Someone alert the children. We need to update their nursery rhyme. It’s no longer just the bridge that’s falling down, but rather huge sections of London, as the city has endured four days of violent riots, complete with burning cars, giddy looters, and hopelessly outnumbered cops.
The length and sprawling geography of these riots put them right up there with some of America’s most notorious, including Detroit, Newark, and any of your favorite Los Angeles meltdowns: Zoot Suit (1943), Watts (1965), Rodney King (1992), take your pick. And while they’re far beyond a typical sports riot (welcome to the club, Vancouver), London still has a long way to go before catching up to something like the New York City draft riots of 1863 in which over 120 people died, more than 2,000 were seriously injured, and total damage was somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars in today’s money.
Whenever a major riot like this erupts, people understandably try to make sense of something that is unusual and somewhat mystifying. And one of the major traps that they fall into is trying to frame a riot as exclusively the result of either the bloody ferment of beaten down masses, or the unconscionable actions of screwed up and/or immoral individuals. There are plenty of examples at the moment.
Rachel Tonkin of a group called Parenting UK took to The Guardian of all places to claim rather predictably that this is all the result bad parenting. That if people grew up feeling loved and safe, they “wouldn’t feel the need to go out and ransack their own neighbourhood.”
She’s so wrong it’s shocking. Were some of the rioters raised by wolves? Sure. But don’t doubt for a second that there are people from perfectly stable and healthy families out there who are also smashing windows and throwing moltov cocktails.
A riot is not merely the result of bad people making bad decisions. Of course there are lots of individual decisions and actions involved, but if you really want to understand a riot with any complexity or depth, you need to look at it as a social phenomenon, something that occurs at the peculiar intersection of individual choice and collective group action.
In America’s hyper-individualistic culture, people are often loath to acknowledge that gro
up actions are an important part of the human condition. But ya know, there’s reason why every university has an entire department called Sociology. Yes, we’re all individuals, but people don’t function in a vacuum. Whether it’s secret fantasies, private actions, or public defiance, everyone’s thoughts and actions exist within the context of a larger social framework. Riots are no exception.
Laurie Penny of Monthly Review offers a somewhat more sophisticated view than Tonkin. Sitting in front of the television, watching her city burn, Penny opines that riots are “not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out.” Instead, she blames all of this on “structural inequalities.” Essentially, she’s saying that long simmering problems came to a boiling point.
Of course Penny herself is a media pundit, so perhaps it’s no surprise that in championing the macro-explanation of “structural inequalities,” she not only ignores other important macro factors such as culture, but she also makes the mistake of dismissing individual action entirely. Focusing exclusively on negative conditions that many (though not all) of the rioters supposedly endure is a dead end explanation. After all, can’t just a few of these rioters be comfortable, middle class brats?
The truth is, hundreds of millions of people all over the world face the frustrations and dangers of poverty, prejudice, and other forms of “structural inequality.” If such conditions inevitably led to riots, there’d be a helluva a lot more rioting going on. Furthermore, some very real riots would make absolutely no sense, such as the aforementioned Zoot Suit Riots that broke out druing middle of World War II. In that instance, mobs of white sailors rampaged through L.A., beating and raping Latino and African American middle schoolers and high schoolers. What the hell did that have to do with structural inequality?
No, bad conditions are
just one of several catalysts that can get a riot going, and it’s not much of an explanation for what actually happens once it has begun.
I’m a historian, not a sociologist, so I won’t go too far out on a limb by offering a definitive explanation of why exactly human beings sometimes go absolutely ape shit en masse. Instead, allow me to point you to this very smart and very readable blog entry at The Sociological Imagination. It’s no longer than this one, and it does a pretty good job of breaking down riots and explaining how the press, both on the left and the right, will fail abysmally at trying to explain this one.