Well, this is a tough one.
Class.
Sounds like glass. Breaks like glass as well, along clearly defined fault lines, and under predictable conditions; the ‘energy of fracture’ revealed along economic, social, cultural, ethnic/racial, educational, and other markers of human social worth.
Francis, a Malaysian acquaintance <http://fh2o.blogspot.com/> has written quite interesting and pointed posts on people who fit in entirely different places in Malaysian society than himself. He writes about people he encounters with respect, integrity, and a certain humility. And those qualities make his writing special.
When putting pen to paper, or typing furiously on a computer keyboard, Francis is aware of the economic and social gulf that exists between himself, and the people he writes about. He realizes that these people will probably never have the opportunity to read the words written about them, they may not be able to read English, they may have no idea how to connect to the internet, and they may not even know they have been the subject of public attention. And that separates Francis from those he writes about.
But I’m interested in what separates his readers from the people he writes about. I’m interested in the people that Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, and several others) writes about. I’m quite often interested in the ’subjects’ of writer’s work. But I’m far more interested in the relationships between the readers of the work, and the ’subjects.’
In ‘Planet of Slums’ Mike Davis’s focus is on the unbelievable degradation in which several tens of millions of people, predominantly though not solely in the equatorial or sub-equatorial world, live in – often over generations. In a world a century and a half further on, we are seeing, again, and again, the recreation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England,’ by Friedrich Engels (1845).
But one could argue that Engels’ was a world different than ours. We argue that we are more technically advanced, more concerned with ‘efficiency,’ more aware of the health dangers of urban overcrowding, deprivation, and degradation than any society before our time. You could argue that, I can’t.
Engels’ world existed about 161 years ago. It was the most technically advanced ‘world’ of its time. A very few years before Engels’ book, Darwin publishes ‘The Voyage of the HMS Beagle.’ In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe publishes ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue,’ the first modern detective story, and in 1843 writes the first mystery story – ‘The Gold Bug’ – as we know them now. The first ‘fax’ machine was demonstrated in England by Alexander Bain. And these are mere snippets of a world undergoing, perhaps, an unprecedented acceleration in the production of knowledge, technical, scientific, and social.
This was not, as some of my student acquaintances believed, a period only dimly removed from the caves at Lascaux.
Engels was simultaneously drawn to the plight of the urban misery of the working class, and revolted by it, and his work may still be the best descriptions of unbelievable filth, working, and living conditions written. Though I’ll entertain suggestions on that statement.
Now, one hundred and sixty-one years later, Mike Davis is trying to draw our attention from the fate of today’s urban underclasses in the developed world (of which he has written well and often) to the plight of those tens of millions of people outside of London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, New York, Vancouver. And that is where I get interested again.
Mike Davis, like any writer, has to engage his audience. The ‘writer’ needs to tease, to cajole, to interest, inform, and to illuminate a world that is uncomfortably different from the world his readers actually inhabit. Not one single resident of a shanty town in South Africa is likely to read this blog, let alone Davis’ ‘Planet of Slums.’ Nor are residents of slums in Manila, China, India, Malaysia, or any other nation likely to read, or to have even heard of, Mike Davis.
So the target audience is comfortably middle-class, well-educated, literate, socially-engaged, and isolated from the bloody grim realities of life on well under US $1/daily.
Hell, in Vancouver, even the poorest on welfare get more than US $1 a day! Actually, they get an astounding US $5 (after the ‘rental allowance’ of Cdn $325 is subtracted from the initial Cdn $510/month), to live in some of the most expensive places (particularly when compared by the square foot) in Canada. But, I digress.
How do people who have probably never gone hungry imagine digging through garbage for something to eat? How do people, living in houses with several bathrooms, conjure up an image of literally walking through shit in the street? And, apart from those who insist on living in ‘Hurricane Alley,’ or the tornado belt in the US, or riverine flood plains anywhere, think about the odds of having your house disappear in flood, fire, or earthquake?
My guess is that the vast majority of readers, whether of Engels, or Davis, or hundreds of others, are spectators in a consumer society. While comfortable in their condo, or sitting on beach, or reading in the bath they are removed, viscerally, from the grinding realities that the authors work to portray.
These readers are the people on whose behalf downtown business associations hire private security, to protect the Disneyfied presentation of retail consumer goods. The people reading about the slum dwellers are engaged in a form of pornography: only slightly removed from the televised disaster-porn of the last tsunami, or the cover of ‘The National Enquirer,’ these people are protected by class from the realities of those they read about.
Like my post regarding the ‘World Urban Forum, and why I’m not there,’ http://citylover.wordpress.com/tag/urban/ these people are functionally, socially, and culturally insulated from the actual, lived, reality that is the subject at hand.
But Engels and Davis are engaged on another project as well. Both authors are offering an indictment not only of a ‘foreign’ middle class, but of an extremely powerful ‘local’ middle class as well. One of the discussions I overheard while the WUF was on in Vancouver was concerned with the local (in this case Ghanaian) middle class gaining access to housing intended for the poor; through political connections, ‘business as usual,’ graft, corruption, and human venality class won the day. Again and again Davis offers criticism of the ‘usual suspects,’ The World Bank, powerful foreign-aid lobbies, neo-conservative forces. But, every time he accuses the ‘rich and powerful’ foreign interests, he also shines a light on the local middle and upper classes as being guilty parties in the continuation and worsening of the conditions of slum dwellers around the world.
And our local middle-class readers?
I suspect that they will read the books, think thoughts, and then with every available grace, engage that which is theirs by right. They won’t think of not flying to Hawaii, Florida, the Mexican Riviera, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. They won’t think of not buying a holiday/retirement property that not long ago was unsecured land, squatted on by a generation or more of local inhabitants. They won’t take the time to inquire exactly how our foreign aid money is spent, nor will they ask the Swiss (for instance, I’m sure there are others equally blind to the source(s) of wealth) just how did all that money get stripped out of a country whose annual GDP is equal to the bank deposit of some newly-retired klepto-politico. They won’t do these things because it is difficult. And may reveal awkward, and difficult, truths.
Some of those truths are revealed in the class perogitives that are truly cross-cultural. The well-heeled, the well-educated, know that they are worth more than others. That’s just the way it is. And the well-heeled ‘over there’ share much in common with the ‘well heeled’ over here. The handbags, the cars, the watches, the medical treatment that one flies somewhere to obtain, the airline tickets to the same destinations all reveal the commonality of class expectation, nearly world wide.
Our middle class has many of the same class-interests as their middle class. And, as long as that is the truth, well, one can observe, but taste dictates a modesty and delicacy that proscribes such untoward behaviour. I mean, one mustn’t interfere.
Class has its prerogatives, and its obligations, remember.
And that’s where I go out on a limb.
