Daylight
I was somewhat cryptic in that post ‘Interpretation’ yesterday. Deliberately, I suppose, because I wasn’t trying to make a flat assertion, but rather to point out possibilities – areas of murk, of darkness, of fog, of confusion. Of more than one possibility. Of epistemic uncertainty. Also because that post was only preliminary; I thought I would probably try to look at the subject further, later.
So, one thing I’m not saying is that there’s no reason for people in the banlieues to be angry. Hardly. No – but it’s not a choice between ‘people in the banlieues have every reason to be angry therefore the riots are political rebellion and nothing else’ and ‘people in the banlieues have no reason to be angry therefore the riots are the same kind of thing as suicide bombing or just plain criminal assault.’ Nope. There’s a huge amount of territory in between those two items. One possibility – among many, be it noted – is ‘people in the banlieues have every reason to be angry but the particular people who are out rioting are more caught up in the fun of group violence than they are rebelling in a political way.’ That’s just one possibility, remember – but surely it is no less than one possibility. It seems to me it’s not on the face of it so outlandish and implausible that it should be ignored completely.
There are hints, after all. There are complications. Where is everyone else? Where are the women? Where are the non-youth? Why is this a young guy thing? Well, duh – for the same reason war is a young guy thing. Yes, but that’s my point. It’s probably also for the same reason that most violent criminals are young men, and that most football players are young men. Because they’re fit, energetic, muscular, all that, yes, but also because (on average) they’re more aggressive than they ever will be again. It’s because they’ve got testosterone leaking out of their eyeballs. It’s because they like doing things like this. (There, there’s a flat assertion for you. Standing there all naked and vulnerable. Go on, knock it down.) That aggression can be compatible with political rebellion, with dedicated work of all kinds, it can be admirable and useful and courageous – but it can also be compatible with much worse things. Can be, has been, often is.
So it’s just not self-evident that what’s going on for instance in the riots but in other areas too is not at least partly just plain aggressive group-driven violent sadism. It can’t be. It can’t be self-evident – it’s happened too many times before. Lynch mobs, race riots, religious riots, the New York draft riots that were part race riot – and so on. Remember the video of what happened to Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles? Because I do – it seared itself into my memory. Why? Because it was so obvious that the guy who kicked Denny in the head was having fun – was enjoying himself. And, I think, in a particular way – a self-righteous way. A way that was backed up or validated by self-righteousness. In other words a different kind of fun from the fun of a more routine, furtive criminal assault – of beating someone up in an alley. This was broad daylight, with an audience – and a ’cause’ – of sorts. (By which I mean, a very valid reason to be angry, but a non-useful way of expressing the anger.) So the guy felt good about it – you could tell, from the way he threw his arms up in the air. (That’s another naked assertion. I think it’s true, but I don’t know. I’m interpreting.) Maybe the reason it seared itself into my memory is partly because I could so easily imagine how he was feeling – I could imagine feeling that way myself. On another day, maybe that guy would have joined another crowd to rescue people from a collapsed freeway after an earthquake, the way people did in Oakland when the Nimitz freeway pancaked.
These things can be all mixed up together. People can have a valid grievance, and also have cruel sadistic vindictive urges. They can have both, and they can act on both. The one doesn’t rule out the other. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn’t.
Thank you, Ophelia. Both the standard sides (the right’s just napalm the whole group because they don’t deserve French society -or the City Journal variant that argues that the social welfare state “causes” this-or the left’s they are victims of racism and nobody is giving them jobs (as if the state or anyone can just simply “give” uneducated people valuable jobs, anyway) seem to miss things. I think you’ve nailed it.
A mob is an ugly thing.
And how about the mob — the mass of the bourgeoisie — that observed with indifference as these centers of poverty have been constructed, who have spent, oh, twenty years watching an unjust system exploit the manual labor of dark skinned people while providing them with prejudice instead of job advancement, underfunding and callousness when it came to education, and policing as surveillance and repression in which les beurres are almost completely unrepresented?
Funny that we don’t call that a riot, but public order. Burn somebody’s car and it is vandalism, diminish their income and their chances and their social chances over twenty years and have the cops insult their kids day after day and no arrests are made, and no stories are filed about how violence is flaring in France.
However, once upon a time the ancestors of those middle class types had to strike, had to burn buildings, had to cut the heads off kings, had to commit random acts of horrible violence (burning the Louvre, for instance, during the Paris Commune) in order to change the system. If the message is going to be more repression, that message is not going to protect the comfortable from more violence.
Two questions:
1. It took far too long for the French government to come up with the totally obvious and fairly effective response of instituting a curfew. Even the morons in charge in New Orleans did that right away.
2. If the young men want to express their grievance, why don’t they gather and march peacefully in number throughout the major cities of France?
That the enjoyment of vandalism and mayhem played a role is evidenced by the legitimacy of the second question. That the government was complicit, perhaps to make the young men look inhuman, is evidenced by the first question.
Sorry – I said two questions. The first should have read “Why did it take far too long…”
Agreed, Roger, but it still doesn’t follow that the people doing the rioting are doing it for the reasons you indicate. They may be, but they may not. Or it may be some of both.
>However, once upon a time the ancestors of those middle class types had to strike, had to burn buildings, had to cut the heads off kings, had to commit random acts of horrible violence (burning the Louvre, for instance, during the Paris Commune) in order to change the system.< *Had to* commit random act of horrible violence… Interesting reading of this period of French history. Ah, well, as Lenin nearly said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking heads.
It is self-evident that young men are aggressive, violent creatures; I was one myself, though being skinny and speccy I was prevented by a certain amount of a) scorn and b) self-preservation from ever actually acting out my inner rage…
The question is, how does a society manage this, no doubt ultimately biological, fact? Probably not best by marginalising large groups of these dangerous creatures, dangling the media lures of a consumer society in front of their faces, then denying them almost all opportunity to legitimately join the consuming classes, and treating their every act as the prelude to violent disorder, and thus to be repressed with intimidatory policing…
BTW, re. Allen’s post, and profound ignorance of history. People who don’t accept that change comes through violence are the sort of people who clearly think that America would be better off still a British colony [actually, that would be OK with me, but for different reasons], or that it would be good for most people to live under the yoke of a feudal lord who could command a chunk of their labour and income [and beat them up at random] just because the king said so…
People don’t get out from under by being NICE, it just ain’t so. Waiting around for the powers that be to recognise your essential worth is a recipe for a long, long time at the bottom of the heap…
Thus, what Roger said.
Anyone seen the amount of fuzzy liberal columns telling us how this is all about banning the Burqua and why we should build more faith schools. Gotta love the Independent…
>BTW, re. Allen’s post, and profound ignorance of history. People who don’t accept that change comes through violence are the sort of people who clearly think that America would be better off still a British colony [actually, that would be OK with me, but for different reasons], or that it would be good for most people to live under the yoke of a feudal lord who could command a chunk of their labour and income [and beat them up at random] just because the king said so… < The above comment is a non sequitur, given that it imputes to me contentions I didn’t make and opinions I don’t hold. Or perhaps more accurately, it is a strawman argument.
Actually, I don’t impute anything to you at all. Your comment, which could be read as either supportive or not of my basic contention, merely prompted that thought. And I don’t believe in any case it is a straw-man argument to point out that people whose ancestors established the groundwork for their current circumstances by acts of extreme violence need to be careful about denying the use of such means to others.
Of course, this is heading in the direction of an argument about the distinction between a ‘moral right’ and what’s morally ‘right’, which was had to no great satisfaction some days ago. We confront the great paradox that there will be no peace without justice, and no justice without struggle… Including struggle by naughty people who enjoy kicking people’s heads in…
>Your comment, which could be read as either supportive or not of my basic contention, merely prompted that thought.< My original “comment” was directed at one specific contention, and was not addressed in your response – which is why I misread the point of your response. I presumed it was a response to what I highlighted, rather than a general thought *prompted* by what I wrote.
Not sure tat sadism is quite the right word; thje impulse is more about agression than the causing of pain. Sewing live animals inside someone’s digestive system for the pleasure of causing pain is sadism – burning cars and chucking stones is not. The thrill is from the adrenaline, from that pumping fight-or-flight response; that’s a different thing from sadism.
So what are you going to do? Do you appease teh rioters, or do you repress them? If you appease them, they have got something [only a littel no doubt] of what they wanted. If you repress them, how far? Do you ‘Karcherise’ them? What does that mean, lock them all up, at a cost of tens of thousands of the currency of your choice per year? Or maybe shoot them, because they fail to live up to your ‘civilised’ standards?
That last post escaped before it was proofread, or finished…
And why do you think some people in this world can have shiny new things? Exactly and precisely because most other people can’t. The level of material consumption idealised by Western societies is materially impossible to sustain unless the majority of the global population [and a minority of the Western population] is systematically excluded from it. Simple fact. You couldn’t make most of our shiny gadgets at a price we could afford if you didn’t pay people to make them [or other, more simple commodities] at a rate which precludes them from owning them. Hell, you couldn’t make enough electricity in the world to give everyone an IPod and charge it!
As for the bit about moving to France to escape something — ever hear of colonialism? Maybe African societies weren’t quite on a par with Europeans when the latter arrived, but boy were they screwed when they ‘left’ [except of course they didn’t leave, they just continued the abusive relationship under a different name…]
People in the West today live like pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats, wilfully blind to the fact that every facet of their daily existence is predicated on a vast edifice of inequality, content to denounce the surface iniquities, but unwilling, perhaps unable, to imagine how much would have to change to make their position in any conceivable way just.
Yes, I live that way too, no, I’m not going to give away all my money. I made the selfish decision to bring two small children into the world, and now I have to look after them, even as I wonder what kind of world they will grow up into, or even if they will have a chance to grow up in a world that can still call itself civilised in even the most limited sense. But at least I’m honest about it.
Dave – “You couldn’t make most of our shiny gadgets at a price we could afford if you didn’t pay people to make them [or other, more simple commodities] at a rate which precludes them from owning them.” Most of them are being made in countries such as China where their expanding economies mean precisely the oposite of that – huge economic growth relies on a burgeoining middle class, who will soon all want white goods and whizzy media goods. The African nations these rioters are descended from 2 or 3 generations ago have been stiffed over 50 years by international industrial groups, their own govts, and no doubt the French govt. I’ve always doubted the French’s foreign policy, and there is no doubt we can now see the shortcomings in their domestic social policy. But how does that make me or any one else here akin to an ancien regime bastard ? I mean, they were total shitbags.
My point exactly, at 2 levels, 1] the people who actually make stuff for us are not the burgeoning middle class, they are proletarians who live in conditions akin to those familiar to us from the novels of Dickens. 2] you didn’t have to be a bastard to be an aristocrat, indeed most of the great humanitarian writers of the Enlightenment derived their income, directly or indirectly, from the systems of oppression that would fuel the French Revolution’s ire. But that’s the point — their material being depended on conditions they could acknowledge were wrong, but to do something about it meant, in the end, the destruction of their way of life…
And further re. China, anyone read recently how they’re scouring the world for oil, iron, etc to keep their economy going? Any bets on how long they can keep it going without a serious war? Economic growth is, ironically, a dead end, unless and until someone invents an alternative to fossil fuels, and simultaneously solves the global warming problem…
“People don’t get out from under by being NICE, it just ain’t so. Waiting around for the powers that be to recognise your essential worth is a recipe for a long, long time at the bottom of the heap…”
But there are a great many ways of being not nice, or of doing something other than waiting around. Teenage boys setting fires is not the only possible form of revolt.
Beware the false dichotomy.
Dave, I see where you’re coming from in a general sense, but cannot get over the fact that these guys are not rioting because they are working in non-unionised sweatshops – they’re rioting because they can’t get any job at all, never have, never will, so hence their fork-in-the-eye nihilism. And that’s because they’re African origin (i.e brown-skinned) and the state doesn’t recognise it’s own racism toward them. (For once I look at the UK model and think damn, it really could be worse.) My worst fear for now is that the French govt introduce in a knee-jerk fashion the fundamentalist Muslem Brotherhood to these sprawling ghettos (sorry, suberbs sounds wrong) to fill the vacuum… the British Govt has done itself no favours allowing those bastards into our post 7/7 mess…
So Dave, let me get this right. Before the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of the modern capitalist system everybody was healthy, wealthy and wise.
Which history book did you read that in? You might like instead to note that the most significant factor in the overall drop in poverty levels in the world has been the introduction of such mechanisms in China and India. Of course it is impossible for everybody to be as rich as Bill Gates. But that doesn’t mean that everybody can’t be better off than they would have been without the Bill Gates’s of this world.
I don’t recall saying anything about pre-industrial conditions. I could, if you like, give you a few thousand words on forms and varieties of unfreedom in the European middle ages, but you’d probably find some other way to misunderstand…
Sure, capitalism is better than feudalism, but it ain’t good, certainly not in any moral sense. As I implied above, wealth can only trickle down so long as resources continue to exist to be exploited without thought for the morrow, which in global terms isn’t going to be the case for much longer, barring a technological miracle… And whatever ‘overall drop in poverty’ there allegedly has been, there are still a couple of billion people getting by on a dollar a day…
Anyway, to change to what is, I readily acknowledge, a different subject, as of last night, president Chirac was saying that there was an urgent need to address alienation and lack of economic opportunity in the banlieue, so score one for the car-burners…
As a final thought, if these guys are so irredeemably bad for doing what they have been doing, why don’t they do it all the time? Why is it only every 10, 20, 30 years that major rioting breaks out, if it’s all hormones and nastiness? Seems to me that things that happen only a few times in a generation must have more contingent and complex causes than teenage yahoo-ism…
‘It’s because they’ve got testosterone leaking out of their eyeballs. It’s because they like doing things like this. (There, there’s a flat assertion for you. Standing there all naked and vulnerable. Go on, knock it down.)’
Since you ask so nicely. Isn’t that just ‘women are too delicate’ repackaged?
God, (or maybe In the name of Saints Hewlett and Packard) I need to learn to type better-or at least proof my posts better :(.
I was going to suggest the better proofreading option yesterday! But take heart – that one’s an anomaly. You were probably distracted by a wasp or something. (It is rather funny to read – it’s as if you were doing it on purpose. cackle)
Maybe annoyance leads to incoherence? Not one of my better rants?
It’s just the whole “every benefit we in the west have is because we are oppressing everyone else” meme annoys me. He assumes that the Chinese factory hands preferred working as grunt field labor in communes in isolated rural villages-and that the industrialization of China would occur as rapidly (or at all) if they were paid UAW wages and benefits. That’s just silly.
Not that I believe the current “system” is sustainable over the long term-for either “side” (America will be a much, much poorer place in 20 years, imo, and China will choke on it’s own industrial pollution and corruption)
The basic point, about cheap labour, is one I agree with, and have droned about here more than once. There is a rather large cognitive disconnect about all this – one can hear politicians (even Bush, when the Katrina fiasco is too embarrassing to ignore) talking about ending poverty – and almost in the same breath talking about global competition and corporations’ need to cut costs. Well, cutting costs means paying lower wages. (The World Service the other day was talking about British Airways’ burning need to cut costs other than fuel – meaning [they made explicit] wages. Who would that be then? Gate Gourmet.) Nobody really wants to end poverty, because without poverty, there will be no one to do the millions of crap jobs for low wages. Whenever poverty does start to dwindle, that is called (because it is) a labour shortage. Next thing you know, there are burning banlieues.
However. It does not follow from any of that that riots are a progressive form of social protest. And I don’t think they are, at least not in general.
Fine, Dave. But when you start talking about “the Capitalist System” and hoiw we are all oppressing the Chinese masses and all that rot, that to me leads to an assumption that you are one of the idolators of The Book and The Party.
As I’ve argued before, I’m no true beleiver in the joys of laissez faire. Heck, the last argument on this subject I was accused….horrors…of not “supporting free trade.” We are probably actually closer in our views that you might think. I just thought you were being Marxist-pious :) I just don’t think the industrialization of China-or even Chinese factory work-has been that one sided.
I think it is difficult to measure happiness, and attempts to do so via surveys often give weird answers. The more specific a survey becomes, the more it measures subjective ideas of what the surveyors think ‘the good life’ entails. However there are plenty of areas of life however where everybody can agree about what is good, areas like life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy etc. In a country like England, there is no serious threat of going without medical attention, housing and education, and it’s not all that difficult to find a job, surely that’s pretty good. Countries that can afford this are broadly free market. I’d say that the elimination of absolute poverty from many countries is a pretty good achievement.
You attribute to me statements I did not make. But for the record, google ‘factory conditions in China’.
I don’t believe I ever said riots were a ‘progressive’ solution to anything. Indeed I was rather implying that they were an inevitable symptom of a crisis in a wider system — in this case, the ‘system’ of marginalisation and neglect afflicting French peple of non-European origin.
Anyway, this discussion is probably out-of-date now, and I may indeed be the only person still reading it…
O and of course I’d also make the suggestion that France could reduce its unemployment by being a mite more free-market.
Nope, not out of date yet. Can’t be: people still adding to it.
Dave, no, you didn’t say riots were a progressive solution. But you did say this: “People don’t get out from under by being NICE, it just ain’t so. Waiting around for the powers that be to recognise your essential worth is a recipe for a long, long time at the bottom of the heap…”
Given the context, I read that – perhaps incorrectly? – as saying that the alternative to being nice is to riot. If that’s not what it means, I’m not sure what its relevance is – it seems like battering on an open door.
The alternative, historically, has often been to ‘riot’, or otherwise to rise up in insurrection. I believe somewhere back in the mists of time the USA, for example, might have been aware of that… ;-)
Now, one might argue that right now nobody lives in conditions that would justify violent resistance to the powers that be, but one might equally well argue that the banlieusards of Paris were being shit on from a much greater height than Franklin, Jefferson, et al….
[And I could give you a couple of references to the savagery of the guerrilla war their noble principles unleashed…]
Going even further back, post-1689, the British establishment made much of its scorn for ‘passive obedience and non-resistance’, which it interpreted as the central tenets of a ‘Popish’ slavery to absolutism.
Anyway, now I am returning to things I have already said, and which were responses in the first place to things other people said, that had led us off at tangents from the original debate. I leave you with the words of Frederick Douglass:
“Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Sure, revolts and revolutions occur, and are often “justified” or at least understandable.
I am less sanguine than you about the significant positive changes that you expect. Too often, the revolts merely put in power a different group of thugs (France’s history).
Let’s look at France. Stagnant, calcified economy that simply doesn’t “need” the unskilled labor that it wrongfully encouraged to immigrate during the 1960s.
What net result other than more top-down welfare state “programs” will these revolts create? Will the revolts by a minority result in any wholesale changes in French society that is inherently hostile to les beurres? Can “political action” do anything more than gather more “goodies” to the particular group? What happens if these goodies are distributed to Islamist thugs who are inimically opposed to the French state?
Dave, yes, but rioting is not necessarily identical with rising up in insurrection. And an insurrection that consists exclusively of adolescent males seems to me less than likely to lead to better things.
I still don’t see how you bridge the gap between these two separate facts: 1) the people in the banlieues have valid grievances, and 2) adolescent males in the banlieues rioted.
I bridge it by the observations in my very first post on this thread, qv. If it is an existential fact that young males are violently dangerous, then it behoves society [love that verb] to ensure that they are not collectively marginalised, discriminated against and generally pissed off… Or it behoves society to regiment them, lock them up, chemically castrate them, shoot the ringleaders and otherwise enforce order.
Appease or repress, what other options are there? What is ‘right’ in any given circumstance will come down to the observer’s judgment of the relative moral merits of the adolescents and the ‘society’ concerned…
[If on the other hand these people are educable, other options become available, but how do you ‘educate’ people you have spent a generation marginalising and disregarding?]
All the other points were tangents, and I didn’t start the casual use of loose historical analogy in this thread, so don’t blame me…
BTW, on a picky note, beurre is French for butter, the term wanted here [verlan/backslang for arabe] is ‘beur’.
Oops. So noted. I can’t even spell/type in English very well, so to attempt French….