Post-modern bourgeois liberals, to borrow a description of the late American scholar Richard Rorty, do not like to have their space violated by poverty. Let's call this aspect of affluence, this desire for a tranquil vista, "Copenhagen syndrome", since the Danes are among the greatest practitioners of it. They give away one of the largest percentages of their gross national income in foreign aid and their government has the most restrictive immigration policies in the European Union. Danes are very generous to the poor and needy, the "other", but they do not want to look at them.
Rorty, who died on 8 June 2007, argued that such exclusivity might be central to preserving world harmony. He wrote that in order to be publicly tolerant and accepting, people might require a haven where they retreat to the comfort of their moral equals and relish a familiar order. Some might find a world such as this boring, this state of things that Rorty described as private narcissism and public pragmatism; others would call it beset by cynicism and detrimental to society-building.
Also in openDemocracy on Richard Rorty's work:
Roger Scruton, "Richard Rorty's legacy" (12 June 2007)
Ramin Jahanbegloo, "Richard Rorty: living in dialogue" (20 June 2007)
I read Rorty's thoughts on this topic in an essay he wrote as a reply to the anthropologist-philosopher Clifford Geertz (who died in October 2006). The two scholars had turned their mighty minds to a debate on "anti-anti-ethnocentrism," in 1986 (the exchange was published in Michigan Quarterly Review). That was the period when French critical theory still held sway in academia, when Unesco was at its most radical, when westerners were debating the applicability of western ideas about right and wrong and proper behavior. The United Nations was swinging back to the idea of universal values that it had initiated thirty-eight years earlier with the universal declaration of human rights.
Now the world is faced with a superpower that believes that certain values only apply to certain people. No American would be treated the way prisoners are at Guantànamo (at least not if anyone knew about it) and it's no surprise that the first prisoners released from there were citizens of France, Britain and Australia. But the United States's derogation of internationally accepted standards of human rights is only one of the more visible aspects of a much broader phenomenon. This is the "Copenhagen syndrome": the test of a society's willingness to endure discomfort without abandoning an open heart and mind, and to include "others" in pursuit of a broader and more inclusive sense of "we".
A pivotal issue for the "Copenhagen syndrome" in many western societies today is immigration. The intense political bargaining in the United States Congress over the parameters of a bill that would remodel the country's immigration policies included as one of the proposed changes a "points system" to assess prospective immigrants based on educational qualifications. The better educated an immigrant, the better chance he or she would be allowed to enter the US. In other words, people who least need opportunity are the most likely to get it. The bill may have reached a point of breakdown on 28 June 2007, but other countries have or are likely to pursue a similar course. Germany's abortive "green-card" effort to attract technology graduates from India is one example, and the ideas on immigration of the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, also have this principle at their foundation.
The club and its radius
Robert Putnam, the scholar of community-building and author of such influential works as Bowling Alone, has released gloomy findings from a current project on "diversity, community and social capital" that on first glance seem to give reason for these policies. The least cheering: diversity in a community makes people withdraw. After synthesising studies of changing populations in several countries he discovered that:
KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs During the period of the fellowship, she is travelling between north Africa and France.
Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:
"The freedom trail" (4 August 2005)
"France seeks a world voice" (8 December 2005)
"Europe's forked tongues" (16 February 2006)
"Zidane and France: the rules of the game" (19 July 2006)
"Barack Obama, Moroccan Ali, and me" (5 February 2007)
"Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel" (6 March 2007)
"The discomfort of strangers" (24 April 2007)
"France's two worlds" (8 May 2007)
"A girl, a knife, and Hawa Gréou" (30 May 2005)
Morocco outside in (14 June 2007)
"Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations' or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behavior, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us."
Putnam's findings affirm that people behave as Rorty suggested: when living among those who are different, they retreat to the sanctuary of their presumed moral equals. But this is not the endpoint of a diversifying society. In the medium-to-long-run Putnam's team found that "successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities. Thus, the central challenge for modern, diversifying societies is to create a new, broader sense of ‘we'."
In spring 2007, another American author - William T Vollmann - released the fruits of a lengthy, unscientific, international study of poor people. Vollman's method was to travel the world asking people why they thought they were poor: not why in the sense of what attributes of their situation they equated with poverty, but why in the larger metaphysical sense - how had this happened to them?
What good can come of Vollmann's project? His book Poor People is messy, even chaotic; his questions are intrusive and often painful ones for the subjects; the stories are sad and not particularly illuminating about how to eliminate or prevent poverty. In short, Poor People brings poverty to life but not in a particularly instructive way. But what it inevitably does is bring him - and us - to the Copenhagen-syndrome moment. And he does not shy away from it.
Vollman finishes the book with this moment. In California he lives in a "transitional neighborhood", as an American real-estate agent would call it. It is a term that means an area where people of diverse socio-economic levels live in close proximity: in all likelihood a neighbourhood that once held mostly poor people, but that has recently become attractive to adventurous wealthy people.
Vollmann writes about his interactions with the poor people near his home in a chapter called, "I Know I Am Rich." In it he details the fine balance he is constantly readjusting between him and the poor people who live around him. He wards off their intrusion into the walls of his home but assiduously allows other encroachments on the property that is legally his. And in his most dedicated act, he always shakes the hand of one of his unofficial tenants, whose hand was "warm, brown-smeared and feculent." And he tells his young daughter to shake the hand of "Daddy's friend" as well when it is offered before just as assiduously washing both pairs of hands once inside the confines. He does not, he writes, want his daughter to grow up disdainful of poor people or needlessly afraid of them.
As I write this, I have come to realise what disturbs me so much about Copenhagen syndrome. It is the radius of the "club", and the refusal to tolerate even the slightest discomfort. Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, has said that giving isn't really giving until it hurts, which is hard to swallow but probably true. We keep the poor invisible in New York, where I lived for so many years, by preventing them from making us aware of poverty: Being homeless isn't illegal but sleeping in most of the places that homeless people sleep other than shelters is (In the richest neighbourhoods, my cousin pointed out to me the bolsters that had once held benches. They've been removed, he said, so homeless people won't sleep on them). Being poor isn't illegal, but begging is.
I once said disdainfully to a friend that it was requisite for people of his social set to take a trek through poverty at between the ages of 18 and 22 (perhaps more than once), that Africa - which can stand in for any poor unhappy place - is often simply a backdrop for westerners' own search for self-discovery, an exotic stage on which to be self-obsessed, before settling into a life spent with the same wealthy privileged class the privileged young had grown up with. What do those young travellers take away other than inexpensive goods as badges of their explorations? What does it compel the casual traveller to leave behind or return as a way of changing the order? What if the people they encountered or viewed in Africa came to live in their country, their town, their neighbourhood, their lot? When does the Copenhagen syndrome kick in?
How big is yours?
As I was leaving Morocco last month I sat in my hotel room talking to my travelling companion. Before he arrived, I had visited a splendid home in the middle of a shanty town in Casablanca. The owner had moved there from England in part because the money that in London had only permitted him a cramped apartment allowed him here to live in splendour. "I don't think I could do that", I said to my friend, "Live in opulence in the middle of poverty with a house of servants."
But I do live in opulence in the middle of poverty; the poverty is just farther away so I don't have to see it. We often hate most what we dislike in ourselves which may be why it seems so appropriate to give this syndrome a name that evokes the Danes and their unapologetic "hunkering" (as Putnam calls the retreat to the comfort of one's equals, or, rather the people we assume to be our equals because they have like morals, points of reference, purchasing-power).
It's the degree of discomfort, the effluvia-scented handshake that tests our mettle. What is the radius of your Copenhagen, your willingness to respond to disruption to your world with generosity and openness rather than by reaffirming selfishness and exclusion? As I sat in Marrakech by the window of my modest hotel room, preparing to go home to well-preserved and protected Paris, I wasn't sure how I would answer that.
The narrative of Poor People closes with a chapter titled, "I Know You Are Rich". Its last line ends with a vision of a poor woman and her child: "DONATE HERE, and help keep me out of your neighbourhood."