If You Can't Make it There, You Can't Make It Anywhere

As I wrote in the previous post, sociologist Richard Florida has noted that we may be moving from a society based on suburbs, big cars and long commutes to a society where the creative class all resides in certain creative clusters. It is in these clusters that the new SPAN Society is really taking off.

On one hand, this is a good thing. Places like Cambridge, MA and Brooklyn, NY have lots of people walking, not owning cars and shopping at local markets. You won't find a lot of huge SUVs or "dreaded WalMarts" in these locales. The elite meritocracy -- the creative class that has clustered in these spots -- has created a more sustainable, local existence. And it's not based on inheritance or race -- it's getting closer and closer to being based purely on "merit."

But before we get too excited, we need to consider some of the problems with this new setup.

This article from Front Porch Republic notes many problems with this new culture, but I'll just discuss two. First, what happens to people who aren't that "creative"? What happens to those whom the system deems have no "merit"? What happens to those who simply (gasp!) aren't academic? What if you (shhhh!) don't like to read? Your childhood then is spent feeling utterly worthless. Every week, in every class, you are told that you are a C, a D, an F. You are not honorable -- not allowed into the Honor Society at least. The absolutely relentless focus on college means that if you can't get into a college, or just get into a low-ranked college, you have been stamped as a C, D or F for the rest of your life. If you have the double curse of being not that academic and not that athletic -- if you are simply a good person who tries hard and lives life -- there's just no place for you in our society:

...modernity, whose distinctive political philosophies have stressed equality, has led to greater inequality than ever, precisely because it has equalized opportunity — that is, because it has unleashed talent either to sink or swim — more than had ever previously been done. To put it yet another way, modernity has created many more opportunities for the expression of inequality than ever. And it has made inherent inequality more important than ever in determining social and economic distinctions.

A second problem is the effect of this migration to the creative clusters on local communities. We have created such mobility, such meritocracy, that communities in the heartland are being utterly destroyed. The "best and brightest" from everywhere in America in the past fifty years have been encouraged to leave their communities, go to far off universities and never return. The new economy draws talent or "merit" out of local places and puts them all together in close creative clusters like Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle or Denver. As the author states:

Indeed, with regard to higher education, we might think of meritocracy as the equivalent of the practice of strip-mining. For the meritocratic system is a method that uses impersonal technology (e.g., the SAT) to help us identify valuable natural resources (bright kids), and then pitilessly removes them from their ecological contexts (local communities), never to return them, thus creating cultural landscapes just as ravaged as the denuded mountainsides of Kentucky coal country.

The author concludes with a final shot at those who blindly live their "sustainable" urban lifestyles while ignoring what is happening to the wider society:

Eating local, buying local, thinking local all are now in-usually among people who are in no sense “locals.” Being local is the next and most crucial and hardest step. That’s not yet cool. It’s hardly thinkable as anything but synonymous with failure. And that’s the problem.

As they say in the blog world, read the whole thing.