The Lost Massey Lectures (15 page)

With regard to one area of science, however, it is essential that citizens do learn to judge the substantive issues. This is human ecology, combining physical science, physical and mental hygiene, sociology, and political economy, to analyze problems of urbanism, transportation, pollution, degenerative disease, mental disease, pesticides, indiscriminate use of antibiotics and other powerful drugs, and so forth. These matters are too important to be delegated to experts.

A few years ago, C. P. Snow created a stir by speaking of the chasm between “two cultures,” that of the scientists and that of the humanists. Since we live in times dominated by scientific technology, he castigated the humanists especially for not knowing the other language. The point of this lecture has been that Sir Charles posed the issue wrongly. There is only one culture; and probably the scientific technologists have betrayed it most. Science, the dialogue with the unknown, is itself one of the humanities; and technology, practical efficiency, is a part of moral philosophy. Scientific technology has become isolated by becoming subject to the empty system of power: excluding, expanding, controlling. The remedy is for scientists and technicians to reassert their own proper principles and for ordinary people to stop being superstitious and to reassert their own control over their environment. Then there will be communication again.

I started the last lecture by pointing out how the present style of technology is regarded as an autonomous cause of history. It is even more so with urbanization. It is as if by a law of Nature—the favored metaphor is that the City is a Magnet—that by 1990 75% of the Americans will live in dense metropolitan areas. At present only about 6% are listed as rural.

Yet, first of all, the urbanization is not a necessity of technology. On the contrary, the thrust of modern technology, e.g. electricity, power tools, automobiles, distant communication, and automation, would seem to be disurbanization, dispersal of population and industry: this was the thinking of Marx and Engels, Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other enthusiasts of scientific technology.

The urbanization is not a necessity of population growth. In
fact, with the bankruptcy of small farming, vast beautiful regions have been depopulating and sometimes returning to swamp. American growth is supposed to level off, in fifty years, at 300 million, not a crowded number for such a big area. Yet the cities already show signs of overpopulation. They do not provide adequate city services and probably cannot provide them; they are vulnerable to urban catastrophes that might destroy thousands; it is prohibitively costly to live decently in them; and, in my opinion, though this is hard to prove, the crowding is already more than is permissible for mental health and normal growing up.

But it is as with the misuse of technology: the urbanization is mainly due not to natural or social-psychological causes, but to political policy and an economic style careless of social costs and even money costs. Certainly cities are magnets, of excitement and high culture, markets, centers of administration, and arenas to make careers; but these classical functions of cities of 100,000, capitals of their regions or nations, do not explain our sprawling agglomerations of many millions with no environment at all—Metropolitan New York City has 15 million, and most people cannot get out of it. In general, magnet or no magnet, average people have been content to remain in the provinces and poor people never leave the land, unless they are driven out by some kind of enclosure system that makes it impossible to earn a living. Especially today, when the great American cities are morally and physically less and less attractive, while the towns and farms, equipped with
TV
, cars, and small machines that really pay off in the country, are potentially more and more attractive.

Like the rest of our interlocking system, the American system of enclosure has been an intricate complex. National farm subsidies have favored big plantations which work in various combinations with national chain grocers who now sell 70% of the food—100 companies more than 50%. Chains and processors
merge. The chains and processors have used the usual tactics to undercut independents and co-operatives. In the cities, Federally financed urban renewal has bulldozed out of existence small vegetable stores and grocers, who are replaced by the chains. Shopping centers on new subsidized highways bypass villages and neighborhoods. Guaranteed by Federal mortgages, real estate promoters transform farmland into suburbs. Farmers' markets disappear from the cities. As rural regions depopulate, railroads discontinue service, with the approval of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Rural schools are encouraged to degenerate, and land-grant colleges change their curricula toward urban occupations. The Army and Navy recruit apace among displaced farmboys (as they do also among city Negroes and Spanish-Americans).

All this, which sounds like Oliver Goldsmith and Wordsworth, is rationalized by saying, as usual, that it is efficient. One farmer can now feed thirty people. Yet strangely, though most of the farmers are gone and the take of the remaining farmers indeed tends to diminish every year, the price of food is
not
cheaper, it is about the same. The difference goes to the processors, packagers, transporters, and middle-men. (Of course, with the present wartime inflation, food prices have risen spectacularly; but again, a disproportionate amount of the rise is due to processing and distribution.) These operate in the established style. That is, the urbanization and rural depopulation is not technical nor economic but political. The remarkable increase in technical efficiency could just as well produce rural affluence or a co-operative society of farmers and consumers.

It has certainly not been technically efficient to bulldoze the garden land of the missions of Southern California into freeways, aircraft factories, and suburbs choked by smog, and then to spend billions of public money to irrigate deserts, robbing water from
neighboring regions. The destruction of California is probably our worst example of bad ecology, but it is all of a piece with the destruction of the fish and trees, the excessive use of pesticides, the pollution of the streams, the strip-mining of the land.

Of course, the galloping urbanization has been worldwide and it is most devastating in the so-called underdeveloped countries which cannot afford such blunders. Here the method of enclosure is more brutal. Typically, my country or some other advanced nation introduces a wildly inflationary standard, e.g. a few jobs at $70 a week when the average cash income of a peon is $70 a year. If only to maintain their self-respect, peasants flock to the city where there are no jobs for them; they settle around it in shanty-towns, and die of cholera. They used to be poor but dignified and fed, now they are urbanized, degraded, and dead. Indeed, a striking contrast between the 18th-century enclosures and our own is that the dark Satanic mills needed the displaced hands, whereas we do not need unskilled labor. So along with our other foreign aid, we will have to bring literacy and other parts of the Great Society.

In the United States, though we collect the refugees in slums, we do not permit them to die of starvation or cholera. But I am again bemused at the economics of the welfare procedure. For instance, first, for 60 years, by a mercantilism worthy of George III, we destroyed Puerto Rican agriculture and prevented an industrialism solidly based at the bottom; then recently we allowed 800,000 Puerto Ricans—a majority with some rural background—to settle in New York City, the most expensive and morally strange possible environment, rather than bribing them to disperse. When share-cropping failed in the South, rather than subsidizing subsistence farming and making a try at community development, we give relief-money and social-work in Chicago and Los Angeles. Take it at its crudest level: if the cheapest urban public housing costs $20,000 a unit to build, and every city has a
housing shortage, would it not be better to give farmers $1,000 a year for twenty years, just for rent, to stay home and drink their own water?

Partly our urban troubles spring from no planning, partly from just the planning that there is. When concrete observation and sympathy for human convenience are called for, there is no fore-thought and we drift aimlessly; when there is planning, it is abstract and aimed at keeping things under control. For instance, in the last sentence of my previous paragraph, I contrast “$20,000 a unit” with “staying home,” but no such equation could occur in urban planning, for the word “home” has ceased to exist; the term is “dwelling unit” or D.U. The D.U. is analyzed to meet certain biological and sociological criteria, and it is also restricted by certain rules, e.g. in public housing one cannot nail a picture on the wall, climb a tree in the landscaping, keep pets, engage in immoral sex, or get a raise in salary. There is a theory, as yet unproved, that planning can dispense with the concept “home”; it is a debased version of Le Corbusier's formula that a house is a machine for living, equal for any tenant and therefore controlled to be interchangeable. But is it the case that people thrive without an own place, unanalyzable because it is the matrix in which other functions occur and is idiosyncratic? Maybe they can, maybe they can't. My point is not that the D.U. is not so good as the shack in a white supremacist county down South; it is better. But that home in a shack plus $1,000 a year to improve it is much better even down South, where money talks as loud as elsewhere.

Another term that has vanished from planning vocabulary is “city.” Instead there are urban areas. There is no longer an art of city-planning but a science of urbanism, which analyzes and
relates the various urban functions, taking into account priorities and allocating available finances. There is no architectonic principle of civic identification or community spirit which the planner shares as a citizen and in terms of which he makes crucial decisions, including uneconomic choices. Such a principle is perhaps unrealistic in a natural culture, economy, and technology; we are citizens of the United States, not of New York City. In planning, the interstate and national highway plan will surely be laid down first and local amenity or existing situations must conform to it; and Washington's ideas about the type of financing, and administration of housing will surely determine what is built. (Oddly, just in such urban functions as highways and housing, local patriotism and neighborhood feeling suddenly assert themselves and exert a veto, though rarely providing a plan of their own.)

But is it the case that urban areas, rather than cities, are governable? Every municipality deplores the lack of civic pride, for instance in littering and vandalism, but it is a premise of its own planning. Anomie is primarily giving up on the immediate public environment: the children are bitten by rats, so why bother? The river stinks, so why bother? This kind of depression can go as far as tuberculosis, not to speak of mental disease. In my opinion it is particularly impossible for the young to grow up without a community or local patriotism, for the locality is their only real environment. In any case, when the going gets rough, which happens more and more frequently in American cities, poor people retreat into their neighborhoods and cry “It's ours!” or they burn them because they are not citizens in their own place. The middle class, as usual, makes a more rational choice: since the center offers neither home nor city nor an acceptable environment for their children, they leave it, avoiding its jurisdiction, taxes, and responsibilities, but staying near enough to exploit its jobs and services.

It is painfully reminiscent of imperial Rome, the return of the farmland to swamp and the flight of the
optimati
from the city center. The central city is occupied by a stinking mob who can hardly be called citizens, and the periphery by the knights and senators who are no longer interested in being citizens. This is an urban area.

Moral defects are disastrous in the long run; but American cities are also vulnerable to more immediate dangers, to life and limb. In my own city of New York, during the past year we have been visited by ten critical plagues, some of them temporary emergencies that could recur at any time, some abiding sores that are getting worse. It is interesting to list these and notice the responses of New Yorkers to them.

There was a power failure that for a few hours blacked out everything and brought most activity to a stop. There was a subway and bus strike that for a couple of weeks slowed down everything and disrupted everybody's business. There was a threatened water shortage persisting for four years and which, if the supply had really failed, would probably have made the city unlivable. In these “objective” emergencies, the New Yorkers responded with fine citizenship, good humor, and mutual aid. By and large, they remember the emergencies as better than business as usual. Everybody was in the same boat.

(By contrast, during the long heat wave of last summer—no joke in the asphalt oven of a giant city—there was less enthusiasm. In Chicago it was the occasion for a bad race riot, when a fire hydrant was shut off in a Negro neighborhood but, it was said, not in a white neighborhood. In New York it came out that the poor in public housing could not use air-conditioners
because of inadequate wiring. Evidently, everybody was not in the same boat.)

The rivers and bays are polluted and often stink; in a huge city with no open space and few facilities for recreation, this is a calamity. The air is bad but not critical, so I will not include it. The congestion is critical. Traffic often hardly moves, and new highways will only make the situation worse; there is no solution but to ban private cars, but no politician has the nerve to do it. As for human crowding, it is hard to know at what density people can no longer adapt, but there must be a point at which there are too many signals and the circuits become clogged, and where people do not have enough social space to feel self-possessed. In some areas, in my opinion, we have passed that point. In Harlem, there are 67,000 to the square mile; people live two and three to a room; and the average child of 12 will not have been half a mile from home.