Are Disorder And Freedom Two Sides Of The Same Coin?

Thoughts and a guest contribution on the question of America's poor public spaces

Chris Arnade wrote this piece, on a point he’s fleshed out over the years, on America’s seemingly uniquely poor ability to design and maintain pleasant public spaces and amenities:

I agree, mostly, with this. I think “disorder” is a real thing, even when it doesn’t rise to the level of criminality. I’ve made this point variously here, and here, for example. I don’t think people who are proud of their inability to be fazed by odd, disruptive, or potentially threatening public behavior are showing anything except their own privilege. If children, or single women, or elderly people, or disabled people, can’t feel safe out in public, we have a problem.

Yes, this principle also applies to homeless people, some of whom are the source of this public disorder, but we should help them, whatever that entails, not treat them as some abstraction or some means to strengthen out own hard-heartedness, which is what “I don’t care about public disorder!” often simply boils down to, in my opinion.

I also just wrote a piece, yesterday, on some of the thoughts that go on in my head when I’m in a public (or semi-public) place, and how I realize I have, from my fairly sheltered suburban childhood, a sort of expectation of zero friction or discomfort, and how little it takes to perk up my “hmm, could this be a bad situation?” antennas.

All of this is to introduce a bit of a counterpoint, which is that I also don’t think public places should be blandly conformist. Not that Arnade is really saying this, but it’s all part of the conversation over public order versus pushing the envelope versus behaving in a straightforwardly antisocial manner.

Arnade writes, after describing some disruptive and apparently homeless, drug addicted, and/or mentally riders on an American subway train, which he does not find to be uncommon:

We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.

I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.

It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can’t happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

So I basically agree with him, and I’ve written as much myself: that urbanism requires a higher baseline of public order than often obtains in America.

All of that said, I replied to Arnade’s piece:

There is a lot to this, and I often say so myself, but I think it’s more than toleration of disorder. When we visited Japan, I liked how orderly and polite everything was, but it also felt a bit…oppressive. There really is a part of the American in me that would rather have a disorderly public sphere than have my right to behave disruptively constrained.

Now, I don’t behave disruptively, I just kind of find it emotionally claustrophobic to be somewhere where I can’t if I wanted to. I wonder how many other Americans feel a touch of that?

What I’m getting at here is that I think our problem with cities/public spaces/etc. is deeper than just toleration of overt disorder, or high crime. And I don’t think it boils down to “the left is too soft on crime or permissive of antisocial behavior.” I think there’s a thread of American folk-libertarianism—the vague don’t tell me what to do sentiment that pervades so many aspects of American life—that basically values the right to be a little bit rude or disruptive in public over the right to exist completely comfortable in said space.

As I noted in my reply to Arnade’s piece, I found the spotless, perfectly quiet trains in Japan to be almost a little bit unnerving. I would, and I suppose this is the point, feel uncomfortable doing something loud or slightly rude on one of those trains. And on some level, I would rather permit that kind of behavior in other people in order to reserve my own right to engage in it. I think getting a bit loud and boisterous and carried away, or sneaking a snack on a train, or whatever, are all normal things you occasionally do when you’re out and about.

And I think I prefer the American you-do-you approach, where you feel like nobody’s really watching or keeping tabs, over the conformist approach of a place like Japan. (You can’t even take photographs in stores; everything feels very ritualized and rule-bound, and I chafe against that more than I appreciate the calm and order it brings.)

In other words, the whole sort of “cities are un-American!” canard contains a little grain of truth, which is that America has a deeply individualist culture, and that this kind of individualism really is incompatible with density and living in close proximity with a lot of people all the time. I am not endorsing hyper-individualism. There’s a happy medium between public spaces becoming de facto homeless shelters, and not being able to do anything a little out of bounds ever, and I think we clearly take it too far in one direction.

I also want to publish these extended remarks from fellow Substacker NickS (WA), with whom I had a brief exchange about this, whose piece follows:

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The conversation about public disorder reminded me of something I’ve been mulling over for a while.

I was a teenager in the early 90s, and I was a weird, geeky kid. There was a noticeable amount of social pressure to conform. I was aware that being visibly weird meant that you would somewhat regularly have interactions in which people were clearly put-off by that. For example, neither I nor anyone in my group of friends dyed our hair. I had a cousin who dyed her hair at one point and I remember thinking that was clearly pushing the envelope a bit.

I never felt worried that I was going to get beaten up, but my impression is that for people 5-10 years older than me, that was a real risk. In the decades since then, there’s been a welcome expansion of what is considered appropriate or allowable in normal society (tattoos¹, piercings, weird T-shirts, etc . . .).

As part of that process, however, I have the sense that there’s a shift towards the message, “If you see someone who strikes you as ‘off’ you are discouraged from directly engaging, or expressing disapproval, instead you should mention any concerns to someone in an official position and they can decide how to respond.” That norm is connected to the expansion in socially allowable behavior, but I worry that it also means that there’s no easily accessible social standard for how to respond to someone who is being a nuisance.

Ideally what I would like is a society in which there’s both wide bounds of personally acceptable behavior, and clear boundaries around disruptive or harmful behavior. As I joked to Addison, the other night someone was driving through downtown on a loud motorcycle and it sounded like they were going around the block in a circle, and I really wished that I could have thrown a tomato at them. Obviously I wouldn’t do that—I’m generally averse to confrontation—but it made me think that there is a tension in trying to figure out what are the right ways for people to act on and enforce standards of social behavior.

I don’t want to go back to my experience in the 90s, but I’m not sure the current standards are the best solution either.

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Nick adds a key point, which is not just which behaviors are commonly allowed or tolerated, but what norms or expectations we have around calling out, or not calling out, such behavior. There is a lot to think about here.

What do you think? What do you the right balance is here, and what do you think is the root cause of America’s difficulty in making great public spaces? Leave a comment!

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Related Reading:

The Only Thing Worse Than Disorder

Don’t Do This In Remembrance Of Us

Kids And The City

Crime and Housing

Acid and Alkaline

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1. Japan is still extremely anti-tattoo, to the point that most hot springs, which are commonly used in Japan, ban visible tattoos (small ones can be covered up with a temporary sticker). Supposedly this is because tattoos are associated with the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, but mostly nowadays this probably comes down to a generational grudge.