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Sunday, February 06, 2005
Consensus And Constitutional Order Part Seven: Density Effects
Your Curmudgeon has noted in a previous tirade that contextual factors can alter the applicability of the concept of freedom as it's commonly understood. Indeed, sufficiently harsh surrounding conditions can nullify all possibility of freedom, as J. G. Ballard, Anne McCaffrey and others have depicted in fictional form. The harshest and least yielding such condition is a local overabundance of humanity.
Put down the torches and pitchforks! Your Curmudgeon is not suggesting that there's such a thing as excess human life. But the concentration of population to a sufficiently high density can deprive individuals of their latitude. The mere proximity of others can drive one's choices near to zero. The only solution is dispersion, which is not something one can always compel at need.
Under normal circumstances, we do tend to move away from one another when we feel too crowded, just as we tend to move toward one another when we feel too isolated. But "normal" in this context must be carefully understood. "Normal circumstances" would preclude much to which humans have accustomed themselves en masse these past decades, including coercive control of land and extractible resources, and the large-scale redistribution of wealth through State action. The prevalence of State interference in economic matters over the century past actually explains a great deal more about the population dynamics of such places as Calcutta, Mexico City, and Washington D.C. than politicians would like you to know.
Today, Joseph Hertzlinger, one of the very best all-but-unknown bloggers in the 'Sphere, cites a fortunately forgotten book -- "fortunately" because widespread knowledge of its contents would have anyone unwise enough to call himself an environmentalist swinging from a gibbet before dusk. The passage he quotes concerns a Third World ruler who has been asked why he will not finance the creation of a clean public water system for his capital city:
The ruler replied, “I know it is not pleasant to see people drinking from ruts in the road, and we do have enough money at least to change things here in the city. But the problem is not that simple. Rather, I have not been sure in my own mind how to handle this problem. So I have visited other countries, especially India, to see what happens when a city gets pure drinking water. My decision was that when India learns how to feed all of the people who have been kept alive because of the good water, then I shall order a modern water system here.”
The authors of the book find themselves in agreement with this ruler. (See why your Curmudgeon called the book "fortunately forgotten"?) But the incident itself illuminates one of the first effects to limit the freedom of individuals in dense environments: the difficulties attending disease control and septic management in an urban setting.
When people are crowded together, transmissible diseases circulate easily among them, and affect a great many lives. This is because, to a disease microbe, the human body is a shelter from a generally unfriendly world, just as a house is to a human being. A greater density of "houses" means that, in jumping from one victim to the next, a bacterium or virus need spend far less time exposed to the cold, cruel world than it otherwise would. This sharply reduces the probability that the parasite will die before it finds its next host. When the expected duration of exposure falls a little way below the 50% lethality point -- that is, the point at which the microbe would be as likely to die from exposure as to survive and find a new host -- the disease becomes endemic; it will only abate if its victim population becomes immune, or dies off to the last man.
Dense environments also put great obstacles in the way of individual choice as regards water and septic systems. For practical purposes -- that is, if cost is a bounding factor -- all the residents in an apartment building must have a single water supplier and a single septic service. When apartment buildings are sufficiently close together, as for example in Manhattan, it becomes impossible for neighboring buildings to have different water and septic mains; there simply isn't room enough beneath the streets.
In consequence, when a city of sufficient density has formed, the drive to municipalize the water and waste systems becomes irresistible. More, the city is pressed to take charge of "public health" matters such as vaccinations and the tracking of epidemics. Municipalization inevitably means monopolies enforced by political power and funded by taxation; no amount of theorizing about fanciful alternatives can change that.
To the freedom-minded, this is a case against the city and in favor of the country, or at least the suburbs. But things are not so simple. For density doesn't bring only costs; it also brings benefits, some of which are widely held to be immensely desirable.
Most obviously, density reduces the probable distance between a resident and any particular service he might desire. The vendors of services gravitate to density; there's money to be made there. Less obviously, the proximity of a large market has a depressing effect on the prices of goods, as long as alternative sources for the goods exist. Much less obviously, in the absence of laws that militate to the contrary, cities are far safer environments than less dense areas, because of the greater likelihood that someone will be available to intervene in a crisis at any arbitrary moment.
So not all sensible persons will flee the cities at the approach of public health services, municipal water mains and waste management -- not even all of those, well to the right of your Curmudgeon, who hold that the only good bureaucrat is a dead one. (Fleeing the cities once laws against personal armament are passed, on the other hand, is a matter of survival. Predators, too, gravitate toward density, and disarming its citizenry makes a city into a predator's Disneyland.)
In government, smaller is better. Municipal systems for the distribution of commonly desired resources, or for the collection and management of wastes, are much to be preferred to state or federal schemes. With the exception of national vector tracking, the same is true for public health systems. Yet every act of government, no matter how small-scale, takes from some and gives to others. If we are to have cities, they will have governments that do more than the classical liberal "night watchman" who springs to action only when someone has been assaulted or defrauded.
Of course, one must put some clamps around the concept of a city in this context. Some recognized cities, such as Indianapolis, are not nearly as dense as suburbs in the Greater New York area that have managed to avoid the municipal takeover of their water and sewer systems. A density comparable to San Francisco or Boston would appear to be required, at the least, to trigger those needs. As for the willingness of persons to live in such conditions, that is a matter of individual choice, and will yield to analysis no further.
But we come back to that Third World ruler and his capital city, whose squalid masses drink rainwater from carriage ruts in the manure-filled streets. It seems a short road to a grisly death. Yet their numbers never diminish; indeed, the populations of Third World capitals seem only to swell over time. What draws men there? What keeps them there?
Political power draws them and keeps them there. More specifically, the hope that those who possess political power can be induced to smile upon them draws them and keeps them there.
No less than to parasites and criminals, cities are irresistibly attractive to the politically ambitious: men avid for authority, who seek to scale the walls that defend the citadels of State power. Capital cities, where legislatures deliberate and governors reside, are the worst of the lot. Nearly every capital city in the world is divided into two zones: that dominated by officialdom, and that dominated by those who seek favors from officialdom. In most American capitals, that translates into a zone of marble and alabaster where the political classes work, and a surrounding belt of squalor where the indigent and the miscreant reside.
The political classes love urbanization, because it affords them more opportunities to assert that the State must step in to manage this or that or the third thing. Fire protection. Street cleaning. Electrical power. Phone service. Cable TV service. Internet access. The conditions of the city, they claim, simply dictate a centralized approach.
But centralization isn't just about practical undertakings. As it sweeps through a society, it also takes root in the minds of men. Hearken to Rose Wilder Lane's brief recounting of events of similar effect:
There was still plenty of energy in Spain to till the fields and man the looms and keep trade thriving. But human energy is individual energy, controlled according to individuals' beliefs. Great stretches of the Moriscos' fertile land, depopulated then, have never again been plowed. When Spaniards grew hungry, they flocked to the cities, to the Church, to the King, who should feed them. As if fishermen should come to the cities for fish.Again and again in history, this happens. Always, when people look to Authority for the things that only their own energy can create, they flock to the cities where their energy can produce nothing. During Rome's declining centuries, Romans did this. During the past ten years, a few million Americans have been doing this. During the past twenty years, starving Russian peasants have crowded into the cities -- for food. [From The Discovery Of Freedom, 1943]
What drives urbanization and necessary municipalization is multifarious and largely unexceptionable. But what drives unnecessary municipalization is power lust. What permits it is the acquiescence of a consensus: the condensed urban mass, weary from the peculiar strains of city life, made altogether too ready to surrender its liberty to authority in exchange for a promise of relief. We should not be surprised to see the collectivist seed imbedded in human density, if allowed to germinate under the sun of New Urbanism, flower into a great and malignant bloom.
