The Unheavenly City Revisited

...To Banfield, people are not us and them or victims and saviors, nor are the problems of the cities as new and unprecedented as all things appear to be to those who are ignorant of history...

...About five blocks away, all this during the same years, there was another kid who would grow up and make a name for himself, James Baldwin...

...Although each new generation in the world of policy-makers and opinion-makers "tend to be open to new ideas," nevertheless they "come more and more under the discipline of large organizations, especially foundations and government agencies, whose maintenance and enhancement depends in some way upon the elaboration of an alarmist, or at any rate expansionist, public definition of the situation...

...A kid who lived half a block from me went on to become a psychiatrist, owned property in California's Napa Valley, and is now retired and living overseas...

...But neither were the ghetto schools miles behind everyone else, like today...

...5—holding its own with elementary schools on the lower east side, from which many immigrant kids rose to achieve many things in later life...

...For someone whose time horizon is close athand, even a severe "penalty that lies weeks or months away is not a part of reality for him...

...Common sense, for example, cannot be very ego-gratifying because it is so common...

...From the time it seeks to select juries with the most remote trace of bias removed to the time it scrutinizes the criminal's childhood in search of mitigating factors before sentencing, the criminal justice system is a breeding site for delays, as swamp water is a breeding site for mosquitoes...

...Now in its 25th anniversary year, The Unheavenly City is as contemporary as today's news stories—and far deeper in its insights than today's editorials...

...As The Unheavenly City notes in a number of places, it is misleading to measure progress by looking at given neighborhoods, for the people in those neighborhoods a generation ago may be living in radically different neighborhoods today, being replaced in some cases by other people still going through the process of preparing for a move upward...

...Although I am sometimes credited with an apparently miraculous feat of rising out of the Harlem schools to go on to an academic career, the cold fact is that I did not rise out of today's Harlem schools but out of schools from which many others also went on to have professional careers...

...The assumption that if Negroes riot it must be because they are Negroes is naive," he said, pointing out that even in some of the ghetto riots of the 1960s, "Negroes and whites mingled on the streets and amicably looted side by side...

...For them a job that must be worked at regularly and that pays only at the end of the week is not a real alternative to stealing...

...A t the heart of the many sharp differences in policy recommendations, as between Banfield and others who write on urban issues, are fundamental and irreconcilable differences between their assumptions about the nature of human beings in general and about the kinds of alternatives available to urban policy makers in particular...

...In other words, policy-making is ego-gratification—which means that policies that do not gratify the ego are not likely to get very far...

...In neither neighborhood were the test scores what they were in more affluent neighborhoods where children had better-educated parents...

...All sorts of immigrants have arrived in all sorts of countries with virtually no skills—including most Japanese and Chinese immigrants to the United States—and yet risen to prosperity over the years and generations, often in fields in which they had no historic experience and no "role models...

...Those who did not want to confront the Banfield thesis, which cut the ground out from under the whole Weltanschauung of the liberal-left, called this picture of lower-class culture "racist," though The Unheavenly City itself said, "most Negroes are not improvident, do not live in squalor and violence, and therefore are plainly not lower class" in this cultural and behavioral sense of the term...

...You cannot "retrain" someone who was never trained in the first place—and who has no desire to be trained...

...A black attorney who read one of the gee-whiz accounts of my rise out of Harlem wrote to me: I grew up at 143rd and Amsterdam, not far from your neighborhood and lived in a 5-story walk-up tenement...

...Swift and certain punishment is out of the question...

...These were not just isolated individuals in a mass of sheer despair or incompetence...

...Specific job skills can be acquired in a relatively short time, certainly in less time than the urban problems describedin The Unheavenly City have been festering...

...For most people, these political frauds may be an annoyance, but for the urban poor they are deadly in their effects...

...Again, the argument is not race-specific, for Banfield pointed out a quarter of a century ago that the infant mortality rates among black males in 1940 was where the infant mortality rates among slum dwellers in general had been for decades—that is, when many of those slum dwellers were white—and that the black infant mortality rate had declined since then...

...DuBois...

...The great majority of New Whites would continue working at the same jobs, living in the same neighborhoods, and sending their children to the same schools...

...Indeed, any punishment at all is rendered less likely by the innumerable new legal technicalities created in pursuit of super-justice, the net effect of which is to destroy the more fundamental justice of retribution for crime...

...But Banfield sees much of the crime, violence, drugs, and other social degeneracy that plagues urban communities as being rational ways of responding to given incentives in the light of cultural characteristics and value preferences among the people involved...

...T he message of The Unheavenly City is even more applicable today than when it was written...

...Because painful urban issues are only becoming more acute with the passage of time and the pouring of vast sums of federal "aid" down a bottomless pit, Professor Banfield's insights and framework of analysis are more urgently needed than ever...

...Speculative theories and "innovative" policies are much more consonant with this mindset than are time-tested policies that ordinary people believe in...

...For "radically present-oriented individuals," the criminal justice system must also be swift and certain in its punishment to be effective...

...Although people today ascribe high infant mortality rates among the poor to "neglect" by a "society" that fails to provide enough prenatal care to those who cannot afford it, a quarter of a century earlier Banfield pointed out that high infant mortality was due not to poverty per se, but to behavior, for the poor Jews in the nineteenth-century slums had very different death rates from other immigrant groups in poverty...

...In The Unheavenly City, the main advantage of imprisonment is its "reduction of the individual's opportunities to commit crimes," rather than either deterrence to others or rehabilitation of the offender himself...

...n short, big bucks and big egos are at stake in the fallacies that have survived and are still going strong, twentyfive years after The Unheavenly City exposed them as frauds...

...Tragically, that movement upward from the bottom may be less likely to take place today than in earlier times, when the barriers seemed higher...

...Hence it is desperately important for them to discredit Banfield and The 46 The American Spectator February 1994 Unheavenly City "by all means necessary," of which charges of racism are just one...

...Statistics that separate out those Mexican Americans who were born in this country from those who have just crossed the border show this progress clearly...

...Whether in a racial or a non-racial context, the very idea that people's own behavior has much to do with their misfortunes is anathema to those whose vision of the world is one of helpless victims needing to be rescued by the superior wisdom and virtue of the anointed...

...The liberal intelligentsia prefer explanations which assume that the harm caused by other people, whether to themselves or to others, is due to circumstances beyond their control—but within the control of government programs designed or favored by the intelligentsia...

...The whole picture of urban problems in The Unheavenly City is less race-specific than in most other writings on thesubject, whether from the left or the right...

...Banfield mentions similar riots among whites in Montreal in 1969, in Philadelphia during the nineteenth century, in Boston during the eighteenth century, as well as in Atlantic City, Stockholm, and elsewhere during the twentieth century...

...Few predictions of a quarter of a century ago have been borne out so thoroughly, and in fields extending even beyond those covered so masterfully in The Unheavenly City...

...Yet Banfield's chapter on the subject is entitled: "Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit"—a description more in tune with the television and newspaper pictures of looters happily emerging from stores carrying liquor, clothing, and other items than with the surrounding prose describing them as full of "rage...

...S ome books are so basic to their subject that you cannot be considered educated without having read them...

...Those with an axe to grind, however, prefer to cite gross statistics that lump all Mexican Americans together or all Hispanics together...

...The city has never been heavenly—a point he drives home in setting the present urban problems in a historical context, as well as in the title of the book...

...In more than twenty years of living in California, I have never seen a Mexican or Mexican American begging in the streets, though I have seen many able-bodied young white men with middle-class accents panhandling...

...After reading his letter, I thought of some people who The American Spectator February 1994 47 came out of my old neighborhood, within a five-block radius of 145th Street and St...

...Thomas Sowell The Unheavenly City Revisited Edward C. Banfield's classic critique of the American city is even more powerful today than when it was published 25 years ago— but so are the interests that would deny its insights...

...Crime has gotten worse since The Unheavenly City was first published, but most political "solutions" suffer from the same fallacies that Banfield exposed then...

...For understanding contemporary urban social issues, the classic that is essential is The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield...

...From just that one building came a college president, an M.D., two engineers, a lawyer, a college professor, a high school teacher and a Jesuit priest...

...Given these radically different assumptions, it can hardly be surprising that Banfield and the libThe American Spectator February 1994 45 eral intelligentsia differ consistently across a whole spectrum of urban problems...

...Test scores from the 1940s show the Harlem elementary school I went to—P.S...

...When I checked the math textbook used by my niece in Harlem, I discovered that what she was being taught in the eleventh grade was what I had been taught in the ninth grade...

...The "reformer wants to improve the situation of the poor, the black, the slum dweller, and so on, not so much to make them better off materially as to make himself and the society better off morally...

...Today, of course, such interracial comity in larceny is less common, and Negroes must now be called blacks or African Americans, or some other name that may have surfaced since this essay went to press...

...Perhaps Banfield's strongest statement of the behavioral thesis was this: If, overnight, Negroes turned white, most of them would go on living under the same handicaps for a long time to come...

...If behavior, values, and performance are the real keys to a better life for the urban poor, all these prerequisites have been undermined by the liberal-left trends of the past three decades...

...Community leaders who used to demand higher standards of their own people are now busy making excuses and laying guilt trips on others, while seeking largess in lieu of achievement...

...In short, being realistic is less important than being one of the anointed...

...No Asian-American youngster of half a century ago was likely to see an Asian-American schoolteacher, scientist, or engineer...

...But that makes it all the more important that this classic be reread and its insights applied to contemporary examples of the liberal-left vision that has wreaked such havoc under such lofty rhetoric...

...Another fellow who came out of the same neighborhood at the same time did all right in entertainment—Harry Belafonte...

...but it would make one vast difference: it would inspire the young to try harder, it would stimulate the idle and discouraged and it would take away from this race the omnipresent excuse for failure: prejudice...

...Nor is it clear that retraining is either necessary or sufficient for people to advance out of poverty...

...Nicholas Avenue, back in the 1940s...

...government programs are bigger and more determined than ever to continue on the present course—defining "change" as more money for more of the same kinds of programs—a complete re-examination is in order, not just a re-examination of particular fallacies but a re-examination of the whole framework of misconceptions behind the urban disasters of our times...

...The very concept of personal responsibility would put a whole industry out of business, ruin innumerable careers in politics, the media, and academia, and—perhaps worst of all—deal a fatal blow to the egos of those who see themselves as part of a vanguard of compassion and progress, not unlike the famous painting of Liberty leading the people...

...Despite much mediaspeak which suggests that you must be full of computer-age high-tech skills in order to get jobs, Mexicans cross the border by the thousands every week and go right to work, without any of those skills and often without much knowledge of English...

...To talk seriously about the American constitutional form of government without having read The Federalist Papers is virtually impossible...

...While Mexicans often start in low-paying jobs, they move up the ladder over the years, much like the European immigrant groups of the nineteenth century...

...Sometimes even the criminal himself may be worse off in the long run, as the reluctance to punish youthful "first offenders" (whose previous crimes are kept in sealed records because of age) can mislead brash young thugs into believing that the law can be defied indefinitely, so that they end up in later years with far longer sentences for repeat felonies than would have been sufficient to deter them if applied when they first got caught...

...T he many counterproductive policies exposed by The Unheavenly City—and still going strong today—are more than isolated happenstances...

...Here I can speak from some personal experience...

...Given this perspective, our criminal justice system operates in a way almost guaranteed to produce more crime...

...Nor can one talk seriously about ancient Greek philosophy without having read Plato, or about the nature of warfare without having read Clausewitz...

...Within the same five-block radius, a young man named Colin Powell attended CCNY, though he lived elsewhere...

...Another kid I knew just retired as dean of one of the colleges in New York...

...lacks likewise have been rising occupationally, since B long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, much less "affirmative action" policies...

...After deploring racial discrimination in employment, DuBois said: Probably a change in public opinion on this point tomorrow would not make very much difference in the positions occupied by Negroes in the city: some few would be promoted, some few would get new places—the mass would remain as they are...

...Again and again, it puts contemporary urban problems in historical perspective and provides examples of how such problems have persisted through complete turnovers of the people who exhibit the offending behavior...

...Urban riots, for example, are routinely ascribed by the media to pent-up "rage" at oppression and lack of opportunity...

...If this statement seems astonishing, consider the same proposition being put forward in different words more than seven decades earlier by W.E.B...

...Institutionally as well, Banfield saw little prospect of greater realism...

...Today that same principle holds true, though today it is the Mexican Americans who have infant mortality rates no higher than those of whites, while receiving even less prenatal care than blacks, who have much higher infant mortality rates than either...

...Schools that no longer teach academic subjects at the levels of earlier times are instead teaching racial paranoia and provincialism in the name of "multiculturalism" and are attacking the very idea of right and wrong in the name of "values clarification...

...The perennial liberal nostrum of providing "retraining" to give the poor "skills" was shot down by Banfield in 1968...

...Ban-field saw these policies as products of a particular way of looking at the world...

...Among the liberal intelligentsia, the issue is what "we" can do for "them"—a somewhat proprietary view of urban residents, especially the poor and minorities, at variance with the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment...

...The liberal welfare state has made poverty more comfortable and innumerable liberal innovations in the public school systems have made it far less likely that today's slum dweller will get a decent education with which to launch his rise in the world...

...CI 48 The American Spectator February 1994...

...Indeed, much of what it says directly contradicts today's editorials...

...According to Banfield, to demand realism from people with this mindset is itself not very realistic...

...From this perspective, "the need is not so much for more 'good' jobs as it is for more casual ones...

...T o Banfield, the crucial variable in urban riots, or in much of the other urban pathology, is not a matter of race, but a matter of cultural values and feckless behavior—"an outlook and style of life which is radically present-oriented and which therefore attaches no value to work, sacrifice, self-improvement, or service to family, friends, or community...

...And because the political, administrative, and ideological vested interests behind the failed approaches of Thomas Sowell's most recent book is Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas (The Free Press...

...The notion that crime can be reduced by offering more opportunities for "good jobs" was rejected by Banfield as being incompatible with the kind of people who commit crimes: Most stealing is done by persons who want small amounts now...

...Nor does The Unheavenly City treat these riots as something new in history or as peculiar to blacks...

...The lower-class person cannot as a rule be given much training because he will not accept it," Banfield wrote, long before the Clinton administration revived this war-on-poverty nostrum under the banner of "change...