The High Cost of Occupation: The High Cost of Injustice

According to various reports, the Occupy Wall Street movement has cost cities upward of $10 million. As the protesters are angry at the diversion of public funds away from public services (I know people say no one knows what they want, but they are really quite clear about what they want), it might seem that this wasteful spending is only making things worse. The more cities spend on police, the less they can spend on libraries, public parks, infrastructure, and all the other things that make society work. We might ask whether military ordnance such as Tampa Police Department's tank (no, armored rescue vehicle) is a good use of money, but policing protests takes a few pennies either way.

Somehow, it seems cities always have enough money to deploy an army to suppress a non-violent protest but not enough money for basic services. The cash tin for security is bottomless. But surely, even those in power would rather not have to spend all this money on security if it can be avoided. No one wants to have to live with barricades everywhere. And no one wants to live with the inconvenience of constant protests.

And that is the point. Protests are intended to create a situation that everyone would rather avoid. As Martin Luther King put it, "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." This is what this movement, and any other political movement, seeks to accomplish. It is obvious that $10 million is not enough to create a crisis for the current established order.

When the current order is threatened, it will of course blame the dissenters for a new sense of crisis and chaos. This blame is misplaced. It is a breakdown of order that provokes civil disobedience in the first place. Mass movements are made up of people who want a just and civil society. As John Rawls, another great American philosopher, said, "If legitimate civil disobedience seems to threaten civil peace, the responsibility falls not so much on those who protest as upon those whose abuse of authority and power justifies such opposition."

Which brings us to the final point. The purpose of protests is to make the cost, financial and otherwise, of injustice greater than the price of justice.

Brooks and the Milquetoast Revolution

In today's New York Times column, David Brooks mocks the Occupy Wall Street protesters for offering only mild and ineffective solutions to the country's problems, rather than radical changes that would significantly alter the American system. It's funny, but I haven't seen or heard any OWS protesters claiming to be radicals or to want to overthrow the American system. Rather, I have seen people who love their country and want to let their leaders know they are not expendable. This should not be radical; in fact, no one should ever have to assert this position. We should assume all Americans are of value and that repairing our nation will require shared sacrifice.

He says, "They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation." I happen to think that removing the Bush-era tax cuts, ending corporate subsidies for corporations making huge profits, and closing tax loopholes that enable rich individuals and corporations to pay taxes at an exceptionally low rate or not at all, you will have an impact on the national debt.

But what if I am wrong? I am a humanist and not an economist, after all. I don't have the solutions for the economic problems of the country, but I do feel that everyone should be subject to the same laws, same punishments, and same regard. After the financial collapse in 2008, we were told that banks were too big to fail and that we must rescue them. Taxpayers bailed out the banks only to see them become even larger through mergers and continue the same dangerous behaviors that caused the economic failure in the first place. We rescued them, rewarded their bad behavior, and are now being treated as if our voices do not matter.

If the banks are too big to fail, and the government won't break them up, we must make them smaller ourselves by moving our money to credit unions and smaller banks. We must hold corporations accountable for their crimes. We must ask them to pay their share of rebuilding our country. Mr. Brooks is correct; this is not radical. He may also be correct that it will not solve all the financial problems of the United States, but it will be fair.

It is more important for me to live in a fair and just society than it is to live in a prosperous society. We should not need a revolution to achieve this.

Can philosophy matter?

In the last century, it seemed philosophy might disappear from public consciousness. Much of philosophy had become so technical and so removed from the problems of daily life that most people who were not professional philosophers could not even name a living and working philosophers. Philosophers hardly have the recognition of other public figures even now, but they are addressing concerns that are public--medical ethics, corporate ethics, how to live a good life, and so on.

In Stephen Toulmin’s book, Cosmopolis, he describes various aspects of modernism, and concludes that it is no accident that philosophers are beginning to take seriously concerns that Descartes thought had no depth. After centuries of theoretical and technical exploration, philosophers are returning to discussions of how to live and how to make life better for others. Toulmin says it is no accident that “more and more philosophers are now being drawn into debates about environmental policy or medical ethics, judicial practice or nuclear politics.”[1] He says some philosophers may fear being drawn away from the technical questions of academic philosophy, but he argues, “These practical debates are, by now, not ‘applied’ philosophy but philosophy itself.”[2] The problems facing the world now are not new. Wars, pollution, and poverty have been with us for centuries. But these same problems are acute, chronic, and critical. It is easy to despair at our lack of progress, but Martha Nussbaum reminds us that progress has been made. In Frontiers of Justice, she says, “Racial hatred and disgust, and even misogynistic hatred and disgust, have certainly diminished in our public culture, through attention to the upbringing of children and their early education. The careful attention to language and imagery that some pejoratively call ‘political correctness’ has an important public purpose, enabling children to see one another as individuals and not as members of stigmatized groups.”[3] As humanists, we cannot solve the world’s problems, but we can choose to contribute to moral progress and promote a common understanding and care for one another, regardless of how many people join us along the way.

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[1] Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 190.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2006), 413.