Liberalism, Crisis, and the Arab Spring

If you believe in liberalism, Stephen Spender's journals can, at times, provide some disconcerting reading.  By liberalism, here, I don't mean to refer to the current American denotations of the word—a kind of weak-ass version of social democracy, in which minor state interventions are meant to provide some kind of cushion against the more extreme depredations of the market.  Rather, I'm thinking of the word as it is connected with Enlightenment-era philosophy and the political tradition that grew out of that philosophy in the nineteenth century: a tradition of freedom of speech, ideas, trade, assembly, religion, and the press, a tradition devoted to personal liberty, private property, egalitarianism, and the eradication of hereditary privilege.  This tradition finds its primary political expression in representative democracy, and, to a greater degree than most political philosophies, it shies away from the articulation of particular ideals and social goals.  You're free, as far as these classical liberals are concerned, to pick your own ultimate goal: one might even say you're condemned to be free.

This sort of liberalism is not without its contradictions—being in favor of private property but also for egalitarianism and the abolition of hereditary privilege leaves one having to make some pretty fancy arguments every time a trust fund kid cruises by on the way to Stanford in the Lexus daddy bought her for Christmas.  It's easy, and in many ways right, for those of us living in liberal democracies to focus on the contradictions and shortcomings of this kind of liberalism, but we ought not to take for granted just what an astonishing historical achievement this live-and-let-live philosophy represents.  It helped end the religious wars that tore Europe apart for centuries.  What is more, liberalism represents the political aspiration of many millions of oppressed people in the world today.  A significant portion of those who rose up in the Arab Spring did so in order to fight for a liberalization of their own societies.

The political crisis across the middle east isn't just an expression of liberalism, of course.  In fact, it presents us with a test case for the limits of liberalism at times of crisis.  And this brings us back to Stephen Spender, whose journals shed some light on the current muddle.

In 1945 Spender was in Germany, serving as a kind of cultural administrator in the reconstruction of the defeated nation.  Among his duties were the re-starting of German newspapers under new, non-Nazi management and the re-opening of libraries.  On the 28th of September his duties in the latter capacity took him to a library in a provincial city.  He records the experience in his journals:

An assistant librarian at Aachen said to me: 'We understand perfectly what you require with regard to our library.  We shall take all the Nazi books down from the shelves and lock them up in a separate room where they will be read by no one except students who may be given access to them for their purely historical studies.  We are perfectly used to doing this since formerly we took down from the shelves all the books by socialists and Jews and kept them locked up in a special room where they were only accessible to students writing anti-socialist or anti-Semitic studies.'

What's disturbing about all this, for those with liberal consciences, is that the librarian does understand perfectly well what Spender requires.  In the context of crisis—and the rawness of the German defeat was a very real crisis, with the de-Nazification of the country far from an achievement or even a certainty—the locking away of Nazi propaganda was the task at hand.  It was, on the small scale of the libraries, an extension of a general process including the removal of Nazis from positions of power in the media, the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, the outlawing of certain political parties and expressions, and so on (it was a big deal: initially some 90,000 were imprisoned, and almost two million forbidden to hold employment as anything other than manual laborers, policies that were moderated only in the early 1950s).  But as important as the political goal of de-Nazification was, it also involved a violation of the principles of liberalism.  Liberalism, after all, cherishes freedom of speech and of the press, and not just for people we agree with.  It relies on debate and argument, rather than state suppression, to weed out prejudice and falsehood—at least it wants to.  But in a time of crisis, liberals can find themselves in the position of advocating illiberal actions in the name of preserving liberal democracy.  The librarian of Aachen points out, perhaps slyly, the uncomfortable parallels between Spender's requirements and those of the totalitarian Fascists whose regime he is, in his small way, seeking to replace.

In the great sandstorm of the Arab Spring there are many places that give little reason to hope for the development of liberalism: Syria, for example.  Despite the rosy picture recently painted by Senator McCain of liberal democrats ready to ease into power after the dropping of a few well-placed American bombs, the darker assessment given by Slavoj Žižek is the more convincing.  "It seems," writes Žižek, "that whatever remained of the democratic-secular resistance is now more or less drowned in the mess of fundamentalist Islamist groups supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with a strong presence of al-Qaida in the shadows."  The options in Syria for the great powers seem limited to "taking the side of one fundamentalist-criminal group against another."  In other places liberalism has been a strong component of the Arab Spring—but even here, it has shown its weakness in handling certain kinds of crises.

Consider the case of Egypt.  As Francis Fukayama has pointed out, the Tahrir Square revolution against the Mubarak was led by liberals—by, in his words, "angry young, middle-class Egyptians who used social media like Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests, spread word of regime atrocities, and build support for a democratic Egypt."  When democratic elections were held, though, those middle-class liberals lost at their own game: the Muslim Brotherhood, whose ideological base comes from the poorer classes, came to power and proceeded to destroy the embryonic institutions liberal democracy.  It turns out that the appeal of liberalism has difficulty in traveling beyond the middle class (and not just in the Arab World: watch a Chuck Norris movie, and you'll see the dream world of many blue collar  Americans—a world in which those who insist on such liberal niceties as police procedures, the law courts, and the rights of the accused appear as the unwitting allies of criminals who should be dealt with by brute force delivered from the fists and guns of mavericks who refuse to play by the rules).

In the crisis of embryonic liberalism in Egypt after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, a great many Western liberals have embraced the entirely illiberal methods by which the Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi was deposed.  Morsi came to power through liberal means, but was removed by a military coup, and that coup has the support—begrudging, to be sure—of many liberals.  As with Spender in the Aachen library, liberals find themselves awkwardly advocating the destroying of liberalism in order to save it.

Few liberals endorse the Egyptian coup without some serious pangs of conscience, like the pangs that drove Spender to record the words of the librarian of Aachen—without refutation—in his journal.  Many, too, have considerable doubts about the possibility of liberal democracy in Egypt.  Algeria, after all, went through a similar cycle years ago—opening to liberal democracy, seeing the rise of illiberal Islamists, and then shutting the whole thing down with strong-arm military tactics.  There is, however, some grounds for liberal hope in Egypt—not hope for the immediate future of political institutions, but hope for the conditions that make liberal institutions viable.  There is hope, that is, for an Egyptian public sphere.

The public sphere, as theorized by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is a network of communications in which private individuals can articulate their social needs, eventually forging a broad-based public opinion that is often critical of established authorities such as the church and the state.  When it emerged in England in the eighteenth century, the primary institutions of the public sphere were the coffeehouse and the printed journal: it was through these that private citizens, most of whom had little or no prior access to political power, emerged as a social and political force over the course of the century.  The public sphere, with its critical discussions in person and in print, would eventually become a monitor of power, and even in some sense the leading force in society, making political authorities legitimate themselves before the court of public opinion.  In Egypt, what began with Facebook and Twitter and public assembly in Tahrir Square has grown into a much larger-scale opening of the public sphere, and there is reason to believe that this public sphere will survive the current crackdown, and grow.  In fact, it is in the best interest of everyone in Egypt that it do so, as it would allow for the creation of a court of pubic opinion to which the regime and the leaders of the various social factions could be held accountable.  It is this kind of unofficial court of opinion that made liberalism possible in the nations of the West, and its survival is the best hope for Egypt.  Despite its contradictions, liberalism is a robust plant, and once it really takes root it is hard to get rid of for long.  

Occupy Arcadia: Mythos of an Emerging Movement

“What,” ask the pundits, “do the Occupy Wall Street people want?” When they deign to answer their own question, they tend, if they are uncharitable, to say that the protestors don’t know what they want, that any real message is lost in a miasma of different agendas.  The more charitable type of pundit tends to say something more along the lines of “the protestors know what they’re against — economic inequality and the power of money — but they don’t know what they’re for.”  I’ve spent enough time at the Chicago manifestation of the movement to see the iota of truth in both the charitable and the uncharitable analysis, but in the end both analyses miss the significance of what’s happening.  To get at that significance, it’s important to drop the usual categories of analysis — left and right, cultural and economic, idealist and realist — and come at matters from an angle where things appear less familiar.  Otherwise, we risk reducing something truly new into one or another version of what we find familiar.  So bear with me while I propose a means of analysis that might seem quite strange: it’s the strangeness that we’re after, here, since the familiar categories of understanding have proved remarkably ineffective.

Mythos and Movement

As the scholar Malcolm Bull argued in New Left Review (March-April 2010), Greek mythology presents a coherent typology for understanding the relations of power, production, and knowledge.  In his view, the Greek mythos can be mapped out on a pair of axes thusly:

Olympus is the realm of pure power, in its various manifestations.  It is the dwelling-place of Zeus, the figure of pure executive power, and of Hercules, the figure of physical strength.  It deals with realities, and does so by ruling over them, by authority, by influence and manipulation, or by sheer force.  It is the realm of mastery.

Hades also deals with realities, but does so differently.  It is the realm of production, where Hephaestus works at his forge: his realities are those of existing materials, of the strengths and limits of bronze and silver and gold.  Many people who know their myths have been puzzled about why Aphrodite is married to the lame, ugly, Hephaestus — but at a symbolic level, it makes perfect sense: while he is the figure of artisanal, or even industrial production, she is a figure of sexual reproduction.  Together they cover the realms of inorganic and organic production.  If Olympus is the realm of mastery, Hades is a subordinate realm, the world of labor set against the Olympian world of command.

Parnassus deals less with existing realities than with the free play of speculation: it is the realm of Athena and the life of the mind, and of Apollo and the poetic.  The muses dwell here, and it is to Parnassus that scholars and intellectuals repair.  Like Olympus, it is a privileged realm, but unlike Olympus, it is not a world of power.  To put it in modern terms, one might think of Olympus as the realm of executives, and Parnassus as the world of tenure, think tanks, and foundation grants.

And then there’s Arcadia.  This, too, is a realm of free play rather than of existing realities with all of their limitations.  But unlike Parnassus, this isn’t a world of concepts or philosophies or epic poems: it’s a wild realm, a realm of potential energies.  It’s the world of Pan, who dwells in forests and open meadows that have not been brought under cultivation.  It’s the world of Diana the huntress, another forest-dweller defined in terms of potential: she is, after all, the virgin goddess.  Everything about Arcadia is about the primitive state of things, from which other things might emerge.  

Hermes, the messenger god, is a special case: he inhabits the very center of the map, at the intersection of the axes: this is central to his function as the messenger god, and to his function as the god of boundaries and those who cross them.

Once one grasps the general structure of mythological relations, a lot of things become clear about the significance of the myths: when Apollo and the faun Marysas (a figure of Arcadia) have a musical duel, won by Apollo who then flays Marysas, we have a kind of martyring of naïve or potential artistry by the established forces of Parnassus.  One can see its relevance to, say, aristocratic culture’s disdain for folk culture, or the sophisticated formalist’s soul-crushing dismissal of emergent talent. 

But we’re a long way from talking about Occupy Wall Street.  What happens when we try to view the movement through a conceptual framework as defamiliarizing as the Greek mythos?

Occupying Olympus, Occupying Hades, Occupying Parnassus

The first thing that should be clear about Occupy Wall Street is that it isn’t a movement based in Olympus.  Unlike the Tea Party, which was bankrolled by the enormous fortunes of the Koch Brothers and for which Fox News served as something like an advertising and P.R. firm, Occupy Wall Street has little or no connection with the realm of worldly power.  Even when those in powerful positions, such as President Obama, make gestures of sympathy to the movement, they do so in ways both unconvincing and uncomfortable.  Michael Gerson of the Washington Post put it clearly enough:

President Obama’s awkward, unreturned embrace of Occupy Wall Street is among the strangest developments of the 2012 campaign…. Obama has been the unrivaled leader in fundraising from the financial sector in recent years. Senior staffers with Wall Street connections have occupied the White House for some time now. Banks and financial-service firms have been some of the main direct beneficiaries of Obama’s economic policies.  And Obama himself has often sought to defuse public criticism of Wall Street.… Last year, he went out of his way to defend large bonuses for the chief executives of ­JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.”

A stronger case can be made for Occupy Wall Street as a movement based in Hades, under the protection of Hephastus (if that sentence doesn’t defamiliarize the political categories, I don’t know what will).  Unions, for example, have intermittently swelled the ranks of the protestors in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.  But the key word here is “intermittently”: the Occupy protests are not union-centered rallies, like those we saw in Wisconsin earlier this year.  Union leaders don’t call the shots.  If they did, we probably wouldn’t hear the punditocracy’s complaints about the lack of a clear message: instead, they’d be writing about how the demands of workers for decent wages and benefits are unreasonable in a globalized economy.

What about Parnassus?  Is this where the real center of the movement rests?  There are certainly plenty of students to be found at the demonstrations, and a few professors (full disclosure: my tenured feet have occupied a few sidewalks and parks in Chicago).  But the disproportionate representation of students is certainly a matter of greater opportunity to show up, rather than of significantly greater motive.  As one man said at a recent demonstration, “you students, you’re my voice: I work 60 hours a week to keep my house, and I look after my kids, and I just can’t get out here often.”  Some polls suggest that the majority of Americans support for the movement: this isn’t an ivory tower thing, not in its essence.  Veterans, working stiffs, union guys, moms with kids in tow, office jockeys, street people, and others are all in evidence, and though they applaud when Cornell West speaks, they’re not lining up behind him: they’re standing beside him.

Et in Arcadia Occupy

This leaves us with Arcadia.  But what exactly is Arcadia, anyway?  In the Greek mythos, it’s all about what might-yet-be.  It’s where Paris stands when he judges who has the greatest beauty: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite.  This is significant: he’s choosing between representatives of Olympus (power), Parnassus (knowledge) and Hades (production), and as he makes the choice from the only position outside of their realms: in Arcadia, the world of the not-yet, the potential.

This, I think, is the proper location of the Occupy movement in the Greek mythos, at least at the moment. 

A few days ago I was arguing with the historian D.L. LeMahieu about the nature and meaning of the Occupy movement, and I’d begun with the proposition that what we were seeing was a resurgence of the now-old New Left paradigm: the language of class, anti-capitalism, and economic justice returning after a long eclipse.  LeMahieu refuted all that, claiming that what we were seeing wasn’t a return to something old, but the birth of something new.  Sure, there were old left-wing slogans.  But this was part of the mulch out of which something very new was being born.  We weren’t going to see a new socialism, because socialism was the countervailing force that tried to civilize 19^th and early 20^th century capitalism: it was a response to a kind of economics that doesn’t really exist anymore.  We’re in a new phase of economic development, with transformative technological forces and the entry two billion of new workers into a global marketplace.  We had an unprecedented economics (which developed out of our old economics), and it would create an unprecedented politics (which would also develop out of our old politics).  I’m convinced LeMahieu was right: we’re not going to get a return to something old, even if the new thing we get takes up and transforms the old political paradigms. 

In a way, the very fact that the pundits have had a hard time grasping what the protestors want is a sign that what’s coming together is something truly new.  It doesn’t fit easily into our paradigms.  It’s not a student protest, it’s not a labor protest, it’s not a rally orchestrated by one or another of the political parties.  Slavoj Žižek got at the nature of things in his address to the protestors in Zuccotti Park:

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

…. Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?….We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

I’ve only felt the political ground shift beneath my feet twice in my life.  The first time was in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when one could feel a horrible lurch toward authoritarianism and fear.  The other time is now.  I don’t know where it’s all going any more than you do.  But unlike last time, I have faith that it’s moving in the direction of hope.