content analysis

Regular readers of ca will notice that the places and spaces we live in is an issue of great interest to me.  So, naturally, I couldn’t resist making “The sociology of the mega-home” by Daniel McGinn (the third of a four part excerpt from his new book, House Lust) the slow news article today (tip of the hat to Contexts Crawler).

The article essentially focuses how Americans are currently obsessed with unnecessarily large homes (with obscenely large utilities bills) and how those rich bastards might feel lonely and isolated from each other.  Naturally, the actual studies of room usage show that much of the space goes unused and that the majority of waking house are spent in the kitchen.

Though I am wholly unconcerned about the loneliness of people living in 9,000 square foot nouveau riche palaces, I am very concerned about waste of space, materials (does anybody think these shoddily-built monstrosities will last the way older homes have?), and the destruction of neighborhoods that McMansions cause.  One of my favorite books, Suburban Nation (by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk), made me into an absolute evangelical for the New Urbanist movement (see also the PBS Newshour special for a balanced consideration of the movement).  While it is clear that development cannot be stopped, it is essential that we pressure for it to happen in ways that are environmentally-sound and foster strong communities where people from all different classes and racial and ethnic backgrounds interact.

It’s hard to argue with the merits of mixed-use (business and residential) zoning, pedestrian-friendly streets, short commutes, architectural consistency (whatever that style might be), and places where their children can play with friends and have some independence without being forced to turn her/his parent into a full-time chauffeur.  That type of neighborhood — both of the past and a could-be better future — is impossible as long as McMansions, the SUVs of residential life, keep being built.

Last night, The Colbert Report did a special episode on the growing water crisis.  After pissing off the curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s special exhibition on Water, Colbert (in his guise as a conservative pundit as always) discussed how usable drinking water is disappearing.

The social inequalities on this issue are staggering.  According to experts, the minimum amount of water per day needed to survive (for drinking, cooking, and hygiene) is 5 gallons.  Most people in developing nations routinely live on less than 1.3 gallons.  The average American uses between 60 and 90 gallons daily!  Even Europeans use about half as much water per capita.  As guest Dean Kamen made clear, North Americans are able to consume so much water because we are not paying the full cost of replacing the water we use with other purified water.

At the same time, bottled water waste is becoming a serious issue.  According to the director of the Container Recycling Institute, 40 million plastic water bottles head to landfills every day.  As of this morning, 30.1 billion (with a “b”) beverage containers had been sent to landfills so far in 2008.

What to do?  Well, Kamen is doing his part with a machine that can turn anything (even a barrel of human waste or, say, Doritos) into usable drinking water and, at the same time, works as a power generator.  It seems clear that we all need to do our part to cut down on water consumption and container waste.  I used a water consumption calculator and discovered I’m using 78 gallons daily.  So, I’m going to make a concerted effort to cut back on my indulgent showers and start using a reusable water bottle.

But thinking about this issue sociologically, little can be accomplish by isolated people making a decision to behave better.  We need to push for a Bottle Bill to create greater incentives to recycle and find systematic ways of promoting reusable containers.  New technologies like efficient toilets and shower heads can curb our overconsumption of water.  The most essential change is for consumers to start to pay the real cost of the water we use.  That may be a hard pill to swallow for millions of Americans already paying big water bills, but it’s perhaps the only way we can deal with this crisis.

As Kamen pointed out, the oil crisis pales in comparison to the water crisis.

In the past year, I have read three books and seen a movie that deal with overlapping themes of tribalism in England. Two of the books — Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea and Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs — and the film, the near-perfect This is England, are set in 1980s England and address the severe issues of poverty, nationalism, racism during that time. The third book, Bill Bryson’s cheerful romp through the UK, Notes from a Small Island, depicts England in the mid-1990s, a period of increasing prosperity. At the heart of all four items was a struggle for the meaning of Englishness in a time of growing diversity and a shifting economy.

This is England begins in the early 80s. Unemployment is high, England is involved in a war in the Falkland Islands, and PM Margaret Thatcher is denying that society exists. A young boy, whose father recently died in the Falkland Islands, is picked on in school and joins a group of friendly, harmless punks. However, when an older punk is released from prison, he introduces the boys to a brand of racist, white nationalism. What is presented as standing up for England is thinly veiled racism against blacks, South Asian immigrants, and Jews. In a similar vein, Among the Thugs notes the recruiting of football hooligans to the white nationalist organization, the National Front. Theroux notes that much of the language of economic downturn is couched in racist language. He writes,

“It’s the blacks, see,” a respectable-looking man named Strawby told me. “We whites are the original inhabitants of this country, but they make all the laws in favor of the blacks. That’s why it’s all gone bad.” Mr. Strawby saw me making notes. He was not alarmed. He gave me a little lecture on racial characteristics and offered me tea.

All three sources tend to suggest that faced with the dual threats of massive unemployment and increasing immigrant populations, many white British people began to formulate a brand of reactionary white nationalism and tribalism. These feelings were acted out in several ways. Theroux notices grafittied swastikas on walls throughout the country. TIE depicts a National Front rally in which feelings of patriotism are quickly turned into anti-immigrant language. Buford describes how white people who feel little sense of a unique ethnic identity turn to country and football club to develop a identity. Some supporters of various football clubs — Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United — develop tribal identities and engage in often horrific violence toward other supporters*. In sum, England of the 80s and early 90s was a place of bigotry, violence, and incredible inequality.

By the mid-90s when Bryson toured England, things sound a bit better. With dramatic interventions by FIFA and FA, football violent was significantly reduced. New economic prosperity was developing with the high-tech and service industries replacing many of the manufacturing jobs that disappeared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Whereas Theroux complained about historical buildings being neglected and falling into disrepair, Bryson’s gripe is about how new (ugly) construction was quickly replacing historic buildings. In 1994, Tony Blair, then regarded as the “British JFK,” was elected as Prime Minister.

Today, the outlook in the British Isles continues to be fairly good. The pound sterling is worth over $2. Building on tourism, the “Celtic Tiger” economy of Ireland has been one of the great economic success stories in recent years. Similarly, England has moved three quarters of the labor force into the service industry and Britain, as a whole, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. While there are certainly major issues of inequality (especially for immigrant populations), they are nowhere near the levels of American stratification**.

I mention all of this for a reason. Last week, I was discussing Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American with a friend who studies global inequalities. My friend claimed that on most social, political, and economic measures, the U.S. is on the same trajectory as Europe, but lagging about 15 years behind. I am aware that several members of the pundit class have claimed that “the European social and political model” will ultimately prevail. This social and political model, I suppose would include an expanded social safety net, a more reasonable balance between life and work, a consumption model that emphasizes quality over quantity, etc. While I wish this would happen, I remain skeptical given America’s stubbornly individualist, free-market, materialist culture.

Nonetheless, spinning this idea around in my head, I was struck by the similarities between 1980s England and 2000s U.S. of A.: the reactionary anti-immigration attitudes, the economic difficulties (and disappearance of manufacturing), a war that the public doesn’t know how to react to, a right-wing administration trying to dismantle the social safety net, and so on. Of course, there are big differences (e.g., Iraq ≠ Falkland Islands). But the idea that in a relatively short amount of time, we could genuinely improve this country is encouraging. Naivete? You decide.

*Buford rejects the idea that the violence of football supporters is rooted in economics, noting that hooligans come from a variety of class backgrounds. He claims that rather than passionately being pulled into a crowd by dramatic circumstances, football fans rationally seek out the violent encounters for the adrenaline rush it provides. These claims would tend to be supported by recent rational choice, social movements literature (e.g., resource mobilization), which reject older LeBonian theories of crowd behavior.

**I don’t doubt that there are any number of problems I’ve neglected. I’m simply making to key contentions here: a) things have gotten a bit better, and b) economic disparities in the UK are not as bad as the US.