Why We Justify Violence

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, Tuesday 10, 2020

 

Why do rational, compassionate, and discerning individuals lose themselves in violent crowds? The question has been explored over the centuries, and the conclusions reached by generations of philosophers and social scientists are generally aligned: There is something instinctual, perhaps evolutionary, in the human consciousness that subsumes mankind’s nobler traits into a reptilian singlemindedness.

 

“The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures,” Elias Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power. “Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence.” We saw that in the rioting mobs that ransacked American cities this month, as we did with the officers tasked with subduing those violent spasms. These opposing crowds antagonize one another, intensifying their thirst for conflict. The ages pass and our circumstances progress, but the mob never changes.

 

But what of the mob’s intellectuals—the people who recoil at the crowd and would never join it but legitimize its actions from afar? There’s plenty of social science around that, too. The Washington Post published a chilling example of this kind of mindset on Wednesday in a dispatch entitled, “After killing of George Floyd, white liberals embrace ideas that once seemed radical.” Contrary to the headline’s assertion, the ideas expressed therein do not merely “seem” radical. They are objectively extremist.

 

This item profiled Meredith Webb, a 33-year-old resident of an affluent Minneapolis suburb who declared war on her subconscious aversion to wanton violence and property destruction and emerged victorious. “I wasn’t sure what side I was supposed to be on,” Webb confessed after witnessing peaceful protests against the Minneapolis police devolve into pillaging and arson. “It felt wrong to say we’re with you until you start looting.” To her demographically similar friend, such destruction was “a perfectly warranted and justified response,” an “expression of righteous rage.” Webb eventually got around to convincing herself of this as well.

 

She subordinated her apprehension over the prospect that the nightmare unfolding a few blocks down would reach her street. She dismissed the concerns of her neighbors that their children’s safety might be compromised. She suppressed the instinct to mourn for the livelihoods lost in the fires. But it took some work and constant reinforcement from her like-minded peers. “I am trying to push myself to understand looting,” Webb confessed, “and understand that we have to go outside the law sometimes to make things happen.”

 

There is an intellectual infrastructure at work glamorizing violence as an efficacious remedy for societal maladies. “The demand to protest peacefully is a trap,” the New Republic’s John Patrick Leary wrote. Such demonstrations are cathartic exercises in banality that yield no tangible benefits. The very definition of a “peaceful protest,” he insists, is something we cannot define ourselves—we outsource the job to authority figures. “What good, then, is this ‘peaceful protest?’” Leary concludes. “Show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful,” CNN host Chris Cuomo asked. “Because I can show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is and led to any major milestone.”

 

To reach these conclusions requires a steadfast commitment to ideology. The converted must reject not just an instinctive revulsion toward violence but a utilitarian and well-supported understanding that violent outbursts reduce popular support for a particular course of action. But this phenomenon is not so inexplicable. A September 2009 study published in the American Journal of Sociology provides some insights into how deviant and self-destructive behaviors can evolve into “unpopular norms,” which “emerge through a cascade of self-reinforcing social pressure that increases with the level of conformity.”

 

That study demonstrated that a combination of herd behavior and pluralistic ignorance—the phenomenon in which “people suppress their dissent and copy the behavior of others who are assumed (again incorrectly) to represent the popular majority”—result in a “spiral of silence” that reinforce the presumed logic of obviously destructive behaviors.

 

Some classic examples of this phenomenon include excess college drinking and displays of support for patently terrible scholarship. Surveys of matriculated students indicate that individuals are far less comfortable with excessive alcohol consumption than their collective behavior would suggest. Likewise, scholarly works that are festooned with incomprehensibly complicated jargon that mimics the language of the academy but actually says nothing at all will attract sincere defenders who aren’t convinced by the text but the prospect of condemnation from their peers. Both behaviors are self-destructive and both are rigidly enforced.

 

And while the consensus around these dangerous norms can be quite fragile, they become much more durable in an environment that stigmatizes dissent. Moral panics, societal scares, and an atmosphere of crisis all bolster support for this ruinous and dishonest behavior. “[A] very small fraction of true believers can spark a cascade of conformity and false enforcement that quickly engulfs a vulnerable population,” this study affirmed, “not because people are converted to new beliefs, but just the opposite: because of the need to affirm sincerity, a need felt by those who know that their conformity is a lie.”

 

Thus, we convince ourselves of the virtue of violence. Because to object would expose us to the condemnation of our valued peer group and the accusation that we are unmoved by the enlightened new consensus. Such displays are, however, by their nature public exhibitions. Does this phenomenon prove so compelling in the isolation of the voting booth? We may find out in November.