Protest
Robin:
Hello, Agnes!
Agnes:
Hey, Robin!
Robin:
What's on your mind today?
Agnes:
I thought we could talk about protest. What is protest? And I mean, I'm
particularly interested in the ways in which universities naturally become
sites of protest. Why is that? And sort of what is the ethos of protest? So
one thing I read today that I thought was interesting was someone saying
protest is essentially disruptive. This is someone who is on the side of, you
know, protesters on my campus. So that this was not being put forward as a
criticism of the protest, that it's essentially disruptive. And so that was a
question I had for myself. Why would it be disrupted?
Robin:
So a traditional literature in economics or those areas, close areas, focuses
on it as a signaling story. That is, if you think of different kinds of
political communication, If you just send a letter to the editor or vote in
some poll, it doesn't have as high a cost. And so a story is that protest is a
way to show you're willing to take on a higher cost. You spend more time out
in the street or travel to a place that would be awkward or yell a lot or
something like that. And that does make some sense, but I think you're
pointing out that, and many people have, that mere cost isn't enough to
explain the particular forms of protest. They also apparently want to impose
costs on other people, which you might think is not very social. I mean, if
you want to tell me your point of view, I might be willing to listen, but if
you're going to go out of their way and bother me and cause me trouble, then I
might not be so inclined to listen to your position.
Agnes:
Right, so there's something adversarial about protest that in some way the
protesters expect that at least a large fraction of their audience doesn't
want to accept their message and doesn't want to hear their message maybe. And
that's part of, that's sort of built into the act of protest. And now maybe
it's just, there's this element of, there's the status quo and the protesters
are trying to, you know, bring about a new status quo or something like that.
And so that involves calling assumptions or norms of behavior or whatever into
question.
Robin:
Now, when you have a particular law you don't like and you go out and you
break that law, I get how that would especially call attention to that law and
perhaps people's willingness to enforce it in those cases. So I get why people
might break laws in a disruptive way when they are challenging those
particular laws. But a lot of these protests are breaking laws and causing
disruptions, but the disruptions they're causing aren't challenging the
particular law against that disruption. And I can't help but notice that...
basically people often invoke the idea of revolutions as a background concept.
And then it makes me seem like they're trying to hint that if enough of them,
you know, got behind this and were mad enough, they might cause something like
a revolution. And we wouldn't like that, would we? So it's kind of an
extortion sort of threat hinting at revolution. And I think there's some
element to that, although most protests are so far from revolution, it's
really hard to believe that we actually take that seriously as somehow a
threat of that. But maybe we do.
Agnes:
I mean, I think that that may be right, but if so, I think it's pretty far
from the minds of protesters. So my sense is just to put some features of
protest on the table. Protesters tend to be idealistic. That is, they espouse
idealism in one form or another. You know, maybe the simplest form just being,
there tends to be a kind of inference from something bad or unjust is
happening to, like, we can do something about it. That's an idealistic form of
inference. But then they often, it's idealistic in that, like at least with,
you know, the current protest, say on my campus, there's, it's advocacy on
behalf of people who are very far away. So it's, there's a sense of like a
good or a just world and that even people who are very far away from you
matter. The demands of protesters are often impracticable. That goes along
with the idealism. I mean, I was just reading about French protests where the
demands were things like the end of capitalism and the restructuring of
society. But things like the versus for my campus thing, like getting rid of
the university police and stopping all construction on the south side, these
really big demands that are not very practical.
Robin:
Everything you've listed so far does gesture at revolution. Yeah.
Agnes:
So let me let me list a few more things. So I think that there is a sense in
which the protesters are not very inclined to negotiate. They do things that
would generate hostility between themselves and the administration like
they'll you know, insult the president of the university using graffiti or
something, but that's the person they have to negotiate with, right? So
they're not putting themselves in a good negotiating position, which suggests
that they're not inclined to negotiate. That supports your revolution theory.
So they sort of feel free to generate hostility and a kind of adversarial
stance. But then here's the next bit. I mean, There's also purchase as a form
of political activity in which you're fundamentally trying to get someone else
to do something, right? So the idea is there's someone out there and you want
to affect their behavior. And so you're going to do a bunch of stuff and then
that's going to cause them to behave in some way, which is different from if
you were yourself going to do that. Okay. So I think that the sort of puzzle
that this raises for me is that it's a weird combination of sort of
leisureliness and unleisureliness. That is, it's a kind of leisurely form of
politics, a form of politics that is unconstrained. by a lot of what are
usually the constraints of politics when you have to like affect changes on
your own to the world around you, usually to solve problems that you actually
have. And where you would be very cognizant of what the limits are for the
possibilities of achieving those forms of change. And that that leisureliness
might be connected to its appearing on campuses. which are, I think, spaces
that are in some ways dedicated to leisure. By leisure here, I want to say I
don't mean rest. Oh, I mean neither work nor rest, but a third thing. So
anyway, these are like, and I guess I think that the idea of revolution is
supposed to loom in the background. Maybe that's right. But I think that's
where it's supposed to stay, is looming in the background. There's something
quite practical and work-like about a revolution. I think the thought here is
really supposed to be that the end result would be somebody else doing
something, which is not quite like a revolution.
Robin:
So I think we can, like right from the start, say that, you know, one set of
effects of the protesters will just be on themselves. Another set of
protesters will just be direct effects, will be directly on, say, the
administration they are talking to and about. And a third set of effects will
be on some audience who they're trying to call to attention to it. It does
seem like that third one is more important than the first two. That is, the
first two are in the service of the third one. That is, if the university
administration is going to respond, it's going to be because of that audience,
not because directly what the protesters did. The university is mainly
concerned about that audience and how they'll respond, not so concerned more
directly about what the protesters might do, except through how the audience
might react to it. And so both of them are playing to this audience then, and
the protesters get to take the initiative with the audience. And then we might
ask, well, what's the message that the protesters are trying to get to the
audience? And why do they think this message will induce this audience to
pressure the administration to do something in their favor? because that has
actually happened in the past. We might admit, like we could say that the
protests in the 60s not only got some policies happening, but probably got,
say, Nixon to pull out of China before he otherwise might. So concrete policy
outcomes did result. And we might ask, well, how did that happen exactly? Is
it that the public opinion moved against Vietnam because of the protesters, or
were the audiences more concerned about what the protesters might do if we
didn't get out of Vietnam? It was more of an extortion threat, or what exactly
were people thinking would happen if they did or didn't placate the
protesters?
Agnes:
Yeah. I mean, I guess I think... Maybe a thing I feel I've missed in my list
of properties of protest, well, the thing I said at first, that they're
idealistic, that they really care about the issue that they're protesting
about. It's really important to them. It's sort of more important to them than
anything else. And I think that what they want to do in the audience Is infect
that audience with that same Karen so they think there's something terrible
happening and they're sort of They wanna be responding to that and doing
something about it, but in ways that are not necessarily gonna be immediately
constrained by the question, what can I do? What can I do to end this bad
thing from happening? So it's a kind of idealistic response to the injustice.
And so it's like, fully allowing the wrongness of the injustice to kind of
saturate your emotional response to it outside of other sorts of concern. And
then, yes, I think that's what they want for the audience as well. And then
the question is, is that the disruption? Like, is the disruption kind of
getting the audience to feel the way you do when they don't already, and thus
they would experience it as a disruption, or is it more than that?
Robin:
So it sounds, again, you know, the first place that the political science
literature starts with is costly signals. So the idea would be, well, some
people care to some degree, but the audience doesn't really know who cares how
much. And then you do some very costly things, and you point out how much it's
aligned with this thing you care about, that people might come to actually
believe that you care about it a lot. And that could be on the... You could do
people sit in a tree for a long time or light themselves on fire or cut
themselves or... I mean, there's things people have done in history that are
just imposing direct costs on themselves to show how much they care about
something. But the interesting thing here is there is some of that, but
there's also imposing costs on other people. trying to invoke revolution in
some sense, identify laws, to induce confrontation with police. Those are not
just ways of having costs. Those are ways of indicating the kind of feelings
they have and the kind of attitude they have about this moral outrage they
have. And it seems to be basically saying, we're so morally outraged, we're
willing to break laws. we're willing to go the revolution direction because
we're so outraged. And that's a key message trying to get across. And they'd
like you to share that with them. But it's not just, I care a lot about this,
which cutting yourself might do or cutting off your hair. You know, there's
lots of things people have done to hurt themselves to show how much they care
about something. And these people are hurting themselves to some degree,
risking their jobs, being out in uncomfortable weather, things like that. But
There's this other element of the fight, they're trying to show that they're
fighting, they wanna pick an authority to fight, and it needs to be an
authority, not just anybody who objects to their position. So there is some
sense in which they're highlighting, we would be willing to fight authorities
for this.
Agnes:
Right, so that gets at the element of hostility, and this is like a battle
between good and evil.
Robin:
where the evil is represented by local authorities, like university
authorities, who they've been fine with all the years before that. I mean,
they didn't have that many complaints about university authorities as
students. All of a sudden, university authority is only evil because of some
indirect connection to some world event.
Agnes:
Right, so there's some way in which the university becomes a proxy for
whatever the bad thing is that's being fought, because the university is the
authority.
Robin:
Right. That's the key thing. It says that it's that idea that evil in the
world is caused by authorities and authorities are all kind of one thing
together. And they're going to fight authority as a general thing because this
problem elsewhere in the world is caused by authority.
Agnes:
OK, but so what is the what is what is being opposed to authority have to do
with protests? That is. Is all protests essentially anti-authoritarian?
Robin:
I wouldn't think so, but I guess maybe a big class of them are. So, you know,
maybe there is just a sense of which a whole bunch of these groups are framing
the problems of the world as caused by capitalism or, you know, US dominance
or things like that. That is, there could be a sense of which they have chosen
a particular framing of the problems of the world where it is in fact, in
their minds, some large coalition of authorities were behind the problem.
Agnes:
I mean, capitalism is actually a bit hard to square with that, because there's
not anyone in charge of the economy. It's not a thing, right?
Robin:
I guess there are very rich people, but- Well, they often think that powerful
governments and the rich and the media are in cahoots in not just a simple
competitive market way, but they are coordinating to oppress I mean, certainly
Israel today, you might say Israel isn't just some country over there doing
things, it's in cahoots with powerful Jews in the US and the US government
supporting them and powerful capitalist firms profiting from the war and et
cetera, right?
Agnes:
Right. We maybe maybe the activity of protests. So like take when your kids
are protesting something. Right. So you've told them no dessert for you
because you didn't finish your dinner. Happens sometimes in my household and
they get very annoyed by it and they in some way protest that. I guess the
point there is they wouldn't employ the technique of protest, like storming
off to their room or getting angry at you about it or whatever, they wouldn't
employ those techniques as opposed to other ones if they thought that it was
available to them to just directly get dessert, right? So they think it's up
to you whether they get the dessert. Which is largely true when it's your
kids. And so maybe protest is already selecting for a field of powerlessness.
That is a feeling like we're not the ones in charge, there's another group of
people and at some basic level we're asking them for something. But there's a
funny situation, which is that we think they're not going to give it to us. So
we're asking them for something they don't want to give us. So we somehow have
to make them give it to us. But still, we're angry that we even have to ask.
We're angry that we're in the position that we're in. The way kids could get
angry that, you know, you're in charge of whether or not they get dessert.
Robin:
So to test this theory about bad capitalism, U.S. government thing, if we
looked for right-coded protests of people who don't have a problem with the
U.S., say, dominance of the world or capitalism, it might help us disentangle
things. First thing that came to mind was the January 6th protest, which can
very much be seen and has been seen in revolutionary terms. They were
definitely hinting at revolution, and people have accused them of actually
trying to do a revolution. So can we think of other right-coded protests?
Agnes:
But I guess I don't see that this is a right-left issue. I think the
right-coded protests are also protesting against authority.
Robin:
Well, that's what I was hoping. Then we could verify the authority symbol.
Right people might protest when the left is in power.
Agnes:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, right.
Robin:
It's always- Like mask mandates, say. Maybe the right would do a protest about
mask mandates when the left was imposing them.
Agnes:
Right, right. I mean, I think the question of who's your villain is going to
be different, and who do you think of as being in power is going to be
different between the right and the left. But, right, okay, so you just wanted
to check that it's in fact true that
Robin:
Well, so for example, at one time the right was concerned about images of
children or sex or something by Disney, and so they might go protest outside
the Disney offices, but they wouldn't necessarily protest the government or
something, right? But they're finding this authority to protest who's related
to the problem.
Agnes:
Right. Or like anti-abortion protesters.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And yeah, they'll protest the government. I mean, they will protest at
abortion clinics, but also government. And. I mean. Yeah, I guess it does seem
to me that.
Robin:
So protesting at an abortion clinic isn't so much protesting authorities as
sort of calling attention to the thing you think is a problem by standing next
to it and complaining or a union protesting. I mean, a union, you know,
basically on strike not only goes out and stops working, they stand around the
plant and prevent others from coming in and cause a lot of noise, et cetera.
So they're trying to call attention to their complaint. and also complain
against the authority of the management.
Agnes:
Yeah, good. So attention is a crucial element of protest, it seems to me.
Right. And that's getting at the audience, right? So there's the protesters,
there's the administration, and then there's the audience. And some of the
element of disruption has got to be the sort of grabbing of attention, that
is, doing something that in some way forces you to pay attention to them. In
general, it's hard to get a lot of people to pay attention to you, and a way
to do that is to be disruptive.
Robin:
And it just seems to me clear, but you can challenge me if you want, that a
core way to get attention in protests is to get close to or induce violence of
some sort, some direct physical harm. You burn down a building, you smash a
fence, you get people to hit you with... Police to hit you with clubs, you
stand next to people and yell them in a way that might make them afraid you'd
hit them. I mean, people are... That's what makes the news, it seems to me,
that cameras and the news love these images of people who seem to be close to
violence or in some ways are suffering and induced violence.
Agnes:
Yes, but I actually think just like the first method is just literally being
loud. So like chanting, hard to turn your, you don't have little flaps to
close our ears, right?
Robin:
Right. But you don't have to bring the TV cameras next to people yelling loud
if you don't want to. The question is, why would anybody want to watch them
yelling loud?
Agnes:
Right, so I guess there are different audiences, right? And there are, like,
the people who just live nearby, who are nearby, are gonna have to pay
attention if there's loud chanting. But, right, so there's a question, what's
going to get the TV cameras to film something? I think passionate expressions
of emotion Right. People like to look at those and maybe that's already
intimation of violence.
Robin:
There's just blocking traffic. I mean, in San Francisco, they block bridges or
things like that. Just preventing other people from doing the usual things
will get attention.
Agnes:
Right, so I guess I think if the category is disruption, the disruption of
ordinary life, and violence is maybe the most extreme form of disruption, but
I think that there's an attempt to you know, stay at the other end of the
disruption spectrum, the part where you stop traffic, maybe, or you stop
people from getting into a building, so that there's this idea that a certain
amount of disruption is permissible, and then it's hard to draw the line how
much disruption is permissible, but, you know, once you get to violence,
you're gonna get to the impermissible end.
Robin:
So there's the cost that the protesters themselves suffer, and then there's
the cost they impose on other people, and then there's maybe the cost they
impose on the authorities that they are trying to directly oppose, like
occupying their office or something. That's just different than disrupting
traffic or something. You're trying specifically to disrupt people you are
challenging, so that would be sort of more on brand. But it seems like people
don't just want to impose costs on others. They would like the authorities to
impose costs on them. They don't want to just impose self-costs on themselves
themselves or costs on the audience themselves. They would like to induce the
authorities to impose costs on them as ideally violent, because that's the
most dramatic news. is where they are the sufferers of the violence induced,
you know, that's caused by these authorities they dislike. And that's the way
to make them seem, you know, the victims of this moral outrage. And then they
stand for these other people far away in the world who are also being, you
know, hurt by they say, and that's the connection that's the most symbolic for
them, is those people far away are world of suffering and they are right now
suffering at the hands of the same authorities who are causing violence to
both.
Agnes:
Right. So maybe, yeah, I mean, maybe that's, maybe that's right. Like,
certainly that seems sometimes to be true. I think that
Robin:
But it's rare, we'd have to, this story has to come up against the fact that
this doesn't happen that often, but.
Agnes:
Like, I think that the. you know, the self-understanding of the protesters on
my campus is not that they were trying to induce or taunt the violent
activities of the police. And I don't just mean what they say. I mean, they
don't think of it that way. Like, so there's this question
Robin:
But they did. If you set up a camp and you insist on keeping it there until
the police drag your camp away, you know that that's going to happen. I mean,
you are directly setting up that later event.
Agnes:
Well, so this gets to the idealism issue, which I think is, in a way, the
really interesting part of protests. Like, people who can make demands that
are as impracticable as the ones that many protesters make, I think they're
just very capable of setting up the camp and viewing it all idealistically. So
I'm really interested in that idealistic mindset because I think that so part
of where you know I'm coming at this from is like I feel I don't feel very
sure about the free speech defense of protest. That is I think free speech
entails some right to protest but I'm not sure how far that right goes given
that it's going to interfere with other intellectual activity, say, on campus.
But it seems to me that there's something else about protest on campus and why
we might think we ought to protect it besides free speech, which is that the
fundamental spirit or attitude from which protest springs is a kind of
idealism that we're actually trying to foster. And again, we're not going to
support every manifestation of it. But actually, I think it's pretty important
that we not always interpret it in the most cynical ways possible, right? As
like, oh, they're just trying to provoke, you know, violent reactions that
they can portray themselves as victims. So that's not totally wrong, but I
think, like, it's important that that's really not how they see it. And they
see what they're doing is very meaningful. Like, it's very, you know, people
report these as some of the like my, you know, I'm just reading reports like
my life began when, you know, we set up the barricades. This is from the 60s,
not now. So these are, it somehow seems to me to be a very fundamental and
profound expression of idealism. One that's a bit alien to me personally, so
it's a little hard for me to wrap my head around it, but it may well be that
very fundamental and profound expressions of idealism are going to involve
engaging in behaviors where, in some sense, the predictable responses to those
behaviors are not gonna be predicted by.
Robin:
I mean, I think you're definitely right that there is an element of idealism
here and even of the sacred, because, I mean, one of the most dramatic facts
about, say, the last 50 years or 70 years is that there was this burst of
protests in the 60s, which at the time hurt the left. politically and you've
got getting Nixon elected or things like that. But then over the subsequent
decades, people have worked somewhat successfully to tell dramatic hero
stories of protesters of the 60s, including civil rights protests and anti-war
protests, and have made those some of the most iconic hero stories that we
have in the last half century. And many people tie their identity even today
to their role with respect to those things 50 years ago. It's sort of the
truth measure of whether you really committed to these causes, whether you
were committed way back then and did the right things. So there's definitely a
huge amount of symbolism and and sort of idealism credentials for these
things, not just as expressions of idealism, but later on they become almost
the purest test of whether you're really committed to these causes is whether
you were doing these things.
Agnes:
So I've been reading about it and like the leaders of those movements didn't
go on to become people that we've like heard of. Right.
Robin:
But the leaders we do have want to point out their connections to these
origins.
Agnes:
Right, but the other thing is you would think that if protests had been so
glorified, then there'd be like lots of it. And in fact, I mean, recently
there has been, but actually there was just this long period, you know, from
like, yeah, like during my time as a Bicycle Team Member, this has not been,
or as a student, you know, there's not been much by way of protests. So for
something that is so glorious and well-respected, it hasn't actually been
happening very much. There was like an era of it, and then even though we
glorify that era, we're not engaging in it, which is a bit odd. It's almost
like, so in Berkeley, I don't know if you know this, on the Berkeley campus,
there's a cafe, it opened while I was there as a grad student, called the Free
Speech Movement Cafe. And it's got these like pictures of Mario Savio, and you
know, all these things that the administration at the time was incensed about,
they're now proudly, they've made a cafe as a monument to this.
Robin:
There was also the divestment protests from the 80s, I guess, which was not
just the 60s.
Agnes:
But that's still slightly before my time, yes. I started school in the 90s,
so. Right, so still, it's not as though we've kind of had a continuous
American tradition.
Robin:
Although it occurs to me like there is this striking analogy with the horrors
of war and the idealism stories that we get from war. I mean, many of our
grandest idealism stories are also of soldiers in war, even though war is
horrible and we'd like to prevent it. And so, you know, there is this
question, how much, how much we should accept these connections between where
our idealistic stories happen and the events that happen near and whether we
want to encourage those or not.
Agnes:
Right, I mean, I guess I think there's just a lot of stories of people who
say, yeah, I thought war was great, but then I went to war and it was
horrible. Like lots and lots of those stories, that's the dominant story.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And you don't hear that from protesters.
Robin:
But you hear it about the people around the protesters, the people they were,
you know, who had to suffer the disruption that they caused.
Agnes:
That may be, but the point is that the idealism I think doesn't really get
reversed in the way that it does with war. Like the people who are against it
are against it from the start. And I guess we have, there is this sense of
like, maybe there's like a consensus of some kind that like protests like
tends to be on the, people tend to be on the right side, the protesters tend
to be on the right side of history. I hear that phrase a lot.
Robin:
Right. So there's like a- And that's a presumption often with revolution
People tend to want to celebrate known revolutions, although I think the
historical record isn't so kind to revolutions being overall good. But yes,
that's part of why I think why protesters want to evoke the concept of
revolution is because of that perception of that they are on average good.
Agnes:
Right. But so maybe it's supposed to be somehow a nonviolent revolution, a
nonviolent war. Except they're hinting at violence and often... Yeah, but
maybe hinting at violence is part of how you do the nonviolent war. And the
fact that you're hinting at it may be something you don't have to notice if
you're in a very idealistic frame of mind. So maybe there's this dream of this
other way. So there's going through the status quo and making small
improvements or whatever, and everybody dreams of revolution on some level.
What if we could just make it all way better really fast? Problem is that
tends to go super bad and involve tons of violence and then end up worse than
we started. But then there's this idea, but what if we could do that, but
without any of the really bad parts? That is just by, in some sense, the fact
that people have an idea of it's being much better. Like, I can imagine this
much better world. Why isn't my, why isn't that enough?
Robin:
So our world is full of people doing positive things that they want to frame
as idealistic and helping the world be better. People make art projects,
people have discussion groups, they do Unitarian churches, they make gardens,
they have parades. There's all these things people do in an idealistic spirit
with an idealistic cause. in the name of our best ideals and coming together
and getting stuff done. And there's a sense of which it just doesn't grab
people as much as going next to and hinting at violence, even if you don't
cross the line. Maybe this is a sad fact that all those other things just
don't feel as compelling as protest.
Agnes:
I think that it's not because they're hinting at violence. It's because
protest is specifically an idealistic response to injustice. So most of those
garden fairs and whatever are not
Robin:
And it's a response to injustice that involves directly challenging authority,
right?
Agnes:
Well, the question is, I mean, maybe we could start with this. It's an
idealistic response to injustice. And then maybe we could derive the other
features from that. That is, what is the idealistic response to injustice?
Suppose that's all you knew.
Robin:
Well, I mean, but many Unitarian Church discussion groups are all about
injustice. Their whole topic of discussion is injustice. So there are a lot of
these are many movies made about injustice and celebrated as things calling
attention to injustice. So injustice isn't only in protest. Many of these
other things also.
Agnes:
So one thing one can do in response to injustice is call attention to it.
That's a thing you can do. But calling attention to injustice seems to me to
be not the full-blown idealistic response to injustice, because we want to get
rid of the injustice.
Robin:
I would say protest moves toward fighting the injustice. I think people use
that word in protest, but fighting means you have to actually engage an
opponent. So you pick a villain, you engage them into some degree, and you
actually have a little bit of a tough with them. There's some contact where
sparks or dirt or something happens. Like it's not just calling them the
villains, right? Because many of these other forms, calling attention to the
Justins, you will point out the villain, name them, but still the protest goes
farther than naming them. You're fighting them. And I think the fighting is
reified in the actual conflict, the physical conflict. You're occupying their
lawn. You're occupying their office, you're getting in their way.
Agnes:
Well, maybe that's fundamentally why protest has to be disruptive, is that it
has to be a fight. It's an idealistic fight, and which is going to say it's
going to shy away from a battle. So we could think of actual war, actual
battle, and then we could think of two things that are sort of versions of it,
like sports is a version of a battle. It's like a mock battle and stuff. Some
sports, anyway, are a mock battle, like football looks to me like mock battle.
And then protest is also a mock battle, but in a different way.
Robin:
And I think that... I mean, there's a third kind of battle, which is just,
say, voting. So in a democracy, people often want to fight injustice by
recruiting voters to vote in an election sort of on one side. And that, in
some sense, is more directly causal. to kick out the bad guys connected with
the injustice and put in better people. But somehow that's also not as
satisfying as the protest because it's not as physical a fight.
Agnes:
Right. I don't think it's because it's not so physical, I think, or maybe, I
mean, maybe this is itself can be explained by that, but I think it's just not
as obviously a fight. Like, say, say you have a product that you're working on
and your competitor has a product, right? and you wanna beat them, and you
want your product to sell more than theirs, that might motivate you in a way
that just selling as much of your product as you can isn't gonna motivate you.
And you're especially gonna be motivated by framings of the situation that
make the battle element show up really clearly. Like if there's like a list of
things where it shows your things rising and their things falling or whatever.
Robin:
But all of that's true in an election. It's not, you have the opponent and you
have the rivalry trying to get more votes than them.
Agnes:
I think that that's right, and that's why our attention is very much captured
by elections, especially insofar as they can be visually framed as like, who's
beating who? I think we do care about elections. We are moved by them. There's
tons of news coverage of them, and we're moved by them as battles. And so the
question is just what other kinds of spaces of battle can be introduced so as
to kind of harness our, you know, how compelling we find battles to be.
Robin:
There's many movie scenes where in a room full of people, our hero will stand
up and give a speech that is, you know, fighting somebody else in the room.
And then typically that other person will just sit there and stand quietly
listening to the speech and sheepishly accept the wisdom and glory of our
hero. But that's kind of a fight. That is, it's set up as a fight in the sense
that they are arguing.
Agnes:
Yeah, good. So I think the fact that protest involves speech is very
important. Because I think that it sort of gestures at, once again,
idealistically at this idea, maybe the best ideas can win because they're the
best ideas. Now, it's gonna try to achieve that in a very distorted way, which
is like often just rhetoric and bullying and whatever, right? Right. So
certainly by just presenting the best arguments as clearly as possible. But
still, I think that the protesters wouldn't want to win by means of physical
force. They might want to incite physical force against the South. They would
not want to win by means of physical force. They want, in some sense, the
ideas to triumph. So there's this idea that there's a battlefield. And the
very idea of the right side of history, it's sort of like, our ideas are going
to win because they're going to prove right. And so there's this very
idealistic thought that the right ideas just have to be the ones that... So
that's another element of idealism.
Robin:
So I've been thinking a lot about culture lately. So, you know, basically one
of the huge ways our culture changes is by people thinking they're in a fight
to change culture and thinking that if their end wins the fight, that will be
good for the world and that they are morally good people for pushing for that
fight and then they often talk about needing to call attention to their fight
and maybe needing to make people take sides. So maybe just calling attention
to your point of view doesn't really make people take sides, but a fight does.
Like in some ways, if there's a fight that's going to push neutral people to
go one side or the other. in a way that otherwise it doesn't. So for example,
the Israeli Hamas conflict has been a conflict for decades, but now that
there's a fight, a lot more people feel like they need to take a side because
they've seen a fight. And maybe that's just a way we react to fights is more
feeling that you can't sit on the sidelines and be neutral anymore.
Agnes:
Right, like you could imagine there's like a fight between two people, two
individuals, and there's a big crowd around them, and slowly the crowd is
getting pulled into the fight.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Where people are, and eventually it's like everyone's on one side or the
other, so what are you doing not being on one of the two sides?
Robin:
Right, whereas if they were just arguing, they're not fighting, maybe you
wouldn't feel like you needed to take a side in their conflict, where it would
be less of a push, Like if it was a mild conflict, if there's, you know, two
sandwich shops next to each other competing, you might not think you need to
take a side, but if they start yelling at each other outside the store, you
might more, and then they start fighting. I mean, now, you know, the more we
up the magnitude of the fight, the more you might feel you need to take a
side.
Agnes:
I actually, I'm just thinking about this and I'm not sure why. Like, I mean,
maybe one thought is if you don't take a side, it's going to be assumed that
you're on a side and you'll be attacked by the people on their side anyway or
something like that. I'm actually not sure why you have to take a side, even
if the fight is spreading through almost everybody. Maybe somehow if you don't
take a side, everyone's going to hate you. So in effect, the only way to have
any allies at all is to be on one of the two sides.
Robin:
If there is a fight. But if there isn't a fight, people will complain that you
didn't take a side. It's just a potential conflict. or it's a very small-scale
conflict, but if it becomes a big one, then we expect everybody to take a side
in a big conflict, I think.
Agnes:
Right. But often, in order to have a conversation, as happens in our
conversations, it didn't happen in this one, but it's like you have to take a
side, and in fact, it's not just that you have to take a side, you have to
take a side against the one that the other person's taking, otherwise you're
not going to have a conversation, right? Right. I just keep meeting with you
all the time, we're not going to have a conversation. And so you might think
conversation is even more constraining. That is a conversational argument.
Ben, my ex-husband, will often just be like, I'll be making dinner or
something. He's like, so where do you stand on free will? I'm supposed to take
a side. Are you a mind-body dualist or not? Whichever side I take, he's going
to take the opposite side. He's forcing me to take a side, in effect.
Robin:
In general, if there's a room full of 10 people and two people largely start
to argue, yes, other people will be, you know, if you're going to speak up,
you should speak up on one side or the other of this debate. You shouldn't
just make an independent third comment. Right.
Agnes:
Right. So so the demand to take a side is it's quite it goes beyond fights to
arguments of all kinds. That just seems like a very common thing.
Robin:
Or we see arguments as a week as a different kind of fight.
Agnes:
Sure, but it's sort of like, I guess, once there is a fight, it's like the
terms of the encounter have been set. And it's like either you're here or
you're here. You could stand outside it. You could just not participate. Then
you're irrelevant and no one's gonna listen to you.
Robin:
Or maybe, in general, there's a vast space of possible positions, but once a
fight forms, then you have to pick one of those two sides. You don't get to
invent a third side, maybe is the rule. But if it was just a conversation
among equals, you might be allowed to take a side. If somebody says A,
somebody else says B, you might be allowed to just take C until there's a
fight between A and B. Once it's a big enough fight, then you're not allowed
to say C. You need to pick A or B. And so that's what the protesters are
trying to do. They're trying to get you to pick a side. And they think there's
a lot of neutral people out there if forced to pick a side would pick their
side. But at the moment, they're mostly not wanting to pick a side and not
thinking they need to.
Agnes:
And what. What is the motivation of the authority that's being protested in
this way, like the administration? That is, what do they want? They just want
this all to go away, I guess.
Robin:
Well, you know, basically, first, their authority, they don't want to lose
their authority. So they want to seem to maintain their authority and maintain
their position as an authority. you know, protecting wide interests, not
letting small group of interests overrun all everybody else's interests. And,
you know, with respect to, say, a larger group of parents at a university,
they want to seem to be the same sort of neutral, fair-minded people, you
know, weighing the different interests and keeping a neutral place where
different people can discuss things together, etc. Right. And but then they're
also going to mean if there are some people who don't like the protesters,
which is what's happening now, they're going to exert pressure on the
administration to do more. And, you know, and they are responsible for, say,
like some recent protests that prevented graduation ceremonies from happening.
You might think the university, you know, they thought they wanted to have a
graduation ceremony. They thought that was a good thing to do. So you might
think they would want to have those and try to do things to make them happen,
because that's the sort of thing their students and parents, donors, et
cetera, et cetera, want to have happen. And it bonds people together. Right.
Agnes:
So that just goes to the they want this to go away because it's a disruption.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
They don't want to have disruptions.
Robin:
But they certainly don't want to lean into sort of the identity of, yeah,
we're the people who invested in the terrible people in the world that you are
opposing. Right. I mean, I want to embrace that because that's what the
protesters are trying to create, that identity. You're their authorities doing
bad things. You're an authority. You're the same authority as them. You're
supporting them. That's why you're bad. And they clearly don't want to just
accept that. Typically, at least.
Agnes:
Right, so let's say the protesters are idealists in some way, and the
administration is not going to be idealist in those same ways, but they also
don't want to be cast in the role of the villain. They can't just kind of come
over to the protesters and be like, OK, you know, you have a good vision of
the world. Let's do your thing. Because they don't share the idealism. They
don't simply think we can make the world a better place by making these eight
changes. Right.
Robin:
Well, as you say, typically they choose very hard to satisfy demands. Right.
Prevent the administration from giving in easily.
Agnes:
So I think that's a cynical reading, which is similar to the cynical reading
of they're trying to instigate violence against themselves. And I'm not saying
it's entirely incorrect. It may be correct about many people, but I am
inclined to think that it's the better, a kind of deeper explanation is
something like idealism. So that they're choosing very idealistic demands. Not
because they think precisely those demands will be rejected, but because
they're not choosing demands by first checking whether or not they're going to
be accepted. They're just choosing what they think is good. Forget about what
will be accepted or not.
Robin:
So why is infeasibility idealistic?
Agnes:
It isn't. What you would predict would be that some of the demands, many of
the demands would be infeasible and maybe some of them would be feasible.
Robin:
It seems just sloppiness or poor thought, inconsiderate, predicts infeasible,
but idealistic doesn't predict thoughtless or sloppy per se.
Agnes:
So if you imagine what it is to say to someone like, dream big, that's to say,
you know, what if there were no constraints? So I think that they are not
thinking so much with constraints in mind.
Robin:
But then if the administration simply pointed out the infeasibility, they
would go, oh, then change their mind. But clearly, that's not how it happens.
Agnes:
Well, if they're committed to their idealism, then they're committed to not
thinking in terms of those constraints. That is, if the idealism is the
deepest thing, if it's the thing that's pushing them and motivating them, then
my thought is that that may also be a thing that we want to protect. It would
be a grounds for protecting protest. And that, like, in effect, it's very,
very easy to come up with cynical interpretations of protest on the part of
people who are not idealistic and thus who have all these constraints in mind
and who have all these predictions in mind about behavior, but it may just not
actually be so accurate just in terms of the mindset. I think protesters are
inclined to employ a bad form of argument, which is they might do some bad
thing, like occupying a university building or breaking something or whatever,
and they'll be like, but that's a small thing in comparison to these people
dying in this other part of the world. So that form of argument says a bad
thing isn't bad because there's a worse thing. And that's a bad form of
argument. The bad thing is still bad, even if there's a worse thing, you might
think. But I don't think it's like, oh, they're cynically employing this bad
form of argument that they realize to be a bad form of argument. It's that
they're in a mindset where that doesn't seem like a bad form of argument to
them.
Robin:
I think we're on an issue that we've touched on many times before. I might say
that something in the history of this sort of behavior has induced certain
patterns of it that have certain consequences and that those consequences have
in the past selected for these behaviors. And that's why they're doing it.
That's a way of explaining them. You might say, well, certain kinds of
protests happen because they worked in the past. And so people copy things
that work. That doesn't mean they have to know exactly why they work or have a
cynical attitude toward it. But you know, it could still be that they're doing
the things that work and that we can understand why they're doing things
because once upon a time, those things worked. So, you know, they might at
some point know that protester groups in the past that asked for small,
reasonable demands weren't as famous, didn't get stories told about them as
much and that they are copying the stories of the events that were the most
famous and those are the ones that worked in a certain sense. And that can be
an alternative to a cynical story. It's not attributing bad motives to them
and saying they're acting consciously on those bad motives. It's saying that
there's a structure here that will select for success in some cases and not
for others. And that these people definitely have a history of celebrating
past cases, which were the most successful in their minds and trying to model
what they do on those.
Agnes:
But it's not true that in all of the past cases there were infeasible demands.
Robin:
I mean, like, I was just reading- But there might have been more infeasible on
average.
Agnes:
I mean, I guess, I just think sometimes they were infeasible, sometimes they
were feasible. And I don't know that the infeasible ones were the more
successful protests. I mean, maybe that's true, but I don't know that that's
true. I think, And in fact, I think these protesters are actually remarkably
non-violent. They're staying further away from violence than at least what I
read of a lot of the protests in the 60s. I haven't been reading about the
ones in the 80s, so I just don't know what those were like. They might be
willing to do some things that could cause violence against them, but they're
not doing much by way of causing violence themselves. And I don't know how
much they know about those. These people are young. They were definitely not
around in the 60s. They may not even have heard much about the 60s or the 80s.
Robin:
I was listening to some NPR show about famous protests from the 30s. and how
people in the 60s modeled many of their protests on those famous protests in
the 30s, labor protests often, but involving free speech and freedom of labor
advocacy.
Agnes:
Those would be like concrete demands, feasible demands, right? I mean, many of
those demands were met.
Robin:
But often, large demands that they weren't willing to give. as opposed to
small demands that they were. So typically when they made small demands, it
happened and then it didn't become a famous case. So the most famous cases
were the ones where they made demands that weren't given and then there was
violence and then eventually they won and those are the cases they most
celebrate.
Agnes:
Well, I mean, there's gonna be a selection, right, which is that there's gonna
be all these times when people make small, feasible demands. They continue,
like, people are making those demands. They're not avoiding those demands
because those demands don't make you famous. They're making those demands, and
they're getting some of those demands met. But every once in a while, they
have bigger demands when they, you know, and then that's where the other side
is not inclined to give them what they want. It may not be that they're
selecting that in order to match these famous cases, but just that sometimes,
like, because of the size of the demand, they're not getting what they want.
And then maybe somebody in an idealistic frame of mind, which I'm saying is
what's true of college students, that those people are going to lean in the
direction of the sorts of demands that would call for a protest because
they're not just going to immediately be met.
Robin:
So I'm especially interested here in understanding what it is that people will
see as idealistic, and then maybe what it is that's seen as a credible sign of
idealism. And what we're touching on here seems to deviate from the simple
idea that idealism is just wanting to make a better world, and then making
choices that, you know, recommending things and suggesting things that would
in fact make a better world, as those things would tend to be feasible. And
then you would tend to be ready to negotiate. Like you said, these people are
typically making less feasible demands and they're less setting themselves to
be able to negotiate with them. And then you're giving them in some sense,
more credit for being idealistic because of these features. And therefore
there's some way in which the way we see idealism and the way we credit it is
different than the most straightforward way to be effective.
Agnes:
Right, right. So I think the fight against injustice is seen as being very
idealistic, maybe especially if you lose, like that is especially if you lose,
if you experience very significant costs, like losing your life or something.
So the fight against injustice is more idealized than the working in small
ways to make the world a bit more just. There's this sense of taking it on
directly.
Robin:
So as economists, we hear people advocating for changes to the economic
system, and there are many changes you can advocate for that would be modest,
feasible changes, and it seems like we can discuss those. And then there's
always a group of people who want to advocate for really huge changes that
seem quite infeasible and not very likely to be good, but they get great
credit for their idealism, for fighting capitalism, they call it that,
fighting the system by making, I would call crazy huge demands for changes
that have just not been tested and that we don't necessarily have good reason
to think would work, but there's a sense of which they would be very
disruptive and they would be paying a very high cost to push for it and we're
giving them idealism credit for that.
Agnes:
Yes, I think that's right. I think we do give people idealism credit for
making those moves. I mean, maybe one of the most striking things about
idealism is that it's very motivating. So like these producers are very
motivated. And improving things a little bit, like in a small way, it's just
not very motivating. Improving things a little bit for yourself maybe is, but
for a world at large, a tiny improvement is not very motivating. It might even
be motivating to the person who's doing it, but it's like an audience or
whatever. And so, yeah, our attention is captured by these by the idealism of
the fight against injustice, irrespective of whether that's in fact going to
improve the world.
Robin:
There's all these ways in which are in our ordinary life habits. We do almost
everything through lots of small steps. So clearly we accept the idea. I mean,
if you want to get from A to B, you typically get there through a sequence of
small steps from A to B. You don't try to make big jumps, you know, stand to
do huge four foot jumps to see if you can get there. You know that if you,
even if you get three of them, the fourth one, you'll fall down and hurt
yourself. Right. We know. In a lot of contexts, you get things done by lots of
small improvements, right? And so then that's the background context for
wondering why we make these exceptions in these other contexts.
Agnes:
So in my household, like every once in a while, we'll say, one of the grownups
will say, I want to celebrate something that like happened to one of the kids
today or they did this or whatever. Like this happened actually just last
night. One of my kids was rollerblading in a skate park and like totally wiped
out. And like an older cool kid came up to him and said like, oh, that was an
epic grind or something. And like the kid was like a teenager. So for him, you
know, that was like a big deal for my son to have. I have the kid not say, are
you okay? I have the kid praise him. So then this was celebrated to the people
who hadn't heard of it. Now, my son has been role ready for a long time. He
practices all the time. He's improving by incremental steps. But it's kind of
important that there are these moments where we're like, now we're going to
celebrate it. It's not every moment that we celebrate. We choose a moment to
celebrate. That moment has to have some drama to it. Sure.
Robin:
Drama is gonna, you know, so I think... Right, but if the protester were
asking for lots of little things and every 20th one they had a party about
another 20 of them, that would be an analogy there, but they're not really
interested in that, right?
Agnes:
Right, but this wasn't just one out of 20 of whatever. There was all this
symbolic structure to this movement, right? Which is like, he's getting the
approval of this older, more established skate park veteran. Sure. And that
don't have that much directly to do with the fact that he spends a lot of time
practicing wheeler. Sure. Um, so what, and you know, I don't know if he'd had
to like fight a bad guy to do his scroll of blading, probably that would get
even more applause, but that just doesn't happen that often. Um, so there's a
question, what are going to be the circumstances that allow us to applaud? And
Robin:
So I think an important part of the context here is that once upon a time,
most political action and organizing was very local in a town, in a workplace,
et cetera, for relatively local outcomes and for practical outcomes that
people wanted. Right? You might want sewers in the city, or you might want a
school to be expanded. You might, you know, want better wages at a firm in the
union negotiation. That's what most politics was for a long time. And then,
you know, once in a while you might negotiate, you know, have international or
larger issues that you would join in to support, but that was usually a
sideline from the main activity of politics, which would be your personal
local organizing. And in some sense, that sort of personal local organizing
has gone away. And even, and it's even sort of the thing that's less a thing
that college students would do. That is some college protesters would be
asking, you know, to create a major or change the grading system or, you know,
have better food at the dorms. But like the brand of college protests is more
the, Oh, we're protesting these world events far away from here. And that's,
in some sense, a key way politics has changed over the last century or two, is
for people to focus on celebrating on these attempts to influence very distant
events through actors who don't have much of a connection to them, and then
maybe do influence sort of larger national or international opinion, but they
are just noteworthy not doing that much locally. They're not helping a kitchen
locally or a homeless shelter or, you know, whatever. Even in the sixties, a
lot of people did those things.
Agnes:
Right, so I know you know that I did this event that was a kind of theater
type event for community organizers, and I learned at this event there are
plenty of community organizers. There are people who organize the homeless
shelters, but also just who work locally with violence prevention. There's
actually tons of people who do that.
Robin:
But maybe- It's hard for them to get national media coverage or local media
coverage.
Agnes:
They don't get that much coverage and maybe there's not that much connection
between those people and let's say college students or elites of various kind.
But it's not I think it's not true that there is local political organizing
and work at that level. I think there's lots of it.
Robin:
In fact it's just less of a focus of most voters. and most people, when people
want to be idealistic, they mostly talk about national or international
politics, and they don't actually do much local action.
Agnes:
Hmm.
Robin:
So they're.
Agnes:
See, stop, because we've gone over.
Robin:
OK, there. Yes, we have. So nice talking to you.