Ethical Rioting

 

     Is rioting ethical? The typical response to this is yes, when it is done by people like me and no, when it done by other people. I am assuming an audience of philosophers here, however, in which case the bias against carving out my side exceptions is assumed to have some sway. This is because we are seeking for ethical principles that are universal and binding and not simply an expedient shorthand for inclination or self- interest. Though most people are exceptionalists on principle and committed to the notion that what my side does is good and what their side does is bad even if the action in question is in all pertinent respects identical, philosophy is founded on the denial of this principle. Socrates in the Republic shocks his audience by holding that the festivals of other cities can be just as beautiful, or even more so, than the Athenian ones. Thus, it opposes the view that belonging to the right collective washes my sins, which, if we are to honest, is the great appeal of things like patriotism (one of the things I dislike most on this planet!).  Today, all too typically, the harm my side does is spun as an overenthusiastic expression of our underlying virtue while the harm their side does is spun as an expression of their deep seated and probably inherent corruption.

So, I will proceed on the assumption that rioting presents an identifiable moral gestalt taken in abstraction from who is in fact doing the rioting. Some people will denounce this claim as tone deaf and clueless and claim rioting is about nothing but the just or unjust intentions of the persons doing it. I think this view is mistaken. Intention is one pertinent feature of moral analysis but not the only pertinent feature. Further, I hold that the people who make this claim do not actually mean it: I have never heard anyone say that a just intention justified the harm, say, of torturing children. People, then, who say things like ‘what furthers social change is good and what hinders it is bad’ would never apply this principle with any degree of consistency because they would be insane monsters if they did so. Plus, no one who supports revolutionary social change does so on any other grounds than that such change is just but if justice exists it applies equally and impartially to all: that is the only thing that distinguishes it from force and what is asserted simply on the grounds of force can be denied simply on the grounds of force as logic teaches us concerning the fallacy ad baculam. There is no neat separation except in reason between ends and means as evil means will corrupt and subvert the noblest ends.

Here though some readers are going to quit in disgust on the assumption that I am going to deny the morality of rioting and rob the poor and powerless of their only means of redress.^[1] As I am NOT in fact going to do this, except in a sharply qualified way, I ask such readers NOT to assume that anyone who probes the morality of certain forms of street violence is only writing reactionary propaganda. Many readers will also assume, too casually, that anyone who questions the efficacy or morality of violence is a weak minded sop but, as I will show, there are hard core realist reasons for doing just that. Furthermore, since most people argue in stereotyped patterns that apply to some ideal argument they wish they were having rather than the argument actually before them (and yes I do that too), I will be challenged in the following way: “Well sure Dr. Wills riots are terrible but where were you when x, y or z (fill in an example of egregious state violence) happened? How come you didn’t condemn that?” The not very subtle insinuation here is that non-violence is something I have adopted on an ad hoc basis because I have been triggered by the sight of minorities resisting. As there are indeed people who are pacifists of opportunity in this way the question is fair. Here let me state that an examination of my books, articles and blogs and Facebook posts shows that I have been a tenacious critic of state violence including both military and police violence. My concern is not our violence or their violence but violence and the discourse about it because, frankly, the justifications penned for certain violent acts are often more concerning than those acts themselves. If an angry man burns a store that is over and done with and we can forgive him and move on knowing our own potential for un-productive rage and that he may have faced temptations beyond what any of us could bear. An apology for store burning, though, may live on being cited and uncritically repeated for generations. A one off action becomes a wholly different thing when it is elevated to a precedent and hallowed as an example. Thus, I will NOT deliver myself of an opinion of the current riots in the U.S. as in a profound sense the decisions of marginalized people swept up in those events are none of my business. People in such communities are capable of having sophisticated discussions of violence and non-violence without my input. Plus, it is unclear to me how much of the looting people are endorsing is, ironically, being orchestrated by the police. One thing that is clear is that the overwhelming majority of protestors choose not to loot and it’s the assaults on these people by police that are fueling what may be a burgeoning reform. 

I will however address some of the dubious generalizations about violence these events have inspired in the army of white liberals whose opinions fill my Facebook feed. I know such people are trying to be allies (a military image by the way) and I commend them for it but at a certain point it becomes necessary to think clearly as well as to perform solidarity and, to be frank, I think their discourse currently contains a certain amount of un-thought cliché. Indeed some are employing the age old rhetorical tropes that always justify violence such as ‘the only language they understand is force’ or ‘you can’t just do nothing’. In particular, I am starting to see the customary use of ‘non-violent’ and ‘pacifist’ as terms of reflexive contempt and automatic dismissal. These trends in such publications as The Guardian, The Jacobin and (for some strange reason) the usually mind numbingly centrist Slate are concerning for they perform a dangerous rhetorical erasure of a whole host of modes of resistance all indiscriminately categorized as ‘peaceful’ or ‘passive’.^[2] They perpetuate the myth that non-violence is just a lazy emotive reaction rather than a thought out philosophy. I should say to these publications that while their writers may have just discovered the arguments they propagate the proponents of non-violence have heard them all a million times before and have (gasp!) actually thought out responses to them.         

There seems to be an assumption about violence that is clearly wrong and so far from being ‘hard-headed’ and ‘pragmatic’ that it is in fact idealistic and dewy eyed. This is the notion that violence is a ‘tool’ that has ‘results’ and that we could solve a certain problem summarily with it if we were not too decent and restrained. Violence is not a tool and it has no results. What were the ‘results’ of WWII? Everything and nothing we see today from NATO to children who would not otherwise have been conceived. There is an old military adage that captures the nature of violence far better than the so called ‘realists’ have ever managed. This is that “the plan never survives the first encounter with the enemy”. Violence is not a tool with results because violence is fundamentally stochastic. Both ends and means in war are altered and jury rigged as the war progresses and circumstance and necessity impose themselves. Mutations occur, which makes predicting the results of violence haphazard, lawless and a form of guesswork. No one in 1914 could have predicted what the world would look like in 1918. This bedevils the casual assumption that lies behind all appeals to violence which is that by laws of cause and effect the application of a certain amount of force x will have desirable effect y. It just may (or may not) but it will also have undesirable effects c, d, e and f none of which could have been anticipated.

        This would be easy to see but for the fact that where violence is concerned we exercise a certain confirmation bias where two or three tolerably successful examples are elevated into paradigms of just and noble violence (and taught to children!) and all the times violence failed dismally to secure its supposed simple, law-like results omitted. At any rate the old philosophers have warned us about the nature of fortune and its wheel: the problem with good luck is that it tempts you to rely on it perhaps in the unfounded belief that something more than luck determined your success. This is called ‘pushing your luck’ and it is the typical road to disaster. Every time we advocate for violence on the basis of some paradigm of noble struggle we learned in school we are pushing our luck.^[3]  This, in fact, is a crucial consideration because it is always inviting disaster, as the Greeks knew, to win a battle. This is because of the assumption that one has then created a precedent for future action. When a man succeeds at something he assumes he will succeed again if does the same thing though this is a balloon that may well inflate till it bursts. The bully is a perfect example for if he succeeds by bullying he assumes, naturally, that he will succeed even more if he redoubles his bullying.             

That said though we must define our terms. Actions like rioting and looting are on a continuum of actions that fall under the general category of protesting. Prima Facie it does not seem likely that all such actions are straightforwardly moral or that they are all straightforwardly immoral. In fact we will find that different actions on this continuum are subject to different moral analysis and evaluation. So, on this continuum we find a range of actions such as marches, strikes, sit-ins, blockades. At the farther end we find destruction of property and finally, physical assaults on officers of the law or, at the bottom of the bottom of the scale, bystanders.^[4] Some might make the argument that in riots there are no bystanders for all who are not rioting are giving tacit support to oppression. This claim, however, is false. A person may decline to join a riot because of something as simple as fear or social anxiety. Crucially, no one in the midst of a riot is in any position to evaluate the motives of anyone not participating. So I will proceed on the assumption that bystanders exist and that bystander harm is a relevant moral concern. One more caveat: some people claim that violence directly applied to persons is of moral significance but that harm to property is not as an item of property is not a person and is thus morally neutral. This claim is also false and, again, the people who make it do not actually believe it. I have never been invited by anyone, EVER, to trash their vinyl jazz collection let alone burn down their house. So I will proceed on the assumption a. that bystanders exist and are objects of moral concern along with others and b. that some forms of property at least are of moral significance as embodying in material form the freedom and autonomy of individuals (by which I concede that some forms of legal property may NOT have this moral status- there is a simple, direct notion of pre-capitalist property). Finally, I believe that all my readers accept these two propositions on an intuitive level however much discursive rationalization gets in the way.^[5]

The point of a riot, of course, is to intimidate and it is one of the basic forms of intimidation have nots use when they seek recognition from haves: whatever the rights or wrongs of rioting it has always existed for this purpose and will probably always exist. The rioter says ‘recognize me or else’ on the assumption that fear of the ‘or else’ will bring forth the recognition as night brings forth day. Also there is an implicit demand in rioting to ‘feel something of my pain’ through causing someone pain to make them feel your pain may be as fleeting and uncertain a way to win recognition as there is. This is evident from a related phenomenon, that of revenge: here the avenger ‘shares his pain’ with the other in the most direct and literal way and thus establishes the point that the avenger is equal in worth and dignity with the avenged. The problem of course is that the avenged cannot receive this message in the form presented because he cannot make his own humiliation and harm an object of his will.^[6] Hence he responds in kind the instant he can and a cycle of revenge starts that has no logical end point. In short, the problem with demands for recognition of this direct kind is that they provoke the opposite response for the person so addressed feels his OWN recognition is suddenly at stake. No collective ever has been bombed into recognizing the pain of the other and that is the basic fallacy of terrorism. One problem with most looting is that, on any analysis at all, it is a form of revenge justice and thus mired in the bad infinity of revenge (some looting may be a form of redistribution but to establish that this is his motive the looter must share else his action is an expression of greed not justice).

So, rioting is an application of force and as such it is not in fact immoral as all societies there are run on force and implied threat if certain actions are not performed or refrained from. A parking ticket is an application of force. What then is violence over and above force? As a preliminary working definition of violence let me say that violence is force without consent that inflicts or threatens significant physical or psychic harm: it is force that passes a certain threshold of harm. Violence may be offered directly to the bodies of persons such as a punch or a kick. Violence can also be inflicted indirectly on persons through their property as when I threaten to burn somebody’s house down or destroy their crops. Violence in this sense is not prima facie immoral either because all societies employ punishment and punishment in any degree proportional to the significance of grave offenses must cross the threshold from force to violence. Prisons are violence as are fines that are confiscatory and leave the perpetrator with severely diminished means. Of course the harms of punishment, as violence, are constantly butting up against the moral limits of what is acceptable and may in many instances surpass them. We do not have public floggings any more but if challenged to explain why our industrial scale prisons are better than public floggings we may well stutter and stumble. Bodily harm will not do as a criterion for every judge who sends a convicted felon to a prison knows they are exposing them to near certain bodily harm as the millions of prison rape jokes we tell attest.

Of course one response to this is to eschew violence altogether. After all, punishment as deterrence at least has little unambiguous evidence that points to its efficacy though punishment may serve other purposes. At any rate C.S. Lewis was surely correct when he pointed out that if deterrence were the purpose of punishment we would punish all offences by boiling in oil: punishment is more about recognition and rectification of wrongs than it is about deterrence. This raises the question of how much violence a functioning society requires. It is possible to say none and this is the position known as pacifism. Pacifism does not eschew force and indeed effective non-violent protest (which PLEASE note is not the same as the ‘peaceful’ protest which garners so much contempt in times of trouble) is a species of it. Another position is called just war theory. This the notion that violence can be legitimate if it keeps itself within a certain tradition of procedures and broad moral limits like proportionality or maintaining the distinction between bystanders and combatants. Finally there is realism which is the position that in war ‘anything goes’. War is such a disruption of ordinary human business that in a war, civil or otherwise, ALL ethical categories are suspended. The pacifist in fact agrees with this which is why he says there can be no wars. Indeed, the pacifist can challenge us to show if any just war proscription has ever stopped any military from doing just what it pleased. A pertinent example is aerial bombing in WW2 which was as clear a violation of just war principles as has ever existed yet no senior commanders or allied politicians have ever been held accountable for it. Nor was there ever any public outcry to do so in the same nations that conducted the Nuremburg trials with such a sense of righteous zeal. To this the realist responds that war is just war and applying ethical standards to it is sentimental and ridiculous.^[7] The realist regards just war theory as a mushy half way house to pacifism. The pacifist regards just war theory as a mushy half house to realism. Both prefer the purity of extremes. My own position might be called ‘extreme just war theory’ which takes just war principles to be essentially logical and valid but adds the proviso that the consistent application of these principles excludes the use of lethal force but allows some other acts of force (including vandalism, if appropriately contextualized).

There are a number of reasons for this odd take of mine and the first is that I do not call myself a ‘pacifist’ per se. One reason for this is that the word does not work. People hear connotation not denotation and the word ‘pacifism’ connotes by its very sound passivity.^[8] It then becomes impossible to convey the fact that non-violent protest is a form of ACTION which is anything but ‘peaceful’ or ‘pacific’. Indeed the language of ‘pacifism’ is treated by victims as profoundly disempowering and indeed disrespectful for this very reason even though the dehumanization and disempowerment that comes with violence is merely accepted as inevitable. The use of this word only reinforces the myth that violence is the paradigmatic form of effective and energized action such that anything becomes ‘action’ only to the extent it comes to resemble its ‘Platonic form’ i.e. violence. This is reinforced by our use of military metaphors even in a casual everyday context. Taking action against cancer is waging war on it for instance. In progressive discourse we speak of militants and militancy as if we were Medieval people speaking of the ‘church militant’ or the ‘soldiers of Christ’. Our blasé use of such imagery should give us pause: when we say such and such a struggle is a ‘war’ we impose a logic and a structure on it that may be far different than what we intend but by which we are slowly but surely seduced. We all, at times, fall victim to our own metaphors. Metaphors have a nasty of way of literalizing themselves if we are not critical about them. If cancer is a war are smokers then traitors?

Another concern of mine is that inevitably the strict pacifist will be confronted with an example of violence of which it is difficult to disapprove. He might then resort to the time honored art of casuistry by saying “I oppose all violence but x, y or z is not really violence because…”. He might also do this in a ‘my side exception’ sense according to which ‘x,y, or z is still violence, though, when q does it’. I accept that casuistry of some kind is probably a fact of mortal life. Principles are always challenged by circumstance. However, I always keep in mind Pascal’s devastating critique of this notion in the Provincial Letters where, in one sweep of impeccable logic, dueling is turned from a mortal sin into a Christian duty! There is though a danger here for the pacifist if he comes to find this sort of casuistry intolerable for he has, by his critique of the just war position, left no other option on the table but realism. Having left nothing between the two extremes he must now trade one for the other: this is, I suspect, is the reason why conversions from the far left to the far right and vice versa are easy and swift.               

        That said there are two things about which it seems to me the strict pacifist (I take Tolstoy as my touchstone here) is absolutely correct: the first is that taking the life of a person for a ‘cause’ or a ‘reason’ is a paradigm case of treating them as a mere means and not an end. As such it can never be a moral act per se though it might be extenuated in certain extreme circumstances (note though that an action that can be extenuated or excused does not thereby become moral). The second is the subtler but even more pertinent point which is that the perpetrator of violence reduces himself to the status of a means by killing for he must violate every impulse of compassion and conscience in order to do so. This is why killers are made not born: turning a young man or woman into a reliable soldier requires comprehensive deadening and dehumanization. This is what officers do. In Caesar’s Gallic Wars we see again and again the legionaries outdoing the Gauls in endurance and sheer stamina. What makes a man who is hungry, tired and frightened summon that last quantum of muscular energy needed to overcome his opponent? Not the cause. When a man is at his limit of exhaustion and terror the first thing that goes out the window is the greatness of the cause. The catalytic agent here is the Centurion and the terror he wields. The Centurion turns the soldier into a reliable tool by turning him into a thing, one who does not think or feel anything but fear: fear of the violence or humiliation he can inflict. The Romans had a brilliant though malign variation on this by which the Centurion might not kill you at all but rather force you to kill your comrades and see how you like all that survivor guilt. Your brothers in arms are your only emotional connection and YOUR cowardice can get THEM killed possibly at your own hand (depending on how the decimation lottery turns out). Modern militaries, thankfully, do not go this far but they are still held together by just this kind of psychic violence. Further, the mob psychology of a group of rioters may well function in a similar depersonalizing way though I am not certain about this.     

I think then that there is no cause that is proportional to the taking of a human life and for that reason just war theory must reject the application of lethal violence though it may permit other kinds of force.^[9] I say this knowing full well that in some extremities such as threats to my family I too might take or give a life. I would do this, though, knowing that in this act of rage something of my soul will be damaged and that while the passion of Christ might absolve me the principle of double effect will not. I will not, after that action, declare it a ‘clean kill’ or present myself as a hero. Now, at last we can return to the question with which we began; the morality of rioting for this seems the next level down from organized military violence. One might object that the next step down is civilian policing but that has become progressively militarized in Western nations. We might place the coast guard somewhere here and if the reader wants to insist on that I will not quibble over it. However, in addressing this question we must note that riots and protests are layered events. There is protesting. Over and above protesting there is rioting (violent interaction with police or counter-protestors, vandalism) and over above rioting there is looting (i.e. smashing shop windows and removing merchandise). Each of these three components presents a separate problem for moral analysis so that we can’t answer the question ‘is rioting ethical’ without being granular in our response. Plus, we must note that protests (as an umbrella term containing all three elements), while to some degree organized, attract a penumbra of activities which are not and which may even undermine the intention of the organizers. The overwhelming majority of protestors do not in fact loot or behave violently and that choice is surely significant. Plus, we may be wrong to assume that, if a certain ‘riot’ issues in direct social change it is the ‘riot’ as a totality which caused this as opposed to some specific part of it.

For the sake of brevity, and despite some of the anti-covid protests, I will take the general category of protesting to be mostly unproblematic: it is a legally enshrined democratic right. This leaves rioting and looting. I will discuss these in terms of my primary concern in this paper which is the problem of bystander harm (please consider the meaning of the italics in this sentence before angrily attributing to me the view that bystanders are my exclusive concern here). Some people show an odd indifference to bystander harm on the grounds that it is an inevitable result of ‘getting things done’. The acme of this attitude is the military phrase ‘collateral damage’. We must continue with the great struggle even though we have just blasted a busload of children because dead children are a sad and inevitable byproduct which should not distract us from the bigger picture. I think this relates to what I said above about masculinity and violence for concern for mere ‘collateral damage’ might be construed as soft and sentimental not hard headed and manly. Now we come a crucial point about what I AM and AM NOT saying in this piece. I am not drawing ANY false equivalence between the actions of rioters and looters and those of militaries and unhinged police forces. Indeed, the harms of violently suppressing a riot very likely surpass those of the riot itself at least in consequentialist terms. Still, every harm contains a component of evil in some proportion of greater or less and so every harm is an object of moral concern proportional to its gravity. Unless we are realists, and that position is a gate to hell, we have to admit that in a conflict the good side (the one with the casus belli) is as bound to exercise moral judgment as the evil one and this is because both sides are human. Please note again that I am talking about actions that are ethical per se not such as are understandable or readily forgivable.

Thus, rioters are, I think, and I say this in spite of the ridicule I will face from realists, bound to respect the dignity and autonomy of all persons. Looters are for the same reason bound to respect all property which embodies in a direct way the will and autonomy of persons. Since people are so fond of military metaphors I will invoke the notion of rules of engagement. If what we are doing is something we insist on calling a war, then we are bound by the rules of war (such as they are). X is a legitimate target though Y may not be. Indeed, the just war principles that were so troubling when lethal force was in question now become intuitive and obvious. Let me emphasize that others have chosen this metaphor not me but having chosen it they are bound by it. So, given a situation in which something approximating a civil conflict exists, what are the rules of engagement? Since the conflict is with the state it seems obvious that force (though not lethal force except in an extremity) may be applied to all those who represent the state by say, wearing a badge or a uniform (which is not to say that that is always a good idea tactically). Of course, I mean by this members of the security apparatus specifically who I think should always be marked as such.^[10] In the same sense looters may target government property connected with the security apparatus though not things like welfare offices or clinics on which innocent bystanders might depend. As for legally recognized private property all property which directly embodies the interests, sentiments, personal history, direct livelihood and individual labor of persons MUST be respected because persons must be respected. Small shops owned by families seem to me a signal instance of such property. Conversely, chain stores may well by this standard be morally neutral though this judgment would have to be contextual: certainly a man who has 37 houses cannot be particularly invested in any particular one for which of his 37 houses contains his favorite books or treasured photos? Plus, if looting is ethical and indeed essential to producing the desired result of social change then it should be directed by the organizers of the protest on the just war principle that violent actions must be sanctioned by legitimate authority. Plus, any property owners who have suffered undue harm should be compensated by protest organizers to the extent that this is possible. I mention organizers as police in such circumstances might well be unhinged to the extent that it may not be moral to turn looters over to them. It is a problem with failed states that things like policing may fall on pre-civic organizations. If the reader is pounding his keyboard in rage and derision about such mushy sentiments, I reply to him that I did not choose the war metaphor. If he says the riot is not a war but a one off cathartic event, I reply that if that is the case he is entitled to no general conclusions about the efficacy or necessity of violence based on it. If he draws general conclusions he is establishing precedents and all propositions stating precedents are objects of fair critique. This is so especially as any revolution that replicates aspects of the dominant ideology of violence embodied in militaries, police forces, prisons, border patrols and so on is no revolution at all.

Now we come to consent: all directly affected persons must in some sense consent to the activities of rioters. This claim of mine tends to generate laughter but consent is now the universal gold standard in ethics and, since the ancients said that laughter is a reaction to perceived contradiction, it is I who am entitled to laugh. At any rate this is not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds. Some store owners have in fact (in a sense a bit difficult to untangle logically) consented to having their stores looted post hoc. Of course, looting cannot be consensual because if it is then it is not looting anymore. But, that logical quirk aside, what these store owners have done is retroactively withdraw their will from their property for what they perceive as a greater good. That is fine though, while such a gesture can be freely made, it cannot ethically be compelled. Nor can one predict which shop owners will, after the fact, make such retroactive gestures. This means one needs to obtain consent to loot though why one would loot the shop of anyone willing to give such consent is baffling. What is clear however is that the problem with looting is that it can't be made into a maxim common to all rational agents i.e. the shop owner cannot rationally will the loooting of his shop. Even if he says 'go ahead loot my shop'  (before or after the fact) this is nothing to the purpose, as I said, for it is not looting if he consents to it i.e. he simply gives his property away. This is as confusing as time travel but what is not confusing at all are the direct needs of the workers such as clerks, secretaries and cleaners and so on whose lives depend precariously on the ‘mere property’ that has been violated. I once heard a Marxist make the astonishing claim that all such workers are complicit with capital and hence not objects of ethical concern or respect as if Marx intended the revolution only for lumpen proletariat or students who have the leisure to riot full time. However, a riot or protest that is part of a broad movement for changing the lives of individual workers makes it rationally possible for such persons to consent to short term harms (though NOT to things like assault). This illustrates the crucial connection between the universality of maxims and autonomy for if  maxim cannot in principle be shared by all rational agents then there is no way of acting on it without implicitly or explicitly violating personal autonomy.

One final point; one knows that adults, especially academics, are in a frazzled state when they forget things that even children know: broken glass cuts flesh and fire burns it. The breaking of windows and lighting of fires presents at very least a potential risk to bystanders and the workers charged with dealing with them. Shards of glass do not care who is a racist and who is really, really woke. Broken glass and flame harm indiscriminately. Ethical rioters must make at least SOME effort to take this into account. On a personal note I myself have had the dubious pleasure of being employed to clean up a building gutted by fire and I can assure you that it is dirty and dangerous as well as dehumanizing for such workers are the lowest of the low and treated as such (at least where I lived: perhaps they are unionized with benefits everywhere else). My boss, I suspect, was TRYING to get me cut which is a story I may relate elsewhere. 

Let me conclude with a tactical point: one of the most powerful weapons in the divide and conquer playbook of the right is its ability to pit workers against petit bourgeois small business owners. They make it appear that any gain for the worker can only be a loss for them as in their endless fear mongering about the minimum wage. Looters might want to consider, before attacking members of this class, what their actions are contributing to the propaganda of the enemy and whether their actions are making the regime’s propaganda more persuasive to its intended audience. Plus, from a tactical perspective what comes with rewards also comes with risk. The greatest risk in rioting is that the backlash might strengthen the regime rather than weaken it. A president or prime minister who can use TV images of riots to stoke public fear and tribal responses in the majority group will do very well politically. Fortunately for the protesters in the United States, the current POTUS may be too incompetent to turn ANYTHING to his advantage. Furthermore, and it would be interesting to see how current events play out in this respect, regimes crumble when members of the security apparatus begin to question their orders. If protestors are on the whole non-violent this may happen more quickly for most police officers are not hard core sadists deep down (though in our corrupt police departments it may be the sadists, who, like the unruly kids in a junior high class, set the overall tone and define the workplace culture). This is surprisingly true of soldiers whose whole training and ethos is directed against external foes. There is in militaries actually some repugnance to firing on the very people they are sworn to protect and this played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union where armored forces set to be unleashed on Moscow protestors simply refused to move with some tankers even turning their guns around to protect the crowds.^[11]    

These are my suggestions, and others can refine them, for ethical rioting and insurrection. There will be readers who are still thinking that ‘ethical insurrection’ is an oxymoron. I ask these readers to check out the success rate of the non-ethical ones and get back to me. If you are American of course you will reply that YOUR country is THE sterling example of the success of a violent revolution. You will say this in the very instant the product of that revolution crumbles around you for reasons rooted in its very founding. At any rate there will be some profound changes to your country. If you are liberal/progressive you will assume I mean good changes but I can see nothing that guarantees that. Terminal decline is an option and that is what I suspect you are on the brink of. I hope I am wrong and that you can persuade me to optimism but for now I’m a prophet of doom and part of the reason is that the current protests have nothing to sweep into power but Joe Biden who, gentleman that he is, only wants to shoot you in the leg.  That said, demented behavior by the cops may be having its predictable effect. Revulsion is growing against police departments at least and there is a movement afoot to have their bloated budgets trimmed and money rededicated to useful purposes. We have a vast security network of armies, navies, air forces, border services, police, prisons, intelligence agencies and even armed coast guards that cost vast amounts of money and have ceased to promote human good in any meaningful way. This is not just true in the US but in China, the EU (where you can be literally arrested for saving a drowning person) and elsewhere. All these should be progressively dismantled because as a collective they all embody the same ideology of violence. This is mutigenerational work and it will not be easy or simple for violence as a response to danger or stress is deeply rooted psychologically and culturally so that it is nearly impossible to imagine a world without it. We need to stretch our imaginations, though, even if past the breaking point. Imagining un-policed societies is not where I thought it would start but it’s as logical a place as any begin. Scaling down policing might well have the effect of making the other forms of institutionalized violence seem less inevitable than we thought. We might then begin reducing them to the point where they will seem not necessary but redundant. I conclude by noting that my entire aim in this piece is to avoid the one pitfall that undermines any movement for social change and that is the tendency to uncritically replicate the vices that define the very regime one is trying to overthrow: the equation of violence and masculinity with action and change is one of those vices and if this is a myth one swallows one is not an agent of revolution but mere change.                   

                   

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                               

 

              

 

                                             

 

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[1] People react in disgust and contempt to non-violence as an ethical position as they think it robs the poor and marginalized of hope. They also think (as I can remember thinking) that non-violence displays a callous indifference to human suffering. Also, no one likes a scold and a lecturer and that is what a pacifist will sound like to others. Indeed, there are probably still some people who associate non-violence with cowardice though publically challenging people in a state of war fever is far from a safe activity. Finally, people equate pacifism with passivity and think that pacifists counsel inaction or actions that are ‘peaceful’ i.e. limp, ineffective and merely symbolic. What I think of these objections will become clearer as we go.       

[2] A typical statement goes like this: “That’s why you’ll notice this rhetoric so frequently employed to dismiss oppressed people who direct their anger…at their oppressors. Through a white-writing of history (and history textbooks) that erases and minimizes all of the revolts that were necessary for change, liberals are able to demand that protesters remain totally peaceful, pacifist, and nonviolent (by which they mean non-destructive of property) in the face of dehumanization, degradation, and absolute repressive violence (the actual destruction of human life).” (https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-to-uphold-white-supremacy-by-focusing-on-diversity-and-inclusion?fbclid=IwAR0wqDIH_gKj33L1E-mPmBixqsbgGv1eLJQcBQPiz6cX0tJvanqnwNywmB8) Another author, in The Atlantic refers, with no apparent irony, to America’s violent founding and general history of violence to justify current goings on. (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/riots-are-american-way-george-floyd-protests/612466/0) I have no doubt this author is a well- intentioned person but her entire argument boils down to the ‘what else is there to do you can’t just do nothing’ cliché noted above. I think the notion that violence is ‘necessary and unavoidable’ is shaped by institutional values and priorities that structure that perceived necessity: in this case a national history of violence elevated into a universal paradigm for action. 

[3] I know there are people on both the left and right who deny this. Such people seek open war with the hated other on the grounds that the result is predetermined either by ‘the dialectic’ (if they hale from a Leninist mausoleum) or by some divinely appointed racial destiny. All I can say is that if that is your belief then good luck to you and God speed.

 

[4] When social change follows protest it is sometimes assumed that the behaviors on the extreme end of the spectrum are the ‘real’ catalyst of change and the rest frilly window dressing. This is because we believe violence is the quintessential form of action and the thing that produces results most swiftly and decisively (though how many wars drag on and on?). In fact though, there is shockingly little evidence for this view. I have a suspicion that the primary value of looting (if it can be said to have value) is not the looting itself (stealing a t.v. is pretty trivial) but the violent overreaction of the security apparatus which produces public revulsion. I suspect this factor is even more powerful when violent overreaction is visited on mere protestors who are simply exercising their rights of legal assembly. In other words, looting may be expendable from a tactical point of view and if it is expendable there is no reason to endorse it.     

 

[5][5] There is yet another caveat I have to make here. I am assuming in this paper that the actions of rioters embody principles and maxims open to rational investigation. Some would say that riots are emotional outbursts and a form of catharsis so that rational ethical principles are misapplied. Implicit in this claim, though, is the notion that riots are a form of legitimate catharsis and if this, indeed, is the claim then they must, in fact, be subject to analysis and evaluation as any other actions are. Plus, if the excited state of a rioter absolves evil then it also precludes good. In ethics we are dealing with personal acts and if rioting is a sub-personal act and a form of automatism it can claim no virtue and, much more importantly, no political significance. The same goes for the argument that rioting may be bad but that police, politicians and so on also do bad things. The fact that act A is immoral does not show that act B is moral just because it is a response to act A. The Trump administration tortures children but merely pointing this out does not make kidnapping and torturing Baron Trump moral even if this action is pursued as direct retribution. This is even true if the torture inflicted by the Trump administration is worse than the torture we inflict on his son. The fact that some people have been tortured on racks does not excuse waterboarding though racks are worse than waterboarding. A greater evil does NOT absolve a lesser evil because both are still evils and must be judged proportionally to each other. The confusion here results from the fact that acts which are forgivable and understandable do not automatically coincide with acts that are moral.              

 

[6] This is only possible when the lex talionis is transcended by the concept of legal punishment. Any rational agent can, qua rational agent can accept guilt. This, though, entails a court of law and cannot apply to street encounters.

[7] Here I must say that realism is not just a preserve of the right. Things like ‘Che T-Shirts’ embody a culture of ‘revolutionary chic’ according to which any ethical concern for the other is ‘feminized’ as weak and hence insufficiently radical. Radicalism here equates with masculine toughness which supposedly equates with pragmatism and realism. These people want to save ethics till after the revolution though no revolution can be truly liberating unless it takes an ethical form and this is something, to speak of realism, which has been demonstrated again and again. Usually this kind of talk belongs to the gutter end of the comments section of the Jacobin. Now, of course, liberals are, in a desperate effort to appear relevant, throwing around phrases like ‘revolutionary violence’ but I would ask them to reflect closely on what this phrase actually means before casually endorsing it.

 

[8] A clever trick though is to hide behind denotation when one is really connoting: as in the phrase “all lives matter”.

[9] Here we face an almost intractable problem as proponents of non-violence and that is the fact that in our world countries are so structured as to resist threats by military means. The upshot of this is that in a sudden crisis military resistance may be the only organized resistance available. The solution to this is to work for a world of which armies are a smaller and smaller part but of course this cause is bedeviled by the same dynamic that allows one man to hijack a plane with a hundred passengers: who goes first? At any rate, and again, the problem is that desperate (and perhaps necessary) acts of resistance are regularized into paradigms: all enemies become Hitler and every war of plunder a crusade of liberation. Hard cases make bad law as the adage goes. Plus, where WW2 or other such events are concerned I do not think proponents of non-violence should concern themselves overmuch with re-litigating the past except where gross distortion and white washing of those events in the service of present ideology is concerned. Non-violence as I conceive it is about the future not the past. Part of the reason I say this is because there have been, despite all temptations to the contrary, soldiers, sailors and airmen who have kept their humanity intact and I am not in the business of posthumous condemnation of these people or any others put in an impossible situation by historical circumstance.       

[10] It is the uniform that makes the target for the uniform marks a person as standing in for a larger social body. This is why, traditionally, killing a soldier was not murder. Of course the problem with this is that many people are ‘put’ in uniforms or forced to stay in them due to economic necessity. Nor is it clear to me how a person, in the ethical sense, can simply be absorbed in an impersonal collective such that their moral personhood is lost. This paradox is easier to live with if lethality is taken off the table. In the case of police I tend the think that all the force that typically NEEDS to be offered against them is firm moral suasion. Assaulting them physically seems pointless given their protective gear and the risk of making them objects of sympathy as the injured cops will be lionized on Fox or Sun News as devout Christians and gentle family men who would not hurt a fly. Generations of T.V. have conditioned people to view cops as heroes or at least flawed but basically good individuals and there is a large public primed to believe such tales; particularly white people who believe that police exist to protect them from black people. It is another just war principle that any proposed violence must have a reasonable chance of success so that pointless, purely cathartic, or tactically unsound acts of violence are off the table. Again, I did not choose the war metaphor. That said their vehicles and equipment are, on the terms laid out here, fair game.       

 

[11] It pains me to say but the prognosis for any mass political movement of the Arab Spring type does not look good in the U.S. This is because, like Assad in Syria, the regime has a geographically concentrated base that is unconditionally loyal. The greatest threat in any civil struggle is perpetual stalemate or a pyrrhic victory for the regime and conditions in the U.S. seem ideal for that outcome. Mass movements are a volatile and uncertain way of fixing a country and the best thing is to have a stable and functioning civil order to begin with.