Police Brutality And The Suicide Of Revolutionary Violence
(OPINION) As ever, then-Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin had to dehumanize George Floyd before he could kill him. Chauvin placed Floyd first figuratively, then literally, beneath him. Prior to jamming his knee into Floyd’s neck in an act of brutal subjugation, the toxic lie of his own superiority was already established in his heart. And because every man knows deep down that he is merely human, if Floyd was below him then Chauvin could only believe that Floyd was sub-human, a mere animal. This dehumanization is a very old story, as old as Cain slaying his brother Abel, whose blood cried out from the ground.
Citing the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that racial segregation replaces an “I — thou” relationship with an “I — it” relationship, and thus relegates persons to the status of things. James Baldwin went even further, pointing out that the racism’s dehumanization of African-Americans did not stop with its victims: this ideology not only denies the humanity of blacks, the racist also dehumanizes himself. A police officer cannot willfully ignore a black man’s humanity without thereby lowering himself, morally speaking, to the level of a beast. As Baldwin wrote, “If I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.”
Although MLK’s fragile legacy of nonviolent resistance remains alive among countless peaceful protesters (many of whom plead with supposed allies not to deploy violence), these voices have already been overshadowed by apologists for violence who see it as a necessary tool in the struggle for racial justice. To pivot from a critique of the violence of police brutality to a critique of the violence of riots is to court the charge of moral equivalence. So I will state clearly and without equivocation: violence on the part of law enforcement officers, who are commissioned by elected officials and take an oath to serve and protect the public, is a graver injustice (because it is institutional, systemic, and publicly supported) than violence on the part of private citizens who are looting — and this distinction holds not just in cases where the police target people and the looters target property.
But this fact should not prevent us from mounting a strong critique of both forms of violence. Police brutality and the ensuing riots, each in their own way, confront us with the urgent question: why has the normalization of violence become one of the most characteristic features of our time?
The misbegotten revolutionary violence of the riots — allegedly in Floyd’s name, but actually in a grotesque mimicry of police brutality — magnifies dehumanization on a massive scale. Furthermore, apologists for the rioters unwittingly dehumanize the disenfranchised protesters they claim to understand and support. Empathy and understanding are surely necessary—I am a psychiatrist, and spend my days trying to understand other people’s motivations and inner lives. But “to understand all is to forgive all” is not a humanitarian principle, precisely because it robs people of that which makes them human: the ability to take moral responsibility for their actions, contrary to acting on mere animal instinct.
The claim that whoever smashed, looted, and set fires could not have done otherwise is not sympathetic; it is dehumanizing and alienating. The real revolution would involve restoring the humanity of the rioters precisely by holding them responsible for the wanton destruction they cause.
Without excusing, then, let us try to understand. The rioters and thieves highjacking peaceful protests are human beings, not animals. They have human motivations and reasons, and they explain their thinking if we listen to them. Some clearly just want Louis Vuitton handbags or Nike shoes, demonstrating just how thoroughly they have absorbed the ultra-bourgeois values of our opulent society. But others among them truly believe their actions serve a just cause, and their elite apologists tend to agree.
Take as one example from thousands this Twitter thread from one of the architects of the Pulitzer prize winning New York Times “1619 Project.” In a remarkable feat of Orwellian logic, she asserts that the nonviolent civil rights protests ultimately succeeded because of violence: King and company’s “non-violent” resistance was merely a dialectic moment in a larger historical process ultimately vindicated by violence — which was actually the necessary ingredient to move the legislative needle. (This account omits the key element of conscience — of a shared humanity, the real hinge of the civil rights movement — which King firmly believed could be awakened in the hardened hearts of his fellow citizens. But that is an argument for another day.)
This is not a fringe opinion: these advocates for dialectic revolutionary violence are carrying the day. Their arguments appear increasingly attractive to young people, primed by a steady educational diet of critical theory and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The Washington Post described one recent college graduate who is planning to attend law school, and is quite rightly tired of people looking at him as though he is dangerous simply because he is black. He joined the protest outside the White House not because he really wanted to, but because he felt he needed to, as he explained: “Turn the other cheek hasn’t worked. We’ve got to do something. If we burn everything down, then something has got to give.” Justified anger? Without a doubt. Effective plan? Not so fast. If we burn everything down, then … well, we burn everything down.
Historically and philosophically, the elevation of violence follows the ideology of total revolution — understood as a transition from the old order characterized only by oppression, to a qualitatively new order that is so far beyond us that we can barely describe it. Given the revolution’s necessary break from the past in order to usher in the new future, it cannot be carried forward under the banner of traditional ethical principles (peace, freedom, justice, love): these words are empty slogans at best or justifications for the existing oppressive order at worst. Once ethics disappears, violence inevitably follows.
If order is merely a thin veneer for oppression, then it too is an abomination to be eliminated: order can only be interpreted as hostile and tyrannical. The goal is to erase the adversary so that nothing from the old world, not even its memory, remains. Thus, anarchic nihilism is not only justified, it is required by the total revolution. Research indicates that nonviolent protests, especially when met with state or vigilante repression, lead to positive change; whereas protestor-led violence moves public opinion instead toward social control. But for apologists of violence this is irrelevant, because their goal is revolution rather than concrete improvements in the here and now.
This should not surprise us, as it apparently surprised Chris Martin Palmer, a sportswriter in Los Angeles. When the riots started in Minneapolis, he tweeted, “Burn that shit down. Burn it all down.” Three days later when the riots arrived in LA and attacked a community down the street from his home, he changed his tune, “It’s a gated community and they tried to climb the gates. They had to beat them back. They destroyed a Starbucks and are now in front of my building. Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live” (italics added).
What had made Palmer think the revolutionaries would not include him among the denizens of the old bourgeois order? The gates outside his gated community? The Starbucks down the street? The fact that he wrote books about black NBA players? Total revolution by definition cannot be merely about racial justice or economic justice; it requires toppling an entire system that must be surpassed in order to usher in the new eon.
The attorney general of Massachusetts understood this perfectly well. Disavowing revolutionary violence in one breath, she ennobles it in the next as she reassures business leaders, “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.” Riots are the Pentecost of the wholly new future, a baptism by fire, don’t you see? One hears echoes Robespierre’s (or was it Napoleon’s?) famous quip, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” and Lenin’s remark, “To chop down a forest splinters will fly.” Though they disavow the past, revolutionaries nevertheless have their own mythology. After Marx the recurring symbolic motif has been that of completing the unfinished business of 1789: consider the looted Target shopping carts piled up like Jacobin barricades in Minneapolis.
Like 1789, this cannot end well. As the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce argued, “Suicide is the philosophical destiny of the [total] revolution, in the sense that it cannot go beyond the violent and nihilist stage of devaluing the values that previously were regarded as supreme.” The prototype of the revolutionary rioter will inevitably look like The Dark Knight’s Joker, who responds to a question about his aims by saying, “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”
Of course, the violence of police brutality and the violence of widespread riots are no ironic joke. The social and political consequences could not be more devastating. Del Noce points out the obvious corollary of the rioters’s nihilistic negations or their apologists’s ennoblement of violence: “The political counterpart of this devaluation [of values] is totalitarianism, i.e., institutionalized revolutionary violence.” If we aim at utopia by any means necessary, we end up with brutality. If we aim at human decency, we can make real progress, though our gains are always fragile, precious, and easily forfeit.
The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn learned this hard lesson while lying on his bed of straw in the Gulags, and only after suffering years of unjust oppression: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.” And, he asks, who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Misbegotten revolutions not only fail to produce their stated goals, they unfailingly produce exactly the opposite. The only revolution that will land where it aims is one that starts from the unshakeable conviction of the equal dignity and worth of every individual — and therefore it must disavow violence in any of its guises. In the last analysis, this premise is grounded in the conviction that every human person participates in the same transcendent Logos, which establishes our shared rationality and our shared humanity. This doctrine — which runs through Western philosophy and religion from Plato to Rosmini, but which is eclipsed by any ideology that ennobles violence — is the reason why no man or woman can ever be reduced to a merely animal existence.
The real revolution is the reawakening of this truth in every human heart, which can never be accomplished through violence. Like King, George Floyd believed this, and this is the only revolution that will honor Floyd’s memory.
This article was originally published on Arc Digital. It was published as part I of III in the series, The Origins of Our Crisis.
Aaron Kheriaty is an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the medical ethics program at UCI School of Medicine.