September 30, 2004

It's the Weather, Stupid

New York Times article about pessimistic Canadian historians and pundits:

[A] growing number of historians, foreign policy thinkers and columnists from some of the nation's top newspapers ... see themselves as part of an informal school that has no name or single mentor ... [All] are writing the same assessment: Canada is in decline, or at the very least, has fallen short of their aspirations. For these thinkers, Canada is adrift at home and wilting as a player on the world stage. It is dogged by not only uninspired leaders but also by a lack of national purpose, stunted imagination and befuddled priorities even as its economy prospers.

Here we have the conjunction of two very common phenomena. One: Canadians who think Canada is a great country that would be much better off if Canadians, and Canadian leaders in particular, weren't so lame. Two: A Times article that identifies a long-standing situation and declares it a novel trend. (Canadians are pessimists! Brides go crazy about weddings! Parents love their children!) Still, it's always nice to see CanCon in the NYT.

"I'm in almost total despair," Michael Bliss, a University of Toronto historian, said in an interview. "You have a country, but what is it for and what is it doing?"

... "A logjam developed in the river of Canadian political history," he wrote. "Where are the visionaries?"

But here's a funny coincidence: I was just reading a history of Canadian business by the same Michael Bliss. And in that book, published nearly twenty years ago, Bliss took the opposite position to the one he voices today. There's nothing wrong with Canada's leaders, he said then. It's just that the country's potential really isn't that great:

Many observers of Canadian business have been inclined to share what I call the Martin Frobisher view of Canada as a rich land whose people would have been much wealthier if only its businessmen had been more enterprising. My studies ... lead me to the opposite view. There has been no shortage of enterprise in Canadian history, one important reason being the openness of the country to immigrants and foreign entrepreneurs. But it has been a harsh land, difficult to extract wealth from, and gravely handicapped by its small population and its peoples’ and governments’ great expectations.

So in 1986, it's Canada's climate that's to blame, not the people. In 2004, it's the opposite. I wonder what accounts for the change. Global warming, maybe?

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September 22, 2004

Car Wars

I went to a talk yesterday by Martin Melosi on the historical impact of the automobile on American cities. Melosi is an urban and environmental historian who’s written several big books on urban transportation, communication, and sanitation networks. His talk was heavy on facts and anecdotes and light on conclusions, so my notes on it will be too. But it was interesting.

Modern streets and roads are (like young academics) highly specialized. They have one thing they’re good at—collectors, commercial strips, arteries, ring roads, dispersers—and they’re not very good at anything else.

Cars have a voracious appetite for land. Leaving aside pollution, traffic congestion, dependence on fossil fuels, they just take up a whole lot of space. The average car is parked for 90% of its lifetime, and even when used remains nearly empty. As a result, about half of a modern city’s total land area is dedicated to automobiles and designed to their specifications: streets, driveways, garages, and parking lots. Ronald Horvath called this "machine space." Machine space is not public space in any meaningful way. In fact, machine space can be remarkably hostile to human life. We live in segregated cities: human beings are unwelcome in half of our own cities, unless chaperoned by our automobiles. (NB: I’m paraphrasing and editorializing here. Martin Melosi didn’t use loaded terms like “segregation.” That’s me being overdramatic. But he did say that in many parts of Houston you can be ticketed for walking without a car.)

Melosi is too good a historian to fall pray to technological determinism. The effects of the automobile are socially and politically constructed—they are choices we make, not inevitable impacts of the technology. For instance, it’s common to say that western cities like L.A. or Houston sprawl like they do because they grew up after the automobile. But that kind of growth was also dependent on patterns in municipal politics after WWII that gave big city governments sweeping powers of annexation. And the modern “ring city” is similarly a product of the political power of the exurbs and suburbs.

All that said, it is striking how virtually all the choices made in postwar American urban planning have been in line with what is best for the car. Street systems a hundred years ago were, Melosi said, “about as poorly designed for cars as it was possible for them to be.” Today the opposite is true.

The first question came from a great old codger who insisted on calling Eisenhower “General” Eisenhower, which always mildly amuses me, like people who call Muhammad Ali “Cassius Clay.” Somehow he managed to get a dig in at Michael Dukakis (“I think Michael Dukakis is a piece of shrimp stuck to a piece of baloney!”), which took some doing, because who the hell said anything about Michael Dukakis? But his question was about the Cold War rationale for building the Interstate Highway System to move troops or evacuate cities in case of nuclear war. Melosi said that claim was really secondary. The federal government wanted to build highways for commerce and traffic relief, but the defense rationale was required to allow the federal government to move into highway building, traditionally a power of the states. I’d never heard that explanation before.

Another question was whether the modern “multi-nucleic” city—cities where there is “no there there” as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland—could fulfill the city’s “historic role as a bastion of social diversity.” That kind of stumped Melosi. It would have stumped me as well. I don’t know if I grant the premise that cities have always behaved in that way, but certainly it's interesting to think about.

Follow Up: The NYT Magazine this week (9.26.04) had a section on automobiles, including a strange article called “The Autonomist Manifesto (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road)” that allegedly offers “a social, moral, and environmental case for driving more.” I don’t actually think it does anything of the kind, but it does smear environmentalists as snobs and anti-populist aristocrats.

The looniest part of the article suggests adopting the term “Gulfstream liberal” to describe all those snooty liberal anti-car activists who fly around the country in private Gulfstream jets. (Huh? Wha? Only liberals use private jets?) (The article mentioned by name exactly two (2) liberals who used Gulfstream jets: Arianna Huffington (is she really a liberal?) and, um, someone else. The wife of Larry David, I think.) Apparently, those oh so liberal Gulfstream jets burn ten times more fuel per passenger on a cross-country trip than an airliner, and twice as much as an all-American Humvee. Which would appear to mean that a Hummer burns five times more fuel than a freaking commercial airliner, but that wasn’t the author’s point.

So that was demented, but then the next article cheered me up completely: FLYING CARS!

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September 16, 2004

Curling for Loonies

Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

I had lunch the other day with a very smart, very nice guy named Jason Kaufman, a young professor of sociology at Harvard. He is one to watch, folks. He obviously possesses that astounding combination of dogged hard work and genuine genius that one needs to become a young professor at Harvard, but he’s also such a nice guy that I can’t envy him for it, much.

Jason got in touch with me through one of my advisors, which struck me as a nifty coincidence since I had just finished reading his excellent book, For the Common Good: American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity. The book is about fraternal organizations in the Gilded Age, and it takes Robert Putnam’s famous “Bowling Alone” thesis head on. The Tocqueville quote above is on the first page of his book. (It doesn't apply to Jason.)

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argued that the main thing wrong with America today was the decline of social capital. Put crudely, Americans a century ago used to join a lot of clubs—bowling leagues, benevolent orders, the Illuminati, and so on. Today, they don’t. And this, Putnam says, has impoverished American social and political life. He got a hunk of money from the Clinton administration to find out why this was so and what could be done about it, and that money, I should add, provided summer jobs for many of my grad school cronies. (Final verdict: there are lots of reasons social capital declined, but one big one starts with T and ends with V. And that stands for trouble, right here in River City.) Bowling Alone was a big, important book, but like many things from the late 1990s, it already seems a little quaint. O for the days when the worst thing Americans had to fear was the demise of league bowling.

Anyway, Kaufman turns this argument on its head. For him, a big part of everything wrong with America today is the fault of fraternal organizations: persistent racial and ethnic prejudice, a weak labor movement, half-hearted social services, a love for guns and a fear of government... all these, he says, are legacies of the club-happy Gilded Age. We should not lament its passing.

There's lots of merit in each book. I encourage you to read them both yourself and decide who you find more convincing. But what I kept thinking while reading Jason’s book (and what I gushed about at some length over lunch) was just how great it is to read a first book by a young scholar that makes such a big, fat, contentious claim.

For quality of prose, I’ll generally choose a historian over a sociologist. But for clarity of argument? We historians are very nervous about the monocausal explanation. We so rarely say, “A caused B.” It’s usually more like, “A was a factor in B, given the context of C and D, and the influence of E, F, and G through Z.” A sociologist wouldn’t necessarily disagree with all those qualifications, but the name of the game in sociology is nailing the elusive independent variable. “Too many clubs in 1904? No health care in 2004.” As I embark on turning my own cautious, nuanced, somewhat meandering dissertation into a book someone might actually care to read, there’s a lot to admire in that sort of audacity.

Why were we having lunch? We’re both interested in comparing the histories of Canada and the United States, which is a surprisingly rare endeavor. In fact, Jason was probably hoping I could help him nail down the key independent variable in the Canada-U.S. comparison. Of course. I couldn’t. (“Well, A was a factor, but so was B, and the context of C and D, and the influence of E, F, and G through Z. Or Zed.”) But we may get back together on the project in future.

One more difference between Jason and I is that, while I grumbled in my footnotes about the absence of good Canada-U.S. comparative work, he just shrugged and said, well, I guess I’ll do it myself. And set off writing a four-century history of both countries. What was I saying about audacity? What was I saying about envy?

Memo to myself: I owe Jason Kaufman a nice lunch.

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September 07, 2004

Time Machine Go

Today is my first day at a brand new job. And this is my first post on a brand new weblog.

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