Fresser.

I took students down to #occupywallst today. I don’t have a clean takeaway about the protest itself, except that it’s definitely not hippies and dropouts, and it’s definitely not sophisticated protest the way the 2004 RNC protests were.

It was hard to read any of it as hopeful, though the overall sensibility of sharing and mutual support were encouraging. I wish it were all for something I could help demand, like preventing a military occupation. But it’s just sadness, right up close.

Later, at Cooper, the whole class was mostly about DNA and systems, but it was impossible to put away neatly what we’d seen. I could write a long time about what happened in class, about spending an evening looking at the world through Dawkins’ eyes. Whenever I thought about what we’d seen, I shuddered.

Tonight, I came across the 99 Percent Tumblr. While I should be working, I can’t stop reading the posts there. I was skeptical about it even when I clicked, but I’ve spent the last 30 minutes staring at the screen, wondering just what is supposed to happen next.

I don’t know who named the 99 Percent, but the name is the right one, it seeks to embrace rather to divide. Because it was clear that — outside this little park on Wall St. — everyone else is in their own little world, where none of that exists. Not because no one cares, but simply because there’s no vocabulary for caring. Or, to flip it, as when Andrew Brown wrote, on Dawkins:

“Selfish”, when applied to genes, doesn’t mean “selfish” at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: “the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process.” This is a complicated mouthful. There ought to be a better, shorter word—but “selfish” isn’t it.

I want to say that the “bankers” under critique there are selfish, but it’s more banal than that, banal like Hannah Arendt banal. They’re simply responding, without empathy, to the incentives as they are structured. When I look at the 99% blog, I see everything that fell on the wrong side of the Darwinian selection process, and it is something that is replicating anyway.

I donate my time teaching at Cooper Union, because I believe so strongly in the free education that those students receive, the same free education I got. But it feels like what it is: an island in a storm. 

I entered the job market at 18, on the heels of the S&L crisis. I remember exactly what it felt like to work in a recession. It didn’t feel like this.