Saturday, August 31, 2013

Anarchism, the Occupy Movement, and the Kingdom of God

Back in the heyday of the Occupy movement, Christian writer Joseph Bottum spent some time hanging around Zuccotti Park talking to protesters. He never wrote his planned story about them, he says, because
I couldn't find a way to explain the enormous spiritual anxiety I felt radiating from nearly all of the people I met.
I understand. I also had the sense that the goals of the Occupiers were more about spiritual renewal than economics. Pressed to explain what they were doing, they usually said that they were upset about how wrong the world is. "We want change," one young man told Bottum. "Just change." Others seemed to be more interested in joining a movement for meaningful change than actually achieving any:
Most of all, he said, "we want people to know about the wrongness in society the way we do. We want them to see us as the 'moral vanguard of change' " (repeating a catchphrase from a meeting the night before). "Exactly," the young woman with him added. "We want people to see how brave we are, and to know that they can be brave, too."
The movement petered out even more quickly than most such amorphous crusades, leaving the rest of us to wonder what it was all about. Bottum thinks it makes most sense as a religious movement:
An era more comfortable than ours with religious history would have understood immediately what Occupy Wall Street was: a protest against the continuing reign of Satan and a plea for the coming of the Kingdom of God, with a new heaven and a new earth. In perhaps their most revealing invention, the protestors developed strange hand-waving gestures as rules of order and a substitute for voting during meetings—a marvelously utopian attempt to achieve absolute equality and democracy within their own community of saints. This was not a coherent religious worldview making an ethical stand against a particular evil, as the early 1960s civil rights movement had been in the view of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. This was instead a great, incoherent cry of apocalyptic spiritual pain: We know what is right—true, good, real—and still the world lies in sin and error.
But most of the movement's allies see it in other terms, specifically through the lens of anarchism. As it originated in the nineteenth century, anarchism was as much a spasm of violence as a philosophy. That tradition is still maintained by certain hackers and black-clad fence breakers, but most modern anarchists are pacifists. From the raft of books penned by left-wing commentators about Occupy, Bottum singles out two as worth reading: David Graeber's The Democracy Project and James C. Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism. Graeber is bullish on Occupy. Not because it struck any meaningful blows against the bureaucratic state, but rather because it did not. Rather than changing the world, the protesters changed themselves; they did not create anarchy, but they did live it:
We are already anarchists, every time we come to understandings with one another that would not require physical threats as a means of enforcement.
James Scott is less enthusiastic. A Marxist who has written extensively about peasant movements in southeast Asia -- I think Weapons of the Weak is a terrific book for explaining why peasants are the way they are -- Scott has less use for objectively failed movements. Yet he, like Graeber, is interested in the notion that anarchism can be something lived as much as something achieved. We can resist the state and social conformity in a thousand small ways without needing to have a revolution, even if that is the ultimate goal. I was especially struck by Scott's depiction of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. This has now become a history lesson about serious people acting with serious moral purpose, organized through churches and mosques, sanctified by sacrifice, presided over by holy martyrs.
The real civil rights movement, Scott argues, was much wilder, much woollier, and much wackier.
I agree. To pick apart "the movement" of the 1960s and say that the civil rights crusade was good and important, but the rest of what hippies were up to was suspect and silly, is to do violence to the time. For most participants the political goals were just one part of a longing for liberation in every sense. Dancing all night to rowdy music, preferably in an interracial group, was in the sense of Scott and Graeber an act of freedom as meaningful as passing laws.

Politics has never been kind to anarchists. As Scott admits,
Every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew.
Does that mean that the whole project of anarchism is stupid? Or does it mean that anarchists should focus their attention on something other than mundane political action?

I am much more acculturated to bourgeois existence than radicals like Graeber and Scott. Yet I sometimes react badly enough to the stifling miasma of the ordinary, rule bound, clock directed life to understand what motivates them. My world of suburban houses, anonymous downtown office blocks, and traffic jams sometimes sickens me, and I long to somehow break free.

But where would I go and what would I do? Life isn't stifling and rule-bound for no reason, it is stifling and rule-bound because that is the only way we have found to make it work. The Kingdom of God -- the place that would be perfectly safe and profoundly meaningful at the same time -- is not coming soon. What to do in the mean time? I used to scorn people who sought meaning by throwing themselves into fringe causes or marching in doomed protests, but no more. To say that something does not "matter" is to offer a sweeping generalization about the universe and our place in it that I no longer feel qualified to make. What does it mean to be free, anyway? Is it really about politics, or can it be found in actions like a sit-in, or in dancing, or in love? or even in accepting what cannot be changed?

9 comments:

Unknown said...

"To pick apart "the movement" of the 1960s and say that the civil rights crusade was good and important, but the rest of what hippies were up to was suspect and silly, is to do violence to the time."

Actually, it seems to me that the splits on the left over these sorts of issues are central to the sixties. While liberals of all sorts could agree that Jim Crow was an abomination, the "movement" started to break up precisely after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, between those who thought things like the Acts were just what was wanted, and those who said, "Okay, now let's smash all the clocks." Likewise, while many contemporary liberals can embrace breaking up the big banks or curbing executive pay, they're put off by the creepy, self-regarding Rousseauism of "a new language of gesture." (And just think how much coercion would be required to get everyone to use that!)

Many of us are frustrated by schedules, red tape, and assessment by superiors. But we confine our resistance to passive aggressive weapons of the weak: turning work in late, buying essays online, smoking in the bathroom. I think for many this is not simply because one has to ruefully admit that stifling discipline makes fallen human life possible, or that anarchism "doesn't work." Instead, self-suppression is, to many, quite congenial.

If you can't separate the hippies from the movement, you also can't subtract the rest of the movement's hostility to them from the story of its inevitable failure.

John said...

You are surely right that the movement collapsed partly because the crockery-smashing wing and the suit-wearing wing fell out. I was making the historical point that without the energy of the bourgeois-hating hippies and the angry black nationalists, the serious stuff probably would not have happened.

I have also been thinking about the afterlife of the movement over the past 40 years. One of the echoes has been the prominence in popular culture of angry rappers, obscene comedians, and various other bnlack performers. That is, I think, the expression of the wild, woolly side Scott was talking about. Obviously it is possible to separate the church-based civil rights movement from the furious energy of black musicians and performers, but would that make any historical sense? Certainly both have had big impacts on how Americans live today.

Unknown said...

"Obviously it is possible to separate the church-based civil rights movement from the furious energy of black musicians and performers, but would that make any historical sense?" I think it would be a historical necessity to do so. In the first place, as I said, the division itself was crucial to the history, to the movement's waning after 1965, and to the breakup of the liberal coalition. The more promiment folks like Stokeley Carmichael and Tom Hayden became, the more fragmented the Left got. So in a way the energy they represent *separated itself* from "the movement." Separating the truly elect from the wolves in sheep's clothing, the hypocrites who think they can rebel and still wear suits and respect subject-verb-object logic--is vital to such people.

Second, I get the impression you're indulging in a bit of scorn toward the suit-wearing types, who in fact had plenty of energy and courage. If you watch the Edmund Pettus Bridge incident, for example, you can see that the folks getting beat up are very proper, quiet, suit-wearing types. The suit-wearers, of course, knew what would happen, and self-consciously helped create this media event. Likewise with the kids who actually enrolled in the U. of Alabama, etc.

Unknown said...

Speaking of scorn, I'll have to admit I scorn hippies, the new language of gesture, the true elect, and all that. I'm fascinated by such movements, in the same way I'm fascinated by serial killers and my own id, but I don't respect them.

I'm not saying those movements were extraneous to "the movement" in the sixties. And, as I sit here barefoot in sandals and a t-shirt, I profit from the informality and self-indulgence they legitimized.

John said...

You, I take it, have not watched your children learn about the civil rights movement in school as many times as I have. It is taught like the life of Jesus in Sunday school, with proper reverence for heroic saints doing saintly things. Maybe that is ok for elementary school, but for my kids at least it was the same way in high school. I think this account is wrong.

I have no scorn for suit-wearing, serious radicals, and I am not saying the hippies and the black nationalists were more important than the SCLC. But it took a big coalition to make this happen, and they were a key part of it.

I was just struck by James Scott's account of the movement as something much wilder and much more enmeshed with the bad elements than the way it is usually presented.

Unknown said...

Well, James Scott would say that, wouldn't he? At some point, who and what one likes to emphasize becomes very personal and psychological. I must admit that, on a fundamental level, I don't think anarchists have ever added much. I don't like them, I don't trust them, and I don't respect their philosophy. For better or worse, I don't.

That said, on a less personal note, I think all could agree that one shouldn't tar the original suit-wearers with the bowdlerizing brush of public education. King and others were quite cunning and adept politicians, as well as idealists. King for example was quite clear that, while JFK was charming and said the right things well, LBJ was the one to get the job done, when it came to the Civil Rights Acts. But King was no anarchist. And if Abbie Hoffman had been in charge, there would have been no Civil Rights Acts. Just as Occupy hasn't prevented a single bank fraud, not one.

John said...

David, what do you think of the notion that Occupy is more like a millenarian cult than a political movement?

Unknown said...

That seems like a sound argument. I often point out to my students that folks like the hippies--unwashed, barefoot types preaching universal love and violating social norms--are very common in many traditional societies. In that sense, hippies are arguably more "conservative" and traditional than corporate executives.

I don't have a strong beef against hippies et al. per se. I'm suspicious of academic anarchists like Scott and professional bombthrowers like Assange. On Scott's specific point, it strikes me that Ron Paul could just as easily say that you can't separate the Civil Rights movement from the Vietnam War, since both are extensions of federal power. My response would be, first, that Ron Paul would say that, since he's basically a racist paleocon, and second, that in the event King and others were quite able to separate the two, since King broke very publicly with LBJ over the war. That was another part of the story of the liberal breakup.

Unknown said...

Did you see how I did that? I convicted Ron Paul of racism on the basis of a hypothetical. Cohen would say that you can't separate Ron Paul from the Grand Dragon, wouldn't he? But I would bet $10 that he has said you can't separate Civil Rights from Vietnam.