Two related points came to my attention over the past week.
The first was from a summary of the year 2020 published by the Barna group. The Barna group found that as the result of "the surge of racial justice protests and activism" in the summer of 2020 is that the number of people "not at all motivated" to address racial justice almost doubled from the previous year, with a corresponding shrinkage in the "somewhat motivated" category. The other categories stayed about the same. This means that the protests, rather than motivating people to change, completely alienated some of those who had been somewhat favorably inclined.
The Barna study also found that the number of people who say that race is not a problem almost doubled over the same period (from 11% to 19%). Obviously the majority of Americans think that race is still a problem in the United States, but almost one in ten who had thought it was a problem decided, on second thought, that it wasn't.
The second was that about a dozen years ago, two scholars surveyed the success rate of protests and published their findings in the journal International Security. They found that non-violent protest movements achieved their goals 53% of the time (slightly over half the time), but violent protests achieved their results only 26% of the time (only about a quarter of the time).
Thus, if you launch a non-violent protest movement, your success is likely to be a flip of the coin. Is it worth it? It depends on whether you are a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person. If the protest turns violent, however, your odds of success will half. Resorting to violence alienates people who would be inclined to support you.
A couple of decades ago, I did my own informal survey about whether academic protests were actually effective. These were the sort of letter-writing campaigns that happen when a university decides to shutter an ancient studies program. Again, success has been something of a coin-toss. Indeed, the enthusiasm for this course of action seems utterly unconnected from its efficacy. You can see the latest variation on this theme here.
What does this have to do with the ancient world? Two things: First, protests have a very long history, and anciently were a risky proposition. Jeroboam's protest against Rehoboam turned violent and did prove successful (1 Kings 12:1-20), but that seems to have been more of the exception. Psammetichus I successfully threw off the yoke of the Assyrian empire, but most of those who protested against the Assyrians paid dearly for it in the long run, just ask Sidqa, king of Ashkelon.
The second, is an event that happened in a class on ancient languages: Years ago, when I was a graduate student at U. C. Berkeley, I remember looking with my professor out the window of his office in Evans Hall at a protest being staged for a cause that my professor had worked long and hard for. He shook his head and said to me: "They give the movement a bad name."
