We need a another word
Rebecca Solnit argues persuasively in the Nation that it is journalistic malfeasance to report on “looters” in Haiti as if they were opportunistic criminals:
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.
By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. [...]
So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.
In this circumstance, taking the food and drink you need to survive isn’t an excusable offense; it’s a duty. Private property was made for man, not man for private property; and what the church calls “the common destination of all goods” becomes a much more immediate consideration when every system of distribution has broken down. Looting is a kind of theft, and the Haitians you see grabbing food and drink from collapsed grocery stores are not thieves; they are desperate human beings left without other resource.
So why does it matter so much if journalists call them looters? Because it suggests that the police we see beating and shooting at these people are just doing their jobs, as if enforcing property rights should be any kind of priority after a calamity of this kind. Because it suggests that Haitians are a lawless people making a bad situation worse rather than a resourceful people surrounded by death and determined to live.
Yes. One of those times when you have to quote The Onion: “White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters.”
Looting is a kind of theft, and the Haitians you see grabbing food and drink from collapsed grocery stores are not thieves; they are desperate human beings left without other resource.
Far be it from me to judge people in such an extreme situation, but not all the looters are taking food and drink. Some of them are taking whatever merchandise they can get their hands on from shops. I have read reports of fellow Haitians (civilians, not police) beating and even lynching looters. And of course youths wielding machetes and making sure that they, rather than the unarmed people, get the “loot” are not helping the situation even if they are getting themselves food and water.
In times of extreme and urgent necessity, the usual claims of legal ownership do and should come under heightened scrutiny. The Haitian situation is one of those times. So are most times of widespread dislocation. This is well understood in traditional Catholic thought, but I doubt that most Catholics, at least in this country, realize this. Of course, the question of rightful ownership does have to return to center stage as soon as is feasible, but that does not mean just re-establishing the status quo ante.
I realize that I’ve not said much here, but what little I have said, because it does reflect our tradition, is not irrelevant.
I saw a report of people “looting” some kind of department store, taking bolts of fabric, or perhaps it was carpets. And that did seem distinct from people taking food, and clearly just opportunistic — until I recalled that these people are probably living on the streets and could be intending to create a makeshift tent out of the stolen fabric. The line is very hard to draw. There’s also the question of how much news media actively seeks to create the “looting and chaos” narrative, vs. how much they’re just reporting on what they observe. The earliest stories out of disaster zones tend to anticipate the turn toward lawlessness — “No reports of looting or riots yet, but locals are concerned that it’s only a matter of time,” etc.
The state is going to be interested (or should be) in both order and justice. Allowing people to take goods after the disaster can support both. But the state may also decide that certain kinds of taking are a threat to order, or that taking at all after a certain time is a threat to order. So it may be legitimate for the state to take steps to stop it.
I think they can do this, because what we are talking about always remains theft. But in this case it is theft with mitigations. The mitigations can be such that they far outweigh the theft.
In this regard, the whole thing looks to me strangely like a more general discussion of sin.
The more fundamental point is that the we can never own any material thing absolutely. (John Locke claimed that we owned our own bodies. I think he’s mistaken, but that’s another matter.) Anyone in desperate need to preserve his or her life or the lives of other helpless people has a right to make use of these necessities that trumps all legal rights to these items. In these extreme cases, there is no theft in the moral sense, only in the legal sense
I can recall seeing a video clip or newspaper story somewhere where a person was photographed with some piece of unusual electronic equipment and the reporter asked him if he knew what it was. The person replied no, he had no idea but that maybe he could get “5 cents”, yes “5 cents” for it.
Obviously he was desperate but in another way, besides his own life, he is also keeping the capitalistic financial system alive, is he not?
Ownership in situations like Haiti comes down to who has the item in their possession. Only from that position can the system become renewed and order eventually reestablished. And often it is the bully and crook who come to the fore and eventually create the new “crust”. Think of the era of prohibition in the USA and who it make respectable today.
Eventually, those who are leaders in the drug underground are likely to emerge as respected capitalists once they are legalized, regulated, taxed and controlled.