To Rules or Not To Rules

Do more rules make communities better?

I recently read David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules, a very thought-provoking read. As Graeber is an anarchist, one might assume his answer to the above to be a simple “no”, but I noticed him highlighting a significant tension in this discussion, and I’ve been thinking through it, as seen below.

Rules = Good?

On the one hand, we have to look at why well-meaning people create rules in the first place. As I’ve been a part of various communities, I’ve often wanted to have more established rules. Rules record precedents for future reference in order to create transparency, equity, and consistency. This is why we have employee handbooks, and rulebooks for games, and community guidelines in online spaces. We want to prevent surprising outcomes or inconsistent responses by the community to different individuals based upon who they are.

Communities often have shadow rulers, people who strongly influence the realities of the community through their influence, charisma, relationships, tenure, etc. Clear rules and structures can bring shadow rulers out into the light by more explicitly answering who makes decisions and how they are made.

Where does that desire come from? Partly, it comes from a fear of what people with power, freedom, or the ability to arbitrarily make decisions will do. It flows from a worldview where human nature is predominantly inclined toward evil and contexts where there is not a foundation of trust among people. So this instinct has tended to be more common in communities where increased size, or decreased stability (think of increased migration, long-term agricultural societies based on tribes, clans broken up by industrialization and shifting to more transitory life, anonymous cities, individualism, etc.) has eroded close, stable, relational networks and the trust and implicit norms they allow. So this perspective might be predominantly associated with Western white middle-class educated folks of a modern industrial society (though it has existed many other places previously, and spread many places more recently), establishment liberal reformers in line with the Progressive movement of the early 20th Century, rooting out familial and honor-based systems like the patronage system and seeking to fix the world through efficient and effective bureaucratic systems of neutrality and objectivity, where the evils of human arbitrariness are given no space to do damage.

Rules = Not Good?

Others would critique this outlook. If you imagine a complex bureaucracy (which often results as structures continue to develop to address more and more situations), they do still privilege some people - those who know the rules and how to navigate them. That’s how we have lawyers as a prestigious class and people frustratedly trying to navigate government offices and corporate customer service to get a fair decision out of officials with little motivation to hear the specifics of their concern. It’s how we end up with police forces with significant power to do what they want and little chance of facing accountability for their actions. And it is how the realities of unequal power and dominance by ruling elites become hidden away, harder for the public to see clearly, and justified as “won fairly” within the rules of the system, suppressing discontent with the situation.

Opponents would argue that rules generally constrict human freedom and give power and privilege to elites, allowing them to utilize the rules to consolidate power. They’d argue the development of explicit rules, systems, and bureaucracy formalizes and legitimizes rulers, empowering them even more.

The fear from this end is not what humans generally will do with freedom, but fear of what the elites and rule-enforcers will do with the power created by the structures themselves. There’s a more positive view here of human nature, assuming humans can do good with freedom at the lowest and most distributed level, but a skepticism towards power and suspicion of what humans will do if given unequal power over their peers.

This way of thinking fits best in societal contexts where there is a higher amount of relationship between everyone involved that allows for trust and for working out issues by finding consensus and through solutions fitting each individual situation.

So… What’s the Right Answer?

I think that it’s hard to say one or the other of these is straightforwardly correct. We have to live in the tension of these two instincts. While I’m sympathetic to the second outlook, it is true that some rules and structures actually do create the conditions for freedom, consensus, and thriving community.

Books like Anarchic Agreements and Come Hell or High Water:A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry detail the ways in which coming to agreement about norms and processes allows even the most anarchic egalitarian communities without hierarchy to function (and are very interesting short reads). When we form community with other people, especially people without a long foundation of relationship, unless we want to default to the loudest or strongest getting their way, we have to come to agreements about how we will interact and make decisions. These agreements give space for us to navigate conflicts and live and work together in harmony, with freedom for each person to live as an equal member without being coerced by others.

So the question is not really - “Are rules good or bad?”, but “Is this rule or structure being created a rule that will better enable freedom, well-being, communication, interaction, and equity, while still leaving room for creative response to individual needs and situations?”

Maybe that’s all a bit dry, so let’s talk about games, improv, and poetry.

Games, Improv, Poetry - Living in the Tension

Games, improv theater, and poetry all illustrate this tension and its creative potential.

Graeber himself briefly considers games in his work. Games are activities involving voluntarily chosen self-restrictions in order to create a challenge to be overcome within a specific framework. Those voluntarily chosen limitations make space for a type of creative community, as well as providing predictability and space where rules will be followed, allowing structured engagement together. Freedom and creativity are nourished in this space (at least in well-crafted games, that is), but there is a certain level of shared agreement to abide by set rules and structures that allows that freedom and creativity to have space to thrive.

I’d suggest that improv theater works similarly. Participants engage in an experience with a wide range of freedom to act and create in unpredictable ways, but implicit agreements to particular ways of doing things with each other allows it to be an enjoyable and fruitful shared creative exercise among a group of people rather than just an individual. This is why there are whole training programs for improv. Those are not just about how to creatively exercise individual freedom. They are just as much about how to understand and abide by shared communal norms within improv that allow performers to build upon one another’s creativity and leave space for each other to be free and creative and not coerced by one another’s ways of interacting within the experience. Shared norms and structures make the space here for creativity and freedom to thrive and make enjoyable (and unpredictable) experiences for both the participants and the audience. Many other forms of art work similarly, such as jazz bands, full of creative freedom made possible by shared understanding and commitment to certain norms (like staying within the same musical key!)

Combining games and improv, good tabletop role-playing games (with Dungeons and Dragons as the most well-known example) are all about the same thing (and Graeber mentions them too). An extensive set of rules exists but exists to create space for free and creative communal interaction.

As I discussed this with my spouse, she suggested that poetry works similarly. Poetry often seems very free of rules, but most good poetry is deeply concerned with a particular poetic form and the rules involved with it. Even if the work rebels against those rules, it does so with the rules very much in mind and its interaction with and rebellion against those rules is intentional and communicates something. Rules and form make creativity and beauty possible within poetry, including enabling the creative expression of breaking out of the form in well-crafted moments.

In each of these areas, socially created structures full of rules exist to make space for human agency, freedom, and creativity to thrive and to do so within the strengthening of relational bonds. These examples display an essential piece of what it is to be human and how rules have potential for creating more freedom and creativity rather than less when done well.

Part 2 Yet to Come - Linguistics, Coercive Grammar, Biblical Ethics, and Creative Solutions from the Margins

I think there’s much more to continue to say that follows along this train of thought - so look for Part 2 soon!

Everyday Anarchism: Home Repairs

Recently we saw some small seeds of mutual aid starting in the building we live in. We were working on a home project and my wife was removing paint from a door. I’d told a neighbor about this project and they had been doing a lot of paint stripping and had some equipment that would make it easier, and they lent us that equipment, making the process much quicker!

So many of us have assets around that we only use occasionally which could benefit others around us if we were to share them with one another. Do we all need to duplicate purchases of tools, vacuums, small appliances, lawn equipment, items used for parties, etc.? Not really! If we build relationships with close neighbors we may be able to share some of these items with one another, consume less, and spend less.

We’re looking forward to continuing to meet neighbors and build relationships as we continue to settle in. Some neighbors have even talked together about clearing out a cluttered common storage area and making a small shared workshop or something like that. There’s no coercive or capitalist entity making that happen, just cooperation of free individuals choosing to associate and improve things. We’ll see what comes of it!

Trail Safety Rules photo by Toby Dagenhart on Unsplash

Dragon Game Photo by Clint Bustrillos on Unsplash