On Berkeley in the 60s by David O.

"I always remember this particular period of time because the change was so phenomenal. I went to sleep one night and I was a woman who was dissatisfied with my position as a woman in society but I felt solitary in that dissatisfaction and suddenly I wake up and right and left everybody is speaking about it. I have women who agree with me everywhere. We start to form a sisterhood. Everything in my life that has disturbed me is being challenged. Things that haven't disturbed me before suddenly I look at and they do disturb me." - Susan Griffin, Berkeley in the 60s The contemporary act of protest in America, it would seem, is most commonly an act of moral outrage. Jasper, in his works The Art of Moral Protest and Getting Your Way posits that this is the result of a social dynamic determined by cultural, emotional and individual experiential forces. In my own estimation, this most commonly arises out of the tendency for communication between the personal and the political which arises in American culture subsequent to the post-enlightenment philosophical precepts of the liberal tradition. More specifically, the Liberal traditional value of freedom, fairness and equality as intrinsically human rights. This tendency is observable within the entire spectrum of liberal politics in America, from conservative to social. This tendency takes on a slightly different character in non-liberal post-enlightenment political philosophic traditions such as the Anarchist tradition. The Politics of the Personal In watching the documentary, Berkeley in the 60s, what is most striking about the shape of the left counter-cultural movements of protest at that time is the many intersections of personal meaning from which the wider protest movement was built. For the students of the University of California at Berkeley, their relationship to the gears, wheels and levers of the apparatus of Government, industry, organized labor and the existing institutions of society itself were being called into question. For them, the ideology underlying their future employers' motivations for hiring them could in no way be supported were it in any way connected to that underlying of the House Un-American Activities Committee's attempts at actively shaping the political discourse in America through means which threatened the freedom of human thought within American universities. For the feminists, it was the marginalization of female voices in a society which demanded a great deal of taxation in terms of labor (in terms both industrial and maternal) while disallowing in practice equal right for self-representation which brought them into the wider movement for social change. For the Black Panthers, the institutionalization of white supremacy and racism provided the incitement to protest the status quo. In each of these cases, the individual sense of social entitlement as predicated and conditioned upon a cultural mythology in which notions of self-evident truths of equality and ringing freedom coalesced into a wider collective demand for social accountability to broadly accepted moral precepts. In the present day context, similar social disturbances presently coalescing into wider social demands hinge upon the American cultural mythologies of taxation demanding clear and accountable representation, of the establishment of justice and promotion the general Welfare, and security of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, and of notions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These disturbances can clearly be seen in the protests of the conservative liberal tea party movement and in the recently emergent social liberal occupy movement. The Personality of the Political In each of the above mentioned cases, the personal moral shocks behind the participation of each of the participating individuals involved varies greatly from experience to experience. When brought into collectivity, however, the experience of collective action and social communication informs not only the group as a whole of these constituent moral shocks but each individual within the group with the political personality and the concomitant collective shock of the wider movement. It is this

identification with the shock of the wider movement which separates the individual fringe lunatic in single protest against society at large from the stakeholder in a struggle over a clear and demonstrable social grievance. Even despite attempts by political opposition groups to peg participants in wider protest movements as insane, unprincipled discontents, ill-educated boors and the like, it should, at the very least, be clear that in so far as their opposition to status quo consensus is often shared by wide cross sections of the demographic landscapes their delusion is a broadly experienced collective one, if such a thing is pathologically possible. More to the point, in each of the above mentioned cases, the political grievances expressed find their most immediate source in interwoven into the fabric of the cultural mythology underlying the American liberal tradition. This should be taken as no insignificant fact when one takes into consideration the degree to which, in the universe of political ideas, liberalism hardly exists within a vacuum (regardless of what Francis Fukuyama has to say about it). The Integral Personality of other traditions One particular heterodox political traditions which have had a not insignificant history within America is the Anarchist tradition. The Anarchist tradition holds that the dynamic relationship of social hierarchy and capitalist production (taken together or apart) are both inherently immoral and subsequently shocking in their commonness within society. For the Anarchists, the power to impose coercive violence upon one individual by another, extrapolated into a wider social context expressed in its most highly apotheosized form through the institution of the state, is morally reprehensible. Similarly, the social relationship imposed upon society by the predatory forces of the vested interests of those engaging in the accumulation of capital at the expense (both proverbially and materially) of the rest of society is held as being an institutionalization of theft from the common interest of society at large. Subsequent to this philosophic tradition and the concomitant cultural mythology underlying it. From the Haymarket Martyrs to the Makhnovchina in Ukraine to the CNT-AIT militia in Spain to the Anarcho-punk to the fictional works of anarchists Ursula K. LeGuinn (The Dispossessed) or Alan Moore (V for Vendetta), the cultural content underlying this political philosophic tradition begs consideration. It is this cultural content which shapes the form of moral shock among adherents of the anarchist tradition. This shock is commonly directed within the scope of wider protest movements toward emphasizing decentralization and avoidance of cooptation by or cooperation with institutions deemed illegitimate due to their inherent moral reprehensibility (as distinct from the liberal perspective of illegitimacy of such institutions being predicated upon their choices or actions), as well as toward emphasizing political self-reliance in the push for wider social change. Anarchist contributions to political protest often involve reliance upon consensus models of decision making, disregard for municipal permit requirements for public demonstration and a respect for a wide diversity of tactics of political protest and civil disobedience. Conclusion Moral shock in contemporary American political protest takes its character from the liberal tradition which underlay the central mythologies of American culture. This occurs through the communication of values between the shocked individual and the collectively aggrieved. Ideationally dissimilar aggrieved collectivities express their moral shock in dissimilar ways. The distinctions which can be observed between such collectivitites demonstrate the degree to which differences in the foundational culture help to shape differences in the moral shocks which inspire protest as well as the degree to which the approach to political protest is actively different on the ground.

Works cited: Jasper, James M. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Jasper, James M. Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Berkeley in the Sixties. Dir. Mark Kitchell. Prod. Mark Kitchell. By Stephen Lighthill and Veronica Selver. Tara Releasing, 1990.