Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

I wanted to say something about Jane Jacobs, one of my favorite thinkers and writers, who died on 25 April just nine days before her 90th birthday. Although American-born, she moved to Toronto in 1969 and remained there until her death.

The first I heard of her was in 1986, while was working as a user test analyst at ICBC. I had coffee one day with a coworker named John, a quiet brown-eyed guy, who, it turned out, had a degree in economics. We got talking about economic issues and he mentioned Jane Jacobs.

"She's really good," he said. "Cities and the Wealth of Nations. You should read that."

I picked up a copy of the Vintage paperback in due course and read it. I loved it. I admired everything about it: the simple, practical, and persuasive way she developed her points; her lack of attachment to any theoretical school or point of view; her fearlessness in junking whole continents of sacred-cow economic theory; her passionate interest in the subject she was writing about, in this case, the economies of cities and how these are the real generators of the purely artificial construct we call national economies; her admiration for human ingenuity; her brevity; and her exemplary writing style. She was everything I think a writer of nonfiction should be.

In chapter 1 of that book, "Fool's Paradise", 25 pages long, she demolishes all of economic theory, at least in its efforts to explain the twin phenomena of inflation and unemployment. In simple, insightful, nonrancorous prose she demonstrates the embarrassing failure of the most revered economists--from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman--to account for these unwanted conditions, especially when, as in the 1970s, they happen simultaneously (I remember terms like "stagflation" and "slumpcession" being coined during the Ford administration to describe the economic malaise gripping the U.S. at that time).

Having demolished the previous explanations for inflation and unemployment, she goes on to propose one of her own. The pith of it, as I recall, is that, first, there is no such thing as a "national economy". The U.S. economy, for example, is actually an agglomeration of many different economies, and different parts of the country are in vastly different economic condition, and earn their living in vastly different ways. The real, organic generator of human wealth is the city, and vital cities undergo bursts of wealth-generation through one basic process: the replacement of imports. This means that a city--not a country--stops importing certain goods and services, and replaces these with things that are made (or done) locally. Money that formerly left the city to buy imports now stays within it, creating jobs, buildings, and new businesses--wealth.

Classical economic theory, which holds that inflation and unemployment are reciprocal, that if one is high the other must be low, is wrong. Jacobs held that the two of them have always in fact appeared together, and they are symptoms of economic decline. I recall she gives the example of Ethiopia: a country that, in the centuries before Christ, had been a vital, wealthy empire. Now (or anyway in the 1980s when she wrote the book), Ethiopia is a poor country. Aside from subsistence agriculture, there is very little work there (high unemployment); and even though prices for most things are very low, they have gradually slipped out of reach of most of the population (high inflation).

I became a kind of Jacobsian. I read all of her other books--each one is excellent. If you start by reading the first, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, you can follow the progress of her thinking from book to book: how her interests gradually spread from the question of how and why slums appeared in American cities to, finally, how the world economy functions with respect to the environment.

She was an example of a brilliant and nonacademic thinker. She held no teaching post and had no university degree. To me, fussy, picky, and critical as I am, she is one of the very few writers whose work, in its entirety, I truly admire.

I decided to mark her death today by buying (online at Abebooks.com) her last book, Dark Age Ahead.

evil: an introduction

Reading period last night: Shantaram, and a book that arrived in the mail the day before yesterday, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy F. Baumeister. Mmm--who wouldn't want to get inside that?

Evil is important to my story. It's not particularly a story of good vs. evil, as in a crime melodrama, but rather the issue of evil, its source and its continuing appearance in the world despite ostensible divine rulership, is central to religion in general and to the evolution of Judaism in this period in particular. Increasingly, scholars of that period are recognizing that there were two main streams of Judaism: the Mosaic stream, based on the laws of Moses and the Torah he revealed to the Israelites; and the Enochic stream, based on the revealed teachings of the patriarch Enoch, who was taken to heaven and given instruction and heavenly tablets directly by angels. Enoch never died; he was simply taken up to heaven while still alive. The Mosaic stream eventually became rabbinic Judaism and the foundation of the religion as it exists today. The Enochic stream was the source of the Essenes and other Jewish groups who were less connected with Mosaic Judaism.

Enoch taught that evil entered the world by way of angels who rebelled against God. In particular, a certain group of angels became infatuated with human women, and mated with them to produce giant offspring who in turn caused all kinds of trouble. These rebellious angels taught humans various things that helped perpetuate evil (as they saw it) in the world, in particular weapons for war and adornments for women to make them irresistible to men, thus promoting fornication and sex in general. In the process, the whole cosmic order as established by God was contaminated, and could not be cleansed again until the end of time, when God would cause evil and its agents to be destroyed so that the original paradise could be restored. The rebel angels became demons, and their leader would become the figure we know as Satan.

In contrast, the Mosaic stream did not mention a rebellion by angels, and for the most part did not emphasize Satan or his role in world history. In the garden of Eden the first humans were tempted to disobey God, setting a precedent for humanity: people would continually disobey God and suffer the consequences. In this context evil is not so much an active enemy of God and the good, but the giving in of individuals to the temptation to sin.

So what is evil? I wanted to find out more, so I bought Baumeister's book, and one or two others (not here yet). He is setting out to explain evil from a psychosocial perspective, using factual data (that is, only real-world examples, not fictitious ones that are often used to illustrate evil and its operation). One of his first points is that actual evil--the way it actually happens in real life, and the attitudes of its perpetrators--is strikingly different from evil as it is portrayed in stories. Far from being cruel, sadistic types who take pleasure in hurting, most evildoers are bland functionaries, people who lack strong emotions about what they do and generally have a workaday attitude. Perpetrators of large-scale evil find themselves fussing with details of how to get more bodies crammed into ovens or how to optimize the use of ammunition for mass shootings.

All very interesting. Baumeister makes the point that evil is largely in the eye of the beholder, particularly in the eye of the victim, since perpetrators never see their own actions as evil. Personally, I find this hard to accept. While it's true that perpetrators may not see their own actions as evil, this doesn't make evil a subjective thing. Surely the Golden Rule is the touchstone for evil: how would I like this to be done to me? What if you were the torturer and I were the one strapped to this rack?

This topic, again, is vast. Think I'll go read some more on it.

memes, genes, and joy

Yesterday I happened to look in on The Lost Fort, a blog by Gabriele Campbell, a German writer of historical fiction in English, who has been kind enough to link to this blog in her list of blogs worth visiting. I was surprised to see my name in a list with four others that Gabriele was assigning a task: to participate in a "meme" called The Search for Joy, in which a blogger is asked to search his own blog for the word joy, link to the associated post, and write a bit to expand on the experience of joy mentioned.

Gabriele, I'll accommodate you. But a couple of thoughts have arisen for me in the process.

First, I had not heard of the word meme in the context of blogging. I gather that these memes are simple instructions or tasks that bloggers send to selected other bloggers to execute and pass on, rather like a chain letter. A chain letter, when it contains a financial component ("send $1 to each of the people on this list, then add your own name to the bottom..."), is known as a Ponzi scheme, a swindle in which early entrants are paid by later ones, the last entrants being only payers and never payees. In developing countries, whole banking systems have been set up as Ponzi schemes. Mathematically, every Ponzi scheme must collapse sooner or later. A "successful" one is one in which its initiators get rich--and out of the country--before that happens.

In chain letters I've more often seen "luck" as the thing being multiplied, rather than cash. I have no idea how that's supposed to work. In practice, the further such a scheme goes the more resources it ties up, both with snail mail, where thousands and then millions of "good luck" letters are being sent, and with e-mail, where a "successful" chain letter can clog the whole Internet.

The other thought had to do with the word meme itself. I recognized it from where I first learned it, reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins sometime in the 1980s. Dawkins was and is famous as a fierce proponent of rigorous Darwinism (a recent Discover magazine feature called him "Darwin's Rottweiler"). His central thesis in The Selfish Gene was that the true actor of natural selection is not the individual organism but the individual gene--a cohesive biological unit carrying a single package of hereditary traits. Organisms--like you and me--exist for the purpose of transmitting genes. All of our other activities--eating, finding shelter, fighting predators, shaking off disease--serve purely to get us to the point where we can transmit our genes. According to this view, in a fundamental sense, our bodies and minds are simply delivery systems for genes; we are a complex mass of molecules purpose-built to propagate a set of simpler molecules. The concept of meme he threw out at the end of the book as a kind of image to suggest how knowledge and ideas propagate. These too would have "survival value" and generate behaviors and structures to ensure their propagation. The theory of evolution itself would presumably be such a meme.

At least, that's my memory of it. But even when I read The Selfish Gene I found Dawkins too authoritarian, too fanatical. He seems to be more about browbeating opponents into silence and submission than about winning hearts and minds. The concept of the meme I took to be more of a poetic idea than a scientific one. I didn't get the feeling he was seriously proposing it as a scientific concept on a footing with that of the gene.

Nonetheless, meme seems to have taken off in pop culture. It means, I suppose, something like "an idea with survival value", but it appears to have morphed, in the blogosphere anyway, into something akin to a virus--a thought or idea you can't get rid of, even if you want to. Something infectious and annoyingly persistent. A thing that spreads, Ponzi-style, from blog to blog until the next one comes along.

So here we are: a blog-meme.

I searched my whole blog for the word joy. It crops up almost exclusively in variants of the word enjoy, which, I found out, I use a lot. It's closely related to joy, of course. Sense 2 in my Webster's says, simply, "to take pleasure or satisfaction in", which is the sense in which I use it. So I scanned back, looking at each instance for a use that most reflected what is being sought in the meme: a genuine expression of joy in one's life. I decided to use this instance in the post titled writer: know thy world. It crops up thus:

I had lunch at the local Japanese restaurant Honjin with Greg, a fellow fiction-writer and former coworker at ICBC (former because I no longer work there; he still does). It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. I really enjoyed it; we talked about the projects we each currently have on the go.

There: "I really enjoyed it". In the Buddhist training I received, much of the spiritual practice was devoted to being aware of the present moment, whatever that moment is. Ordinarily our minds leap forward and back, going everywhere but the present moment. When we're having fun, however, or experiencing true joy, we're naturally in the present moment. We're paying attention to what's going on right now, and happily so. This was the quality of the lunch with my friend Greg. I am a writer, but a solitary one: I don't usually fraternize with other writers. But as a result I often have no real opportunity to talk about writing with someone who understands. Greg is an exception: he is a writer, and more than willing to talk (or listen to me talk!) about writing. There is no time when you're absorbed in the present, so before we knew it, it was time to pay the tab and part ways. So that sense of enjoyment of a good meal, companionship, and a brief window of time in which we could commune about shared experience and interest, were certainly an experience of joy as meant by this meme.

I hope that satisfies Gabriele. I understand her mother died recently, so she is looking perhaps for reminders of the good things in life. This was one of mine.