The global Occupy revolution[1] has been weighing heavily on my mind for the past month. The same issues surrounding morality, enlightenment, democracy, justice and governance continue to gnaw at us today, centuries after the Age of Enlightenment, although under different circumstances. As with Kant’s time, we are still grappling with the question of how to generate public enlightenment. While I agree with Kant (1784) that self-incurred tutelage[2], laziness and cowardice are reasons for the lack of public enlightenment (para. 1), I have deep qualms with his ‘argue as much as you want but obey’ advocacy (para. 7) within our modern day context. Want to fight economic injustices, environmental degradation or the erosion of civil liberties and human rights? Then, write a letter to the Premier. Sign a petition. Go work for World Vision. Make a donation to Amnesty International. In other words, voice your concerns but do it within the confines of the law. Obey. Business as usual.
I agree with Kant that the contradictions arising from one's use of public versus private reasoning creates dissent but how to activate this dissent in an experiential and material way? I feel trapped in this paradox right now and have been for a long time... I argue that the inability to reconcile one’s public and private reasoning would lead to a state of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance necessarily involves reason pitted against passion. To counter and reconcile one’s cognitive dissonance requires that one integrates public reasoning with private reasoning. This necessitates not just dissent external to our duties to our government but active resistance as well. One significant difference between our time and Kant’s time is the current collusion between corporate power and the government. If our government is one of the sources of various injustices, I argue that it is our duty not just to dissent but also to also actively resist. If we continue to obey and to conduct business as usual, how can social change really occur? Would we not merely be paying lip service to issues of social justice then? With this in mind, I argue that within our modern day context, civil disobedience is a necessary element to exact social change.
Public reasoning cannot be separated from private reasoning. If we merely have the freedom to speak our minds but we continue to act as cogs within the machinery of everyday life, victory for social change from our current Machiavellian model of government can only be partial. Partial victories such as the postponement of Keystone XL Pipeline or the recent Supreme Court ruling that long time political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence is unconstitutional are still part of a long process towards progress and mark the slow continuing revolution of change. Change comes in small spurts and not with immediacy. We must not settle for partial victories and we should continue fighting for social justice.
I think that in many instances, our western society tolerates dissent, especially when it is in the form of “folly” or humour but resistance is something to be shunned upon. Scathing critiques of corporations, of governments and their leaders are tolerated by the public when they are presented in comedic forms by Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart or George Carlin but block a busy intersection within the financial district or occupy a public space, in other words, disrupt business as usual and you will be chastised, arrested, fined or worse, assaulted by the police. The question of how to create social awareness and enlightenment remains. How to change mainstream perception of resistance from something bad to something good? I am not going to purport to know the answer but I argue that passion (sentiment) acts as the glue that holds one’s rational thoughts about social injustices together and propels our reason into action. Malcolm X asserts that it is only when one feels angry about one’s condition that one acts to bring about change[3]. I am in agreement with this statement and concur with Hume that both reason and passion/sentiment constitute our thinking mind. It would however not only be unfair but also inaccurate to claim that reason trumps passion or vice versa. I argue that both reason and passion are part of a continuum in our ability to emancipate ourselves from the self-incurred tutelage that Kant speaks of.
I agree with Hume (1751) that we are generally self-serving creatures but we are also social creatures capable of non-selfish concerns for humans and non-humans alike (pp. 42-43). As ensembles of social relations, we are dependent on each other. Furthermore, our ideas are never derived exclusively from within ourselves – they are borrowed, shared and passed down. This unity with other beings from the past, present and future in an abstract and tangible sense is how I interpreted Descartes’ (1637) concept of the immortal soul (pp. 48-49). Descartes, Hume and Kant lived centuries before us and yet the issues of human nature that consumed them continue to consume us today. In essence, human reason and passion live go on forever, as long as we exist.
Hume’s argument on the usefulness of utility makes good sense as a means of maintaining social harmony and is reminiscent of Mencius’ philosophy of governance. While I do not subscribe to Hume’s (1751) assertion that one should strive for fame in order to keep one’s character in check (p. 77), I do consent to the self-reflection that such a pursuit enacts. If we constantly apply self-reflexivity within a social context, this enables us to understand the “Other”, to feel empathy and/or anger for another person’s cause which will hopefully in turn motivate us to act according to what is ethical or moral. This self-reflexivity involves the synthesis of applied reasoning and passion. I believe that this union is the key to public enlightenment or social awareness, which in turn generates experiential reality and active resistance.
When the majority of the world’s population lives in poverty and a small number of humans live in extreme wealth, we have a duty to speak out and to act. The Humean utilitarian argument should (and does) compel some of us to act in solidarity with those personally affected by poverty, ecological destruction or loss of civil liberties and human rights. It should not matter whether one is personally affected by poverty or not. The majority’s well being should be our concern and is a marker of our society’s virtue (or lack thereof) and in turn, our personal virtue. It is thus unfair to criticize the educated middle-class activists in Occupy who are not just speaking against social injustices but also acting against social injustices, in a non-violent revolution[4].
The paradox of resistors fighting capitalism, especially in its neoliberal expression while actively participating as consumers and producers of capitalism is not lost to me. As history has shown, life is full of paradoxes (Kant, 1784, para. 13). Perhaps this is just a fact of life that we cannot really fully alter. We can however reduce the paradox of capitalism and the restriction of freedom through state oppression in strong and large numbers, working in solidarity with each other. The absent referent stories of horrific working conditions of those who built our computers or who manufactured our clothes are not apparent to us. We will probably never ever meet the men, women and children whose lives are similar to those of indentured slaves, who created our material goods. Out of sight and thus out of our consciousness. But if we allow the workers voices to be heard and actively resist in solidarity with them, we can work towards a better society.
While paradoxes and failures exist in life, history has also shown fine examples of selfless acts in which humans jeopardize their own lives and their family’s well being to do the right action by complete strangers because they feel in their heart that injustice is being committed and it is their duty to resist[5]. If laws are enforced on the basis of the happiness of a few (shareholders of an oil corporation) over the happiness and well being of the majority (human and non-human residents of the oil-rich area), then there is no utilitarian purpose to these laws anymore. The Humean conception of justice thus allows and requires us to resist the laws since the utility of the law is being disregarded (Hume, 1751, pp. 33-34).
Even if Occupy is reaching for an ideal state that can never be fully attained, why should we strive for less and act in Machiavellian ways towards each other? The ‘folly’ of idealism provides us with hope and the courage to act and to move forward in our journey towards a better society.
References
Descartes, R. (2008). A Discourse on the Method (I. Maclean, Trans). Oxford: Oxford
University Press. (Original work published 1637)
Hume, D. (1983). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. J. B. Schneewind, (Ed.).
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published 1751)
Kant, I. (1997). Modern History Sourcebook: Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment?,
1784 (P. Halsall, Trans). Retrieved from
Mencius (D. C. Lau, Trans.). (2004). London: Penguin Classics.
Machiavelli, N. (1995). The Prince (G. Bull, Trans.). London: Penguin Classics. (Original
work published 1515)
[2] “Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.” (Kant, 1784, para. 1).
[3] Apologies, Steve. I am not sure where this quote is from and so I am not able to add the source to my references.
[4] Most of the violence that has occurred in Occupy has been that of armed state thug (a.k.a. the increasing militarized police) oppression towards the mostly non-violent Occupiers.
[5] e.g. Germans shielding Jewish strangers during the Holocaust or Hutus shielding Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide.
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