We’re All Mad Here

Freddie and Mark have recently gone a couple of rounds over the effectiveness of the counter culture and its protest modality for expression of concern and frustration about any variety of issues. In many ways I think that both are simultaneously spot on in their analysis and way off-base.

Firstly, let me just say that I think it was wholly unfair of Freddie to extrapolate the very last line of Mark’s post in order to conveniently conjure up one of his favourite axes to grind. That’s precisely the kind of rhetorical voodoo for which  Freddie has regularly criticised his more dishonest nemeses, and rightly so.  As Mark has subsequently gone out of his way to point out, his criticism about the incoherence and subsequent lack ineffectiveness of protesting was leveled equally at participants from both the left and the right. I personally would have thought that his extremely funny “Pardon Scooter” line made that fact abundantly clear.

That said, I think Mark analyzes the function of protesting from a distressingly one-dimensional perspective that misses an entire component of its value. Ironically, such an analysis is of precisely the same kind for which Freddie called me out some time back at The Politics of Scrabble (sorry, no link – I really should have migrated the content before letting to site go dark), so I’m somewhat surprised that he failed to offer the analysis here, especially insofar as I think it’s compelling and has re-shifted my own perspective on the subject.

Much, much more after the jump.

Wrote Mark,

The trouble is that in order for a protest to have any success, it must become a movement.  And in order to become a movement, you have to attact people who may agree with the specific cause you are protesting, but have exactly zero interest in signing on to your other beliefs.  Worse, you cannot control the message they try to send in their own protest.  Sure, you can try to limit the people who actually get to hold a microphone at the protests, but good luck prohibiting someone from speaking who has agreed to donate substantial resources to the protest, and even more good luck preventing individual protesters from carrying signs that convey an irrelevant message that you or – more importantly – the average observer may find appalling.  Even if the average observer might not find that irrelevant message appalling, its existence makes it increasingly difficult for the average observer to figure out exactly what it is you’re protesting, and the result is that it just looks like you’re throwing a collective temper tantrum because your “side” lost an election, even if you never considered yourself part of that “side” in the first place.

Mark is certainly right in that analysis, insofar as one chooses to measure the value of a protest based on its ability to change things. And to be sure, that is always one of the primary goals of any protest, demonstration, or mass act of civil disobedience. In some senses, people wouldn’t bother with the effort it takes to hold a reasonably well attended protest if they didn’t believe on some level that doing so might stand to change some identified state of affairs. But evaluating the merits of protests on this basis alone fails to take into account the value of having people engaged in a sense of civic responsibility at all, which their attendance and participation in a protest represents.

Look, it’s no secret that levels of civic engagement amongst citizens of western democracies have been on the wane over the past decades and that this level of disengagement has serious repercussions for the underpinnings of democracy itself. Part of that disengagement is a ubiquitous sense that government has little to do with the lives of its citizens and that there is little that those citizens can do to change this fact. That people in those democracies bother to turn out to protests on a variety of social and political issues is a proverbial stick in the eye of that kind of apathy and I for one am disinclined to frown upon it, regardless of its overall effectiveness.

And, as Freddie notes in his response,

This is what happens when a rhetoric of exclusion has grown to include such a large slice of political and philosophical life. The left-wing– you know, once half of the political spectrum, a vast, diverse and ideologically and intellectually teeming slice of thinkers– has been pushed out of the conversation. This would be wrong in general, but it has sadder in the wake of current events, which demonstrate how utterly necessary the political left is. There have been two vitally important lessons of the last decade of American political life: that wars of aggression, particularly those designed to spread democracy and increase stability, undermine democracy and destroy stability; and that the free market is not self-regulating and wise but rather requires strong hands to reign in risk and prevent human greed from damaging everyone working within those markets.

Indeed, there is some not inconsiderable value in cultivating a willingness to be openly critical about certain held norms so as to ensure that the most diverse and robust of debates takes place within the walls of one’s polity. The kind of confidence that springs from the act of openly, vocally, and demonstrably expressing one’s criticisms of the current state of affairs is invaluable to the practice of counter-balancing politics.

It is in this regard that I think both Andrew Sullivan and Mark are missing part of the point when they dismiss the tea parties for their incoherence of message. There is something to be said for average citizens having the motivation and wherewithal to take to the streets to comment on what they perceive to be the wrong direction in which their country is generally headed.

And let me be clear, the ways in which the country is headed that many of the tea partiers take to be wrong, I think are fundamentally right.

But I would rather see those individuals moved to express their concern rather than lethargically sink into even deeper chronic whateverism. It is that discussion between warring factions that winds up moving the ball forward over the long haul, even as messy as that discussion usually winds up being. And let’s also be clear about the fact that the ferocity of that discussion is fundamentally different and more sincere than the lazy hyper-partisanship to which I reacted with disdain earlier this week. Those conversations, even when they’re yelling matches, aren’t postured or trumped up for the sake of naked power grabbing; they are real conversations that need to happen if any kind of consensus ever has a chance of emerging. If they are destined to take place on either side of police lines and placards with spittle flying, then in some senses: so be it.

That one interlocutor in the conversation isn’t as coherent in their messaging as they might be  doesn’t diminish the value of the conversation, nor, frankly, does it necessarily diminish the message that the hazy communicator is offering. There is also some value in people turning out to express their frustration over a certain state of affairs, even when they are unclear about what the alternative might be. There is nothing saying that that push back will be forever marked by a lack of clarity, and I don’t think one should assume that the tea parties will always and forever be a jumble of contradictory messages, if indeed they are now.

But more importantly to my mind, in some cases the lack of clarity in protest messaging could be indicative of a group of people who are grappling with the articulation of a future that is novel, bold, and sincerely innovative. One doesn’t always necessarily have a fully-formed image of the different state of affairs that one thinks ought to be the case and the act of trying to articulate that vision, building it as you go, is an important and worthwhile endeavour. That our political discourse only takes seriously, to ape on Freddie for a moment, those articulations that are perfectly put together and nicely packaged is part of its problem. Such requirements stifle real creativity and debate, more often than not.

On the flip side, I think there can be the tendency on the part of counter culture proponents and down trodden leftists to assume that it is only and ever the agents of the status quo who engage in group think. My own not insignificant experience in organizing a variety of protests and and public rallies over the years speaks to the fallibility of that notion. While I am ardently supportive of engaging people via participation in protests and other civil disobedience, be it with motivations from the left or right sides of the spectrum, I am highly dubious of the idea that such participation means, by definition, that one is engaged in truly thoughtful and independent critical thinking.

Lefties and counter culture icons have their own set of sacred cows that enslave them to a certain bias about what the state of things are and how things work that is no less blinded in its limited partiality than the myopia of the status quo. In particular, protests can draw a class of folks who are just turning up to tear structures down, be they physical, social, or conceptual, and for whom the construction of some alternative is worse than besides the point, it is antithetical.

These folks are, as a good friend pointed out to me in a discussion on this topic, “the explosive ones,” as Nietzsche coined them in The Gay Science. The powder kegs,

When one considers how the energy of young men needs to explode, one is not surprised to see them decide so unsubtly and unselectively for this or that cause: what thrills them is the sight of the zeal surrounding a cause and, so to speak, the sight of the burning match — not the cause itself. The subtler seducers therefore know how to create in them the expectation of an explosion and to disregard justifying their cause: reasons are not the way to win over these powder kegs!

I’ve seen far too many of exactly these types of folks at protests and within the counter culture in my relatively short tenure to be able to provide those activities and scenes with unqualified approval and praise. The explosiveness and potential group think of the counter culture and protest set is, in my mind, every bit as corrosive to the sincere practice of democratic dialogue as mindless adherence to the status quo.

In short, I think the problem here, again, is that we don’t give due credit to just how much work and how difficult it is to cultivate truly independent and razor sharp critical thinking and analysis. Whether you’re examining the arguments put forward by those on the left or those on the right, one is left largely with the impression that, as Chris pessimistically notes (kind of, sort of –  friendship license of generous interpretation via background invoked), the fundamental underlying analysis in each hasn’t changed all that much in the past couple of decades. Conversely, the world around us has undergone tectonic shifts over the same period of time, so there is a fundamental incongruity about what is being said and what the case seems to be no matter which vantage point you happen to be assuming.

So in some senses I think Mark is spot on in terms of his challenging the protest set to sharpen their analytic spears, it is only a truly honed and independent critique that will cut through the mire of  the perennial culture wars and the like. Such a critique is actually very rarely achieved, so given its potential importance and use we owe it more of our efforts than we generally tend to show. But leveling this critique doesn’t necessarily entail throwing the engagement baby out with the mindless protest bathwater. There are potentials here, and where Chris and I part ways is over the gusto with which we choose to run at this brick wall.

Admittedly, I’ll likely wind up being the one with a goose egg, but I’ve come to the conclusion that any worthwhile, forward moving endeavour requires the taking of lumps, at some point or another.

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