The Mask of Civilization

 Seeing the images of the race riots that broke out across the UK last week, it's hard not to agree with the poet John Berryman's dire assessment: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery." In the sight of the balaclava-clad mobs hurling bricks at mosques and trying to set fire to hotels full of people—because they reportedly housed asylum-seekers—we have the type and image of every torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mob throughout history, hunting for witches to burn. We see that the same patterns of communal violence repeat themselves at the slightest pretext, in every society. In short, we find that the mask of civilization rests ever so lightly on the face—and is in perpetual danger of slipping off. 

It is tempting, when confronted with this spectacle, to cite theorists of crowd psychology to explain it. Elias Canetti and Gustave Le Bon both wrote that one of the default ur-forms of the mob is the pack organized for hunting. The ginned-up mob searching for an outsider to lynch is—sadly—one of the oldest and most frequently-recurring features of history. But what makes the UK riots fit so well into the familiar patterns of communal violence is that they were sparked by reports of a crime. This, indeed, is the script of every major wave of ethnic violence or pogroms. Hindu persecution of Muslim minorities in Gujarat; Kyrgyz pogroms against Uzbek minorities; Rakhine violence against the Rohingya in Burma; the anti-Black Tulsa riots in the U.S.—they all followed this pattern. 

Even, most recently, the Dublin anti-immigrant riots—late last year—obeyed the same pattern. There were reports of a crime (in that case, also a stabbing) committed against children. An outraged mob started targeting immigrants and asylum-seekers at random. All of the cases of communal violence enumerated above likewise started with a report or rumor—whether real or fabricated—that a member of some racial or ethnic out-group had just committed some act of violence against a member of the racial in-group: usually, women or children. The mob therefore sets out to take a kind of collective revenge. This accounts for why the mob always seems to be feel so "righteous" and "justified" in the crimes and atrocities it inflicts—people convince themselves they are "defending the innocent." 

This is the missing piece in the crowd psychology of the classical theories. Canetti and Le Bon's conception of the ginned-up posse, the lynch mob, portrays it simply as the modern evolution of the "hunting pack"—the human version of canis lupus. And indeed, these acts of mob violence are essentially little more than an excuse for sadism—a chance for the majoritarian group to persecute disfavored outsiders and flex their disproportionate power. But the human animal seems to need some further pretext to unleash this latent cruelty, before it will do so. Reports of horrific crimes—like the stabbing attack in Southport that ignited the current UK riots—and the quest for collective punishment, serve to unbridle this ever-present potential for violence. 

This—surely—accounts for the fundamentally gratuitous nature of human mob violence. The "hunting pack" in the animal kingdom forms in order to find food. The struggling victim becomes a meal that sustains the life of the pack. But humans are the only known species (with the exception perhaps of a few great apes) that hunt for the sake of cruelty. And in order to activate this part of the human psyche—it seems a particular ingredient is needed. The mob needs to feel that it is somehow morally entitled to its wrath. This accounts for how seemingly ordinary citizens become transformed into lynchers and pogromchiks. It explains why they feel so proud of their little murders and outrages. They not only get an excuse to exercise their latent sadism—they get to feel righteous about it too. 

This is why Trump's constant harping on the fiction of "migrant crime" is so incredibly dangerous in the U.S. It's not only that his narrative about asylum-seekers causing a "crime wave" is factually false and unfairly stigmatizing. It's also that it is pressing the one button needed to activate communal violence. It is giving the mob this pretext it needs to feel entitled to unleash its fury. Trump is saying: this disfavored minority? The one you've always wanted to crush, on some level? Here is your excuse! Now you can go assault them, and feel good about it too. You are "defending the helpless." You are "avenging the women and children." That's usually all the mob needs to hear. And so, it seems only a matter of time before the riots happen here too. The spectacle in the UK is a glimpse into our future. 

There but for the grace of God go us all—in other words. We may look with disgust upon the violence and racism in the UK, but we are made of the same stuff. We belong to the same species with its ever-present capacity for mob violence. This, indeed, was Matthew Arnold's point, when he wrote with contempt of the mob—seeing in it the ever-present threat of anarchy. Reading Arnold's irony-laden prose on this subject, it's possible to see in it merely the sneering class prejudices of a Victorian critic. But at the same time, Arnold was genuinely trying to remind us that we should never feel too smug and self-complacent, when regarding the unthinking fury and outrages of the mob. For we have the same human nature within us—the same latent cruelty—and so we should remain ever-humble before it. 

As he wrote, in Culture and Anarchy (a work in which he often recurs to the subject of rioting and mob violence—something that was evidently much on his mind in that era): "And as to the Populace, who [...] can look at them without sympathy, when he remembers how often,—every time that we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion, every time that we long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, every time that we are envious, every time that we are brutal, [...] every time that we add our voice to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage, every time that we trample savagely on the fallen,—he has found in his own bosom the eternal spirit of the Populace, and that there needs only a little help from circumstances to make it triumph in him untameably?"

Indeed. That should be the lesson we take from the outrages happening in the UK this week. The same capacity exists in our own society—and within all of our hearts. The mask of civilization is thin. "Culture was only a phase," as Berryman wrote—with the threat of "Anarchy" always lurking underneath, per Arnold. It would take only the slightest nudge to awaken the same kind of vile passions and capacity for violence in the United States. And we certainly have our own share of demagogues—the Trumps, the Vances—who are doing everything in their power to give the mob the rhetorical justification it needs to go out and vent their sadism on asylum-seekers, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, and every other out-group in sight.