Homo Playpens

Fellow blurgher Montag gazes into the middle distance, a few reluctant tears welling into his eyes, because the Occupy Wall Streeters appear to be generally fumbling their way toward some crackpot collegiate model of participatory self-government, having, in other words, a This-Is-What-Democracy-Looks-Like moment. Probably worth more a rueful giggle than a manly, reluctant cry, but I am sympathetic. A lot of fine radical sentiment gets bogged down in the Organizing-Group mentality, and a lot of protestivists erroneously view the current state of representative government as debased and corrupt rather than as an apotheoisis.

However I see no reason to be too concerned. Occupy Wall Street is no revolution, and we are in no danger of replacing democracy with democracy. The protests are symptomatic of something else; they do signify change, even though they are neither the cause nor the ultimate result of it. These sorts of things are like melting glaciers and long tomato seasons: phenomenal indicators of a self-catlyizing reaction across a whole vast and complex system of systems.

If that sounds optimistic to you, or somehow out of keeping with the habitually noncomittal sentiments of this doggler, rest assured that I'm not making the positivist error; I am no progressive; change and flux do not operate in the service of some universal movement in the direction of materialist human betterment as conceived and propogated by the present-obsessed prognosticators of the current moment. It's a mistake to ascribe moral precepts to evolutionary processes. The crises of democracy are in turn mere side effects, minor mutations. But I am, by the way, serious about the evolutionary metaphor, which is cautionary as well. Speciation is not something that either the prior or latter species self-observes.