Urban communities and virtue pt 4

This is the fourth and final in a series. You can read the first here.

 Raymond Hain has a second and third reason for why suburbs do not promote virtue as well as a walkable, new urbanist community would. but I am going to take them in reverse order.

My third argument is this: When our lives are fragmented in the way suburbia makes possible, it is much easier for us to act badly, and it is much harder to learn from the bad actions we do perform (and so to become someone who eventually acts well).

This is true.  You can get in your car and drive across town to a bar where you are unlikely to see anyone you know and you can get drunk, gamble and look for casual sexual partners. You can walk by the poverty and suffering and not do anything about it or even care. That is all true and is somewhat deplorable. (It's also true that if our lives aren't fragmented as in a small community it is easy for a small bunch of interfering busybodies to control other people's lives in vicious ways.)

But I have a question for you: do you think that the suburbs are hotbeds of private vice? Because that is the base of Hain's argument: that suburbs are especially bad places for developing public virtue.



This is, of course, a major subject of modern fiction. Sinclair Lewis loved to write of the emptiness and hypocrisy of suburban life. It was also a staple of shows like Law & Order that the respectable looking guy in a suit turns out to be the rapist-murderer-extortionist and the nasty anti-social punk turns out to be innocent. But do you really believe this is true of suburbs?

If I took you to an upper-middle class suburb with well-tended lawns and then took you downtown to the hip loft-living neighbourhood where the single twenty-somethings live, could you really convince yourself that there is as much or more sexual excess, drug abuse and lack of caring for the suffering around them on the part of the suburbanites as there is among the inner-city trendies?

I don't live in a  suburb and wouldn't want to. But I just can't see that there is anything that looks even remotely like evidence that suggests that suburbs are conducive to systemic public or private immorality. Quite the contrary.

Give Disney credit for this much: when they built Celebration, their model was suburbia. Celebration is a suburb where distances are reduced so that cars use can be less likely. It's a fantasy, there couldn't possible be enough good jobs to support such a community within walking distance. But those practicalities aside, the new urbanist ideal is full of suburban assumptions: there are no hookers, no street people and no drug dealers in these imagined towns. The yards may be smaller and full of gardens and patios rather than grass but those yards are every bit as well-tended as a suburban lawn. 

And I can tell you exactly what the sort of built environment that is most conducive to a lack of public and private virtue. I can tell you because I used to live there. It's a ten story apartment building downtown one block from a street full of trendy bars. Never have I lived anywhere where people had so little concern for the feelings or welfare of those around them. And never have I lived in a neighbourhood where people were so little concerned about their private vices.

It seems obvious that judging someone's private morality based on whether they have a well-tended lawn but there is a sense in which such a thing is not crazy. It takes a lot of effort to keep that lawn up. Sticking a Greenpeace sticker to the fridge in your downtown apartment right beside the one for Amnesty International is no effort at all. (See this mornings post on narcissism in popular music expressing political and moral concerns.)

And a big part of modern city life is driven by a  desire to make some areas of morality completely or almost completely, private. These days, especially in matters sexual, the sphere of some private action has become ridiculously large. And hip urban types would make that sphere even larger for some matters: For example, the cartoonist who argues that prostitution is a simply a private matter between consenting adults.

Now, rather than go anywhere with that, let me go back to Hain and his second reason:

Here is my second argument for thinking that the natural law requires walkable human communities: true virtuous action demands that we treat others justly, charitably, and with kindness. But it’s not sufficient for me, when I perform a virtuous action, to know that what I do is just in this particular context. Many actions will be just or charitable or kind when considered in abstraction from their wider context ...

And I can think of no better example of something that will seem charitable and kind when abstracted from the larger context than sex. Just the expression "between consenting adults" is an act of abstraction. It only affects these two people, so what business is it of anyone else's? That's why there are so many happy, well-adjusted prostitutes after all ... err, maybe not. Even in countries where prostitution is legal, it is a miserable, soul-crushing enterprise for the women involved. And no one ever gets hurt when two people decide to have sex, even if one or both of them is married to and has children with someone else?

Public virtue really does requires a private sphere. It requires boundaries and freedom of association (which means freedom of disassociation). And if we are looking for models to follow, we could do a lot worse than the suburbs.