The Unheavenly City Revisited

...Unfortunately, there were others: politicians (some of them disguised in sheepskin and academic robes) and public officials who were embarrassed or confounded by the book's arguments, and gangster elements on many campuses who needed a cause to stir fellow students from their post-Vietnam torpor...

...They also mean that, despite the rapid dissipation of old-fashioned racial prejudices, expressions of class likes and dislikes (between working- and lower-class persons for instance) may be mistaken as racial dis...

...if anyone could drive a taxicab, each individual driver would earn somewhat less than under current arrangements in most cities...

...In an early chaper introducing the concept of class culture, le paid scant attention to the hot debate among sociologists on this question...

...governmental) "solution" in a liberal democracy such as prevails here today...

...This is rather startling, and probably will disappoint many of his friends and supporters...

...These circumstances mean that despite the large economic advances of the poor, many who remain poor may be not only lower-income but lower-class, and disinclined to take advantage of future economic expansion...

...In his painstaking inquiries into what he regards as the most serious urban problems—poverty, joblessness, violent ;rime, and rioting—he shows that to the extent they are manifestations of lower-class :ulture, there is very little that government :an be expected to do about them consistent with the ideals of a free society...

...But The Unheavenly City was very different from most books written by college professors—especially their "policy books"—which achieve a wide popular audience...

...Indeed he actively solicited reasoned criticisms of his first edition, and has taken meticulous account of many of them in his revision...

...Although American population has tended to "move up" the class scale over time, it is not clear that lower-class individuals have ever moved up in significant numbers...

...Banfield left the ;eneral impression that lower-class culture s irremediable, but in his concluding chaper on the future of the lower class, he acknowledged that present-orientedness night be either "cognitive"or "situational" or even "volitional"), and then turned its attentions to the obviously limited posdbilities of curing cognitive lower-class ,ehavior without abridging liberties inacceptably...

...Banfield's view sounded convincing to this reviewer and, I think, to most readers who did not misunderstand him to say that discrimination was "unimportant" or that inadequate education should be "ignored...

...And preventive in3arceration or lesser restrictions on his freedom, designed simply to protect others from his disposition for violence, are out of he question for both practical reasons there is no certain way to measure disposiion for violence) and ethical reasons (a free ;ociety ought not to compromise a person's freedom because of probabilities...

...The first edition, for example, noted that there were 13.2 million persons living in metropolitan areas whose family incomes were below the federal government's "poverty line...

...according to this view, nembers of the lower class would shift heir attitudes if their social and economic )pportunities expanded...

...the "symbiosis" of lower- and upper-class values, it seems, involves learned behavior in bothdirections...

...Many of the circumstances which are often said to be problems of "crisis" proportions, Banfield suggests, are really costs of city living which could be eliminated only be foregoing important benefits which no one wants to give up...

...It seems plain that nothing in the history of the poverty program suggests that lower-class culture would be unaffected by real and large-scale changes in the social opportunities available to the poor...

...And all around there were bald efforts to embarrass the man by dealing loosely with his arguments—telling people that he had said things like "racism isn't important" or "poverty is the poor's own fault...

...A society that knew itselfby Edward C. Banfield Little, Brown $8.95 would have libel laws to remedy such mayhem...

...Institutional Barriers to Reform "Serious" urban problems are not, of course, caused solely or even (in some cases) primarily by the heedlessness of lower-class behavior...

...As a result he has elaborated upon many of his more difficult points, and has usefully simplified one of his central arguments (concerning the amenability of lower-class culture to objective changes in social opportunity...

...The remaining gap of $1,430, which could plausibly be attributed to discrimination, would certainly have been smaller had other variables been accounted for, and it would be smaller still if the same analysis were applied to current income figures...

...And it is here that Banfield leploys his class analysis with greatest Force...

...The empirical observation that different groups in society possess different values which affect their behavior is sufficient for this...

...In any event, it is difficult to reconcile with Banfield's figures the widely-expressed notions that the cities "breed poverty" and that the urban poor are "left out" of society's general economic progress...

...In the end Banfield concludes that the debate is more academic than practical since human behavior tends to adapt only slowly to changes in circumstances (such as increases in social opportunity), but he does argue more explicitly than previously that increased opportunities might expand the time-horizon of many lower-class persons over the long run (meaning a generation or generations...

...they will reduce the chances of innocent misinterpretation and present new challenges to those who wish to lie about the book...

...In any event, these are important matters for speculation, and it undoubtedly would have been enlightening for Banfield to have discussed them at greater length...

...As a heuristic hypothesis to account for these distinguishing patterns, Banfield suggests that an individual's class cultural position can be explained by reference to his ability or willingness to provide for the future...

...The charge that he is callous probably resultsfrom his refusal to sentimentalize: it is true that he has the capacity to discuss emotional matters in a matter-of-fact way...

...They made a fine hash of Professor Banfield's views and served it up to anyone who would listen, in some important respects representing his views to be precisely the opposite of what they plainly were...

...His most graphic addition is a regression analysis by Otis Dudley Duncan, which shows how the 1962 income difference between blacks and whites diminishes as four independent variables are successively accounted for...

...The threat of upper-class political terrorism appears to be a serious enough urban problem these days (certainly it will take a middle- or upper-class group to construct the small nuclear bomb Mr...

...A homeowner who complains about "sprawl" does not mean that the state should have prevented his housing development from being built, but rather that it should prevent development of the still-open land beyond his back window...

...Part of the reason for this arises from the power of interest groups in a pluralistic democracy: many workable reforms are rendered impossible by the opposition of critical interest groups...

...Some were more or less converted and others fought back—but understood the dignity of pure intellectual battle and the importance of keeping it pure...

...Christopher De Mut...

...Nor was it a call to action or a brief for the author's policy proposals...

...These changes would not expand the total opportunity available to the lower-class poor as much as might be supposed...

...Aside from economic expansion, such changes might come from repealing minimum wage laws, eliminating union restrictions on apprenticeships, and permitting free entry into such occupations as truck- and taxicab-driving...

...His view, however, was rather long on argument and short on facts...

...There may well be more to go on by the time he writes his third edition...

...Their main disadvantage, he said, was the same as that once faced by other groups such as the Irish and Jews: blacks are presently "the most recent unskilled, and hence relatively low-income migrant(s) to reach the city from a backward rural area...

...To tell suc a boy that he must stay in school anywz because in the future there will be no jot for people with only hands is to tell hii something that is both untrue and irrel vant...

...Others did wrestle with Banfield's statistics, but followed rather too comically the game-plan he had written for them (thus, to his modest assertion that urban housing has been improving for all income groups, housing consultants went to unpersuasive lengths to demonstrate that housing has really been getting worse...

...He asserts that in some respects most of these serious problems have been improving dramatically in the American city, although in other respects they are far more intractable than is generally acknowledged...

...Callous and Cold...

...He senses tha the school authorities and the whole ac paratus of middle- and upper-class opinio: that confine him there neither understan, nor even care about the most palpab...

...Moreover, upper-class values need not invariably lead to mischievous political attitudes...

...Indeed it is fair to say that under present arrangements the more future-oriented and calculating one is, the more one will understand the negligible chances of being punished for most crimes, and the more one will be left to one's own moral devices...

...On the other hand, it may be that working– and lower-class persons are more sensitive to the opportunities of political clout or connections (as presented by unions or political organizations, for instance) than to those of the marketplace...

...Thus, poverty in the cities has been diminishing rapidly, and it is not concentrated in "festering black ghettos," although it serves the interest of many public institutions to emphasize precisely the opposite view...

...consequently he invests heavily in himself through education, foregoes present gratification when it would threaten long-range goals, and is generally prudent and altruistic in his behavior...

...Discussing one social policy which many people would no doubt regard as highly progressive and beyond much debate—the requirement that all young people attend a school through their late teens, regardless of their knack, interest, or use for booklearning—Banfield explodes...

...will be manua workers and to girls who will soon star having babies—that it and it along offers `opportunity' is surely one cause of youth unrest...

...This is not to say, of course, that Banfield has neglected all of his critics...

...It did not exaggerate the importance of its subject, but rather questioned whether many of the most talked-about "urban problems" could properly be called problems at all, and argued that many problems which were serious were resolving themselves independent of—or in spite of—all public exertions...

...apparently it was also bought and read by many people who were not professionally concerned with its subject, perhaps because the "urban crisis" was still moderately in fashion then...

...The other War on Poverty programs were simply benefits-in-kind aimed at alleviating the poor's lack of income, such as the Legal Services Program, and while it may have been imagined that such benefits would make recipients more self-respecting and socially aggressive, they did nothing to change the opportunities available to them...

...if it is "cogiitive," then there is no way to change ower-class culture except by interfering vith child-rearing practices, an option our .ociety finds unacceptable...

...But it is doubtful that the example is apt...

...The existence of different class cultures greatly complicates those serious urban problems which otherwise seem to be solving themselves...

...This matter has been greatly clarified in he course of Banfield's revisit, though not .ntirely to the satisfaction of the present redewer...

...6 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 197, turally rooted, they are extremely stubborn, to saying that government agencies are unLikely to do much to relieve (much less `solve") them...

...By staging dramatic acts of political expression, the upper-class moralizer lends justification—and therefore encouragement—to lower-class behavior that is not only expressive but truly violent...

...The serious student, though, will find that Banfield's most important revision is his addition of scores of references to recent statistical studies (such as Census surveys) and scholarly works (e.g., Thomas Sowell's Black Education and Race and Economics and Christopher Jencks' Inequality), and his incorporation oftheir conclusions into the body of his argument...

...By magnifying the practical importance of one moral issue, racial discrimination, the upper class may deepen feelings of resentment and hostility on the part of blacks...

...For example, he cites the failure of the War on Poverty programs of the 1960s to affect the lifestyle of "the poor" (despite hefty funding in at least some cases), as an unsuccessful attempt to help the poor by changing the "opportunity structure" facing them...

...It should be noted that Banfield's "time-horizon" hypothesis is not necessary to his use of class theory in analyzing social policies...

...He takes future years, decades, or his entire lifetime into account as he gauges his present behavior...

...He also has a great need for self-expression, which reifies his place in his very large universe, and he gives vent to this need the more his future seems secure...

...At the other end of the scale, the lower-class individual is radically present-oriented...

...The Concept of Class Culture That many of the cities' serious problems have in most respects been improving, it will be recalled, is only half of Banfield's argument...

...Thus, although labor market restrictions benefit unions less than they cost society generally, unions are better organized than "society generally" and, within limits, can be expected to prevail when specific legal restrictions are at issue...

...Of nine million persons surveyed in these communities, half were black and 35 percent were non-Spanish white, three-fourths reported incomes above the poverty level, 25 percent of white families and 20 percent of black families reported family incomes over $12,000, and the racial distribution of those below the poverty level was about the same as those above it...

...as it was, the result (aside from a good deal of grief to Professor Banfield) was confusion on the part of many well-meaning people who had not read the book or had read it carelessly, and distraction from the serious arguments the book had been intended to provoke...

...Professor Banfield has now revised his book...

...And it is rather painfully apparent that our criminal justice system provides little in the way of discouragement to even the most future-oriented individual who would commit riot or other violence, much less publish classified government documents or destroy draft records...

...Here it is necessary to introduce, in a drastically simplified form, Banfield's use of class analysis...

...Many who read The Unheavenly City were mightily disturbed by it, as Professor Banfield plainly intended them to be...

...Obviously there are some fine upper-class minds at work in the Illinois prisons department, but just as obviously (at least in the view of the paper's editor and headline writer) there are many middle- and working-class minds in this city who will be enraged, and who conceivably will prevail...

...lere, Banfield's original text created some inderstandable confusion...

...This last point is suggested by recent Census surveys, not cited by Banfield, which found that for certain narrow groups—for example, young Northern couples where both husband and wife worked—blacks were approaching or had achieved income parity with whites...

...This kind of moralizer believes that the only way to help blacks is to "fight discrimination...

...An important relationship between these last two factors is described in a typically illuminating quotation from Thomas Sowell, one of many in the second edition: "The net effect of any institutional arrangement which sets the rate of pay above that required to attract the number of qualified workers needed is to make it cheaper to discriminate in deciding who not to hire...

...Conceivably, the pra tice of forcing the incapable and unwii ing to waste their adolescent years schoolrooms further weakens the alreac tenuous attachment of the lower class, to social institutions...

...In these and numerous other instances, the practical institutional reforms to which Banfield is led in his analysis of specific problems seem doomed by the asserted dominance of upper-class moralism in the policy-making process: for none of them provide do-gooders with opportunities to parade their moral virtue, and many are offensive to their sublime optimism...

...Moreover, a disproportionate share of the present lower class happens to be black (as a century ago it was disproportionately Irish...

...The Unheavenly City Revisited, however, is a second edition rather than a sequel: the format, argument, and conclusions of the first are essentially unchanged...

...Banfield is right, though, to warn of the dangers of moralistic and demonstrative politics...

...Some readers reacted with the superstition of a coach at half-time, fearing that attention to past success might jeopardize the future...

...The Perversity of Moralism But to Banfield the more important reason for the "perversity" of urban policy is the nature of moralism which more and more tends to determine that policy, and especially the moralism of the well-to-do...

...As for Banfield's point—which could hardly have upset anyone who had come to know the life of a Bedford-Stuyvesant or a Lawndale—that it is misleading to characterize the poorest city neighborhoods as "ghettos" which are uniformly black, poor, or squalid, he has received strong support from a special Census survey in 1970-71 of fifty-one OEO/Model Cities "low-incomeareas" in large cities...

...The upper-class individual, for example, is highly future-oriented...

...If gravely serious problems exist in the cities, says Banfield, they must be circumstances which threaten the essential welfare of individuals or the good health of society, such as crime, poverty, and racial (or other) injustice...

...realities of his situation: that he will vet likely work with his hands all his life, th he is not learning anything, that for suc work he would not be helped by learnin any more, and that one who works with h hands had better start early because he wi be 'old' by the time he is forty...

...This review has dealt almost exclusively with the conceptual aspects of The Unheavenly City Revisited, as did almost all of the reviews of The Unheavenly City...

...At this point he presents a complicated and politically delicate argument...

...indeed, the culture itself may prevent those who are strongly lower-class from advancing at all), and it appears that a substantial lower class persists in all of the big cities...

...Banfield's approach to his subject commands this response...

...after all, an important part of the presidential mandate of 1972 was a rejection of some upper-class views and behavior...

...Banfield devotes a very large share of his book, in both editions, to exploring these "institutional" aspects of urban problems, but he concludes that government is as unlikely to "solve" the institutional as the cultural aspects...

...This argument, which seemed accurate when Ban-field made it in his first edition, seems rather too optimistic in his revision...

...But the time-horizon idea does prove to be a powerful tool for simplifying his analysis, and it stands as an important achievement in its own right...

...The upper-class view of things is sometimes mischievous and sometimes not, and it is only one of many forming public opinion...

...This spring, SDS mobilizers appeared to have found their final solution when they bullied Banfield into silence at two academic gatherings...

...for this reason he is reckless and improvident, makes no attempt to discipline his passions, and trusts his fate to luck rather than pluck...

...The frustration, anger, and contempt f authority engendered by the school mi possibly enter into the personality of ti individual, coloring his attitudes adulthood and leading him to take cynical and resentful view of the socie and all its works...

...As this review is written the headline on Chicago newspapers is "Killer Con to Attend College Unguarded...

...For in the meantime we have learned from such agencies of moral virtue as the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army that the upper class, too, is possessed by a capacity for genuine violence...

...Professor Banfield's essential argument is that the genuinely serious social problems of the American city are inaccessible to public (i.e...

...While the poverty program certainly adopted the language of "economic opportunity" in fact it had little effect upon the real opportunities of the poor...

...Banfield now alerts us early to the wo conflicting views of the causes of culural characteristics, this time called the social machinery" and "social heredity" rguments (not, please note, biological Heredity, an altogether different debatewhich Banfield does not discuss and which he appears to regard with great dubiety...

...Society, he writes, can be divided for analytical purposes into four classes —upper, middle, working, and lower—each of which embraces persons with a distinguishing pattern of attitudes, values, and modes of behavior...

...likewise it is senseless to describe "urban sprawl" as a crisis when it arises simply from providing people with homes and lots they desire at a price they can afford, and when it generally affects no one but them...

...If he cannot learn, staying in scho, will not help, and if there are no jobs fi people with only hands, supporting hi: will be society's problem, not his...

...Expanding the real economic opportunities of the poor may be politically difficult or even impossible but it would improve the lot of some of the poor quite tangibly, and it would not much affect the selfish interests of upper-class persons one way or the other...

...He concluded that if all blacks turned white (or if all whites turned black) overnight, ex-blacks would be somewhat better off but not much: their social and economic circumstances as a group would for the time being remain largely unchanged...

...Theodore Turner is worried about), though perhaps Banfield felt it was still too new and uncertain to be discussed with much precision in his second edition...

...he is oblivious to the condescension of his position and is angered by the observation that more mundane economic problems are of much greater practical importance...

...The discovery th the school consists largely of cant ar pretense may prepare the way for tl discovery that the police and the court for example, do too...

...Banfield's discussion of upper-class values and behavior is one of the most fascinating aspects of his book, no doubt because it touches on at least some of the values of most of his readers...

...No doubt most of the blood spilled by the middle and upper classes will be steers' blood carried . . . in plastic containers," Banfield writes, but, "the effect on the lower classes of this sort of behavior by the upper classes may be incendiary...

...These changes have greatly clarified and strengthened his exposition at important junctures...

...As matters now stand, the pre tense of the school—one that must bi ridiculous to boys who...

...The Community Action Program, which was the centerpiece of the poverty program, was intended to stimulate the poor not by expanding their opportunities but by teaching them self-confidence through participation in dramatic group action, which almost invariably meant political action...

...But they might make such opportunities as exist more visible and easily grasped...

...The Unheavenly City was a lapidary work, addressed to the ages and not to the humors of the time...

...although it discussed practically every urban policy idea ever advanced, its focus was on the complexity of things, and on the persistency of human nature against all attempts at manipulation by "policy...

...The two arguments, we shall see, are closely related, and both rely on the same two explanatory principles: the nature of democratic politics and the class composition of American society...

...The program's job training and education efforts aimed not at expanding opportunities but at better preparing the poor for such opportunities as existed...

...crimination, poisoning race relations at time when they ought to be improving...

...The boy who know that he has learned nothing since till eighth grade but that he must nevertheles sit in boredom, frustration, and embarrass ment until he is sixteen or seventeen (in few states, eighteen), when finally he will b labeled 'dropout,' must be profoundly dis affected by the experience...

...Others see lower-lass culture as "cognitive," as an expresiion of psychological traits acquired in iarly childhood which persist indepenlently of social circumstances...

...It must have taken saintlike restraint for him to have abstained, but anyone who devotes himself to the book will see that he was right...

...Unemployment is as much a result of such things as national economic policies, the restrictions in the labor market just mentioned, and racial discrimination...

...The way to deal with crime is "rehabilitation," in his view, and proposals to make confinement more immediate or certain are abhorrent...

...After all we are not yet plunged totally into chaos: the sturdier forces of middle- and working-class opinion continue to have their effect at all levels of government, and undoubtedly they will continue to do so...

...In his first edition Banfield argued that racial discrimination was not the main social disadvantage of blacks taken as a group...

...Many of those who did not like Banfield's first edition complained that he was "callous and cold" in discussing the problems of the poor...

...The Unheavenly City Revisited will not convert these people but it does incorporate important new data and statistical studies which lend further weight to Banfield's arguments...

...He hardly plans his affairs from one moment to the next, and seldom accounts for tomorrow in gauging his behavior today...

...The upper-class individual it will be recalled, tends to be highly altruistic, generous, and optimistic...

...There is simply no other way to demonstrate this than to quote him directly...

...But it is unduly pessimistic to suggest, as he seems to, that the upper-class ethos can be counted on to defeat any sound social policy which survives the machinations of interest-group politics...

...Consequently, the upper-class persons who have already acquired wealth and status tend to emphasize the moral over the practical aspects of social issues, for moralizing provides opportunities for dramatic self-expression, while practicalities require attention to the base as well as the noble in human affairs...

...In the same period the number of poor families living in rural areas apparently increased, however, a circumstance which is not explained...

...To understand this, however, one must first confront his preliminary argument that the usual public definitions of urban problems are erroneous or perverse...

...Such matters are puffed into "crises" because our democracy provides numerous opportunities for people to shift the costs of their pursuits to others by political means...

...The idea of "expanding opportunities," however, is a hazy one which deserves more attention than Banfield has given it...

...And why not, when tenured professors had written in scholarly journals that his ideas were not only mistaken but socially "dangerous...

...in fact it was one of the principal criticisms of the program that it trained people for nonexistent job opportunities (it was said that the Job Corps transformed ten-thousand unemployed day laborers into ten-thousand unemployed stone masons), and in this it probably reinforced lower-class attitudes that were rational adjustments to limited opportunities...

...Why, then, could it not be a fit subject for the attentions of the upper class...

...he adds that the public discussion of these problems is usually misleading because, as in the case of the purely political "problems," important interest groups find it useful both to oversimplify them and to exaggerate their severity...

...In The Unheavenly City Revisited, Ban-field has added the facts...

...He pointed out that the gap between black and white income, unemployment rates, and other indicators of social welfare is greatly reduced—though not eliminated—when one statistically "corrects for" demographic factors such as regional origin, family size, and educational level...

...the other half is that in some respects these problems are more stubborn and complicated than is usually supposed...

...It is not at all the case that he is cold...

...Predictably these assertions were among the most controversial in The Unheavenly City, but the controversies generally failed to cut very deeply into Banfield's arguments...

...The Sources of Lower-Class Culture If one believes that many important social 3roblems result in a significant degree from mltural values such as those of Banfield's ower class, it obviously becomes terribly mportant to determine the extent to which hose values might themselves be changed...

...One indication of those dangers was in the reception his first edition received in many important circles, and one indication that his warning has been heard will be if his second edition is received with greater civility...

...Banfield also asserts that racial discrimination, while morally repugnant and a grievous burden to blacks historically, is today only a secondary cause of the particular problems (such as disproportionate poverty and unemployment) facing the black community, although the logic of the black leader's role is to emphasize discrimination and minimize other circumstances...

...For he could have used the occasion to clobber those who had treated him with such meanness...

...It should be said, though, that in many ways the most satisfying parts of his work are his several discussions of discrete policy issues: it is here that his concepts come to life, and here that his knowledge of the realities of human situations places him so far above the abstractionists who populate his field...

...It is obviously a small step from saying that because many urban problems are cul...

...It was and is impervious to easy or self-interested criticism, and it is surely better that Banfield does not now dignify such abuse with his attentions...

...If, for example, an individual's proneness to violent :rime results from a radically myopic view pf the future, the conservative prescriptions )f increasing the severity and/or likelihood if punishment will have as little effect (be:ause punishment, no matter how likely, is 3eyond his time-horizon) as the liberal ones )f rehabilitation and education (because he ;ees no purpose in learning or otherwise `improving" himself...

...It is senseless, for example, to say that "congestion" is a problem, since the opportunities of congestion are what draw people to the city in the first place...

...Six million is still a lot of people, of course, but as Banfield points out even they are for the most part very far from "hardship," thanks in part to numerous government subsidy programs for such goods as housing, food, medical care, and legal services...

...The mayor who moans that his city must receive a "massive" infusion of federal funds, "or else," does not mean that his constituents have run out of money to pay the bills he has run up, but rather that they would much prefer that somebody else pay them instead...

...What is worse, Banfield argues, moralistic behavior may itself aggravate already serious social problems...

...in his new edition he cites the comparable figure for 1972, which was 6.1 million...

...Some, ike Elliot Liebow in his classic study, rally's Corner, look upon the "culture of )overty" as "situational," as a rational adaptation to a world of severely limited )pportunities...