Playing God

...Banfield suggests that overexpectation must be cooled—a proposition many Americans are quicker to accept in foreign than in domestic policy—and tells us that since a significant part of the urban population is unable to accept education, compulsory education should be terminated after the age of 14...

...All of these prescriptions are guaranteed by Banfield to offend our sensibilities, although one might expect that over a period of years one would get used to them...

...However reasonable the statistical basis for assuming inferior competence on the part of members of the lower class, the arrogance remains arrogance...

...If the term (untimely ripped from the unwritten British Constitution, and originally referring to the position of the Church of England in the British government) fails to kindle a spark of recognition in you, if you cannot see that this figure of speech truly describes the character of American urban institutions?then you may be offered a directly religious explanation of contemporary evil...

...After all, Americans have learned to scale down their moral scope...

...The first believes, more or less consistently, that the overwhelming obstacles are intellectual: The nation has not solved its urban problems because no one knows how...

...Why arc housing accommodations, though better than a century ago, still characterized by heatless winters, broken plaster, stopped-up plumbing, lead-paint poisoning, and garbage-strewn back yards...

...The weeding out that was once provided by bacterial predators may in the future, and with similar tragic imprecision, be effected by narcotics...

...Thanks to some very sweet candy bars and very dry martinis, I have patched the wounds in my ego...

...Assailed by the imprecise invective that spills forth from the moralists, one longs for the days of the Marxists with their plausible de-monology...

...The more enthusiastically the reformers promise to mend things, the more credulously the lower class expects to benefit, and the less capable its members become of doing what they could to extract a measure of satisfaction and physical comfort from the tasks that are actually within the range of their cultural potential...

...Some years ago I wrote a volume (title and price on application) that hazarded several guesses as to the cause of contemporary urban poverty, race tension, urban unemployment, and political dissension, and they rather resemble the hypotheses now (and no doubt earlier) set forth by Professor Banfield on these subjects...

...The night passed, the oil in my lamp burned low, and finally I could no longer defer the realization that neither my name nor that of my book appeared even once in the long compendium of sources assembled by Harvard University's researchers to bolster Banfield's opinions...

...Unfortunately, Banfield's tone, even when he himself is seeking to conciliate the compassionate, tends to postpone that happy day...

...He says little about the problems of governmental income, transportation or physical arrangement, but asks why, when there is practically full employment—exceeding by far the dreams of even so sanguine a romantic as Henry Wallace—there should remain in the cities hundreds of thousands of adults and children who are kept alive on welfare funds and surplus food distribution...

...In other words, I am not convinced Banfield's adversaries have made good the case that some significant forces in American life are determined to keep all the poor, the blacks and the unorganized in their places, hence their backwardness...

...It is possible that this phenomenon is only a fad, since the difficulty of providing well for the nonworking, nonowning members of a social order finally seems to dawn on those young people who have actually tried to work with them...

...Or take the "Establishment," another shapeless set of villains, guilty because their notorious lack of "sensitiveness" permits them to "ignore" the needs of the poor...

...While the burden of the first school is how to accept its limitations without offending its own humanity—how to live acceptably with a sense of moral impotence?the second school must explain the nature of the evil that prevents the constructive use of social knowledge that is allegedly at our fingertips...

...but the assumption that "We" know how to cure social ills and refuse to put the knowledge to work involves the imputation of nothing less than evil...

...Surely it was sensible to believe that in order to maximize profits, bourgeois industrialists were imposing unspeakable conditions on wage slaves, keeping down their workers' pay simply to augment their own riches...

...I remain even less persuaded by this new Messianic argument than I was by the old-time religion of Earl Browder...

...This is not to say that certain segments of these underprivileged groups haven't got a tough battle ahead to get their reasonable share of the world's benefits...

...author, "The Living End: The City and Its Critics" I confess at the beginning that I am either the worst or the best reviewer for Edward C. Banfield's The Unheavenly City, an account of the present state of American urban life...

...The Power Structure's sin is that it supposedly —and in general—somehow "profits" from slums, pollution and "community powerlessness...

...Many who 30 years ago were insisting that the responsibility of free men was to come to the help of their menaced brothers abroad—in Spain, for example—now regard this same interventionism as a delusion of grandeur, a megalomania whose pathology is described by its unreality...

...Why are so many children of the middle- and upper-middle class apparently hell-bent for adopting the style and aims of the "present-oriented" lower class...

...But why does he have to put matters so sourly...

...Yet the ambiguous frame of mind in which I remain seems to me to underscore the position members of the "moral realist" school find themselves in with respect to the debate on urban problems...

...He suggests, further, that both their inflated hope and much of their disappointment may be traced to the same source: the exuberance of middle-class compassion, which fails to recognize that middle-class or working-class norms lie beyond the reach of those who are brought up in, and conditioned to, present-oriented low-class culture...

...We perceive, in the words of Lionel Trilling quoted by Banfield, the "dangers of the moral life itself," and welcome Banfield's intervention because there are so few of us left who agree that protestations of moral Tightness may often do more harm than good—both to the protester and his objectives...

...Why are schools in disorder...

...There are other interesting matters to consider...

...Income supplementation should be provided to working families or individuals as their needs outstrip earning capacities, but job qualifications should be reduced to a level the lower class can realistically meet...

...Thus the Reverend Paul Moore, the new Episcopal Bishop of New York, suggested to his former communicants in Washington that God is so outraged by the wickedness of the modern world, He has, in His mercy, picked the poor, the young and the black to set things right again...

...Still, society may be developing a new interest in dealing with problems, instead of merely crooning moral verities and banalities...

...In any event, help may be coming in ways unforeseen by Banfield, or even by this reviewer...

...Or perhaps the demand now voiced by so many to conserve the environment from accumulated wastes will result in a dispersal of the population density and restoration of the urban-rural balance, reducing the critical inner-city mass Banfield finds so dangerous...

...Banfield tries to diminish the crisis, explaining that today's needy are not really poor when judged by historical or foreign standards, but that they are paying the toll of dashed overexpectation...

...The second insists that there is a failure of will, not of technique: "We" do not solve the problems because "We" do not want to...

...Like any other reasonable man, I scurried to the footnotes of The Unheavenly City at the merest hint of the common ground between its author and me, even buying the special glasses needed to unscramble the mini-agate type, all in an effort to see how deep would be the homage paid me for my contribution to the field...

...Surely the "important danger" in restraining the lower class is that its members, too, are human beings...

...Banfield himself says, "A very important danger in such efforts to restrain the lower class is that this might be applied also to people who are not lower class, thus abridging the freedom of these others without justification...

...Professor—only please, stand over there, not quite so close...

...Have we come so far to remember so little...

...Work is good for everyone, but especially for those who cannot usefully continue in a school system they simply cannot apprehend...

...And when necessary, the body politic as a whole should be prepared to compensate its "lower class" citizens in kind rather than money...

...Moreover, lowering the legal working age would solve the high school dropout problem by permitting anyone who so desires to go to work...

...Take downward social mobility...

...What you can't achieve, you are acquitted from not having tried hard enough to achieve...

...The minimum wage law would have to be abolished, of course, to encourage the employment of the young...

...There are, I think, persuasive reasons of public policy why men should not allow themselves to make judgments on social class that amount to a choice between the elect and the damned: This, I always thought, was God's work...

...In short, we are informed that the lower class is with us permanently, and that we had better get used to living with it...

...Perhaps, Banfield says, the lower class could benefit from some form of semi-institutionalization—hopefully no more restrictive than the "training housing" in which Swedes who are incapable of initial adjustment to cooperative living are offered a start at apartment house life...

...How much less satisfactory than the "bourgeois industrialist" is the vague, instant sociology of the "Power Structure," a group of villains whose composition is so loose that every man can deny being a part of it...

...But those engaged in a fight for specific objectives—the hospital workers, for instance, or the grape-pickers—are clearly no longer part of the problem of social impotence...

...No one is impelled morally to explain away a lack of knowledge...

...I'm with you...

...The sentence sends the chills down one's back...

...Why is he at such pains to project himself as a mechanistic and unfeeling boor, delighting only in trampling our remaining sensibilities...

...The author addresses his book to the present urban crisis, and his very definition of it constitutes a large part of the message...

...What, if not current prosperity, will give the poorest in the city a feeling that they too are participating in the material benefits of industrialization and have the power that they, perhaps mistakenly, ascribe to all of their wealthier fellow citizens...

...Must I believe, along with our common antagonists, that he sounds insensitive because all moral realists are...

...And were he to disavow some of his own dourest prescriptions, he would still be held responsible for having thought of them in the first place...

...A social order which permits the a priori judgment of talents and potentials, and presumes that the members of a certain social class have only limited abilities, has expressed an arrogance even more destructive than the arrogance of limitless compassion...

...Concerning himself with the effects of the city on its inhabitants, he seees great tension between social classes, partly masquerading as a race conflict...

...Here lies the difference between the Banfield-Nathan Glazer-James O. Wilson school of thought on urban problems and, roughly speaking, the Robert Dentler-Donald Canty-Richard Cloward school...

...On the other hand, I am not convinced either that Banfield's rationalism exhausts the possibilities...