Demanding Subtleties

In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, staff writer Dan Barrett explores some of the intellectual influences that may be at work in the recent phenomena known as “Occupy Wall Street.” Barrett notes the various scholars who’ve addressed the crowd, including Cornel West (Princeton) and Frances Fox Piven (CUNY). Moreover, Barrett identifies other scholars who “have anticipated some of the central issues” in the movement’s critiques of capitalism and who have related U.S. domestic protests to other international incidents—e.g., Spain, Cairo, Athens.

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

Drawing parallels from the “direct action” he observed in the Betafo community of Madagascar—e.g., when a group of villagers dig a well on their own initiative, rather than appeal for government assistance—anthropologist David Graeber (University of London) claims that this year’s protests represent the latest impulse to produce "democracy without a government." From an anarchist’s perspective this seems to be a healthy development in community formation.

Unfortunately, the Occupiers don’t seem all that eager to dig wells or build any sort of lasting infrastructure. But, they are angry.

Among the students present, the anger over mounting student-loan debt and bleak job prospects loom large. But, the protesters have saved their greatest outrage for that simple vice of greed. When Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s article in Vanity Fair “framed income inequality as a matter of a wealthy 1 percent versus the remaining 99 percent,” the movement discovered a trope to champion. To be among the 99 percent was the unimpressive but essential criteria for membership in the Occupation. And Occupiers are “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.”

In fact, as some have observed, the celebrity appeal of this movement seems far more clear than its self-definition, for greed is notoriously difficult to locate, let alone remove from the human species. Moreover, scholars of anarchism have yet to produce a compelling, coherent explanation of the phenomena’s purpose, let alone its potential for genuine social change.

Ironically, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs may have come closer to the truth than any of the other ‘scholars in residence.’ As a supporter of the movement and leading proponent of sustainability, Sachs claimed that “[e]ither our government is going to become completely shrunken and dysfunctional, or we're going to start paying for civilization again."

Stretching Sachs’s term, Western civilization would seem a fine place to start—beginning with the revitalization of citizens who understand their rights and duties, under the law and in pursuit of the Common Good. Yet, fighting greed does not build a civilization. On the contrary, combating greed constitutes a moral crusade, susceptible to the domination of moralists and pedants. As the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassett reminds us, promoting the virtues of a just society and a thriving civilization will require “incalculably subtle powers.”

The Occupiers may be many things, but subtle they are not.