Spite and the Civil Unrest in Baltimore
The unrest has died down in Baltimore and Ferguson; we wait for the next flashpoint. The narrative is well defined. An incident of apparent police brutality leads to demonstrations. During the civil unrest, there is property damage, maybe even some looting.
Those involved are described as thugs, instigators, inciters….. The mainstream media will broadcast talking heads that look in confusion and disgust as they describe the events as incomprehensible and irrational — people wrecking havoc on their own communities. There is a sense of self-destruction and nihilism that is beyond reasoning, a manifestation of deep pathology at beast and an undercurrent of racial evolutionary thinking at worst in the vein of Lewis Morgan.
These narratives are reinforcements of the marginalization of these communities in the generation of the sense of the other. Plus they are deeply idiotic in their inability to incorporate a basic psychology, the psychology of spite.
We see spite, the willingness to incur a cost to myself to inflict a much greater cost to you, whenever people feel deeply wronged. Or when they see other people being wronged. Th Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has done humor experiments with little kids, demonstrating that the impulse to punish the unjust runs deep in our DNA, and that this impulse is so strong, kids will force feed them selves the dreaded broccoli if they think it will hurt abutter kid who is a bully.
The forms of spite depend upon the context, especially the mechanism available to people to inflict damage on others as punishment. For the disenfranchised, these forms can be extreme. Even suicide bombers, I would argue, can be seen as an extreme form of spite.
Protesters in poor marginalized communities like Ferguson, who have experienced deeply unjust costs, are incited to rage. Spite is not a rational response because as we all know, people are not rational machines. It is an impulse. It is uncontrollable like so much of our behavior.
The trust game, the ultimate game, etc, all show how irrational we are. And anyone who has experienced the tinge of road rage knows that the response to a cheater inflicting a cost on you is impulsive. Meaning, one someone cuts you off forcing you to hit the breaks, your anger flares. You might even do something stupid in return.
The rage that is expressed by protestors is not random. They are not lashing out indiscriminately. Who are the targets of their rage? The police, representatives of a system of corrupt rule of law, any more largely, anyone who contributes to the continued marginalization of the community. Layered onto this is a practical tactical evaluation — you would expect recipients of their rage to be defined by who is a facile target. When enraged they want o inflict the greatest damage at the least cost to themselves.
When I hear how protestors are wrecking havoc on their own communities, I also have a hard time understanding what exactly this means other in the most crude sense of geography. The incidences happen in a location to a population that is aggregated in a location, and may not be extremely mobile. And the forms of social manifestation are not necessarily organized. So the location of the civil unrest seems predictable and understandable. And I am also not clear what the meaning of community is in these contexts. They stores that are looted may not been seen to be a part of the community fabric. The liquor store might be seen as exploitative. Are looters and vandals targeting what they see to be key assets of the community? I wonder.
Community is an old concept, meaning it stems from the particularities of our social organization when we lived in small tight-knit communities many 1000s of years ago. What community the news casters are talking abut is unclear to me.
So the next time police brutality incident that leads to unrest, and you hear the old narrative, think about the self-sacrifice that people are willing to make to inflict some harm on the system that seems unjust. It is both comprehensible and predictable. Because it is basic human nature to want justice.
