Occupations as Incubators, I

(I first published this on my Facebook page 26 October 2011.)

Occupations are incubators for the new ideas, new values, new human relationships, new ways of being that we are daring to make, discover, and nurture. These protective environments are necessary, for all new life is vulnerable. And what is most dangerous to this new life is simply the old ways, the old life, which so often tries to kill the new, because it sees its own mortality in even the most peaceful, loving, and life-affirming of the new. 

Incubation and gestation is, I think, strongly connected to the idea of a discursive commons (not quite a public sphere) that recalls Aristotle's notion of the polis. Crucial for his notion of the polis is the certainty among the citizens themselves that they are "all in it together." There is no opting out, or simply finding another "interest group" or collective. There was, of course, no notion of the virtual community. One was a member of the community simply owing to geography - you were a citizen of the city-state that you occupied. People rarely moved, and even if they did, citizenship could not be easily acquired. So you had to do your political work with the people you lived with. This required the kind of consensus-building work and investment in process that we are rediscovering in the Occupations today. People cannot simply opt out and find a new citizenry to join and new systems to become part of, because we are all enmeshed in the same systems. (This re-imagining takes a particularly painful turn in America owing to the ways in which the Frontier has been part of our psychological landscape since our birth.)

The global village is, I claim, becoming a global polis. And that polis is responding to worldwide catastrophes of environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, human and animal exploitation, financial system collapse, and political corruption. And these are all causing profound critiques of the assumptions that underlie human systems. We know that our current systems of understanding ourselves and our world not only do not work anymore, but that they are the very systems that created and reproduce our crises. There is no piecemeal re-jiggering, no simple adjustment to the machinery. Any thread that we pull in one place can unravel something in some location around the world. So we build consensus not merely with the people down the street, but with the sweatshop laborers in Jamaica, or the plastic water bottle recyclers in India, or the indigenous people’s land rights claimants in Quebec. And we build consensus with those not yet born, those who will inherit our ways of knowing and acting, as well as our systems and planet.

That consensus building can no longer ignore fundamental questions of the Good. As for Aristotle, no question of policy, procedure, fairness, (or in modernity, of rights) can be asked until we have also asked questions about the Good. These questions are fragile. They make us vulnerable, and threaten our intellectual grasp on our world. We discover that we’ve been doing it all wrong for so long, and that this has destroyed our planet, our fellow human beings, and ourselves. We must grieve for our loss, and recognize our own complicity in these crimes. This too makes us vulnerable. And this vulnerability makes it necessary for us to work with one another in this incubator space.