The Lost Massey Lectures (16 page)

Toward these abiding ills, the attitude of New Yorkers is characteristically confused. They overwhelmingly, and surprisingly, vote a billion dollars to clean up the pollution; they co-operate without grumbling with every gimmick to speed up traffic (though taxi-drivers tell me most of them are a lot of nonsense); they are willing to pay bigger bills than anywhere else for public housing and schools. As people they are decent. But they are entirely lacking in determination to prevent the causes and to solve the conditions; they do not believe that anything will be done, and they accept this state of things. As citizens they are washouts.

Finally, there are the plagues that indicate breakdown, psychopathology and sociopathology. There are estimated 70,000 dope-addicts, with the attendant desperate petty burglary. The juvenile delinquency starts like urban juvenile delinquency of the past, but it persists into addiction or other social withdrawal because there is less neighborhood support and less economic
opportunity. Families have now grown up for several generations dependent on relief, reformatories, public hospitals, and asylums as the normal course of life. A psychiatric survey of midtown Manhattan has shown that 75% have marked neurotic symptoms and 25% need psychiatric treatment, which is of course unavailable.

Given the stress of such actual physical and psychological dangers, we can no longer speak, in urban sociology, merely of urban loneliness, alienation, mechanization, delinquency, class and racial tensions, and so forth. Anomie is one thing; fearing for one's life and sanity is another. On the present scale, urbanization is an unique phenomenon and we must expect new consequences. To put it another way, it becomes increasingly difficult for candid observers to distinguish between populist protest, youth alienation, delinquency, mental disease, civil disobedience, and outright riot. All sometimes seem to be equally political; at other times, all seem to be merely symptomatic.

Inevitably, the cities are in financial straits. (At a recent Senate hearing, Mayor Lindsay of New York explained that to make the city “livable” would require $50 billion more in the next ten years, over and above the normal revenue.) Since they are not ecologically viable, the costs for services, transportation, housing, schooling, welfare, and policing steadily mount with diminishing benefits. Meantime, the blighted central city provides less revenue; the new middle class, as we have seen, pays its taxes in suburban counties; and in the state legislatures the rural counties, which are over-represented because of the drastic shift in population, are stingy about paying for specifically urban needs, which are indeed out of line in cost. Radical liberals believe, of
course, that all troubles can be immensely helped if urban areas get much more money from national and state governments, and they set store by the re-apportionment of the state legislatures as ordered by the Supreme Court. In my opinion, if the money is spent for the usual liberal social-engineering, for more freeways, bureaucratic welfare and schooling, bulldozing Urban Renewal, subsidized suburbanization, and police, it will not only fail to solve the problems but will aggravate them, it will increase the anomie, the crowding.

The basic error is to take the present urbanization for granted, both in style and extent, rather than to rethink it: (1) To alleviate anomie, we must, however “inefficient” and hard to administer it may be, avoid the present massification and social engineering; we must experiment with new forms of democracy, so that the urban areas can become cities again and the people citizens. I shall return to this subject in the following lectures. But (2) to relieve the absolute over-crowding that has already occurred or is imminent, nothing else will do but a certain amount of dispersal, which is unlikely in this generation in the United States. It involves rural reconstruction and the building up of the country towns that are their regional capitals. (I do not mean New Towns, Satellite Towns, or Dormitory Towns.) In Scheme II of
Communitas
, my brother and I have fancifully sketched such a small regional city, on anarcho-syndicalist principles, as a symbiosis of farm and city activities and values. (Incidentally, Scheme II would make a lot of sense in Canada.) But this is utopian. In this lecture let me rather outline some principles of rural reconstruction for the United States at present, during a period of excessive urbanization.

Liberals, when they think about urbanization, either disregard the country or treat it as an enemy in the legislature. A result of such a policy is to aggravate still another American headache, depressed rural areas. The few quixotic friends of rural reconstruction,
on the other hand, like Ralph Borsodi and the people of the Green Revolution, cut loose from urban problems altogether as from a sinking ship. But this is morally unrealistic, since in fact serious people cannot dissociate themselves from the main problems of society; they would regard themselves as deeply useless—just as small farmers do consider themselves. A possible basis of rural reconstruction, however, is for the country to help with urban problems, where it can more cheaply and far more effectively, and thus to become socially important again. (An heroic example is how the Israeli kibbutzim helped with the influx of the hundreds of thousands of Oriental Jews who came destitute and alien.)

Radicals, what I have called the wave of urban populists, the students, Negroes, radical professors, and just irate citizens, are on this subject no better than the liberals. They are busy and inventive about new forms of urban democracy, but they are sure to call the use of the country and rural reconstruction reactionary. Typically, if I suggest to a Harlem leader that some of the children might do better boarding with a farmer and going to a village school, somewhat like children of the upper middle class, I am told that I am downgrading Negroes by consigning them to the sticks. It is a curious reversal of the narrowness of the agrarian populism of eighty years ago. At that time the farmers lost out by failing to ally themselves with city industrial workers, who were regarded as immoral foreigners and coolie labor. Now farmers are regarded as backward fools, like one's sharecropper father. Although the urban areas are patently unlivable, they have narrowed their inhabitants' experience so that no other choice seems available.

In Canada, a more rational judgment is possible. You have a rural ratio—15-20%, including independent fishermen, lumberers, etc.—that we ought to envy. Your cities, though in need of improvement, are manageable in size. There is still a nodding
acquaintance between city and country. I urge you not to proceed down our primrose path, but to keep the ratio you have and, as your technology and population grow, to work out a better urbanrural symbiosis.

Traditionally in the United States, farming as a way of life and the maintenance of a high rural ratio have been regarded as the source of all moral virtue and political independence; but by and large public policy has tended to destroy them. The last important attempt to increase small farming was during the Great Depression when subsistence farms were subsidized as a social stabilizer, preferable to shanties in the park and breadlines. The program lapsed with the war-production prosperity that we still enjoy, and for twenty years, as we have seen, public policy has conspired to liquidate rural life completely. There were no Jeffersonian protests when President Johnson declared two years ago that it is his intention to get two-million more families off the land. (Lo and behold,
this
year LBJ has made a speech for massive migration
to
the land!) Nevertheless, in the present emergency of excessive urbanization, let me offer five ideas for rural reconstruction:

(1) At once re-assign to the country urban services that can be better performed there. Especially to depopulating areas, to preserve what there is. And do not do this by setting up new urban-run institutions in the country, but using local families, facilities and institutions, administered by the new underemployed county agents, Farmers Union, 4-H Clubs, and town governments. Consider a few examples:

For a slum child who has never been half a mile from home, a couple of years boarding with a farm family and attending a country school is what anthropologists call a culture-shock, opening
wide the mind. The cost per child in a New York grade school is $850 a year. Let us divide this sum equally between farmer and local school. Then, the farmer gets $30 a week for three boarders (whom he must merely feed well and not beat), and add on some of the children's welfare money, leaving some for the mothers in the city. With a dozen children, $5,000, the under-used school can buy a new teacher or splendid new equipment. Add on the school lunch subsidy.

In New York City or Chicago, $2,500 a year of welfare money buys a family destitution and undernourishment. In beautiful depopulating areas of Vermont, Maine, or upper New York State, or southern Iowa and northern Wisconsin, it is sufficient for a decent life and even owning a house and land. (Indeed, if we had a reasonable world, the same sum would make a family quite well-to-do in parts of Mexico, Greece, or even Ireland.)

The same reasoning applies to the aged. Given the chance, many old people would certainly choose to while away the years in a small village or on a farm, where they would be more part of life and might be useful, instead of in an institution with occupational therapy.

Vacations are an expensive function in which the city uses the country and the country the city. In simpler times, when the rural ratio was high, people exchanged visits with their country cousins or sent the children “to the farm.” At present, vacations from the city are largely spent at commercial resorts that tend rather to destroy the country communities than to support them. There are many ways to revive the substance of the older custom, and it is imperative to do so in order to have some social space and escape, which, needless to say, the urbanized resorts do not provide.

Here is a more touchy example: the great majority of inmates in our vast public mental institutions are harmless themselves but in danger on the city streets. Many, perhaps most, rot away
without treatment. A certain number would be better off—and there would be more remissions—if they roamed remote villages and the countryside as the local eccentrics or loonies, and if they lived in small nursing homes or with farm families paid well to fetch them home. (I understand that this system worked pretty well in Holland.)

(2) Most proposals like these, however, require changes in jurisdiction and administrative purpose. A metropolitan school board will not give up a slum child, though the cost is the same and the classrooms are crowded. No municipality will pay welfare money to a non-resident to spend elsewhere. (I do not know the attitude in this respect of frantically overworked mental hospitals, which do try to get the patients out.) Besides, often in the American federal system, one cannot cross state lines: a New York child would not get state education aid in Vermont.

So, in conditions of excessive urbanization, let us define a “region” symbiotically rather than economically or technologically. It is the urban area and the surrounding country
with a contrasting way of life and different conditions
that can therefore help solve urban human problems. This classical conception of the capital and its province is the opposite of usual planning. In terms of transportation and business, planners regard the continuous conurbation from north of Boston to Washington as one region and ask for authority to override state and municipal boundaries; for tax purposes, New York would like authority to treat the suburban counties as part of the New York region. These things are, I think, necessary; but their effect must certainly be to increase the monstrous conurbation and make it even more homogeneous. If I regard Vermont, northern New Hampshire and New York, and central Pennsylvania as part of the urban area, however, the purpose of the regional authority is precisely to prevent conurbation and strengthen locality, to make the depopulating areas socially important by their very difference.

(3) The chief use of small farming, at present, cannot be for cash but for its independence, simplicity, and abundance of subsistence; and to make the countryside beautiful. Rural reconstruction must mainly depend on other sources of income, providing urban social services and, as is common, part-time factory work. Nevertheless, we ought carefully to re-examine the economics of agriculture, the real costs and the quality of the product. With some crops, certainly with specialty and gourmet foods, the system of intensive cultivation and hothouses serving farmers' markets in the city and contracting with restaurants and hotels, is quite efficient; it omits processing and packaging, cuts down on the cost of transportation, and is indispensable for quality. The development of technology in agriculture has no doubt been as with technology in general, largely determined by economic policy and administration. If there were a premium on small intensive cultivation, as in Holland, technology would develop to make it the “most efficient.”

In our big cities, suburban development has irrevocably displaced nearby truck gardening. But perhaps in the next surrounding ring, now often devastated, small farming can revive even for cash.

(4) National
TV
, movies, news services, etc., have offset provincial narrowness and rural idiocy, but they have also had a more serious effect of brainwashing than in, at least, the big cities which have more intellectual resistance. Country culture has quite vanished. Typical are the county papers which now contain absolutely nothing but conventional gossip notes and ads.

Yet every region has seventeen
TV
channels available, of which only three or four are used by the national networks. (I think the Americans would be wise to have also a public national channel like
CBC
.) Small broadcasting stations would be cheap to run if local people would provide the programs. That is, there is an available community voice if there were anything to say. The same
holds for little theaters and local newspapers. I have suggested elsewhere that such enterprises, and small design offices and laboratories, could provide ideal apprenticeships for bright high school and college youth who are not academic and who now waste their time and the public money in formal schools. These could be adolescents either from the country or the city. (In New York, it costs up to $1,400 a year to keep an adolescent in a blackboard jungle.) Perhaps if communities got used to being participants and creators rather than spectators and consumers of canned information, entertainment, and design, they might recall what they are about.