Author: Ophelia Benson

I like this, so I thought I’d share. There’s this job interview for a prospective philosophy teacher, see…

Other candidates should create distractions. One man illustrated proper logic with this syllogism:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is mortal.

Therefore, Socrates is a man.

I raised my hand. “Birds are mortal too, aren’t they?” I asked, hoping he would correct his error.

“Yes,” our teacher agreed.

“So Socrates could be a bird?”

He smiled benignly. “No. Socrates doesn’t have feathers.”

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.

If you read French, do explore the website for le livre noir de la psychanalyse. It’s highly interesting. There is this page where Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen answers ‘internautes’ for instance. Maybe I can translate a little…

Internaute: Can one say that religion, psychoanalysis, and Coke are products that work and that sell well? MB-J: Thomas Szasz wrote a luminous, decisive book on that question. in which he compares the marketing of psychoanlysis to that of Coca-Cola. I’m entirely in agreement with his analysis.

Religion, psychoanalysis, and Coke – I like that. (Appropriate, too, since Siggy was a coker.)

Sometimes it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that people can’t always see what’s in front of them. However obvious it is. However frantically it jumps up and down right in front of them. However hard it punches them in the face, however red and dripping the clothes it wears, however loud it screams, however charred the flesh, however choking the smoke.

Not that they don’t notice that something is there. But what they – some people, sometimes – have a hard time making out in the fog is a possibility about what the something is. They see the something there – all red and jumping and punching as it is – and they notice it – but they don’t always do a very good job of figuring out what it is, or what it might be – they don’t do a very good job of figuring out that it might not be what they think it is. In other words they think they recognize it, and they don’t stop to consider that the light is bad, that they’re not wearing their glasses, that it’s the middle of the night, that they’re sound asleep. All those courtroom things. ‘I suggest to you that you could not possibly have identified the defendant from two miles away during a blizzard while wearing a blindfold.’

It’s not just the riots. It is those, but it’s other things too. It’s also suicide bombers, and animal rights campaigners, and people who make death threats over plays and movies and novels that ‘offend’ their religion. The possibility that seems to escape a lot of people’s attention is that all these things are far less a matter of protest, and alienation, and revolt, and justified anger, and understandable resentment, than they are just plain old pleasure in sadistic violence. No more edifying than that. Just joy and pleasure and delight in frightening people, and hurting them, and smashing them up, and making them suffer. That can happen, you know. (Read a little Thucydides or Euripides, if you don’t know – it’s all right there. There was no need to wait for Nietzsche or Freud or Foucault; it’s all right there.) People can just plain get off on beating up on people or leaving fake bombs on their porches or stealing the bodies of their relatives from cemeteries or setting fire to the buses they’re sitting in.

That possibility, at least, is part of these events and activities, but it doesn’t always get as much explicit attention as it should. Too often it’s just tactfully swept out of sight and ignored, or never even noticed in the first place. That’s unfortunate. Think of Gladys Wundowa. Think of the driver of the bus she was on, who instead of running away ran upstairs to help his passengers. Think of the woman on crutches who was set on fire in Sevran, outside Paris, on Friday. Think of the driver of the bus she was on, who suffered smoke inhalation in helping her to escape the bus instead of running away. Think of the woman leaning out the window on a high floor of a block of flats where some ‘youths’ had just set fire to a rubbish bin inside the lobby, calling down that she was frightened. Consider possibilities – that’s all.