How Do We Put This Back Together?

Lilliana Mason Says It Doesn't Look Good

Migrant mother, California. Dorothea Lange/FSA, 1936.

I've been living with this picture for a very long time. A lot of people have. It is one of the most famous pictures to come out of the Farm Security Administration's photo project during the 1930's. Florence Thompson, the subject of this portrait, was born in the old Indian Territory of Oklahoma to Cherokee parents in 1903. She survived the Great Depression and died in 1983.

The image is famous because the face says it all: What comes next?

I can't believe it, but we're actually facing another one of those times. And, frankly, things don't look very good.

Recently my son suggested I read a book by one of his college chums, Lilliana Mason, who is now a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. And so I read the book, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and I almost wish I hadn't. (Earlier this year she also published an op-ed in the New York Times. To see it, click here.) The book analyzes the stovepipes that we Americans have frozen ourselves into, and answers some questions that I have had for some time. The answers are not encouraging.

But first some background.

What's Been Going On
For several decades now, many smart people have been wondering about the Republican base. Their leadership kept pulling the old bait-and-switch trick on them - offer one thing, then deliver another. And in the next election, the same people would go to the polls and vote again for the Republicans.

Under Trump, the ground has shifted somewhat, but the basic dynamic remains the same. A very small group of people at the top are trying to turn their base, and the whole country, into a herd of peons, ruled by a small and increasingly closed elite.

The idea of a middle-class society, the idea of social mobility, the idea of a career open to talent - all these are to be replaced by an economic, political, and social profile similar to that of medieval France or a modern banana republic.

So why  does the Republican base keep voting for this program? Why the visceral hatred for Obamacare, even as they sign up in droves? Why do they vote so enthusiastically against their own self-interest? Why do they vote for their own degradation?

The Answer
According to Mason, the basic answer is very simple. And I must say she has convinced me. Mason suggests that many, many people in America see life as a football game. The main goal, and really the only goal, is to win. People want their team to win.

Mason starts her story back in the time after World War II, when researchers performed a number of experiments that had disturbing results.

Robbers Cave
Flashback to the summer of 1954 and the Robbers Cave State Park in Latimer County, Oklahoma. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif is holding a special summer camp for 22 fifth-graders. All are from Oklahoma City, but none of them know any of the others. All are white, protestant, middle-class boys, and beyond that they have been screened to be psychologically as close to identical as possible.

Sherif and his coworkers divide the boys into two teams of equal size, and, for the first week of the three-week camp session, they are kept apart. In fact, they don't even know of the other team's existence.

In the second week the two teams, called the Eagles and the Rattlers, are brought together for a baseball game, and the trash talk starts immediately. Things go downhill from there, with raids on the other team's cabin. Fist fights start to break out, and boys start to collect good throwing rocks.

As Mason puts it, "By the end of the second week, twenty-two highly similar boys who had met only two weeks before had formed two nearly warring tribes, with only the gentle nudge of isolation and competition to encourage them." (Mason, page 2.)

In the final days of camp, the researchers tried to reverse this process with a number of what we would now call team-building exercises - in this case, trying to get two teams to act as one. Among other things, the researchers shut off the water supply to the camp, and all the children had to work together to figure out what was wrong and restore the water supply. "After these exercises, the boys remained partial to their own teams, but they did agree to ride home in the same bus at the end of camp. Prior to the exercises, both teams had refused to share a bus with the others." (Mason, p. 134.)

Lord of the Flies
If you're thinking that the Robbers Cave experiment sounds a lot like a scientific version of Lord of the Flies, you are not alone. However, it seems unlikely that there was any cross-influence. Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, the same year the Robbers Cave experiment took place. They are contemporary, and both clearly living in the shadow of World War II, but I'm prepared to think they came to similar places by different paths.

Ingroups and Outgroups
"Humans are hardwired to cling to social groups," as Mason puts it (p. 9). In the 1960s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel decided to test this concept. In one experiment, he made up two notional groups; the experimental subject was assigned to one of the groups. However, there was no conflict between groups, no difference in values. And there were no actual people in the groups. Except for the subject, who had been assigned to one of the nonexistent groups. How non-confrontational can you get?

The subject was then given a choice on how to allocate money between the two groups. Either both groups could receive the maximum amount, or the subject's group (the ingroup) could receive less than the maximum and the other group (the outgroup) would receive even less than the ingroup. Again and again, in many variations of this experiment, the subject chose the second alternative. Winning was more important than prosperity.

Civilization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
One of the purposes of civilization is to tame some of these instincts. This of course involves the leaders of a society actually being interested in preserving civilization.

It's easy enough to point out flaws in the demagogue's world. For starters, life is not like a football game. Football is a zero-sum game, with one winner and one loser. +1 -1 = 0. Civilized life is largely composed of non-zero-sum games. +1 +1 = 2.

Here's an example. I have no idea how to change the oil in my car. I take it to my dealership, which employs a small army of mechanics. One of them changes the oil. I pay the cashier. So my car has fresh oil, and the dealership has a little more money than it did before I showed up. You don't exactly have the drama of a Superbowl, but I prefer it when oil changes are not exciting.

The Last 30 Years
Unfortunately, over the last 30 years or so, the idea of looking for win-wins, as they are sometimes called, has been displaced in our political life by the search for conflict. And we have found it.

Mason chronicles this process with about 100 pages of impressive original research. Her statistical analysis of data primarily from the American National Election Studies, which have been analyzing presidential elections since 1948, confirms our rising ire and progressive retreat into tribal groups.

Sorting
At the base of this process is a phenomenon that Mason calls sorting. She notes that we all have a variety of identities. Membership in a political party is only one of these identities. Race and ethnicity, sex, religion, favorite sports, smoker/non-smoker, pre-existing medical condition - it's a very long list.

What happens when all of the people in a group share most or all of their identities? It's not pretty.

As Mason puts it (p. 19), "Imagine how much more intense the Robbers Cave conflict would have been had the Rattlers all been Catholic, northern, and white, while the Eagles were Protestants, southern, and black."

This intensity, based on the sorting of identities between the two groups, reinforces the focus on winning. Fast-forward to American politics today: "All of the political arguments over taxes, welfare, abortion, compassion, responsibility, and the ACA are built on a base of automatic and primal feelings that compel partisans to believe that their group is right, regardless of the content of the discussion." (P. 50.)

Winning becomes everything; the issues themselves become relatively trivial.

Misleading Polls
Naturally, in such an environment, polling on particular issues can become quite misleading. Take the legislative fiasco that occurred in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings. It looked for a while like some meaningful gun control reforms would get through the Congress. One poll showed "83 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans personally supported a law expanding background checks." (P. 54.) And then - nothing happened.

Writes Mason (also p. 54), "when it came to the moment of public partisan competition, party victory trumped preferred policy for many Republicans. Party affiliation today means that a partisan cares a great deal about one party being the winner. Policy results come second."

What Comes Next?
As I noted at the outset, Mason is not sanguine about finding a way out of this mess. Neither am I.

Those who follow demographic trends - or just walk down a street in a city like Philadelphia - can easily see that it's not a white Christian country. Frankly it never was. Florence Thompson, pictured at the top of this story, was not Scotch-Irish. She was Cherokee.

But that doesn't mean that we will not be ruled by a closed oligarchy of white Christian men.

The idea that the country's wealthy business interests will desert the Republicans and possibly (aping Ross Perot) try to start a third party is, to my mind, unrealistic. The business interests in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy adapted pretty readily to Hitler and Mussolini (at least in the beginning), and the same already seems to be happening here.

I did come up with two glimmers of hope. I traded a number of very cordial emails with Professor Mason, and I asked her about these potential rays of light.

First, the Democrats ran hard on healthcare in the midterm elections, and it seems the issue contributed to their success. I asked Professor Mason whether she thought this might be a sign of returning civilization, or whether it was simply a matter of the Dems using healthcare (an extremely emotional issue) to mobilize their base.

Her response: "My most recent thoughts are actually pointing toward policy-based campaigning working better for Dems than Reps. Because the average policy attitudes of the American electorate are liberal (but a majority call themselves conservative), policy-based appeals should work well for Dems. The GOP, on the other hand, is incentivized to fall back onto identity-based appeals because their policies are less popular."

Here's my other possible point of light. I think the great move to the suburbs after World War II was a disaster on many levels, not least because it tended to isolate people from others who weren't just like them. (Mason talks a bit about the suburbs on pages 41-42.) Now, however, many people are moving back to the city and even rubbing elbows with people (gasp) who aren't just like them. And, as the recent election showed, even the suburbs around Philadelphia are changing.

Professor Mason threw some cold water on this one: "Re-urbanization might be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does generate more community-oriented influences. On the other hand, it further centralizes Democratic voters in smaller and more dense geographical areas. This makes the 'natural' GOP advantage in the Senate and electoral college even bigger."

Is there anything out there that can be big enough, and come soon enough, to head off our move to a two-class society, with a very small elite at the top, a large group of powerless poor people at the bottom, and no middle class in the middle? I don't know.

Just before the recent election, Mason gave a very interesting interview to WNYC. To listen to it, click here.

See also Fascism, Life on the Farm, Mr. Piketty's Book, Rugged Individualism From Daniel Boone to Barack Obama, Unsustainable Income Inequality.

Christ Church Park Redesign

Here's What I Think

X marks the spot.

Great meeting November 27 at Christ Church's Neighborhood House, on the redesign of Christ Church Park. The design team has been busy - a previous neighborhood meeting in July, also at the Neighborhood House; an open-air design workshop on Church Street, directly next to the park, in August; an online survey; research on other parks both in Philadelphia and elsewhere; and of course observation of the park itself.

At the most recent meeting the team went over all this activity and then presented a series of four design options, each taking a different approach but aiming at the same goals of increasing the park's usage and its usefulness to the community.

The Parking Lot
There was a bit of tip-toeing around what should be done with the elephant in the room - a parking lot that sits discreetly behind a red brick wall at the west side of the park. One of the presenters noted that turning the parking lot into part of the park would increase the size of the park by 50 percent. However, the National Park Service has stated from the beginning - very nicely - that the parking lot is out of scope for this project.

The presenters did discuss expanding the park in a tentative way that I hope didn't offend anyone, and they offered drawings of lesser takings from the parking lot that would improve the sightlines into the center of the block.

I say what I'm about to say with a twinge of regret, because I do think this is a model parking lot - it essentially disappears, in a nice way, behind a red brick wall. I wish every parking lot in Philadelphia looked this good. Very few of them do.

However, having given the matter some thought, I strongly support turning the parking lot into park land, for several reasons. First, this is a small lot in a crucial location that should be devoted to active people and not sleeping cars. Second, these drivers have alternatives in very large garages at the mall and on Second south of Chestnut. Third, turning the lot into parkland would provide a lot more room for people to enjoy themselves outdoors right in the center of Old City. Fourth, it would open up the block in a dramatic way that would let people see, before they stepped into the park from Market or Second, the potential for further walking adventures beyond the park, to the north and the west. Currently the rather complex web of streets within this block is not particularly visible until you get through the park and hit Church Street - the main drag, but hardly the only option for an interesting walk.

I hope the National Park Service will reconsider its position.

Diagonal Walkways
The presenters showed us drawings for four main options. I liked pieces of each of them, and pulled them together into what I suppose we could call option five - the rather clumsy drawing at the top of this story.

First, I think the park needs two strong diagonal paths, from the southwest to the northeast, and from the southeast to the northwest. These will be good for the park itself, and for the whole neighborhood. The survey came up with a figure of 20 percent of respondents who never go to the park. This is a terrible number, and the way to fix it is to allow people walking - residents, workers, tourists - to use the park as a shortcut to their destination.

There seems to be a lingering idea that a park should be solely an oasis for quiet contemplation, and that foot traffic shuffling through would be a distraction for those who have come to meditate. If you look at Washington or Rittenhouse Square, you'll see that they both have strong diagonal paths. And if you stand at the northeast gate of Rittenhouse Square, at 18th and Walnut, around 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, you'll just about get run over by the people walking through the park on their way to the office. This is not a conflict with other uses, it is a complement.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, pp. 96-97), Jane Jacobs analyzed Rittenhouse Square in detail and came to the conclusion that the square's secret to its success was the variety of users who appear in the park over the course of the day.

Jeff Speck, in his book Walkable City (2012), likes to talk about the importance of bringing back the useful walk - walking to the office, or walking to pick up groceries, possibly at several different stores (say, in Rittenhouse, coffee at La Colombe, bananas, clementines, and arugula at Sue's, and cheese and maybe soppressata at Di Bruno's).  Walking should not be simply a leisure activity. It can also be a useful way to get around.

I think people - particularly our leaders - have trouble with this idea, just as they seem to have trouble seeing a bicycle as anything other than a leisure-time toy. The pattern of bicycle commuting and utility bicycling throughout the day is firmly established in certain parts of Philadelphia. And certainly it's not a secret at this point. I just think a lot of people have trouble processing the information, let alone acting on it.

And I think I know why. Jarrett Walker, who is consulting on the redesign of Philadelphia's bus network, has an interesting blog post on elite projection. This is simply the idea that the well-to-do and influential people in our society imagine that everyone else is just like them, or wants to be just like them. As he points out, many, many problems flow from this lack of vision.

Anyway, the strong diagonals should be very good at getting people into the park, and they should also encourage people to see how permeable this block is. And this block is only part of a larger, currently unintegrated, circulation pattern that, if it ever gets hooked together, would allow people to get around entirely on byways and, with the exception of crosswalks, avoid the highways. This system of walkways and alleys is prepared to run from the mall on Fifth Street down to Front Street, and from the Arch Street Meeting House to Old St. Joseph's Church, below Walnut.

Opening Up to Market Street
Coming back to the park itself, let's have a look at proposals for the perimeter of the park, starting with the south side, by Market Street. The actual park is at present set well back from Market, with much of the additional space taken up by a planting bed. I personally think the original designers of the park saw this as a mashalling yard for tourists. You can stand at the fence and gaze at Christ Church on the other side of the park's large lawn, maybe take a picture. Then you can walk through one of the park's two gates, which stands inconspicuously at the west edge of the park, next to the brick wall for the parking lot. You can then walk up a brick path to the gate at the north side of the park and, if you want, cross the Belgian block of Church Street and enter the church.

So the whole park, on its most heavily trafficked side, is essentially hiding. Time to open things up a bit. There are a number of interesting proposals about how to do this, but I do think one thing is quite clear. This park needs a gate at the corner of Second and Market. Which by the way is only a few steps from the Second Street stop of the Market-Frankford line, and less than half a block from stops for six different bus routes (5, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48).

Unless you're moving a piano, you really don't need to drive to Old City. But however you get there, the corner of Second and Market is the natural front door for Christ Church park. At present there is no gate on this corner.

Sidewalk Bumpout on Second Street
The design team also suggested bumping out the sidewalk on Second Street, roughly from Church Street down to Market. Engineers have been consulted, and we are assured that this can be done without materially affecting the flow of motor vehicles down Second Street.

Steps for Sitting on the North Side of Church Street
The design team also recommends adding steps to the north side of Church Street. You could use these steps to walk up to the church's grade level, which is a bit higher than the surrounding area, or you could use them to sit on; this happens quite a lot on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I think the steps the design team proposes would work well.

The team is also proposing a lower wall on the north side of the actual park. These two changes would serve to meld the Church and its yard, Church Street, and the park itself into a more organic whole.

Back to the Parking Lot
Okay, back to the west side of the park. Another advantage of removing the parking lot is that it allows you to move the current north-south walkway further to the west, so it's on line with American Street to the north. There was a lovely rendering of this new walkway, paved now in cobblestones instead of brick, and looking for all the world like an eighteenth century Philadelphia street, shaded by the mature trees that are already present in the parking lot.

This new alignment for the walkway allows people to see from Market Street that the block has an interior north-south street, and from the park they will also be able to see Church Street running east to west, and intersecting at the northwest corner of the park.  That's not the whole internal grid on this block, but I think it's enough to create an invitation to explore. 

About Those Pink Stickers
At the end of the meeting, printouts of the four design options were put on tables, and the members of the audience, who had each previously been provided with several small stickers, some green and some pink, were asked to show their approval of particular design elements by placing a green sticker on things they liked, and a pink sticker on things they didn't like. I placed my stickers, chatted with a number of people, and at the end of the session I walked around and had a look at where the various stickers had descended.

On the plans that still had the parking lot at least partially intact, the lot looked like a leopard with pink spots.

Parking lot gate. Unlock the value.

See also The Invitation, The Future of Christ Church Park, Permeable Blocks.