The Spread of Urban Decay
The self-imposed decay exemplified by urban cities like San Francisco and Chicago spreads and contaminates even conservative small towns. We need to wake up faster than we think.
There is much humor and fun in pointing out signs of the self-imposed social collapse happening in progressive cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and others. However, the permissiveness that enabled this decline in large urban cities has already spread to small towns with depressingly similar results.
I live and work in a conservative small town that is located in a heavily blue state several hours’ drive from a crumbling progressive city. It is a rural town and is not considered in any way a suburb of its progressive urban cousin. Yet, despite the physical separation and its generally conservative temperament, the same outward signs of disease infecting progressive cities are now infecting ours. And I suspect it is the same in many small towns elsewhere.
Signs of rural decay
If you live in a small town, I suggest the following as a quick test of whether your community has been infected with this. Drive around your downtown or local business centers just after dawn on a workday. As you drive past small businesses and public buildings on your way pay attention to anything going on in their stoops or any covered areas. You may be shocked by how many homeless you see waking up, stirring about, and eventually spilling out into the streets like ants to make themselves scarce before the business owners and employees start showing up for work and notice them camped on their stoops.
While homelessness is not the only symptom of the urban progressive disease, it is one of the most visible and therefore earliest to spot.
I had noticed a steady increase in homelessness in my town over the past five or ten years. But from what I had seen during the day the picture didn’t look as dire until I noticed this dawn exodus taking place for myself. Where the homeless go during the day is difficult to tell. There is a church downtown with a soup kitchen and there are some government services in the area, but I suspect the majority are busy doing whatever it is the homeless have to do to stay supplied with the alcohol and drugs they never seem to run out of. You can speculate for yourself what it is they do for those items.
New patterns of life have emerged in my town. There is the monthly build up of a cardboard box city in the parking lot behind my office that gets larger and larger until a couple of parks department officers come at the usual interval and watch while the uninvited lodgers pack up their earthly possessions and wander off to new locations—I’m sure just until they are later shooed from those places and wander back to my office to start the cycle over again. The use of Ring doorbells brings us a cycle spanning every few months when bands of criminals return to my neighborhood to break into parked cars at night, and we receive notifications and videos on our phones reminding us of the terrible things happening around us as we sleep.
The unstable and imbalanced now roam our streets in open daylight and make downtown streetcorners their daily encampments. The neighborhood around my office has its “local color.” The guy who constantly walks around talking to himself with his pants around his ankles. The guy who lies in the bushes between buildings yelling at nobody. The woman who walks the sidestreets loudly cussing out an imaginary crowd. The other night as I was walking to my car, I was almost hit in the head with a piece of a tent pole which had broken off from the rest of the pole as a homeless man swung it in a drug fueled rage against a concrete wall while attempting to erect his encampment in the parking lot for the night.
And while we once looked at the existence of human waste on sidewalks as the pinnacle of the consequences of urban progressivism, we have that here now as well. The crossing of this last boundary has become noticeable in the last year or so. It is still a mostly uncommon sight, but we can expect to see it several times a year, depending on where you walk.
This new feature of small town life is particularly depressing to see because it was among the few remaining things that we could point to about our town that categorically unaffected by progressive rot. Our lack of open human waste was not simply better in comparison to our urban counterpart, we didn’t have it at all. With homelessness and drug use, we had less than in the cities, but we had some. But we could say that some homelessness and drug abuse is unavoidable, that didn’t make us progressive enablers. And at least we had not crossed whatever civilizational Rubicon it is that causes some people suddenly to feel free to openly defecate in the streets. We thought only delusional progressives were stupid enough to allow that to happen. But we were wrong.
Why were we wrong?
Why has this progressive rot reached our small town even though we reject the progressive extremism that seems to feed the rot?
For one thing, it is not necessarily the extreme parts of progressivism that feeds the rot. In a sense, progressivism itself is extreme as it is defined by a movement away from whatever is natural. The feature of progressivism responsible for our degeneracy is thus deeper than the cutting edge issues Left wing politicians and media trumpet like race culpability and transgenderism. What is most responsible is the culture of permissiveness that is a necessary part of progressivism at its root.
Consider that the average homeless man in the street probably cares very little about gender affirming care or whether selling Mexican food is cultural appropriation. He may hate progressivism. He cares much more whether anyone is coming to make him leave the park bench he is sleeping on. More importantly, his homeless circumstances probably have much more to do with nobody telling him convincingly that he shouldn’t encamp in the street, that he shouldn’t make his city’s parking lots ugly and dangerous, or that he shouldn’t burden productive people with his choice of lifestyle. It is not that he is molded by the far Left ideas progressives tell him to care about, it is that he is allowed not to care about the things that are meant to hold societies together.
And this permissiveness has crept into the leadership of even conservative small towns. Even those who would say—and probably even believe—that they are trying to put an end to just these types of progressive policies, are often soaked in the very same sensibilities that motivate their Leftist counterparts. This sensibility is sometimes called tolerance or charity or some other individual virtue that should have no place in governance.
These good individual virtues go bad when we abdicate our ability to judge when it is right or wrong to use them. Western society has nearly abandoned any philosophical commitment to meaning, and communities are left with no tools to judge one lifestyle right and another wrong. Conservative communities feel a vacuum of philosophical support for what was once healthy human judgment—what is now labeled discrimination. When an obvious evil is called what it is, the academic class replies, “whose to say what is evil?” The common man has no response because he is easily confused by the modern rationality worshiped by the academic class, who tell him his natural judgments are invalid because they are supported by science and objective research. He doesn’t know to respond that his natural judgment is a sufficient kind of knowledge in and of itself, not dependent on scientific proof, because even the conservatives of our age have largely fallen for the lure of modern rationality and forgotten what wisdom is.
This has become the one and only standard by which modern societies are allowed to make decisions. In other words, modern societies are no longer allowed to make decisions by the standard of actual truth, but instead by a restricted subset of facts that are approved by the academic class. The body of wisdom and traditions that have been built by eons of mankind relying on the uniquely human capacity of judgment are reduced in the eyes of the academics to mere historical accidents and a backward practice of simple people unfamiliar with science.
And the judgment we lost was the ability to recognize the obvious patterns we see before us now. For one thing, human beings are weak willed, and spread among us are those who would take advantage of the rest of us rather than exercise discipline. Thus, the easier we make it to live irresponsibly, the more of us will choose that path. There is therefore a gulf of difference between charity and entitlement. Charity meets needs but requires reciprocation by the receiver because he knows he is not entitled to it. It can be removed on a whim if the giver so much as dislikes the way the receiver looks. Charity thus discourages the life of irresponsibility even as it lessens the burden of lives that nonetheless fell into that evil. Entitlement actively encourages irresponsibility as a person predisposed to that evil can both increase the irresponsible ways he desires while maintaining the material support to avoid the worst of the suffering that lifestyle otherwise would have visited upon him. I couldn’t prove any of this scientifically, but it is undeniably true. Yet, if any part of this argument were made in public decision making it would quickly be pilloried as anti-scientific and calls of “citation please!”
Thus, even conservative lawmakers abandon wisdom and share in the culture of permissiveness that our progressive neighbors preach. We don’t want to be called unscientific bumpkins; and, since it sounds like kindness or charity, it seeps easily into our thinking. We are as compassionate as anyone, and so the promise that providing these people public services is the answer is attractive. We stop thinking and just press the bright red button that we are told makes suffering go away. The question, “what are these services the answer to?” is hardly ever asked and is never answered. But they are only the answer to the immediate misery we see in front of us. Permissiveness allows the underlying problem to be swept under the rug, but remain unaddressed, where it ultimately grows and spreads.
Means of Change
We find ourselves stuck in a regime that calls foolishness progress. It is hard to predict the exact route the Right must take to overcome this. Who knows what the catalyst will be that actually motivates enough people to wake up from the prevailing way of thinking about things?
But one thing I think must change, one way or another, is the common person’s lack of a defense to the empty philosophies of modern rationalism. Before they can put up even the most basic fight against the progressive lawmakers who demand they allow their streets to be inundated with the disease those lawmakers created, they need the confidence to trust their own judgments as sources of genuine truth. They are not wrong simply because an academic cannot observe human nature through a microscope or measure wisdom with a ruler. But to have confidence in this, they need the tools to understand the hollowness of this modern rationality. They need to be flooded with an equally strong message to the contrary, engraining it into their consciousness just as modern rationality has been engrained into it over the past half century or longer.
How exactly we get from the current regime of permissiveness to one of judgment is unknown. But it cant’ be done by any means unless there is first a resurgence in respect for wisdom and judgment in the first place.