rape, but keep in a state 34 00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:34.120 of fear. Or for advancing either an essentialist or a determinist theory about rape. Either 35 00:03:34.120 --> 00:03:37.680 sort of reading is hard to reconcile with any reading of the text that gets beyond page 36 00:03:37.680 --> 00:03:42.440 15. In chapter 6, the police blot a rapist, Brown-Miller discusses the commonplace criminological 37 00:03:42.440 --> 00:03:47.120 reality behind sensationalistic myths about the stereotypical stranger rapists and the 38 00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:49.820 The effect of his actions on women's daily lives, quote, 39 00:03:49.820 --> 00:03:52.200 Rape is a dull, blunt, ugly act committed by punk kids, 40 00:03:52.200 --> 00:03:53.560 their cousins and older brothers, and yet, 41 00:03:53.560 --> 00:03:55.760 on the shoulders of these unthinking, violence-prone young men, 42 00:03:55.760 --> 00:03:58.720 the rest an age-old burden that amounts to an historic mission, 43 00:03:58.720 --> 00:04:01.960 the perpetuation of male domination over women by force. 44 00:04:01.960 --> 00:04:04.320 The warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, 45 00:04:04.320 --> 00:04:06.040 the Myrmidons, to do his bidding in battle, 46 00:04:06.040 --> 00:04:08.960 functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. 47 00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:11.520 Police blotter rapists perform a Myrmidon function 48 00:04:11.520 --> 00:04:13.140 for all men in our society. 49 00:04:13.140 --> 00:04:14.780 Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, 50 00:04:14.780 --> 00:04:16.960 they function as anonymous agents of terror. 51 00:04:16.960 --> 00:04:22.780 Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, to actual men the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued. 52 00:04:22.780 --> 00:04:26.600 A world without rapists would be a world in which women move freely without fear of men. 53 00:04:26.600 --> 00:04:30.960 That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation. 54 00:04:30.960 --> 00:04:37.400 Mermodons to male dominance, police blotter rapists have performed their duty so well that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. 55 00:04:37.400 --> 00:04:43.600 Rather than aberrants or spoilers of purity, men who commit rape have served in effect as frontline masculine shock troops in the longest sustained battle 56 00:04:43.600 --> 00:04:45.680 the world has ever known. 57 00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:50.280 So, Brown-Miller does not then portray all men as rapists or is biologically driven to rape. 58 00:04:50.280 --> 00:04:57.780 One important gear in her theory of how this all works turns on the structural effects that the rapist actions have for men who do not commit rape. 59 00:04:57.780 --> 00:05:05.780 She has to be understood not as asserting that all men rape, but rather that the practice of rape by some men functions to give all men a position of power over women. 60 00:05:05.780 --> 00:05:12.480 Now, clarifying the position is not the same thing as defending it. This corrected understanding may still be challenged. 61 00:05:12.480 --> 00:05:16.420 Many critics point to the alleged motivations of rapists, suggesting, for example, that 62 00:05:16.420 --> 00:05:20.900 most rapists act on no such grandiose plans about upholding patriarchal control, but rather 63 00:05:20.900 --> 00:05:25.480 on concrete personal desires from whatever source. Thus, it makes no sense, it's said, 64 00:05:25.480 --> 00:05:29.660 to claim that they act to further the interests of men as a class. On the other end, critics 65 00:05:29.660 --> 00:05:35.040 frequently accuse Brownmiller of disregarding how far individual men, as well as male-dominated 66 00:05:35.040 --> 00:05:39.980 public institutions, condemn rape, for example, by making and enforcing laws against it, thus 67 00:05:39.980 --> 00:05:43.860 Thus presumably demonstrating that rape, however common and devastating, must be understood 68 00:05:43.860 --> 00:05:48.080 as a private crime disavowed by existing political authority and committed by isolated men for 69 00:05:48.080 --> 00:05:50.100 reasons of their own. 70 00:05:50.100 --> 00:05:53.580 Both approaches respond to Brown-Miller as if she had proposed a sort of conspiracy theory 71 00:05:53.580 --> 00:05:57.760 to explain the pervasiveness of male violence, in which the men sort of all get together 72 00:05:57.760 --> 00:06:02.140 somehow with the anonymous rapist consciously collaborating with the more respectable men 73 00:06:02.140 --> 00:06:05.260 in some kind of shared plan to keep women down. 74 00:06:05.260 --> 00:06:08.800 If that were Brown-Miller's proposal, then certainly it would suffice to show that most 75 00:06:08.800 --> 00:06:20.800 It is not Brown Miller's proposal. She never says anything of the sort, and in fact explicitly states that the role of police blotter rape and maintaining male supremacy has largely gone unnoticed, quote-unquote, including among men. 76 00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:27.800 Such responses reveal a certain kind of exegetical failure. They read into the text a claim that Brown Miller doesn't make. 77 00:06:27.800 --> 00:06:34.800 But more than that, they reveal a conceptual failure, a failure to see what Brown Miller is saying because you haven't yet got the right conceptual lenses with which to see it, 78 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:54.680 Contrary to canonical misunderstandings of feminist theories of male violence, I will 79 00:06:54.680 --> 00:06:59.000 argue that the central insights of radical feminist analysis can be illuminated by rereading 80 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:03.920 them in light of a surprising source. By charitably reconstructing Brown-Miller's Mermudon Theory 81 00:07:03.920 --> 00:07:08.440 as an unusual but recognizable application of the concept of spontaneous order 82 00:07:08.440 --> 00:07:12.400 as developed by libertarian social theorists, most notably Friedrich Hayek. 83 00:07:12.400 --> 00:07:15.440 Rearticulating Brown-Miller's theory in Hayekian terms provides a surprising 84 00:07:15.440 --> 00:07:18.000 resource for the radical feminist critique of rape culture. 85 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:22.200 It may also dialectically clarify and enrich the concept of spontaneous order 86 00:07:22.200 --> 00:07:25.680 in the process of applying it to the concrete problem. 87 00:07:25.680 --> 00:07:29.040 So spontaneous order theories spring from an observation that the vital 88 00:07:29.040 --> 00:07:31.560 underpinnings of human social life include large-scale patterns of 89 00:07:31.560 --> 00:07:35.600 of Interaction, and coordinating structures which seem to emerge without, and indeed beyond 90 00:07:35.600 --> 00:07:39.600 the capacity of, any intelligent designer or designers to construct or manipulate them 91 00:07:39.600 --> 00:07:43.960 to particular ends. So examples of spontaneous orders are familiar and ever-multiplying in 92 00:07:43.960 --> 00:07:48.320 both economics and in libertarian social theory, presumably to most of you in this room, the 93 00:07:48.320 --> 00:07:52.480 adjustment of market prices to relative scarcities under conditions of free exchange, the convergence 94 00:07:52.480 --> 00:07:57.760 on common media of exchange and barter economies, the emergence and maintenance historically 95 00:07:57.760 --> 00:08:02.380 of Networks of Paths and Roads prior to large-scale militaristic road building are all sort of 96 00:08:02.380 --> 00:08:07.340 clear and well-documented examples of spontaneous order. Although closely associated with free 97 00:08:07.340 --> 00:08:11.440 market economics, there's no conceptual reason why the employment of spontaneous order concepts 98 00:08:11.440 --> 00:08:15.640 need be limited to narrowly economic topics. Hayek, for example, viewed the attention to 99 00:08:15.640 --> 00:08:19.960 spontaneous orders as the distinguishing feature of all serious social science and frequently 100 00:08:19.960 --> 00:08:24.160 mentioned as examples the emergence of ongoing evolution, emergence and ongoing evolution 101 00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:28.180 of Human Languages and Writing Systems. He devotes his closest attention in his later 102 00:08:28.180 --> 00:08:33.100 works to the polycentric evolution of customary principles at common law for resolving disputes 103 00:08:33.100 --> 00:08:38.360 peacefully without recourse to blood feuds or to violence or to vendettas. Other examples 104 00:08:38.360 --> 00:08:42.080 of spontaneously developing community norms have ranged from conventions regulating the 105 00:08:42.080 --> 00:08:46.560 use of agricultural commons as explored in the work of the Ostroms to international postal 106 00:08:46.560 --> 00:08:51.440 standards to the evolution of common rules for American baseball. In the hands of Hayek 107 00:08:51.440 --> 00:08:54.320 Hayek and other libertarian social theorists, the concept of spontaneous order is employed 108 00:08:54.320 --> 00:08:58.180 not only to explain how we got many actually existing social goods, but also to counsel 109 00:08:58.180 --> 00:09:03.080 how future goods might be better achieved and maintained without government imposition. 110 00:09:03.080 --> 00:09:06.340 Hayek invoked spontaneous order to argue, contrary to Marxist and Fabian worries about 111 00:09:06.340 --> 00:09:11.120 the so-called social anarchy of production, that positive social order can emerge without 112 00:09:11.120 --> 00:09:15.400 deliberate social regulation, and that market processes without centralized control were 113 00:09:15.400 --> 00:09:19.840 neither blind, destructive, nor chaotic, that they could actually do these things far better 114 00:09:19.840 --> 00:09:22.040 than any central planning could. 115 00:09:22.040 --> 00:09:25.920 Another increasingly popular example these days, especially in popular 116 00:09:25.920 --> 00:09:28.000 literature, but also someone in scholarship, 117 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:31.280 is the success of knowledge and communication systems of the internet 118 00:09:31.280 --> 00:09:34.760 in general and of the explosive growth refinement and success of Wikipedia 119 00:09:34.760 --> 00:09:35.760 in particular, 120 00:09:35.760 --> 00:09:38.700 which has become within a decade the world's largest and most successful 121 00:09:38.700 --> 00:09:40.200 encyclopedia even though, 122 00:09:40.200 --> 00:09:42.360 or rather precisely because, 123 00:09:42.360 --> 00:09:46.080 it's driven by the social anarchy of decentralized contributions 124 00:09:46.080 --> 00:09:49.260 for millions of volunteer reader editors without any prior screening 125 00:09:49.260 --> 00:09:53.780 or Direction by Any Central Authority. 126 00:09:53.780 --> 00:09:57.660 A careful re-reading of the Mermedon passage from Brown Miller with these Hayekian lessons 127 00:09:57.660 --> 00:10:02.700 in mind ought to bring out a number of features in her analysis of rape culture that are reminiscent 128 00:10:02.700 --> 00:10:06.820 of common characteristics of spontaneous order. Brown Miller holds that rape culture involves 129 00:10:06.820 --> 00:10:11.380 some conscious centrally coordinated campaigns like the use of rape as a weapon of war in 130 00:10:11.380 --> 00:10:16.020 conflicts between male governed nation states. But her understanding of rape culture crucially 131 00:10:16.020 --> 00:10:19.900 really depends on the structural effects of widely dispersed actions, which are carried 132 00:10:19.900 --> 00:10:25.640 out by, quote, a swarm of men acting in anonymity, rather than by governments or organized bodies 133 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:30.100 of men acting on some kind of centrally directed plan. This ought to suggest a very clear and 134 00:10:30.100 --> 00:10:34.540 direct parallel to Hayek's characterizations of spontaneous order as polycentric order, 135 00:10:34.540 --> 00:10:40.540 more akin to organism than to organization. The undirected but systematic actions of the 136 00:10:40.540 --> 00:10:45.500 swarm of Mermudan rapists have profound effects, but because of their very anonymity, police 137 00:10:45.500 --> 00:10:48.100 These water rapists have performed their duties so well that the true meaning of their act 138 00:10:48.100 --> 00:10:52.380 has largely gone unnoticed. Just as Hayek characterizes spontaneous orders in such terms 139 00:10:52.380 --> 00:10:56.020 as the unintended and often uncomprehended results of the separate and interrelated actions 140 00:10:56.020 --> 00:10:57.500 of men in society. 141 00:10:57.500 --> 00:11:01.820 Now, yet there are, of course, other ways in which the sexual politics of a rape culture 142 00:11:01.820 --> 00:11:05.260 are more reminiscent of constructed order and governmental politics than they are of 143 00:11:05.260 --> 00:11:09.920 paradigmatic spontaneous orders. Crucially, the dispersed acts that we are discussing 144 00:11:09.920 --> 00:11:15.140 are, after all, not free exchanges or willing negotiations but acts of force. And so any 145 00:11:15.140 --> 00:11:19.300 Any social order emerging from them must be seen as a social order imposed on women against 146 00:11:19.300 --> 00:11:23.980 their will, just as the economic or social plans of government are imposed on the governed 147 00:11:23.980 --> 00:11:28.140 without genuine individual consent. 148 00:11:28.140 --> 00:11:31.480 Both the similarities and the differences from our paradigmatic cases may help reveal 149 00:11:31.480 --> 00:11:34.700 two important and interrelated points I'd like to make. 150 00:11:34.700 --> 00:11:38.220 Both points are easily missed and often are missed in extant writing, in part because 151 00:11:38.220 --> 00:11:44.140 normative work the concept does in libertarian arguments for freeing economic exchange from 152 00:11:44.140 --> 00:12:14.140 As valuable and insightful as that normative employment may be, attempting to apply Hayekian categories to Brown-Miller's account of a rape culture may help to highlight the fact that market exchange and government intervention considered as systems of interpersonal coordination differ from each other along more than one dimension. I would in fact argue that a notion of spontaneous order, as employed in libertarian writing, is systematically ambiguous. The term may evoke at least three different sorts of distinctions, depending on the precise sense of the critical term, spontaneous. 153 00:12:14.140 --> 00:12:22.140 Spontaneous order means a macroscale pattern of social coordination which is, on the one hand, consensual rather than coercive. This is when spontaneous means something like uncoerced. 154 00:12:22.140 --> 00:12:28.140 It can refer to an order which is polycentric rather than directive, when spontaneous means something like unprompted. 155 00:12:28.140 --> 00:12:34.140 Or it can refer to an order which is emergent rather than consciously designed, when spontaneous means not planned in advance. 156 00:12:34.140 --> 00:12:41.140 When spontaneous order means consensual rather than coercive order, coordination is achieved through free actions and agreements of many different people, 157 00:12:41.140 --> 00:12:46.140 are contrasted with coordination imposed by using force to compel the participation of unwilling parties, 158 00:12:46.140 --> 00:12:49.140 as always happens in government programs. 159 00:12:49.140 --> 00:12:52.140 When spontaneous order means polycentric rather than directive order, 160 00:12:52.140 --> 00:12:56.140 coordination comes about through the converging micro-actions of many players acting independently 161 00:12:56.140 --> 00:13:02.140 rather than deferring to designated supervisors or authoritative decision-makers, plans and instructions. 162 00:13:02.140 --> 00:13:07.140 So in directive orders, coordination happens vertically as players act on the bidding of recognized authority. 163 00:13:07.140 --> 00:13:12.640 In polycentric orders, the order depends on participatory or entrepreneurial action. 164 00:13:12.640 --> 00:13:18.140 There's no recognized final authority. Action is guided by impersonal norms rather than personal deference. 165 00:13:18.140 --> 00:13:25.140 Individual actors coordinate horizontally among themselves, determine for themselves how to pursue their chosen goals and so on. 166 00:13:25.140 --> 00:13:30.640 When spontaneous order means emergent order, contrasted with conscious design, forms of social coordination 167 00:13:30.640 --> 00:13:34.140 emerge from the actions of many different people who are acting on motives separate 168 00:13:34.140 --> 00:13:37.900 from any conscious desire to affect that form of social coordination. 169 00:13:37.900 --> 00:13:41.220 Intentional orders affect social coordination through people acting for 170 00:13:41.220 --> 00:13:44.140 the sake of a shared purpose, whatever that purpose may be. 171 00:13:44.140 --> 00:13:47.780 In undesigned orders, participants may know nothing about the macroscale 172 00:13:47.780 --> 00:13:50.660 pattern that's emerging from their interlocking microscale actions, 173 00:13:50.660 --> 00:13:54.620 or they may be aware of it but consider it only a side effect, even if a pleasant 174 00:13:54.620 --> 00:13:54.940 one 175 00:13:54.940 --> 00:14:00.340 of pursuing a different private purpose. So, for example, in the discussion of 176 00:14:00.340 --> 00:14:24.820 for rhetorical simplicity, these three dimensions of spontaneity and non-spontaneity are presented 177 00:14:24.820 --> 00:14:28.900 here as they usually are elsewhere in the literature as if they were simple dichotomies. 178 00:14:28.900 --> 00:14:32.820 The distinction between polycentric and directive orders, and also that between emergent and 179 00:14:32.820 --> 00:14:37.300 intentional orders, does have to be understood as really a difference of degree. Participants 180 00:14:37.300 --> 00:14:41.080 can exercise greater or lesser degrees of autonomy in selecting and vetting their courses 181 00:14:41.080 --> 00:14:45.800 of action. The gap between microscale intentions and macroscale patterns that emerge from them, 182 00:14:45.800 --> 00:14:50.700 if there is such a gap, may be more or less wide of a gap. 183 00:14:50.700 --> 00:14:53.380 It's important to understand that each of these three distinctions are interrelated 184 00:14:53.380 --> 00:14:57.900 but analytically distinct pairs of categories. They tend to coincide, in fact, often enough 185 00:14:57.900 --> 00:15:00.900 and the fact that they might be mistaken as indistinguishable in concept. 186 00:15:00.900 --> 00:15:06.900 Notably, when libertarians contrast open networks of market exchange with economic planning and allocation by governments, 187 00:15:06.900 --> 00:15:11.900 they're contrasting socioeconomic orders that differ along all three of our dimensions. 188 00:15:11.900 --> 00:15:16.900 Governmental allocation is legally enforced, it's coordinated by requirements from a designated authority, 189 00:15:16.900 --> 00:15:19.900 the government or the regulatory agency in charge, 190 00:15:19.900 --> 00:15:23.900 and it's consciously designed to achieve some particular predetermined set of policy goals. 191 00:15:23.900 --> 00:15:35.900 whereas free markets, on the other hand, produce organic structures which are the product of consensual agreements between buyers and sellers which are participatory in character without any fixed center of authority, there's no one person in charge of the market, 192 00:15:35.900 --> 00:15:41.900 and develop an emergent structure that the parties to the exchange did not necessarily consciously set out to create. 193 00:15:41.900 --> 00:15:46.900 The question then is which of these three differences we should treat as definitive of spontaneous order. 194 00:15:46.900 --> 00:15:52.900 Hayek himself was fairly consistent when he attempted to give a formal definition of spontaneous order in his work. 195 00:15:52.900 --> 00:15:56.900 As we've seen above, in some quotes I clipped actually, 196 00:15:56.900 --> 00:16:00.900 when he tried to give formal definitions of it, 197 00:16:00.900 --> 00:16:05.900 he defined it in terms of emergent coordination with a noticeable gap between micro intentions and macro patterns. 198 00:16:05.900 --> 00:16:11.900 He often recurred to Adam Ferguson's results of human action but not human design to describe it. 199 00:16:11.900 --> 00:16:16.900 But Hayek also constantly equates spontaneous orders with polycentric orders, 200 00:16:16.900 --> 00:16:20.900 which are not made by anybody by contrast with directive orders which have been made by somebody 201 00:16:20.900 --> 00:16:50.900 His application of the concept also, in discussing free market processes, consistently contrasted their healthy, unimpeded ordering processes with purposeful interference or intervention, paradigmatically backed by the coercive power of government, and so closely linked it with cases where the consensuality is really one of the most important features of the relationship. In any case, both later Hayekian scholars and popular writing have repeatedly used spontaneous order indifferently to refer to orders that are spontaneous in any of our 202 00:16:50.900 --> 00:16:54.960 by Three Senses, or to all of them, or they've just equivocated between different senses 203 00:16:54.960 --> 00:16:59.620 of spontaneous from one statement to the next. And so in the paper, I discuss some passages 204 00:16:59.620 --> 00:17:06.540 from John Hasnes and also a long passage from Anthony de Gesse, where Gesse uses spontaneous 205 00:17:06.540 --> 00:17:10.500 and three different senses within the space of two paragraphs, and you can see it on the 206 00:17:10.500 --> 00:17:15.300 handout or in the paper. Although each of these arguments from de Gesse depends on a 207 00:17:15.300 --> 00:17:19.300 distinct sense of spontaneity, he uses the term spontaneous order throughout without 208 00:17:19.300 --> 00:17:22.740 not noting that each argument turns on a different characteristic or that social orders may be 209 00:17:22.740 --> 00:17:28.060 spontaneous in any of these senses with or without being spontaneous in the others. But 210 00:17:28.060 --> 00:17:32.460 of course they can. These are simply three different distinctions and while many examples 211 00:17:32.460 --> 00:17:36.820 overlap the features may come apart even in some of the paradigmatic cases of spontaneous 212 00:17:36.820 --> 00:17:42.660 orders. Orders may be consensual for example while being voluntarily directive and orders 213 00:17:42.660 --> 00:17:48.260 may be polycentric while being designed to some substantial extent designed. So for example 214 00:17:48.260 --> 00:17:51.380 For example, the development of Wikipedia, which gets mentioned pretty constantly these 215 00:17:51.380 --> 00:17:56.040 days, is a clear example of a consensual and a participatory order. So, you know, nobody's 216 00:17:56.040 --> 00:18:01.220 forced to contribute to Wikipedia, thank God. The editing process is wide open to anyone 217 00:18:01.220 --> 00:18:05.660 who wants to jump in without waiting for instructions. It's not a strong example of an emergent 218 00:18:05.660 --> 00:18:10.060 order. Typically, people who edit Wikipedia edit it at least in part with the intention 219 00:18:10.060 --> 00:18:15.660 of improving the breadth and accuracy of information on Wikipedia. That is, the micro-scale success 220 00:18:15.660 --> 00:18:27.660 The second high level point to be made about the notion of spontaneous order here is related to the point we've made about the equivocal meaning of spontaneity. 221 00:18:27.660 --> 00:18:35.660 Because the paradigms for applying the concept have generally been cases where a social order is participatory or unplanned and also consensual, 222 00:18:35.660 --> 00:18:44.660 what libertarians have tended to see in spontaneous order is almost always a macroscale pattern that is freely chosen and where all involved find some mutual benefit from the proceedings. 223 00:18:44.660 --> 00:18:53.660 You don't need top-down command and control to get many important things that libertarians like to use, like language, or money, or roads, or Wikipedia. 224 00:18:53.660 --> 00:18:58.660 So, in libertarian vocabulary, spontaneous order is almost always employed to praise benign orders, 225 00:18:58.660 --> 00:19:04.660 especially benign orders that spontaneously accomplish something that government planners cannot do as well or cannot do at all. 226 00:19:04.660 --> 00:19:11.660 Now, it's remarkable and wonderful that bottom-up forms of social cooperation can so often produce unplanned, large-scale social outcomes 227 00:19:11.660 --> 00:19:15.660 outcomes, better than could be managed through comprehensive consciously designed political 228 00:19:15.660 --> 00:19:20.740 schemes for social coordination. But nothing conceptually requires that emergent orders 229 00:19:20.740 --> 00:19:25.700 need be benign orders. If widely distributed forms of intelligence, knowledge, virtue or 230 00:19:25.700 --> 00:19:30.540 prudence can add up through many individual self-interested actions into a benign, undesigned 231 00:19:30.540 --> 00:19:35.780 order, there's no reason why widely distributed forms of ignorance, prejudice, folly or vice 232 00:19:35.780 --> 00:19:41.300 might not add up through many individual self-interested actions into an unintended malign order. 233 00:19:41.300 --> 00:19:45.580 show also my widely distributed micro-level patterns of violence. 234 00:19:45.580 --> 00:19:49.660 As libertarians, the possibility that our threefold distinction raises of an emergent 235 00:19:49.660 --> 00:19:54.700 but non-consensual order must surely give us pause. 236 00:19:54.700 --> 00:19:59.100 So I'd like then to return to Brown-Miller in an attempt to charitably reconstruct what 237 00:19:59.100 --> 00:20:02.760 it is that she's arguing in her Myrmidon theory. 238 00:20:02.760 --> 00:20:06.740 As I understand Brown-Miller, her hypothesis that stranger rapists serve a Myrmidon function 239 00:20:06.740 --> 00:20:11.220 for male supremacy, with benefits that were down not only to practicing rapists themselves 240 00:20:11.220 --> 00:20:41.220 to all men is best understood as arguing that the pervasive fact of rape and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all women produces an emergent but coercive order in which non-consensual micro-scale actions inflicted by unrelated, anonymous stranger rapists end up reinforcing a macro-scale pattern of male dominance over women and the cultural and institutional superstructure of patriarchy. Feminists highlight the far-reaching significance of the everyday fact that the threat of rape constrains women's range of free action. These constraints operate through felt danger 241 00:20:41.220 --> 00:21:04.220 Paternalistic double binds often narrow the range to a vanishing point. Don't leave a late-night event without a man to walk you back. Don't leave with a man unless you intend to invite him in, or you'll give him the wrong idea and who knows what could happen then. 242 00:21:04.220 --> 00:21:16.220 Women are warned about the dangers of crowded public spaces, like subways, parties or rock concerts, while simultaneously being warned about the dangers of empty, secluded or private spaces, like parking garages, alleys, empty country or man's house or car. 243 00:21:16.220 --> 00:21:24.220 The double binds construct both public space and private space, being either alone or accompanied, as pervaded with lesser or greater degree of danger. 244 00:21:24.220 --> 00:21:28.220 Ultimately, the only space constructed as safe is male-protected space. 245 00:21:28.220 --> 00:21:32.540 and the reliability of male protection is closely linked to the personal connections with men 246 00:21:32.540 --> 00:21:37.740 within a limited set of very specific structured relations, usually either paternal authority on the one hand 247 00:21:37.740 --> 00:21:40.740 or heterosexual availability on the other. 248 00:21:40.740 --> 00:21:47.580 These restrictions on women's everyday life, their use or exploration of public space, what they feel they can safely do or say, especially in the presence of men, 249 00:21:47.580 --> 00:21:54.340 simply mean that women's freedom is systematically constrained by the fear of men as a ripple effect of the danger of the widespread, intense random, 250 00:21:54.340 --> 00:22:02.340 Danger of widespread intense random male violence and the practical need to solicit the aid of seemingly safe men for protection against the threat that other men create. 251 00:22:02.340 --> 00:22:07.340 As Bram Miller says, a world without rapists would be a world in which women move freely without fear of men, 252 00:22:07.340 --> 00:22:13.340 but here in this world that some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation. 253 00:22:13.340 --> 00:22:19.340 It's important to pause for a moment to note that just as Hayek writes that in spontaneous orders much of the structure of social life 254 00:22:19.340 --> 00:22:23.700 Life is determined by rules that are understood through tacit understanding and know-how rather 255 00:22:23.700 --> 00:22:28.780 than through an explicit rulebook or the conscious application of explicit general principles. 256 00:22:28.780 --> 00:22:34.180 In Brown-Miller's discussion here, some of the intimidation that she describes is expressed 257 00:22:34.180 --> 00:22:41.000 in self-conscious feelings of danger and explicit warnings and sort of episodes of felt fear. 258 00:22:41.000 --> 00:22:45.100 But a lot of it is tacitly inscribed just into everyday relationships, simply incorporated 259 00:22:45.100 --> 00:22:50.220 into an intensification of the sort of small-scale subconscious acts of vigilance and self-protection 260 00:22:50.220 --> 00:22:55.620 that we all carry out as a daily routine or as an expression of felt anxiety. 261 00:22:55.620 --> 00:22:59.580 Now another natural consequence of the danger created by police blotter rapists is for the 262 00:22:59.580 --> 00:23:04.220 men who don't rape and who sincerely care about the safety of individual women. Such 263 00:23:04.220 --> 00:23:07.740 men are in a material and emotional position where they easily see themselves as needing 264 00:23:07.740 --> 00:23:11.440 to protect the women that they care about from the threat of male violence and where 265 00:23:11.440 --> 00:23:41.440 The desire to protect others from violence is in itself a personal virtue, it's not a social problem, but the danger is how tempting and how easy, and also how corrupting, it is for men to take the psychological step of going from an attitude of human solidarity to a fantasy of male rescue, of coming to see themselves as defined by their identity as protector, with capital P, in contrast to frail womanhood, and of coming to see women as uniquely dependent by nature, rather than uniquely threatened 266 00:23:41.440 --> 00:23:44.440 Due to the Chosen Actions of Other Men. 267 00:23:44.440 --> 00:23:49.140 And to go even further, to try and make sure that women seek and depend on and stay within 268 00:23:49.140 --> 00:23:52.500 the scope of a man's protection, whether or not they really need it or want it. 269 00:23:52.500 --> 00:23:58.500 So use intimidating and restrictive warnings and other means of sort of keeping women socially 270 00:23:58.500 --> 00:24:03.800 confined within the stiflingly close boundaries of a certain list of safety tips. 271 00:24:03.800 --> 00:24:07.800 That kind of imposed dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for 272 00:24:07.800 --> 00:24:11.720 for Women. And that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative 273 00:24:11.720 --> 00:24:16.720 in men as any other form of structural dependence and power can. Libertarians and anarchists 274 00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:22.800 who so readily see this dynamic when it comes to the government police and military protection 275 00:24:22.800 --> 00:24:26.980 of an unwilling and disarmed populace shouldn't have any trouble seeing it if they're willing 276 00:24:26.980 --> 00:24:30.560 to see it when it comes to male protection of women. 277 00:24:30.560 --> 00:24:33.960 All of this can happen quite naturally when a large enough minority of men choose to commit 278 00:24:33.960 --> 00:24:38.040 Widespread Intense Random Acts of Violence Against a Large Enough Number of Women, and 279 00:24:38.040 --> 00:24:41.720 it can happen quite naturally without the male rapists or the male protectors or the 280 00:24:41.720 --> 00:24:47.040 women in the society ever intending to bring about any particular macro-scale socio-political 281 00:24:47.040 --> 00:24:52.920 outcome. What does happen, noticed or not, is that women's social being, how women appear 282 00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:57.840 and act as women in public, will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed, and the amount 283 00:24:57.840 --> 00:25:02.460 of time and effort they need to spend keeping supposedly protective men around and pleased 284 00:25:02.460 --> 00:25:32.460 will be increased while men's everyday material leverage over women will be reinforced and their identities as men systematically channeled into more patriarchal expressions through the defused decentralized threat of violence and the natural but unintended consequences of many small self-interested actions carried out by women and men reacting to the unequal positions that this threat constructs. Now, I should say that I've talked about the specific topic of random stranger rape all this time because that's Brown Miller's topic in her book, 285 00:25:32.460 --> 00:25:41.460 Brown-Miller's theory is a good case study in the kind of analytical point that I'm trying to make about the application of spontaneous order concepts outside of their normal domain. 286 00:25:41.460 --> 00:25:56.460 But similar remarks with different but importantly related consequences could be made for other forms of violence that are directed against women, such as, for example, harassment in public spaces or battery or sexual assault in intimate relationships, which Brown-Miller's theory does not encompass. 287 00:25:56.460 --> 00:25:58.460 It's just not a significant part of her book. 288 00:25:58.460 --> 00:26:07.460 In fact, I think that what feminist researchers have learned about rape in the decades since the publication of Brown-Miller's book is published in 1975, I believe. 289 00:26:07.460 --> 00:26:14.460 In particular, the fact that actually the overwhelming majority of rape is not committed by strangers but by intimates and acquaintances 290 00:26:14.460 --> 00:26:19.460 calls for some significant revisions to Brown-Miller's theory about the function of stranger rape, 291 00:26:19.460 --> 00:26:25.460 although what will remain after the revision is still a feminist theory importantly akin to Brown-Miller's. 292 00:26:25.460 --> 00:26:38.460 But, whether Brown-Miller's theory is true, or something else in the neighborhood is, the different roles that the different forms of violence play in shaping the violent, undesigned order of a rape culture is best understood when they're seen as different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon. 293 00:26:38.460 --> 00:26:46.460 Now, a carefully articulated and fully radicalized concept of spontaneous order presents both a crisis and an opportunity for radical feminists. 294 00:26:46.460 --> 00:26:52.460 Given the analysis of rape culture as a maligned form of non-consensual, spontaneous order, 295 00:26:52.460 --> 00:26:57.180 it might seem tempting to suppose that that offers feminists reasons for general skepticism 296 00:26:57.180 --> 00:27:02.340 of spontaneous orders and a challenge to anything like libertarianism, which proposes to transfer 297 00:27:02.340 --> 00:27:07.700 vast spaces of social life from government control to spontaneous orders within civil 298 00:27:07.700 --> 00:27:11.700 society. If that's the kind of thing you can get out of spontaneous orders, why should 299 00:27:11.700 --> 00:27:29.700 If the distinctions I've traced help illuminate the radical feminist understanding of rape culture, I also believe they can help illuminate how the genuine need for a systematic and comprehensive response to oppression need not entail a governmental response. 300 00:27:29.700 --> 00:27:38.700 Spontaneity is, as Hayek pointed out, not chaos, and resistance can be systematic and comprehensive while remaining decentralized and bottom-up. 301 00:27:38.700 --> 00:27:49.700 Abandoning government solutions to oppressive political systems, like patriarchal violence, hardly means that you'll just sort of trust and an anonymous civil society will come up with a solution, somehow. 302 00:27:49.700 --> 00:27:56.700 If distinguishing consensual from unplanned from participatory orders allows us to better understand feminist understandings of the problem, 303 00:27:56.700 --> 00:28:01.700 it may also help us to better understand the radical impulse behind many feminist solutions, 304 00:28:01.700 --> 00:28:10.700 such as women-led social movements to counter the effects of diffuse male violence outside or beyond the sphere of government and conventional political lobbying. 305 00:28:10.700 --> 00:28:20.700 CR groups, speak-outs, culture-jamming, building grassroots networks of institutions like battered women's shelters, rape crisis centers and other kinds of feminist spaces 306 00:28:20.700 --> 00:28:26.700 all originally had little if any connection to hierarchical power politics or to the male-dominated state 307 00:28:26.700 --> 00:28:37.700 And all could productively be understood as voluntarily coordinated, polycentric, but consciously organized political resistance to a polycentric emergent coercive order of violent oppression. 308 00:28:37.700 --> 00:28:40.700 It's turning one form of spontaneity against another. 309 00:28:40.700 --> 00:28:51.700 But libertarian social theorists face their own crisis and their own opportunity as well, given the central role that pervasive violence against women plays in upholding patriarchy, if this kind of theory is correct. 310 00:28:51.700 --> 00:29:08.700 The way in which a pervasive, diffuse threat of coercive force constrains the liberty of women in everyday life to move and act and live as they want, libertarians must recognize patriarchy as a system of violent political oppression even older, just as invasive and no less powerful than the violence of invasive government and state command and control. 311 00:29:08.700 --> 00:29:38.700 But unlike the kinds of state violence which male libertarians have been accustomed to discuss—violent restrictions of freedom, handed down as explicit policies, ratified through political processes, promulgated from the center and consciously carried out by official agents of the state—patriarchy expresses itself in attitudes, behaviors, and coercive restrictions that are largely produced by bottom-up, decentralized forms of violence. Committed independently by countless unrelated men, freelance terrorists who commit violence of their own accord 312 00:29:38.700 --> 00:30:08.700 Now, it's vital for libertarians to recognize that the coercive social orders that arise from this kind of diffuse gender violence, both as direct consequence and as social, psychological, or economic 313 00:30:08.700 --> 00:30:19.700 are no less important, no less political, and no less evil for being undesigned, for battering women into the social position they occupy as if by an invisible fist. 314 00:30:19.700 --> 00:30:30.700 Here, as elsewhere, the insights of libertarian theory are genuine and they are essential, but to apply them for all human beings they must be radicalized and applied everywhere that systemic coercion limits freedom. 315 00:30:30.700 --> 00:30:42.700 That includes invasions of liberty by the state, but it also includes radically different forms of invasive violence coordinated through wholly different means and calling for different sorts of response. 316 00:30:42.700 --> 00:30:54.700 Spontaneous order in civil society on a properly rich and well-delineated conception of both can be a space for hard-driving, conscious grassroots activism, at least as much as conventional governmental politics can. 317 00:30:54.700 --> 00:31:24.700 Spontaneous Order Theory is vital as a tool both for analyzing the workings of non-governmental forms of oppression and also for more clearly understanding the unique non-governmental forms of solidarity and resistance that radical feminists have employed, which have in fact often, over the past 40 years, done a much more effective job at changing social attitudes toward violence against women and at providing life-saving help to women who need it than any comparable government program. When feminists challenge the dichotomy of pervasive private crimes from public 318 00:31:24.700 --> 00:31:54.700 Public Policy, and insists that the personal is political, their critics often react to this move by treating it as an attempt to extend our existing conception of politics out to some new cases, which we had formerly classified as personal, as an attempt to interpret private violence as parts of a consciously coordinated social policy aimed at some defined common end and directed towards that end by policies handed down from the patriarchy as some recognizable central authority with an underground layer somewhere. But the aim in declaring the personal 319 00:31:54.700 --> 00:31:58.500 Conventional to be political is not simply to extend pre-existing conventional notions 320 00:31:58.500 --> 00:32:03.860 of political coordination to new cases, formerly considered private. Rather, it was to challenge 321 00:32:03.860 --> 00:32:08.380 the conventional understanding of politics and to call for a more supple understanding 322 00:32:08.380 --> 00:32:13.100 to encompass other kinds of social structures and relationships of power that involve so-called 323 00:32:13.100 --> 00:32:18.600 private interactions without any conscious coordination or recognizable center of authority, 324 00:32:18.600 --> 00:32:23.340 but which also share the pervasive, systematic and far-reaching characteristics of more 325 00:32:23.340 --> 00:32:28.660 or conventionally political social structures. If, as I argue, spontaneous order theory can 326 00:32:28.660 --> 00:32:33.220 provide a rich conceptual resource for articulating this new conception of political order and 327 00:32:33.220 --> 00:32:37.900 political resistance, then a forward development and application of spontaneous order theories 328 00:32:37.900 --> 00:32:42.060 to an agenda set by the needs of women's freedom as well as men's may provide a vital 329 00:32:42.060 --> 00:32:46.600 point of reconciliation between feminist and libertarian insights by further radicalizing 330 00:32:46.600 --> 00:32:51.380 libertarianism and by liberating radical feminism and by helping to highlight possibilities 331 00:32:51.380 --> 00:32:56.780 is for more effective radical activism than state politics could ever allow for. 332 00:32:56.780 --> 00:33:02.020 Spontaneous order theory so often pilloried by statists as a tool of political quietism 333 00:33:02.020 --> 00:33:06.500 or conservative defenses of the socioeconomic status quo, can and should be defended as 334 00:33:06.500 --> 00:33:09.980 a vital tool for radical politics and transformative social critique.