In Defence of the Rioters

Prologue One
I am a middle-aged man. I am, by my own judgment, largely an effete individual. I don’t riot. I haven’t looked that the video footage or (with the one exception of the kissing-on-the-ground couple, which I couldn’t avoid) photographs of the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot. As I think will become clear, I have little in common with those I am defending below. I am not, of course, in favour of violence or vandalism on whatever scale. However, humans do not reach their potential when they simply condemn without trying to understand. And, I think, there is a very great deal to understand here.

Prologue Two
When I was about 13 or 14 years old I was one of the observers of a school-yard fist fight. Luckily, as with most of these things, nobody was truly hurt. Thinking about it all later, what I noticed was that, first of all, most of those crowded around the two combatants were as engaged as those actually exchanging blows – maybe even more so: they, the observers, were shouting, cheering, physically moving and jumping, acting almost as if they were doing the fighting.

The second thing I noticed was that the crowd became a single thing: it moved as one thing and seemed to be animated by one emotion. It was a thing different in its totality than any of the individuals that made it up, including me.

Prologue Three
I remember a 1970s TV news show about a police strike in a city in one of the maritime provinces. At one point, a night-time crowd was arranged in front of a plate glass window of a store on a downtown street, clearly about to smash the window. One person stepped forward to stop the mob and was violently sweeped aside and slammed to the ground, perhaps to suffer serious injury. My sympathies, as an observer, were for the one person, not the mob.

Prologue Four
Disaster is now entertainment.

Riots In History
Riots are very common in human society. The history of the French Revolution depends on the existence of the mob. Across the English Channel, consider the Gordon Gin Riots of 1736. John Ralston Saul was on CBC Radio recently talking about the pre-history of the Canadian Dominion in the 1850s about the central role of mob violence as a central political fact of the time ( see: Louis-Hipployte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin (Penguin Books, 2010)) The modern history on the Indian sub-continent after the second world war arose out of hyper-violent riot and the mob and riot continues to be a important factor in politics there. The Arab Spring has elements of the mob, as did the Battle in Seattle from the WTO conference in 1999.

So the first point to make is that riot is a longstanding human behaviour.

Why Does Riot Continue?
It is important to understand that the riot is largely the temporary inversion of the normal social universe. This, it must be observed, has possible positive implications. The economic/social/political structure is likely, at any point in time, to be extremely unfair. Riot is, in a way, a visceral, temporary rejection of normality. Being visceral, it is largely based on emotion.

While potentially violent, potentially even dangerous to religious or racial minorities, still emotion must be, at some level, true. That is to say, you cannot have an untrue emotion. At the same time, being the lowest common denominator across hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of individuals, emotional truth is, alas, as likely to based on ignorance as anything else.

Be that as it may, riot is the release valve of great mass emotion. It cannot, perhaps should not, be permanently curtailed. The greatest danger, on my view of the matter, is not when the mob is ranged against the privileged or even the state itself, but when the state controls and animates the mob. The great dictators of the 20th century surely understood that.

The Spark
Riot thus depends on the existence of a suppressed emotional truth. But it also depends on a spark. It could be many things: an increase in the price of gin, the G-20 coming to Toronto, or a sporting event. The point is that there must be an opening into the very rare country of freedom. Individuals, first, then gain an unusual licence; then, as individuals gather, the group then gains the licence.

Modern Capitalism, the West, and The Lack of Place For the Young Male

Rioting is one of the few things that young males do better than other people (although females, it seems to me, often have a major role in what we might call “positive” riots).

In the west, the state, the economy, the police, the municipality, large corporations, many social conventions – it is all arranged to impose restrictions and boundaries on the young male. As an individual, the young male is helpless against these forces. These forces may be dangerous themselves.

So, when western alienated individuals join, by chance and licence, and are thrown together into the unthinking mob and carry out violence (especially when it is violence against simply property) then they express the key emotional truth of our age: that the totalitarianism of modern day culture (consumer corporate culture) alienates a great number of people. It is the great un-freedom of our age.

Thus the largely ignorant and drunken rioters of June 2011 express, whether they know it or not, a great progressive emotional truth.

Microsoft or the Mob

If I had to choose a world to be ruled by the mob or by Microsoft (or any other symbol of the corporate hegemony), I would choose the mob. Thus the rioters of June 2011 are my political allies, though we could not be more unalike.