Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[189]CHAPTER EIGHT
═══🙡═══Conclusion
Ordinary Lives
in Disorder
THIS BOOK CONTRASTS A SOCIETY THAT IS WITH A SOCIETY that could be. On the one hand, there exists a life in which the institutions of the affluent city are used to lock men into adolescence even when physically adult. On the other hand, there is the possibility that affluence and the structures of a dense, disorganized city could encourage men to become more sensitive to each other as they be- come fully grown. I believe the society that could be is not a utopian ideal; it is a better arrangement of social materials, which as organized today are suffocating people. Yet the feel, the quality, of a social change is difficult to envision. People have only the sense of what they al-
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ready have experienced, and that makes talk of social change seem abstract and unreal. To convey an impres- sion of how these anarchic cities would affect ordinary life and everyday problems seems to me a fitting way to close this book.
Let us try to imagine what it would be like for one in- telligent young girl who grows up in an anarchic urban milieu. She lives, perhaps, on a city square, with restau- rants and stores mixed among the homes of her neighbors. When she and the other children go out to play, they do not go to clean and empty lawns; they go into the midst of peo- ple who are working, shopping, or are in the neighborhood for other reasons that have nothing to do with her. Her parents, too, are involved with their neighbors in ways that do not directly center on her and the other children of the neighborhood. There are neighborhood meetings where disruptive issues, like a noisy bar people want con- trolled, have to be fought out. Since the neighborhood is a densely packed place, thus permitting personal styles or deviations to be expressed, and since the personnel of the neighborhood is constantly shifting, her parents are out a great deal merely to find out who their neighbors are and see what kind of accommodations can be reached where conflicts arise. A black couple down the street may feel the little girl is cruel to their children, or some days she may feel they are cruel to her; the families cannot ignore each other. They are physically thrown together without impersonal resources, like attendance at homogeneous school districts, for separation.
In fact, the schools of the neighborhood are a kind of focus of conflict and conciliation for the parents. They Igo
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are controlled by the community, but the community is so diverse that the schools cannot be pushed in any one direction. Families of the school district may have the right to set moral and religious policy for the school, for example, but since in these cities Catholics, Protestants, and Jews are mixed together, accommodations concern- ing ethical instruction and Bible training have to be ar- rived at. Indeed, the rules of the school shift constantly as new people in the district, with special backgrounds and interests, assert their right to have a hand in the shaping of their children's education.
But this little girl sees, every day, that the tensions and friendships in the community or school, so transitory and unstable, do not create chaos. She is made conscious of a kind of equilibrium of disorder in the lives of adults around her and in her own circle of friends. People are not sheltered from each other, but their contacts are more explorations of a constantly shifting environment than an acting out of unchanging routines.
Therefore this little girl grows up in a neighborhood that does not permit her family or her circle of friends to be intensive and inward-turning. This fact has a liberating power for her as someone who is exceptionally bright. For at school, the complex weave of friendship and casual ac- quaintance makes it very difficult for the other children to exercise pressure against her for being "different" because she is bright. In the suburbs, where social and economic backgrounds are ironed out, that pressure frequently and in terms of the development of children like this, tragically arises. But in the city school this little girl attends, every- one is in some way different; there is a jumble of many
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backgrounds, and it becomes harder to shame someone who is unusual. Were this little girl exceptionally unintel- ligent, the same would be true. The children do not play and learn in packs; their backgrounds and their social contacts are too complex and too shifting for the brutal baiting that suburban children practice against kids who are "different" to work.
Let us now take a glimpse of this intelligent young girl later in her life, when she is a woman. Sociologists know something of what lies ahead for her in city culture as it exists now. Beyond all the clichés--made clichés by being so often true-_of the inequities she will find in her work and the fear intelligent men show of treating her as an equal, her city life as an adult is today constricted in sev- eral less obvious ways. The forums for being with men as friends are usually limited to work; it is difficult outside this sphere to get to know people who aren't also after her. If and when she marries, there is usually an enormous amount of guilt about giving up her work and becoming just a housewife, since housewifely tasks, including her relations with other people in the community where she lives, offer little scope for exercising her intelligence. From what is known of young women like this, her life in a city faces two equally unacceptable alternatives of iso- lation: either a professional life where the opportunities of social encounters are limited to colleagues who feel competitive and men who want possession, or the more usual housewifely and community routines, which offer no field for intellect. But in a city where men and women are forced into all sorts of contact for accommodation and mutual survival, these poles of isolation can be greatly
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diminished. A single woman's work wouldn't define the sole society of peers in which she had to exist. It would be possible to meet a great number of people, in a variety of situations of mutual interest and curiosity, out of the necessity of dealing with her home neighborhood, her work neighborhood, and the city-wide political and social problems. Working in voluntary organizations or political clubs wouldn't be something an intelligent girl forced her- self to do in order to meet men, as so often now occurs. These skeins of association would be a natural social life that arose out of the necessity for common action. Were a woman such as this to marry, have children and leave off her career, the same skein of necessary community rela- tions would offer her a field to use her talents in ways that mattered. It is a commonplace that large numbers of middle-aged, intelligent housewives are left in suburbs with the time and desire to work in the communities where they live, but little room is given them in which to work, save as helpers or assistants to "real" professionals in schools or hospitals. By increasing the complexity and loosening the rules of routine in the community settings of these women, they would have a chance to be creative and have a forceful social life, even though they had opted out of professional careers.
A change in the kind of communities intelligent women can live in will not obviously change the whole complex of discrimination and fearfulness with which intelligent men and other women regard them. But for a young wo- man like the one I have described, the opprobrium of being different would be muted in childhood and ado- lescence; in adulthood the new anarchic communities
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would offer a means out of isolation whether the woman pursued a career or not.
Let us then try to envision the impact of anarchic cities on an ordinary group of city men: people from the "work- ing class" who have become relatively affluent. A popular stereotype has it that such affluent industrial laborers and service personnel have become conservative and a force for the maintenance of repressive "law and order." It might seem, then, that they would be most resistant to social changes that introduced greater disorder into the city.
What researchers are beginning to glimpse about af- fluent working-class communities is that the cries for law and order are greatest when the communities are most iso- lated from other people in the city. In Boston, for ex- ample, the fear of deviance and conflict is much greater in an Irish area called South Boston, which is cut off geographically from contact with the city at large, than in another Irish area, North Cambridge, which is stuck in the midst of the city and is to some extent penetrated by blacks and college students. Cities in America during the past two decades have grown in such a way that ethnic areas have become relatively homogeneous; it appears no accident that the fear of the outsider has also grown to the extent that these ethnic communities have been cut off.
If the permeability of cities' neighborhoods were in- creased, through zoning changes and the need to share power across comfortable ethnic lines, I believe that work- ing-class families would become more comfortable with people unlike themselves. The cries for law and order are
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Ordinary Lives in Disorder enormously more complicated than the effect of commu- nity setting, and no one can pretend that a different kind of neighborhood would of itself transform the feelings of status insecurity or frustration in work that are involved in the desire for law and order. But the experience of living within diverse groups has its power. The enemies lose their clear image, because every day one sees so many people who are alien but who are not all alien in the same way.
Let us imagine a family where the father is an indus- trial worker moving into a disorganized community that forced family members into contact with others, with black families becoming affluent themselves, with mana gerial and professional people, with the young as well as the middle-aged. The image and demands of the neighbor- hood would work against whatever desire this family had for exclusion of the immoral, unpatriotic "them." But these communities would have a further, positive value to such a family as well.
In a community like this, the bureaucratic manipula- tion of conflict is gone. A factory man can confront those around him on a more equal basis than in a situation where middle-class bureaucracies prevail. The reason is that the willingness to use impersonal bureaucracy and faceless power has become the great weapon of the mid- de classes today over those who do routine labor. This Weapon is purposely made weak in anarchic cities. It is patterns of personal influence and personal alliance that shape the balance of disorder in the new cities; politics and less formal community relations on these terms are historically how working-class people have evolved institu-
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tions in which they feel a stake. I am convinced that in such a milieu a man who does humble work can feel more of a man in dealing with others than in circumstances where the present weapons of power prevail. He can use himself as a human being, make himself heard, rather than be muffled by those who are different and more skilled in the arts of bureaucratic management. Instead of establishing common dignity by ensuring the sameness of all who live in a community, as happens in so many af- fluent working-class areas now, this laboring family could establish its dignity in a more satisfying way, by having a community forum for conflict and reconciliation in which it faces other people as concrete beings who have to talk with each other.
In this way, a disordered city that forced men to deal with each other would work to tone down feelings of shame about status and helplessness in the face of large bureaucracies. Participation of this sort could mute in affluent workers that sad desire for repressive law and order.
The final effect of the anarchic cities on the feelings of ordinary people facing day-to-day problems concerns the functional efficiency of the city itself. There is a Homeric catalogue of complaints today about the quality of the services and the environmental health of cities. Trans. portation is jammed, the air is polluted, the streets are dirty; inadequate fire, police, and sanitation staffs strike for more pay from cities that already operate at a loss: most city schools are out of date and poorly equipped with inadequate provisions for teachers and staff.
These problems depend on more money, and this book
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purposely provides no answers about new ways to make more tax dollars. Getting more money for cities in Amer- ica is a brutally simple affair: the priorities of the econ- omy have to be changed from massive military spending to a more just distribution of public resources. In the face of the military dominance of public finance, all other revenue-raising operations are "Bandaids, publicity de- vices that will have little real effect. The American econ- omy is certainly able to finance the cities; after all, much less affluent countries whose budgets are not all-absorbed in military affairs have maintained their massive cities much more adequately than has the United States. As urbanists like myself have said over and over during the last few years, the urban financial problem in this coun- try is the problem of military spending. Converting the economy from a military-industrial to an urban-industrial base is the only real solution.
But once the money is available, what is the best social use to which it can be put? As I have tried to show in this book, many of the seemingly routine aspects of city ad- ministration, like police, housing construction, and school administration, need not be routines, but opportunities for community life, thereby revitalizing the people directly concerned. Furthermore, I have sought to illustrate how the peculiar model of routing that has guided the plan- ning of these services--a model based on the way ma- chines produce goods-_becomes dysfunctional and, in the words of the economists, counterproductive, when applied to the management of the social affairs of city men. Once the financial base for city services is expanded by a reduction in expenses for war, these services could be-
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come more responsive to the desires of city dwellers, if men could only accustom themselves to look at conflict over city services as a necessary, desirable product of people seeking to govern themselves. The social break- down of city services- -a strike by teachers, a strike by hospital staffs, etc.-is not an immoral threat to the public; these strikes are expressions of human need, voiced by people who want to be heard and are now thwarted by the central bureaucracies. Take conflict in the public arena away, and you revert to the idea that a broad swatch of urban society can have its best interests "managed' I" for it by impersonal bureaucratic means. As has been shown, this godlike presumption about other people's lives on the part of planners only builds up steam for violent disrup tion
When conflict is permitted in the public sphere, when the bureaucratic routines become socialized, the product of the disorder will be a greater sensitivity in public life to the problems of connecting public services to the urban clientele. The financial crisis in city services caused by militarism has only served to reinforce the idea that "good" public service is one in which some measure of routine can function. Once the cash is available, the threats to routine will take on an entirely new character. The threats will be a focus of "sensitizing" public service bureaucracies to the public and to the public issues.
The fruit of this conflict--a paradox which is the es- sence of this book--is that in extricating the city from replanned control, men will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other. That is the promise, and the justification, of disorder.