Some thoughts on verbal taunting and violence

Lindsay at Majikthise (and here) sets out a claim about the Zidane-Materazzi incident to which others have responded. Here it is:

I am convinced by Abbas's argument that a racist taunt from Materazzi would have been an incredibly low blow and an especially serious provocation for Zidane. However, I don't see how a verbal assault of any kind, no matter how reprehensible, can excuse a high-level professional athlete who assaults a fellow player during a critical match...

Provocation is at best a mitigating factor. If an individual becomes so enraged as to lose control of their rationality, then they are less culpable than a cold-blooded assailant, but they are nevertheless culpable. If you catch your spouse cheating on you, you have a right to be furious, but you don't have a right to physically assault anyone. If you do lose control and hurt someone, it's your fault for not having better self-control. The same goes for Zidane.

Let's look at this for a moment in terms of taunting/verbal provocation and violent reaction more generally speaking.

Neddie makes a similar point about Zidane's reaction as a professional matter in the comments here. And Matt points out also here that the claim of moral failure takes the matter out of context. I agree with both of these points, so let's set them aside for now, although I'll come back to the point where Matt and I agree.

Further, Lindsay's analogy to killing an unfaithful lover doesn't hold water. There's a rather large difference between murder in response to a perceived injustice and a headbutt in the chest in response to a provocation. The analogy serves to collapse several crucial ethical distinctions in order to make the point about verbal provocation and violent reaction. Law and ethics make distinctions between different kinds of verbal provocation and physical violence for very good reasons. Hitting someone is not the same as killing that person. Hate speech is not the same as calling a person an "asshole." In France, at least, hate speech is a crime. Calling someone a connard may be offensive, but it's not a crime for good reason. These are important ethical and legal distinctions which cannot be glossed over. I seriously doubt Lindsay wants to do that, so the criticism here is about the analogy and its misleading role in her argument. If the claim is simply that Zidane lost control (and deserved a red card), everyone agrees with that and it's therefore rather trivial claim. He may or may not have continued to make a difference in the match.

The claim that verbal taunting never justifies a physical response is what I'm curious about here. I don't think Lindsay provides an argument here, but rather an assertion. That's fine. Assertions are part of our ethical life. Of course, she subtly qualifies the claim and turns it back towards the role of a professional athlete. I've said over and over that Zidane's headbutt was stupid as a matter of the context of the most important soccer match in the world - a World Cup final. And we can also say it lacked professionalism. But neither of these claims are moral claims. Perhaps the only way we can turn the professionalism criticism into a moral issue is in referring to Zidane as a role model for kids. We don't want our role models teaching violent responses to provocation. This is an old claim in American sports as well. I don't know of anything other than anecdotal evidence here (although I imagine there are sociological studies), but I doubt this claim's strength as a basis for ethical criticism.

Furthermore, as I've said elsewhere, the reason why Zidane's reaction is so perplexing and shocking is also because the man is a decent man. Daniele de Rossi's elbow to Brian McBride's face during the Italy-US match was particularly violent and intended to harm, perhaps even take McBride out of the game. This event has been forgotten. We can cry "double standard!", but I think it's not. It's that we hold Zidane to a higher standard than we hold Italian players (generally bad examples as role models, for sure), including those players who continually fouled Zidane during the final and intentionally worked on building up his fury. We easily forget about them because Zidane is a great one, a quiet and shy one, and one we look to as a hero. One might claim that this places more responsibility on Zidane's shoulders, but this responsibility is placed on him by us.

How about the more general claim, then? Is verbal provocation never a reason for a violent reaction? Steve Gilliard has one answer that speaks to the racial context and the issue of respect: "there's only so much crap one can take in life." I feel a similar sentiment from a different angle - anti-French sentiments (my wife is French), which we get even from my own family. I wrote earlier in comments that,

I was standing in a pub next to a francophone African fan of the French team when the headbutt occurred. This guy erupted with "oh, yeah!! YEAH!!!!" and the fist pump. I found myself having a similar visceral reaction mixed with "oh, shit, he didn't hold it together." Given all the BS the French "African" team has put up with, the long history of racist taunts from Spanish and Italian fans and players and coaches, there was a kind of personal and collective release that came with the headbutt....

At the end of the match, in the same pub, a woman was saying loudly, "fuck the French! Fuck the French!!!" The same woman called my wife - who was wearing a Zidane jersey - a "fucking bitch." This is not unusual when you're in the US and you're French. Sometimes people welcome Frenchness or simple humanness, sometimes they can be bitingly offensive. It builds up. My wife is pretty good about letting it go. I'm not. So, isn't there a sense - which, I believe, Steve is trying to get at - that an individual, unique action such as the headbutt must necessarily come with the contextual packaging? Isn't to judge it as an isolated action, or even in the immediate context of Materazzi's remarks and his yanking on Zidanes's injured arm, to miss the ethical point entirely? I think so.

While ethicists love to make up imaginary ethical scenarios in order to constrain the contextual elements within an argument, actual ethical life is never that neat. If it were, we would have knock-down ethical arguments for most all situations.

So, the claim that physical violence is never justified as a response to verbal provocation may work in the abstract, but that very abstraction neglects important information in deliberating about ethical issues. Context is important here and Steve is right on this. But we still need to figure out which context is ethically important. After all, if Materazzi called Zidane a "poopyhead," we're much less likely to see this as a mitigating factor in Zidane's reaction. If Materazzi first hit Zidane then said racist insults, wouldn't we view all this completely differently? How about if Materazzi pulled on Zidane's previously injured arm and then made racist insults? What if Materazzi poked Zidane gently and then made racist insults? What if he didn't touch him and made the insults? Is there an ethical border for the physicality?

The actual situation seems to have been one in which Materazzi pulled on Zidane's injured arm, then racially insulted him or his family after Zidane made a snide remark about the tugging. As a professional matter, in the context of the match, the headbutt is stupid. We all agree on this. But as an ethical matter - in the context of the arm-pulling (and perhaps nipple-twisting, as The Guardian has reported), ongoing racist taunts by the Spanish and Italian fans, players, and even the Spanish coach, and Materazzi's own intentional insults, and that Zidane headbutted Materazzi in the chest rather than the face (like Figo in an earlier match) - I'm not so sure at all that it's unjustified, unlike nearly all commentators on the case.

My own view is that verbal taunts come in different forms and of varying severity. The distinctions are ethically significant, but drawing an ethical boundary between what's severe and what's not is a very difficult matter. So is drawing an arbitrary line between verbal insults and physical response. In Just War Theory, we talk about the question of proportionality. Usually this refers to the severity by which an aggressive act is countered, and the moral requirement not to respond out of proportionality to the aggressive act. The Iraq War, for instance, is all out of whack in regard to proportionality and thus the political need to exaggerate the severity of the initial threat. In general, however, proportionality is difficult to gauge - if you hit me in the face and I kick you in the crotch, is my act proportional? They are different acts, for sure. If you say something heinously racist at me and I shove you, is that proportional? How about if a daughter or wife suffers years of terrible, degrading verbal abuse, suffering psychologically as a consequence, and finally reacts by killing the father or husband?

If we're using a notion such as proportionality to think about the relation between verbal abuse and physical reaction, it's simply unclear that there are not proportional degrees of verbal abuse and physical violence. Lindsay wants to draw a clearcut line there by abstracting from context. This move works only in the cool confines of the academic classroom.

So, on what basis do we compare verbal abuse and violent reaction? Context. I'll have to stop here, but let me say that - for me and, I think, Steve and Matt - pervasive, continual racism provides a context that may very well justify violent response. If it doesn't, might it not also be the case that we pass to the side of the damaging and real effects of racism?


UPDATE (3:40): Zidane speaks:

Zidane, who was captaining his country in his final match before retirement, stated that Materazzi insulted his mother and sister in the seconds leading up to the incident, which saw the France midfielder thrust his head into the Italy defender's chest. 'I reacted badly and I would like to apologise for it,' Zidane told Canal Plus. 'I would like to apologise because a lot of children were watching the match. I do apologise but I don't regret my behaviour because regretting it would mean he was right to say what he said.

'There was no tension with Materazzi before or during the match. 'He just put his hand onto my shirt and I told him to stop. I told him that if he wanted it I could give it to him at the end of the match. 'Then he said very harsh words to me and repeated them several times. I left but then I went back towards him and things went very fast. The words he said concerned my mother and sister. 'I heard them once, then twice, and the third time I couldn't control myself. I am a man and some words are harder to hear than actions. I would have rather been knocked down than hear that.' 'Afterwards I explained to the referee that I had been provoked, but my behaviour is not forgivable,' Zidane said.