Urban communities and virtue pt 4

The post that was here has been moved to Monday. I decided that two long, long posts was too much for one day.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Aside from love ...
You've probably never heard of Chester Brown. I never had until I read about him in last week's newspaper. His big achievement is that he is both cartoonist and a cartoon. He's just published a book called Paying For It, a comic strip memoir about being a john. (Interesting title: we don't really have to read the book now do we?)

The opening panels show Chester and his ex discussing "his growing disillusionment with romantic love". The following dialogue ensues:

He:

Aside from love, there were three reasons I wanted to have girlfriends. One: because it is expected—guys who don't have girlfriends are considered to be losers. Two: I liked the ego-boost of having a woman want me to have that sort of exclusive relationship with me. And three: sex.

She:

But you don't have to have a girlfriend to have sex.

That takes four panels. I think Mary Worth's plots moved faster than this.

Notice the interesting slip in the first panel where it's "girlfriends" plural he wants.  So the whole love claim is just a lie. He says the conventional thing because it's expected of him but he doesn't really value love that much. He isn't disillusioned with romantic love, he never cared for it in the first place.

His first stated reason is because he doesn't want to appear like a loser. Okay, but if this really matters to him then going to prostitutes makes no sense at all. 'Cause if you want to look like a loser, paying for it is the way to do it. So this is another lie. Truth is Chester Brown doesn't much care what other people think of him.

His second stated reason is getting closer to the mark. But it is also making "Aside from love" more and more ludicrous sounding isn't it. Because Chester Brown is about as perfect an example of textbook narcissism as you'll ever find. The "girlfriends" don't matter as human beings in their own right; their only real purpose is to validate his self image. He's the star and they are bit players.

By the way, it's a little weird his saying that it is the woman wanting an exclusive relationship that gives him the ego boost. If an ego boost is what you really want, you get much more bang for your buck (if you'll pardon the expression) from having more than one woman wanting you so badly that they are willing to settle for non-exclusive relationships. Why? Because that's the harder thing to achieve. But, again, he's a narcissist, his ego doesn't need boosting. All he needs is bit players to support the unshakeable self image he already has. Who his girlfriends really are doesn't matter, why they may as well be paid hookers for all the difference ... .

And it's awful nice of his ex-girlfriend to tell him he doesn't need a girlfriend to have sex isn't it? What was she really thinking? She clearly had no trouble concluding that neither love nor the other two stated reasons really mattered all that much in the final analysis. And she is Chester's ex-girlfriend.

But why did he need to write a book about it? To justify what he is doing? To whom? To most of us, this book only confirms that Chester is a loser. No, the answer to everything about Chester Brown is narcissism.

I think there are dark moments when a lot of men have the thoughts that Chester Brown is having here. Sexual love means so much to us that when, as it inevitably does, this sort of love gets difficult, the thought will occasionally cross a guy's mind that it might be easier to just ... and here a wide range of answers from "just jerk off" to "call a hooker" might pop into our heads. And it is easier to do both of those things. The odd thing is not having the thought but being satisfied with the one of these alternatives. For the last twenty-four years Chester Brown's sexual relationships have all been with hookers. And now he writes a book about it in which he is the hero.

Well, of course he does, Chester is always the hero of the story and everyone else is just a supporting player. They may as well be hookers for all the difference it's going to make. That's the way narcissists see it.

Interestingly, the review in the Globe and Mail promotes the book heavily. It's called "relentlessly honest".

Simply told in a deceptively straightforward manner, Paying for It is a defiant work of truth-telling and a welcome return to autobiographical comics from one of the medium’s incontrovertible masters.

Well, in a sense yeah. Any creep can write a relentlessly honest book or defiant work of truth telling but no amount of honesty compensates for the fact that the author is a creep.

And the point is to not be a creep.

By the way, the book's description and Brad Mackay's fawning review pretty much confirm everything you've ever suspected about adult men who are really into comics don't they?

Some post-election musings

Now that 24 hours has gone by, I thought I’d share some thoughts about the election we just had here in Canada. It ended in a dramatic and unexpected way. A party that no one thought had a chance of getting a majority got a majority and the another party that everyone expected to be in contention was decimated. This last is worth lingering on because the party in question, The Liberal Party of Canada, is the most successful political party of any advanced nation. They are the New York Yankees of politics. They have held power for seventy of the last hundred years. In the entire history of Canada there has never been a time before now that they weren't either the government or the official opposition. Today their continued survival is in doubt.

When I think about Canadian politics there is one thought that troubles me and has troubled me for a few decades now (and it is not an issue unique to Canada). And it is the fear of a disproportionate amount of power and influence held by a relatively small group of people who live in Ottawa and Toronto and who have senior positions in the public service, the media and a small set of universities. These people aren’t a conspiracy. They don’t have meetings where they plan their strategy. No, all they have in common is a shared set of values. These values aren’t nefarious or evil and they aren’t a secret. Most anybody could make up a list.

1. They believe that government should be a large and dominant presence in the lives of citizens.
2. They believe in multiculturalism and in having large numbers of immigrants accepted.
3. They believe the arts, universities and scientific research should be heavily funded by government.
4. They hate the idea of a media that is mostly driven by profit and so they support government regulation and subsidization of the media and government support for public broadcasting (the CBC).
5. Related to the above, they want government to use its regulatory power to keep existing media from having to face any serious competition particularly from American sources.
6. They believe the government should tax people not just to get revenue but also to decrease what they see as unfair income distribution.

What really disturbs me about this group is not that they believe what they do. I live in a neighbourhood dominated by these people. I live among and like these people and I believe they have every right to believe the things they do and every right to push and promote these ideas.

But one thing that does disturbs me is that they don’t respect anyone’s right to disagree with them. They demonize everyone who does.

The other thing that really disturbs me about this group is that for the last few elections it has tended to feel like it didn’t much matter what Canadians actually voted for, these people got what they wanted anyway. It felt to me like they were using their power to effectively neutralize any opposing voices.

One of the things this group has been very effective is that the things they don’t care about, don’t show up in the media. And they don’t show up in legislation and regulations drafted by public servants nor do they show up in policy discussions. If there is one thing my experience working in Ottawa has taught me it is that public servants spend a lot of time gumming up the works to prevent certain kinds of policy alternatives from being implemented or even from being explored as options. Finally, there are the universities. These are heavily subsidized and they are powerful gatekeepers as to who gets ahead in Canadian society. Again, they are heavily invested in the above values and kids getting university education never learn that there are respectable arguments on the other sides of these issues.

In recent years, however, the power of these people has declined dramatically. Governments cannot regulate the Internet nearly as effectively as they could regulate television, radio and print media. The rise of reformed Conservative party from which old insiders like the red tories have been expunged and now the NDP replacing the Liberals has dramatically reduced the power of insiders to control politics. And the universities are in a severe crisis brought about by rising costs and their inability to deliver jobs commensurate with the financial and time sacrifices students have to make to get degrees.

That is what I think this last election was really about. This group has lost a lot of its power. This decline has been creeping up on them for years. They haven’t lost all their power but this election signaled a tipping point. You can see it in the media coverage. They were, as always, spinning the results to favour their world view as they always do but they weren’t so much powerless as absolutely irrelevant. You can see it in their attempts to analyze what was happening as the campaign went on. They had no idea what this election was really about or what dynamics were really driving voting patterns. The final result was a complete surprise to them. They simply didn’t have a clue what was happening.

I was talking to a public service manager I know yesterday and her response was equally telling. She was deeply depressed by what had happened but the telling thing is that she never saw it coming.

But it came anyway.

Urban communities and virtue pt 3

This is the second in a series. You can read the first here and the next one will be here.

 Did you ever wonder what the thin leading edge of fascism looks like? We all know what fascism looks like when it's fully entrenched: mass rallies, jackboots, lots of leather et cetera. But what does it look like when it's just getting started? When it hasn't started to show it's ugly side? Every thug was once a cute baby and every form of political oppression started off with moves that seemed anodyne when they were first made.

Like this:

Though suburbanites still live, work, play, worship, and shop, there will be very few people, if any, with whom they will have more than one activity in common. We live with people other than those with whom we work, and we pray with yet a third, different community.

And that, according to Raymond Hain, is a bad thing. Now you may not agree with Hain but I doubt it strikes you that his ideas here are actually dangerous. I want to convince you that they are.

Here is Hain's first argument that suburban social life diminishes our virtue. He begins with the perfectly true claim that we need to be in council with others to identify what is good for us. But which others?

Now we can see a problem with suburbia and its various communities, isolated from one another. Typically, we have no companions who share all the various parts of our lives, but if we require the counsel of others in order to integrate these different aspects, we will need help from those who, alongside us, are a part of all the different activities that we must integrate.

You know this argument right? In the modern world our lives are fragmented and fragmentation is a bad, bad thing. Why exactly? Well, there it gets murky. We must integrate our lives, says Hain, and that means we must be able to consult with people who share every aspect of our lives.

But let's flip this one around. Suppose, as Peter advises us in Acts, we wish to save ourselves from this corrupt generation. You want to talk about integrated, walkable communities: how about ancient Jerusalem? Pretty much any ghetto passes the test too.

And we do like to separate church and state for a reason don't we?

Of course, Hain means well. He doesn't plan to ghettoize anyone or to run an pogroms.  If this is fascism it is, as Jonah Goldberg memorably put it, fascism with a happy face. So why worry?

Worry because freedom matters. The ability to choose the community or communities we live in is a good thing. We talk about the difficulty of integrating our lives in our lives but forget that having this problem is a tremendous luxury. Most people to live had no such problem.

To the extent that we want to integrate that is. And there's another issue. I can't help but think that Hain's real problem is not that we try to integrate and fail but that we don't really want to integrate. More of this tomorrow.

Urban communities and virtue pt 2

This is the second in a series. You can read the first here and the next one will be here.

Last time I said the kind of argument that people like Raymond Hain make in favour of new urbanism is not businesslike but conceals a very businesslike purpose. What do I mean by that? Well, you can see it in the following paragraph [emphasis added]:

Given how we pursue and achieve happiness, and that our built environment can encourage or discourage the activities necessary for human happiness, we must promote building patterns that will help these various small-scale human communities to flourish and make virtuous action possible. But the architecture of community, the architecture that will best promote successful small human communities organized within one large civic community, is the architecture of new urbanism. Therefore, as Aquinas might have said, the natural law requires that we make mixed-use, walkable human settlements.

What you see here is the potentially heavy hand of political morality. Lurking behind all this is the very  businesslike project of controlling the way other people behave in a very deliberate and conscious way. And when we see that sort of project it becomes very important to ask who exactly this "we" is. By what authority and using what means will this be accomplished? And, quite frankly, words like "must" and "requires" scare me. It also bothers me when people talk about using the environment to "encourage and discourage" what we do and it is not at all comforting to be told that this is being done to promote "human happiness". The Russian and Chinese communist regimes killed more people than any other regimes in history in the name of promoting human happiness.

It is important to acknowledge that any community requires us to control what others can and cannot do. I like like laws that discourage specific things such as violent assault or drunk driving. But the moment controlling others gets linked to bigger projects to achieve vague ideals such as promoting happiness, I begin to get worried. Particularly as, you may have noticed, most people don't naturally choose to live in walkable communities. Most people prefer to live in suburbs. Model communities such as Celebration are model communities. They are artificial ideals that would require a lot of encouraging and discouraging to be made to work as real communities. If they would, in fact, work at all.

You might argue that suburbs also require all sorts of underpinning to exist. That is true but it is underpinning that already exists and people had choices. There were and are other kinds of communities ranging from inner-city neighbourhoods to small towns and most people chose and choose to live in suburbs. Those competing types of communities still exist and people can still choose or not choose them.

The new urbanist walkable community hasn't done so well in this competition. Governments could and perhaps should make efforts to support the creation of such communities but I still want it to be a choice. I want people to be able to make their own decisions about what is best for human happiness. When i read arguments lie those made by Raymond Hain I get a disturbing feeling about this.

Look at that paragraph above again. The language used gives me goosebumps and not in a good way. Our built environment is a large impersonal force. I'm not comfortable with people who want to use it to encourage and discourage. I get even less comfortable when they write sentences wherein the actual actor doing this manipulation disappears into passive voice. And I'm not comfortable when imperatives like "must" and "require" suddenly pop up. We must? Why exactly must we? And what purposes require that we do particular things? Right now it feels like I have a lot of choices and you're making me feel like you want to replace these choices with obligations and controls. And it makes me even more nervous when I hear someone talk about controlling other people's lives but when I wonder who it is that will be doing this controlling I see the pronoun "we" cropping up. I always know who "I" is; I'm not all certain who "we" are.

Urban communities and virtue pt 1

Over at a site called The Public Discourse, a philosopher named Raymond Hain has an argument bout how the new urbanism creates communities that will promote virtue better than the ones we currently live in do.

It's an odd argument he makes. Like a lot of philosophical arguments it comes across as abstract and, as Wittgenstein put it, not businesslike. By the latter, I mean it is not an argument that has much place in actual moral life. It is, rather, the sort of moral argument people have in rarefied circumstances when they can set aside the moral concerns of actually living their lives and let their moral imaginations fly a bit. An argument to make when we aren't considering any actual practical decisions.

And opponents of new urbanism are very businesslike as clear when Hain sums up some opposing arguments:

The response to such arguments has been swift and to the point. People like having larger yards, fresh air, and separation from their neighbors. Commute times have not drastically increased; we are simply driving faster. And claims about the environmental impact of suburban development are deeply controversial, as are claims about what sort of human development represents “beautiful architecture.” The white picket fences of the new urbanist town of Celebration, built by the Disney Company, are “charming” to some and nothing more than tacky kitsch to others.

You can feel those objections can't you? No matter what side you might take, all these arguments sound like something that might break out in a real discussion you might have with your neighbour or spouse about actual living arrangements. When Hain begins building his counterargument, however, we very quickly move off into things that don't seem to get much traction:

First, we are by nature social animals. Second, the most important human goods are the moral and intellectual virtues: courage, temperance, justice, prudence, wisdom, and the like. Third, the communities that make virtuous action possible and so make happiness possible include families, churches, schools, voluntary associations, and many other organizations that share a common purpose and whose members are therefore together pursuing common goods. Finally, the most important overall human community is the city itself, a community of communities, whose purpose is to shelter the various smaller communities and make possible the discovery, pursuit, and achievement of our complete human good, happiness itself.

First, does anyone dispute that we are social animals? And does this mean anything more than the trivial point that our living arrangements are social? A trait we share with an awful lot of other animals. And what about, I mean this as a quite serious issue, those times when I feel like being alone? When I don't want to be social and I don't want anyone else's idea of social life pushed on me? When I want to be able to go into my space and shut the gate, or the door.

And some kinds of social life I would be able to shut the door on more or less permanently. I don't want to be social with some particular people or with some particular kinds of people. I do not want to be social with hip hop fans. I hasten to point out that in my community at least, hip hop fans are all male, white, single and drive around in crappy little cars like Pontiac Sunbirds blasting their music really loud. I don't like these guys. I really don't like them. I wish they'd all change or go live somewhere else. And, for the record, I don't like the sort of aging guy who listens to "classic rock" really loud with his windows open on hot summer days either. (And I might point out that the very existence of the sort of walkable community that new urbanists favour tacitly assumes that these people can be made to go away somehow.)

What is a "human good"? How does it differ from a good such as a toasted English muffin with butter? Are moral and intellectual virtues really the most important? I know that I can go a lot longer without temperance than I can go without drink. I mean water not bourbon when I say drink but if bourbon were the only drink available, I'd still need it a lot more than I need temperance.

The communities that make virtuous action include families, churches, and so forth. That's probably true but it seems kind of trivial to me. How many already existing communities don't have these things? And didn't Nazi Germany have all these things and yet still develop one of the most hateful regimes in the history of humanity?

Finally, do we really know that the community of communities is the best? I mean we all live in communities of communities. Even if you live in a relatively isolated place on a nice lake somewhere you are still living with communities of communities. You pretty much have to be to survive. You don't make all your own food yourself. The electronic device you are reading this on came from someplace.

As I say, this whole argument all seems unbusinesslike to me. And I'll tell you what troubles me even more. I sense another, very businesslike, purpose at the heart of arguments like Hain's. A purpose so businesslike it strikes me as a little frightening. And that is the subject for part 2 which can be found here.

Sort of political Monday

Falling apart
Do you ever worry that things might fall apart?

I do.

And one day they will. That's the thing. You can't tell yourself, it won't happen because it will. One day the Pax Americana we have known for my entire lifetime will come crashing down. The world might even be thrown into another dark age.

And yet it seems stupid to worry about it because the chances that I, as an individual, could do anything decisive to prevent it, should the day come in my lifetime, are nonexistent.

And yet I worry.

Do you?