Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards. London: Fourth Estate 2005.

Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee 2001.

As we walk through city streets, it normally does not trouble us that we know almost nothing about the lives of those whose paths we cross. City life is supposed to provide freedom from responsibility for others, apart from our family or friends. Everyone else just gets a casual glance – except for when a “street person” appears, someone obviously destitute or desperate. Our first instinct is to look away, before they can make us aware of something we would rather avoid: the needs of strangers.

Alexander Masters, a freelance writer in Cambridge, England, chose to keep looking at a homeless man he noticed on the street, Stuart Shorter. He has written Stuart’s biography, and made the claim that his is “an important life.” Most people who read this book will agree. It is the funny, fantastic and agonizing story of someone who made a complete mess of his life, and did much harm to others along the way. Failure, of course, is often more interesting than success; and absolute failure becomes more than that, a trip into the infernal regions beneath the affluent surface of Western cities. Stuart underwent pain, and inflicted pain, far beyond anything most of us have experienced. Then he chose to end his life – like Jesus, at the age of 33. Masters hints that Stuart, too, may have died for our sins, though one of the virtues of this book is that it suggests many other ways of telling the life of Stuart.

Stuart was one of the “chaotic homeless”: people who have no settled homes or relationships, who are rarely employed, who are unhealthy, violent and addicted to drugs. In the government agencies that deal with the homeless, the chaotic are often considered beyond repair. Their life expectancy in England is 42 years. They are 35 times as likely to commit suicide as an average person. Ten of them are male for each female. Why? Masters suggests that women may cope better with failure and disappointment. This is not a very satisfactory explanation, but one of the themes of Stuart is that it isn’t easy to explain anything about homelessness. The problems in a life like Stuart’s are so comprehensive, so majestic in their destructive power, that the standard sociological explanations of them look like the most feeble of clichés.

Masters does offer reasons why Stuart ended up living on the bottom level of the Lion’s Yard parking garage in Cambridge. Many reasons. His father was a gypsy who walked out when Stuart was small; Stuart was dyslexic and had muscular dystrophy; he was sexually abused by his brother, who later killed himself; he damaged his brain through glue-sniffing, head-butting, car-crashing and using heroic amounts of alcohol and heroin; his marriage failed (when he held his infant son hostage at knife-point); he had borderline personality disorder; he did time in 16 prisons. As Masters sums it up, “It isn’t a bedsit and employment that need; it is a new brain. At best we can keep them steady with drugs. At worst, we must throw them in jail, and hope that we are not in the room when they decide to hang themselves.”

In fact, “The System” (as Stuart calls the social services) provides much more for the homeless in England than drugs and restraint. Over the three years of their acquaintance, the government paid Stuart more than Masters, a Cambridge graduate in physics, managed to earn for himself. Once classified as unemployed and disabled, Stuart received about $400 a week and free rent. He regularly found ways to spend $150 a day on heroin. Apart from direct support, Stuart had guidance from the small army of social workers and administrators who deal with homelessness (Masters served in this army for a while). Theodore Dalrymple, in the other book under review here, described a hostel he visited that had 91 residents and 41 staff, most of them working behind locked doors so that they wouldn’t be bothered by their clients.

The government helps, and gets no gratitude in return:

All homeless people hate the System, even though many of its organisations – housing benefit, social security, the rough sleepers unit, dozens of charities – have been set up especially to make their lives easier.

The System is hated because it holds a carrot in one hand and a stick in the other. Hostels have many rules and penalties for bad behaviour; drug dealers make no demands on their customers, other than the price of their wares. Whatever the System gives to the homeless, it is never enough to repair the chaos of their lives. A homeless person has nothing and needs everything; how does one provide that?

Today, the state is close to throwing up its hands in trying to solve the problem of homelessness. Part of its despair comes from an intellectual failure. Psychiatry, medicine, sociology, criminology no longer claim that they even understand homelessness, still less that they know how to fix it. The most effective, and notorious, policy has been that of Rudolph Giuliani in New York: just drive the underclass out of central public places through ruthless law enforcement. Yet it is precisely in great and wealthy cities that homelessness seems to be growing fastest.

Alexander Masters began trying to understand Stuart by reading the social science literature, but Stuart himself would have none of it. “You grew up with order,” he told Masters, “so you’re going to want order to explain things.” Stuart can’t explain himself, so how can an outsider do better? Masters falls back on just telling Stuart’s story – and telling it backwards, from adult to child. First we see Stuart the psychopath and criminal; at the end of the book we see the chubby, smiling baby with his big brother. They are both going to kill themselves, but Masters never really tries to tell you why, or who is to blame.

What Masters gives us is the world according to Stuart; and he convinces us that Stuart is more interesting than most of the people on the other side of the college walls of Cambridge. But how much of Stuart’s fascination is put there by Masters’s talent as a writer? Masters rejects the compassionate social-worker approach, which would see Stuart as only a victim – one of the “socially excluded,” in current jargon. Stuart had his own social world; it just wasn’t a comfortable or law-abiding one. By joining that world on its own terms, Masters was “feasting with panthers,” in Oscar Wilde’s phrase. He was not looking for sexual excitement in consorting with Stuart and his friends, but prided himself on finding acceptance in an underworld that the solid citizens of Cambridge just wanted to avoid. Masters was lucky not to end up like Timothy Treadwell (portrayed in Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man), who lived with the grizzly bears for 13 years, until one of the grizzlies decided to eat him.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels, who also writes under his own name on travel and other subjects. Until recently, Dalrymple worked as a psychiatrist in British inner-city hospitals and prisons. He belonged to the sharp end of government response to “the underclass” (as he calls it), where doctors, nurses, police and prison guards have clearly defined tasks of treatment and social control. Such people tend to be critical of the soft end, where social workers, hostel managers and poverty advocates do their work. Yet neither the hard people nor the soft ones seem to have great confidence in what they are doing, as the underclass has become a permanent feature of the urban landscape. Both Dalrymple and Masters are resigned to this, but their moral judgements are radically different.

One could say of Masters what Martin Amis said of himself, that he is “not terribly interested in disapproval.” People on either the left or the right might have their reasons to be indignant about Stuart’s life, but Masters mainly just wants to know what it’s like to be Stuart. Dalrymple, on the other hand, goes in for all disapproval, all the time. He is furious with how the System intervenes in the lives of his patients, and more furious with how it fails to intervene when it should. The reason for this dangerous passivity, Dalrymple says, is that “moral relativism … has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.”

The thesis constantly repeated in the essays in Life at the Bottom is that “the fish rots from the head.” Misguided intellectuals, Dalrymple says, have undermined traditional beliefs in moral standards, free will and personal responsibility. There are two reasons to disagree with this. One is the fragility of the proposed causal chain: between Rousseau and Woodstock, or Nietzsche and the Nazis, there are too many links. What is the point of making such thinkers responsible for the distant and distorted “consequences” of their ideas? Today, people on the right like to blame disorder on “elites” and assume that ordinary folk, if they were not led astray, would come up with strong and simple values. In fact, populist ideas can also be traced back to intellectuals, just different intellectuals – Calvin rather than Montaigne, for example.

The other problem with the “intellectual decay” argument is that the underclass is not drifting in a value-free, postmodern cloud. They still have plenty of rules, and believe in reward and punishment; if anything their rules tend to be too savage, not too lax. In the Kingston Penitentiary uprising of 1971, the inmates held a mock trial of sexual offenders and tortured several of them to death.

Dalrymple’s book is full of horror stories about young women killed for breaking the rules of their immigrant communities, or old people persecuted by thugs. When he speaks of the “collapse of the British character,” he means that there is more violence, selfishness and addiction; this may be true, but woolly ideas are not the core of the problem. Nor is it plausible that “the tastes, conduct, and the mores of the underclass are seeping up the social scale with astonishing rapidity.” The British elite have no desire to join the underclass; they just think it can be a good joke to behave like them in superficial ways like wearing grubby clothes or dropping their aitches. That sort of play-acting has been going on since Marie Antoinette dressed up as a shepherdess. No middle-class person actually wants to live on a sink estate or send their child to a failing inner-city school.

Dalrymple’s book is a good read, nonetheless. He tells his stories well, and has a clear-eyed view of what makes life hard for immigrants and other “marginalized” people in cities. As a right-wing thinker, he also has some refreshing differences from the sort of American neoconservatives who praise him on his back cover. Dalrymple believes England is circling the drain; the neocons are so sure that America is the greatest country in the world that they turn a blind eye to much evidence to the contrary. Dalrymple, like Christopher Hitchens, has no love for faith-based solutions to social decay. He is hostile to vulgar consumerism; neocons believe that big houses and cars help to make America great. Dalrymple says the welfare state is not to blame for the underclass, because it’s only in the last 20 years or so that things have gone to pot; neocons say that welfare saps initiative. Dalrymple still resembles his Communist father in being appalled by many of the fruits of capitalism; neocons bang the drum for Anglo-Saxon economic freedoms.

Although he believes that order and responsibility are better than permissiveness and self-expression, Dalrymple sees the underclass as people who choose for themselves, not just products of the social machine. They are a much larger group than just the homeless, and they live on the margin because society gives them what they need to survive there:

They have no fear of failure and are utterly without the constraint of routine: their only daily task is to appear on time for a meal, and their only weekly task is to collect their social security. Moreover, they are automatically part of a fraternity – quarrelsome and occasionally violent, perhaps, but also tolerant and often amusing … It is difficult for most of us to accept that this way of life, so unattractive on the surface, is freely chosen.

The descriptions of a tramp’s life in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London show that Western societies used to deal with the homeless far more harshly than they do today. Orwell did not sentimentalize his tramps – he says of one that he has “a jackal’s character” – but he spent time at the bottom to get a perspective on the vices of those at the top. He viewed hardship below as a product of selfishness above.

Dalrymple, on the other hand, blames postmodern intellectuals for the chaotic lives of the underclass. Neither he nor Masters accepts Orwell’s old-fashioned leftist view of social inequality. In their different ways, they are both postmodernists. They look at the underclass as a distinct culture, with its particular rules. When members of one culture seek to judge members of another, they cannot appeal to any universal or national culture that overrules local patterns of behaviour. Dalrymple deplores this situation, to be sure, but he accepts that moral and social fragmentation are irreversible in contemporary Britain.

The multicultural model of society now includes groups – predominantly white, as Dalrymple notes – that used to be defined by their economic deprivation. Society is now a horizontal tapestry of cultures, not a vertical pyramid of classes. Economics has yielded to anthropology. Orwell still believed that the injustices of that pyramid could be dissolved, and that solidarity could bring about a happier and fairer future state. Now, as David Goodhart has argued, “The left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.”¹ Goodhart sees Scandinavia as the exception: in a homogeneous population with an old-fashioned national identity, it is much easier to create a feeling of solidarity between rich and poor. There is an underclass in Scandinavia too, but it is proportionally much smaller than in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

In North America the right deals with the underclass by retreating into gated communities, or by trying to displace the poor from the public sphere of the city. The left tries to engage with them, but does not challenge values that are in fact destructive to those who hold them. Solidarity used to be the answer; but the lesson of recent decades is that solidarity is surely not forever. n

Continue reading “The World According to Stuart” →

Edward Glaeser
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
New York: Penguin, 2011
338 pages.

Bill Bishop
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008
370 pages.

Feelings about American cities have always been mixed: some seek the centre, others flee from it. Edward Glaeser (like Richard Florida) celebrates city centres as magnets for ambitious people who seek richer and happier lives. “The enduring strength of cities,” Glaeser writes, “reflects the profoundly social nature of humanity.”

Nonetheless, we can see that many people prefer to express their social nature in suburbs or other kinds of decentralized living. Joel Garreau, for example, has argued that the real action has shifted to the urban margin, in the “edge cities” that have mushroomed up at freeway intersections 30 or 40 kilometres out. Going farther yet, John Kasarda locates the future in the “Aerotropolis.” New airports come first, on the outskirts of Bangkok, Dubai or Seoul, then a new kind of agglomeration follows them. Grandiose terminal buildings, built to the scale of 50 million passengers a year, are the cathedrals of the 21st century. Centrality yields to accessibility: Bangkok’s new airport at Suvarnabhumi is within three and a half hours’ flight time for one third of the world’s population.

These rival visions also divide those who look to the past and want to revitalize the traditional kind of city from those who look to the future and see old-style cities as obsolete. In the United States, this division pits Democrats against Republicans, the centre against the suburbs, the public against the private, the subway against the freeway. Edward Glaeser has lived most of his life in Manhattan and Boston, and he makes a vigorous case for the central city. But in Triumph of the City he slides over the fact that many U.S. cities have been experiencing more trouble than triumph.

Of the 16 largest U.S. central cities in 1950, six have now lost more than half their population. Detroit, probably the sickest of them all, has lost 58 per cent. Many of these declining cities have suffered from the hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing. But there are two broader and more powerful reasons for decline: the attraction of suburban living, and self-segregation by whites as many city centres have become predominantly black. American urbanization, like American politics generally, is still haunted by the legacy of race.

In recent years these population movements have taken on a more complex form, which Bill Bishop has called The Big Sort. Glaeser does not mention this book, but it gives a more convincing picture of where the United States is going. More and more Americans are choosing to live in “like-minded clusters” – often inside walls and gates – that are both politically and economically homogeneous.

There are now “Blue” towns and “Red” towns; on a larger scale, the liberal dwellers on the east and west coasts inhabit a different world from conservatives living in the midwest and south.

Bishop focuses on the massive increase in “landslide counties,” where more than 60 per cent of voters favoured one or the other presidential candidate. These areas, he argues, are becoming the geographical bases for rival tribes, where political allegiance is only part of an interlocking set of lifestyle choices. In Republican landslide counties, people have guns in their houses and oppose abortion; 45 per cent of the adult population belongs to a Bible study or prayer group. In Democratic landslide counties they fear global warming, favour gay marriage, drive Volvos and call their dog “Che.”

Counties voting for Bush in 2004 averaged 110 people per square mile; for Kerry, 836. As Karl Marx spins in his grave, Democratic landslide counties have higher levels of income and education than Republican ones. Instead of clustering around the political centre, opinions are polarizing, and this process expresses itself spatially as people move to be with their own kind.

Bishop does not consider the intellectual roots of American urbanism, but what is going on now resembles the kind of Puritan revivalism that has recurred throughout American history. John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” defined American exceptionalism by proclaiming the ideal of a likeminded “godly” community. In Gore Vidal’s quip, the Mayflower colonists did not sail for New England because they were being persecuted, but because they were not allowed to persecute others. They had settled in Holland, the only country in the world that had established religious tolerance; but they feared that their children were absorbing the pluralist values of Dutch society. Once in New England, the Puritans could enforce conformity and drive heretics into exile. Quakers and witches could be hanged. When cities later became more secular and diverse, the alternative was the Frontier, an area of radical freedom and black-and-white values.

If most Americans are now living by “the Big Sort,” then the “creative city” touted by Glaeser or Richard Florida may be the exception that proves the rule. A dominant tendency in American culture has been the pursuit of mobility and outward expansion, a search for the “great good place.” Only a few cities formed dense pedestrianized European-style centres, usually because they were founded on peninsulas or islands: Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle.

These cities do indeed thrive, thanks to their financial or intellectual resources. But there can also be vitality in different models. Sprawling, doughnut-shaped cities like Phoenix, Houston or Dallas manage well enough without a residential downtown. There are also decentred creative regions, like Silicon Valley or the periphery of Washington, D.C. College towns or corporate campuses give a third model: Stanford University (familiarly known as “The Farm”) has become preeminent thanks to its 3,000 hectares of land. (Canadian universities are more likely to be in city centres, though it is not clear how much advantage they have gained from this.)

Greenwich Village and North Beach, as bohemian neighbourhoods, have certainly contributed to the success of New York and San Francisco. But Richard Florida’s idea that such areas are now central to economic development probably puts the causative arrow the wrong way round. Those two cities became the financial centres for the east and west coasts long before they became bohemian meccas for recent college grads. Bright ideas do not come to fruition in college dorms or trendy bars. As the movie The Social Network shows, their practical success is driven by networks of venture capital, a system that has little to do with bohemianism.

Dense city centres still have their uses, of course, even in the United States. As Glaeser notes, they have a lighter ecological footprint than sprawl cities like Los Angeles or Phoenix. The inhabitants of Dallas use more than three times as much energy per capita as those of New York City. Nonetheless, the United States will not easily give up its culture of McMansions, cheap gas and likeminded suburbs. Republicans will fight doggedly against government subsidies to mass transit, or zoning that promotes densification. Michele Bachmann has promised that if she is elected president, gas will sell for less than two dollars a gallon. On the other side, liberals and environmentalists are often the most rabid NIMBYites; they do their bit to ensure that housing in desirable cities will remain scarce and expensive.

Where do Canadian cities fit into Glaeser’s scheme? He has nothing to say about Toronto or Montreal. Vancouver he calls a success story as a “consumer city,” thanks to Asian immigration and a positive attitude to densification. What has been built on Vancouver’s downtown peninsula is certainly impressive, and its formula of residential towers, transit and public space is highly efficient. As Glaeser notes, a 1,200-square-foot apartment in a 40-storey building takes up 30 square feet of land – the size of a grave. In Vancouver, that apartment uses about $30 worth of electricity a month, including heating. Yet the low running cost of such compact space is dwarfed by the purchase cost – currently at least five times as much as similar space in a Sunbelt suburb.

Glaeser’s praise of Vancouver omits the awkward fact that it now has some of the most expensive housing in the world. This might not matter if incomes were equally high. New York and London have very high incomes because they are global financial capitals, and much of their wealth ends up in bricks and mortar. Incomes in Vancouver sit at precisely the Canadian average; in Calgary, incomes are one third higher and housing costs half as much. How long can this go on? Glaeser argues in a circle on this issue: when housing is expensive relative to income, he says, that just gives us a measure of how much people are willing to pay for “quality of life.”

Vancouver housing prices have become stratospheric because the city is relatively small, has geographical limits and is an international safe haven – the Zürich or Geneva of North America. But Switzerland has a closed door to immigration, Canada an open one. On the west side of Vancouver, about 600 houses are listed for sale at a given moment, and the only way to build a new house is to demolish an old one. China alone now has more than 500,000 people with a million dollars to invest, so a real estate bubble in Vancouver is probably unavoidable.

The weakness of the local economic base may be obscured by the flood of money coming in from the nouveaux riches of developing countries. But in the long run Vancouver needs to gear up its indigenous economy, and it’s not clear how that can be done. Glaeser suggests that manufacturing cities are in decline and “idea cities” on the rise. If so, what is Vancouver’s “idea,” beyond its natural beauty and agreeable lifestyle? Where are its “idea businesses,” on the scale of Microsoft or Amazon in Seattle, Intel or Nike in Portland?

The “Vancouverism” model is a huge bet on two propositions: that the expansive development of post–World War II North America can be reversed, and that a vibrant centre is bound to generate sustainable economic and cultural wealth. Glaeser largely takes such a “triumph of the city” for granted.

It makes for a good story, but urban history has followed a more erratic course. The white middle class has been fleeing American cities for decades out of dislike for one of the things cities do: force people of different races or incomes into proximity with each other. If oil rose above $200 a barrel, Vancouver could manage while U.S. sprawl cities would be in crisis; even so, politicians might respond by reducing gasoline taxes even further.

In any case, how quickly can they change their urban model? Vancouver’s dense centre has taken more than 50 years to build, since the West End was up-zoned in 1956, and it still accommodates only 5 per cent of the Lower Mainland population. Cities like Florence or Amsterdam have historic density, but have succumbed to the monoculture of tourism. Detroit and Dubai, in their different ways, are now facing collapse. Public transit may bring 100,000 people a day into the centre of Vancouver, but wealth and happiness are not guaranteed by their presence. As we have seen here and in London, the creative crowd can quickly turn into the destructive mob. Cities do demonstrate “the social nature of humanity,” but the better side of that nature does not always triumph.