The Idiot-Proof City
The limits of inclusivity.
I have been using the metaphor of the idiot-proof city for a while.
Many years ago I came upon the detective fiction of John Sandford. I can't tell you how refreshing it was, after several of these novels, to read about a hard-edged genuine good guy who generally solved crimes and beat the bad guy. It was good for the soul. In one of the Sandford novels, the hero works with a woman who is ex-KGB and she notes about America that it is full of signs. Back in Russia if you didn't know the name of a street, then you simply didn't know. There weren't a bunch of signs to tell you every single feature of every part of the city.
Since then I've been noticing how much of American 'culture' is taught through signs and music, movies and tv that speak the obvious at a 8th grade reading level. How politics 'teaches values'. How little of public education actually does that through literature or history, and quite notably how we have fewer and fewer mature men and women as actors but more cartoons, witches, vampires, superheroes and other idiot-level signs doing the lifting in cultural production.
How It Fails
We lurch towards and away from the Welfare Nanny State. These days towards. And I think about the political agitation towards 'equity'. At the movies tonight during 45 minutes of propaganda 'previews' we were reminded about how not to think of our paraplegic friends as disabled. Except of course that they get public service announcements at the movie, but they're all the same right? Every curb in California is cut for the wheelchairs. Every parking lot has the blue striped stalls. The city makes it easy for everyone. And if you have no job skills, then the minimum wage should be raised to a 'living wage' and 'affordable housing' should be made available as well.
At some point, when our public fails to assess with anything resembling scientific discipline, it will become too expensive to insure against all pre-existing dysfunctions and shortcomings. We will have already made the promise, and it will prove to be a lie. We will find people failing despite all our efforts. It will be called discrimination, but it will only be regression to a prior mean. That is the kind of discrimination the idiot-proof, no-fault city seeks to eliminate. It is the kind of discrimination many of us understand that makes efforts at self-improvement worthwhile. An elevated and sophisticated society discriminates. It knows the difference between failed, weak, satisfactory, very good and excellent and it cares about that difference. A proper society rewards the good and punishes the bad. A dysfunctional society wallows and refuses to make proper distinctions about cause and effect; it lets its judgments lapse. It knows something is wrong but can't seem to do anything about it. In a dysfunctional society people know that you're very lucky if you get what you deserve.
A degenerate society rewards the bad actors and punishes the good. I say we are mostly dysfunctional but we have quite enough degeneracy to make people almost comfortable with the dysfunctions. Thoughtful, sensitive people have deep concerns about American society. Unfortunately, most of them think that political solutions can be engineered, and so they engage in politics to strengthen what they believe should be society. They do not realize that society must be grown, not genetically engineered. And yet they continue to build themselves into activists, one Frankenstein at a time.
These are the classes, who through democratic propaganda seek to aggregate the votes of the masses into self-sustaining policy. It is a well-worn path towards the Nanny State, and the protectionists are winning. It makes sense that one should not overeat. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins known since antiquity. But outlawing fast-food restaurants merely creates a police state. Policy becomes the deadly vengeful god of Progress whose prophets of truth are TED lecturers and university studies. And so all media with any sense of not using cartoon avatars dutifully repeat the memes on the 6 o'clock news and dissenters are shunted. All the signs and billboards and public service announcements and afterschool specials and celebrity reminders need to march in step. But I digress and pontificate.
Skid Row
We're Los Angeles, not Boston. So we have homeless living comfortably on the streets in the dead of winter. There's a little idiot-proof part of downtown reserved especially for them. A no-reality zone. It's where all the charities setup their soup kitchens. It is a subsidized economy, healthy as far as subsidies go. There aren't literal signs to let you know that you are in Skid Row, but the place is unmistakable.
I remember driving through Skid Row a few weeks into the pandemic when there was a curfew of 10pm here in California. you remember the days when the numbers from Johns-Hopkins were at the top of our daily tasks. The circus of squalor had not changed one iota. None of the filthy people were carefully swept from the filthy streets. This, in the same place that had suffered not only a scheme to generate fraudulent voter registrations, but an outbreak of typhus. There was no presence of anyone who might be called a police officer or public health official. I wept at the calamity I foresaw.
While I'm amenable to attenuating the idea, my bias is towards the idea that big cities should be cosmopolitan and modern. What that means practically speaking is that people engage in commerce and society according to organic class status but with conscious efforts to conform to their best public minded and public spirited social behaviors. Such behaviors should be so easy and naturally understood that one couldn't graduate from high school without having been socialized properly. I'm talking ethics and civics as required reading, and perhaps even on standardized tests. I wouldn't mind terribly if men wore color coded earrings to demonstrate their social proficiencies, which is to say I'm not defending any hidebound mannerisms or status quo. But cities should have that character of socially elevated and that people should conform towards the order and not have that order undermined by every tribe of non-skilled transients and immigrants who arrive there.
Is this nationalist chauvinism? It sounds like it, but it is not. If I were not challenged to speak French and order in an upscale Parisian restaurant, that would make it no more special than the train station in Zurich with its multilingual signage speaking the obvious at an 8th grade level. There is tension here. There is the tension of allowing culture to evolve against the desire to be all-inclusive. I think nations can do this without contradiction if their open societies allow for local control. That way, quaint little downtowns like that of Manchester, NH don’t have to be like San Francisco. Let Starbucks be for all the 8th graders. Let my city council deny them a building permit in my arts district.
I want to live in a town where townies matter, where there is a certain advantage to having been a part of its fabric since youth. Where there is an unpredictable learning curve to its particular charm and secrets. Not Disneyland, where the magic is real and the laugh track is pre-calibrated.
Now you know what I mean. The idiot-proof city is antithetical to sophistication, and while some cities may ultimately fail, great cities like Los Angeles should not. Great cities like Detroit shouldn't have. If we are to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave, we should be brave enough to resist the social engineering that comes from political arm-twisting. We should be free enough to make our own rules outside of national governance. The city is where it begins. My city. If it’s not my city, why am I there? Because I’ve got no choice?
A Status Quo
While I’m in this corner of concepts, let me talk about the difference between the god of Progress and the minor deity of excellence. Excellence manifested culturally is comforting and inspirational. I am particularly sensitive to this in the arts of music and cuisine. So much so that I dabbled with Epicureanism some years ago, but I decided against living within a walled garden of delights. Being from LA, I am quite aware of the Westsiders who resemble Hedonismbot. The Status Quo, at whatever time it is, represents a ruleset whose mastery matters for at least a generation or two. Notwithstanding the ‘interesting times’ of those who suffer from revolutions, we should be glad for the status quo. A status quo education should deliver satisfactory progress for the status quo living standard of the middle class. Everybody shouldn’t ‘learn how to code’. Nevertheless were Americans are stuck in a pseudo-revolutionary age of activism which overstates the degradations of the past and promises a utopian future, or at the very least one that might survive their predicted social collapse. The god of Progress must move the world because it predicts the oceans will be boiled. It wants national standardization. The deity of excellence figures out the details and recognizes brilliant serendipity. It wants a few perfect skyscrapers in select locations. For example, the deity whispered to me about Elon Musk’s Mars plan, that if we can live on Mars, surely we can live in Earth’s oceans.
The last idea to send by you I may have mentioned before is the thesis of Walter Schiedel. The only things that successfully destroy income inequality are war, famine and plague. So long as people are capable of achieving wealth because what is valuable is known to the status quo society, wealth will increase. Think of wealth very broadly as the reward for knowing and producing what humans need and want. Only a status quo makes wealth itself sustainable. Sustainability requires a status quo of productive knowledge. Only disasters destroy these things. Like typhoid. What would Hedonismbot care about typhoid? He’s only into the obscure progress of self-indulgence. Funny how he always finds minions. Sorry to use cartoons, who is the classic literary figure I’m looking for? Becky Sharp?
