I’ve argued repeatedly that we need to accept that we live in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. This isn’t just a matter of intellectual correction. Much of the suffering in recent centuries was caused by our prideful attempts to control dynamic entities, even our own children, as they go through maturing processes of various sorts. Many acts of mass-murder by revolutionaries, many imperialistic acts so damaging to other countries, were the result of efforts by self-defined elites to create a brave new world of some sort.
Most of the alleged beneficiaries of these acts of conscious or unconscious cruelty had, and have, enough self-respect to at least resent all that we could label as social-engineering, including the replacement of troubled neighborhoods by high-rise concrete crime zones. That resentment is only part of the reason for the failure of urban-planners to turn Harlem into a prosperous region of New York City, the failure of social-workers to rescue children by destroying what’s left of family ties, the failure of Judge Garrity to raise the quality of education for African-American children in Boston by putting them on buses for hours each day, and the prior failures of Bolsheviks and Maoists and others to transform their countries into workers’ paradises. The methods themselves, even if they had been implemented with the self-sacrifice of the Ukrainian Kulaks or that of the prosperous Iraqi middle-class, were grossly defective, out of touch with reality. These grand projects of rebuilding Harlem or building a new nation in Iraq or rebuilding Haiti (see Why We Can’t Build or Rebuild the Countries of Other Peoples) are efforts to impose human schemes upon God’s world. Don’t try to fool Mother Nature and don’t try to force the Creator’s hand. The results can be ugly and painful. It’s far better to work with Mother Nature and her Boss.
Jane Jacobs saw the problems in urban-planning schemes early on. Wikipedia’s article about her begins:
Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American–Canadian journalist, author, and activist best known for her influence on urban studies. Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that urban renewal did not respect the needs of most city-dwellers. The book also introduced sociology concepts such as “eyes on the street” and “social capital”.
Jacobs is well known for organizing grassroots efforts to protect existing neighborhoods from “slum clearance”—and particularly for her opposition to Robert Moses in his plans to overhaul her neighborhood of Greenwich Village. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through Washington Square Park, and was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on the project. After moving to Canada in 1968 she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto planned and under construction.
Development and evolution aren’t pain-free paths to perfection. There’s plenty of pain and this world is mostly made up of ad-hoc entities which are good enough for now but might have to be far different next year, let alone a century from now. The world doesn’t stay put long enough for it to even be desirable for us to attain a state of perfection. If we could attain such a state during our lifetime, it wouldn’t be perfection by the time we attained it.
It’s a fact in this world that evolution and development sometimes lead to deaths and other ends of something once good or potentially good, yet, evolution and development are the ways of this world. Though change can often appear suddenly, as a result of external events or as a result of the buildup of stresses which unleash at once, this is mostly a world of gradual processes, at least in the macroscopic realm of things.
Yet, evolution and development are the ways of the world, the ways chosen by the Creator. To be complacent and not to try to make things better is a sin for a Christian; to try to enforce our desires and schemes upon the world is also a sin for a Christian. We are called to cooperate with God’s world, the story He’s telling, and to try to bring about as much good as possible. Not to try to ease all pain and suffering but to bring about as much good as possible. Those are different goals and conflict with each other.
What about American cities? Some of them were magnificent and livable at least into the World War II era at what now seems the end of a great expansion of prosperity for all American workers, from ditch-diggers through engineers and on to industrialists. By way of human beings living together, neighborhoods developed and no one cared that those neighborhoods were homogeneous, neighborhoods of Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans or African-Americans. Some cities dominated by conservative ethnic groups even had neighborhoods of artists and wannabe artists, true Bohemias. Those neighborhoods were mostly at peace with each other and shared many public squares.
By the 1950s, something had gone wrong, and urban renewal programs shifted into higher gear to rebuild neighborhoods such as those in Harlem for which the description `troubled’ is an understatement. The experts had arrived and were working as if guided by a sinister invisible hand to make things far worse, even threatening to modernize New York City by a highway project through the middle of Manhattan which would have destroyed much of the city, including Washington Square, where Jane Jacobs lived. She set to work. She was right. Now, truer experts, those who study reality and those who think about ways to make things better rather than thinking to make a new reality are still at work, as they will be so long as there are human communities in this mortal realm.
This is an interesting article about work done by one of those experts, Katherine King of Duke University: Jane Jacobs Was Right: Gradual Redevelopment Does Promote Community. She even found it conducive to good neighborhoods to have residences with their own direct door to the street, townhouses rather than flats or other sorts of multi-unit buildings. An interesting finding, one which makes some sense after being established as a fact but it wouldn’t have likely been conjectured by someone working from some schematic representation of reality any more than Darwin himself could have anticipated the many strange and inconvenient facts he discovered.
I don’t know if we Americans will ever learn better, but we’ll soon be forced to act better as we realize we are no longer an extraordinarily wealthy nation.