Nature and Madness

5. The Mechanists

5_ The Mechanists iT is ODD, after seventy centuries of city life, that we continue to be uneasyabout it and uncertain as to what iswrong. The situationis likethose psychological illnesses in which the patient shows a devilish capacity to obscure the real problem from himself. A demon seems to make false leads, so that deliverance requires more of the same, confusing problem and symptom. It is as though traffic, smog, disease, violence, crime, uncaring strangers, dirt, drug addiction, and unemployment collectively provide distraction from something that perhaps cannot be dealt with. The city's central role in harm to world biomes, especially when dressed as success rather than failure, surely has more subtle roots than bad strategy or inept philosophy. Can we make a radical leap beyond explanations citing unjust laws, torpid administration, miseducation or graft? Let us suppose, with some evidence, that the city is typically a sink of psychological problems. In the individual these are partly caused bycity life, but in the longer view theycause the city. Where can the cycle be broken, and what are its processes? To gain a start, the psychological dimension may be characterized as a disease of attention—that is, the focused operations ofhuman consciousness between directed sensory experience and memory, between the perception of 93 Nature and Madness phenomena and their formulation. This area of individual consciousness mediating experience and theory develops from habits of early life, linked to the start of speech in the infant, to personal identityformation patterned by child-rearing customs and adult assumptions. The evidence isgood that our fellow creatures individually and collectively showdistorted behavior when their numbers go beyond a norm for the species. The symptoms of overcrowding include almost every organic and social dysfunction . Rats and rabbits congregate in dense immobile clusters or "behavioral sinks."1 Horses and mice abort. Fish show increased homosexuality. In general, all share physiological abnormalities and impaired reproductive lives. Among primates , the group or noyau (the society of balanced recrimination , or brotherhood of tempered conflict) degenerates into chaos, with killing, maiming, tyranny, attacks on females and young, and heavy stress in the whole group.2 In higher animalsof many kinds,includingman, the depletion of physical resources maynot begin to signal "too many" until long after psychological damage has begun. Bythe time the subsistence base of physical resources begins to show signs of excessive withdrawals, some behavioral processes may be so distorted that the group lackstheflexibilitytomake an adjustment. Of course, the topic of human numbers is confusing because there is no agreement as to what "too many" means. Death from famine in Bangladesh or Biafra or Cambodia maybe "caused" bytoo many people or, according to a different perspective, by too little food—which results from poor strains of seed, lackof transportation, bad weather, government policy, or former colonialism. AsGarrett Hardin says, ironically, "Nobody ever dies of overpopulation."3 Perhaps one of the density distortions in humanpsychology is a kind of desperate togetherness. Urbanization affects human biology in ways for which the organism was not prepared by evolution.4 The logic of this peculiar massing isthat 94 T H E M E C H A N I S T S there is no limit to human numbers, short of space itself.Low or declining numbers become a kind of fearful specter. The writers of history, for example, revel in the growth ofhuman numbers and tremble at their decline. Bang, whang, whang, goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife. Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!5 So sang Robert Browning, and he is not disproved by modern psychology or anthropology, which show that man is "naturally" a lover of high-contact, high-proximity living. One study from the Kalahari Desert of Africa observes that the IKung bushmen, though living in small groups in vast savannas, like to sit touching each other around their fires at night and build their huts close together: Eureka! They like crowding!6 Another concludes that the crime and violence of cities cannot be correlated with density as measured by people per square mile, but must be examined as people per block, apartment buildings per block, number of apartments per building, number of rooms per apartment, or number of people per room.7 Still another argues that it is not high density itself that causes city miseries but the effects of density .8 (No,Inspector, the man wasnot killed...