Quick Take: From a Distance

A minor theme may be emerging in my choice of things to photograph for this blog: things in the built environment that project one image when glimpsed in passing or viewed from a distance, but that reveal something quite different on closer inspection.

Walter Benjamin had his "Arcades Project," so maybe this could be "The Facades Project."

Today's exhibit is the Carnegie Education Pavilion in Hardy Ivy Park, along Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta.

From a distance, approaching on foot or driving up Peachtree from the south, it looks modestly impressive: not a grand monument, by any measure, but solid, respectable, and public-spirited enough for a small park:

The Bafflement of Colleagues

I recently wrote to an economist colleague to request some references on the idea of moral hazard as it has made its way into economics form the insurance industry. I have since found further references by other means, but my request sparked an exchange in which I found myself confronted by puzzlement on the part of my colleague . . . and a pressing need to further clarify what I mean by the tragic outlook, and what some critics have meant when they said such an outlook poses a moral hazard.

One crucial point of clarification - a point on which my colleague insists - is that the original meaning of moral hazard is very restricted in scope. It really only applies to principal-agent relationships under conditions of uncertainty, particularly relationships within which the principal (i.e., an insurance firm) in effect shields the agent (i.e., the insured client) from certain losses. The hazard, from the insurer's point of view, is that being shielded from risk will change the behavior of the agent with respect to those same risks, possibly bringing about greater losses than would otherwise have occurred.

So, on the face of it, the tragic outlook cannot be subject to the moral hazard objection, because there is no principal involved, and agents (i.e., you and I) are not shielded from risk. I'll have more to say about a possible extension of the moral hazard objection in another context, but I think the intuition behind it is having, in some more general sense, "nothing to lose."

But my colleague started asking other tough-minded questions about the coherence of the tragic outlook itself and, in formulating my responses, I've come to a better and more articulate understanding of what I mean.

To that extent, I am generally grateful for the bafflement of colleagues.

Here is how I first characterized the outlook:

Self-Sufficiency

Following up on an aside in my first post on Brown's book, I'd like to consider an essential question of ethics and political philosophy:  What is the smallest self-sufficient unit of human life?

For myself, I lean to the ancient account, from Plato and Aristotle: the smallest self-sufficient unit of human life is the city, that is, the polis, which entails community and political order as well as geographic proximity and economic interdependence.

An adult human being may indeed be able to eke out a bare subsistence, alone in the wide world, but to thrive, to have any hope of developing our capacities and leading fully human lives worthy of the name and, indeed, to have help in getting through hard times, we need community and some kind of political order.

It is a peculiarly modern folly to think not only that the individual can be self-sufficient, but that we somehow start out as self-sufficient, and only come into civil society by choice or by contract.

What the ancients realized, what the moderns seem to have forgotten, is that we are always already in some kind of community. We cannot come into the world and reach adulthood without communal cooperation involving at least two other people.

We members of H. sapiens sapiens aren't exactly precocial, able to leap from the womb and start fending for ourselves.

(I sometimes comment to my students that the "state of nature" thought experiment, introduced by Hobbes, could only have been written by a man, and probably one who had never raised children. That Rousseau never raised children is entirely too well known, and a blot on his character: he sent off to the orphanage the children he fathered with his companion, Thérèse.)

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have been reading Plato's The Republic with my students in a political philosophy class. In order to figure out what justice is, Plato has Socrates build a hypothetical city. In the following, Socrates is using the first person; he is speaking to Adeimantus who, as it happens, is Plato's brother:

14 Days and Counting . . .

I have been continuing to read Wendy Brown's book, Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs, though sporadically. My train commute really isn't all that long, and I've had many, many other things to read in the mean time.

I have small addition to my review-in-progress of the book, which merges with the theme from my last post: skepticism.

Imagine I came to believe the world as we know it really would end in 21 days and, following my own priorities, I decide to meet my neighbors and to work toward getting us all organized to prepare for the end.

Why on Earth would they believe me?

Because I am convinced, I might well regard their disbelief as irrational denial. But, in all fairness, consider the possibility that it is also, at least in part, rooted in a healthy skepticism. I am making an extraordinary claim - certain knowledge of the very hour at which the-world-as-we-know-it will end - which would require extraordinary proof.

The Last Man

I'm currently at work developing a new paper, which I hope will be the first publication from my investigation of the tragic outlook in the ethics of the built environment.

Since I cannot, yet, take on the whole thing at once I have, for the purposes of this paper, narrowed the focus down to the charge that, by attempting to promulgate a tragic outlook, I am guilty of creating a moral hazard.

(I first mentioned the charge here.)

The argument goes something like this: If you give people reason to think there is no solution to the problems of sustainability and/or environmental protection, they will stop looking for solutions. In fact, they may just give up and engage in all sorts of self-indulgent and self- and nature-destroying behavior.

If the game is up anyway, they might say to themselves, we may as well have fun on our way out.

My goal will be to set out a reply to this charge, an argument that a tragic outlook, as distinct from a fatalistic or apocalyptic outlook, does not set up a moral hazard.

21 Days and Counting

I could hardly resist buying and reading a book titled Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs. It falls into that happy category I call "train reading": engaging enough to hold my attention at the beginnings and ends of work days, but not so demanding that I can't break off from it when I have to change trains or start walking.

The author, Wendy Brown, is a writer and homeschooler living in New England.

The premise of the book is straightforward: imagine you live in a house in the American suburbs, and you learn that the world as we know it will end in 21 days. "It does not mean that life will cease to exist," Brown clarifies, "and it does not mean that humans will be obliterated from the Earth" (p.9).  Rather, it means the social and technological systems on which we have come to depend will simply and abruptly stop working.

Twenty-one days from right now, it will happen overnight. Just like that. The light switch goes off . . . and does not come back on. The grocery store shelves are mostly bare, and the manager just doesn't know when . . . or if . .  the next supply truck will arrive. The gas station does not have lines, because there is simply no gasoline on most days, and when there is some available, it sells out before a line can even form. The tap is dry. The power grid has collapsed. Blackouts are the norm, and having electricity is an anomaly. No Internet, no cable, no cellphones. (p.9).

Now, Brown is not presenting this as a serious possibility, but as a (blog-inspired) thought experiment: given that you're stuck in the suburbs - a landscape more than any other abjectly dependent on the smooth and ceaseless functioning complex technological systems -  how could you prepare yourself and your family to survive or, indeed, to thrive?

It's an intriguing experiment, one that can be a spur to imagine the scope and the fragility of the systems on which we are, in fact, dependent, and to imagine alternatives that might have us living more adaptably, closer to the ground, as it were. On the other hand, even though I have read only the first few chapters, the experiment is problematic on a number of counts, and may do more to foster resignation than hope.

Quick Take: Move Along! Nothing Unusual Here!

I walk by this building in Midtown Atlanta nearly every day, on my way to and from work. The bank that once occupied the building has moved to a newer, larger, altogether shinier building about a block away.

(Incidentally, the new bank building is a one-story structure on a site once occupied by a multi-story office building. This seems counter to recent trends in Midtown toward greater density, but that's an issue for another time.)

Notice the windows of the vacant building. It has, in effect, been boarded up, but in a way that serves as a kind of camouflage - though only selectively.