I've been doing this self-guided urban theory reading course over the last little while (with a few intermissions) and this week's reading is from Jane Jacobs. I've read The Death and Life of Great American Cities before, but it's nice to revisit it. This morning I was reading from the chapter on the role of city sidewalks in assimilating kids into public life and was wondering if this is true anymore.

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn—if they learn at all—the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public responsibility for you."

Granted, I don't live in a large city, but it seems to me that the notion of public responsibility has so eroded that I'm not sure there's much left to be assimilated into. Something I write about often here is the dynamic between public and private life and the sort of collapsing of the two into each other. A big fan of Hannah Arendt, I like her idea that the public realm has become primarily about protecting private interests. This gives me a helpful way of understanding the loss of public responsibility for one another.

A while back I noted this idea of collective, or shared, responsibility in keeping kids safe; but it's interesting to also think about this as Jacobs did on the shared responsibility of helping kids learn public responsibility. Specifically, how this can't really be taught. It needs to be seen and experienced. But how can kids learn something that they can no longer see?

“The ideal of universal small property held those without property in collective check while it lured them on as individuals. They would fight alongside those who already had it, joining with them in destroying holdovers from the previous epoch which hampered the way up for the small owner.”

I started reading White Collar by C. Wright Mills this weekend, a book I picked up a few years ago and never got to. It's a bit of a social history on the American middle class and the rise of white collar work. I'm only just into it, but there's already some great nuggets in here. This piece (above) is notable to me, as it helps illustrate the myths that have propped up capitalism over here.

There was this emerging narrative in the 19th century that American was the land of small fortunes rather than 'great wealth' and that anyone could achieve this. This note here around the way the seeming accessibility of property ownership put those without property in solidarity with property owners do is a fascinating look at a myth that we are now seeing crumble. As the ideal of property ownership becomes less available to each successive generation and the division of wealth becomes more stark, I wonder if that solidarity will fully collapse.

“The last thing we need is blind optimism about technology. History is rife with innovations that failed to being shared prosperity… Nothing says that tech progress will automatically benefit everyone... That depends on the choices we make as a society, and those choices have moral aspects we can’t sidestep.”

Bregman talks about the need for a cyclical relationship between tech/science and activism. He notes that science has saved more lives than all the most famous activists combined. Yet, activism is still needed to give tech a moral centre.

AI is a perfect example of this.

Are there real, life saving opportunities with AI? Of course. Everything from medical scans to climate change mitigation can be possible with well deployed AI. But we also cannot ignore the ethical arguments against AI. The energy and water use, the loss of jobs, and the cognitive decline associated with it are all legitimate concerns that need to be taken seriously. And, let's be honest, not every company investing in AI is making the world a better place. Most are seeing it as a way to increase profits.

So yes, advancement in technology is necessary; but without moral guidance we can do more harm than good.

"You don’t do good things because you’re a good person. You become a good person by doing good things."

Started Rutger Bregman's new book, Moral Ambition, this weekend. I really enjoyed one of his previous books so I've been looking forward to this one.

I really like this sentiment, that morality is something that is forged over time rather than a starting place. It also places action as the core thing that truly matters. Good intentions are not enough to make you good. It's not a belief system or a sense of identity, morality is something you do.

It reminds me of a short film in the anthology, Paris, je'taime, in which a man is getting ready to leave his wife for a mistress when his wife tells him that she has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Instead of leaving, he chooses to stay and care for her until she dies. This brings about a change in him and his understanding of happiness. The vignette ends with the line, "by acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again."

I find myself coming back to this story over and over again as a picture of how selflessness changes us from the outside in. While there are certainly issues with this portrayal of a marriage (the betrayal and deception as a starter), I think this underlying idea rings true to what Bregman is saying: we learn how to be good people by doing good things. It's the ethical version of 'fake it 'till you make it.'

"At its worst, 'corporate multiculturalism' is an attitude that patronizes imported diversity while ignoring its own backyard.”

Mike Davis talking about how a city (LA) can invest major capital into becoming a cultural epicentre while also defunding arts programming that might benefit people who actually live there.