The great Way is very smooth But people love by-paths.
Tao Te Ching
In the unpromising year of 1943 in Copenhagen, the architect for a Danish workers’ housing cooperative at Emdrup had a new idea for a playground. An experienced landscape architect who had laid out many conventional playgrounds, he noticed that most children were tempted to forsake the limited possibilities of the swings, seesaws, carousels, and sliding boards for the excitement in the street and to steal into actual building sites or vacant buildings and use the materials they found there for purposes they invented on the spot. His idea was to design a raw building site with clean sand, gravel, lumber, shovels, nails, and tools, and then leave it to the kids. It was hugely popular. Despite the site being crowded day after day, the possibilities were so endless and absorbing that there was far less fighting and screaming than in the classical playground.
The runaway success of the “adventure playground” at Emdrup led to efforts to emulate it elsewhere: in “Freetown” in Stockholm, “The Yard” in Minneapolis, other “building playgrounds” in Denmark itself, and “Robinson Crusoe” playgrounds in Switzerland, where children were given the tools to make their own sculptures and gardens (fig. 3.1).
“The Yard,” shortly after it began, ran into trouble. Much of the lumber and many of the tools were hoarded and hidden in the competition to build the largest shack as quickly as possible. Quarreling and a number of raids to plunder tools and material broke out. It appeared, as paralysis gripped the playground, that it would now have to be taken over and run by adult park employees. But after only a few days many of the youngsters, who knew where most of the material was hoarded, organized a “salvage drive” to recover the materials and set up a system for sharing the tools and lumber. They had not only solved the practical problem of securing the material they needed but had, in doing so, created something of a new community. It should be added that this wildly popular playground satisfied the creative urges of most of the children, but it by no means satisfied the standards for visual order and decorum that the custodians of such urban spaces expected. It was a case of working order trumping visual order. And of course, its shape changed daily; it was being torn down and rebuilt continually. The adventure playground, Colin Ward, writes,
is a kind of parable of anarchy, a free society in miniature, with the same tensions and ever-changing harmonies, the same diversity and spontaneity, the same unforced growth of co-operation and release of individual qualities and communal sense, which lie dormant.1
Figure 3.1. Playground constructions, Emdrup, Denmark. Photograph © Tim R. Gill
I recall visiting the slum housing project of an NGO in Bangkok that used essentially the same insight not only to create housing for squatters but also to build a political movement around it. The NGO began by persuading the municipality to deed it a tiny parcel of land in a squatter area. The organizers then identified no more than five or six squatter families who wanted to band together to build a tiny settlement. The squatters chose the materials, selected the basic layout, designed the structures, and agreed on a work plan together. Each family was responsible for an equal amount of sweat equity over the two- or three-year process of (spare-time) building. No family knew what section of the attached structures they would occupy when it was finished; all thus had an equal interest in the quality and care that went into each stage of the building. The squatters also designed a tiny, shared common ground that was built into the scheme. By the time the building was up, a structure of work and cooperation (not without tensions, to be sure) was already in place. Now the families had property they had built with their own hands to defend and they had, in the process, acquired the practice of working successfully together. They, and other groups like them, became the institutional nodes of a successful squatter movement.
The magnetism of the Emdrup playground, obvious in retrospect, perhaps, flowed from its openness to the purposes, creativity, and enthusiasm of the children who played there. It was deliberately incomplete and open. It was meant to be completed by the unpredictable and changing designs of its users. One could say that its designers were radically modest about their knowledge of what was on children’s minds, what they would invent, how they would work, and how their hopes and dreams would evolve. Beyond the premise that children wanted to build, based on observation of what actually interested children, and that they needed the raw material to do so, the playground was open and autonomous. There was minimal adult supervision.
Almost any human institution can be evaluated in these terms. How open is it to the purposes and talents of those who inhabit it? There are only a certain number of things one can do with a swing or a seesaw, and children have explored them all! An open building site offers a veritable buffet of possibilities by comparison. Dormitory rooms of standard layout and painted the same color, with bunk beds and desks screwed to the wall or floor, are, well, closed structures that resist the impress of student imagination and design. Rooms or apartments with movable partitions, variable furniture and color schemes, and spaces that can be used for various purposes are, by comparison, more open to the inspiration of their users. In some cases it is possible to design with a view to accommodating the choices of users. A large open grassy area at a major university was deliberately left for a time without walkways. Over time, footpaths were traced by the actual daily movements of thousands of pedestrians. Those tracings were then paved to reflect what seemed required. This procedure is another illustration of Chuang Tzu’s adage, “We make the path by walking.”
The test of openness is the degree to which the activity or institution—its form, its purposes, its rules—can be modified by the mutual desires of the people pursuing and inhabiting it.
A brief example comparing war memorials may be helpful. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., is surely one of the most successful war memorials ever built, if one is to judge from the quantity and intensity of the visits it receives. Designed by Maya Lin, the memorial consists simply of a gently undulating site marked (not dominated) by a long, low, black marble wall listing the names of the fallen. The names are deliberately not listed alphabetically or by military unit or rank but rather chronologically, in the order in which they fell—thus grouping those who fell on the same day and often in the same engagement. No larger claim is made about the war either in prose or in sculpture—a muteness that is not surprising, in view of the stark political cleavages the war still inspires. What is most remarkable, however, is the way the Vietnam Memorial works for those who visit it, particularly those who come to honor a comrade or loved one. They must first search out the name they seek; then they typically run their fingers over the name incised on the wall, make rubbings, and leave artifacts and mementos of their own—everything from poems, a woman’s high-heeled shoe, or a glass of champagne to a full-house, aces-high, poker hand. So many of these tributes have been left that a separate museum has been created to house them. The scene of many people together at the wall, touching the names of particular loved ones who fell in the same war, has moved observers regardless of their position on the war itself.
I believe that a great part of the memorial’s symbolic power is its capacity to honor the dead with an openness that allows all visitors to impress on it their own unique meanings, their own histories, their own memories. The monument, one could say, virtually requires participation to complete its meaning. Although one would not compare it to a Rorschach test, the memorial nevertheless does achieve its meaning more by what citizens bring to it than by what it imposes. (A truly cosmopolitan monument to the war would, of course, list all Vietnamese civilian and military war dead, together with Americans in the order in which they had fallen. Such a monument would require a wall many times longer than the current one.)
We may compare the Vietnam Memorial to a very different American war memorial: the sculpture depicting the raising of the American flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in World War II. Moving in its own right, referring as it does to the final moment of a victory gained at an enormous cost in lives, the Iwo Jima statue is manifestly heroic. Its patriotism, symbolized by the flag, its theme of conquest, its larger-than-life scale, and its implicit theme of unity in victory leave little room for the viewer to add anything. Given the virtual unanimity with which that war is viewed in the United States, it is hardly surprising that the Iwo Jima Memorial should be monumental and explicit. Although not exactly “canned,” the Iwo Jima Memorial is more symbolically self-sufficient, as are most war memorials. Visitors can stand in awe, gazing on an image that through photographs and sculpture has become an icon of the war in the Pacific, but they receive its message rather than complete it (fig. 3.3).
Figure 3.2. Vietnam Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photograph © Lee Bennett, Jr. / www.ATPM.com
The example of play invoked earlier may seem trivial by comparison with war and death. After all, play has no purpose at all beyond the pleasure and enjoyment of play itself. It is successful, even efficient, to the degree to which those who are playing judge it to be more fun than other things they might be doing. And yet play is deeply instructive, for it turns out that open, unstructured play of this kind, looked at broadly, is serious business indeed.
Figure 3.3. Iwo Jima Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photograph by Dennis@visitingDC.com
All mammals, but especially Homo sapiens, appear to spend a great deal of time in apparently aimless play. Among other things, it is through the apparent chaos of play, including rough-and-tumble carousing, that they develop their physical coordination and capacities, their emotional regulation, their capacity for socialization, adaptability, their sense of belonging and social signaling, trust, and experimentation. Play’s importance is revealed above all in the catastrophic effects of eliminating play from the repertoire of mammals, including Homo sapiens sapiens. Denied play, no mammals become successful adults. Among humans, those deprived of play are far more prone to violent antisocial behavior, depression, and pervasive distrust. The founder of the National Institute for the Study of Play, Stuart Brown, began to suspect the importance of play when he first realized that what most violently antisocial people had in common was a deep history of play deprivation. Play, along with two other major apparently purposeless human activities, sleeping and dreaming, turns out to be foundational, both socially and physically.
The concept of efficiency would appear to be at cross purposes with the openness that characterizes play. Once the purpose of an activity is sharply defined—making automobiles, paper cups, plywood sheets, or electric light bulbs—there often seems to be a single most efficient way to go about it, at least under current conditions. If the task environment of an institution or factory remains repetitive, stable, and predictable, a set of fixed routines may well prove exceptionally efficient and, perforce, closed.
This view of “efficient” is deficient in at least two respects.
First and most obvious, in most economies and human affairs generally, such static conditions are the exception rather than the rule and, when conditions change appreciably, these routines are likely to prove maladaptive. The larger the repertoire of skills a worker has and the greater her capacity to add to that repertoire, the more adaptive she is likely to be to an unpredictable task environment and, by extension, the more adaptable an institution composed of such adaptable individuals is likely to be. Adaptability and breadth serve as a personal and institutional insurance policy in the face of an uncertain environment. This was, in a larger sense, arguably the single most important advantage Homo erectus had over its primate competitors: an impressive capacity to adapt to a capricious environment, and eventually to act on that environment.
The importance of adaptability and breadth was brought home to me in a practical way by a brief article on nutrition in my university’s health newsletter. It noted, reasonably enough, that scientific research had in the past decade and a half discovered a good many nutrients now understood to be essential for good health. So far, so good. Then it made what I thought was an original observation (which I paraphrase here). “We expect,” it went on, “that in the next decade and a half we will uncover many new, essential elements in the diet of which we are not now aware.” “In light of this,” it continued, “the best advice we can give you is to eat the most varied diet of which you are capable in the hope that you will have included them.” Here, then, was advice that built in the postulate of our ignorance about the future.
The second deficiency embedded in a static concept of efficiency is that it ignores utterly the way in which the efficiency of any process that involves human labor depends on what those workers will tolerate. The Lordsville, Ohio, General Motors automobile assembly plant was, when it was built, the absolute state of the art in terms of assembly lines. The steps and movements in assembly had been broken down into thousands of distinct steps and was a model of Fordist efficiency. The buildings were well lighted and ventilated, the factory floor was kept scrupulously clean, there was piped music to counteract the mechanical noise, rest breaks were built into the schedule. It was also, in the name of efficiency, the fastest-moving assembly line ever devised, requiring a tempo of work that was without precedent. The workers resisted the line and found ways to stop it by inconspicuous acts of sabotage. In their frustration and anger, they damaged many parts so that the percentage of defective pieces that had to be replaced soared. Eventually the line had to be redesigned and slowed to a humane pace. For our purposes, what is crucial here is that the resistance by the workforce to its inhuman speed actually made the design inefficient. There is no such thing as labor efficiency in neoclassical economics that does not implicitly assume conditions that the workforce will accept and tolerate. If workers refuse to conform to the discipline of the work plan they can, by their own acts, nullify its efficiency.
What if we were to ask a different question of institutions and activities than the narrow neoclassical question of how efficient they are in terms of costs (e.g., resources, labor, capital) per unit of a given, specified product? What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people.
What if we were to bracket the manifest purpose of an institution and the efficiency with which it is achieved and ask what the human product was? There are many ways of evaluating the human results of institutions and economic activities and it is unlikely that we could devise a convincing comprehensive measure of, say, GHP, for gross human product, that would be comparable to the economists’ GDP, gross domestic product, measured in monetary units
If, undaunted by these difficulties, we decided to make a stab at it, we could, I think, identify two plausible approaches: one that would gauge how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills and one that took its bearings from the judgments of the workers themselves about their satisfaction. The former is, at least in principle, measurable, in ordinal terms of “more or less.”
What if we were to apply the standard of human capacities and skills to the industrial assembly line? After five or ten years on the assembly line at Lordsville or River Rouge, what are the odds that the capacities and skills of a worker would have been substantially enlarged? Vanishingly small, I would suspect. In fact, the whole point of the time-and-motion analysis behind the division of labor on the line was to break down the work process into thousands of minute steps that could easily be learned. It was deliberately designed to eliminate the artisanal-craft knowledge, and the power this knowledge conferred on workers, that characterized the carriage-making era. The line was premised on a deskilled, standardized workforce in which one “hand” could be easily substituted for another. It depended, in other words, on what we might legitimately call the “stupidification” of the workforce. If by chance a worker did enlarge his capacities and skills, he either did it on his own time or, perversely, by devising cunning strategies to thwart the intentions of management, as at Lordsville. Nevertheless, were we scoring assembly-line work by the degree to which it served to enlarge human capacities and skills, it would receive failing grades, no matter how efficient it was at producing cars. More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on Adam Smith’s classic example of the division of labor, asked the essential question: “What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins.”2
In economics there is something called “Hicksian income,” after the British economist John Hicks. It represented an early version of welfare economics in which Hicksian income accrued only if the factors of production, land and labor in particular, were not degraded in the process. If they were degraded, that meant that the next round of production would begin with inferior factors of production. Thus, if a technique of agricultural production depleted the soil nutrients (sometimes called “soil mining”), that loss would be reflected in a diminished Hicksian income. By the same token, any form of production such as the assembly line that degraded the talents and capacities of the workforce would, to that degree, be charged with losses in Hicksian income. The opposite also applies. Cultivation practices that systematically built up soil nutrients and tilth or manufacturing practices that expanded the skills and knowledge of the workforce would be reflected in an increment to the farmer’s or firm’s Hicksian income. What welfare economists term positive and negative externalities were built into the Hicksian calculus, though rarely, of course, appearing in the firm’s net profit.
The term “capacities” as we have used it here could be understood narrowly or broadly. Taken narrowly with respect to, say, auto workers, it might refer to how many “positions” on the line they had held, whether they had learned pop-riveting, welding, tolerance adjustments, and so forth. Taken broadly, it might mean whether they had been trained and qualified for more skilled or management work, whether they had gained cooperative experience in the organization of the work process itself, whether their creativity was fostered, whether they had learned the skills of negotiation and representation on the job. If we were to apply the test of an enlarged capacity for democratic citizenship, it is obvious that the assembly line itself is a profoundly authoritarian environment where decisions are in the hands of the engineers and the substitutable units of the workforce are expected to do the work assigned them more or less mechanically. It never quite works out that way, but that’s the imminent logic of the line. The line as a work process would have a negative “net democratic product.”
What if we asked the same questions of the school, the major public institution of socialization for the young in much of the world? The query is all the more appropriate in light of the fact that the public school was invented more or less at the same time as the large factory under a single roof, and the two institutions bear a strong family resemblance. The school was, in a sense, a factory for the basic training of the minimal skills of numeracy and literacy necessary for an industrializing society. Gradgrind, the calculating, hectoring caricature of a headmaster in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, is meant to remind us of the factory: its work routines, its time discipline, its authoritarianism, its regimented visual order, and, not least, the demoralization and resistance of its pint-sized, juvenile workers.
Universal public education is, of course, designed to do far more than merely turn out the labor force required by industry. It is as much a political as an economic institution. It is designed to produce a patriotic citizen whose loyalty to the nation will trump regional and local identities of language, ethnicity, and religion. The universal citizenship of revolutionary France had its counterpart in universal conscription. Manufacturing such patriotic citizens through the school system was accomplished less through the manifest curriculum than through its language of instruction, its standardization, and its implicit lessons in regimentation, authority, and order.
The modern primary and secondary school system has been much altered by changing theories of pedagogy and, most especially, by affluence and the “youth culture” itself. But there is no mistaking its origins in the factory, if not the prison. Compulsory universal education, however democratizing in one sense, has also meant that, with few exceptions, the students have to be there. The fact that attendance is not a choice, not an autonomous act, means that it starts out fundamentally on the wrong foot as a compulsory institution, with all the alienation that this duress implies, especially as children grow older.
The great tragedy of the public school system, however, is that it is, by and large, a one-product factory. This tendency has only been exacerbated by the push in recent decades for standardization, measurement, testing, and accountability. The resulting incentives for students, teachers, principals, and whole school districts have had the effect of bending all efforts toward fashioning a standard product that satisfies the criteria the auditors have established.
What is this product? It is a certain form of analytical intelligence, narrowly conceived, which can, it is assumed, be measured by tests. We know, of course, that there are many, many skills that are valuable and important for a successful society that are not even remotely related to analytical intelligence, among them, artistic talent, imaginative intelligence, mechanical intelligence (the kind that Ford’s early workers brought with them from the farm), musical and dance skills, creative intelligence, emotional intelligence, social skills, and ethical intelligence. Some of these aptitudes find a place in extracurricular activities, especially sports, but not in the measured and graded activities on which so much now depends for students, teachers, and schools. This monochromatic flattening of education is brought to a kind of apotheosis in educational systems like those in France, Japan, China, and Korea, where the exercise culminates in a single examination on which one’s future mobility and life’s chances substantially depend. Here the scramble to get into the best-regarded schools, to find extra-hours tutoring, and to attend special exam-preparation cram courses reaches a fever pitch.
How ironic it is that I, who write this, and virtually anyone who reads it, are the beneficiaries, the victors, of this rat race. It reminds me of a graffito I once saw in a Yale toilet stall. Someone had written, “Remember, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat!” Below, in a different hand, someone else had riposted, “Yeah, but you’re a winner.”
Those of us who “won” this race are the lifetime beneficiaries of opportunities and privileges that would not likely otherwise have come our way. We are also are likely to carry a lifetime sense of entitlement, superiority, accomplishment, and self-esteem that comes from this victory. Let us bracket, for the moment, the question of whether this dividend is justified and what it actually means in terms of our value to ourselves and others, and merely note that it represents a fund of social capital that adjusts the odds of financial and status mobility radically in our favor. This is a lifetime privilege extended to perhaps one-fifth at most of those the system turns out.
And what of the rest? What of the, say, 80 percent who in effect lose the race? They carry less social capital; the odds are adjusted against them. Perhaps as important is the fact that they are likely to carry a lifelong sense of having been defeated, of being less valued, of thinking that they are inferior and slow-witted. This system effect further adjusts the odds against them. And yet, have we any rational reason to credit the judgments of a system that values such a narrow bandwidth of human talents and measures achievement within this band by the ability to sit successfully for an exam?
Those who do poorly on tests of analytical intelligence may be incredibly talented at one or more of the many forms of intelligence that are neither taught nor valued by the school system. What sort of a system is it that wastes these talents, that sends four-fifths of its students away with a permanent stigma in the eyes of society’s gatekeepers, and perhaps in their own eyes as well? Are the dubious benefits of the privileges and opportunities accorded a presumed “analytical intelligence elite” by this pedagogical tunnel vision worth so much social damage and waste?
A chilling encounter with a “caring” institution twenty years ago brought me up short. Two of my aunts, both widowed and without surviving children, were living in a retirement home in West Virginia not far from where they had taught school. It was a small retirement home for about twenty women, who were expected to dress themselves and walk under their own power to meals in the common dining room. They were in their mid-eighties, and one of them had recently sustained a fall, requiring a hospital stay that was somewhat prolonged because she had to demonstrate to the retirement home that she was up and walking before it would take her back.
Realizing that, as they became frailer, they would have to leave the retirement home and enter a convalescent home providing more intensive care, my aunts asked me, their closest relative among the next generation, to come and survey the convalescent homes so they might choose the best care they could afford.
I arrived on a Friday, and by the time we sat down to dinner at their retirement home on Saturday, I had visited two convalescent homes that seemed acceptable, though one seemed a bit friendlier and better scrubbed, with less of the smell that permeates even the best of them. Wanting to know what the residents themselves thought of each place, I had conducted something of an informal survey by going from room to room introducing myself, explaining my aunts’ situation, and listening to what the residents had to say. The evaluations were very positive: they praised the care they received, the attention of the staff, the food, and the weekly activities and small outings afforded them.
I set out again on Sunday to “bag” two more convalescent homes nearby, hoping to see six in all before I had to fly back. That morning I began, as on Saturday, talking to the staff and then to the residents. On the floor nearest the reception area, there appeared to be only one nurse, who then took me around the facility, explaining things as she went. When she had finished, I said I would like to talk to a few residents, and she, knowing I was looking on behalf of my two aunts, took me first to a room shared by sisters who had arrived together the year before.
After introducing myself and explaining why I wanted to hear about their experience, I listened as they praised their care with animation and some enthusiasm. “Another suitable place,” I began to think. Just then, the phone could be heard ringing faintly in the distance at the nurses’ station. The nurse excused herself, explaining that they were always a bit shorthanded on Sunday, and sped down the hall to answer the phone. The moment she was well out of hearing distance, one of the sisters put her finger to her lips and with great feeling said, “Whatever you do, don’t send your aunts here!” “They treat us terribly.” “If we complain about anything or ask for extra help, they shout at us and tell us to shut up.” They explained how some of the staff would delay bathing them or bringing their food or personal effects if they displeased them in any way. At this point, as the nurse’s footsteps could be heard approaching the room, one of the sisters put her finger to her mouth again and we resumed an innocuous conversation as the nurse entered.
As I drove off to inspect a fourth convalescent home, it dawned on me that I had just witnessed the operation of a regime of low-level terror. To judge by this experience, the residents, constantly dependent on the staff for their basic needs, were afraid to say anything other than what they thought the staff expected from them, lest they be punished. My aunts, particularly the lifelong English and debate teacher with a Napoleon complex, would not fare well under this regime. I also realized that until this last incident I had always spoken with the residents with a staff member constantly at my side. Henceforth, when I visited the four additional convalescent homes on my list, I insisted that I be allowed to walk on my own through most of the facility and talk with those I met. If this request was refused, as it was in three of the four, I left immediately.
In the end, I found other grounds on which to make a choice. At one place, when I described my aunts as teachers, one head nurse asked me who they were and then exclaimed, “Oh, Miss Hutchinson! I remember her; she was my high school English teacher. She was strict, but I remember how she would invite us all out to her farm in Sandyville.” It seemed to me that as long as my aunt was “Miss Hutchinson, our English teacher,” and not merely an anonymous frail person in her eighties, I had reason to hope for better and more personal care that, ideally, would extend to her roommate and sister as well. I only hoped that my Aunt Elinore’s Napoleon complex was not so memorable that her student would want to make a St. Helena of her convalescence.
What was so demoralizing to me was to envision my two aunts, who had long been figures of power and authority to conjure with, reduced in the last stage of their life to such servility, fear, and silence. Nor could one ignore the infantilizing terms of address that prevailed among the overburdened staff-when they spoke to their charges: “Now, dearie, it’s time to take our pills like a good little girl.”
It’s not difficult to imagine how quickly and how thoroughly conditions of such abject bodily dependence for the most basic needs on a hard-pressed and underpaid staff might induce an “institutional personality,” how infantilization might produce elderly infants. The convalescent home, not unlike the prison, the cloister, and the barracks, is something of a “total” institution of such comprehensive power that the pressures to adapt to its institutional norms are nearly irresistible.
We live most of our lives in institutions: from the family to the school, to the army, to the business enterprise. These institutions to some considerable degree shape our expectations, our personalities, and our routines. Recognizing that these institutions are varied and that they are not static, can we nevertheless say something about the aggregate effects of such institutions in shaping us?
I believe we can, in a rough-and-ready way. The first thing to notice is that since the Industrial Revolution and headlong urbanization, a vastly increasing share of the population has become propertyless and dependent on large, hierarchical organizations for their livelihood. The household economy of the small farmer-peasant or shopkeeper may have been just as poverty-stricken and insecure as that of the proletarian. It was, however, decidedly less subject to the quotidian, direct discipline of managers, bosses, and foremen. Even the tenant farmer, subject to the caprice of his landlord, or the smallholder, deeply in debt to the bank or moneylenders, was in control of his working day: when to plant, how to cultivate, when to harvest and sell, and so forth. Compare this to the factory worker tied to the clock from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., tied to the rhythm of the machine, and closely monitored personally or electronically. Even in the service industries the pace, regulation, and monitoring of work are far beyond what the independent shopkeeper experienced in terms of minute supervision.
The second thing to notice is that these institutions are, with very few exceptions, profoundly hierarchical and, typically, authoritarian. Training, one might say, in the habits of hierarchy begins, in both agrarian and industrial societies, with the patriarchal family. While family structures in which children, women, and servants are treated virtually as chattel have become less authoritarian, the patriarchal family still thrives and could not exactly be called a training ground for autonomy and independence, except perhaps for the male head of household. The patriarchal family historically was rather a training in servitude for most of its members and a training ground of authoritarianism for its male heads of household and its sons-in-training. When the experience of servitude within the family is reinforced by an adult working life lived largely in authoritarian settings that further abridge the workers’ autonomy and independence, the consequences for the GHP are melancholy.
The implications of a life lived largely in subservience for the quality of citizenship in a democracy are also ominous. Is it reasonable to expect someone whose waking life is almost completely lived in subservience and who has acquired the habits of survival and self-preservation in such settings to suddenly become, in a town meeting, a courageous, independent-thinking, risk-taking model of individual sovereignty? How does one move directly from what is often a dictatorship at work to the practice of democratic citizenship in the civic sphere? Authoritarian settings do, of course, shape personalities in profound ways. Stanley Milgram famously found that most subjects would administer what they imagined were severe, even life-threatening electric shocks to experimental subjects when directed by authorities in white coats to do so. And Philip Zimbardo found that subjects assigned to role-play prison guards in a psychology experiment were so quick to abuse this power that the experiment had to be aborted before more harm was done.3
More generally, political philosophers as varied as Étienne de La Boétie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were deeply concerned about the political consequences of hierarchy and autocracy. They believed that such settings created the personalities of subjects rather than citizens. Subjects learned the habits of deference. They were apt to fawn on superiors and put on an air of servility, dissembling when necessary and rarely venturing an independent opinion, let alone a controversial one. Their general demeanor was one of caution. While they may have had views of their own, even subversive ones, they kept such views to themselves, avoiding public acts of independent judgment and moral direction.
Under the most severe forms of “institutionalization” (the term itself is diagnostic), such as prisons, asylums for the mentally ill, orphanages, workhouses for the poor, concentration camps, and old-age homes, there arises a personality disorder sometimes called “institutional neurosis.” It is a direct result of long-term institutionalization itself. Those suffering from it are apathetic, take no initiative, display a general loss of interest in their surroundings, make no plans, and lack spontaneity. Because they are cooperative and give no trouble, such institutional subjects may be seen by those in charge in a favorable light, as they adapt well to institutional routines. In the severest cases they may become childish and affect a characteristic posture and gait (in the Nazi concentration camps, such prisoners, near death from privation, were called by other prisoners “Musselmänner”) and become withdrawn and inaccessible. These are institutional effects produced by the loss of contact with the outside world, the loss of friends and possessions, and the nature of the staff’s power over them.
The question I want to pose is this: Are the authoritarian and hierarchical characteristics of most contemporary life-world institutions—the family, the school, the factory, the office, the worksite—such that they produce a mild form of institutional neurosis? At one end of an institutional continuum one can place the total institutions that routinely destroy the autonomy and initiative of their subjects. At the other end of this continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeffersonian democracy composed of independent, self-reliant, self-respecting, landowning farmers, managers of their own small enterprises, answerable to themselves, free of debt, and more generally with no institutional reason for servility or deference. Such free-standing farmers, Jefferson thought, were the basis of a vigorous and independent public sphere where citizens could speak their mind without fear or favor. Somewhere in between these two poles lies the contemporary situation of most citizens of Western democracies: a relatively open public sphere but a quotidian institutional experience that is largely at cross purposes with the implicit assumptions behind this public sphere and encouraging and often rewarding caution, deference, servility, and conformity. Does this engender a form of institutional neurosis that saps the vitality of civic dialogue? And, more broadly, do the cumulative effects of life within the patriarchal family, the state, and other hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists.
If it does, then an urgent task of public policy is to foster institutions that expand the independence, autonomy, and capacities of the citizenry. How is it possible to adjust the institutional lifeworld of citizens so that it is more in keeping with the capacity for democratic citizenship?
The regulation of daily life is so ubiquitous and so embedded in our routines and expectations as to pass virtually unnoticed. Take the example of traffic lights at intersections. Invented in the United States after World War I, the traffic light substituted the judgment of the traffic engineer for the mutual give-and-take that had prevailed historically between pedestrians, carts, motor vehicles, and bicycles. Its purpose was to prevent accidents by imposing an engineered scheme of coordination. More than occasionally, the result has been the scene in Neubrandenburg with which I opened the book: scores of people waiting patiently for the light to change when it was perfectly apparent there was no traffic whatever. They were suspending their independent judgment out of habit, or perhaps out of a civic fear of the ultimate consequences of exercising it against the prevailing electronic legal order.
What would happen if there were no electronic order at the intersection, and motorists and pedestrians had to exercise their independent judgment? Since 1999, beginning in the city of Drachten, the Netherlands, this supposition has been put to the test with stunning results, leading to a wave of “red light removal” schemes across Europe and in the United States.4 Both the reasoning behind this small policy initiative and its results are, I believe, diagnostic for other, more far-reaching efforts to craft institutions that enlarge the scope for independent judgment and expand capacities.
Hans Moderman, the counterintuitive traffic engineer who first suggested the removal of a red light in Drachten in 2003, went on to promote the concept of “shared space,” which took hold quickly in Europe. He began with the observation that, when an electrical failure incapacitated traffic lights, the result was improved flow rather than congestion. As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection in Drachten, handling 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area. In the two years following the removal of the traffic light, the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with thirty-six crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared. Monderman likened it to skaters in a crowded ice rink who manage successfully to tailor their movements to those of the other skaters. He also believed that an excess of signage led drivers to take their eyes off the road, and actually contributed to making junctions less safe.
Red light removal can, I believe, be seen as a modest training exercise in responsible driving and civic courtesy. Monderman was not against traffic lights in principle, he simply did not find any in Drachten that were truly useful in terms of safety, improving traffic flow, and lessening pollution. The traffic circle seems dangerous: and that is the point. He argued that when “motorists are made more wary about how they drive, they behave more carefully,” and the statistics on “post–traffic light” accidents bear him out. Having to share the road with other users, and having no imperative coordination imposed by traffic lights, the context virtually requires alertness —an alertness abetted by the law, which, in the case of an accident where blame is hard to determine, presumptively blames the “strongest” (i.e., blames the car driver rather than the bicyclist, and the bicyclist rather than the pedestrian.)
The shared space concept of traffic management relies on the intelligence, good sense, and attentive observation of drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. At the same time, it arguably, in its small way, actually expands the skills and capacity of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians to negotiate traffic without being treated like automata by thickets of imperative signs (Germany alone has 648 valid traffic symbols, which accumulate as one approaches a town) and signals. Monderman believed that the more numerous the prescriptions, the more it impelled drivers to seek the maximum advantage within the rules: speeding up between signals, beating the light, avoiding all unprescribed courtesies. Drivers had learned to run the maze of prescriptions to their maximum advantage. Without going overboard about its world-shaking significance, Moderman’s innovation does make a palpable contribution to the gross human product.
The effect of what was a paradigm shift in traffic management was euphoria. Small towns in the Netherlands put up one sign boasting that they were “Free of Traffic Signs” (Verkeersbordvrij), and a conference discussing the new philosophy proclaimed “Unsafe is safe.”
