|
 riday
in the Piazza Alimonda in Genoa a policeman shot dead a murderous
young thug named Carlo Giuliani. The Italian media have reported
that Mr. Giuliani was a beggar with a criminal record, but that
day he was a masked anarchist about to hurl a fire extinguisher
at the head of a cop. Two days after his death the anti-globalization
protesters proclaimed him a martyr to their cause, "a model of compassion
and commitment." Carlo had become Jack the (would-be) Giant Killer
crushed by the Global Giant.
The New York Times, meanwhile, was puffing the softer side
of anarchism. In an article by John Tagliabue, we learned that Atle
Mikkola Kjosen, 25, and his companion, Siv Helen Hesjedal, 22, are
Norwegians who are "tanned and blond, with attentive blue eyes,"
and a desire to "rid the world of capitalism because it unfairly
divides the rich from the poor." Atle and Siv are majoring in development
studies at the University of East Anglia in Britain, and are "determinedly
pacifist and nonviolent." But they were among the protesters on
the Piazza Alimonda mourning the compassionate and committed Carlo.
Anti-globalization, animal rights, radical environmentalism: We
live in an age of naïve and futile but peculiarly destructive protest
movements. Although their agendas appear in some ways quite disparate,
their memberships and their occasions for protest overlap, and they
share some deeper characteristics. They radiate a kind of cheerfulness
while shrugging off any serious sense of responsibility for the
nastiness they foment. And their roots are very clearly in the contemporary
university.
We don't need to go to the University of East Anglia to discover
the streak of cheerful inconsequence displayed by Atle and Siv.
It exists all around us in the little things that university leaders
say and do. Consider this: the new president of Princeton University,
Shirley Tilghman, who took office this month, declared, "I would
like to think we could begin to attract students with green hair.
We will take pink and blue and orange hair, too."
President Tilghman's call for greater diversity of hair color among
Princeton students may seem light-hearted to some, but she was of
course speaking to the need for the Ivy League university to open
itself up to the fun-loving spirit of alienation that manifests
itself these days in parakeet-colored tresses. Presumably Princeton
does not actually deter applicants who have green hair; it simply
does not project the kind of image which makes the chartreuse-coifed
comfortable.
We tremble here on the brink of something, although I am not sure
whether it is profound insight or the crater of the extinct volcano
of sixties radicalism. Anyone who has tuned into the CNN pictures
of the exuberant anarchists of Seattle, or Davos, or last week Genoa,
knows that fashionable protest has a carnival-esque quality. Before
the riot comes a riot of colors (competing with the ever-timely
basic anarchist black), costumes louder than the ubiquitous bullhorns
and tom-toms, and slogans boisterously rendered in a vivid palate
on white sheets.
The sober analysts who I hear commenting on these protesters always
seem to miss the point. The analysts complain that the protesters
have no clear message; that they claim to speak on behalf of the
poor and oppressed in the Third World, yet offer proposals that
would only extend poverty and deepen misery; and that the economic
theories of the protesters are crudely irrational. I say, of course!
Of course! These are, after all, our liberal-arts graduates. They
have been taught to feel, not to think. They have learned from their
teachers that "so-called" rational thought is just one of the masks
worn by power. They believe that expressing one's solidarity with
the victims of power requires action, not overly intellectualized
theories.
This is not to say that the inchoate armies of the Left cannot whomp
up a theory when one is needed. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, after all,
offered a 35,000-word opus on the evils of modern technology, a
work now admired and respected within the subculture of terror-symp
radical environmentalists. The protest movements can and do spawn
elaborate explanations of why it is a good thing to burn laboratories,
destroy experimental crops, and occasionally kill people.
But these theories have a fairy-tale quality to them. They are expressions
of placid belief that the world is just so: Greedy capitalists,
money-hungry corporations and their political stooges relentlessly
driving down the poor, the weak, and the different. The tale is
Marxist-sounding, but far more diffuse than earlier generations
of Leftist mythology. The unifying theme of contemporary radical
protest is flamboyant incoherence.
Princeton could admit many green, pink, and blue-haired individuals
without deeply altering the character of a Princeton education.
The dining clubs would not collapse; the Firestone Library would
remain a splendid underground catacomb of books. The real change
was cultural and it occurred long before President Tilghman's call
to admit the quick and the dyed. College was once the passage from
the lingering enchantments of childhood to the harder mysteries
of adult knowledge, but it has become more and more an extension
of childhood, a period in which trivialities abound and the search
for new enchantments proceeds.
For some that search leads to the dusty hall of mirrors that is
sixties revivalism. Last year when a flyer went up on my campus
announcing a lecture by Noam Chomsky, I overheard the buzz of undergraduates
excited by the prospect of seeing not one of the founding figures
of modern linguistics, but the loony anti-American, anti-capitalist
conspiracy theorist. Chomsky is held in reverential regard by one
strain of the Seattle-cocci, along with a handful of other sixties
relics, like the radical historian Howard Zinn.
But the radical movements du jour — anti-globalization,
animal rights, and radical environmentalism--are more than Sixties'
Kool-Aid in the Earth Friendly recyclable boxes of the Naughts or
the Zippies. The participants in these movements see themselves
as better informed about the way the world really works than
any of their predecessors, and their source of this surpassing wisdom
is not the campus radicals of the past but the students of those
radicals who went on to make their own university careers. For example,
Martha Ackelsberg, the Chair of the Department of Government at
Smith College, received her Ph.D. from Princeton (where she "explored
anarchist theories of justice in Godwin, Bakunin, and Kropotkin")
and now is a leading figure in "anarcho-feminism." Her 1991 book,
Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation
of Women, is an anarchist discussion-group favorite.
The participants in the radical movements of the moment also see
themselves as taking unprecedented advantage of new information
technologies to bypass old forms of organizing. January a year ago,
a young man named Lance, still flush with the excitement of the
Seattle protests, wrote to me about the possibility of his pursuing
a Ph.D. in anthropology in my department. He had been impressed
with the Direct Action Network's success in "creating a human chain
around the meetings to block the delegates" and was fascinated with
the activists' use of "informal lines of communication" and "their
agenda against post-colonialism." He wrote to me because he saw
a fit with my "interests in modernity and cultural change."
Lance had ill luck, I suppose, in writing to an anthropologist who
considers colonialism not an unmitigated evil but a mixed affair.
But the fluidity with which Lance combined his sympathetic view
of anti-globalist activism with ambitions for advanced academic
study is a good illustration of the essential academic character
of this movement. Anti-globalism, like our other contemporary radicalisms,
is a welter of confused ideas the loci of which are not the factory
floor, the tropical plantation, or the union hall, but the university
classroom and the campus coffee shop.
One of the foes conquered by the fairy-tale hero Jack The Giant
Killer is a two-headed giant. Jack, who has hidden a pouch full
of porridge inside his jacket, pretends to cut open his own stomach
without suffering ill results. The giant says, "I can do that too,"
eviscerates himself and, of course, dies.
In their dream world, the protesters retell this myth: the plucky
young heroes will trick the evil old giant into destroying himself.
But I have an illustrated edition from the 1870s that suggests the
protesters may have mistaken their giant. He does not look much
like the World Trade Organization, Globalization, the G-8 Summit,
or even George Bush. Rather, standing in his frock coat, one head
beaming with benevolence and hospitality, the other impatient to
get to work with his cudgel, he looks an awful lot like the giant
of the Left in his castle, the contemporary university. But I don't
expect any help from Jack. His disrespect for the indigenous culture
of giants and the disabled — two-headed giants being unfairly
stigmatized as evil and stupid — has earned him exile
from contemporary children's lit.
In any case, Carlo Giuliani was neither a brave Jack nor a martyr
to any meaningful cause. He was an aimless and ignorant young man
enjoying the opportunity for lawless violence that the gentle idealists
of the university had set in motion.
|
