Protests, protests, everywhere, but does anybody stop to think? #2

'change is possible... but only if you know how to change policy'

Here, I’m continuing the series on protest - by looking at how protest can result in policy change, or fails to do so. I am looking at protests as a social psychological and cognitive phenomenon (this is a multipart series): this framework can help us get at some of the interesting dynamics underlying protest.

Protests are not just political statements

Protests are not just political statements; they are also gatherings of like-minded hearts and minds. Mood, emotion, and a sense of belonging converge, creating a space where individuals can express their discontent while finding community and support. The collective energy of a protest can be a powerful draw for those seeking to make a difference and those looking for camaraderie in the face of challenge.

IMPOSSIBLE CITY: Paris in the Twenty-First Century by Simon Kuper

Because the experience of being in a protest group can be so emotionally intense, we can come to believe that assembly and marching changes the societies we live in – which is not the case. In free societies, we are able to participate in large-scale assembly, but the downside is in mistaking the feeling of unity, interdependence and relational outcomes as actually influencing political processes or policy outcomes. The hard realities of legislation or policy are very often completely unaffected. 

Protests, protests, everywhere, but does anybody stop to think? #1

The group itself may be entirely unrepresentative of the population at large, and irrespective of how compelling they feel their own arguments to be, if the population at large is unconvinced, change will not happen. Just because you might be obsessed with a particular issue doesn’t mean that the rest of society is, even if you happen to think that it should be. The policy pursuits and fixations of some marchers are simply quixotic: their proponents are the only ones who can see their unique merits. Marchers of this type do add greatly to the colour of life, though.

Mass demonstrations that can matter

Sometimes, though, marches can evolve into something else: mass demonstrations before which autocrats are, in fact, powerless, when assent is completely withdrawn from them by both people and the security apparatus of the state. The mass demonstrations and marches that preceded (and perhaps even caused) the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989 are a profound example. Marching is not pointless if it is coupled to other forms of effective collective action focused on changing laws and policies.

Relevant BrainPizza Pieces

• Collective Memories: how we get from neurons to neighbourhoods to nations

• Brains at war: Metacognition and mental time travel underpin conflict and combat

• Folie à Deux: Our connections run deep: our porous egos

• Notes on a neuroscience of nationalism: Collective memory, imagined communities, mental time travel, agency, identity

• Cognitive dissonnance for illiberals: wanting prosperity, but hating the change making it possible

• Belief exhaustion (part two)

• Thinking about the future: Our cognitive blindspots - why we can't plan for the longer-term, and what to do about it

How can protests secure change?

The mass demonstrations organised by Gandhi demonstrated to all that removing consent by the governed, makes colonial power untenable. The civil rights marches of the 1960s in the United States understood this lesson well. Mass marches, designed to demonstrate the depth and breadth of feeling on the one hand, but coupled to legislative action and the civil rights acts on the other, led to deep and enduring changes in the treatment of minorities in the United States.

Civil rights marchers also undertook demonstrations across Northern Ireland in the late 1960s in what was seen as open defiance of the then Stormont Parliament. During one major march, the protestors were attacked at Burntollet Bridge in 1969 in what was characterised by one historian as ‘the spark that lit the prairie fire’ in Northern Ireland. The ‘prairie fire’ was a three-decade-long conflict which consumed nearly 4,000 lives, and the scars from which have yet to heal. If the march had been allowed to pass, then the history of Northern Ireland might have been different, but as this is a historical counterfactual, we will never know.

There is an interesting lesson here: authorities should allow marches to pass off freely. Don’t police them, except to prevent damage to life, limb and property. Unless they are designed purposely to bring civil society regularly and completely to a standstill, they may act as a vent which releases the energy to generate social and political change.

Autocrats, of course, despise free marches and free assembly, and will suppress marching with firepower, and have frequently done so. It’s curious, of course, that the one form of collective walking that autocrats do approve of, the marching of soldiers, is a show of martial strength, with all individuality excised.

Free assembly, and the free walking implied, gives life to the idea that the power held by others over us is because we assent to that power. Marching can give life to solving the collective action problem – how do we know that we all think and feel the same way about a crucial issue? Well, by getting out there, walking in unison and proving it on the streets.

(btl: changing policy, exercising power, sausage making)