The Age of the Privileged Revolutionary
By: Lauren Reiff
Tags: Philosophy, World, Psychology, Society, Politics

At this juncture we ought to segue from the street revolutionary with their open mouths, posters, and weapons to the general population. There is something glaring in our midst: It is the share of the general population that shares in the revolutionary sentiment. They are perhaps less violent than their street counterparts but they are willing to espouse the-system-is-irredeemably-corrupt ideas just the same, and to back them up with an intellectualized vindication. This is historically significant and very revealing.

Americans are increasingly souring on many of the precepts our country has long held dear. But ill feelings are not confined to cynicism, as there is also rage; the souring of cynicism and the smoldering of rage. A rage that government is insufficient to solve income inequality, racial tensions, and massive health care reform in one fell swoop. A rage that is also a little muddled and chaotic.

Accordingly, the talk of radical initiatives such as universal health care and the defunding of law enforcement have heated up in the national conversation, these colossal projects that are posed as panaceas of existing corruption. These are crusades mostly impelled by the progressive middle-and-upper classes, crusades fueled by a somewhat naïve faith in projects of vast, top-down destruction and subsequent reconstruction.

All this to say, the age of the privileged revolutionary is riddled with an undisguised irony, informed by the philosophical winds blowing in the academic sphere, and suffused with a confused, angry energy which wishes to tear down and reject, all of which deserves to be explored.

The Tug-of-War

Democracy, capitalism, civil rights — all of these things, to some degree, have been problematized and subject to the scowl of suspicion. Democracy, for example, is somewhat morbidly paraded around as “hanging on by a thread”, at the same time that it is indirectly maligned.

Democracy as this time-tested model of western governments is not only criticized for its insufficiencies and bathed in a kind of disappointment for failing to meet the demands of the masses, but it is also regarded somewhat anxiously as an endangered system we need to preserve.

But there is a lack of coherence and consensus, for people cannot make up their minds. Which one is it, to preserve or to tear down and make anew? This is the question of the era, isn’t it? For every adamant adherent of the latter option (and they usually make up the street protestors) there are just as many everyday citizens conflicted by this preserve-or-tear-down drama, best represented as a tug-of-war.

Futility

Progressives who hurl around the words “institutional” and “systemic” inject a kind of futility into the activism endeavor. And this is precisely the point. For example, it is a popular claim to make that racism is an “institutional” and “systemic” problem — racism is not something to be encountered in the individual human heart, it is more pressingly a living, breathing part of existing “systems” that troublesomely, everyone is, by default, “in denial” about.

As it is, the notion of the “institutional” is so vastly large and the notion of the “systemic” too overwhelmingly abstract and complicated that no one can really engage them. So too is the notion of unwitting complicity (as in the proposed systemic racism example) imbued with a hopeless quality.

People are understandably defeated by these terms. They are repeated so endlessly that they begin to feel suffocating and individuals begin to feel their choices narrow. People throw up their hands and concede that perhaps every structure our nation’s history has wrought is rotten to the core and can’t be trusted. Hence, “burn the system down” sentiment has escalated and is it any surprise?

What’s ironic is how willing many are to reject the systems which have clearly benefited them. For example, sitting amongst the plush spoils of capitalism, westerners are apt to sully its image, to mercilessly poke holes in it (leading to a crisis of faith) rather than to make note of its achievements.

After all, capitalism’s track record of furthering the collective standard-of-living is second to none but recognition of this fact is strikingly absent. Praise for capitalism is scant these days, replaced by the nose-wrinkling of its cynics. So too is democracy sourly regarded by the modern revolutionary as another classic western system that introduced a corruption of the sophisticated, ideal society and smeared the tempting fantasy of what-could-have-been.

Cynicism

We see this cynicism at play in the illiberal desire for censorship, a clear violation of democracy’s free speech doctrine. It need not only be the authoritarian hardness of outright censorship that we can point at; there are also the soft, passive-aggressive “language fashions” in which the party-line of particular political topics must be toed — a certain “correct” way of saying something.

The idea abounds that the principle of free speech is outdated in its unsophistication and that its inherent permissiveness is “messy” rather than the mark of the human dignity of language liberty, say. To such a supposition, I flatly say no. Some things are fine just the way they are and ought to resist the toxic “sophistication upgrades” that the revolutionaries insist upon (believing that they have graduated from principles to projects, which I will talk about in a bit).

Note that there are two breeds of revolutionary types: a) the street variety, who are “hard,” tolerant of violence (à la “the ends justify the means”), and do not mince their words or cloak their wishes and b) the intellectual variety, who are “soft,” are fond of employing academic jargon to advance technically radical ideas, and are more apt to use social pressure rather than force when it comes to furthering their aims.

What happens when you didn’t fight for what you have?

If history teaches us anything, human memory is prone to being washed of the lessons of the past with surprising ease. When we do not reflect on the past and safeguard timeless principles (and defend them in our speech) we are prone to ingratitude and worse, ignorance.

It is true that those who fought for freedom have a far more visceral stake in preserving it than those who have lazily inherited it. The former will likely have a sharply-defined, fiery vindication for freedom, but their progeny is not likely to feel quite so convicted. This watering-down may be partly inevitable, simply the consequence of being bequeathed something that you did not have to work for, but there is more to the story.

Principles vs. Projects

Modern generations of prosperous westerners who have been mostly spared the kind of gritty, life-or-death struggles of war and/or merciless political oppression in their own backyards lack the clarity, in some ways, of what ought to be fought for — that is, classical western principles (they are few but clear-cut) such as liberty and equality of opportunity that have been historically held in high repute.

The modern revolutionary has lost sight of principles and now finds themselves hungrily grasping towards projects instead. Principles need preservation and require historical memory. They are not especially exciting but they are exceedingly necessary. Liberty, for example, is an uncomplicated principle theoretically, but is vast in scope when enacted. It also does not take from anyone in order to label itself a general right of all people. This is not so with projects, which increasingly flutter about in the the modern revolutionary’s imagination. Projects generally take from others in order to muscle particular goals into place.

And so, such individuals are beguiled by the promise of a future that can somehow incorporate a teeming multiplicity of demands stemming from a multiplicity of supposedly world-improving projects. Recall the slightly odd privileged-status of the modern revolutionary. It is highly interesting to observe that it is they, with their overly-ambitious (though necessarily vague) projects of re-ordering society who march in the streets. A thin undercurrent of entitlement might even be spotted.

The underlying observation is this: these activist-types are curiously dissatisfied, certain in their need (and right) to do away with the problematic fashions of the day, and weirdly content to not press into details of plans for change.

So, western populations have been facing trouble without worthwhile principles to fight for. They have gotten their hands entangled in the seductive project instead, and because historical memory of principles-worth-defending is fading, individuals have become both restless and a little entitled.

That the west’s success (which has made enormous strides in the arenas of law (human dignity) and economy (prosperity) might produce a people who sour on these very sentiments — and behave “restless and a little entitled” — may not be quite so astonishing when we consider society’s underbelly of human psychology in all its complicated and paradoxical glory. More on that next.

The Psychological Underbelly

Hear me out: Take democracy, for example. It is far from an innate feature of human society but this reality can be difficult to recognize and value when you are disconnected from the work and the vindications that went into it. I have earlier explored this truth, writing the following:

“[Democracy is] an ingenious intellectual creation predicated on the inevitable tension vibrating between freedom on one end and security on the other. Democracy originated as a project of the human mind, which is to say that it’s not natural in the sense of our primitive makeup. Authoritarianism is closer to nature and is sloshing with power — that Darwinian albatross that haunts human society. Democracy, then, requires much vigilance to be maintained. Power is to nature as liberty is to civilization.”

When we gain success and prosperity (which any honest accounting of America’s progress will indicate we indeed have), the tautness that exists during gritty periods of history collapses. Simply put, the higher we ascend, the greater our chances of forgetting simple, sobering realities such as “democracy isn’t natural and ought to be maintained” and taking the sacrifices of the past for granted.

When we believe we largely have something in the bag, we have energies to divert elsewhere. This, I am precariously speculating, can account for the modern revolutionary’s shoveling of energies into finding fault with systems like democracy rather than fighting for them. Call it a theory of (psychological) energy equilibrium.

We are subconsciously compelled to work on something, and if we have already built something, it is scarily possible that we will eventually reach a point where we will start to claw at what we have built for no other reason than we are discontented with inaction.

It would appear that in the second decade of the 21st century we have reached that point. Hence the cynicism, the futility, the disorienting demands of confusingly “privileged” revolutionaries.

The role of higher education

One must also account for the inarguable responsibility of academia not only for producing the modern revolutionary but for producing enough of a lather that the mainstream has begun to adopt these ideas. Steeped in the cynical theories of systemic (and necessarily unsolvable, short of the system being overthrown) racism and systemic patriarchy (again, unsolvable, short of destruction and a new installment), a new generation of Americans is taught to regard celebratory historical achievement and slow-but-steady improvements as an affront to what-could-be (a totally reworked society, the plan for which is rather fuzzy and undeveloped).

Weirdly, race and gender relations seem to have worsened in this era. Little wonder when the aforementioned theories are so often unabashedly alienating. Their allure lies in their futile reading of race and gender relations and the accompanying justification for some kind of radical action plan (which plays to the energy-equilibrium psychological dynamic I pointed out earlier.)

And steeped in fashionable notions such as American un-exceptionalism and introduced to the degradation of capitalism, so too is a new generation of Americans taught that it is something of a virtue (or at least a necessary quest) to find ways to discredit ideas that have long been venerable. From looking at what is handed down in college classrooms (and subsequently maneuvers its way into journalism and HR and so on) we can begin to see how the those graced with the spoils of education have embraced a soured look at America.