All Posts Tagged With: "society"

It was amazing to see so much graffiti in Berlin, especially considering that the prevailing stereotype of Germany is that it is a meticulously clean and orderly country. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the graffiti in Berlin, however, because of the rich history of graffiti on the Berlin Wall. The western side of the Berlin Wall was a gigantic slate for Berlin’s creative counterculture to express themselves for nearly three decades. When the wall fell, the graffiti artists sought new canvases to bomb on sides of buildings, subway seats, street signs, doorways, mailboxes, boats, and almost any other surface you can dream up.

Berlin is an ever-evolving city of culture. Streetscapes, architecture, and fashion are constantly changing. It was truly a pleasure to walk outside my DDR-style apartment building each morning to discover a freshly painted piece of art to ponder for the day.

For more information about Berlin’s street art, check out this New York Times video, the following books, or my online photo album.

Today, August 14, 2008, marks the one-hundredth anniversary of a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. One of the results of such riots in cities across the Midwest was the creation of “sunset laws” as we called them–regulations that forbade people of color from remaining in a community after dark. These laws resulted in cities and towns in the North becoming much more segregated than those in the South. Black people were not merely forced to drink from different water fountains or use designated bathrooms; they were instead excluded from being any part of the communities, whatsoever.

The assortment of ethnic groups that surrounded me when I was a boy was limited to the long-term residents of America on my mother’s side and the universally Catholic collection of immigrants on my father’s. To the best of my knowledge, there was no overt racism or hatred within that mixture of folks simply because there was no one around to hate–no one bothered to tell me, as a child, that there were people with skin even darker than Skinny Bernardoni and the other Italians. We knew from the July 4th celebrations every year, when Wilson Warrner read the Gettysburg Address, that soldiers from Tonica had fought to free slaves from their masters, but that was a long time ago–it may as well have been on another planet. There was nothing on television in the mid-1950s to show us anything different. The United States was a land of white people, as far as anyone could tell.

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Now I hear beats everywhere I rove. The pumping of the train. The dropping of the rain. Sometimes I’m alone and I hear the beat in my brain. I attended Lollapaloozalaoapoaallozzapoallozaalollazpoalloozalooza a few days ago. It was my first music festival. For many years I was stuck in the 1960’s, but since I have begun writing my own lyrics my appreciation for all genres of music has flowered.

Freedom and liberation and inspiration floated everywhere. I kept thinking about freedom. A music festival is the ultimate expression of freedom. Everyone acted as they pleased. Fans smoked pot in full public view without fear of arrest. The security seemed stricter about people sneaking in food than sneaking in alcohol or drugs. Everyone expressed their peculiar identities through hats and dirty shirts they bought in high school (I wore my Jim Morrison Doors shirt on Saturday. I purchased it freshman year while at Elk Grove High School.). Girls wore bikini tops and jean shorts and didn’t care that every nearby guy stared at their exposed skin. I didn’t realize how many people have tattoos until surrounded by dragons and butterflies and flowers in the dried fields of Grant Park.

The colors of the diversity and the freedom and the music melted and swarmed together to create one new and brilliant color. A light blue. The musicians leaned with all of their weight on the definition of music. Jamie Lidell did a white British funk fun groove; I had the most fun at his show. Newton Faulkner showed me his ability to simultaneously strum acoustic chords and thump a beat on the body of his guitar. He closed his show with a raucous and fun acoustic cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (shout out to Univ. of Illinois friend Zenobia Ravji, who is the niece of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury). Saul Williams jumped furiously around the stage trying to scare and awaken white people with his race conscious lyrics and his urban guitar riffs. His spoken word poetry makes me jealous of his lyrical command. I admire the courage of musicians and artists who throw all of their blood and chance for a practical, normal life on the floor to blindly and hotly pursue the impractical dream of becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star. I admire them because I got a law degree instead.

Freedom is the perfect state for humans. This festival allowed and encouraged freedom to flourish. But, America allows that too. In both the festival and in America, freedom is allowed but is rarely seized. Idiots abounded at Lolla. Most of the people didn’t give a damn about the music, brilliant though it was. Many of the people there were 20 year old punks and ditzes who took the Metra in from the white suburbs. Their parents have money. They wore expensively torn clothes from Hollister. Lolla was the thing to do that weekend and the place to get drunk. The slightly older 26 year olds were no better. They all looked unique when compared to society at-large, but they all looked the same when compared to other 26 year olds at the concert. They wore bandanas and tattoos and they smoked and drank. The proportion of people who smoked surprised me. It seemed that 82.7% of the entire country smoked cigarettes or pot, and perhaps they do. They wore groovy hats and refused to shave (some of the girls too). They wore pins and shirts preaching about the environment, but at the end of each day the Grant Park fields were impossible to walk through without crushing a plastic cup or bottle with every step. They littered without shame, or at the least trampled the litter of others without offering to recycle any of it. Most of these people appeared poorly educated and without grand futures. When rebellion from a dominant society results in the creation of an identifiable and cohesive sub-culture then it is no longer rebellion; it is conformity. The hippies rebelled from the dominant culture to conform to a sub-culture, but in the process forgot the original idea: expression of individuality. So too with this generation of self-proclaimed rebels (sorry, sometimes I like fragments). I didn’t see individuals; I saw people who conformed just as much to the sub-culture as the kids wearing Hollister. It is all ironic and pathetic.

Whenever people get drunk or high I become an observer. As many of you know, I have never been drunk or high, so I have done much observing. I sat on the trampled tan grass while I was waiting for the Kanye West concert. A stupid, drunk girl dropped her cup of beer on the ground near me and it splashed all over the left side of my favorite cowboy shirt. It mostly dried after about 30 minutes. Then another drunk girl dropped her beer near where I sat. Her cup had twice as much beer as the first cup. She apologized profusely and we became friends for two hours. I also made friends with some cool chemical engineers from Florida.

By the end of each day my feet stung as I walked through the beds of jellyfish. I was starving and thirsty and my legs cramped up. I had a headache and my contacts dried out from the dust blowing off the softball diamonds and all of the pot and cigarette smoke. I don’t give a damn. I loved it. My body still hurts. On Monday, I got trapped in the stairwell of my building and had to go down 42 floors of stairs to escape, which doubled my aches. The music pounds in my head. Notes have dangled from every steel beam and gentle leaf seen on my Loop walks to the UBS Tower. I hear a beat in the 32 year old drugged out mother with gray hair who sits on the west side of the Madison St. bridge with her daughter everyday and shakes a cup to beg for spare change from the slick suited corporate men walking to Union and Ogilvie Stations to leave for white homes (I have become one of them; Borg). When she does not jangle her cup at a regular interval, my mind forces her to do so. I hear an urban beat backing up Shakespeare’s poetic rhythm as I read Julius Ceasar on my daily Metra train rides to Union Station.

The music. The irony. The freedom. Yea.

So I haven’t written much lately and Billy remarked on it this morning, so I decided to give our readers a taste of what has been going on in my mind the past few months. I’ve been tempted to write a few times, but either there were too many new posts on those days or I felt that I needed a more coherent vision of what I was aiming for. Now I’ve got both space and a vision, so here goes.

This is the first in what will be a series of posts on what constitutes a virtuous society or at least a version of a virtuous society. This has to be a series because it’s too much for one article and I’m not trying to talk about a panacea or silver bullet, so it’ll take some time to lay out. Essentially this series will pose the question “What makes a society virtuous?” and attempt to answer it. When I talk about society here, I’m not just talking about a nation, but a city, a community, basically any group of people sufficiently large that they don’t all know each other and are reliant in one way or another and where people are affected by the actions of others. Technically this can go global if you really want it to, but I’m not that ambitious yet.

One of the first things a society must deal with when defining itself is how to deal with problematic people or behaviors. Do we allow individuals absolute free reign to do as they please with absolutely no restrictions? Do we force people to comply with a set of rules by using the police and coercion? Do we control every aspect of a member’s life with a police state? The virtuous society does none of these.

A virtuous society uses a combination of informal social control mechanisms and police power. Before anyone (Tom) screams, I want to qualify the hell out of that statement. Police power should only be used for the most egregious and outrageous conduct. By that I mean things like violence against the helpless, using a weapon on an unarmed person, murder, irreparable property damage (I’m thinking arson or something like that), fraud, etc. This is not to say that there wouldn’t be laws against other things like battery, intimidation, or even petty traffic offenses. They just wouldn’t have to be enforced much and they would be relatively low priority. Sort of like decriminalizing drug possession. It’s still not legal or ok, just not something we’re going to pursue all that vigorously hopefully because it won’t be necessary.

Let’s start with correctional mechanisms. For the most egregious conduct, yeah we can still have prisons and all that, basically we don’t want people hurting one another physically or severely impairing them financially/in their welfare (and if you’re going to bitch that this isn’t a comprehensive list, I know that, these are just examples). For the rest of the stuff we have alternatives to incarceration. What if, instead of locking up a guy who steals some kid’s iPod or who gets into a bar fight, we turn him over to the community? By community I mean his family, friends, the victim, and neighbors. No, this isn’t vigilante justice, that’s why his friends and family are there. I’m talking about the classic shaming session where everyone gets together and asks the perpetrator to a) admit guilt, b) explain their conduct, and then c) decides on remedial measures. I’m sure you could add to that, but those are the basic elements. Now granted, this won’t work on everyone and it won’t make us all sit around the fire singing kumbaya, but the power of group approval or disapproval is sorely underestimated these days. The end goal is to get the offender to admit guilt understanding that they won’t face punishment by some unfamiliar power and explain why they acted as they did. Once they’ve done that it’s a negotiation process where the victim, family, friends, and neighbors talk about what would be an appropriate way for the offender to kiss the boo boo make all better.

The way that this works is we build on a common moral code. A common moral code means that we have an agreed upon set of things that we think are right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, better and worse. A common moral code requires that the vast majority of people agree on these things, and by vast majority I’m talking maybe 95%. Now before I get any complaints about how that’s not possible, I want to qualify the hell out of this too. I’m not talking about a pervasive every-little-action-you-take morality, but a solid core of what we value. We already have such a core, it’s just not as big as it should be and we don’t enforce it too well. 99% of us don’t commit murder, why? Because we’re afraid of being caught? Well if we just went by our chances of being caught on a strictly cost-benefit rational basis, murder’s not such a bad thing. Ok that’s a bit extreme. Let me give another one. The Los Angeles subway system operates on the honor system. Yeah, you buy a ticket, don’t pass through a turnstile and once in a blue moon a sheriff wanders onto the train and asks people to show their tickets. Mostly they just accept anything that looks vaguely like a ticket without checking the date. The chances of any individual being caught are almost nothing, but the rate of payment is still about 94%. In fact, the city was arguing for a long time whether it should even bother installing turnstiles because the cost-benefit was pretty dubious. Metro loses about $5 million a year to nonpayment, but costs of implementation and maintenance would be high. People are paying because they know they should.

There’s a laundry list of our core values, but I’m not really interested in the specific list at this moment. Maybe we could work that out in the comments section. What I’m interested in is strengthening the core values and expanding them so they encompass more types of behavior. No, I’m also not talking about social control over every aspect of a person’s life. We’re not in a 14th century village, it’s neither practical nor particularly desirable. I’m just talking about normative values that keep people from messing with one another and possibly themselves. I also want to stress that this is voluntary to the extent that it wouldn’t involve state power to force people to accept a core of beliefs. The state might facilitate a dialogue, but it’s not going to be imposed from the top down. This is something that’s organic, bottom-up if you will. A common moral code has to come from a serious conversation about what we value and what kind of life we’d like to live. It’s more than just the golden rule because it’s about how you treat nature, your neighborhood, and abstract entities (businesses, other societies, etc).

Before Tom tells me that this can only come from religion, I’m going to say that religion isn’t enough. Religion can be an element, but it’s simply insufficient both because the language of religion tends to be either-or and because it would by its very nature require physical coercion. Why? Well quite simply that to use religion we’d probably have to pick a religion and well, we live in a diverse, pluralistic society where not everyone has the same religion or any religion at all. We can take elements from religious teaching, sure. I’m good with that, even as a non-theist. We can use some universal elements particularly from multiple religious traditions, but we need more. No, we need a serious society-wide (depending on what level we’re talking it could be national) dialogue about first principles and what we are about as a society and sort of argue it out. Think of it as a moral constitutional convention but with its endpoint being something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or in this case Society X’s Declaration of a Moral Consensus).

Ok before I go on too long, I want to wrap up quickly by reminding you all before the flames start to spout that I’m not talking about forcing people to do anything. I’m talking about approval and disapproval, the casual “Hey Jim you’re a bastard for kicking that dog” type of thing. Also, I’m not talking about pervasive Spanish Inquisition dogma or even Salem witch trials stuff. I’m talking about a basic set of dos and don’ts that the vast majority of us can agree on and enforce. Yeah we’d be our brother’s keepers. I’m also ok with that. We’d also have consciences. Crazy stuff.

The man who made my future, and the future of an entire generation of pocket-protector-sporting geeks died this morning. Before he worked his magic, there was no revenge for nerds. Those who were too skinny, too smart, or too uncool for sports and the popular social cliques of high-school and college had no recourse but to dwell in dark apartments, alone, living lives of quiet desperation as they completed their collections of photos of steam locomotives.

Gary Gygax changed all that.

In 1974, my buddy Pat, of orange-police-car fame, arrived back in Champaign-Urbana after a trip to the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin area. With him, he brought a set of mimeographed pages he said was a game based on both miniatures and Lord of the Rings. Those of us who were experienced wargamers didn’t quite know what to think and a number of us, myself included, made fun of this new phenomenon.