The commonsense view.
One hard pill Singaporeans may find hard to swallow is that the events that unfold in our country (Chinese Bus Driver riots, Little India Riots and even the regular ‘pondings’ around country) lack the simplistic idea of ‘causes’ they demand.
The idea of causes, as our commonsense understanding of it demands, doesn’t work particularly well in complex systems. In artificial, man-made mechanical contraptions like washing machines, you push a button and get an exact response. Your clothes end up spinning or a light blinks. However, in complex systems interdependencies are extreme, and the notion of cause is suspect.
Causes in the real world are either nearly impossible to detect or define. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system. It is useful to think in terms of ecology, you remove a specific animal and disrupt an entire food chain. Predators starve, preys grow unchecked and you have series’ of cascading side effects.
So what then about riots?
The journalist and author, Charles Duhigg, in his best-selling book ‘The Power of Habit’ describes how he became interested in the science of habit, as a newspaper reporter in Baghdad. He had been Iraq for about two months when he heard about an officer conducting an impromptu habit modification program in Kufu, a city ninety miles south of Baghdad.
The major had recently been assigned to oversee the base at Kufu. To prepare, he had studied footage of the nearby towns shot by drone planes, and had noticed a pattern that often emerged when a crowd turned violent. Frequently, before a riot erupted, a small crowd of Iraqis would gather in a plaza or other open space and, over the course of several hours, start shouting angry slogans. Spectators would show up. Food vendors would arrive. The angry shouts would get louder. More time would pass.
Then someone would throw a rock or a bottle and all hell would break lose.
When the major met the mayor of Kufu, he had an odd and specific request. “Could the local police keep food vendors out of the plazas?”
“Sure,” the mayor said. “No problem.”
A few weeks later, a small crowd gathered near the Masjid al-Kufa, or Great Mosque of Kufa. Throughout the afternoon, it grew in size. People started chanting angry slogans. Iraqi police, sensing trouble, radioed the U.S. base and asked troops to stand by. At dusk, the crowd started getting restless. More and more people were shouting. Spectators began looking for the kebab sellers normally filling the plaza, but there were none to be found. It was dinnertime. The crowd was hungry. A handful went home to eat. Others left to find restaurants. By 8 P.M., almost everyone was gone. The riot never happened. In fact, there hadn’t been a riot since the major arrived.
Seeing the world through a lens of cause and effect imposes a kind of simplicity that simply may not be there. It would be easy to attribute a myriad of ‘causes’, all equally valid and ambiguously ‘fundamental’. And these problems extend beyond a mere psychological tendency towards ‘patternicity’(skeptic Michael Shermer), ‘intentionality’ or the human predisposition to be ‘conspiracy theorists’ (philosopher Alex Rosenberg). The logician V.W Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that match a given series of facts, all of which were devoid of nonsense. For an event as complex as an Iraqi riot we can attribute a multitude of different causes ranging from the presence of American imperialism, centuries-long animosity between Islamist factions and Western Christianity, absence of education and even the embedding of the patriarchy in mainstream Iraqi society.
And yet, sometimes it boils down to removing kebab stands. There is a paranoia that acknowledging the absence of ‘causes’ as we understand it renders us powerless to prevent the occurrence of future high impact events like the riots.
One useful heuristic that prevents us from spiraling into a regress of causes is the adoption of the Five Why’s heuristic. Developed by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production system, the system takes its name from the investigative method of asking the question “why?” five times to understand what has happened (A watered down version of the Socratic method).
We can imagine diagnosing the occurrence of the riot as such:
1.Why were there so many migrant workers involved in the riot? (they gather on the open fields near the vicinity of Race Course road on weekends)
2. Why do they gather on the field? (low cost location for them to consume alcohol and unwind)
3. Why is it a low cost location compared to other regions? (police have been very tame in their policing of their occupying state-owned land)
And this is just 3 levels in. We can intuitively see that one possible way to prevent future riots is the actual strict enforcement of smaller crimes such as trespassing and jaywalking in that region. Simple uncontroversial actions like these can prevent the crowd from reaching a critical mass that might tip into full scale violence.
To the credit of Singaporean administrators, they have sought practical solutions to the problem of mob concentration. One actionable factor identified rapidly by Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew was the high degree of vendors in the area with liquor licenses. Employing the ‘5 whys’ heuristic, it is easy to imagine how one would have arrived at that conclusion, in the aftermath of beer bottles being used as weapons for the police.
However, adopting this perspective on Singaporean society demands that we abandon most of our cognitive biases. In the hours that followed the riot, we have seen ruling party members, opposition members and journalists play amateur sociologists and social psychologists. Pushing forward a neat narrative about the origins of the riots, these conspiracy theorists have proposed theories that not only have no empirical grounding but mask elitism, racism and hypocrisy. These conspiracy theories range from the oppression of migrant workers in Singapore leading to a revolutionary explosion of repressed anger to accusations to incompetence by an administration thirsty for economic growth. There may be elements of truth in these narratives, but unfortunately they do not hold up to rational scrutiny. (In fact, I am of the view that this was a result of gross negligence of that particular region for years by law enforcement agencies).
While seductive, we must abandon these false narratives and instead seek solutions that hold up to the highest levels of examination. Any simplistic explanation involving fundamental causes or folk psychology must be discarded as sophistry.
After all, our future depends on it.
Kizen
*Article first appeared on http://kizen.hubpages.com/hub/Little-India-Riots