Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction: Follow Up

In an older post - Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction - I introduced an argument about how Orange County purposely designed its neighborhoods to have a lack of public spaces and opportunities for interaction. Every time I cite this argument, people ask for my references and I always feel bad to come up empty-handed.

Well, Matt has helped me address this grievance once and for all --

Lisa McGirr's "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right", published by the Princeton University Press, contains the much sought after reference. Pages 41 through 44 or so are the most condemning with the most powerful passage on page 42:

Convenience, privacy, and decentralization were the keys to the master plan, with few central public spaces except those dominated by consumption. Irvine executives, with a good sense for business, conciously created solidly middle-class neighborhoods. They preferred to forgo federal subsidies that would have required them to open their developments to poorer residents, and they did not incorporate open-housing provisions into their master plan. Their desire to build high-priced homes helped to reinforce an already existing social homogeneity in Orange County. The result of development along these lines, of both the corporate and the free-market models, was spatial isolation and an abscence of community, which, in a complicated way, helped to reinforce a conservative ethos.

Page 41 introduces the company that was responsible for designing the Irvine area and there are plenty of other interesting things said later as well. In particular, I found the "NIMBY" political movement ("Not In My Back Yard") referenced on page 43 to provide another powerful defense of the idea that home ownership, with a focus on cultivating your own private landscape, encouraged a protective attitude towards private property and a dislike of communal spaces.

I must confess that the idea of simply mulching your own flower beds and garden (something my grandmother so enjoyed in her previous large suburban home) on the weekends hardly seems like an act of conservatism, but it does seem like a selfish act compared to donating your time to working on the community play ground or garden, something to be built and enjoyed by many.

Page 42 is not by default part of the limited preview of the relevant section, but if you use google books to search for the phrase "open spaces" in the book, the first result is on page 42, allowing you to view the missing page.

Deep Ecology

Hello and welcome again to Justin's endless effort to procrastinate less interesting work in favor of the quest for insight!

My 21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues, is the first humanities class I've taken at MIT that is NOT a philosophy class. Believe me ladies and gentlemen, that I would have never ventured outside the lofty domains of Course 24 - Philosophy and Linguistics, is it hadn't been for the wretched "HASS-D" requirement of MIT, that requires that I explore at least 3 flavors of the same ice cream: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

What have I done to negotiate this forced exposure to other fields? Crafted the class into my own philosophy course of course! So far I've successfully been able to dictate my own philosophical-personal style of writing and have been received warmly. For an upcoming 10-12 page research paper, we've been asked to investigate some environmental issue of something relating to this area. My chosen topic is the Environmental Ethics of Zen Buddhism. Ha! Take that for forcing me to follow an assignment!

In my search for references, I actually came across a very good book by the name of "Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics" by Simon P. James. In my first pass of the book, I ran across this notion of "Deep Ecology" which asserts that our current environmental crisis cannot be solved by the application of more science and technology. Rather it requires a deep shift in western consciousness in how we view our place in nature. Apparently one of the first proponents of this idea was Lynn White a professor in Medieval History who in a 1967 issue of Science, wrote "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis".

In White's essay I've found a interesting analysis of the psychological foundations for our current relationship with the environment. Upon first reading I became convinced that it was one of the direct influences on Daniel Quinn's amazing book Ishmael.

The underlying idea is that the roots of modern science lie inside a Christian world view, which focuses on Man's quest to dominate, understand and subvert nature. The closing of the class gap has put the need and desire for technology in touch with the higher pursuits of pure science. Like gasoline on a fire, we've exploded in capability and population as a result of this, and even though the concerns of over-population and the environment are relatively new ones, we've been sowing the seeds of our destruction for hundreds of years.


As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

One of the things which struck me about this excerpt is the striking resemblance of "brain and hand" with MIT's slogan "Mens et Manus" -- "Mind and Hand."

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.

At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.

And some people wonder why I'm a pagan.

The Greeks believed that sin was intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination, orthodoxy--that is, clear thinking. The Latins, on the other hand, felt that sin was moral evil, and that salvation was to be found in right conduct. Eastern theology has been intellectualist. Western theology has been voluntarist. The Greek saint contemplates; the Western saint acts. The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.

I was not aware of this divide even within the church. I suppose it goes to show what an evolving, self-selecting entity religion can be. It also points to why it so hard to say matter-of-factly "I am Christian." What breed of Christian? What time and place of Christianity are you referring to? In many ways, I find the gnostic and early Christian ideas incredibly interesting. I might even say I'd believe in some of their ideas, but it seems frightening to me to then say that I am Christian.

But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology. In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul's aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific.

Ditto. Then enters the big bad Latin West --

However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious understanding. From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leibnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so expert an amateur theologian he would have got into far less trouble: the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.

The hypothesis may now be unnecessary, but the view of conquest and understanding remains.

If so, then modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology.

Professor White, then brings us the bad news:

I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.

I can only hope that he is wrong, and there are some indications that he is wrong. The environmental movement spurred by essays like this one have reached the shores of scientists and politicians and (some of us) are working fast to correct our poor steering of the past few centuries. The human mind has produced some incredible good and I am optimistic enough to think that we will develop some brilliant inventions to reduce our impact on this world and stabilize our place on this little blue marble.

I have no doubt that life on Earth will survive until our solar system suffers from a cold death in a few billion years, it is only a question of whether or not humans will outlast the next few centuries.

What I envision is a scientific-enlightened citizenry that adopts some of the more buddhist and animist ways of thinking, in an effort to live in harmony with other life on Earth. By wedding mind and hand, we did more than we knew better to do, but our consciousness is catching up with our capabilities and I can only hope that a wedding of mind and spirit will be able right the wrongs of the past.

Royksopp - "Remind Me"

So this music video has infected my brain.

Sometimes I really hate being the victim of internet memes, but then again our internet has enabled small jewels of high quality to become easily identified and popularized. It makes me wonder how this has impacted business and the ability for the "little guy" just to speak out.

The advent and use of the internet has also enabled things like this blog to actually come to life. I had thought several years ago that it would be nice for there to just be an open online forum for discussion for my family and friends to post on and read each other's thoughts. This could offer glimpses into each of our own personal worlds and thus we can get to know each other in ways that normally wouldn't have been possible. Normal interaction has its pluses: Visual eye contact, body language, tone, mood, etc. Whole worlds of emotions are hidden in the text-based communication of the online world, and often this leads to misunderstanding, i.e. flamewars. However, that degree of impersonality and chance to actually just write for whoever wants to read, in many ways allows your loved ones to observe you externally.

I'd like to dub this the "Relationship-Schrodinger's-Cat-in-a-box" paradox. When we interact with people in a face-to-face manner, we learn to exaggerate certain aspects of our selves and suppress others. We cultivate separate images of ourselves for separate friends and groups of friends. Pretty much everyone does this. When guys are out to a pub with just the guys we can almost become more crude then we'd like to think of ourselves normally. Machismo and all those little bits of our person-hood come rushing to the surface. In new social situations, some of us dry up waiting for someone else to crack the ice, or some of us become the group jester, to help break the awkward silence. The bottom line is that we have these constants, these eigenstates of personality that certain people always observe us in.

The fascination that I have with my blogging experience is that there is this rare opportunity for different people to tune in and look inside this box of personality you've created. Weird things happen. Your parents can see you in a superposition of personalities which are both known and unknown. Certain friends can observe you talking about things which you may have never normally discussed with them. In some ways this may create stress, stress to keep your personal eigenstates separate for separate people, but I welcome the superposition. May it be insightful for everyone!

Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction

After the long awaited reunion with my good friend Matt, I was truly amazed to hear the changes in thinking and creative ideas he's explored in the last year.

The one idea which I want to highlight is how space affects people's interactions and their political, economic, and social tendencies. The main thrust of the argument is that in large city design where there is a high degree of connectivity and interaction between people, the favored way of political thinking is liberal not by self-selection and income bracket, but rather interaction with people makes liberal people. Suburbs and sections of sprawl, where everyone has to drive everywhere, and little or no interaction with other people actually occurs, tends to promote conservative thinking.

The thrust of Matt's argument comes from using Orange County as a case study of intentional urban planning of conservatism. As you may or may not know (wiki it), Orange County is a very conservative section of California that routinely votes Republican. Apparently in the 60s or 70s, there was a pushing front of liberal culture in all the areas surrounding Orange County. In an effort to rebuff their influence, city planners actually designed large sections of Orange County to have classic suburban sprawl as a design, where interconnectivity and the chance for encountering other people is intentionally low. In doing so, the structure of the space of Orange County has created a safe haven and virtual breeding ground for conservative thinking. Although I haven't found specific evidence for this claim, I've heard it said that actual minutes of the meetings of the city planners captures this intention to design cities to be conservative.

This idea I find completely striking. It is not the case of classism, where the rich are more conservative and thus live in large suburban mansions with their personal golf course in the back yard, but rather that well-off people are being conditioned into conservative ideals by their lack of interaction with people. This idea makes sense, as there are tons of wealthy people living in cities (Who else can live in those million dollar brownstones in Boston?) but they happen to be more liberal in tendency.

The Congress for the New Urbanism documents these ideas much better then I'm doing here. Their Charter, makes some interesting points and does a better job of fleshing out the complexity of the issues involved. In addition to the political tendencies that cities engender, by optimizing already developed areas, we can reduce our impact on the environment. This has been already realized by many European cities in the form of Green Belt Policies. I was amazed at how Europe has 10 times the population density of the US and yet there is so much green area. I spread these memes in passing, and turn again to some of my own thoughts.

Matt and I have been considering how this "space affecting interaction affecting people" idea is manifest on even the smaller level of living communities at MIT. In particular it seems striking to me that the reason why East Campus is particularly liberal is not because some how a large group of liberal, progressive, hippy MIT undergrads managed to get lotteried into the dorm and the culture just snowballed, but rather the actual architecture of the dorm has created such an environment. In particular the long connected hallways provides immediate line-of-sight to anyone who might else be out in the hall hanging out. Seeing people milling outside their room provides a nucleation site for interaction and suddenly people are talking and socializing and sharing ideas and expanding each other's minds. This is to be contrasted with Simmons, which has each long floor divided arbitrarily into towers so that in order to get from point A to point B, one has to really do some work in navigating different floors quickly so that one can get inside one's room and hunker down for the night. The only chance for interaction is maybe the elevators, which is often stifling, awkward, non-committal and brief. In fact it is interesting how each of the major MIT dormitories has an architecture which is conducive to the type of people which live there. Granted there is a process of selection on the part of the student, but for formation of these cultures they really are governed by the structure of the space.

This brings me nicely to one of my favorite living groups to visit, tEp. As Matt correctly points out the structure of the spaces for interaction in tEp really are conducive to certain activities and sometimes the disorientation caused by the frequent, bizarre happenings, is just what is needed to stretching ones consciousness and tolerance.

The effect now seems pretty self-evident. Interaction with people on a frequent basis, implies a wider exposure to opinion, culture, beliefs, and backgrounds. The necessity of sharing a common space and living area encourages tolerance in all of these dimensions. Tolerance often is the seed to open-thinking about various subjects and policies and consequently, dis-attachment from dogma, conservative values and general narrow thinking.

Of course an already existent inclination towards liberal thinking, has also promoted the growth of communes, but it is interesting to see the causality go the other way.