The Dislocation of Relocation

(Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Generation blog)

Much as I love my fellow leftists, we have the habit of continually making some pretty crippling oversights in our political views. For example, we very often underestimate the importance of community and social connections. Nowhere is this more evident than in proposals, such as the 1994 “Moving to Opportunity” initiative in Chicago to move massive numbers of families out of poor urban neighborhoods and disperse them into the suburbs: proposals that are not nearly as uniformly beneficial as many leftists would like to think they are.

Such ideas are fundamentally flawed insofar as they fail to take into account the non-material impacts of picking a family up and moving them to a new subdivision, neighborhood, or town. Moving, particularly when it involves crossing racial and/or socioeconomic lines, is a difficult thing to do. You arrive in your new “home” as a stranger in a strange land, a de facto outsider even in the most welcoming of communities.

But community is not just a network of acquaintances: it is a set of practices, customs, and shared understandings that can only be fully grasped over time. Rather than being something that simply exists, every community is actively created, and then sustained, by its constituents. The practices can be as weighty as voting, as mundane as putting out the recycling for pickup on the correct day, or as ingrained as using the correct local slang words. But they are all essential to the character of a particular community. To do them, and do them correctly, is to be included; to fail to do them, even if you tried your best, is to be marked as outside the shared experience of the locals (epitomized by that most exclusionary of questions – “you’re not from around here, are you?”).

Relocating people out of urban ghettos and into the suburbs flies in the face of this notion of community. The newly-settled often find themselves unmistakably differentiated from their new neighbors, be it by skin color, preferred style of clothing, accent, or any number of other characteristics. After all, the whole point of these programs is to bring people out of the cities and into areas with a “healthier” culture, which must necessarily be different from that of the urban areas in at least a few important ways.

It is likely that at least some of the values, support systems, and norms of suburban communities are indeed healthy ones, ones that we would like to see develop in all groups of people. But relocating people to the suburbs fails to highlight these contrasts, or if it does, it highlights them in a way that serves to alienate and discomfit the new arrivals. The poor may end up making more money after moving to the suburbs, but the act of moving tears them from the fabric of their community and then clumsily tries to incorporate them into a fully-developed suburban social scene. The aftereffects of this often mitigate the quality-of-life improvements stemming from increased income.

So how do we address the very real problems of life in urban ghettos without destroying communities? To me, the solution is to go directly to the urban areas themselves. Fix up inner-city schools rather than busing kids out to the suburbs. Invest in after-school programs and other extracurricular activities. Rebuild dilapidated buildings, creating jobs in construction as well as in whatever companies end up occupying the new spaces. Yes, any sort of intervention will inevitably force some aspects of an existing community to change, and as such, these types of efforts are not entirely free from the destructive effects I described above. But by allowing people to stay in the same homes and social networks, we would preserve quite a lot of what made that particular community what it was, something that is far more important than most leftists are willing to admit.

Ceci N'est Pas Un Choice: Musings on Paternalism

Paternalism. These days, the word has taken on an almost entirely negative connotation. And yet, paternalism is everywhere, whether we realize it or not. By manipulating subtle things like the order in which food is presented in a buffet line, or the particular type of voting procedure used in an election, authority figures can steer us toward making a particular decision without our ever being consciously aware that they are doing so.

Sometimes this is a good thing: in the buffet line example, putting dessert at the end of the line makes people less likely to eat it, which in the long run probably rebounds to their benefit. On the other hand, many people derive great pleasure and enjoyment from things that paternalistic worldviews would advocate abolishing, such as gambling, smoking, and other risky endeavors.

We do not encounter paternalism solely on a personal scale, though. Much of international relations, such as attempts to spread democracy into the developing world, can be conceptualized as paternalism writ large. Even if it is true that Country X would be better served as a democracy than as whatever it currently is, as soon as another country does anything more than talk to them about it, they have crossed the line.

Most discussions about paternalism get bogged down here, as they attempt to decide whether paternalism qua paternalism is a good or a bad thing. I don’t want to do that. Paternalism is inevitable. We are human beings, and one of the things that human beings do, particularly in politics, is try to win other human beings over to their side of an argument. Clearly there should be some limits on what sorts of persuasive tactics are acceptable: rational discourse is OK, Russian roulette is not. But paternalism, or at least all but the most heinously coercive forms thereof, must fall within the acceptable realm. How would you outlaw it without simultaneously preventing experts from using their knowledge to improve people’s lives?

I am of course willing to acknowledge that at times, paternalism may impinge on an individual’s “freedom of choice.” But there are also instances when it is unarguably better for the person in question to make one decision or the other. It is impossible to eliminate bias and outside influence from any human decision, and to rail indiscriminately against paternalism is to attempt to do so. Furthermore, to say that paternalism is unequivocally bad is to commit the very offense that is being condemned: attempting to impose your view of what is best for people upon them.

So what can we do? Tell people about ways in which sleazy salesmen might try to scam them; make psychological research commonly available; refuse to use military force if another country wants to continue to do things its own way. All of these are productive ways to combat malicious forms of paternalism. But don’t crusade against paternalism per se in the name of Choice.

How Neighborly of Them

As if it weren't already obvious enough that John McCain is quite a different animal from most of his compatriots in the Republican Party, to say nothing of the rest of the country, consider these numbers from Gallup, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias. 79% of Democrats and 70% of Independents favor negotiations with "enemy" leaders, as do a surprising 48% of Republicans. This, of course, begs the question of how exactly such negotiations go against "what America stands for," as McCain has alleged previously.

In other news, the Obama campaign had it exactly right when they said recently that the Iraq War "has done more to dramatically strengthen and embolden Iran than anything in a generation," and that McCain's argument that withdrawal from Iraq would be a boon for Iran should therefore be taken with a vein of salt. Indeed, just about the only thing the Iraq War has accomplished is giving the Iranians confidence and object lessons in how to stand up to the Iranian military, much as Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 2006 did wonders for Hizbullah's popularity and influence.

Furthermore, it's not exactly like the American presence in Iraq is preventing the Iranians from doing much of anything. The centrifuges at Natanz and Bushehr are still spinning away, and while Ahmadinejad's recent showing in the parliamentary elections may not be a vote of confidence for him in particular, the radicals show no signs of closing up shop in the Majlis. We would be leaving Iraq in a state of disarray, and the Iranians couldn't exactly waltz right through it on the way to Israel - even ignoring all of the IEDs and roadside bombs, the large Sunni population in Iraq probably doesn't have particularly high opinions of Iran (both because of Iran's Shi'ite tendencies and because of grudges from the brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s). And don't talk to me about how we can't let the Middle East descend into general chaos: America, not Iran, is far and away the most destabilizing presence in the reason.