A Reflection on the Riots. An essay on how we attribute causes, continued

While there are many things that can make young men resentful, not least certain religions or ideologies that appeal to the downtrodden left out of the communion of earlier religious or social movements, most youth, including I dare say most of the young men in the Paris suburbs being set alight, don’t often riot. And since we are all resentful to some degree, resentment is not an explanation in and of itself for violence.

The mystery lies in the question of how, in certain situations, resentment goes further than usual in eroding the order by which everyday grievances and evil desires are usually contained, giving way to the hysterical circumstances of the riot. The flipside is the mystery of how culture most often works, allowing most of us to transcend nonviolently our resentments. In fact, in a world with as much destructive potential as ours, our culture has to work much better at deferring violence, much more of the time, than culture ever has had to do at any other point in human history. (There is, though this is not a point I will argue here, a direct correlation between the ability of a society to first develop the means to build weapons of mass destruction, and its ability to defer using them. It is the scientific latecomers who can learn to copy the first feat, but perhaps not the second, who need to be kept on a leash.)

If I am right that there is some inevitable mystery in the riot’s emergence, why don’t more people just admit our inability to properly explain causes? Why must we all play instead the game of making the event meaningful? (This is both a naïve and sophisticated question: why is it inevitable such an event will be given some historical significance, even by the more blasé and unaffected spectators?) I have not yet found many blog commenters satisfied to stick to the most simple-minded, most proximate explanation for what is happening in France: viz., that the riots are caused by the combined moral failings of those who participate in them, and that any strategies or rationalizations the rioters attempt to justify their resentments are dubious or unacceptable explanations for the event, because these are only attempts at forward-looking power plays and not really very profound causal explanations of what first caused the kids to let go (assuming that at the beginning it was not a pre-planned and disciplined campaign, a war). Nor, as far as I know, is any rioter offering mea culpas (hah!), which, in a truly patriarchal world, might be the only explanation one should have any patience to hear.

My taste for such simple-minded (non)explanations – and keeping young troublemakers out of the history books - does not seem to have a wide appeal. It seems that most people feel mass violence must have a deeper, more profound reason or cause than aggregated moral failures. They would ask, “why are all these people failing morally at the same time, if not for some demon generally embedded in the social fabric?”

For many bloggers, it is a question of properly identifying the participants in the riots; are the rioters primarily the poor, the Muslims, the North Africans, the street gangs, etc.? The implication is that violence is not simply irrational; violent events reveal understandable problems with pre-existing social groups or behaviors, and not simply the event’s own chaotic dynamic, its exchange of name-calling, truncheon blows, Molotov cocktails, etc.

Most bloggers as debaters/historians prefer (like most professional historians) to fight over the priority of material or ideological causes. Ultimately, the object is to successfully point the finger at some particular historical force, as if events emerged from underlying social or cultural realities as their logical expression. On the contrary, a wiser minority of the blog commenters suggest that it is seemingly chaotic events that become themselves the motive force in creating both our ordered realities and the culture that today works, relatively nonviolently, the vast majority of the time. Violence (though this is less true of war than civil unrest) is at first much more the erosion and ensuing chaos, than the logical outgrowth, of any existing social or cultural forces, even of those cultural forces (like the anti-Semitic Arab tv watched by many in France) that actively preach resentment. Resentment is the key force in social erosion, but still, for keeping the civil peace, it is better to have a formally resentful culture (like official antisemitism) than to face resentful nihilists with fewer cultural resources.

To repeat, while I am the last to deny the obvious, that these riots could not have occurred without certain necessary social pre-conditions, these conditions are not in themselves sufficient to explain the event (even though it seems very much as if they could, once the event has erupted and we feel a great need to lay blame). To a great extent, I believe people riot in order to give or take meaning from the riot. At certain moments people seek out such events as a way of making a difference in the world.

Riots attract lost souls desperate for landmarks, and there are of course always aggressive players quick to tell everyone what these landmarks are. Still, to say “riots attract” is to leave the chicken and egg debate unresolved; it is my way of avoiding, in this essay, the mysterious workings of the “mimetic desire” (see the work of Rene Girard to better understand this force) that created the dynamic that led all the participants to the unusual point of a riot in the first place. (Again, I am assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that while the present rioters are a “smart mob” with high tech communications, they probably began without much coordination, whatever interests may have attempted to instigate or influence the proceedings). Resentment, which is the key agent in the erosion of the social order that usually holds always somewhat resentful/somewhat loving people in line, is in good part an irrational, contagious, and unpredictable force.

Yet before we go further with this, consider also that if it is correct that people riot in order to give or take meaning from the riot, the paradox is that violence is not meaningful in and of itself. What comes before or after may be meaningful, but in the heat of the moment, when blows are exchanged or property consumed, violence is always the same meaningless thing – and this is especially true of civil violence within a society, as opposed to war. Violence within a society is always de-differentiating; it is the temporary loss of the meaningful differences that once maintained a social, cultural, or mental order in its essential job of deferring peoples’ potential for violence. Violence is the loss of respect for difference. The other becomes an object to be assimilated or destroyed.

Even when I act violently in a pre-meditated or pre-emptive action in what I consider my own self-interest or defense, I am acting out of a sense that I must respond to the impending loss of a meaningful order on which I can no longer safely or usefully depend. However calculating, my behavior is something of an act of faith that a new order will evolve, through various positive and negative reactions to my might-is-necessary assertiveness.

Thus the question the historian of riots (and much else) should ask is less “what causes violence?” as “what is entailed (e.g. what tragedies or leaps of faith) in the old order happening to break down at this moment and not another?” The quick, fill-in-the-blanks, answer to this question is always that resentment erodes the old order, and that this creates a need or desire for meaningful sacrifices (as an alternative to endless resentment and meaningless violence) that entail or lead (in a mysterious process that is never easily explained) to new ways of representing our transcendence of conflict, in our renewed visions of the social order. Our culture is nothing more than the aggregated outcome of such personal and public moments of transcendence that have occurred through the ages.

A leading commenter at Belmont Club, Michael Mccanles, develops a line of argument similar, but in some ways different, from mine:

I'm uncomfortable with any explanations of Jihadi violence and aggression that derives it from frustration of desires, lack of upward mobility, resentment, etc.

The reason is that such explanations are little more than riffs on the old marxist and marxoid notion that the only reason why anybody attacks anybody is because the first "anybody" was oppressed by the second "anybody" and was therefore deprived of [XYZ: power, money, prestige, whatever]. Therefore, the cure? Give them what they want.

This doesn't mean that sometimes this explanation doesn't actually apply to specific cases.

But this is not what the Jihadis say, and it's not the message which the broad history of Islamic aggression against the West since the 8th century delivers to us. What it delivers is something which the marxoid categories of explanation simply cannot handle, because those categories are founded on the notion that envy is the fundamental drive of all human endeavor: whatever you have that I don't has been taken from me and is in justice owed me.

Islam has never said that the West owed them anything--except absolute acceptance of Islamic beliefs. It's possible that because the West is so irrecoverably post-Christian that it simply can't take seriously such a motivation. They want to make everyone do their prayer-rug thingy five times a day, that's the reason why they attacked the World Trade Center?

The explanation is worse than non-explanatory to our mindset--it's insulting. We have a major problem understanding Jihadi terrorism because we can't understand religious fanaticism, and we can't understand religious fanaticism because we no longer take religion seriously.”

This comment was part of a discussion on the Paris riots. The open question of the degree to which the riots may or may not have a strictly religious or ideological motivation need not distract us from a more general point. For Mccanles, “resentment” is the shabby excuse and character trait of the spiritually bankrupt postmodern westerner whose culture or thought has become overly obsessed with victimhood. The pervasive envy of materialistic westerners engenders a worldview that fails to appreciate the deeper religious motivations of those who might see burning down Paris as part of some larger Jihad.

There is no doubt value in Mccanles’ formulations, especially in his dismissal of marxoid rhetorics that seek to explain riots in terms of underlying root causes that are ostensibly causing our resentment. But what, in the most basic anthropological terms, is this religious motivation that we should take seriously instead? Is it the force behind - or rather, is it a reflection of - our love, resentment, neither, both?

I would suggest that our motivations are something more than hard-wired appetites or drives. Motivations depend on context, that is to say on one’s position in a shared human scene. (Am I happy where I am?) We must always keep this context in mind, rather than trying to define religion or motivation in purely abstract (i.e. decontextualized, unhistorical) or naturalistic terms.

However secretive we may be in keeping our understanding of our motivations to ourselves, we have developed them from our sharing in public scenes. I’d argue that a good way to understand our religious motivation is in terms of our desire to share in the sacred and divine Beings that, for the religious person, center the scenes of human consciousness. The secular also have a sense of sacred central Being, figured by the Maos, Madonnas, even Mccanleses, etc.

If Paris is to burn, it is because Paris is thought to unduly impose itself on the scenes of someone’s consciousness, usurping the place of some supposedly truer society or divinity. The rival whom we would destroy is always the one whose presence on the scene is seen to alienate us from the centrality we consider our due. We resent the rival because of our alienation, whether the alienation is rationally justifiable or not, whether even the rival in any way remotely caused it or not.

Resentment goes beyond reason; it is an inevitable, unavoidable, outcome of the fact that we cannot all be equally central (because this would require us to remain socially undifferentiated, and hence have no practical organization). We cannot all be equally central within a human order that nonetheless must always be - as it surely was from the start - centered on common objects, signs, and places of sacred significance.

When we try to rationalize - instead of gamely accepting or gracefully transcending - our inevitable resentments of necessary social differences, as if resentments could be wished away, or eliminated by a proper justice, we at some point begin to delude ourselves about the nature of the human world. At the extreme, we become like Hitler: if only I can kill all the Jews, I will no longer have to live with my fierce resentment. I will be happy and gay... and it will again be “springtime, in Germany...”

How wrong can a man be? Hitler had almost all the power, centrality, and dead Jews he could have hoped, and yet he remained fundamentally deluded because he could neither gracefully accept, nor transcend his resentment by violent means.

In the less extreme case, see e.g. much of today’s MSM and MSE, the resentful attempt to grab a piece of the spotlight by pretending to speak on behalf of, if not as, the marginalized. “If only the French, the Americans, the Zionists, would give us/them our/their due, then I wouldn’t have to feel this way (resentful)…” Yeah right. The many Argentine rioters recently pointing their fingers at President Bush are prime examples of such delusion, what bloggers have aptly labeled BDS. These protestors kid themselves; they would be resentful no matter who was in the Whitehouse. In other words, their sense of causation is in good part mythological.

If I am straying from my topic, it is only to remind my friends that if we want to fight against the sundry utopians out there, we have to learn to teach the necessity of resentment, in order to contribute to our understanding of how best peacefully and gracefully to transcend it. This is where I may differ with Michael Mccanles: we both see resentment as delusional, but I’m not sure Michael accepts its ubiquity or fundamental necessity (along with love) in the human condition.

Whether we are Jihadis or deluded westerners, it is only human to consider a certain amount of centrality our due, and resent the lack of it, however justifiable our relative lack, however justifiable the ways the social order or marketplace differentiates people in order to expand the freedom within, or complexity of, the social system as a whole. We consider centrality our due because all of human consciousness depends on sharing in a central Being. We cannot think without it/him/her. Our culture is nothing but the religious or secular exchange of this sacred being, whether in the form of linguistic signs, or material tokens whose value is not simply in sustaining our basic subsistence needs (as with an animal’s food), but in going beyond natural appetite to mediate our shared cultural desires (as with a sacrifical feast, or even a Dorito: “That’s not just a piece of corn in his mouth, it’s a Dorito!” “Cool, can I have one? not that I actually need the extra calories”).

Words and things, arbitrary signs and corn chips, are exchangeable to some extent because language and religion have been closely related from the start (St. John was surely right that In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God). Lacking Doritos or dollars, the poor must always turn to words or symbolism if they are to engage in the exchange that is fundamental to human being. But by the same token(s), the rich Arabs who help fuel Wahabi fires around the world, show us that the rich do not want to live on mountains of corn, or oil, alone. Since the mountain alone doesn’t make one feel closer to God, it must be traded or used to allow for “greater” spiritual possibilities.

Exchange is the key to everything human, and should be everywhere encouraged. But when one is rioting, exchange is reduced to its most primitive elements. Rioting entails the breakdown of pre-existing modes of exchange, and is a cry for new ones, of some yet undetermined shape.

When we, as peaceful spectators, ascribe causes or reasons for riots, what we are doing is engaging in a game in which the rioters have unfair advantages, especially in a world where western governments are almost certain to seek negotiations rather than Roman style decimation. This is the game of starting to build a new order, by naming or otherwise giving meaning to the initially de-differentiating, meaningless, violence. Violence consumes, requiring a new form (and its negotiators) to arise from the ashes of the event. In giving a name to the burnt-out traces of the event, i.e. to someone’s understanding of the event’s content – e.g. labeling it the riot of the poor, the Muslims, the unFrench, whatever – we are attempting to transcend the violence in finding a renewed way of re-presenting and hence organizing the social order.

But it is just this name game that the rioters in the heat of their riot, in their re-enactment of some kind of chaotic run-up to the establishment of primordial order, at first seem unwilling to play, even though the desire to give meaning to the very public event, a meaning that will transcend the violence, is harbored in their riotous hearts and will come out with journalists’ provocations. At first, the rioters seem to be refusing to do what human beings have always already learned to do: exchange signs and things instead of violence. Through their violence, they are raising the stakes of the game, attempting to force our hands, so that we will agree to their terms for defining and ending the event.

Because riots involve such gambling, the question of their causation ultimately lies in the mysteries of the human heart and the poker face - in the free human choice, and weighing of risks and benefits, between loving affirmation of one’s society, and delusional resentment of it (and all points in between). Given that such infinitely complex mind games are riots’ causal force, there can be no certain methodology to rationally determine their cause.

In terms of strategy, the spectators’ intellectual desires to quickly rationalize explanations for the disruptive event, may not serve the interests of authority. Certain explanations, which duly constituted authority may have little role in choosing, will serve as tokens (ostensibly promising some future payoff) and become established as the currency of exchange among participants. In the postmodern world, simply by causing a riot, taking a little risk, the rioters are likely to be rewarded with public negotiations over its meaning. While it is often best, however distasteful, to grease the squeaky wheel, it is also easy to fall into the trap of appeasement when it would be better that the state bluntly enforce order.

It might be best if the French could remain sufficiently blasé, despite the damage and ruined lives, to largely ignore the rioters incipient claims, but this would require a police force capable of vigorously putting down the protests. Thus while the French are likely to seek accommodations – and so we might as well all jump in and try to shape the name game in implicit debate with these riotous destroyers of society - I would still conclude that in a better world, we would not be interested in divining “the” reasons or causes behind such unacceptable events. At certain times, inarticulate zero tolerance may be preferable, especially if the name/blame game will accommodate forces that will in future prove deadly toxins to our society and state. We might wish to play the blame game in order to point our fingers at those we deem the real culprits, in a world in which the MSM plays an often irresponsible version of the game, but there is still a downside.

The true human spirit is always at risk of some corruption in a debate over causes, since the name/blame game obscures the nature of this spirit, and its dilemmas, by promoting a mythology which seeks out victims in order to turn them into idols or gods. (Just say Che! And put your fists in the air, People!) What really causes us – whether as rioters or commentators - to choose love or resentment, peaceful exchange or violence, is not reducible to any readily identifiable material, racial, social, or sectarian forces, nor even to our (in)ability to deconstruct the mythologies of causation and victimhood. It is ultimately a question of our knowledge of, and love for, good or evil. And it is all too easy to confuse our names or signs for representing good or evil forces with the knowledge of reality that our system of signs allows us to acquire. The true spirit has faith in a human or divine Being that exists beyond the names or discourses we use to invoke it, and so does not make a fetish of the name/blame game.

I don’t believe we can seriously spell out the true human spirit, or what it is to love the good. That’s the point. Goodness lies in a free and open exchange whose terms are not defined by victimization and attendant ideologies of causation. Playing the name/blame game is often a pragmatic necessity if we are to serve our need for exchange. But, in this new nuclear age, there must also be a limit to playing with cynical or violent players.

True causation is rooted in the mystery of how faith and its representation as a system of entwined cultural and material exchange allow us to transcend conflict. In other words, the cause of violence is simply the failure of some individuals to achieve transcendence (Doritos!) without first acting out in violence.

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