My apartment in Brooklyn looks out on a side-street that ends, mid-block, at a footbridge. Two apartment buildings open onto this street, and my own opens onto the avenue around the corner. These buildings are all large and rent-stabilized and have gentrified very slowly, while the surrounding neighborhood has been uprooted, its inhabitants scattered eastward and southward as if by some strange wind that carries people instead of leaves and paper.
With no through-traffic, our side-street forms a natural gathering place. In the summer, kids sometimes play football in the middle of street. The older men play dominos at a folding table on the sidewalk. There is a van that parks in front of one of the buildings certain evenings and plays a mix of soul and dancehall at high volume until past midnight. Occasionally there are barbecues. At other times, there are screaming matches. Once or twice I’ve heard shots fired.
A couple days ago there was a block party. Late in the day, I came outside and stood talking with one of my neighbors near the end of the block, where a line of police tape had been stretched to stop cars turning off the avenue and disrupting the party. A white man in his late thirties or early forties was standing nearby spray-painting some piece of paneling from a motorcycle. He held the object up near chest level, spray-painting back and forth continuously, and in the windy air the fumes wafted over to where my neighbor and I were talking, smelling strongly and stinging her eyes. I asked her if she’d like me to go say something. She said, yes please do.
I walked over to the man and politely asked him if he could move over to the side, near the wall of the building, where the fumes would be less likely to waft towards us. I don’t remember his exact answer; it was something to the effect of: “You’re outside, deal with it.” It was delivered aggressively. I said that I’d been polite to him and there was no reason to be rude to me. He doubled down. Eventually I walked away—I was close to losing my temper.
As more people walked by and commented on the situation, it became clear that this man had been spray-painting here for some time and had been rude to others before me. I was told that this man was also in the habit of calling the cops on people on the block. At one point, several passers-by were all chiding him at once, though none very aggressively. A couple people called him a gentrifier, I said he was rude and disrespectful, I don’t think anyone so much as cussed.
It felt good to have the crowd on my side, and it was especially easy to feel righteous in this case, because I really had been polite and he really had been rude; because all the other people yelling at him were black, and most of them had lived in these buildings for many years; because this man seemed to stand against neighborhood, against community, against everything I find worth preserving in New York.
But it did not entirely escape me that I was a member of a crowd busy ostracizing someone for flouting its mores. Leaving out the racial dynamics, if this were a movie, I'd be one of the villains.
In a novel or a movie or a TV show, we know immediately that we are to side with the outsider, that he is righteous and the crowd that is railing against him is wicked. I remember first noticing this a couple years ago while reading Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” how the very fact of outsiderness in fiction automatically signals goodness. Even then it made me suspicious. Because there is a strange feeling of righteousness that we, as readers or watchers, feel in siding with the outsider against the crowd, as if we ourselves were courageously standing against a crowd; whereas in fact we are behaving in an entirely prescribed and automatic manner; we are acting with the crowd— the crowd, that is, of readers and watchers, all of whom know that the outsider is the good-guy. We are adhering to a mainstream value system.
But only if we are the audience to a work of fiction. Place us in an actual crowd whose mores are being flouted by a real individual, and most of us will, without a second thought, side with the crowd (and here too we will feel righteous). We are not always wrong to do this. When we talk of in-groups and outsiders we tend to imagine scenes of a gay teenager being picked on by homophobe classmates, but this is a carefully constructed fantasy. In most cases, the outsider is not expressing anything that we would recognize as an identity; he is merely breaking norms of civility: using a cell phone in a movie theater, taking up too many seats in a subway car, being rude, irresponsible, unneighborly. etc..
When we talk about homophobia, racism, etc., we are focusing on bad norms, and through this focus on bad norms, the very concepts of norms, of normal, of social pressure, have come under suspicion, so that by now many people see these concepts as something out of a dark past of prejudice and brutality. And it is from this vision that we come to the liberal ideal of the individual as a free actor, unconstrained by conformist social forces, peer-pressure, fear of his neighbors; the individual who is constrained only by the law, which acts to uphold the rights of man.
But the law is never enough. We need mores, we need the soft pressure of social relations to enforce all those small niceties of behavior that make it possible to live side-by-side in anything but a state of simmering mutual hatred. We need this even more in the city, where we are packed together, than in the small town.
And yet there is no way to ensure that these social forces will always behave justly. Indeed they are more or less guaranteed to turn tyrannical.
(This discussion is continued in the next crumb.)
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