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?