Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  JACOBS: From using each for the wrong functions, or from mixing them up. An obvious example is the Mafia. With a couple of exceptions, it operates under the Guardian syndrome. The exceptions are that it trades, but not the way the Commercial syndrome tells you to trade. It doesn’t shun force, it doesn’t respect voluntary agreements, it isn’t honest, though it values enterprise.

  WARREN: And since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become possible for everyone to see that Communists work much like Mafiosi.

  JACOBS: They try to run commerce with the Guardian syndrome. Structurally, they are like the Mafia. The motives are different, the history is different, but structurally they are very similar.

  WARREN: One reason for their collapse was that they could not keep up with the military spending and technological development of a trading nation, when the United States pursued the Cold War. And they failed even though the whole Soviet economy was built around the military.

  JACOBS: They didn’t have the commercial success to support the military spending. The United States may not either. This is very insidious—most empires end up poor from a combination of reasons—but the Soviet Union was so extreme in disdaining the Commercial syndrome that it came a cropper pretty fast.

  WARREN: Among wealthy families, there is a tendency over time to switch from Commercial to Guardian mores. I think of an Italian who once boasted, to the scion of a titled English family, “My ancestors went homosexual a century before yours even made their money.”

  JACOBS: Such families come to disdain trade, to be ashamed if their money came originally from trade.

  WARREN: But why only two syndromes? Can’t we think of a third?

  JACOBS: We have two basic ways of making a living, and everybody has the natural capacity for both. You can rack your brains—I did anyway—trying to find ways other than taking and trading. You can live on gifts, inheritances, patronage, whatever, but that only means somebody else worked up the wherewithal. People recoil against this, they would like to think that there is something besides taking or trading. They invent utopias where everything just magically falls into the right mouths, but these don’t hold up.

  ON PLATO’S SHOULDERS

  WARREN: I wonder if the syndromes offer complementary versions of the Fall of Man.

  JACOBS: What did man fall from? I don’t know. That’s very metaphysical and I’m trying to deal in the functions of the real world.

  WARREN: I’m not referring to something abstract, but to man’s fundamental propensity to do harm, to screw up, to put the gooper in, no matter which the syndrome.

  JACOBS: That’s true, and I wish you wouldn’t just say “man” all the time. This is a human thing and it applies to women as much as men.

  WARREN: Believe me, I know it applies to women. I use the word “man” in the traditional inclusive way.

  JACOBS: Yes, and I don’t like it, because we get a distorted view of who has been doing all these things. Women have been doing them too and they’re just as important. In the commercial system, they may be more important.*4

  But back to your question: We have the capacities both to take and to trade, and there are times when it is appropriate to use one or the other. If we do them inappropriately, yes, then we’re bad and things are going to turn out badly. You’re being immoral when you force people, under the pretext of trade, without their voluntary agreement, or if you are dishonest about what you are trading. If you take bribes in the Guardian syndrome, that’s immoral. Sure, people have infinite capacities for making a mess and being cruel, for using industriousness in warfare or murder, but they also have capacities for doing and being good. And the world wouldn’t work at all if they didn’t. We emphasize sin, and violence; but we should also emphasize the marvels of the arts, of altruism, the wonderful things people create and are. So you can call that the Rise of Man.

  WARREN: The natural law tradition is singular: it is good to go with nature and bad to go against it. Now you discern two natures. This is breathtaking. But there can be nothing new under the sun. Whose shoulders did you climb on?

  JACOBS: Well, Plato’s. He separated all the activities into two great classes. I could have saved myself a lot of work if I had read Plato before I started trying to make sense of my precepts. Afterwards, reading Plato, I thought, “Hey, hey. He got here first!” I pay tribute to him, incidentally, by using the terms “Guardian” and “Commercial.” But Plato doesn’t entirely agree with my precepts.

  WARREN: Where do you differ?

  JACOBS: Plato doesn’t allow for self-appointed Guardians. His system is sometimes called fascistic. It’s really a paradigm of the whole idea of caste. And some castes have been very Platonic; old Japan’s was. He thought you could only be in the Guardian class by birth, you couldn’t switch back and forth. He is a precedent because he said all injustice and the worst harm to the State came from mingling the two kinds of work. He seems to have thought that no one human was capable of doing both kinds well. I certainly disagree with him there. People have often done both kinds of work well and been moral in each kind. Benjamin Franklin is a marvelous example.

  WARREN: Yet it is possible to read the Republic and Laws in another way: to take the State as a metaphor of the human soul.

  JACOBS: Yes, but I think Plato fell into a trap—and this is very arrogant of me to talk this way, I know—but he did. He fell into the trap of trying to unify everything, so he had to warp and ignore things to make them fit. Taking and trading cannot be unified. They can be symbiotic.

  I think philosophers in general have emphasized two things: what virtuous ruling is and what the virtuous private life is. They have tried to reconcile these, and to some extent you can. But the philosophic tradition has been to ignore commerce and its system of morals. I think that is because philosophers are self-appointed Guardians. When they have not ignored the whole Commercial syndrome, they have regarded it as ignoble or secondary. That’s why I bridled when you wanted to put Guardians first and Commercial second. You’re very Guardian-minded. Political scientists too. They beat their brains about government and other Guardian affairs—and trade as an aspect of government policy. But they are neither much interested in commerce nor respectful of it in its own right.

  WARREN: And yet Adam Smith was a philosopher.

  JACOBS: Adam Smith was extraordinary. A great many economists since Adam Smith—and Smith had a tincture of this himself, but less than many who came after—have actually identified with the Guardian syndrome because they advised rulers. Advisors to commerce are what we call microeconomists, advisors to Guardians tend to be macroeconomists. And these latter think that Guardians can manage an economy.

  WARREN: You have yourself “worked up the ranks” from microeconomics.

  JACOBS: It isn’t a matter of rank, of intellectual hierarchy. The macro-picture isn’t more important than the micro-picture. The macro-picture is made up from the micro-picture.

  I think Plato had hold of a great truth in distinguishing Guardian people from Commercial people, if he had only carried further his analyses of the reasons for distinctions between Guardian and Commercial functions. But you can’t expect one man to do everything, when there was no one before him to lay the ground. What I find amazing is that nobody took up those insights of Plato’s and pursued them to their logical conclusions.

  HOW GUARDIANS GROW

  WARREN: It strikes me that open-mindedness is not a quality of either syndrome; that a person may be open-minded from whichever vantage.

  JACOBS: Well, you can look at this in another way and say, isn’t it sad that you have to regard someone as open-minded who can see things from both these vantage points? Every normal person is capable of taking and trading. And so, if we want to talk about what is natural, it is natural not only to do both things, but both things correctly. The fact that some people cannot see the other syndrome at all, or see it only as evil, or that they can’t work correctly within the other syndrome, or within either, means tha
t a natural capacity of human beings has been warped or suppressed by indoctrination and education. And this is a terrible indictment of our system of education. Little children are capable of taking—they grab things from each other, they play cops and robbers, they love Robin Hood, they can identify empathetically and sympathetically with the whole taking side. They make heroes of takers like Robin Hood.

  WARREN: They are naturally conservative.

  JACOBS: To some extent, but they also love novelty. They are also capable of exchanging and trading. When I was a child, we played pirates and made people walk the plank from an old stump and that sort of thing. But we also did things like trading cards. Ours were election cards with the candidates’ pictures on them. We would trade them. Children naturally trade from a very early age. They love lawn sales and lemonade stands. They are capable of both ways of getting a living, unless one is stamped out of them before they can even try.

  WARREN: You said once that there are two kinds of education: apprenticeship, in which the teacher is a role model; and the old aristocratic form where the teacher is the social inferior of the student: Aristotle teaching the young Alexander, or the poor English governess with her privileged charges.

  JACOBS: You can also be an apprentice to a commercial system. But our schools for the most part are Guardian institutions. They want obedience, they want loyalty, they want hierarchy among their own functionaries; they’re bureaucracies, and the larger they get, the more bureaucratic they become. Children in elementary school are being apprenticed to the teacher. The children who do best there are quite commonly little girls who want to be teachers too when they grow up. By the time they are in high school, they’re being apprenticed to bureaucrats, and the ones who do best are fitted to become bureaucrats. That’s what we apprentice promising children for—and that’s what universities traditionally have done, trained students to be Guardians, either for the Church (which founded most of the universities) or for the State.

  I think it significant that science came into universities very late, as did technological vocations. The old universities, like Oxford and Cambridge, taught classics and the things that would make people suitable members of Parliament and the bench and bar. Science was beneath them. The first scientific schools arose out of separate schools of technology. Only recently have universities begun to assimilate them. Science became intellectually respectable and unignorable, and so you got things like the Cavendish Laboratories, the physics departments in American universities, and natural history—which was first called natural philosophy.*5

  A great evil of our school system is again derived from Guardian principles, and that is the separation of junior high—the students of the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades—from the rest. This is a hierarchical, an army point of view. Junior highs are awful places. Children are troublesome at that age. The idea was to isolate them, but that didn’t civilize them. During adolescence, you want all the civilizing influences possible. You want to cultivate in adolescents care for the younger children, and expose them to aspirations that can be imparted by the older ones. I think the terrible decline of the public education system dates from that separation. By the time they get into high school, the kids have been through a bad experience in junior high.

  WARREN: What about the old aristocratic education?

  JACOBS: I got that idea from Ivan Illich, though it’s right in front of everyone’s nose.*6 Talking one day, he said that the great educators of modern times are not only in service to students, they are in awe of the students’ capacities and originality and charm. They even regard themselves as inferiors in that sense. He thought that was why they were such inspired teachers.

  WARREN: Why has education gotten this way? Is it through neglect of the principles of “education through art,” as expounded from Plato through Sir Herbert Read?*7

  JACOBS: I would say because the school is a Guardian institution, making the mistake that everybody should follow its principles. Now, what is right for a school system is not necessarily right for students. Art, to my mind, didn’t arise from an educational system at all, it has been appropriated. It’s been so much appropriated that it has come to be thought basic to education. But if you follow that to its logical extreme, schools and learning and work become play. And maybe you never learned to read because it was work, or you didn’t do math, which is hard for many people. I’m convinced that art came from leisure. Hunters have a great deal of leisure time, as do women gatherers, at least in groups that exist today, and we may assume that this was true in the past. It was necessary for them to take time off, for otherwise they would overexploit their territories to no economic purpose. They would exterminate their prey.

  So what do you do with leisure time? You can lie around, and your capabilities will deteriorate and it’s unpleasant and dull. Or you can pursue things that are demanding and interesting but have no economic purpose. And that is what sports and games are, and also what a great deal of art is. You find art in the most primitive groups (by our terms) of hunters and gatherers; also storytelling, religious rituals, dancing, and making music, making beautiful things that are neither sold nor supported by patronage, really art for art’s sake. In Guardian organizations throughout history you find jesters and troubadours, cathedrals and costumes and tournaments; the aristocratic tradition of the amateur. The aristocrats didn’t patronize technology and technologists, the people who made the windmills and so on. A lot of science, probably most of it, comes out of questions raised by technology. If that had been left up to Guardians, science would still be narrowly metaphysical.

  OF RABBIS AND RESTAURANTS

  WARREN: Baudelaire said that no economy has yet been invented that makes room for poets.

  JACOBS: He has gotten hold of a sad but important truth there. Of course, places have to be made for them. But art and sports, if I am correct, arose neither from taking nor trading, they are outside. They were a form of not taking, specifically, and to this day artists have a hard time finding ways to support themselves. From the beginning, artists didn’t support themselves by art, they supported themselves by the hunting or whatever else.

  WARREN: For centuries rabbis had to have a trade.

  JACOBS: Yes, and many artists today find the same necessity. They work in the post office and write poetry or music outside. Actors commonly work in restaurants. Often art brings only part of an artist’s living: it is a catch-as-catch-can thing. Patronage has been extremely important to artists, and also to governments, to rulers in general, for patronage often commands loyalty to a territory and a regime. All kinds of arts—music, dance, drama, novels, poetry, sculpture—give human meaning to a territory, and a territory or a regime without art, if you can imagine such a thing, would command very little loyalty. People wouldn’t feel much attachment to it.

  WARREN: The amount of largesse poured by the province of Ontario into the SkyDome, for instance, makes sense in your scheme.*8

  JACOBS: It is a perfectly natural thing, and it is also perfectly natural that the province, city, and Metro contribute to the Toronto Arts Council. All civilized regimes support the arts, and the fact that they have gone from feudalism and various kinds of autocracies to democracies doesn’t make any difference.

  WARREN: I think of a remark in one of Baudelaire’s Salons. He sees a policeman beating an anarchist in the street, and says in his heart: “Thump on, thump harder, thump again. O beloved constable! The man you have in your hands is an enemy of literature and fine art!” Through the Thatcher-and-Reagan years I noticed how artists adhered to the State, how they ran in horror from business and the specter of “privatization.” Afraid of being orphaned, they clung to the devil they knew.

  JACOBS: Of course there is a great danger here. The State can, as the Soviet Union did, show great disrespect for artists by demanding obedience. But artists are really outside both syndromes and when they are forced to be instruments of the State it is bad for art, and bad for artists, quite as bad as when they
are forced to commercialize art or debase it for the sake of commercial income. In Canada we’ve been very good about dispensing government funds to artists at arm’s length.

  Artists must look after themselves to preserve their freedom. They have to care about it, they have to be more devoted to their art than they are to anybody’s politics or attempt to use them in service. Much commercial support of the arts is really commercial advertising.

  WARREN: And that is also a kind of corruption, is it not? I’ve seen so many talented but unassertive people wasted in some form of commercial advertising.

  JACOBS: I don’t mean in advertising itself. I mean when you see on public television this oil or that pharmaceutical company is supporting this particular edition of Masterpiece Theatre—that’s a form of commercial advertising. It’s institutional advertising and it can be done at arm’s length too. Sometimes it’s surprising to see what they have paid for. Take the cigarette companies that sponsor sports and art events: when it is suggested that it is not appropriate for a cigarette company to be extolled, that they should continue giving to these events but that the company’s name should be omitted—Whoosh! All that funding is going to disappear. This is what terrifies a lot of arts groups here who depend to quite an extent on tobacco. Now if it were real charity, if it was really done for love of the sport or the art, the company would say, sure you don’t need to use our name. No, no, no, if their name isn’t advertised, they aren’t going to fund it.

  WARREN: But I was thinking of the patronage that consists of actually employing people: industrial designers, packaging experts, ad illustrators, etc. It is in the nature of the Commercial syndrome to be industrious, to put things to practical use; to get people painting chocolate boxes instead of chapel ceilings.

  JACOBS: Don’t be scornful of all this. For a long time, high-minded people were scornful of the movies because they were commercial. It took time for them to go back and look at early films and see how marvelous some of them were as works of art; to see what an artist Charlie Chaplin was, or Buster Keaton. Art appears where it appears and there is no use being snobbish about it.