Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Cosmos The In Lost

Home
Catholic
Why Are Protest Movements (Like the Women’s March) Ineffective?

Why Are Protest Movements (Like the Women’s March) Ineffective?

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 6:33 pm by Artur Rosman

Why Are Protest Movements (Like the Women’s March) Ineffective? 2017-01-24T18:33:38-07:00 Artur Rosman

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

(A woman cheers during the Madison WI rally for the Women’s March on January 21, Author: Amandalynn Jones; Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Women’s March protest has me thinking about protest movements . . . if only because several folks skipped out on my son’s birthday party to attend the Seattle march, a few others were a bit late.

Protest movements frequently use the slogan of “Solidarity.” Solidarity is measured the quantity of people attending the marches, rather than by the quality of their interactions. This choice of words cannot but remind me of the Polish context of the word. I once even translated a piece explaining why Solidarity collapsed so quickly for Thinking in Values (“Solidarity as Church” by Dariusz Karlowicz).

I suspect that the Women’s March will have the same short-term effect as the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, Femen, the Greenpeace protests, Global Warming resistances, the Pro-Life Movement, and any number of such movements that have had their moment in the limelight only to fall into irrelevancy in ever-shorter cycles. Almost by design, success spells the end of these single-issue movements; the same goes for lack thereof.

I include the Polish Solidarity movement in this group, along with many other Eastern European opposition movements, which have totally disappeared without too many Western commentators ever really noticing it. I still get people who come up to me and say “Solidarity” and expect me to jump for joy, or those who say Walesa is a hypocrite as if that’s some sort of news.

If protests are so ineffective, then why is it that protest movements are so popular? Here’s what Alasdair MacIntyre says in his widely-discussed After Virtue:

It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. ‘To protest’ and its Latin predecessors and French cognates are originally as often or more often positive as negative; to protest was once to bear witness to something and only as consequence of that allegiance to bear witness against something else.

He continues in the same book (part of my TOP11 critiques of modernity booklist) to go on and explain why these movements are so ineffective:

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premise. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

I should add that they tend to be minimally effective because they are not rationally effective. Since the protesters tend to talk to themselves about either nebulous notions unrelated to any concrete political agenda, or, about a single cause divorced from a program that rationally embraces dialogue across a series of interconnected issues.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s differs from the movements I’ve mentioned above, and the ones MacIntyre describes, because it worked from an assumption that there was a common language that everyone could communicate in (frequently biblical), unlike the incommunicability assumed by most recent identity politics movements. It also had a much more robust and far-reaching and goal-oriented organizational structure that became further institutionalized by enshrining its imperatives by the nation-state. I do believe that the global warming movement is the only one, out of the ones listed above, with the potential to communicate the common good in such a way.

Another book from the list—The Consequences of Modernity–by Anthony Giddens, has some really interesting things to say about how the modern world has disrupted the connection between time and place.

I’m still reading it, but suffice it to say that it be the case that we’re stuck with protest movements, because local action is no longer possible as such because there is no such thing as “the local” anymore. It is highly probably that we are nomads in a liquid modernity.

If true, that might be a sword through the heart of a third-way like Distributism, which might not be possible, except for under-modernized regions.

The new Adam Curtis documentary Hypernormalisation is also, among other things, an analysis of why protest movements have proven so ineffective. His more left-leaning analysis converges with After Virtue by criticizing protest-emotivism. Curtis also focuses upon the general unwillingness of those who govern to admit they are exercising power. He has this in common with another Catholic thinker, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, whose Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith is all about the paradox of governing elites who don’t want to exercise power openly and hide behind economic expertise.

You will want to take a look at TOP11 critiques of modernity.

Consider making a donation to this blog through the donation button on the upper right side of its homepage. Many thanks to all the souls who have already done so, or plan to do so in the future.

Stay in touch! Like Cosmos the in Lost on Facebook:

Cosmos the in Lost

Previous Post

January 22, 2017

St. Paul's First Letter to the Catholics

Next Post

January 25, 2017 The Good = Evil + Time

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category #WhyRemainCatholic Abortion Advent Anti-Catholicism Arts Atheism Beauty Benedict XVI Bible Book Review Catholic Cinema Comedy Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey Czesław Miłosz Dariusz Karłowicz Devil Easter Eastern Orthodoxy Economics Environment Family Famous Atheists Who Weren't Atheists Guest Post Hans Urs von Balthasar HHS Mandate History Imagination Interview Islam Jean-Luc Marion John Paul II Judaism Just War Lent Literature Little Sisters of the Poor Liturgy Martyrdom Music News Paganism Patristics Phenomenology Philosophy Pierre Hadot Poetry Poland Pop Culture Pope Francis Poverty Prayer Protestantism Rabelais Race Remi Brague Rene Girard Russia Sam Rocha Science & Religion SCOTUS Secularization Sexual Abuse Sexuality Silence Solidarity Stratford Caldecott Synod14 Terrorism Top 10 Uncategorized Walker Percy War Weakened Edition World War II World Youth Day WYD Krakow

Select a Month July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What occupation did Peter, Andrew, James, and John have before following Jesus?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Tax collectors Scribes Politicians Fishermen