the corporal jones theory of the riots

There's been much debate over the 'root causes' of the riots. Inequality? Family breakdown? Welfarism? Consumerism? Tony Blair?

Much of this discourse has taken the form what we can now call Greenfieldism, after Susan Greenfield, who recently responded to criticisms of her evidence-free speculations about the rise in autism diagnoses by saying, "I point to the increase in autism and I point to internet use. That is all." So now we have:

"I point to the rise in one-parent families and I point to the riots. That is all."

"I point to widening inequality and I point to the riots. That is all."

Etc. Oddly, enough, these hypothetical root causes are usually the same problems that the author has been complaining about/campaigning against for a while.

Perhaps the real problem here is that we're looking for "root causes" that don't exist or that inevitably represent massive over-simpifications. We have an inherent tendency to see patterns - causes, explanations - in everything, and we hate randomness. But that doesn't mean that randomness isn't the best way to 'explain' some social phenomena. Cities are incredibly complex systems; riots are incredibly complex manifestations of a complex system. When you have enough complexity, sometimes weird stuff will happen, and you can't draw a straight line to a cause.

I find myself increasingly drawn to what might crudely be called the "shit happens" hypothesis. It goes something like this: "Big cities will experience breakdowns in order from time to time. That is all." The extraordinary thing isn't that that they occur but that they don't happen more often. Bagehot at Economist has provided some historical perspective on moral panics. Iain Roberts suggests we should think of riots like earthquakes.  Christopher Dillow provides one political/philosophical framework for this way of thinking about it. But I haven't seen it better expressed than in a superb piece entitled Are Riots Normal? Or 'Don't Panic, Captain Mainwaring'. It's by Leif Jerram, a lecturer in urban history at Manchester University. I urge you to read it in full, but here's an extract:

Louise of Louise’s Hair by the bus depot in Wolverhampton came out of her shop and shouted at the 200 or so rioters to leave her alone – and they did. Louise is black, a woman, speaks with a mixture of a West Indian and Wolverhampton accent. According to most of the hackneyed theories we have, she shouldn’t be powerful, in control, confrontational, dynamic, or even a businesswoman at all. Yet she drew a line in the sand and confronted 200 young men with sticks and rocks, and they just left her, and her shop, alone.

I say this not to heroise Louise, but to randomise her. The randomness of Louise is clear – we couldn’t set up a programme to produce Louises; we couldn’t train them; we couldn’t station them around a town if we could. We’ve got no idea whether Louise is a good or bad person in other areas of her life. We can’t define why Louise was successful in getting the rioters to move on, when the police could not. It was a random person in a random moment exercising random effects. So why, then, should we expect to be able to understand the rioters?  

Link to piece.

Comments

[WilliamCB]

This is a council of despair. And I say that as someone who agrees 100% with your points about complexity and the difficulty of drawing straight lines back to causes.

Lots of the explanations might be glib and shallow as you say. But even the worst have one virtue your approach doesn't - they are the start of identifying things that we *could* do about it. "Shit happens" gets us nowhere.

[Marbury]

It's not a counsel of despair, it is a counsel of calm. It's a way of saying, let's not have our policy-making determined by random events (see Jerram on the peril of 'crisis-ifying').

[WilliamCB]

Now you seem to be saying that complex = random = causeless. It still doesn't add up.

[kb]

I find myself increasingly drawn to what might crudely be called the "shit happens" hypothesis.

I guess we can close down the sociology and economics departments then. And why not history and psychology while we're at it. If we go on at this rate we'll soon only be left with divinity. Which, appropriately, is where you started.

Has a crowd of happy people ever rioted? There's one variable to get you started. I suspect many of the people cited above are rather worried by what a thorough analysis might produce.

[John]

Not surprised by Louise. Or the rioters reaction to her. It's the puerile white middle class who run the country who have lost all sense of direction. Sally Bercow is on BB to give the fingers to the establishment. What does she think the Speaker's wife is?!

[Ariel Adam]

Misbehaving is fun. Nobody wants to think about that, they just want to blame something other than human nature.

I'd recommend that everyone go out knock a policeman's helmet off, then scarper. Once a month should be about enough.

[John W]

We might as well do nothing about anything then because we know nothing. The Mystic Masseur. Somehow I suspect the "shit happens" theory has ideology at it's heart as well. Nobody is to blame so let's carry on as we are.

[Marbury]

John, as I say above, my point is that policy-making should not be overly determined by events like this. That's emphatically not the same as saying the government shouldn't have policies. I'm not even saying the riots aren't significant. I'm cautioning against over-confident over-interpretations of them, of which there's a lot about.

[simon kane]

To describe a riot as a "random event" is not really a council of calm. The "short memory" argument is a nonsense to anyone who remembers the constant civil broils of the Thatcher years, and the peace that followed. Nobody's saying policy-making should be "overly" determined by riots, but I would argue that not having a riot in the first place should always play some part in the policy-making.

[Elemjay]

I don't think the riots have to "mean" anything. I think it's a bunch of kids trying it on, and not getting stopped fast by the police. School holidays and social networking/ mobile phones made it easier to muster big groups. Areas that have a lot of shops near areas of deprivation (like Clapham Junction) seem to have been particularly affected.

Actually the big questions seems to be not "why did we have riots" but "why do we not have MORE riots?". It's clearly pretty easy to get going, and once started somewhat hard to stop. Amazing we don't have more of them really....