What the Teach-Ins Taught Us

...On the other hand, in the absence of protest, the supersaturated society may go on for a long time without change, simply because of what physicists call the nucleation problem...

...I participated in what may well turn out to have been an historic occasion, the first "teach-in" at the University of Michigan...

...in our national heroes, many of whom are generals...

...We also have in our national image a high value on negotiation and a willingness to negotiate, and our present interpretation of negotiation as the abject surrender of the other side can be protested fiercely and effectively...

...Thus the strike in industrial conflict is usually a rather effective form of protest, particularly when it is directed toward a change that would have come anyway, because it is appropriate to the objective, and the objective itself is usually very clear...

...There is real danger lest in our obsession with Vietnam we forget the larger issue and we forget that the solution to Vietnam lies in our relationship with Peking...

...The result, however, was the arousal of a much larger movement of counterprotest among those who were fright ened and dismayed by Goldwater, which resulted in a quite unprecedented defeat...

...The movement for social security in this country is an interesting example of one in which the educational process dominates it almost completely, and where the role of protest is almost negligible...

...It is clear also that American society at least is not supersaturated in regard to social change toward stable peace...

...A good example of this in race relations is the work of the NAACP, which unquestionably laid the educational groundwork for the recent protest movement in civil rights...

...The motivations which inspired it were no doubt various...

...When nobody is listening to us and we feel we have something to say, then comes the urge to shout...

...They included a genuine fear of escalation into nuclear warfare...

...It is a form of protest which is not related to the object of protest...

...Societies, like solutions, get supersaturated or supercooled...

...We see this exemplified in the relative success of the protest movements in civil rights...

...Unfortunately, it is by no means easy to assess the various probabilities of change...

...The protest of the man who does not read the Philadelphia Bulletin is likely to be highly successful, as he is usually trying to call attention to events which obviously ought to be in the Bulletin, being intrinsically newsworthy...

...The techniques of these two movements may be very different...

...Any object of protest can easily be lost in argument and counterargument over the question as to whether the form of the protest is legitimate or appropriate...

...We need to emphasize also the possible role of the United States not as a great power or as a world dominator, but as a leader in a world movement for stable peace...

...We can identify certain cumulative processes in the history of social systems, such as the growth of knowledge, the widening of integrative systems, and so on, which have a certain long-run irreversibility about them, even if they may have shortrun setbacks...

...S. Where the society is not supersaturated, a protest movement has a much rougher time...

...its objectives are unclear and often inconsistent...

...Let me venture, then, on a few tentative suggestions for a possible theory of protest, in the form of some tentative propositions...

...The contrast between the shred of legitimacy which the United Nations gave us in Korea and the total absence of Iegitimacy in Vietnam is very striking, and protest could well be concentrated on this...

...I am constantly impressed by the ironies of social sys * This article is reprinted, with permission, from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists...

...This is something to which protesters rarely give sufficient attention...

...It is important, therefore, for protesters to have some theory of protest, and to be sensitive to those circumstances in which protest is effective in achieving its intended consequences, and those circumstances in which it is not...

...nevertheless, we can surely know something about it...

...It is quite possible, for instance, for protest movements to arouse counterprotests much larger than the original protests, and hence the net result of the protest is to move the system away from the direction in which the protesters want it to move...

...There is nothing in our Constitution...

...It developed from a simple protest into what turned out to be a unique educational experience, in which between two and three thousand students literally sat down and talked and argued all night...

...tems, where action often produces quite the reverse of the consequences which are intended...

...In the case of the peace movement, therefore, protest arouses counterprotest with great ease...

...Under these circumstances, protest is like the seed crystal or the silver iodide in the cloud...

...Goldwater was nominated as a Republican candidate as a result of a protest movement among discontented conservatives...

...it is trying to create a radical change in the national image, against which all the forces of ordinary legitimacy seem to be arrayed...

...that is, they reach a situation in which their present state is intrinsically unstable but it does not change because of the absence of some kind of nucleus around which change can grow...

...The peace movement is not simply trying to mobilize an already existing mass feeling or sentiment...

...Because they are themselves emotionally aroused, they tend to think that almost everybody must be in a similar frame of mind, which may not be true at all...

...This originated as a protest movement against the escalation of the war in Vietnam, by a group of Michigan faculty, mostly younger men...

...Educational movements have to be low-keyed, respectful of existing legitimacies, and tying into them wherever possible, and chary of arousing counterprotest...

...This may be some time off, but we should be ready for it when it comes...

...On the other hand, it fulfills practically none of the other conditions...

...In a sense, the task of the peace movement is fundamentally educational, rather than protest...

...This violated a good many of the above principles...

...2. Protest is most likely to be successful where it represents a view which is in fact widespread in the society, but which has somehow not been called to people's attention...

...the protesters are those who see something quite obvious that isn't in it...

...In the educational process, unlike in the process of protest, we want to tie in as far as possible with existing legitimacy, existing images, and familiar history...

...The Goldwater campaign was a good example of this...

...The educational task is to convince people that stable peace is possible...

...7. Protest movements are also likely to be weakened if the object of protest is not clear, or if there are many different objects, some of them incompatible, combined in the same protest...

...Nobody, unfortunately, is much concerned to study the effects of all this, some of which may be quite different from what the people who are aroused by the arousal intend...

...The form of a protest should be closely related to the object of protest...

...Political protest, by contrast, is apt to be diffuse...

...A protest movement needs to be shrill, obstreperous, undignified, and careless of the pattern of existing legitimacy which it is seeking to destroy, in the interest of a new pattern which is waiting to emerge...

...it immediately aroused a large counterprotest over the means, as well as over the object of protest, and it was very strongly on the protest side of the spectrum and away from education...

...It can be particularly disastrous to the protest movement if the protest takes a form which arouses a counterprotest over the form itself, and not over the object of protest...

...Systems move, however painfully, towards payoffs...

...Obviously, a protest movement which is trying to push the social system in a direction in which it has a high probability of going anyway is more likely to be successful than one that is trying to push the social system in a direction that has a low probability...

...Where a society is divided and ambivalent, a protest movement designed to push it in one direction may easily arouse movements of counterprotest designed to resist the movement or to push it in the other direction...

...in our greatest single national experience, which was the Civil War...

...Wherever there is hypocrisy, there is strong hope of change, for the hypocrite is terribly vulnerable to protest...

...The basic problem here is change in the national image itself, and this is something which protest is singularly unable to do, for protest has to take the image for granted and call attention to certain inconsistencies and incompatibilities...

...Most of the communications which are received by Americans, whether in the formal educational system or in the informal contacts of face to face conversation, tend to create an image of the world in which war is a recurrent necessity, and in which, furthermore, for the United States, war has paid off pretty well...

...Here we have a situation, as Myrdal saw very clearly in The American Dilemma, in which certain fundamental images of the American society were inconsistent with its practices, and where, therefore, the protesters could appeal to an ideal which was very widely held...

...There is no doubt that the payoffs of a stable peace are enormous...

...in our national origin, which came out of a war...

...This is why, for instance, on the whole, the sit-ins have been very successful, whereas marches and parades are usually less so...

...The probability of long-run change toward a system of stable peace is therefore high, and the peace movement fulfills this one essential requirement for the success of a movement for social change...

...Unlike the civil rights movement, which had fulfilled almost all the conditions for successful protest, the peace movement only fulfills some of them...

...we are not only ruthless and bloody but we feel no shame about it...

...It began as a movement of pure protest and outrage...

...or in anything which con tributes to our national image which makes war illegitimate in the way racial discrimination is felt to be illegitimate and inconsistent with our national ideals...

...The teach-in movement is clearly a response to Johnson's behaving like Goldwater, so in a way is part of this same arousal...

...The $120 billion a year that the world spends on the war industry is an appalling waste which may well set back the achievement of world development by even hundreds of years, and might even prevent it altogether...

...It precipitates the whole system toward a position which it really ought to be in anyway...

...Political protest movements almost always run into the problem of strange bedfellows, and the less clear the objectives of protest, the less likely is anybody to fulfill them...

...We need to play up how we got a security community with the British and the Canadians...

...It now begins to look like almost a national mobilization of university teachers and students...

...I am inclined to think that the largest motivating factor was a sense of simple human sympathy with the sufferings of the Vietnamese, and a sense of outrage at the utterly inhuman weapons of the American air force, and a sense of outrage also that we were using Vietnamese as the guinea pigs in weapon experimentation...

...The teachin, which was adopted as a substitute, was much more successful...

...When the movement for protest arrives, however, the educational institution is often pushed aside, and perhaps properly so, as inappropriate in the circumstances...

...We need to emphasize the continuing dynamic that goes on in socialist countries as well as in our own, and to emphasize the learning process and our role as a teacher...

...That is, the techniques for creating the preconditions of change may be very different from the techniques required for crystallizing it...

...We have paid enough lip service to the United Nations also, to render protests on this score viable...

...The method of protest first suggested by the original group at University of Michigan was a work moratorium and a one-day suspension of classes...

...4. The dynamic process of social systems are not entirely random, and this means that any particular social system is more likely to go in some directions than it is in others...

...Its objectives in terms of specific institutional and behavorial change are not clear...

...The protester is the man in the advertisement who does not read the Philadelphia Bulletin, but who has something very important to say that clearly isn't in it...

...Here we need to point to the many examples in which it has already been achieved...

...Furthermore, protest as a social form, which may be very effective and indeed necessary in crystallizing a supersaturated society, may be quite ineffective in moving a society which is not saturated for change toward a point where it is saturated...

...All these things can easily be fitted into existing images and existing legitimacies...

...1. Protest arises when there is strongly felt dissatisfaction with existing programs and policies of government or other organizations, on the part of those who feel themselves affected by these policies but who are unable to express their discontent through regular and legitimate channels, and who feel unable to exercise the weight to which they think they are entitled in the decisionmaking process...

...The teach-in movement represents perhaps a partly subconscious recognition of the validity of some of the above principles...

...We are not and never have been a peace-loving nation...

...In the present case, the State Department White Paper on Vietnam is clearly the Philadelphia Bulletin...

...it should be directed at the use of specific weapons which certainly fall under the heading of "cruel and unusual punishments," the moral feeling against which is securely enshrined in our Constitution and history...

...We tend to associate war with easy victories, like the war against Mexico or Spain, or with periods of economic prosperity and recovery from depression, as in the Second World War...

...It will take an extensive process of education and perhaps even the grim teacher of national disaster before we learn that the prevailing national image is incompatible with our well-being or even with our survival, and we have yet to learn that we are only one people among many, that we are not the rulers of the world, that power cannot be exercised without legitimacy, and that the costs of stable peace, significant and important as they are, are far less than the benefits...

...We still do not really know how to get stable peace, and what particular forms of behavior lead us toward rather than away from this goal...

...Our deepest trouble in Vietnam arises out of the total failure of our China policy, and at this point it may well be that the country is ripe for change, and that, to continue this particular metaphor, protest will shake the tree...

...It should be a strategy of limited protest and extensive education...

...With these propositions in mind, let us now take a look at the peace movement and the current movement of protest against the war in Vietnam...

...On the other hand, presumably, the better our knowledge of social systems, the more likely are we to avoid any unintentional consequences...

...As we learn to understand the payoffs, we can identify those protest movements which have the best chance of success...

...Protest, I suspect, should be directed mainly at the air force...

...We need to play up historical examples of peaceful coexistence, such as was achieved between Protestants and Catholics in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648...

...they included also a sense of moral outrage at the use of such things as napalm and the "lazy dog," and the appalling sufferings which we are imposing on the Vietnamese in the supposed name of freedom and democracy...

...In the case of war we have very little hypocrisy, and change is very difficult...

...Coupled with this, unquestionably, were some people on the left who were politically sympathetic with the objectives of the Vietcong, though in the original movement there were few if any of these...

...It then has to move the society toward the new position, from which change can then crystallize out, and this is a much more difficult task than crystallizing change in a society that is ready for it...

...In a way, the forerunner of this movement was the remarkable mobilization of faculty members on university campuses against Goldwater, which represented political arousement on a scale which has rarely, if ever, been seen before in these supposedly cloistered circles...

...5. We might perhaps distinguish between protest movements and educational movements, the one designed to crystallize a change for which a society is ready, the other to push the society toward a change for which it is not yet ready...

...The condition which it fulfills is that related to the long-run payoff...

...Furthermore, as he apparently has no access to the Bulletin, all he can do is to stand in the middle of its complacent readers and scream...

...It assumes a given national image and says, in effect, to the policymaker, "be consistent with it...

...It at least edged toward the education end of the spectrum, even though it still retained a good many of the qualities of protest, and it was appropriate to the situation...

...The movement spread rapidly to other campuses and organized a national teach-in which was held in Washington in May...

...We should not, 1 think, abandon protest altogether, for there are many points even now at which, for instance, the conduct of the war in Vietnam violates a widespread national image of the United States as a reasonably decent and compassionate country...

...Beyond this, I suspect, protest will be ineffective, with one possible exception...

...On the other hand, it is not the "real" payoffs which determine human behavior, but the imagined ones, and there can often be a strong divergence between the two, at least in the short run, and this short run can be painfully long...

...Then at some point, a protest movement may be necessary to crystallize the image as a peace leader...

...On the other hand, protest movements for which society has not been prepared by education, or which are seeking for improbable change, are virtually doomed to failure, like the IWW...

...At least we can be pretty sure, for instance, that movements toward absolute hereditary monarchies today have a pretty slim chance of success...

...Beyond this, social change toward stable peace can only come through education and research...

...Under these circumstances, what is likely to be the best strategy for those of us who are interested in producing social change toward stable peace...

...The hawks in our society far outnumber the doves, and those who flutter the dovecotes stand in danger of arousing clouds of hawks from their innumerable nests...

...There is, furthermore, a great diversity of view as to immediate objectives within the peace movement...

...6. Even when a situation is ripe for a protest movement, it can go astray and be ineffective if it takes an inappropriate form...

...The answer seems fairly clear...

...The teach-in movement, furthermore, seems to be developing more and more in the direction of dialogue rather than pure protest, and this itself reflects the fact that there is an educational task ahead rather than a task of pure protest...