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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 9, 2002
Latest Update: November 9, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Doing Something:
War and Anti-War Demonstrations

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, November 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Reuters
More than 100,000 demonstrators marched in Florence, Italy, today
to protest a possible military strike against Iraq.
New York Times.

Florence Wary as Opponents of War Stage a Huge March By FRANK BRUNI. New York Times. Saturday, November 9, 2002. Backup. Link added November 9, 2002.

Doing Something, that's the big question in politically explosive times such as we now live in. Many of us are asking ourselves what should we do? how should we live? We are listening in good faith, but what does that mean when most of these countries are so far away I'll never see them? Besides, if they really dislike us as much as they say, do we even have a chance of "making friends" with them, or this like going to a new school where the rival gang is in control?

I don't know the answers. That probably means a postmodernist, because otherwise I would puff up like an academic bullfrog and insist that if you would just study as hard as I did to achieve something then we wouldn't even be having these problems. That's the knee jerk defense of the world would be perfect if you would just do what I tell you to do. We tried that "right answer" routine with modernism and science, and social science. In case anyone hasn't noticed, it didn't work! Hunger is still the world's number one cause of death; war is still with us in rather more places than we care to look; the poor are still poor, sometimes even devastatingly more so.

It would seem like a good idea when the official line isn't working to listen at least in good faith to some of the proposed alternatives. The alternatives I have chosen to listen to are colonial studies, the rejection of empire and domination, peace and the rejection of war (because it kills, even though the official line still doesn't seem to notice that). Since these are the alternatives I am studying in the hope that they will help me and others learn to actually function in public sphere discourse on governance and legitimacy, as Habermas hopes, these are the alternatives I hope I am teaching you. That doesn't mean there arent' others, equally or perhaps even more valid. I shall at least remain open to hearing them in good faith when I come across them.

My life experiences and the lifeworld in which I find myself lead me to read with greater depth in philosophy, religious studies, organized efforts at peace, and our own lifeworld for narratives that may elucidate ways to peace. I find myself drawn to colonial studies and to critical race theory. To global feminist theory, and to theology. These are actually traditional areas for socilogists. When sociology grew up as a field many of its practitioners were closely related and schooled by men (appropriate to the historical times) of the cloth.

As I sat down to write on this news article I recalled Leslie Keeney's question on How shall I live now, knowing what 9/11 has caused me to know? It's a good question. And it applies to much that we are learning. I suspect that peace organizations have come up against it more than most. They make appeals for you to listen to the stories of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, the maimed. But good marketing means that they must then follow through, for if you do nothing, you will soon forget what you have learned. So they ask you to sign a petition of send off a letter of protest or e-mail a protest against injustice. Sometimes they ask for money.To the extent with you follow through with the appeal, to the extent that you DO SOMETHING, you are more likely to remember the cause and continue to support it, at least in silence.

But there's something wrong with all that. This is a part of what so upset me with Stanley Cohen's States of Denial, when he came up for air out of his narrative and started outlining definitions of denial for a textbook. No, no, no. As an old political operative I know more of the political world than that. Yes, with volunteers who respond to our appeals, we do have to make sure we give them SOMETHING TO DO to seal the bargain. But that's all just part of building a bond with them, of welcoming them into a backstage that is still new and a little frightening to them. Some of their friends will not agree with our appeals, and they're not sure what this will mean to those friendships. After all, they can't do a lot. Maybe they should just say a prayer for these people and go home like everyone else. That's when we have to have a "hook." part of Goffman's dramaturgical vocabulary.

There's a quality in physics called surface tension. You've seen it when you spill a little water, and instead of spreading evenly over the whole table, it breaks up into little puddles that slip and slide over the table. It's surface tension that holds those molecules of water together. And that same surface tension makes it hard for those molecules to break apart and spread evenly over the table. We've got a similar problem with volunteers who join us in the early stages of their affiliation. There's already a force like surface tension in their own friendship and family groups. They had to break through that surface tension to respond to us. And we need to generate enough surface tension with us to keep them coming back.

The tasks that Stanley Cohen suggests for DOING SOMETHING in States of Denial are surface tension tasks. Simple tasks, requiring no expertise, that will get you hopefully into a group of workers in which you will be able to join in conversation and come to discover similar beliefs and values that will provide the new surface tension for the peace organization. I suspect that maybe Stanley Cohen wasn't bothered by the inanity of those tasks because he can't even remember the time when he needed such tasks to provide a solid entree into a peace-related group. This is one of the tragedies of bureaucracy. Because those who are intensely committed are off somewhere with others being intensely committed in deep theoretical discussions, they pay little attention to those from other disciplines and from other walks of life who would like to commit to their values and goals and discussions.

This is a mjaor organizational pattern for serious thinkers who are trying to connect in a day and age when the Internet has made that possible technologically, but we have never thought it through in terms of establishing interpersonal cross-disciplinary, cross-professional bonds. And it won't work for me to just speak up and say, I'm a professional and I want to join you. Half the time the website isn't being maintained. The people we wnt to connect with are over committed already, as we are. And a lot of the time people claim commitment because they get off on being committed persons when they're really just lazy flakes. That means messy interpresonal communication, across a minimum of ten disciplines, professions, and counting. When you start to look at the problem at this level, the tasks aimed at surface tension are enough to make you want to scream.

Part of our student-designed curriculum project in the Spring of 2003 will be to address this issue of how to go from illocutionary discourse, which most of us in this project have already mastered, to DOING SOMETHING, on our own, as Dear Habermas, that will provide us with credentials that might serve to entree into some of the other groups with which we need to bond.