A broken bond
[Wrote this yesterday, but waited until today to post it. I still think it needs said so here you go.]
The world is not black and white. It's not even greyscale. It's filled with all kinds of hues, and colors, and shades and saturations and textures. The world is complicated.
One of the most obvious places it's complicated is in the realm of human societies. And one of the places where that gets really complicated is when those societies undergo rapid change. There are a handful of places experiencing that change right now: Spain, Israel, the UK. I want to talk about them a little bit, about what's happening, and the different ways it's happening. In particular, I'll touch on Spain and the UK because those are the situations I know best, and they also make a strong contrast.
Right now as I type, there are huge, violent riots happening in London. The story behind the riots is that a young black man (possibly armed with a gun, possibly resisting/firing on police officers, possibly not) was shot and killed by the Police last Thursday. In particular, it was part of a special unit in the London Police force that deals with gun possession and crime in the African and Caribbean communities (that's code for black people). On Saturday, there was a march demanding justice for the man shot that started peaceful. There was some kind of a conflict with the police that sparked the whole thing into violence. Shops and homes were set on fire, as was a city bus. There was extensive looting. The looting and rioting has continued on and off since then, cropping up and moving through various parts of the city. As of this writing over 100 people have been arrested.
The rioting is a problem. It is a huge problem, involving violence against property (haven't heard much about attacks on people yet, but wouldn't be surprised). It is a terrible, terrible thing, and it is going to cause further and far reaching harm to these marginalized communities. But I do not believe the rioters are "evil". I'm willing to bet that, a week ago, spending time with any of them for ten minutes would have left you believing they were just people. Maybe a little bitter, or paranoid or different from yourself, but just people. They did not magically become something else just because this violence broke out.
Here's the deal with rioting: it indicates breakdown in the social contract. The social contract is this tacit agreement that everyone makes, consciously or otherwise, with the society they live in. It's the thing that stops you from stealing a pack of gum even when there's no police man looking over your shoulder to stop you. It's what keeps most people with guns from walking down the street and shooting one another. We know this is unacceptable behavior. It is socially unacceptable behavior. So, because we want to belong to a society where it's socially unacceptable to throw Molotov cocktails through store windows, we ourselves resist throwing them. Everyone does this, and, for the most part, it all works out.
Now, sometimes the social contract gets broken. People feel that their society (often in the form of their government) doesn't represent them any more. This could be something like the 'taxation without representation' chant from the American revolution. It could be something like the segregation, second-class status, poll taxes and official sanctioned discrimination that African Americans faced before the civil rights movement. It could be the Gestapo coming into your homes, kidnapping you, and forcing you into labor or concentration camps. It could just be that your government or society doesn't think you really love the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, just because you're both the same gender.
When you get discrimination like that, especially from a majority position onto a minority, the social contract comes under strain. Think about it. Would YOU want to pledge your allegiance to a society that seemed to single you out and exclude you for differences you might not even have any control over? Didn't think so.
Now, sometimes someone says "Look, I know you guys won't let me and my lover get married, but on the whole this is a great country and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else." And so they try to renegotiate the social contract. No one is going to go loot a store, or burn a car over this, but they might march around with some signs, write letters to their government and do sit-ins. In fact, if nothing goes past making use of the constitutionally outlined methods for "complaint", the social contract hasn't been broken at all. There's an effort to chance things, yes, but everyone makes the effort within the bounds of the social contract which generally doesn't involve hurting anyone else to make your point.
Civil-disobedience is what we get when people decide to break the social contract, but peacefully and with a desire to renegotiate it. This is what happened the night before last at the Malaga CIE sit-in in Spain. To prevent the deportation of a man seeking political asylum, protesters sat down and linked arms and legs in front of the detention center where he was being held. When police arrived, they didn't fight them, they didn't hit them, but they also didn't help them at all. They had to be physically lifted up and carried away- sometimes two or three cops to a person. They didn't fight back, they went totally limp. What the did is, under the letter of the law, illegal. But it was not violent. While the protesters behind the sit-in and other movements in Spain don't feel they're represented by their government, what they are asking for is a reform. They want to revisit the social contract, and renegotiate it to be more representative of the desires of the Spanish people, rather than banks or big business. That might sound a bit idyllic, but I'd like to note that they aren't pushing any particular political agenda besides a strong defense of basic human rights- including the right to civil disobedience.
Then there's rioting. Rioting is what happens when the social contract completely breaks down. Especially, it happens when a group of people feel that the majority society doesn't just not represent them, but is actively out to get them. When you don't feel like you belong as part of the society, there's no reason not to interact with that society violently. This is the psychological trick that lets humans stage war on one another. It doesn't make the people who do it inhuman beasts anymore than people who take up arms to protect their country are inhuman beasts.
More than anything else, it's a sign of desperation. Societal breakdown and desperation. Violence like that takes a lot of energy, and is sparked by a feeling of "They are out to get me, so I will get them first." There's also quite a bit of "Me too!"-ing, where people who see the violence are suddenly reminded that the only thing between them and misbehaving is themselves. They may decide that this is a special-instance, or generally acceptable. In either case, you would probably find that each individual rioter has their own lines that they will not cross. This may be not stealing from local shop owners, not attacking other rioters, or not looting homes. It will probably vary individual by individual, and be a fluid boundary that can be changed with peer-pressure and fear.
But the riots don't make the rioters inhuman! Thinking of those people as inhuman is what led to the situation that made them think it was okay to riot. If you push an animal hard enough, corner it long enough, even the most gentle and well behaved will eventually snap and bite. And a cornered animal doesn't feel like it has anything to lose. A cornered person is just as bad. And people can be very inventive, so they don't just bite- they reach for tools to help them fight back.
That is what goes on behind the violence of a riot. It's the same violence behind a civil war or any other conflict where large numbers of humans on both sides decide the ones on the other side aren't actually /people/.
The problem with riots is they're hard to stop once they get going. Running in with a huge police force, especially shooting people will just turn everything that much uglier. Instead of rioting you'd have fighting, and if both sides have guns you have urban warfare. If you've ever seen riot police, what they have above all else is good armor and BIG FUCKING SHIELDS. They try to act as a physical, human barricade between the chaotic violence and the rest of the society until things calm down. They also might use tear gas, or something similar, to try and disperse the rioters. Rain is an excellent riot killer, but it can't exactly be summoned on the go.
But when the police fire into a riot... That makes the possibility of dialog later very, very hard to recover.
So, what do you do in a riot? Try to keep your head down. Keep your essentials on your person in a non-obvious way. Be ready to leave your home if it's set on fire. Be ready to stay in your home if there's violence in the street. Don't confront anyone. Hope for the best.
And what made me write 1,500 words about rioting, social contracts, and the importance of dialog? Well, not just the riots in London but the reaction of people I know that are in London and the UK. Things there are frightening. They are violent. But the repeated calls to "shoot" people, "razz those fuckers", "feed them to the lions at the zoo"? Those I can't handle. YES, it's bad when people go out and riot. There is a REASON we have social contracts, both explicit and implicit, and that's because if we didn't we'd have this violent chaos. But you should never forget, never, that the social contract goes both ways. And no one wants it to break down.
The world is not black and white. It's not even greyscale. It's filled with all kinds of hues, and colors, and shades and saturations and textures. The world is complicated.
One of the most obvious places it's complicated is in the realm of human societies. And one of the places where that gets really complicated is when those societies undergo rapid change. There are a handful of places experiencing that change right now: Spain, Israel, the UK. I want to talk about them a little bit, about what's happening, and the different ways it's happening. In particular, I'll touch on Spain and the UK because those are the situations I know best, and they also make a strong contrast.
Right now as I type, there are huge, violent riots happening in London. The story behind the riots is that a young black man (possibly armed with a gun, possibly resisting/firing on police officers, possibly not) was shot and killed by the Police last Thursday. In particular, it was part of a special unit in the London Police force that deals with gun possession and crime in the African and Caribbean communities (that's code for black people). On Saturday, there was a march demanding justice for the man shot that started peaceful. There was some kind of a conflict with the police that sparked the whole thing into violence. Shops and homes were set on fire, as was a city bus. There was extensive looting. The looting and rioting has continued on and off since then, cropping up and moving through various parts of the city. As of this writing over 100 people have been arrested.
The rioting is a problem. It is a huge problem, involving violence against property (haven't heard much about attacks on people yet, but wouldn't be surprised). It is a terrible, terrible thing, and it is going to cause further and far reaching harm to these marginalized communities. But I do not believe the rioters are "evil". I'm willing to bet that, a week ago, spending time with any of them for ten minutes would have left you believing they were just people. Maybe a little bitter, or paranoid or different from yourself, but just people. They did not magically become something else just because this violence broke out.
Here's the deal with rioting: it indicates breakdown in the social contract. The social contract is this tacit agreement that everyone makes, consciously or otherwise, with the society they live in. It's the thing that stops you from stealing a pack of gum even when there's no police man looking over your shoulder to stop you. It's what keeps most people with guns from walking down the street and shooting one another. We know this is unacceptable behavior. It is socially unacceptable behavior. So, because we want to belong to a society where it's socially unacceptable to throw Molotov cocktails through store windows, we ourselves resist throwing them. Everyone does this, and, for the most part, it all works out.
Now, sometimes the social contract gets broken. People feel that their society (often in the form of their government) doesn't represent them any more. This could be something like the 'taxation without representation' chant from the American revolution. It could be something like the segregation, second-class status, poll taxes and official sanctioned discrimination that African Americans faced before the civil rights movement. It could be the Gestapo coming into your homes, kidnapping you, and forcing you into labor or concentration camps. It could just be that your government or society doesn't think you really love the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, just because you're both the same gender.
When you get discrimination like that, especially from a majority position onto a minority, the social contract comes under strain. Think about it. Would YOU want to pledge your allegiance to a society that seemed to single you out and exclude you for differences you might not even have any control over? Didn't think so.
Now, sometimes someone says "Look, I know you guys won't let me and my lover get married, but on the whole this is a great country and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else." And so they try to renegotiate the social contract. No one is going to go loot a store, or burn a car over this, but they might march around with some signs, write letters to their government and do sit-ins. In fact, if nothing goes past making use of the constitutionally outlined methods for "complaint", the social contract hasn't been broken at all. There's an effort to chance things, yes, but everyone makes the effort within the bounds of the social contract which generally doesn't involve hurting anyone else to make your point.
Civil-disobedience is what we get when people decide to break the social contract, but peacefully and with a desire to renegotiate it. This is what happened the night before last at the Malaga CIE sit-in in Spain. To prevent the deportation of a man seeking political asylum, protesters sat down and linked arms and legs in front of the detention center where he was being held. When police arrived, they didn't fight them, they didn't hit them, but they also didn't help them at all. They had to be physically lifted up and carried away- sometimes two or three cops to a person. They didn't fight back, they went totally limp. What the did is, under the letter of the law, illegal. But it was not violent. While the protesters behind the sit-in and other movements in Spain don't feel they're represented by their government, what they are asking for is a reform. They want to revisit the social contract, and renegotiate it to be more representative of the desires of the Spanish people, rather than banks or big business. That might sound a bit idyllic, but I'd like to note that they aren't pushing any particular political agenda besides a strong defense of basic human rights- including the right to civil disobedience.
Then there's rioting. Rioting is what happens when the social contract completely breaks down. Especially, it happens when a group of people feel that the majority society doesn't just not represent them, but is actively out to get them. When you don't feel like you belong as part of the society, there's no reason not to interact with that society violently. This is the psychological trick that lets humans stage war on one another. It doesn't make the people who do it inhuman beasts anymore than people who take up arms to protect their country are inhuman beasts.
More than anything else, it's a sign of desperation. Societal breakdown and desperation. Violence like that takes a lot of energy, and is sparked by a feeling of "They are out to get me, so I will get them first." There's also quite a bit of "Me too!"-ing, where people who see the violence are suddenly reminded that the only thing between them and misbehaving is themselves. They may decide that this is a special-instance, or generally acceptable. In either case, you would probably find that each individual rioter has their own lines that they will not cross. This may be not stealing from local shop owners, not attacking other rioters, or not looting homes. It will probably vary individual by individual, and be a fluid boundary that can be changed with peer-pressure and fear.
But the riots don't make the rioters inhuman! Thinking of those people as inhuman is what led to the situation that made them think it was okay to riot. If you push an animal hard enough, corner it long enough, even the most gentle and well behaved will eventually snap and bite. And a cornered animal doesn't feel like it has anything to lose. A cornered person is just as bad. And people can be very inventive, so they don't just bite- they reach for tools to help them fight back.
That is what goes on behind the violence of a riot. It's the same violence behind a civil war or any other conflict where large numbers of humans on both sides decide the ones on the other side aren't actually /people/.
The problem with riots is they're hard to stop once they get going. Running in with a huge police force, especially shooting people will just turn everything that much uglier. Instead of rioting you'd have fighting, and if both sides have guns you have urban warfare. If you've ever seen riot police, what they have above all else is good armor and BIG FUCKING SHIELDS. They try to act as a physical, human barricade between the chaotic violence and the rest of the society until things calm down. They also might use tear gas, or something similar, to try and disperse the rioters. Rain is an excellent riot killer, but it can't exactly be summoned on the go.
But when the police fire into a riot... That makes the possibility of dialog later very, very hard to recover.
So, what do you do in a riot? Try to keep your head down. Keep your essentials on your person in a non-obvious way. Be ready to leave your home if it's set on fire. Be ready to stay in your home if there's violence in the street. Don't confront anyone. Hope for the best.
And what made me write 1,500 words about rioting, social contracts, and the importance of dialog? Well, not just the riots in London but the reaction of people I know that are in London and the UK. Things there are frightening. They are violent. But the repeated calls to "shoot" people, "razz those fuckers", "feed them to the lions at the zoo"? Those I can't handle. YES, it's bad when people go out and riot. There is a REASON we have social contracts, both explicit and implicit, and that's because if we didn't we'd have this violent chaos. But you should never forget, never, that the social contract goes both ways. And no one wants it to break down.