Occupy Wall Street (And Everywhere Else)

Apologies for the three or four of you out there who regularly read this blog--I haven't even been doing a good job keeping up with my lame once-a-week posting schedule on Fridays.  The main problem with teaching two online courses this fall is that I'm spending even more time sitting in front of the computer.  I've been sitting in this chair at my office since before 8:00 this morning and have done little else but type away to students, and about the last thing I can bring myself to do voluntarily after days like this is sit down and type more!  My hope is after one of my online classes ends next week (it's an accelerated 7-week course) I'll be in better mental shape to be more involved in writing for myself.

Anyway, at the end of a long Friday and a long week, I just had some thoughts rolling around my brain about the Occupy Wall Street stuff going down, and I feel like I'll lose my mind if I have to type yet another version of "please make your thesis statement more specific," so here are some random thoughts . . .

As the Reverend Jim Wallis said, much more eloquently than I ever could, standing up for the poor and disenfranchised is truly doing God's work, particularly when we're spending fortunes on sending people to kill and be killed while millions in the richest nation that's ever existed go hungry and sick through no fault of their own.  One can sneer all one likes at "hippies" beating bongos in Zucotti Park, but were Jesus here today, he'd be down there with them, I'd reckon . . . just another unkempt, long-haired dude talking about taking care of those whom the rich have left behind.

So I'm all for the #OWS movement since its an attempt to bring the public back into the public sphere.  In an age when the majority of the mass media is owned by a handful of corporate behemoths, it's heartening to see people with nothing more than their vocal cords wrest control of the national discourse away from the talking heads, both in the media and in Washington (an increasingly blurry distinction, by the by). As someone interested in rhetoric, the reclaiming of the public sphere by those without ties to the political or corporate machinery of the nation sends shivers of Habermasian glee up and down my spine.

The only thing I'd add--and this is from a perspective of someone who has become an amateur student of peace studies and relate issues--is that I don't think of what's happening as the "99%" vs. the "1%."  I think it's "The 100%."  We're all in this together.  The only issue is that 1% don't quite realize it yet.

If history teaches us anything, it's that a greater and greater discrepancy between those with a lot and those with a little is a bad thing for a society.  It leads to instability, which is bad for everyone, not just 99%.  I'm sure a lot of the folks participating in these demonstrations across the nation would disagree with me on this, but I don't think the 1% are the enemy.  They are, as the saying goes, allies in disguise.  What folks aligned with the OWS movement want (to the extent one can generalize) are things that would make society better for everyone.  And not just in some fuzzy-wuzzy, kum-bah-yah sort of way, but in utterly concrete and practical terms.

I don't think the majority of those in the 1% are bad people.  Sure, you have your Bernie Madoffs here and there, people who truly see their fellow human beings as nothing more than resources to be harvested and discarded.  But I think these folks are in the minority of the minority.  Of course, such people tend to wind up at the top of the financial and political hill in disproportionate numbers, so their influence can make them seem more numerous than they are, but we're not talking about a lot of people.

But when you've been brainwashed (perhaps by yourself) into thinking that the number at the bottom of that quarterly earnings report is the end-all, be-all of your existence . . . well, it's probably easy to miss a lot of things. One of those is how your own long-term survival is entwined with that of the person who empties your wastebasket at the end of the day.

So yes, by all means (necessary) occupy Wall Street, Main Street, and everywhere in between.  But (and I say this to those both inside and outside the movement) let's not frame this as an "uprising" or "battle."  To say that this is not the 99% against the 1% but the 100% for all of us, whether we know it or not, is not some sort of tie-dyed commonplace or granola-y shibboleth; it truly is the reality of the situation.  I think we'll all be better served if we keep that in mind.

At least, that's what I'm thinking at the moment.  I could be wrong, as I so often am.

Yikes . . . what a rambling, semi-coherent bit of blather I've subjected on the poor Internets.  I'm fried.  Time to go home and have a beer.

Peace.

Galtung, Macrohistory, and 2008

I'm cheating a bit on this blog post by doubling up with my final assignment from my latest class from Transcend Peace University.  I'm using the text of my response as my blog post, which actually works out fine, since I've been thinking about economic/political issues anyway.  It might not make a lot of sense out of context, but I think the basic upshot--that our discourse around the economic "crisis" is based in a rhetoric of personal accountability and blame and this leads to a myopic view of the problems and solutions--is clear enough.

A macrohistoric/holonistic view of the response to the response to the 2008 economic crisis would move us away from (to use the terminology of rhetorician/social critic Kenneth Burke) a preoccupation with the Agent/Act relationship to the Agency/Scene relationship.  These roughly translate to moving from questions of “WHO did WHAT” to “HOW did it happen and WHEN and WHERE did it happen.”  In the macrohistoric view, the when and where are vast, the when being the history of capitalism and the where being the globe.   We are then prompted to look at 2008 as a byproduct of a system, not as the malfeasance (ACT) of particular people (AGENT), such as bankers, government leaders, unions, or even whole countries (Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc.).  

The problem policymakers see 2008 in agent/act terms, and the solutions are similarly short-sighted.  The complexity of the system is ignored.  “Austerity” is invoked—a solution steeped in the idiographic mindset that individual virtues are the response to a systemic issue.  Particular people are blamed and punished (“greedy” union members, the “unproductive” poor, etc.).  The blame falls on those whose economic existences are most directly affected by situation, despite the fact that they are already economically marginalized within the system of capitalism.  Here, we have Burke’s fifth and final term: purpose, or “why.”  While traditional views would ascribe the “why” of 2008 to individualistic motives (albeit often projected onto collectives) and corresponding flaws in character, a macrohistoric view would see the “why” in terms of the internal mechanisms of capitalist economics—as system problem, not an individual problem.  Solutions would be based on examining the internal mechanisms of the system and changing them.  Even then, however, a macrohistorian would point out that such changes will only slightly alter its workings in the long run.  As the Roman empire enveloped cities and states, societies that had theretofore been relatively homogeneous in terms of economic standing of their populace became increasingly stratified, with growing disparities between the wealthy and the poor.  Social instability followed.  To the macrohistorian, such a data point would be more relevant to explaining 2008 than the GDPs of various countries in 2007.  Militaristic capitalism leads to expansion which leads to empire which leads to exploitative use of resources which leads to society being “stretched” wildly between extremes of wealth, which leads to economic, political, and social instability.  

Because policy makers generally 1) have a vested interest in maintaining the system more or less as is, 2) have chronological horizons that last only until the next election cycle, quarterly earnings report, or their own personal lifespan,, and 3) are wedded to the personal view of history, with heroes and villains (where they, at the top of the political and economic ladder, are of course the heroes), there is little chance for fully grasping the problem, let alone resolving the conflicts it engenders.   A macrohistoric view looks the issue from a systems point of view, at the changing relationships among economic stratification, expansion of economic domains over time(city-state, nation, region, globe), and conflict/peace over the scope of history.  She/He would also perhaps suggest that the current system and its measures of “success” are problematic and that not only the system, but the purpose behind it should be questioned and changed.