COLUMN LEFT/ MICHAEL LERNER : Looters Were Living Out the Cynical American Ethos : We don’t care to acknowledge that our social system is ravishing the Earth.

The aftermath of the riots in Los Angeles is the predictable liberal/conservative debate. Both sides miss the point. Conservatives talk about the failure of Great Society programs from the 1960s without ever considering what might have happened to the culture of poverty had these conservatives been less effective in blocking programs for full employment and massive reconstruction of the cities. Liberals correctly talk about underfunding and neglect without addressing the obvious point that there are many people in this world who live in far worse conditions and yet do not tolerate an ethos of random violence and looting.

The only surprising thing about the looting that followed the Rodney King verdict was that this has not happened more frequently. The riots that followed the verdict were no less rational than the normal daily operations of the major institutions that run American society. We live in a culture of looting--the unfair appropriation of random destruction of the collective goods of others for the sake of personal and private benefit.

Those who live in the ghettos are not violating American taboos--they are living out the American ethos within the context of poverty and racism.

Simply stated, that ethos tells us that the highest goal is to “look out for No. 1” and get what you can when you can. Any cost to others is acceptable as long as you don’t get caught or don’t hurt your own future chances. Moral ideals are fine if kept in their place, but their place is not the economic marketplace and increasingly also not the arena of politics.

Within this ethos, concern for the future--of the planet, of one’s own country or even of one’s own children--seems naive and silly, something to be left to “do-gooders.” The ethos of looting becomes the “common sense” of the society.

Looting takes many forms. American corporations loot the resources of the world, turn them into products to satisfy media-induced needs of the American population, and thus make huge profits. These profits enable them to play a disproportionate role in selecting the people who will be deemed acceptable candidates for public office in both parties. And these candidates, in turn, refuse to challenge the ethos of looting, but instead reward it.

Perhaps the best way to define the class structure of American society is this: The higher up you are on the class ladder, the more individual looting is honored as acceptable behavior; the lower you are, the more likely your looting behavior gets defined as irresponsible and potentially criminal.

And that brings us to the L.A. riots. It’s totally wrong to justify the rioting and looting as somehow “appropriate” behavior. It is not a rational response to racism and it’s not a smart strategy for achieving economic redistribution. Many innocent people get hurt--and that’s wrong.

But saying just that misses the point. Looting is the dominant way of life in America, and the hypocritical cries of outrage at what happened in Los Angeles were not wrong because the riots were justified but were wrong because they were classically racist: They selected and condemned one group for behavior that is not substantially different from the behavior of other groups that are not being equally condemned.

One reason why we allow this racist response to continue is that most of us know that we are complicit with the culture of looting. We’ve made our own little compromises, hurt or disadvantaged others to get ahead, and turned our backs, closed our ears, averted our eyes to the consequences of social selfishness.

We don’t want to see the consequences of our supporting a social system that is ravishing the Earth, and that is at least part of the reason why we are so ready to join nationalist celebrations that proclaim this society the best in human history.

How much easier, then, to denounce the looters in Los Angeles. If the cost is a little racism, well, for many it seems a small price to get us off the moral hook of having to look at ourselves. We have become co-dependents with selfishness and looting, and hidden this from ourselves by righteously condemning all violations of “law and order.”

When the history of the last decades of 20th-Century America is written, it will focus on the way corporations looted America’s resources and then moved abroad to find more profitable investments, leaving much of the American urban environment in tatters, the ozone layer destroyed, the oceans polluted, our children’s futures mortgaged so that we could have low taxes. It will not be the small-fry looters of Los Angeles, provoked and justifiably outraged at American racism, but the culture of looting that will strike future generations as the great and unaddressed problem of contemporary American politics.

Needless to say, any politician could pick up the language of moral outrage. But none seems ready to propose the kinds of changes in America’s economy and political structure that would generate a new ethos of caring and social responsibility. Instead, the Republicans will use the language of “responsibility” as a club to beat up blacks and pretend that we really don’t need new funds for housing and employment and health care. And the Democrats will talk about racism, but not challenge the ethos of looting, because to do that they have to challenge their own funders who are also corporate polluters and rip-off artists.

The frantic pursuit of self-interest is a depressive response to despair about our ability to build a political community within which our deepest-held moral intuitions and spiritual aspirations could be actualized in the real world--a despair that manifests differently depending where we are on the class ladder. Most of us have made our personal compromises with the culture of looting and with an ethos of “me-firstism,” not because we are bad people but because we’ve come to believe, in cynicism, that these principles are all that could ever govern human life.

Liberals would be right to insist that we will need hundreds of billions of dollars invested in a program of full employment, full housing and humane, aesthetic and ecologically sound reconstruction of our cities. But if those programs are not accompanied by a “politics of meaning” that represents a full-scale assault on the economic and political institutions that foster selfishness and an ethos of looting, these programs too will be subverted and eventually the American people will defund them as they have done in the past.

If you don’t teach empathy and other values in the schools, don’t put corporate polluters in jail, don’t reward cooperation and mutual caring and social responsibility in the workplace, don’t challenge the cynicism of the media and its pandering to the rich and famous, don’t reawaken to a spiritual and ethical sensibility, count on the ethos of looting to shape all of our futures. Frustrated at our own inability to lead lives of moral meaning and purpose, feeling compromised by the ways we’ve accommodated to America’s festival of self-centeredness, we mistakenly attempt to regain our moral footing by focusing our moral outrage on those now being caught acting out in the streets the logic of the social system we have fervently embraced.