There is an interesting, provocative, and disturbing article by a staff editorial writer in The Washington Post this morning entitled "What the Occupy protests tell us about the limits of democracy."
Anne Applebaum, the staff writer, hits the nail on the head in a lot of ways. Her thesis is quite similar to what I've been saying recently, and she needs to be heard. Let's call it a "reality check."
She says that the reason there "understandably" is no coherent set of policy objectives for what is now a worldwide Occupy Movement (let's not call it OWS, but OM, which sounds more sixtiesh anyway) is that democracies, which since the time of Pericles in ancient Athens have been local, are paradoxically not equipped to deal with global challenges.
Remember the old Eighties slogan popularized by John Naisbitt, which embodied the second wave - we're now in the third - of "participatory democracy", a phrase coined by the New Left of the 1960s. "Think globally, act locally!"
We need to act globally now too, Applebaum says, but we can't really do that effectively because democracy wasn't designed to act globally. Acting globally requires a unified, global, democratic political order, which we don't have. If Europe can't get its act together together even in the midst of a crisis potentially far worse than in the US, how can you expect the world to do so? And to do so right now?
Chanting "democracy now", as we did in the Sixites, is fine if you're directing it at the present occupant of the White House (which we probably don't need to do). But try doing that right now in Beijing, the erstwhile "Communist" Versailles palace of the current global capitalism. See my point?
What Appelbaum notes is obvious. But rather than merely acquiesce to the obvious, which will ensue in instant despair, we need to do more than simply be "aware," which is what OM has already done for us.
Awareness is a good thing, not a bad thing. But awareness is like taking only a few days of your antibiotic to combat a life-threatening strep infection when the prescription calls for two weeks. If you don't go all the way with the prescription, the infection seems to abate for a while, but then comes back with a vengeance.
As speaker after speaker at our conference last spring in Denver on the global plague of human trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable people from Benin to Belarus emphasized, too much "awareness" without a careful analysis and a realistic follow-up for mobilization of people and resources can have the opposite effect in the long run. It can get hopes up with a passion to "do something," only to realize the impossibility of the task, ending in apathy and long-term loss of motivation.
In order to immunize ourselves against long-term despair, we need to do something first (and I realize, it's not immediately gratifying or glamorous), which is to do our own kind of "consciousness raising" - see, I threw in another generationally unfamiliar Movement term which Marx actually invented. To raise our own consciousness about the real reality - not the "hyperreality", the pure Truman Showish, totally virtual, Baudrillardian, "more real than real" reality of our slogans and significations - of our plight, we need to do something different than we are thoroughly addicted to doing, which is either one of the following:
- Blame some vague, generic, Other (i.e, "the rich" or "the government") or some vague, generic form of emotionally-laden Otherness (i.e., "capitalism" or "the liberals" qua "socialists")
- Once we realize the impossibility of solving anything by doing that, or after we have done just-enough-to-be-dangerous "consciousness raising" on ourselves, start blaming ourselves for our consumerism, our complicity in the "system", our laziness, our inaction, all our misguided choices since we first put our baby fingers on that hard stove, etc., etc.
The blame game, as we've had psychologists tell us for a long time but not of course politicians who we both blame and vote for simultaneously, is just a sophisticated form of denial.
What we need in this new era of or conscousness raisining, or CR (fashioning acronyms is not sixtiesh but au courant, ), is what I would call a new, more sophisticated, self-organizing method of the name game. Psychologists tell us that if we can name it, we can really deal with it. That's probably, anthropologists tell us, human beings most likely invented language in the first place.
Naming involves also the development of definitions, synonyms and their definitions, a new grammar of discourse, etc. It does not involve using what the psychologists call "thought-stopping cliches," which satisfy emotionally (like crack) but leave us ultimately worse off, and which is what we're all, on the right and on the left, doing.
You know, "back then" before we mobilized we had something called "teach-ins." They weren't just for the academe crowd, they were theoretically for everybody.
Teach-ins are about the substance of what is going on. The "why are we in this flix?" question ultimately flows into the "what ought we to do?" question.
Hopefully, this blog is the beginning of a serious teach-in about the global crisis we're all caught up in.
I know, I know, we're all afraid that we'll just end up "talking", not doing. But if you have a severe and baffling disease, would you just treat it yourself without first at least coming up with a tentative diagnosis, having a physician do that perhaps just to confirm or disconfirm what you already thought, then reading everything you can about it, then joining or creating a "support group", etc., etc? Of course you wouldn't.
But with social media we're talking all the time. We now live in the digitally networked age of instant and complex information.
We didn't have any of that in the Sixties.
Tomorrow I will write about why we shouldn't listen to the false prophets who tell us "all you need is communism (whatever that means), da, da, da, da, tum."
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