The First Derivatives of Jane Jacobs

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What do these people have in common: a physicist with an interest in anatomy, a pair of libertarian metrophiles, a building architect who inspired a software movement, and a sculptor and writer whose critical model centres around Star Wars?

Pursuing a topic as a layman has its own pleasures. One, fairly widely commented on, is the pleasure of wandering at whim, without a set course or destination. Another, perhaps less noted, or perhaps part of all study, is that you can discover great thinkers by accident, just because everyone you read seems to be talking about them. It is like walking through a dense forest and suddenly realising the rises you have been skirting around are actually the foothills of some great mountain, obscured by the foilage.

I found such a thinker recently, the American writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs. A post by Cam on the physicist above, Geoffrey West, who also modelled metropolitan growth, let the pieces fall into place. (It’s also a great NYT article. This seems to be the key city paper.)

Chris Alexander – the architect – has been an interest for a while, and though he doesn’t reference Jacobs in A Pattern Language, their names now get mentioned together in the same breath. They form part of a humane, localist school of design, which celebrates the dynamism of the city. She was explicitly referenced in Virginia Postrel’s The Future And Its Enemies, which I read some years ago now, without getting that particular hint. The chirpy economic libertarian thread then takes us to Market Urbanism, and the design thread takes us to the wonderful (and anti-corporate) Star Wars Modern.

If you haven’t so far had the pleasure, this Reason interview gives a decent introduction, and the wiki article isn’t bad either.

Interviewer: What should a city be like?
Jane Jacobs: It should be like itself. Every city has differences, from its history, from its site, and so on. These are important. One of the most dismal things is when you go to a city and it’s like 12 others you’ve seen. That’s not interesting, and it’s not really truthful.

I haven’t read any of her books yet. Time to go climb the mountain.

2010: A Zed Odyssey

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Community radio station and Brisbane institution 4ZZZ celebrates thirty-five years of existence this year. To celebrate, or maybe just for the heck of it, they painted their offices with a three storey high mural. In keeping with the general idealism and radicalism that emanates from the place, the 4ZZZ offices are also the former HQ of the Australian Communist Party.

4ZZZ was originally a student station, started at UQ under a liberalization made possible by the Whitlam government (though National Peter Nixon amusingly ended up signing the paper). It moved to the current office in the valley after a formative struggle which has an almost mythological status. A change of power at the UQ student union put the Young Nationals in power. Under president Victoria Brazil, they cut costs, including kicking 4ZZZ off campus. The National Party had been in power in the state of Queensland for several decades straight, leaning well over the line towards a thuggish police state at the end, rigging the electoral system and intertwined with corrupt police. Though in retrospect it seems obvious the Nationals were on their last legs, at the time occupying the radio station in protest must have seemed proportional resistance to a semi-fascist regime disturbingly willing to use illegal or paramilitary force. By John Birmingham’s 90’s account in the UQ student newspaper, Semper – he rather gleefully described punching Young Nationals in the face – the station occupation wasn’t exactly a model of Gandhian non-violence either. (Semper archives are still dead-tree based, unfortunately.)

It may appall every other subscriber, but I think kicking 4ZZZ out of the uni has been good for it. Certainly it was a Thatcherite kill-or-cure solution, and probably intended with more kill than cure. The content is still flavoured by a student aesthetic. The title of this post comes from the anniversary booklet of the same name, and it’s very reminiscent of Semper, the UQ paper. It’s not a bad paper, but the programming itself looks beyond the somewhat self-absorbed venue of the campus. The result of eviction, even if unintentional, was creating an independent pillar of civic society, that stood on its own terms, not beholden to any parent organisation. You could call it an institutional expression of anarcho-syndicalism at the centre of a modern corporate city, or you could just say it’s like the local cricket team. Not too large. Fit to purpose.

4ZZZ programming mostly displays the glorious, fractious diversity of the left, but it’s also a distinctly local voice. It doesn’t have playlists, and though there is a kind of consensus 4ZZZ reality, its shows become windows into the Brisbane community, and communities within that community, in a way other stations cannot, simply because of their central corporate or national organisation. Triple J, for instance, the national youth broadcaster, and not a bad one, if you’re going to have such a thing, simply can’t give as many local bands a break as ZZZ, because of its size. And because of its no playlist policy, you get a delirious skittering around during the week, from Nothing But The Blues, to Zed Games, to the New Zealand Show, to Dykes on Mykes. It has an amateurish charm. It resists a mere demographic averaging in a way that anticipated the internet, and is as old as free speech and songs without words. It’s a week late, but happy birthday.

Sagacity and the Sympathetic Observer

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In A Theory of Justice, Rawls spends considerable effort drawing out a thread in utilitarian thought on the importance of sympathy, and of a sympathetic observer. He does this for a number of reasons. Utilitarianism advocates a nice empirical-sounding position, that of either the greatest good for the greatest number, or the greatest aggregate good. But that position depends on a number of far from empirical concepts, like happiness, desire, rightness and the good. (There have been recent attempts by psychologists to measure these, but let’s put that aside for now. One always imagines laboratories full of stand up comics, with technicians dutifully noting down their impact in milli-guffaws.)

I am perhaps unusual in being a skeptic about strict definitions of such things, but even for people like myself, the utilitarians are a smart bunch, and have another mechanism to cover these and to add weight in considering society as a whole. This is the sympathetic observer, used by Adam Smith, among others. The observer lets you get away with the wooliness of your definition of the good, with a trick used by a US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when defining porn: I know it when I see it. Or in the case of the utilitarians, I know it when my sympathetic mate, who is however unmoved by the passion of the moment, sees it. Plus, since he is observant (and therefore at a remove from any one individual), but still sympathetic, he cares for society as a whole. How could he not want the greatest good for the greatest number?

Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded. […] The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others.
[…]
In solitude, we are apt to feel too strongly whatever relates to ourselves: we are apt to overrate the good offices we may have done, and the injuries we may have suffered: we are apt to be too much elated by our own good and too much dejected by our own bad fortune. The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger to a still better temper. The man within the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty by the presence of the real spectator: and it is always from that spectator, from whom we can expect the least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn the most complete lesson of self command.

— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

There is an interesting stoic flavour when Smith talks of sympathy.

The method has a humanism to it, and a long history not often noted in the Western tradition. It can be found in the book named for Mozi (墨子), written during the Warring States period, 2500 years earlier. (I haven’t done a full lit review, but to pick a few arbitrary but widely used reference points and introductions, there’s no mention of it in Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, Singer’s Ethics reader, or Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Mostly such things get thrown in the comparative scraps bucket.)

Mozi only has one book, a kind of self-titled debut album, and some of the material was probably written by a later generation of his followers (Mohists, 墨家). AC Graham translates some of the relevant sections of Mozi in Disputers of the Tao (p145 Chap II.2 From Mo-tzu to Later Mohism):

Expounding the Canons 2. “Everything which the sage desires or dislikes beforehand on behalf of men, men learn from him as necessary through its essentials; but in the case of desires and dislikes born from the conditions they encounter, men do not learn them from him as necessary through their essentials … Yesterday’s thinking is not today’s thinking, yesterday’s concern for man is not today’s concern for man … Yesterday’s wall to the wits is not today’s wall to the wits.
[…]
A7 (Canon) “Benevolence” is concern for units.
A8 (Canon) To do “right” is to benefit.
[…]
A35 “Achievement” is benefiting the people.

Graham comments on the parallels:

Here then the old Mohist utilitarianism is developed as a highly refined system. By a series of interlocking definitions it is established a priori that the benevolent and the right are what will be desired on behalf of mankind by the sage, who consistentely weighs benefits and harms on the principle of preferring the total to the unit. This system does not seem to be vulnerable, as I at one time assumed, to a charge commonly made against Western Utilitarianism, that it confuses fact and value by starting from what men in fact desire. It elucidates what the sage, the man who knows most, desires on behalf of mankind; it has behind it what we have identified as a general assumption of Chinese philosophy, that desires change spontaneously with increasing knowledge and that ‘Know!’ is the supreme imperative.

Graham doesn’t really have room here to draw a parallel with Adam Smith and the sympathetic observer specifically, or perhaps he was just busy learning a really bodacious skateboarding move. Can we rebut this critique of Western Utilitarianism with the same technique? The sage (圣人) and the sympathetic observer are awfully similar.

Rawls is also no stranger to complex analytic definitions of major everyday concepts, and he doesn’t attack the sympathetic observer on those grounds. He points out that the utilitarians need the observer so badly because it is often against an individual’s interest to follow the greater good when using a utilitarian formula (ie maximised average or aggregate good). Why would a rational individual consent to that, when there is such a nasty downside? This is even before taking into account the nastiest counter-examples for those utility functions, like a proportionally tiny slave underclass that is nevertheless horribly mistreated. JS Mill’s tack was to argue that you could only get to the greatest good for the greatest number through liberalism. Which appeals to me, but is also a bit convenient.

Rawls’ response is another kind of observer, his innovations of the initial position and the veil of ignorance. In the initial position, people decide what sort of society they should live in without knowing their position in it (the veil of ignorance). We choose for society by considering ourselves as a self-interested person in it. We observe ourselves and the society we live in from a distance that allows us to be just.

Darth Zoidberg

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A lifetime of procrastination, miserliness and laziness has given me a slightly different perspective on games than most, or at least, than the mainstream of visible gamer culture. Specifically, I prefer to buy acclaimed games years after release and play them slowly over a relatively long period of time. Though new graphics can be pretty, they have never really been my priority. This means you can attack a classic game much the way you attack a classic novel, and with the same allowances for period or cultural quirks.

Steam is as good an enabler of this approach as it is of the obsessive-compulsive hunt for newness in my serious gamer friends. The $2.50 I recently spent on Knights of the Old Republic (KoToR) is both fantastic value for a game of this size and quality, and some of the easiest money LucasArts and Bioware have ever made. The gameplay is still great, and I was impressed by the writing, which included one of the few genuine twists I’ve ever seen in a game.

In the recent book Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin analyses KoToR in terms of quest flags and dialogue trees, which do see heavy use. Wardrop-Fruin sees a dilemma between the consistency enforced by a linear narrative, and the better exploitation of an interactive medium, but greater chance for narrative bugs, in more open ended approaches. KoToR is far from a complete sandbox, and has a very strong narrative, so is probably more vulnerable to these sorts of narrative bugs. I saw a few, but it seems to have been less disruptive to my play experience than for Noah. I remember one Wookie side-quest where I hit the conclusion without one of the middle steps, and this meant the quest was never officially finished on the quest list, even though the subplot was resolved.

The profusion of subplots and quests linked to new characters and party members, backed by a lot of voice acting, gives the game a real richness, though it can also make you feel a bit like an intergalactic Jedi therapist. Indeed, at one point you do have the chance to explore a fellow Jedi’s relationship with her mother. It’s that sort of game, but that’s arguably not out of character for the Star Wars setting. As it happens, I found the Sandral-Matale subplot described in the article memorable for a different reason – the pretty clear nod to Romeo and Juliet had kicked off a cheesy loop of tunes from West Side Story in my head. When the guards from the two sides faced off at the climax, I was sure a dance fight was imminent. It’s possible I just overlooked the glitch because I was busy giggling.

Moments of critical or joking distance were very much the exception, though; mostly I played the game engaged and with disbelief suspended. It seems to me that technical constraints like quest flags and dialogue trees simply become formal constraints of the medium. In an engaging game, these elements are backgrounded or ignored by the player. It becomes as the stage in theatre or the frame in painting. We aren’t much distracted by the logistics of fitting the castle of Elsinore on stage when we watch Hamlet; at least, not if the production is any good.

For me, the greatest grating against verisimiliute in KoToR happened in the final battles. (It is so much a trope of the RPG genre that this barely counts as a spoiler.) The pattern of gameplay up to that point meant I had selected certain skills, in a certain distribution across characters, that were pretty poorly suited to those late fights. After tedious repetition, the only successful method seemed to be continuously running away while throwing my lightsaber from a distance. As the room was circular, this was slowly repeatable until the fight was won.

I think of this as the The Ancient Art of War effect. One of the first great wargames, the 1984 The Ancient Art of War was a beautifully crafted game based on Sun Tzu’s famous treatise from the Spring and Autumn Period. Indeed, if you don’t mind two colour graphics, it’s still very playable, an RTS fifteen years early, and without all the build queue management. It had one tiny flaw – if you had a unit entirely made of archers, you could in tactical mode let loose a volley of arrows and immediately retreat. Though the feigned retreat is a legitimate tactic greatly favoured by the Mongols, within the game, this would quickly exhaust your troops, but it was perfectly possible to retreat haggardly most of the way across the map. By this point the opposing army had usually been cut to pieces without being able to get a hit in.

Because the tactic is both the most efficient within the mechanics of the game, and very silly in analogous circumstances, it undermines suspension of disbelief rather brutally. Now, the game wasn’t ruined for me – I still think it’s marvellous. But I find distorted game tests of this nature far more distracting than the occassional narrative bug. They turn characters of flesh and bone into puppets on an empty stage.

The Psychopathology of the Welfare State

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My inner sociologist was prodded awake by an artful question and discussion at erudite horror blog And Now The Screaming Starts:

Would Obama style health care reform have prevented the creation of Jigsaw, the conceptual franchise-like serial-killer meme embraced by the various murderers of the film series?

Sadly, I am little qualified to directly answer such a question, possessing neither the critical nor the intestinal fortitude to endure a single Saw movie, let alone five. I let brave voyagers like CRwM, proprietor of ANTSS, run reconnaissance for these inky corners of our shared popular reality. Though the joy of the original article is of course its in-depth analysis of conjoined trivialities, I instead wondered to what degree social institutions determined serial killer types.

Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that technical changes to medical coverage laws could point fictional villain John Kramer down another twisted path. And social institutions certainly influence the types of serial killers to emerge – from opportunity if nothing else. For instance, geographical, infrastructural and social factors made an Ivan Milat easier to emerge in Australia. Specifically, long, empty highways next to forest, between relatively distant population centres gave a certain pattern of opportunities. Similarly, figures like Ed Gein, hunter and babysitter, seem intertwined in the details of small-town American life.

If we take serial killers as a horrible symptom of humanity, or at least that they emerge in all industrial societies, presumably an Obamacare America will get the real and fictional serial killers it deserves, just as Bush and Eisenhower America did. But what would a socialized medicine serial killer look like?

Harold Shipman.

Shipman, embedded in the medical profession and the welfare bureaucracy. Silent before and after arrest, not admitting guilt, motives only fuzzily deducible in aggregate from a pattern of victims, leaving people to speculate on the mix of malice and a brutish utilitarianism usually only seen in cartoon villains. Professionally trained, but grubbing for jewelry in a sad post-mortem black market. He’ll get to you, but only after you make an appointment. This is the psychopathology of the welfare state.

Now, this isn’t just a chance to bag out the abused and beloved NHS. (Though honestly, Atlantic anglosphere, your health care systems all suck – please pay more attention to the French.) Before anyone gets all excited and declares that socialized medicine brings both communism and serial killers, note that Shipman, Gein and Milat were all freaks on the edge of the system. If anything it points to a rule of thumb for identifying a totalitarian regime: one where the psychopaths are on the inside, running the show.