This NYT article on Occupy Sandy (h/t to Mark on FB) is noteworthy for highlighting a pressing problem for more-or-less anarchist strains of thought as they cross political affect.
"Occupy Wall Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery. This altruistic urge was initially unmet by larger, more established charity groups, which seemed slow to deliver aid and turned away potential volunteers in droves during the early days of the disaster."
The question is how to institutionalize for efficiency without losing the face-to-face that helps drive empathy and altruism. I tend to take a modest evolutionary psychology angle here -- there really is something about faces for human beings and that something is plausibly an evolved predisposition for emotional resonance. Of course, the big question here is the ontological status of "predisposition."
To forestall objections: the empathy / altruism we see is very often limited to in-group members and is fragile not just in its development (there really are psychopaths) but also in its expression (it can be attentuated by certain atomizing social conditions -- here I usually like to refer to an interesting article by Elinor Ostrom, as well as to this piece by Debra Satz and John Frerejohn, and this classic social psychology article).
To come back to the NYT article, this is an interesting bit for complex systems / social ontology folks:
“It’s a laterally organized rapid-response team,” said Ethan Gould, a freelance graphic artist and a first-time member of Occupy. Mr. Gould’s experience illustrates the effort’s grass-roots ethos. He joined up on Nov. 3 and by the following afternoon had already been appointed as a co-coordinator at one of the “distro” (distribution) sites."
Of course, we don't want to feed the neoliberal monster, i.e., let government do a crappy job and then rely on civil society to take up the slack:
"“They asked if they could crash here,” said Juan-Carlos Ruiz, a community organizer there who knew the Occupiers from their previous endeavors. “Those few bags became this enormous organic operation. It’s evidence that when official channels fail, other parts of society respond.”
On the other hand, we don't want to think Occupy in governmental (e.g., military) terms either:
"Occupy Wall Street is capable of summoning an army with the posting of a tweet, and many of the volunteers last week were self-identifying veterans of the movement, although many more were not."
Not to make too much out of a throwaway line (sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor), but this sort of military language risks making social life into an exclusive binary, with exactly the self-organization the article talks about being squeezed out of an opposition between vertical (military) organization and horizontal chaos.
So there are twin dangers here: 1) allowing government to provide crappy service that is replaceable by charity (contra the libertarian creed, the answer to bad government is not less government but better government); 2) thinking that any civil society efforts to supplement government must take government (military) form.
To avoid these dangers, the trick I think is not to oppose government and civil society (as replacement or as pseudo-government), but to have vertical government co-ordinate and facilitate the horizontal self-organizing efforts of people on the ground, who are, after all, always the real "first responders."
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