Chapter IX SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR Throughout this report we have concentrated on showing the difficulty of determining what causes and what prevents violence, such as it is, in several protest movements. A common theme has emerged from the analysis of these movements. We have argued that they represent forms of political protest oriented toward significant change in American social and political institutions. In this concluding chapter we consider some of the implications of this perspective for public policy. In doing so, we narrow our focus to the question of the meaning of riots and civil disorder. We believe that conventional approaches to the analysis and control of riots have inadequately understood their social and political significance, and need to be revised. In the first section of this chapter we examine the prespective on riots developed in social-scientific theories of collective behavior. This is not merely an academic exercise. At least since the 1919 Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1 these perspectives have influenced the assumptions underlying official responses to civil disorders. Even where direct influence is unclear, it remains true that there has been a remarkable similarity between academic and official views on the nature, causes, and control of civil disorder. In the second section, we consider some of the themes in the official conception of riots in the light of historical and contemporary evidence. In the final section, we consider the implications of our findings for conventional approaches to the social control of disorder. THEORIES OF COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR "Common sense" sees riots as threatening, irrational, and senseless. They are formless, malign, incoherent, and destructive; they seem to raise to the surface those darker elements of the human character which are ordinarily submerged. Most of all, they are something others do: the lower classes, disadvantaged groups, youth, criminals. By and large, this conventional view of riots has been adopted in the development of the study of collective disorder, although some of the most recent work in social science has come to perceive the relative and definitional aspects of such terms as "order," "violence," and "crime." As William Kornhauser has recently written, "The readiness to assimilate all politics to either order or violence implies a very narrow notion of order and a very broad notion of violence . . . what is violent action in one period of history becomes acceptable conflict at a later time."2 It is this more recent prespective that we attempt to apply to the analysis of collective behavior, especially in our consideration of social response. The "Crowd" The modern study of collective behavior has its origins in the nineteenthcentury European writers on the "crowd." In the work of Gabriel Tarde, Gustave LeBon, and others, the emergence of the "crowd" was identified with the rise of democracy. It was seen as both the catalyst and symbol of the decline of everything worthy in European civilization during and after the French Revolution. In becoming part of a crowd, wrote LeBon, “a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization."3 Unlike civilized behavior, crowd behavior was impulsive, spontaneous, and uninhibited, rather than the product of reason, established tradition, and the restraints of civilized life. Ideas spread in the crowd through processes of contagion and suggestion. In this view, the crowd developed like a highly infectious disease; the crowd represented a pathological state.4 Like others after him, LeBon had little to say about the origins of crowds; while exhaustively discussing their nature, he left the conditions of their emergence obscure. In this way, the "pathological" and "destructive" behavior of crowds was dissociated from its environmental and institutional framework. Finally, LeBon and other early writers tended to lump together indiscriminately what we today regard as distinct phenomena; in their aristocratic assault on the crowd, they included parliamentary bodies and juries as manifestations of "crowd behavior.”5 This approach, while perhaps useful in discrediting the aspirations of rising social classes in a democratizing age, seriously undermined the analysis of specific instances of collective behavior. Transplanted to American sociology and social psychology, the preconceptions of European theorists underwent considerable modification. 6 Lacking a feudal tradition, American society was not receptive to the more explicitly anti-democratic biases represented in European theories of the crowd. The irrational behavior of crowds was no longer, for the most part, linked to the rise of democratic participation in government and culture. The simplistic disease model of collective behavior was for the most part replaced by a new perspective which, while discarding some of the older themes, retained many of their underlying premises.7 The major change invoked in more recent analyses of collective behavior is toward greater interest in the causes of disorder. At the same time, early conceptions of the nature of riots have largely been retained. The Nature of Riots Social scientists usually place riots under the heading of "collective behavior," a broad concept which, in most treatments, embraces lynchings, panics, bank runs, riots, disaster behavior, and organized social movements of various kinds.8 Underlying this union of apparently diverse phenomena is the idea that each in some sense departs from the more routine, predictable, and institutionalized aspects of social life. Collective behavior, in the words of a leading social psychology text, is not only "extraordinary” and “dramatic," but also "likely to be foolish, disgusting, or evil."9 The crucial element of "collective behavior" is not that it is collective-all group interaction isbut that it is qualitatively different from the "normal" group processes of society. Smelser, for example, acknowledges that although patriotic celebra tions may erupt into riot, they are not to be considered as illustrative of collective behavior. True, they are based often on generalized values such as the divine, "Collective behavior" is thus conceived as nonconforming and even “deviant" group behavior. Under this conception, the routine processes of any given society are seen as stable, orderly, and predictable, operating under the normative constraints and cumulative rationality of tradition. The instability, disorder, and irrationality of "collective behavior," therefore, are characteristic of those groups which are experiencing "social strain," for example, "the unemployed, the recent migrant, the adolescent." 11 As such, "collective behavior" is characteristically the behavior of outsiders, the disadvantaged and disaffected. Sometimes, however, "collective behavior" becomes the property of the propertied, as when businessmen and bankers "panic" during a stock-market crash or the failure of a monetary system. Yet since the propertied rarely experience such "social strain" they likewise rarely inherit the derogation "panicky" and "crazy." When they do they are also relegated to the status of social outcasts, even though a bank run may in fact be an illustration of rational self-interest, narrowly conceived. Usually, however, "panicky" and "crazy" are terms reserved for social movements and insurrections, collective-behavior theorists suggesting that a fundamentally similar departure from reasonable and instrumental concerns underlies all of them. According to a recent theorist, what such phenomena have in common is their organization around ideas which, like magical beliefs, distort reality and "short-circuit" the normal paths to the amelioration of grievances. 12 This distorted outlook is held responsible for the "crudeness, excess, and eccentricity" of collective behavior. 13 Related to this conception of collective behavior as irrational is an implicit notion that collective behavior is-particularly in its more "explosive" forms-inappropriate behavior. Just as many bewildered observers tend to view a riot in the same terms as a temper tantrum, so a social scientist categorizes collective behavior as "the action of the impatient." 14 Implicit in this perspective is the application of different premises to collective as opposed to "institutionalized" behavior. To define collective behavior as immoderate, and its underlying beliefs as exaggerated, strongly implies that "established" behavior may be conceived as both moderate and reasonable, barring direct evidence to the contrary. Needless to say, such an approach has important political implications, which ultimately renders much of collective behavior theory an ideological rather than analytical exercise. This inherently judgmental aspect of collective behavior theory is made all the more damaging by being unexpressed; indeed, many of the theoretical traditions represented in current work on collective behavior stress the need for a "value-free" social science. It should be emphasized that theories of collective behavior are not all of a piece, nor are they necessarily as internally consistent as this overly brief analysis implies. Several theorists, for example, recognize the potentially constructive character of collective behavior: all, however, remain deeply rooted in the tradition of viewing collective behavior as distinct from "orderly" social life. 15 Whereas much of modern social science remains close to its early forerunners in its assessment of the nature and quality of collective behavior, it departs from the traditional view in recognizing that the origins of collective disorder are neither mysterious nor rooted in the dark side of human personality. 16 Rather, modern social theory usually focuses on two social sources of collective behavior: a condition of social "strain" or "tension," leading to frustration and hostility on the part of marginal or disadvantaged groups; and a breakdown of normal systems of social control, both in the sense of widespread social disorganization and of the inability of local authorities to maintain order in the face of emergent disorder. When contemporary theorists attempt to deal with the causes of riot, one or both of these factors is generally invoked. On balance, the latter factor, i.e., the breakdown of social control on a global or local level, predominates in these discussions. A major text in the sociology of collective behavior stresses as determinants of collective behavior both "social disintegration" and the failure of those occupying positions of social control to effectively perform their functions. 17 Another, while stressing the importance of "frustration" as one kind of strain leading to "hostile outbursts" 18 also argues that firmness in the "agencies of social control" may play a role in preventing outbursts. 19 This perspective is affirmed in a recent work directed specifically to the causes and control of ghetto disorders, where it is argued that while "social tensions" clearly underline riots, they amount to only a partial explanation; "a key element in the outbreak of riots is a weakness in the system of social control." 20 Specifically, the failure of social control is said to be involved in a number of ways, and at a number of stages, in the emergence of ghetto riots. On one level, the breakdown of social control means the existence of “a moral and social climate that encourages violence," especially through the mass media.21 On another level, it means the failure of law enforcement agencies to stop the process of "contagion" 22 through which riots spread. Left inadequately controlled, the riot escalates into widespread destruction and extensive sniper fire. 23 Similarly, modern riot control manuals stress that riots are triggered by "social contagion" and "the level of mob frenzy... is reinforced and augmented by seeing others who are equally excited and also rioting." 24 The retention of the concept of contagion illustrates the degree to which most theories of collective disorder remain bound by earlier perspectives. The conception of the "escalated riot” involving heavy sniper fire illustrates the reciprocal relation between an inadequate theoretical framework and an inadequate attention to questions of fact, for, as the Kerner Commission exhaustively demonstrated, the existence of "heavy sniper fire" in the ghetto riots of the 1960's was largely mythical. 25 It is the kind of myth, however, which fits very well the theoretical presuppositions dominating much collective behavior theory. It is also the kind of myth which may turn out to be self-confirming in the long run. |