Surreal Politics Better than you could do
Calling rioters opportunists is the easy answer – too easy
By Ethan
“People should be in no doubt that we are on the side of the law-abiding.” These were the words of our Prime Minister this morning and I think he has it wrong. There are some stories – quite a few stories – in which choosing a side is just too much of an easy answer. In this one, that there are sides at all is perhaps the essence of the problem.
Very little of what happened last night in London and across the country is worth defending – burning down people’s businesses, stealing what you can and directing violence towards police trying to protect passers-by are all ugly, vicious things to do – but the consistent – calculated – writing off of those involved as baddies can’t be useful to anyone. When you draw up sides and you write these people off, you refuse them their own back-story; you call them out as “mindless” and “ruthless opportunists” doing things which hurt other people because they can. And that, frankly, is not how people work.
People react. Keep calling them baddies, and they do bad things: tell them you don’t care about them, and they will tell you the same back: allow the gap between rich and poor to grow for thirty years and perhaps the poor will not like the rules which do the allowing, or the rules altogether.
And do be sure that it is the poor who are being villainized today. The adjective of choice seems to be ‘young’ people – perhaps because if youth is the problem then everyone can relax and rely on these people growing older as the solution – but the reality is that poor people were out on the streets last night, doing things which we can all see are horrible, and that isn’t correlation; that, dear reader, is causation.
The people who find themselves at the bottom of society – told by David Cameron that they are baddies, watching from afar as men like him have a free ride to the top and going to schools where failure is the expectation, not the exception – as it turns out, do not like what society has dealt them. What we saw last night was the people who don’t have the money to do what they want to do – who don’t have “freedom” – taking the chance to grab some last night.
As they did, news readers brought out their indignation voices. Various interviewees suggested it might be something to do with cuts to the public sector – cuts which affect poor people most and, like anyone with a bad argument, our impartial news makers acted appalled that there might even exist an explanation for “mindless thuggery”: “you mean these people setting things on fire are doing it because of tuition fees or cuts?” No, these were riots, not protests; something more raw, less logical than a protest.
The fact that people were taking the chance to steal food and water doesn’t mean that this wasn’t about being poor. When the rules of the game are stacked and stacked and stacked against you, breaking them – any of them; the easiest to break, first – isn’t a nice thing to do, but it’s a reaction that you just might come to.
What went on wasn’t nice, the people involved weren’t nice and it didn’t do anyone any good: all of which makes seeing why they happen more important. We should see that society creates baddies, who, yes, the men on the hill are right, did not have to do what they did last night, but who saw no reason not to – and that’s a hell of a problem. And it’s our problem.
When we decide that they were simply opportunists – baddies without a real motive – we take the easy way out. This shouldn’t be about sides, David: what happened to us “all being in it together?”
From what I saw last night, eye witnesses claimed most the looters were ‘young’, 14-22 or so. Even if they are poor; different principles apply to them. Think they are much more intent on grabbing themselves a new pair of riot edition nikes than expressing their angst at being marginalised by society.
They weren’t expressing it directly, as I say. It was a reaction, not some kind of message, as I say.
“…but the reality is that poor people were out on the streets last night, doing things which we can all see are horrible, and that isn’t correlation; that, dear reader, is causation.”
But the reality is that the vast majority of poor (and young, and black, and *insert social category*) people in London weren’t in any way involved in the rioting. Quite a lot of the workers and citizens whose jobs and livelihoods are being threatened and damaged by the riots… guess what? They’re poor too. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of the folks who’ve been getting involved in the community clean-ups didn’t show up in their new BMWs. The causation you so glibly invoked, it doesn’t seem to work so smoothly.
To me, explaining this away or (almost) excusing the looters as “victims” of poverty or social inequality is just as lazy as calling the rioters “mindless” or “opportunistic.”
I wasn’t being lazy. I know they’ve done this to other poor people, which is rubbish. Guess what? The whole thing is rubbish. None of it is excused in this piece, and I just can’t believe you’ve said I’ve excused it. I just can’t fucking believe you’ve said I’ve excused it when I spent hours trying to make clear that it wasn’t okay what people have done.
In fact, it is clear, you’ve just not read it correctly.
Well, I said “(almost) excused.” You didn’t read my comment correctly. But I shouldn’t have used “(almost) excused” at all.
I’m with you on resisting easy categorisation of the rioters. But the whole tone of the post – calling it a “reaction,” suggesting that poverty is the cause of it, saying “the rules of the game are stacked and stacked and stacked against” the rioters – seemed to me like you were finding an overly simple explanation for something that you said is a collective problem, one which is therefore more complex.
I’m sorry, sir, for interpreting that in a way that you didn’t like.
I’ve tried to say, and maybe I’ve failed, that it’s not a logical reaction, or a direct one, but that there is a link between poverty and this kind of crime (as all crime in general). That doesn’t excuse it at all, but it does go some way to explaining it, and it says that those who’ve created massive inequality in this country deserve part of the blame for what is going on.
So decades of poverty can’t be an underlying cause of a riot unless all poor people participate and only target rich people? Good to know, thanks for clearing that up Rob.
That’s not what I was saying. I was saying, or at least trying to say, that you can’t reduce this behaviour to essentialist categories, whether it’s “poverty” or “mindlessness” or “ownership of a Blackberry.” All those factors may be characteristic of (a lot of) the looters, but that doesn’t mean they caused the looting. To suggest that those are the causes rather than characteristics of the madness would be to deny the role of the rioters’ agency/free-will/motives/irrationality, which is rather patronising, even if it is a key feature of the self-congratulatory left.
Pro basketball players tend to be very tall, which is quite different from saying that being very tall causes you to play basketball. Looters (and, as Ethan said, people who commit crimes of this nature) tend to be poor, disaffected, etc., which is different from attributing crimes to those factors. And framing the issue as “poor people lashing out at the rich/inequality/capitalism” sounds to me like a goodie-baddie narrative, which is, I think, exactly what Ethan was warning against in this post.
The pagroan of understanding these issues is right here!
I’m not quite sure how to say this; you made it exrtemley easy for me!
Ethan, this is the best comment I’ve read on the riots. Finally someone realising it should be about bridges not walls.
I have just read Ethan’s comments and fully agree with Rob. No matter how much you argue you’re not making excuses, you are! Any attempt to reason this horrific turn of events is making an excuse. Do you honestly believe vast majority of those involved have a genuine reason or cause?
Reasons explain, excuses excuse. There’s a big fucking difference.
You Sir/Madam are the enemy of confusion eevwrhyere!
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