What happens when Hobbesian logic takes over discourse about protest – and why we should resist it

By Regina Rini (the-tls.co.uk)Protesters near the spot where George Floyd died while in custody of the Minneapolis Police, on May 26, 2020© Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images

Two weeks after Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd, the videos are still coming. Enormous crowds of peaceful protesters demand justice for Floyd and other victims of anti-black police brutality. Alongside the many peaceful protests, there are scattered acts of violence and even looting. And so out come the confident moral verdicts on political violence. We are usually offered a choice between two absolutist views: either violence is a brave corrective to sclerotic social apathy, or it is an inexcusable corruption of noble protest. But I think neither of these options is satisfying. This situation demands more nuanced moral attitudes than simple celebration or condemnation. A failure to recognize moral ambiguity is leading us to dangerous political ends.

Condemning violence, of any sort, seems like the easiest answer. But we cannot judge uprisings by the standards of Sunday tea. Yes, of course, it is usually an unambiguous moral wrong to ransack a shop or burn a police car. Yet those verdicts ignore context. We accept that soldiers in a legitimate war do things inexcusable in peace time; we don’t agonize over the damage Allied forces inflicted on beachfront property at Normandy. Insisting that people who have endured years of racist police brutality – now amplified in nightly crackdowns – must meekly petition for gradual redress is a kind of moral appeasement fit for drawing room Neville Chamberlains.

Yet, at the same time, it’s also a mistake to romanticize or glorify violence. However righteous the cause, the costs of destruction fall largely on communities already suffering from mistreatment. In Minnesota, fifteen pharmacies were looted or burned by the end of May, leaving locals scrambling to find crucial medicine. In St. Louis, a seventy-eight-year-old man was killed by looters while guarding a pawnshop. The people who suffer these harms are dishonoured by naive applause from amateur revolutionaries with little at stake. One video circulating on Twitter appears to show white people caught trying to hand out bricks to black people; “that shit could get them killed”, a black woman informs the joyriding provocateurs as she returns their dubious ammunition.

But, if neither oblivious condemnation nor naive enthusiasm is fitting, then what is the right moral verdict on violence amid protest? The right answer is to refuse to deal in verdicts. This isn’t a situation that calls for thumbs thrust up or down. Brutal systemic racism is a vast tragedy where both complacency and resistance lead to frightening outcomes. In such a tragedy, the first duty of observers is to listen to what is said in broken glass and wailing sirens.

You’ve probably already heard the line from Martin Luther King Jr., “a riot is the language of the unheard”. The speech, delivered at Stanford in 1967, is an extraordinary example of embracing moral ambiguity. King reiterates his advocacy for nonviolent tactics, saying that acts of “violence will only create more social problems than they will solve”. Yet he insists riots are not mindless destruction; they are communicative acts, drawing attention to decades of poverty and neglect. They are reminders “that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity”.

King’s insistence on seeing beyond simple judgement is echoed in recent trends in moral theory. Traditionally, western philosophy tended to focus on theorizing what makes actions count as right or wrong. But many philosophers now see this as an overly limiting project. Elise Springer, in her recent book Communicating Moral Concern (2013), writes that “nothing bars us from framing our practical life as a chronicle of individual actions, each with a stand-alone moral status; but it is as insightful as conceiving dialogue as a chronicle of individually chosen words”. Instead, Springer focuses on the importance of attention; moral communication is first about getting others to recognize that something morally important is at stake, not simply adjudicating its place in a table of rights and wrongs.

What are the concerns being drawn to our attention by the peaceful Floyd protests, and even by the less peaceful turbulence around them? Many are still the same that King pointed to more than fifty years ago: poverty, neglect, disrespect. Added to these is the increasingly urgent problem of racist police violence. An online spreadsheet lists (at the time of writing) more than 300 videos of police brutality directed against non-violent protesters. In a YouTube video, the writer Kimberly Jones answers those who ask “Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?” with the following: “It’s not ours. We don’t own anything … There’s a social contract that we all have: if you steal or if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us. So the social contract is broken”.

If you’re thinking: “yes, but that doesn’t justify violence”, then you’re missing the point. Like King, we should insist that listening for the message in violence is not the same thing as justifying it. Many black Americans have noticed the way that nonviolent protests – like Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem, which got him pushed out of the NFL – are ignored or misinterpreted by whites. Some have chosen, in desperation, to communicate instead in the language of the unheard.

And if we still refuse to hear that message then we will risk temptation by dangerously simplistic policies. On June 3, the Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton published an op ed in the New York Times calling for military force to quell violence in American cities. Cotton insisted, “the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd”. Instead, he claimed it to be the work of “nihilist criminals … simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction”, abetted by “cadres of left-wing radicals”.

Cotton is refusing to listen to the unheard. He cannot imagine any motivation for violence other than greed, “radical chic”, or the carnival thrill of flames and crunching glass. On that myopic moral view, of course there’s no reason to listen. These are not respectable motives, and the people who hold them cannot be reasoned with. So, Cotton concludes, the only answer is the threat of deadly force.

This is a very old idea. It echoes the politics of Thomas Hobbes whose book Leviathan gave us the famous idea that, without government, human life would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. Hobbes sees an all-powerful Sovereign as the only solution to a “warre of every man against every man” in which “the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place”. Peace comes only when every person submits to the rule of the Sovereign.

On a Hobbesian view, there can be no protest within civil society, because protesters show that they were never really part of the state at all. Protest “does never breake the Peace, but onely somtimes awake the Warre. For those men that are so remissely governed, that they dare take up Armes, to defend, or introduce an Opinion, are still in Warre; and their condition not Peace, but only a Cessation of Armes for feare of one another; and they live as it were, in the procincts of battaile continually”.  In other words: anyone who would challenge the authority of the state was never truly signed up to the project of government at all, and they can only be dealt with through overwhelming violence.

Most of us have rightly come to see Hobbes’s views as narrow and simplistic. We insist that governments should tolerate dissent, that order is possible even among a multiplicity of voices. Making the state the sole arbiter of collective action leads to a jaggedly binary worldview: there are only those who submit, and those who must be subdued.

Hobbes seems even to have anticipated the clashes we’ve now seen between police and protesters. “To resist the Sword of the Common-wealth, in defence of another man, guilty, or innocent, no man hath Liberty … But in case a great many men together, have already resisted the Soveraign Power Unjustly, [they have] the Liberty then to joyn together, and assist, and defend one another… For they but defend their lives, which the guilty man may as well do, as the Innocent.”

That’s the moral universe of a simplistic condemnation of political violence. All violence against the state is wrong, but then once it happens, once the process has begun, more violence is justified – both from the state and from its opponents. We can see this idea in the police enforcement of evening curfews across America’s cities. Peaceful protesters become criminals when the curfew hour strikes, and then the police are free to charge. The boundaries for what counts as defiance of the state shift from hurling Molotov cocktails to waving placards at dusk. And then Hobbesian logic takes over to predict not only police violence against civilians but civilian violence in turn.

Senator Cotton would surely deny that he subscribes to Hobbesian tenets. He insists he is distinguishing between legitimate nonviolent protests and unacceptable riots. But his refusal to acknowledge the desperate message of the unheard forces him to evaluate them just as Hobbes would; as irrational outsiders to peace, rather than citizens who believe they have no other way of speaking. And his proposed solution, a Leviathanic assertion of military might, certainly could not be trusted to practice a principled distinction between types of resistance. Events of the past week have surely proven that much.

This, ultimately, is why we must all resist judging desperate political violence through a simple binary lens. Against a history of wilful ignorance towards injustice, and with the list of unaccountable acts of state violence growing daily, we shouldn’t expect easy or comforting verdicts. There’s no need to endorse violent protest, still less to celebrate it. What’s really needed is for us to listen.

Regina Rini (@rinireg) holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University in Toronto