Everyone's asking, why do the subways suck?
Why claiming morality has to change first, is missing the connection.
I have been watching a new trend of articles speaking about social ills supposedly from a left-wing perspective. Most of these articles throughout the same kind of thesis, something along the lines of: yes, capitalism is bad, but what about the social ills that plague us? Don’t people have to be good people first for society to be good?
The idea seems to be that we have to work on ourselves and our social cohesion first, in order to get ourselves to the space in which a broader social transformation can take place. I’m mildly sympathetic to this until I spend more than a few seconds thinking about it. So let’s start with this: one of the things I see come up a lot is about the decline of public transit in Philadelphia, where I live. First, I’m not going to sit here and claim it hasn’t gotten worse; all the things everyone speaks about in articles like this, smoking on the subways, the way they feel unsafe, the chaos, and so on, these are real to an extent, and it’s even accurate to say it has gotten worse since 2020. It is also true that having a functional public transit system isn’t something that is unachievable. I have been to other countries, and even smaller ones with fewer resources still tend to have a cleaner and more efficient subway system than ours. But why?
Most of these articles seem to postulate a moral failing of some sort, as if society has lost touch with some basic concept of human decency. So be it, but what can we say about this?
I think we can still be good materialists when thinking about this. We are watching a mass privatization of everything, everywhere, and all at once. This isn’t trying to obfuscate those “social” issues, so much as to say they don’t occur in a vacuum, and, more importantly, that interdependence which they have isn’t simply a “oh society is bad, therefore it’s okay for people to be ‘bad’, so much as it is having a basic understanding of what causes people to act.
When people talk about social cohesion, what they are really pointing to (at least in my mind) is community. Community is, after all, what makes us social creatures, and what makes us human. Community, however, depends on communing, and we need a commons to do that. What often connects us is indeed the physical spaces which we inhabit, and our ability to gather there, to talk, and to share experience and resources. When everything has been privatized, this excludes us from taking part in this (and crucially, excludes some more than others).
This has a profound psychic toll on everyone; the isolation leaves us unmoored, and this will lead to different people reacting in different ways. We indeed need social cohesion (although a different kind) in order to have the wherewithal to build the kind of world we would like to inhabit. (I would even go so far as to say we need a kind of revolutionary discipline), But moral posturing about the current state of things, especially if we are coming at it from a hyper-individualistic standpoint, is missing the mark.
I often think when I am reading these pronouncements about how I am in recovery, and I work more or less as a social worker for people struggling with substance use. (I have a lot of moral qualms about doing this work, which I have written about before, but for the sake of this argument, I am going to leave that aside for now) And one of the things people sonatntly come up against when they are in recovery, is the grandiose moralizing that comes from people who are not in recovery. This argument about social cohesion reminds me of this.
One of the things most people not in recovery (or without any personal experience of it) tend to get wrong is this false assumption that people who use drugs or alcohol are somehow irrational. After all, why would someone do something that they know is causing them real harm? What this fails to realize is a very basic fact: while substances can, of course, cause harm, at least initially, they alleviate it. Most people use substances in excess because they act as a psychic balm, whether of trauma, poverty, or a combination of the two. This is, of course, an oversimplification of what substance use looks like, but it is instructive in the way that many people look at social problems.
When someone on the left says something to the extent of “I can’t blame individuals for social ills,” this is what we are pointing to. It is not that we think it is a good thing for people to use substances to the point of self-harm; it is not that we enjoy a public transit that feels outdated and chaotic. It is rather that by pointing out that these happen as a result of causes and conditions, we can begin to imagine what kind of social structures (what kind of community) would need to exist so that we would live together in something closer to harmony.
What I imagine those who try to focus on the moral ills are attempting to do is to ask the question: why? Where we need to move towards isn’t a negation of the material, nor a negation of the moral, but rather a synthesis of the two. If you are someone who has a feeling that there is no longer a sense of belonging, no longer a sense of collective identity, realize that these work together in tandem. A lack of belonging informs the privatization, and the privatization informs a lack of belonging. That physical toll manifests in a variety of ways, but it doesn’t occur in a vacuum.
P.S. - I have a new poetry chapbook out called “Terms and Conditions.”
If you would like to buy a copy, it’s 10 bucks, plus 2 for shipping, and you can reach out here or on IG: @toddjonathon
email: jonaspoet88@gmail.com
Here’s a poem from that chapbook:
Letter to a Friend
Okay I’ll admit it I’m vaguely bored today it
could be the unpronounceable in the back
of my throat the scratching calls and culls a
series of slips designed to startle me
we talked about time, being-time, ritual,
and the Sabbath I go upstairs and unplug
everything, and plug it back in again make
tea and yell at an insufferable sun
accidentally stabbed myself with a pen
and tried to translate the same sentence
I couldn’t figure out 20 years ago
solidarity would feel less abstract if
there was a public I used to gamble
often just to have someone to drink with and
I guess it’s the heat I guess it’s being paid to listen
every 30 days I become ambitious for around
24 hours and wear myself out
this is similar to psychosis
except then, I didn’t try
I just gave up each time
I came into contact with water
go ahead and light a candle and
prepare for a half day
yesterday I couldn’t sleep and started
cleaning everything for hours somehow
this felt good
a friend called me well-read today
this after staring at a screen for ten hours