Riot: A hissy fit gone too far
With a note on the rise of neotoddlerism
Back when tertiary education was free, I took part in a student demonstration against a government move to have us pay a small sum towards our privileged existence. A group of us entitled little snots marched ourselves on a busy weekday to Queen Street, in the heart of Auckland’s CBD, and planted our entitled arses in the middle of what may have been New Zealand’s busiest intersection.
It got us nowhere. Actually, that’s not true - many of us, including me, were arrested and appeared in court a few days later. Fortunately, we came before a lenient judge who slapped us with a small fine and sent us on our childish way.
When I see the numerous protests taking place around the world at the moment, one thing I have to remind myself before judging anyone is that I have been, and may well still be, quite capable of throwing a hissy fit over perceived slights against myself or others.
That said, a lot of people today seem to be throwing a lot of hissy fits, some of them with rocks and other missiles. A small but disturbingly angry proportion of them are also railing against people who’ve done them no harm.
Writer Gurwinder Bhogal has dubbed this phenomenon neotoddlerism in an article that’s being shared far and wide, defining it as “the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year-old”.
In Britain, many of those would-be three-year-olds have ventured into arson, looting, breaking into refugee accommodation, assaulting police, and using social media to incite others to acts of violence. Charges that people have been sent to prison for include violent disorder, racially aggravated criminal damage, attempted arson, burglary and assaulting an emergency worker. Surprisingly few have been charged with actual rioting, a crime that can earn you up to 10 years in prison.
In the unlikely event that you had been charged with causing a riot in the 12th century, when that word first appeared in English, your peers would have taken it that you’d followed the wrong scent on a hunt, misled by your incompetent hounds. If ever a word began life with a narrow meaning, this surely is it.
Over the next 200 years, riot’s meaning became delightfully decadent, sliding in a manner that Oscar Wilde would surely have applauded into “debauchery, extravagance, wanton living”.
Although it was only a small conceptual step from there to the modern meaning of “civil disorder, violent disturbance of the peace”, that meaning didn’t show up until the 1700s. In 1714, Great Britain passed the Riot Act, authorising local authorities to declare any group of 12 or more people to be unlawfully assembled and order them to disperse or face punishment, including death.
The Act was a response to a series of riots that had recently taken place across Britain. Any qualified official could read the Riot Act to an assembled group, after which they had one hour to disperse. As you’d expect, the Act quickly became a political as well as a legal tool, most notoriously in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which 18 people were killed and hundreds more injured when sabre-wielding cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000 in Manchester.
The Peterloo Massacre as envisaged by the losing side. Artist: Richard Carlile, 1819.
English took riot from the Anglo-French rioute, where it meant “dispute, argument, domestic strife”. (Trust English to ditch that useful definition in favour of one unique to fox hunting.) It may have originated from the Latin rugire (“to roar”), which is etymological code for “who knows where tf it really came from?”
If you ever find yourself bemoaning young people’s habit of using negative words in a positive sense (sick, bad, mean, etc), note what our generation - and generations before us - have done with riot. An uber-successful event may be riotously successful. That garish painting in your lounge that you love so much is a riot of colour, and that friend who’s the life of every party she attends is famous for being an absolute riot.
While rioting in the throwing bricks sense is almost always reprehensible, I find myself granting only qualified assent to Bhogal’s un-nuanced argument. By lumping in supporters of Hamas’ 2023 strike on Israeli civilians with those who back the actions of Just Stop Oil, for example, he paints with such a broad brush that activists like British suffragette Emily Davison, Nelson Mandela, Canadian environmentalist Paul Watson, Tiananmen Square occupiers, Greensboro sit-inners and those who occupied Hamilton’s Rugby Park during the 1981 Springbok tour - all of whom disrupted people going about their everyday (and legal) business - would all qualify as neotoddlers.
The thing with civil disobedience is that your neotoddlerism may be someone else’s brave stand against injustice - and vice versa. History is rich with people who, by breaking the law and disrupting established systems, have contributed to important changes. And history, unfortunately for those of us who’d like to be right about our view of things today, is probably the best judge of which actions fall into which category.
One thing I’m certain of, though, is that I was not taking a brave stand against injustice when I parked my backside on Queen Street. But I’m confident that those who occupied Rugby Park, while they may or may not have contributed to the end of apartheid (a system that already contained the seeds of its own demise), played an important role in New Zealand’s painful awakening to the fact that we were part of an adult global community and that giving the finger to the rest of the world - as New Zealand did so eloquently that year - was itself the act of a neotoddler.
That’s my rant for this week. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my nap.
Bits and specious
Britain’s Riot Act was repealed in 1973. The New Zealand equivalent was repealed in 1987. One of its more curious features was that whoever read it was required to do so verbatim. Failure to do so meant any subsequent conviction was likely to fail.
OK, since you insist, here’s the full wording: Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.
US readers can stop scoffing now. Your Massachusetts state legislature passed a Riot Act in 1786.
Sadly for Britain, the latest riots are nothing new. 2011 saw a similar outbreak of violence that led to five deaths.
Quote of the week
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room!
Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley in Doctor Strangelove