The Long View

The Masque of Anarchy

One of the conference rooms in my building at work has a very good view of one of the access routes from Zuccotti Park to the New York Stock Exchange (it's no great distance), so I could see one of yesterday morning's altercations between the Occupiers and the New York City Police. On television, the scuffle looked like a scene from Potemkin. From above, it was clear the crowd was not very large, and that there were about as many police. There were about a third as many journalists. There were also many horses, all in a double column, who had nothing to do and were unhappy in the drizzle.

At ground level, the marching groups were businesslike when they were not trying to force a police barricade. I saw black flags, but no black masks. The most animated element was a small number of bearded young men who scurried around the edges of the groups while conferring earnestly on their cellphones. Police and Occupiers ignored each other except at the designated points of confrontation.

There's retail history for you.

* * *

History in the form of a polemical poem is even better than television news. The title of this entry, "The Masque of Anarchy," is of course the title of a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley to protest the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 (and available here). The incident was the bloody suppression of a large open-air meeting that had been called at Manchester to demand a reform of the parliamentary franchise. We should note that Shelley here was against anarchy, which in the poem is represented by the government. However, the poem has been cited as the first statement of the tactic of nonviolent resistance. We should also note that a "masque" is a kind of intimate play in which the audience often participates.

The final verses speak to our condition, if only by contrast:

LXXXIV.

"And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there;
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew;
What they like, that let them do.

LXXXV.

"With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they stay
Till their rage hasdied away:

LXXXVI.

"Then they will return with shame,
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hotblushes on their cheek,

LXXXVII.

"Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street:

LXXXVIII.

"And the bold, true warriors,
Who have hugged Danger in wars,
Will turn to those who would be free
Ashamed of such base company:

LXXXIX.

"And that slaughter to the nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular,
A volcano heard afar:

XC.

"And these words shall then become
Like Oppressions thundered doom,
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again--again--again.

XCI.

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable NUMBER!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
YE ARE MANY-THEY ARE FEW.

Perhaps not even the most clueless Occupiers think that they are "the many" ("multitude" is the term that neo-Marxists prefer). The point of making the claim is the hope that it can be redeemed if the Occupiers visibly undergo ritual martyrdom; then the general public will identify with the Occupiers rather than the police or ordinary civil authorities. This tactic is harmless enough when it is a matter of streetfighters provoking the police and then whining about the result. One of the creepier aspects of the Occupation, however, is the spread of human-shield tactics, the deployment of children and elderly people in crowds that also contain streetfighters. The old people probably know what they are getting into, but to bring one's children to such an event is a grave evil.

Regarding the motives of the Occupiers, it is often remarked that they have trouble articulating why they are trying to preempt public space. There is indeed a catechism of slogans that activists deliver to the press, usually touching on income inequality, but these slogans are not doctrine or even common knowledge among the participants. The know-nothing state of the Occupation is often presented as a defect. That misses the point.

The Occupation is like the old joke about the man who crosses a border checkpoint one way every day on a bicycle with sand in the handlebar basket. The customs officers puzzle and puzzle about what he could be smuggling. Finally they realize what he is smuggling: bicycles. Similarly, the reasons or unreasons that people offer who have excluded civil authority from public space are less important than the fact they have excluded civil authority from public space. Note that the occupations are generally near centers of government. This fact-on-the-ground is not in service to theory; it is what theory has always tried to achieve.

* * *

The growth of inequality is quite real. Ed West of the Daily Telegraph makes the valuable point that its primary cause is unmentionable:

It is unquestionably a huge issue, yet there's one major, unavoidable aspect of inequality that is almost entirely suppressed from the debate. Last month in the New York Times Columbia Professor Alexander Stille touched on this strange paradox. He wrote [in the New York Times, October 23, 2011]:

It's a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another -- blacks, women, Hispanics and gays -- has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.

At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.

This is nothing new. A few years ago David Goodhart wrote a hugely influential article in Prospect pointing out that diversity and equality are in conflict, and David Willetts coined the phrase the "progressive dilemma" to define the same problem.

The "diversity" here is an effect of large, continuous immigration. To be fair, we should mention that the aging of the disproportionately large Baby Boom generation also exacerbates inequality, since old people tend to have more assets than young people. Still, if the secular growth in inequality worries you, then just turn off the immigration intake and turn up the assimilation machine. It's not hard.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a era when the legitimacy of of government itself is under attack, arch-conservative Mark Steyn's solution is to turn the state over to minimum-wage mall cops:

The British public is said to be mad as hell and threatening to run as independent candidates up and down the land, which, in a parliamentary system, could wreak real havoc. We'll see whether they learn the real lesson -- that a permanent, professional, career legislative class is no friend to democracy. In a healthy polity, our representatives should be part-time, poorly remunerated, perk-free, and pay for their own [porn].

We know what happens when you do this. The legislature is taken over by real estate developers and their lawyers. They don't do a good job.

The bit about the [porn] need not concern us here.

{Readers may have noted the italics around the fifth word in the line above. I used them because the conventional spelling elicited regrettable ads in the AdSense column on th right of this page.]

* * *

Speaking of the Baby Boomers, Walter Russell Mead warns: Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun

We are the generation that accepted the behavior of the multi-millionaire CEO with the trophy wife. We are the generation that failed to protect its children from a tide of filth and debasing popular entertainment without parallel in the history of the world. We are a generation that deliberately and cynically passed the cost of its retirement down to its children. We are a generation that preferred and rewarded financial engineering over business construction. We lost control of the borders and failed to make provisions for the illegal immigrants our fecklessness allowed into the country....

Further atrocities follow, but let me clear up just one point: all generations, everywhere and forever, pass the cost of its retirement down to its children. The state in which the retired are maintained is supported by what their society produces while they are retired. If anything, Mr. Mead has the matter backwards; the Boomers may be unique in thinking that they could support themselves in unexampled geriatric opulence by using investment devices that would produce high returns no matter the size or well-being of the following generation. Most "reform" proposals for entitlements are just as blind.

* * *

Finally, regarding persistently high unemployment, we may note that David Warren suggests:

We need a revolution in our attitude toward work. This is because the notion that we must "work to live" is only suitable to animals. The proposed Christian alternative is "live to work" - in the image of the creator, which is to say, creatively, "for the sake of doing well what is well worth doing."

Oswald Spengler, as we have noted before, took a grumpier but not wholly incompatible view:

"If we would set against the Roman "panem et circenses" [bread and circuses] (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and Egypt) it would be the 'Right to Work.' This was the basis of Fichte's thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate in the Duty to Work."

Employment is a matter of public morale as much as production. As robots do more and more of the latter, perhaps we should try to sort the two notions out. Eschatologically, perhaps, work is revealed as liturgy.