Welcome To Our Mayhem: Facing The World’s Cultures Of Chaos
By James G. Poulos
Posted On November 06, 2005

I just don’t see…the outrage. I see people sad, I see them kind of bewildered, I see them kind of looking out in space. But I don’t see enough, ‘Goddammit, I’ve had enough of this.’

— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (two days before Katrina)

IT’S DIFFICULT, reading the news coming in from France, not to think of the cascading nightmare that overtook New Orleans before and after Katrina made the levees break. And it’s perhaps an equal challenge to avoid thinking about what has happened in Mar Del Plata, Argentina—where anti-American, anti-free trade protests segued into looting, burning, and pitched clashes with those sent in to keep order—without thinking also not just of Paris but of Iraq, too, where the “insurgency” is fueled by simple murder, personal and pathological, murder not of the forces of “occupation” but of children, market shoppers, job seekers, and devout Muslim diplomats. In Iraq, even the traffic has been touched by anarchy, but across the globe, touched off by disparate grievances, a tendency tuoward mayhem, universal in its interchangeability, has made anarchy the mark of the season. Why?

The conspiracy answer, the anti-capitalist one, is that forces of greed and power have systemically disenfranchised nonwhite, propertyless majorities around the world, and the spasm of destruction that’s taken place on four continents is an _expression of injustice writ in the only language left to the oppressed. We, it’s suggested, are responsible—for keeping poor, black New Orleans locked in poverty; for keeping poor Latin Americans in a Mestizo-like state (or worse); for freezing poor, Muslim immigrants out of white European society; and, of course, for forcing Western values on Iraq, killing all who resist, and plundering on our way.

However much of an indignity these charges seem, there has always been substance to the claim that injustice exists on a global level and is part of the machinery of civilzation. It is the distribution of injustice that Marxists, most prominently, have hated—for its inequality; and though communism failed most spectacularly to understand that an equal distribution of injustice destroys economies, families, lives, and souls, we owe it to ourselves and others not to feign parlor-room surprise when the underclasses attack, in those moments of spontaneous reckoning with the disappointments of their station.

IT’S FALSELY TEMPTING, then, to call this “the new mayhem;” there’s nothing new about it. What might be fresher, however, or more pungent to our modernity, is the way in which the current mayhem is keyed so brutally toward innocent bystanders. In New Orleans, Paris, Mar Del Plata, and Baghdad, retribution was not restricted to the real sources of grief themselves. Neighbors were murdered, streets were decimated, and private property was wantonly destroyed. There is meat to the possibility that, often times, those real sources of grief are too powerful to attack—the U.S. helicopter gunship, the apparatus of international capital, the culture of an entire nation or people. But, as the last example already implies, another possibility is that the real sources of failure and frustration in the lives at society’s bottom are not tangible things or people; another possibility is that the sources are within those who strike out, when they punish, against others instead of themselves; and a third possibility is that the failure and frustration that inspire uprisings among the mob have less to do with the physical quality of life and more to do with the spirit.

Certainly, pain and grievance cannot be routinely pawned off on weakness of character. Job may impress, but his example is not an excuse for tolerating social failure. It is a reminder, however, that discomfort can be transcended, and that no matter how bad it gets in one’s country the decapitation of random strangers is always unconscionable. Torching a McDonald’s may harbor a certain appeal, but torching the livelihoods of those who work there is an impoverished way to fight labor poverty.

On the smallest level, there is a gap—a moral gap—between the sensation of being wronged and the act of wronging another in response. Pelting the police with pebbles to condemn international capitalism is one type of thing; shooting at firefighters and medical teams as part of a running riot is quite another. Bombing an occupying army—even one that has its heart in the right place—may be stupid and hateful, but battle often is. Bombing a line of recruits for your local police department, or exploding the machinery your city needs for clean drinking water, is simply a cruelty and a crime.

THIS IS WHAT should concern us: the translation of generalized upset among certain groups into wanton, indiscriminate, nihilist violence. With the 20th century as our guide, we know already the horror unleashed when troubled intellectuals get behind the wheel of brute destruction. It is a dangerous myth that only the poor and oppressed become bloodthirsty; a poverty of the spirit, an oppression of the soul, have gripped bourgeois nonentities and turned them into some of death’s profoundest despots.

That impulse, which has fed human nature steadily since the beginning, needs to be faced and fought—in America, in Europe, in Iraq, and wherever it threatens civilized humanity. We can’t join every fight, and it isn’t our job even if we could; you fight the worst and the closest enemy first. This is why Iraq is important. It is why recreating New Orleans matters. It is why we must be careful with the power of international capital, which moves as quickly as fire and can move from warming to burning just as fast. Order, as Kirk quoted Weil, is the first need of all, and those who seek to destroy not just an order but the order of human life seek injustice in its purest form.

James Poulos is an attorney and writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.

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