In discussions on a recent AVI post the question arose of whether cities would inevitably trend Democrat. If this is so, what aspects of Democrat philosophy and policy make it so?
To answer that, first ask what qualitative differences are there between rural and urban living?
One obvious difference is the scale. The much greater number and density of people in the city make it easier to build machines of people—whether an orchestra or a courier service or a sweat shop. These machines provide services the rural area can’t often match, and often quite fast—it’s a cliché but an accurate one that life in the city is faster.
The machines of the city can generate a great deal of wealth too. Historically the bulk of this was reserved for the elite, but when a middle class gets large the wealth gets shared around more.
Being part of a machine puts impersonal demands on you. This happens in the rural areas too: “Make hay while the sun shines,” and your animals depend on you. I have no idea how impersonal this may be—my adult life has been city-dwelling. But a city runs by the clock.
Machines need controllers. Self-organizing can work surprisingly well in the short term, but if you want a reliable machine long-term you have to have a clear organization and enforcement.
Some city-specific problems demand careful planning—waste disposal, for one thing. That’s much less of a problem in rural areas—unless you take your water from downstream of somebody’s leaky outhouse, or somebody from the city decides to dump stuff on you. City travel has to be tightly regulated. I can walk a shortcut through cornrows, but driving on sidewalks is frowned on.
I think I see one bias right off away: there’ll be a larger fraction of people in the cities who are used to being part of machines, and of people who think in terms of managing people-machines. They’d be more apt to find social and economic planning to be natural, instead of presumptuous.
In the city you are likely within a brick’s throw of hundreds of people, and a daily trip to work puts you close to thousands. (I’m thinking of taking the subway to downtown Chicago here.) I have been repeatedly assured that human limitations mean you can only know about 150 people well—and once you count your family and your “co-workers in the machine,” there aren’t a lot of slots left for neighbors. I don’t vouch for the accuracy of that 150, but it seems to match my own experience so I’ll go with it.
What that limitation means is that my actions impact a lot more people than I can actually know. In a rural area my fire pit probably won’t annoy anybody, but if it does they know who I am and can talk to me about it—and so long as they’re not my enemies we can reach an accommodation.
But in the city the complainants may be strangers, and negotiations get more complicated. I’m not as invested in the well-being or good humor of people I don’t know. I’m not certain that I can be, or should be. So instead of negotiations, we need rules.
In a mono-culture the rules can be intricate rules of courtesy, Japanese style—but that doesn’t seem to work at all in multi-cultural areas. It probably can’t—the rules of courtesy are part of culture.
That means you need codified rules—laws. Lots of them, and more all the time, because the number of possible interactions between people grows with the more different things they can do. I want to fly a drone and you want to listen to a radio--and if they use the same frequency who wins?
This obviously restricts liberty. Up to a point the restrictions come along with enough benefits from the smooth functioning of the machines that most people make the trade-off willingly. There is no natural bound to the number of laws, though, and there’s ample precedent for adding to them every time there’s another problem—however minor.
The Democrat governing philosophy matches this attitude and legal situation very well. Elect wise planners and the machines will run on time. They claim that this will be more equitable, but Acton’s Law applies—though that’s not relevant to the original question.(*)
Have you noticed that when “make a new regulation” is the default attitude, the elite tend to think that law and the good are whatever the rules are? Can you say “idolatry?”
Together with the impersonal environment and the cog-in-the-machine life, this elevation of the state to Arbiter of Good and Evil makes for a rather toxic environment for a human being. We need to be more than machine parts, and to love God and the good.
Perhaps cities have unique spiritual dangers after all.
(*) Although perhaps it is relevant. Entrenched corruption can give the same effect as the "one man, one vote, one time" rule—once the all-controlling rulers are in place you can’t get them out. I read a saying (possibly made up—I can’t find it again), that the tigers in the city are worse than the tigers on the mountain.
And it is demonstrably true that finite-minded humans don't plan well.
1 comment:
While this isn't entirely new to me, it is put simply, which is an advantage. My thought when reading your final paragraphs was the idea of low-hanging fruit. In managing situations, the first run of having rules and procedures often solves a lot of problems. But there is a law of diminishing returns, yet you now have a group of people in place making new rules and thinking that each one is going to solve just as much problem as the last one.
The necessity for more management in more complicated systems is of course so, and often neglected by conservative and libertarian types.
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