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Before we consider the author's presentation we should provide the dictionary definition of violence:
the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy...Summary: Violence is hurting people and breaking stuff. Now we are prepared for the author's leftist misdirection as he attempts to re-define a commonly understood word.
We also shall note the irony of the author as he was previously critiqued on this blog, where he advocated for animals and humans to be regarded as equally pointless. If they are equally pointless, how is it possible that violence against people is egregious, but violence against property is not?
Ultimately, the author never gets around to answer the question posed in the title.
Ultimately, the author never gets around to answer the question posed in the title.
Harm to objects is not the same as harm to people, and we have to keep the distinction in mind when evaluating protests.
During nationwide protests against the killing of George Floyd, there has been a great deal of violence. For instance, police have blinded a woman in one eye, driven an SUV into a crowd of people, beaten unarmed protesters with batons, shot pepper bullets and tear gas at a car with a pregnant woman in it, thrown journalists to the ground before pepper spraying in them in the face, and attacked John Cusack. (Among other aggressive acts.) (The author wants us to think that only law enforcement is being violent. He studiously ignores how protesters are beating people up. Here, here, here, here, here, here.)
But with images of burning police cars and even burning police stations, protesters too are being seen as “violent,” and media accounts have described the protests as “turning violent.” If protesters can be classified as violent, it’s easier to justify police violence as proportionate or defensive. (Who does this?
Now begins the false equivalency. The author wants to appeal to comparative harm in order to eventually assert that rioters causing property damage is acceptable because it isn't as bad.)
This is why it is very important to be clear about what constitutes “violence” and which harms are more objectionable. If protesters destroy a police car, and police destroy a protester’s eye, both will be called “violence,” and it won’t be made clear that what the police did caused far more human harm and is more brutal and inexcusable. Police cars are replaceable. A journalist’s sight is not. Destroying property is not in and of itself a violent act. (The author makes this bare assertion, assuming but not demonstrating it to be true.)
The word “violence” should be reserved for harm done to people. (Second bare assertion, also not demonstrated to be true.)
Otherwise, we risk making the term conceptually incoherent and—much more importantly—conflating acts that do very serious physical harm to people with acts that have not physically harmed anyone. (Third bare assertion, that this conflation is a problem.)
Many times, the “violence” of a riot or protest is taken for granted. We see store windows being smashed, cars being turned over, etc., and it seems as if there is nothing to discuss: This is a “violent” protest. But if the car or store is empty, it may be that nobody is actually hurt. This is actually very important, (The author will now appeal to an arbitrary standard of morality...)
because when we weigh up the morality of actions on each “side” (say, what the police do versus what protesters do), if the protesters have not actually injured anyone, they have done less violent harm. (This is his moral standard, that if someone isn't injured, the damage is morally acceptable.)
If, on the other hand, we conflate damage to people with damage to property, then we might think that the “side” that has physically harmed no one (but has damaged a lot of property) has been more violent than a side that has physically harmed many people. (An idea he has yet to actually refute.
From this point the author will assume his premise is true, but of course he hasn't shown it to be so.)
One reason it’s important to maintain a clear concept of what violence is and isn’t, is because true violence is such a deeply terrible human experience. Actual violence leaves people with brain damage, nightmares, disability, and trauma. (The author presumes that there is little or no trauma from a person's property being destroyed. However, we're sure the shop owner who poured his life savings into his business, who managed to hold on through the COVID scare, only to have it destroyed by violent thugs, would probably not agree.)
The destruction of human bodies is a moral horror that simply cannot exist in the same category as the breaking of objects. (The author continues to make unmoored moral pronouncements.)
Using the word “violence” to describe the smashing of a window (which is, it should not need saying, incapable of feeling pain) diminishes the term. (Undocumented assertion. We are waiting for the author to actually demonstrate his premise.)
Seeing harm to inanimate objects as violent also creates all kinds of definitional contradictions. (Now the author will attempt to obfuscate the issue of willful property damage with unrelated ideas...)
What kind of harm to an object comprises violence? Is it a violent act to recreationally shoot a glass bottle with a BB gun? To take apart an air conditioner? The ethics of property destruction can certainly be debated, but to label it violence is to expand the use of the term in a way that dangerously blurs the distinction between the moral value of people and that of objects. (Another appeal to morality. Why we should accept the author's morality has yet to be explained.)
So when Donald Trump tweets “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” we need to understand that “the shooting” and “the looting” are two very different kinds of acts. (No one denies that they are different acts.)
Taking a television from a big box store is an act of theft, shooting at someone is an act of attempted murder. (It can also be self defense, which includes the right to defend one's property from criminals.)
Trump’s tweet amounts to advocating extrajudicial execution as a penalty for property crimes, (The author is welcome to his opinion, but there is no evidence this is true.)
but when “looting” is understood as inherently violent, “shooting” will be defended as a proportionate response, when it’s actually a psychopathic response. (The author continues to make assertions as if they were self-evident. As mentioned, it is permissible and legal to use force to ward off criminals intent on causing destruction and mayhem.
The author will never get around to demonstrating an understanding of a key concept: A person engaging in property destruction is a threat to engage in bodily injury. Thus a person experiencing property damage at the hands of a protester cannot assume that this destruction will stop at throwing bricks through windows.)
One of these acts is not violent, and one of them is incredibly violent. (A thesis that has yet to be demonstrated.)
The immediate objection one encounters to this point is that property destruction is harmful. It causes financial harm. It can cause emotional harm. It destroys economically valuable items, and thus makes humanity materially worse off (at least, the portion of humanity that owns property). (The author concedes, only to immediately take it back with an irrelevant false equivalency...)
But many things cause financial and emotional harm without being violent, such as firing someone. There is a tendency, often on the left, to reason that anything producing some of the same negative effects as violence (e.g., gentrification) therefore is violence. And I think we should be careful about that kind of reasoning, because it can lead us to overlook some of the unique features of injuries that are done to the human body. (The author persists in isolating physical harm from property harm, as if there is no overlap.)
People on the right often conflate property and personhood, suggesting that one’s assets are an extension of one’s self, and that therefore attacks on property are morally equivalent to attacks on a person. But they’re not, for an obvious reason: They don’t produce the same kind of trauma and injury. (Now we begin to doubt the author's thinking skills. A person's property, as well as his own person, are his possessions. A fundamental aspect of property rights is the possession of one's own body and the fruit of one's labor. It is wrong to injure someone, not simply because it causes physical trauma, but also because it violates the person's property rights.
There can be no distinction between a person's human body and what that human body produces by effort and ingenuity. A person's labor is part of his personhood. That person engages in an exchange of his labor for money. Money is a proxy for labor. Money, in essence, is a certificate of labor.
Therefore, what that person purchases with his certificates of labor are as much a part of his personhood as his body. If a person's property [that is, what he acquired via his labor] is destroyed, he has experienced violence.)
The wealthy, (now comes a gratuitous and irrelevant attack on prosperity...)
who live comfortable lives largely free of violence, often pity themselves by comparing taxation to slavery and such, and ignoring the vast differences between what it is actually like to be a slave and what it is like to be a person with millions of dollars who has to pay some portion of it to the government. (The author summarily dismisses this without comment.)
When they make those sorts of arguments—when wealthy investors like Tom Perkins and Steven Schwarzman compared Obama to Hitler (The Left never compares people to Hitler...)
for proposing a tiny hike in the marginal tax rate, for example—conservatives trivialize the pain of every single victim of violence in recorded human history. (Undocumented assertion, and quite ludicrous.)
Nothing that occurs to a rich business owner on a spreadsheet can ever approach the seriousness of even a minor bodily wound. (Notice the false choices. We would say that everyone whose labor certificates are taxed is experiencing a diminution of their property rights and personhood, but the author arbitrarily isolates it to the rich only. Then he makes a false equivalency about personal injury and pronounces a moral judgment out of thin air.)
But when we adopt a definition of violence that includes the destruction of objects, these kinds of arguments become less nonsensical than they rightfully ought to be. (The author persists in moral judgments absent an actual articulation of the basis of those judgments.)
Of course, we may ask the question: Well, what about incidents in which nobody is physically harmed, and the damage is to property, but people are nevertheless traumatized? What about a domestic violence case in which a partner punches through a wall? What about the police destroying a shopkeeper’s stock in front of them? Are these not violent acts, simply because objects were the victims rather than people? But I think in these cases, we can see that the reason our instinct is to call the acts violent is that there were people present who were being threatened, terrified, and traumatized. This is precisely what we should focus on: What is happening to people? A person doesn’t have to actually be injured. If someone points a gun at you, and chases you threatening to kill you, they are being violent even if ultimately you escape “unharmed.” If, on the other hand, they are chasing a drone or a ball threatening to destroy it, they are performing a very different kind of act, one that should not be put in the same category. (The author basically concedes his case. Now we find that he does think property damage does cause injury to the property owner, but with the proviso that the property owner must be present for this to be true. Again the author draws an arbitrary line not based on any fact or evidence. We wonder if he will draw a new line later.)
This is not to say that riots and looting are always “nonviolent.” There have been acts of violence in the current protests. (More concessions.)
If someone throws objects at a police officer, that is violent, and then we get into a different set of questions about when violence can be justified as “self-defense.” If the police in one’s community act as a roving gang, roughing up people without accountability, is violence justified? Is violence against occupying armies justified? Is the only legitimate use of force that which is necessary to defend oneself against an actual attack? Is it equally violent to attack a person who is well protected—e.g., is a stone thrown at someone in full armor the same as a rubber bullet shot at a person in a t-shirt? Does a person’s vulnerability change how violent an act against them should be considered? Personally I am inclined toward a strictly nonviolent approach, for reasons of both principle and pragmatism, (Principles left unarticulated and unexplained.)
and on occasions when left-wing protesters have hurt people I have criticized it. But I also recognize that the questions involved are complicated, and I share Martin Luther King’s reluctance to condemn the violence of those who have no obvious means of having their political grievances dealt with through the democratic system. What I do think is clear, though, is that when we read a sentence like “protesters blocked buses, broke an arm off a statue of King Louis XVI outside City Hall and threw fireworks at police officers,” we should make sure to keep in mind that it is different to break the arm off a statue than to break the arm off a person, and that “blocking buses” does no damage beyond making people late. (The author has no comment regarding police officers suffering violence and trauma due to being placed in these dangerous situations. What about the harm they experience?)
(Blocking ambulances, on the other hand, might do substantial damage, and if it ever happens should be evaluated differently.) (As the author continues to parse and categorize, we wonder if anyone would want to bother to follow a flow chart of moral and permissible destruction vs. immoral and impermissible destruction. Frankly, his distinctions and provisos and exceptions are becoming pedantic and inscrutable.)
There is an instinct, in times of angry protests in major cities, to explain or excuse “the violence.” When protests broke out in Baltimore in 2015 in response to the death of Freddie Gray, there were those sympathetic to the protesters who defended violence as an occasional necessity in the pursuit of civil rights gains or pointed out that it is unfair and hypocritical to ask for the disaffected of Baltimore to remain peaceful, given that they have been violently besieged by the police for many years. This is correct, (Why is it correct? Why is it permissible to engage in violence and destruction at any time at all? The author dances around these issues and makes artificial delineations, but his rules and precepts are arbitrary.)
but it also concedes that violence is being done, and we should be careful about that. The police committed an act of violence when they murdered George Floyd and Freddie Gray; those who loot a building technically commit a crime, but not a violent one. It might be a Bad Thing, for something does not have to be violence in order to be unjustified and wrong. (So the author finally finds some moral disapproval for looting.)
(Personally, when it comes to big businesses I do not condemn it, because I find the distribution of wealth in this country so grotesquely unjust, so impossible to defend by any rational principle, that the violation of corporations’ property rights does not strike me as a wrong. (Spoken like a true socialist. That is the crux of the matter. Not comparisons, not categories, not morality. Everything he has written so far is a smoke screen. In actual fact, he wants the proletariat to rise up against the bourgeois.
Any action taken in the name of revolution is acceptable, because the rich have oppressed the poor and stole their wealth. Therefore, his intent to assert that property damage is not violence is simply a technique to further the underlying cause: The implementation of socialism. When viewed through this lens, we see the true agenda of the author.
And we have come to understand that socialists will say and do just about anything in service to the cause. If it can be accomplished without violence by misdirection and prevarication, that is fine. If the revolution has to be a little more destructive, that too is acceptable. If the revolution must become bloody, well, we have seen the long history of socialism's penchant for taking human life.
The author states that looting big businesses is not wrong. Again we gain insight into the socialist mind, from a somewhat different perspective. In the past, the Left has wanted progressive tax rates because the rich have too much and that money is better spent by government.
Socialism by incrementalism has been their strategy. But this has proved to be not enough. Higher taxes are not making the rich poorer. Wealth inequality has not improved. Increased central control is not having the desired effect.
Now that property destruction is deemed non-violent, it only makes sense that looting big business is morally acceptable. The mechanism has simply changed from government doing the looting to the oppressed doing the looting. This is in keeping with inciting the worker to rise up.)
The moral calculus changes somewhat if the property in question belongs to an uninsured small business, because there people’s livelihoods are actually hurt. (Yet another line is drawn.)
Attacking a small newspaper office with someone inside it is not defensible.) But unless we keep the distinction clear we minimize the fact that what happened to Freddie Gray—who had his spinal cord destroyed by being tossed against the metal walls of a police van—was infinitely worse than anything a shop window has ever experienced. (Again the author makes moral pronouncements.)
It is worth emphasizing, too, that property destruction is not a universal feature of anti-police protests. Many engage in none of it at all, and nothing even remotely resembling violence. (Well, yeah. But these people are not under discussion. If there are people not destroying property or hurting people, they have nothing to do with the author's article.)
In many of these protests, it is the police who are fully the aggressors by whatever rational standard we apply. As Ali Velshi of MSNBC reported of one Minneapolis protest, it “was a 100% peaceful march and the police opened fire into it. There was no reason to do so, there was zero provocation.” Protesters as a whole will be blamed for any act done by a single person who can even tangentially be tied to the group; if someone attacks police officers in the name of Black Lives Matter, it will be “Black Lives Matter attacks police officers.” Regardless of where one comes down on the justice of burning and looting, it almost always forms the minor part of these actions and is focused on to the exclusion of everything else.
More than simply being a definitional quibble about a particular term, defining violence carefully is about making sure “what happens to people” is placed at the center of our analysis. What happened to George Floyd is not the same as what happens to a looted Target, and while there are those who will want to say the protesters are “as bad as” the thing they are protesting against, that will only be the case when the protesters start pinning innocent, peaceful people to the ground and squeezing the life out of them. We need to keep the moral differences clear. (A final rhetorical flourish from the author, leaving us with no more information than we when started.)
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