In the Flower City, Take Root
Brown, Michael J.
PAUL GOODMAN FOR OUR TIMES In the Flower City, Take Root MICHAEL J. BROWN When I tell people that I live in my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., their most common response is, "Why?" Rochester is the...
...it is the brush of elbows and the rush of friends' faces amid the Saturday crowds at the Rochester Public Market...
...It is here that abstractions become tangible realities...
...as a college student I learned of ancient Greece...
...They are observers rather than participants, and they are often disgusted observers...
...They would be elections inspectors...
...Rochester is a city with grinding urban poverty, but its suburbs are rather prosperous places from which crops of upwardly mobile students are harvested each graduation season...
...Perhaps I should first say why many people, and I include myself, have left the places they come from or at least seriously contemplated doing so...
...People have their jobs, and they work hard at them...
...Michael J. Brown is a graduate student in the department of history at the University of Rochester, where he studies the place of intellectuals in American political culture...
...In Rochester, life moves along tracks other than the career track...
...Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the presence of self-governance...
...The price of living in a place like Rochester might be the curtailment of one's career...
...Yet we yearn for it...
...What's at issue is the tension between belonging to a rootless professional culture and a rooted local one...
...Would such a person even be a part of history...
...At the conclusion of their time, CIVIC alumni would be able to say that the community had owned a part of them and that they, in return, had owned a piece of it...
...They too often deny them the opportunity to realize an aspect of our human potential distinct from our professional and private selves: our civic self...
...I am rooted in it not simply because of the accident of birth...
...They would staff farm markets and beautify bus shelters...
...The price of holding on to the latter may be exclusion from the status, power, and income the former offers...
...But they also have projects outside their jobs...
...It is not freedom from external constraints...
...Rochester is a snowy place...
...They were thankful for the opportunity to renew their city...
...I'd like to suggest that this relation is the grounds for a special kind of independence...
...My proposal is for a national youth service program that gives participants the chance to shape the future of their own communities...
...Large suburban business parks with rolling green lawns and constructed drainage ponds are luring businesses from the central skyscrapers...
...If the glamour of the center pulls us in, the reputation for dullness that surrounds remaining at home pushes us away...
...It is not because Rochester affords me economic independence (though the low cost of living helps...
...In the second year of CIVIC, they would be handed some of the keys to the city in addition to their ongoing community work...
...But presidential campaigns are fleeting things...
...Though the "liberty of the ancients" may sound alien to us today, it is nonetheless appealing...
...They have also come to experience the buzz of such places, to "be a part of it" as Frank Sinatra sings of New York...
...Some have characterized Rochester, along with cities like Buffalo, Detroit, and Baltimore, as dying...
...What is different in Rochester is that I own a piece of this place, and this place owns a piece of me...
...For Aristotle, "man is by nature a political animal...
...We don't need hurricanes to arouse this sentiment in the people of our cities, nor do we need the wars that plagued the Greeks and ultimately struck down their ancient liberties...
...These students often leave the region, either for college or for work, and many never return...
...They would attend all meetings of the council and deliberate about the matters before it, choosing a different delegate to cast their collective vote at each meeting...
...The small scale of the polis—estimates put the population of Periclean Athens at 250,000, of which far fewer than half were eligible citizens—facilitated civic participation...
...I was one of them...
...The same arrangement would apply to the county legislature, school boards, and the various town councils...
...But there is something else...
...In fact, its appeal lies in our sense of its absence, our lack of civic self-determination...
...In the spring of 2008, I attended a conference in New Orleans...
...In Athens, the citizens of the polis are thought to have experienced what the eighteenth-century French thinker Benjamin Constant called "the liberty of the ancients," and what more recent political theorists label "positive liberty...
...People stand in relation to their political community as spectators stand in relation to spectacle...
...My peers are not leaving to pursue Jeffersonian independence...
...it's the forum on violent crime with the mayor and the police chief at the single-screen movie theater two blocks away...
...To live outside the city was to live outside the political and cultural community that allows humans to exercise their capacities for reason, rhetoric, imagination, and artistry...
...CIVIC members would perform useful work and would be affected by it...
...The tradeoffs involved here are very real...
...CIVIC will offer youth a taste of the "liberty of the ancients" by placing their hands on the rudder of the civic ship...
...To the extent that the Tea Party calls forth a response from the Left, it is likely to come in the form of shouts...
...They would be students of and participants in the life of the community, with their classroom the city itself...
...The city elders wring their hands over this "brain drain...
...It's not the case, however, that those leaving their childhood homes in places like Rochester are lighting out for wide open spaces where opportunity abounds and careers are simply open to talent...
...it was a way of life...
...And they would enjoy voting membership in municipal legislative bodies...
...The day of the New Hampshire primary, I knocked on doors in the towns of Antrim and Hillsborough...
...They went on the road to campaign in places like Dayton, Ohio, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Sarasota, Florida...
...And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity...
...The people I know and love are scattered all over the world, but the highest concentration of them in any one place is in Rochester...
...This is the difference between a rootless professional culture and a rooted local one...
...Such positive liberty differs from the "negative liberty" that Constant called "the liberty of the moderns...
...it is not a field for 'investment to yield a long-term modest profit.'" CIVIC aims to make good this lesson...
...And yet when people ask how it is that I live here, I am eager to tell them...
...Instead, these programs often uproot people from the communities they're in and place them in new locations...
...The essence of this Athenian liberty was the citizens' freedom to determine the policies of their city, to shape the course of the common life...
...It brought young Americans off campuses and into the streets...
...There is a conscious sense here of building the community: one vacant lot converted into a neighborhood garden, one old factory turned into an art gallery, one letter to the editor at a time...
...He who lives outside the city, Aristotle said, "must be either a beast or a god...
...I think I have found such a pathway here in Rochester...
...What we need is a sense that our efforts are meaningful, and this sense is to be found in our left-behind hometowns and dying cities, in places like Rochester...
...They would immerse themselves in the community by collecting oral histories from elders in nursing homes, providing transportation for those who cannot transport themselves, and tutoring elementary-school children in literacy and math...
...During that time, however, CIVIC participants would either strengthen or form the civic spirit that promotes the virtuous circle I have described...
...William James wondered what might happen if "there were, instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years part of the army enlisted against Nature...
...Athenian citizens were selected for public office by lottery, and their assembly comprised the entire body of citizens (though women and those not born of Athenian parents were excluded from citizenship, and much of the hard labor was performed by slaves...
...As a boy I learned of ancient Rome...
...Athens was not simply a place where people lived...
...I think James was on to something...
...There are the faces and the names of the people around me, each of which has a story behind it, each of which is a buoy anchored in the social sea, helping to orient me...
...As a kid reading books on ancient history, I wondered about the people alive at the height of the Roman Empire who didn't live at the center, who weren't among the bread and circuses, the politics of the forum, the enormous power of the city of Rome...
...If I lived in New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, or San Francisco, no one would ask me why...
...But what James's proposal may—and its latter-day descendants the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps do—miss is the opportunity to mobilize (or foster) the affective bonds that young people have to the places they're from...
...Participants would experience the natural environment by clearing trails, cleaning shorelines, and maintaining parks...
...Here is where the proposal differs from the "youth work camps" that Paul Goodman and others have discussed...
...it's the Genesee River flowing north into Lake Ontario and passing by Kodak factories and the Genesee Brewery...
...In Athens, the freedom to participate in the life of the city was regarded as a defining characteristic of human beings...
...The career aspirations that drain the young from Rochester impoverish the city, but they also impoverish the young...
...They start discussion clubs, urban farmers' markets, political action groups, and new schools...
...The local delicacy is called the "garbage plate" and is best served after 2 a.m., with a side of Lipitor...
...It is this reality that has led some to characterize Rochester and other mid-size cities in the older, non-Sunbelt portions of the country as dying places...
...he is like the 'Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,' whom Homer denounces...
...When they do participate, it is often simply to display this disgust...
...A virtuous circle forms that quickens the bond between citizen and city: the dearer the city becomes to the citizen, the greater the citizen's zeal for lending a hand in its affairs...
...For those in the former, the city they live in is the site of their job...
...Katrina was terrible, but it was also an opportunity for new thinking, new projects, and new collaborations...
...He is the founder of Flower City Philosophy and the coordinator of Rochester Educators for Obama...
...At the holidays, I've sat in airplanes listening to my fellow twenty-somethings commiserating with each other: "I liked going home, but if I had to stay there one more day I'd shoot myself...
...CIVIC participants would have regular jury duty...
...Expecting them to be marked by the tragic blow their city had suffered, I was startled by their sense of hope and their enormous energy...
...Obama's primary defeat was heartbreaking, but the campaigning was not...
...This program would address the constellation of social problems I've laid out...
...The downtown core of the city is deserted after dark and, increasingly, during the work day...
...They would have column space in local newspapers...
...Rochester is the fifty-first largest metro region in the United States, a tad smaller than Buffalo and a tad bigger than Tucson...
...But what's at issue here, I have come to believe, is not simply independence...
...Moving from small places to larger ones is a major theme in American life...
...Our group heard from local leaders on the effort to rebuild the community following Hurricane Katrina...
...They would learn the infrastructure of their community by installing solar panels and creating urban gardens...
...But political participation can also perpetuate itself...
...For those in the latter, it is the site of their civic life...
...People from farms and towns, from other regions and other nations, have come to large American cities for work...
...Such people were, I later learned, described by the term "provincial...
...There are surely capricious bosses and volatile markets here, too...
...I feel a sense of ownership over this place...
...The two sides are more apt to cover each other with spittle than convince each other with smarts...
...Surely the endemic warfare among Greek city-states and the hard work performed by slaves also played their part in laying the foundations for the positive liberty of the citizen, for these offered him ample questions of great moment to deliberate on—nothing less than war (alas) and peace—and the freedom from labor necessary to do so...
...In Rochester, for example, the second-year CIVIC class would have one voting seat on the city council...
...The way it called upon my strength of mind to make the case at every door, my strength of body to trudge through snowy back roads, and my strength of will to approach isolated houses whose owners, I anticipated, had had enough of political canvassers— all this made for a sense of a day's labors done well and for a worthy purpose...
...Today, it's as though this virtuous circle has become a vicious one...
...Not only were they people living in the provinces, they were also people whose world was thought to be narrower—materially, intellectually, and culturally—than those living at the center...
...It was time for all hands to be on deck, for all who loved New Orleans to rally to it, for the citizens to find in the rebuilding of their city something like what William James called "the moral equivalent of war...
...CIVIC will counterbalance the call of the highly mobile and therefore rootless professional life, which has the full weight of cultural power, social prestige, and material wealth on its side...
...I feel committed to it...
...they're leaving to enter large professional organizations in which they often become quite dependent— on the caprice of bosses, the vicissitudes of markets, the shifting terrain of mergers and acquisitions...
...If they leave us inspired, they leave us wanting more...
...it is freedom to be a self-determining person or community, to partake in public life...
...It would stem the "brain drain" from places like Rochester by retaining young people, at least for a time...
...Dispensing with the martial metaphors, I'd call this program (C)itizens (I)n(V)olved (I)n (C)ommunity, to be known by its catchier acronym CIVIC...
...Ironically, civic life springs from this perception of urban death...
...To denounce someone for living without an attachment to a city seems harsh to contemporary readers, but the very forcefulness of this language tells us that the Greeks took their civic communities seriously...
...There are the old buildings—the grand facades of high culture, the battered storefronts of the inner city, the sentinel-like pump house on the reservoir hill— to remind me of history and time...
...Politics is not shouting faces on television...
...This liberty is negative because it is the absence of intrusion upon private life...
...We too seldom experience commitment to something outside the self (but that serves self-development), something larger than the individual (but that tangibly involves individuals we know and value...
...for the citizen, Athens was life itself...
...The environment is not some photo of a distant stream with a bear pawing for salmon...
...These places are fields for our civic action, and they are places where our efforts can be vital, direct, and discernible in their results...
...Witness the Sarah Palin rallies, which amount to the venting of spleen...
...In a culture where "helicopter" parents can extend adolescence well into the third decade of an offspring's life, there is undoubtedly merit in striking out on one's own...
...It is a place where corporate giants—Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb—once stalked the land but now skulk amid layoffs and falling profits...
...Community is not an ideal of political theory...
...And this brings me back to how eager I am to tell people why I live in Rochester...
...There simply aren't the opportunities here that there are in the larger cities...
...Witness the presidential campaign of Barack Obama...
...Most strikingly, I could see that these civic leaders were ignited by the very real way in which their city needed them...
...What's missing is a field for meaningful action, a forum for the public use of reason, a pathway to civic life...
...As Paul Goodman observed fifty years ago in Growing Up Absurd, "We have to learn again what city man always used to know, that belonging to the city, to its squares, its market, its neighborhoods, and its high culture, is a public good...
...The positive liberty of the ancients was not a function of the political season...
...I wondered whether some future kid reading history would ask how a person living in my own time could have made a life somewhere other than in the great metropolises of our age...
Vol. 57 • October 2010 • No. 4
