Mob . . . Mobbing . . . Mobbed

That a thing in its essence is both a noun and a verb, both the actor and the action, simultaneous – that without the verb, without the action, there is no noun, no ‘it’ – what is one to do with that?

Thus do I read in this morning’s paper about recent events in Egypt.  Some people have been ordered executed for their role in a previous soccer riot which resulted in deaths.  In reaction against the execution order, family, friends, soccer supporters or all of the above, rioted and caused the deaths of 27 additional people.  The irony would be laughable were it not so very tragic.

The word ‘mob’ comes from ‘mobile’ and ‘mobility’ – a thing that moves and the movement itself.     Entomology

In Examining the Mob Mentality, an interview with Tamara Avant, Psychology Program Director at South University in Southern Source, Avant says:

Deindividuation obviously does not occur every time people get together in a group, and there are some group characteristics that increase the likelihood of violence, such as group size and physical anonymity. First, many people believe they cannot be held responsible for violent behavior when part of a mob because they perceive the violent action as the group’s (e.g., “everyone was doing it”) rather than their own behavior. When in a large group, people tend to experience a diffusion of responsibility. Typically, the bigger a mob, the more its members lose self-awareness and become willing to engage in dangerous behavior.  Second, physical anonymity also leads to a person experiencing fewer social inhibitions.  When people feel that their behavior cannot be traced back to them, they are more likely to break social norms and engage in violence. 

Avant points to the presence of certain elements in mob violence:

1. Conscious choice – as in “I won’t get caught”, which suggests not that the mob makes the action happen, but that being in the mob allows cover to do that which we have wanted to do all along.  If the ‘doing’ doesn’t occur otherwise, it is only out of fear of consequences.

2. Related to #1, Avant holds that there is a sense of diffuse responsibility in a crowd that turns into a mob – that is, the individual no longer feels responsible for what he or she is doing.  But again, it would seem not that the mob gives birth to desire, but rather gives cover for it.

3. The greater the emotion, the lesser the restraint.

Anger and rage are feeding fires.  Without the oxygen of provocation (real or perceived) they die.  With it, they thrive, destroying all, including the holder of the anger or rage, in their wake.

Violence begets violence.  It’s so axiomatic I wonder that we continue to wonder at it.

A fire has to be starved of what feeds it to die.

I wonder whether any mob in history ever self-checked and simply went home.  If so, I suspect it began with one person: one person saying count me out.  One person bowing out of the fray, leaving in quiet, noticed perchance by a neighboring rioter, who then put down the brick and followed suit.  And then another. . . and another.

It takes lots of people to make a mob.  I’m guessing it only takes a few to unmake it.

Reinhold Neibuhr, as I remember, opined that the evil actions of the group are inherently different, of a differing class, than the evil of the individual.  Simply put, the evil of the group is of such a greater magnitude than the evil of the individual that there is something inherent in the nature of groups themselves that is evil.  I would tend to agree, but I have experienced mass groups differently.  Not all crowds are mobs.  Not all groups are evil.

Some years back, colleagues and I in CPT, along with our translator, monitored elections in north western Iraq, where Kurds are populous.  The Kurds had been denied the right to vote and many gathered outside the election commission to protest.  We went and spoke with many in the crowd.  They were mostly men.  They were all angry.  They were not a mob, but they could have become one.  Our translator was very nervous that we had placed ourselves in their center, and justifiably so.  And yet we stayed and we listened to their stories.  We wrote down their names.  We reported on their disenfranchisement.

There was no riot that day.  There could have been, but there wasn’t.  I don’t know if our presence played any part in that or not.  Perhaps it was as simple as this: the men and women gathered that day not in anger, but in purpose.  They were angry, but their anger was not their purpose: casting their vote was.  Maybe it’s the purposelessness of anger that is so dangerous.

Anger isn’t the opposite of peace; violence is.  And not all anger is violence.

Transforming anger at injustice into justice is hard work – painful and long and just plain hard.  The results are not often instantaneous.  It’s the work of the generations.  It takes patience.  Yet it bears fruit, this hard work.  The men and women I met that day stood taller than their fellow citizens who simply went home without their purple finger.  They took back their own pride and place.  It was a beginning.

How I wish those rioting in Egypt over a soccer match could have stood with their fellow citizens in the liberating squares, standing taller than sentiment, proud to claim responsibility, to say, We did this.

What makes the difference between a rioting mob and a citizenry gathered to change their world?  Maybe it is in the taking rather than the shedding of responsibility, in the insistence on being counted rather than being invisible.

Maybe.

McQueary and Mobs

There is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage than a useless mob.  --Herodotus

Students learn of the firing of former coach Joe Paterno and what is described on the news as a “small riot” breaks out.  I hear and wonder exactly what is a “small” riot?

 The footage showed what looked like a telephone booth (or was it a van?) overturned, a student atop a light pole and a group of students shouting and perhaps chanting.  It was nighttime.

The reported chants were “We want Joe back” and “One more game!”

And now it is reported that Assistant Coach Mike McQueary will not be on the field on Saturday for Penn State’s game, due to threats against McQueary, who was reportedly an eye-witness to one of the sodomy episodes at the center of the scandal at the school.

So here’s my question for the day, with a few givens:

1. GIVEN that Mike Mcqueary’s response of not intervening to save the child he saw being brutalized with his own eyes would not have been your response

2. GIVEN that you would have definitely intervened then and there

3. GIVEN that real people, children at that, were really hurt in real and lasting ways, at least some in a place (a college campus locker room) where they should have been safe and protected, but were not

Given all these things, and any other suppositions we care to make, how are the death threats against McQueary different than the behavior of the students rioting in the night with their foolish chant, One more game?

Aren’t both the reaction of the mob?

The punditry have given us the correct level of moral outrage, but did we really need that?  Do we really need anyone to tell us that this was wrong?  We know it was wrong, all of it.

But what we, the collective expression of opinion and will of the nation, do with this knowledge is the challenge.

We can, as we usually do and seem to be doing now, simply express our outrage, as if the mere expression of offense is taking action.

Or again, we can look to our own mirrors.  There are some hard and bitter truths to be found there:

1. Children in every neighborhood in every village, town and city in this country and around the world are exploited by adults while other adults look on and do nothing.

2. For every one of us who really would have stepped in in that locker room, there are probably ten who would have turned and walked away.  It happens every day.

3. Being disconnected from each other in any genuine sense of community (what philosophers call post-modernism [fn]) means that we have no sense of duty to the other, because we have no sense of the humanity of the other.  It is not surprising that we walk away.  It is sad, heartbreaking even, but not surprising.

If all we have to give the children who were exploited and abused is our outrage, it is little enough.  And they need so much more from us.  Perhaps a good starting place would be to stay off the streets and simply sit for a time with the enormity of it all.  For it is in the still small voice that Truth comes.

And Truth would remind us that all of us have walked away from somebody who needed us . . . all of us have let people down . . . and all of us can become better than we have been. . . better people, better family members, better citizens.

Threatening to kill Mike McQueary is no virtue.  It does not undo what was done.  And contrary to what we may tell ourselves, our outrage does not establish us as morally superior.

There is a place for outrage . . . it is and can be the impetus for change, individual and societal.

But remaining stuck in a perpetual state of outrage is unhealthy and ultimately is worse than doing nothing, because it gives us the illusion that we are acting for change when in fact we are doing nothing at all.

Moreover, our outrage, when given vent in the form of violence (and threats are themselves a form of violence) merely demonstrates than we are really no different at all.

If all we have to offer the children are our threats and our anger, we have failed.  We have failed them.  We have failed ourselves. And we have failed our God.

God’s call is to justice, not spleen venting.

And worst of all, perhaps, by giving vent, what we are actually doing is making this about us rather than about the true victims.

Where are the prayer vigils?

Where are the calls to friends who have suffered similarly asking if they’re all right?  For surely, any such news is a shock to those who have walked that horrible walk themselves.

Where are our tears?

And for outrage, where is our shock and dismay at the self-inflicted organization of our own destruction in the form of established power systems that cannot help but do what they did by virtue of their very nature?

More simply said, how dare we be surprised?

How dare we, who create demi-gods of our sports figures and give them immense power and wealth and acclaim and protection from lesser sins, be surprised that they took us at our word when it came to the greater ones that we did not want to know?

For let us remember, rules and laws were in place telling each one of those involved within the educational system what they were to do in such an event.  The problem is that they didn’t follow the rules.  But they seldom do.  And most days, we could care less.

Child sexual exploitation is not so much about sex as it is about power.  When we finally grasp that truth, it becomes clear how we are all complicit

And this isn’t touchy-feely do-gooder liberal gibberish.  This is hard truth.

When we set up systems with rules but then tell those within the system that they are exempt from the rules, we can’t be surprised that they believe us.

When we get angry with rule enforcers for consequences to the car-buying, money-lavishing behaviors in amateur sports; when we propose to ‘solve’ this problem not by stopping the practice but by legalizing it; when we value those of the institution or system not for their learning (the supposed purpose of colleges, after all) but for their money-making ability; when we wink and nod at grade fixing and criminal behavior by our sports ‘warriors’, we cannot, with any integrity, be surprised.

We have had our time of outrage.  It’s time to move on to the hard work, the hard work of being accountable to each other, the hard work of rethinking systems of power, the hard work of caring enough about each other to hold each other accountable before the horrors rather than after, the hard work of being citizens, people who live not alone but in community.

______

Fn.  With the denial of an objective reality and an objective Truth, postmoderns have been denied a sense of self and have developed a fascination with power.  Postmodernism and You.  The loss of self and the concomitant increased focus on power makes the mob a likely outcome in a time of crisis.  That, of course, is not new (although it can be seen as evidence of a society devolving rather than evolving).  What might be new, is our tendency to give meaning to the trivial, as in rioting to give Joe Paterno one more coaching opportunity.  It would be hard to imagine anything less important given the disclosures of the day.