Cities, Real and Ideal: Categories for an Urban Ontology 9783110321968, 9783110321623

Table of contents :
Introduction
Chapter One Theories of social structure
1. Three theories
2. Contentious history
Chapter Two Systems, Individuals, and the Whole
1. Systems
1.1 Systems created and stabilized by their constitutive relations
1.2 Two kinds of systems
1.3 Systems, classes, and castes
1.4 Relations among systems
1.5. Aims
1.6 Members
2. Individuals
3. Regulating the array of individuals, systems, and networks
4. Qualifications and details
4.1 What is each factor’s principal virtue or vice?
4.2 How is each factor reconciled to the other two?
4.3 Are there limits to accommodation?
4.4 Is there an ideal proportion—a balance—among the three factors?
4.5 What are the circumstantial conditions for balance among the threefactors?
4.6 Why do settlements, cities especially, vary in the prominence of one oranother of the three factors?
4.7 Criteria for appraising social life
5. Anomalous perspectives
Chapter Three Motivation
1. Motivational structure: are motives episodic or abiding?
2. Inspection or inference?
3. Function/Structure
4. Animators
5. Character
6. Deliberation
7. Education
8. Goals, volition, and rewards
9. A useful metaphor
10. Systems and the whole
Chapter Four Circumstances
1. Climate and site
2. History
3. Culture
4. Technology
5. Government
5.1 Government’s tasks as regulator
5.2 Regulating dense networks of systems
5.3 Regulation’s effects on individual freedom
5.4 Regulating change
5.5 The status and character of the regulators
5.6 Regulative styles
6. Economy
7. A determinable and its determining conditions
Chapter Five Values
1. A taxonomy
2. Historical referents
3. The three variables
3.1 Systems
3.2 Individuals
3.3 Corporate self-regulation
3.4 A harmony of parts
4. Balance
5. Spiritual and aesthetic values
6. The real and ideal
Chapter Six Social process

Citation preview

In memory of John N. Findlay

David Weissman Cities, Real and Ideal Categories for an Urban Ontology

CATEGORIES Edited by Roberto Poli (Trento) Advisory Board John Bell (London, CA) Mark Bickhard (Lehigh) Heinrich Herre (Leipzig) David Weissman (New York) Volume 2

David Weissman

Cities, Real and Ideal Categories for an Urban Ontology

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected] United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected]

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2010 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-082-8 2010 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher.de

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Bradley Horn for this book’s illustrations, and to my wife, Katherine, for her patience and help. The book is dedicated to my former teacher. This is not a book he would have written, but I couldn’t have written it without him.

Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………. Chapter One: Theories of social structure……......…. 1. Systems………………………………………..……… 2. Individuals………………..…………………………… Chapter Two: Systems, individuals, and the whole.… 1. Systems………………………………………………… 2. Individuals…………………………………………….. 3. Regulating the array of individuals, systems, and networks………………………………………….. 4. Qualifications and details……….…………………….. 5. Anomalous perspectives………….…………………… Chapter Three: Motivation…………………………….. 1. Motivational structure…………………………………. 2. Inspection or inference………………………………… 3. Function/structure……………………………………… 4. Animators……………………………………………… 5. Character………………………………………………. 6. Deliberation……………………………………………. 7. Education………………………………………………. 8. Goals, volitions, and rewards……………………..…... 9. A useful metaphor………..…………………………… 10. Systems and the whole………..……………………… Chapter Four: Circumstances………….……………… 1. Climate and site………………………..……………… 2. History…………………………………………………. 3. Culture……………………………………..………….. 4. Technology…………………………………….……… 5. Government…………………………………………… 6. Economy……………………………………………… 7. A determinable and its determining conditions………. Chapter Five: Values…………………………………… 1. A taxonomy…………………………………………… 2. Historical referents……………………………………. 3. The three variables…………………………………….

7 19 19 30 35 35 45 51 58 63 65 67 67 68 70 70 72 73 74 76 78 81 81 82 83 84 86 101 111 113 113 116 118

4. Balance……………………………………………….

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5. Spiritual and aesthetic values……………………………. 6. The real and ideal………………………………………… Chapter Six: Social Process……………………………… 1. Systems and networks………………………………….. 2. Individuals………………………………..…………. 3. Corporate self-regulation……………………………… 4. Evolution/ revolution……………………………………. 5. Process at three speeds………………………………….. Chapter Seven: City form…………………………..……… 1. Carrying capacity………………………………………… 2. Boundaries……………………………………………….. 3. Infrastructure…………………………………………….. 4. Bulk and pace……………………………………………. 5. Networks and stratification………………………………. 6. Centrifugal or centripetal forces….……………………… 7. Attractor states…………………………………………… 8. Beauty……………………………………………………. 9. Idealization and control………………………………….. Chapter Eight: City Life………………………………….. 1. Intensity……………………………………………………. 2. Diversity…………………………………………………. 3. Character…………………………………………………. 4. Morality, cooperation, and trust…………………………. 5. Work, money, and wealth……………………………….. 6. Communities displaced by networks……………………. 7. Power, conflict, and violence……………………………. 8. Significance that unifies or divides……………………… 9. Variations………………………………………………… 10. Evaluation………………………………………………. Chapter Nine: Measures of city health…………………….. 1. Essential social values…………………………………… 2. Managerial tasks…………………………………………. 3. Material conditions………………………………………. 4. Humane values…………………………………………… 5. Profiles…………………………………………………… 6. Connection or exclusion……………………….…………. 7. Justice as balance and inclusion……………… ..…………

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Introduction Cities are conspicuous among settlements because of their profiles: bridges, streets, or skyline: Venice, Paris, or New York. Every city joins stability to flux in ways peculiar to itself, though each resembles others because the elements of social structure are common to all. Each city is a web of social relations, a clamorous machine of systems and networks; none is merely an aggregate of people going their separate ways. No one doubts the reality of individuals or the whole: every significant social or political philosophy exalts individual freedom while acknowledging the possibility for conflict, hence the need for an authority that mitigates complexity and conflict. Many sociologists but few modern philosophers argue, as I do, that systems, not bare individuals, are a settlement’s principal agents and substance. There are no systems without members, yet core systems— families, businesses, schools, and churches—do a society’s work while supplying contexts for personal development and initiatives that express individual character and talent. Discount systems while emphasizing freedom and you ignore the contexts where people live, work, and dream. Discount networks of overlapping systems—each defended against all or some others—and you fail to see barriers that divide and stratify societies. These features are common to settlements of every size, though cities express them in distinctive ways: orchestras play music too elaborate for a quartet; city densities promote collaborations unachievable in simpler towns. My account of cities emphasizes ten points: i. Every human settlement is a complex of individuals, systems, and a public regulator. ii. Systems are created by the reciprocal causal relations of their members (pitcher and catcher, friends conversing). Some systems are mutually independent. Others are organized hierarchically (marriages regulated by the state); they overlap (the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey); or they form networks because of common or complementary interests (businesses, their suppliers, and clients). iii. Many urban social structures and processes are organized

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principally for the benefit of a settlement’s social systems and networks. The intensities of personal experience and self-concern somewhat obscure the fact that we use city schools or stores while filling roles in one or several systems: as student or teacher, customer or clerk. iv. Every dimension of individual character is formed by one’s roles in systems or because of reactions to them or their members. One acquires the language, tastes, and emotional profile of his or her family; talents are perfected and enjoyed in schools or at work. Cooperation is a principal social virtue because filling systems’ roles requires the complementary skills of their members. v. Cooperation and coordination have an offsetting tension. Members rank their commitments: how much time and effort goes to each role when duties and opportunities are graded on the scale of one’s interests? These choices and commitments entail that every resident has a singular perspective on the web of urban systems. Each has a particular trajectory through city streets and systems; each wants safety, satisfaction, companionship, and perhaps some beauty when navigating them. Residents distinguished by their choices and trajectories are often oblivious to the perspectives of their neighbors. vi. Cities are complex entities; managing a city is contentious because the responsibility for city budgets, infrastructure, and efficiencies sometimes overrides the needs or convenience of individual systems and residents: having schools or bus stops at every corner isn’t feasible. vii. Many books about cities are evocative—they tell how a city looks or feels—without identifying the variables of social structure responsible for these effects. I specify the relevant variables—systems, individuals, and a regulatory authority—while showing that they mate with circumstances to produce cities that are ideal, tolerable, or deficient. The same variables can have either effect, given different values and relations. Distorting the relations of individuals and public authority generates alternate social pathologies; authority crushes initiative or

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anarchy defeats authority. Reconciling freedom and discipline— initiative and cooperation—minimizes these conflicts. The chapters to follow describe circumstances that promote a range of values for these variables, though I emphasize results that are viable or ideal, not deficient. viii. Cities form because cooperation and coordination enable people to do together what all find difficult to do alone: master a food supply; shelter from the weather; defend against animals and other tribes. Cities grow to exploit possibilities created when people educated by their systems see opportunities for different activities and new alliances. But cities founder if internal complexity and friction provoke hostilities that subvert them from within: they collapse if their people and systems are overwhelmed by pressures within or without. ix. Cities are open dynamic systems that have either achieved a steady state or are in transition from one to another. Steady states are attractors (least energy states); once achieved, they may be stabilized and sustained. How can large settlements be stabilized at that fragile extremity, far from equilibrium, where individuals thrive within their self-regulating systems? This possibility suggests a question: is there a steady state vindicating the ancient idea that cities are propitious contexts for achieving individual perfection, social harmony, and benign corporate discipline? What are these effects and what are the material conditions for their realization? One promised outcome—justice— would be ideal; what are its constituents and conditions; is it realizable? The nine issues preceding are considered systematically; my response to the tenth is more impressionistic: x. Each city is a montage of features that determine its look and feel without having essential relations to one another or to urban social structure: bulk, pace, and noise, for example. No portrayal of city life and form is complete without specifying such features, though no plausible narrative explains why pace needs bulk or either favors noise.

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My account ignores most of the urban history recounted by Max Weber.1 Cities he described were diversified by caste, wealth, gender, rank, status, occupation, ethnicity, race, religion, or birth; regulation was usually enforced by one or several settlement powers (religious authorities or guilds, for example). These older styles of organization persist, though the fluidity of market economies and the constitutional framework of democratic governments drastically reduce effects that were always less conspicuous in North American cities. Guilds still discipline their members (doctors and lawyers), religious courts still mediate domestic disputes and annul marriages, but a constitutionally authorized government has final authority for managing complexity and conflict in many contemporary cities. We call this political solution ideal without distinguishing two kinds of ideality. Haircuts are ideal: you can have the one you want, but none is more natural than another. Health is ideal in this other respect: it is a natural norm—a steady state—often achieved by living systems. Ideals of these two kinds are easily confused because neither may obtain though both are desired and achievable by taking practical steps. The difference between them is, nevertheless, elementary: one is a conceit, the other is a norm, a least energy steady state into which living systems sometimes settle. I allege that settlements sometimes achieve a steady state equivalent to health, one requiring individuality and initiative, productive systems, and the discipline that clears spaces for the work people and systems do. There is a norm—balance—that embodies regulation at all three levels: individuals and systems are self-disciplined; the self-regulating whole—the public— institutionalizes itself as a government constrained by principles and procedures laid down in its founding constitution. Balance has expressions that differ with settlement size, circumstances, and history (different values for the three variables and different weights in their mutual relations), but achieving any of its many possible expressions optimizes a settlement’s efficacy and stability, given appropriate resources and peace with its neighbors. Every settlement has some degree of balance because there would be no cooperation or stable systems, no coherent personal development, and no corporate discipline without it; each would reduce to a nightmarish state of nature. Many versions of balance are nevertheless stunted or deformed 1

Max Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vols. 1 and 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 1225-1339.

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because they cripple one or another of the variables: slave labor increases output at cost to the slaves; autocratic governments suffocate systems and their members. (One could fill many pages with accounts of the pathologies resulting when one or two of the three variables are suppressed by one or both of the others.) Cities complicate balance because density, complexity, and size frustrate regulators, especially those having dogmatic ideas about the scope of tolerable activities. Regulation is resilient in cities that attract musicians with schools, concert halls, recording studios, and an audience that savors music they play. Life is impoverished, regulators are vulnerable in cities that bar music for religious or ideological reasons because thought, sensibility, and freedom are stifled. Chapters One through Eight specify factors pertinent to the emergence of an ample complement of systems and their educated members. They describe social balance comparable to the physiological balance achieved when the functions or parts of healthy bodies are individually effective and mutually sustaining. Chapter Nine lists criteria for appraising the degree to which settlements in general, cities in particular, consolidate an ample or optimal balance. I allege that balance is an attractor state (Chapter Seven), a natural norm. Settlements achieve it because of supple regulation, the efficacy of their systems, and the cooperation of their skilled members. No person is self-sufficient; self-preservation requires that each participate in systems whose efficacy justifies loyalty to them and obligations to fellow members. Balance among the three variables has this simple beginning, though achieving it is ever more complicated as successful systems generate opportunities requiring more regulation because they provoke initiatives that create more systems. Complexity with density is nevertheless our aim because a dense tissue of hierarchically organized, overlapping systems is the nutrient sea of urban culture: we acquire one sort of perfection—sensibility, appropriate companions, and work appropriate to our skills—by living in it. But this is urban complexity at the borderline between chaos and coherence: we are less and less able to manage or promote this far-from-equilibrium steady state as density and diversity overwhelm regulation and the resources for educating and employing city residents. A balance rich enough to promote effects we desire is a necessary condition for urban justice. That is so because ample or optimal balance— right proportion—reduces conflict while promoting thought and effective

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action. There is, however, another aspect to justice, one thwarted if we achieve an ample balance for some residents but not all. Distributive justice requires inclusion. Imagine that some city residents enjoy viable families and schools, safe neighborhoods, companions and circumstances to deepen their sensibilities, and profitable work that uses their talents. The balance promoting these effects is faulty because its partiality entails exclusion, deficient systems, and squandered lives. We often suppose that justice is served if all residents have money or jobs and juridically defended rights. But these conditions fail to guarantee that opportunities are available to all a city’s residents. Chances are distributed unevenly because networks and systems that shape personal development and social relations are barriers to inclusion: one attends the wrong church, lives on the wrong side of the tracks, or has no friend in a powerful business or union. There is also a cause more elemental than hostility or privilege. Inclusion is often thwarted by the demands of local cohesion and efficient systems; loyalty, intimacy, and skill limit participation. These barriers are a city’s economic and social topography; they propagate exclusion. Still, the norm abides: it isn’t an illusion; balance with inclusion—the two kinds of justice—is a steady state just beyond our ability to achieve it. Locating norms within a settlement’s constituents and their relations— calling them ideal—seems perverse when settlement life is dismal for many people: it seems to imply that pathologies are the best to be hoped or expected. This point of reference is a principal justification for saying that ought never derives from is, so reality’s conflation with the ideal is a category mistake. A previous book, The Cage: Must, Should, and Ought from Is,2 argues that some norms inhere in natural processes: complex selfsustaining systems—including stable families and successful businesses— often resist internal disruptions and those caused by intruders. One may argue that norms are ideal because preferred, not because of inhering naturally in states of affairs. But this persuasion implies that balance and justice could never be more than a fragile achievement—a house of cards— undefended by processes and relations intrinsic to social structures; it ignores the conditions for other steady states: biological health, for example. See David Weissman, The Cage: Must, Should, and Ought from Is (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006).

2

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Achieving balance, inclusion, and justice is a practical question: how to organize material factors sufficient to stabilize a desired norm. I emphasize three social variables—individuality, systems, and regulation—because those vital social goods are unachievable if values for these variables are feeble or excessive or if relations among them are misaligned because of despotic regulation, dismembered systems, or submissive individuals. It may seem odd that human intervention is as often decisive for realizing natural social norms as for haircuts. Why does nature require our prodding? Because human societies are variable, because they are sensitive even when stabilized to disruptions that may send them spinning uncontrolled through a chaotic succession of changes, and because reasoned intervention sometimes moves a society to a stabilizable set-point in a way analogous to the effects of diet and exercise on health. This was Plato’s assumption when writing The Republic. It offers specific proposals for organizing society’s material conditions while lacing the argument with metaphors that tell how justice may be achieved. The literal parts concern artisans, guardians, and philosopher-kings; the metaphors invoke Eros and the Good, a Form beyond being.3 Translating these allusive ideas to our circumstances requires two claims: the Good is beyond being in the respect that justice is everywhere desired but nowhere instantiated; Eros bridges the gap between the actual and ideal by impelling us to do those practical things that may achieve it. This solution implies that the contrast of social ideals and natural norms is sometimes exaggerated. Some ideals are natural, however hard to achieve: they emerge when material relationships are stabilized. Think of seamen tacking in the wind: intelligence—especially the negative feedback of selfcorrecting human oversight—enables us to direct some natural processes. Action guided by deliberation may also stabilize a higher-order balance of social systems and their members. Plato satisfied the demands of practicality by writing The Republic and risking his life to see it implemented in Syracuse. My hypothesis does half as much. Justice, I suggest, has two components in the life of human settlements: balance in the relations of the three variables is one; fairness— equity—is the other. Equity requires inclusion because it isn’t achieved if a Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Ruth Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 209a-d, pp. 560-561; and The Republic, Trans. Paul Shorey, Collected Dialogues, 502c-509c, pp. 737-745. 3

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settlement’s residents can’t participate in its core or other systems while free to pursue initiatives consistent with both their talents and the rules prescribed by the self-regulating whole. This result is normative and self-sustaining when achieved, but results are partial: there are cities and states where balance is ample though participation is restricted; none is fully inclusive. The issue is complicated in ways Plato foresaw: reality frustrates the realization of its incipient ideals. Five deformations are emphasized below: i. City systems and laws make us safe, but complexity, density, and conflict are dangerous. (Chapter Eight) ii. Cities are sometimes beautiful, but often ugly and degraded because of poverty and sprawl. (Chapters Seven and Nine). iii. The independence and resilience of city people is conspicuous but this—their autonomy—is acquired and exploited in circumstances where no one is independent because everyone depends on many others for material needs and services that make life viable (Chapter Eight). iv. Autonomy presupposes the wit required to make one’s way in complex circumstances; originality and conceptual power are often honed to a fine edge. But this effect is sabotaged in two ways: people have more talents and want more freedom than focused systems can satisfy or tolerate; city intelligence is often routinized and blinkered when city size and complexity preclude the overview required to perceive urban structure or anticipate urban conflicts. Intelligence often reduces to the efficiency—the skills—of people who make their way in complex circumstances. (Chapter Nine) v. Cities would be the apotheosis of justice if benefits such as educated talents, autonomy, opportunity, tolerance, excitement, and refinement were enjoyed by all residents. That doesn’t happen because economy is the motor that creates these benefits and because systems and networks that dominate successful economies reward some people while excluding others. Starting from social inequality—never providing equal access and opportunity to all a city’s residents—these economies propagate it. (Chapter Nine) City anomalies crystallize in these oppositions: sometimes close to the attractor—the farfrom-equilibrium stable norm—that would resolve them (Chapter Seven), cities struggle, waver, and fail. We look for evidence of success while imagining ideals no city achieves: sometimes so near, never close enough. I sometimes refer to particular cities, though Chapters One through Six discuss generic features common to all settlements. Cities are the focus for Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine.

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Concern for ideals is half my motive for writing about cities; urban reality is the other spur. Cities are so complex that authors describe emblematic aspects of urban life or settle for talk about its look and feel. Philosophy is useful in this context. It, too, can be an empirical inquiry, one that differs from others because of the conceptual scale and systematic rigor it brings to outsized topics and because of its sensitivity to ideals incipient in the real. Natural law theory has a similar aim and defers at least superficially to evidence for its claim that virtue and conscience perfect moral practice. But natural law was long ago hijacked by thinkers who aver that laws or standards they prefer are the very ones commanded by their god. The empirical inquiry I propose doesn’t make that assumption. Its point of reference is prosaic, mechanical, and simple-minded: a machine of several parts doesn’t work well or at all if it isn’t constructed appropriately. My concern is the construction of societies and especially cities. What is the viable range of variability for the three variables (individuals, systems, and the whole), given the requirement that each couple to the other two? A coupling sufficient to stabilize a settlement has balance with some degree of respect for each of the variables: well-regulated systems encourage the effort and initiatives of members trained for their roles. Balance is partial in cities where unemployment is chronic and few people are trained to use their talents, but an inclusive arrangement is possible. What are its conditions; which criteria measure its achievement? We appraise settlement health and prospects by citing the ideal when measuring the real. My emphases—families, work-sites, schools, neighborhoods, and local networks—may seem retrograde to readers for whom globalization and electronic media (television and the Internet) are points of reference for current socialization. City bulk seems an excrescence if interlocutors in London or Bangalore are better known than people across the hall.4 Paul Virilio wrote presciently for all who share this view: Where once the opening of the city gates announced the alternating progression of days and nights, now we awaken to the opening of shutters and televisions. The day has been changed…. Chronological and historical time, time that passes, is replaced by a time that exposes itself instantaneously. … As a unity of place without any unity of time, the City has disappeared into the heterogeneity of that regime 4

See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.)

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comprised of the temporality of advanced technologies. The urban figure is no longer designated by a dividing line that separates here from there. Instead, it has become a computerized timetable.5 People talking on cell phones are everywhere; coffee houses and park benches are crowded with surfers connected wirelessly to the web. Technology penetrates systems altering opportunities and attitudes, but this isn’t new. There were similar effects when the telegraph and telephone were introduced: they, too, seemed to abstract people from their material circumstances. Devices said to damage social relations sometimes transform them in surprising ways: next door neighbors are mutually oblivious but they communicate regularly with Facebook friends. Molecular biology may someday change us in ways unforeseen; successive generations of technology do not. My ideas about social structure, first expressed in A Social Ontology,6 are similar to those of Talcott Parsons, Georg Simmel, and Louis Wirth: Parsons, too, emphasized the role of systems in societies organized for efficacy, opportunity, and control;7 Simmel and Wirth are points of reference for my account of urban personality and its development8 Manuel Castells supplies my agenda: In 1968 I published my first academic article, under the title “Is there an urban sociology?”…Thirty-two years later, with the hindsight of historical perspective and a life of practicing social research on cities, the answer is: yes, there was; no, there is currently not; but perhaps, with luck, it will resurge in the twenty-first century, with new concepts, new methods, and new themes, because it is more necessary than ever to make sense of our lives—which will be lived, for the large majority of people, in urban areas of some sort.9 Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext (e), 1991), p. 15. 6 See David Weissman, A Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 7 See Talcott Parson, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951). 8 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Form, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 324-339; and Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a way of Life,” in Cities and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 60-83. 9 Manuel Castells, The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory, ed. Ida Susser (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002, p. 390. 5

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I allege that some established ideas do make sense of urban lives. My biases and perspective are apparent. Having lived in Chicago and New York, knowing some European and Middle Eastern cities, I have little direct experience of sun-belt towns where cars span the gaps between home and work, shops and friends. But cities evolve: having disparate histories, they follow converging trajectories. Chicago was once the Wild West; more recently, a conductor who refused an invitation from the New York Philharmonic is the Chicago Symphony’s new music director. Burgeoning populations, systems, and networks recreate big city complexities in newer settings; complexity breeds intensity so principal attributes of city life are reproduced. Descriptions appropriate to Venice or New York can be tested for their relevance to Phoenix. I acknowledge the Panglossian effect of supposing that balance and inclusion are remote but sustainable natural norms, possibilities immanent though unachieved in contemporary cities. Do I overreach because of enjoying the advantages of a tolerant, efficient, and wealthy city? Walter Benjamin didn’t risk that mistake. Historically informed, knowing Paris and Berlin in the 1930s, he was sober and poised: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.10 Why describe a natural norm we shall never likely achieve? Because health, too, is elusive, though knowing what we lack is a condition for improving what we have. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), pp. 257-258). 10

Chapter One Theories of social structure Every characterization of city life and health presupposes a theory of social structure, a theory that identifies critical variables and their relations. This chapter considers reasons for preferring one of the three principal alternatives. 1. Three theories Individuals often go their separate ways: each prizes his or her freedom and exploits it on behalf of personal interests, talents, and needs. But there are many things one cannot do alone, hence one’s inevitable affiliation with other people in cooperative relationships—systems—that satisfy shared or complementary interests. People who go alone or together in different directions while competing for scarce space and resources resemble cars and trucks on a crowded highway: traffic slows until drivers regulate themselves by way of traffic laws. Discipline is constraining, but it facilitates movement. Societies everywhere exhibit all three postures: individuality, systems, and a corporate regulator. Alone at night, sick, or at odds with a friend, we feel our singularity. Finding partners for shared or complementary aims, we establish myriad systems that satisfy human needs and interests. Every member has his or her personal routine but all participate in systems that compete or collide, each elbowing others as it struggles for space and resources. These complex relations imply the need for corporate selfregulation, a public or government that uses law to mitigate complexity and conflict.

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Each of the three variables—individuals, systems, and a regulator—has a character and expressions appropriate to itself; each supports or destabilizes expressions for the other two. Theories of social structure differ because each argues that its preferred variable has priority over the other two. Three scenarios represent these emphases: Each settlement is a whole. All activity is controlled by a central authority or a totalizing organization. Every despotic regime is an authority of the first sort: its edicts dictate the conduct of business, worship, reproduction, and defense. Plato’s Republic is holistic in this other respect: each person’s role is the function of a plan that organizes every social activity, including the private lives of those who do the state’s work.11 Both versions encourage intermediate organizations—military or industrial units, churches, families, or schools—that perform essential functions or intensify loyalty to the state. Neither tolerates defiance to central authority. A settlement is an array of systems. Systems may be as small as a friendship or as inclusive as the federated states of the United States. They may comprise people living side by side or interest groups dispersed within the city: artists, bankers, or policemen. Individuals behave responsibly to systems and fellow members—by filling their roles—because of loyalty or because doing it satisfies their interests. Authority is shared among the society’s constituent systems and their members; rules are negotiated and endorsed rather than imposed. Or participants assemble as a public institutionalized as a government, because informal arrangements are inefficient: complexity and conflict aren’t resolved without laws and the apparatus required to enforce them. A settlement is an aggregate of individuals. Personal autonomy is the dominant value. People are cordial but distant or mutually indifferent; they cooperate when interests are shared or complementary, but cooperation endures only as long as needs impel it. Hostility is discouraged, because harming others is the one breach all join to suppress. This attitude reduces families, businesses, schools, police, and the night-watchman state to utilities. Nothing but personal liberty is good-initself. The more ample characterizations that follow exceed the interests of human social theory because each is said to be a comprehensive account of all reality, human and otherwise: each is a candidate for categorial form, a

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Plato, Republic, 369a3-541b2, pp. 615-772.

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design for all reality.12 This level of generality is remote from the concerns of human social theory, but useful because it exposes motives and assumptions that may be invisible there. Individualism affirms that reality comprises self-sufficient agents moving freely in a medium; each goes its way until or unless it collides with others. Humans complicate this story by introducing laws that reduce collisions or facilitate cooperation, but that emphasis is incidental to the singularity and self-sufficiency claimed for things of every kind, whether material or spiritual, living or inert. Democritus spoke of atoms, Aristotle of primary substances; Luther argued for the individuality and responsibility of souls; Descartes discovered his own existence and implicitly that of every thinker; Locke and Mill affirmed the rights and autonomy of individual citizens. The practical experience of human agency and responsibility, like the perception of things moving freely, seems to confirm that particulars are mutually independent. But holism demurs: it affirms that the identity of every particular is a function of its place or role within the coordinated parts of a cosmic system, be it a consciousness, God, or spacetime. These two positions could only oppose, never challenge one another— given their difference of scale—if there were no terrain on which to judge their respective implications. Social, political, and ethical issues, especially the opposition between individual freedom and one’s duties to a unitary state, supply that middle ground. Mill emphasized positive and negative freedoms (freedom to and freedom from) and the principle that harm to others is the sole basis for interfering with liberty of choice and action. Holists respond that society is paralyzed by indecision if the disparate wills of independent thinkers are mutually canceling; freedom is a liability and conceit. Hobbes described chaotic individualism cured by a holistic, tyrannical state; the loi Chapelier (an edict promulgated in Paris by the Committee of Public Safety on June 14, 1791) disestablished every system intermediate between citizens and the authority of the sovereign. Formulated as the Committee’s response to a butchers’ strike, it justified the state’s coercive authority. The dispute widens because neither individualism nor holism is adequate to all phenomena. There are no unallied particulars. The simplest David Weissman, Hypothesis and the Spiral of Reflection (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 34-52; Weissman, Cage, pp. 9-23.

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atom is a complex of parts, one whose integration and autonomy presuppose a tolerant environment of temperature and pressure: even protons could not form in the heat and pressure of the early universe. Holism alleges that the character of each thing is a function of every other, though its doctrine of internal relations is falsified by the numbers in any telephone book: 123-4567 and 765-4321 are not mutually determining. There is one whole such that every item within it is mutually determining, either directly or mediately: namely, the spacetime where gravitational relations are pervasive. But holism fails on this condition, too: anything created today has no effect on things that dissolved before its creation. Systems theory accommodates all the phenomena explained by individualism or holism and every consideration for which neither is adequate.13 It alleges that every “thing” is a system whose members—its parts—are related statically or dynamically. No system of either kind exists without parts, but all systems derive integrity from the constitutive relations of their parts. Static systems are those having parts arranged temporally or spatially, but not causally: rhythm in music, contrast or proportion in painting. Dynamic systems are formed and stabilized by the causal relations of their parts. (A settlement’s buildings are systems in both respects: structures having static designs are supported by the immanent causality of weight bearing pillars or walls). The causality creating systems imposes a further condition: namely, the reciprocity binding the causes. Elementary reciprocities—gravity and electromagnetism—create elementary systems; those established by feedback are higher-order. Positive feedback reinforces a self-energizing process: the fire oxidizing a portion of combustible material heats material adjacent so it, too, burns. The process continues until an external agent intervenes to lower the temperature of the oxidizing material or until all is burnt. Many biological processes are perpetuated in this way: metabolism continues until Systems theory is an ancient idea. Plato’s Republic is an early expression. The principal modern formulation is Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1976). Others include: Mario Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Vol. 4: Ontology ll: A World of Systems (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979); Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990); and Weissman, A Social Ontology. 13

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its energy source is exhausted. Negative feedback is system-forming when one or more in a set of causes is maintained within a range of values because of another’s response. Thermostats are a familiar example, but the process is equally apparent in conversations where the cogency of every next speech is controlled by previous speeches: “Markets tumble” isn’t a cogent response to a question about the weather. Every feedback system is a module having an inside and an outside: the back and forth of a conversation establishes an internal economy and a barrier that filters extraneous inputs. One may think of modularity in terms of bodies and their bounded spaces—engine here, carburetor there—but that assumption doesn’t apply to a political debate before a mixed group of partisans. Each candidate rouses supporters randomly distributed in the crowd; inside and outside, here, are functions of commitment, not spatial organization or location. Modules emerge successively from the simplest elements in the trajectory represented by Figure 1:

Figure 1. Progression in the complexity of systems with stability at points 3, 7, and 10. Let quarks be first order. Never existing alone at current temperatures and pressure, they are always coupled to one another within the nuclei of atoms. Some atoms and their parts are stable in themselves, but we ignore them for the purposes of illustration, declaring instead that molecules are the first order of stability: they embody energy sufficient to maintain the reciprocal

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relations of their parts. Figure 1 represents molecules as the highest order in one sequence and as the lowest order in the sequence running through cells, tissues, and organs to human bodies. Bodies, too, are more stable than their antecedents, because they have access to sources of sustaining energy. The ascent beyond bodies is the highest-order sequence represented: individual humans are not usually sustainable apart from families that nourish and protect them, but families are vulnerable apart from tribes or communities that suffer, in turn, from mutual conflict and other hazards until unified as viable states, represented at level ten. States terminate the trajectory by forming stable alliances and common markets. Stability at levels three, seven, and ten is a steady state, meaning that relations between or among a system’s parts are stabilized either because sustaining energy is intrinsic to the system or because it extracts energy and materials from its environment as needed. Notice, as the figure implies, that a system’s parts are themselves steady state systems, and that the stability of a higher-order system presupposes that its parts are themselves in equilibrium. Some parts (protons, for example) embody a sustaining pool of energy. Others (cells) acquire sustaining energy, because their higher-order system, the body, has access to it. The trajectory implies growth, higher orders of complexity, and the extended power that comes when systems prove their mastery of a situation by joining effectively with others. But dissolution, too, is change. Systems that fail to stabilize at a higher node dissolve to the next lower one: anarchy reduces cities to their members; living things reduce to their constituent molecules. It may seem that steady state—stable—systems are static: how could they grow or adapt to altered circumstances? Many systems that are tightly packed, mutually reinforcing, and defended by stable circumstances— crystals, for example—resist change. There are also petrified communities where practices are routinized in ways that blunt every initiative. Imagine fishing villages on a small island in waters teeming with fish. Island canneries export to a hungry market until fish stocks are depleted and mainland tastes resist tinned fish. Innovation is critical—tourism, perhaps— if local villages are to avoid depopulation, though habits that stabilized the community are inimical to change. There are many such settlements: people saturated by the beliefs and practices of a church, towns sustained by a dominant industry. All will surely disappear if beliefs or practices cannot be

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altered in ways appropriate to new information, techniques, or markets. The identification of stability and stasis is, nevertheless, mistaken: stability is often the mark of a far-from-equilibrium (far-from-entropy) dynamic steady state system: health, the sustainable equilibrium of its parts and their relations, enables a living body to control its energy supply while developing a more articulate internal structure (the developing infant brain, for example); participants in a stable friendship elaborate the reciprocities binding them. A breeding population would go extinct if some members—often genetic sports—couldn’t adapt to changes in its niche; a community is stabilized but resilient if one fraction renews the community with initiatives sensitive to current or prospective opportunities while another has habits and practices adapted to current circumstances. The exact fractions of old and new can’t be accurately specified (they vary with communities and their circumstances), but the new must offset the old if the community is to survive an altered environment. The analogy from species to communities is imperfect: there may be no conflict between individual gnats dying in altered circumstances and sports that survive, though nothing mitigates social disruption when established human systems resist change by fighting for their privileges and security. Biological evolution is tidy; social evolution leaves memories and resentments that sabotage its adaptations. The turbulence of systems that form or disintegrate isn’t represented in Figure 1. Suppose, as the figure implies, that each step supplies prime parts for the next higher step. Now consider that systems are organized hierarchically, sometimes with overlap. Figures 2 and 3 represent embedded systems.

Figure 2. Hierarchy.

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The small center circle in Figure 2 represents anything constrained by systems of higher order: Manhattan, for example, limited successively by the rules and practices of New York City, New York State, and the United States. Systems sharing members overlap: they complicate hierarchies and the lives of members who participate in systems that compete for their attention.

Figure 3. Overlap. Figure 3 represents hierarchies with overlap, implying shared responsibility. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has responsibility for maintaining trans-Hudson River tubes and tunnels: employees are responsible to the Authority (a first order); the Authority is responsible to these states (higher orders). Chaining occurs when systems share a function (parents and teachers educating children) but no members, and when systems sharing no members have complementary needs and effects (publishers, bookstores, and libraries).

Figure 4. Chaining. Systems are organized in several or many hierarchies that rise from a common base. The base is the network of gravitational relations: every material entity relates gravitationally to every other, however mediated their relations. Gravitational relations are the only ones that satisfy the idea of

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pervasive internal relations.14 For typically, things are mutually independent and indifferent apart from this base: city-dwellers often have little to do with their next door neighbors; having different origins, work, and friends, they rarely meet. Think of their gravitational relations as the base of a cloud bank and the hierarchies in which each participates as separate clouds rising from that base. Think of residency as the equivalent to gravitational relations, while each resident’s affiliations locate him or her in one or another of the separate networks that flourish in cities. Figure 5 illustrates the mix of connection, disconnection, hierarchy, overlap, and chaining that engages every person and system within each of a settlement’s hierarchically organized networks:

Figure 5. Networks formed by individuals, overlap, chaining, and hierarchy. Every domain has several or many arrays of systems related in the style of this figure, but also many individuals and systems that are mutually indifferent: tailors, grocers, and bakers relate to their suppliers and trade associations but they may not relate to one another. People who jostle for space in the street or subway never meet; some are ruffled, helped, or hurt by these chance encounters, but no causal reciprocities stabilize their relations. Mutual independence is, nevertheless, hard to establish. Paying taxes in Utah and Florida seems disconnected though it is not, because money paid in both places goes to federal services enjoyed by taxpayers in each; let either pay less and the other may be G.W. V. Leibniz, Monadology, in Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1965), para. 39, p. 154; para. 56, pp. 156-157.

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affected, however slightly. There are many such connections, so autonomy is wrongly perceived as a norm for social reality and the baseline for social theory: independence is the limit to connection, not its absence. Figure 6 represents individual persons participating in three systems:

Figure 6. An individual participating in three systems. All the systems represented in this figure share a common member. That person is the point of overlap for relationships—to family members, friends, colleagues, or teammates—that are otherwise mutually independent. Each person’s social identity is a function of the roles he or she accepts or chooses, satisfies, and prioritizes: what to do, with whom, in which order of preference. The six figures above vindicate the superiority claimed for systems theory (communitarianism). It says that individuals of every order higher than quarks (or an order still more fundamental) are systems—modules— having a degree of complexity introduced by the reciprocal causal relations of their parts. All participate in arrays of overlapping higher-order systems. So, human bodies are systems stabilized by the reciprocal causal relations of their parts. Friendships emerge with the reciprocities of the friends; character emerges when a person’s distinguishing tastes, talents, and loyalties develop within the systems where he or she has roles. Cities and the universe are arrays of systems, though they, too, are unitary systems for the purposes of some relationships: corporate regulation (government) and gravity, for example. Compare the alternatives. Individualism emphasizes self-sufficiency: everything—atom, brick, mind, soul, or person—is said to be self-sufficient and free-standing. Relations to others are incidental to a thing’s identity, because there is no

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difference between causal relations and accidental conjunctions: one enters a relationship fully formed and leaves it—a singles’ bar, marriage, or subway car—unaltered. Some conjunctions are accidental, but are those relationships a plausible point of reference for describing human development or the work people do? Are we unaffected by families, schools, marriages, or friendships; is it true that leaving one or dissolving another makes no difference to who we are and what we can do? Individualism takes its point of reference from self-willed adults (or autonomous mind or souls) and Hume’s notion of causality. It has little or nothing to say of children: its theory of causation makes no sense of their birth or of systems—families and schools—responsible for their nurture and socialization. Communitarianism locates children and adults in systems where they are reciprocally bound in work, love, friendship, or civility. But each of us is engaged by many systems, so we learn both the skills required by their roles and the autonomy—the power, judgment, and self-discipline—to choose our roles and the degree of our commitment to them. Holism solders each thing to every other. Communitarianism emphasizes the selective character of relations: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me” makes its point. Human settlements, cities especially, exhibit its principal claim: reality is an array of systems, some mutually independent, others bound within the overlapping orders of hierarchically organized systems. City dwelling families are often nuclear and mutually independent. They compare to networks of businesses, suppliers, and clients, politicians, lobbyists, and publicists. Every city is a maze of hierarchically arrayed systems and networks: some that dominate are invisible to all but their members. Each array is a web of constraining relations; each relation is consequential for freedom. Positive freedom (freedom to) is the power to choose and fill one’s roles. The negative freedom claimed by individualists, libertarians especially, is a justified demand when directed at intrusive churches, employers, or governments. But no one is exempt from interference if everyone participates in systems where freedom of action is restricted by one’s roles. Holism acknowledges both positive and negative freedoms, but argues that each is satisfied by having skills, resources, and no interference when filling one’s role or roles in the whole. Holism can’t acknowledge that every person decides the time and effort appropriate to his

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or her roles, because its doctrine of internal relations entails that relations to others determine what shall be done, to what standard, and when. This proposal’s implications are amply confirmed by the experience of living in a city or state organized holistically: people and systems are crushed; initiative suffocates when the only motion is the slow churning of the whole. 2. Contentious history Objections to understanding urban social structure by way of systems theory are sparse and uneven. Ferdinand Tonnies despaired that systems constitutive of traditional communities—principally families, neighborhoods, and churches—dissolve under the atomizing pressure of markets, technology, and the demands of reason and autonomy; social relations come to be mediated by contracts, laws, and utility, not loyalty, duty, or reverence.15 This implies that systems cannot form or stabilize if they are not bound by sentiment or sanctified by exalting stories or traditions: marriages made in heaven, communities glorified by their god. But neither is necessary to their formation or stability: we may believe that an army, family, or team thrives under the watchful eye of its demon, but little or nothing of their generation or utility depends on this way of construing it. Significance (valorizing interpretation) is often window dressing; core and other systems adapt and endure because practical life requires them. Gesellschaft (utilitarian society) supersedes Gemeinschaft (community) without turning every system into an aggregate. Gilles Deleuze was hostile to the traditional systems Tonnies favors, though his objection has more splash than substance: Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school…; then the barracks…; then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison….What Foucault recognized as well was the Ferdinand Toennies, “On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: Conclusions and Outlooks,” in Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1957), pp. 33-34. 15

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transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life)…We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—person, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an ‘interior’, in crisis like all other interiors…But everyone know that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies….There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope but only to look for new weapons.16 People, hospitals, factories, schools, and families are fixtures of social structure short of unforeseeable transformations. Social systems change with altered circumstances, but none confirms the claim that “these institutions are finished.” They may be replaced: families will be superseded if human infants are raised in vats like oysters; perfect health and brains loaded with computer software may make hospitals and schools passé. But other systems stabilized by the reciprocal causal relations of their members will structure that new social world. For there is no choice: people or machines that cannot do everything for themselves will be linked to others within systems. Then as now, systems will be the thick productive agents of activity; then as now, the status of corporate regulation and the degree of individual autonomy tolerated or encouraged by systems and the regulator will be issues to resolve. Deleuze’s gloss of Foucault is provocative because systems theory is so little discussed among philosophers who write of social structure. There are elements of it in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. But these are intimations of a theory that none develops 16

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59, 1992, p.3.

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fully. Systems are often ignored for reasons that are practical or ideological, political or religious. Jefferson argued for the advantages of a state that is communitarian because federal: each constituency regulates itself within constraints established by higher-order systems: towns within counties within states.17 This program reduces large aggregates to parts that are administratively viable: it enables a jurisdiction’s residents to know one another while managing their corporate interests. But layered jurisdictions, each predicated on a community of interests, are hard to achieve when the participants at each level have different, often contrary interests.18 Hierarchies make governance clumsy, reduce a sovereign’s authority to regulate individual citizens directly, and reduce each citizen’s freedom by embedding him or her in a hierarchy of regulators. Prizing freedom over governance and community, Locke and Kant deferred to the atomist charge that freedom is suppressed or constrained by every organization intermediate between the citizen and state. Freedom from these layers of interference is a condition for making choices appropriate to individual interests19 or reason’s laws,20 hence the urgency for reducing every organization to its members: no hierarchy of systems should frustrate one or challenge the other. Holism is inimical to systems theory because of its religious or cosmological inspiration. Some holists suppose that God creates and organizes every contingency for reasons of his own: initiative is a delusion— even the individuality of perspectives disappears within the whole—if every finite consciousness distorts the unity of God’s creation. The true church is the whole: its parts—the members—suppress refractory impulses while thinking reverentially about the all-inclusive One. This persuasion is widely shared by some governments, though fractious cities condemn it. Think of alliances sometimes achieved by competing urban interest groups, then ask why they often disintegrate if all are unified already.

Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams,” in Writings (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), pp. 394-403. 18 Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 23-25. 19 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 269. 20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London: Longmanns, 1963), p. 65. 17

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Americans once sung “Home on the Range” as an anthem to freedom and the frontier. But it is cities and towns that liberate us by supplying the myriad contexts—the systems—where tastes and talents thrive. Cities are oddly schizoid. They promise rich, thick privacy—singularity—in the midst of complexity. Some residents are overwhelmed; many are elated by the intensity, opportunities, and spontaneity of city life. Aims that would be unthinkable in other circumstances are realizable there. Other people are never far, but one finds a way among them, seeing opportunities, making choices others don’t perceive or oppose. Freedom is a risk; cities encourage it. The atomist ideology of our time resists this communitarian persuasion. We believe slogans that affirm our autonomy: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”; “All men are endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Systems theory qualifies this story. It offers copious evidence that rights are legislated, not innate. It says that autonomy is learned when children acquire information, habits, and attitudes appropriate to families, friendships, neighborhoods, and schools. These are core systems where the taste and skills for using freedom are acquired. There is also an underside that libertarianism ignores. For no celebration of freedom softens the drudgery and hopelessness of people who move to cities because they confuse possibility with opportunity. Entangled in systems they never master, powerless in circumstances they can’t control, they gag on atomist slogans.

Chapter Two Systems, Individuals, and the Whole Each of the theories mooted in Chapter One has a distinct tension quickly perceived by anyone visiting a settlement where one of the three rightly characterizes the orienting social bias. One sees busy people loosely related. Or residents are magically coordinated: all is clockwork. Or there is apparent confusion—people go in every direction for indiscernible aims— though all is resolved as one distinguishes their alliances and roles. This chapter describes the three variables of social structure— individuals, systems, and the self-regulating whole—from the perspective of urban complexity. The chapter title inverts the pervasive assumption that individuals are the point of reference for any plausible account of reality, be it molecules from atoms, words from letters and syllables, bodies from cells, or social organizations from their human members. Wittgenstein’s remark— words acquire meaning in the context of sentences21—reorients an established perspective: human bodies, like words, antedate their affiliations, but they acquire character and purpose in the context of systems. Topics introduced in the last chapter are amplified here. 1. Systems An artist’s palette has all the colors that appear, directly or mixed, in his or her paintings; their value within a picture is a function of relative size and placement. This is also true of notes in a musical phrase, words in sentences, and people in systems. There are six principal headings to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), para. 3.3, p. 25. 21

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consider: 1. systems created and stabilized by their constitutive relations: 2. two kinds of systems; 3. systems, classes, and castes; 4. relations among systems; 5. aims; and 6. members. 1.1 Systems created and stabilized by their constitutive relations A familiar view avers that nature is an aggregate, all its complexity explained by the shifting relations of elementary particles in spacetime. Many examples justify this Humean persuasion: alter the sequence of colors or notes and one has a different painting or song. But this fluidity doesn’t always produce viable effects: some atoms won’t bond to one another; exchanging liver and brain kills the patient. Function is the appropriate test for examples such as these, because it shows that some relationships stabilize while most do not. A bag of parts is not a sewing machine; join them properly and the machine works as designed. This ensemble effect is productive and self-regulating: conversation enhances efficiency in partnerships of every sort; an orchestra’s members play better if they can hear one another. Hume wrote that cause and effect are only spatial and temporal conjuncts,22 but that surmise doesn’t explain the efficacy of sewing machines. It doesn’t survive this assortment of five objections: i. Hume conflated reality with data perceived: “impressions,” he called them. Existence, he said, is just the force and vivacity of our percepts. This is his much reduced version of Descartes’ argument that I exist whenever I think: meaning that I exist when aware that my consciousness is qualified by thoughts, dreams, or percepts.23 Descartes also posited a beneficent God to leverage the inference that there is also an extra-mental world. But Hume alleged that all reality is a stripped-down version of the cogito: a stream of data with no idea or impression of the mind entertaining them. His notion of causality is an artifact of this reduction: the data are related sequentially or merely by virtue of similarity. But several factors critical to experience and reality are missing from this gloss: error and frustration are evidence of a David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, second edition, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 1. 23 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 64. 22

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world that resists us; practical experience (burning oneself on a hot stove, getting what you want because you ask for it) is evidence that causality is more than constant conjunction. ii. Hume remarked that every sequence embodying no contradiction is possible: an event may have any conceivable cause, not only those heretofore observed. But this claim conflates the ample world of logical possibilities with the subset of possibilities instantiated in our world: events in a world satisfying a law such as 2F=ma differ considerably from those obtaining here. No events in either world are necessary in the respect that their negations are contradictions, but all events in either world are necessary in the parochial sense that they satisfy their world’s signature laws. iii. Hume declared that any event may occur in the absence of a cause24 because no contradiction is implied by imagining either in the absence of the other. But is it true, as this entails, that things or events can come into being from nothing? This classic puzzle derives all its cogency from the grammar of cause and process: but nothing is not a cause; coming into being from nothing is not a process. iv. Hume insisted that every idea, causality included, should acquire its cash value from impressions that exhibit its sense. But efficient causality is energy exchange. One sees the effects—toasted bread, for example—but not the exchange that heats a toaster’s coils. v. Most puzzling of all is public acclaim for Hume’s dictum that existence, including the existence of extra-mental things and events, reduces to the force and vivacity of sensory data: esse est percipi. Hume gives hopes and nightmares a status they haven’t earned; he emphasizes the plasticity of imagination without regard for all that is unyielding in nature. Sewing machines and toasters are forward sequencing machines: a cascade of effects culminates in the function for which the machine was designed. This is a version of positive feedback: fires feed on combustible material until none remains; completion of each successive stage in a 24

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 172.

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successful process provokes others until an aim is achieved. Human systems exploit this style of feedback when teams start and continue a game until one side wins or rain stops play. Games also exhibit negative feedback: each player relates to the others of his team in ways determined by their roles and interactions. Six players shift to the left, but the seventh doesn’t move: others see his response, then move back to the right after inferring they have shifted too far. Human bodies and social systems embody negative feedback by way of the reciprocal causal relations joining their parts. The novice pitcher attends more carefully to his catcher’s next sign if he waved off the last one before throwing to a batter who hit the ball out of the park. Partners in a relationship act within limits fixed by signals exchanged between or among them; each sets boundaries for the other. Circuits of mutual control may have two partners or many: two people in conversation or all bodies related gravitationally. Fellow workers, family members, friends, even enemies, respond to one another in ways that may oblige each to modify a previous sally in ways determined by the other: a singer and her accompanist adjust to one another’s phrasing and rhythms; the chorus line of New York’s Radio City Rockettes is straight as a die because each dancer looks down the line and to her partners, left and right, as she adjusts her position relative to theirs. Every feedback system is a module having an inside and an outside: the back and forth of a conversation establishes an internal economy and a barrier that filters extraneous inputs. Modularity, causal reciprocities, and the negative feedback relations they enable structure every human social system: each has an internal dynamic such that responses to a member’s actions are construed by that member as a sign that he or she should go on as before or alter his or her behavior in appropriate ways: an instructor speaks too loudly; students put fingers in their ears until he lowers his voice. One may think of modularity in terms of bodies and their bounded spaces—engine here, carburetor there—but that assumption isn’t always correct. A radio station broadcasting in Spanish is heard throughout the city, though its advertisers and announcers speak only to people who understand them: here, inside and outside are functions of cultural and linguistic identity, not spatial organization or location. We sometimes construe society as a crowd: people moving or standing about with little or no interest in one another. This is mistaken if one’s vital relations to others are founded in the reciprocities of negative feedback

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systems. There are two vectors of concern: a system’s aim and the character or welfare of its members. Members who share a system’s aim are alive to one another; each sees the others’ talents as a respected resource, one that all are happy to nourish. Schools are a principal example but mentoring is everywhere, so the sensibility it requires is always appropriate. The cynosure of these efforts is the character—the skills and attitudes—of persons trained for a role or roles. Viable members make their system work, but roles are never mechanically joined; creating a coherent system from an array of qualified members—achieving its aim—requires organization and sensitivity to the sentiments and expectations of the members. No system works as well as it could if members resent the work or one another. Mancur Olson emphasized that a system’s prospective members calculate the cost of membership versus the price of independence or freeriding. Systems (classes and castes) form in a sea of latency, all of it amorphous, he thought, until people identify a common cause and organize to pursue it.25 They wouldn’t form, if Olson was right, without coercion or the perceived advantage of membership.26 The caution hereby implied is typical of people choosing friends or partners, but it is false to many bonds suffused with commitment to systems and their other members. Our experience as children supplies a different paradigm for all subsequent attachments: bonded to one or more other people in need and emotion, our identity and well-being conditioned by these relations, we cleave to them. Free, as adults, to make choices of our own, we seek affiliations that reproduce the intensity of those early experiences. Expecting that we shall often give more than we get, we don’t always figure the cost. (Olson would likely have agreed.) 1.2 Two kinds of systems Systems vary: some are associations; others are organizations. Associations form when people of similar attitudes, beliefs, or practices affiliate. Their bond is the security each feels when his or her ways are confirmed—mirrored—by others. Mirroring is a reciprocal relation, for each vindicates his or her belief by seeing it objectified in them. Mirroring is most effective when the number of believers has achieved a critical mass, one that varies with the belief or practice at issue: ideologues don’t need many fellow Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 48-52. 26 Ibid., p. 51. 25

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believers before assuming that their thesis is valid; a team’s fans couldn’t sustain an association having so little support. This difference expresses itself behaviorally: members of a large church are often calm; numbers speak for the power of their beliefs. Fervor is more conspicuous in smaller churches where each member intensifies the beliefs of others by raising the level of his or her intensity. Association is commitment valorized because socialized. Organizations are cooler. Members bound by their mutually dependent roles (pilot and navigator, shortstop and first baseman) commit themselves to an organization in two steps. Liking the activity and wanting to participate, they choose a role appropriate to their skills and cooperate with people having complementary roles: I’ll wash the dishes if you’ll cook. Communitarians divide: some emphasize organization, others association. Some systems embody features of both kinds: Quakers have very little organization; labor unions and other religions have more. 1.3 Systems, classes, and castes The existence of classes and castes requires only that some or many people share a property, interest, status, or practice. Neither implies a system in which people sharing an aim are joined as members. The latency Olson described is nevertheless real: society alters when systems crystallize (unions form) from distributed differences (unaffiliated workers). Class differences become class conflict when established systems defend themselves against newly emergent and assertive systems by creating networks of allies: corporations and banks on one side, federated unions on the other. Democratic theory postulates an open playing field where any system can form if its aims and practices are not inimical to those of others. But disadvantaged people have no access to a playing field dominated by powerful adversaries. That space fractures when crystallized classes or castes challenge systems that exploit or exclude them. Social balance with inclusion is the ideal described below: these conflicts impede or preclude it. 1.4 Relations among systems Walk the streets of any city and one sees individual people, not systems, going about their affairs. Each person has a name and address, but more important marks are invisible until people identify themselves as participants in systems whose aims and functions explain their trajectories. Now ask these

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same people about their system’s role in chained or nested systems. If a business, there are clients, suppliers, trade associations, licensing authorities, insurers, and building inspectors; if a family, there are parents, children, godparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Members seem anonymous when walking a busy street, though each has several roles and a complex social identity centered in an array of overlapping, hierarchically ordered systems. Relations among systems have several bases. They are accidental when otherwise unrelated systems—a church and barber shop—share a member; they are incidental if systems share no member or function, but are nevertheless related by propinquity: the yoga and boxing classes scheduled for adjacent hours in the same room. Overlap—systems share a member that may be a person or persons, a system or systems—is usually an accidental relation: Canada and the New York Rangers share several members. Relations are essential if the organization or function of one system depends on the organization or function of one or more others. There are three kinds of essential relations: i. partnership; ii. inclusion/ constitution; and iii. client-command relations. i. Partnerships are symbiotic: each of two or more systems (heart and lungs, business and supplier) requires the work of the other to sustain itself. Symbiosis is apparent in their functional interdependence and in structural features that anticipate these functions (a catcher’s glove). Partnership is often benign (as when each supplies a substance—oxygen or carbon dioxide—necessary to the other), but it survives in marriages and friendships that are symbiotic, but toxic. Relationships that start well may continue for other reasons: there may be advantages that offset a partnership’s corrosive effects, though a limit is breached when habit is the only advantage. Generative partnerships are particularly notable: Britain and the United States, Portugal and Brazil, Judaism and Christianity. Relations within a pair sometimes resemble those of parents and children: impatient adults, careless children. ii. Inclusion/constitution is a relation implicit in the trajectory represented by Figure 1 of Chapter One: electrons are systems wholly included in molecules; organs and bodies are composed of cells. This is constitution from the standpoint of the whole; it is inclusion when considered from the perspective of a system’s parts. Inclusion/constitution implies that

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the whole is greater than its parts, though disparity of scale—earth and the cosmos, a family and its city—may be vast. iii. Client-command relations are complementary: there is never one without the other. The client takes direction; the commander gives it. This dynamic has various expressions, including military chains of command, the psychology of personal relationships, and market transactions where buyers oblige sellers to satisfy them. Hegel’s description of master-slave relationships is classic: the slave is organized to serve; the master couldn’t function without a service turned on or off by negative feedback.27 Members over-lapped by mutually independent systems are sometimes free to choose the amount of time and effort given to each. Hierarchy is often less permissive because it embodies two of these relations: inclusion/constitution and client-command. Lower-order systems operate in ways constrained by the higher-order environment created by systems in which they nest. Relations of these three kinds (essential, constitutive, and clientcommand) generate dense networks of social systems. Western philosophy since the Enlightenment has emphasized individual persons, their freedom, rights, and prerogatives. But each of these qualifications has conditions or a context. Individuals are born and formed in systems; they pass out of families and schools, enjoying the fantasy of having no context before creating or joining systems that will be their context throughout adulthood. Individualism unattached and out of context is a romantic fantasy. 1.5. Aims Systems vary in this simple way: some work to satisfy members’ needs (housing and education, for example); others give precedence to systems’ needs irrespective of costs to their members (labor camps). Conditions for enforcing a system’s aims vary accordingly: members are usually willing participants in systems that serve their interests; salaries, bribes, or coercion are usually required when they do not. Seductions required to make coercion tolerable or attractive—military decorations, for example—are not less G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 228-240.

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effective for being transparent. Yet fidelity to a task doesn’t always require a bribe. Sacrifice is not always a ruse: parents and friends do it often for their children or one another. The familiar response is that no one does anything for others short of coercion unless doing it satisfies a personal interest or need. But what self-regarding motive explains the soldier who throws himself on a grenade or the parent who washes floors to put a child through school? These parents and soldiers don’t need bribes or coercion to motivate a corporate interest. For this alternation is always the choice of either-or. Contrary aims have fused if neither is satisfied when the other is not: I may be my system’s willing instrument; I may want what it needs. Large salaries paid to motivational speakers seems money well spent if workers leave their meetings humming the company song. Some religions also want this self-abnegation. Marriage once required women to embody the aims of their men; it is still expected of parents and priests, who willingly comply. But these examples are marginal because systems can be valued without obliging them to cannibalize the aims of their members. I see the virtues of my systems; I approve their aims and want them satisfied. But I can fill my roles effectively while having an equally clear idea of my purposes, including places where they deviate from or cohere with those of my systems. I do my work efficiently, but I won’t do it when a system of mine pursues abhorrent aims or when my sick child would be alone were I not with her. This posture is strained to breaking by work’s Taylorization and the large pool of needy people competing for jobs. It is appropriate to the complementary perspectives of systems and their members: systems theory acknowledges that neither is self-sufficient. 1.6 Members Why do people bend themselves to the dimensions of a system’s roles? Need and coercion are two reasons: I take any job I can get or do what I can’t escape. Responsibility and formation are additional reasons: I choose to be a parent; I go to school or take an apprenticeship because I want skills appropriate to a talent. This fourth motive is fragile because one isn’t sure of having a talent, because it seems self-indulgent, and because roles filled for the other three reasons dominate one’s time and limit one’s opportunities. But it is likely that I would better enjoy what I do if it were something for which I have a knack, something I could do well. This dream is a reasonable desire for self-knowledge sufficient to exploit and enjoy one’s nature. Tension

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roiling these three duties—self-discovery, self-fulfillment and one’s roles—is perpetual: how shall one do work appropriate to a role while doing it in ways that leave space for oneself? Positive and negative freedom—freedom to and from—are conditions having a sense specific to this context: positive freedom is the opportunity to fill a role within a network where other members have complementary tasks (judge and jury, parents and teachers); negative freedom is exemption from interference as one fills a role. But this is only half—the systems side—of the equation. For both freedoms are imperatives as well as material conditions: stand back, let me be who I am or would be. This complexity is obscured by the individualist emphasis on freedom. It wrongly implies that social bonds are loose. Stressing the advantages of contractual relations and laws that make breaking them expensive, it implies that people would be unaffiliated but for rewards and punishments. This emphasis resembles Galileo’s account of motion: things continue to move in a straight line unless stopped or turned. Characterizations of freedom apply his principle to human affairs: we are essentially disconnected, hence free to do as we like short of harming other people. Relations to others are temporary, even ephemeral, with only the prospect of benefits to keep us joined. Physical laws formulated on this Galilean principle radically simplify descriptions of motion; the implications for freedom are less felicitous. Compare Aristotle’s ideas about motion. They are more complicated, less accurate than Galileo’s when applied to physical change, but closer to the truth about social roles and relations. Aristotle’s theory was flawed because extrapolated from observations of living things and their niches. But similar constraints are apparent in human societies where roles are fixed by places in systems.28 There is a degree of freedom: some affiliations are chosen, though others are inherited. Many people decide the time and effort devoted to systems of both kinds, but almost no one lives unencumbered by firm bonds to the other members of valued systems. Membership is costly. Obligation trumps freedom: time and commitments prevent most people from learning, using, or enjoying their principal tastes and talents

Aristotle, Politics, in Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) 1252a25-1252b25, pp. 1127=1129.

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2. Individuals Systems locate individuals within networks of relations where character evolves as we learn roles and respond to the expectations of other people. Every person is nevertheless convinced that he or she is more and other than a member of systems. We think so because our bodies are freestanding and mutually separable, because thoughts, feelings, and desires differ among bodies, and because the belligerence and contrariety of other wills is direct evidence that one is sometimes opposed to other people, not only their systems. The particularity of wills is nevertheless allusive if most of what we call “individual” is the behavior of agents whose thoughts and actions are fixed by layers of affiliation. For no one is raw or unformed by circumstances that include the systems where character is acquired. Some people dress distinctively; their style is elegant or silly. If elegant, it extrapolates from standard clothing to finer materials, fit, accessories, and detail. Many are less aware; most are careful not to breach a vague frontier that few trespass. Some lose touch: individuality reduces to a misperception when people leave fancy shops looking odd or foolish in clothing tailored for a different figure. Where do we look for “authentic” individuality, individuality that is more than a particular body, nervous tic, or the misjudgment that stands out in a crowd? It begins with a particular genetic inheritance and develops as a fetus responds to nourishment, its mother’s physiology, and the chance occurrences of her pregnancy. It evolves after birth as the infant acquires a repertoire of responses to its caretakers and circumstances, including power to refuse the care offered. Development quickens with intellectual and motor skills and with the newly discovered freedom to choose one’s companions and sequence one’s actions. Individuality is elusive past the singularity of bodies, situations, and the wrinkles of personal development, because similar talents, resources, culture, tasks, and technology guarantee similar training and outcomes. The ardent pilot has a different trajectory from the dedicated plumber; both are competent, both rank their priorities and organize their time, but individuality retreats another time because the differences of pilots and plumbers fail to distinguish either from others of their kind. A vocation’s tasks and skills are similar, so individuality is the small space achieved by the particularities of a worker’s personal situation and the idiosyncrasies of his character. Let pilots or plumbers meet to talk about their work and one hears how little difference this is.

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There would be nothing more to say if we weren’t looking in the wrong place. For there is a clue to the individuality we seek in the idea that freedom is a power comprising perception, judgment, talent, and will. Freedom is the mark of live interiority: we appraise, deliberate, and choose. Freedom of this sort is never entirely squelched because no one avoids having to judge, select, and act many times a day. Authorities may struggle to repress this insolent singularity, though a different force is more effective: spontaneity is routinized by familiarity, comfort, habit, and the expectations of others. Think of artists who turn formulaic; they lose the individuality that expressed itself as active self-criticism and experiment. Or their singularity is never doubted, though its cause is the madness overwhelming judgment, discipline, and talent. Join Nietzsche’s description of the artist29 to Kierkegaard’s story of the tax collector,30 then color them with this childhood memory of an amusement park. Men, boys, and an occasional girl swung a heavy mallet trying to make a column of water rise high enough to ring a gong and win a prize. The column would spurt when the mallet hit a spring but never high enough to ring the gong. Strong men would try repeatedly but with the same effect: the water would fall back before hitting the top. Individuality is like that:, we talk, think, and live like our neighbors when it fails. Yet each of us recovers a measure of freedom when he or she takes the measure of his or her circumstances, deciding what to do with whom and when. This much individuality is all but inalienable. There is more if people acquire an evolving moral or aesthetic sensibility, though homogenizing culture guarantees that much that passes for interiority is posturing and fashion. Why does freedom dominate our thinking about individuality when little or nothing is said of judgment—discrimination and choice—though judgment is one of freedom’s expressions, a condition for the others, and a principal mark of individuality? Freedom without judgment is impulse, spasms where there should be discrimination, choice, and efficacy. This would be obvious if we were not forever exhorted to use and exalt our freedom without regard to its conditions or expressions. For no one acts Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdate (New York: Vintage 1968), pp. 420-453. 30 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 32. 29

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freely, effectively, and responsibly without judging the systems and roles appropriate to his or her talents, duties, and aims. Comparing Figure 7 to the figures of Chapter One emphasizes the different claims at hand:

Figure 7: Individuals, alone or allied. This figure expresses the idealized persuasion that each person is complete in him- or herself, free to go when and where he or she chooses, but for occasions when ad hoc relations are established with other people. Relationships may endure, but they can only inflect the character of individuals who are fully formed before their relations are established. The figures of Chapter One (Figures 2-6) represent individuals having two essential but contrary aspects: character forms as roles in core and other systems are learned, though the variety of roles encourages responsible improvisation; each person decides the time and effort devoted to his or her duties. This, too, is an idealization because some people have very little freedom to make these choices. Still, the earlier figures represent the circumstances of almost everyone from infancy to adulthood: children have roles in systems diverse as mother, father, sibling, or nursemaid and child. Each relationship is nuanced by the personalities of the partners, but they teach a child the competence and flexibility required later when the selective expectations of early roles provoke responses learned as attitudes and habits:

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satisfying these first partners, one knows some rudimentary steps for satisfying others and oneself. We often suppose that self-regard and the relations of independent persons are the touchstones of morality, though much we count as moral has no sense apart from systems and their roles. Four issues are primary: concern that one’s skills, resources, and relations to a system’s other members are appropriate to one’s role; commitment to a system’s aim; concern for the system’s effects on other people and systems; and concern for the economy of one’s life, hence regard for the time and energy required to satisfy personal interests. These issues are moral because morality’s origins are practical: interdependence is a practical necessity secured by a moral posture having two vectors: personal interest and the worth of one’s systems, their members, their aims, and effects. One participates in systems while having this more or less lucid schizoid stance: What do we propose doing and how shall we best succeed? Should we be doing it this way or doing it at all? And sometimes hardest of all: should I continue doing this if others persist in doing what none of us should do? These tasks—filling roles efficiently and morally—invoke the self-scrutiny and self–control that enable one to work while appraising the activities, efficacy, and aims of systems in which one participates. Plato emphasized temperance while assigning responsibility for the aims and organization of systems to philosopher-kings. He acknowledged that those learning roles by habit are incapable of independent judgment when times demand it.31 For judgment is critical: duty to a system can’t exempt its members from responsibility for its pernicious aims and practices. People everywhere fit smoothly into the roles of systems they choose or inherit; relations to other members are often good because one’s interests and skills mesh with theirs. Reserve is nevertheless critical because members share responsibility for their systems’ aims and effects: we need space for judgment. Today’s newspaper describes a French priest and the elderly Ukrainians he interviews. They tell their stories about atrocities in World War II; he helps salve their memories. Accompanying the article is a photograph. It shows a pit filled with bodies. Nine or so German soldiers stand to the side; one man kneels at the edge of the pit. An officer stands behind him, arm extended with a pistol aimed at his head. The victim seems haggard, sad, and resigned. The others are bored: another day’s work. 31

Plato, Republic, 619c5, p. 843.

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These soldiers were compromised by a system and aims abhorrent to individualist morality. It requires discernment, judgment, and the stubborn independence that distinguish one person’s choices from others. Nietzsche’s emphasis on spontaneity and creation is less high-minded, more romantic: each of us is or can be an inventor, explorer, poet, saint, or entrepreneur. This is no myth: there are bold captains of science, the arts, war, athletics, and industry. Each is individual in the way of a sculptor: he or she initiates a course of action then shapes the outcome in ways appropriate to the skills and circumstances at hand. Most expressions of individuality are less heroic. Consider this sequence of examples, each less explicable than the one before: immigrants, city residents, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The initiative and courage of immigrants is easiest to explain: Why leave home? Because living there is perilous or unsustainable (because of persecution or hunger); one immigrates when staying home is unthinkable. Departing is a choice if there is some way to survive without leaving, but the choice is easier as the threat of staying is greater and the destination seems benign. Individuality is compromised if many immigrate, for then it seems less daring, less irrational. The individuality credited to city residents is also real but qualified. Initiative and judgment are implicit because each person’s affiliations express his or her choices, hence by implication, alternatives that were rejected. Yet people make similar choices because culture (including education and advertising) restricts the array of acceptable choices. Entrepreneurs are harder to explain: they risk capital and effort for rewards that cannot be achieved without persistence, wit, and luck. Why risk money, time, and effort when you know, as new restaurant owners do, that most will fail within a year or two of opening? Pioneers are all but incomprehensible. Why join a wagon train headed West, given the prospect of drudgery, hostile natives, isolation, and infinite vulnerability? Desperation can’t be the best answer because despair is as likely to make its victims hopeless and passive. What explains this courage? Free land was an inducement; the idea of the American frontier and its advantages provoked excitement that sometimes verged on hysteria. The deprivations of the frontier were less intimidating to manually skilled people having no experience of the innovations that ease our lives. Compare space travel: astronauts train for years in machines designed to minimize risk. No trekker prepared as well. Their initiatives, as reckless as optimistic, exceed anything we know of character and circumstances. Or their example is evidence that

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city lives are a feeble point of reference for understanding people who walk overland for hundreds of miles to emigrate in leaky boats. Perhaps this courage is explicable with just two variables: character and context. Character includes skills and the attitudes where values lodge: favoring an outcome, one persists in the actions required to achieve it. Context—circumstances—provides opportunities visible to people qualified to see and pursue them. Weighing these variables unevenly creates two versions of individuality: individuality as initiative and fortitude or individuality as a distinct mix of choices, tastes, skills, and interests. Entrepreneurs and pioneers exemplify character’s dominance over context: circumstances are transformed by their initiatives. Aesthetes (an Oscar Wilde, for example) exploit local variety by selecting and assembling a montage of distinguishing tastes and interests: sensibilities refined by a context are enriched by perceiving and appraising it. Individuality of both sorts is centered and confirmed in the self-perception of those who take these risks or enjoy their choices. Characters of these two kinds are not clearly distinguished when individuality is praised. The individuality of choice, fortitude, and risk was transformed in America after the closing of the frontier. It survives in mythology but also in practice as the daring of speculators who risk all for an idea. Others risk it, too: scientists and artists work in obscurity until one or a few emerge as heroic representatives of their kind. For now, when maps are complete, terra incognita signifies things we don’t yet know or can’t yet imagine and represent. Individuality of the other, experiential sort is implied by thinking of democracy as freedom of tastes and choice. This is the individuality encouraged and enabled by the diverse interests and cultures of a city where every taste has its venue. Individuality implies singularity or idiosyncrasy. Individualism is an ideology that emphasizes positive and negative freedom: freedom to choose or act and freedom from interference. The considerations mooted above qualify both sorts of freedom. For character is acquired in systems and expressed by filling roles inherited or chosen. Initiative—gumption—is an attribute of character. Individualism postulates that every person has a potent charge of it, though the taste for risk and the kinds of risk taken are shaped by ways that initiative was rewarded or punished in childhood. Imminent danger is a universal test: the least aggressive person responds if his or her life is threatened. Evidence of these personal differences is everywhere apparent in

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societies of every scale. Accordingly, individuality is real. There is idiosyncrasy in talent, taste, and judgment; each of us resonates with an aesthetic or moral sensibility peculiar to him or her, but shaped by culture and circumstances. Individualism has, nevertheless, a distorted view of character: it ignores the systems in which character develops, the roles for which it qualifies us, and the systems that everywhere engage us. It generously endows each person with powers of initiative, but exaggerates their strength. Everyone believes that he or she has independent taste and judgment, but there are very few pioneers. 3. Regulating the array of individuals, systems, and networks Regulation is an essential social function when complexity and conflict sabotage the array of self-assembling systems and their members. A network of many individuals and systems regulates itself, falls into anarchy and dissolves, or is prey to a subordinating power. Corporate self-regulation is a practical alternative to anarchy and coercion. It requires discipline under rules appropriate to a task: reduce complexity so individuals and their systems can plan and act; defuse conflict; anticipate obstacles. This pragmatic style of regulation may be construed in either of two ways. Imagine a dense array of expanding bubbles, each pressing against its neighbors until they settle into an equilibrium where some or many survive. Systems compete for personnel, space, and resources; politics is the struggle of systems disputing the right to make laws advantageous to themselves. There are many contenders, so the outcome is an equilibrium of forces. Democracy, so conceived, is the politics of competing interests.32 The alternative avers that citizens organize to achieve common goods: security and personal freedom, for example. Temporarily abstracting from private concerns, they form a public that considers the interests of all: drivers, for example, enact efficient ways to reduce traffic accidents. Government, on this telling, is the constitutionally established expression of a public organized for self-regulation: it maintains essential infrastructure, and mitigates complexity and conflict; it organizes forums (a legislature) where goals are fixed and obstacles are anticipated. The first idea is push-and-shove realism. The second is a strategy: create and stabilize a public that identifies See Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: a Study of Social Pressures (Edison, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995).

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and achieves common goods; establish a public authority that promotes discipline, oversight, and foresight. Assume that government is a system, one responsible for regulating the whole. People and systems may ignore this responsibility while pushing and shoving, or they willingly discipline themselves. This second alternative is widely praised, but carelessly observed. It requires citizens (or settlement residents) to wear two hats, one private, the other public. Dominated by private concerns, each goes his or her way. Citizens legislating as members of the public pass traffic laws, then slow down to observe them. The idea of a deliberating, self-regulating public seems naïve, even simple-minded, given Mancur Olson’s careful argument that competition and calculation preclude its formation. Why join a deliberating public if participation’s costs outweigh the benefits, or if advantages accrue equally to participants and free-riders? Olson’s analysis restricts the pertinent domain to competing businesses: each wants to maximize income while minimizing costs.33 Hence this strategy: don’t cooperate when it reduces profit by increasing costs. Notice, however, that Olson’s formulation ignores the many goods—including safety, mitigated conflict, literacy, health, tolerance, civility, and dignity—to which profit and wealth are incidental. Some of these goods are distributed: like literacy, they qualify individual persons. Others, like safety, are corporate: none is safe unless all are safe because of laws that organize the whole. Will people cooperate to acquire common goods? Olson supposed that nothing impels it short of coercion or supplementary benefits (material inducements), though conspicuous examples fault his generalization. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign organized millions of voters, without coercion or inducements, by emphasizing principles, values, and shared concerns; civil rights legislation was passed by majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, though it raised some costs by supplying legal remedies to workers who were underpaid. Why the popular support for Obama and civil rights? Because profit-seekers, too, have interests and principles obliging them to cooperate in pursuit of common goods. The republican idea of self-government is, nevertheless, troubled by the size and complexity of the whole, and by the difficulty of forming a public when divisive issues reduce the citizenry to hostile factions. Every resident 33

Olson, Rise and Decline of Nations, p. 74.

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wants his or her street plowed after a snowstorm but there are many residents living on many streets, so authority can’t satisfy all at once. Government is forever perplexed by its schizoid task: appease individual electors without ignoring the infrastructure that sustains them. There is also an intermediate standpoint lying between the array of individual concerns and responsibility for the mechanics of the whole. This is the perspective of the traffic officer clearing an intersection: he or she defuses complexity from a position in the midst of it. Intimacy is advantageous for seeing a problem close at hand but a disadvantage for estimating the viability of long-term solutions: police directing traffic can’t see past the next set of traffic lights. Complexity and conflict emerge when individuals and systems compete for scarce opportunities and resources (road space, for example). Complexity implies the weave of relations and effects occurring when systems bind and proliferate. Conflict results when the crush of people and systems overwhelms facilities and supplies; people struggle for a share of benefits too meager for the welfare of all. Or the supply is ample; many or all have much, but each wants more. Hobbes supposed that regulation must be punitive to compensate for the want of individual self-control, though it isn’t true that there is no control in the absence of an authority empowered to punish breaches of its rules: statist authority has its complement in personal discipline and the constraining effects of systems and their networks. There are stop-and-go traffic lights, but prudence alone convinces most people that being out of control is self-subverting. Self-control inhibits desires or affects one’s ways of expressing them; it makes time for deliberations that consider aims and means. No one who fails to master some degree of it is disciplined by rules or intimidated by the threat of any law’s penalty. This seems mistaken: scare people sufficiently and you control them. Yet terror’s principal effect—paralysis and passivity—is not the one relevant here. Frightened people aren’t effective; they respond to terror as sheep respond to barking dogs. An authority empowered to regulate adds a layer of control to agents who are already effectively selfdisciplined; a well-marked highway and traffic laws enable capable drivers to drive better; a score and conductor help musicians to play better Regulators are sometimes dangerous to all concerned, however innocuous most of the time. Hundreds of years were required before the idea of a self-critical democratic people could challenge the belief that wise kings, generals, or church administrators should decide what other people believe or

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do. Now regulation has turned pragmatic; laws are considered by elected parliaments before being tried and amended. The laws are constraining, there are real penalties, but there is a rational aim tested empirically: citizens who follow or participate in public deliberations confirm for themselves that laws proposed are appropriate to their circumstances. Clumsy regulations and those outliving their utility are or can be replaced. Think of a crowded highway where cars move equably. Radar and occasional police cars monitor traffic but these tokens of authority are mostly incidental because the desires of individual drivers cohere with the need for social control: drivers want, laws facilitate, the steady flow. The occasional lawbreaker is inimical to both. This elision of interests is the mechanism giving life to the public. Every pressure group has particular needs and aims, but so does every driver feel the pressure of other cars while going his or her particular way. There is no essential conflict between regulation and the free pursuit of one’s aims if regulation is well-conceived and no more onerous than efficacy requires. This is Kant, not Olson (Arthur Bentley, or Herbert Spencer): all collaborate because regulations applying universally enable each person to achieve his or her aim: I can’t have goods I desire—safety and the right of way—unless others have them too. Traffic laws are exemplary: no, you can’t drive in the lane of oncoming traffic, but this is a minor annoyance. Effective laws are often hard to write. The issue is straightforward when an activity is banned because it violates basic interests—murder, for example—but proscription is the least subtle option. Prescription—lawmaking that facilitates an activity while controlling it—is more inventive. There are various ways to divide traffic; the one chosen is typically the most effective given available money and space and the speed and maneuverability of current vehicles. Material conditions alter, so traffic laws change as the ban against murder does not. This variability over time is characteristic of prescriptive laws: they address current circumstances without foreclosing unforeseeable changes. There is tension, half impelling, half inhibiting, as we choose categorical proscription or firm but tentative prescription. Some issues move us both ways. Pharmaceuticals are dangerous. Some are banned, but many are critical to public health. Licensing drugs requires discretion and control: discretion because rigid controls on research and certification discourage experiments that produce useful drugs; control because of possible abuses by

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producers, advertisers, and consumers. Regulators need foresight, but a government’s food and drug commission can’t foresee all applications for drugs currently available or those still to be conceived. It weighs the risks of particular drugs against the need to experiment: some drugs thought too dangerous to use turn out to be lifesavers. But judgment is fallible and revisable, so regulators struggle to keep abreast of public vulnerabilities and private research: what to do, how much to regulate. Traffic on a two lane road is easy to control because there are few variables: cars go in opposed directions. The subprime mortgage and credit crises in American and world banking are harder to fix because there are many variables and no agreement about the causes for breakdown: mortgage requirements, monetary policy, effective accounting, or reckless profiteering. There are, moreover, several thresholds to pass before deciding whether or how to regulate. What is the social aim: loosen mortgage requirements to encourage home ownership or restrict loans to people who are low credit risks? What is the risk that declining to regulate will have irreparable effects (reckless profiteers) or consequences so severe that later intervention will require violating principles otherwise thought to be inviolable (newly homeless people and unsustainable government deficits)? Should the U.S. Federal Reserve or Congress have intervened in the American housing market before a bubble inflated by subprime mortgages obliged government to violate its commitment to private markets by nationalizing principal banks and an insurance company? Discount the ideological anomaly: capitalist America is self-transformed; it imitates statist France. Is this an efficient style of regulation or only the clumsy result of having ignored the uses of regulation until further delay caused a breakdown in confidence and world credit markets? Should we still insist on the Reagan gospel that social activities—financial markets, for example—always work best when left to themselves? Grant the need to regulate: do we know, in normal times or crisis, what is happening or how best to regulate in complex circumstances? Regulators hesitate: don’t make matters worse by intervening in the dark; let markets right themselves.34 Two exculpating responses to the current banking crisis are the concession that economists don’t understand everything about market George Soros, “Do not ignore the need for financial reform,” Financial Times, “Special Report: the FT’s Year in Finance,” December 15, 2009, p. 2. 34

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mechanics and the recognition that markets are distorted by social aims: don’t restrict home ownership to the wealthy. Hands off was nevertheless a reckless policy: why would prudent “owners” holding one hundred percent mortgages continue paying monthly premiums when the market value of their houses was lower than their mortgaged values? Why not walk away? Both lenders and government could have made this calculation and both could have exercised greater foresight. For regulation expresses oversight and foresight: it is radar in the fog. Botched interventions are evidence that the transition from autocratic regulation to a practical democratic style is partial and inefficient: pragmatic regulation is often more trajectory than achievement. Mill—thinking of his experience as partner to an already married woman—complained that constitutionally defended freedoms didn’t obviate coercive social pressure.35 A similar failure is apparent in the idea that a self-regulating whole—the public of Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Dewey36—is the appropriate instrument of regulation. This whole is constitutionally real (because acknowledged or invoked) but practically a fiction. Universal suffrage obtains in many jurisdictions—there are elections—but many people, often a majority, don’t vote. The officially prescribed response to the banking crisis of September 2008 was formulated and imposed by two government appointees—the president of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Secretary of the Treasury—within the framework of Federal law and with consultation but without prior Congressional approval. The baffled public looked on and hoped that all would go well. Emphasizing public self-regulation, implying that state or settlement residents have assembled to assay and mitigate the complexities and conflicts that impede them, is conspicuously more aim than reality. Yet the aim is appropriate and partly realizable, given religious and philosophic traditions in the West. Aristotle averred that men are most like gods when making laws that regulate their affairs; Luther declared that souls are autonomous and equal before God; everyone can say with Descartes that he or she necessarily exists, though every other belief is doubtful: these commitments supersede John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 10-13. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 94-95; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968), pp. 62-65; John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH.: Swallow Press, 1954), pp. 110-142. 35 36

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prior claims to status and entitlement. They favor democratic oversight—the self-regulation of a deliberating public—though reality is often closer to ancient practices: regulation frequently expresses the interests of those whose wealth, religious office, or other status gives them authority to make laws and adjudicate disputes. The public doesn’t form. My appeal to the self-regulating whole is also deficient in this other way: it perpetuates the illusion that regulation is the benign managerial task of alleviating complexity without interfering in the everyday choices people make. This is naïve when the mechanics of social control are subtle and pervasive. For every society, whatever its political form, enforces homogenizing practices and norms; each enhances uniformity, predictability, and safety by using myths, national festivals, and a self-justifying narrative to shape collective beliefs and practices.37 Notice, too, that businesses are most profitable when their homogenized products infiltrate and dominate personal choices. Governments regulate by enforcing laws. These other regulators are more subtle. Habit and attitudes are first learned as one responds to caretakers and friends. Deliberation is their counterweight: action is regulated by way of effects calculated when one ponders alternate choices. Previously habituated or persuaded, one considers and recoils. Yet persuasion is often subtle, early, and hard to challenge. One learns to discount compelling ads for toothpaste or breakfast cereal; the beliefs and practices of one’s society or culture are harder to dispel. For each of the three—habit, attitude, and law—has the advantage of working as a second nature: no one is born knowing to drive on the right or left, but everyone trained one way or the other does it thoughtlessly. This efficiency is often a blessing but sometimes a danger because it requires no thought. Easily habituated and convinced, we show little resistance to people and interests that shape our beliefs and feelings. This would be a silly charge if people affirmed Descartes’ rule: “doubt, …deny,…refuse,”38 but no regulator agrees because socialization requires that we learn practices and rules appropriate to common needs and the demand that we organize for minimal conflict given inevitable complexity. David Weissman, Styles of Thought: Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 45-65. 38 Descartes, Meditations, p. 66. 37

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Distrusting our good sense or wanting it confirmed, we sometimes ascribe the origin of rules, laws, or practices to a god or cosmic design, though both are anomalous to the task at hand. We ban murder and theft; entitle citizenship or inheritance; protect with building codes, environmental laws, and defense; facilitate traffic and contracts; oversee markets; and encourage charity. The first proscribes; all the others prescribe. Some considerations fall under two or more rubrics: licensing professionals entitles and protects. Every version of both types is a practical response to an interest or need. Personal discipline is the first line of response, one acquired under the complementary pressures of loyalty, obligation, demanding others, and the increasing facility for managing oneself. Law is a second-order response, a fail-safe, contrived when these primary forces are ineffective. That happens in the context of core systems when personal discipline or responsibility fails, then again as one moves beyond the intimacies of family and neighborhood: law intercedes to establish and enforce rules of all sorts. Yet law works badly if those falling within its domain are passive tokens moved about by law’s agents. Self-discipline infused with the requirements of social discipline is the more effective solution: we embody laws’ demands as attitudes and habits. The social cohesion thereby promoted is remarkable and often beautiful: moral law and the starry heavens. We marvel at seeing a thousand choreographed dancers celebrating a national holiday but the sight of people moving freely without conflict—traffic flow on a busy four-lane road, the mostly untroubled complexity of New York City—is more astonishing. We are self-organizing: deliberation, self-control, order, productivity, and language are the principal virtues or advantages distinguishing us from other great apes. 4. Qualifications and details More detailed questions ensue: 1. What is the principal virtue or vice of each variable: individuality, systems, and corporate regulation? 2. How is each reconciled to the other two? 3. What limits these accommodations? 4. Is there an ideal weighting or proportion—a balance—among the three variables? 5. What conditions facilitate or preclude balance among them? 6. Why do settlements vary in the prominence of one or another of the three? 7. What are the measures of social life, the criteria for appraising it?

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4.1 What is each factor’s principal virtue or vice? Individual autonomy requires freedom from interference and freedom to act. No ordinary circumstance justifies interfering with other people as each chooses partners, goods, or projects. But individuals are sabotaged by their vices, including narcissism, greed, disorientation, and the anger, frustration, and hostility provoked by failure or competition. Cooperation is a condition for establishing systems, hence a virtue of human relations. Systems are also prized for their initiative, productivity, and the plasticity required in altered circumstances. They are impaired by internal conflict and aims inappropriate to their circumstances. Their vices are unworthy aims and actions that damage their members, other people, other systems, or the collectivity. The virtue of corporate self-regulation is order. Its vices are rigidity, arrogance, and oblivion; the symptoms are inefficiency, resentment, and degeneration. Stasis is assured when regulation suffocates all the sources of initiative and vitality. 4.2 How is each factor reconciled to the other two? Each may strive to dominate the other two. But that shouldn’t happen because their roles are complementary: neither succeeds if the others do not. Individuals need formation and cultivation. People want compelling work and attachments—love and work—in systems that acknowledge and support them. Systems have narrowly focused interests. Each has an economy calibrated to a principal aim: business, education, or sport, for example. The array of systems comes together as a deliberating, self-regulating whole when unregulated behavior causes inefficiency. It averts harm by regulating or banning the activity. Mutual accommodation requires that each factor pursue only those tasks or opportunities appropriate to itself: let individuals fulfill themselves by participating in systems that satisfy the rules and laws of their self-regulating collectivity. Accommodation fails when one or more of the three brutalizes or subverts the tasks of another: totalitarianism and anarchy are complementary pathologies. 4.3 Are there limits to accommodation? Accommodation is dynamic, because each factor has an interest limited by the opposing force of the other two. Each may dominate the others, but

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each is thereby sabotaged. For accommodation is natural in two respects. Each factor requires the other two: no systems or wholes without individuals, no individuals without systems that satisfy needs or laws that make a social complex viable. Reciprocity is benign: individuals and their systems can live within laws calibrated to their interests and needs. Distortion and perversion are commonplace, but always because a society has ignored one or another of these distinct, but complementary roles. 4.4 Is there an ideal proportion—a balance—among the three factors? Some degree of balance is achieved in every settlement becausenone having as few as two people could survive without personal initiative, one or more productive systems, and regulation that reduces complexity and conflict. Ideal proportion—ample or optimal balance—is something more. Visionaries from Plato to Jane Jacobs have defended one or another idea of social structure while extolling the human perfection achieved in cities where complexity and overlap create spaces for germinating ideas and nurturing talents. Neither supplied an adequate account of balance, because both slighted one of the variables. Plato scanted individual freedom; Jacobs emphasized the glories of small systems and locality (her perch on Hudson Street), but she ignored the material complexity of the New York and resisted people assigned to manage it. One is grateful for her pluck and foresight but respectful, too, of people responsible for managing city complexity. An ideal proportion among the variables can be specified only generically because each can be satisfied in several ways: individuals accommodate to systems of many kinds, expressing their freedom in different ways (as leaders, artists, thinkers, or parents); systems of every task and scale need order, but ordering principles may be a parliament’s laws or a tradition’s customs. Settlement life may be structured by the reciprocities of family, shop, and church, a market, or a comprehensive design like that of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City.39 Balance is achieved in all these ways, with the proviso that ideal solutions are sensitive to the essential requirements of each variable. Optimal balance requires that each variable realize its virtues because of reciprocities joining it to the other two: individuals are free to discover and cultivate their talents in systems that use and respect them; 39

See Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London: Faber and Faber, 1945).

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systems are productive because of cooperative, skillful members and because efficient regulation clears the way for work they do; regulation is effective because individuals and systems deliberate how best to discipline themselves. This is not pie in the sky: the ideal is an attractor state (See Chapter Seven), a steady state to which a settlement may evolve. Plato said that we are more likely to thrive if the work we do is appropriate to our talents: individuals should exploit their skills for the good of all in a system where specialization, cooperation, and self-control secure the well-being of themselves, others, and the community at large. But Plato ignored or deplored some advantages of city life, including diversity and the experiments provoked by urban complexity, spontaneous encounters, fruitful privacy, and the freedom to associate and organize for whatever taste or talent is impelling.40 Excitement, intimacy, tolerance, and safety are palpable material virtues: idealization made concrete. A perfected balance might not generate these qualities in every city; it would welcome them as desirable effects of density and complexity wherever they are consistent with productive stable systems and supple but efficient regulation. 4.5 What are the circumstantial conditions for balance among the three factors? Harmonious relations among individuals, their systems, and a regulating authority are precarious because they require material conditions that are never guaranteed by this tripartite division; balance is stunted or deformed without an economy, material means, and administration fit to sustain it. An ample balance, like health, has complex material conditions. Chapter Four describes the difference they make. 4.6 Why do settlements, cities especially, vary in the prominence of one or another of the three factors? We explain the diminished vitality of cities that prize bureaucracy and routine over initiative by distinguishing hubs of manufacture, finance, or trade from centers of bureaucratic or ecclesiastic authority: New York or Washington, Milan or Rome. Commercial cities promote opportunities; 40

Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” pp. 324-339.

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perceptive residents position themselves to exploit them. Initiative and productivity are less urgent in the bureaucratized cities where laws are made and administered: we don’t encourage initiatives from the bureau of taxation; we don’t expect government agencies to mimic the productivity of Silicon Valley; we would be alarmed if Washington took Stalin’s Moscow as its administrative model. The pathologies of cities—overcrowding and unemployment, hostility and violence, corruption, dirty water, oligarchy or tyranny—are situational and historical, not essential to large settlements. Desert cities won’t have sufficient water; growing cities in underdeveloped countries don’t usually have viable facilities or governments safe from the blandishments of oligarchy and corruption. London and Tokyo were also foul and poor before they were empowered by resources, history, opportunity, or purpose. But others aren’t as lucky: many growing cities wait for technological, economic, or political transformations that are possible but unforeseeable. 4.7 Criteria for appraising social life Measures of social efficacy and balance include stability, freedom, security, productivity, discipline, tolerance, and initiative. Stability is an expression of balance, because it requires individual freedom, resources for systems, and laws that facilitate activity or reduce harm. A society is unstable for want of either one. Restricted freedom entails fewer associations and organizations, hence reduced initiative and productivity. Failures of corporate self-regulation entail conflict, inefficiency, and insecurity. Security is safety in the pursuit of personal well-being and the tasks appropriate to one’s roles in valued systems. Productivity is the result of using opportunity, resources, human talent, organization, and focus to create goods, services, or ideas. Discipline is a condition for security and productivity: undisciplined systems are inefficient; each role is a discipline that taxes the resolve or ability of people occupying it. Complexity turns chaotic without regulations and the discipline they require. Tolerance is recognition of and respect for difference. Initiative is the impulse to organize oneself or others for productive activity. Each of these factors is both a condition for social wellbeing and a measure of the health achieved. A successful city or town throbs with the diversity of its people and the array of their activities. Its citizens are engaged, reasonably secure, and

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aware that they participate in an odd collectivity: one hardly knows what others are doing, though aware that many or most are busy, productive, and somewhat content. The degree of ambient hostility is a litmus test of social heath. There is little hostility, because little fear, in successful cities or towns, but more hostility, because more anger and insecurity, in those which are less safe or productive. The difference is economic and organizational: do a settlement’s people have the skills, capital, abilities, and markets to secure and satisfy themselves? Do they have the organizational skills to regulate themselves? Settlement life goes better if they do, worse if they don’t. Visionary fables come to ground in the practicalities of urban life. Is there individual freedom? Do associations and organizations satisfy needs, interests, and talents? Does corporate self-regulation establish ground rules that quell or contain city intensities? Stability, freedom, security, productivity, tolerance, and initiative are evidence that the ideal is achieved. 5. Anomalous perspectives Rousseau had his garden, Jane Jacobs her front stoop. Every person has neighborhood haunts and wants them protected. But the society known to regulators resembles an ant hill: anonymous people scurry every which way leaving the regulator to supply the rules and infrastructure regulating traffic. Robert Moses was sometimes shortsighted and relentless—stoops in Tremont (New York) were eradicated by his Cross Bronx Expressway—but Moses accepted the challenge of organizing city facilities when other residents were busy with tasks that were only personal and local. These are complementary perspectives: one is particular and selfconcerned; the other is global, hence indifferent to the urgencies of the first. Urban planners calculating large-scale efficiencies need remember that residents need comforts that make private lives viable. The residents need reminding that others, often millions, have needs like theirs, and that planning and coordination may preclude advantages they prize. Leibniz is apposite because the myriad finite perspectives of his Monadology are integrated when thought as one by the divine consciousness.41 The local perspectives of city residents require an equivalent integrator: namely, city

41

Leibniz, Monadology, para. 39, p. 154; para. 56, pp. 156-157.

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government and infrastructure, local rules and morals, and the many systems and networks that bind people and their neighborhoods. Core systems—families, friendships, schools, religious centers, and local businesses—mediate these extremes by locating individuals in contexts where other concerns supersede their own. Settlements of every size and style—central cities, suburbs, towns, and edge cities—acknowledge these anchors for personal identity and social responsibility. Visit a town or precinct turned shabby and half-abandoned; see that people leave it because a new road makes a principal church, school, or vital employer inaccessible. The center doesn’t hold; it wasn’t perceived or defended. But there is an alternative: plan in ways that respect the conditions for viable local systems. People will come and stay. Jane Jacobs wrote carefully about the personal qualities of local life, but small shops and neighborhood alliances were a stable backdrop to all she commended. Imagine a cruise ship at sea. Passengers think principally of their convenience: cabins, meals, shops, and entertainment. The captain and staff know that passenger satisfaction is a condition for future bookings and profitability, but management’s task is complex: maintain the many systems required to satisfy passengers and the safety of them, the ship, and its crew. All the crew make a virtue of hospitality, but they disguise the hard truth that the experience of any particular passenger is an ephemeral value; it is enough that systems work well enough to satisfy most passengers. For this is a business that manages ships and their on-board systems. Ads that picture jubilant passengers are misleading: individual customers don’t count for much. Why is this digression relevant to cities? Because we who occupy them imagine that we are the cynosure of past and future. The city exists for us or more specifically for my circle, my network, or simply for me: my convenience or inconvenience is or ought to be a principal concern for anyone responsible for city management. But of course it is not and cannot be except to the degree that obstacles shared with many others are gravely disrupting or dangerous. A city’s regulators and managers are mostly invisible, but they are its enablers: there would be no infrastructure, systems, or stability without them.

Chapter Three Motivation Life is essentially practical: having needs and interests we adapt to circumstances or alter them for our purposes. Motives, we say, are the drivers; they fix human aims and trigger activity. Impulsive or deliberate, they are visible—inspectable—to everyone having them: we do or can perceive what we aim to do and our reasons for doing it. This formulation—a version of Aristotle’s idea that things are inert until pushed or pulled—is familiar and widely espoused but contentious in two respects. It assumes that motivation is the conscious act of choosing an aim or directing effort to achieve it; its emphasis on self-conscious individuals precludes ascribing motives to systems or the self-regulating whole (as distinct from particular officers or executives) because neither is conscious, or it requires that we credit systems and the whole with corporate minds. Is there an idea appropriate both to the character of personal motivation and to the claim that systems have motives? There is no idea satisfying both requirements if motivation requires introspection. We are saved this impasse because the claim of inspectability is mistaken: it conflates episodic motives—inspectable impulses or reasons for acting at a moment—with each person’s constraining but mostly uninspectable motivational structure. This structure is a hierarchy of proclivities and aversions that determine one’s choices and responses. It comprises habits or skills (more or less specific capacities for action), attitudes (appraisals of and feelings about real or alleged states of affairs), and intentions (commitments to actions calculated to achieve rewards or avert punishments). Embodiment is muscular and neural: there is no separate or

66 coupled psychic agent (mind, consciousness included, is a bodily activity1), though introspection, deliberation, and choice are surely real. Motivation is personal and practical: people respond to their circumstances while acting to satisfy themselves. Particular motives are explained by citing one’s acquired motivational structure, a specific interest or need, available information about one’s companions or situation, and the reward or punishment achievable (one supposes) by acting in ways considered or decided. Motivational structure is engaged by considerations of two sorts: some determinable, others determinate. Basic needs and interests (for food and partners, for example) are determinable: each has a range of possible satisfiers, though biology, socialization, circumstances, and practical experience narrow our choices, sometimes reducing them to one (oxygen for breathing). Determinability usually survives these constraints, so one chooses among a range of satisfiers (coffee or tea; chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla). Or contextual constraints are mute regarding preferred satisfiers, though some possible choices (murder and self-mutilation) are proscribed. Character is the singular integration of motives—attitudes and habits— having these contrary sources: others and oneself. We engage other people and things in specific learned ways because we couldn’t otherwise secure and satisfy partners or ourselves in the style of our culture and society. We persist—will is a gauge of motivation—because of attitudes directing us and because of anticipated rewards or punishments: wanting beer, marriage, or a career, one persists until having it; fearing the Internal Revenue Service, one pays taxes. Motives usually cohere with attitudes and habits, but psychic life is tensed and distorted, temporarily or forever, when motives are inconstant and confused because attitudes are conflicted. Locating motivational structure in muscles and nerves may seem to be another dead end for any account that ascribes motives to systems and the self-regulating whole: they have neither minds nor muscles. But this is a viable basis for the mechanism—mirroring—that explains their generation in systems and the whole.

David Weissman, Lost Souls: the Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 27-53.

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67 1. Motivational structure: are motives episodic or abiding? Late for work, I choose among several ways of getting there: which is likely the fastest? I go by subway, but the train breaks down; forced to take a cab later stopped by a policeman for speeding, I walk the rest of the way. One motive directs these successive choices. All may be conscious, though the dominant motive abides whether or not I attend to it: commitment to work is a habit; I go as the clock and calendar direct me. Other people needn’t eavesdrop on my conscious states to know my habit; they know it by my persistence. That is also the best evidence available to me; the motive is unchanged on days when I am too distracted by other things to think of having to do what I’m already doing. Three considerations are prominent whenever motives are considered: beliefs (true or false) about specific contingencies (too wet or cold to walk); attitudes and habits (I favor going to work and am habituated to getting there on time); and the need to choose (by snap judgment or deliberation) the best ways to achieve my aim given beliefs about my situation. This is the balance between motives that abide and the several or many subsidiary decisions they regulate. Motives of both sorts are sometimes conscious, but often (more often) I chose among alternative courses of action without conscious reflection. Why is deliberation usually unnecessary? Because I have learned from experience that some choices are more effective than others. This learning usually carries on without conscious regard for evidence that deters some choices while promoting others. How did I acquire the attitudes and habits that direct me? Some heuristics for engaging people and things in the near world are probably hardwired in human genes. The rest is learned. Animators—hunger and temperature, for example—impel us to secure and satisfy ourselves by engaging other people or things. That is so, because every motivational structure is a singular way of construing practices shared with other members of one’s culture or society: they supply distinctive routines for engaging people and things before personal experience inflects their rubrics. A Frank Sinatra song distorts the result: “I did it my way.” 2. Inspection or inference? Motives are ascribed to minds, hence the easy assumption that selfinspection is the direct and accurate way to discern and characterize them:

68 nothing, said Descartes, is better known to mind than the mind itself.2 But is it so: are motives better inspected or inferred? Dancers concentrate as they perform, but sequences are “in the muscles”: one isn’t consciously thinking, assume this posture, do this step. People of all sorts act in ways appropriate to a task and circumstances without having to consider what to do, how or why they do it. Everyone would likely agree that many or most of his or her actions are motivated. But ask this other question—Are you motivated because of having consciously deliberated?—and answers would vary. I am motivated to use a knife and fork rather than chopsticks, because of my training; I am motivated by that learned habit, not by an inspectable aim. There are many such motives: one is motivated to dress as a man or woman, to speak one’s native tongue, or to part one’s hair on the left or right. And always, the motive is embodied in a learned practice. I may think about what I do or why, but this is a reflection on the doing, not a motive for doing it. Deliberating—inhibiting action, while consciously deciding what to do—is a familiar experience, one considered below. But we deliberate infrequently, because circumstances and our interests are relatively stable and because we typically respond as we learned to do. Focus may change: one may be asked to justify an act rather than describe it. Granting what you do, why this preference: what considerations justify it? We often suppose that a justifying reason is all or part of the motive for a practice, but this assumption is moot: there is no argument or evidence for the superiority of many or most of one’s practices. We may have very little to say when obliged to justify them. Some vegetarians affirm their altruistic motives; people living in a vegetarian culture merely cite their training. Observers have no better explanation: they infer from vegetarian practice to its likely condition, here a cultur. 3. Function/Structure The Cartesian (phenomenological) style encourages self-inspection;3 the alternative—a style of argument that Peirce called “abductive”—requires an inference from matters perceived to their conditions.4 Conditions are Descartes, Meditations, p. 70. Ibid., p. 64 4 C. S. Peirce, “Pragmatism—The Logic of Abduction,” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols i-v, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. v. paras. 195-205, pp. 24-56. 2 3

69 sometimes perceived or perceivable if they are causes or constituents. But laws, too, are conditions and they are unperceived and unperceivable if we distinguish regularities they promote from laws whose normative material basis may be unknown: (F=ma, for example). Most abductive explanations are so jejune we hesitate to pronounce them. Why this toothache? Because of a cavity. Why does she speak Chinese? Because she was raised in Shanghai and lives there. Challenged to confirm the truth of what I say when telling my name, I infer the accuracy of my memory. Seeing what I do, I infer the social demand for doing it or the personal interest that drives me. But reflection comes after the fact: it identifies a condition for my behavior without itself being that condition. Notice the character of these inferences: from an action to its conditioning habit, from a function to its conditioning structure. Inferences of this sort are often scorned, because the appeal to habits is often a placeholder for structures unknown. This style of inference is nevertheless reliable and familiar: we infer from stomach aches to stomachs, from heat to molecular motion. We predict the effects structures may have, then confirm our predictions by perceiving the differences predicted, though we often have little or no additional information about those structures: habits are imprinted in neural circuits activated or inhibited by ambient signals, but we know very little about circuits that distinguish brains from one another. Skeptics would have us eliminate inferences to an I-know-not-whatground for observable behaviors. Why infer to a structural difference that explains the preference for coffee, tea, or beer? Merely predict that people will continue to choose as typically they do after deliberating and making a choice? Why not say that motivation and its explanation start and stop here: we consciously consider and choose, then act (more or less) consistently as choice directs? There are three reasons. First is the fact that most behavior described as motivated is grounded in training. Why not drive on the left? Because that would be deadly in a country where everyone drives on the right, and because this is the way I learned to drive. Second is the consideration that many or most motives are uninspectable. Imagine that ideas come freely to someone preparing a book, painting, or score. The artist is alternately elated and weary, but always the work carries on to an end as much discovered as intended. The task has an aim but there is little or no inspectable data that explain its persistence or shape. Money or recognition may be a principal motive for doing the work, though citing them may intimate nothing about the character of choices required to have either.

70 Dickens and Hegel wrote on commission, but talent, training, and experience, not that conscious motive, explain choices responsible for the vitality of their books. Third is this amply confirmed leading principle: no action without an agent. Motivated actions—whether they be practices inflected by culture or the fruits of talent or deliberation—are caused. Principal causes include the uninspectable muscles and neurons of the actor. (Uninspectable doesn’t entail unobservable: surgeons and technicians reading brain scans see things undiscerned by patents.) 4. Animators Observing behavior—others’ or one’s own—we also perceive elementary interests or passions that acquire specific culture-bound expressions within human societies. Animators include needs, desires, hopes, fears, and obligations that come with participation in core systems. Animators are first-order motives; the learned practices satisfying them are second-order motives. Practices that vary widely may express a single animator: the fear expressed as hostility in one culture may be evinced in others as deference or an exchange of gifts. Seeing a practice, knowing the provocations of its home culture, we infer the animator. Animators differ generically. Some are first-order: get food, shelter, and partners; others are impulses of several higher grades. Simple needs are an abiding keel: work is animating because most people need an income to pay their bills. The feeling of obligation to and responsibility for others is an impulse of the first higher order, one that emerges in organizations or associations where needs or interests are satisfied. Simple needs are an abiding keel: money and work are animating because most people need an income to pay their bills. Affiliation is magnetic among people who share an interest: loyalty and discipline are reliable because a system’s members are bound by the mirroring that intensifies feeling. Ideals are animators of a still higher order. They are refinements achieved when we reflect on the practices of individuals or systems and their effects: equity is a motivator if one is offended when virtue and need don’t correlate with rewards; beauty motivates because it liberates thought and sensibility from the urgencies of practical life. 5. Character Each person embodies an evolving array of motives. They express appetites, desires, attitudes, ideals, talents, and fears, all shaped by culture,

71 circumstances, expected satisfactions, punishments, or rewards. The order of priority evolves as circumstances change: lunch is over, time to work. Or information, attitudes, or skills change, so one who dreaded water when he couldn’t swim is happy in it now that he can. Age is a decisive developmental variable: the fast cars of adolescent dreams give way to station wagons, bicycles, or canes. Motivational structure is character: each person is distinguished by things he or she does or will do, by his or her style of doing them, and by things one declines to do. Or, to start more simply, character is a function of the ways that animators, information, habits, and skills are warped by attitudes. Desire, for example, is never raw after the first weeks or months of infancy: we want such things as attitudes approve. Imagine that entrance to a sacred place is barred because of one’s clothing (shorts rather than something more decorous). The guard offers a skirt. Women gladly take it. Men think twice: how badly do I want to enter; does it matter how silly I’ll look? The choice expresses an animator modulated by attitude. Motivational structure has a steadily evolving developmental course: one makes choices consistent with learned responses that are appropriate to sex, age, culture, and circumstances. Yet these constraints are usually generic, hence determinable. Specific values are (ideally) appropriate to the particularities of one’s situation, though the complexity of interests, attitudes, estimated effects, and social demands makes choice unpredictable. Action is sometimes paralyzed or inappropriate because interests conflict or because radical situational changes—war or natural disasters—exceed one’s competence. Still, the principal shape and variables of motivational structure are firmly established in childhood. Active and athletic, one enjoys games that reward competition and skill; someone more bookish challenges him or herself before competing with others. A culture’s members learn the same or similar practices, but express them in ways nuanced by attitudes and each person’s distinctive habits and skills. Most people embody Nietzsche’s “herd”5 and Mead’s “generalized other”6 to a high degree: their aims and responses are formulaic; a Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 24-56. 6 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 154. 5

72 standardizing current measures and constrains them. Others don’t want or do what the many want and do. Standard motives and practices are ignored because of circumstances or because something personal—an idea, aim, or feeling—resists uniformity. Think of pianists rehearsing a score. Most listen to others, then repeat the standard reading. Some avoid hearing others, fearing that their playing would lose its distinction. Having ideas about the score, expressing qualities of intellect and feeling specific to themselves, they play music as they think it should sound. Probably no one, pianist or otherwise, is a cipher: there is idiosyncrasy in all of us. But some, more scrupulously than others, mimic the motivational structure—the dominant attitudes—of their societies. 6. Deliberation No one knows most of his or her motives by way of introspection: like an observer, I typically know what I want by remarking and remembering what I do. For there is momentum to practical life; one knows its direction by choosing and acting in ways prescribed by habit, passion, or circumstances. There are, however, times when we reflect on our behavior and motives, wanting to alter both. Not knowing that exercise is good for health, I avoid it; knowing better, I do it often. Some decisions—stopping at red lights, moving on green—require little conscious control. Other changes are slow to occur because one scrutinizes evidence, arguments, values, and aims. Tallying costs and benefits, regulating the flow of considerations, we come to decisions while overseeing, sometimes correcting or redirecting, the process. Peirce described this oversight as self-controlled self-control.7 Is deliberation’s efficacy a reason for saying that introspection is, contrary to my emphasis, a sound basis for knowing one’s motives? The answer is a qualified yes: deliberation is incidental to practice until the fit between habits and circumstances is problematic. Then we inhibit action while considering alternate routes ahead. Conscious inspection and control are critical to fine distinctions and tortured choices, but here, too, the emphasis on inspection is qualified: we often deliberate for long periods with only occasional episodes of conscious oversight. How many decisions— alternatives to consider, anxieties to appease—are left to stew? 7

Peirce, “Six Characters of Critical Common-sensism,” Collected Papers, vol. v., para. 5.442, p. 296.

73 Conscious deliberation is often essential to responsible choice, but it is significant, too, when reflection exposes the hierarchy of attitudes, hence values, embodied in one’s motivational structure. Attitudes are usually unknowable apart from actions or perspectives they sanction, but now, as we consider what to do, they are visible in the array of acceptable options and in the bias that favors one. Some aversions and inclinations are hard to alter: no amount of evidence or argument shakes them. These are typically attitudes defending vulnerabilities, many acquired early in childhood. Limiting choice, they may be all but unknown to those having them. Answering a friendly invitation from the local skydiving club, I consider for a moment before declining. The idea frightens me, though the invitation delights my companion. Her excitement, like my fear, is a symptom of attitude and habit: invincible by her own lights, she quickly accepts. Primitive motives express one’s insouciance or defend one’s vulnerabilities. They abide. Motives acquired later in development are more plastic. Expressing the idiosyncrasies of personal taste and development, they respond to altered circumstances and chance encounters. Impulse rather than deliberation explains many such shifts: one responds to provocation or opportunity, bypassing deliberation until or unless one rues the effects. Or changes accrete when attitudes are transformed by a tide of reflections. Deliberation’s efficacy is, all the while, mysterious. For we don’t understand the mechanics of the transition from deliberation to the altered neural networks that provoke considered actions. The issue is unresolved because of obscurity in structure’s relation to function. We know many functions without knowing their structures and, equally, we have considerable information about structures—genes and the brain, for example— without knowing many of their functions. Thought is a brain state; thinking about what to do alters brain states, though deliberating about motives reveals nothing about this structure or the process that alters it.

7. Education Character—motivational structure—is acquired by way of the training that forms attitudes and practices, habits and skills. Principal animators are innate; all the rest is learned, so education is a lever for creating and altering character. Some of the relevant education requires schools, but most socially sanctioned skills are learned in other core systems. We credit or blame individuals for their character, though much of it is formed in childhood when people have little or no control of what they are

74 taught or what they make of it. Character’s determinability—its plasticity— entails that responsibility for character lies as much with teachers as with those whose character they determine. But teachers is misleading: it personalizes a role that is often mechanical. The character of a particular teacher, priest, or policeman is mostly incidental to rules, roles, mores, or laws he or she prescribes. These are norms. Kant and Hegel ascribed their authority to reason, though Nietzsche condemned them as engines of herd morality. Their dispute is incidental to a point agreed: motives are animated by desires and fears and shaped by accepted standards of social practice. Accordingly, agency is displaced. Most that we do when acting publicly is “responsible”: internalizing public norms: we are motivated to do as others would have us do. Idiosyncrasy isn’t quashed, because people learn these routines in subtly different ways, and because physiological differences and personal development guarantee that the balance of attitudes is different in each of us. But character—personality—is potentially dangerous: we are least original in respect to motives we share, but risky to others because unpredictable as regards motives that distinguish us. Education works both sides of this schism: it enforces the norms, but promotes tastes, talents, and attitudes that make us different. There is also this corollary: we are educated by others when the task is socialization, but self-educated when choosing to elaborate or perfect our differences. Elaborations are sometimes consciously directed—one’s style of dress or speech, for example—though most extrapolate habits or proclivities that are not consciously learned or sought. For consciousness of our aims is not the same as a conscious intent to pursue them. Having acquired a particular stance, we persist. Here as above, motivational structure is a hierarchy of habits and attitudes, most of it uninspectable. 8. Goals, volition, and rewards Character embodies the motivational structure of one’s society and culture but always with idiosyncrasies that distinguish people from one another. Some differences express the peculiarities of physiology or development history. We learn the same rules but apply them differently because of ambiguities in our learning or different affective responses: you say no with more authority than I because you’re less fearful of the response. Other motivational differences are a function of one’s goals.

75 Goals are the precipitates of attitude. For the hierarchy of attitudes—some learned early and hard to change, others that are newer and malleable—is the hierarchy of values: some things are favored, others not. Think of a lens, each leaf falling into place as one focuses on a distant object. Tastes and choices have that effect when they give determinate values to determinable variables: family and friends are determinables, my family and friends are determinate values. More than preferences, these are goals: I do what I can to maintain them and my place within them. Where success is a reward and failure a punishment, I am motivated—focused and persistent—in pursuit of the reward. Why do it? Because of affection or duty, and because failing them would be self-betrayal. The hierarchy of attitudes is a steady state system: where failure would be disrupting, one acts to sustain it. This is the teleology that explains volition: values direct action until a reward is achieved or until failure or punishment is averted. Or rewards are self-reinforcing because achieving them promotes behavior calculated to sustain the effect. Consider the two constituents of motivational structure apparent in the preparation for a career: there are determinable skills and attitudes learned in the course of one’s socialization, and the more determinate, focused attitudes calibrated to successive tasks. One satisfies social expectations while marking a trajectory. Its trace may be formulaic and clear: apprenticeship and a craft, marriage and children, the army, or a profession. Or it may have no certain line of advance, no assurance that the next move isn’t a step backwards. Yet there is, all the while, an aim and choices calculated to achieve it. We speak of will or intention, but more fundamental variables are the array of attitudes and experiences that fix certain values (these or other attitudes) as personal navigating lights. Satisfy them and one is rewarded; fall short or turn away too soon and one is angry, flustered, or disappointed. What explains the persistence, the will, apparent in many people? Some persist because of the reasonable fear that circumstances are adverse and that they or others important to them will suffer if they stop. But discount the many occasions when will is a response to external circumstances. Why is volition strong when circumstances don’t oblige us to continue? The plausible answer is, as above, the array of values prefigured in one’s attitudes. Some are idealized; fulfilling them confirms both the choice of ideals and one’s self-perception. One persists because this idealized value has a focal place in the hierarchy of his or her values: I am what I chose to be. Or I don’t quit short of success because that would be self-subverting when

76 the quest is a surrogate for the achievement. For there is intra-psychic equilibrium when an ideal is earnestly pursued or achieved. This can be simple: one sticks to a diet out of conviction that he or she will look and feel better if weight is lost. This aim is likely conscious, but many are not: there are parents who fear the competition of their children, and children who never realize that the aims and trajectories of their lives, whatever the degree of their success, are reactions to parental hopes or styles. Every such example confirms that character—the socialized motivational structure made singular by experience, talent, and attitudes—is one of motivation’s two principal determinants. There is character and chance, hence character as it construes its circumstances. 9. A useful metaphor Phenomenology is the direct descendent of the self-inspection commended in Descartes’ Meditations. Plato abjured personal perspective when intuiting the Forms; Hegel considered it the fragmentary and shallow starting point for thought’s trajectory as it exceeds particularity and contingency on the way to universality and necessity (the Absolute). Descartes’ antecedents were Plotinus, Augustine, and Proclus. Nineteenth century phenomenologists sometimes emphasized their links to Aristotle or Kant, but it is Descartes’ emphasis—the self-discerning subject—that gives phenomenology its content, purpose, and method. Introspection is, however, too feeble a light for the task at hand. Consciousness turned on itself seeks clarity in the dark; much that it pretends to clarify—the unity of consciousness, for example—is created by projecting ideas into the mist of processes that never stand clearly in conscious light. Self-awareness discloses some episodic motives, but little or nothing of the attitudes and habits that direct us. It attends to one or a few concerns at a time, unable to comprehend or explain the spatial or temporal unity of experience or the complex of habits and attitudes that regulate behavior and reflection. The inflated regard for self-inspection is, all the while, the principal source of skeptical objections to every claim exceeding the bounds of awareness. This is consequential, because phenomenology avoids the difficulty of relating function to structure by denying that a structure unknown to inspection—the brain—has any relevance to motivation. This assumption, the relic of Descartes’ dualist ontology, founders with confirmation that Locke was right; there is no contradiction to supposing that

77 God could have created matter that thinks. Computers do it in an elementary way; brains do it better. The issue is plainer if we consider a flaw in Descartes’ starting point, one implicit in the wax example of the second Meditation.8 It (coupled to later remarks) implies that wax has a geometrical form more elementary than the observable changes of state suffered as wax is heated or cooled. Knowing the form and its possible transformations would enable us to explain and predict the changes observed, though mind could know this form only by superseding its percepts—of wax hot or cold—on the way to achieving the clarity and distinctness of mathematical ideas. We are reminded of Plato’s cave: obscurity in back, successive orders of greater clarity as one moves through and exits the cave.9 The analogy to motivation is imperfect but useful. Identifying attitudes that shape behavior requires that we infer one from the other; we exceed inspectable data in order to identify their constraining conditions. But here, where motives are the issue, those conditions aren’t perceived by abstracting from the phenomenal given to clear and distinct ideas: we don’t escape the back of the cave by invoking Plato’s figure of the divided line or Husserl’s eidetic reduction.10 Instead, we proceed abductively, inferring mind’s structure from its actions. Our hypotheses make an assumption that was daring a hundred years ago, though engineers and physiologists have made it plausible in our time: mind is altogether the activity of body, so motives, too, have an exclusively material character. Self-inspecting minds never decipher the neural activity that is their constitutive condition and cause. Phenomenology discerns the effects of neural activity, never the structure responsible for its occurrence. Relying on self-inspection for a comprehensive account of motivation is, therefore, too much like describing the changes in wax without being able to specify the geometrical form that explains them. Worse, it guarantees nothing will be known of motives that are quiescent when nothing provokes their expression. Mind is not a self-inspecting cave where conscious light skitters off the walls, but neither is it an insensate material brick. Mind resembles a motor idling; always active, most of its gears disengaged. The brain and its extended nervous system are a complex parallel processor. Mapping its Descartes, Meditations, pp. 67-68. Plato, Republic, 514a1-515d7, pp. 747-749. 10 Ibid., 509d6-511d8, pp. 745-747; Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Hijhoff, 1960), pp. 69-72. 8 9

78 attitudes, habits, and skills onto its neural circuitry is still preliminary, but we see already that these stable imprints guarantee persistent, stable motivation when circumstances are appropriate to culturally sanctioned, learned practices.11 Add idiosyncrasy and deliberation and we have all that motivation requires or implies. 10. Systems and the whole Motivation is usually construed as personal: individuals have motives; dogs, cats, and corporations do not. Dogs and cats are hardwired for objectives; corporations have aims formulated by their managers. Motives justifying the aims are also credited to managers, not to corporations, themselves. How could it be otherwise: how could motivation be ascribed to systems or the whole without presupposing that either or both have corporate minds? An answer purged of mysteries goes as follows. Consider friends planning a day together: how shall they spend it? Both are amiable; neither has a secret agenda. Each makes suggestions and listens for the other’s reactions; a positive response expressed without enthusiasm is counted as negative. Conversation carries on until each is convinced that the other wants to do something proposed. At that point banter changes: each confirms the other’s pleasure in the project agreed. Mirroring is the reciprocal bond that confirms their common aim; each feels and reflects the other’s enthusiasm. Recall that mirroring distinguishes associations from organizations. Organizations are stabilized by the reciprocal relations of members having complementary roles. An association’s members have the same role: each mirrors the beliefs or emotions of other members. An organization’s members are often directed—as distinct from motivated—by leaders or officers in a chain of command. But organizations are more effective if members are linked in both ways: by the complementarity of their roles and by the loyalty each feels to other members and to the collectivity when perceiving—seeing and feeling—that all (or most) share an aim. Motivation is rightly ascribed to systems because all or some of a system’s members (shop floor stewards or leaders elected to represent the intentions of all) debate their options in the way of friends planning a day’s activity. A final decision may be slow to come because participants have Jay Schulkin, “Effort and Will: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective,” Mind & Matter, vol. 5(1), 2007, pp. 111-126. 11

79 divergent interests, or a common interest but differences of opinion. Here, too, mechanical assent may be discounted if speakers betray hesitation or regret; there may be no agreement without the ramifying dynamic of emotional consensus. Autocrats may ask for the views of others merely to identify people dissenting from a choice already made, but systems they lead are inefficient (short of coercion or high salaries) for want of an emotional consensus. Accordingly, it is systems—not only members—that are motivated. Causal reciprocities binding members having complementary roles are transmission lines for consensual emotions that drive the system. This point generalizes to self-regulating publics. Think of people making rapid, mutually assenting eye contact on a bus or subway car when someone acts especially well or badly. A moral consensus previously implied by each person’s self-control (each sits quietly, careful not to disturb others) is now averred in this more explicit way: members of this small self-regulating public reassure one another by mirroring their accord. This effect generalizes on feast days and elections. Thanksgiving is emblematic. Family and friends affirm a moral attitude by assembling; angers and anxieties are mostly suppressed as cordiality circulates around the table. The domain is larger, but the corporate effect is similar among voters on election days (even those who disagree) and citizens responding to terror or war. Mirroring’s importance for consensus seems unproblematic in the relations of friends, family members, or people riding a bus. But it is troubling because the emotional responses on which it depends are more easily manipulated than beliefs justified by evidence or logic. A public of disciplined citizens gives mirroring a good name; mobs inveigled by rhetoric and propaganda are its other face. Either way, mirroring explains the unity of purpose that motivates systems of every size.

Chapter Four Circumstances Values for the three variables—individuals, systems, and the whole— vary with circumstances. So, intra-family relations are a function of familysupporting employment; the work, itself, is a function of terrain. Spouses in farming family work together, often with their children; the family unit coheres because all participate in the work the farm. Husbands working as miners return to their families at night, but wives and children have no direct knowledge of mining or of the esprit of the mine’s workteams. Deep sea fishermen are ship-bound for days and weeks, seeing their families sporadically. The men are often strangers to their children and, when home, an annoyance to their self-sufficient wives. All three variations are sustainable, but each has different effects on the character of those involved. The array of determining circumstances includes climate and site, history, culture, technology, government, and economy. One or another of these factors is more decisive than others in particular cases, but there is no settled order of priority, because each is sometimes determining. 1. Climate and site Climate and site are the context and principal resource for the work required to support a settlement’s material needs (no ships’ crews in Kansas, no panning for gold in Berlin). People adjust to circumstances of all sorts, though every situation warps the variables in particular ways: fishing is expedient for people living on rocky soil near a natural port; shepherds don’t settle because their animals quickly exhaust available vegetation. Circumstances were decisive for styles of life until they were neutralized by trains, planes, electricity, telephones, insulated houses, and the internet. Individuals are always situated, though location and environment have become incidental to many activities: work, entertainment, even the

82 conversations of friends often depend on information and services that have no settled location. Locality intervenes when people exchanging e-mails turn to other tasks: a sea captain goes home by climbing a ladder, accountants take buses or cars; businessmen in London and Paris talk to one another all day before driving home on opposite sides of the road. Each city has its venues for personal initiative, stylized core systems, and a distinctive tradition of self-regulation. Versions appropriate to a lunar space station may initially mimic those on earth, but they will likely acquire forms and a balance peculiar to themselves. Our ability to manage climate and sites makes us careless of the material conditions required to sustain them. How much degradation can we introduce before an established community isn’t sustainable in an adverse climate or depleted site? Earth has seemed endlessly fruitful and supportive. We are only beginning to realize that we have substantially reduced its carrying capacity. 2. History Societies embody a process analogous to the evolutionary formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”: each incorporates its past as inclinations and aversions to threats and opportunities. Cities that survive repeated invasions because of a strong church or king still crave that central authority if attacked. This is history expressed in a society’s habits and attitudes, systems and laws. Reformers explain the rigidity of the French economy by citing its feudal origins: current practices were determined when the relations of initiative, community, and regulation were fixed long ago. Initiative languished because personal success was leverage that could be used against the king or church interests. The king demanded obedience; the church valued community and humility rather than private wealth and achievement. Societies perpetuate familiar structures and routines, but they founder or adapt when circumstances change. Every settlement addresses altered conditions with a mix of advantages and liabilities. Small settlements may be flexible because less complexity entails less infrastructure, but local attitudes and habits often make them rigid. Cities invert this posture: residents are flexible, but infrastructure and many systems or networks are big, clumsy, and slow to adapt. Cities are principal incubators of change, because others share one’s passion or because of the many places to hide, each a sanctuary that tolerates fantasies or disciplined experiments. Most tendencies lose

83 momentum and disappear. A few propel viable accommodations to new circumstances. City dynamics explain the impatience that residents feel when reproached for ignoring their city’s past: it seems irrelevant, given the plasticity of current arrangements and the steady pressure to revise them. History restarts like a watch rewound, each time with a different calibration. 3. Culture Initiative, systems, and regulation are common to every society, though their values and relations vary from place to place and over time in every place. Culture is the tissue of evolving habits and practices, values and interpretations that overlay the three social variables—individuality, systems, and corporate regulation—as they jostle for space and leverage. Core systems are a culture’s transmission lines and generators. Every culture prescribes routines for these systems because they satisfy its elementary needs and interests. Members respond by defending structures and practices that establish deep features of personal and communal identity. Cultures are reasonably faulted if they fail the test of ample balance: can systems form and breathe; is initiative disciplined rather than reckless; does regulation facilitate or repress? Balance is deformed in cultures choked by systems so entrenched they stifle initiative and frustrate regulation. Diversity is a cure: stasis is mitigated if one culture dominates while others defuse or deflect its emphases. Belleville, an avenue and neighborhood in Paris, is open and tolerant because each of many sects perpetuates itself without being able to suppress the others. Jostling for space and advantage, acknowledging people who resist us, we come to enjoy their differences. A city can’t acquire more than formal unity (a place name) or the practical unity imposed by a common infrastructure if there is no culture shared by its several or many sects and their members. (The Old City of Jerusalem exemplifies this quandary; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is an example in miniature.) City coherence requires habits, attitudes, behaviors, and a language that make residents mutually intelligible and effective. People of every persuasion are warped in mutually recognized ways if they frequent the same streets, schools, business, and shops. Differences abide but the many are one, an achievement celebrated by their fans when a city’s team plays its hated rival in the local stadium. This doesn’t happen—there are ghettos but no city culture—if shops, schools, and businesses, even streets, are segregated. Balance fails because mutual suspicion precludes formation

84 of a public responsible for corporate self-regulation. The city reduces to factions, its shards. Security is uneven; violence is tolerated in some neighborhoods because the police force is directed by a class or clan whose members don’t live there. Cultures supply determinate values—specific vocations, styles of organization, and rules—for the three variables of social structure. Yet there is tension between a culture’s internal dynamic and the elemental balance required by every stable settlement. This is apparent wherever a culture is insensitive to the conditions for balance: individuals employed in roles appropriate to their talents; productive systems that respect initiative; effective regulation that is light and respectful. Prudent systems encourage initiatives that respond to altered circumstances, though a culture organized for social control may punish them for actions that flout its precepts (by educating women, for example). Cultures differ in their ways of resolving this tension. Some are transformed: they acquire the secular habits promoted by the economy, politics, and technology of their time. Others resist, because they are remote from secular inducements, because of stubborn history, or because of pride and conviction. Mutual accommodation—melding sectarian habits with the secular city—is fraught. Settlements of every size need flexibility and mutual tolerance, but this is urgent wherever tastes, rituals, and habits differ among a settlement’s communities: a library here, karaoke next door. Diversity is a challenge to social discipline: it requires self-control for individuals; mutual tolerance for systems; vigilance, discretion, efficacy, and adaptability for corporate regulators. We go safely in opposite ways on the same sidewalk because each observes the rules of passage. Cultures that distrust informal solutions want rigid discipline and enforcement. They create members too fearful, inflexible, or morose to notice different people nearby. 4. Technology City size and density are functions of technology: no skyscrapers without steel frames and elevators; no dense aggregations of people reliant on distant farms without transport; no factories or offices without electric power, clean water, and effective sewerage. Every city exhibits the technology available, known, and cost efficient at the time it was made or remade. Yet technology is not altogether determining: it enables possibilities without choosing among them. Should houses shelter single people or families; should streets and lanes be a maze congenial to privacy or straight enough for

85 traffic flow and effective policing? Practical interests are so acute that inventions securing them—piped water and telephones—are adopted everywhere. Other choices are discretionary: we calculate cost and advantage. Some technologies radically alter the relative weights of individuality, systems, and authority. Literacy and printing presses empowered individuals by liberating thought from authoritarian dogma; electronic surveillance empowers authorities while reducing privacy and freedom. One hopes that a technology’s uses respect individual initiatives, systems, and the need for corporate regulation, but that isn’t always clear given the inscrutability of long-term effects. Will the internet reduce the power of statist authority by giving everyone access to the same information, or is it the cutting edge of more perfect surveillance and thought control? One imagines an outcome we should fear: access the internet and the state supplies information while monitoring the uses made of it. A technology’s applications require—but don’t always receive—a trial having three steps: consider its likely effects, apply it in a controlled smallscale experiment, then alter future applications in light of the result. We often ignore the third step, because perceived advantages overwhelm prudence or because the effects are so considerable that there is no easy way to recover the previous state of affairs: regulate the pharmaceutical industry too closely and companies won’t experiment; regulate too loosely and some people are damaged by untested drugs. This conundrum is often resolved on the side of permissiveness: experience confirms that early costs are sometimes justified by unforeseen advantages. But technology moves quickly: we can’t always weigh the benefits of short-term advantages against long-term threats. We don’t build nuclear power stations in the middle of cities because the risk is apparent; we equivocate about inefficient car engines because driving is convenient. Technology is so advantageous that we often prefer ignoring its costs: pollution, for example. But this is a Faustian bargain. We can’t foretell what we may become or how we may be used as control passes to machines that direct us. This seems ridiculous in cities where the principal machines include buses and toasters, but the density of cities and the cost of city workers make residents vulnerable to technologies that make city living more efficient. Few people think twice about relinquishing personal control to elevators or subway trains, dentists or hairdressers. But imagine machines that schedule clients or patients for haircuts or extractions done by these same

86 machines. Nietzsche observed that people like being organized and directed. Would we be happy if machines were to set our agendas or use us for their projects? How would we recover autonomy? Could we? 5. Government Governments defend their citizens, provide courts and social services, and manage infrastructure. Regulation is their essential task and the only one relevant here; duty to regulate is often the excuse when governments do those other things. Regulation has distinct profiles when considered from each of six perspectives: i. government’s task as regulator; ii. regulating dense networks of systems; iii. regulation’s effects on individual freedom; iv. regulating change; v. the status and character of the regulators; and vi. regulative styles. 5.1 Government’s tasks as regulator Density, diversity, complexity, and conflict, size, spontaneity, and change make cities hard to manage. Tyrannies respond by controlling behavior and eradicating dissent, but privacy flourishes because everyone is anonymous to most others: who knows what the neighbors really think or do? Democratic regimes don’t care; promoting a self-regulating public while managing complexity is their rationale. Go to any large city park on a summer weekend; watch thousands of people walking, picnicking, boating, sitting alone, or playing ball, all with a discipline that makes policemen incidental. Regulation is internal: each person and system is self-regulating. Government intercedes when self-inhibition isn’t sufficient to manage complexity’s effects. Most everyone older than five knows without being told that one should not interfere when others are doing something important to them. People working alone or together create privacies that buffer relations to outsiders; others see and respect those boundaries. The discretion implied is everywhere learned; expressing it requires minimal coercion. Corporate regulation—laws that governments pass and apply—is nevertheless urgent, because other people do sometimes interfere with effects that are disruptive or lethal. Proscriptive laws ban murder, theft, and pollution; prescriptive laws facilitate movement, association, and agreements. Administering laws of both sorts is an art. Promote discipline without interfering; set priorities and legislate to encourage them; organize and direct some projects that no private interest

87 would likely do for profit, then allow citizens to use and adapt it to their purposes. Olmsted didn’t foresee roller-skating in Central Park. 5.2 Regulating dense networks of systems Regulation’s effects on people liberated or terrorized is apparent. Its effects on systems are more subtle. Repressive governments inhibit their work or creation by anathematizing their aims or intimidating their members. The loi Chapelier is emblematic because it neutralized power centers independent of state authority: core and other systems were organized, locally rooted, and stubborn; that tangle of affiliations was an obstacle to sovereign authority. The Committee of Public Safety had a simple remedy: deny the existence of mediating systems by declaring them illegitimate; prevent them from forming; empower the state to disrupt or destroy them. The aim was paradoxical because little or nothing consequential happens in any society without people joined in systems.12 One principal measure of governmental efficacy is, therefore, its effects on core and other systems: does it facilitate or impede them? Regulation establishes a context for personal initiative and the work of systems: does it cause them to founder or help them thrive? The loi Chapelier was anomalous in the context of French communitarianism, though its decimating effect on systems coheres with Mill’s individualist liberality: let everyone do what he or she likes; let all find suitable companions for activities consistent with their interests and harmless to others. This formula reduces systems to temporary affiliations created for specific, often ephemeral aims; associations are to do their work, then dissolve. Mill reduced the state to a night watchman or, for want of anything policemen might do, an ambulance brigade. Renouncing global control, minimalist governments limit regulation and oversight to situations that require it because of complexity, conflict, or threats to public safety. Laissez faire, as Mill proposed it, is a policy suitable to the diversity of cities where businesses, bureaus, and clubs manage themselves and deter control; it favors market economies. This style of administration is revolutionary, given the history of authoritarians and their desire to command what other people believe and do, but these advantages are overwhelmed by the complexity and It’s odd that this law was formulated in France, given that few states have so many vocations—currently 600 or so—protected by inherited rights and rules. Or it isn’t odd, because of having been a calculated response to the tangle of intermediate systems.

12

88 conflict endemic to dense webs of systems. Market economies don’t manage themselves: their competition for workers and resources isn’t always scrupulous; the emphasis on profit is often reckless; work conditions are often punishing; workers are paid too little, managers pay themselves too much. Mill’s instincts are generous but naïve: his liberality reduces complexity to the frictionless aggregate of disciplined people. But coherence isn’t likely given complexity. Think of many cars driven at speed on a narrow road in heavy fog: regulation is imperative. Laissez faire does have this offsetting advantage: effective economies excuse governments from responsibilities they would otherwise inherit. For there is little alternative to governmental intervention if individuals or core systems need help because damaged by complexity or conflict: the wounded may be left to fix themselves or die, but this is cruel and shortsighted when every person and system is vulnerable to unforeseeable contingencies. Churches, generous aristocrats, and some jurisdictions once took up the slack with alms houses. But that is too piecemeal a solution after Kant’s universalizing ethics and Mill’s utilitarianism; it is too shallow a solution given the depths of city squalor and distress. Market economies relieve the pressure by generating work, salaries, and goods that lift the poor. Useful systems proliferate; ambitious people enjoy ample wealth and a choice of partners, tasks, and entertainment. Participants are healthier, more productive, and happier in many ways; women are better educated. Government is saved from having to do what the market does better; it maintains a safety net without having to be the principal economic engine. The required degree of intervention isn’t decided because market cycles test any particular set-point, but the viable principle is established: let a multiplicity of systems compete for customers in disciplined markets. Regulate these systems; don’t try to replace them. Regulation isn’t always benign because authoritarian governments abuse it. The claim to authority may have the magical sanction of inheritance, wealth, power, ideology, or sanctity: each is construed as permission to dictate styles of life and affiliation. These versions of authoritarian power are crude because their motives and means are crude; others are subtle, even elegant, when systems form and people dance in ways regulators prescribe. An ideology may be secular or religious; people who acquire identity by living as it dictates are little motivated to challenge the authority responsible for schools or churches that teach it. Company towns and military dictatorships also impose their shortlists of desirable properties,

89 never caring that initiative dies when individuals and systems can aspire only to satisfy the regime’s recipes or formulas: the Aryan family, the patriot. People suffering these regimes are disoriented when authority has lapsed, liberty is affirmed, and government is democratic. The future seems dangerously fluid; authoritarians imagine that they know enough to control it. They join either of two mistaken ideas to a pernicious aim. One avers that individuals and systems derive all their value from the whole; the other misidentifies ruling authority with the whole. Both would have us infer that every person and system should endorse authority’s beliefs, serve its needs, or annihilate its enemies. Democratic government perceives itself as an instrument of public well-being, not as society’s proprietor or moral instructor. Its rule is more deliberate, because divided authority prevents authoritarian abuse. Quick decisions are sometimes required, but they are rare; there is usually time for public deliberation. Gathering evidence, weighing alternative policies is a discipline. The work is repetitious, contentious, and often boring. Leaders who have no taste or skill for doing it prefer drum rolls and the excitement of war. Deliberation stops if a small circle of elected or appointed officials makes decisions on the basis of “facts” averred when fantasy supersedes information. Plato described the decline of his ideal state: someone unfit for the role of philosopher-king makes decisions that subvert it. What steps or conditions promote this debacle? Which procedures advance unsuitable candidates for elective office; what are the perceptions and education of a public that prefers them? Great failure requires ample discussion and practices reformed to avert comparable errors. Sustainable democracies defend themselves in three ways: safeguards are structural (divided authority and elections); self-scrutiny and correction are everywhere approved and practiced; public officials and decisions are perpetually monitored and challenged by a press committed to transparency and accountability. 13 Benign, competent officials may be elected or appointed: transport specialists make traffic laws better than amateurs elected to city councils and state legislatures. A community safely cedes authority to a city manager when there is oversight and power to replace him or her. Too much convenience—authority too easily extenuated—is a formula for civic neglect: we risk making others responsible for discipline that is everyone’s business. 13

Dewey, Public and its Problems, pp. 179-181.

90 Warning against regulatory intrusions on personal initiative is a democratic anthem. We say less about systems because our individualist/atomist tradition makes them invisible: we acknowledge that people sometimes join forces for mutual advantage, but those affiliations are misconstrued as temporary alliances of convenience (Mill’s third region of liberty14). This bias ignores core and other systems that condition every feature of human well-being. Their neglect is dangerous because authorities oblivious to systems are apt to legislate in ways that sabotage or suppress them. We do talk of “family values,” but this is obsequy to core systems without precision or commitment. Serious talk would imply tax and budgetary policies that support the health, education, and well-being of families at all scales of wealth. Libertarians jeer that policies having this aim promote a “nanny” state on the back of confiscatory taxes; they don’t acknowledge that the “self-made man or woman” works within systems and that he or she rides a tide sustained by the work of others. Why is it good that cities and states finance police, courts, and prisons, but resist less costly programs to help poor families raise healthy, educated, ambitious children? Why not prepare residents of every social status for the social structure we have, one requiring that individuals be educated within effective systems for systems they join or create? Governments sometimes extenuate this responsibility by citing the individualist thinkers whose preference for a minimal state is coupled to their neglect of systems: let government restrict itself to defending honest citizens from the occasional thief. Their formulation cannot be more than rhetorical when so plainly irrelevant to the task of managing a complex array of systems, networks, and their members. Plato supposed that philosopherkings would reliably know and make right decisions; Mill, Dewey, and Hayek believed as firmly that no person or cabal has judgment so acute that he, she, or it should have authority to dictate rules to a society’s members. But that leave the issue undecided: how shall we manage the complexity and conflicts generated within an array of systems while anticipating pitfalls ahead? A detailed justification for democratic rule alleges that the people’s voice and interests are best represented by an elected legislature or expressed in referenda. But justification is incomplete if it fails to show that democracy is also the style of government most appropriate to the balance of the three 14

Mill, On Liberty, p. 16.

91 social variables. Suppose that judgments rendered by a legislature or referenda are equally liable to error: things don’t go as planned. Suppose, too (somewhat contrary to fact), that occasions requiring a quick decision are discounted because rare. Why prefer a democratic style of decision to choices made by a prince with or without the advice of his counsel? Why shouldn’t a wise sovereign or committee of regulators decide every issue that concerns personal or social well-being? Adults make these judgments for children. Why shouldn’t adults take advice and direction when their problems and circumstances are all the more consequential? One reason is that childhood is an apprenticeship for adulthood: children take advice until they mature sufficiently to make decisions for themselves; a government endowed with parental authority entails an infantile people. Abrogating choice deprives adults of the opportunity and responsibility for making prudent decisions. This suppresses initiative by restricting it to activities routinized by edict: one chooses to drive but never questions having to drive on the right. It thwarts the formation of local selfregulating publics, though circumstances requiring regulation are typically local and particular, hence remote from the preoccupations of authorities who legislate for the whole. Self-forming, self-regulating local publics are the life blood of a society that ossifies if its members can’t organize to accommodate altered circumstances. Discipline is harsh in tyrannies because people and systems resist it. Regulation works best when the work of the regulator coheres with the discipline of persons and their systems. This is the genius of democracy: discipline is resonant and stable when corporate regulation defuses complexity and conflict without subverting systems and members that are effectively self-disciplined. This advantage is a benchmark for the subtle task of designing democratic governments, though population size, density, diversity, complexity, conflict, and the size of the area populated imply the fragility of plausible solutions. Small settlements facilitate governance; large areas thinly populated, warring factions, or complex activities make it slow and inefficient. Town meetings are feasible in small settlements; telephones or the internet are a technological fix for larger populations, though these attenuating styles of communication are no substitute for face-to-face debate with familiar neighbors. Direct contact would be less relevant if the emotional neutrality of people unknown encouraged more thoughtful discussion than the mutual hostility of longtime neighbors. But neutrality is a

92 limited advantage. It is a necessary guise for mediators who preside at negotiations, but not an answer to conflict. The resolution of local issues must satisfy the neighbors: they need to address their differences if there’s to be a solution. Abstracted negotiators don’t have this practical, existential interest. Nor do ordinary citizens have the time, information, or skill (diplomatic or technical) to master issues that require decisions. For consider all the topics for which they need information: facilitate the creation of productive systems while protecting their members (laws defending contracts); guarantee civil rights (a bill of rights, voting laws); disentangle complexity (traffic laws); supply basic social services (education, health, and housing); punish deleterious effects (pollution) and criminal behavior (murder, treason, theft); allocate public resources among competitors (for opportunities, money, or land); protect and defend (by organizing a police force); raise funds to pay for infrastructure and these tasks (tax laws); anticipate crises in all the above. Add density and diversity to size, complexity, and conflict, and the issues to be decided become exponentially complex. The popular solution is selection or election of candidates for constitutionally sanctioned offices. Election implies contending views about appropriate solutions, hence the need for a procedure that facilitates choice. Selection implies that the principal consideration is skill of the sort appropriate to a community’s tasks, and that citizens are bewildered by the work at hand. Better find an expert: hand off responsibility to him or her, though doing this extenuates sovereign power by authorizing unelected managers to command adherence to their decisions. Compound these tasks and obstacles with those entailed when governments own and manage systems that produce goods or services (factories, utilities, schools, or hospitals). These interventions are justified by saying that people organized as a whole and represented by their government accept responsibility for basic services critical to the health, education, and welfare of every citizen. This is regulation in the name of fairness: minimize inequalities of opportunity; give everyone a fair start. This posture sets government in opposition to its economy’s private systems—both compete for labor, capital, and resources —though government-owned businesses needn’t earn profits because they are supported by taxing private business. This would be illogical if there were no compelling reasons defending it. But there is justification: a society may organize to provide all its members with a safety net of goods and services if

93 their provision is otherwise uneconomic. Education and health are fundamental conditions for personal and social well-being, hence the claim that a society should organize to provide this least standard of welfare to all citizens. But providing these benefits opposes government to profit-seeking private competitors. These competitors have lobbyists and elected officials to plead their case, hence the unequal conflict between private profit and social equity. and the dismal levels of urban health and education. Disputes about welfare and those responsible for securing it are unresolvable without understanding the three social variables—individuals, systems, and the whole—and their relations. What is the whole, and what is its responsibility for constituent persons and systems? Atomists are certain there is no issue: the whole is an aggregate; a government’s only essential task is that of protecting citizens from antisocial neighbors. Communitarians and holists respond that community is more than the aggregate of individual interests. A family or business is already an entity with a corporate interest; a city’s corporate interest is served by the amity of its people and the productivity of their systems. How good is this analogy: is the extrapolation from family to community—“the family of man”—leveraged by rhetorical piety? That analogy is mistaken, because the family of man—a breeding population— isn’t a family. Arguing for the extension of social bonds from systems and networks to an array of them (a city) is a recommendation, not a finding. Yet a simple practical reason commends the analogy. Conditions for social wellbeing are deeper than the fact that some are rich and others poor, and that the rich are better able to pay for health, education, and welfare. That distribution is always temporary; “shirtsleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations” was Carnegie’s dictum. Society has a longer trajectory, one requiring the mix of individual initiatives and the viable systems individuals create and sustain. A society that ignores the health and education of its citizens wastes its principal resource. It is less productive, harmonious, and stable than it could be. Private wealth and advantage is self-interested and shortsighted; societies require a more ample perception of the conditions for their long-term viability. We ignore inequity at cost to social health. 5.3 Regulation’s effects on individual freedom Regulation is rightly perceived as inimical to freedom when it represses initiative or obliges people to move in tracks that government prescribes: never marry, don’t learn, memorize our truths. This possibility—this history

94 —justifies libertarian objections to every authoritarian assault on personal liberty. But there is another side to regulation’s bearing on freedom: no one would be free to drive anywhere in the absence of traffic laws because accidents or tie-ups would stall traffic everywhere. Regulation liberates us by proscribing violent crime, then by prescribing laws that facilitate free movement: one would hesitate to make agreements with parties known (marriage) or unknown (buyers and sellers), whatever their documents and bona fides, if contracts were not defensible in law. Membership in systems is a risk; laws (worker’s compensation, for example) protect people who freely undertake their roles and responsibilities. Freedom’s opposition to regulation is overdrawn. 5.4 Regulating change Change in democratic, market-driven societies is principally the work of individuals and their systems: their ingenuity masters obstacles and opportunities. Government is effective because it eases transitions by legislating rights of way. These tasks are common to settlements of every size, though advantages and liabilities differ with size, history, and circumstances. Small settlements are more agile but more exposed, because abrupt changes can be destabilizing: family structure and tradition can’t stabilize mining villages when the coal seam is depleted. Large settlements have inertia: their many people and systems aren’t easily deflected from established habits. They change in piecemeal ways: years were required before Pittsburgh’s economy moved from steel to technology. Regulation is implicated, because government is the mediator, conciliator, and supporter of last resort. Assailed by competing interests—innovate or defend—it needs, but often lacks, a secure neutral position from which to adjudicate contrary demands. There may be no solutions for a settlement in decline until it shrinks to dimensions appropriate to a sustainable economy. Government oversees the transition: feebly, when it submits to forces it doesn’t understand or control; ably, when foresight promotes infrastructure and regulations that enable its city to recover a stable footing. 5.5 The status and character of the regulators Legislative and judicial authority make governments intimidating. Government’s status is, nevertheless, anomalous, because corporate regulators are a system among systems. Their powers would be arbitrary expressions of force if government did not have the consent of the governed.

95 For nothing else explains the public’s willingness to let one system regulate the conduct of others. Government, so construed, is an agent of the whole, not the whole itself. Regulation is holistic in two respects: its writ extends throughout the whole, because its legitimacy derives from the citizenry organized or acknowledged as the whole: the public. Both the authority to regulate and the limited range of its authority are enunciated in a constitution formulated and confirmed by the public or its representatives. A procedure (elections, for example) rotates members of the public into and out of government offices, thereby saving them the confusion of thinking that authority is personal rather than conferred. Rotating members of the civil service is also appropriate: it prevents government’s unelected employees—its bureaucrats—from establishing a self-perpetuating cabal, one that separates itself from the citizenry while affirming its derived authority over them. Choosing or electing people competent to regulate is always problematic because few people qualify and fewer still want the responsibility. Character is a principal qualification, one that campaign ads trumpet but can’t create. Plato emphasized wisdom, but gravity (respect for the task), deliberation, judgment, courage, persistence, practical savvy, altruism, and humility are this world’s substitutes. Authority also carries the burden of discretion: self-abnegation minimizes the risk that decisions are motivated by self-interest or the interest of one’s core systems. Curiosity is vital, because the regulating authority needs information about the complex of systems it regulates: some atrophy, others are never established if an ignorant authority carelessly suppresses the liberty of benign systems or their members. That happens when blanket decrees prohibit and punish innocuous deeds, and when authority encourages freedom but punishes some choices or actions arbitrarily and unforeseeably, after the fact. This has predictable effects: initiatives languish because authority is vicious or capricious; initiative and collaboration are dangerous to authority, so useful work isn’t done. The legitimacy of democratic regulation is taken for granted, though familiarity disguises a conflict of interest so fundamental that the neutrality of the regulators—an elemental value—is sabotaged. The conflict ensues because of social structure’s three constituent variables: individuals, systems, and a regulator. A cogent social inventory lists both individuals and the core and other systems—families, businesses, and neighborhoods—that do a society’s work. Hence this question: why limit the voices heard in political

96 deliberations to those of individuals or their representatives? Why deny it to systems where character forms and work is done? Is it scandalous that Ford or Toyota should have a voice and vote in local, state, or national elections, given their effects on the lives of workers, suppliers, clients, and all who profit from taxes they pay? We may assume that their interests are represented when people they affect weigh their concerns when voting. But this is naïve because individuals often don’t know or ignore those interests, and because systems take matters in hand by paying lobbyists to represent them wherever governmental decisions are made. Count the bills passed and appropriations made because of popular clamor; compare them to laws sponsored by lobbyists; then notice that private interests—systems— effectively penetrate government in ways that are nowhere prescribed in the Constitution. This is government by private influence, not any variation on the theme of government by and for the people. Solutions for this paradox are not apparent. It may seem that bringing systems into the electoral process overloads it in their favor: better leave them out, obliging them to fight for influence. Yet powerful systems (large businesses) have a weapon—money—for which private citizens have no adequate response. Election laws limit business contributions without closing loopholes used to engorge campaign treasuries: there are people and companies able and willing to pay all of a compliant legislator’s campaign expenses. Wealth’s effects would be minimized by requiring that qualifying candidates be restricted to funds supplied by the public treasury. But this solution is usually defeated when systems lobby successfully to stop legislation that would reduce their influence. They say that restricting their expenditures is a pernicious limit to free speech, though no value is unqualified if each has implications for others: so, elections are free if the result expresses differences of opinion, not the effect of money used to buy or influence votes. Is there no way to provide directly (not only by the intervention of their members) for the legitimate interests of systems? There is no good answer, though the U.S. Supreme Court recently supplied its version. It voted 5-4 to overturn legislation limiting the amount of money corporations, unions, and other systems may use to endorse candidates for political office. The Court’s decision frees interest groups of all sorts to spend whatever sums they can raise to advertise for candidates who favor their interests. Or they can intimidate candidates: vote our way or suffer the consequences when we advertise to denigrate you or support your

97 opponent. The Supreme Court’s justification for this decision is “free speech”: Because speech itself is of primary importance to the integrity of the election process, any speech arguably within the reach of rules created for regulating political speech is chilled….a speaker wishing to avoid criminal liability threats and the heavy costs of defending against FEC [Federal Elections Commission] enforcement must ask a governmental agency for prior permission to speak. The restrictions thus function as the equivalent of a prior restraint, giving the FEC power analogous to the type of government practices that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit. The ongoing chill on speech makes it necessary to invoke the earlier precedents that a statute that chills speech can and must be invalidated where its facial invalidity has been demonstrated. 15 The point affirmed is clear; the rationale is naïve. The freedom of speech affirmed in the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution) is assigned specifically (though implicitly) to individual persons, not to corporations or other systems: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.”16 Corporate entities express themselves in various ways: in print or through agents such as lawyers or executives. But it is only individual persons who speak. Strict constructionists shouldn’t construe “speech” metaphorically for the purpose of ascribing it to entities that don’t speak. The “speech” of corporate entities requires a separate entitling rule, one that acknowledges the difference between the right granted individuals and the right ascribed to these entities. Individuals living in democratic societies are responsible for thinking and deliberating about a range of issues: uninhibited speech is a condition for learning and surveying the array of relevant options. The “speech” of corporate entities—unions, companies, religions—has either of two aims: use or obtain the means required to support or reward them, or convince others—people and other systems—to defend their interests. These are narrower aims than the one justifying the free speech ascribed to individuals by the First Amendment; they require more stringent control. Corporate entities shouldn’t be free, for example, to subvert democratic elections by using their resources to intimidate opponents, buy support, or

15 16

Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission 558 U.S…..(2010), p. 3. Constitution of the United States, First Amendment.

98 swamp the media with advertisements favoring candidates and policies favorable to their interests. Why does the Supreme Court extend unqualified free speech to corporations, unions, and others? Is it because the Court wants to empower interest groups while diminishing the weight of deliberating citizens? Or is its rationale the confusion promoted when individualist theory alleges that systems are aggregates, hence nothing in themselves apart from their individual members? Individuals are free to speak; they don’t lose this right when aggregated, hence the conclusion that an aggregate may express the views of its members. This assumption is a principal justification for the majority argument: “The speaker is an association with a corporate form.”17 This use of association is synonymous with aggregate. Associations, so construed, are nothing over and above the individuals assembled. Each participant has the right to free speech, so an association’s preferences or decisions are condensed expressions of their many voices or votes (assuming either unanimity or choices expressing a majority of the members). The Court majority would likely say that the Court itself is an association, one exhibited when rulings are expressed numerically as the number of concurring or dissenting justices: 9-0, 5-4. One might expect every association to be equally scrupulous in recording members’ views, for each member has the right to express his or her opinion on the matter at issue. But that doesn’t happen, and the Court majority didn’t rule that it should: each corporate entity advertises as though it were a single agent; none qualifies its advertisements with surveys showing the number of members favoring or dissenting from the opinion expressed. Recording individual opinions is pointless when companies advertise their wares or services, because employee views aren’t tallied when a company tries to sell its goods. There is also little reason that an advertisement should cite the votes of members bound by loyalty to an idea, team, or faith: all will agree, given, for example, that a religion’s communicants share its creed. But neither unanimity nor a majority is rightly assumed when ads support political candidates: some or many members of the alleged aggregate may dissent from the views expressed. Shouldn’t the Court have required an entry in every political ad sponsored by a company or union telling the number of individual voices supporting or opposing its views? For, as it stands, the Court allows systems to represent themselves as 17

Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission 558 U.S……(2010), p. 4

99 single agents, not as aggregates expressing the views of all, some, or a few of their members. The majority opinion is inconsistent: it begins by reducing systems to aggregates (associations with corporate form), then supersedes the aggregate with an entity—a corporate voice—entitled to speaks for all its members, including any who dissent from the views expressed. Is this an oblique acknowledgment that systems are not aggregates, contrary to the assumption fundamental to the majority’s decision? Or is it an effect of the muddle ensuing when individualist theory contends with corporate entities— systems—having an identity distinct from that of their members? This ruling echoes the dictum affirmed by the loi Chapelier: there is no power mediating between the sovereign and individual citizens. But there are many intermediate powers—namely, core and other systems—so the Court’s opinion is essentially ironic: denying the reality of systems because of individualist theory, it consolidates the power of systems zealous to shape legislation in ways congenial to their interests. It would be wiser to start again: acknowledge that systems have interests, then ask how they may be addressed given the U.S. Constitution; or change the Constitution to acknowledge the role of systems in social and political life. Do neither and we perpetuate the anomaly of denying the reality of large systems while allowing them to dominate political life. Why does it matter to cities anywhere—within the United States or elsewhere—that a law concerning U.S. federal elections is ruled unconstitutional? Because settlement governments everywhere are subject to influence or control by wealthy persons or businesses. A law that legitimates wealth’s influence on elections is subversive everywhere, 5.6 Regulative styles Authoritarians argue that social life is chaotic if no strong hand directs it. This was Hobbes’s view, perhaps his reaction to the English civil war. What justifies it in times of civil peace? Or does emphasis shift between initiative and regulation as circumstances change? Initiatives are encouraged or allowed when they are fruitful and mutually supportive or indifferent. Regulation intervenes when intra-systemic conflicts or bad personal choices have pernicious effects: a plague is spread by current practices, but all can be saved by a rigid code of behavior that only government can enforce. One hopes such crises are rare, because this posture—wise intervention—is also the excuse for despotic rule. Intervention itself, whatever its motive, should

100 be circumspect: an authority obliged to intervene repeatedly suppresses initiative. People come to believe that they should wait for regulators to tell them what to do. Appropriate regulation is discreet and experimental: policies are considered, applied, considered again, revised, rejected, or sustained. Having no single expression suitable for every occasion, regulation, like elastic, is tense or loose depending on circumstances. One style of regulation is more desirable than others because values for the three variables— individuals, system, and the whole—make it sustainable and benign. We establish an open playing field where people freely choose partners for common or complementary aims, a field where the unexpected or foreseeable effects of competition and conflict are overseen—regulated—by a public comprising the participants. Important details are unspecified, because there are several ways to satisfy these generic conditions. The open playing field is the commons, the shared space. It can be the intellectual space of ideas exchanged and appraised; the physical terrain where goods and services are produced, sold, and enjoyed; or the notional electronic space of the internet. Regulation and the entities regulated are also generic for, as Dewey emphasized, both evolve in unforeseeable ways. He knew of Standard Oil and United Steel, but a global market and the internet were all but unimaginable. He couldn’t anticipate that both reduce the power of individual nations, as each courts international business while limiting its effects on local competitors and labor markets. No government masters this dilemma. Regulating individuals and systems as they compete for scarce space, opportunities, and resources is more easily described than achieved. The tasks are plain: mitigate current disputes; avert others by anticipating likely points of conflict; formulate and enact priorities for the whole with the direction or approval of the persons and systems engaged. The full array of possible means is obscure or unknown. We want regulation that is discreet and effective mated to initiative and flourishing systems. This is balance, an enviable but infrequently achieved attractor state. Promoting it globally is all but impossible because the complexity and conflict of systems and personal initiatives exceeds the information, foresight, and authority available to any conceivable regulator. Adept regulators are an essential condition for achieving it locally. Regulation is clumsy in principal cities but easier in towns and villages where its domain is small. Cities resist regulation because the unity implied

101 by the word city is bogus. Tour boats on the Chicago River rock in the wake of high-speed launches piloted by traders who work the floor of the Chicago options exchange: same water, different worlds because Chicago is an overlay of systems and networks, neighborhoods and social strata. Chicago’s city council can regulate river traffic; it could impose a luxury tax on hulls and marine engines, though it hesitates to tax a market it mustn’t kill. Chicago competes with Bermuda and the Cayman Islands: why enrich one of its rivals? Anxious despots anticipate danger with draconian laws. Benign regulation is more often an afterthought. Rarely foreseeing the effects of competition, pollution, or conflict until they occur, we have unsatisfactory choices: regulate in ignorance, foreclosing opportunities that may be fruitful and benign, or encourage prudent initiatives that seem to carry little or no threat to humans or our niche. Uncertainty makes us timid. The result is governments too hesitant or feeble to regulate competition or its costs: let the market regulate itself by eliminating companies poorly managed or trapped by an outdated technology. The ideal—fair, farsighted, and effective regulation—often eludes us. 6. Economy The economy of any settlement, whatever its size, should do no less than satisfy two imperatives: supply goods and services sufficient to sustain core systems and their members; do this in ways appropriate to the ensemble of the three variables. The discussion that follows moves between these imperatives. Emphasizing what an economy does without telling how it’s done reduces economy to a black box, thereby encouraging indifference to its internal organization and processes. These include effects on workers, systems, regulators, and the environment. Local concerns make these effects conspicuous; exalting the interests of global markets—profits, efficiency, and fungible workers—makes them invisible. This effect is pernicious, because an economy’s value is local irrespective of profits or losses calculated elsewhere. Does the local economy offer jobs and essential goods to all or most residents; does it encourage schools and employers to form or use the talents of local people? These contrary interests—global business, local people—is resolved productively in a few cities—Singapore, New York, London, Hong Kong—where global finance is local business. These cities are exemplars (in

102 good times) of the wealth that promotes balance. They compare to numerous cities and towns decimated by international markets. For the two imperatives—productivity sufficient to satisfy needs and the balance of the three variables—are irreconcilable within global markets. Why? Because the urgencies of private lives and core systems disappear from sight when businesses are organized nationally or globally. Local interests are invisible because of anomalous scales: the priorities of international markets and trade dominate one scale; the other is occupied by local people and governments advertising for work and taxable industry. How do local economies get attention from global industry? By offering lower salaries and tax rates than competing states or settlements. We can off-set this imbalance by describing the generic features of an economy appropriate to local needs and the three variables, but doing this is a modest defense of local interests, one similar to protecting barn owls by posting their photographs. The exercise is nevertheless worthwhile because local communities won’t reclaim vitality until the conditions for communal economic health are identified. I assume that the variables of social structure are present without qualification in economic activity. Economies require individual initiatives, systems they promote, and discipline that mitigates bottlenecks and conflict. These constants are sometimes obscured by the different emphases of urban economies: some are dominated by production and trade, others by military power, bureaucracy, royalty, tourism, entertainment, artistic creation, or ecclesiastic authority. Each power or activity alters the weight accorded to individual initiative, systems, or regulation; each emphasis determines the structure of the local economy. It favors an open playing field—a market— where initiatives and systems create disparities of wealth and opportunity; commercial monopolies sanctioned by government; or an authority, usually a government or church, that uses its power in other domains to influence commerce (New York, Tokyo, Moscow, or Rome). Regulation is the signature of command economies: an authority prescribes both the goods and services provided and the style and rhythm of their production; cooperation within and among workteams is critical, but initiative is discouraged. Demand economies reverse these emphases: discover what people want and need; satisfy an old desire in a new way; or create needs with products that were unanticipated. Here, too, cooperation is required, because little is done without it, but regulation comes after the fact:

103 it corrects excesses and directs the flow.18 There is also a middle ground where business devolves about mid-sized firms with steady clients that dominate towns where local people depend for jobs in the local firm. Owners and managers, often allied to a church and ruling political party, are local aristocrats and moral authorities. This style persists in Germany and Italy, though its virtues were ignored when demand and command economies (America and the Soviet Union) were the competing exemplars. Most economies are mixed: governments solicit private bids on contracts for military hardware, then regulate labor and credit markets vital to its production. Balance is achieved among the three variables if each has an expression adequate to itself and appropriate to the other two. This outcome is sensitive to styles of economic organization. Compare economies dominated by local production to the world markets for toys, steel, or shoes. Local producers have small factories supplying finished goods to local shops. Cycles of work and profits are relatively stable; local managers accurately predict their needs to suppliers who reliably satisfy them. Markets are orderly because of established relationships, the consistent quality of goods produced, and the honesty of buyers and sellers. Occasional disputes are settled informally or by local courts applying local laws. Individuals, systems, and a selfregulating market are effectively balanced: initiatives renew products and services; systems are effective; discipline minimizes disputes while authority resolves conflicts in ways that are minimally intrusive. Authority’s discretion encourages businesses to exploit fruitful opportunities for the advantage of themselves, employees, suppliers, and clients. But circumstances evolve: the complex of local systems dissolves when local factories can’t compete with cheaper imports. Factories close, skilled workers retire; their children move, because there is no work and no chance to learn a parent’s skills. Weissman, A Social Ontology, pp. 174-175; George Soros, “The false belief at the heart of the financial turmoil,” Financial Times, April 3, 2008, p. 9: “For the past 25 years or so the financial authorities and institutions they regulate have been guided by market fundamentalism: the belief that markets tend towards equilibrium and that deviations from it occur in a random manner. All the innovations—risk management, trading techniques, the alphabet soup of derivatives and synthetic financial instruments— were based on that belief. The innovations remained unregulated because authorities believe markets are self-correcting. Regulators ought to have known better because it was their intervention that prevented the financial system from unraveling on several occasions. Their success has reinforced the misconception that markets are selfcorrecting.” 18

104 City life is a magnet for the unemployed. Some earn more money than their parents could have imagined. Choices seem endless, but there is little taste for risk because one hesitates to sabotage a secure job or even one more temporary, given bills to pay. There is little or no chance to participate in managerial deliberations responsible for the effective coordination of tasks and duties because work schedules are regulated mysteriously, somewhere else. Still, life is busy, even compelling when work, church, or children are its anchors. One’s sense of place is reduced because there is little to substitute for the nested, hierarchical systems that once secured it. Those benefits seem meager to people determined to succeed in a world oblivious to roots, but they are an essential resource for every system or person whose initiatives are contextualized, including family members, artisans working in a tradition, and local businessmen. Locality is also vital to regulators who don’t know what to defend or how to protect widely distributed systems in a large terrain. Locality isn’t altogether missing in large cities: one works in a particular place with familiar partners. Some clients and suppliers may also be nearby, though coworkers in Hong Kong are known by their web addresses and chatty e-mails. We say with evidence and conviction that administered economies are inefficient. They produce goods and services of low quality and little utility, because the people commanding them have scant idea of popular needs or tastes and no motivation to produce goods of higher quality. Demand economies are more efficient, because there is profit to be made by producing things people want and because their organization is appropriate to the diversity of interests and needs: entrepreneurs sensitive to opportunities can respond with goods or services people desire. Administered—command— economies are slow to use advanced technology, hence slow to encourage the educational skills required to apply them. Why bother when the goods made already are the only ones management prefers? Demand economies employ technology, hence those who master it, for every iota of exploitable gain. Women are principal beneficiaries, because their intelligence and skills are appreciated and used. This effect is a conspicuous example of the contrast between material goods and those that are social, intellectual, or moral. It is one of the principal benefits rightly ascribed to technology and globalization. Other virtues of market economies are also familiar and important: better, safer working conditions; better salaries; more health and leisure; greater personal freedom because of these material conditions and because market economies promote (but don’t always achieve) democratic political

105 forms. There are offsetting costs. Some are material. Flexible labor markets undermine localities by requiring that workers move to sites where jobs are available, no matter the damage to personal lives and core systems. Global markets promote uniform goods and tastes; local preferences are oddities reserved to people with long memories and money to indulge them. The taste for local affinities—neighbors and workmates—is sentimental and medieval when corporate discipline fixes a regime for the scattered sites to which workers commute. Their relations to one another may be amiable and efficient, drinks and chat after work, but there is less coherence when all disperse to neighborhoods or families known to coworkers by only their names or photographs. None of this is immoral but it is morally depleting because it reduces the importance of character, talent, and idiosyncrasy. No one cares that a shortstop has a private life: can he do the job? He cares, so a job that leaves no time or energy for his tastes and talents, a job that disrupts his personal life, is a liability, whatever its benefits. The shortstop is a local personality, sometimes a hero to his teammates; the vast majority of workers are anonymous. They occupy remote corners in hierarchically organized systems managed from afar. Their personal needs and social relations have little or no visibility in the sights of managers focused on this year’s plan and profit margins. Hence the silent judgment everywhere respected: work has no meaning apart from the salary it earns. Social affiliations are casual or indifferent; products or services are uniform; producing most of them requires little skill or imagination. Salary is the principal or only motive for workers’ loyalty. It may be true that this has always been the principal reason for work; it doesn’t follow that work has no additional values when better founded in locality. Hence the giddy feelings induced by economies abstracted from locality: effects include fragmentary information and attenuated systems; fewer initiatives with leverage; fewer systems that support personal needs or talents; and less knowledge and authority with which to use or alter one’s circumstances. Locality seems parochial: no one well-educated and stylish should want it. But we humans aren’t spirits that soar from perches in the ether; any flight we take starts in the particularities of our practical lives before rising only as many steps as we can climb. Airplanes and world cruises obscure our losses without altering this state of affairs. Every visit home seems as temporary as the place last visited.

106 These may seem captious doubts. Who prefers driving hours on crowded roads if the alternative is a short, cheap plane ride? Why have email and internet shopping replaced letter writing and the post office, catalogues, malls, and stores? Because time, cost, and convenience trump all. Personal contact and complexity, two considerations essential to locality, are distractions from the business of most lives: people gladly do without them. Yet habits we acquire should give us pause: we prefer movies to books, driving to walking, games watched rather than played. Many people enjoy gadgets that intensify experience while reducing us to brains in a vat, though preference is no measure of well-being. Having fewer settled connections to other people and places, we retreat into the only secure locality we know: ourselves. Things desired may be ever more remote from those desirable. For an economy can produce goods of two kinds: some are material, others are social, intellectual, or moral. Material goods are products and services that include food, shelter, medical care, pianos, and books. Social, intellectual, and moral goods include relationships required to produce material things, and ideas, activities, or other effects these goods incite. Books promote study, discussion, and communities where differences of opinion are heard and debated. Pianos promote music lessons, skill, ensembles, and the pleasure of their listeners. Restrict attention to material goods and you emphasize nuts, bolts, and things made with them; consider other goods and you acknowledge the effects of an economy’s organization and ethos. The first is dominated by lists of products and services, the second by questions: who works, with whom and where, to what effect? Workers, their talents, relations, and satisfactions are incidentals ignored or suppressed when material goods are emphasized. They are paramount when these other goods are the reference. Intellectual values are goods of a separate kind because many are more fragile than social and moral goods. Engineers flourish because technology is a motor that makes the economy go. Other sorts of intellect don’t fare as well. Some suffer, more or less directly, because of technology: newspapers are displaced by the internet’s open web sites, so journalists learn to compress the information conveyed. This is an improvement if writers are prolix, but a cost to subtlety, depth, and the criticism implied by unanswered questions. It is costly, too, that most people posses the same “information,” have no way to augment it, believe it adequate, and don’t want more. This is pacified intellect, the stupor that makes citizens manipulable and dangerous to the democracy they prize.

107 The arts, too, are vulnerable. There was never a time when everyone played the violin, though many did before recorded music depressed the motive for learning it. Chamber music concerts run deficits, but salve the morale of people aging: no matter one’s age, two thirds of any audience seem older. Chamber music is hard to sell. Paintings—ever more costly—are commodities in an avid market that cannibalizes works of art. This effect is energized by converging interests: one stylistic, the other economic. The narrative required to make this point is somewhat detailed. Painting has evolved through a succession of dominant styles, from representational to abstract. The schematic progression to market icon has seven steps. (This account is schematic. A trajectory and its outcome are the only relevant considerations. It is incidental that every step is a dominant tendency, one resisted by individual painters in each period.) Medieval and renaissance Western art is our baseline. Its religious and heroic paintings tell allegorical stories: figures or scenes on wood or canvas represent histories, myths, or moral lessons. Their form is representational, but only nominally realistic: it uses recognizable figures or scenes to signify people, situations, or events of a supernatural—spiritual or heroic—kind. Literally representational—realistic—art was a second step. Its style was photographic: paintings represent real or imagined states of affairs without encouraging viewers to acknowledge or engage an allegorical world. There are table settings, voluptuous women, portraits, and chronicles of daily life, all of it ample and provocative because of its presentation and allure, not because of a mythic or moralizing narrative. But representation is risky, indeed, a slippery slope. For what is represented: people and things or light and shadow? Emphasize light, and painting moves a step beyond representationalism to the idea that light play is independent of things illumined. This impressionist perspective is a third step. Abstraction is a fourth, for light abstracted is most compelling as it acquires intrinsic form. Let artists concern themselves exclusively with forms distributed on a surface; let each reduce his or her resources to the simplest elements: form, proportion, asymmetry, and color, or no color. This progression alters the aims and perspectives of artists, but it is decoupled from the experience of people who never relinquished the expectation that art would edify and instruct. Viewers want to be improved by the meanings art communicates; no matter that this demand seems romantic and naïve to abstract artists. Hence the gap between public expectations and artistic intentions: some artists hope to provoke feelings in

108 those seeing their work, but there are no meanings intended in the shapes and configurations of their abstractions. Typical viewers are mystified. This is not a problem for people whose aesthetic tastes are shaped by cultures that proscribe graven images; it is an absence keenly felt within the tradition of allegorical and realist art. Georg Lukács expressed this mix of surprise and confusion: The taxing struggle to understand the art of the ‘avant-garde’…yields such subjectivist distortions and travesties that ordinary people who try to transfer these atmospheric echoes of reality back into the language of their own experience, find the task quite beyond them.19 Several responses are possible; several steps exploit them. Museums and many artists encouraged the illusion that paintings are morally significant. A public hungry for aesthetic—spiritual—instruction gladly agreed; they wanted edification. The next step was accomplished when Marcel Duchamp desacralized this art by putting a latrine in a museum. Painting, he implied, earns its title to fine art by virtue of its context: museums and galleries cynically exploit the conflict between artistic intention and viewers’ expectations. Duchamp was at once scandalous and didactic: don’t expect edification when none is there. His sneer implied that museums, like splendid churches in a world without gods, were testimony to the social construction of silly hopes and bogus values: art has no meaning; don’t pretend otherwise. Two responses to Duchamp energize the further steps in this progression. The urinal had no aesthetic worth; context was necessary and sufficient for whatever aesthetic value was ascribed it. This thought invites generalization: perhaps paintings, too—especially unintelligible abstractions—have no intrinsic worth. He also encouraged a decisive inference: technique, talent, and intellect, too, are incidental to a painting’s quality if context is the necessary and sufficient condition for artistic value. But this is paradoxical: why admire work that has no inherent worth? I credit Andy Warhol with these next assaults, a sixth step in the progression. Forgery is an offense because a painting’s value is partly its singularity, a virtue devalued by copies. Warhol used silk screening to George Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980). Susanne Langer’s emphasis on the integrity of “virtual spaces”—paintings or photographs whose artistic value resides in their intrinsic form—is incidental to the popular expectation that significant art is representational. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), pp. 69-103.

19

109 produce multiple copies. Etchings and prints had long been available in numbered series, but oil paintings, especially, were prized for being unique. Again, the butt of the attack was implicitly art’s pretension. (Painting and sculpture were the all-but-exclusive targets, for no author or composer objects to printing and selling multiple copies of his books or scores.) Warhol also undermined the presumed dignity of art by deriding its content. Recalling Duchamp, he painted Brillo pads and soup cans. Join irony to derision and the effect is ridicule: content is where you find it; high art is pretentious fantasy because works of art are artifacts. The last moment down this slippery slope arrives with conceptual art. Philosophers in the 1950s and 1960’s were fond of the idea that all intelligibility, hence all experience, derives from language. This was a contemporary version of the Kantian idea that the character and relations constitutive of things, books and paintings included, are projections— interpretations—of the minds perceiving or thinking them. The effect on literature was dramatic when critics displaced authors, but it was consequential, too, when generalized to art: painters provide work for critics who project content and form—significance or meaning—onto artifacts that are otherwise unintelligible. Arthur Danto was a principal sponsor of this idea: “Unless you read the texts [interpreting art], you could have gotten very little out of the art.”20 But this was liberating: it was “the first time civilization had been in such a situation…artists could make of art whatever they wished.”21 Or, better, artists could do little or nothing because their interpreters, the art critics, were free to make of art whatever they wished. These last steps are peculiar. Things artists make have character independently of the ways they are construed. Yes, they do, critics would admit (Kant was a bit extreme), though the character of their work is obscure, rather like shadows at the back of Plato’s cave. Why do ordinary people— buyers, for example—need critics to project qualities, relations, or meanings onto things promoted as art (canvases, installations, and videos, for example) if this is something every thinker does? Because the works are allusive and deep, too deep for untutored sensibilities.22 Art is mystifying but exalted; let

Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 15-16. 21 Ibid., p. 14. 22 Plato remarked that poets are inspired but can’t explain or justify what they say; auditors do it better. Plato, Apology, Collected Dialogues, 22b-c, p. 8. 20

110 an expert, a critic, explain it. His or her judgment is the reliable measure of its worth. This outcome has its complement in the market economy. Three considerations are pertinent: the market needs things to sell; people enriched by an economy awash in money dream of status; people and systems sensitive to market opportunities use one to exploit the other. Fuse these three and watch art history converge with market savvy. Good taste is distinguishing; owning fine art is its mark. But what should one buy? Ask the critics: they interpret works that may seem unintelligible or banal, though this impression is evidence that clients lack a critic’s fine mind. Danto is explicit: “As the history of art has evolved, the critic is needed more and more to explain to the viewer what is being seen.”23 There are experts for hire, galleries, auctions, buyers, and prices testifying that “artists could make of art anything they wished.” What is the value of an artist’s technical skill, imagination, and intellect? They are all but incidental in a market where critics decide what is or isn’t significant, hence valuable. Yet the issue is confused because critics disagree and because their interpretations are often opaque. What should anxious buyers do? An answer is implied in a dealer’s remark to me: “Ninety-five percent of the contemporary art sold today will be unsaleable [valueless, by market standards] in twenty years. But it sells.” Books are sometimes demanding, but there are capable readers. Bach and Haydn exhibit intellect and taste with every phrase; attentive listeners don’t need critics to explain them. Gifted artists are equally acute and affecting. But artists suffer as writers and composers do not, because art critics and the market have preempted the spaces where art is shown, seen, and enjoyed. The market economy could not have created this effect without dealers, critics, and auctioneers to nurture and encourage it. Where is art: in painting or market froth? We are easy marks; Duchamp’s irony is lost on us. But isn’t money to burn better than no money at all? Why care that money easily made is passed around? Because Gresham’s law applies to music and art as well as money: things cheapened by little imagination or intellect drive better ones out of the market. Sotheby’s share price recently fell sharply after sales at an auction of contemporary art were considerably lower than the range predicted, though contemporary work consistently sells for higher prices than fine paintings 23

Danto, Unnatural Wonders, p. 18.

111 from past centuries. This is costly to shareholders, but more consequential for artists and to those whose lives are vivified by things they see and hear. Cities embody a paradox: many people who escaped constricted towns and neighborhoods are better educated and richer than their parents but prey to enthusiasm and manipulation because they lack the critical judgment that comes with experience and reflection in libraries, laboratories, museums, or galleries. An economy that supported distributed stable centers of production and control has evolved into one that pays workers better while depriving them of judgment, context, control, and the insight required to appraise this change. People who work too much for too little, people who have no choices will have no doubt that my idealization of these other lives is fatuous. But this is not a paean to old abuses: it affirms that significant personal and social virtues—aesthetic judgment and pleasure, for example—are lost and hard to retrieve. 7. A determinable and its determining conditions The three variables and their mutual relations are determinables made determinate by circumstances. Circumstances are always biased in one or another direction, so values for the variables often preclude a balance that doesn’t cripple one of them. Ideologists happily justify these effects, though their preferences—principally, liberty without context or a version of the corporate state—are unsustainable when achieved. Is either of the variables less decisive, implying that its domination by one or both of the others is inconsequential? No, each is required for social and civic health: circumstances change, outdated systems need revisions or replacements that do not come without initiatives by their members or others; systems compete, so conflict or paralysis isn’t averted without an authority that regulates the whole. There is no substitute for viable relations among the three, hence no durable equilibrium without the foresight that manages change in the values of each variable. Individuals, systems, and their government must have the wit to reflect on conditions for the well-being of each, then to negotiate viable alterations with all concerned. Negotiations are clumsy in small towns, slow and agonizing in big cities. Indeed, negotiation is misleading because it disguises struggles that are often raw and unremitting. There are families, companies, and teams whose mutual consideration is dignified and steady; others—dominant people, businesses, churches, and states—exploit every opportunity to dominate others.

112 Balance, like health, is all the while a point of reference. There is no guarantee or likelihood that the real will “naturally” achieve and sustain some version of the ideal. There are internal constraints, natural norms to which social life inclines, but we lose track of them as quickly as electric lights suppress the rhythms of night and day. For the ideal is more lure than necessity: circling about it, never quite knowing what we do or why, we easily lose or violate it. Knowing what it could be, we know its absence.

Chapter Five Values Which should dominate: individuals, systems, or the whole? Can there be parity among them, each having its due? Value is relevant because plausible answers implicate each factor’s intrinsic character and its value for the other two. This chapter clarifies the nature of pertinent values. 1. A taxonomy Should values be understood as preferences that direct choice or action (buy what you like), as criteria expressed by appraisals (bad restaurants), or as properties qualifying things (good light)? Preferences often track objective differences. But that isn’t always so: one alternately likes or dislikes the same thing for reasons that change. The status of appraisals is, therefore, ambiguous: do they express preferences or objective differences? This debate is interminable, though its solution is always close at hand. Many appraisals are expressions of taste; others are plainly objective: saws cut wood—they have instrumental value—because of their serrated blades. Motivation (Chapter Three) is subjective in the respect that it expresses personal interests or needs. Values pertinent to this chapter are objective. Appraising a city’s social structures as healthy signifies that each of the three social variables is expressed in ways appropriate to itself while complementing the other two; social health is compromised if one or another variable is distorted by its relations to the others. But objectivity is problematic: are things (or certain of their properties) valuable in themselves, or valuable because of their utility as causes having effects? Instrumental values are unproblematic: people and machines are more or less effective, given a task. There is less confidence about intrinsic goods: are health and well-being good in themselves or good because of their

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effects? We emphasize this difference by distinguishing utilities from nodes. Cutlery is valuable for the uses made of it; health is a node, a state of affairs having valuable effects. But this is a difference of degree, one too shallow to make it categorial: a spoon is narrowly instrumental (it has relatively few uses), while health is richly instrumental (it has many effects). Nodes seem different from utilities because of the contrary perspectives assumed when distinguishing them. Instrumental goods are considered from the perspective of their effects (pens that write); nodes are prized in themselves. For node is honorific; it implies integrity and status apart from its effects. But health is good because of its consequences. We might show similar respect for pens or spoons, given that they, too, may be construed as nodes, hence good or bad because of their effects. This is a conclusion we generalize: the quality of a thing’s effects is the only basis for its goodness or badness. There are no intrinsic values, though some things (families, friendships, and schools) are set apart because of having a cascade of desirable effects. Is there a way to resist conflating intrinsic with instrumental values? Try this: establish that intrinsic goods (or evils) have surplus value, meaning value additional to their value as utilities. Things have no surplus value when consumed (apples, for example). Coats have surplus value in the respect that their utility isn’t exhausted by use; they can be worn repeatedly. Surplus value is, nevertheless, ambiguous: is it a store of available utility or something additional? Clerks, employers, and parents are often used instrumentally, so it isn’t altogether surprising that we humans pass from nodes to instrumental values, depending on one’s perspective. Schubert and Caravaggio remind us of things assumed to exemplify intrinsic value: namely, works of art. No infinity of uses exhausts their worth, though ambiguity persists. Why are they enjoyed? Because well-made. But notice: surplus value is not peculiar to the works of artists: good watches are accurate each time one looks at them. Craftsmen of many sorts make things having surplus value because of being well-made, hence this fourth notion of value. A fifth notion follows directly: namely, the good artisan or artist. Their judgment and skill produce things having desirable effects and surplus value. (Not every artisan has this effect: things well-made by cooks don’t have surplus value.) These considerations justify a five-fold division among objective values: intrinsic values, instrumental values, things having surplus value,

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things well-made, and people whose goodness lies in their craft. These five reduce to four, three, and two. There are four if we discount intrinsic values for the reason that the difference between instruments and nodes is perspectival, not a difference in things: intrinsic value is ascribed to things that are richly consequential. Four reduce to three if we augment the class of instrumental values to include artists and craftsmen who make things well. This leaves instrumental values, things having surplus value, and things wellmade. But surplus value is either residual instrumental value or the value of things well-made. Hence, the five reduce to two: instrumental values and things well- made. Is the fact of being well-made sufficient to infer the status of intrinsic good? No; daggers, tanks, and bombs are well-made, but none is a candidate for designation as an intrinsic good. Does the answer change if we choose more carefully among things well-made? Haydn and Mozart were craftsmen. Their music is singular and well-made. Does it qualify as good-in-itself? The answer requires two steps. The first requires that we distinguish the craft of their work from its effects. The second emphasizes that the value assigned their music is directly consequent on hearing it: feeling aroused while perceiving the music’s form, timbre, rhythm, and dynamics, we affirm its value. Reading their scores confirms that that they are made well; hearing them converts that perception into the experience of work that seems goodin-itself. This is odd: from reading to hearing; from well-made to good-initself. Why this shift? Because this ascription—good-in-itself—is the effect of an elision. Effects in us are construed as evidence of the music’s inherent value when they are projected onto the music played; listeners’ excitement and pleasure are misconstrued as the direct perception of value inherent in the music. There are analogies in morality: someone honest or generous is perceived as good in herself when she exhibits the surplus value—the instrumental value—of a character well-made. These distinctions dispense with the idea of intrinsic goods without convincing everyone that there are no goods-in-themselves: aren’t we humans intrinsic goods because created in God’s image or because we, unique among living things, can know truths, beauties, the good, and ourselves? We alone experience apotheoses, moments of fulfillment so intense that the sequence of means and ends seems to stop. Things or states promoting these raptures—freedom, love, and music—are its exalted instruments. Each intensifies the aesthetic moment of knowing with

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immediacy and certainty that one has intrinsic worth. Protagoras, Augustine, and Descartes remind us that man is the measure; we alone are intrinsic goods, while every other thing is good or bad instrumentally. The sole justification for this self-perception is the intensity of our experience and our self-importance. Intensity is a consequence of our physiology, selfimportance expresses our vanity. We are more accomplished than other creatures; we do resonate with social, intellectual, and aesthetic effects indiscernible to them. But nothing in this elects us to the status of goods-inthemselves: we prize our sensibility, but every material thing (not only those living or human) has some degree of receptivity; think of us as nodes and you emphasize our effulgence; see us as instruments and you make us responsible for our effects. But there is nothing unique in this. Every material entity can be regarded in these three ways: each is receptive; all have efficacy and effects. This chapter’s principal topic is the instrumentality of persons, systems, and the self-regulating whole. Each is constrained in two ways: first by its character, second as the other two affect it. Each has a distinctive character and functions, but nothing justifies saying that any of the three is an intrinsic good. 2. Historical referents Catalogues of human values—Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, Spinoza’s Ethics—often express the atomist views of their authors. Describing individuals out of context, they invoke Aristotle’s notion that primary substances—individual persons—are fundamental, thereby entailing that relations to others are secondary: saving or sustaining one’s life is a value; it is secondary or incidental that other people are critical to the success of doing it. This posture is refined to simplicity when Mill describes liberty’s three regions: freedom of consciousness (thought) and conscience, freedom of tastes and pursuits, and freedom to join with others having shared or complementary aims.1 We reasonably infer that each person’s freedom is a paramount human value: opinions should express judgments founded on evidence and logic; thought, feeling, and behavior should be morally rigorous; choice should be deliberate; affiliations should be prudent, 1

Mill, On Liberty, p. 16.

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whatever the aim. Mill would have us believe that freedom is our telos and perfection; we prove ourselves worthy of its advantages by using it appropriately. One thinks of punctilious men and women living and working in any big city: what they do, their partners, and how they do it is detail; it is liberty—responsibly enjoyed—that defines them. Compare the values of Plato’s Republic. It proposes that justice is the efficient adjustment of relations within both society and the souls of individual members. The parity of justice in the soul and state is elegant, but problematic because it almost precludes justice in either. That is so because neither can be made just unless there is already justice in the other: souls acquire temperance and specialized skills in a well-ordered state, but a just state can’t be assembled without individuals who have skills and self-control qualifying them for work as artisans, defenders, or leaders. This chicken and egg puzzle is the consequence of giving equal priority to each of the three variables: educating specialized, self-controlled individuals requires appropriate systems, but they require regulation (appropriate organization); that, in turn, requires self-controlled individuals qualified for their specialized tasks. Plato breaks the circle by starting with educable children and qualified elders who are already temperate and wise. Other ways to create a holistic effect are also conceivable: uniformity is coerced (Hobbes), or we make ourselves predictable and safe by copying the manners of our neighbors (Nietzsche’s herd). But these accounts fail because they discount the array of systems that supply the bulk of social life. Some are atomistic: they reduce every system to its members. Others, more holistic, aver that every person and system is soldered indissolubly within the whole. Communitarianism mitigates these warped extremes by emphasizing that personal identity is the developmental result of culture, nationality, personal development, and choice. It argues that autonomy is learned as one chooses new affiliations (friends, schools, or work) from within the core systems (families and communities) where character is nurtured. One learns in them that cooperation and discipline are required of every effective system’s members. The complementarity of these variables—systems, individuals, and corporate discipline—makes communities stable and coherent. But Plato described justice as a harmony of parts:2 why imitate him if the reciprocities 2

Plato, Republic, 433a1-435b2, pp. 674-677.

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of individuality, systems, and regulation preclude their joint realization? Because every settlement already has a degree of balance—none is stabilizable without it—and because the value for each variable can be altered incrementally in ways that support changes in the others: better education and social integration improve systems by improving their members; they make regulation easier by easing the complexity and conflicts generated when less socialized people lack discipline for want of understanding the effects of their actions. 3. The three variables 3.1 Systems Systems are valuable in four ways: for their corporate effects (music played, games won); for educating and creating opportunities for members who fill a system’s roles; for the fellowship of their members; and for clients who want or need a system’s products or services. Parity requires that disvalue is also considered: games are lost; players have bad days; members argue; fans are disappointed. Systems are nodes having surplus value; hence these several effects. A system’s objectives are instrumental values: they regulate its choice of organization, members, resources, partners, and activities. Friendship has no aim beyond itself if friends are bound by reliable expectations and shared intimacies. These are benefits intrinsic to the system (but not intrinsic goods). There may also be several or many extrinsic benefits: friendship’s value at work or during illness, for example. Other systems invert the order of priority: their principal aims are extrinsic. Schools fail if they don’t educate for life after graduation; businesses close if they earn no profit by satisfying clients. Systems are consequential for individuals because no one is selfsufficient, because we enjoy the company of partners who share our aims, and because refined tastes and skills are usually unattainable without the instruction of those who have them. Members acquire the first inklings of themselves in families, friendships, and schools: self-perception is a value and effect intrinsic to these systems. People wounded in their early core systems can’t save themselves by leaving, because their systems don’t let go; inseparable from one’s self-perception, they are perpetually nagging if only in memory.

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Many aims are innocuous; organizing to pursue them is inconsequential for neighboring systems. Others are morally, environmentally, or economically good or bad, so choosing them is properly a topic for public concern. Should those choices be left to systems and their members, or should a public authority stipulate a list of projects that are desirable or banned, and subject to reward or penalty? Most settlements do both: many aims cannot be banned or approved because their effects are unknown; others—criminal gangs—are proscribed. An open society is reluctant to post too ample a list of banned activities; repressive societies are known by extensive lists and clean streets. Notice this play of orientations: systems essential to individual wellbeing because they satisfy material needs (food or shelter) are said to have utility; systems that are contexts for character formation and learning are perceived as nodes having intrinsic value. Families have value as child breeders, a utility; but family life is eulogized as the crucible (the node) where members are nourished, enabled, and mutually bound. This is duckrabbit ambiguity,3 the shifting perceptions of systems seen alternately as utilities or goods-in-themselves. Principal systems are respected, even revered, though most systems and roles are jejune. Valorizing work as an end in itself is a perpetual aim that rarely succeeds, because many tasks require little skill or passion and because the results are too meager to earn a worker’s respect. Required skills are easily learned, the work is repetitious, one is easily bored. Members of these systems would deny—the idea would seem cynical or ironic—that their system has the value of enabling workers to coordinate their skills while making something useful and making it well. But there is a motivating seed in Plato’s Republic and Freud’s (alleged) formula: love and work: everyone needs companions appropriate to their sentiments and occupations appropriate to their talents. Systems fulfilling these aims are contexts for self-affirmation. They are nodes perceived as intrinsic goods. This persuasion is biased by the different perceptions of associations and organizations: members experience associations as having intrinsic value, while organizations are construed as valuable principally or only for their effects. Many systems are one or the other, but some—families and many Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 194.

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religious sects—have features of both: members have disparate roles though all are dedicated, ideally, to the corporate well-being of their system. Organizations have diversified roles for achieving their complex functions. Every member of an association has the same role: each mirrors the aims and commitments of other members. Having several or many mirrors intensifies the effect of having one’s beliefs or feelings roused and justified: immersion in the faithful becomes a self-affirming addiction. This difference has predictable effects. Associations make loyalty compelling. They are perceived as nodes having effulgent good effects (principally the intense loyalties they provoke), though loyalty is incidental to organizations thought to have no value but utility. Businesses organize programs designed to motivate employees, but workers aren’t fooled by systems whose only value for them is the money earned. Organizations need members who are talented and committed but also a structure—an assembly of roles—appropriate to the corporate aim and reciprocities that bind members in ways suitable to achieving it. This is no problem for associations where the roles of members are identical (a Quaker meeting), but decisive for systems having specialized roles (a team or school). Systems of both sorts are established by reciprocities regularized by habit; either may demand little feeling or concentration, because having a role for months or years reduces the attention required at little cost to efficiency. Boredom is, nevertheless, costly in this other way: it precludes the experience of enjoying one’s system. This is the advantage of associations: their reciprocities are largely founded in effects mutually generated and reflected as each partner enforces the enthusiasm of others. Imagine the loyal crowds at sporting events where teams provoke delirious pleasure or melancholy in their fans. Fans respond directly to events on the floor or field, but, more insidiously, each responds uncritically—without mediating judgment or control—to feelings diffused among them: each feels the others’ pleasure or pain. This effect anesthetizes a system’s members, paralyzing each person’s ability to judge his or her system and circumstances. Descartes emphasized that mind is a thinker who “doubts… denies …refuses.”4 Systems vary in their tolerance for this resistance: “treason” and “heresy” are two responses. Balance among the three variables requires that systems tolerate members who appraise the things systems do. For there is no 4

Descartes, Meditations, p. 66.

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balance if systems bribe or intimidate those who reject their aims, procedures, or ambience. There is a difference, sometimes hard to discern but real, between workers who are docile because intimidated and those whose seamless work together expresses their commitment to a system and its aims. 3.2 Individuals Systems are the incubators of individuality and the whole: no systems without initiative, but nothing much for individuals to do without their support; no viable systems without regulation, but less to regulate without their competition and conflict. Personal autonomy is, nevertheless, real and apparent: we have different aims and resonate to different notes. Freedom of choice and movement is a condition everywhere acknowledged, because our separate bodies imply needs satisfied by and for oneself. But initiative, in pursuit of personal interest or that of others, has two conditions that are hard to satisfy. One is developmental and intra-psychic; the other is situational. Initiative is unproblematic when circumstances are simple: the fire has died, no logs in the shed; better go out to find dry wood. Every subtle context requires a personal formation that familiarizes a learner (in or out of school) with the problematic terrain and strategies for negotiating it. Action stops, the way ahead isn’t clear, until someone having an eye for the situation acts effectively; others admire his or her foresight, courage, or facility, but this was a reasonable choice in the circumstances. People trained appropriately see opportunities that are invisible to others, hence these necessary and sufficient conditions for initiative: opportunity because of circumstances, perception, skill, a strategy, and the impulse to act. This account seems incomplete because it fails to mention freedom and will. Freedom is implicit. Acting presupposes freedom from interference; acting effectively requires commitment, perception, strategy, and technique. Will is present already in one’s style of addressing a situation. Someone engaged by a task works the matters at hand in ways calculated to achieve an appropriate effect. Commitment is the vector of free energy; there is no additional impulsion, no additional will to act. Appraising the worth of initiatives or achievements is straightforward when activity is routinized by standard duties in typical situations; criteria for success and failure are known and easily applied. Appraisal is harder when circumstances are unusual (there are no paradigms of appropriate behavior) or when a perceptive agent sees a better way of responding to a standard

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situation. Effective solutions are usually unchallenged; failed initiatives invite criticism: what was the opportunity you perceived; why weren’t you more deliberate while pursuing it? Recognizing and integrating viable innovations is a perpetual challenge; originality often baffles or offends its critics, though societies that condemn it are predictable, safe, boring, and inert. How does one dare to innovate in routine situations without being reckless? There is a range of viable strategies within every social practice. Its width varies with the domain: narrow when driving, it is more ample in commerce. Extended by people whose innovations are effective, it narrows when standard practices succeed. People sensitive to a current range of practices identify variations likely to succeed or fail. Evaluating initiatives or strategies is nevertheless problematic, because of uncertainty about appropriate criteria. Initiatives are appraised by considering the ratio of risk to benefit: things go well, don’t rock the boat; or more risk is tolerable because an established practice doesn’t work in altered circumstances. Someone calculating an initiative may reasonably wonder which charge to answer. For there is a right proportion, hard to ascertain, between calls to order and honest assessments that an initiative is appropriate, win or lose, given circumstances and the skill of the actor. Societies that prize uniformity in most things encourage diversity in commerce, dress, or song. Societies that demand uniformity everywhere mix repression, sadism, and fear. Initiative is one mark of individuality; resonance is another. There is no stable social, cultural, or economic baseline without the work of systems and their disciplined members. There are no apotheoses—no intensified feelings—if members (parents or teammates) don’t respond to success or failure with feelings. These two effects are distinguishable in principle: doing a system’s work; vibrating with the pleasure or pain of one’s effort or responses to it. Dividing the two, depriving workers of satisfaction for their achievements, reduces their motivation. This often happens: pharaohs were likely pleased by their pyramids and temples; slaves often died before they were done. One imagines parents too defeated to enjoy their children, musicians so exhausted by a performance that they want relief not applause; but systems don’t work as well as they could if their successes don’t register in the experience of their members. Organizing to achieve an aim is one

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aspect of effective teamwork; recognizing the work done and sacrifices required to do it confirms a member’s self-esteem and justifies his loyalty. People want recognition, but needing it makes us vulnerable to manipulators. Sincere recognition is easily perceived; criteria for ways of showing it are harder to state. 3.3 Corporate self-regulation Regulation is often resented, though no value is more critical to the life of systems. There are no systems in the absence of their self-disciplined members; none endures if there is no way to resolve conflicts with other systems or avert the damage each may do to others (intimidating, deceiving, or polluting them, for example). These risks have independent solutions, though they converge on the single point that discipline within and among systems is a condition for the discipline of the whole. Training people to satisfy their duties to systems and other people is an urgent task wherever systems form and function. For it is true everywhere that a system’s new members need learn their roles. Where all are beginners—in new marriages, for example —each partner is student and teacher in rules and roles that are slow to crystallize. Teaching and learning are easier when tasks are specific and repetitious; a spouse’s role or that of a citizen may be vague by comparison. But every system has its rules and roles, however subtle their demands. Individuals newly appointed to a system’s roles resemble people walking on a crowded street in a foreign city: one takes care not to jostle others. Mutual consideration and patience are commonplace, though a system’s new members may be hesitant because unfamiliar with new responsibilities. The mutual accommodation of systems is clumsier still, because systems have no sensory organs, no eyes or ears. None of the neighbors sleeps because the party next door is oblivious to the people it disturbs. Nothing changes until neighbors object or, if that makes no difference, until rules are agreed and posted. Or civility has no effect, so the police are called. Corporate regulation—laying down laws or rules that avert or reduce conflict within the whole—is contentious, because there may be little agreement about practices that need regulating, the manner of doing it, or the procedure for establishing an authority empowered to regulate. There may be equal uncertainty about its aims: how much order or coherence is required for

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stability with change and growth; are spontaneity and unpredictability good or bad? There is accord that complexity breeds disorder and conflict and that regulation enables a society’s many systems to do their work, but there is this difference of opinion: should discipline be rigid or supple like the rules and understandings that manage order in open-air markets organized informally? There is also this question: how does the discipline of individuals and their systems prepare them for the discipline of the whole? This second question supplies an implicit answer to the first: a society of citizens educated for and responsible to their systems doesn’t need the discipline of an autocrat. Personal experience confirms that diversity and complexity require rights of way and directives issued by people well placed to see the road ahead and bottlenecks that obstruct it. Hobbes wrote for people who would not accommodate themselves to one another and their circumstances. People accustomed to sharing responsibility for their systems don’t need his lessons, though they often need information: understanding complexity, willing to accept discipline, they need to know the junctures where conflict is or will be wasteful or destructive. This response is programmatic. It isn’t adequate to the many occasions when systems are starved of resources or when people lack training that would qualify them to participate in a self-regulating public. It isn’t sensitive to disparities within every society where extremes of wealth and poverty prevent many people—rich or poor—from acquiring middle-class discipline. People having discipline are, however, a substantial fraction (sometimes a majority) of a society. Preferring order and its advantages, even at cost to themselves, they are the principal resource when a citizenry organizes for self-regulation. Traffic moves safely with reasonable efficiency when roads have adequate capacity and prudent drivers observe traffic laws and the cars ahead; there are occasional police and signs but no overseer directs the flow. Street markets exhibit a similar discipline. They work best when an array of merchants attracts a diversity of shoppers. Each stall has its space; shoppers negotiate the lanes; honest exchange promotes mutual confidence. Regulation is often informal, agreed, and effective. Challenges to order sometimes require tough discipline, but more often this harsh style confuses two aims. Proscriptive laws prohibit behaviors that are usually or always pernicious: murder, for example. Prescriptive laws facilitate the formation and work of systems that are useful or benign: roads are essential lifelines for people and goods; traffic laws facilitate their

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movement. Proscriptive laws and penalties forestall their breaches; prescriptive laws are more flexible: no one should kill; every driver should observe the laws; not everyone need drive. Hence the confusion and constriction occurring when regulators fail to ask these questions: are we proscribing an action or facilitating it; do we facilitate activity by telling people what to do or by clearing gridlock, so they can make choices of their own? Pragmatic discipline is sensitive to a background condition that is too rarely mentioned: every settlement is an array of systems, some mutually independent, others that are overlapping or nested. This ensemble resembles the plants and animals of any swamp or field: each has a niche somewhat affected by the others, yet there is often flexibility within niches as occupants to secure themselves while adjusting to the changing responses of adjacent species. Neighbors resemble people sharing a bed: each has room enough to change positions without fully waking the other. This space—physical or psychic—is the necessary condition if systems are to form in ways appropriate to their members and aims. For regulation is a response to the excesses of complexity, not an invitation to denature or paralyze free choice and assembly; the regulator is a pragmatic partner to individuals and systems, not their master. Some authorities misconstrue the public space as a machine they can organize and manage; they squeeze the space and strangle its every system, only excepting government and its bureaucracy. But no citizen believes that his government accurately foresees the disparate interests of its many people or systems or the opportunities available to them. Things go better if the authority responsible for regulating a space begins by respecting freedom of movement within it. Authorities do neither when they presume to prescribe the details of everyday life. The discipline achieved when citizens organize themselves (either directly or by way of a constitution, government, and laws) has the effect, paradoxically, of liberating them. Participants feel and express the exultation of succeeding at this ultimate challenge: creating one from many while hardly interfering with the aims and practices of each.5 This is soft anarchy, freedom and diversity stabilized by prudence and mutual respect. Its exemplars are cities that luxuriate in difference. Governments sometimes hope to suppress its rude expressions, but they fail because diversity is redistributed rather than 5

Rousseau, Social Contract, p. 60.

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reduced; it goes underground or moves to less conspicuous parts of town. City people don’t mind that some of their practices are routinized: traffic, for example. But spontaneity, variety, and surprise are the energies of city life. Any authority determined to suppress them makes itself the enemy of city people. It may use eminent domain or police power to win temporary victories, but it will not prevail without becoming an occupying foreign power. My idealization—this account of democratic regulators—would be inexcusable if merely naive. For there is no end of complexity that exceeds the grasp of most citizens and no end of governments that violate democratic prerogatives without blinking. They are excused, because people who distrust their personal judgment have magical confidence in the judgments of others. Tell them a story of danger and you get their attention; emphasize solidarity, salvation, and tradition and you have their loyalty. It is familiar, if dismaying, that mean and complicated lives leave no time or energy for public affairs (even elections or juries). Or we leave corporate self-regulation to others, because private life is awash with possibilities that absorb every conscious moment. Either way, the democratic public cannot form. Why should it form? Why not assign every aspect of corporate regulation to experts, as we already use lawyers or traffic engineers to design laws and roads? Complexity defeats the democratic ideal: we may as well acknowledge that it does, while establishing procedures that empower experts: why do or imagine more? Because regulative power is a drug that too often turns the heads of the regulators. Responsible for a task—honor systems responsible for complexity but reduce the bottlenecks it provokes; avert or defuse conflict; anticipate obstacles—they lose track of these finite aims because power is bewitching. This has effects more destructive than the conflicts experts are employed to fix: systems cannot adjust to altered circumstances if they cannot exploit the initiatives—the freedom—of savvy members. Government is the institutional expression of a public organized for self-regulation. Sovereignty lies with the public; it retains the power of oversight and perpetual renewal, a power that is or should be written explicitly into constitutional provisions for recalling a government. Why should citizens want this authority; why should they persistently care? Because the activity of consulting, negotiating, and making laws is the apotheosis of democratic experience: the discipline of the whole is self-

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discipline writ large. Aristotle averred that man is never so much like a god as when making the laws that regulate the community in which he lives. This ideal is our polar star: we are vulnerable and directionless without it. Despotism is our perversion. 3.4 A harmony of parts Specialization, self-control, and cooperation are the principal virtues of citizens in Plato’s Republic. Social coherence—a harmony of parts—is the effect of coordinating citizens who exhibit these virtues in their complementary roles. There are many viable approximations to this ideal, given that there are many settlements and that none would survive if all were incoherent (because organization fails) or schismatic (because torn by mutually annihilating factions). Settlements are stabilized by the socialized habits of their residents and by the mutually regarding prudence of many constituent systems (rarely or never all): each takes care that its actions don’t impede others. Traffic is coordinated by well-designed laws, roads, and signs; cooperative, skilled drivers make it coherent. Habits, attitudes, cooperation, and coordination are principal conditions for social coherence. A shared language of topics, lingo, and allusions expresses shared attitudes; speaking in the local accent affirms our solidarity. There is also the shared intention that life- and work-sustaining conditions should prevail. For a settlement’s people and systems have an essential interest in its conservation: a settlement survives disruption when coherence and its conditions lower its center of gravity. Every system has its intruders, but families, schools, businesses, teams, neighborhoods, and settlements, too, are typically homeostatic: they stabilize about a setpoint of efficiency and resist disruptions. This is the conservative effect that makes them resistant to change. They survive, short of internal breakdowns, as long as circumstances tolerate or support them. 4. Balance Balance is a global property: it binds a society’s essential constituents, while respecting their integrity and interests. But global is misleading because ambiguous. The cosmos is global because unitary; gravity is normative and global because it applies the same constraint everywhere. Weather is everywhere, but often different from place to place. Settlement balance resembles weather: it varies within settlements, so an over-all

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measure of settlement balance is an average or mean. This way of expressing balance obliges us to distinguish this measure of settlement balance from the dynamics that operate when systems, individuals, and regulators jockey for position and advantage or accommodate one another in particular situations. For balance of any degree is the result of accommodation, only derivatively its measure. It is principally these dynamic expressions that concern us now. My references to balance are always intended as references to the distributed expressions summarized when one refers to balance as an average or mean. Systems shape their members, while coordinating their roles and initiatives in productive work; system efficiencies reduce pressure on the regulating authority by satisfying its rules. Individuals fill roles in systems, including government, while respecting rules and laws that maintain the open playing field where systems form, stabilize, or dissolve. Regulation is effective, because situations requiring it are accurately perceived and because systems and their members respect the judgment of the regulators. Each variable supports the other two while expressing itself. Balance is all the while a generic property, a determinable. There is a shoe appropriate to every foot, but many sizes because feet vary in shape and size. Balance, too, is variable. Its every expression requires a mesh of systems, individuality, and regulation, but there are many ways to achieve this effect. It wouldn’t look or feel the same in Antwerp or Qom, Delhi or Chicago. Balance is essentially Plato’s idea that social structure is a harmony of parts. But too strong an emphasis on Plato’s conception obscures a version contrary to his. Plato’s ideal state exhibits unity in diversity. Like the sections of an orchestra, every part is integrated with the others; each section—strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion—has a distinctive voice, but all cohere. Plato’s emphasis—initiative and regulative authority to philosopher-kings, the work of systems to artisans and guardians—opposes my assumption that everyone would be more effective if their unsuspected abilities were educated and exploited in appropriate systems. Seeing people constricted or deformed, ascribing these results to faulty talents, Plato blamed nature for the effects of nurture and socialization. But these are effects we can avert. Start with children deprived of nourishment, education, and opportunities, and one likely produces adults with few skills and little initiative. Encourage these advantages in families and schools, then watch their maturing children exploit opportunities available in systems they inherit or create.

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This alternative view mixes ideas from Aristotle and Adam Smith. Aristotle described settlement growth: from families and estates to villages joined as cities.6 Smith enlarged Aristotle’s characterization for our time. Now, when commerce and competition dominate the activity and ambition, city people and systems pursue their aims while constrained by rules that proscribe monopolies and devious practices.7 People and systems competing for personnel, resources, and clients are sure to be contentious. Yet competition and change needn’t defeat balance. A team wins most of its games, though individual players come and go. There is roughly equal opportunity for all the teams of its league—each can hire able players and a capable manager—but there is no possibility of equal outcomes if one wins more games than its competitors. Balance does not promise equal outcomes, because risk and failure are as likely as success in settlements that emphasize opportunity and initiative. Yet balance, the global property, has implications for every resident, because its advantages are distributed in settlements where it obtains. Each person can choose some, at least, of the systems in which he or she participates; each can hope to be formed in systems that perfect his or her talents; there are minimal constraints on choice and motion if regulation is carefully calculated, efficient, and light. There is freedom and constraint. Some initiatives fail; others succeed. Plato designed his ideal state as a paradigm for social balance, but his conception is static: its constituents and their relations were intended to be changeless like the Forms. The cohesion he emphasized requires homogeneity in language, ethnicity, morals, and religion; disruption would be minimized by constructing the ideal city far from a port. Its philosopherkings would resemble priests hectoring their pacified congregants. The balance commended here is dynamic in four ways that contrast with his ideal state: i. The reciprocity of the variables requires constant adjustment as their expressions jostle for position: a business owner anticipates relevant laws and the likely responses of his competitors before moving into a new market; Aristotle, Politics, 1252b27, p. 1129. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1985), pp. 306-308.

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drivers changing lanes look to see the traffic around them while inhibiting impulses that would break a law. ii. Balance encourages and requires the initiatives of systems and their members, because circumstances change, opportunities and threats emerge. We thrive or survive by responding. A static society may try to assure equal outcomes: equal pay, for example. But crippling individuality defeats us by suppressing initiative. For there is a cost when workers lose motivation because rewards aren’t commensurate with effort. Require that rewards be equal, and you deprive them of recognition for the difference they make. iii. Balance is productive: systems and initiatives proliferate when effective regulation mates with abundant resources and opportunities. That happens, for example, when the need for housing encourages builders, architects, furniture makers, and those who legislate property rights. Progress stops—positive feedback is arrested—because resources are exhausted, because there is no use for systems newly created, or because growth is opposed by traditional habits or a suppressing authority. iv. Plato alleged that all-knowing philosopher-kings could establish his version of balance—justice as a harmony of parts—in a city-state of 5040 citizens. F.A. Hayek reasonably affirmed that no fallible leader or team of them can do as much in cities having millions of residents.8 There is no balance without light-handed regulators who encourage productivity and autonomy by mitigating complexity and conflict. But their authority is equivocal: powerful rulers can suppress social dynamics; they lack the means to create it because the conditions for balance exceed our ability to understand and command its achievement. This obstacle frustrates romantic ideas about the efficacy of centralized social control. Actual cities are dynamic in all of the ways just described. For tolerance, diversity, and initiative mix easily in cities where ambitious people see and seize opportunities that are invisible to others: wanting a challenge, measuring themselves against others, they are rewarded by making a difference. This effect is hard to achieve and stabilize; encouraging difference and risk, it needs regulation but cannot be managed by a central authority. Why? Because complexity (the weave of systems, interactions, and effects) is often illegible and because regard for freedom precludes interfering in legal, 8

See F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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possibly productive, initiatives. The pragmatic solution makes systems and individuals responsible for self-discipline while restricting regulators to the tasks of oversight and foresight: mitigate complexity’s unforeseen effects; reduce conflict; anticipate obstacles. Balance is ideal, but also real; no viable society is created or stabilized without it. None can emerge if systems satisfying basic needs don’t form, or if individuals aren’t educated for roles in systems and for initiatives that make those systems adaptable. None is stabilized if no regulator mitigates complexity and conflict. There are, however, degrees of balance. There is less if systems or their members atrophy for want of opportunities or resources, or if regulators emphasize ideology or control over productivity and wellbeing. A society may flourish even though a significant minority of citizens is unqualified for participation in its systems, but this is less balance than it could achieve and less than the welfare of its citizens requires. For balance is constricted in societies of any scale if the great majority of citizens lack the judgment, skills, and discipline appropriate to roles and initiatives required to make their systems work, adapt, and evolve. The flourishing we value is multidimensional: its domains include corporate goods—government, economy, and culture—the goods achieved when systems prosper, and the goodness of individual lives formed for skills, cooperation, and the freedom to use and enjoy their talents. Which individuals does this concern? Ideally, all of them: each has talents to cultivate, each would enjoy the freedom to exploit them, all would profit by using these skills to enhance the core and other systems where talents and personal identities are formed. Balance is conspicuous in the stable neighborhoods of skilled workers, churches, and shops; there are pockets of balance and rhetoric promising more in wealthy democracies. Yet ample balance is never pervasive. Sometimes observing the reciprocity of the three social variables close at hand, knowing what balance could be, we are alternately hopeful or confounded: how shall we create and stabilize an effect that material conditions oppose but can’t preclude? Plato and Marx understood the task this implies: systems may be productive, regulation may be light and efficient, yet there will be no ample balance until the aims and organization of work are aligned with the talents of people whose work satisfies human needs and wants. We require education appropriate to human talents; a technology that saves workers from menial tasks; and personal satisfactions

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consistent with the perception that cooperation and coordination are essential social virtues. Caste, class, and stratification—status—are a final obstacle: balance will never be more than local or partial until styles of efficient organization oppose the impulse to form networks that exclude some for the benefit of others. This concern—the benefit of others, hence of each and all—implies that balance is a value and that our failure to achieve it is a disvalue. For balance is a node having a cascade of effects. Raise it to the ideal where balance is ample or optimal, and its effects include productive systems; individuals educated and employed to enjoy their skills, and effective regulation. Let one variable dominate the other two, and we have static repressive systems; demoralized or rebellious individuals; or despotic power. The ideal is no more mysterious than these pathologies: the same variables can have either expression. Which variable is primary when balance is construed alternately as node or utility? Despots say (with Hegel) that the authority responsible for laws and infrastructure is society’s final cause and intrinsic good. But infrastructure is valuable only for its utility. And equally, authority’s laws and grand design (if any there be) have no value apart from the people and systems organized and improved. The three candidate variables reduce to two if authority—government—has the lowest claim to being an intrinsic good. Which of the two remaining—systems or their members—is the point of reference for appraising the effects of balance? This is not a simple choice. Our individualist instincts would have us say that people may be abstracted from systems where they are formed for work and autonomy. Systems, this implies, are mere instruments for human development, instruments that are often adverse to well-being because their roles, reciprocities, and discipline reduce individual prerogatives. This is a step too far: individuals are savage and unformed apart from core and other systems where talents are acquired and duties are learned and satisfied. We find our worth in the work that core and other systems do: parents in families, teachers in schools, workers of all sorts in vocations appropriate to their talents. We acknowledge both chicken and egg: systems are incubators of individual autonomy and skills, sites of productivity, and relationships where selfhood emerges in response to one’s engagements with others. Affirming our worth without deifying it, we acknowledge these Janus-faced roles: we

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are nodes having consequences, hence utilities for our partners and successors. 5. Spiritual and aesthetic values Lewis Mumford surmised that ancient cities began as citadels or sacred places. Excavations confirm that many settlements invoked a god or gods to sanction local authority; let the city plan exemplify cosmic order.9 This emphasis—at once reverential, speculative, and commanding—would once have qualified as spirituality. Current expressions sometimes discount intimidating grandeur: great churches deflect misperception with a sign at the door, “This is not a museum.” Our spirituality requires affect and intellect, wonder and awe nuanced by sobriety. Yet spirituality, old and new, is a desire for meaning. We want assurance that we and our circumstances are more than they seem; let there be evidence that life has significance exceeding our fragile materiality. There is no disputing the anger and anguish provoked by bad luck and mean circumstances, or the desire to invest life and its projects with values that are more than utilitarian. But is there no source of value apart from selfglorifying myths: man is made “in the image of God,” for example? Why is it that core systems, private lives, art, science, commerce, and a democratic public are insufficient confirmations of our worth? Wanting more significance, we look for depths or dimensions in current pursuits, or we find partners or aims that engage us more. Spirituality doesn’t require otherworldly content,10 though it is enriched by beauty. Imagine a city where residents are healthy, capable, and engaged; systems are productive; regulation is light but effective. Why care that the city is ugly, its dirty buildings a mix of nondescript styles and sizes? None may care because all are too busy or distressed to notice, though a settlement’s buildings and terrain are the prop and context for all it is and does. Venice seems beautiful with every change of light and shadow. Other cities have fine prospects, but also precincts that are dismal and decrepit. Imagine every one transformed: mix nature with comfort, efficiency, form, proportion, drama, and surprise; then notice that people are mesmerized by their city. Beauty didn’t prevent Venice from dominating the Mediterranean Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), pp. 35-36. 10 Weissman, Styles of Thought, pp. 45-65. 9

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for several hundred years. We, too, would likely do more and feel better if everything dreary in our cities were transfigured. 6. The real and ideal All the values described above are considered from the perspective of fertile causes—nodes—or their effects. All are rooted securely in character and personal initiatives, core and other systems, or corporate self-regulation. It may seem that this account errs by repeating Mill’s conflation: “The best evidence that something is desirable is that it is desired.”11 Many things desired are undesirable, but Mill, no fool, was reformulating an Aristotelian idea. Suppose human virtues fall between extremes: generosity between excess and stinginess, courage between bravado and cowardice. Isn’t there a fair chance that much human conduct will seek a sustainable, viable mean, one that trial and error will reveal? There are epochs and behaviors so grotesque that no one thinks them desirable. Others, more sober, are revelatory, because they are desirable, desired, and appropriate: like health, they exhibit an empirically manifest ideal. It isn’t surprising that human ideals are alternately buried, disguised, or realized and exposed in human practices and relations. For these are natural norms, constraints, that operate within and upon us. Justice is an ideal of this sort. Described as pie in the sky, it is and seems unachievable; redescribed as the balance of initiative, systems, and regulation, it comes into view as a natural measure of our circumstances. Cities are provocative in many ways, not least because an ample balance—rich complexity with diversity, discipline, and initiative—is best achieved in them. Initiative is paramount; systems are the ballast achieved, stabilized, revised, and embellished when initiatives are tried and sorted, some retained, most rejected. Regulation sanitizes the result by purging excesses, repressing conflicts, setting public goals. Remote city governments make parking regulations, but people on the ground, eyes on the street, establish the ethos of neighborhoods. This is justice of a kind, justice that acknowledges these three goods while allocating a role to each. This isn’t all that justice should be—it isn’t the guarantee or even the promise that goods and services will be distributed equitably—but it is the 11

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1979), p. 34.

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material expression of a norm, one whose imperfect realizations reveal the complexity of urban life. We can all but see the frustration of unrealized form: failed initiatives, aborted systems, conflict where there should have been comity. We can imagine the effects of a well-being so pervasive that it promotes the mutual confidence required of people joined to discipline themselves. This idealization won’t occur without circumstances that include resources, culture, and history, but satisfy them and well-being may be distributed widely, if not evenly. It is critical to societies having this degree of success that authority and productivity are locally rooted. Free market ideology is a useful point of reference because it has this much truth: inventive people released from religious or governmental bondage organize to create desired goods and services. The freedom required to start the process is nevertheless problematic because national and global markets subvert it. Local control is an early, almost ephemeral stage of market capitalism: every start-up market is a free-for-all until dominant producers and traders eliminate weaker competitors. These monopolists are large-scale employers; they create wealth and concentrate its control while thwarting private initiative and local competitors. This result has indisputable benefits—poverty is reduced, women are educated, health is better, and people live longer—but this is a trade. We sacrifice personal growth and expression, idiosyncratic local systems, and regulation by a locally organized public; the goods offered in return are health, wealth, oligarchy, and the homogenized people and products achieved by competitive world trade and lower unit costs. There are other ways: France created large state enterprises that generated services and products of a high standard while employing many people. Private initiative was not so much discouraged as superseded by an economy consciously managed to create satisfactory living conditions for all. The aim was admirable, success was real, until underinvestment and the rigidities of the French labor market sabotaged an economy that is less and less competitive in global markets. Which arrangement and social values are better suited to creating and distributing wealth in markets where the cost of goods and labor is increasingly fixed on a world scale? No simple answer aligns Mill’s distributive justice with the justice achieved by the balance of local initiatives, local systems, and the supple regulation legislated and administered by a local public authority. Nations with small populations—

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Holland and Norway— manage their internal markets in ways that establish conditions for full employment and ample, well-distributed material wellbeing. States that are poor and poorly managed are vulnerable and dependent: they suffer the opportunism of companies that use them for tax advantages or cheap labor. The new hires are grateful; the society rationalizes its passivity. But these two are extremes; the dynamic of global markets draws both to the center. Effective industrial states cannot forever defend their advantages in the face of multinational companies that prefer lower wage costs to local pockets of equitably distributed well-being. Realizing the two aspects of justice—balance with inclusion—in a single city or society will be ever harder. (See Chapter Nine) Yet social ideals aren’t always figments of exuberant fantasy: their material conditions, like those of bodily health, are sometimes just beyond the reach of societies that can’t right themselves. There is a second best: a situation may be troubled but not hopeless; people are more or less healthy without being gravely ill; cities and societies lack an ample balance or a fair distribution of goods and opportunities without being chaotic. The ideal is a navigating light: knowing what we lack is a condition for knowing what to alter.

Chapter Six Social process Four preliminary observations supply this chapter’s context: i. Process is a constant of settlement life, one essential to the internal dynamics of people, systems, and pragmatic (trial and error) regulation. Process in the context of these variables is this chapter’s principal concern, though the scale and dimensions of settlement dynamics implicate factors usually ignored when thinking of city life. For settlements exchanging matter, energy, and information with their environments are open dynamic systems. Systems is ambiguous, because the word has already been used to signify one of the three social variables. Systems as it appears in the phrase open dynamic systems signifies entire settlements. It is incidental to settlements, but not to open dynamic systems, that some residents and systems are unrelated socially (they don’t work together and aren’t connected by persons or systems that work with both). For all the people and systems of a settlement are related dynamically in several ways: first, because they share its infrastructure (power, water, and transportation); second, because their actions are subject to its rules and laws (traffic laws and pollution control); third, because they use energy and other resources while participating in its economy; fourth, because all suffer or enjoy the effects of otherwise unrelated people or systems (noise, disease, and pollution); and fifth, because their physical proximity (space, time, and gravity) entails the aggregation of their physical effects. The open dynamic system is this array. ii. A settlement’s constituent systems form when their members are joined by reciprocal causal relations. These relations are dynamic: energy is exchanged by systems’ members. Relation has, nevertheless, a static ring: it

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implies static-because-accomplished, though individuality, systems, and the whole are perpetually forming. The issue is more than semantic: children are formed for individuality, adults are forever at risk of losing it; systems form and struggle to stabilize; the whole never coheres for any number of circumstantial reasons. Hence this question: which processes determine each of these three outcomes: individuality, systems, and the self-regulating whole? Process seems anomalous in an essay surveying the categories of urban social structure, because categories are often thought to be static: each is what it is, and holds its ground without engaging others. This is a fair gloss of Plato’s Forms or generic properties such as color and sound; it isn’t true of all categories. Some—those of Plato’s Republic and the dialectics of Hegel and Marx—have expressions shaped by their relations to values for other variables. Artisans, guardians, and philosopher-kings are mutually sustaining; none can interfere with the others without subverting itself. Relations between the terms of Hegelian dialectic are all the more dynamic: more than mutually accommodating, its terms are mutually transforming. A thesis posits its antithesis; their contrariety is resolved in a synthesis; the capitalists and workers Marx described are mutually affecting but categorially distinct, until fusion elides their differences. Process is equally conspicuous in the mutually affecting relations of the three social variables. Individuals cannot form without core systems and the regulations that defend them; systems can’t be established or stabilized without members to fill their roles; the authority to regulate falls to systems and individuals (police, courts, and administrators). Social process is the perpetual motion, the grinding accommodation, of these three. iii. Two of the categories—individuals and systems—express inherent natural norms in the range of their variation. These norms constrain each variable’s range of viability. So, systems established by the causal reciprocities of their members founder in the absence of cooperation; brains in vats might function in some systems (as computers do), but not in core systems (friendships and families) where bodily structure is required. Natural norms resemble sailing hulls that right a boat in rough seas: individuals expelled from core systems for laxity or other faults seek roles in other systems; systems on the verge of disintegration save themselves by reorganizing.

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The structural characteristics of human bodies and the range of their variations is natural and well known. Core systems, too, have a natural basis: procreation requires men and women; teachers communicate skills and information to children who don’t yet have either. Corporate regulation also embodies a natural impulse, but not a natural form. For there is no limit on the forms of authority and no form more natural than others. The notion of a self-regulating public is an idealization, not by any means the natural outcome when people and systems jostle for power. The function is natural, because situations requiring it are commonplace; its embodiments are an assortment of shifting power relations. This variable’s unstable expressions turn, nevertheless, about a function that is indispensable if balance—a far from equilibrium natural attractor—is to be achieved. iv. This chapter’s concerns differ from the issues of Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two describes the distinguishing attributes and mutually conditioning relations of systems, individuals, and the self-regulating whole. This chapter argues that two of the three variables—individuals and systems—have developmental trajectories peculiar to themselves. The shape and height of trees is a function of soil and climate (Chapter Three), but trees will have trunks and branches if they grow, whatever the soil and climate. Individuals and systems develop in ways that are equally natural and largely pre-determined, irrespective of circumstances (this chapter). The selfregulating whole is different: none of its historically familiar expressions is natural, not because all are unnatural, rather because none is self-fulfilling or preordained when a society organizes to mitigate conflict or complexity. Regulation succeeds or fails because of the character, activities, and foresight of individuals and systems, and because of factors diverse as history and weather. There will be systems and individuals; regulation is uncertain. 1. Systems and networks The list of a city’s vital statistics often begins with the size of its population, never with the number of its constituent systems. Yet individuals do very little apart from systems. Join them in pursuits that satisfy shared or complementary interests, and their effects multiply. For it is systems— reciprocally related individuals committed to a task—that energize a city. People using city transit and streets are incognito, their aims disguised, though people asked their purpose or destination will likely intimate a role.

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For even here, alone on streets or buses, people identify themselves by citing core or other systems. Process is readily perceived in systems because their formation, stability, and demise are apparent to members and observers alike. We see them assembling, producing, competing, or failing. Some apparent systems—marriages, businesses, and friendships—are inert or defunct. Living systems are necessarily active because an aggregate doesn’t become or remain a system—with distinctive vitality, complexity, and power—if the reciprocal causal relations of the members are not established or sustained. One is a parent or child because of something past, not because this relational property is sustained by current activity. Yet vital systems are only and always the result of a current activity or intention: friends may not meet for a time, yet each knows the other’s concern. Why are they busy or distracted? Because each swims in the attention-compelling tide of several or many systems. Work, school, family: each system has its regime of tasks and schedules, its own clock; each person is immersed in a sea of duties to several systems. Process overall resembles sludge stirred slowly, though it turns faster from the standpoint of people harried by responsibilities. Imagine a tense meeting; participants have conflicting interests, but all share an overriding aim; positions are affirmed, discussion is civil or rude; each side gives a little before reneging defensively; but then common interest prevails, and all yield enough to achieve accord. The system holds; perturbation inside is disguised by the modularity of systems, and the low roar of motion outside. Processes internal to many systems, core systems especially, are similar across cultures that vary considerably in style and detail. Knowing this is an advantage to anthropologists and tourists, because it makes an otherwise unfamiliar city intelligible. Go anywhere, watch the tide of activity, and see familiar practices emerge as people satisfy familiar roles and needs: streetcars and passengers, mothers and children, shopkeepers, deliverymen, and office buildings like hives. Activity is steady, specific, and sustained in systems that organize for a task, while making space for themselves in complex competitive circumstances. But process is always vulnerable to friction and failure. Systems falter—their reciprocities are unsustainable—because aims are unrealistic, resources are wanting, or members are unqualified or distracted. The miracle of societies, cities especially, is that they work as well as they do. This is testimony to regulation on all three scales: competent, self-

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controlled individuals; systems monitored by the negative feedback of their reciprocities; and the discipline of the whole. Systems form and stabilize because their members are not selfsufficient; they dissolve because members argue, withdraw, age, or die. Two processes are active here, one anomalous with the other: members outlive many systems—conversations, friendships, and marriages, for example— though other systems, including families, businesses, and states, outlive their members. Systems resist the generational flow by stabilizing in two dimensions: they assemble—chain—in networks of systems related both laterally (they are mutually independent or connected by overlap) and hierarchically. Networks form to ease or enhance the work of linked people or systems (writers and their critics, banks that trade assets). They consolidate to defend economic, political, or cultural interests from threats of two kinds: generational change and competing networks.12 Network power is intimidating. Seeing its force and effects, we mistakenly construe the web of linked systems as all but invulnerable. But networks are perpetually strained by the misalignment or weakness of their constituents, or by emerging competitors. European central banks and currency are integrated; their economies are not. Prolonged deficits in the budgets of some sabotage the currency of all. The network centered on Microsoft seemed invulnerable until Google dislodged it. We err by construing systems as fixed structures: they are processes constrained within limits that stabilize their internal relations and external form. Pattern maintenance—form—is perpetually challenged by disruption, competitors, depleted resources, or distraction, though change may be slow. Networks endure because the economic, political, and social conditions creating them are sustained; because they are profitable; because individuals and systems they profit work hard to defeat competitors; and because the people and systems defeated are disempowered: they can’t easily fight back. Every city and society has a topography of heights and valleys established by power relations among its constituent networks. Their grip is often a social version of rigor mortis: they subvert a balance enhanced by equal opportunities and mutual forbearance by stymieing processes that would achieve it. David Singh Grewal, Network Power, the Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 17-43. 12

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2. Individuals Individualist thinking—libertarianism, for example—ascribes rights and powers to single persons with little or no thought about the process of acquiring them. “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains;”13 “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”14 Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, and their many heirs affirm these or similar slogans, but all fail to tell how these benefits are acquired. That seemed unnecessary, given the vigor of individual human bodies and the persuasion that God is the source of life, mind, morality, rights, and liberty. Suppose this isn’t so or that we have no evidence it is: what other explanation might there be for the autonomy we prize? It has three bases: the independence and vitality of animal bodies; training that encourages some degree of independence, initiative, and judgment; and the expectations of other members that one will fill critical roles in core and other systems. Dependent infants are nurtured and coaxed: nurtured because they can’t care for themselves; coaxed because caretakers want them to learn skills appropriate to the independence acquired with maturing muscles and nerves. Autonomy is incremental; parents, schools, and jobs require it, and measure our progress. But this perspective—growth observed—is subtly biased: it implies a passive agent submitting to the demands of teachers, though autonomy—individuality—is unachieved until responsibility for one’s choices and acts is seized or accepted by the person formed. Skilled, selfcontrolled, and deliberate—qualified for making judgments—he or she appraises circumstances and resources, opportunities, partners, systems, and objectives. Each person has a developmental history that incorporates phases of various lengths, initiatives that succeed, and failures that slow or stop further development. The result is an autonomous psychic posture, one that distinguishes the person having it from every other.15 Cautious, resolute, or Rousseau, Social Contract, p. 49. See Declaration of Independence and other Great Documents of American History:1775-1865 (New York: Dover. 2000). 15 Weissman, Hypothesis and the Spiral of Reflection, pp. 187-189; A Social Ontology, pp. 267-277. 13 14

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reckless, we develop by engaging and responding to our circumstances. But how do we characterize this result? Citing the skills and attitudes acquired is a way of separating effects from their generating process. Doing this reduces individuality—meaning autonomy and one’s singular skills and attitudes—to its exercise: pictures and home runs are celebrated; painting and the art of swinging a bat are mostly ignored. This is doubly reductive: a developmental history is reduced to capacities and attitudes acquired; they in turn reduce to acts they enable. The epistemological motive—“by their fruits you shall know them”—obscures process by restricting attention to its outcomes or effects. This response is reasonable: cooking schools are important for chefs who succeed, not for the histories of promising students who didn’t finish. We can make process relevant by emphasizing their successes and failures, but this foreshortens the perception of developmental histories. The cognitive, motivational, and muscular powers for which we educate are imperfectly understood. Unable to observe skills and attitudes as they evolve, we treat the child as a black box and settle for the evidence at hand: namely, behavior they enable. We appraise the result without understanding the process it confirms. Educators dispute this for the good reason that many of them are sensitive to learning and its conditions, but much they know is conflated with the tests used to measure the results of study. The issue obscured is the process and physiology of learning. Its course is ever more discernible as we learn to observe the neural and muscular processes with which mental states are identified. But this technological, conceptual revolution is a danger to individuality. For there is a risk that education will be superseded by intrusions that divert its course for reasons and aims fixed by the interests of systems or authority. What will individuality be when idiosyncrasy is achieved by tweaking neural processes? Autonomy will be unproblematic in the respect that wind-up toys have it, but this is no advantage. The individuality we prize has the whiff of uncertainty: we can’t be sure what other people will do, however predictable the correlation of their circumstances and behavior.7 This is an ethical problem for physiological inquiry: it will be morally consequential if we fail to protect the aura of mystery that people ascribe to one another. Know too much, control too much, and confirmation of our machine-like works will surely compromise our respect for the alterity that makes other people slightly

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remote, never fully comprehensible. Think of Kantian noumena:16 things represented but unknown. There is deference, anticipation, and sometimes fear, all projected into a space that lies beyond the plane of sight, voice, and touch. We risk denigrating our material selves. Individuality is also problematic in this other way: it implies autonomy, idiosyncrasy, and initiative. Spiders have autonomy—they are selfmoving—but no initiative. All their possible actions are anticipated in mechanics that respond to stimuli. Initiative implies that people are selfstarting: they see or create, then seize opportunities others ignore. Can material systems be self-starting? The issue is obscured when autonomy is construed as an expression of free will, meaning that one’s acts are chosen, but otherwise uncaused. Evidence of these spontaneities is slight; indeed, it devolves about indeterminist interpretations of quantum effects. But this is treacherous ground. Many theorists assume that nature is indeterminate at the scale of quanta: electrons changing orbits jump energy levels; particles go into and out of being in the absence of determining conditions; a particle’s position and momentum are said to lack determinate values until measured. There is a contrary opinion that these alleged features are artifacts of our statistical methods and the physical constraints that preclude measuring position and momentum at once. Suppose, nevertheless, that nature is indeterminate at the scale of quantum effects. Three reasons justify saying that nature’s indeterminacies don’t make human initiatives easier to explain. First, quantum indeterminacies wash out at scales as small as atoms and molecules, scales much smaller than that of physiological processes. Second, indeterminist effects are thought to occur randomly, though initiatives (as opposed to impulses) are often carefully considered and disciplined. Third, there is no evidence of these random effects in the behavior of people whose stolidity or persistence never seems to vary. Hence, this postulate and these questions. Assume that quantum indeterminacies affect human muscles and nerves. Why does anyone persist in any activity or commitment? Why isn’t everyone observably unsteady or chaotic? Can we do better? Is there a way to explain spontaneity without invoking mysteries, or contestable readings of quantum science? We do it by Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins, 1965), pp. 257-275.

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acknowledging three other considerations: first is development, including the formation of personality and the education that supplies information and skills; second is the set innate propensities for activity or quiescence, curiosity or credulity; third is opportunity. Impulse requires only the second. Spontaneity requires all three: the first makes one perceptive; we are more or less responsive because of the second: the third is provocative for those who see the possibility of satisfaction or achievement in situations that seem risky or fruitless to others. Spontaneity so described implies judgment. One sees opportunities that others ignore because situations are appraised with a depth that makes choice rational, quick, and effective. Nothing in this is undetermined: one is prepared by nature and nurture for opportunities of kinds visible to those having useful propensities and effective training. Opportunities for initiative are everywhere, but there are more of them in cities because most every resident participates in several or many systems, each provocative in its way. Societies differ in their tolerance for individuality, so there are also counter pressures: initiative and difference versus predictability and order. 3. Corporate self-regulation Regulation is achieved holistically in three ways: i. the public is institutionalized as an authority—a government—that proscribes some acts and facilitates others, usually by way of laws; ii. it is achieved when behavior is organized by an economy —a market, for example—that engages people and systems as they exchange goods and services; iii. regulation is the effect of a multi-centered culture that homogenizes social practices in ways that make participants mutually intelligible and predictable. 3.1. The public is institutionalized as an authority Individuals and systems regulate themselves, but regulation of their ensemble is required because of complexities they may not perceive or solve, and conflicts for which they lack neutrality. There is also a shared concern that priorities relevant to all be considered, negotiated, and legislated by or in the name of all. A government that administers, legislates, and judges is the expedient. Creating this authority is problematic because here, unlike the formation of individuals and core systems, there is no distinctive natural course: history and circumstances determine a result or we struggle to achieve regulation in a style commended by deliberation.

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Every material result is natural because of having necessary and sufficient material conditions, but there is a difference to consider. Roses grow on rose bushes, oak leaves on oak trees: the evolution of individual persons and core systems is natural in the restricted sense that each develops in ways narrowly focused by its character. Authority isn’t channeled in an analogous way: any society may find its way to anarchy, oligarchy, democracy, or despotism, given appropriate circumstances. Plato surveyed some possible forms of government late in The Republic, where he described the decline of the ideal state. They include the state he designed (wise philosopher-kings direct temperate cooperative subjects, each doing his or her special task); timocracy (government by generals who decree forms of order); oligarchy (rule by a wealthy few over the sullen many); democracy (a riot of diverse tastes and mutual tolerance); and despotism (fear, deprivation, and slavery under a tyrant who combines oligarchic self-indulgence with the tyrannical authority of the generals).17 Plato supposed that we are drawn to the Good, hence to a state that embodies it, because everything less is a privation abhorrent to Being. But only philosophers see the Good; others live in shadows. Discount Plato’s ideal state and we are left with an array of options (none more natural than another) with variations ranging from despotism to a civil society where a public forms to regulate itself. Each variation is natural in two respects: it emerges from its circumstances and is tolerated by people who accommodate themselves to its regulatory style. But none is natural in the way of individual autonomy or core systems. How do we achieve better proportion in the relations of individual initiatives, systems, and authority? No practical answer is useful without an understanding of processes that establish corporate regulation. Imagine a bicyclist pedaling slowly: momentum isn’t sufficient to keep him level, so he stays upright by leaning left or right. Settlements require an even keel, and regulation that maintains it. Momentary adjustments are unnecessary, because regulation would be impossibly complicated if they were. Yet steady applications of the same rules is not always possible, given altered circumstances. They often require new rules or amendments to old ones.

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Plato, Republic, 543a1-568d2, pp. 772-797.

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Every revision is tentative, ad hoc, or experimental because any amendment to a practice or rule may have unexpected effects. Disciplinarians don’t like this pragmatic bias because it seems perniciously relativistic: why should people accept regulation, if rules change with the wind; houses, cars, and refrigerators endure; why shouldn’t rules and laws abide without needing our attention? They do survive, more or less amended, but they shouldn’t survive if altered circumstances make regulation clumsy, irrelevant, or pernicious. Catching runaway slaves once seemed a good idea; laws commanding it aren’t applied anymore. Why this change? Because circumstances and our self-perception are altered. Practical civics is the discipline that would help us understand the process that animates these changes. Several of its aspects are essential to adaptations that are chronic in a society responding to change. First is the perception that a settlement, like a living body, is dynamic: its changes are unpredictable, cyclical (as agricultural villages are), or its trajectory is plainly up or down. Adapting to these changes requires oversight, judgment, and the recognition that diagnoses and decisions may err. A diversity of practical concerns is second, but equally vital. Are residents knowledgeable about political history; informed about current tasks, aims, and obstacles; and able to appraise ideas and arguments? Do they participate in discussions that identify topics of general concern and plausible solutions? Are there regular elections and candidates who respect public deliberations while retaining independent judgment? Are there laws that prevent wealth from being used to misinform the citizenry, or buy the loyalty of candidates? These conditions for effective regulation are democracy’s constitutive practices, its imperatives: think, experiment, measure the effects, revise, and experiment again. This practice is counterintuitive if one imagines things diminished by repair. Democratic process works inversely: fail to deliberate and experiment when circumstances change, and you find yourself trapped by rigid habits incommensurate with your circumstances. Repair, itself, is often slow; there is usually time to consider the best way forward, time to inform a city’s residents about needs and possible solutions. Forcing the issue, prescribing change without democratic consultation subverts the public: fail to proceed democratically and you lose democratic habits and attitudes. We normally construe democracy as government by the people or the right to diverse choices and experiences, but democracy has a strength too

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often ignored: it requires and implies a distributed sensibility to circumstances that require an altered response. Imagine that citizen are attentive. Each has his or her ear to the ground, and each believes that he or she will be heard if something awry is perceived. These perceptions are sometimes hysterical or mistaken, but they are sometimes the best measure of changes that may be seismic and dangerous or honorable and necessary. A democracy of distributed sensibility averts authoritarian rigidity, because no rule is or can be eternally sensitive to the moving, roiling character of an evolving settlement. There is often no consensus about aims or circumstances alleged to be problematic, and no procedure for creating one. Authoritarian diktats seem more efficient, though regulations prescribed by an impatient authority are usually insensitive to circumstances and the interests of a settlement and its residents. The pragmatic solution is superior to both extremes because it obliges ordinary citizens to pay attention, then to fix what doesn’t work while looking ahead to anticipate and avoid foreseeable crisis. But this is an aim, not an accomplishment: it requires distributed sensibility, public deliberation, and procedures for moving debate to resolution. These attributes are essential to a participatory democracy. Implementing them is all but impossible in the political life of large countries, but they don’t exceed the capacities of small or middle-sized settlements. Democratic practice is, nevertheless, procedurally clumsy at all scales: trial, error, deliberation, and revision assure that it always will be so.. Most private citizens are overwhelmed by the obligations of their personal lives; participating in deliberations that would cure the larger issues of settlement life is beyond them. News is good or indifferent, stability seems rooted, so people bored by hype are only occasionally roused by an issue: abortion or gay marriage seems urgent; the rest slips away. We are slow to notice when bad news is suppressed or “information” is distorted by those who promote it. Is there an alternative? Jefferson favored the assembly of deliberating citizens at each level of public administration: town, county, state, and nation. Elected representatives were to be informed by the views of their constituents, while having discretion at each higher order of deliberation (from towns to counties, counties to states). But that procedure is slow and clumsy if dense populations are badly organized; decisions would often suffer for want of information, consensus, or professional judgment. Could we nevertheless acquire constitutional leverage for publics informed

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and assembled by way of the internet? This would democratize regulative authority despite interests that profit from centralized government: lobbyists are reluctant to cede rights that diminish their power; pressuring legislators in many states or provinces is more expensive than lobbying in the capital. Why do we tolerate our cosmetic attenuated democracy? Because we confuse a prosperous economy with reliably democratic processes. Having one, imagining that the other is its stable condition, we ignore a fundamental error mentioned above: democratic theory assumes that a society’s only relevant agents are individual persons, especially those who vote. Ignores core and other systems, it imagines them reduced to their members. This error is dangerous on two counts: first, because individuals fail to achieve social or psychic identity without systems; second, because it is systems— individuals organized for tasks, not these same individuals unvarnished and disconnected—that do most of a society’s work. Ignoring systems is unsustainable in practice because some are pervasive and powerful. Federal, state, and city governments acknowledge this by encouraging businesses and others to pursue their interests through a side door: they cater to lobbyists while turning a blind eye to the money spent on candidates who represent their aims. This compensates for theory’s neglect of systems, but doing it is costly to people whose interests oppose those of corporations (including their employers). This deception has the ironic effect that individuals vote for candidates and policies supported and formed by systems indifferent to their welfare. The cynicism subverting democratic process is all the more compromising if a government described as “democratic” perverts essential moral and procedural constraints. That happens when a cabal of elected and appointed officials takes the world’s principal military power into war on the basis of “facts” used to disguise other motives: a system already compromised by lobbyist money is further reduced by the duplicity of its principal officers. This is grave because the process of acquiring regulative authority is opportunistic: weaken a democratic system and others—oligarchs and despots—compete for authority. They do it with good heart: whatever is best for them is good for everyone. 3.2. Holistic regulation achieved when behavior is organized by an economy Economies produce and distribute goods. Each has a distinguishing regulatory style with distinctive cascading effects, though all use resources

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that are generically similar: labor, material resources, capital, and technology. Economy is regulative in several ways. Economies are alike in the respect that all provide the material conditions for well-being. Their different products and different ways of distributing wealth and opportunities are also apparent. My concern is the regulative effects of economic organization: how people organize to produce and distribute goods and services, and how this style of organization controls both the activity and the self-perception of individuals and their systems. Markets are my point of reference, though it may seem odd to consider them under the heading of regulation, given that markets are often thought to work best when unregulated. Obscurity dissolves as we realize that regulation needn’t proceed by way of explicit laws. Practice, too, is regulative; markets oblige vast numbers of people to learn the attitudes and behavior required for success as an entrepreneur, worker, or manager. Still more comprehensively, we learn how to live, what to want and be. This is regulation more subtle and intrusive than tax or traffic laws, more holistic than all the canon of laws introduced to regulate complexity and conflict. Elementary economic activity has several constraints, including resources and workers educated for their tasks. Two others are relevant here: little is done or made without cooperation among a product’s makers; nothing is distributed without rules that make sale or barter safe for buyers and sellers. Barter seems incidental to a money economy, but its core practice— exchange—is not. Trading with trusted partners is indispensable if one wants but can’t produce what they have. Money facilitates trade by substituting a quality-neutral commodity for one of the goods traded; it doesn’t vitiate norms critical to exchange: their satisfaction is all the more urgent given the attenuated relation of buyers and sellers. Someone buying wheat on a mercantile exchange doesn’t know the farmer who grew it. The virtues of labor and exchange are superseded by the mechanics of transaction: one pays the bill and takes delivery. But there are many buyers and sellers, so every transaction seems trivial. This perception encourages an illusion similar to the experience of people watching an air show: awed by the rush of activity above, people feel diminished and embarrassed by the triviality of life on the ground. Swashbuckling commerce has the same effect, until one realizes that its only benefits are salaries paid for work performed, and the goods and services traded for cash or credit.

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We forget these primitive truths about economic activity and its aims when the scale of production is vast and local economies are subordinated to world markets. Markets are rationalized as a simple mechanism of production and exchange, though the word itself is falsely seductive. Market evokes local bakeries, bookshops, and auctions, though their only similarity to national or global markets is the relation of buyers and sellers who agree on prices for labor or goods exchanged. Manage a company and that simple relation is encumbered by business plans, cash flow and credit, supply bottlenecks, and labor disputes; read a financial journal and learn about mergers, finance, stocks, derivatives, and world shipping. Norms that regulate production and exchange seem fussy and incidental. But are they? John Rawls emphasized that every person has specifiable least needs and interests, and that a political economy should be designed to satisfy them.18 His concern seems utopian when disparities of zeal and competence, wealth, culture, and nationality are considered, but there is no denying the universal practical necessity of having the means to feed, clothe, and shelter one’s children, spouse, and self. Other values—agreement, honesty, mutual respect, and cooperation—are equally exigent, because fewer goods are exchanged without them, and because mutual acknowledgement between buyers and sellers is critical if the exchange is to be repeated. These considerations imply a task: encourage markets but make them pertinent to the lives and interests of those who do their work and use their products. Markets do many good things: provoking and rewarding initiative, exploiting technology, they improve health, education, and ease. Yet these benefits are offset in several ways: businesses regard workers as a cost, not as partners in making and distributing quality goods or services; having money and influence, businesses pervert democratic procedures by influencing, even writing legislation that protects their interests while compromising their workers. Publics that do (or should) legislate for the interests of their citizens lose control of local economies and their societies when transnational corporations control local labor markets, resources, and these governments. Laborers are impoverished or displaced when local factories are moved or closed; competing businesses use resources with little or no regard for damage to the environment. Cultural diversity (like biodiversity) is suppressed when the rhythms of production and the goods produced are the 18

See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

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same everywhere. Disparities of wealth entail political inequality and social inequity. “One person, one vote” is deceiving when systems employing the many pay for advertising that impels them to vote for candidates who oppose their interests. Two principal virtues of markets are said to be free entry and the freedom obtaining therein. Go ahead: be a poet or flutist. The market is permissive, no one is precluded from doing anything that does no harm to others. Yes, but the market imposes a single criterion of value: the price for which a service or commodity can be sold. Very few people are so stubborn that they persist in tastes made to seem ridiculous because they have little or no market value. Accommodations to changing market conditions have been familiar in the West for several hundred years. But now, change is perpetually disruptive, because technology accelerates transformations that work through production facilities and labor markets several times in a generation. Workers may acquire new skills as circumstances require, but they can’t anticipate inventions that make those skills obsolete. Nor do they choose skills appropriate to a self-perceived talent: one learns what to do and where to do it as the market requires and rewards. One result is a two-tiered labor market: it comprises workers with skills appropriate to new technologies and those trapped with old skills in uncompetitive businesses. This has the regulative effect of dividing workers into castes: those well or badly paid. This has generational effects because children of the privileged caste are educated to standards more likely to secure their standing in the next generation. Democratic society begins to unwind as its shibboleths become topics for interpretation: does equality require equality of results or equality of opportunity. Or is neither implied because children who receive disparate levels of education will not have equal opportunities or equal results. Most people (usually workers of little education doing basic tasks) enter labor markets at a disadvantage easily described in terms appropriate to barter and teamwork: their norms and values—agreement, honesty, mutual respect, and cooperation—are deformed by the demand that one agree to work on the terms offered. For there is no voluntary agreement between buyer and seller when the buyer is an employer and the seller needs a wage. Honesty is ironic when the goods exchanged are very little salary for long hours in tasks that are boring or worse. Mutual respect is a formality to

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employers whose only interest in their employees is their skill, compliance, and reliability. Cooperation in these circumstances requires that workers ignore every other concern (including family, talent, or illness) to do the employer’s work. Renault, the French automobile manufacturer, is currently notorious for reducing the cost of benefits by obliging sick or injured factory workers to return to desk jobs, despite doctors’ warnings. Renault’s policy is an improvement of one sort: damaged workers in many countries are fired without benefits. How do regulators mitigate these effects? How are the elementary norms of simple economies recovered and made viable in ferociously competitive market economies where profit is the aim and success is measured by the market price of a company’s shares? The plausible answer is that one negotiates two opposing but legitimate concerns: reduce inequality, soften the social effects of competition, but enable risk and promote innovation. This is the social democratic equation. Deeply ingrained in European polities, it is anathema in America, where market “freedom” paralyzes the accurate perception of market effects. Governments are not well placed to arbitrate this disparity: wanting tax monies that prosperous businesses deliver, they are compromised when asked to defend the elementary norms and values of individual welfare and the core systems responsible for creating it. Doing both is problematic when elections are won or lost because a winner’s margin of victory is a function of money contributed by business sponsors. Yet democratic governments are created and sustained by the obligation to protect their citizens. The norms inherent in barter and the conditions for effective work teams are implied by the right of association; rights to equal treatment under the law are acknowledged explicitly. A government that ignores these interests abdicates its duty to regulate, and should be recalled. That doesn’t happen: our market economy, ever more focused and constrained by the interests of great corporations, dominates every aspect of social life touched by work and commercial products. Government ignores the effects; citizens struggling with their daily lives barely perceive the degree to which their lives are everywhere constrained by a process that shapes who they are and how they live. A likely objection is cogent: why suppose that norms of dignity and trust inherent in production and exchange are salient in economies that long ago outgrew village crafts and trades? I aver it because these norms and virtues continue to dominate interpersonal relations of all sorts, especially

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those constitutive of core and other systems. Corporations are motivated by profit and the interests of shareholders, though markets serving the many workers and consumers have a different, essentially pragmatic rationale: do they supply goods and services in a manner and at price appropriate to both the cost of work done, and the needs and wealth of buyers? The interests of corporations complicate this simple exchange and divert its aims by interposing themselves between the two elementary sides. This intrusion confuses us by altering the rationale for markets. Markets are a practical solution to the complementarity of needs on one side, production on the other. Exchange is their middle-term. Simple in principle, they satisfy human wants in circumstances where interdependence requires cooperation. Market apologists say that their principal large-scale alternative—administered demand economies—distorts these interests by overlaying them with efficiencies tainted by ideology, diktats, or oligarchy. But that is only the bogeyman created by the Soviet Union, then encoded by the rhetoric of cold war politics. The current alternative is the market economy of transnational companies, quickening technology, and obeisant governments. This market has no time for idealized virtues: cooperation, exchange, and mutual respect. It reduces precarity to the statistics of people unemployed. Troubled workers hear the numbers and take notice. Is the concern for private lives and local systems outmoded because incidental relative to defunct corporations or the federal deficit? Nobel Prizes in economics usually go to mathematical modelers, more rarely to economists troubled by the material well-being and bargaining position of individual workers.19 Yet the norms of small-scale economic life are persistent constraints on the actions of morally responsible buyers and sellers, workteams and their managers. Why embellish these transactions by calling them “morally responsible”? Because social life isn’t sustainable if it isn’t practical, and it isn’t practical if there is disrespect or contempt in the relations of the participants. There are, to be sure, other values that markets encourage. Initiatives are valued, because the alliance of initiative and technology displaces old practices while creating others, more productive and profitable. But why assume that initiative opposes norms that include agreement, honesty, mutual respect, and cooperation? Because values joined in local practice have less 19

See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor, 2000).

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currency, or none, when considered globally. Corporations sometimes relocate their factories in areas starved for work. Local people are grateful; company representatives smile, but their corporate bosses are cynical: employment here entails workers cut adrift in the towns abandoned. Free-marketeers love the mythology that merges stories of the Wild West with those of pirates and gamblers. Tycoons and corporations also disregard norms of private and public life. But is that style indispensable to their success; is success its justification? Great football quarterbacks suggest an answer: they are famous for initiative, all of it consistent with the rules of the game. The appeal to pragmatic norms inhering in human practice annoys skeptical philosophers. They are quick to say that norms are conventions, like tax laws, imposed to satisfy the interests of those who prescribe them. And certainly, norms implicit in the transactions of elementary local markets do satisfy people who exchange goods voluntarily for whatever advantage each pursues. But these norms are enacted rather than prescribed: each person engages the other for his or her benefit, while acknowledging more or less consciously that the other has the same motive. This is the quid pro quo: satisfy the other as one is satisfied; endow the simplest exchanges with equity and dignity. Either partner may regret the exchange at a later moment, but that is incidental to the moral quality of the exchange: knowing what one is getting, knowing what is given, unforced by drastic circumstances (the man dying of thirst who trades gold for a glass of water), one makes the trade. This is all that equity requires. Is it naïve to suppose that each party in a trade respects the other’s desire that their transaction should satisfy him or her? Why assume this mutual regard, given the frequent experience that others gladly cheat people with whom they trade? Think of games such as the prisoners’ dilemma: people who play the game once may act out of self-concern without regard for the other; those who play it repeatedly learn that cooperation is the better policy. Hence the conclusion that people who trade regularly learn that mutual respect is mutually beneficial, prudent good sense. Many people happily take advantage of those with whom they play just once: why shouldn’t this be the perspective for moral lessons and norms? It could be— and for thugs of all sorts—it is the way of engaging other people. Why not generalize our virtues and regulations from pirate morality? Because the standard context for most social behavior is that of systems and

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individuals; both act in ways appropriate to binding reciprocities or casual encounters. Systems with established relations trade confidently because mutual trust and expectations bind their members. Prudent self-interest is always appropriate, but there is retribution for systems and individuals that manipulate others for personal advantage. Knowing the risks of anti-social behavior, we think consequentially and affirm the normativity of cooperation and mutual respect. But notice: affirmation doesn’t entail that trust and cooperation are conventions. For these are natural norms, the lubrication essential to effective interdependence. This defense of local transactions and local norms may seem captious because narrow. Why not choose a different point of reference: consider values appropriate to barter in large market economies where participants never meet? Chinese Locomotive trades with Brazilian Samba over a wireless network; no one in either firm knows anyone at the other, but neither cheats because each fears for its reputation and because both want a longterm trading relation. Regulative values survive the attenuation of human relations, but the example is notable, too, for a consideration it ignores: trading partners may value their employees less than their link to one another, though the relation binding each to its workers is formally similar to to the relation with this partner. Employee and employer have also agreed to an exchange: competent work for a salary in conditions that do not damage the health of the employee. These are expectations governments should enforce. Deontologists won’t like this merely practical motive for intervention. Distrusting the contingency of norms having “merely” legislative origins, they propose to demonstrate or intuit norms that no rational agent could deny. But their a priori derivations seem rhetorical, contrived, and not at all preferable to norms that anchor human relationships of every sort while having no basis other than the expectations, habits, and behavior of practical people making prudent choices. Laws (of contract, for example) sometimes enforce these everyday reciprocities, but their origin is simple and direct: we or our friends have worked together; you trust me as I trust you; each should be protected against the bad faith of the other. . 3.3. Homogenizing culture Culture, like economy, works its regulative effects informally. It doesn’t usually need laws, policemen, or jails (though it may have both), because its control reaches into the very formation of individual personalities

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and core systems. Ask any adult about his or her religious leanings, and the response will likely be a strong affirmation of identity or an edgy reference to cultural childhood training somewhat disavowed. Culture is an imprint, a way of seeing, interpreting, and feeling that forever marks us. Culture is a people’s distinctive way of expressing the 67 variables that anthropologists discern in human practices. Some biological functions escape its influence, though yogis use meditation to regulate metabolism and heartbeat. One expects a specific cultural variation for each of the 67 (diet, alphabet, and sport, for example), but no likely causal relation between them. Mutual influence—between diet and sport, for example—is nevertheless frequent. Influence is one-sided and pervasive if the value for one variable has a cascade of effects on values for many or all the others. Its influence sweeps through a culture like wind through a wheat field, shaping its practices: competition has this effect when it dominates sport, business, and personal relations. Identifying convergences, their causes, and the diffusion of effects is critical for understanding a culture’s regulative force. Two formations exemplify the extremes of cultural determinism. Minimalism in each of several variables is a characteristic style usually occurring without relations among its several expressions: minimalism in architecture is not the cause or effect of minimalism in poetry or philosophy. Compare the dominating effects of values for a variable such as religion: each fixes a set of interlocking determinations for several or many other variables: government, economy, clothing, diet, music, and dance. Their power is transforming wherever religion presumes to speak its god’s mind. For nothing is too trivial for divine attention. The first alternative—a culture of disjoined expressions having a common cause—is uncommon, though minimalism was a dominant aspect of many cultural expressions in the middle third of the twentieth century. The other alternative is apparent whenever the value for a focal variable invades and binds culture’s many aspects. The variable having this power changes with time: religion or styles of tribal organization once invaded and linked every aspect of life. Market economies are currently the decisive variable; it determines values for most other variables in modern societies. Four mechanisms explain market effects. One is unit cost and the savings generated by large markets: making a single widget is costly; the next million are cheap. Second is design: make the widgets attractive; test their appeal with likely buyers. Third is advertising and packaging: flood the

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target audience with ads using accessible language and high-impact graphics. Associate the product advertised with high-status figures; tinker with ads to match the sensibilities of differing target markets; find and retain focal images and slogans. Fourth is satisfaction: deliver the pleasure promised by your ads. Do these things and you may develop a global cult following. Rolex and Mercedes are dream products: people having them feel better about themselves; others who see them know what to want and whom to respect. Profits are stable and good. Let people have what they want, assuming no harm is done to them or others. We reasonably worry if many want the same things merely because others have them, or because advertising commends them. Why worry? Because homogenized tastes defeat individuality, judgment, and the systems where other talents and sensibilities are cultivated. Idiosyncrasy— authenticity—is smothered by an ethos that encourages passivity: we learn to like what others would have us like. Regulation is a good thing when traffic laws are the constraint, and fewer accidents are the effect. But effects are repressive and perverse when a culture’s sensibilities are nourished by the homogenized goods its economy promotes. Tastes atrophy when marketing supersedes talent, courage, and invention; there are fewer artisans or shops distinguished by a craft or task because few survive competition with homogenized goods or the high-rent chain stores common to every big city. Buyers are punished because the tastes they acquire are formed by others; many never learn how to look or listen. Artists suffer because they pander to buyers before learning to paint. Market prosperity is sometimes characterized as a rising tide that raises all boats. Better describe it as a flood where many values drown. 4. Evolution/revolution Cooperation and coordination are evolved responses to vulnerability: we are safer and more effective when work is specialized and workers are organized. Core systems are the result: settlements domesticate change by defending them. The web of settled families and businesses roots like a mangrove and evolves. Children age, marry, and have children of their own; seasons come and go with central heating, air conditioning, and street lights to ease transitions. Technology transforms work’s character and conditions without much reducing the allure of complex, more or less densely packed

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cities: businesses and residents that flee a city go only as far as the suburbs or edge cities that ring its derelict center. The discipline and coherence of settlement life restrict possibilities for radical change while tolerating many that are gradual. This is true in settlements of every size, but cities are a puzzle: why don’t they collapse; why aren’t they vulnerable to their internal stratifications, schisms, and antipathies? Aristotle ascribed city stability to its resilient middle class, but that can’t be the whole story: Beirut has a large middle class, though this morning’s paper (10/5/08) reports that Hezbollah has seized half the city. Riots occur in many cities; there were revolutions in Paris and St. Petersburg. What explains urban stability; which conditions sabotage it? Cities are stabilized by conditions that are internal or external. External factors include farms, regional power grids, trading agreements, and peace with one’s neighbors. The principal internal condition is the web of linked systems and networks: a family member is also an employee, parent, churchgoer, taxpayer, and alderman; his employer has clients and suppliers, a building it rents, insurance brokers, and trucks it leases. Every resident participates in a web of systems and has an interest in sustaining it. The city regulator is a guarantor of urban stability. Its motives may be democratic or despotic, but, either way, it oversees order and defuses, as best it can, symptoms of rage. The regulator intervenes when a grievance of any lifethreatening sort—poverty or religious, ethnic, or racial hostility—alienates or alarms a large fraction of city residents. Or it doesn’t intercede, so anger festers until charismatic organizers provoke riots having unforeseeable effects. The ferocity of these conflicts is one motive creating and regulating settlements. Wanting safety, we assemble to defend ourselves, until complexity, imbalance, and animosities bring danger into the heart of the city. People who flee into gated communities are responding to a perceived threat. They may exaggerate the threat, but their response isn’t irrational, given the pervasive fact of vulnerability and tacit recognition that we assemble to avert it. Purpose and fear expose regulation’s two sides. we adjust to our circumstances by pacifying them as best we can, though we despair of having control sufficient to defend ourselves. Circumstances we can’t control are always a risk, though we also risk defeating ourselves when initiative and productivity generate complexities and conflicts we can’t subdue. We struggle to create a more ample balance, but then our settlements molder or

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implode. The dynamics of internal systems couple to external circumstances in ways that guarantee instability. 5. Process at three speeds Each of the three variables has its characteristic rhythm and tempo. Holistic regulation is (ideally) pragmatic, but steady. That must be so if systems and their members are to have a clear idea of traffic and its rules as they organize and plan. Some systems—short conversations—are ephemeral, others endure. We say that life is short, but it is often long enough for participation in myriad systems, some that survive us, many that do not. There is also this alternate way of regarding process, though care is required because it encourages a dangerous elision considered below. Think of markets and cultures as the seas in which people and systems form; we swim in waters that nourish and support us. Or substitute for the metaphor with talk of constitution and downward causation: cultures and markets have no reality about from their constituent people and systems, yet their rules and practices constrain their parts. Individual persons are rock bottom in this hierarchy. Processes intrinsic to them have cycles and constituents native to the lower orders of Figure 1, but they, too—organs, cells, even molecules— are affected by higher-order regulation when laws, markets, or culture determine diet and education. Reciprocal causal relations regulate the internal economies of systems, but systems, too, are warped by higher-order constraints: the workings of schools and restaurants are constrained by a local authority’s laws. Cities are self-assembling; people and systems form as they swim or float in its tides. Process works at three orders: individuals, systems, and the whole form and reform while achieving a steady state. There is minimal integration when a city is a bundle of unintegrated systems and networks sharing space, a feeble government, and a fragmentary infrastructure. There is more integration if balance is achieved within networks that organize life in large swathes of a city. Balance would be optimal if, as never happens, every resident matured within loosely regulated productive systems. The result would be a totalizing balance, but not fascist or corporate state. This would be that far-from-equilibrium attractor where individual autonomy is achieved within systems that pursue separate though complementary aims while organizing for collective self-regulation.

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Balance so characterized is a formal template. It has several material expressions, each never more than a partial expression of the ideal. Economic balance implies an array of productive systems, each complementary to the others (dress factories and dry-goods stores), or it implies productive systems (software makers, hospitals, and steel mills) that reduce the effects of economic decline (unemployment and falling house prices) because their cycles of profitability are mutually independent. More fundamentally, economic balance is right proportion in the relations of needy people to those people or systems that produce needed goods and services. Or, more instrumentally, it is the relationship of workers, systems that bind them in productive activity, and the authority that proscribes some activities while facilitating others. Political balance requires space for individual judgment, disparate centers of authority (cities, states, and the federal government), and forums and procedures for resolving disputed ideas about priorities and policies. Domestic balance implies division in the rights and obligations of family life. What should count as fair division is contestable; it varies among cultures, but always requires some distribution of rights and duties to individuals, core relationships (husbands and wives), or the whole. Cultural balance implies an array of activities appropriate to the different tastes and tasks of individuals and systems (violinists or trumpeters, string or brass sections, and their orchestra). These are some principal material expressions of balance. All are loosely related; neither requires the other: balance could be achieved in a fragile economy having one product and little or no cultural diversity. These examples and their deficiencies contrast with balance itself: balance is a formal property, an abstraction or template that has no material reality apart from its instantiations in social relations and social activity. A team wins because individual batters hit well, because its essential units—pitcher and catcher; shortstop, second and first basemen—play well together, and because coaches direct play effectively: the blueprint itself doesn’t win or lose. Balance among the variables is, nevertheless, hard to achieve because each factor resists accommodation by dominating the others, or because we regard one or another as self-sufficient. Young adults treasure their freedom after leaving restrictive families and schools. They will make or join systems that shape their lives, but that outcome seems distant and for the moment distasteful. Systems impatient of their members’ personal interests are

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equally shortsighted: each scants the other when their interests are perceived as mutually exclusive. We manage these oppositions by giving individuals time and space to choose engagements appropriate to their tastes and talents. We say that systems need the attention of their members, if shared interests are to dominate impatience and discordant aims. Stability in core systems reduces pressure on individuals by supplying a context for growth and security; people need vocations appropriate to their aims and talents; systems need their energy and skills. Opposition is reconciled when responsibility to systems is consistent with self-regard and the opportunity to decide the time and effort devoted to every commitment. Viable solutions aren’t arbitrary or crude: minutes to child care; hours with friends. Balance seems mysterious because there are no fixed styles or formulae for achieving it. Appropriate solutions are sensitive to the character and development of the persons and systems at issue, their circumstances and relations. Complexity makes the task bewildering, but some parameters— those closer to the ground—are specifiable. First among them are the skill and measured self-regard of individuals, and their commitment to systems willingly inherited or chosen. There are several such systems in every life, so dedication to each is nuanced by one’s concern for others. Socially prescribed attitudes often rank priorities for us, but these are recommendations, not edicts. Individuals decide the time and effort to be devoted to their several roles. Most make plausible choices: bandits and child deserters are relatively uncommon. Balance favors democratic government and a market economy, given equal access and opportunity. The qualifier is essential because, paradoxically, democratic governments and market economies are antithetical to both access and opportunity—hence to balance—when a city or society’s constituent networks are firmly stratified: power, better jobs, and advantages are reserved to the systems and members of one or more dominant networks. Elections are free—anyone can run for office—but winners are usually members of the in-group; garbage is collected everywhere, but only favored precincts are clean. Why do winners always win? Because insiders are rewarded and outsiders intimidated: losers imagine that things could be worse. That could be so, but equally life would be better if prejudicial advantage—stratification—didn’t nullify the promise

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that democracy and a market economy facilitate mobility, opportunity, and initiative for all.20 This is the promise of equal access. It shouldn’t be conflated with the expectation of equal outcomes because abolishing the biases introduced by stratified networks will not eliminate material differences: opportunities will always vary with circumstances (good weather or bad); outcomes will always be a function of personal initiative and skill. Some people will have, see, and profit from opportunities others miss or ignore: suitors are rejected; initiatives fail. Sustaining an open playing field requires attention to these unequal results: the public needs to take care that unequal outcomes aren’t a seed-bed for resurgent stratification. For stratification is an abiding, all but ineliminable obstacle to the ideal democracy of inclusion, opportunity, mutual respect, and participation in the self-regulating public. People struggle with the competing demands of their systems or the tension between self-regard and duties to family, friends, or jobs. They are grateful that others make traffic laws, manage elections, and want public office. Corporate self-regulation is not an option for them: they may read Locke or Jefferson without knowing how to make those romantic democrats cogent to nation states or to the markets and communication networks that perforate their borders. A coterie of elected Americans and their appointees start a war that none can manage; no combination of citizens knows how to repair the damage or avert similar errors, given the Constitutional provisions that sanctioned their election or appointment. We shudder, close our eyes, and wait for a reckoning that is opaque to everyone but survivors and the wounded. War in Iraq has taught us several things: that state power is very great, that some people elected are incompetent to use it, that media and money distort the public perception of candidates for office, that most of us don’t know what is done or why, that we pay too little attention to things done in our name, and that the power to regulate civil society is compromised or sabotaged by external affairs, real or imagined. These effects are confounding: they expose our inability to create a public responsible for corporate self-regulation by informing and organizing ourselves. This is a pervasive failure that stretches from nation-states to city neighborhoods. See the discussion of clientelism in Luis Fernando Medina, A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 177-200).

20

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There, too, disparate opinions and interests preclude the cooperation and coordination that would solve simple problems: let other people fix them. Some gladly oblige because power has uses incidental to common aims. How is a self-organizing public created, given the complexity of the modern state, its perversion by competing corporate powers, its displacement by lobbying and hype? Why is it appropriate that American presidential and congressional elections are decided by advertising campaigns and soundbytes? The cure has eight parts, most of them anticipated in Dewey’s book of 1929, The Public and its Problems. The first is educational: Americans speak of democracy as a holy grail; we forget that informed participation is one of its conditions. Second is the need to organize locally about issues of common concern. Third is the importance of forums where issues—however contentious —are considered pragmatically: we want viable solutions, less dissension. Fourth is the need for media that inform rather than inflame. Fifth is the neutering of interests and organizations determined to preempt or sabotage public deliberation. But sixth is this question about the role of systems, including churches and corporations: how can they legitimately express their concerns in a polity designed to deny them a political voice? Seventh is confirming evidence that the self-regulating public has begun to recover authority; persistence falters without proof of success. Eighth, oversight implies anticipation as well as reaction: we need the judicious social steering best achieved when governments make strategic adjustments ahead of changes felt by systems and identified by their thoughtful, observant members. We never catch up if we persistently ignore signs of the next storm. Is it likely that citizens or core systems will ever have effective leverage in a nation-state of 300 million people or a city of 50 thousand? Probably not. Tolerance for network stratification and oligarchy is proportionate to one’s comfort: much that is politically intolerable is ignored if wealth is confused with well-being. Yet passivity is reckless, given the three pillars of social health: individuality and initiative, productive systems, and the public deliberations responsible for corporate discipline. None of the three is reducible to or substitutable for the others; all are essential constituents of the dynamic relationship in which each conditions the others. But absences, losses, or failures often go unnoticed: our ancestors didn’t miss not having a written language. Most people have no opportunity to participate in a deliberating public and don’t know what advantage it would

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be. It may be true, as Aristotle, said that human perfectibility requires making the laws that regulate civic life; he didn’t say that we educate or organize ourselves to do it. Nor did he emphasize the tradeoff between this moral objective and the incentives of practical advantage: I may not want to share power with others if doing it impairs the network that rewards me. Dominant networks are economically efficient; they manage better and produce more. Resisting them successfully will likely entail less successful economies. This is so because efficient producers capture sources and markets by forming networks that dominate their competitors. Governments can’t do more than mitigate this effect without creating a centrally directed economy that stifles initiative. Which is better for all concerned: a flourishing economy stratified by powerful networks or a government that regulates in the name of equal chances? This is a point about which right and left never agree. I mentioned above that the metaphor infusing these paragraphs is dangerous. That is so, because the holism appropriate to the effects of markets and culture is pernicious when extended to corporate regulation. It does seem that one swims in the ample sea of a culture. Markets, too, are affecting to the point of seeming oceanic. But government must never be allowed to perceive itself as the whole within which systems and individuals acquire rights, identity, and permission to organize, plan, and act. Yet governments and their agents habitually make this mistake. They typically confuse the authority to regulate with the power to define, decide, direct, and create. Go to a city park, step over a fence, walk on the grass, then wait for an attendant to call the policeman who arrests you for trespass. Whose park is it? It belongs, he imagines, to the hierarchy of controlling powers for which he works. He is their agent and surrogate, so it belongs, operationally, to him. But this is all wrong: government—the public institutionalized for a practical aim—is one system among others. Regulation is one of the three essential social variables, so government’s role is critical. But the holistic metaphor isn’t an excuse—it mustn’t be an occasion—for imagining that government, like culture, is the nourishing sea that defines what individuals and systems can do or be. History is social archeology: it chronicles the arguments, reforms, and counter-reforms that resisted or enforced impediments to balance. Process seems ephemeral when only these traces abide. But Jericho isn’t the city it was five thousand years ago; New York isn’t what it was last week: people

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have moved in or out; buildings rise, cranes fall; friendships and businesses have formed or dissolved; the city council has abrogated old laws and passed new ones. Stability dominates this process because of steady, purposive individuals, stable networks, circumstances that secure them, and a corporate authority—city government—that pacifies these networks while mitigating complexity and conflict. City process is less tidy than a sonata. Measures of its health are considered in Chapter Nine.

Chapter Seven City Form Cities are a laboratory for the claims of the previous chapters: all three emphases—individuality and initiative, systems and cooperation, holism and regulation—are conspicuous in them. Each city has a singular look and feel, street plan, and structures, but these perceptions and material properties are rarely more than obscure expressions for the social variables. Ascertain their past and current values, and you know most that is significant in a city’s character and trajectory. Someone thinking of cities is likely to imagine their bulk, pace, or profile: Paris, Venice, or New York, each different from the others. But city is equivocal, because cities are diverse. Some are distinct sites bounded by a wall or distinguished by a skyline, church, or bridge; others sprawl, prosper at crossroads near urban centers, or emerge when small neighboring towns are unified by their mutual dependence (one a dormitory, warehouse, or client for the other). Many cities serve a principal function: religious, financial, intellectual, or military. Some are centers for regional trade and commerce, each a central city with dormitory suburbs and satellite towns. A few are global cities, foci in a system of money, communications, and power. Some are cadaverous because principal industries are defunct. Many are quagmires where no authority coordinates relations between pockets of wealth and swathes of poverty. These versions of urbanity mostly frustrate the ancient dream that cities would foster the intellectual and moral virtues of a perfected humanity. Talent flowers, Plato alleged in The Republic, if people have tasks and education appropriate to their abilities. Intellect will be flexible but vigorous, if crafts are directed and justified by abstract speculations that identify the conditions for effective practice. Reciprocity, cooperation, and mutual

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respect are essential to this design because coordinated tasks and aims are impossible without them. Regulation would be pervasive without being rigid, because every citizen would exercise self-control, because systems would be stabilized by loops of negative feedback that maintain their reciprocities within ranges of sustainable values, and because relations among systems (carpenters, farmers, and tailors, for example) would be disciplined by members who would recognize that their tasks are complementary.1 The Republic implies that social justice is a natural norm. Bodily health is its useful analogue, because the work of every organ depends on both itself and its relations to others. Plato’s ideal city embodies an equivalent reciprocity. Justice in the soul and state are mutually conditioning: individual talents and well-being flourish in well-ordered cities, though such cities cannot be created or sustained without citizens who are temperate and educated for one or another life-securing task. Cities are critical to this equation, because they best approximate the complexity required to achieve these complementary aims. Actual cities are more alike than different, because all are established and sustained by individuals, systems, and the self-regulating whole. Yet health or justice—balance in the relation of the three variables, universal participation in city systems, and corporate regulation—is elusive in actual cities, because conflict and complexity make them schismatic and clumsy. Specifying the urban conditions for these ideals is my aim in these final three chapters. 1. Carrying capacity Every city is a maw that nibbles or chews its way through quantities of energy and materiel. Carrying capacity is the maximally sustainable quantity of resources derivable from its hinterland and available to a city, given current technology. Carrying capacity is variable, because evolving technology improves crop yields, or augments the energy supply by supplying new sources: ocean currents, for example. Resources—including residents and suppliers, habitable and arable land, water, housing, and the infrastructure required for power generation, transport, and communication— imply the terrain from which it draws workers, energy, and materiel. This is a 1

Plato, Republic, 367e7-466d5. Pp. 614-705

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city’s ecological footprint: the land, water, air, and living things it affects. City residents expect heat and water, coffee in the morning, bread in the shops. We barely imagine the weave of systems required to sustain us. The maximum traffic flow on a road is calculated as so many cars moving at a given speed over a specified distance; varying the size or weight of the cars alters the road’s capacity; too many cars and traffic stops. Inversely, we divide carrying capacity by the number of residents or systems to derive the quantity of resources available to each. Carrying capacity is more than adequate—there is excess capacity—if an average person or system’s fraction of all resources is more than the quantity required to sustain that mythic person or system. This implies resources available for more consumption or more consumers. Capacity is inadequate if the fraction is less than the minimum required. Let resources be expressed as dollars and say that a settlement’s resource base is a thousand dollars. This quantity is indifferent to the uses made of it, though we suppose that city residents use it to make their lives and systems viable. If fifty residents need fifteen dollars each in resources, then the twenty dollars available to each (one thousand divided by fifty) leaves a substantial margin for population growth. Prospects are reversed if each person needs resources worth twenty-five dollars, because this entails reduced standards of living, hobbled systems, or a smaller population. These calculations are complicated by the efficacy with which a city regulates its affairs: the same quantity of resources may be used more or less efficiently. Carrying capacity is reduced by waste and carelessness: hence reminders to turn off water taps. But resources experience other pressures, too, given a population’s size and values: does it have interests—frippery or priestly castes—that drain resources; are there conflicts that waste them? Narrowing interests and reducing waste entail that a larger population could enjoy the same level of consumption with the same quantity of resources. These considerations imply an amended notion of carrying capacity: it signifies the quantity of resources available to sustain a population given its habits, complexity, and the efficiencies of its organization. Settlements are precarious because these additional factors reduce their viability. Cities make the risk emphatic, because typical residents have no means of supplying their own food, water, or energy. Someone nearby has a rooster that crows every morning, but this is a pet, not a likely dinner.

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2. Boundaries Boundaries are plain when cities are surrounded by gated walls or water, but not when occasional signs are the only evidence of the transition from Chicago to Evanston or New York to Yonkers. Even the signs are incidental because they mark a change of jurisdiction—sovereignty—not always a breach of community. Simmel’s observation—there can be more or less society2—is a better criterion for city boundaries at times of urban sprawl: city limits are established (however temporarily) wherever the webs of overlapping, hierarchically arrayed systems are flattened and attenuated. This qualitative standard is familiar to everyday experience: we see and feel the places where city intensities, tensions, and densities are reduced or annulled; there are roads, residential developments, gas stations, and occasional malls but little or no urban complexity. (Some city parks challenge this test.) These are frontiers where cities terminate. This way of locating geographic boundaries is plausible, but anomalous when technology makes city borders porous or ambiguous. There are university classes available by way of the internet or satellite television; radio stations broadcast music, news, and information internationally; active, successful businesses trade stocks and bonds from offices in small towns. These are people engaged by city life, while remote from its clamor and grain. 3. Infrastructure Infrastructure makes a city viable by supplying power, water, transport, waste disposal, and communications; schools, hospitals, and housing. It extends beyond a city’s boundaries, however marked, while connecting it to markets and resources: buses and subways within the city, clients, farms, and reservoirs beyond it. Private industry sometimes takes responsibility for building or maintaining infrastructure—England privatized railways and water supply, most housing is privately financed and built—but this is usually government’s work because cost deters private businesses from bankrolling desirable projects unlikely to be profitable: New York’s first subways were constructed by private companies in the 1890s; no private syndicate lobbied to complete the Second Avenue subway line.

2

Simmel, Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, pp. 23-24, 27.

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The task of building and managing infrastructure is oddly disguised. Residents can audit or join the conversation when a city’s aims or values are discussed, but only a few have skills and information sufficient to design and build its airports, schools, hospitals, and transport. Governments respond by consulting their experts, but this is a dilemma: how to plan and build for the whole without ignoring the private interests and perspectives of a city’s myriad residents. Each resident is at home in the city, and treasures its singularities and comforts; none wants to hear that that his or her space is insignificant in the schemes of technicians assigned to enhance the efficiencies of a colossus. Infrastructure is, accordingly, a four-fold challenge to management: first, the problem of democratic oversight—what should be built or repaired?—second, the task of convincing citizens that work is needed; third, the burden of convincing the city treasury to advance sufficient money, fourth the work of design and construction. Democratic oversight dramatizes the difference between citizens and elected regulators (legislators) on one side, experts on the other. Few legislators and most citizens know little or nothing of the arcana familiar to experts making technical decisions. Cities typically hide the tasks of building and managing infrastructure, partly to avoid popular controversy, partly because the public lacks the information and skills required to understand them. But this is anomalous with the idea that citizens are selfregulating, hence responsible for decisions made in their name. Infrastructure is vast, costly, and complicated; building it is disruptive. How do we create it while respecting the comfortable locality of city residents, each guarding his or her private niche?3 How do we distribute responsibility for design and construction to residents too busy or ill-informed to make appropriate judgments? Having no good answer, we settle for the experts we have, and the amnesia affected when residents are asked to share responsibility for the work experts do. What effect would there be if mature, voting residents shared this responsibility? All would be sensitized to the task, but few would make relevant judgments. The parity of the social variables—individuals, systems, and regulation—is often ignored when infrastructure is altered or extended. Sometimes, decisions fall to experts: regulators, in effect. Other times, decisions are made by systems alone, or by systems abetted by vocal 3

See Kevin Lynch, Good City Form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).

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individuals. America built extensive highways, rather than public transport, in and around cities because people wanted private transport and because automobile companies actively lobbied for them. Their slogans—“See the USA in your Chevrolet. America is asking you to call.”—were tuneful and seductive, but the result was perverse: public transport was slighted; there was disproportion in the relation of facilities to needs. Individualism was affirmed when people took jobs far from their singlefamily homes, thereby attenuating family bonds by reducing the time traveling parents could devote to families or other valued systems. Efficient public transport and blocks of ample apartments would have averted both effects, though neither was feasible because of an ideology that emphasizes individual freedom, while deploring as “socialist” every initiative that benefits communities and core systems. Yet individual interests are best served when inflected by those of systems and the self-regulating public. This was Jane Jacobs’ persuasion when she organized to defeat Robert Moses’ plan for a highway through Washington Square in Manhattan. It is apparent, too, in Kevin Lynch’s proposals for transport and housing that respect neighborhood cohesion and the perspectives of individual residents. Haussmann rebuilt Paris without regard for many residents; Beijing remade itself for the recent Olympics while equally careless about established neighborhoods, systems and their members. This superseding intention was justified when New York destroyed slums in the late nineteenth century, thereby reducing the likelihood of citywide epidemics while ignoring the resentment of the people displaced. Those exceptional times required intervention. But there is no balance if the wisdom of builders and city managers always trumps respect for individuals and their systems. 4. Bulk and pace A city’s bulk—the mass, height, and concentration of its structures—is a function of topography, history, culture, technology, and commercial success. There are no skyscrapers in Venice because of silty soil and the technology available when it was built; Paris has few high buildings because respect for its central precincts has justified excluding them. London welcomes builders and their architects because the prevailing balance of initiative, systems, and regulation makes it a thriving financial center. Carryweight ratchets higher—more work to do, more employees and income, more

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density and complexity in the array of systems—when technology and supple regulation enable new systems to form. Bulk is usually concentrated in central cities; typical residential areas have low densities; parks and ports reduce it further. Edge cities often have a core of high buildings surrounded by malls and low- density residential quarters; linked towns—one a commercial center, another more residential— may have few high buildings. Technology that permits instant access to work sites, information, and other people could eliminate bulk altogether by reducing the need for gathering workers to communicate and consult. But this is inefficient in other ways: bulk persists because intensity and spontaneity are its valued effects. Diffusing intensities by reducing personal contacts reduces the flow of ideas, competition, innovation, and efficacy. London’s tall buildings are evidence of this effect on carry-weight and positive feedback. For cities flourish, given a stable supply of resources, when their efficiencies generate the wealth, innovation, and new systems responsible for greater complexity. There is, to be sure, a counter-motion. Bulk as density is vital to productivity (many workers and facilities per task), until technology duplicates its effects without requiring that coworkers share an office. Dispersion is apparent when technicians in Mumbai read x-rays for patients in Milwaukee. But this trajectory has a limit that is not technological: people want direct access to partners: we want their help and companionship. The reciprocities of social life and systems are emotionally sustaining; we are disoriented and demoralized without them. The clatter and excitement of beehive offices and stores testifies to this habit and need; the stubborn loyalty of people clinging to precincts that others call slums confirms it. Technology can’t satisfy them until it mimics the close contact they defend. Pace, like bulk, is one of a city’s identifying marks: sleepy, leisurely, fast, or frenetic. Conversation, street life, fans in the bleachers: all tell of systems that flourish when government regulates with a light hand. Or conversation is hushed, people walk deliberately because natives recognize policemen in street clothes. Pace is a cause when people move with a rhythm they feel. But pace, more litmus test than cause, is also a symptom of the intensity binding people to their systems and aims. It varies as people and systems respond to the intensity and demands of others.

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5. Networks and stratification Density and complexity generate the intensities and opportunities of urban experience; they confirm Hegel’s remark that quantity makes a qualitative difference.4 People living in cities, even those who live alone, are immersed in systems; no one—member or bystander—is ever exempt from their effects. There is, however, a difference in the character of these effects. Some—like noise from a party—are random; others are focused by one’s systems and their affiliates in networks of chained systems. Some of a network’s systems are mutually independent in the respect that none has members that are members of the network’s other systems. The pharmacist shops at the local butcher, newspaper stand, and bakery; the butcher minds his store, but he suffers a little when the pharmacist retires. Networks established by hierarchy and overlap are tighter and more tensile than the systems of this example: a church’s congregants are also their city’s policemen, elected officials, bankers, or merchants; the mayor is the banker’s sister-in-law. Networks are power centers. Their motivation—defense and advantage—is apparent when networks compete for control of civic life. Dominant networks terrace and sculpt societies in terms congenial to themselves. The social architecture they create is often invisible to members of a network that dominates without opposition, though its control is apparent to people living in its shadow. They have fewer opportunities; those they have are less rewarding. People excluded from dominant networks try to create alternate power centers (networks of their own); they defer; or they abase themselves if allowed to join a system in a dominant network. The competition among networks is sometimes benign: there are many storefront churches competing for members in cities where religious commitment is largely incidental to principal systems and interests. But this latitude for experiment is new in itself, and alien in societies where religious identity is a pivot for social power. Secular democracies avert conflict with networks sustained by churches because a generalized skepticism deprives churchmen of moral authority, or because a constitutional provision deprives churches of secular authority. But other networks—founded in business, politics, race, or gender—are equally entitling and exclusive. A new resident G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. 79-80. 4

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negotiates his or her city looking for evidence of the barriers and throughways its networks create; he or she ignores them because of luck or naiveté; or he discovers that the labyrinth of city systems and networks creates spaces where network authority doesn’t extend. 6. Centrifugal and centripetal forces Cities are perpetually alive as people and systems engage one another or withdraw into themselves. These contrary motions, advance and retreat, may be cyclical, simultaneous, or sporadic, but, either way, they make relations confusing: please decide, do you want my attention? The answer is often “Yes,” or “Later, not now.” It can’t always be “No, never” because people and systems aren’t self-sufficient. None can respond scrupulously to “Yes, always” because all risk drowning in the noise, demands, and intensity of city life. Time apart, time to recover self and equanimity, is a condition for surviving the tide while satisfying one’s essential commitments. They go better if distractions are minimized while skills are focused by tasks, but then work ends and one notices people all around. Avoiding many, we want and need the attention, the presence of some. Efficient systems need them, too: no stores without customers, no traffic policemen without traffic. These vectors resemble the opposing blades of a machine that spins in alternate directions: togetherness goes smoothly until violence, pollution, or crowding makes people despair for secure private spaces. Suburbs are an ambiguous solution: close enough to work or visit, far enough to escape noise and pathology. Businesses, too, retreat to these halfway spaces, so cities are leached of sustaining energy, jobs, and wealth. Functions once native to an old city are transformed and transported to surrogates that are smaller, temporary, and new. Nomads desert campsites when resources are exhausted or the site is too cluttered for occupation; cities lose viability when dated structures or social pathologies make them unsuitable to current uses. Functional clones are their successors. Edge cities challenge the expectation that cities are viable centers of business, government, culture, and worship, all surrounded by bands of Edge cities, flourishing near old industry, housing, and suburbs.5 metropolitan centers, solve big-city problems—principally, space, cost, commuting time, and violence—by leaving them. Clustered or sprawling at 5

See Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor, 1992).

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the intersections of principal roads, they prosper where technology and transport support people and businesses that flee big-city ordinances, danger, and congestion. Government is spare, there is little or no history, but a rich economy supports the initiatives of canny entrepreneurs. Their rationale is usually suppressed or obscured by emphasizing the tasks and aims of resettled businesses. But their buildings and parking lots are ciphers until urbanity is established by schools, churches, and all the paraphernalia required when employees settle nearby. There is little or no high culture— universities, museums, and concert halls—but appearances are misleading when internet technology supplies information, books, music, and films to anyone wanting them. Edge cities have no history, but that doesn’t annoy residents for whom stability has the whiff of obsolescence. One doesn’t keep a camera or car past the time when mechanical failure and better substitutes make it dispensable; why suppose that age makes houses or neighborhoods worth saving? Why refit an old building if leaving the city reduces commuting time to 15 minutes? But this is cavalier if attitudes and skills prized in these new cities—discipline, cooperation, and efficacy, for example—were incubated and extracted from the dense array of social systems that distinguish the cities abandoned. Edge cities aren’t sustainable without stable families, schools, and all the ballast of core systems. Can newly resident parents teach those skills to their children, or do these towns fail because their children never acquire the skills and intensity that first residents learned in the central city? Edge cities are slow to overcome the suspicion that they are ephemeral; it lingers because the reasons justifying their creation were reactive. Postulate some new blight or advantage, and one imagines that they, too, will be abandoned. The origin and trajectory of other new cities resemble Chicago’s advantages in the nineteenth century: especially, location, and the ships and railways that carried wheat, ore, and finished goods to remote markets. Ideas are a comparable resource. They may come from anywhere, but universities are reliable generators created to magnify the benefits of reflection. Emphasizing thought, they inspire technologies and social projects that transform life’s material conditions. Cities that fill the gap between Stanford and Berkeley and those circling Boston on Route 128 are their issue. They will endure as long as the universities that supply their ideas and patents. But reflection—thought and imagination—doesn’t depend on universities. The

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ethos of some big cities inspires motions— private reflection and social engagement—that evoke the force of a two-stroke engine: invent and apply. Invent, because applications real or imagined are conceivable and because other inventors are close at hand, provoking ideas while competing for better ones; apply, because inventors like seeing the material effects of their ideas and because businesses want the profits earned by selling them. Some residents flee urban demands for reflections of a different sort. Big and clumsy, dominated always by other concerns, cities create niches and sufficient wealth to support the work of thinkers, musicians, painters, dancers, or their critics. Abandoned factories or old tenements become sanctuaries for thinkers and artists of all sorts. Some are pretenders or mad, many have ideas or projects that come to little or nothing. Others persist and succeed. Most are ignored, but a few have effects that are transforming: ideas exploited in suburbs and edge cities were created in the back streets of bigger towns. This caveat is also relevant: rumination seems elitist because it speaks to time and interests more refined than many people enjoy. But this want of interest is an inhibition: we lose touch with ideas and talents when overwhelmed by the demands of practical life. Everyone reflects many times a day: what to do, how or when to do it. But there is also the thinking that comes when the busyness of city life is suppressed. This effect isn’t often noticed because thought and attention are usually dominated by layered tasks and duties; one takes a walk or retires to a quiet place, but the effect is temporary relief, not this deeper, expansive, productive thinking. For there is a difference between efficacy and rumination. City people are often effective, but they need and rarely have time for listening to themselves: most can’t hear whatever percolates within them in the midst of city static. There are novelists, artists, and photographers who adore the bulk and shadows of city life. But settling the clamor in one’s head is usually a necessary condition for every variety of conceptual or artistic creation. One needs relief from city distractions, free space for germinating ideas. This is another anomaly of city life: people can see or hear great art or music; many have unsuspected talents, but most never enjoy the peace required to discover or cultivate them. Rigorous leaders sometimes imagine that city people need the discipline of harvesting corn or picking weeds. This is halfway to the better idea of writers’ colonies, music camps, or quiet weeks at home by oneself.

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Reflection’s imperative is usually modest: to collect and settle oneself after hours or days of depleting worries or work. The reflections of artists and writers seem dangerous by comparison: thoughtful singularity is also anonymity, a condition more often shunned than admired. Writing and art are also suspect because of the vanity implied by doing them. Claims to originality or depth are often a conceit, but that is no concern to amateurs whose pleasure is never compromised by pretension. There are thinkers and artists who take themselves seriously: how shall one confirm that work has the depth and originality one seeks? The evidence of city resonances is untrustworthy, because there are few reliable critics and because popular media simplify any idea they notice while discarding most of its substance. One carries on without approval. It’s enough that one isn’t interrupted: recognition is usually incidental to the passion driving artists and writers. Coming late or never in the process that invents and socializes useful ideas, it cannot be a principal motive for those who do it. One imagines that reflection goes best in universities, though most thinking doesn’t need their support. Great music and art enjoyed the patronage of monarchs or religious sects; work sponsored by bureaucrats or universities is usually less accomplished. The best of modern physics and philosophy (Newton at the Treasury, Einstein in a patent office; Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Peirce) was supported by employers oblivious to their ideas. Why are a city’s interstices more supportive than a university chair? Because thought and creation are expressions of character, talent, and opportunity, and because conditions that promote this convergence are all but impossible to design. Joyce wrote The Dubliners while living in Trieste: how could that have been arranged? It seems paradoxical that thinkers and artists can be disengaged while living cheek by jowl with many others. But this effect isn’t peculiar to them. It happens because all or most people have multiple roles in several or many systems: schedules are tight; one sees many people with little time to bond. Managing disparate roles, prioritizing time and effort, so much here, so much there, one often withdraws from a current task to reflect on the last or anticipate the next. The effect is dislocated attention: people are dominated by tasks and schedules rather than the warmth of personal relations. The ephemerality of these relations makes some people desolate, but it nourishes self-reliance in those having a bent for thought and autonomy.

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City dwellers romanticize towns and villages because city intensities are distracting or crushing. We imagine their residents uncorrupted by pressures that diminish city life (less vanity, less glare); we guess that personal life is richer because of friends and families known for generations; there is time to think. These worlds seem mutually exclusive: intensified city life or its countrified other. Everything in the middle is likely more diffuse than either extreme: one moves to the suburbs to escape the central city or to escape a smaller town when a city is too frightening. But these are the deformed perspectives of people whose fears outrun their experience. The idea of the vital city has an elitist edge belied by the many residents too poor to enjoy its benefits. These are people who travel uncomfortably from remote houses or apartments to jobs that are underpaid and unappreciated. Moving to the suburbs—to fresh air and better schools— is a dream. They want to move but they know or suspect that something is lost when the close proximity of thinking people is sacrificed for space, safety, clean air, and a front porch. Their hopes of a quiet home and garden are the inverted image of young people happy to find an empty loft or bedroom within walking distance of the subway that will carry them to school, auditions, or any job. City energy and wealth support high culture, though money doesn’t explain actors and dancers who try out for bit roles in local theatres, jobs as part-time lecturers, or places in a chorus line. People who believe that work of a kind exalts their talents will sacrifice for the chance to do it. Those people go to cities. They join the tide of migrants who swell urban populations in developing countries and the counter-tide that reverses the flight to American suburbs and edge cities. Businesses and workers left cities because land and gasoline were cheap and roads were good. Now, workers look for housing closer to city jobs because gas is too expensive for long commutes. Businesses, fearful of losing employees or wanting to secure a stable labor pool, consider going to or toward central cities. These pressures will have unsettling effects on city housing: workers moving into the city will compete with poor and immigrant residents already living there for housing that these middle- class people would once have shunned. Prices will rise; the poor will be displaced to areas ever more remote from their work. There will also be some worthwhile effects: housing stock in and near the city will be renewed, public transportation will be upgraded and extended. Rebirth will be selective because it is always a function of the economy energized when

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businesses relocate in or near city centers. Some currently moribund cities will recover the intensities, and perhaps the balance that once distinguished them. 7. Attractor states Carrying capacity is a function of two variables: population; and the quantity of materiel and energy available to a settlement’s residents, given a terrain and current technology. Inversely, carrying capacity fixes a lower boundary for settlement efficiency: efficiencies below the limit consume more resources than those available to serve the current population and their systems (given a constant rate of expenditure and replacement). City people, systems, and networks settle into a range of efficiencies appropriate to both the energy supply and the energy required to stabilize them. Stability endures indefinitely, intrusions and internal disruptions aside, given constituents whose habitual use doesn’t exceed the stock of available and replaceable energy. Hence the surmise that population size, density, and complexity are the dynamic realization of an attractor. Attractors are the steady states— health, death, or stupor, for example—into which an open dynamic system settles as it exchanges matter and energy with its environment. Havana’s old Buicks are sustainable given skilled mechanics and an energy supply; high consumption is sustainable if the energy used is replaceable. A steady state is vulnerable at both points: inefficient machines need quantities of fuel that exceed or exhaust the supply. The Buicks stabilize at a set point where speed can be maintained given fuel sufficient to power their motors. This idea is more transparent if we clarify an ambiguity in the sense of least energy. Two interpretations are relevant. Gas-guzzling car engines are sustainable if mechanics have maximized the efficiency of their motors and if ample gasoline is available at a cost their owners are willing and able to pay. The cars operate at a set-point where efficiency is matched to available energy. Yet they are not least energy systems when least energy is construed this other way: a least energy state operates at the lowest level of energy expenditure required to generate a given activity or effect. No teamwork without practice; more fragility, greater risk of breakdown when materials are designed to function, with least energy, at their structural limits. Imagine an airplane designed to perform with the least energy expenditure required to propel it at high speed. Imagine, too, that it always

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flies at the limits of speed and altitude. Now consider the implications for balance. It could be achieved in a settlement with wasteful systems in a far from equilibrium steady state, though it would be hard to sustain for two reasons: first, a finite energy supply; second, the inefficiencies and breakdowns of the settlement’s imperfectly designed constituent systems. There would be fewer breakdowns if well-designed systems could perform the same tasks when organized (internally and in relation to one another) to use the least energy required to do their work. Earth’s orbit about the sun is sustainable because efficient; it would be neither if erratic. Optimal city balance would be a far-from-equilibrium steady state at the limit where order verges on chaos because misalignment within or among systems would require energy likely to exceed the available supply. Optimal city balance would always carry the risk of an implosion reducing it to the lesser organizations represented in Figure 1: tribes, families, or single persons. There are myriad attractors of both kinds: those satisfied by systems that work despite inefficiencies because of sufficient fuel, and those inhering in systems organized for the least energy expenditure required for the work they do. Attractors of both sorts are indifferent to the uses made of energy. This indifference to human practices and concerns is a point to emphasize if we are to avert the error of thinking that an urban attractor is a telos—a final cause or aim—carrying city life to an exalted end. That idea is congenial to the hope that cities may be the apotheosis of human intellect, sociality, and artistic splendor, but it has no foundation in the attractor states of stable dynamic systems. Least energy is a point of accommodation between two variables: supply and demand. Machines run down; energy runs out. Degradation is as common as prosperity; cemeteries are steady states. Attractors are pertinent to the idealization of cities because high productivity, civil peace, and an exuberant cultural life may be more than precarious chance effects. The conjuncture of organized complexity and a reliable energy supply may create a self-stabilizing steady state. This opens a possibility that would have seemed utopian and unachievable: a complex social system may be sustained far from equilibrium (entropy), given sufficient resources, by virtue of its energy-efficient organization and activities. This is not so odd as first it seems: health is an attractor stabilized by organic efficiencies. Why shouldn’t the efficiency of disciplined citizens and their systems stabilize a city? Stability may endure as long as they do.

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Consider a jigsaw puzzle that is complete but for a single piece. Now construe the puzzle as a set of ecological niches, all but one filled by species that are mutually sustaining. The empty niche is available to a species that may evolve over time to fill it. The successful competitor adapts to the demands or opportunities afforded this space by occupants of the other niches. It satisfies them while some or all of them help to stabilize it at a sustainable rate of energy expenditure; occupying the niche on their terms likely requires less energy output than struggling to dominate them. Cities find or create their niches in local or global economies. They achieve and sustain high levels of complexity, productivity, civic peace, and cultural attainment if initiative and well-managed systems are sustained by effective regulation, benign circumstances, and a sufficient energy supply. Systems falter if too many inputs disrupt or confuse a system’s responses; stability—a steady state—is more likely if modularity and efficient organization filter inputs, thereby reducing the energy cost of relevant and effective responses. Accordingly, urban social stability has three conditions: a supply of usable energy; the modularity hence efficiency of energy users (people and systems); and the requirement that energy is efficiently distributed to efficient modules. These conditions are satisfied by the systems represented in Figure 1. Molecules (termination point 3 in the figure) contain an energy source sufficient to maintain them; people and settlements (termination points 7 and 10) are organized for energy efficiency while able to acquire sustaining energy. Settlements may be organized in many ways, but their corporate attractor has this simple feature: every such organization distributes available energy in ways that make the complex sustainable. This isn’t always a high-order attractor: badly organized, wasteful settlements having no energy surplus stabilize at a lower order of complexity and activity. Stability is achieved—usually at a level well below the ideal—because settlements embody the two kinds of feedback. A clumsy city, too large for its infrastructure and resources, loses population—negative feedback—when frustrated residents go elsewhere. Flight is stopped or diminished when local obstacles or insults are reduced (fewer traffic jams because fewer cars), or because the people remaining don’t have resources to leave. A settlement grows—positive feedback—because ample resources, opportunities, initiatives, able systems, and effective regulation drive it to stable prosperity.

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Settlements are more likely to achieve stability if they are constructed of modules, as brick houses have windows and doors as well as walls and a roof. But houses are also affected by subsidence and weather; individuals and their systems are affected by economic cycles, birth rates, and epidemics. These complexities vastly complicate the task of specifying the attractor state pertinent to any particular social order. What is the least energy state, the attractor, appropriate to the hierarchies and overlap of Munich or Bonn? Some attractors implicate processes having a specific periodicity (life’s span, earth’s seasons, planets orbiting the sun), but cities have no established span or cycles. Old cities (Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Rome) have often changed, though not in regular ways: too many contingencies and failures disrupt formation of coherent patterns. There is no map adequate to urban complexity: we infer its attractor from a city’s stability. We can’t precisely specify its constituents or conditions. Attractor states don’t require human intervention, but they can be opposed: death requires less energy than life, but we avert it as best we can. Despotism, too, is an inappropriate attractor for human societies because suppressing individuals and their systems distorts them while using energy its systems could use productively. The mutual accommodation of systems, individuals, and their regulator has various possible outcomes: accordingly, balance signifies a range of attractors. The lowest order is the meager accommodation of systems formed to satisfy the least material needs of their members: food, clothing, shelter, and defense. Individuals and their systems supply these needs and no others; regulation (including myths that justify these ways) is steady and commanding. The society is self-sustaining, given a stable source of energy and environment. Generations come and go, but little changes. Disrupt these rhythms, and the outcome is uncertain. Balance shifts, inefficient systems perish. Effective systems—new or old—generate opportunities; farmers growing cotton provoke weavers and Eli Whitney. Density, diversity, intellect, need, and opportunity sometimes move a balanced settlement to the higher order of complexity familiar in some large cities. Positive feedback is a mechanism, natural rather than contrived, for creating the circumstances where Greek ideals of intellect and sensibility can be joined to contemporary ideas of tolerance, civility, and respect. We can have hockey rinks, laboratories, factories, and music schools. Balance of the elementary sort is meager; balance of this higher order is ample. The optimal balance of ideal cities—orderly complexity with minimal conflict (friction),

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productive systems, and inventive people—is an attractor that gives space and expression to each of these variables. This is a high energy state far from entropy, though balance implies that each variable’s expressions are energy efficient. One may doubt that steady states of any degree—meager, ample, or optimal—are achievable in settlements of any size. Their complexity and diversity would seem to preclude the application of ideas formulated to describe gas heated in a closed container. But this use of the idea isn’t metaphorical. Is the idea testable? For there seems no way to falsify it if every city, prosperous or decrepit, achieves an attractor state. This isn’t an obstacle. Ideas about universal gravitation are also wrongly criticized for being unfalsifiable, given weightless states and thought experiments that prefigure possible worlds where gravity doesn’t obtain. Here, too, there is evidence justifying the idea’s application. Settlements failing or growing uncontrollably are in transition from one attractor to another. There was stability before; there will be stability again, at a different order of complexity, when city people and systems can organize to extract and use as much energy as they need to stabilize. Is talk of attractors a merely allusive way of translating Plato’s idealization of cities into vaguely naturalistic terms? No, stability is evidence of an attractor in every dynamic system whose complexity is maintained at least cost to the available energy. Settlement complexity is an example. Infuse cities them with more energy in the form of creative people, resources, or more efficient regulation, and either of two things may happen: a spasm of activity will dissipate because it wasn’t used to create stabilizable systems and their effective members, or new and reenergized systems will stabilize at a pitch of greater productivity. The attractor state described here as ideal is the balance ascribed to cities when efficient regulation and productive systems enable individuals to flourish in roles appropriate to their talents and training. This is the far-fromequilibrium attractor idealized in stories of medieval Venice or nineteenthcentury Paris. We imagine balance in them as the updated version of Plato’s idea that justice is a harmony of parts. But balance is generic: it requires individual initiatives, systems, and regulation without prescribing specific expressions for the three variables. Families are critical stabilizers, but they may be large or small, nuclear or extended. Initiatives and regulation are necessary fixtures, but situations and practicality determine their objectives

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and expressions. Optimal balance is a designer’s fantasy. Ample balance is our best hope; meager balance is the usual outcome. One sees balance forming in rudimentary cities, then transformed as they grow. Large cities were slow to develop: only ten percent of the world’s population lived in cities of any size (having as few as several thousand people) before 1900. That is so because a large complex of overlapping, hierarchical systems requires material conditions—transport, communication, resources, and organization—that were unavailable. Having more resources, better technology, more efficient systems, and more complex ways of integrating them, we have bigger effective cities. These open dynamic systems regulate themselves, overcome disruptions, and stabilize at a level of energy expenditure appropriate to the carrying capacity of their ecological footprints. But cities are messy; there are many streets and corners where people are more distracted than efficient. Tight regulation eliminates these stragglers at cost to the freedom and initiative of everyone who declines fixed roles in established systems. Cities disciplined to this degree stagnate; they pay for efficiency with uniformity and rigidity: uniformity because discipline is more easily enforced if people and systems are restricted to similar activities; rigidity because people fearing punishment settle for activities that are safe because routinized and tolerated. Both qualities are alien to cities because density, spread, and complexity make them resistant to close supervision, and because the diversity of city interests precludes a simple disciplinary regime. Businessmen, priests, and street musicians have distinct venues, friends, and projects. Either activity may thrive while the others suffer. Coherence doesn’t require that none can flourish unless all do; it does preclude activities intent on harm. This discipline favors rules no more constricting than those regulating cars and drivers. For regulation needs a practical reason, one justified by the need—the conflict or complexity—it cures. Assume for reasons above that attractors are the steady states into which dynamic systems settle if undisturbed. Unable to create attractors—we satisfy but don’t create them—we tailor our settlements to a design having two virtues: they suit our interests while organization and modularity generate no expenditures more extravagant than energy supply and resources allow. The city of desire should have systems competent to satisfy basic needs and valued talents: food, clothing, shelter, police, fire, health, education, music,

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art, and sport. Like watchmakers who build modularity into their timepieces, we want stable and productive systems whose efficient reciprocities reduce demands on the energy supply. These should be systems responsible to their members and responsive to altered circumstances. There are many obstacles and false starts, but this result, like bodily health, seems realizable. For health, too, is sometimes beyond our reach, though it is a steady state when achieved. No array of individuals and systems as complex as a city coheres forever, though planning and foresight—The Republic is our example—are apparent and effective wherever settlements thrive. These communities are self-organizing, self-stabilizing, and resilient: sometimes disrupted but homeostatic, they recover. Imagine that neighboring families are mutually annoying. They can battle forever, one or both can move, or they can find ways to settle their differences. This last alternative is exemplary, not because morally better, but instead because it satisfies a least energy attractor, a steady state stabilized by its self-regulating participants. The once quarreling neighbors become a higher-order system sustained by their newly tolerant reciprocities. The attractor is natural; the neighbors find it when quarreling is unacceptably expensive. Notice, too, that the attractor is attractive: accommodations are pervasive because scarcity, crowding, and the cost of hostility oblige rivals to compromise: we legislate the terms of social harmony when “the harm to the sufferer outweighs the advantage to the doer.”6 This is Plato describing the embryonic public—the idealized attractor—dear to the Greeks, then to Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Dewey. Why live in cities when balance and their aims are more easily achieved in smaller communities? The answer can’t depend on the three social variables—individuals, systems, and a regulator—because they are present in every settlement. It derives instead from the singular character of cities where balance achieves fertile complexity. Most taxi drivers don’t want ballet lessons, but there are dance studios for those who do. People having talent and passion know that perfecting their skills requires nurture from people like themselves. Systems form and dissolve as people seek others of like mind; opportunities they promote incite initiatives that reward their members with affiliations, profits, or more opportunities: 6

Plato, Republic, 358e-359b7, pp. 606-607.

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The result will be a greater variety of individuals than under any other constitution. So it may be the finest of all, with its variegated pattern of all sorts of characters….A democracy is so free that it contains a sample of every kind.7 Balance is always diverse to some degree because people everywhere form systems to satisfy their needs and exploit their talents. Higher grades of balance are achieved when energy and complexity promote systems and talents that would otherwise founder for want of opportunity. Social intensity is the measure of urban diversity when anomalous interests are pursued by people standing back to back while oblivious to one another’s passions and skills. Rhythms are slower in smaller town, but opportunities for talent and profit outweigh sentiment. Ambitious people see the possibilities, stifle anxiety, and leave. City intensity bewilders them: so many systems, too many choices, discipline that seems too lax (in the streets), or constraining (in offices, schools, or galleries). The attractor is alternately paralyzing or magnetic, and never as stable as it seems. 8. Beauty Beauty is a principal consideration when people describe the delight and calm they feel while walking in a favorite city. But beauty is rare in many cities; New York dazzles and intimidates, but it isn’t always pretty. Why do we believe that cities ought to be beautiful against the evidence that they are not? One reason is the imposing structures, gardens, or squares of principal cities. These are affirmations of urban worth; they are or seem to be the apotheosis of an urban intention. Anything so beautiful—this city, its culture and society—should endure. We decorate streets, build parks and splendid buildings to celebrate ourselves: this is our home; see the pride and pleasure of living here. Or we beautify to intimidate. Great buildings express the power of their occupants. The beauty of palaces, churches, and mosques ennobles city residents while compelling respect. Individuals build fine homes; corporations build iconic towers. Some governments express their power by tearing up an old city to create an urban testament to themselves. Manhattan never stops remaking itself, though the buildings of city government are mostly ordinary, old, or 7

Ibid., 537a3-558c5, pp. 785-786.

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invisible. Large public spaces were created years ago. Now, when commerce dominates the city, government regulates without intruding: renting space in the boroughs is cheaper than building on land that earns tax revenue. Beauty is mostly an afterthought, a value discounted unless wealth or vanity promotes it. This is so because beauty is thought to be a veneer, something shallow and superfluous. Think of architects who resemble fine jewelers: every other value is subordinate to the “look” of a space or building. This persuasion trivializes beauty by abstracting it from social function, though such buildings—schools, office blocks, churches, or fire stations—are used by people doing the work of core systems. Structures can show their principal uses as plainly as bicycles while exploiting the beauty of their materials, site, or design. Architects can make this emphasis vivid by designing interiors as carefully as exteriors. The tension between a building’s inside and outside is hard to resolve if exteriors are dramatically asymmetrical while the space to be occupied is principally a box. Architects sometimes solve this problem by designing a building’s exterior while ignoring its prospective uses: flimsy interior walls can be reshuffled to satisfy successive tenants. This commercial aim all but guarantees that the beauty of an exterior design has little or no connection to the uses made of a building’s interior. Aldo Rossi observed that structures designed for one purpose are successively altered for others: the interiors of old Italian buildings are often gutted and remade as commerce and technology promote different uses.8 Hence his schizoid recommendation: save the facades but modernize interiors so little or nothing of a building’s uses shows on its face. This is odd because a structure’s uses are the principal or only reason for its existence. Caring only for the aesthetics of the outside—limiting beauty to a structure’s façade—resembles confusing a woman’s value with her makeup. It ignores the aesthetics of dwelling, though city people spend most of their time inside the buildings architects design, not gawking at them from outside. Imagine a small square with trees and benches, perhaps an old statue or fountain in the middle. Cafe tables on several sides spill onto the surrounding street; small shops and restaurants in buildings, high and low, old and new circle the square. People sit, shop, or stroll. The space is a magnet because Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (New York: Oppositions Books, 1984), pp. 5556. 8

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there are many things do, all congenial and effective. People of all ages are satisfied, excited, and secured. The effect is comfort, a complex response to circumstances that satisfy one or more interest in a tangle of needs. This fantasy is jejune, though the humane values it emphasizes are never stale. Why not identify the complex pleasures it evokes in order to embody their conditions in structures and street plans appropriate to our time? Classical beauty is sometimes cold and off-putting; the beauties of streets and buildings designed for mixed use and human scale perfect city precincts by mixing utility with grace. Designing for this aim is frustrated by the singularity and piecemeal character of most projects: a single house or office block, for example. But architects dazzled by icons can take care that new buildings respect their current and historical contexts: does a design violate memory and its site, or enlarge one while extending, liberating, or articulating the other? Designers can make a building’s likely or principal uses legible in its form and appropriate to nearby spaces and structures. Tall office buildings could be dispersed, each surrounded by mixed-use buildings of smaller scale. The cost of land makes this proposal seem foolish in cities like New York, but we won’t reestablish a human scale and perspective in big cities anywhere if values appropriate to human social structure—utilitarian designs that reward habitation visually and kinesthetically—gratify the people seeing and using them. Let occupants feel good while doing work appropriate to their systems and roles. Start from aesthetically satisfying interiors, then design buildings whose external beauty intimates the aesthetic qualities inside. 9. Idealization and control Settlements of every sort, cities especially, aspire to justice, productivity, and beauty. Residents imagine themselves distinguished by courage, strength, intelligence, and honor, qualities made concrete and particular when the home team defeats every competitor. These aspirations express a nearly explicit desire for the idealized attractor where individuals, core and other systems are perfected by collaboration, initiative, and discipline. This complex achievement requires the social control afforded when a society is organized for self-scrutiny and self-correction. City economies exploit positive feedback by finding markets for their goods and services. They regulate themselves with negative feedback: registering the evidence of conflict or intemperance; they make laws and procedures that

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limit excess by reestablishing viable practices and relations. The result is a productive steady state organized and sustained by citizens and their systems. Residents don’t conceptualize the balance of individuals, systems, and regulation as an attractor state; that idea is too unfamiliar to be mythologized. Yet we do something comparable when settlements are idealized as large, sacred families. The Great Community is an idea common to Plato, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Dewey.9 It exalts the idea that communities are organized for the well-being of the many and the grandeur of the whole. It promises justice in the relations of citizens and justice in a city’s relation to its niche. The real and ideal should be one: being prudent and good, a city should be beautiful.

9

Dewey, Public and its Problems, pp. 143-184.

Chapter Eight City Life Cities aren’t uniform: their differences preclude a one-size-fits-all characterization of urban life. Yet there are constants that power city tensions, ardor, and excess. This chapter explores them. 1. Intensity City residents imagine that people in smaller towns enjoy lives less cluttered than their own. This fantasy is our response to encounters that are more diverse, but less personal. Infants and their caretakers are a baseline: each wants the other’s warmth and attention; each is mortified or dismayed by their absence. This need drives children and adults into other core systems where intimacy flourishes (friendship and marriage, for example), but these expectations are distorted by city complexities. Intimacy suffers, intensity is heightened when cities reduce the circle of intimate relations while augmenting intensity by increasing the number and variety of systems demanding one’s time and energy. People living in small town meet friends or relatives while going about their affairs; knowing one another’s routines, they greet in passing. Cities are different, because one knows few or none of those passed in stores, streets, or the subway. There is all the intensity of flesh, noise, movement, and purpose, but less intimacy because more to do than time allows: one is focused on tasks and duties, less on people served. City people are prudently defensive, partly to disguise or defend themselves from others, partly because no one can respond to everything perceived. Learning to be selective, one ignores many things, other people

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included. This is more than inhibition. For cities perpetually challenge their residents: what must I do today; how shall I do it; with whom and where; how shall I get there? One conjures every day’s trajectory from anomalous resources, duties, and appointments. Groceries are here, work there, each separated from home and the other by streets, buses or subways. Thought is supple because so much is contingent: stores go in and out of business, one changes living quarters, partners, or jobs. Judgment is critical because so much is provisional: do I like my work or home? Thought is synthetic because the bits and pieces don’t cohere without its intervention. We describe these effects in different but complementary ways. City dwellers are streetwise, savvy, judgmental, and introspective: everyone has an opinion. Consensus is hard to achieve, but hostility is slower to form because no one is surprised that others have views different from one’s own. People are mutually indifferent: neighbors say little to one another; one calls days or weeks ahead for lunch with a friend. People move intently through crowds, conscious all the while of being alone, careful not to invite the flood tide of another’s concerns. Few relax because demands are greater than means, or because choices outrun time and energy. Imagine that all the keys of a piano are played at once, louder or softer, held or repeated, each a note within the clamor of the whole. Community is paradoxical because every person is oddly anonymous. Pleasures are taken separately, but together. We are fellow patrons in a restaurant, bus, or bar; cheering at a game, roused by a movie or ballet, we don’t know our seatmates. Pain is separate, too, if no one shares or sympathizes. Anomie is mutual estrangement. Unknown, unrecognizable to people as lonely as ourselves, we are defensively selfaware. Some, with purpose and means, adore this mix of complexity and difference. Most can only scramble; many are bruised or lost. Does city life have advantages that outweigh its liabilities? People who have no choice don’t ask. They manage as best they can without means or hope of doing otherwise. Those who can choose stay for many reasons. Some want excitement, others money. Members of city cults and tribes share a passion; craftsmen enjoy their work and opportunities. Dancers, artists, actors, and musicians want companions like themselves, hence opportunities to learn and perform. The able baker is an icon to his neighbors: he or she flourishes because they are indulged and pleased. Few imagine a rural life because their talents are too specific: they would be fish out of water. The

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suburbs of city imagination are a mix of pabulum and malls; they are all the more remote. A city’s urbane residents enjoy the paradox of quarters where tradesmen know their tastes and names while newspapers and airports have global reach. Paris and New York are fantasies in many lives, because they promise a version of Hegel’s concrete universal: intimacy and elegance, diversity and excitement, personal achievement, worldly style, and public recognition. Others, the sullen majority, enjoy secure routines and big-city pleasures while ignoring differences that annoy them. They have reliable jobs, a network of long established churches and clubs, political friends, and the security of neighborhoods defended by close police surveillance. The city’s poor live precariously, alone, or both. They survive because their city’s economy and government support them mechanically with odd jobs or food stamps. Helpless without work, co-opted by city diversions and distractions, they enjoy life in any way they can. Would simpler lives suit them better? They haven’t the means—money, experience, or education—to choose. Jane Jacobs described the qualities of her daily life: The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang…Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with either laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofar, the short, thick-bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street….We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back to each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: All is well.10 This is an idealizing perception of city living at its neighborly best, living that strikes sparks by rubbing people together in ways that are unforeseen but

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 50-51

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provocative, safe, and, if one chooses, ruminative, intense, and alone. There are other views: For immigrants who made up the [street’s] economy, the bus stop was something else…a bubbling hotpot of ambition, creativity and bickering—New York boiled down to its essential elements.11 Why bicker? Because there is everything to fight for and no reasonable claim to prerogative. Local commerce is a free-for-all: do what you can to get what you can. Winners are envied or admired; losers can try again. Raw contention isn’t stately but many residents don’t enjoy the luxury of manners. People strive and struggle to sustain themselves in ways that approximate local standards of well-being. Those who have it already move over a bit to let these others pass. 2. Diversity Diversity is variety in four principal domains: differences of gender, generation, talent, or inclination; the mix of races, ethnicities, and religions; levels of wealth and advantage conspicuous in housing, schools, and facilities; and the kinds of employment, goods and services provided by a city’s culture and commerce. Other differences—architecture, topography, or history—are incidental here. Plato’s Republic was designed to maximize stability by minimizing diversities of origin, gender, and wealth. His ideal city resembles a professional team in any sport: it has gifted players and a coach (a philosopher-king). Team members are specialized, self-controlled, and cooperative; the coach chooses the lineup for each game and co-ordinates play on the field. Other teams are more fractious than effective, so Plato’s team wins more games than it loses. But their play is machine-like, hence less interesting to players and spectators alike. What is missing? Provocative difference, surprise, and spontaneity. You paint, cook, design, or think in formulaic ways until someone shows you an alternative: Mozart in Italy, woks in New York, Picasso seized by African sculpture. People in small towns are also affected by difference, but they have fewer chances to engage it and less confidence that neighbors would enjoy having it on local menus.

Saki Knafo, “Dreams and Desperation on Forsyth Street,” The New York Times, City section, page 1, June 8, 2008.

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Plato located his ideal state far from a port to minimize the effects of unpredictable encounters with a fluid population. Difference has these same effects among us, hence the ambivalent attitude to émigrés: they excite us because of their talents and different ways or they scare us for the same reasons. Some regimes have barred or exiled alien populations to guarantee the homogeneity of city’s residents. Fidelity to a creed is one of the tests applied, though purity of belief is window dressing if a regime fears that dissenters would reduce its authority: you won’t buckle to our rules if your gods demur. Yet coercion is dangerous because homogeneity is a risk: it threatens stasis and irrelevance when altered circumstances demand a cogent response. A vital city survives because cultural differences promote adaptation by enlarging the inventory of possible responses. Economically powerful but homogeneous cities—little or no ethnic, racial, or religious diversity—often resist the influx of foreigners attracted by opportunity and wealth. Newcomers learn the local language, but there is incomprehension on both sides—residents new and old—because each is committed to cultural practices and values that are deeply rooted and stubbornly defended. Or the difference is color, a superficial trait, but a point of distinction when people use it as a mark of tribal identity. Why this reaction? There may be several reasons, but one is elemental: the response to racial or cultural differences is inverse to the comfort experienced in core systems where familiarity, loyalty, and care over-ride perceived differences. Consider the emotional depths in the idea of home: a dwelling inhabited by people like oneself, each committed to and safe with others, whatever their squabbling. A village somewhat extends this embrace, a town attenuates it, small cities stretch it to breaking. Residents sometimes struggle to exclude anyone not immediately recognizable as a plausible family member or neighbor. Patterns of migration nevertheless bring alien peoples into cities where they are little known. Reactions may be peaceful if there is work for newcomers who are mostly out of sight, but they can be violent for no reason better than feelings outraged by difference. New arrivals come to be familiar because they assume the look and practices of local people and because they introduce ways and qualities long-term residents happily adopt. Manhattan’s local cuisine is Chinese with a dollop of Japan and South Asia, all this after wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Differences that were unintelligible

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and threatening come to be seen as exotic and surprising; rejected then appropriated, they are local and safe. This trajectory measures thought’s control of emotion. Men and women don’t always overcome their mutual anxieties to establish abiding partnerships: differences of ethnicity, race,and religion provoke the same or similar fears, so it isn’t surprising that they, too, deter relations. Gender differences are more easily accommodated because sex is magnetic; race is perplexing because so much is made of so little. Ethnicity is deeper because culture inflects almost everything we do: we don’t know how to respond to people whose many practices are unintelligible or disorienting. Religion is a specific array of cultural beliefs and practices, one to which congregants are often deeply committed, so difference is alienating unless rationalized as alternate ways to honor the same god. Look past the god, emphasize rituals, practices, organization, and beliefs and the differences are seismic. Lives are organized as religions prescribe; belligerence is fierce because other religions affront one’s identity. Reason has no answers, though mutual respect is the order of the day when disaster tests all believers. Leaders of several faiths are interviewed together and asked if their beliefs are shaken. None concedes that they are: each is secured by the others’ declarations that they, too, are steadfast. This mutual forbearance must confuse the faithful: how can one sit and exchange reassuring stories with people who deny our truths? Economic prosperity is a stronger basis for mutual tolerance. It helps if a significant fraction of business success is credited to outsiders, the very people likely to be its pariahs if the economy slides. Diversity is never quite digested; an uneasy peace is often the best to be hoped. But there is a long-term solution, one rejected by nativists within each race or sect: identify and incorporate the strengths of constituent tribes; detoxify religious schisms by emphasizing religious practice as a substitute for the ardor of religious beliefs; neutralize race by encouraging inter-racial marriage. These proposals seem outlandish until one considers that large wealthy cities already promote them. There is no conscious plan; none is required. Ethnic differences erode in contexts where people of disparate origins have similar opportunities and resources. Racial differences lapse when children of mixed race are an ever larger fraction of the breeding population. Religious doctrines seem less compelling when one observes the

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illogic of their construction and the want of evidence for their truth. But this leaves tradition and practice as substance for religious identity, Age, too, is a point of diversity. Every city’s principal tasks rely on the work of people in the middle third of the scale that runs from birth to ninety. Their attitudes and habits dominate its pace and social style. The spaces allotted to young and old are more problematic. The experience of city life varies accordingly: the generations have disparate tastes and interests but each is tolerated and all cohere, or the young, the old, or both are marginalized or co-opted. Marginalizing the young is dangerous because it incites their resentment and violence. Co-opting them is safer, traditional, and more typical. Imagine a small prosperous city where decorum is emphasized and young people are eased into schools, jobs, marriage, and community life. The processes are formulaic; the young rock no boats while passing from adolescence into styles and responsibilities that will endure through middleage; people with ideas and initiative suppress them or leave. This is a loss no town can afford. For there is a generational equation: the young renew social life; the elderly have judgment critical to righting or redirecting a society that verges on stasis or misadventure. Gender is a similar advantage: women and men often have different perspectives and different ways of solving problems. Cultures disagree about the roles appropriate to gender, but there is no disputing that societies and systems are impoverished if denied the advantage of vital skills, attitudes, and perspectives. There are few roles women can’t fill; city life is more vibrant and civil when men defer to their talents. This is commonplace, though sexual combat makes us slow to see it. 3. Character Why celebrate the virtues of cities given the ease and sociability of smaller towns? The high culture of theaters, concert halls, libraries, and museums is often missing, but these communities enjoy local drama groups, amateur concerts, and hobbies quietly pursued. The Metropolitan Opera is live in local theaters; libraries and the internet make books, newspapers, music, and film available everywhere. Why emphasize cities? For a reason that joins the psychology of city people to an assumption about moral autonomy and creativity. Moral autonomy requires that one’s judgments express findings and affirmations of one’s own: mores, rules, or laws require certain behaviors but

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one decides when, how, or if to apply them. Or there are no rules, so judgments express values and considerations of one’s own. Creativity is all the more singular: the artist, manager, or craftsman forms ordinary material in distinctive ways. There are schools that teach traditional styles of organizing ideas, notes, or colors, but the possibilities are protean and vast: originality extrapolates from established traditions while exploiting this frontier. City life teaches autonomy; it isn’t easily survived without it. Freedom—autonomy—implies discipline, skill, choice, and intention, each an aspect of character founded in habit and attitude. But freedom is vague. A mantra in democracies, it signifies freedom from interference and freedom to do anything not inimical to others. But this permission specifies no power or aim. That is its beauty, we say: the law is on your side; do as you please. City freedom antedates this political entitlement. Rhapsodic accounts of urban life emphasize opportunities and one’s liberty to choose among them. Character’s formation is the more fundamental story. Freedom emerges in the character of every person obliged to learn skills that qualify him or her both for roles in systems and for judging when and how to choose and rank interests and duties, given scarce time and resources. Freedom’s emergence is a paradox of city life. We are made free— free-in-context—by having to negotiate city complexities: I learn my way in a foreign city by correcting my wrong turns. Ten year old children sometimes go to school, unaccompanied, by bus or subway. They learn to go safely by correcting their mistakes. Autonomy isn’t slower to form in small towns, but it is different because the challenges of complexity and safety incite special habits: know where you are and how to leave it; don’t talk to strangers; ask for help when it’s needed; look around, enjoy yourself. Allegiance is restricted, choice is ordained when the systems and networks of smaller towns mix family relations with friendship and commerce. Participants in a family business affirm their inherited roles and responsibilities; distancing themselves from these commitments while declaring personal priorities would be an anti-social indulgence. Compare city people: they are primed for both sorts of autonomy: all learn skills appropriate to their roles; time-pressure or scarce resources oblige most people to rank their commitments to the systems and networks in which they participate. It often happens that there isn’t time to deliberate because one learns and chooses on the wing. But deliberation is better than impulse

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because choice is better founded if one temporarily steps aside from his or her commitments in moments of deliberation. This distance—standing apart to evaluate and choose—creates the often formidable singularity of city people. But reflection isn’t detachment; one isn’t disengaged when deciding the order or degree of fidelity to family, work, or friends. For there are choices to be made, choices requiring that costs and benefits—to others and oneself—be honestly weighed. City life is intense because relentless. Standards are high; it isn’t enough that work is done: others will appraise it. Many things—traffic, work, other people, danger, and noise—challenge or resist us: so much to do, so much that deters doing it. Go by subway, walk a few blocks to an office, class, or lunch with friends, then notice the altered focus and relief as you turn from one to the other. Often tired, we are habituated to pressure. Living by our wits, we are self-affirming. Character expresses these tensions like a weather-beaten face. Many people thrive, most survive, but character is sometimes distorted in either of several ways. Call them the operator, plutocrat, sophisticate, artist, thinker, aesthete, and neurotic. The operator rightly perceives that economic and political life is organized by networks and that each of a network’s systems has influence on others because of their mutual dependence. His motives are undisguised: he uses his position in one system or network to leverage access to others, usually or always for profit to himself. Operators are mutually suspicious but each believes that he can do business with others: he will give something, if only a favor, to get something. The plutocrat presides. He believes that money is power and that having much of one justifies having much of the other. Operators cherish money and power, so they are the plutocrat’s natural instruments: he commands, they oblige. The sophisticate is too effete for the bread-and-butter operator, too brittle and self-conscious for swaggering plutocrats. He or she is the attentive consumer of fashion, art, or any milieu where products or activities of high status are made or promoted. Artists are often retiring; work they do is display enough for them. But sophisticates don’t usually write, paint, sew, or compose; they posture because of admiring the work or attitudes of others. Thinkers have jobs that requires cerebration or they flourish anonymously in spaces created by the overlay of systems and networks. Critics are a welcome challenge, but thinking is a persistent urge: it continues without them. Thinkers shun operators who return the favor. Plutocrats are more

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tolerant because thinkers are useful; sophisticates are uncomprehending or annoyed. Aesthetes are wrongly confused with thinkers or sophisticates. Like thinkers, they appreciate depth; like sophisticates, they are mesmerized by cultural forms. But this is a distinct genre: the aesthete resonates with one or more expressions of high art. Nourished by music, painting, literature, theater, or dance, he or she is addicted to galleries, libraries, concert halls, or museums. Each of the types foregoing is an effective adaptation to circumstances. The neurotic is less easily characterized because there are so many ways to be deranged by sustaining oneself amidst complexity, competition, diversity, conflict, and danger. The great majority avoid this abyss while negotiating their city with persistence and grace. Busy people stop to direct a tourist; they rush to gather up anyone fallen in the street. Once crossing Fifth Avenue against the light in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I slipped on the ice and fell hard in the middle of the street. Instantly surrounded by people offering help, I sighed, rose, and regretted my foolishness. Generosity also has this other side: people of every sort believe that life would be less comfortable, survival more precarious if community were always sacrificed to utilitarian aims. There are few operators and fewer plutocrats, but many edgy people, each looking past his or her current attachments to the next better deal. Most people resist this cynicism, but everyone recognizes it. Probably no one resists it always. Are we blasé? 12This is the pose of urban sophisticates, though it can’t be more than a pose because city life is fraught. Residents of every sort are deeply engaged; very few are merely casual. People diverge as idiosyncrasies of temperament and talent respond to individual circumstances and need. Simmel is usually cited for having described city people as blasé, but he, too, remarked their interiority, particularity, and purpose: [The] essential characteristic [of individual freedom] is rather to be found in the fact that the particularity and incomparability which ultimately every person posses in some way is actually expressed, giving form to life. That we follow the laws of our inner nature—and this is what freedom is—becomes perceptible and convincing to us and to others only when the expressions of this nature distinguish

12

Simmel, Georg Simmel: On individuality and Social Form, p. 329.

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themselves from others; it is our irreplaceability by others which shows that our mode of existence is not imposed upon us from the outside.13 4. Morality, cooperation, and trust The styles of city morality don’t always cohere. People engaged by family, neighbors, or workmates learn mutual respect and loyalty. Yet loyalties and duties learned in core systems are incidental on a crowded city street; one doesn’t know these people and will never see most of them again. They are backdrop—wallpaper—to the everyday chores of making one’s way. The paradox of city morality is here: always finding oneself near or amidst other people, one is usually a stranger to them. Wanting decent treatment, intending to respond in kind, one cannot rely on the morality learned in core systems. The alternative is a version of Kant’s categorical imperative: live and let live. His morality seems designed for the German city states of his time, each a challenge and obstacle to the others. Unable to rely on loyalty or good feeling, one resorts to a formal rule. Kant’s rule appeals to reason: it requires coherence and universality (universality bars contradiction, hence incoherence).14 The practical rule directing behavior in contemporary cities invokes prudence: don’t be provocative. But this, too, is an application of Kant’s principle: conflict is averted if everyone is prudent. City morality is calibrated to this rule’s implication: let everyone take care to avoid belligerence. That aim is implicit in the bargaining we do do many times a day: my safe passage for yours. Most everyone adopts this policy, so residents often share a firm sense of security in the absence of any formal or material guarantee. And as above, many people willingly help others in distress. This is street morality, the morality of public spaces. Walk in crowded cities and notice how rarely you see uniformed policemen. Officers in plain clothes may be everywhere, but their presence has no effect (because of their dissembling) on the discipline everywhere apparent. Street morality is superseded as soon as one enters a private or commercial space. Private spaces are principally the core systems—the homes, schools, work places, or houses of worship—where those present are bound by the deference and care owed a system’s other members. 13 14

Ibid., p. 335. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 131-140.

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Commercial spaces don’t participate in the morality of core systems (salespeople and customers aren’t usually intimates); there would be fewer customers if Kantian street morality—live and let live—were the only moral imperative. But turn off 34th Street into Macy’s New York and feel the difference: tension in the street; safety, serious looking guards, and the low roar of buyers’ excitement in the store. Relieved as they enter, people take a moment to reorient themselves: things to see, the pleasure of finding something useful, moments of calm before going back to the street or subway. This is morality of a third kind, the zone morality of protected spaces: the visitor’s presence implies interest in the zone activity (he or she is a possible customer); the business or office protects its clients. This pledge is implicit, but palpable in large stores; its variable force diminishes with the price of baseball tickets. A friend describes an afternoon in the bleachers with his son. People behind them were bellicose, screaming threats and imprecations at the visiting team. He turned to object, pointing to his boy. The beer-swilling woman behind them suggested they leave: this was their place, they would do as they pleased. Every city resident would feel recklessly vulnerable if inhibition and cooperation—hence safety—were not constants of city life. One surmise would be that city morality is brittle, that safety is always a gamble. Another affirms that one is usually safe because these moral codes dove-tail: each supersedes another as one moves among core systems, zones, and public spaces. For three grades of cooperation, each a measure of trust, correspond to the three kinds of morality. Trust is maximal in core systems where styles of cooperation—parent and child, student and teacher—establish the rhythm of everyday reciprocities. We want and expect the confidence of our partners: someone disappointed or betrayed tries again; even cruelty doesn’t extinguish the hope for mutual trust. Zone morality promotes engagements of two sorts. Some are informal: Jane Jacobs’ neighbors counted on one another for support and defense; she didn’t suggest that those she mentioned were her good friends. Its other expressions are business-like and efficient. Cooperation in the context of zone morality is a dance learned so widely and well that everyone knows the steps: trust is focused, honor and good will are expected, but the relations of buyers and sellers, professionals and their clients are contractual and specific: each is a quid pro quo; give something to get something. The cooperation appropriate to Kantian morality is altogether depersonalized: I trust you, whoever you are, to act with the inhibition and in

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the manner law prescribes. Street morality is the promise of safe conduct. Each trusts others to observe this obligation. Limits on trust and cooperation are apparent to every city resident. Each knows or quickly learns the occasions for relating to others in one or another of these ways. For trust is dangerous: misperceive your situation, respond inappropriately and you risk being distained, arrested, or attacked. Kantian morality becomes a fall-back defense against breakdowns in the other two styles. For consider the perspective of disoriented new arrivals. Having no local family or friends, they don’t know how much confidence to place in others. Long-term residents don’t know these strangers and can’t be sure of seeing them again. How much trust should either place in the other, given the uncertainty that cooperation will be repaid with long-term reciprocity?15 Uncertainty is chronic when businesses prosper on numbers (tourists, for example) rather than the loyalty of individual clients; it is intensified if one doesn’t expect to see tonight’s partner past morning. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a last, fragile defense. The foregoing is real; the next step is ideal but more than a fantasy. Myriad activities flourish because city ethos, initiatives, and diversity favor them. People and systems are mutually intrusive because crowding assures that all suffer unwelcome costs or noise, but only harm is proscribed. We are mutually tolerant up to the point of suffering it, because offence is not harm and because we acknowledge that others are free to make choices appropriate to their tastes and talents. Indifferent to many of their projects, we endure or hide from those which annoy us. The city promoting this response is a moral space: people secure in core systems, at peace with themselves acknowledge the dignity, autonomy, and tastes of others. This is respect and tolerance, a morality distinguished from the morality of core systems, zones, and Kantian universalizability. Morality of this fourth kind is familiar in smaller settlements, but pervasive in cities. 5. Work, money, and wealth City work is many things. School is work for children; caring for them is work for parents. Work of both sorts is vocational without being remunerative; work that dominates city life is both.

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Medina, A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change, p. 153.

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Paid labor is doubly complicated for most city workers. Some or many work at home; the majority steel themselves for the agitation of buses, subways, trains, or traffic. Getting to work may require as much focus and provoke as much stress as work itself. This makes workers less efficient at jobs where tension is unrelenting because one’s efficacy is perpetually appraised. Depleted at night, one starts every next day mindful of responsibilities, bills, and the salary that supports them. Many workers are sullen, but some adore their jobs; others search hopefully for work they will enjoy. People find work because a city rich in systems creates opportunities for initiative and niches for talent. This implies the two tiers of city work: there are tasks of every sort required to maintain productivity or satisfy basic needs, and supple vocations that create the blush of culture and reflection. Most city dwellers work because they can’t otherwise afford the things money buys. Those frustrated by the roles and opportunities of established systems can start their own businesses: working alone or with a few others rewards initiative while perfecting a talent. Or one avoids the snare of enveloping systems by working alone, selling services or a product to others. Doing this is a perpetual test of talent and initiative without the safety of a job: one trades security for freedom and anxiety. Needs and wants oblige everyone to have capital or an income—this is a constant—though the money securing us has social costs, first as it becomes the universal measure of worth, second as it attenuates social relations and obscures significant values. Previously (in other times or smaller towns), one worked with others to create goods or services; now, one buys them. This effect is liberating: time once devoted to a single task can be used to do many things; one quickly buys wanted goods or services thereby leaving time for reading, writing, tennis, or making more money. This is a critical advantage in cities where demands often exceed one’s time and energy: no need to bake bread or fix the boiler if others can be paid to do it. The advantage is, nevertheless, costly because disaffiliating: an abstraction—money—mediates one’s relations to other people. Their identity and desires are incidental to people buying their goods or services. Marx was accurate and ironic: The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his produce becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product—exchange values,

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or the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.16 Relations to fellow providers were once an instance of the core morality that binds a work team’s members. Now, when money is the surrogate for productive activity, one’s moral posture is Kantian and legalistic: rules or laws define relationships otherwise devoid of loyalty, duty, and respect. Atomism seems vindicated because everyone with money imagines that there are no duties to others past the obligation to pay one’s bills. A successful economy breeds rich people: they have houses, land, factories, shares, or cash. Some city residents acquire great wealth; many who acquire it elsewhere enjoy city life, so wealth is concentrated in urban centers. This is an advantage if wealth attracts and pays for services that require patrons: universities, music, art, and dance, for example. It is a disadvantage if wealth suffocates the risk, clash, and spontaneity of city life. The rich consume but rarely invent. Some are great entrepreneurs, but risks they take and systems they prefer are usually chosen to augment or defend what they have; initiative is an indulgence they resist. Once bold or lucky, they enjoy what they have. They do care about regulation, principally to demand that wealth be protected from high taxes and thieves. Money supporting candidates who defend their interests is well-spent. Wealth drives the costs of every scarce commodity, including housing and food. Other people adjust. Doctors, dentists, and lawyers raise fees high enough to live with the rich; barbers, most shop keepers, policemen, and service workers commute to work from remote boroughs or suburbs. Wealthy cities (or their ample neighborhoods) are scrubbed and secure, but vital systems have a narrowly focused aim: care for and defend these residents or tantalize them with things to buy. Shops abound, museums become emporia. Culture overflows concert halls and theaters, but most things presented were created elsewhere, usually long ago. These effects explain some impressions of city life: everything is for sale; city people lack sympathy or fellow feeling; their relations to others are usually or always Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 156-157. 16

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manipulative; they care principally or only about money. Where does one go for focus, imagination, and risk? Aristotle remarked that an inventive middle class is critical to urban vitality.17 It also requires young people—talented, poor, and aggressive—who don’t confuse wealth with virtue and entitlement. 6. Communities displaced by networks Every city resident lives in a neighborhood of streets and shops, businesses, churches, and schools where some or all of life’s necessities are supplied. But neighborhoods are precincts on a city map when people moving in and out never set down roots. Work and loyalties are elsewhere. Every resident has neighbors next door or across the hall, but many are anonymous: seeing them infrequently, sometimes sharing an elevator, one doesn’t know their names. Cities described from this perspective are bundles of individuals, each oblivious to most others, though all share a government, space, and infrastructure. People living in smaller towns or villages find this situation intolerable. They have antipathies, but rarely this pervasive indifference. Two factors— excess and networks—explain it. Excess implies a psychic overload: the variety of opportunities and provocations obliges city residents to ignore most other people and their systems (without careful attention to their uses or virtues) while choosing a few. Most everyone has an array of friends or acquaintances, but these are not the networks that organize city life. Dominating networks are the interlocking systems—business, schools, religious centers, or clubs—within which members flourish. Networks facilitate choice by restricting attention to specific tasks, responsibilities, and opportunities. Network business is handled efficiently by constituent systems; membership is prized and exclusive. There is a quid pro quo: members immerse themselves in networks that are essentially indifferent to them in return for money, status, and security. These spectral affinities—objective, enduring but impalpable—offend the residents of smaller towns because the networks of their experience instantiate a different kind of sociality, one founded in the intimacies of kin, friendship, or community. The pharmacist is an uncle, the baker a cousin; one has known them for decades. Loyalty trumps other considerations, given roughly equal costs and benefits. Big city networks sometimes share this 17

Aristotle, Politics, 1296b12-1297a12

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feature: there are ethnic and religious communities whose members live principally within circles of people like themselves. But this is not the style of most city lives because the diversity of systems and opportunities is magnetic. People distracted by them are often estranged from their roots. But there is a cost for this liberty: namely, anonymity, loneliness, and insecurity. Networks promise salvation because one who finds his or her way into a viable network recovers a degree of community and safety. The anomie so often ascribed to city life is here: network identities are no more than tags. We do our jobs in networks, knowing we are replaceable. People excluded envy our good luck. This isn’t the whole story about city networks because some are gratifying to participants who find or confirm personal identities in networks that supply purpose and status. A prima ballerina walks local streets with her two children; most passersby don’t recognize her, but that is probably a comfort. People too old, sick, or unlucky to secure themselves in statusbestowing networks rely on the style of socialization—the intimacies of family and friendship—for which cities are least suited. Upwards of fifteen thousand people died in France several years ago during an exceptional heat wave. Many were elderly people left to themselves in Paris while younger relatives took summer vacations. They suffered the isolation of people who lose value and identity when they have no role in the utilitarian networks that shape and pervade city lives. These social dynamics are obscure because density is misconstrued as community, though density is aggregation, not community. Cities contain religious communities, networks of friends, and the ethnic enclaves where family bonds and mutual recognition are valued, but these links are vestigial where the primary organizers of city life are rules, infrastructure, and the utilitarian networks organized for work and advantage. Talk of community is usually an expression of regret for “organic” bonds long ago superseded by efficiencies that prescribe adaptable labor markets, hence individuals who willingly abandon current loyalties for a better job. This is, we say, freedom’s injunction: don’t confuse any current affiliation with personal destiny. Freedom is the autonomy that tests and proves itself by one’s willingness to go wherever need or opportunity directs: no matter that these advantages reduce communities to networks of useful affiliations. This attitude is the apotheosis of Calvinist aspiration: let everyone prove his worth by the facility with which he pursues his opportunities. Never

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impede the freedom that enables us to make these choices; let everyone exhibit the evidence of his successes. Religion, politics, and economy fuse in this justification for the energy, willfulness, and exhibitionism of city life. Why is community so often alien to cities? Because cities are alien to community. Cities have always been centers of commerce or administration (whether military or ecclesiastical). Weber remarked that most residents are émigrés from near and far,18 thereby assuring the attenuation of personal relations. Means for knitting personal bonds among these strangers are chiefly family, friendship, religion, profession, and ethnicity. Utilitarian networks have the contrary effect: having little need for community, they breed cynicism among their participants: all a network’s employees (managers included) may know that they have no value for employers apart from the roles they fill. Businesses and others organize motivational programs to stimulate loyalty, but few are convinced in the absence of cash incentives. These failures deprive cities of the over-lapping and nested loyalties important to creating civic community, but there is an expedient. Create an impression of community by deferring to a recognized totem: Bulls or Bears, Tottenham or Arsenal. Follow team standings, celebrate their victories, die a little with each loss. Avoid the stadium or go, but suppress the fact that you don’t know and may not want to know the people all around, each a fan like yourself. 7. Power, conflict, and violence City prosperity would have little effect were it stored in gold bars. Its principal resources—human capital, money, and materiel—aren’t exploited without tasks appropriate to talented people organized for productive labor. Diversity enhances the talent pool. Women complement men; ethnic differences excite curiosity about other peoples’ music, food, or clothing. Both augment the pool of available abilities and perspectives. Positive feedback is one effect: it raises the order of a city’s attractor by creating a luminous space impelling to those who construct its interdependent, hierarchical systems. This outcome forever eludes us because talents and initiative are distributed unequally and because system and network efficiencies exclude people whose talents and interests would otherwise qualify them for 18

Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2, p. 1244.

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membership: not everyone can play the bassoon in the local orchestra. Marx explained this disparity—some educated and employed, others not—by saying that having capital bestows control of jobs, pricing, and finance while guaranteeing access to education, health services, and every other perquisite of status and well-being.19 Marx is criticized for having identified wealth with ownership, a relation peculiar to the industrial organization of his time, but his principal error was that of confusing a generic power with one of its specific expressions: factory owners can dominate workers but, equally, a network of businessmen, bankers, editors, and political office holders can dominate their city by opening or closing doors to work that enriches its members. The network can seem porous; it may be nourished by a diversity of families, schools, and businesses. A city may have several virtually independent, efficient, and productive networks. Each enhances the wellbeing of participants by assigning roles, tightening relations, reducing waste, and resisting the intrusions of other people, systems, and their networks. Each defends its turf. Most city residents have no access to the influence or control that networks afford, though many have cipher-like jobs within them. These are a city’s stoic workers living in mean but tidy neighborhoods. Commutes are long, wages don’t budge when prices rise, their children attend ordinary schools, and aspire to ordinary jobs. These residents enjoy city excitement like resident tourists. Or city advantages shrivel because neighborhoods are shabby and under-served; there is little work but city leaders don’t care because unemployed residents don’t vote. Ghettos have little or no effective links to the upscale economy; their residents sometimes walk its streets but watch the quickening around them as though seeing it on a screen. People marginalized by an economy often share the values of its participants: both enjoy the same entertainments, admire the same styles, and suffer the same blunted sensibility. Better education qualifies the economy’s participants for specialized work and the judgments it requires. But judgment in other contexts is an unnecessary skill when media culture overloads busy minds with banalities that most endorse. George Balanchine discouraged dancers from asking too many questions: just dance, was his advice. Media culture is that sector of economic power that beams from a few cities to

19

Marx, Communist Manifesto, pp. 39-57.

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control lives in all. It has simple instructions: do your job, buy our goods and prosper; you don’t need to think. Many people are only partly captured by the culture sustained by prosperity, advertising, and entertainment They, too, see the ads and enjoy the movies, but they don’t have jobs or jobs paid sufficiently to afford the goods advertised. Wanting something to sell, they sell drugs; having nothing to sell but wanting what they see, they try to take it. Failing both, they settle for dope. There are police, courts, and prisons for these disasters. White color offenders also go to jail, but their risk is marginal; it is the less calculating, violent thieves that challenge authority. Police power is, principally, a response to them. Its authority is constitutional, though the many acts expressing it are particular, local, and largely out of sight. Scrutiny of its uses and abuses is largely in the hands of policemen themselves. A wealthy society disguises and ignores the skirmishes of a civil war fought within it. Policemen are its frontline: they guard the frontier between the many whose jobs are a toehold on prosperity and people marginal or excluded. Violence is the complement to power, either because of being its expression or because of reactions it provokes. Violence promoted by the relations of individuals, systems, and the whole varies between subtlety and brutality. It is subtle when a parent discourages a child from pursuing a dream, rough when bullies terrorize a school yard, brutal when a bank closes the credit line previously extended to a struggling business. Every relation between individuals or systems, within systems, or between individuals, systems, and their governing authority is susceptible to these kinds of friction: frustration, disruption, injury or breakdown, and death are the dysfunctional perversions of freedom, reciprocity, discipline, and success. Violence of another sort is all the more affecting because it is more than friction: people gratuitously hurt one another for no better reason than ethnic jealousies, racial, religious, or cultural differences. These hostilities are paralyzing because the victims are often outnumbered or defenseless against aggressors who loathe them for no better reason than their low estate or features that distinguish them. Communities responsible for violence to others are often surprised and righteous when victims or their heirs respond bitterly to its memory. Victims, too, can be violent, though some are alchemists who cure pain with dignity and song: there are spirituals that speak of “home” with a Lord whose suffering redeems fear and anger with

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hope. Is this the appropriate response to violation? Love thine enemy, turn the other cheek, are familiar slogans and debatable strategies. This response strengthens people who will not do evil, but it resonates with equivocal messages: should one submit to further violence; do we forgive and forget because we haven’t the power to do otherwise? Violators shouldn’t expect their victims, past or possible, to affirm their compliance. Tell them to forget and you violate them again. City violence incorporates all these failings while adding dimensions of its own. City people first experience violence as dread because encounters and outcomes aren’t predictable. Fear is a decisive aspect of city life, one that explains the selective exposure and interiority of city experience. One has routines, safe havens, places to avoid, numbers to call. Many pleasures are private, enjoyed alone or with friends in well-defined settings. Security itself is a principal pleasure. These responses are the underside of diversity and complexity. Why can’t people just get along? We know the principal reasons. The jostling, competition, and noise of so many people struggling to secure and satisfy themselves is exhausting and frightening. But this is just one of several reasons for fear. People different in looks, habits, or desires are—to that degree—mutually unrecognizable. Not seeing myself in you, I recoil in discomfort and fear. You respond in a similar way, so each sees the other’s distress and prepares a defense. Or we are mutually inimical because our systems compete for the same resources or because we construe work, politics, money, or sex differently. Every such fear crystallizes a target for the roiling anxiety pervasive among people living in tight capricious circumstances. There are off-setting consensual beliefs that reconcile us to our place and prospects—“go along to get along”—yet these beliefs are challenged by the self-justifying story told by a sect or sects different from ours. Each sneers at the other; neither may be content until the other is suppressed or humiliated. Diversity and complexity promote these fears. Large cities alternately intensify or defuse them. John Berger describes Ralph Fasanella’s paintings as a metaphor for Manhattan: The windows disclose what is inside their buildings. Only disclose is the wrong word, for it suggests that before the disclosure, there was a secret. The windows present the life or lives of their building. They present their interiors in such a way as to show that they were never

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interiors. Nothing has an interior. Everything is exteriority. The whole city, in this sense, is like an eviscerated animal….The city has done away with all space for what lies behind or within. The only inner space sanctioned is that of the safe.20 There are two kinds of deprivation because two kinds of cities. People poor and marginalized in static cities rightly have little hope because their city lacks the means to help. People in a dynamic city rightly believe that its social structure and economy—proliferating opportunities and productive systems, light but sufficient regulation—will better serve their children and themselves. Berger acknowledges this dream without understanding the conditions making it plausible. The immigrant proletariat, unable to return home, suffering from being who they were, yearned to become, or for their children to become, American. They saw no hope but to exchange themselves for the future.21 Loathing for “developed capitalism”22 qualifies Berger’s recognition that New York was (and is) an instrument for inter-generational change. Nor does he see that interiority is the critical lever. Berger is ambiguous: there “were never interiors” backing the windows in Fasanella’s paintings and by implication there were no interiors behind the eyes of their immigrant residents. This is wrong. Interiority was ferocious in immigrant families: people didn’t survive without intensity and grit. Securing a foothold in the social fabric of jobs and schools was everyone’s purpose because doing it would stabilize a family’s well-being and prospects. Berger doesn’t notice that Fasanella’s success as a painter is one measure of his family’s interiority. Nor does he remark that the city he lacerates nourished many thousands of other families. Berger is disarming: I am of course ignoring what Fasanella loved in Manhattan, because I am writing about the lessons of the place, and not about the people and the ingenuity with which they often resisted the lessons.23 The relevant lessons are obscured because Fasanella is merely the token point of reference for an indictment, one allowing Berger to say another time that capitalism perverts or destroys everything worthwhile. But there is a lesson in 20 21 22 23

John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 105-106. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 106.

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Fasanella’s example: social structure cures poverty when people and their systems are embedded in a productive economy regulated democratically. Fasanella’s parents were recent émigrés. Never expecting to find the streets paved in gold, they wanted a chance. Their hope was justified: one generation was all the time required to make their child an acknowledged artist. Berger is unapologetic and unaware: his screed is a “frontal protest against…. the impersonal ahistoricity” of the modern city.24 A former provost at the school where I teach once told me that her father didn’t go to high school. Nor did mine. Something remarkable happened between them and us. Berger’s animus gets in the way of seeing it. 8. Significance that unifies or divides People alienated from one another by their systems and networks need something to reconcile them. Available binders—a common language, government, infrastructure, and locale—are rarely sufficient. There are surrogates: local clubs welcome their members; houses of worship appease communicants who compete in other places. Systems of both sorts are foci for loyalty because people excluded from work or devalued there recover a degree of amity and self-esteem. But this is a partial cure for schisms that divide a city: they require activities, sites, or institutions whose significance is affirmed by all or most residents. Londoners know that life quickens in Oxford Street and Piccadilly. No New Yorker gladly lives far from Times Square—bright as noon at midnight—though most avoid it because of imagining that all the world courses through it at once. Roland Barthes described the Eifel Tower as the magnet and point of reference for every Parisian.25 Proximity to a focal site bestows significance: if the city it centers is grand, so are its people. But how does one affiliate with buildings or monuments? Proximity is bloodless: loyalty to a local team is passionate and active. Perceiving the team’s successes and failures as my own, I share its fate with every committed resident, whatever his or her station. None of us thinks our passion is irrational; all consider it an important aspect of personal identity. Forsaking this loyalty—becoming the fan of the enemy team—makes no more sense than changing one’s name or converting to another religion. Ibid., p. 109. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1979), pp. 3-17. 24 25

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Yes, people do both, but that doesn’t diminish the unity of those who aver this loyalty, this identity: anxiety and hostility are quashed, if only here and now, when I hear you cheering as I do. Significance that unifies is offset by meanings that divide. The same activities, sites, or institutions can have either effect. Dominating churches intimidate people harassed or despised because they refuse conversion; revered sites are alienating to those denied entry. The topological map of city streets, buildings, and transport is overlaid for each resident by the personal map of quarters where he or she feels welcome, merely safe, or endangered. Each person’s impressions of any quarter may err in either direction, but that is incidental to the experience of negotiating city streets in ways prefigured by a personal map. For this is one of the many occasion when reality-testing (the topological map) is obscured by interpretation. The maps in people’s heads are colored by their fears; there are place one goes and those one avoids. Schismatic divisions destroy a city by sabotaging confidence and the possibility of cooperation: few people risk encounters with alien others if all feel vulnerable. The city plan mitigates these fears if there is a recognizable division between public and private spaces. Homes are private; neighborhoods may seem private to residents and those who shun them. Spaces are public if anyone does or can pass in or out without fear for his or her safety. Principal stores, streets, schools, central parks, and government buildings do or should project this security because people learn that sharing these spaces is safe and because there is the chance of cordial encounters with people never seen at work, people whose homes and neighborhoods one never visits. Eliminate public places, build gated communities in Central Park and Times Square, then see how complementary nightmares squeeze life from the city. Cities breathe because well-regulated systems are productive and because chance encounters promote alliances that eventuate in new systems and better ideas. Destroy the spaces where people mingle and you reduce a city to its fears. 9. Variations The effective side of city life mixes cooperation, initiative, productivity, and regulation, These are constants, though their experiential values and relations differ from city to city. Consider these variations:

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9.1 Unregulated agglomerations versus managed cities Some cities, are surrounded by neighborhoods with primitive services and few links to their more prosperous centers. A jerry-built administration regulates daily affairs; life is intolerable because residents willingly support one another. These quarters often surge with private initiative, but lack the finance and facilities required to create and sustain systems that would commend them to entrepreneurs and officials in the central city. Compare any city that prospers because circumstances—economy, education, government, history, or culture—are reliable bedrock for competent city managers. Initiative has leverage because of willing partners, resources, and a context where contracts are legally enforceable. The cities of underdeveloped countries may someday have the resources, educated citizens, legal rights, and opportunities that would carry initiative to its fruition in stable, productive systems. But there is no foreseeable way to stabilize them, given their resources, size, and tasks. These cities exemplify the inverse of Plato’s contention that justice in the soul and state are mutually conditioning: individuals are defeated by the absence of the coherence and facilities required to do a society’s principal work. 9.2 Holistic or piecemeal planning Every city, including the most effective, is vulnerable to the holistic perspective of its city planners. They often regard their city as a great machine or anthill, one whose disorderly parts or functions should be pruned or remade. Regard the city as designers and mechanics regard a car: eliminate frippery, let it be sleek and fast. This emphasis is reasonable given a city’s large-scale organizational tasks, but it ignores the perspectives of city residents. Each has a home, neighborhood, friends, and particular tasks; each knows the resonances of city life in ways specific to a viewpoint and locale. One may construe the city as a machine requiring efficient management, but the city known to its residents is a montage (impossible to represent) of myriad local perspectives. Ignore them, and the city risks becoming an internment camp. Jane Jacobs seems oddly parochial in her Hudson Street aerie: she discounted or assumed viable city mechanics, a potent economy, and the advantages of middle-class wealth. But her belligerence was an impulsive response to planners who deprecated or ignored the intensity, spontaneity,

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and local complexity of city life. Walking, gawking while having no fixed trajectory, one knows a neighborhood osmotically, its rhythms the complement to one’s own. People who adore a city suffer its ugliness, noise, and congestion for these inarticulable pleasures. Homogenizing a city, ironing its wrinkles, bulldozing its idiosyncrasies effaces these differences. Construing cities as anthills is sometimes plausible; insisting that this is the only relevant perspective errs in a way comparable to that of doctors who see patients as illustrations of the pathologies cited in text books: neither is altogether mistaken, but both miss half the story. 9.3 History and context Residents of every sort, native-born or immigrant, permanent or temporary, typically regard their city as if it were self-sufficient. No one supposes that his or her city was created yesterday (edge cities apart), but most residents are too busy or burdened to know their city’s history or hinterland. We—who know only that our city ends just beyond its last bus or subway stop—are fish out of water. This blinkered persuasion is hard to maintain in cities having a history conspicuous in old buildings and street plans. But think of Las Vegas: how many visitors imagine or care that its versions of Paris and Venice have only the substance of stage sets? Why suppose that many or most of the people living in those cities, people having precarious jobs and bills to pay care more deeply about the historical authenticity of their buildings? This version of amnesia guarantees that city residents are oddly parochial: we know our city or, better, our trajectory within it, but little else about it. Our constriction frustrates city integration and regulation: people obsessed by personal trajectories haven’t time or sympathy for the trajectories of others; regulation and infra-structures are left to politicians or experts happy to do their work without interference. Self-concern wouldn’t be disabling if prudence made us sensitive to the need for corporate selfregulation. But that perception doesn’t usually survive the frustration of tripping in a pot hole or waiting too long for a bus. Dominated by the complexity of our private lives, we stop caring about the whole. Balance fails because one of its three constituents —a self-regulating whole (the public)—doesn’t form.

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9.4 Identity A city’s identity is more than the effect of its bulk and boundaries. City pride is sabotaged if its public identity—its reputation—is merely symbolic. Loyalty is strained if the name rings hollow (the New York Yankees displaced to New Jersey), though attenuated identity is tolerable and appropriate when a city is a metropolis, not a clearly bounded concentration of people, buildings, streets, and tasks (Paris versus its suburbs). This is also true when the city is a regional center with a footprint that stretches over several jurisdictions (Chicago), or when the city spreads more or less evenly across a large terrain (Los Angeles). Every such city retains a degree of symbolic integrity, but identity is thin if one is a New Yorker of sorts living in Stanford or Short Hills. Compare the intensifications of life in the inner city: Brooklyn versus Manhattan, East or West Sides. These focal identities are grounded in the persuasion that the activities constitutive of life—home, work, and most everything constructive—are centered in one’s neighborhood or city. Extended cities—metropolitan areas—qualify this sense of place when principal activities—work or school—are far from home. Globalization subverts it by creating nomadic people while homogenizing the cities they roam. Jobs are similar in each; goods and services (the brand names and goods) are much the same in all. Members of a town’s signature teams, musicians of its symphony orchestra, lawyers and specialists of all sorts come from elsewhere. Buyers flooding its streets and stores are often tourists. City identity becomes a place-holder for phantom images, historical associations, old photos, and prominent structures; I know where I am by watching films or television programs that caricature people like me. City residents once regarded its special products as a mark of pride and authenticity. Now those idiosyncrasies are a quaint indulgence. A candidate city comes of age—it is acknowledged as “global”—when these goods, like its site, culture, and history, are suppressed or superseded by its new role. But most city’s residents don’t work in the global economy and don’t enjoy its prerogatives; this new identity confuses them. They are bumpkins to people in the know, though city functions depend on their work and good will. These effects alienate a city from itself. Most residents know where they are and are satisfied being there. Others live happily in a delocalized world: Paris, New York, Tokyo, or Shanghai. Languages, buildings, and manners are different, but these are backdrop to important work. For everyone does or can learn to speak enough English to enjoy advantages that are everywhere gratifying and mostly the same.

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Imagine a cruise. It stops at many ports, each piquant in its way. One’s cabin is ample; cuisine changes, but meals are always a delight. Where am I? is a question these travelers always or never ask: always, because they are never sure; never, because it hardly matters. Objections to cosmopolitanism are shopworn but different. The cosmopolite speaks several languages. He or she is comfortable with the manners and idiosyncrasies of disparate peoples, respectful of their differences, and quick to admit that his or her history was different from theirs. Globalization homogenizes culture while making history irrelevant. One is comfortable everywhere, because luxury is everywhere the same. The rest is local color. Cities—better, that part of a city that participates in global culture—makes life easy for those it indulges by eradicating the obstacles to a global standard and style of comfort. Homogenizing these services dulls perception, including the self-perception of their customers. 9.5

Function detached from place Chicago in the nineteenth century was a city on speed. Development was assured given the proximity of farms, coal and iron ore, a flat, unencumbered surface, Lake Michigan and the railways.1 People living in Chicago worked for Chicago firms, suffered Chicago weather, and vaunted Chicago’s power. Ethnic, religious, and racial divisions were raw, but Chicagoans were fiercely proud because their city was a place, a producer, and a destination. Location and topography were destiny. No longer: steel mills, grain elevators, and stock yards are gone; O’Hare Airport is more important to the city economy than all the railway stations combined. Wheat futures contracts are still traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but the city is better known for financial derivatives sold on the Chicago Board of Trade. Before, most residents worked for products and services generated in or shipped from Chicago. Now a small coterie of entrepreneurs uses “Chicago” as call-letters in a network of financial traders to whom place and location are incidental. This divides city’s residents into the two camps suggested above (I exaggerate): there are Chicagoans whose work supplies goods and services that support their daily lives and those of traders, and executives employed in its financial service businesses. The first have salaries more or less adequate to their middle or working class status; the others are better paid. None of those doing mean work and born after 1960 remembers anything See Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess, Roderic McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). 1

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of Chicago’s early glory years. Yet they are as proud as any banker that Chicago is now a fixture in the circle of international financial centers: no matter that the “Chicago” of the options trade could be Cincinnati or Sheboygan. Many of the people it employs live in Chicago on sufferance; most won’t stay beyond their current assignment. Chicago as they know it has fine shops, music, museums, and diversions. The rest is tolerable or amusing when it isn’t parochial and dull. The Cubs or White Sox, Bulls or Bears are a common focus of excitement but it masks this radical difference in perspective: expatriates (from Boston or Delhi) are displaced and alien while temporarily at home in the city; natives are sullen because of having no access to its money spinning businesses. “World city” was once an extravagant phrase that signified notoriety, not as it currently does a city’s role in a global network of finance and influence. It meant Times Square to New Yorkers, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; residents could shine with their city’s reflected light by walking through one or seeing the other. Now the identity condition is more vicarious, less convincing. People who hear of bonuses they never share are more annoyed than admiring. The perks of living in a world city are unavailable to them; “their” city belongs to carpet-baggers. New Yorkers have long shared their city with people more devoted to myth than grit. That is part of their city’s fascination with itself: “bigger than life” is local legend and irony. Now when large tracts of Manhattan are reserved to people of considerable wealth much of it earned elsewhere, it is people of the outer boroughs who defend local identities against visitors who distain them. Hence the schism in “global cities”: the title is earned by people who derive little or nothing of their personal identity from cities in which they work; people rooted in its neighborhoods are alien to the fashionable neighborhoods and lives that give the city its cachet. There are other cities, cities out of the limelight that have solid locally based economies and residents whose identities are locally rooted. Personal and civic identities are firm because grounded in local systems, priorities, and achievements. These cities aren’t antiquated, technology hasn’t passed them by, but these aren’t poster-boy destinations in the global network. Romanticizing these towns seems reactionary because it implies approval of institutions that justify their authority by affirming their age or chanting their hymns. But Socrates is evidence that there is no conflict between worldliness and locality.

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9.6. Gresham’s law Cosmopolitanism has often seemed inimical to locality, but only because those having it move comfortably among several locales, not because of distaining them. Their impatience with locality is the shudder of seeing local practices celebrated as if they were the singular perfection of variables having other equally viable expressions. Current global cities are unrecognizable to those worldly travelers. They are disappointed when global companies clone their shops or hotels, each a near copy of others, all providing the same goods or services to people who enjoy the same indulgences. This is the algae that suppresses locality wherever wealth and status go. It violates identity by negating it: we do, want, and think the same things. There is one ambiguous exception. Refined tastes and skills are undermined by market wealth because they require practice and patience working paint, muscles, words, notes, or clay. Hungry artists, forced to choose between discipline and success, sell as they can. Successful entrepreneurs also lack these cultivated skills, but some have taste: others tolerate boredom if it promises status. Wealthy cities commodify culture; they market it as local stores sell cosmetics: one looks better for attending museums or concert halls. One also feels better, though we confuse consumption with taste, the best seats with the best taste. Are there cities where people paint or play music for their personal pleasure? Surely there are. Crossing a bridge the other day, I passed a line of artists each perfecting a startling watercolor. Probably none paints for a gallery, though all may collect the work of friends. A city of many beauties provokes them; they respond in kind. This, too, is cultivation. Compare it to commercial art shows and auctions: buy a painting, exhibit yourself. 10. Evaluation We need measures for the values and balance of the three variables: individuals, systems, and regulation. What are the ranges of values for a viable balance? What are the criteria for viability? Chapter Nine proposes several elementary criteria for appraising cities.

Chapter Nine Measures of City Health A healthy city has systems that perform all the functions required for the well-being—current and prospective—of members and themselves. The measures considered below appraise values for the three variables— individuals, systems, and corporate regulation—and their mutually affecting relations. Impediments mentioned in the Introduction are also relevant: cities fail to achieve ideals they prefigure for causes intrinsic to city processes and structures. The measures considered include 1.essential social values; 2. managerial tasks; 3. material conditions; 4. humane values; 5. profiles that exhibit a settlement’s contours; 6. connection or exclusion; and 7. considerations relevant to balance. 1. Essential social values There are four essential values: productive systems; individuals trained for cooperation, initiative, and roles appropriate to their talents; regulation that mitigates complexity and conflict; and the ample or optimal balance of these three. Each of the four is a measure of social health. A settlement’s members are its principal resource, but only its materiel until they are educated and organized for roles appropriate to their talents and social needs. Systems can’t be productive without healthy members educated for their roles, they can’t adapt to altered circumstances without members able to see disguised opportunities. Their members aren’t fully developed if they can’t step outside their roles to appraise the time and energy appropriate to each. Autonomy

222 also implies that one sometimes leaves a system or chooses to participate in another. And it implies judgment: one deliberates and chooses for reasons one can justify. Systems form for many reasons and aims, but those having priority satisfy a settlement’s core needs: healthy educated cooperative members; their material needs; safety; the development, cultivation, and autonomy of individual persons; and the efficient coordination of systems and their members. The last of these items makes it explicit that regulation, too, is the function of a system. For government is ideally the public organized for selfregulation. Its role is powerful, but the irony of its task—one system responsible for the safety and efficiency of others—is the best reason for its self-control and self-effacing modesty. A society or settlement of any size is less healthy than it could be to the degree that either of these variables has a value that is deficient when measured by these standards. Many systems aren’t productive, they abuse their members, or their productivity is perverse because they efficiently make things inimical to personal or social health. Distracted individuals fail themselves, usually because character couldn’t form or because luck was against them: their families weren’t stable; their schools didn’t teach; there was no work appropriate to their talents. Regulation fails because regulators are blinded by the complexity that needs fixing, or because they misconstrue their role and turn away to aggrandize themselves. Doctors go to school for years before being able to discern ailments they will be asked to cure. It’s seems odd that social health and dysfunction are apparent and widely perceived. But this isn’t strange because every adult perpetually sees and adjusts to the successes and failures of systems, people, and regulators. 2. Managerial tasks City managers (elected or appointed) are regulators having three principal responsibilities: 1. oversight; 2. construction; and 3. maintenance

223 2.1 Oversight Regulators mitigate complexity and conflict so systems and individuals can form; they identify social flash points while using suasion, laws, or the police to reduce anxieties and antagonisms. Systems and their members require an open playing field equitably managed. Having it, they go their separate ways while doing their work and tolerating others. People denied this opportunity are confused or convulsed; seeing others enjoy services or the space and resources denied them foments anger and encourages violence. Civility is an expression of confidence that the benefits of work, core systems, and regulation are secured for all residents. Competition and friction are tolerable if individuals and their systems show foresight and good will, though friction construed as malign is paralyzing or inciting: systems don’t form or function; antipathies spread until nothing works. Civility limits these effects by enabling the coherence that resists them. Its conditions are self-discipline and the discipline established by regulators (traffic laws, for example). The civility founded in discipline is, however, fragile; it differs fundamentally from civility rooted in mutual well-being. Civility is inhibition: one defers or gives way because dense traffic will come to a standstill if all fail to observe the more or less informal rules of the road. Civility is an expression of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You have the right of way, I’ll wait. This response is commonplace among individuals, but rare among systems. Their focus is often established by an aim and the means required to achieve it: many systems have no provision for registering their effects on others until informed that harm has been done (neighbors responding to noisy parties, people objecting to pollution upstream). Social coherence requires early warning antennae. Individuals can see or foresee their effects on others; systems can be more observant than typically they are. For systems and their initiatives usually have some negative effects. Damage is lighter if quickly perceived and corrected by the person or systems causing it, though authority sometimes intervenes because systems are blind to their effects or because their complexity exceeds a system’s ability to repair them. The regulator’s touch should be supple, and no more intrusive than circumstances require; it sustains coherence by mitigating conflict while clarifying viable routes and relationships. The

224 civility promoting coherence is thereby defended and consolidated by more civility. This is, of course, a pipe dream, when clumsy regulation and bureaucratic inertia defeat coherence while stoking resentments that strain civility. One may believe that civility is motivated by respect for other people, but its deeper motive is vulnerability: people want safety and the comfort of familiarity. Mutual regard is a latter effect, one that emerges when safety seems assured. This play of values resembles the dilemma of chicken and egg: we aren’t comfortable with people we don’t know, but we can’t know them if there isn’t the mutual respect that comes with comfort and safety. This puzzle has two principal solutions. One is slow: let people come to know one another in situations that are safe and mutually satisfying. Cities haven’t time to allow this process to run its course. They need and have a quicker solution: namely, the three kinds of morality described above. People regulate themselves in core systems and semi-public zones. Laws and penalties cover circumstances where self-regulation isn’t a sufficient defense. Regulators monitor city complexity and defuse its bottlenecks. But regulation is less effective if people and systems are oblivious to the complexities and conflicts that provoke oversight. Where is the resonant membrane sensitive to all a city’s diversity and able to exhibit these differences to its residents? John Berger describes self-reflection as the “narrative which, at one level or another of your consciousness, you are continually retelling and developing to yourself.”1 Live without it and you risk blindness or bravado. City life requires an equivalent scrutiny: journalists are sometimes its analysts, enthusiasts, apologists, and jeremiahs. Each can weave a coherent city map over the months and years of a career, but no single perspective is adequate to city scale and diversity, so an adequate recounting and appraisal needs an economy able to support several urban diarists working for local media. Who can afford them? That isn’t a problem if city people buy local papers or subscribe to local services because they see the value of having their systems and selves honestly described. But people aren’t sure they want regular surveillance and judgment; or they are very certain of not wanting it: who needs a Greek chorus chanting all day, every day? There is a balance 1

Berger, About Looking, p. 204

225 between no urban self-awareness and the boredom of reading more stories about the details of local life. Great journalism finds that middle way. A vigorous city tolerates embarrassment, responds to news of its failures, and enjoys stories celebrating its virtues. Always in conversation with itself, more ironic than vain, a city enriched by its journalists is a better place to be and a better partner to others because of knowing what it is and is not. They are a city’s eyes and ears, the essential adjunct, to regulators out of touch with the grain of city life.

2.2 Construction and maintenance A city’s regulators build and maintain its infrastructure, including facilities for power, communication, transport, and sewage disposal. City residents and systems thrive with routine. Each system has its tasks, members, and resources; every person has (ideally) his or her security and commitments. But this accommodation dissipates—early warning may be critical—if reliable ways are sabotaged by crises or faults unforeseen. Repair has four principal resources: three are apparent. First is the efficacy of response: vaccines, credit lines, food, and shelter for the victims. Another is the perceived character of the social order disrupted: was it seen to be equitable? People will struggle to reestablish an order that treated them fairly; they have no incentive to defend arrangements that marginalized them. Third is the resilience of many steady state attractors: someone healthy survives the illness that leaves others impaired. The complex of people and systems can absorb minor perturbations; it may adjust to larger ones. Social structure is a fourth asset, one distinct from the first, but allied to the second and third. Individuals quickly organize and cooperate for the good of neighbors and strangers. Systems reassemble; regulators extemporize in ways appropriate (ideally) to the altered situation. But disruption sometimes has chaotic effects, so these strengths are confounded for want of information and coordination. Private citizens often direct traffic during blackouts, but clearing traffic at one intersection increases coagulation at those nearby if none can see the others. Or conflict is more elemental because regulation and initiative collide: police intervene to arrest people converging on abandoned stores, but are these people looters or merely hungry?

226 Conflict is reduced if the memories and habits of the old city enable people and systems to reestablish securing routines. Cities that fail this test stabilize at a lower pitch of efficacy and well-being. New York quickly recovered from the disaster of the World Trade Center because the attack was cosmic but local, because it received vast moral and material support, and because there was little damage to the city’s civic and economic life. New Orleans and Detroit suffer more because the social incoherence of one and the narrow industrial base of the other made them vulnerable to calamity.

2.3 Supervision Regulators supervise police, courts, schools, hospitals, and procedures (elections, for example) that designate their successors. They take the measure of their city, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, proposing steps that may enhance their city’s corporate well-being. Each of these tasks can be problematic, but one is always urgent because a city’s well-being requires it: it is critical that all or most residents believe that city life is equitable. The percentage of people sharing this belief and acting as it prescribes is a measure of social coherence: do residents agree that they participate in a community—a self-regulating public—that convenes directly or mediately (by way of representatives) to oversee its affairs? Convening is impractical in large cities where coherence often reduces to the euphoria or disappointment provoked when signature teams win or lose important games. But civility and safety are vulnerable if residents, systems, or regulators suspect that the well-being of some residents is costly to many others. Altering this perception by repairing the systems or people ignored or mistreated is a priority in cities that monitor and repair themselves. The alternatives—disintegration or autocratic rule—are poor substitutes for mutual trust and the practical experience of allocating resources, resolving disputes, and working for common goods. Inequity is one tear in urban coherence, but there is another— dissolution—still more urgent. Venice, a case in point, is architecturally coherent: buildings, streets, and canals are mostly intact though the coherence of these structures has outlived the social coherence that empowered the city. Preservationists struggle with a puzzle they haven’t the means to solve: how

227 to establish an aim and practices appropriate to buildings they restore. This wasn’t a problem when Venice was a commercial center and military power: the urban social fabric was an effective instrument of city industry and purpose. It is a problem now when Venice lacks the social structure— systems and skills—that made it vital. Hence this impasse: what to do first? Fix the buildings hoping they’ll find a sustaining use? Or choose a viable urban purpose, then use tax incentives and subsidies to motivate the creation of systems appropriate to buildings restored? Preserving city structures without renewing city systems and purpose guarantees palazzi that are pretty but abandoned. 3. Material conditions 3.1 Resources and productivity Every settlement requires resources and productive systems because nothing is sustainable without food, clothing, and shelter, health and education. Productivity and efficiently managed resources are not, however, sure signs of social coherence. Other conditions—forced labor camps—can also sustain a desired effect, though production organized tyrannically has off-setting costs. Inflexible when circumstances change, it suppresses initiatives that would promote needed innovations. Systems press on mechanically, but inertia can’t save them. Coherence—balance—works better: individual initiatives reorganize systems while regulators reorient themselves to altered circumstances and these systems. One listens to a humming motor to confirm that a car’s parts are working synchronically. Cities, too, can be seen as machines having parts, products, and resources. A city rich in one domain may be indifferent to others (steel mills, brokerage houses, or blackboards), though productivity must be sufficient to satisfy material needs: the city produces basic products or buys them with profits earned by selling what it makes. Other goods vary with interests and circumstances. A culture fascinated by poetry, dance, or God responds, with publishers, performances, or churches. Systems and activities of these many kinds are native to settlements of every size. Cities are different because density and diversity generate complex webs of overlapping, hierarchically organized systems. Artists settle a neighborhood zoned to encourage them before galleries and clients arrive to sustain them.

228 The neighborhood evolves as each variable—individuals, systems, and regulation—achieves an expression appropriate to itself while supporting the other two. A city of many such neighborhoods is civilized because productive. 3.2. Public health The physical and mental health of residents conditions the work they do, the pleasure they take in their lives, and relations to one another. Some of health’s conditions are beyond the control of a city’s regulators and its material conditions. Many others—access to food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, clean water and air—are secured when a city organizes to satisfy this elementary condition for efficacy and well-being. Individualists sometimes argue that each person is responsible for his or her own well-being, but this ignores the mutual dependence of people in core and other systems, and the chance that illness may spread like plague. Conscious of these risks, with sympathy for people in distress, we organize to avert them. 4. Humane values 4.1 Experiential measures Each resident’s experience of city life is a perspective warped by his or her situation, interests, and needs. So, the view is different for each of several people standing on the same street corner looking the same direction. Each looks, then interprets what he sees: one admires the building he owns; another looks at the windows of an apartment he rents; a third, sees the building where his mother was raised. City life as all know it is socialized by intensities and aversions less plainly crystallized in other settlements. Some encounters are simple or raw, but many are over-laid with several orders of meaning. Attention is steady, but often challenged by complexity, difference, responsibilities, need, or risk. There is more anonymity because many relations are ephemeral, because people negotiating their commitments barely know one another, or merely because one avoids others. Competition and crowding guarantee spasms of impatience and hostility. There is more anxiety because things happen, unforeseeably. Late for an appointment, you take a cab, but traffic stalls so you leave the cab and walk, calling ahead on a

229 cell phone that doesn’t work because of a dead battery. Delayed by a detour at a street blocked by a parade, you arrive at the appointed address only to find that elevators are out of order. You climb stairs to the fourteenth floor. Tension is chronic in city life; feelings are supercharged; risk is offset by the spontaneous pleasure of street musicians and acrobats, fine buildings and their shadows, sanctuary in a quiet café, a job that comes one’s way, friends who meet in the subway after months or years apart. Dense, oppressive, and complicated, laced with surprise or fears of random violence, city experience surges through one’s head and body like an addict’s tainted blood. Visitors are mystified, excited, or repelled. Most residents wouldn’t leave. Raucous cities are a challenge: stutter-step with me if you can. There are also slower cities, more stately than clamorous, where visitors and residents, too, are embarrassed by habits too crude for their elegant streets, clubs, shops, or hotels. These cities value manners more than diversity, measure more than spontaneity. Cities dominated by the rhythms of a church have a constant pace: hours, days, and years are calibrated to the cycle of feasts, processions, or calls to prayer. There is less cacophony but also less urgency and surprise. Religious practice is different—more desperate and frenetic—in pathological cities where squatters occupy tracts of land surrounding a central city. These are the boldest people. No social programs defend them: personal ingenuity and mutual help are their principal resources. Surviving by dint of health, grit, and irony, they care as best they can for children, spouses, neighbors, and friends. This is Rousseau’s state of nature in the context of urban experience, socialization without a social contract. Spontaneity and diversity have special implications for children and people too old or sick to know it in these adult terms. Parents worry that city life will crush their children, and that is often so in neighborhoods where drugs and violence are the local pest. But poor and middle-class children are street-wise from an early age.2 They, too, enjoy the mix of stability and spontaneity, the multitude of things to do and see, the many ways to be seen. The children of rich families are more likely cosseted and indulged: entitlement is a blight that discourages initiative; one might take a chance and lose. Children of the middle class have less to risk, more to gain. They often Joseph Grange, The City: an Urban Cosmology (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 18-19, 35-37, 56-58, 60-61, 109-114, 133-136, 144-146.

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230 have a solid base in core systems and the support of viable schools. These are a city’s likely entrepreneurs, its upwardly mobile doctors and lawyers. Poor children are accustomed to losing; they are likely victims short of a chance that opens a door to their talents. Entitled oldsters are warehoused in retirement communities; those less affluent struggle with illness and too little money, or they test themselves against a city they alternately trust and fear. This diversity challenges my claim that experience is a criterion for differentiating settlements: how could it be if the experiences of city residents are as diverse as settlements themselves? Experience is a measure because everyone who walks its streets knows his or her city with an intensity inflected by a complex of fifteen effects described below: i. affiliation; ii. anonymity; iii. intimacy; iv. competition; v. tension; vi. vulnerability; vii. fear; viii. constraint; ix. security; x. freedom; xi. opportunity; xii. spontaneity; xiii. purpose; xiv. provocation; and xv. satisfaction/frustration. These are some principal dimensions of city experience, though there is an ambiguity: experience has two relevant senses. It signifies an intra-psychic content or state, or one’s engagement with other people. Each of the fifteen effects has both components. i. Affiliation is primary because we can’t live or flourish without it and because life is a succession of companions and connections, some decided at birth, others chosen as early as first friends. It implies tasks, roles, and partners, mutual concern, duties, and a schedule. One cannot think of oneself without thinking of duties to or feelings for partners past or present; one doesn’t imagine a future without some of them. Affiliation is a skill partly innate, partly learned. Life without it is demoralizing and lonely, hence this uncertainty about autism: is it the experience of unbearable loneliness or an insensitivity to it? ii. Anonymity is an effect of complexity, one generated in either of three ways: people committed to many systems may spend little time in each, with the effect that systems’ member are mostly unknown to their mates; the thicket of systems has many pockets, so people falling into one (unemployment, for example) may not escape; or people with money choose to avoid other people or their systems. The experience of anonymity varies accordingly: one is too busy to notice the private lives of other people or the fact of being unknown to them; one is isolated and despairing; or life seems rich and ample because one enjoys city riches without duties to others.

231 iii. Intimacy is hard to sustain because of one’s many tasks, the diversity of people one meets, and the likelihood of meeting many more. Yet intimacy is all the more precious for being rare: people not having it determine not to want it or they despair of its absence. These responses make intimacy fragile: there is little chance it can evolve unattended when finding, having, and keeping it provokes so much anxiety. iv. Competition is the experience of encountering people or systems whose aims oppose or frustrate one’s own: they want the same partners or resources, or they have strength or authority sufficient to impede us. Competition is affiliation’s antithesis. It comes as early as the distress of perceiving that one’s primary care taker is busy with other things. It compromises loyalties when time and effort are allocated among contending tasks and roles. v. Tension is the effect of competition, complexity, diversity, danger, and crowding. One is anxious because there is much to do, too many impediments, or too little money to do it. People living anywhere need an income, friends or family, safety, and a comfortable place to live, but these are harder to secure in cities. vi. Vulnerability is the experiential response to need, illness and fragility, danger, competition, hostility, and arbitrary authority. Perceiving vulnerability can make us prudent; responses to merely feeling it are paralyzing and less effective. vii. Fear is the expression of perceived vulnerability, though some vulnerable people aren’t afraid while many who are fearful aren’t especially vulnerable. viii. The experience of constraint is the intellectual and affective side of regulation. Every system, role, and activity has rules: some are laws, but most are informal and many are never formulated. Self-discipline is a constraint learned in the midst of norms that give it form and direction. For it isn’t true that everything is permitted: freedom is constrained by an artist’s medium, ideas, and the tradition in which he or she works; a batter’s stance is his own, he swings when he chooses, but he stands in a place and swings his bat in ways appropriate to his game. ix. The experience of security is complex because security, itself, has several bases: satisfaction of needs and interests; stable relations to partners

232 in core and other systems; physical and mental health; a stable job or other source of wealth; a home; protection from violence or unforeseen accidents; and laws that make other people benign and predictable. Someone who rightly believes himself secure in all these respects is lucky, indeed. But no one is exempt from risks of all sorts, so the experience of security requires a dollop of hope. x. The experience of freedom has two bases: there is possibility, the sense one could choose or learn to do something, and power, the experience of having the skill or resources to do it. Libertarians believe that socialization diminishes freedom by obliging us to do such things as systems—governments especially—require. But they ignore the difference between negative and positive freedom. They imagine that negative freedom would be unqualified if government were to withdraw all its demands, though people liberated may lack talent, training, or other factors required to support their undertakings. Some conditions for expressing positive freedom are social. For choosing to act, knowing how to act effectively is invariably a possibility or power taught, sanctioned, or otherwise conditioned by core and other systems. Positive freedom has two expressions: the power to do a specific thing (cook or learn to cook), and the power to choose one’s systems or decide their relative priority in the personal economy of time and effort. But these choices, too, are constrained: priorities are decided within the circle of one’s affiliations: their demands and one’s duties to them may not be negotiable. The experience of unvarnished—“existential”—freedom is Sartre’s mythic extrapolation to a limit no one has ever experienced.3 xi. There is no positive freedom without opportunity and resources: knives with nothing to cut, a car to drive without roads or fuel. Opportunity is possibility made concrete: circumstances converge so action is sufficient to produce a desired effect. People and systems comfortable with habit and routine are oblivious to opportunity; restless others perpetually seek it, though finding useful leverage makes no difference without ability, means, a purpose, and resolve.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Citadel, 2001, p. 29. 3

233 xii. Spontaneity is a feature of encounters that occur when events converge in unexpected ways. Surprised by circumstances, one acts or chooses in ways that seem unconstrained by rules. But there are consequences, so choice is restricted if reflection inhibits impulse. xiii. Every adult and all but the youngest children experience themselves as having purposes. Aims generated or focused within core or other systems are socialized: tasks and one’s way of doing them are shaped by the ends and design of systems that direct and support them. Few personal ambitions are uninflected by social conditions or objectives they serve. We experience their aims as our own: playing the game as best I can, I don’t forget that its rules and skills are norms I affirm and satisfy. xiv. Provocation is usually experienced as if circumstances alone were the trigger, though it is also and equally a function of character. People wise to themselves—recovering alcoholics and people on diets—take care to avoid situations where their impulses are out of control. Or, like gamblers bound for Las Vegas, they want provocation but carry no credit cards and only as much cash as they can afford to lose. Settlements are a perpetual provocation, because other people and circumstances inevitably make offers or demands that trigger an impulse or reflection: Do I want this? Can we use it? Cities are multiply inciting because of encounters no one plans or anticipates: the kindness or brutality of street life, a face one can’t ignore, clouds reflected in a building’s façade. There are rarely days when city residents aren’t surprised, provoked, or recentered by something they see or hear. xv. The experience of security is sufficient in itself to explain the satisfaction of people afraid of their neighbors. Others feel that security is only a necessary condition for the well-being that comes with wealth or defeating a competitor. Satisfaction is somewhat independent of one’s circumstances, whatever they be, because some people are ebullient, others more easily or chronically distressed. Frustration is always a risk: skills aren’t sufficient, people don’t cooperate, resources are inadequate, circumstances oppose us, nothing works. Frustration annuls satisfaction, hence well-being. These factors never coalesce because several are contraries: provocation and satisfaction are adversarial when the latter is an obstacle to challenges that reduce it. Freedom challenges security and satisfaction by

234 putting them at risk, but initiative is confounded if this opposition isn’t resolved. Security is the middle term that adjusts the balance of freedom and provocation on one side, satisfaction on the other. Artists want provocation, but can’t use it well until they enjoy the assurance of a settled style. Satisfaction is an off-setting danger if it elides with security making us smug: the artist paints to order when nothing else provokes him; always constrained, never surprised, he repeats himself. We want more from artists who are secure, but dissatisfied, or content because they paint, but insecure. The experience of safety is, itself, unstable because of its several constituents and because one can’t guarantee all its material conditions, especially in cities. Feeling secure is a reward for good choices, nurture, luck, and a potent economy. But being secure has the odd effect of desensitizing us: we don’t feel our good fortune until something threatens to reduce it. The flight from cities was first provoked by the hope of better houses, fresh air, status, and better schools; it evolved as a flight from the insecurity provoked by violence. Security is also problematic in this other way: it is all but impossible to distinguish the contribution of its constituent elements—the experience of this or that securing condition. Yet security (like well-being) is a global feeling that dissipates when any of its conditions is threatened or destabilized: wealth and status are incidental when a judge or doctor speaks the worst. There is no consensus about the proper integration of these experiential variables: how are they joined or mixed to produce feelings of misery or well-being? The protagonist of Camus’ The Stranger declares that he would happily spend a hundred years in jail, given only the memory of a single day of liberty,4 but that isn’t plausible. No friends or future, no support but anonymous jailers: this is security mortified, security without the possibility of reciprocity or initiative. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” is ambiguous in a similar way: is it liberty before every other consideration or yes to liberty, hence to its necessary conditions? Most people have little freedom or security. Given a choice, they accept limitations on their freedom of choice and speech in exchange for more security (after 9/11, for example). People of wealth and little purpose confirm that provocation, too, is secondary to security. Yet most people agree 4

Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York: Spark Publishing Group, 2002), p. 79.

235 that affiliation is a condition for security. Variations proliferate because people who are young and vigorous or merely vigorous are unhappy with lives that are secure, but lacking purpose. Wanting an aim or having it, they also want freedom and provocation. These many ways of perceiving security are one reason for the clamor of cities: residents who want different things live accordingly. 4.2 Aesthetic measures The experiential measures cited above (i-xv) ignore two that may seem equally fundamental: the moral and aesthetic. Moral perception (considered below) is a complex having security, affiliation, duty, freedom, and constraint as its constituents. Only aesthetic experience is unimplied by the factors cited. Most cities are agglomerations built piecemeal: buildings, streets, and squares, each created without regard for the whole. Beauty, comfort, nature, and grace are usually an afterthought, one that doesn’t come to fruition until successive styles cohere or until a powerful church or government remakes principal neighborhoods. The sensibilities of a city’s people are shaped by the grace of these structures, occasional open spaces, and the uses made of both. Are its buildings and street plan appropriate to human stride, scale, and the sweep of a glance? Are there city gardens, vest-pocket parks, or well-spaced precincts of greenery, sky, and moving water? Do city structures intimidate because they are faceless, vertical. and spare? Aldo Rossi described cities that acquire complex form over centuries of stylistic change. The result is a coherent fabric, one that integrates styles as different as Romanesque, gothic, and baroque. Compare Rem Koolhaas and his preference for cities that have no past. His Manhattan is Coney Island in concrete and steel: see one as the laboratory for the other, then congratulate their makers for fantasies that have little or nothing to with either the lives of most residents or buildings that line most streets. Rossi is memory and old music. Koolhaas is imagination punctuated by rock and roll: design iconic buildings because you, the architect, are anonymous if your structures don’t stand out against the backdrop of their context. This attitude is plausible when context is established by a background of vernacular buildings, then enlivened by a foreground of one or

236 more that are iconic: Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a familiar example. But is it true that cities are ever more beautiful as architectural novelties fill their empty lots, each compelling in its way, though the eye struggles to integrate the jumble? Does the success of the new depend on its opposition to the old? And why, if so, is this opposition so muted in the Italian towns Rossi describes? Koolhaas avoids this opposition by celebrating New York as a free space where everything is possible. Accept the street grid—a schematic checkerboard of right angle streets and avenues—then do as you like. Build as high as steel and elevators allow, though the result is monolithic and sterile on many streets (Sixth Avenue south of Central Park in Manhattan) and fractured on others (the Bowery) by conceits that fight with those next door. Many cities have precincts of considerable beauty. Is each handsome in the same way? Or is urban beauty particular and contextual implying that beauty is a family resemblance and that each city’s beauties are evocations, never copies, of those in other towns? Diversity doesn’t entail that city structures share no aesthetic features. For beautiful things of every sort have form, detail, contrast, and coherence; many provoke surprise because of broken symmetry or other anomalies. All rouse feelings of excitement, expectation, and resolution. These qualities have their apotheosis in music, but one knows them, too, in the shape, bulk, and detail of buildings that have an advantage absent in music: buildings are inhabited, not merely seen; one enters, explores, and enjoys them. Most houses are built by developers who care more about cost than beauty, though the interiors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses complement their external designs. Mass housing precludes this care: leafy streets fronting splendid houses are reserved for people more wealthy than most. Cities with few empty lots intensify the challenge: how to design streets and neighborhoods for beauty without leveling all that stands in order to start again. Burn and build is risky: most cities considered beautiful were not built to the specifications of a single design. Venice is an accretion: wealth made it possible and desirable to build well. History laid down traces that subsequent architects incorporated in formats that evolved; no one prescribed a plan equivalent to Haussmann’s design for Paris. Venice succeeds where most cities fail because its pedestrian walkways and bridges are everywhere in scale to buildings and plazas appropriate to human sight lines. Necks don’t

237 crane: churches and campaniles are pivots that integrate facades terminated by a canal. One looks down a waterway bounded by houses, humble or grand, each with windows, shutters, and roof line different from its neighbors. The buildings are stable; light and water move. These oppositions, distinct but integrated, make the city beautiful. Could one design a city as fine as Venice? Perhaps, though no city built to the plans of a single designer or committee seems to approach it. The reason is implicit in Rossi’s Architecture of the City: urban beauty is partly a function of coherent difference. Difference is historical; coherence is the product of architectural genius and ambition moderated by respect for the work of dead colleagues: Palladio didn’t suppose that his buildings should oppose and affront their neighbors. Rich clients in our time want attention; architects provide it. Modest city residents want less, but more. We don’t need vanity buildings; we do want forms that draw the eye and reward it with unexpected resolution. Throughways are often landscaped in ways appropriate to people observing from cars moving at speed. We enjoy color and shade, trees and public spaces where air can move; we’re pleased by skylines and facades that advance or retreat in ways that resolve perceptually and geometrically as we move through them. Let architects duplicate these experiences (as they do) for people walking through and around buildings of consequence, seeing them from different angles, watching light and shadows moving over and through them. We want complexity that coheres: texture, color, organization, shape, and scale that are visually, even kinesthetically, rewarding. Gaudi’s apartment houses in Barcelona are surprising, but they don’t violate the context established by other houses on the street. Designs like his are a perpetual challenge: how to create buildings that beautify a street while making them fit those already standing. For what is there to do if the buildings in place are ordinary or worse? Destroying them creates an opportunity for developers who use the same design to construct buildings with trivial variations on every empty tract. An alternate solution distracts attention from the old by creating an icon. But there is also the harder task of finding a way to revitalize the look of a street-line by designing a façade that makes something of interest where there was little or nothing before. This respect for history and context is familiar to architects persuaded that the experience of beauty is constrained by expectations that are culturally and situationally determined. This is one of the depths in Rossi’s formulation:

238 we come to see a city as beautiful when we are familiar with those historically situated architectural norms that make this perception possible. Anarchy—Koolhaas writing of Coney Island and Manhattan—discounts visual rhythms that evolve with time, historically educated designers, and people who live with structures they build. These considerations are critical measures of one’s adjustment to city life: when is it unsettling or frustrating, vivid and compelling? The answers are consequential for a range of effects: the ugliness of one’s circumstances reduces the pleasure of being there or wanting to stay; it discourages initiative and frustrates efficacy. All this seems incidental to the efficiencies of an anthill, but all is critical to the motivation of city residents. For there are these three perspectives: working systems, their individual members, and the global management of essential services. The first two are discounted in a prison camp, but not in towns and cities where the satisfaction of the residents is no less critical than the efficiencies of its banks and roads. Why is Koolhaas provocative and unsettling when Rossi is quiet and serene? One reason is an assumption more implied than explicit. Rossi assumed that the buildings and urban textures he described were home to successive generations of families, schools, or businesses; context is preserved though the buildings are refitted periodically for use by residents or their systems. Koolhaas begins by describing thousands of milling people diverted by the sham environments of Coney Island amusement parks. He leaps from Coney Island’s mock structures to their Manhattan equivalents: exotic parties at the Waldorf Astoria, Radio City and the Rockettes. Families, schools, and businesses—most all of Manhattan—is missing in a narrative that reduces the city to heroic designers and the crowds moving through buildings that resemble stage-sets. Is regard for stable context and a human scale merely sentimental and retrograde? Fredric Jameson isn’t sure: It becomes clearer [after reading Roger Scruton’s Aesthetics of Architecture] that we have to do not merely with a class vision, a description of the way in which the upper classes (like Holderlin’s gods) inhabit their spacious dwellings and live their bodies, but with even more, all the complex mirror-dialectics of envy involved in class perceptions. What is being excited here is not the will to restore my perceptions, but rather the envy of those full perceptions as they are

239 exercised by another class (and not by the bourgeoisie, but by the aristocracy: these are middle-class envies that survive in the general form of culture after the bourgeois revolution itself). It becomes then a little more complicated to distinguish between an attempt to restore older kinds of space and the incitement of collective fantasies whose very different function is that of legitimating a nobler way of life (and thereby excusing whatever has to be done, economically and politically, to perpetuate that way of life which virtually by definition is not for everyone, but whose minority experience somewhere is nonetheless supposed to redeem the fallen lives the rest of us have to lead).5 Jameson’s irony misfires: wealthy people are typically healthier than the poor, though improving the health of all is feasible and desirable, not merely the fantasy of people envious of those healthier than themselves. Class prerogatives are real, but not immutable. A city’s street plan and structures are a principal zone of contention: they embody their city’s haphazard growth including ways that dominant classes have affirmed themselves. Those results can be altered: neighborhoods can be transformed piecemeal in the name of equity and coherence (in the style of Kevin Lynch’s Good City Form); facilities remade can promote comfort, diversity, excitement, and beauty appropriate to the scale of individual lives and core systems. Doing this doesn’t require new towns sited in a void; it is sufficient that we alter decrepit precincts or those where change is opposed by people or systems fearful of losing an advantage. One example strengthens resolve: Koolhaas was vindicated when Times Square and 42nd Street were remade in the style of Coney Island, with lighting (visible from Mars?) that makes its buildings incidental. People move slowly but amiably, mesmerized by lights, traffic, noise, and the press of other bodies. This isn’t a noble way of life, but it is social, intense, and complementary to the quieter but equally democratic pleasures of Central Park. One is rest, the other recreation. Both are distractions from a problem we never solve: modern cities are not designed for the pleasure of their residents; the values of work and home, technology and human scale are opposed. Coherence was easier when work Frederic Jameson, “Is Space Political?”, in Anyplace, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 203.

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240 was done at home; no buildings but palaces or cathedrals exceeded human scale; highways weren’t bulldozed through neighborhoods because there were no cars, and no remote factories, offices, or malls. Those older cities and towns enjoyed a coherent architectural style or one whose evolution was manifest in the harmony of streets and squares. Razing buildings that once supplied urban texture destroys continuity; it also reduces sensibility for want of examples (Penn Station) that would educate it. We might try bootstrapping ourselves to a sensibility appropriate to our time, but cultural diversity deprives us of shared aesthetic standards. Proud of ethnic tastes or personal autonomy, we resist an integrating style. Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas—billboards and the Long Island duck (a building in the form of birds in its owner’s flock)—are epigrams for our distraction. And anyway, cities are already vast; there is no wealth sufficient to remake them. Dominated by the structures in place and by economic powers oblivious to aesthetic interests, we tolerate a Babel of styles. Times Square uses light to dramatize and hide its diversity. It (like Coney Island) is a refuge if cacophony is our point of reference: people moving through the Square at night, half paralyzed by the intensity of flashing neon, are oddly pacified, almost quiet. This is an odd effect: refuge without shelter. Both are essential to well-being, but neither is sufficient. We want and need the comfort of affirmation and safety in spaces of our own: dwelling as well as shelter and refuge.19 Home is a dwelling but so are offices, shops, schools, barracks, and churches, gardens, streets, and parks; every structure could be designed to enhance the experience and efficiency of the people and systems living or working within it. We are less content and think less well of ourselves when the aesthetic of dwellings—a need indifferent to class and status—is ignored. Lacking knowhow; too poor to refurbish all or parts of a city; distracted by other interests (profit, for example); unable to achieve consensus about a program for change; we discount dwelling and its conditions as a fantasy of “middle-class envies.” This has a curious effect: many city residents often feel displaced. Aesthesis is sensibility with beauty at one extreme, comfort or well-being at the other. People uneasy in ugly streets or structures don’t feel settled, safe, or pleased. Churches and baseball stadiums are sanctuaries where purpose and design are mutually supporting, but streets, work sites, neighborhoods, and housing are often primitive or chaotic. With little said to remind them

241 that dwelling is an elemental value and need, people feel dispossessed without knowing why. Dispossession makes people angry and dangerous because it implies a lack of worth: trashing the neighbors or their neighborhood is a way of getting even. These are the moral effects of an aesthetic failure. They would be reduced by the self-esteem that comes with inclusion and the mutual respect of people joined by communitarian values. Karsten Harries proposes “an architecture responsive to our essential incompleteness, our need for others, for genuine, concrete community.”6 But there are two kinds of community. One requires only that people participate together in a practice meaningful to them individually. The prayers of a church’s members and fans roused at a baseball game are examples: I cheer louder because of hearing you; but I could cheer alone; people pray together though salvation is earned and received alone. The other sort of community is established by the reciprocities of systems. People move together through Times Square but each responds in his or her own way to the intensity of the lights. Central Park has people sitting or strolling alone but also those playing games, talking, or eating together. Communities of both sorts promote inclusion by defending shared values, though it is principally systems that create essential goods and the wealth required to support communities of the other kind. Harries emphasizes that urban beauty is both instrument and apotheosis: city aesthetics are a basis for city morals because urban structures and precincts, ugly or graceful, renewed or decrepit, are the context where systems form and attitudes germinate. The beauties of a church resonate in the prayers of its congregants. Chicago’s lakefront is a sanctuary: it is rarely defaced by the families or strollers whose self-esteem is confirmed by its grace. This overlay of qualities—morality enhanced by beauty—is conspicuous when urban design softens the opposition of public and private. Parks do this to a degree, piazzas and town squares—the agorae in ancient Greece—do it better. People come into a common space to do some of their business, for air, or for the pleasure of unexpected meetings. The public space is contiguous with the private spaces whose doors and windows face onto it. They are places of work and retreat; it is the shared space into which they Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 152-166. Also see Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 32-48. 6

242 empty. Contemporary sensibility often reduces public spaces to thoroughfares where drivers and pedestrians move anonymously on their way to roles in systems that are private to the point of isolation. The missing agorae (like common rooms in English universities) would restore the equilibrium where privacy is the adjunct to sociality. This is an appropriate aim because every system is already a small public bound by the complementarities and conversations of its members. Design the public space for beauty, comfort, and access—make it a lure—and people will happily move back and forth between private roles and public presence. 4.3 Intellectual measures People suspicious of urban life imagine that cities cage people as zoos cage other animals. This is not altogether mistaken: well-managed prosperous cities satisfy principal needs while routinizing lives and restricting the kinds of available stimuli: residents don’t hunt or fish for lunch; they don’t shiver with the pigeons when it’s cold. The analogy fails because it ignores capacities that are unexpressed outside human settlements and because settlements do more than use intellect: they exhibit and provoke it. Markets display fruits and vegetables in ways that show their differences and relations; stoplights cycle in ways calculated to maintain traffic flow; libraries shelve books by author and subject. Every office building is a hive, every office a cell where competent people move some process toward its dedicated aim. These expressions of utilitarian intelligence are the background and condition for thought’s other expressions: insight; speculation; appraisal; or play. Cities magnify these effects because spontaneity and diversity are perpetually arousing: people recoil with surprise, then analyze and integrate. There is ample space for reflection because the overlay of systems creates niches where artists and rebels can observe and comment. Many people can’t use this freedom: lacking time or imagination, they cycle through a routine of thoughts and aims that are only relevant until superseded. These are alternate ways of thinking— accommodate or create. Almost everyone enjoys the irony and wit provoked by city frustrations. Now use paint, film, or language to mythologize or express them. A basketball player improves his skills; challenged by friends, impelled by an idea of himself, he refines his moves. People of every sort discover

243 singular talents and respond to opportunity. People in simpler towns produce work of great quality, but the sociality of cities is the complement and goad to city autonomy: everyone experiences an array of pressures; some people respond by surpassing themselves. This is the luck of finding oneself in a community of artists, writers, or entrepreneurs, each a point of contrast for work of one’s own. Or a city provokes its flaneurs, loners who integrate their responses to city complexity while walking its streets. The result is a skill intensified, an intelligence alive and appropriate to circumstances: a camera, paint, or words are its instruments. 4.4 Moral measures Most residents don’t have surpassing skills, but all are provoked by complexity. The discipline learned in systems makes us sensitive to activities—intrusions—that violate or disrupt other people or systems. Wanting to avert conflict, we invent ways to live together while doing what we like: ear phones rather than boom boxes. This, too, is an instrumental use of intellect, one having a democratic motive and aim. Plato assigned organizational tasks to philosopher-kings; we credit all a city’s residents with the capacity to discipline themselves while considering and debating procedures appropriate to public discipline. A city elects representatives to make final decisions, but elections are or ought to be the occasions for provoking deliberation in the electorate. Dewey’s emphasis on accessible information, responsible media, and a literate public fills this space:7 thinking residents identify city priorities, points of conflict, and plausible strategies for achieving one, avoiding the other. This democratizing project is conspicuously less successful than the refining of specialized intellectual powers because other forces oppose it. Some are noxious but banal. Busy people have little time for public affairs given the demands of private life: why bother? Or habit makes us lazy; we stop noticing that familiar practices aren’t effective. Other influences are pernicious: principal media entertain or excite rather than educate. This is sometimes a reasonable response to public taste, though its persistence suggests that two interests profit by diverting us: some are enriched because we pay to be entertained; others want us distracted when city priorities and 7

Dewey, Public and its Problems, 143-184.

244 organization are favorable to their interests. Having wealth, power, and media control, they are careful not to publicize their advantages. Popular understanding is discouraged; the deliberating public—the principal agent of civic morality—doesn’t form. Cities raise or intensify moral issues because of the three variables and their relations, and because residents disagree about the priority rightly ascribed to individuals, systems, or the whole. Individualists deny that these complications could have moral implications: circumstances are amoral; let everyone accept the moral burden of his acts. But credit or blame cannot all be mine if what I do and its effects are affected by my situation: I can’t be a reliable employee if there are no jobs; I can’t be a reliable parent if there is no money to pay the rent. Creating a city’s goods, services, and opportunities requires that individuals initiate and sustain the systems that do its work. Families produce and nurture its next generation, schools educate them formally, businesses supply goods, services, and salaries. The many systems sometimes cohere, but their competition for members and materiel provokes conflicts which require the intervention of an authority that regulates for the whole. There are moral issues each step of the way. One obligation—parental responsibility—is pervasive and elementary. Most parents care for their children without a law requiring it because they were raised by caretakers who instilled the habit of reciprocal care. Their children learn it, too, so duties and rights are coeval: one learns the domain of one’s freedom while learning its boundaries, including duties to those who set these limits. Every system engaged will have these same parameters: it will have roles, entitlements, and duties to the system and other members. The morality appropriate to core systems is founded in attitudes and habits. Attitudes join beliefs and feelings. Each is a perspective expressed as a resonance provoked by one’s engagements with other people and things: were they threatening or confirming, pleasing or painful? Pleasing roles and duties are filled enthusiastically; we struggle to fill roles causing pain, though we learn to satisfy roles that give no satisfaction. Why do we persist? Because the primary expression of the morality instilled by core systems is reliability in the performance of one’s roles. This formulation is too abstract for children, but watch them behave: reliability, respect, and loyalty are virtues they learn, proudly display, and carry forward into systems they prize.

245 Morality is, nevertheless, essentially schizoid. For these virtues are offset (in many cultures) by the demand that we judge our companions, systems, and selves: what are we doing; should we be doing it? Satisfactory answers invoke one’s situation, aims, and moral values that apply irrespective of circumstantial details. One may steal in situations of grave need, but not usually; lying is normally abjured; killing is never justified apart from extreme and imminent danger. Some cultures and societies elevate loyalty to core systems above other values, but those shaped by the Old Testament and Protestant Reformation insist that an autonomous moral conscience is an essential developmental outcome: children must learn to make independent moral judgments after appraising a situation and its demands. Systems that violate this second condition nullify the otherwise reasonable expectation that members are loyal and reliable: the conscientious soldier refuses an immoral command. The foundation for this second, countervailing moral force mixes interpretation and philosophical dialectic with empirical data about personal development. Interpretation includes Luther’s appeal to divinely infused moral souls. Dialectic culminates with Descartes’ self-discovery—“I am, I exist each time I think or pronounce it,” and his affirmation that I am a being who “doubts, denies,…refuses.” Experience matters, too: crude practices and pernicious effects stir reflection and resistance, though most people hesitate to resist because they fear disruption and punishment. Others learned to think critically as children: doubting, denying, and refusing are easier than appeasing a system’s other members if one learned it early. A stubborn few decline rewards and resist intimidation. Independent moral judgment is initiative at the edge where having it dangerous. Cities make resistance easier because members who abandon their systems can hope to disappear into obscurity, or because a taste for criticism and risk is well honed in many residents. It helps, too, if a system’s critics— whether observers or members—aren’t inhibited by loyalty to its practices, aims or other members. These considerations have two effects: systems and their members can expect criticism for any project that exceeds norms or expectations, however banal; any person or system less than robust is likely to be shaken by criticism, not all of it well-founded. There is also a countervailing defense: each city is a warren of private spaces; most people busy with their own affairs hardly notice the aims, practices, and

246 improprieties of others. Their single-mindedness is tolerable until it serves as cover for pervasive evil: a den of thieves isn’t a city. Amorality—indifference—has its limit wherever city residents come together to regulate their affairs, or when they assign this responsibility to a surrogate. People assemble to deliberate because complexity and conflict impede essential tasks and because bad choices can’t be mitigated or deterred if they aren’t scrutinized and regulated. We mark this point by replacing the private morality of systems and their members with rules or laws legislated and administered by an authority: law and the morality of right and wrong supersede the morality of loyalty, duty, and respect. Zone morality—their interface and middle term—is frozen mannerism. Dispensing with law and intimacy, it choreographs the mechanical interactions of customers and clerks, lawyers and clients in formulaic settings. It gets no credit when law and the threat of punishment are the only cure for complexity and conflict. The authority responsible for making and administering laws in democratic cities and states is the institutionalized public, a constitutionally sanctioned government. Skeptics (or realists) perceive democratic government as a ruse, a system that disguises bureaucrats when they pervert sovereign power for their private aims. It is true historically that most governments, city governments included, have coercive power but no legitimacy. Democratic governments are nominal exceptions: their authority derives entirely from the will of their citizens as expressed in a constitution, elections, deliberations, and laws. But government’s sovereign authority can be high-jacked in several ways. Cities make one of these vulnerabilities conspicuous. City government is never far from urban life: it maintains the infrastructure on which all rely; its regulations mediate most transactions. Yet government is oddly invisible. Few residents know what it does, when or where it meets. Most registered voters ignore municipal elections, though candidates elected will have every opportunity to alter the terms of city life. This is odd: people who admire discipline in their systems and require it of themselves are happy to let city government run itself. Each carefully plans his or her life, but most leave its context—their city—to chance. Carelessness is rewarded if city officials are honest and competent; it corrupts every interest if they are not. Other moral issues are more abstract, but not less problematic. What is the relation between the universality implied by the idea of the public (every

247 citizen having the right to participate in deliberations or elections that determine a state’s aims and laws) and the distribution of material costs and benefits? Is the universality of rights consistent with material disparities that distinguish rich and poor? The question is settled if all residents have jobs and salaries adequate to the costs of institutionalizing government as an expression of the public. But the sick and unemployed can’t contribute even a minimal fraction of government’s costs: do they nevertheless share the rights that government legislates and the goods its economy produces? Plato never doubted that a corporate interest dominates city life: individuals may thrive while the city rots, but there is no way to educate and employ every citizen in work appropriate to his talents without the organization and cooperation that creates a one of many. Aristotle, more pragmatic, resisted the idea of a perfected city: a liberated middle class generates activities, wealth, and ideas that animate a viable city; there are rich and poor; let middle class stability mitigate the excesses of both. Marx and Mill transformed these alternatives for contemporary sensibility. Oligarchs and the poor are perpetually joined in a conflict that eventuates in proletarian democracy; or a powerful central government uses the levers of law and economy to transform the working class into a stable middle- class—the social democratic ideal—by redistributing wealth, education, and opportunity. Mill’s distribution principle—the greatest good for the greatest number—is the rule directing political economies in the West into the current century. City residents are principal beneficiaries because density and complexity bring the poor and disabled into the web of city systems. Let careful organization enable willing residents to improve their lives. That happens when the schools and business of a productive city are escalators to relative stability and prosperity. Money spent to improve the lives of the poor and unemployed earns an ample return within a generation if the health and education of their children is assured. This was Plato’s idea twenty-four hundred years ago, though he simplified the task by restricting it to the survivalist settlement described in The Republic. Marx’s slogan—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs—generalizes this principle to all a society’s members. Why include people for whom no productive roles are available? Because the failure to include those who seek work is a social failure, not the fault of

248 the unemployed. Isn’t this a grandiose idea of human social power, given the evidence that a full employment economy is all but impossible to achieve? It is grandiose, but admirable. Marx and Mill express a moral intention: there is no sustainable justification for excluding anyone willing to participate and innocent of heinous crimes. Therefore, we accept our corporate responsibility and affirm Mill’s distribution principle. Why not restrict the recipients of goods and services to those who earn their wealth and well-being? Because they aren’t the only ones who need and enjoy well-being. Unable to guarantee this result to all, we distribute its instruments as widely as we can. Storable wealth—money and property—offends Mill’s principle and reduces government’s ability to apply it. One may regret this effect and the sense of entitlement disparity breeds, but there is a material condition that explains it: the larger and more complex a settlement, the less its government can equalize distributed benefits without impairing the productivity of its systems and networks. Productive systems and networks are focused and lean: they use fewer skilled workers to produce more goods or services than less efficient systems using more labor. People they employ are better paid; prudence makes them wealthy. Taxing them heavily reduces their motivation, so less is produced. Unemployment is structural and stubborn; technology has made us efficient in ways that are socially costly. Intellectual success— technology—stymies the moral intention. Cities respond to this tension in all the ways it prefigures. Some technologically underdeveloped cities have no commitment to distributing wealth: wealthy residents ignore their dismal neighbors. Or there is some degree of commitment, but little to distribute. Technologically developed cities may also abjure the intention, but they have the advantage of a productive economy, so the excess of goods produced is distributed beyond the circle of those paid to produce them. A few technologically developed cities are committed to distributing both the material conditions for wellbeing and opportunities for self-help: principally, education. They are organized to achieve a minimum standard of well-being for all residents. But the people of these cities don’t pretend that their personal and corporate intention expresses a demonstrable moral truth. This is an understanding founded in sensibility and the simple perception that people have roughly equal needs. No rationale justifies the luck of some, the misfortune of others;

249 therefore, distribute the elementary conditions for well-being, as best can be done, to all in need. This policy is contested or ignored, with effects apparent, in every city. People have their excuses for taking disproportionate amounts of wealth. Others tolerate their avarice or luck because great wealth is mostly out of sight. Its sources—salaries, bonuses, stock, and bonds —are invisible to people who have no access to entrepreneurial culture and education. Like ocean currents that pass without mingling, these cultures don’t fuse. Disparities are apparent, but they are not so vast that others can’t imagine acquiring the insignia of wealth: it’s fortunate for the rich that the goods of fantasy—cars, travel, and clothes—are widely available. How do the rich justify themselves? Isn’t it apparent to them that their welfare depends on goods and services they enjoy but haven’t made? They respond that great initiative or leadership earns its rewards. Do they notice that entrepreneurs owe a large part of their success to people they manage or that most managerial wealth derives from an ethos that transforms ordinary talents into plutocrats. Managerial wealth, like inherited wealth, needs a justification, though people who hear this request construe it as an insulting annoyance: don’t they pay for goods they use? Cities are morally disappointing. The rising tide that raises all boats is their principal moral lever: live in a city with a thriving economy and you, too, will have a chance to earn your way out of poverty. The processes generating wealth nevertheless guarantee that some people will be very rich while others—long time residents and immigrants—are and will be much poorer. The health, education, and welfare of most workers are better than those of Victorian mill towns, but the disparities of income and advantage are as great as then. This has malign effects. For there is no moral justification for the superior education and health care available to people of inherited wealth or high salaries. The pathological cities of developing or underdeveloped nations—Dacca, Lagos, Mexico City, Cairo, and Sao Paulo—are all the more compromised: they lack a social democratic ethos and no government willing or sufficiently powerful to alter the status quo. American cities—with an ample middle-class but without universal health care and low educational standards—are a mixed case. Is there an argument that might convince governments or the rich to reaffirm the moral intention? One likely justification avers that human

250 interdependence entails that the advantages of some necessarily implicates all. Evidence confirming this would have to show that a city’s economy is an array of nested, overlapping systems such that any person in any system is connected by relations of efficacy and dependence to every other. But this isn’t true. All a city’s people may depend on its water and sewage system, all are affected by pollutants everyone breathes, but it doesn’t follow that all are implicated in the production of its wealth. There is also this other way to establish participation: actions pertinent to corporate self-regulation engage all the citizens of a democratically governed city. This is more than trivial because regulation is an enabling context: no chess without the rules of the game, no businesses without a network of enabling rules and practices. People responsible for establishing this context enable their city to function. But this strategy also fails to create an inclusive community, because people who don’t vote or register to vote earn no credit for the choices regulators make. Regulation is, moreover, a facilitating condition, not a productive one: context—including the regulated market—doesn’t cause or explain everything created within it. Why require more solidarity than these considerations justify? Mill’s appeal to the greatest good for the greatest number evokes the Good of The Republic and Rousseau’s general will: it wills the good for all. Both would have us acknowledge our common origin and shared destiny. Locke, Rousseau, and Dewey put flesh on these appeals by arguing that a community is constituted of and by its members: they share responsibility for regulating its activities and for creating a community where the dignity of each is protected by the mutual recognition of all. But this is moot because merely edifying if many people in a democratically organized city neither satisfy their public responsibilities nor do the work that creates wealth. What should we infer from these failures: say that people who fail the doubt test of public service and private efficacy don’t earn a share of the wealth generated? Or excuse them, saying that their non-participation is the effect of circumstances: they are discouraged from participation in public deliberations and have no access to schools that would teach them skills they lack? This second point trumps the first if people would participate in the public’s deliberations if there were opportunities—schools—preparing them for jobs and civic responsibilities. Why suppose the contrary, given that no

251 one interiorizes the duties of citizenship and the skills for productive labor without education. Social failures resemble disabling medical conditions: no one walks with a broken leg; no one is productive and responsible without schooling, fellowship, work, and hope. This isn’t Rawls’ appeal to enlightened selfinterest: imagine the least anyone, hence you, would need and want if all were ignorant of their circumstances.8 It does resemble a nutritionist’s list of the steps to better health. This rationale makes two assumptions: people have essentially the same needs; entitlements and abilities that distinguish them are principally the effects of contingencies—advantages or deprivations—for which people are not themselves responsible. Accordingly, equalize opportunities in the name of equity. Then observe that most people do act appropriately: effective at home and work, they are responsible members of the public. This is the voice of the general will: support each person as he or she qualifies to participate in the private and public activities that create the good for all. This policy—looking forward, not back—is generous but programmatic. Hence the caveat affirmed above: people who generate wealth due to personal initiative and skill are not obliged to share it with others merely because these successful ones use the public schools and water supply. Those are basic services provided by tax revenue to which all contribute. Surplus profit earned by risk or talent goes to those who earn it. Taxing profit to pay for public services is different from redistributing it for the benefit of people not responsible for creating it. Recognition of our human condition, sympathy for those who share it, respect for the dignity of each, and concern for our collective future are four cogent aims. Each is admirable, all are complementary to the pragmatic altruism of the observation that democracy is unsustainable without people educated to value and achieve it.9 Yet none of this obviates the point that many residents do not participate in a city’s economy or the politics of corporate self-regulation. This conundrum is easily solved in theory. Let those who earn it keep their profits after reasonable taxes are paid. But alter the current disparity by Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 136-142. Jeremy Bentham, Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), vol. xiii, pp. 395-397.

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252 doing two things: reform the political process so those excluded can participate; educate their children for jobs in businesses that pay good, even excessive salaries. Do both things and the inequity of the current situation will be significantly reduced. Reaffirm the moral intention, steer the boat: make inclusion a principal aim, but do it in ways that hardly interfere (taxes) with people who don’t share that moral aim. They may come to affirm it when people once excluded prove reliable and productive. 5. Profiles Evaluating city health requires a format for representing the evidence, one that facilitates comparing city precincts, cities, or periods of a city’s history. We need, but don’t have a measure similar to a blood test, a reading that gives values for a number of significant variables. A preliminary version profiles settlements by representing several or many of their constituent variables. Values for the variables invite an inquiry that specifies their causes. We start by choosing a point of reference for variations among settlements. Population size is one possibility, density is another. Population wouldn’t distinguish Venice (several hundred thousand residents at the zenith of its power) from defuse American cities that occupy many times the terrain. Density is a more useful point of reference: local transportation, for example, is better in London or Berlin than Phoenix or Los Angeles; noise is worse. But density is not the only useful baseline. Distance from the center on starburst rays might represent the degree of fidelity to cultural practices such as diet, frequency of worship, or rites observed at times of birth, death, or marriage. Density is, all the while, the easiest base line against which to plot other variables and often the most cogent. Figure 8 profiles three imaginary settlements of equal density. They differ because of an imbalance among the three social variables. Here, as in subsequent figures, values for variables represented by rays diminish with distance from the center: more at the center, less at the extremes. Each ray represents a dimension of settlement life. Values are represented by points on the rays; settlement profiles are generated by connecting the points. This first graph profiles settlements warped by the domination of one or another of the three social variables:

253

Figure 8. Settlements of equal density. Figure 9 represents variables common to imaginary settlements that vary in respect to density.

Figure 9. Settlements that differ in respect to diversity.

254 Profiles are visually powerful, but problematic because of the diversity and complexity of the information expressed. The information displayed is hard to interpret—nothing integrates the profiles—if, for example, one constructs graphs with different baselines (density, wealth, or ethnicity, for example) while representing different variables. This might be remedied by compressing several graphs so that all the information on each is represented on a single profile. So, we divide a star burst graph into color differentiated quadrants, before expressing the information on each of four graphs on the rays of one quadrant. This economy doesn’t help, because it juxtaposes the information without integrating it. Complexity is also problematic because of the difficulty representing higher-order functions. So, rays in the star-burst graphs of Figure 9 imply the mutual independence of the variables represented, though cooperation is a higher-order function of mutual respect and discipline. This problem is solved by representing a higher-order function as a point on a profile of second order functions, though doing this summarizes information by hiding it. That fault is slightly eased by representing first-order values by blue rays, higher-order functions—the points—in red, though doing this doesn’t make the information easier to extract. These issues are averted in Figure 10 by restricting the variables to elementary features of settlement life: more informative profiles require complex variables and better, more legible graphs.

255

Figure 10. Various settlements; elementary variables with values that vary with density. These diagrams are illustrative only: their variables are fanciful; their accuracy isn’t critical. They are nevertheless useful in two ways: profiles are an economic device for vividly representing or comparing settlements; more, they dispel the impression that settlements vary deeply because they look or feel different. The first advantage is heuristic; the second is theoretical: cities differ among themselves and from smaller towns, but these variations don’t obviate deep similarities among settlements of all sizes and histories. Spiders and frogs seem very different, though considerable DNA in each genome is common to both. Settlement variety resembles the similar profiles of DNA in

256 the cousins of a family. Picture postcards emphasize city differences; profiles expose their structural affinities. 6. Connection or exclusion Imagine that vital systems are sustained or modified by people having initiative, education, and appropriate resources. These innovators are disciplined by their attitudes and habits. Systems are disciplined by the negative feedback of reciprocities that bind their members; both accept the discipline of an authority that mitigates conflict and complexity while encouraging stability and experiment. Coherence is balance, a harmony of parts. Each part conditions the others and each is conditioned by the coherence of the whole. An effective team has players skilled at every position: none poaches on others; each plays better because of the focus and coordination that bind team members. Competing teams are also disciplined, skilled, and coordinated. Games come and go; competition is friendly but fierce. Everyone wins and loses, but some are better than others; losers one year return as winners the next. A league of competitive teams is a poor analogue for city balance because a city’s constituent systems are less directly bound to one another than the teams of a league. The analogy is nevertheless useful for exposing a flaw in city integration: namely, the many people and systems (persons, families, even neighborhoods) that don’t participate in the web of systems and networks constitutive of city coherence. Exclusion is reasonable when games are played to a high standard—not everyone can play professional basketball—though implications are different if a city’s coherent political economy is inaccessible to some residents: exclusion is a litmus test for pathology in settlements where connection—participation—prefigures an idea of social justice Ebenezer Howard’s garden communities were designed for access and connection: no resident would be isolated from neighbors, work, shops, or schools. But his plan was deficient in two ways relevant here: regulation came with his design; it solved problems by fiat without consulting residents. Coherence—balance—would atrophy (or never form) because regulation was prescribed not negotiated, and because realizing the plan would stifle individual initiative: there could be no place for changes advised by lived

257 experience if details were settled already. Defenders rightly say that Howard’s ideas expressed a generous hope: transform the miserable lives of city workers by giving them fresh air, comfortable homes in a verdant setting, short commutes, higher wages, and lower costs. But Howard’s plan cured incoherence and exclusion by creating pockets of coherence and inclusion while suppressing the innovation and self-control that make coherence vital. Compare the tumultuous cities of developing countries. Workers and families emigrate to them because rural life is precarious. Neighborhoods form on ground left undeveloped because barely habitable; residents build shacks and import water while living with open sewers. There is mutual support, but no viable economy and little infrastructure. Resolve is sometimes ferocious; residents survive on grit and small amounts of money or goods earned for hard, dangerous work. Regulation is informal, local, and sometimes effective, but systems are fragile. There is little coherence and much competition but also little or no exclusion: all acknowledge that this is a boat in which all risk drowning. No government incorporates these tracts into the central city—they endure at the margins—because incorporating them would attenuate centralized control, dilute and weaken the local economy, or require the infusion of money government doesn’t have or wish to spend. Yet disconnection is also expensive if it breeds jealously, anger, illness, frustration, or violence. This is bad for residents, and bad for their neighbors. These effects are not restricted to underdeveloped countries: large neighborhoods within or contiguous to Los Angeles, Paris, Chicago, and New York are neither integrated within flourishing parts of their city economies nor adequately supported by city services. Schools are poor, health and health care are degraded, drugs are pervasive. Water and electricity are reliably supplied, but police cover isn’t usually evident until violence erupts. Everyone knows someone in prison; many people have been there. Watts was remote and neglected; it exploded. Paris has suburbs where residents have no access to the city economy; they explode. These pathologies aren’t easily isolated; coherence in the central city is sabotaged when its people respond to violence or fear by transforming their precincts into fortresses. Initiative is constricted, systems throttle down; complexity and conflicts internal to vital networks are ignored when hostility to outsiders dominates government’s thinking. Connectivity—a material,

258 social, political, and economic bond—is the principal solution for every such city: extend or create city networks that integrate forlorn districts. Reduce their disabilities by joining the wealth of established quarters to the vitality and aspirations of the poor. More cohesive cities are the plausible, though distant result. Coherence is stabilized as an intrinsic constraint on networks of laterally and hierarchically related systems: so, a business is stabilized when connected laterally to its suppliers and clients and vertically both to employees (lower-order systems) and to a licensing or trade association (a higher-order system). Why doesn’t the business relate to possible suppliers or clients in marginal neighborhoods? Because successful businesses calculate the time, money, and effort required of social missionaries working in deprived regions in or around their city. Is this a fault: are a city’s productive systems, some of them long established, responsible for new arrivals and their neighborhoods? The prudential response emphasizes the costs of ignoring them; an altruistic response argues that all humans are created in the image of God: he requires life, liberty, and happiness for all. But this secular age doesn’t take its marching orders from religious texts; it wants a secular justification, one that is practical or founded in a natural tendency or norm. Market economies make us skeptical that caring for disadvantaged people is prudent good sense for the wealthy. Markets dominate our thinking, so we assume that poor communities are an affliction: they shrink or grow with time and circumstances, though there are always several or many. But illness, too, is always with us; we don’t capitulate, saying that it shouldn’t be treated. Can we establish the natural basis for more ample social links by saying that a society is unhealthy if some parts are gangrenous? For exclusion has pernicious effects, including hostilities that subvert coherence and the productivity it sustains. Hence the calculation cited above: does a profitable business or business community profit or lose by establishing bonds to deprived neighborhoods within or near its domain? The mythology of America avers that a democratic political structure and ample economy generate confidence and connections that create Dewey’s Great Community:10 affiliation would promote mutual respect, 10

Dewey, Public and its Problems, pp. 143-184.

259 inclusion, and coherence throughout a city if other things didn’t prevent it. This aspiration is worthy but vague: it suggests that the Great Community is a natural norm (like cycles of days and nights) somehow impeded, though creation of an all-inclusive deliberating public is a moral hope, a moral intention, not a natural end or norm. Remember that Marx deplored utopian projects: they postulate a moral aim without identifying the material conditions that would assure its satisfaction.11 Is there, nevertheless, a least energy steady state—an attractor—that would nullify social disparities by curing exclusion? We can describe the objective and its principal conditions (schools, educated women, medical care, jobs, and stable families); we don’t see the towns or cities it prefigures. Why do cities usually fail to achieve an effect we can plainly specify? Seven factors explain their failure: insufficient resources; unproductive systems (a feeble economy); inadequate organization; the modularity (the exclusiveness) and inefficiencies of social systems and networks; lack of desire (the absence of moral intention); the extraordinary energies required to maintain gargantuan social systems at a state far from equilibrium; and regulators defeated by complexity and conflict. We do better by claiming less. Cities are disrupted by festering pariah communities because disaffiliation seems less costly than inclusion. Networks that make us productive are also efficient filters: they exclude people and systems that would raise costs or dilute profits. We cut our losses by separating effective precincts from those that don’t work. Edge cities were built to escape big city inefficiencies and hostilities; large companies are often divided into several autonomous parts because of economies achieved. The moral solution—inclusion—seems inimical to another more efficient and profitable: a single, inclusive economy may not be a natural attractor because complexity and size make it inefficient; networks and pocket economies, each somewhat independent of others, are more efficient. One response to this impasse is a detour around it: despairing of practical solutions, we affirm the norm—coherence, care, cohesiveness—as a superseding expression of moral purpose. There are many precedents—the kingdom of ends, the greatest good for the greatest number—but also many 11

Marx, Communist Manifesto, 58-78.

260 impediments. Germany’s Eastern provinces remain poor and depopulated after billions of marks and euros were spent to integrate into the West. The City University of New York opened itself to all New York high school graduates for several years in the early nineteen seventies, but found that graduation rates were very low when academic standards were maintained. Requirements for admission were raised, but graduation rates are still modest among students having marginal achievement scores or high school records. Coherence isn’t easily achieved—history, culture, and fear deter it— though the idea of connection prefigures a cure: extend city networks into deprived neighborhoods. Take care to identify those networks, their constituents, and stabilizing conditions; find ways to penetrate them. Estimate the costs of supplying health, education, police, and business in those neighborhoods, then invest the time and money required to make a difference. Will the benefits justify the costs? Often not, but sometimes. 7. Justice as balance and inclusion The city of dreams has bulk and pace, an ensemble of beautiful buildings, and the palpable excitement of people enjoying their work, companions, and this setting. But these are symptoms of well-being, not its cause. Why are residents happy? Because there is balance and inclusion. Core and other systems support their members in work that is agreeable, productive, appropriate to their talents, and useful. Mutually reliant systems have proliferated in a dense web characterized by hierarchy and overlap, efficacy, freedom, and discipline. There is little conflict but many opportunities; coagulation is anticipated and averted. Employment is mostly assured; systems and their members enjoy comity and safety, self-perfection, and material well-being. Sociability, intellect, and sensibility are everywhere encouraged and often achieved. This is ample balance, a steady state stabilized far from entropy (enervation) where each of the three variables is supported by the others within a range appropriate to itself. It embodies initiative because systems and the discipline of the whole provide opportunities and because individuals are educated to see and exploit them. Systems are stabilized because individuals have and see an interest in sustaining them and because regulation mitigates conflict while facilitating mutual relations. Regulation is effective

261 because discipline is an individual virtue (a habit), a constraint inherent in the negative feedback binding systems’ members, and a norm enforced by an authority responsible for the whole. Balance is the calibration stabilizing each variable on or about its mean, given circumstances and each variable’s relations to the other two. Its expressions vary in apparent character because individuals and systems vary in cities dominated by universities, churches, or factories; they vary in quantity because it is achieved in many settlement relationships or only a few. Its achievement, like failure to achieve it, affects city residents everywhere, hence the conversations, deliberations, and negotiations wherever people and systems have created a public that oversees settlement life. An ample balance is achieved by degrees. Success is uneven because values for each variable (the play of initiative and regulation, for example) are sensitive to values for the other two, and because success in one precinct doesn’t entail success in others. Balance is sometimes a tendency: conditions enabling it in one neighborhood spread to others; or it dies in one, then others. Balance is a far from equilibrium steady state achieved to some degree in settlements of every size: every collection of people (living in a metaphoric state of nature) needs the systems, individual initiatives and corporate regulation that transform their aggregate into a viable community. Why emphasize its relevance to cities? Because city density and complexity have distinct effects. Autonomy emerges as individuals move among core and other systems, perfecting talents that enable them to participate effectively in the specialized systems attractive to them: the city has conflicts to litigate and restaurants of all sorts, so one attends a law or culinary school to learn skills appropriate to lawyers or chefs. Overlap and chaining imply networks of mutually sustaining systems: artists, art schools, clients, and galleries; brokerage firms, banks, auditors, and the Security and Exchange Commission. Surplus wealth—money remaining when basic costs are met— can be used in other ways: company shares or a painting, for example. Occasional policemen like poetry; great writers sometimes spend their days chatting with neighbors in local shops: talent and autonomy are focused but socialized. This has effects that radiate: every resident is or can be excited by the achievements of local systems and the prowess of fellow residents. The city becomes a magnet for talented people attracted by its businesses, teams,

262 ambience, and schools. Residents feel intensities that join them as workers, performers, or auditors: others played or sang, but I was there. Fortunate cities achieve ample balance in some precincts but never comprehensively because control of the circumstances affecting city life (infra-structure, crime, climate, the banking system) is always imperfect. Add inherited rigidities, short-sightedness, and accidents, then consider the complexity of aligning all the parts. Cities at the zenith of creativity and production shine for a while before altered circumstances make their rhythms unsustainable. No one is surprised that optimal balance isn’t achieved or that ample balance isn’t extensive and doesn’t endure; still, the aim is more than fantasy. Health is ideal but also an attainable natural condition, one secured by living bodies stabilized within a range of values for distinct but mutually affecting metabolic functions. Or we forestall decline, recovering better form, by intruding on natural processes in ways that slow or divert them: pianos are tuned after losing pitch; dentistry and exercise stop or delay degeneration Can we generalize this point to the health of settlements, cities especially? Justice, as Plato understood it, is social health. Many details are disputable, achieving it is problematic but the idea of an ideal form intrinsic to social relations is not implausible. Can we discern its outline and least conditions? Is there a specifiable ensemble of natural constraints—an attractor—that shapes and limits the relations of individuals and their systems in settlements where balance is ample? Balance construed generically is represented by a trace having the form of an inverted letter L. See Figure 11:

Figure 11. Balance.

263 This profile implies that individuality is less dominant than systems (though both are highly developed) and that corporate regulation has a lower value (on the scale from center to extremity), given the assumption that individuals and systems are self-disciplined. But optimal balance is rarely achieved or sustained because societies are dynamic and essentially unstable: they are destabilized by altered circumstances or because one or another of their constituent variables comes to dominate the other two: individuals prize freedom more than their systems, systems coagulate, or supervening regulation stifles systems and their members. Failures of balance are representable as distortions of the ideal:

Figure 12. Departures from balance in Manhattan and Mumbai. These profiles postulate that systems (families, castes) are more dominant in Mumbai than Manhattan, and that individuality and regulation are less developed. They represent average or mean values for their respective cities; they misrepresent sectors or neighborhoods that vary from the average or mean. Manhattan and Mumbai share a principal condition for achieving ample balance: namely, densities sufficient to promote the overlap, chaining, and hierarchy that breed complexity, opportunity, education, and initiative. Balance is less than ample in Manhattan because an array of productive systems cannot form and stabilize if fidelity to one’s roles is sabotaged by

264 self-concern or unregulated complexity (Wall Street failures are emblematic); it is less than ample in Mumbai because the constricting effects of core systems and tradition (families, castes, and religions) throttle initiative and impede corporate regulation. These examples nevertheless remind us that density is critical for balance of any sort because there are few systems (and little interdependence) if people are widely dispersed. The next figure profiles this effect:

Figure 13. A settlement far from optimal balance because of low density Imagine a frontier where single men without families or settled employment are disciplined by nothing but their pecking order, fear, and the local sheriff: regulation is crude; individuality is emphatic. There is no balance because few established systems stabilize roles and reciprocities. Dormitory suburbs are populated more densely than a frontier but they too often fail to achieve more than a meager balance because of dispersion. Stay-at-home spouses participate in local systems motivated by the interests of child care or a local church, but commuters recovering from work are averse to deliberations or systems that oblige them to honor local roles and reciprocities. Cities incubate complexity as suburbs and other low-density settlements never can. Systems form and stabilize when need provokes the search for partners while density assures interaction. Their vector recalls Figure 1 and the emerging complexity that distinguishes cities. Systems of high culture (circles of amateur writers or musicians, not only professors and museums) express this effect: they emerge from the intensities and opportunities promoted when aggregation, chaining, and overlap nurture skills, tastes, competition, and risk. Recall the Greek persuasion that cities are the incubators of intellect, aesthetic sensibility, and moral perfection. Heirs to

265 this tradition, wanting these virtues, we invoke Plato’s formula: justice in the city and soul are mutually conditioning. The city supplies a context for the education and expression of individual talents while citizens organize to satisfy common needs. The wealthy cities of industrial states achieve this ideal to a degree: many or most residents are well fed, healthy, productive, and safe; many are educated; a few do great things. But failure is often more conspicuous than success: many cities fail all these measures; no city satisfies them for all its residents. This outcome disappoints the Greek ideal. It supposed that material well-being and safety might be achieved for all or most citizens, but that cultivation and autonomy would be reserved to a few men and women of talent and wisdom (Plato) or to men of wealth and authority (Aristotle). The difficulty of achieving these effects is compounded when democratic ideals oblige us to create the society prefigured by Mill’s distribution principle: the greatest good for the greatest number. Its application is, ideally, universal: every participant is to be secured materially while intellect, moral practices, and aesthetic sensibilities are cultivated in all. Why can’t we extend these benefits to all a city’s residents? The reasons are practical and material. An effective city provides and distributes food, clothing, and shelter, protects the health and safety of its members, and educates its children for skills appropriate to its economy and their talents. Sensitive to the recurring needs of members and their systems, it uses resources carefully. Attentive to competition for members and resources, it monitors conflicts with legislation that deters hostility (criminal laws) or facilitates free movement (banking regulations and traffic laws). Foreseeing likely obstacles, it sets priorities. Responsive to external challenges—aggressive competitors—it seeks a tolerable modus vivendi or defends itself. A society that does these things is actively self-critical, effectively self-regulating, and sustainably coherent, disasters apart. The relative practicality of these aims implies a series of attractors, each more remote from our current state because harder to achieve and stabilize. Most remote are settlements where balance is optimal: productive systems secure material well-being for all residents while supporting their moral and intellectual perfection. This is unachievable in the small cities Plato and Aristotle imagined; it is all but impossible in the larger cities we have. Cities that would have these effects are an unrealizable limit to

266 conception: we can’t guarantee full employment or the material well-being of all; the perfectibility promised to philosopher-kings eludes us. Optimal balance is a limit to conception; it directs but eludes. Manage the city better, is a likely response. Command results that aren’t achieved when regulation is light but ineffective: control individuals and their systems as policemen direct traffic. This is bad advice because the analogy is misleading. Traffic is relatively uncomplicated: vehicles move in opposite directions, starting, stopping, and turning. Simple expedients— divided highways, traffic lights, and speed limits—solve most problems mechanically. Nothing as simple, nothing imaginable, enables regulators or tyrants to resolve the complexity and conflicts generated by people and systems doing myriad things in varied circumstances. The learned, natural discipline of self-interested systems and individuals prevents most conflicts, perceptive, well-designed regulation averts others. One can manage a city by terrorizing it into paralysis; one can’t bring it to optimal balance, with inclusion, by neatly arranging its many people and systems. Discipline is most effective when it achieved in ways appropriate to each of the three variables: individuals are self-disciplined by their habits, attitudes and judgments; systems are disciplined by their aims and binding reciprocities; competent regulators (informed legislators or city managers) discipline the whole. For the task—living well—is practical in all three domains. The aim is best achieved when responsibilities are distributed: people with common needs but disparate aims organize themselves. People self-disciplined and mindful of others need the oversight and foresight of a regulator, not a tyrant. But managing our lives doesn’t make us wise. Practical life is replete with false starts, failed initiatives, and wrong turns. Waste is everywhere; energy and morale are depleted; the balance achieved is never optimal. Practical failures are rooted in our material disabilities. Personal development is complicated. We don’t know the conditions sufficient to create people of supreme intellect, sensibility, courage, reliability, and sanity; aiming lower, we’re puzzled when children of the same family come to maturity with different aims, tastes, and values. Material failure is human developmental failure magnified by the failure of systems that run out of ideas or resources, and regulators who can’t see corruption or resolve complexity.

267 These are impediments to optimal balance, but its prospects were always dim. Its achievement would require high-order systems to operate at that limit of efficiency where minimal energy (minimal because scarce) is sufficient to do such things as those systems are organized to do. But no great musicians graduate from schools without money or pianos; no great thinkers are educated in schools without books. The productivity of systems in cities achieving optimal balance might have these resources occasionally; they couldn’t sustain them through business cycles that impoverish their benefactors. Ample balance is achieved when a city’s productive systems satisfy their members while regulators clear the road ahead and members assure the efficacy and stability of their systems. A city organized for these advantages enjoys the miraculous productivity achieved when people and systems organize themselves. The city doesn’t aim or know how to create intellectual or artistic giants, though some appear for reasons no one understands. Residents do understand that stable families, thriving businesses, and good schools enable many or most residents to find work and companions appropriate to their talents and inclinations. There are city neighborhoods where this degree of balance is achieved. How can we exploit their example to abet inclusion? Do two things: value effective systems, personal initiative, and light regulation, but shift the emphasis from equal outcomes to equal opportunities. Honesty, loyalty, intellect, and sensibility are virtues widely acknowledged; circumstances where every person might achieve them would be ideal, though competition, limited talents and opportunities preclude equal outcomes: we won’t all be musical or wise. Cities that achieve an ample balance in some of their precincts can provide material conditions and opportunities for people motivated to help themselves. Educate them for tasks appropriate to their talents, then employ them. Value cultivation, but acknowledge that it has various expressions and that success achieving it is incremental and real but relative. We aspire to a balance that is inclusive, but tolerant of people whose interests and talents will not converge on a small set of tasks and values. Some prefer drums to the violin, bowling or the Beatles to Bach. Any plan for achieving ample balance with inclusion will likely invoke three notions of justice: justice as proportion, just desert, and justice as fairness (distributive justice). Justice as proportion requires that each of the

268 three variables—individuals, systems, and authority—achieves an expression appropriate to itself while promoting expressions appropriate to the other two. Just desert implies that one is entitled to both the fruit of one’s labor and to those material conditions appropriate to one’s nature. Fish deserve water in the respect that they can’t live without it; ample balance is the context for human fulfillment and social productivity. Justice as fairness is the idea that differences of gender, race, or origin are incidental to the demand that every person (but those self-disqualified) have access to systems that secure his or her well-being. All would ideally develop and apply their skills in the company and for the benefit of others and themselves. A productive balance promotes equal opportunity in settlements organized for initiative, cooperation, and discipline. Residents join freely with others having shared or complementary interests; systems they establish are effective because disciplined by realistic aims and by the reciprocities binding their members. Everyone has a vocation appropriate to his or her talents and a role in productive systems. Networks are permeable: none is allowed to dominate or co-opt every other. Residents flourish because they enjoy the company of others in activities that are productive and mutually esteemed, and because they share responsibility for organizing and regulating both personal affairs and those of the city. Every such ensemble achieves a steady state, an attractor that is intrinsically normative: self-regulating and elastic, it resists disruptions. Satisfy these conditions and there is justice in the city and soul, each a condition for the other. These aspects of well-being are experienced by many residents in some big cities. Few are active in every domain—economic, political, domestic, and cultural—but inclusion is satisfied because they find opportunities to express themselves in the productive systems of one or several domains. Residents are lucky because their city’s economy is resilient; their government is efficient and responsible to its citizens; culture is diverse because there are networks that promote the work of artists, cooks, athletes, and businessmen; domestic life is sometimes problematic but there are families of several kinds and many schools. Personal disappointments are common but one can recover and flourish: systems have many needs; people frustrated in one endeavor have talents to exploit in another. People of many vocations achieve some measure of the intellectual and moral sensibility to which they aspire.

269 Plato’s Republic is egalitarian in the respect that no material advantage is implied by one’s vocation: artisan, guardian, or philosopher-king. A city restricted in size, form, and tasks would educate and function in specific ways for specific aims; people bred for particular talents and roles would have an education and opportunities appropriate to their skills. None would be rich when others are poor. Disadvantaged people and their systems don’t enjoy The Republic’s advantages: balance isn’t global in our cities. Economies falter; populations are too large and divers for self-organization and effective management; health and education are often poor; coercive regimes punish initiative and innovation; dominant systems and networks are inaccessible to people who don’t share the history, friendships, or antipathies of their members. These effects—social stratification and exclusion—have the rationale mentioned above: wanting efficiency, systems and networks make participation conditional on skill, wealth, or affinity. No ensemble of systems, however stable and productive, allows participation by everyone who wants it. A fortiori, none is inclusive in all or any of the activities pertinent to balance. A doctor’s talented child can likely be a doctor: others may have little or no way to acquire the skills and confidence required for opportunities accessible to the members of dominant networks. These outsiders are included in the local census, but not in the hierarchy that confers power and status. Inclusion is always problematic in the world economy: we say that globalization, free-trade, and expansive economies are a tide that lifts all boats, though we ignore cycles of low tide and the many boats beached or swamped. Herbert Simon’s two watchmakers are cautionary: one starts from scratch after every failure; the other reassembles his modules when one has failed.12 Should we enjoy universal expansion while risking collapse? Or do we secure ourselves more effectively by constructing and defending smaller stable markets before linking them to one another? Full-employment and prosperity may never be more than a persistent intention. We would be better defended against enthusiasms that terminate in disarray if there were a secure baseline—surviving modules—after a global collapse. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 188-189. 12

270 Urban exclusion isn’t easier to cure because of its smaller domain. For every city is an array of systems and stratified networks. There is balance among a network’s participants when successful businesses have steady customers and suppliers. There may be ample balance—productive systems, personal initiatives, and effective regulation—in neighborhoods of workers, small businesses, or professionals. Inclusion nevertheless fails when people unemployed, uneducated, or underpaid are too demoralized for domesticity, politics, or culture. Nor is this a case of teams having losing records in a league where competition guarantees winners and losers. People and systems excluded from dominant networks neither play the dominant game nor play it on a field leveled for all competitors. Their city is an array of systems and networks jostling for resources in a small space. Such cities are often stable— their economies regularly survive market cycles and the bankruptcies of local firms— but community is a euphemism. Important events—the success of a local team or a nearby disaster—arouse strong feelings of communal identity without disguising social fissures. One factor so far unmentioned is too consequential to ignore. Balance is structural; networks are structural. Network efficiency requires selectivity, so any balance networks promote is sure to exclude many people and systems. Emphasizing these structural, functional constraints implies that cities are closed systems, and that achieving an altered balance—from the meager to the ample—is a problem of internal adjustment. This formulation is too restricted, given every city’s reliance on external sources for food and energy. It errs, in addition, because of implying that a city’s population is stable. This is a useful assumption if we imagine that a settlement is closed while calculating the most energy efficient ways to generate and sustain activity within it. But this stipulation ignores a massively disrupting factor: namely, the tide of people moving into or out of cities. These migrants overload city resources and organization; they disrupt whatever balance a city has achieved. Networks respond by defending established residents from the competition of new arrivals. But their defensiveness augments the prospects for an ample balance with inclusion. Plato’s devise fails us: we can’t design a city, as Plato designed The Republic, by restricting ourselves to a stable population large enough to create and sustain the complex of systems required to satisfy city aspirations.

271 One contingency sometimes averts disarray: a population surge can be absorbed by cities with booming economies and judicious but effective regulation. Middle-western American cities—St. Louis, Chicago. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit—had this fortune in the nineteenth century. Jobs were plentiful; immigrant creativity and initiative nourished complexity. But this history isn’t often repeated: other magnet cities are more disorderly than productive. Some were never productive; others have lost the industries that generated their wealth. They remind us that an ample balance is always fragile: systems competing for scarce energy while maintaining themselves are easily disrupted by any factor that diverts them or reduces their supply of energy or resources (including money and effort). They fall back—like depopulating mid-western cities—to the meager balance of unproductive systems, demoralized people, and patchy regulation. Is an ample balance achievable among all a city’s disparate systems, residents, and networks? The question isn’t rhetorical, though one strains to imagine conditions that would make it possible when density, size, and diversity, competition and antipathies, stratification and exclusion all but preclude it. Thinking about these effects exposes contrary interests. Fairness requires inclusion in the economy that houses, nourishes, educates, and employs, though a productive economy uses and rewards people differently because of the value of their work. Universal inclusion postulates the equality of persons after abstracting from every material property that distinguishes people from one another. Democratic theory alleges that inclusion should be universal because no a priori reason justifies preference for some at cost to others. We say, thinking of Descartes, Luther, Socrates, and the Old Testament that each person is self-affirming, self-directing, and selfappraising. We emphasize these measures of equality while minimizing differences of wealth, cast, political allegiance, vocation, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion; we deplore networks that track people in parallel but mutually invisible work-lives. What should inclusion imply when societies are cleaved these many ways? The demand for equal treatment before the law, including legal protections and rights, is clear; the claim of equal status is not. Equal status construed morally entails that we acknowledge each person’s dignity and worth; construed materially, it requires equal distribution of opportunities, education, wealth, and social standing. Yet an effective economy requires

272 material differences—skills, motives, and discipline—ignored by this abstraction. Joining these paired demands frustrates inclusion because neither seems achievable without compromising the other. We exalt the idea of equal moral status though people vary radically in talent, effort, advantages, and luck: no matter one’s station, we say, all have intrinsic dignity and worth. We nevertheless organize to produce goods and services by exploiting the network efficiencies generated by these differences, thereby guaranteeing that participants are richer, happier, and healthier than those excluded. Members of dominant networks may willingly acknowledge these advantages. But what should they do in the name of outreach if the work-at-hand require partners educated and ready for specific tasks? Access to hi-tech businesses, orchestras, and the professions is limited; their expressions of regret and good will don’t reduce barriers that exclude most applicants. A few small societies minimize advantages of wealth, class, or gender in ways prefigured by ideas of equal moral status: they redistribute wealth by taxation to improve health and education. Larger states and cities tax less to do less. Those giving lip service to the idea of inclusion defend themselves by distinguishing material from moral status: acknowledging that material conditions for creating wealth—talent, initiative, and markets— preclude equal material status, they mitigate the effect by promising equality before the law. But there is no convergence in status if money buys better lawyers while poverty extinguishes health, opportunity, and dignity. The puzzle about inclusion is here. We justify it by abstracting from human differences to our core identity as minds or souls of equal worth. We discount these differences for moral purposes (calling them accidents of birth), though achieving ample balance in all a city’s domains—economic, political, domestic, and cultural—guarantees that we shall exploit the differences of talent, education, energy, or social status discounted by arguments for inclusion. Hence our perpetual indecision: appeal to a moral nature that makes every person indistinguishable from every other, or acknowledge and use the stubborn differences among us. Inclusion is a demand: cure this irresolution by finding ways to mitigate inequality. Justice is the idea that marks this tension. It requires inclusion and the social stability and productivity consequent on fulfilling the implicit demands of ample balance; let a hundred flowers bloom; from each

273 according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Exclusion precludes justice by denying the application of these principles to many residents. The legal framework of equal rights protects deprived people without much altering their circumstances. For cities are not and will not be just so long as city vitality is the energy of people and systems able to do what the unfortunate many cannot do. Our failure is material and rhetorical: material because cities don’t achieve balance with inclusion; rhetorical because cities are praised for being the apotheosis of human achievement. Plato said, and many have agreed, that anyone seeking intellectual, moral, or aesthetic perfection would more likely find it in a city; people exasperated by noise, crowding, and pretension aren’t surprised that cities can’t do this for every (or any) resident. Skeptics may agree that there are conspicuous city virtues (autonomy, resilience, and tolerance, for example), though city conditions are rarely sufficient to achieve the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic ideals formulated when we exaggerate our possibilities. What shall we do? Be practical. Is and ought are joined when a rocket achieves orbit and circles Earth: the orbit is a norm established by a balance of forces. Yet is and ought are distinct and separate until the engines of the earth-bound rocket power it into space. An ample and adequate balance requires a similar thrust. Joining the real and ideal, altering one to embody the other is a challenge of two sorts: how to make way for people underrepresented in a city’s productive life without compromising their cultural identity and personal dignity. Inclusion fails until moral status is consolidated in the material status that comes with stable families, good schools, appropriate work, and personal discipline: these are conditions for access and some least degree of well-being. Productive cities unburdened by mutually hostile classes have a solution: infusing material status with moral significance, they employ, educate, and support socially marginal families. Good for parents, better for their successful children, this is local inclusion, a small expression of respect for an ideal that eludes us. We can also be expansive. Assume that people want to know their talents and enjoy using them. Then consider that circumstances won’t change decisively—equality of formation and opportunity won’t be achieved—until several conditions obtain: Political management reduces gargantuan cities to assemblies of affiliated, self-regulating neighborhoods or functions; oversight

274 identifies points of complexity and conflict before they become dangerous; regulation is as simple and light-handed as circumstances allow. Stratified networks are eliminated because social fears and antipathies have cooled, because efficient organization makes them costly or unnecessary, and because stasis makes these networks maladaptive when circumstances change. Technology eliminates menial chores; systems flourish because they complement one another while engaging the talents of workers educated for their roles. This would be a new day. Why call it ideal? Because we are transfigured—intellectually, aesthetically, and morally—by productive systems, initiatives they provoke, and the styles of personal and social discipline. Heaven is the city where all are remade.

275

Index animators, 67, 70, 71, 73. Aristotle, 21, 31, 44, 56, 65, 76, 116, 127, 129, 159, 165, 206, 247, 265. attractors, 9, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 225, 265. authority, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 26, 32, 52, 53, 54, 57, 61, 74, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 100, 102, 103, 105, 111, 119, 123, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 138,139, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174, 175, 195, 210, 220, 223, 231, 244, 246, 256, 260, 265, 268. balance, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 40, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 74, 82, 83, 84, 90, 100, 102, 103, 108, 111, 112, 118, 120, 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 141, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 168, 172, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 216, 220, 221, 224, 227, 234, 252, 256, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273. Barthes, Roland, 213. beauty, 8, 70, 133, 187, 188, 189, 198, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242. Benjamin, Walter, 17. Bentley, Arthur F., 51. Berger, John, 211, 212, 213, 224. boundaries, 38, 86, 170, 217, 244. bulk, 9, 15, 117, 167, 172, 173, 177, 217, 236, 260. Buchler, Justus, 22. Bunge, Mario, 22. Camus, Albert, 234. carrying capacity, 82, 168, 169, 180, 185. Castells, Manuel, 16, 17. categories, 138. cause, 36, 37, 39. chaining, 26, 27, 261, 262. character, 7, 8, 19, 20, 22, 28, 29, 35, 39, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 81, 86, 94, 96, 105, 109, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 134, 139, 146, 148, 159, 162, 167, 174, 178, 186, 187, 189, 197, 198, 199, 222, 225, 233, 261. climate, 81, 82, 139, 262. complexity, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36, 44, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 71, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 100, 106, 118, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135, 139, 140, 150, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192, 198, 200, 211, 216, 221, 222, 223, 224, 228, 230, 231, 237, 243, 246, 247, 254, 256, 257, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 266, 271, 274. conflict, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 19, 20, 24, 25, 40, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 71, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 111, 118, 121, 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135, 139, 140, 145, 150, 159, 166, 168, 169, 174, 183, 185, 189, 200, 201, 208, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 243, 246, 247, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 265, 266, 274.

276 cooperation, 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 21, 59, 61, 102, 117, 127, 131, 132, 138, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 164, 167, 176, 201, 202, 203, 214, 221, 247, 254, 268.

culture, 11, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 57, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 81, 83, 84, 108, 117, 131, 135, 140, 145, 151, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165, 172, 175, 176, 179, 187, 194, 195, 197, 204, 205, 209, 210, 215, 217, 218, 220, 227, 239, 245, 249, 260, 264, 268, 270. Danto, Arthur, 109, 110. deliberation, 13, 53, 54, 57, 58, 66, 67, 70, 72, 73, 78, 88, 89, 95, 96, 103, 145,147, 148, 164, 198, 199, 243, 246. density, 11, 14, 61, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 173, 174, 180, 183, 185, 207, 227, 247, 252, 253, 254, 255, 261, 264, 271. Descartes, René, 21, 36, 56, 57, 68, 76, 77, 116, 120, 178, 245. determinables, 75, 111. discipline, 9, 10, 19, 29, 46, 51, 52, 53, 58, 61, 62, 70, 82, 83, 84, 86, 91, 102, 103, 105, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 141, 144, 147, 159, 164, 168, 176, 177, 181, 185, 187, 189, 198, 201, 210, 220, 223, 243, 246, 254, 256, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266, 268, 272, 273, 274. Duchamp, Marcel, 108, 109, 110. economy, 10, 14, 23, 38, 48, 59, 61, 81, 82, 84, 92, 94, 101, 102, 106, 110, 111, 131, 135, 137, 145, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 176, 179, 193, 194, 196, 204, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 224, 232, 234, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259, 265, 268, 269, 271. education, 42, 49, 59, 73, 74, 89, 90, 92, 93, 104, 118, 128, 131, 143, 145, 151, 152, 160, 164, 167, 185, 193, 209, 214, 227, 228, 247, 248, 249, 251, 256, 260, 263, 265, 269, 271, 272. energy, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, 37, 48, 105, 121, 126, 137, 144, 162, 168, 169, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 192, 204, 208, 221, 259, 266, 267, 270, 271, 272, 273. equilibrium, 9, 11, 14, 24, 25, 51, 76, 103, 111, 139, 160, 181, 184, 242, 259, 261. evolution, 25, 82, 87, 143, 145, 158, 159, 239, 240.. fairness, 13, 92, 267, 268, 271. feedback, 13, 22, 23, 37, 38, 42, 130,140, 168, 173, 182, 183, 189, 208, 256, 261. freedom, 7, 8, 11, 14, 19, 21, 29, 31, 32, 33, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 84, 86, 93, 94, 95, 97, 104, 115, 116, 117, 121, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 135, 152, 153, 154, 161, 172, 185, 198, 200, 204, 207, 208, 210, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 242, 244, 260, 263. Freud, Sigmund, 119. function, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 51, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 81, 84, 97, 116, 120, 123, 138, 139, 153, 157, 163, 167, 172, 175, 179, 180, 188, 210, 215, 217, 218, 221, 222, 223, 233, 237, 239, 241, 250, 254, 262, 269, 270, 273.

277 Deleuze, Gilles, 31. Dewey, John, 56, 90, 100, 164,186, 190, 243, 250, 258. Garreau, Joel, 175. Gehry, Frank, 236. goals, 52, 74, 75, 134. government, 10, 11, 19, 20, 29, 30, 33, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 62, 64, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 111, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 134, 135, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 187, 188, 193, 206, 213, 214, 215, 221, 231, 232, 235, 246, 247, 248, 249, 257, 268. Grange, Joseph, 229. Grewal, David Singh, 141. Harries, Karsten, 241. Hayek, F.A., 90, 130. health, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17,19, 25,31, 52, 54, 61, 62, 72, 88, 90, 92, 93, 102, 104, 111, 112, 113, 114, 133, 134, 135, 136, 151, 156, 164, 166, 168, 180, 181, 185, 186, 208, 221, 222, 225, 227, 228, 229, 232, 239, 247, 249, 251, 252, 257, 258, 260, 262, 265, 269, 272. heaven, 32, 58, 274. Hegel, G.W.F., 42, 70, 74, 76, 132, 138, 174, 186, 190, 193. hierarchy, 25, 27, 32, 42, 65, 73, 74, 75, 160, 165, 174, 260, 263, 269. history, 10, 17, 30, 62, 74, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 93, 94, 110, 133, 134, 139, 142, 143, 145, 147, 165, 172, 176, 194, 215, 216, 217, 218, 236, 237, 252, 260. holism, 21, 22, 29, 32, 165, 167. Howard, Ebenezer, 60, 256, 257. Hume, David, 29, 36, 37. ideality, 10. inclusion, 12, 13, 17, 40, 41, 42, 136, 163, 241, 252, 257, 259, 260, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273. individuality, 10, 13, 16, 19, 21, 32, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 58, 83, 85, 118, 121, 122, 128, 129, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 158, 164, 167, 170, 200, 263. individuals, passim. inference, 36, 67, 68, 69, 108. infrastructure, 8, 51, 53, 63, 64, 82, 83, 86, 92, 94, 132, 137, 160, 168, 170, 171, 182, 206, 207, 213, 216, 225, 246, 257. initiative, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 24, 25, 30, 32, 49, 50, 51, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 111, 121, 122, 126, 128, 130, 131, 134, 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 151, 154, 155, 159, 163, 164, 165, 167, 172, 176, 182, 184, 185, 186, 189, 197, 203, 204, 205, 208, 214, 215, 221, 223, 225, 227, 229, 234, 238, 245, 249, 251, 256, 257, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274. inquiry, 15, 57, 129, 143, 252. inspection, 67, 68, 72, 76, 77.

278 intelligence, 13, 14, 104, 189, 242, 243. Jacobs, Jane, 60, 63, 64, 172, 193, 202, 215. Jameson, Fredric, 238, 239. Jefferson, Thomas, 21, 32, 56, 76, 142, 163, 186, 250. Knafo, Saki, 194. Kant, Immanuel, 32, 54, 56, 74, 76, 88, 109, 142, 144, 178, 186, 190, 201, 202, 203, 205. Kierkegaard, Søren, 46. Koolhaas, Rem, 235, 236, 238, 239. laws, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 32, 37, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 69, 74, 82, 86, 89, 92, 94, 96, 101, 103, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 137, 145, 147, 150, 155, 156, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 189, 197, 200, 205, 223, 224, 231, 232, 246, 247, 265. Leibniz, G.W.V., 27. Locke, John, 32 loyalty, 11, 12, 20, 21, 30, 58, 70, 78, 98, 105, 120, 123, 126, 147, 173, 195, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 213, 214, 217, 244, 245, 246, 267. Lynch, Kevin, 171, 172, 239. Lukács, Georg, 108. Marx, Karl, 131, 138, 190, 204, 205, 208, 209, 247, 248, 259. Mead, George Herbert, 71. Medina, Luis Fernando, 163, 203. metaphor, 13, 76, 97, 160, 165, 184, 211, 261. Mill, John Stuart, 21, 56, 87, 88, 90, 116, 117, 134, 135, 142, 247, 248, 250, 265. Mumford, Lewis, 133. networks, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 27, 28, 29, 40, 42, 45, 51, 53, 64, 73, 82, 86, 87, 90, 93, 101, 132, 139, 141, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 174, 175, 180, 198, 199, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 248, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 49, 71, 74, 86, 117. norm, natural, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 28, 57, 74, 112, 134, 135, 138, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 168, 231, 233, 238, 245, 258, 259, 261, 273. Olmsted, Fredrick, 87. Olson, Mancur, 32, 39, 41, 52, 54. overlap, 7, 11, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 41, 60, 125, 141, 170, 174, 183, 185, 227, 250, 260, 261, 263, 264. Parsons, Talcott, 16. Peirce, C.S., 68, 72, 178. perspectives, 8, 32, 43, 63, 73, 82, 96, 101, 135, 172, 179, 197, 208, 215, 238. philosophy, 7, 15, 22, 31, 36, 42, 157, 178. Plato, 13, 14, 20, 23, 31, 48, 60, 61, 76, 77, 89, 90, 95, 109, 117, 119, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 138, 146, 167, 168, 184, 186, 190, 194, 195, 215, 243, 247, 262, 265, 269, 270, 273.

279 process, 7, 12, 13, 22, 23, 31, 37, 38, 51, 72, 73, 76, 82, 96, 97, 101, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 160, 165, 166, 178, 183, 196, 221, 224, 242, 249, 251, 262. proportion, 11, 22, 58, 60, 107, 122, 133, 146, 161, 164, 172, 248, 267. public, 7, 8, 10, 19, 20, 21, 37, 39, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 74, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100, 107, 108, 119, 124, 125,126, 127, 133, 134, 135, 138,139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 154, 163, 164, 165, 171, 172, 179, 185, 188, 193, 194, 201, 202, 214, 216, 217, 222, 224, 226, 228, 237, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250, 251, 258, 259, 261. Rawls, John, 151, 251. regulation, passim. revolution, 87, 143, 158, 159, 238. rewards, 44, 49, 65, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75, 130, 152, 164, 204, 245, 249, 271. rights, 12, 21, 33, 42, 52, 97, 124, 130, 142, 149, 153, 161, 165, 215, 244, 247, 271, 273. Rossi, Aldo, 188, 235, 236, 237, 238. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 63, 125, 142, 186, 229, 250. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 232. self-inspection, 68, 76, 77. self-regulation, 51, 56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 81, 84, 122, 124, 126, 134, 145, 160, 163, 224, 250, 251. Sen, Amartya, 154. settlements, passim. Schulkin, Jay, 78. Simmel, Georg, 16, 61, 170, 200. Simon, Herbert, 269. site, 15, 81, 82, 105, 106, 132, 167, 173, 175, 188, 189, 213, 214, 217, 239, 240. Smith, Adam, 129. Soros, George, 55, 103. steady state, 9, 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 61, 75, 160, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 190, 225, 259, 260, 261, 268. structure, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 30, 31, 35, 38, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 84, 90, 94, 95, 102, 113, 120, 128, 138, 141, 167, 172, 175, 187, 188, 189, 212, 213, 217, 221, 225, 226, 227, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241. systems, passim. taxonomy, 113. technology, 16, 30, 45, 81, 84, 85, 94, 101, 104, 106, 131, 150, 151, 152, 154, 158, 168, 170, 172, 173, 176, 180, 185, 188, 219, 239, 248, 274. Toennies, Ferdinand, 30. United States Supreme Court, 96, 97, 98, 99. values, 8, 9, 10, 12, 22, 49, 52, 54, 71, 72, 73, 75, 83, 84, 90, 100, 105, 106, 108, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 133, 134, 135, 138, 144, 151, 152, 153, 154,

280 156, 157, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 188, 189, 195, 198, 204, 205, 209, 214, 220, 221, 224, 228, 239, 241, 245, 251, 252, 254, 255, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267. variables, three, 10, 11, 13, 15, 20, 35, 58, 81, 84, 100, 101, 102, 103, 111, 117, 118, 120, 139, 160, 168, 184, 220, 221, 244, 260, 266, 268. Virilio, Paul, 16. volition, 74, 75. von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 22. Warhol, Andy, 108, 109. Weber, Max, 10, 208. whole, 7, 10, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 29, 30, 32, 35, 41, 42, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65, 66, 78, 81, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 100, 111, 121, 123, 124, 126, 138, 139, 141, 160, 161, 165, 168, 171, 190, 192, 210, 212, 216, 235, 244, 256, 260, 261, 266. Wirth, Louis, 16 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 35.