The Unheavenly City

...Today politicians and social reformers have induced a delirium of rising expectations amongst the citizenry and this is the most serious urban problem-people think there are dangerous problems and as with so many other problems "thinking may make it so...

...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.hly...

...Delineating these cultures by their inhabitants' psychological orientation towards the future, Banfield shows that all four classes are equally disgusting...

...And finally Banfield describes the most disgusting class of all-the lower class which lives "from moment to moment," unconcerned about providing beyond immediate bodily needs, incapable of skilled or routine work, burdened with self-contempt, anti- social and often mentally ill...

...Apparently the present-oriented you always have with you...

...On the other hand a situationally present-oriented person can control his impulses and conceive the future, but he feels his present situation renders investment in the future unprofitable or impossible...

...They want to live in cities where the action is, where multitudinous opportunity abounds ...where congestion abounds...

...A volitionally present-oriented person is disciplined, able to conceive a future, and lives in a situation where investment in the future strikes him as both possible and profitable...

...Well as the saying goes, you cannot build a highrise Utopia on faulty analysis...

...But automobiles are a positive necessity in many persons' lives...

...Unfortunately it failed to solve many social problems, and when in the early fifties Liberal urban planners made urban studies a profitable field for research at the major universities every intelligent taxpayer despaired for the city and prepared to move to South Dakota...

...Often those who pour forth most profusely on urban problems are pathological reformers and political mountebanks...

...Most urban problems exist because Americans judge their environment today by standards elevated over what they have been in the past...

...Rpinhnld Niehuhr And what of the "massive programs," the "dream cities," and the grand strategies of Washington's urban planners...

...On the streets present-oriented persons generally mix these three analytical classifications, making the task of the urban planner about as feasible as that of Sisyphus...

...the cost of living is high enough in cities already and responsibility is the concern of governmerits and corporations not of the average citizen...

...In The Unheavenly City Banfield exhibits more coherent knowledge of modern urban problems than any single author has ever shown in one volume...

...Banfield plots America's obsession to "do good"back to its origins in the upper class's service mentality...

...In the case of the cities the upper-class do-gooders will be doing it for years to come...

...But this is unlikely...

...The professors proved us right...

...Pollution is not caused by fate or the turning pages of history...

...They can lessen pollution by giving up their automobiles for mass transportation or bicycles, paying a little more for utilities, exercising more responsibility in their purchase and use of consumer goods...

...Robinson, Mr...

...Even our educational programs are more likely to produce urban problems than to eliminate them...

...Nonetheless he prefers the present-oriented life...

...But the irrepressible Banfield goes further, insisting that the present programs actually exacerbate urban problems and contribute to the urban crisis...

...But now the genius of the social strategists is under attack from revisionist scholars like Daniel P. Moynihan, James Q. Wilson and Edward Banfield...

...Successively Banfield describes the less future-oriented middle class, a class that is conscious of the future and confident of its influence on it...

...Neglecting the significance of the urban population's cultural differences, most analysts fail to account for the three "conceptual distinc-tions"characteristic of the lower class which Banfield calls: cognitive, situational and volitional...

...If the demogogic politicians who thunder about hungry children would attempt to understand the peculiar kind of poverty existing in our cities, some progress might be made...

...To understand the urban crisis one must understand that the city has grown according to three imperatives: demographic, technological and economic...

...It is the source of the "urban crisis...

...Consider the "drop-out crisis" which Banfield alludes to but does not elaborate on...

...The same problem underlies pollution...

...In the sixties the majority of boys and girls graduated from high school...

...Such persons are not only psychologically unable to conceive a future but are also incapable of controlling their impulses...

...This technique has for years sustained vast populations of loving social workers inspired by self-images of the Good Fairy and offered security to big city politicoes who-in the words of Boss Plun-kitt "seen (their) opportunities and took em...

...Obviously these urban problems will only be solved when people want to solve them...

...Urbanologists must understand the intransigence of present-oriented persons if they are ever to solve the urban crisis...

...Urban renewal, designed to create cheap housing, has created the cheapest housing of all-no housing...

...This is the class which provides the city most bountifully with its crimes and disorder...

...Minimum wage laws force low productivity and unskilled labor out of work...

...As a matter of fact their growth in a field which had early been dominated by evangelizing charlatans almost renews my faith in the intellectual process...

...Great American Series It has been the unfortunate weakness of both liberalism and liberal Christianity that they have easily degenerated into sentimentality by refusing to contemplate the tragic aspects of human existence honestly...

...a city's pollution is caused by the consumption of its private citizens...

...But it is only recently with the continuing middle-class-ification of American life and its concomitant "elevation of standards" that the harshness of present-oriented lives has attracted so muchjlabbergasted concern...

...Unions which coerce business to employ low-producing labor at more than it is worth cause diminution of job opportunities for unskilled labor...

...Early in his study Banfield endeavored to think about "the problems of the city in the light of scholarly findings," whereupon he tripped across the embarrassing discovery that "the overwhelming majority of city dwellers live more comfbrtably and conveniently than ever before...

...As earlier implied, Banfield finds the contemporary analysis of urban problems invalid and often arrantly tendentious...

...His careful research impels him to distinguish these urban problems from what he terms the urban crisis-a most troubling phenomenon and no less resistant to solution...

...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Good jobs may be provided for all, still some will remain chronically unemployed...

...For though urban renewal is wondrously efficient at bulldozing housing, it has not been very provident in replacing that housing, and what housing it does replace is inevitably more expensive...

...But the disfigured remains of this growth-slums in which "the style of life is squalid and vicious"-were not prefigured solely by these "growth imperatives" nor by radical and economic dissimilitudes, but by the presence of four cultures within the city-to wit: upper class, middle class, working class and lower class...

...So we fashioned all ilk of programs to meet the drop-out crisis and are finally turning the corner on it, filling the high schools with every species of scoundrel and jackass, and behold now we are told America is in the dawn of a new crisis- "Crisis in Our High Schools...

...Frankly I was reminded of John Lindsay, Lord Mayor of New York, whose "purpose" it seems is to turn New York into a grand rest and rehabilitation center for idealistic young revolutionaries (sort of the Havana of North America), and whose success would be at hand were it not for the idealism of what must be the finest young generation of hard hats in American history...

...For instance today we gnash our teeth over congestion and air pollution yet blithely run about clogging the cities and fouling the atmosphere...

...In asserting that most urban problems (at least those not arising from racial injustice, poverty and ignorance) are not serious (merely questions of amenity) and that society is unlikely to solve them because it simply does not want to solve them...

...In fact Banfield feels that the more ambitious urban planners have undertaken a labor unto eternity, for "so long as the city contains a sizable lower class, nothing basic can be done about its most serious problems...

...Our urban crisis will be with us for several more seasons and Banfield knows its plot thoroughly...

...Now concern for one's fellow man is admirable and even socially necessary, but we should not confuse concern with wisdom much less with virtue...

...These are the persons who originally relieved their anxieties by reforming penitentiaries and laughing farms, and who now wish to initiate the censorship of breadfast cereal packages while plunging into the urban crisis by sipping cocktails with idealistic Black Panthers...

...As Banfield cogently argues, this obsession to "do good" often does "bad" at everyone's expense...

...Not only would our urban slums cost more but so would out academic slums...

...In 1900 almost everyone "dropped out" of school, yet no one considered it a crisis...

...In fact the life led by a member of the lower class is so chaotic, with a system of values so primitive and anomalous that Banfield considers members of all the other classes "normal" by comparison...

...When students lack motivation to learn they are as likely to learn as a snake is to strut...

...Banfield has researched his subject thoroughly using state and federal commission reports dating to the last century and a vast collection of articles and books by the most sophisticated economists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and so forth...

...The city had long been the special demesne of Liberal ideologues who extinguished every problem in a gush of cool cash-money, generally from someone else's pocket...

...almost everyone received some high school education...

...If they are not making the world safe for democracy they are prohibiting ardent spirits, fashioning world governments, begetting a nation of saints or attempting to legislate away Original Sin...

...Local, state and federal agencies which -driven by ideology--set "enlightened wage policies," pay labor more than it is worth thereby attracting skilled labor and prempting unskilled labor from simple jobs-often the only jobs an unskilled laborer is capable of holding...

...The Americans who once loved a circus now love a crisis...

...There was more crime, more poverty, and more drug addiction at the turn of the century, but people expected it...

...Motivation to learn is not characteristic of the lower-class student, and he is less educable than is his classmate of another culture...

...The only way to ease urban congestion is to disperse the population, but most people do not want to live in Dog Patch...

...Here the thoughtful reader will be reminded of the late Joseph P. Kennedy and his apparent purpose of transforming the American republic into a monarchy...

...Expressing concern for "the future of such abstract entities as the community, nation, or mankind...," he is confident he can "shape the future to accord with his purposes...

...Banfield feels that educators must distinguish between intractable, present-oriented students and normal students...

...Our only hope lies in Mrs...

...Violence will exist amidst whole armies of of armored gendarmes...

...one class causes the "urban crisis...

...Hence the urban planner will have very little success easing the urban crisis, and urban problems will probably be around for as long as the lower class multiplies and continues to set up office on street corners and sagging front porches...

...Then too the FHA, the VA and the highway construction program have aggravated urban problems, making the life of the poor just that much more unpleasant...

...The only book even approaching Banfield's erudition, thoughtfulness, and coherence is Daniel P. Moynihan's Toward a National Urban Policy...

...And there are other programs which usher in more problems than they resolve...

...Then, the working class which-though even less future-oriented and not likely to "invest as heavily in the future" -appears from Banfield's description the least disgusting...

...Yet as most urbanologists come from future-oriented cultures, they cannot imagine its lifestyle and assuredly will not recognize it...

...Tumult has always existed in the "squalid and vicious" neighborhoods (slums) of the lower class...

...All other assertions in The Unheavenly City revolve about this axis...

...Nowadays it is almost impossible to discern which "crisis" is a crucial turning point for society and which is merely another opportunity to sell more newspapers, peddle more moonshine and stick one's snout into another man's business...

...They fashioned urban renewal, model cities and all sorts of hair brained housing projects and transportation mazes until their more successful cit\es looked like gigantic jungle gyms with the emphasis on jungle...

...Jones and the continued "middle-class-ification" of America...

...Banfield's argument is compelling...

...Every time Banfield mentioned this lower class my mind beheld visions of David Brinkley and teeming tenement houses infested with network news commentators contributing to delinquency of every sort...

...In The Lnlieavcnly City, Banfield captures at least two laurels: A) he has antiquated much of the tommyrot once fatuously accepted as conventional wisdom, and B) he has vindicated much of the earlier conservative scholarship attracting long overdue prestige to the authors of this scholarship...

...Banfield, I believe, is subjecting Liberals to cruel and unusual punishment while nevertheless sounding an essential conservative theme -a theme sorely needed in a society psychically frazzled by its inability to feed the hungry, calm the waters and all that...

...Banfield stresses that Americans have always had to fuss about one thing or another...

...And if you are unable to arrest the bungling progress of your do-gooder neighbor, well read Banfield again, pull up your chairs and devour the show...

...Misery will endure the increase of welfare payments or the cunning of the negative income tax, and ignorance will prove immune to the most advanced educational concepts...

...Thus in slum schools where lower-class children (often blacks) are, until age sixteen, meaninglessly incarcerated with the more future-oriented working-class students, the lower-class students grow frustrated, psychologically isolated, and-in spite of education's reputed magic-they become nuisances to serious students, ultimately becoming social problems...

...According to the author, a member of the upper class, the class most future-oriented, looks ever to the horizon planning for "the future of his children, grandchildren, great grandchildren...

...Throughout the sixties the situation continued to improve while every newspaper in the land roared luridly about the "drop-out crisis...

...Stating at the outset that most analyses of the urban problem are unsound, it should surprise no one that Banfield considers our present programs ineffective...

...Even the most impecunious city dwellers live more comfortably than in the past and indeed could live better still were it not for their being inflicted with the many imbecilic government programs dreamed up by persons of the middle and upper classes who wish to "do good" regardless of consequences...

...Utimately all that these programs harvest is inflation, unemployment, unbalanced markets and unrest...

...Our cities have always contained persons of the lower class whose primitve lifestyles were never consonant with the majority's "future-oriented virtues of self-discipline and denial, industry, thrift, and respect for law and order...

...Sociologists have found that education "does not liberate the child from his class culture but instead confines him in it more securely...

...The real tragedy is that the working-class people (the people intent on providing a future for their families) must- often due to racial prejudice or misfortune-live in fear in neighborhoods shared with the lower class...

...Slums may be demolished, but if the housing that replaces them is occupied by the lower class it will shortly be turned into new slums...

...Cognitively present-oriented persons lack even the concepts by which people anticipate or prepare for a future...

...The solving of urban problems depends first on sound analysis and then on the capacity to act on that analysis...

...Every conservative should read Banfield's book as a program for urban chaos...