JS: Well, it depends on, again, it depends on whether the kind of protest that you envision has a public resonance and for whom and among whom and to what degree it does, right? Some kinds of protest of course can be polarizing as well. Many of them are. So it's" I'm trying to" Let me give you a really simple example because I do have a chapter that has to do with schools and exams and so on.
Rob: Which book?
JS: This is Two Cheers for Anarchism. There's a kind of" I don't know where this is going to go, but one of the things that I find quite interesting is that in many places there have been public walkouts by high school students who are refusing to take the seventeenth state mandated exam, right, for which the teachers are supposed to drill them for so that they can get the kind of grades that will trigger federal or state money. Anyway, students who feel that they are being treated like, what shall we say, they're being treated without much respect for their individual creativity and intellectual talents and are just having to do mindless drills, many of these people have walked out of exams including the scholastic aptitude test, I might add, and this has become a kind of small social movement. I don't how common it will become. It's kind of risky. So here are people who are in a sense violating a whole series of school routines that they find demeaning and disrespectful of their individual creativity and I think it's one of the things that if it does take off will lead to a better kind of reform of schools. But, you know I'm"it's hard to tell actually whether this, as they say, has legs or not and how far it will ramify.
Rob: Okay. We only have a certain limited amount of time here and I want to make sure I get a couple things covered. I call my show the Bottom Up Radio Show because I believe we're in a transition from a predominantly top down structure to one that's more bottom-up and that the Internet has helped to catalyze that so people start seeing and thinking more that way. A lot of your writing talks about concepts that are top down or bottom up. Do you have any thoughts based on what I've just said?
JS: You mean about the social media and the new forms of communication and Internet and so on? Is that what you're talking about?
Rob: Well, generally about the nature of our culture from a top down and bottom up perspective. You've written whole books about it. I'm just asking you to kind of throw something at me that is related to that off of the top of your head.
JS: So, there are many ways of coming at this. For the most part I think historically, action from the bottom up has come from people who feel they're being severely pinched or cornered or disadvantaged and so on. So from that point of view it seems to me it is perfectly clear that since the increase in income inequality, especially it's concentration at the highest levels and the kind of grip that gives the one percent over legislation and lobbying and the media, that there comes a point and, of course, no one knows exactly where that point is, in which it" because it jeopardizes the life chances of millions of people there comes a point when these people react.
In a sense, the Occupy Wall Street was a first example of that that brought attention to this huge income inequality. It seems to me that the worse the income inequality gets the more the banks and the super wealthy are able to control legislation, the more likely you're going to have a reaction of one kind from the bottom up. Now, how that reaction takes place is more complicated than it used to be.
You used to have trade unions. Our trade unions are a very small portion of the active working force these days so it's less likely to come from that quarter. Compare us to Canada which has the same industrial structure, more or less, and we're far less unionized than they are. Realize that Occupy Wall Street was coordinated to a certain extent by social media just as the Arab Spring was.
I don't know. I don't know enough to say whether those forms of coordination can substitute successfully for face to face communities of people who have lived together, who know one another, who trust one another, whether they are social organizations or unions. But I worry, actually, about the" what shall we call it, the thinness of relationships that are purely through social media.
Rob: Okay and that's a concern that others have certainly expressed. The book called The Shallows, for example. I think that's part of the change in the way people function. They lose the depth and they have more thin, shallow connections.
JS: Also, the other thing to observe, I suppose, is that in fact most of us, and here, alas, I have to place myself, I have a kind of farm in Connecticut, but the fact is that most of us live in settings that are highly segregated by class and by race. So that, in fact, my connection to the inner city of New Haven is a connection that I have to make. It's not a connection that's naturally there in terms of where I live and what I see every day. So, to the degree that our lives and experiences are segregated by class and race, to that degree it's" we're"our sympathetic nerve for other people's suffering is not stimulated as much as it would be if we lived in multi-class and multi-race settings
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