A few thoughts on the London riots

Tonight, it appears that rioting has spread to other major cities in the UK, and to be honest I do not have a whole lot to say about the situation. I do not really know what is going on, despite paying attention to the news. I know that the police shot a man dead, and that according to the latest release from the IPCC, he had an illegal firearm but never fired it. I know that there was a peaceful protest, and I know that there followed rioting, and there followed looting.

Other people have commented in more detail, for example at Feministe here and here, and at The F-Word Blog.

I don't want to get into what is happening and the politics or criminality argument very much, because I really don't know for sure what the reality is for the people involved or on the sidelines, or just hunkering down and hoping it doesn't affect them too much.

I did have some stray thoughts that I noticed or that made connections for me.

The first is that I just watched Newsnight on BBC2, and eventually turned it off because I got too angry with Michael Gove (the Tory Secretary of State for Education), who was making classic straw person fallacy arguments, basically suggesting that anyone who implied there was a link between the violence and government policy was suggesting that there was somehow a rational link between anger at a particular, specific, policy, and the decision to torch a particular building. My answer would have been, had I the opportunity to make it (none of the people who had the opportunity did make it) the following:

It is not a rational, reasoned response, but it is a consequence. People respond and react to the economic and material conditions of their lives, and sometimes where those conditions are bad, and visibly far worse than the conditions of others' lives, and they perceive someone to be responsible for that, then they respond emotionally and angrily. Where government policies have a direct impact on the material and economic facts of people's lives, then yes, there may very well be a causal link between your government's policies and the fact that angry people are setting fire to buildings in the capital. It's not a rational argument by them against the policy, it is an emotive reaction to the effects of the policy.

Now, I say that nobody made that case but this is not precisely true. Earlier in the programme, the presenter hosted a debate between two young Londoners from the communities affected, and two White people (Michael Gove and a woman whose name I missed, who said she works with victim support groups). I wasn't paying proper attention through the programme, so I missed the young people's names and which description of personal circumstances went with which person; all I know is that one was obviously Black and the other I read as White, but could have been mixed-race of some description. Of those four people, the young people were the ones who made the intelligent, reasoned, structured arguments. They were dismissed by the White presenter and White establishment figures, and assumed to be ignorant (it seemed to me especially so the young Black man) based mainly on the fact that their accents matched that of poor London and therefore (presumed to be) uneducated, ignorant London - even though I know at least one of them was described as attending University.

Even the presenter did this. The young Black man at one point quoted Martin Luther King's statement that, "A riot is the language of the unheard," and the presenter immediately asked, "Are you comparing the rioters to Martin Luther King?" The only reason to do that is to portray the original speaker as ignorant because any fule kno that MLK was a pacifist, right? These two young men explained their beliefs clearly and intelligently, but were spoken over and ignored by the people who thought themselves better - in effect, reproducing the point of MLK's statement that the young man quoted, because these young men were there as representatives of the communities that erupted into violence, and as they went unheard, so do the communities, and the people who are perhaps less articulate than those people in the TV studio seek to be heard in other ways. Perhaps. As I said, I don't know the reality of what's going on, but that theory was exemplified by what I saw on my television.

I also saw the White woman they had in the studio, and in a "vox pops" piece they had another White woman describing the rioters as "feral", "vile" and similar terms. I felt like asking that vox pops woman, "Do you think they know you hate them that much? Do you think that they felt as though you felt that way about them before they started rioting?"

The White establishment woman in the TV studio also asked, when footage of a hooded youth interviewed earlier was shown in the studio, "If he's got something to say, why is he hiding his face, he should come here and talk with us instead!" Which, of course, is the voice of Privilege speaking.

Anyway, that was just some angry thoughts that I had while half-listening to the Newsnight report.

One other connection crossed my mind, thinking about how riots start, and how a peaceful protest got taken by unconnected people and turned into the rest of it.

I recalled a programme called How Violent Are You? (link is to my review of the programme) that talked about some of the brain chemistry of violence. It's associated with dopamine, which is also related to sex and the high of taking drugs. There is also the impetus of a crowd, and humans being social animals are driven by crowd behaviour more often than we sometimes recognise (the inverse, of course, is the Bystander Effect in which the more people around there are, the less likely it is that someone will make the first move and break with the crowd passivity to help a person in trouble, or even to avoid a danger such as smoke pouring into a room).

I don't know the causes, so this is just speculation, but I imagine that it is not directly the death of Mark Duggan that caused the anger that led to the initial rioting. What I imagine is that people felt as though Duggan was representative of them, that it could have been their chest that caught the bullet, and that maybe next time it will be. Having a concrete example of the fear that people felt, some of them started to express that fear as anger and violence. Regardless of how that step actually got taken, or what the feelings and reasons really were, it is not hard to see how rioting can snowball and go far beyond any kind of targeted political violence if you think about the body and brain and how we are wired for this fight-or-flight cascade effect. Once the violence starts the body and brain gear themselves up to fight to the finish, to be ever more ready and "up for it". Violence feels good, once you get into that state - it's an end in itself because of the dopamine and adrenaline and endorphins and what-have-you. The bigger the enemy, the bigger the buzz (especially if it feels like you actually beat them!), and what bigger enemy is there than the State, the Police, Society? I've not been directly involved in political violence (I was at Mayday 2000, but the area I was in was peaceful), however, I have experienced being violent.

Looting happens for two reasons - one is, the fear that you could lose everything, therefore you need to grab as much as you can to try to prevent that from happening (also seen in panic-buying situations). The other is what seemed to be the case this time, judging by the reports on the news: some opportunistic people see the breakdown of law and order and seek to cash in while the police are distracted elsewhere. There are reports of criminal gangs now organising looting expeditions into the riot-stricken areas to take advantage of the fight-or-flight response of others.

Of course, that makes it easy for the politicians whose policies may well (or may not, but I doubt it) be the root cause of the initial violence, to portray both the political and the opportunistic rioters as being purely criminal, and nothing to do with them.

The last thought (and again, this was echoed by the young men in the TV studio, who talked about how the looting is part and parcel of a culture of greed) is that on the news after all the stuff about the rioting, they casually mentioned that some stupid figure of value had been knocked off the stock exchanges today (I know I heard the words "trillion dollars" mentioned, I don't remember how many trillion dollars it was!) And yet, the criminals are the ones smashing a few shop windows and grabbing a bit for themselves, not the arseholes sitting in the FTSE or NYSE, the Dow Jones or the what-have-you. As I watched that part of the news, i was reminded of one of the most awesome Celtic rock bands I ever saw, which was Lenahan. I thought, in particular, of one of their original songs - Hooligans In Suits:

They buy expensive gadgets & they buy expensive clothes,
And some of them buy quite expensive powders for their nose.
They take expensive holidays from their expensive lives,
And they share expensive flats because they can't afford a wife.

Hooligans in Suits - Hooligans in Suits
And gold's the only colour that
They ever will salute
They keep a civil tongue upon
Their supervisor's boots
But oh, to hear the language
When they're Hooligans in Suits.