I am an atheist. I am also thoroughly bourgeois. But today, I wish to sing the praises of the Anscombe Society and of Princeton’s fledgling freegan movement — and, perhaps, to find some common ground between them. I do not think this is something members of either group would appreciate. I even suspect that each would want to dissociate itself completely from the other, for reasons both ideological and political. But they come together in ways that have a great deal to teach us.
One ground for comparison is fairly straightforward: These people are pretty weird. There is something strange, something a little masochistic, about a college student who condemns free condoms or dives into dumpsters in search of sustenance.
But what distinguishes Anscombe members and freegans from the rest of us is not simply their status as outsiders. All kinds of ideas pass in and out of style; the accepted notions of our time, we are often taught, were all met with incredulity at first. But the causes these groups are fighting for seem so distinctly lost, the arguments they insist on having so distinctly anachronistic. After learning that 90 percent of Americans have had sex before marriage, you’re still arguing about birth control? Are you still railing against the consumer society when the alternatives have been thoroughly exhausted, when, as we all know, capitalism and globalization are here to stay? Anscombe members and the freegans, in short, are arguing with history, and we more humble folk may be forgiven for suspecting that History will eventually win.
From the standpoint of the average Princeton student, such a defiant stance can seem pathological. And luckily, good explanations for this pathology immediately suggest themselves. Elizabeth Anscombe was Catholic; so is professor Robert George. So, it seems, are many Anscombe Society members. Once the religious (read: irrational) roots of Anscombe’s message are established, Anscombe is easily dismissed as yet another fundamentalist enclave. The freegans, meanwhile, get to tell themselves and the rest of us that they’re changing the world without having to pay for food. Their idealistic (read: naive) mission is explained away as the product of childish impulses.
But it is this dismissal — this inability to understand “fringe groups” on their own terms — that underscores how important these groups are to campus discourse. It is easy and fashionable to reduce the ideas of the extreme left and the extreme right to what George Will called “emanations of … psychological needs and neuroses.” It is easy to fit the unfamiliar arguments we encounter into a familiar and convenient framework: That person’s attached to what his parents taught him, that person’s afraid of sex or women, that one wants attention and that one wants power over other people.
These reductive explanations may sometimes be legitimate. But it is slightly more difficult to question our own decisions in the same light — and to ask ourselves whether we are as free, rational or practical as we suppose ourselves to be. Perhaps Anscombe and the freegans are useful to us middle-of-the-road individuals because, if we are patient enough to examine why we so easily dismiss them, we realize just how dependent our own ideas and values are on accidents of birth, on the constraints imposed by the world we happened to grow up in.
As today’s Princeton undergrads attain positions of influence in politics and in the media, this kind of humility might go a long way. We’ve all read about then-Senator Obama’s explanation of the bizarre, “clinging” ways of small-town Americans. We’ve all heard working-class anger about immigration explained in terms of latent racism. What we haven’t heard is an account of how the views of well-educated, urban Americans on issues ranging from religion to immigration are shaped by their own circumstances — in the latter case, for instance, by the fact that American immigration policy is skewed against high-skilled labor and thus impacts the professionals to a significantly lesser degree.
Coupled with this self-examination, we ought to begin to take the arguments of such groups as Anscombe and the freegans more seriously. Their visions may be far-fetched, their motivations may be muddled, but their ideas are worth considering, if only because our own beliefs no longer seem so self-evidently true after seriously examining others.
So I salute the natural lawyers and the dumpster-divers of Princeton. While I doubt that they agree on much of anything, they share a common mission of reminding us of the alternatives to the lives that we complacently lead. We owe it to ourselves to pay attention.
Andrew Saraf is a sophomore from Chevy Chase, Md. He can be reached at asaraf@princeton.edu.
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