Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure Read online

  What would acceding look like?

  We know what “combating” homelessness looks like. We attack on two fronts. On one front, for example, we open shelters for the homeless but (since we don't want them to stay in the shelters) we make them as unwelcoming as possible. On the other front, we pass anticamping legislation that criminalizes those who won't stay in the shelters. This legislation allows (or compels) the police to harass the homeless, who are “out of place,” who turn up where we don't want them to be. Until the homeless straighten out, get jobs, and somehow magically lift themselves into the mainstream of middle-class America, the game is going to be “Heads we win, tails you lose.”

  Acceding to homelessness would look like helping the homeless succeed WHILE being homeless. What an idea! I can almost hear the howls of outrage from both liberals and conservatives that must greet such a concept. Help people succeed at being homeless? We want them to fail at being homeless! (So they'll return to the mainstream.)

  Step one in acceding to homelessness would be to decriminalize and deregulate the homeless. We can happily deregulate trillion-dollar industries capable of doing immense harm, but deregulating the relatively helpless poor—what a thought! The officers of deregulated savings and loan institutions may have bilked us out of billions, but at least they didn't hang around street corners in shabby clothes!

  Letting them house themselves

  Regulating and criminalizing homelessness is equivalent to defying earthquakes with rigid structures. Deregulating and decriminalizing homelessness is equivalent to acknowledging that “the machinery of the system has … created a world it can no longer control.” We should abandon control of homelessness, therefore, because it's beyond control, just like the earthquake. Since we can't defeat it, we should learn to make the best of it.

  There are thousands of miles of unused, habitable tunnels under Manhattan that are interdicted to the homeless for only one reason: that the homeless might try to live in them. The homeless do try to live in them, so it's conceived to be the duty of officialdom to drive them out. Officials explain that no one “should” live in the tunnels. They weren't designed as living spaces. They're unsafe. They're unhealthy. They're unsanitary. Despite all this, some of the homeless would rather live in the tunnels than in doorways or under bridges.

  Instead of sending in the police to drive the homeless out of the tunnels, officials should send in city engineers to ask what services the city could provide to improve conditions. What they would hear is, “We need help with sanitation, with water, with electricity.”

  Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.

  Letting them feed themselves

  Just as we want to deny the homeless access to shelter in tunnels, abandoned buildings, shack cities under bridges, and so on, we also want to deny them access to the plenitude of perfectly edible food that is discarded daily in our cities. Some restaurants have adopted the practice of dousing discarded food with ammonia to render it inedible. Others have installed locks on their dumpsters. Imagine instead helping the homeless organize systems to distribute this food, much of which now just ends up rotting in landfills.

  Or, even better, imagine the outrage such a proposal would awaken in the good burghers of our cities. How dreadful (even immoral!) it would seem to them to allow a class of “loafers” to make a living out of what we no longer need or want. More than merely “allowing” such a way of life, we would actually be encouraging it—facilitating it!—when instead we should be “combating” it, stamping it out!

  Letting them make a living

  In our culture, for some odd reason, we teach kids to despise scavengers. Prey and predators are heroic, but scavengers are contemptible. The truth is, our world would be unlivable without scavengers. We'd be buried in corpses. Scavengers make their living by ridding the world of its biological refuse. Far from cursing them, we should bless them. Right now most road kills are made to disappear by birds like crows and vultures. If these birds ever become extinct, we ourselves will have to take over their duty. What these scavengers presently do for us at no cost, we'll have to pay for out of our pockets.

  The only “honest” living available to the homeless in general is scavenging—and in general they're quite content to make that living. It's work they can do without having an address, submitting to supervision, punching a clock, or maintaining a wardrobe of socially approved clothing—and it's flex-time all the way.

  David Wagner describes how teams of drunks work together to strip sellable copper from abandoned buildings in the northern city of his study. Naturally this is illegal, even though the copper would otherwise just be lost. Instead of obstructing this sort of activity as much as possible, why not facilitate it? Enormous amounts of materials could be reclaimed and recycled in this way, not only conserving resources but reducing the amount of material that goes into landfills to degenerate into toxic waste.

  Let my people go!

  The homeless are “beyond civilization” because they're beyond the reach of civilization's hierarchy, which has been unable to develop a structural extension to enclose them. The most it can manage is to oppress, harry, and obstruct them. To accede to homelessness would be to “let them go,” much as the biblical pharaoh let the Israelites go.

  Am I saying the homeless actually want to be homeless? Not exactly. Some are “short-termers” who have landed on the streets after a spell of bad luck and who want only to get back on the road to middle-class success. None of my proposals would hinder this. The rest are on the streets not necessarily because they love being homeless but because the alternatives are worse than being homeless—institutionalization, unending family abuse, involvement in foster-care systems that are blind or indifferent to their needs, and laboring in a job market that offers no real hope of upward mobility.

  The fact remains, however, that many who initially become homeless against their will later gain a different perspective on it.

  “I like the way my life is now.”

  This is what a tunnel-dweller told reporter Jennifer Toth. He goes on: “I'm independent and do what I want. It's not that I'm lazy or don't want to work. I walk all the way around the city most days to collect cans. This is the life I want.” Another tunnel-dweller described being tracked down by a brother, who wanted to help him back to normal life. “He offered me $10,000. He just didn't understand. This is where I want to be for now. Maybe not forever, but for now.”

  One of David Wagner's subjects, escaping the constant battering of home, found that street life “was cool. I slept where I wanted. I hung out with people, I drank. I was free as a bird.” According to another, who fled an abusive home at age twelve, “it was fine. I traveled, went all the way down the coast, down South. It was great, and I was never turning back, no matter what happened.”

  Even when the street is just the least worst alternative, people often feel they have more support there than they had at home. One runaway, describing his street friends to Katherine Coleman Lundy, said, “If they need food, need a few dollars, I'll give 'em a few dollars…. Whenever I need something, if I need it, they got it, they'll give it to me.” A runaway told Jennifer Toth, “We've got real support from each other, not for just an hour from some social worker, but from people who really care and understand.”

  What would come of it?

  If we let the homeless find their own places of refuge and helped them habilitate those places (instead of rousting them wherever they settle), if we channeled to them the vast amounts of food that are discarded routinely every day (instead of forcing them to grovel for food at shelters), if we actively assisted them to support themselves on their own terms (instead of ours), just think—homelessness would largely cease to exist as “a problem.” It would become something we're always working at in the cities, like street maintenance. The streets in our cities are never going to be “fixed.” They're going to be falling apart forever—and w
e're going to be fixing them forever. We don't think of street maintenance as “a problem,” because it's something we've acceded to.

  If we were to accede to homelessness, then we and the homeless would (for a change) be working together instead of at loggerheads. Keeping people sheltered, fed, and protected would become a common concern and a common task.

  Acceding to homelessness doesn't mean that panhandlers, bag ladies, and street drunks are going to disappear—any more than maintaining the streets means that potholes, closed lanes, and traffic jams are going to disappear. Acceding to homelessness (like acceding to earthquakes) means dealing with reality, it doesn't mean doing away with it.

  I'm not ENTIRELY alone!

  Near the end of his landmark study of homelessness, Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community, David Wagner writes:

  What if homeless people … were offered the opportunity of collective mobility and collective resources rather than individual scrutiny, surveillance, and treatment? What if the dense social networks and cohesive subcultures that constitute the homeless community were utilized by advocates, social workers, and others? What if housing could be provided near the geographic areas in which street groups congregate, decent housing that does not require leaving the group but that could be shared by street friends … What if social benefits were distributed not individually but collectively so that income maintenance or resources for food, shelter, and other goods were given to an entire group of people, not to individuals. That is, one would not need to wait for hours, provide all aspects of one's personal life, and come into a welfare office continually to be recertified, but would obtain a collective grant as part of a cohort of homeless people (or other group of poor people).

  All these suggestions (which even Wagner concedes are radical) represent accedence to the realities of homelessness. They're designed to help the homeless live decently while homeless—and to live the way they want to live (as opposed to the way government caretakers think they should live).

  Objections

  The idea of acceding to homelessness will raise objections on all sides. Liberals will perceive it as “giving up” on the homeless, but this would be like saying that acceding to street decay means giving up on the streets. Acceding to homelessness means listening to the poor, who believe they can take care of themselves—with the help they want instead of the help the respectably housed think they “should” have.

  At the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives will perceive acceding to homelessness as coddling freeloaders, who should be disciplined and punished until they “get a job.” Eventually they may see that it's like helping a poor fisherman get together some fishing tackle instead of giving him fish to eat.

  Officialdom's objections will be the loudest, however, because its stake in homelessness goes beyond mere principles. Many people make their living “fighting” homelessness, and they'll see its disappearance as threatening their livelihood (though naturally they won't be silly enough to put it this way).

  In 1998 Los Angeles, stealing a shopping cart would earn you a thousand-dollar fine and a hundred days behind bars. When an anonymous donor arranged to distribute a hundred “legal” shopping carts to the homeless, officials pulled a long face and denounced it as “well-intentioned but misguided.”

  The most telling objection of all

  Acceding to homelessness—actually allowing the poor to make a living on the streets—would open the prison gates of our culture. The disenfranchised and disaffected would pour out. It would be the first great movement of people to that social and economic no man's land I call “beyond civilization.”

  The Tribe of Crow, no longer suppressed, would grow—perhaps explosively.

  We wouldn't want that to happen, would we? Heavens to Betsy, no.

  It would be chaotic. It might even be exciting.

  Carlos, a runaway living under a loose grate in Manhattan's Riverside Park, told Jennifer Toth: “I'd change the world so there would be a place for us. A good place where we would have real freedom and not live in a hole.”

  Some dangerous ideas here … a place for the homeless … a good place … real freedom … not in a hole …

  Put more guards on the walls. Reinforce the gates.

  PART SIX

  The New Tribal Revolution

  You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

  BUCKMINSTER FULLER

  The tracks of our ancestors have been wiped away by the Great Forgetting. It's not up to us to replant their exact footprints, but to make our own, equally original tracks.

  CARL COLE, AGE NINETEEN

  The Tribe of Crow—and others

  Thanks to his father, Jeffrey was able to live as a vagabond without ever being stigmatized as homeless. He clearly had no interest in working, but no one ever sneered “Get a job!” at him, because he never needed to stick out his hand for alms. He may have been too lucky for his own good, for had he been truly homeless, he might have found his true place in the world as a member of the Tribe of Crow.

  But of course this tribe isn't for everyone.

  When I first described the New Tribal Revolution in My Ishmael, I was rather like an astronomer describing a planet whose existence has been deduced but which has yet to be seen by any eye. If asked, I couldn't have furnished a single example of what I was talking about. Only after a year of vague groping did it occur to me that the circus (which I'd used as another sort of model in Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest) is in fact organized in a way that is authentically tribal. (And I subsequently added this example to later editions of My Ishmael.)

  But even so: only a single example?

  After more months of vague groping, I realized I was preoccupied by the ethnic tribal model, designed to make a group of sixty or seventy individuals totally self-sufficient. I was looking at size and structure and forgetting benefits.

  The East Mountain News

  As soon as I began looking at the problem in a different way, I realized that Rennie and I and two other people had once (quite unconsciously) made our living in an authentically tribal way producing the East Mountain News in a vast area east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rennie and I started the paper as a speculative venture with virtually no capital. After putting out a couple of issues we got a call from Hap Veerkamp, an old newspaper man living in forced retirement (because no one would hire him at his age). He said he could do literally anything on a newspaper—except sell advertising. We said we'd love to have his stories and pictures, but if we didn't find people who could sell advertising we were going to be out of business very soon. He said he'd give it a shot. A few weeks later we heard from C.J. Harper, a young woman who wanted desperately to be a writer and who had an idea for a column that we might like. We liked the column and we liked her. The next question was, “Can you sell advertising?”

  She said, “I can sell anything.”

  Why it worked

  Suddenly we were in business—in a modest way. None of us was salaried. At the end of the week, when the issue was out, Rennie would sit down with C.J. and Hap and divvy up the advertising revenue that was left over from paying the printing bill. It was our rule only to print as much newspaper in any week as could be paid for out of advertising revenue. If we had enough advertising for twelve pages, we printed twelve, and that was “a good week.” If we had only enough for eight pages, we printed eight, and that was “a fair week.”

  The newspaper worked for us for two reasons. First, we all enjoyed a very low standard of living, so what we got from the paper (a pittance by normal standards) was enough. Second, it wasn't just a way of making money. We all loved the paper and were intensely proud of our contributions to it. Hap's photos were as good as any published in any big-city paper. C.J.'s columns were fabulous. Rennie's features and news stories could have served as journalism-school models. Still slogging away at
the sixth version of the book that would someday be a novel called Ishmael, I gave only three days a week to the paper, doing design and typesetting, but it gave me a break from writing and a chance to do other things I enjoy.

  We were nothing like the size of an ethnic tribe, nor were we living in community, but we were nonetheless receiving the chief benefits of tribal life.

  The East Mountain News as circus

  As at the circus, each of us had a job to do that was essential to the success of the whole. As at the circus, the worst job was the boss's (and that was held by Rennie); no one envied her or dreamed for a moment that she was overpaid.

  Just as at the circus, everyone knew the paper had to make money, but making money wasn't the object. Like circus folks, we had a way of making a living that suited us. To keep that, we had to keep the paper going. We all needed the paper.

  Without discussing it, we all knew that, like a circus, we had to keep the paper going so the paper could keep us going. The only trouble was, the tribe needed a couple members more, and we didn't quite see this. The boss needed to share some of her more exhausting tasks—and there were plenty of those, considering that we were covering an area the size of Rhode Island. Rennie was being progressively worn out, but the people we needed didn't present themselves to throw in their lot with ours and (at the same time) to extend our business so that they too could make their living from it. Several people presented themselves to be hired, but they were only interested in the wage. When they saw how little they'd be making, they walked away. They weren't content to live out of the paper and make its success their own, as the rest of us were doing.