Intellectuals vs. reality

As sporadic riots spread across urban America again, inner city to inner city, an all-too familiar and all-too-futile pattern appeared in the country’s allegedly intellectual circles. We got detailed descriptions of conditions in America’s slums, which don’t seem to have changed all that much since Jacob Riis ( How the Other Half Lives) and Jane Addams were depicting the teeming, rat-infested tenements of another century.

Only now it is the unrelenting violence of the drug trade that fuels the violence and social dysfunction that characterizes our ghettoes. But once again nice, middle-class readers are supposed to be shocked, shocked at the scenes. As if it were all new. And to those unacquainted with American history, it probably is.

Once again there’s plenty of blame to be assigned, but this time it’s not focused. This is less diagnosis and prescription than free-floating resentment—at The System and its supposed policy of mass incarceration for young black males, a policy supposedly designed and enforced by the police and the establishment in general.

But none of these “intellectuals” bemoaning today’s conditions in the nation’s ghettoes suggests any real change in policy—which is the big difference between the old social reformers and the new muckrakers, who seem content with hatching conspiracy theories to explain the squalor in the inner cities instead of proposing ways to address it. Like the Settlement House movement of the late-19th Century.

To read this latest crop of intellectuals on the subject of today’s riots, you’d think no one in particular ever threw a brick through a store window, joined in looting the neighborhood’s only grocery store, tossed a firebomb, or took pot-shots at the cops and firefighters when they were dispatched to the riotous scene.

No, it all just happened. By itself. Like spontaneous combustion. For if we’re all responsible for the squalid conditions in our inner cities, then no one is. That’s always the problem with the idea of collective responsibility; it’s more collective than responsible.

What we have here is a scholarly, sociological, and intellectually fashionable abdication of responsibility by our Thought Leaders; the rest of us are just supposed to read their articles and . . . what? Go tut-tut?

We get statistical tables about inequality in America, social conditions in the inner cities, the rates of diabetes and obesity there, the prevalence of every kind of ill . . . . But what’s the point of all those studies if no one in particular is to blame, and no particular policy needs to change?

Should we all ignore the crime and disorder and just hope it goes away? That isn’t social analysis as much as an excuse for passivity in the face of social rot. Yet it’s the current fashion among the literary and scholarly set. I’ve got my own diagnosis of this condition: intellectual malpractice.

A writer named Alice Goffman is now all the rage for her description of life, if you could call it that, among the urban underclass. Her book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American

City is getting rave reviews in the New

Yorker and New York Review of Books; her admirers include leading lights like Christopher Jencks and the always fashionable Malcolm Gladwell, who promptly hopped aboard this popular train of thought, if you could call it thought.

Bringing up the rear, as usual, came

the kind of politicians who never let a trend pass without echoing it. Like the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who announced last December that he worries “every night” about the dangers his biracial son faces from “officers who are paid to protect him.” That would have been a few weeks before two of those officers were gunned down in Brooklyn by some nutcase who took the mayor’s anti-police rhetoric all too seriously.

Let it be noted that even Alice Goffman had to admit that despite our society’s “policy” of imprisoning the mass of young black males, there are honest, law-abiding residents of our inner cities who stay out of trouble, live well-ordered lives, hold down jobs and generally defy her picture of social breakdown everywhere in America’s poorest, most desperate neighborhoods:

“If they lose their jobs,” she writes, “they don’t start dealing drugs; they rely on friends and family until they find another position. When they break traffic laws, they pay off their fines and

recover their driving licenses before they start driving again. Their unassuming rejection of criminality comes as an enormous relief . . . .”

But instead of holding up these self-respecting people in the ghetto as examples, and asking how to promote and encourage their selfdiscipline and self-reliance, she only dismisses them as exceptions to her dismal rule.

She calls them the clean people, and grudgingly admits they’re worth “a few pages” of her book. But that’s it. She doesn’t seem much interested in their stories. They offer hope, and her stock in

trade is hopelessness. That way lies only the next wave of riots that is sure to erupt if the rest of us accept Alice Goffman’s thesis that nothing and nobody is really responsible for changing anything in our slums. We’re just supposed to join in applauding her sensitivity for pointing out the despair she details.

No, thank you, I’ll pass. I vote for hope, for action, for individual responsibility, and, yes, for intellectual responsibility.