Rational Rioting

A recent Scientific American article on the British riots claimed that “contrary to popular wisdom, mobs are not mindless. In fact, they act rationally—a characteristic that suggests ways to prevent riots.”

If you go through the reasoning, what it amounts to is: we need to stop rioting, but rioting is a response that follows from the assumptions and thinking of the rioters. In other words, the view of the articles’s author – all too common these days – is that “rationality” is just logic: rationality has nothing to do with the correctness of the assumptions upon which you operate, just how consistent your actions are with those assumptions. As if assumptions are necessarily arbitrary and subjective.

But if one recognises that reality is objective not subjective, that all things including ethics are within the reach of your thinking mind, then the last thing you would think is that rioting of the kind and for the motives indulged in by the British mobs is “rational”. The mindless destruction and the injustice of the usual riot is anti-life, because it is irrational. Rationality is not following your assumptions to their logical end: it is our primary virtue, that, as the riots show, should be used to question and validate our assumptions.