Social Matter

Western society, by far, is the most tolerant society that exists today.  I define “Western society” as the system of norms and values generated in the Old World and transferred to the Anglophone New World. Tolerance is an immanent feature of a civilized society. It furnishes respect for the individual, which in turn allows pluralism to flourish.  However, this pluralism is subject to the reasonable constraints of inviolable individual rights.

At times, the tolerance of Westerners seems to exceed all reasonable limits. Here are a few concrete examples.

Instances of truculent behavior on the subway abound. A drunk and disheveled man will enter the subway car and start loudly cursing, sometimes addressing specific people – for no obvious reason. The entire car falls silent. No one dares to confront him, call the police, or otherwise attempt to dispose of him. Each person sits quietly and pretends that there is no crazy man shouting in his face.

Sometimes a troglodyte enters the subway car with a boombox blaring loud music. He passes station after station.  New people come on the train and hear the music but not a single person dares to challenge the boor. Passengers turn aside, set their noses deeper in their books, and put on their headphones rather than stand tall and simply hit the off button.

The third example is fresh in timing and outrageous in its conduct – a woman washing her small dog in a drinking fountain of Central Park. In the video and the photo you see numerous people observing this situation while doing nothing. They stand and stare; no reproaches, no intervention. No one tells the woman what is acceptable and what is not.

Common spaces such as subways and parks have rules to protect both the safety of users and to codify norms against public nuisance.  Without rules and their vigorous enforcement, each user becomes an unwilling victim of whatever the indignity of the day happens to be.

At first glance, we might consider these annoying transgressions “minor” because they hurt no one in the long run.  But these small infractions in the aggregate lead to the breakdown of the social norms that enable tolerance in the first place. Many choose to ignore the nuisances out of narrow selfishness or aloofness or rationalize them within the framework of political correctness.

These attitudes ultimately lead to abuse on a much, much higher level. Eventually a educated, law-abiding, and tolerant minority works hard to pay half of their earnings to the government, which then subsidizes uneducated, unemployable, rude, and abusive Morlocks, who are allowed to run roughshod over the civilized. Some of the latter group even use racial animus to justify these types of behavior – in essence claiming it is payback for centuries of unjust white exploitation.

In America, the rapacious state seems particularly content to tax the civilized and subsidize the uncivilized. Public housing (“NYCHA projects”) in New York City demonstrates this clearly.  In order “to increase opportunities for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers by providing safe, affordable housing and facilitating access to social and community services,” New York City government moved lower-income residents out of slums and ghettos into decent housing closer to middle-class people.

In theory, middle class family values and work ethic were supposed to spread to their lower-income cohabitants. Yet in the past 40 years, social scientists and behavioral geneticists have obtained reams of evidence suggesting that behaviors are more immune to social experiments. Indeed, genetics play a much stronger role than environment in determining behavior. The notion that man is shaped primarily by his environment is a stringent myth held by both the right and the left.

Fifty years later, we are witnessing how “well” the values of the civilized have rubbed off on those who live in the projects. Merely overlay a map of recent homicides and a map of the City’s projects. On the NYCHA’s own map, the projects appear as red spots–one is almost reminded of a PET scan highlighting cancerous tumors that have spread across the city-body.

Besides the thousands of hardened criminals they house, the projects occupy approximately 5 sq. miles of the City (Manhattan by comparison is only 23 sq. miles), they account for 12.4% of the City’s rental stock (~180,000 apartments), and contain over 600,000 people (7.4 percent of New York City’s population). If the NYCHA were its own city, it would be the 21st most populous city in the nation, larger than Boston and Seattle. Are all these people employed by the world’s largest companies in midtown? Hard to believe. Do these people get up at six in the morning and go to the office? No. Over half of them receive government benefits and fewer than half work.

New York is the business and intellectual center of the Western Hemisphere; it attracts the brightest and hardest working people from all across the world – to work, create, and contribute to human flourishing. Yet, in part because of NYCHA, these young, bright, ambitious people have no place to live–a simple matter of supply and demand. As more such people arrive, absent an increase in the supply of housing, prices will rise. As a result, the prices for apartments in the City are staggeringly high and are barely affordable for a young professional who just started his career at Google, IBM, or a bank.

Long commutes and shoebox apartments are fine for an entry level employee. A few years go by, however, and the same employee now wants to raise a family, Manhattan becomes practically off-limits. The middle-class has to either move to the suburbs (where the commute becomes measured in hours) or cram a family in a small one-bedroom. Thus, instead of living in Harlem, which is in Manhattan and has a 12 minute ride to midtown by subway, this relatively large category of people instead relocates to a safer area outside the city and suffers through a two hour daily commute.

So, while many middle-class families and young professionals tolerate the commute, others instead pay $4000 a month for an apartment that resembles a walk-in closet while their neighbors in the projects pay $445 per month. On top of this obscene rent differential, imagine 20% rent increases and $8,000 broker’s fees. As if the discrepancy in rent were not enough, many NYCHA projects have $30 per month parking. Parking in Manhattan for taxpaying citizens costs $300-500 per month. Should not those parking spaces be leased to working citizens to at least defray the cost of subsidizing the projects?

Given the rampant crime and social decay, how much longer will those who “work for a living” tolerate those who “vote for a living”? Will people subject to anarcho-tyranny finally say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”?  If the “Camp of the Saints” really is our future, and the government forces “the privileged” to invite “the oppressed” into their homes, will they continue to pretend that “everything is fine”?

Realistically speaking, change will be slow. The taxation system, welfare programs, and immigration policy won’t change favorably any time soon. However, each of us can do something on a day-to-day basis to remind people that they should respect themselves and those around them. Tolerance does not automatically imply submission to barbarism. If each and every harbinger of civilization stood up and expressed indignation with the ongoing boorishness and flouting of social norms – that would be a notable step forward.