In June, 2014, the “Capital Civilization Office” in the
Chinese Government began a half-year campaign to “encourage Beijing’s 20
million residents to behave better.”[1]
Targets include “people who are noisy, smoke in public, curse at sports events,
fail to line up for buses, run red lights, drink while they drive, and drive
aggressively.” It seems to me this list could equally apply to Miami, and, at
least in terms of driving, to the entire Northeast coastline of the United
States. Perhaps urban modernity is to blame, or maybe it is simply the old truism pertaining to the rise and fall of great empires, and thus to cities as well. Chinese history is no stranger to this cycle in the form of a succession of dynasties. Perhaps we would be wise to view the modern city in such terms too.
The Chinese civilization office informed Beijing residents that they are to “dress properly, show grace in
speech and manner and say ‘hello,’ ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ more often.” Lest
this list conger up images of George Orwell’s “Big Brother” figure in the book,
1984, the gargantuan task can be
regarded as futile at best. Although Chinese officials were set to utilize “guidance,
education and relevant laws and regulations,” including fines, some of the unseemly
conduct was at the time not against the law. The underlying problem may be
whether arresting cultural decadence is even possible when it has come to
characterize the culture in a particular geographical area.
Visiting Beijing a number of years ago, I was immediately
struck by the lack of lines, or queues, in public places. It was as if the
phenomenon of waiting one’s turn had been lost in a society whose culture
stretched back thousands of years. Once the Confucian ethic has been lost, how
does a society regain it? A government cannot very easily legislate “building
civilization,” though Jan Longbin, deputy director of the Capital Civilization
Office cites “immense results” from the Olympic manners campaign six years
earlier. “Building civilization is not something that can be done in a single
day,” he admits. This may be a tremendous understatement, owing to the
self-reinforcing mechanism that is a part of human culture.
Decadence in a society, which is to say, among people who
live in the same geographical area, may have a downward, intensifying dynamic
that makes any reversal especially arduous. Once a particular assumption, such
as that it is ok to ignore the people in line and go directly to the front,
reaches a critical mass in terms of the proportion of people having adopted it,
they proceed with added confidence in doing so. This second assumptions
operates as a kind of protective bubble by giving the individuals the mistaken
sense that the primary assumption cannot be wrong. Efforts to force those
people to wait in line must contend with this “gravity,” such that when the
enforcement ends the original rudeness is likely to re-emerge virtually
unscathed.
I have witnessed this descending cycle of cultural decadence
through visits to my hometown in Illinois. In spite of the city having been hit
hard by the loss of machine-tool plants in the early 1980s and the subsequent
increase in crime as well as unemployment, most new comers and visitors such as
myself cite the predominate attitude of a high proportion of the local
inhabitants are particularly problematic. The sordid demeanor, based on a lack
of education—the city being among the least educated in the U.S.—can be
characterized as ignorance that cannot be wrong, backed up by whatever
authority it thinks it has.
Ironically, the decadence manifests particularly in
the low-level office workers and in the service sectors. Bus drivers, for
example, are said to be particularly boorish and even aggressive, and office
workers tend to be rigidly obsessed with their tiny policies at the utter detriment
of common sense, not to mention plain decency and workability. Neither
unemployment nor crime can be blamed for the pretention; rather, the arrogance
of ignorance, operating as a sort of self-entitlement as if on stilts during a
flood rather than rightfully submerged, seems to be in play as the particularly
intractable pathology plaguing the rust-belt city.
Given the rigid defense
mechanisms protecting the dysfunctional mentality that is shared by many there,
any civic effort to render the city more livable would almost certainly be
fraught with difficulty, if not founder at the outset. As it is, the healthy
people—those who recognize the banality so widespread—tend to leave town, if
they can, and this self-selection out intensifies the proportion of sickness in
the town, which of course pushes any fix even further away. The decadence, or
garden-variety crassness, is as though predestined to pursue its own path until
the black hole can be distended, or bloated, any further.
In short, once a squalid mentality, or set of assumptions
regarding interpersonal and organizational behavior, sets in in a particular
geographical area, the decadence is likely to continue downward until it hits
rock-bottom rather than be staved off by government intervention. The tools
available to government are no match for the self-reinforcing defense
mechanisms of a dysfunctional culture.
For example, even though my banal hometown consistently ranks near the bottom of livable cities in the U.S, local
residents in the thick of the pathology (i.e., in utter denial) try to claim that every city has the mentality, which in terms of the rankings is a mathematical impossibility. The
denial feeds the arrogance, and the pathogens go on in their ways with a misplaced confidence rather like bloated fish walking on
stilts during a flood. When rudeness, or even meanness, as new-comers tend to characterize it, is backed up by the sheer presumptuousness of ignorance that cannot be wrong, a
hard shell is formed that may succumb only when the rotten core as reached it,
rather than from external efforts at reform.
However, it does seem theoretically possible that an influx of enough healthy souls can put the indigenous weakness on the defensive, essentially knocking it off its perch in the work-places and in public spaces. In a city of 20 million, such as Beijing, such an intervention would be too huge to be at all realistic; and so it is that as is the case for any great civilization, so too modern cities are subject to the rise and fall of being human, all too human after all.
[1] For
this quote and all others in this essay: Calum MacLeod, “Be More Polite,
Beijing Residents Told,” USA Today,
June 11, 2014.
