Slums

Utah man ordered not to
contact estranged wife
writes letters to her cat.

My blog of last night caused me to start thinking about slums. I am by no means an authority on slums, but I have seen slums in Mexico and the Philippines and a few other places and I know they are most unpleasant. Like everything else these days there is an extensive literature on the subject with which I am not very conversant. I think we could all agree that slums are unpleasant places where huge numbers of primarily unemployed people are crammed into inadequate housing, lack clean water and sanitation, have little or no health care, often go hungry, and are in general not well off either in resources or health. It is believed at the moment that at least one billion people now inhabit slums and it is predicted this number will grow to two billion within another ten years or so. Slums are, of course, an urban phenomenon and are directly linked to the growth of cities. There is a new book out now called Pandora’s Seed, by Spencer Wells, that deals with some of the problems that have resulted from the change from hunting-gathering to agriculture to industrialization and urbanization, the general outlines of culture change since the beginning. As I have not yet read this book (I certainly intend to) I do not know if Wells deals specifically with the question of slums, but the growth of slums surely is related to the vast changes that have occurred in human cultures over the past few thousands and hundreds of years, and specifically to industrialization and urbanization.

My interest in this subject is not with the details and problems of slums and slum life in general, but, rather, with what slums tell us about the human species. That is, it seems to me the problem of slums is a species-specific one. As far as I know no other species has anything resembling slums. There are, I’m pretty sure, no honey bee slums, no ant hill slums, no giraffe or elephant slums, no termite or bird slums, and no slums for any of the completely social species that exist other than ours. I suppose one could argue that when there are surplus populations in insect or animal societies they somehow are killed off and just disappear, you know “nature raw in fang and claw,” as it is sometimes said. Thus there is no need for slums because there are no creatures to populate them. There are of course situations where there are groups of bachelors that live on the outskirts of certain animal communities until they might be strong enough to overthrow an existing harem-master, but these surely could not be considered slums.

There are also no slums found in small-scale so-called “primitive” societies either. In such groups everyone shares pretty much with everyone else, there are no exceptionally wealthy individuals, when one person eats they all eat, and so on. I believe this is largely true even of small-scale farming communities where people in general take care of each other, orphans found homes, the elderly were care for by the community, and so forth. Slums are clearly a characteristic of very large-scale, industrialized and urbanized communities. I strongly suspect they are also more strongly characteristic of capitalistic societies than socialized or communized communities. Are the same kinds of slums found in socialistic countries like Russia, China, or others? I confess I don’t know for certain if there are, I will try to find out. In any case there would not be such slums at least theoretically in such societies. If they in fact exist it probably has to do with the overall poverty rate keeping people in such conditions rather than with demands for cheap labor and surplus populations found in capitalistic societies, or so I would think. In any case, I cannot see why slums need to be an inevitable consequence of human cultural evolution, and it must be true that some slums are much worse than others, and some countries go to greater lengths to avoid them than others. If this is not one of the inevitable consequences of industrialization and urbanization, along with capitalism, why does it occur (I am aware of the fact there may well be slums in some societies claiming to be socialistic or communistic but are, in fact, controlled by an elite that is the functional equivalent of capitalistic rulers). In principle, however, socialistic societies should not generate slums.

Could this problem be the result of some kind of sick cosmic experiment? Could that all powerful deity (if such a thing exists) that created everything, have planned this just to see the outcome? Did he/she/it/they simply look down one day and observe a small planet where everything ran pretty much in a perfectly natural order as it was designed to do, without the presence of the human species, and then, out of curiosity, think to itself, what if I/we introduced a different kind of creature, one with a bit of variety that would be capable of complicated languages, the basic ability to reason, one with “free-will,” who would be superior to all others and have the power to control the earth almost completely as they choose, and watch and see what happens? If there is more than just one supernatural did they place bets on the outcome? Was it all just a cosmic joke? Is it perhaps still going on? Who will win out in the long run?

Yeah, I know, this is all pretty silly. If I were a Republican I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d just keep enough of a surplus around to keep wages down and let the rest disappear. After all, they’re not people, just labor.

LKBIQ:

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

-Jean Giraudoux

TILT:
Howler monkeys are considered the loudest land mammals.