Megacity - World of Strangers

There are two dichotomies that came oto my attention recently. People are classified according to whether they are settlers or nomads. Alternately, settlers are farmers and nomads are hunters.

One of the big things in human society is that most human beings now live in cities. So it might seem that people are more connected to each other. This picture is not consistent. In a city, people can be stangers to eacch other. The city is the classic example that youare not alone but you are lonely.

Robern Kaplan has written a lot of books lately largely from the point of view of a geographer. But his “area studies” approach is really interesting, because it forces you to consider the places in their totality. Not to see them through any one intellectual lengs.

Hel's written about the “waste land”, and it proably won't be one of his classics, but it maeks very interesting points about why things are going downhill. One of his mos interesteing points is that he seems to blame the very high rates of urbanisation for the breakdown in society.

In a small down, you're a a settler. Everybody knows everyo=body else. And there is as sense of amiliarity about the place. But cities are a different animal. It's a place where a lot of human driftwood comes together. People are ostensibly close toeach other, but it's such a large community that the vast majority of the people you interact withare strangers. Relationships are largely transactional. There is a sense of decay of community, of values, of shared experiences.

It is not impossible to find your own tribe and your own niche in a place like this, but that requires intellectual sophictiation to pull off.

The city does offer upsides for the nomad. You can meet noew and interesting people quite often. You can enjoy novel experiences. You can find fulfillment and excitement if you like these things. But the price that you pay is in the ties that bind people together. I don't know if the founders of the USA – who were quite liberal for their time – bargained for this. Maybe the closeness of people in a tightly knit community was something that fell on their blind spots.

This was the age of the Enlightenment, where people were discovering science for the first time. People were talking about things in an analytic way. They saw society and people as abstractions. Hobbes talked about “freedom” as though people were atoms in a scientific system. Talking about people in a scientific way made it possible for people to miss a few crucial aspects of the human condition, but still be utterly convinced that they're right. People are now jumping on the transsexual bandwagon, and while trans rights are important, they attach far too much importance to it. People don't understand how racism is a very natural condition of life, and even if they decry racism, they don't really talk about how to make a person less racist. It's easy to go after the big things like – you should not be lynching people, putting up burning crosses in your lawn. But the most insiduous parts of racism are the hardest to deal with. The redlining, the denying people of opportunities, the inability to form human connections with people who are different from you. It's the small things which are hardest to deal with.

This reminds me a little of how child sex offenders in prison are usually the ones who get beaten up worst. Their fellow prisoners are not moral people. They're just looking for an excuse to beat you up. So while there is some genuine desire to make the world a better place, some of it is just holier than thou-ness at its best and a desire to break some heads at its worst. I experienced some of this when I was younger. If you were the first people to understand that being gay wasn't a sin, it felt like you were in an exclusive, enlightened club, who “got it” before a lot of other people did.

There were a lot of times when I was a kid and I saw how crazy a lot of adults were. Then I found out that you just had to keep them happy and not prod them too much on you thought was the irrationality of their beliefs. There were people who were nice to you, but they had such horrible things to say about racial minorities and gay people. But you just kept quiet because you didn't want to start a big fight that you didn't have to. Today, everybody says out loud what they are thinking. Society has become much less peaceful because of that. There will always be people who either won't accept gay people or will take a long time to get around doing it. Realistically, there's nothing you can do but to wait for them to come around.

Maybe this is the world that we face today. A world full of strangers. It was a different world when I was younger. I hated the parochialism of what Singapore was like, how stifling and restrictive it was. I hated how people pretended to agree with a lot of things in order to avoid conflict. But now I grew up and I saw that it served a real purpose. People pretended that they were a lot more similar to each other than they really were. I got fed up with a lot of the bullshit and hypocrisy that took place when Singapore was more like a small town. Then Singapore became more like a big city, and there were more divisions in society. It may not have gotten better. People pretended to agree with each other. People avoided having real conversations with each other, and in the end, ended up not really connecting. They only had superficial conversations with each other which didn't add a lot to their understandings of each other. The illusion that Singapore was “one people, one nation, one Singapore” started to fray, because the social divisions and class differences were starting to come to the fore. You added to the mix the issue that Singapore doesn't have a deep indigenous identity, but rather reflects a lot of its own identity through foreign cultures. That Singapore has never not been insecure about its own identity, then that added another wrinkle to the problem.

An eye-watering number of people who lived in Singapore were not born here, and didn't go through school here. They lived some of their most productive years of their lives here, and then they went home. They made grand visions of what Singapore was going to be like, which didn't gel well with what the natives thought about that place.

It used to be that cities of different countries were all different from each other. However, there will be a sameness for cities which have a lot of immigrants. I thought of this as a good thing. There will be big Chinatowns in many major cities. Big Indian enclaves. Kebab shops. Korean supermarkets.

This is the meaning of globalisation. In the US, paradoxically, is where you have the greatest and the worst of the immigrant stories. On one hand, the USA becomes a tech superpower largely on the talents of the best immigrants. On the other hand, the backlash against the immigrants was very powerful. The sheer number of people who could become ICE agents. (Sometimes I wonder why nobody is compiling hitlists of ICE agents so that people could fuck them up once we throw Trump out of office. ) A big source of the unhappiness is that people didn't recognise the USA that they grew up in. Sometimes no amount of the fruits of immigrant's labours can compensate for that. Race relations in the cities are OK, generally. But then the cleavage will be at the rural-urban divide. The small towns, which are now populated by people left behind in the brain drain, will become parochial and increasingly backwards places to live. The romantic charm of the small town that you see in “Our Town” or the “Last Picture Show” is gone.

If the USA is the part of the world where the labour movements were historically violent affairs, it's just a continuation of tradition that the confrontation between the natives and the new arrivals would be more violent than in other countries.

Governance is another problem in immigrant societies. How are you going to police a bunch of transients? Transients are not going to care about this society except in matter which affect them. They're going to impose their own preferences and live their way of life. Which is fine until it affects your way of life. I was driving in a HDB carpark when a guy I knew to be a foreigner drove a car with his family down the wrong way just so that he could jump a queue. I didn't beat him up, but I kinda wanted to.

The other downside of the great cosmopolitan megacity is that every large enough city will now have slums, and they will often be ethnic enclaves. It's not just that people from the third world can escape the third world to try and belong in the new city. It's also that the ones who fall behind will create a small little third world in their corner of the city. And there will be associations between the migrants and that third world enclave, fairly or unfairly.

I remember going to the Little Saigons of southern California, immensely grateful that I had adequate access to good Asian cuisine even though I was in a foreign land. And yet I was a little appalled that they all looked like slums and holes in walls.