On Looting

With the ongoing uprising against police violence, there has been considerable discourse on the topic of looting.  Much of it has consisted of moralizing narratives that draw lines between good and bad, protesters and looters, and proper and improper forms of resistance.  I certainly understand where these ideas are coming from, but I think ultimately they are not as helpful as they could be.  The following is my own view on the issue of looting as it relates to the current unrest in the US.

The consternation over looting is perfectly understandable, especially since there (I think) actually are people taking this as an opportunity to get a new pair of expensive shoes or something like that. However, a guy named Emile Durkheim would tell you that this is inevitable in situations like the current one in which the existing order has dissolved (at least for the time being). Everyone who’s ever taken a sociology course has probably heard of Emile Durkheim and his most famous concept, anomie. But I think we often give it short shrift, particularly for making sense of the moment we’re witnessing.

Anomie, basically, refers to a situation in which norms have crumbled and no longer bind people to following the rules. Another sociologist, Robert Merton, pointed out that America is a society that promises a lot and generally delivers little for those below the middle class. That causes them to feel what he described as strain, often deciding that the rules have little moral legitimacy and at times pushing them to do some dark stuff. The US is rife with injustice, and short on hope or material comfort for the masses, which means periods of anomie are going to be ugly, involving stuff like looting (and worse).

To understand that does not mean one approves of stealing from Joe down the street and burning his store down. It sucks when average people are suffering and traumatized, and even the petty bourgeoisie deserve our sympathy to some degree (to varying degrees, because let’s be honest, some small business owners are absolute exploitative shitheads).

But anomie, among other things, illuminates the ambiguity of social change. We are hopefully seeing the birth of something big, seeing a new world start to come to life. Hopefully we’re seeing a massive erosion of white supremacy and the emerging foundation of a USA that features justice that is not contingent on the color of one’s skin. But that’s going to involve pain. It’s going to be ugly and ambiguous.

So, while it’s understandable to say the looters are not protesters, and that may very well be true (but it surely is not in an absolute sense or even anything close to it), painting bright lines between good and bad is not helpful right now. It feeds our fragility in a society where we have been fed a mythology of social change and progress that has erased the pain and violence that most often happens when a society takes leaps forward. It will enable police crackdowns and martial law. It will help put A LOT of people in the very cages that BLM is trying to abolish, and most of them will be black.

Instead, I think we should help each other live with the mess, to live with the ambiguity of this situation. It’s going to be tough for a long time friends, and things are not going to make sense quite often. We must lean on each other as we venture through this storm. We don’t have to be resigned to ugly shit and harm against innocent people, but we do have to understand that the more we stop, stare at that, and talk about how bad it is, the less we look towards a bright future, and the longer our journey will be.