The Kensington Dilemma
A question of infrastructure & political will.
It should be enough just to watch for 30 minutes. It’s more than just an admission of “It can happen here”, it’s a confession that “It has happened here, and it’s still happening”. Don’t believe me, just watch.
This isn’t a mass shooting. It’s not an abortion. It is not an arrest gone deadly wrong. This is a slow motion calamity with meteoric inertia. I expect that there are plenty of economists and game theoreticians who can figure out what’s likely to happen if we clean up this problem. They will probably also have scenarios in which we leave the matter to fester. What happens to a dream deferred?
I must confess that as a Stoic, I consider that everything political will break. I am not an advocate of Murphy’s Law, but I have a small inside track to backchannels. What a police officer knows is that people will try anything. Whatever becomes legal will be done. Police will see it and know they have little or no leverage. So the degradation of social rules gets to a point at which point previously criminal behavior is decriminalized. Similarly the sphincter pucker factors in society get to a point where new laws are demanded and passed. In either case people find their culture on the wrong side of the law. Ideological and religious pendulums swing, but human life has more degrees of freedom. This is why I stress discovery and reason as opposed to ideology and religion. Consider the following Venn:
This, as a generalized Venn is not applicable to the USA in any regard to the proportional size of each realm. The point is that in order to maximize your human potential, you have to be able to view all of human behavior, much of which ideology and religion refuse to acknowledge.
The interesting aspect of this is that standing in the third dimension as we are presented the Venn here is that each of those lines is not a wall limiting our perspective. Which is to say there is a perspective we can take to see the limits of each point of view. The assemblage of these perspectives might be called ‘analytic anthropology’. I call it that because I am also saying that it is not a strictly philosophical perspective that helps us to understand the scope of human behavior. I say there is something to the ways of religious or ideological or logical ways of knowing ourselves that helps us make sense of what goes on.
The philosophy of Stoicism alone does not capture all of that. There is something of a leap of faith, as it were, that makes you know and feel and empathize with the stooped over woman. It makes the impression actionable. I want the benefits of Stoicism to limit the impression, but I definitely respect my ability to sense and to a certain extent, owing to my pre-Stoic life, to feel that impression as well. The matter of Kensington, while beyond our immediate stoic control must impact our human behavior.
There are several classes of problems of this sort which require ‘analytical anthropology’. One of them has certainly been the pandemic. Another is the matter of the economy in decline. What happens in such macro situations that degrade society is that they change the context in which Stoicism is compatible with the kind of individual I want to be. In particular I am thinking about how the degraded crowds out the elevated. In an Idiocracy, in a Dickensian London, in a society that begins to look like a feral motorcycle movie there may not be space for what we desire in a cosmopolitain open society.
Who is responsible for Kensington? Is it the Church? Is it Science? Is it Congress? Is it the Administration? This failure has many parents, all of whom were screwing around with each other thinking they might abort any unintended consequences. It’s a bit too late for that. Nevertheless, I am constantly bringing to mind the old Democrat complaint against Ronald Reagan who closed all of the mental hospitals and tossed the ill and many of the indigent out into the mean streets. How many administrations have we since had doing basically nothing about this mutating ugly bastard child? More than were necessary.
I am of two minds. In one case, there is the potentially inevitability of the favela. This seems to be the destination and pace of the status quo. Nobody can seem to stomach police actions to round up these urban campers and their nasty household habits. The streets are legal households out here in Los Angeles County. Everybody knows this. Just the other day I traveled that incongruous yet unmistakable street where all the luxury car brands love to film their newest rides.
Skid Row is still a full 8 blocks away from this scene, but down below this elevated road literally 300 yards away are encampments using plywood and tarp. It was lovely to have underground parking at the Disney Concert Hall just down the escalator from its magnificent lobby. But as soon as you get out.. Well it ain’t pretty. The favela of Skid Row is zoned for Downtown LA, but it spreads out to all of the overpasses and some of the bridges of our major freeways. We’ll dismantle a lot of it for our next Olympic Games as we have before, but there seems to be no alternative to its permanence. In this frame of mind, my revulsion against the culture of Entertainment Tonight on all of the major network news stations wants more favelas. America, to that frame of mind, needs these open sores to sober us up and put us on a pace where we have to face our unwillingness to respect our infrastructure. COVID wasn’t quite enough. Tuberculosis might do it.
In my other frame of mind, the problem must be arrested by a reversion to the infrastructure of mass institutionalization of the indigent and homeless. Convert a few suburban golf courses in every major metro I say. ‘Low Cost Housing’ is a game we’ve been playing for too long. We need federally funded massive campuses made for housing thousands with walls, gates, and hundreds of innkeeping staff. The process for getting people in and out requires dusting off a few old laws, and the whole of the unemployed activists can have their sinecure as caretakers for the least of our brothers led by experts who actually know what they’re doing. We could probably use five or six such facilities in LA County. We certainly have the largest prison in the US. Bigger than Rikers.
Of course I can already sense the yelping about ‘our ability’ to do so. Just look at the Prison Industrial Complex skeptics will say. The question is actually very simple. Do we have the will to do it correctly? Or will we wait for something like typhus to force our hand? Facility or favela, that is the question.