3/3/16 [Draft: not for circulation or citation]
Rosenblum: Good Neighbor Nation
Chapter 2. Taking Offense, Taking Action
What Anyone Would Do
“Neighbor” is often used evaluatively; “good” is superfluous. We see
neighborliness as a personal and social virtue, and lapses disqualify us from the title:
“Thay be not neighbours, sir. Thay be near-dwellers.”1 Sentimentality is smuggled into
our terms and experience sometimes confirms our warm, unearned emotions, as in this
report:
“The town of Essex, sleepy with the approach of winter, had detected the
presence of newcomers and roused itself to greet us. In one week, two
people knocked on the door of our rental house bearing actual welcome
baskets, and three others came by to invite us to the Tuesday-night potluck
at St. John’s Episcopal Church. …. The next week we met some people
our own age who had us to dinner…the babies were laid down to sleep on
the bed and the fiddles came out and the cabin filled up with music, like an
episode of Little House on the Prairie but with beer.”2
These idylls are not dependable, or durable. The stories we tell are often indeed mostly
miserable. If our accounts of neighbors are not outright painful, they reflect our
bafflement, our incredulity at the misconduct or obliviousness of the people next door.
We welcome any opportunity to recount our neighbor woes -- I never had to ask twice.
We become agitated again in the telling. When friends sit down to report their trials we
may feel overcome by ennui and think ‘how tedious’, ‘how petty’. But our own bad
neighbors are serious business.
Plainly, the value we place on being and having good neighbors comes at least as
much from the grinding irritation, inveterate difficulty, ordinary vices, and occasional
malice and dangerousness of bad ones. So much so that “good neighbor” might be
defined by the absence of trouble and offense. He is quiet. She minds her own business
and leaves us alone. Relentlessly barking dogs, blaring televisions, incessant quarrels, an
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excess of domestic odors. Sounds that startle us at night and disturb our sleep.
Bedraggled yards. Snooping and interfering in ways that make us anxious or hostile.
Killing time and wounding reputation:
A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation.''3
The trouble neighbors cause us may be frivolous or costly. They are daily insults,
inescapable. “Your next door neighbor is not a man”, one wry observer wrote, “he is an
environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a
party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours; or roses that are better than yours.”4
The predominance of bad experiences shouldn’t be surprising. Neither should the
fact that once we shed sentimentality, bad neighbor is the background against which good
ones stand out in bright, sharp relief. We have so many opportunities to give and even
more to take offense. There are so many ways to run amok.
“What is there wrong?”
“Something you just now said.”
“What did I say?”5
Precisely because of the absence of defined rules of conduct and set obligations, the lack
of institutional constraints, and the shared purposes and defined outcomes that shape
relations at work and other social settings, temperament and disposition or just the mood
of the day are given comparatively free reign. Neighbor relations are more individual and
fluid than others except the most intimate. Neighbors have latitude to be careless and
inattentive, and to unleash their demons on one another. We have innumerable occasions
to discharge our desire to get back at offenders, too, so that it may take enormous effort
to “represse all appetite of our nighbour’s hurt”.6
Relations among neighbors are largely but not purely personal and dispositional.
Largely, because they are also a matter of local knowledge, which brings the abstraction
“good neighbor” to life. And confidence in our concrete grasp of what, where we live,
“anyone would do” helps explain our propensity to moralism, the poor cousin of moral
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judgment. We assess our neighbors all the time, not just in relation to ourselves but also
for local fit. We may start off taking their measure privately, muttering to our family,
often about their failings. We go on to try out and adjust our assessment in conversation
with others, and to apply our tests of acceptability and contribution. The usual
preoccupations hardly bear mention – they are conventions. They focus on delinquency.
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, “The fathers complained that Mr. Dixit did not fertilize his
lawn properly, did not rake his leaves on time, and agreed that the Dixit’s house, the only
one with vinyl siding, detracted from the neighborhood’s charm.”7 That neighbor with the
broken down cars in the yard, we state emphatically, is degrading our quality of life (and
our property values):
“For the eleven months leading up to this day….the neighborhood adults
had muttered similar sentiments with the same folding of arms and tsktsks in their appraisals that they were muttering now. That they didn’t
appreciate having a squalid unkempt wreck of a home framed in their
picture windows.”8
Few things arouse neighbors more strenuously than the behavior of other people’s
children. Audible and visible, children are the main lubricant and friction. As a correlate
of interaction children take precedence over income, education, ethnicity, religion, and
race.9 Encounters over children are one of the most disturbing respects in which we fail to
mind our own business. Our judgments are the most sanctimonious. Drury’s fictional
neighbors in “Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire” level typical
condemnations:
“Apparently the Bainer parents…were also rarely seen, if at all, at
community meetings, council sessions, and parent-teacher events. They
attended no church, they gave to none of the local charities, they didn’t
frequent the local businesses. They seemed fine with letting their children
wreak unsupervised havoc in public view…”10
We shouldn’t underestimate how closely adherence to local knowledge is tied to
the sense of well-being. An important study of immigration reports that Americans’ chief
concern is whether immigrants are good neighbors. True, we have opinions about
immigration policy shaped by party or ideology, concern about contracting job
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opportunities or ballooning public services, assessments of immigrants’ contributions to
the economy and culture, sympathy or prejudice. In practice, however, acceptance of
these particular men, women, and children turns not on documentation or their ability to
answer questions about American history but on mundane interactions at home. Being a
good neighbor turns out to be more important for immigrants’ acceptance, or
“incorporation”, than earning, paying taxes, or citizenship. Do day laborers dart into
traffic to negotiate with employers, drink in public? Do neighbors park cars on the grass
or cram many people into an apartment? 11 Are new arrivals too shy, deferential,
reserved? Their retiring attitude can be taken as self-segregation and mistrust. Passing the
test of “good neighbor” in the local idiom counts as evidence that immigrants do not
intend to treat residence instrumentally with a view only to jobs or benefits. It is
reassurance that they will not willfully disturb the quality of everyday life. It confirms
that they are open to learning “what anyone would do” here.12
Giving and Taking Offense
The phenomenology of taking offense will be familiar. We all know someone
aggravated by (we might say obsessed with) the neighbor who uses his lawn as a shortcut, with that shoddy new construction directly in his view, with teen-agers massed on the
sidewalk blocking the way, with pets let loose to soil the hallway, with cars with oversize
tail pipes and missing mufflers trolling the street. “How about Mrs. Penny, a nuisance to
her children, to everyone in this building, and particularly to me – something I simply
cannot face?”13 The grating effects and the offenses are not always known quantities that
we can describe convincingly to others. We are sometimes unable to explain our reaction
even to ourselves. It’s not like squatters or junkies. The chemistry of proximity to certain
individuals is just explosive. What accounts for our aversions? Why do frequent sightings
of this young woman and her latest boyfriend set our teeth on edge? Why do we time our
comings and goings to avoid encountering that apparently unobjectionable older man? Or
why, normally insensitive to aesthetics, do we become fixated on the noxious color of the
trim on the house next door, which we experience as an act of aggression?
That our neighbor did not intend to offend and that therefore our sense of injury
and outrage are unprovoked is not a reliable barrier to hurt or indignation. We are
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regularly mistaken and overreact, labeling this woman a bad neighbor that it is our
misfortune to live beside, and broadcasting this conviction. Once the dynamic of offense
is set in motion, it is hard to reverse. A comic account of run-away misperception is
Gogol’s “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”. A careless
word interpreted as an insult provokes an escalating feud between formerly friendly
neighbors in the Mirogord shtetl. Each begins to imagine the other has designs on his
property. Each Ivan rejects attempts by the other to explain his perspective on events and
to roll back the offense. Each represents the other’s claims of innocence as a lie that by
itself amounts to a despicable personal insult. Moreover, the Ivans know that their feud
has become a public spectacle in the village so that personal betrayal is compounded by
dishonor. They demand apologies and compensation from one another, but from the start
they have made satisfaction inconceivable. One Ivan initiates a legal battle, which lasts a
decade and has no conclusive outcome.14
That’s the thing about physical proximity: neighbors’ careless, impersonal actions
can seem to be aimed at us. He didn’t realize that loading the dumpster with the left-over
materials from his home repair would make it hard for me to take out my trash; he just
wasn’t thinking. But his lack of intent hardly registers with me. His selfish inattention is
making my already stressed out life harder. In that moment, he is the last straw. We
experience bad neighbors as more than a nuisance; and even a nuisance, if it persists, can
degrade everyday life. Indignation and a sense of righteous injury at the hands of a bad
neighbor are endemic. We rail against him; he throws us into a rage.
Even then, we may exercise self-restraint. We pretend to ignore the offense. We
do not acknowledge our neighbor’s bad behavior. We do not express our feelings or our
judgment to the offender or to others. We are, with effort, reticent. We don’t advise our
neighbors that because they neglect to pull down the shades we see them displaying
themselves nude or arguing aggressively, and that it is upsetting to have to be exposed to
these intimacies. Whether exhibitionist or just indifferent, they make the difficult
business of minding our own business more difficult. Still, we estimate that things would
be worse if we spoke out. Most of us exercise restraint most the time. We are selectively
inattentive to slamming hallway doors or to doors left ajar, to neighbors who park their
car “temporarily” in our assigned spot, to the disturbances caused by errant children. We
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don’t acknowledge slights or inconveniences even if we find our neighbor’s indifference
maddening or detect a whiff of malice. We pretend to ignore her disturbing behavior.
Keeping offenses to ourselves is a convention of denial that operates in almost every
setting. It keeps us from revealing our every thought and emotion, and thus limits
collisions. We have doubtless observed the opposite: a neighbor who is in a state of
perpetual agitation, who calls us out on every misstep and slight, real or imagined, who
creates awkwardness and excites conflict. We know that our avenues of recourse are
limited, and we have a premonition that our attempts to fashion a response will be
fumbling and futile. No wonder offenders often do their bad turns with impunity, after
all. Speaking up, we judge, is bound to initiate cycles of anger and recrimination. So our
reticence or more simply “unacknowledgment” permits us to carry on our interactions,
such as they are, without more upset. After all, we may not be able to entirely shun or
evade this neighbor, despite what we perceive as selfishness, carelessness, nuisance,
excessive demands and intrusions. “It seems more efficient to make explicit
acknowledgment function as a signal that something must be collectively dealt with.”15
Returning Bad Turns
Often enough, we decide to respond to an offending neighbor. We take tentative
initial steps: calm approaches, patient explanations, mild and reasonable protests. Once
we are resigned to the fact that these do not move our neighbor to acknowledge the
inconvenience or slight, once it is clear that no apology will be offered, and once we have
lost confidence that the disturbance will stop, we fall back on reciprocity. Reciprocity
holds for bad turns as well as good, after all. But assuming we don’t launch impulsively
into retaliation, we discover the asymmetry. It is more difficult to mend wall and balance
loaves and balls when offense and injury need returning than greetings and favors. The
calibration is especially strained. For the most part, we think that good turns ought to be
reciprocated even if they are uninvited, even if assessing what return requires is wearing,
even if in the end we feel justified in distancing and withholding. We can choose not to
reciprocate (or forget, or err), but normally we think we should respond to a greeting or
favor – if not now, later, if not in kind than a rough equivalence. We are less certain
about reciprocating bad turns. So our decision to take action may stall, and we try again
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to turn a blind eye and deaf ear. Our uncertainty about the consequences of returning bad
turns is one reason we practice resignation when it is a question of irritation and
inconvenience. For this reason alone we may settle into passive endurance. If the offense
is persistent and serious enough, inaction can produce troubling self-doubt – do I invite
mistreatment? Am I a patsy or a fool? The dynamic has twists. For some people passivity
has its own sorry gratifications. We wallow in our sense of injury. We become smugly
moralistic (a close relative of sentimentality -- another easy appeal to prepared emotions.)
If, however, we determine that the offense requires self-assertion in the form of
confrontation or retaliation of some kind, the disturbing difficulty of rough equivalence
must be confronted. Thomas Berger’s Neighbors is a surreal account of a mild suburban
man’s reaction to his offensive new neighbors. Harry and Ramona have taken occupancy
of the only other house on Earl Keese’s cul-de sac. Learning of their arrival, Keese
considers asking them to dinner. He wavers. Before he and his wife can make up their
minds, Harry and Ramona intrude on them uninvited. The young couple is vulgar, erratic,
and vaguely menacing. Local knowledge of acceptable suburban behavior escapes them.
They are oblivious to the bounds of what “anyone would do” here. They don’t respect
personal space or property. They come and go from Keese’s house; behave with what he
sees as crude familiarity towards his wife and daughter; shower in his bathroom; put on
his clothes and borrow his car. Keese feels he has lost control of his existence. The
normal disapproving remonstrances and gestures have no effect. The only course open
for handling the situation, he concludes, is active response in kind. Keese turns out to be
a virtuoso, a master of verbal abuse and physical insult. A cycle of bad turns ensues.
Keese tries adopting a Hobbesian strategy of preemptive self-defense. “He was
not displeased”, Berger writes, “to be considered dangerous”. But this strategy is
ineffective given the bizarre unpredictability of his neighbors’ moves (and perhaps by
Keese’s paranoid misjudgment). Nonetheless, he tries to calculate what Harry and
Ramona are owed in return for each instance of trespass and disturbance. Before and
again after each bout, Keese tries to maintain his foothold in reciprocity and to estimate
rough equivalence. Did his traps warrant Henry’s failed effort to strangle him with a
garden hose? He struggles to find some coherence in his “pay back”, and after each
evaluation of the latest give and take “he was satisfied that his version of the outcome
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was fair.” Well into his ordeal, Keese still imagines that reciprocity will be achieved, the
fallen loaves and balls will be picked up and balanced on the wall: “Everything can be
put back where it belongs.”16
Harry and Ramona mock Keese’s attempts to “think ethically”. But without local
etiquette to keep them from blows, and having rejected what seem to be his wife’s and
neighbors’ unaccountably different assessment of the couple, reciprocity is Keese’s lifeline. It is his grounding, his hope to preserve his own equilibrium and a shred of his
identity as a good neighbor. Keese never entirely abandons the norm of rough
equivalence, though he is thrown off by the worry that he is “in fact defenseless against
any form of revenge that a demented adversary might choose”. He wants things to be a
bit to his advantage in the final calculation. “I’ve given more than I’ve got”, he observes,
and “I don’t mind admitting I’m proud of myself.” 17
Berger’s surreal Neighbors rings true because like Keese sufficient provocation
brings us to believe that reciprocity entails the return of bad turns as well as good. For the
most part, we don’t cast our bad neighbors as maniacal, and our responses are tempered.
Unlike Gogol’s Mirogord neighbors, we don’t wreak havoc on goose pens -- though like
Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich we may sue. Unlike Berger’s Keese, we don’t push
our neighbors’ car into a creek, lock them in the cellar, smack them, or give and receive
other kinds of physical punishment. Nevertheless, we recognize the psychological logic
that propels him. We become confident of our ability to accurately discern injury and
offense. We are almost always innocent in our own minds of inviting bad behavior. We
fear we have been naïve and allowed ourselves to be suckered. Compensating, we are
prone to exaggerate and to work ourselves up. “There is no stopping to read the riot act,
no firing over the heads of the mob.”18
Minding Other’s Business: Speaking Up
Bad behavior should have consequences, including reputational consequences,
and we don’t want our neighbor to offend with impunity. We may worry, though, that
despite what may seem to us to be our own sure grasp of the situation, when it comes to
proving intent and offense our evidence may not be strong. We know that the accuracy of
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accounts of offense is often doubtful; we have seen the vagaries of witnesses in other
situations. That is a potential embarrassment because not invariably but most often we
seek confirmation from other neighbors. We report untrustworthiness, deception, bad
attitude, nuisance and offenses to others near-by, and they judge the reliability of our
reports. We want our neighbors to see things from our point of view. We want them to
agree that our agitation and sense of injury are reasonable, that we are not thin-skinned or
acting out of disappointed sentimental expectations. We talk censoriously about the local
deviant, and narrate her trespasses in detail. It is not enough that neighbors confirm: ‘the
son-of-a-bitch should have it coming to him.’ We want our neighbors to concur that our
patience has lasted long enough, that our objections have been ineffective and our actions
abortive so that more is called for. We want our neighbors to make our business their
own. We want them to agree to take action and to do together “what anyone would do” in
this situation: confront, retaliate, ostracize, shame, call the authorities, sue.
In some circumstances the move from reticence to dealing with bad neighbors
involves appealing to authorities or joining local associations committed to addressing
community problems. When we believe our neighbor has violated ordinances, impinged
on property rights, or committed crimes and misdemeanors we report to police, zoning
boards, housing authorities. We translate ordinary offenses into officially recognized
misconduct. For now, though, I focus on offenses that spring from carelessness, spite, or
ordinary vices that degrade the quality of everyday life but that hold no interest for local
authorities. That is, the innumerable cases where we neighbors are on our own.
The most damaging of ordinary vices is cruelty, which often takes the form of
bullying those unable to effectively resist. Consider assaulting neighbors with noise. In
my condominium building, a converted Payne Elevator industrial space, one couple
tormented the family next door – tormented is the right description -- by locating an air
conditioner on a spot on the roof that produced motor noise and vibrations and kept the
family awake on warm nights. The owners refused to move the compressor to another
rooftop location. When a number of neighbors proposed pooling the cost of moving the
AC and footing the bill, the offenders declined our offer. They declared that they were
within their rights; they hired an engineering firm to testify that the sound and vibration
fell within the permissible limits set by the city; they posted the paperwork in the
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hallway. Their determination to inflict pain and their pleasure in their sleepless
neighbors’ impotence were plain. So was the satisfaction they got from observing the rest
of us spend fruitless hours trying to mediate and come up with a solution. Their victims
were brought to the limits of distraction. They tried earplugs, insulation, moving their
beds to a back wall. They tried to sell (were they required to warn potential buyers of the
AC racket and the malicious couple next door?) but the real estate market was slow and
they got no offers. They were stuck. They became depressed and withdrawn. Their
situation was pitiful, and we were sympathetic. The bullies were shameless. All we could
do was serve as witnesses to the assault on our neighbor’s quality of life, voice our
contempt for the bullies’ flawed characters, and continue to demonstrate our indignation
and plead our neighbors’ case.
I offer this scenario as an example of “pure” neighborly interaction. A set of
contrasts is helpful. Again, speaking up against the noise bully differs from speaking up
when official grounds for complaint exist: vandalism, for example, or violations of
housing law by exceeding the number of renters allowed. In these cases we can appeal in
regular if burdensome fashion to police or local agencies where officials are assigned to
the task. There are reasons not to report, the injunction “live and let live” is the subject of
Chapter 5. When we do, we are hardly guaranteed satisfaction. The actual noisiness of
air-conditioners or leaf-blowers, parties or barking dogs, is a vexed question that depends
on environmental conditions. Ordinances are infrequently enforced if only because
ensuring compliance is expensive. In any case, requesting official action or participating
in organized civic activism is different from speaking out against bullying at home where
all we have is confronting, remonstrating, sympathizing, comforting.
Moreover, while the situation I describe has urgency for the bully’s miserable
targets, it is not an emergency and there is no threat of destruction or danger. There is no
intimidation, either, as there sometimes is so that neighbors risk retaliation if they speak
out about violent delinquents and challenge them directly or report them to authorities.
Finally, the cruel infliction of suffering I describe would be different if the offender were
a government official using her authority to single out neighbors for torment for personal
or political reasons. Where cruelty is officially condoned and backed by formidable
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power, neighbors speaking up is a form of political resistance that demands courage, and
I turn to dangerous, politically inspired neighbors in “Holding our Lives in their Hands”.
The noise bully perpetrates an ordinary offense. Sometimes neighbors’
confrontations are effective. But efforts at correction or for that matter at extracting an
apology and effecting reconciliation are often futile. Unfortunately, we can expect only
cathartic relief from confronting offenders and demonstrating solidarity with hapless
victims. Nonetheless neighbors do rally round, speak up to challenge and defend. How
should we understand this act of neighborliness?
Whose Responsibility?
When political philosophers analyze the obligation to speak up and take
action the context is violations of law and public principles of justice, or
violations of basic rights and harm to essential well-being. These obligations arise
in response to official acts of injustice and in certain quasi- public social and
commercial domains where laws apply and adherence to rules and procedures of
fairness and nondiscrimination are monitored and enforced. The moral grounds of
these obligations vary, of course, and so do explanations of the dynamic that leads
citizens to take action. On some philosophical accounts we should speak out when
we see that circumstances call fundamental principles of justice into play; our
obligation is to affirm and uphold them, and this suffices to impel us to act. On
other accounts, we identify with the weak in the face of oppressive authority or
powerful groups; our moral obligation and spur to action derive ultimately from
pity and a sense of shared humanity. On still others, we speak out as a matter of
personal integrity; self-contradiction is painful and we are compelled to remain
true to ourselves and to match our actions to the values we hold.
In my example, our neighbor’s cruel conduct affects the quality of life of
the family next door but does not rise to the level of injustice or violation of a
basic right or well-being. None of these moral positions offers a particularly good
description of our reasons for speaking out about the offense of a maliciously
placed air conditioner. The family of basic moral obligations is unlikely to
correspond to our neighbor’s experience of injury or to capture the motivation to
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defend the victim and confront the offender. In fact, we probably don’t think too
closely about our grounds for confronting the bully or deliberate much about
whether we have an obligation to respond at all. Moral principles, integrity,
common humanity fit ordinary offenses uneasily. If they were invoked, they
would probably strike us as grandiose.
We may be tempted to speak vaguely of our “responsibility” as a
neighbor, though it is difficult to do so without reverting to the high moral terms I
just set aside. Invocations of responsibility to speak up in cases of this kind are
typically casual, part of the effort to rouse others rather than a thoughtful
reference to what is demanded of us personally in situations of this kind and why
our status as neighbor dictates action. In fact, “responsibility” is unlikely to move
those who do not see speaking out against the bully down the hall as any sort of
imperative attached to being a neighbor, for reasons I will lay out. First, however,
what is at work for those who do speak out against disturbances in our face, at
home?
We sympathize with the victims, of course, but speaking out is not just a
gesture of general human sympathy of the sort we might express in other settings
involving strangers. We act as neighbors, although our connection to the targets of
malice is not particularly strong; indeed we may have had no interaction with the
family under assault before. Nonetheless, speaking up owes to our standing as
neighbors.
One thing moving neighbors to speak out is proximity, which gives us a good
understanding of the willful deterioration of this family’s quality of life. Sympathy is
bolstered by this close look at the disruption and emotional disturbance our neighbors
suffer. We are uniquely situated to observe the offense and its consequences. We are also
uniquely situated to provide support to the bully’s poor target. But “epistemic
opportunity” and our comparatively intimate knowledge of the details of the offense and
our neighbors’ suffering are decisive.
Added to this, of course, is our sense that we are not immune from this sort of
harm, perhaps from this particular bully. Sympathy is buttressed by self-protectiveness.
Instrumental reciprocity is in the back (or front) of our minds. It is not hard to imagine
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that we will want our neighbors’ involvement when some noxious neighbor takes aim at
us. There is nothing wrong with prudence:
“Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Then none at all. Provide, Provide!”19
These considerations, which belong to us qua neighbors, are not the end of
the story. In addition, we rally to confront the offender and defend his victim and
in doing so create or cement our relation as neighbors. Thinking back to “the lay
of the land”, we know that ‘neighbor’ refers not to proximity simply but rather to
those with whom we have encounters and admit to a relation, however slight.
These aroused men and women become part of one another’s lay of the land. We
also know intuitively or from wretched past experience that passivity in the face
of cruelty and provocation is debilitating. It takes a toll on us personally and
individually, and passivity in the face of cruelty takes a specific toll on us qua
neighbors. Bullying by neighbors makes it clear to us, as it may not be in the
wider society --where bullies have other titles and there are institutional resources
for relief and punishment – that speaking out is not somebody else’s business.
There is no one else. We elect to make it our business and employ the collective
“we”. Sympathetic rallying enacts the value of neighbors – solicitude, presence,
and availability.
Finally, there is the element of what I call the democracy of everyday life. *
Neighbors act apart from any public institution and speaking up is not an
obligation of citizenship. Why “democratic”, then? Put simply, because speaking
out in this case constitutes resistance to private despotism. At work is the
expectation that no one’s private life should be intruded on and disturbed at the
pleasure of a cruel, unrestrained will. No one should have to endure willfully
imposed and purposeless distress. Malicious arbitrariness should not be exercised
with impunity, even if it is invulnerable to official sanctions. In general, we allow
neighbors wider license for idiosyncracy, inconstancy, offense and exhibition of
*
In the Introduction to Good Neighbor Nation I present a preliminary account of the three facets of the
democracy of everyday life among neighbors. Two make an appearance in this chapter:
speaking up against cruelty and arbitrariness, and the rough equality of reciprocity among “decent folk”.
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all sorts of ordinary vices than in any other domain of personal or social life. But
arbitrariness when it takes the form of senseless, needless attacks on a neighbor’s
quality of life and pleasure in cruelty is something else.
Indignation propels us – a kind of moral anger aroused by someone seizing more
than his due, compounded by using his situation to do ill. Indignation at the bully is as
strong an impetus to speaking out as sympathy with the victim. And indignation is
heightened by the fact that the despotism occurs at home, where retreat is impossible. At
home, where neighbors are mutually vulnerable to one another, and we have a normal
expectation that at least our elementary interests will be taken into account. At a
minimum, we expect that our well-being once recognized will not be aggressively
flouted, the quality of our lives cruelly diminished. Arbitrariness arouses us. Indignation
may be as strong or stronger than our anticipation that we may need our neighbors’
support down the line, so that we should step up as insurance that we will receive that
good turn in turn, and stronger than the gratification of cooperation with neighbors in the
‘we’ created by taking action. Whatever the relative valence, though, democratic
indignation is an independent reason – and motivation – to speak up. Indignation moves
us to speak up against domination and humiliation -- in our faces, close to home.
Resistance to cruelty and arbitrariness is tied to our standing as neighbors. And speaking
out is more than self-defense; it is an expression of democratic indignation.
Speaking up against the neighbor bully is one facet of the democracy of everyday
life. It has none of the articulated justification or potential consequence of political
resistance and it does not count as micro-resistance, either. It is not aimed at abuse of
authority or over-weaning social power. Nor is it the same as speaking out publicly
against patent unfairness or discrimination. When we speak out against injustice, the
obligation to uphold laws and public principles justifies and primes action, whether or not
we feel personally immune -- if we don’t belong to the targeted racial, ethnic, or political
group, for example. Out in public, in a store or at work, we may remonstrate in defense of
strangers who are treated unfairly, particularly if they appear to be targets of
discrimination. We explain our action to others on the scene in terms of rudimentary
fairness or generally acknowledged terms of justice. Our action is, in part, educative; we
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pronounce and reinforce civic values. We speak out and others may join our chorus of
objections. We may be led further to join organized civic associations in the community
and take formal collective action. In this spirit, a Billings, Montana neighborhood
responded to a skinhead attack on a Jewish home by pasting drawings of a menorah
printed by the Billings Gazette on their windows.20 In the case at hand, however, our
cruel neighbor’s offense is a disturbing air conditioner, not injustice. Speaking up alone
or with neighbors against the noise bully in the building merits its own characterization.
For those who take action against the willful destruction of our neighbors’ quality of life
day to day, speaking out is more than sympathy or prudent self-protection. Aimed at
arbitrariness and cruelty, speaking up, causing a fuss, running amok against the offender
is an exhibition of the democracy of everyday life that falls peculiarly to neighbors.
How, then, should we characterize a neighbor’s refusal to rally round?
What should we think about the woman down the hall who holds back from
joining the chorus of objections in support of the miserable family down the hall?
Her aim may simply be to avoid unpleasantness. Or she may be acting selfprotectively according to her calculations; instead of taking a long view of
reciprocity and her potential need for assistance, she sticks to the present. She is
not injured, and her short-term interest is to remain uninvolved. Or, this
disengaged neighbor may have a crystallized judgment of the situation; she has
determined that the offender is within his rights or that confrontation is
misguided. As often, though, the only judgment she makes is that she will not
make this affair her business.
Her detachment in this context is not blamable in general moral terms (as
it is sure to be regarded if she refused to drive a neighbor suddenly taken ill to the
hospital, for example).21 Nor is it blamable in civic terms as it would be in the
context of failing to speak out when we witness an act of public injustice. But is
the neighbor who declines to speak up against the despot next door a bad
neighbor? We know that the terms of neighborliness are loose. There is no list of
constitutive acts much less presumptive responsibilities. Speaking out against
malicious arbitrariness of a mundane sort is not a necessary or defining
15
characteristic of good neighbor. It certainly does not exhaust what good neighbors
do; the neighbor who removes herself here may engage in other good turns, and
the step to speaking out does not flow directly from regular reciprocity. Given my
characterization of speaking up as a facet of the democratic ethos among
neighbors, we might say that resolute detachment in the face of malicious assaults
on our neighbors is a failing by the standards of the democracy of everyday life. I
think it is, also mitigated by the fact that resistance to arbitrariness is just one
facet. Inaction does not amount to a wholesale repudiation of the democratic ethos
any more than it denotes wholesale indifference to neighbors’ well-being. Some
few actions and failures to act are distinctive if not unique to our status as
neighbors and qualify as firm criteria of bad neighbor (the noise bully) and good
(alertness to nearby danger and warning those around). I return to the question of
responsibility in “Live and Let Live”, where I argue that the injunction is
latitudinarian.
Going further, speaking up may be in tension with minding our own
business. Some neighbors consistently adhere to this pose. They are insulated
from the furious goings on. They are protected from the opportunity to know the
facts, to observe the consequences, and are immune to a surge of indignation.
They are not susceptible to the developing “we” of neighbors rallying and
speaking up. Moreover, for the neighbor who assigns minding her own business
weight, as she should, self- distancing is a defining characteristic of good
neighbor. She feels and could reasonably argue that she is justified in electing
disengagement for reasons that are not just selfish. She restricts the bounds of
reciprocity, perhaps particularly when it involves collective action. She will not
be recruited to join efforts to confront, mediate, appeal. Minding our own
business is not a rationalization but a sound reason under many, perhaps most
circumstances. We don’t have to accept neighbors’ insistence that it is our
responsibility to take sides and take action. We need plausible grounds beyond
proximity for thinking we are personally responsible. She can rest her reticence
on grounds that it is not her business as a neighbor to try to right every wrong.
She won’t earn the accolade “neighborly” but given the indisputable value of both
16
minding our own and others’ business and the shifting boundary between them,
she is not a bad neighbor either. Though she is likely to figure as a secondary
villain in her activist neighbors’ tales, and I return to this shortly.
Keeping Offenses to Ourselves
Normally we want others nearby to see just how we have been wronged. We want
them to make our business their own. Not always, though. We sometimes choose to keep
the injury we have suffered to ourselves. Even though it is meant to be supportive,
neighbors rallied in our defense may be reason enough to conceal our grievances. Their
eagerness to broadcast the news and enter the fray can be disconcerting. The accident of
proximity gives them presumptive authority. They are willing informants, attesting to
anyone who will listen including the local TV news: ‘the parents were dutiful and the
four-year-old twins drowned in the family pool was a tragic accident’. To eager
consumers of gossip: ‘I predicted their divorce: they weren’t screamers but their public
demonstrations of affection seemed suspicious, a transparent performance’. Neighbors
magnify the importance of what they know and with that magnify their own. We are
“there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one
with the removal of the gods of Troy.”22
Other inhibitions are at work in keeping offenses to ourselves. If sentimentality
colors our encounters with neighbors and if we are particularly trusting we may not
initially grasp our misfortune. Our uncertainty about what constitutes offense may
provide cover for neighbors to inflict their damage for some time before we are
sufficiently miserable that we admit we have been trespassed on, exploited, misused. We
wonder if our weakness or misjudgment is to blame. Do we invite bad turns? Do we
allow ourselves to be bullied? We find our situation at the hands of our neighbor
humiliating. We are unable or unwilling to protest much less recruit others to our cause.
We don’t play our part in the cycle of bad turns, and we don’t seek confirmation and
reassurance from others. There is something disreputable about our situation, we feel. We
don’t want sympathetic attention.
Besides, we face another uncertainty. Curiously, nuisances like noisy air
conditioners or the stench of cats can be more easily communicated to others than real
17
vices, and we may keep these more painful affairs to ourselves. Consider betrayal, which
along with cruelty is one of the ordinary vices neighbors inflict on one another. The list
of Old Testament prohibitions against coveting begins with “your neighbor’s wife”.
Narratives of infidelity often involve neighbors because proximity provides opportunity,
as well as the frisson of the danger of discovery. Infidelity among neighbors is colored by
the fact that all the parties are likely to know one another. Choosing a neighbor as a
partner in betrayal brings the offense doubly home. The after-effects include the
continued, visible presence of the offender next door or around the corner, and the
possibility that others nearby will learn all about it. We may keep this betrayal to
ourselves, warding off embarrassment and suffering the anxiety that the story will get
around. There is also the specific damage to our inner life that comes from knowing that
others know: forced to respond to their inquiries or worse their solicitude, our attention is
diverted from our own feelings. We are distracted from minding our own business.
Neighbors’ attention can disrupt whatever intimacy remains with the partner who
betrayed us. We are grateful that neighbors don’t know, or grateful for their reticence in
not acknowledging what they know.
Less noticed are betrayals rooted in the violation of neighbors’ trust and in these
cases too, we may keep the matter to ourselves. In Raymond Carver’s story “Neighbors”,
Bill and Arlene Miller are vaguely envious of the couple that lives across the hall.
“It seemed to the Millers that the Stones lived a fuller and brighter life.
The Stones were always going out for dinner, or entertaining at home, or
traveling about the country somewhere in connection with Jim’s work”.
When the Millers agree to feed Kitty and water the plants while the Stone’s go out of
town, they indulge their fantasies about this brighter life. The Stone’s apartment seems at
one visit cooler and darker, another time the air feels heavy and sweet; it is mysterious, a
foreign country. On his visits to feed the cat, Bill takes sips of Chivas Regal, pockets pills
from the Stone’s bathroom medicine cabinet and cigarettes from the bedside table, tries
on Jim’s suits and a Hawaiian shirt and Arlene’s bra, uses the toilet, acts out sexual desire
on their bed (which “seemed enormous, with a fluffy white bedspread draped to the
floor”). When it’s her turn to feed and water, Arlene trespasses too. She finds
pornographic pictures, and urges Bill to accompany her back to the neighbor’s so that
18
they can look at them together. Discovering that they have both turned the Stone’s
apartment into a place of experiment and thrilling disorientation, Bill and Arlene imagine
that maybe their neighbors won’t return and that the new world across the hall will be a
permanent escape from the banality of their lives. One day, caught up in their fantasy,
they forget the Stones’ key, locking themselves out of the apartment. Kitty and plants go
untended.23 The Stones may never know the dimensions of the betrayal. If they do, they
may keep the offense to themselves, not confronting the Millers or speaking out against
them to other neighbors in the building. They may be so appalled and feel so queasy
about their own misjudgment or the indignity of the violation that they do not want
anyone to know.
Then there are the developments that we experience as betrayal but don’t
communicate to those around us, perhaps because we are aware that our sense of injury
doesn’t really match our neighbor’s conduct. The life-cycle of neighbor relations makes
this point. Children are a chief source of accidental, circumstantial friendships. These
relations fall short of friendship in terms of emotional intimacy, still, proximity makes
interactions with the family nearby more frequent and closely intertwined in our daily
lives than with other neighbors, or even friends and relatives.24 The course of these
relationships tracks children’s development, and as they grow up, they no longer provide
the glue. Interactions fall off, neighbors lose their common ground. Sometimes these
bonds outlast the shared tasks of parenting, but typically they have an uneasy half-life,
and we revert awkwardly to exchanging bare greetings or mundane good turns. Shared
personal history can become an embarrassment in any fading relationship, but neighbors
must routinely confront one another’s diminished attention. Moreover, the gradual
change of heart is unlikely to be similar for all parties, which is why cooling feels like
betrayal. These break-ups (or drifts) may be painful, but we don’t speak out. It’s not the
case that our neighbor was a bad one or that our trust was misplaced. Simply, walling in
and walling out is ongoing and changeable, and may give offense.
Rallying Sides/Refusing to be Recruited
We are drawn into the storms that gather when neighbors mind one another’s
business, as they do. We are invited, entreated, to comfort and help. First comes sharing
19
complaints. We stand in the circle of conversation on the stairwell or sidewalk.
Aggrieved neighbors try to convince us that the problem is not purely personal and that
we all have an interest in settling this matter. Our property values are at stake, they argue.
Or -- the second front in neighbor wars – our health is endangered. Leaf blowers are not
only a noisy nuisance, they are “two-hundred-plus-mile-an-hour bazookas – a biohazard
buffet of diesel soot, brake-lining particles, fungi, mold, spores, and animal fecal matter”
launched onto every near-by property. The claims escalate: “Children exposed to these
noise bombs, it’s a disaster: impaired concentration, impaired sleep, inability to learn to
read and speak.”25 Then comes resolve that “we must do something”. That is, something
beyond confrontation with the disturber of the peace. We neighbors call the police or
Department of Family Services. Or show up at the Development Review Board, where
one or two neighbors attending a hearing and voicing opposition to erecting a fence or
installing new storm windows (opposition that may owe to sour grapes) have
disproportionate influence. Or invoke the General Unsightliness Ordinance.
Officers Remove 50 Pets From Malodorous Mich. Home
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:55 p.m. ET August 5, 2010
REDFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) -- Police say more than three dozen
dogs, a dozen cats and about six rabbits are getting veterinary treatment
after being removed from a small home in a Detroit suburb. Police Lt. Eric
Gillman says neighbor complaints about the smell prompted police to
show up Wednesday at the home in Redford Township. Gillman says…
officers described the condition of the house as ''deplorable,'' and that they
said floors were ''covered in dog waste, urine.'' A mother and daughter,
ages 66 and 44, were taken to a hospital for observation. He says the
animals have been taken to shelters and that condemnation proceedings
have started for the home.
This is a standard example, a cliché. Neighbors engage in much more elaborate organized
responses. They advocate for and against a leaf-blower ban under consideration by the
20
town council. Neighbors write to local papers, create websites, convene meetings,
arrange for invited experts to gather at a “No Blow” summit and barbecue.
We are infinitely inventive in what counts as an offense and in our responses.
“Breast-Feeding Boutique in Feud with Condo Board” is the New York Times headline.
“The Upper Breast Side” is “a place to buy breast pumps and BPA-free bottles, and to
bond over the myriad challenges of what is supposed to be the most natural thing in the
world”.26 The condominium board of the Pythian, a building that was once an all-male
lodge, lodged a complaint that the door to the community facility’s ground-floor space
was left improperly ajar. They wanted to evict the nursing emporium. This dispute
involving a condominium covenant, several city agencies, the owner of “Upper Breast
Side”, and her customers/clients illustrates the plenitude of offenses and the expansive
universe of recourses neighbors seize on.
In the face of some offenses like the noise bully, we have little recourse except for
the voluntary rallying of neighbors. In the cases I described just now, offenses can be
translated into violations of local regulations and ordinances, civil rules of property,
contracts and covenants. In affluent neighborhoods and condominium and homeowner
associations litigation is a staple action. Neighbors file a complaint or notify an official
agency; they may not be rich but they hire a lawyer. My homeowner’s association sued
and was sued by the ostentatiously wealthy owner of a lot who tore down the original
house and prepared to build an architect-designed structure that violated the association’s
covenants. His plan did not conform to limitations on square footage, roof height, or
placement on the lot. The review committee was confidently within its rights to deny him
permission to build his favored design. My neighbor believed he could have his way by
out-lawyering and outspending the association. He did not count on our determination to
resist. We were buoyed to keep up the expensive fight by his arrogance and disregard for
the reasons underlying the terms of the covenant -- preserving water views. Our lawsuit
and numerous appeals dragged on for almost a decade. It became famous in the state for
its cost and acrimony. It should be famous for the dynamic of “negative association” that
transformed us from proximate home-owners to neighbors brought together by our
common enemy. We always had something to talk about with one another. The District
21
Court in Barnstable ruled in favor of Shearwater Association, the first ruling to uphold
homeowner association covenants in Massachusetts.27
As this suggests, aroused neighbors make willingness to state grievances and join
in collective action a criterion of good neighbor, and when they do just keeping up the
old greetings and considerations do not suffice. For activist neighbors, failure to rally
may be unforgivable, as the leaf blower controversy shows. To outsiders the question
seemed small, “but people are virulent, almost foaming at the mouth, on both sides.”
“Somehow the blower issue became a referendum on what it means to be a neighbor:
whether neighbors constitute a community or are just nuisances and Nosey Parkers”.28
Once neighbors are geared up, failure to join the fight and to cheer the aggrieved on is
taken as evidence of stone coldness, of absence of “feeling like a neighbor”. Inaction
provokes the accusation of hypocrisy: playing the part of good neighbor until it entails
conflict and cost. Neighbors charge the non-participant with complacency – if her house
or comfort or children are unaffected, she is perfectly able to bear the misery of those
around her. That is the point. “We” is ramped up, at least rhetorically and temporarily; for
the moment we constitute a community. In Jonathan Frazen’s story neighbors level this
accusation against the woman who bakes cookies for the neighborhood children:
“there was no larger consciousness, no solidarity, no political substance,
no fungible structure, no true communitarianism in Patty Berglund’s
supposed neighborliness. It was all just regressive housewifely bullshit…it
was obvious that the only things that mattered to her were her children and
her house – not her neighbors, not the poor, not her country….”29
We are intended to read this characterization as overblown. Again, we have
variable expectations of what neighborliness requires under ordinary conditions.
Organized neighbors represent themselves as the models of “what anyone would do”
here; they persuade and recruit. They invoke responsibility. From their perspective, we
are delinquent if we don’t exhibit support on demand, having been offered reasons for
rallying. Not joining in is more than a personal character flaw, it is seen as a rejection of
the identity of “good neighbor”, a willful derogation of the emerging neighbor “we”. In
cases where neighbors move from spontaneous mutual support to organized local
activism and seeking correction by organized political or legal means, refusal to
22
participate is further cast as a civic failure. There is a tendency in the U.S. (and in social
science) to assimilate good neighbor to good citizen – to the public spiritedness they
attribute to speaking out, reporting offenses, and seeking correction by organized political
or legal means. A lot of lost by the fusion of good neighbor and good citizen, and I return
to this in later chapters.†
For now, the considerations that obtain in the informal case of the noise bully
hold for organized action and formal complaints to authorities. In both, disengagement
and nonparticipation in collective action are consistent with being a good neighbor,
though the import diverges in these two cases. I regard it as a partial falling off from the
democracy of everyday life if we don’t stand up to the bully, but I do not regard refusal to
sign a petition or advocate for or against leaf-blowers in the same light. The first entails
opposition to the private despot loose among us; the democratic ethos of resistance to
cruel arbitrariness is plain. The second is a conventional disagreement, a conflict of
interest over the utility of leaf-blowers. In neither case, however, is joining in a
responsibility neighbors must assume.
My confidence in this conclusion is supported, it should come as no surprise, by
the competing value of minding our own business. The intent behind determination to
mind one’s own business rather than take up the cudgels is not always clear, and the
meaning of detachment is variable, as I show in the next chapter. But discrete distance
and the determination to mind our own business are invited by the voluntary terms of
reciprocity among neighbors. It is comprehended by an unsentimental view of neighbors,
and the reasons we have for casting a cold eye on these particular activist neighbors and
their intentions. Minding our own business is an armature we are justified in putting on. It
protects against our own bad impulses and others’, including the irrepressible impulse to
invoke our responsibility to take action. It is justified by insistence that qua neighbor it is
not my business to try to right every wrong.
†
“Good neighbor” is a familiar representation of American national character -- as familiar as the proud
self-portrait of America as a nation of volunteers and charitable souls who perform good works, and as
common as the representation of America as a nation of public-spirited citizens. The three are distinct,
however, or so I argue. The elements of the democracy of everyday life associated with neighbors diverge
from the core formal principles of democracy. Good neighbors are not good citizens write small, or
preparation for it.
23
Something else may commend minding our own business and inhibit participation
when taking action involves appeals to local ordinances, or health codes, or covenants. A
specifically liberal reticence is grounded in the recognition that we are selectively lawabiding ourselves. We all violate some rule or by-law all the time, in small matters and
not so small ones. We dispose of trash improperly; we don’t report cash income; our car
couldn’t pass inspection; the rental apartments in our three-decker are not up to code; we
pay for child care under the table; we sublet when we should not; we harbor prohibited
pets; we operate leaf-blowers during hours ruled out by local ordinances. The list is
endless.30 We are all always guilty of something, and one neighbor or another, one
authority or another, is ready to take an interest in our conduct. All, if made the cause of
collective action and reported to one official agency or another, would cause us trouble
and involve expense. At a minimum we would have to make appearances before
development review boards; we would be exposed to costly investigation by building
inspectors, civil engineers measuring the location of a shed or fence, tax assessors,
registry workers, police. We have reasons for reluctance to rally and report, reasons for
hesitation at least before we are propelled into action by the presumptive responsibilities
of good neighbors. I want to give reciprocal reticence its due.
“It is Our Right, and it May be Our Duty, to Caution Others Against Him...”
Minding others’ business and speaking up are not always motivated by
democratic indignation at arbitrariness and cruelty or the impulse to protest assaults on
the quality of life at home, of course. We make it our business to teach those who appear
not to have learned the lay of the land. We offer ourselves as models. We admonish and
instruct neighbors directly, bluntly. Few lessons are delivered with thoughtful delicacy.
“They didn’t look the part, and it was our duty to make them aware of it.”31 The
propensity to didacticism is rife among neighbors. Pronouncing the orthodoxies of local
knowledge and publicizing deviations can be effective enforcement of “what anyone
would do” here. Moreover, taking on the commission to impart local knowledge justifies
minding virtually every aspect of our neighbors’ observable business. It grants
permission to surveil, intrude, instruct, admonish, condemn, and interfere in a way that
24
we recognize public officials should not and members of the public generally do not, but
neighbors do and many believe should.
J.S. Mill’s On Liberty is liberalism’s foundational treatise on the social and
personal reasons for valuing and protecting the most expansive personal liberty. In
democracy, Mill warns, liberty of thought and action is constricted by coercive
government and even more by demands for conformity imposed by “society”. Mill is
famously a defender of personal liberty but he is also a proponent of progress and selfdevelopment (and on some readings perfectionism), and towards these ends he condemns
“selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each
other’s conduct in life.” Although liberty prohibits punishing others for actions that affect
mainly themselves, and although Mill discourages us from thinking that we should be
able to control other’s conduct, he does not prescribe minding our own business. Folly,
lowness, depravation of taste, rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit, engaging in hurtful
indulgences, intemperance, extravagance, being a nuisance, and much more warrant
making the person a subject of distaste or even contempt. We are right to judge him a
fool or “a being of an inferior order”. Mill goes on to canvass a surprising range of
permissible tutelary measures and writes approvingly of a surprising range of
disagreeable consequences that rightly flow from these measures and justly afflict the
object of our disapproval. “We have a right…in various ways, to act upon our
unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the
exercise of ours”. We are not bound to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it. We
have “a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his
example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he
associates”. We may give others preference over him in “optional good offices”, Mill
offers. Mill encourages expressing disapproval and beyond that direct reprobation. He
commends active engagement for the purpose of aiding the errant individual’s judgment
and strengthening his will: “there is a need of a great increase of disinterested exertion to
promote the good of others”.32
We give ourselves these justifications when we monitor and set out to instruct
neighbors in “what anyone would do” here. We may tell ourselves that we are minding
their business for their own sake, that taking action is benevolent. We certainly tell
25
ourselves that we are acting for the general good. Neighbors who observe goings on,
admonish miscreants, share information, and urge others to take action may exert
effective pressure and alter behavior. After all, we are normally sensitive to whether
neighbors attend to what we do, and surveillance increases the likelihood of conforming
to local expectations. Clearing our yard may be worth the trouble and expense for the
sake of amicable relations -- if neighbors are watching, if local standards are clear, if
others generally conform to them, and if the loss of standing for refusal is credible.
Assuming, that is, that we feel planted here and that we see certain benefits from
mundane reciprocity. Assuming that we want to avoid being the concerted object of a
campaign of improvement or outright hostility as “a being of an inferior order”.
Local Knowledge Traps
Teaching and enforcing local knowledge and the terms of “what anyone would
do” gather force from the conviction that neighborliness has a cumulative effect.
Moralism is reinforced by the ammunition social science provides for minding other’s
business, which demonstrates the aggregative effects of mundane practices among
neighbors. Even apart from specific individual benefits, good neighbors are assets. They
produce diffuse but identifiable “social capital” -- the virtuous cycles and networks
constructed out of individual acts that taken together constitute the “character of the
community”. Reciprocity enacted generally and over time produces public goods from
which we cannot be excluded. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist and theorist of
“social capital”, confesses that he never attended gatherings in his Cambridge
neighborhood. Nonetheless, he points out, “I benefit from those social networks”, which
have “powerful externalities”.33 His neighbors’ alertness to the well-being of people and
houses on the block protects his home when he is away, for example. Putnam is a free
rider. He does not intend to exploit his neighbors’ concern; like many of us, he takes the
conditions created by their attentiveness for granted. We may be unwitting beneficiaries,
then, until a coin from that stock of social capital is delivered to us in the form of help
with packages or the name of a local employer who is hiring.
26
There are advantages to just keeping track. Property left unwatched and in
disrepair is a magnet for vandalism in affluent as well as in run-down areas: “Untended
property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder, even for people who
ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves
law-abiding.”34 Everyone living nearby suffers the consequences of neighbors and their
pets strewing trash, loitering, disturbing the night. (I turn to crime and violence in a later
chapter.) We understand why the greatest fear expressed by residents in a study of a
Boston public housing project was disorderliness and incivility, not crime. A well-known
thesis called “broken windows” expands on this point. The cumulative effect of petty
vandalism and disorder and in some areas the bother, noise, and interference of
“disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people -- panhandlers, drunks, addicts,
rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed” -- causes neighbors to stay
off the streets, walk hurriedly, avert their gaze. A vicious cycle of dispirited withdrawal
ensues, and “the neighborhood will cease to exist except for a few reliable friends whom
they arrange to meet.” “Broken windows” policing policy calls for officers to attend to
disorder, not just crime, by informal rather than legal means, specifically by enlisting
willing neighbors to look out for and confront those who violate the “appropriate level of
public order”, that is, a level defined by the discernible standards in this place. Where the
policy has been successful “real crime” rates do not go down but neighbors are more apt
to leave their homes, less apt to avoid one another, and experience themselves as more
effective guardians of the minimal standards of “what anyone would do” here. 35
Confident in our understanding of what “anybody would do” and perhaps further
armed with notions of virtuous cycles and social capital, we mind our neighbors’
business. Theorists of social capital and designers of neighborhood public policy don’t
attend to the phenomenology of “minding others’ business”, though. They don’t lower
their sights to the disposition behind neighbors observing, intervening, taking offense and
taking action, or to demeanor when we monitor, scold, and correct. Nor do these studies
explore where neighbors fall into common errors: what I’ll call ‘local knowledge traps’.
Appeals to our common interests are particularly fertile ground for self-deception.
For example, we are prone to rationalize our disapproval and the need to take action by
employing the argument that a neighbor’s negligence is diminishing property values. We
27
invoke high collective stakes and charge the presumptive costs to the couple next door.
We hold individuals responsible for our predicted losses. This amounts to self-deception
when it is an automatic reflex, a routine default divorced from facts. Allowing that it is
misguided anxiety and not strategic thinking that propels us to invoke our most valuable
asset, it justifies minding others’ business, agitating, rallying allies, and taking action to
enforce “what anyone would do”.
We are also tempted to view our neighbors’ behavior through the magnifying lens
of harmonious social integration and fearful social disarray. We desire a coherent
environment, neighbors who behave on balance in ways we have come to expect. The
“local knowledge trap” here is projection -- generalizing from our own experience with
“unsupervised havoc” down the hall. If examination on the basis of standard measures
were to conclude that nothing like a process of social disintegration was at work, our
anxiety would not abate. Social science categories like “disintegration” not only translate
felt personal experiences, they contribute to shaping them. The terms are available to fuel
our disapproval. They give weight to the cry that the sky is falling in when neighbors
don’t learn or comply with “what anyone would do” here. Joan Didion painted an
apolcalyptic picture in her essay on Haight-Ashbury in the culturally turbulent 1970s:
“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and
public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings
and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled
even the four-letter words they scrawled….Adolescents drifted from city
to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their
skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the
games that had held society together.”36
We read a host of deviations as indicators that neighbors don’t learn local knowledge or
are indifferent to “what anyone would do” here; they certainly don’t teach their children
well. With the result that society is unraveling right around us.
Nor are we likely to be receptive to the argument that our perception of local
knowledge is skewed by what we find familiar and comfortable, and that our assured
understanding of “what anyone would do” is dubious. So another local knowledge trap is
acting in the face of what we ignore or deflect: there are different ways of doing things
28
here. Expectations for conduct and demeanor are never single or static. “We have had to
agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent
meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war…”, Thoreau advised, but plural
sets of rules (which are never rules in any case) can spur us to something close to open
war.37 America is a culture of subcultures and when neighbors reject local knowledge
rudely, or appear to be indifferent to it, or live by their own variant of taking offense and
taking action we may not see them just for themselves but as representative. We attribute
to them attitudes and conduct we associate with the group to which they appear to belong.
Local Knowledge as Offense
The temper of our response to deviations from local knowledge is more than a
matter of personal disposition, then. A defining characteristic of America as “good
neighbor nation” is what I call the democracy of everyday life associated with
neighbors.38 Patterns of response to deviations from local knowledge enact the
democracy of everyday life or represent kinds and degrees of falling off from it. The facet
of the democratic ethos that shapes these encounters is the rough equality of reciprocity
distinctive among neighbors.
In one pattern of response we give ourselves license to drive home lessons in
“what anyone would do” here. In practice, our methods may involve humiliation and
cruelty. We become offenders ourselves. Or, we write these delinquent neighbors off
entirely. We tell ourselves that we have a right to avoid their society, and have “a right,
and it may be our duty, to caution others against [them]”. Reciprocity along every
dimension is aborted; we decline to deal. In both cases our standpoint is superiority. In
both cases we stigmatize our neighbor, typically attributing negative traits to her. This is
a violation of the democratic ethos, particularly if we ascribe our neighbor’s incorrigible
deviation to the social category or identity marker we assign her. We efface her
personally and individually. Ethnocentrism or worse, prejudice, justifies our hostile
rejection.39
A second pattern of response is to “live and let live”.40 This is a crucial, complex
accommodation where mistrust increases the probability of giving and taking offense.
Particularly among neighbors who identify with groups that have a history or recent
29
occurrence of conflict, self-distancing and a strategy of avoidance is common. Neighbors
may be densely interspersed on crowded streets, but they limit interactions. This pattern
deserves consideration. Recall neighbor relations in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. A rare,
racially integrated neighborhood, residents lived interspersed on streets and in buildings.
The Hasidic Jews did not join the exodus of other white groups, and neighbors came in
daily contact with one another. Spatial integration is not social integration, though.
Lubavitch Jews wouldn’t move and they wouldn’t mix.41 “We don’t mingle” is a
coherent stance, and no one welcomed official efforts to encourage dialogue and social
interaction between Hasidic Jews and African American neighbors.42 “Live and let live”
had its own etiquette: guarded, cautious, with limited interactions. Recall Frost’s advice:
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
To those charmed by a sentimental ideal of good neighbor and to those who expect
interactions to be easy, spontaneous and without guarded care, virtual walls and selfdistancing constitute an offense. But “live and let live” gives offense only if their Crown
Heights neighbors see Hasidic insularity as discriminatory racial segregation and Jews
see their black neighbors as hostile. Only if mistrust flows in just one direction, or is
rooted in a history of domination and subordination.
Within the constraints of “live and let live”, there is latitude to exacerbate
avoidance on one side and to soften the tenor of distancing on the other. Black residents
“often complain that their Hasidic neighbors aren’t so neighborly, that they rush around
unconcerned with others, without making eye contact or saying hello.” The Lubavitchers
respond “with some justification that they’re just as rude to each other…”. A Hasidic
woman explains unapologetically:
“Sachris [the morning prayer] has a time-frame. Micha [the afternoon
prayer] has a time-frame, Maariv [the evening prayer] has a time-frame,
Shabbos has a time-frame…And that’s why Jews are always rushing. And
that’s supposed to keep us in line, that’s supposed to keep us out of
trouble. This whole thing is supposed to keep us spiritual, connected to
God….However, the fallout is that people wonder, they consider us
30
insular, they consider us snotty, they consider us – but that’s just
ignorance.”
Her claim of consistency (rude to everyone) sounds disingenuous. In any case, “that’s
just ignorance” demonstrates a reluctance to avoid being misunderstood, to prevent
offense. She accepts mutual distancing as entrenched, she is alert to mismatched
expectations and the propensity to misread them, but she is indifferent. She is
uninterested in trying to minimize disappointment, mistrust, and mutual accusation. The
apparently simple injunction to “live and let live” is elastic. It can indicate as it does here
the shrug of indifference we associate with the phrase. On the other hand, “live and let
live” is compatible with casual encounters that are short of social integration but fit our
notions of ordinary interaction:
“I don’t love my neighbors. I don’t know my Black neighbors. There’s
one lady on President Street – Claire – I adore her. She’s my girlfriend’s
next-door-neighbor. I’ve had a manicure done in her house, and we sit and
kibbutz and stuff. But I don’t know them. I told you we don’t mingle
socially because of the difference of food and religion and what have you
here.”43
The point is, day to day cautious distancing is not the equivalent of hostility or disdain,
and does not signal superiority or subordination. It differs from one-sided exclusion.
Crown Heights neighbors understood the damage that vicious back and forth charges,
visible aversiveness, menacing demeanor, and demonstrable mistrust could wreak on
decent life in the neighborhood. After the riots a Hasidic woman explains:
“Do you know that the Blacks who came here to riot were not my
neighbors? …the people in this community want exactly what I want out
of life. They want to live in nice homes. They all go to work…. They want
to send their kids to college. They wanna live a nice quiet life…The
people who came here to riot were brought here by this famous Reverend
Al Sharpton… My Black neighbors? I mean, I spoke with them. They
were hiding in their houses just like I was.”44
This pattern of response to deviation from “what anyone would do here” falls
short of a robust democracy of everyday life, which assumes that give and take extends to
31
those who figure on our lay of the land as “decent folks”. 45 The phrase “decent folks”
helps distinguish the rough social equality among neighbors from the political standing of
equal citizenship and from formal legal equality.46 “Decent folks” signals deliberate
disregard for our neighbor’s position in the wider society, including citizen status and
many social differences and distinctions. Carefully calculating social status, drawing finegrained class distinctions, adjusting to racial or religious markers, taking exquisite pains
to treat neighbors in the particular terms that fit their standing “outside” is a violation of
the democratic ethos among neighbors. The phrase “decent folks” points to a single,
latitudinarian standard for reciprocal encounters. It walls out only those who impose,
exploit, ignore, offend and injure not once but often or egregiously. So, when we adhere
to the democracy of everyday life, we keep our neighbors personally and individually in
view and refuse to approach them as representatives or symbols. We do this in the face of
our own prejudices, snobbery, ethnic and racial identification, and level of personal
comfort. Or we try. We appreciate this particular neighbor as “decent folk”.
Cautious distancing in Crown Heights falls short of this democratic ethos, but
“live and let live” does not fall off entirely. The democratic ethos is violated when
neighbors persistently exhibit indifference or nonrecognition, when they pretend to be
invisible to one another. It is eclipsed if neighbors, feeling intimidated by their fellows,
are pressured to put on a hostile or blank demeanor, or think that loyalty requires displays
of disregard. That is, if neighbors lose the capacity or willingness to initiate or respond to
the most minimal encounters. For even nods and “How are you today?” are significant, as
they were in Crown Heights. In a gesture or word we acknowledge that we are neighbors,
regular presences not trespassing strangers. Because these offerings open us to rebuff
they signal our mutual vulnerability. We demonstrate that we intend no harm. We proffer
this bit of give and take. We exhibit an iota of good will. It is not full-blown democracy
of everyday life but as a day to day matter bare tentative interactions constitute
reciprocity among “decent folk”. It is consistent with the guarded, cautious interactions
prescribed by “live and let live”.
A third pattern of response to deviations from local knowledge comes closer to
the democratic ethos that is common in settings without the strain of settled divisions and
mistrust. We act with simplicity and consistency – “treating others identically and with
32
easy spontaneity”.47 Treating people similarly does not allow for assessments or
adjustments for social status or class, race or religion. We expect simplicity and
consistency to be reciprocated, or at least to be received as benign. An ounce of
sensitivity should warn us not to be complacent. Treating people identically and with
easy familiarity is not always received in the spirit intended. It may go against our
neighbor’s standing in a group that has definite notions of what form of address is
required as a matter of pride, and what gives offense. The terms may be designed to ward
off easy familiarity, to set themselves apart. We, in turn, have to ward off the resentment
we feel at having been rebuffed and misunderstood. Which is why this facet of the
democracy of everyday life entails not only easy spontaneity but also discipline. It
requires the disposition to make allowances and to resist the impulse to magnify slights.
We exhibit it when we are slow to take offense. The democracy of everyday life requires
us to overlook snobbery and coldness, and to disregard the walls erected out of racial or
ethnic mistrust or pride, or to try.
When we don’t adopt the democratic ethos of rudimentary reciprocity among
“decent folk”, when neighbors perpetually give and take offense and take action, we are
drawn into the difficulties I have surveyed: the baffling accounting involved in
responding to bad turns, the uncertainty of responsibility to speak up for neighbors who
are cruelly mistreated, the ‘local knowledge traps’ that dig us into fixed notions of “what
anyone would do” here although we know that not everyone would, or could. Through it
all runs the tension between minding other’s business and minding our own.
Minding our own business is not a simple proposition. Among neighbors it is
strictly an impossibility. Complications emerge when we take the phrase literally.
Discrete self-distancing and refraining from interfering with neighbors are one thing,
tending to our selves is another. What is our business? In Frost’s words, what are the
boulders that have fallen to each? And what relation does our business have to our
neighbors’? Minding our own business may involve neighbors profoundly, if only
because they spur self-awareness, even transformation. Something happens, and we are
startled into thought. From our vantage point as spectators to our neighbors’ lives we gain
insight into our own vulnerabilities, moral resources, and the terms of our happiness. The
path to care of the self runs through them. That is my next subject.
33
1
OED On-Line 1b.
Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love (New York: Scribner, 2010), p. 71-2.
3
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book IV, 1857.
4
Glbert K. Chesterton.
5
Robert Frost, “The Code”.
6
OED 1650 1B.
7
Jumpa Lahiri, “Sexy” in Interpreter of Maladies, p. 95.
8
David Drury, “Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire”, Little Engines, p. 122.
9
Cited in Constance Perin, Belonging in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 63.
10
David Drury, “Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire”, Little Engines, pp. 122-3.
11
Douglas S. Massey and Magaly Sanchez R. Broken Boundaries: Creating Immigrant Identity in AntiImmigrant Times (New York Russell Sage, 2010), p. 247?
12
Pinckus, Noah and Skerry, Peter, “Good Neighbors and Good Citizens: Beyond the Legal-Illegal
Immigration Debate” in Swaine, 95-113. “While the current debate asks whether immigrants can be good
citizens, we argue that to many Americans the more immediately pressing question is whether immigrants
can be good neighbors.” at 100; 105.
13
Doris Lessing, The Diary of a Good Neighbor, p. 25.
14
Leonard Kent, ed. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol Volume 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985): 169-214.
15
Thomas Nagel, “Concealment and Exposure” in Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (Oxford,
2002), p. 15.
16
Berger, p. 173, 169, 160,
17
Thomas Berger, Neighbors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 18; p. 162.
18
Thoreau, p. 112.
19
Robert Frost, “Provide, Provide”
20
Discussed in Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, pp. 279-80.
21
Emergencies and situations critical to life and well-being are something else. I will return to the question
of responsibility in “Live and Let Live”.
22
Thoreau, p. 40.
23
Raymond Carver, “Neighbors” in Where I’m Calling From, (New York: Vintage, 1989) p. 86; 89.
24
I distinguish neighbors and friends in “Good Neighbors, Good Works, Good Citizens”.
25
Tad Friend, “Blowback” The New Yorker, Oct. 25, 2010, p 50; p, 53.
26
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/nyregion/l1breast.html
27
Shearwater v. Kline (GET) (I use the case in my class on “Legalism” whose theme is how rules and laws
alter relations, for better and worse.)
28
Friend, p. 52; 55.
29
Franzen, op cit.
30
I’m grateful to Lucas Swaine for these examples.
31
Drury, p. 118.
32
J.S. Mill, On Liberty, “Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual”.
33
Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. The 2006
Johan Skytte Prize Lecture”, Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 30, no. 2, 2007: 137-174 at 138.
34
James Q Wildon and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows”, The Atlantic, March 1982, p. 3. The
authors speak of the informal “control mechanisms” neighbors provide enforce. See too George L. Kelling
and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows (Free Press: New York, 1996).
35
Local standards may permit public drinking or not, for example. Those who take action experience
themselves as more effective guardians of the minimal standards of “what anyone would do”. Wilson and
Kelling, p. 2, 6, 8, 4..
36
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Washington Square Press, 1961), p. 94.
2
34
37
Thoreau, Walden, p. 133; p. 129.
Two other chapters detail just how the democracy of everyday life is a defining characteristic of America
as “good neighbor nation”.
39
For a careful parsing of forms of racial discrimination see Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of
Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
40
Recent research on trust among neighbors suggests, encouragingly, that traditional in-group/out-group
dyamic is waning. In particular, studies find that racial diversity has declined as a predictor of mistrust
Robert J. Sampson and Corina Graif, “Neighborhood Networks and Processes of Trust”, in Karen S. Cook,
Margaret Levi, and Russell Hardin, ed., Whom Can we Trust?: How Groups, Networks, and Institutions
make Trust Possible (New York: Russell Sage, 2009) P. 209.
41
Goldschmidt, p. 8.
42
They may even be seen as an insult insofar as sacred commandments dictating a Hasidic life are cast as
“cultural differences”.
43
Cited in Goldschmidt, p. 193; 194; p. 119.
44
Goldschmidt, p. 81-2., Jan Feldman, Lubavitchers as Citizens (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003), p.
54-58. s
45
For an extended discussion of this phrase see Chapter 4, “Good Neighbor Nation”.
46
It is also distinguishable from social equality contrasted with hierarchy, assymetrical relations of
command and obedience. Cf. Anderson, p. 102. For the six requirements of equal relations see pp. 106-8.
47
Shklar GET
38
35