The problem with thought experiments (and associated attempts to make them into actual psychological experiments) is that to some extent all they do is clarify what our post-facto ethical narrative will be about an action that was not genuinely controlled by that ethical reasoning. Life almost never presents us these kinds of simultaneous, near-equal choices, and we almost never have the opportunity to reason clearly in advance of a decision about such choices. Drama and fiction as well as philosophy sometimes hope to stage or present us these scenarios either to help us understand something we did (or was done to us) in the confusion of events, or perhaps to re-engineer our intuitions for the next time. What this sometimes leads to is a post-facto phony ideological grandiloquence about decisions that were never considered in their actual practice and conception as difficult, competing ethical problems. Arthur Harris wasn’t weighing difficult principles about just war and civilian deaths in firebombing Dresden, he was wreaking vengeance plain and simple. Neoliberal institutions today frequently act as if they’re trying to balance competing ethical imperatives in purely performative way en route to decisions that they were always going to make, that were always going to deliver predictable harms to pre-ordained targets.

But at this moment in late March 2020, humanity and its various leaders and institutions are in fact looking at an honest-to-god trolley problem, and it is crucial that we have a global and democratic discussion about how to resolve it. This is too important to leave to the meritocratic leaders of civil institutions and businesses, too important to be left to the various elected officials and authoritarian bureaucracies, too important to be deferred to just one kind of expertise.

The terms of the problem are as follows:

Strong national quarantines, lockdowns, and closure of nonessential businesses and potential gathering places in order to inhibit the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 will save lives in all countries, whether they have poorly developed health infrastructures, a hodgepodge of privately-insured health networks of varying quality and coherence or high-quality national health systems. These measures will save lives not by containing the coronavirus entirely but simply by slowing the rapidity of its spread and distributing its impact on health care systems which would be overloaded even if they had large amounts of surplus capacity. The overloading of health care facilities is deadly not just to people with severe symptomatic coronavirus infections but to many others who require urgent intensive care: at this same moment, there are still people having heart attacks, life-threatening accidental injuries, poisonings, overdoses, burns from fires, flare-ups of serious chronic conditions, and so on. There are still patients with new diagnoses of cancer or undergoing therapy for cancer. There are still people with non-COVID-19 pneumonias and influenza, still people with malaria and yellow fever and a host of other dangerous illnesses. When a sudden new pandemic overwhelms the global medical infrastructure, some of the people who die or are badly disabled who could have been saved are not people with the new disease. Make no mistake: by the time this is all said and done, perhaps seventy percent of the present population of the planet or more will likely have been exposed to and been carriers of the virus, and it’s clear that some percentage of that number will die regardless of whether there was advanced technology and expertise available to care for them. Let’s say it’s two percent if we can space out the rate of infection: that is still a lot of people. But let’s say it’s eight percent, including non-COVID 19 people who were denied access to medical intervention, if we don’t have strong enforced quarantines at least through the first three months where the rate of infection in any given locale starts to rise rapidly. That’s a lot more people. Let’s say that a relatively short period of quarantine at that level–three months–followed by moderate social distancing–splits the difference. A lot of people, but fewer than in a totally laissez-faire approach.

Against that, there is this: in the present global economy, with all its manifest injustices and contradictions, the longer the period of strongly enforced quarantine, the more that another catastrophe will intensify that will destroy and deform even more lives. There are jobs that must continue to be done through any quarantine. Police, fire and emergency medical technicians must work. Most medical personnel in emergency care or hospitals must work. Critical infrastructure maintenance, all the way down to individual homes and dwellings, still has to be done–you can’t leave a leaking pipe in the basement alone for four months. Banks must still dispense money to account holders, collect interest on loans, and so on. And, as we’re all discovering, there are jobs which can be done remotely in a way that was impossible in 1965 or 1985. Not optimally from anyone’s perspective, but a good deal of work can go on in that way for some months. But there are many jobs which require physical presence and yet are not regarded as essential and quarantine proof. No one is getting routine tooth cleaning. The barber shops are closed. Restaurants and bars are closed. Ordinary retail is closed. Amusement parks and concert halls are closed. All the people whose lives depend on those businesses will have no money coming in the door. Three months of that might be barely survivable. Ten months of that are not. Countries with strong social-democratic safety nets have some insulation against the damage that this sudden enforced unemployment of a quarter to a half of the population. Countries like the United States with almost no safety nets are especially exposed to that damage. But the world can’t go on that way for the full length of time it might take to save the most lives from the coronavirus pandemic. And make no mistake, this will cost lives as well. Quite literally from suicide, from sudden loss of access to shelter and health care, from sudden inability to afford the basic necessities of everyday life. But also from the loss of any future: the spiralling catastrophe of an economic downturn as grave as the Great Depression will deform and destroy a great deal, and throw the world into terrifying new disequilibrium.

It cannot be that saving the most lives imaginable from the impact of the pandemic is of such ethical importance that the destructiveness of the sudden collapse of the world economy is unimportant. It cannot be that business as usual–already deformed by inequality and injustice–must march forward over the deaths caused by the unconstrained, unmanaged spread of COVID-19. Like many people, this problem is not at all abstract for me. I’m 55, I have high blood pressure, I have a history of asthma, I’m severely overweight and when I contract the disease, I may well die. I have a mother that I love who is almost 80, aunts and uncles whom I love who are vulnerable, I have valued colleagues and friends who are vulnerable, and of course some who may die in this have no pre-existing vulnerabilities but just draw a bad card for whatever reason. But there has to be a point where protecting us to the maximum degree possible does more harm to others in a longer-lasting and more devastating way.

And this trolley problem cannot be left to the civic institutions and businesses that in the US were the first to act forcefully in the face of an ineffective and diffident national leadership. Because they will decide it on the wrong basis and they will decide it in a way that leaves all of us out of the decision. They will decide it with lawyers in closed rooms, with liability and insurance as their first concerns. They will decide it following neoliberal principles that let them use the decision as a pretext to accomplish other long-standing objectives–streamlining workforces, establishing efficiencies, strengthening centralized control.

It cannot be left to political authorities alone. Even in the best-case scenario, they will decide it in closed rooms, following the technocratic advice of experts who will themselves stick to their specialized epistemic networks in offering counsel: the epidemiologists will see an epidemic to be managed, the economists will see a depression to be prevented. In the worst-case scenario, as in the United States, corrupt leaders will favor their self-interest, and likely split differences not out of some transparent democratic reasoning but as a way to avoid responsibility.

This has to be something that people decide, and that people are part of deciding. For myself, I think that we will have to put a limit on lockdowns and quarantines and that limit is likely to be something like June or July in many parts of the United States and Europe. We can’t do this through December, and that is not about any personal frustration with having to stay at home for that length of time. It’s about the consequences that duration will wreak on the entirety of our social and economic systems. But it is not anything that any one of us can decide for ourselves as a matter of personal conscience. We the people have to decide this now, clearly, and not leave it to CEOs and administrators and epidemiologists and Congressional representatives and well-meaning governors and untrustworthy Presidents. This needs not to be a stampede led by risk-averse technocrats and managers towards the path of least resistance, because there’s a cliff at the end of all such paths. This is, for once, an actual trolley problem: no matter what we do, some people are going to die as a result of what we decided.

The rhetorical use of “ally” operates very similarly. It comes out of a deep history of critical attention to the way in which whites, men, straights, abled or white straight abled men consistently grab the reins of political and social struggles for racial, gender or sexual equality and justice. Often unintentionally or unconsciously. The ways that space and power are ceded to dominant actors are often equally unconscious, evidence of the persistent power of stereotypes and discrimination. The reminder to be an ally is meant as a kind of habitual reminder against those tendencies, a sort of struggle checklist. Who is speaking to represent what a group or movement wants or is doing? How was it decided that they should speak? Who is claiming to represent what a group or constituency want or think? Those are always valid questions, and if a movement concerned with what’s being done to people of color or to women or to queers, etc., always finds that the answers are “somebody else”, then that’s a problem.

Uncomfortably, however, ally is sometimes used more expansively, in several ways. For one, it seems to me that sometimes the people who are most likely to police a debate or movement by asking some participants to recede into ally status are themselves people who ought to be “allies” in that circumstance. It’s very likely that in regular reading of progressive conversations in social media you will come across many examples of white straight men or women telling other white straight men or women what it means to be an ally and what the content and appearance of proper ally behavior in the conversation at hand ought to be. This is at least an intervention that begs for a self-reflexivity that it often lacks.

For another, without a fairly careful and historically self-conscious use of the idea, talk of allyship sometimes seems to function as a kind of in-group manipulation of eager outsiders who want to hang out with the in-group. A sort of progressive rushing of potential pledges, with some being sent off to the equivalent of a social justice Delta House. The point of reminding people about being allies is to not speak on behalf of groups or causes, to not anoint themselves as representative speakers without a representative structure for making decisions. The objective is not to produce a state of fawning dependency in someone who is essentially seeking a merit badge or other acknowledgement of their personal virtue.

More importantly, however, is that there is another meaning to “ally” that is strategically important to any group pursuing political or social change. The question in this case is not the distribution of power or authority within a group, but about what groups, institutions or causes require to make strategic gains, to achieve their goals.

“Ally” even in the sense of trying to be mindful of authority within a loosely progressive coalition or group is also a move that insists on at least the necessity and vitality of organizing struggles in terms of identities. Even if you invoke intersectionality, those identities tend to resolve into discrete, structured forms. There is a huge body of scholarly and political writing on identity politics, essentialism (strategic or otherwise), new social movements and so on, and I won’t try to laboriously navigate my way through it all. I don’t quite agree with the sort of left critique that Walter Benn Michaels and others have offered that puts class or economic inequality out there as the important and “real” issue. It should be apparent that I have my doubts about the wisdom of many forms of identity politics, but I would hope in some sense to be enough of an ally of sorts to say that their pursuit is not for me to say yes or no to: the strategic decisions involved are properly vested elsewhere, in other people and other communities.

The point where I and many others enter the picture, with whatever sympathies and knowledge we may have, is when groups, communities or institutions are not by themselves and of themselves sufficient to achieve their goals, protect their practices, or satisfy their needs. Some political and cultural projects don’t need allies or have very parsimonious requirements largely aimed at securing or protecting otherwise sufficient existing practices. Even in this case, the important thing to understand is that “ally” necessarily means someone who is not part of the group and does not share its direct interests or outlook.

Whether political and social actors need few allies or many, they have to think clearly about three things: 1) the instrumental goals that require allies; 2) which allies and why; 3) and what those allies need or want as the price of their support. If there’s no difference between supposed allies–same struggle, same fight–then they’re not your ally. They are you. If they are an ally, they’re not you, and don’t have the same interests and goals that you do.

If I can accomplish an important goal of mine entirely on my own, I will. Of course I will. Who wouldn’t? If it’s a goal that others seek in exactly the same fashion, again, why wouldn’t we just accomplish it if we could? If you can mobilize enough power to overwhelm or ignore any divergent or opposing interests, why not do so?

If we need allies, what we’re doing is recognizing first that there are people who do not share our goals entirely but who may support some of our goals. Second we’re recognizing a limit to our capacity or to our power, that we can’t do it on our own. It may be that one of our goals is to live in a world where there are other groups with other goals, of course. In fact, that’s almost necessarily true if we expect anyone to be our allies except in the most brutally cynical sort of Molotov-Ribbentrop sense: if we look for allies and don’t expect to betray or dispose of them at the first opportunity, we believe that our own goals are compatible with other goals, and our goals are thus limited or constrained in their scope. So third, you are recognizing that other groups and other people have different goals and needs that are at least tolerably distinct or divergent from your own, and that you can not only live with but support the difference between you and your ally.

That’s of course why talking as if you don’t need allies, as if you’re already sufficiently empowered, when this is absolutely not true, is such a bad strategic move. There’s very little reason for allies to join your cause if you’ve preemptively dismissed the need for such allies, or displayed contempt for the ways in which their priorities and needs may diverge from your own.

Perhaps many movements don’t think very clearly about alliances because doing so sometimes means that they come to discover that their own group is not the hero of the story or the prime mover of change. Sometimes thinking clearly about alliances means they discover that they are the ally to some more powerful or coherent institution or cause. Sometimes thinking clearly means they have to recognize that they don’t even know what they want or how they’re going to get it, or what the minimum necessary costs of an alliance might be. Sometimes, at least for progressives, they end up recognizing that a lot of muddled assumptions about the social coherence of the left are unwarranted. That’s precisely why many progressive coalitions have the half-life of Rutherfordium. Too many people want to just demand alliance and not enough people want to think about the ways that successful alliance requires suppressing or deferring or modifying some aspect of their own goals and needs.

Another part of Grasping the Nettle.

But “privilege” as a concept essentially takes its cues from a deep body of pre-existing social theory and social history that dissects the origins and continuing maintenance of inequality. Much of that body of theory argues that in some fashion or another, inequality is functional to the individuals, groups and institutions that sustain it, that it is the product of self-interest. Part of the point behind that general argument is to aggressively dissent from other bodies of theory that see inequality as the natural outcome of meritocracy, competition, or intrinsic pre-existing differences between human beings, to argue instead that inequality has a history and is an active creation of social processes and institutional power.

It would be possible to argue that inequality is both a product of historical circumstances but not self-interested, e.g., that it is an emergent or unintended (if undesirable) outcome of processes and actions that were undertaken for other reasons. To the extent to which that is true, calling out privilege might be a genuinely educational gesture, and one where it’s plausible that the person named as privileged would have no vested desire to defend that status.

For the most part, this is not what progressive or left social theory would argue. The assumption is that the privileged benefit from their privilege, and therefore have every reason in the world to defend or maintain it. So what could possibly get them to do otherwise? Only one of two possibilities, broadly speaking. Either the mobilization of sufficient coercion or force by the victims of inequality such that they can compel the privileged to surrender some or all of their status, or the possibility of convincing the privileged that their status is either morally repugnant or is ultimately more of a risk to their long-term social existence than a more equal disposition would be.

If it’s about mobilization, the only benefit to privilege-checking is painting a bullseye on a target, of making a threat. At some point, making threats casually without the power to back them up is at the least futile, at the worst incredibly dangerous.

If it’s not–if there is some possibility of persuading a privileged person to assist in the abrasion or surrender of that privilege because that’s a thing they ought to do–it’s worth considering what that implies about the act of privilege-checking itself, and many other kinds of related communication.

If the “ought to do” is “because if you don’t eventually there’s going to be a revolution and you’ll be worse off than if you aimed for a soft landing from inequality”, then that’s just a deferred threat, to be taken seriously to the extent that the person making the argument can mobilize evidence about the inevitability of that outcome.

If the “ought to do” is because inequality is morally wrong and there is a hope that even its beneficiaries can see that, the question is: morally wrong how? Potentially for a range of reasons, some of them complementary. Morally wrong because perhaps a democratic society requires some form of rough equality to work, is premised on the notion that all people are created (and therefore should remain) equal. Such that anyone who professes to believe that a democratic society is preferable to any other ought to believe in the active maintenance of equality. But perhaps more because inequality’s consequences hurt people, both in absolute terms in terms of affordances and necessities they cannot access and relatively because they see others who have no greater merit or right enjoying vastly greater privileges.

E.g., privilege-checking arguably works only because or if it’s assumed that the person being called out is compassionate or can be morally moved to compassion.

Here we come to other problems. First, this doesn’t sit entirely well with the notion that the privileged are rationally self-interested in protecting their status. At the very least, to privilege-check as an invocation of shared morality implies that self-interest is never a sufficient explanation of social outcomes and even less of consciousness.

Second, the moral appeal only works if it is shared. It is undeniably true that members of marginalized groups cannot systematically discriminate against, that people of color cannot be racists or women be sexists, in the sense that this argument is typically made. Because to discriminate requires organized social power. It is not true, and is usually not claimed by activists to be true, that people cannot be cruel to one another as individuals. Power is no security against feeling personal and emotional pain, and relative powerlessness is no guarantee of interpersonal emotional virtue.

Early celebrations of online communication embraced it as a many-to-many medium, a wholesome democratizing alternative to the one-to-many structure of earlier forms of mass media. What that characterization obscured is that in some cases, the Internet functions as a many-to-one medium, magnifying and focusing the attention of crowds on individuals.

The problem is that such attention is often not compassionate in its imagination of that individual, even when it is coming from crowds who act in the name of a politics that requires a belief in the possibility of compassion even in those who have no necessary reason to feel it. If you call for people to worry about the injustice of inequality, to feel moved by the immorality of privilege, and believe that it is possible that this call will be heeded, then that requires an ethic of care. Anyone who worries about privilege has to be at least as compassionate as they hope the privileged might be.

In a many-to-one appeal, even if the many are just a handful of activists with little to no social power and the one is an intersectionally powerful person, it has to be possible to imagine that the awakening of compassion will be mingled with feelings of panic, sadness, and fear. The critique still has to be said, not the least because status, privilege and inequality are social facts that need to be spoken about with the same precision and clarity that we devote to talking about the chemistry of covalent bonds or measuring the absolute neutrino mass scale. But calling out privilege shouldn’t be an act that requires hardening the heart or relishing a hope for social exclusion. Which means also that it should be the exact opposite of a flip or easy rejoinder, never the progressive equivalent of a sneer or a call to silence.

Perhaps that means “check your privilege” is a phrase to retire because it invites that kind of ease, a lack of awareness about what that statement hopes for and requires. If it’s not an expression of an ethic of care, trying to radar-ping the world around it to find out who else shares or might share in that ethic, and not a threat with power behind it, then what it usually leads to is the moral evacuation of a conversation and the production of a sort of performative austerity, of everyone in a community pretending to virtue they do not authentically embrace and avoiding the positive or generative use of the forms of social power they might actually have genuinely privileged access to.

A part of Grasping the Nettle.

Or is it instead that we’ve become a nation of Batmen, with social media our trusty utility belt? Vigilantes on patrol against the sort of malice that no law could punish but that leaves people reeling and downtrodden? Who else will punish the asshole car dealers who try to get an innocent pizza delivery man fired if not all of us?

I don’t think there has yet been a definitive history of how we stopped being a society where children could roam away from constant parental surveillance and where adult bodies could be unseen and anonymous in plain sight, but I’m certain that this past moment is uncomfortably twinned with a world where brutal injustices were glossed over as normal and white men from “the greatest generation” could go to sleep at night unperturbed by, unaware of, the racism, sexism, and discrimination that was everywhere around them.

However you could have hoped to go forward from that moment, I think going towards a world of ubiquitious attention to public bodies and everyday speech while leaving much of the force of structural discrimination unperturbed is not high on the list of aspirational possibilities.

21st Century Americans are in many ways becoming a kind of democratic Stasi, reporting on their neighbors and colleagues, assembling dossiers of suspicious or questionable action and speech. This would be one thing if it were social pressure, but it isn’t just that. In many cases, if you call the cops or report to an employer, the target will be dealing with potentially ruinous consequences. Both the state and capital alike encourage, protect and extend mutual surveillance.

Nor is it just reactionary in its content. There will be no fable here of McCarthyism, nothing that lets this story sift neatly into defenders and enemies of an open society. My Facebook feeds are crowded with messages forwarded by progressive friends: look what this person said! Look what that guy did! Hashtag that creep, report that guy to his boss.

That at least you could account to the rough and tumble of political struggle, that you can’t pursue justice and be endlessly genteel and forgiving. But my social media, written by educated progressives, are just as much full of other kinds of negative attention to public bodies. A quiet undercurrent of disdain for misbehaving, unruly bodies that have the bad taste to be visible: fat bodies, slovenly bodies, flyover bodies, bodies that don’t spell and talk good, bodies that look funny. Bodies that eat the wrong foods, bodies that go to the wrong places. Bodies that like the wrong movies, bodies that do the wrong things. We no longer look to a single column in the newspaper to inform middle-class manners, no longer go to charm school. Bourgeois etiquette is done by swarm action now, by flash mobs. And when we swarm over a target, it’s the equivalent of Edward Snowden releasing his memos: it says, “You also are being watched.”

The problem with a lot of our ubiquitious surveillance is precisely not that it is overtly hateful and hating. Instead, what makes so much of it easy to pursue is that it presents itself as a kindness. Here is some advice about not reading the Internet so much! Here is a way not to die because you read your iPad before sleeping! Here is some food you should eat instead of what you are eating! Here is a movie you shouldn’t have liked, ever! Here is a book you should know better than to have read! Here are some bad people that I am sure you are not.

Our new Stasi enlists us out with concern and responsibility. See something? Say something! is the security-state version. Bystander intervention is the progressive, communitarian one. The libertarian complaint about nanny-states falls flat because of the narrowness of its understanding of where surveillance and regulation live (they live everywhere) and how they derive their power (the state is only the beginning of it). You can’t hide from surveillance because to hide from surveillance is to hide from sociality and all its necessary affordances. The Unabomber’s cabin is the only destination for “privacy” envisioned in those terms.

What I do think we can do to check what our new Stasi is doing to us, with us, for us, is to restore some sense of the gravity of “filing a formal report”, as it were. There’s nothing wrong with watching and photographing and talking about the vast social landscape around us. That is and has been a necessary part of being human in mass society. But we do not now act as if there is much of anything at stake when we draw attention to a body, when we circle a face in a photograph, when we link and hashtag and forward. We don’t check to be sure that we’ve got it right, we don’t worry much about what happens next. It’s easy to say that the car dealers were asking for it, but hard to take note that the mock Yelp reviews for the dealership quickly turn into a swamp of juvenile and often ugly sentiment that uses the excuse of righteous ire as a opportunity to perform with unbridled id on a stage of momentary notoreity. The we that follows in from hashtaggery is just as likely to be a mob with torches as it is a polite delegation of neighbors requesting that the lawn be mowed just a bit more often, please.

If we’re going to be spies, let’s accept our moral agency. We’re not reporting up a chain of command and leaving it the hands of our superiors. We are reporting to ourselves. If we believe we do that out of love and concern–or in pursuit of justice–then we need to be better than we are at following an ethic of genuine care, and better than we are in thinking systematically about what we mean by justice.

Another part of Grasping the Nettle.

The overthrow of exploitative capitalism. The elimination of poverty. An end to disease. No more malnutrition. Equality of opportunity. Transparency in government.

Even more modest reformist goals sound increasingly forlorn at this end of modernity. Reduce corruption and inefficiency in government? Less police brutality? Better public education? Maintain the infrastructure? Don’t torture people? Don’t be hateful. Don’t be cruel?

All the institutions and systems involved in what seem to be the most awful, oppressive or unjust dimensions of everyday life in the 21st Century seem to be vulnerable to nothing but their own frailities and contradictions. The powerful are mostly behind walls, inside fortresses. They have the money and the influence to outlast or overwhelm most legal challenges. They don’t particularly fear mass protest, not that there seems to be much danger of protests being genuinely massive in the United States as they have been in many other countries. The political process is drowning in oligarchic money, and even if reformers get elected, they often find it nearly impossible to challenge entrenched interests or do much beyond tinker with the status quo.

Most targets are hard, both in the sense of “difficult” and “protected”. So what has happened in a lot of what passes for democratic politics in the 21st Century, particularly in the United States, is a preference for soft targets: institutions that have to remain ‘open’ in some sense to protest and dissent, or individuals and groups who are compelled for some reason or another to remain accessible and responsive to public criticism. Universities are perhaps the most important example of a soft target. Another might be celebrities, pundits, or indeed any individual who has an active presence in social media.

If protest or critique were aimed at these soft targets because of actions, policies or practices which are native to them, that poses no issue beyond whatever range of debate there might be about the subject of that critique. Protests concerned with the dwindling of public support for education, with issues of access and justice in education, with the eroding of academic freedom, with the safety and security of matriculated students, with the need for open-access publication: all of those could and should target educational institutions and speak to those who work in them, who regulate them, and study in them. (Although, complicatedly, when you’re attacking a soft target for something that is genuinely important to and strongly invested in the real operating life of that institution, it tends to turn into a hard target.)

The problem is when the soft target is used as a proxy for the targets which are too hard to reach. For me, the most important example of this is fossil-fuel divestment. If pushing universities (and other civic institutions) to divest from fossil-fuels has any usefulness at all, it is only as one very small part of what has to be a very comprehensive campaign to bring pressure on fossil-fuel companies and their government supporters. What I warned our local student activists about when they started the campaign here is that a focus on getting the college to participate was likely to very quickly lead to confusion about the instrumental objective of the whole campaign, as the college itself was not the ultimate political target nor was it in any sense actively colluding with that target (at least not to a degree that distinguished it from any other institutional or private user of energy). Pretty much as I predicted, college administrations around the country became almost the singular target of the entire campaign, and the institutions were rhetorically accused of being the fossil fuel companies simply because most of them declined the invitation to join the campaign in the particular way that one group of activists had chosen to pursue it.

The reason to target colleges, if you’re a student activist whose concerns are essentially directed at objectives that are not local or native to higher education, is that many of them are compelled in various ways to listen to and consider the demands that students, alumni and faculty make. Not in any sense, of course, to adopt or pursue those demands. When student activists say that they are not being listened to, what they mean is that they’re not being agreed with, since most of them choose to assume that if someone really listened to them, agreement would be the only rational and tolerable outcome.

This is really another example of the downside of thinking in terms of increments. When a “soft target” is ostensibly chosen because it’s an early step in a long incremental chain of approaches to a hard target, but is in fact actually chosen because of its convenience and accessibility, it becomes very easy to mistake the soft target as a proxy substitute for the hard one, and thus to forget the ultimate point of the critique. It is also seductively easy to misrecognize or misrepresent any opposition in that first “soft” step as being de facto the same as the resistance that the ultimate target might offer. But soft targets understandably resist being cast as proxies for other institutions and actions, and often have difficult missions of their own to tend to which are not necessarily enhanced or advanced by endlessly offering themselves as an accommodating first step for ambitious projects of political and social transformation. A professional association might quickly lose sight of its professional mission if it were constantly being used as an expressive platform for causes with tangential relevance to that mission. A university might have no way to legitimately decide which of the potentially infinite number of causes held dear by some of its students or employees deserves institutional sanction, and might spend a great deal of time and energy deciding how to decide that.

But again, at least incremental thinking is better than no thinking; at least choosing a soft target because there’s some sort of strategic vision about how it relates to a harder or more protected target is debatably valid. Sometimes we choose soft targets because otherwise there’s nothing at all to focus on. We hashtag someone or build up a three-day outrage on social media because the pain and frustration that the targets stand in for are otherwise too diffuse, too distributed, too everywhere and nowhere. The hardest targets are the ones that are in the air, in the water, in the everywhere of the world around us. But making some individual stand for these kinds of wholes, no matter how worthy of scorn that individual might be, loses general support and sympathy, bleeds out political energy, because it mismatches the proportionality and gravity of the structure, the distributed social fact, to the available, vulnerable individual appointed to represent that ubiquitous but ephemeral reality. We end up talking about the fairness or unfairness of targeting that person with a hashtag or a meme rather than the thing itself.

Sometimes soft targets are the bars on the cage. You grab them and rattle them and howl because they’re the only thing you can grasp. But if there are hacksaws or other tools around, it would be a shame to keep rattling the bars rather than patiently filing through them, one millimeter at a time.

(One part of Grasping the Nettle.)

A standard topos in political rhetoric that to me usually signals desperation. Let’s get started! Let’s not think too much! What, are you happy with the status quo?

It’s not just favored among some progressive activists. Development experts love it. Neoconservative advocates of war against Iraq loved it. It’s a salesman’s move. “You gotta have one of these, why not this one?”

Contrast it with the Hippocratic Oath, though. “First, do no harm.” Plainly in some circumstances nothing is better than anything.

But surely in many cases an eternal nothing is unbearable. So the real question is how the small something that we’re being asked to do right now pays off, justifies itself, becomes something more than just the doing-something-so-as-not-nothing. This is the increment. Politics as compounding interest, a small investment of effort today that draws other investments to itself and becomes an unstoppable force tomorrow.

This is where I either get sold or walk away with my wallet closed. One thing that keeps my wallet closed is when the seller acts as if it’s an insult to ask what the next increments are and where this is all going. “It’s unfair to ask for a master plan! It’s unfair to demand a map to Utopia! We don’t know what’s going to come next. We’re not in charge of what comes next. When did you get so horribly teleological? All political projects ever started as increments, no one ever has been a master planner who knows exactly where the tipping point is.”

Fair enough responses. Anyone with aspirations to act politically is not required to produce a road map to the ultimate outcome of their actions. Political action is not solitary, and so by definition is not under the control of any individual actor. It’s true that many important journeys in social transformation began as single steps. Or even as missteps. Transformation is almost by definition an emergent outcome that follows from many simultaneous activities pursued independently, including many that at the time seemed to have nothing to do with seeking some instrumental end. I completely buy Robert Darnton’s argument in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, for example, which posits that the French state was de-legitimized in part not because of the deliberate intent of the authors (or audiences) of those best-sellers, but because bit by bit the content of each eroded the legitimacy of the ancien regime and bit by bit the state undercut itself trying to stop the books from circulating.

And yet. Sometimes it’s high-end theory, like Negri and Hardt at the end of Empire, saying “Here comes the Multitude! Who knows what will happen when they take over, but it’s bound to be better than Empire!” As prediction, this is ok, but as a politics that asks its reader to endorse or participate in particular incremental actions that somehow are all Multitude-favoring, not so much. As Gopal Balakrishnan has observed, the Multitude in Empire are analogized to the early Christians of Rome, a sign of the eventual unmanageability of the Pax Romana. If one is an early Christian–or acting as the Multitude–you have intrinsic motivations for doing what you do. You don’t need to be sold on the increment, or even to care about Empire or Rome at all except inasmuch as it poses a threat to your life or your activities. The only person sold by an incremental logic of action here is a citizen of Empire, who can choose either to be pleased and bemused by its gangrenous rotting away or can try to hold back the tides, usually by killing even more Christians or making life even more miserable for the Multitude.

In a way, it’s the same as pre-Revolutionary print culture: the increments that produce change are the increments of cultural and social practice rather than conscious political work with instrumental aims. This is an old dilemma for any body of political theory that believes in the possibility of systematic progress towards a coherently better world. It’s not at all clear that the people and actions that get you there are always the people and actions that mean to get you there. Intentional projects of comprehensive transformation tend to do best when moments of striking disjuncture manifest. If there are increments that get you to those moments, they’re usually not what you expect.

Sometimes it’s just particular political campaigns. Divest from fossil fuels! Sanction Israel! Interrupt white people at brunch! Make a hashtag!

Sometimes when you ask about the logic of the increment, you get a pretty good sales pitch. Many advocates of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at Israeli government policy can concretely describe what the plausible next steps might be–the next sanctions, the next moves. More impotantly, they can point to considerable evidence that the possibility of incremental growth in the movement actually worries the hell out of Israeli politicians and is concretely affecting their actions. It certainly worries the hell out of supporters of the Israeli government, who dump vitriol in industrial-grade amounts on anyone who appears to contemplate joining BDS. You might question the unintended or negative consequences of these incremental steps (I know I do) but there’s a demonstrated coherency to the game plan.

Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.

I think that’s what worries me most about the increment. Not that we’re asked to think of politics (or any other project) in such a fashion, because as some level it’s a necessary kind of compartmentalization for any big undertaking. It’s when the steps themselves exhibit a kind of magical thinking that claim that they can only be properly discussed and evaluated after they’ve been taken, and when each increment has a kind of isolated and infinite justification. Do this and if it doesn’t work, do it more strongly and if it doesn’t work do it more strongly still. Where there is no possible test of failure or inadequacy. Walk one step at a time thataway, and fear no cliffs or mountains. You don’t have to have a master plan for the end destination but you do have to have a specific idea of the journey you’re on. Is this a reconaissance? A quick, efficient jaunt to a known destination? A voyage to the spot on the map that’s marked “Here Be Monsters”?

(One part of a series: Grasping the Nettle)

Part of that is feeling overly busy, but it’s more the consequence of a growing sense of perplexity and unease about online discourse, about academia, and about the political moment (both domestic U.S. and global). I feel as if I’m losing my voice, or as if it’s not worth speaking up. Or even, sometimes, that the risks to speaking outweigh any benefits to myself or to others. Also, about my inability to easily distinguish between my feelings about all of that and my middle-aged anomie. One of the great failings of some public writers is a narcissism that encourages them to confuse a confessional for an analysis, to think that their moment in life is the world’s moment. Just because at fifty you’ve seen what seem like a few recurrent cycles, have learned to hurt and be hurt, or have seen predictions fulfilled and consequences dealt out, doesn’t mean you’re right about what you think you’re seeing now. Though perhaps that’s middle-aged anomie as well, at least my version of it. I started this blog uncertain about whether to trust my own readings and arguments, and have become less trusting with each passing year.

But just as all honest writing–perhaps most of all truthful fiction–has its inevitable cruelties, so too does all argument have its narcissism, its vanities. To give voice to any opinion at all about how the world ought to be? That means you hold your own thought in higher regard, even if just for the moment that thought is ventured, than the thought of someone else. To share an insight into the way the world is means you think you know something that others haven’t, can’t or won’t see. So very well. Here’s to self-regard, however provisional, and to trying to see clearly, even when it hurts.

I want to start a new year of writing in public with a series of fragments that will repeat each other, as well as some old themes at this weblog. An exploration of this moment in public conversation, in politics, in the lives of academic communities. Rather than tie up all my thoughts in a single logorrheic essay, as I usually do, I’ll try to break up this exploration into smaller overlapping parts and see if it all weaves together. Call the whole thing Grasping the Nettle, and we’ll see how it goes.