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On Berkeley in the 60s

by David O.

"I always remember this particular period of time because the change was so phenomenal. I went tosleep one night and I was a woman who was dissatisfied with my position as a woman in society but I

felt solitary in that dissatisfaction and suddenly I wake up and right and left everybody is speaking

about it. I have women who agree with me everywhere. We start to form a sisterhood. Everything in mylife that has disturbed me is being challenged. Things that haven't disturbed me before suddenly I look

at and they do disturb me." - Susan Griffin, Berkeley in the 60s

The contemporary act of protest in America, it would seem, is most commonly an act of moral outrage.

Jasper, in his works The Art of Moral Protest and Getting Your Way posits that this is the result of a

social dynamic determined by cultural, emotional and individual experiential forces. In my ownestimation, this most commonly arises out of the tendency for communication between the personal

and the political which arises in American culture subsequent to the post-enlightenment philosophical

precepts of the liberal tradition. More specifically, the Liberal traditional value of freedom, fairness and

equality as intrinsically human rights. This tendency is observable within the entire spectrum of liberalpolitics in America, from conservative to social. This tendency takes on a slightly different character in

non-liberal post-enlightenment political philosophic traditions such as the Anarchist tradition.

The Politics of the Personal

In watching the documentary,Berkeley in the 60s, what is most striking about the shape of the left

counter-cultural movements of protest at that time is the many intersections of personal meaning from

which the wider protest movement was built. For the students of the University of California atBerkeley, their relationship to the gears, wheels and levers of the apparatus of Government,

industry, organized labor and the existing institutions of society itself were being called into question.

For them, the ideology underlying their future employers' motivations for hiring them could in no way

be supported were it in any way connected to that underlying of the House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee's attempts at actively shaping the political discourse in America through means which

threatened the freedom of human thought within American universities. For the feminists, it was the

marginalization of female voices in a society which demanded a great deal of taxation in terms of labor(in terms both industrial and maternal) while disallowing in practice equal right for self-representation

which brought them into the wider movement for social change. For the Black Panthers, the

institutionalization of white supremacy and racism provided the incitement to protest the status quo. Ineach of these cases, the individual sense of social entitlement as predicated and conditioned upon a

cultural mythology in which notions of self-evident truths of equality and ringing freedom

coalesced into a wider collective demand for social accountability to broadly accepted moral precepts.In the present day context, similar social disturbances presently coalescing into wider social demands

hinge upon the American cultural mythologies of taxation demanding clear and accountable

representation, of the establishment of justice and promotion the general Welfare, and security of

the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, and of notions of life, liberty and the pursuit ofhappiness. These disturbances can clearly be seen in the protests of the conservative liberal tea party

movement and in the recently emergent social liberal occupy movement.

The Personality of the Political

In each of the above mentioned cases, the personal moral shocks behind the participation of each of the

participating individuals involved varies greatly from experience to experience. When brought intocollectivity, however, the experience of collective action and social communication informs not only

the group as a whole of these constituent moral shocks but each individual within the group with the

political personality and the concomitant collective shock of the wider movement. It is this

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identification with the shock of the wider movement which separates the individual fringe lunatic in

single protest against society at large from the stakeholder in a struggle over a clear and demonstrable

social grievance. Even despite attempts by political opposition groups to peg participants in wider

protest movements as insane, unprincipled discontents, ill-educated boors and the like, it should,at the very least, be clear that in so far as their opposition to status quo consensus is often shared by

wide cross sections of the demographic landscapes their delusion is a broadly experienced collective

one, if such a thing is pathologically possible. More to the point, in each of the above mentioned cases,the political grievances expressed find their most immediate source in interwoven into the fabric of the

cultural mythology underlying the American liberal tradition. This should be taken as no insignificant

fact when one takes into consideration the degree to which, in the universe of political ideas, liberalismhardly exists within a vacuum (regardless of what Francis Fukuyama has to say about it).

The Integral Personality of other traditions

One particular heterodox political traditions which have had a not insignificant history within America

is the Anarchist tradition. The Anarchist tradition holds that the dynamic relationship of social

hierarchy and capitalist production (taken together or apart) are both inherently immoral and

subsequently shocking in their commonness within society. For the Anarchists, the power to imposecoercive violence upon one individual by another, extrapolated into a wider social context expressed in

its most highly apotheosized form through the institution of the state, is morally reprehensible.

Similarly, the social relationship imposed upon society by the predatory forces of the vested interests ofthose engaging in the accumulation of capital at the expense (both proverbially and materially) of the

rest of society is held as being an institutionalization of theft from the common interest of society at

large. Subsequent to this philosophic tradition and the concomitant cultural mythology underlying it.From the Haymarket Martyrs to the Makhnovchina in Ukraine to the CNT-AIT militia in Spain to the

Anarcho-punk to the fictional works of anarchists Ursula K. LeGuinn (The Dispossessed) or Alan

Moore (V for Vendetta), the cultural content underlying this political philosophic tradition begs

consideration. It is this cultural content which shapes the form of moral shock among adherents of theanarchist tradition. This shock is commonly directed within the scope of wider protest movements

toward emphasizing decentralization and avoidance of cooptation by or cooperation with institutions

deemed illegitimate due to theirinherentmoral reprehensibility (as distinct from the liberal perspectiveof illegitimacy of such institutions being predicated upon their choices or actions), as well as toward

emphasizing political self-reliance in the push for wider social change. Anarchist contributions to

political protest often involve reliance upon consensus models of decision making, disregard formunicipal permit requirements for public demonstration and a respect for a wide diversity of tactics of

political protest and civil disobedience.

Conclusion

Moral shock in contemporary American political protest takes its character from the liberal tradition

which underlay the central mythologies of American culture. This occurs through the communication

of values between the shocked individual and the collectively aggrieved. Ideationally dissimilaraggrieved collectivities express their moral shock in dissimilar ways. The distinctions which can be

observed between such collectivitites demonstrate the degree to which differences in the foundational

culture help to shape differences in the moral shocks which inspire protest as well as the degree towhich the approach to political protest is actively different on the ground.

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Works cited:

Jasper, James M. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social

Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Jasper, James M. Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2006.

Berkeley in the Sixties. Dir. Mark Kitchell. Prod. Mark Kitchell. By Stephen Lighthill and Veronica Selver. Tara Releasing, 1990.