Could an anarchist society build the Hubble Telescope?

[brainpanhandler]

I voted no, though I suppose they could build one. But why on earth would they?

It'd be easier.

[justdrew]

[BrandonD]

The survey question makes sense if we are referring to the pop-culture TV definition of anarchy, which would be defined as something like "total chaos and disorder".

No, a telescope could not be built in a state of total chaos and disorder.

However, if we are going by the more classical textbook definition of anarchy, which would be something closer to "non-recognition of artificial authority constructs", then the survey question becomes kind of absurd.

Artificially-constructed authority is not needed to complete a project, no matter how large, if said project is considered to be of value by the community that is performing the work. When people collectively want to complete a project, they generally acknowledge natural authority of those who can best perform the functions required. I have seen this first hand many times.

People will readily work to take care of themselves and their community, but for some reason they feel adverse to working for a group above them that wants to sit on its ass and tell them what to do.

Weird.

The progress of culture is in direct proportion to the overlap between those who possess authority and those who actually do the work. At this point in history, those two are almost entirely divided.

If we were closer to a state of anarchy, with the vast technology and resources existing today being more collectively available, we would likely have a Hubble Telescope for each city.

[Elvis]

Reading Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) on the bus the other day, this jumped out as relevant (bracketed edits mine):

It is out of [his] all-embracing conception of human nature that [Paul] Goodman draws his communitarianism: not from the supposition that men are incarnate angels, but from the realization that only a social order built to the human scale permits the free play and variety out of which the unpredictable beauties of men emerge. But conversely (and here is the anarchist insight so frequently ignored) it is only a society possessing the elasticity of decentralized communities that can absorb the inevitable fallibilities of men. For where we have big systems run from the musclebound center, the blunders of the custodians will surely reverberate into total calamity. And quis custodiet custodes?

As Goodman himself has remarked, it is strange indeed that decentralist sentiments like these are usually rejected by the cautious as unthinkably "radical." The historical reference for his brand of anarchism harks back to the well-tested virtues of the neolithic village. "The 'conservatives,' on the other hand, want to stay with the oppressions of 1910 or perhaps Prince Metternich. It is only the anarchists who are really conservative, for they want to preserve sun and space, animal nature, primary community, experimental inquiry."

(That last quote from Paul Goodman's Drawing the Line.)