The Final Filter

The importance of figuring out precisely others - and you - believe

Last fall, during one of our meandering walks around our hometown, my best friend from New Jersey and I were talking about why our parents don’t like cities. (It was a little more nuanced than that!)

Specifically, I raised this idea I’ve played with here before that Americans “dislike” cities not because they’re afraid of crime or whatever negative explanation there is, but because secretly they like cities, walkability, and proximity to stuff. But for a number of reasons—things like puritanism and work ethic—we see the positive aspects of cities as reprieves from the grind of real life, and therefore something that’s slightly disreputable to want as a normal condition. As I put it once, wanting urbanism every day is like wanting ice cream for dinner.

I’ll quote that bit from the original piece:

My friend and I were thinking about this as we walked by the derelict Turntable Junction with its erstwhile gazebo and sitting areas and winding brick pathways, the Lone Eagle craft brewery with its great big patio, the empty benches scattered around town. Even when they were bustling, people were there for specific reasons. We’re getting ice cream, we’re shopping, we’re in town to go to the bank but sure we can sit on the benches for a little bit.

“Americans feel like they need a reason to loiter,” my friend observed. There has to be a bar or a sports game or a street fair or a festival. It’s so difficult, mentally, to just let yourself sit and rest and take in the views. There’s this tendency to say, “Alright, let’s get going, can’t lounge around all day.” Americans travel to lovely walkable European cities and have fun and feel healthy, and then come back and make cracks about how Europeans don’t work.

“There’s a part of you that doesn’t really want to do something unless a part of you doesn’t want to do it,” I replied.

My friend used this phrase that I liked, “the final filter.” What if you just keep asking questions, like a therapist or like Socrates? Can you eventually pass through the final filter and reach the actual substantive objection?

“I don’t like cities.” “Why?” “They’re too loud.” “What noises are you thinking of?” “Horns and tires screeching.” “Those noises are made by vehicles. What if cities were more pedestrian-focused and had fewer cars on their streets?”

“I don’t like cities.” “Why?” “They’re for rich childless 20-somethings who haven’t grown up yet.” “What makes you say that?” [I don’t know what answer you would get, but it would probably make room for another question!]

Who knows what you’ll find when you do this exercise—with someone else or yourself. You might something really foundational, like a Jeffersonian belief that cities are inherently morally corrosive. Or you might find a bunch of culture-war stuff that evaporates upon further analysis. (The latter was basically me; I was a conservative suburbanite for whom cities were barely real places at all, and so I absorbed all of the negativity about cities without truly holding any of those views per se. And it was only earnestly, patiently explained urbanism, a la Strong Towns, that was able to show me that there was a real positive case for cities and urbanism.)

You might find something to do with trust or communication. For example, someone with my right-leaning background might say that the progressive distaste for going hard after crime betrays a weakness with regard to upholding public order, and that this weakness will affect everything such policymakers do. You might find something even more foundational than that: maybe a reference to something seemingly out of left field like euthanasia in Canada or Europe, a sentiment something like I do not trust people who affirm those things to make any political choices about how I should live.

Some progressives, if faced with an answer like this, would shake their heads and say something about right-wing media, or question the right-leaning person’s commitment to pluralism. But I would ask the right-leaning person: Would you say then that being “anti-urban” or “anti-urbanist” is a kind of insurance against the excesses of left-technocratic politics? Do you think that left-technocrats lack a metaphysics about the world and the human person, and that this implicitly godless materialism will impact how they handle all sorts of issues? Maybe I’m naive, but I do think at least some of it comes down to this.

But cities are for everyone. They can be for conservative Christians and atheist liberals and technocratic progressives and C.S. Lewis fans. And those are only a very small handful of specifics! We’ve made a mistake when urban and land-use policy is a kind of second-tier issue that we choose our views on based on other things, or that we outsource our views on to people we agree with on other matters. Land use is a primary, almost pre-political issue. And we need a way to treat it that way.

Look, maybe for most right-wingers it all just reduces to “I don’t like cities because I don’t like liberals.” But because I come from the right and am an urbanist, I get this skepticism at a gut level and engage it with it to the degree possible.

It would be an incredible breakthrough, in the sort of ecumenical-dialogue sense, to get more conservatives to the “I agree with urbanism in the abstract but I don’t trust the people who are likely to implement it” position. Because that would get at the fact that in many cases the substance of urban policy itself is not what is at issue.

What is at issue instead is that for a lot of people, urbanism is one arrow in the quiver of left-wing social policy. At least getting that supposition out there and unpacking it would be very useful, as this bundle of issues goes more mainstream and the housing crisis becomes more obvious.

All of this is based loosely on conversations I’ve had, so I think it has at least some merit and basis in real conversations that could happen.

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That same friend of mine said once that everyone believes in a different God—by which he meant that even people who adhere to the same religion have their own personal mental conception of precisely who and what God is: their own exceptions to difficult doctrines, their own hopes that God agrees with their grudges or will validate their own particular vices, etc.

In a similar way, we all have different, unique conceptions of political problems and solutions, even when we’re using the same words. “Housing” and “urbanism” can mean as many things to as many people as “God.” And without stripping down what exactly we’re talking about, we’re never even reaching the point of talking about the issue.

Here’s an example of this kind of debate done right. I’m still thinking of the debate among urbanists over state preemption of zoning. Not necessarily because this is the most important issue right now, but because I’ve been really impressed with how the disagreement is playing out.

This is a little inside baseball, but as I wrote here, folks from the YIMBY world and the Strong Towns world—two of the major “denominations,” I suppose you could say, in the broad world of urbanism—have been publicly disagreeing over this issue in a series of essays. You can see how the language across the essays changes to capture nuance that possibly neither side appreciated at the start.

What always strikes me about attempts to understand other people is that the disagreement can end up looking very different at the end. What looks like a cut-and-dry point of divergence—preemption is a good idea vs. preemption is a bad idea, in this case—can end up being the visible part of a whole worldview, which neither side can see without dialogue. And which—the most curious part of this to me—might not even be visible to us.

One of the things about “dialogues” is that it isn’t just that we might misunderstand the folks on the other side. It’s also that the process of articulating your own views—of trying to strip them down to the studs—helps you to figure out what your own views actually are.

I think a lot of us don’t even know what we believe, or why we believe it. Sometimes what you think is your bedrock reason turns out to be another assumption/inference, a view dependent on something else. You have to pass through that “final filter.” And finally, in a way you never would if you were just thinking through the thing on your own, you finally understand what your own reasons for your views are, and therefore what the crux of the disagreement is—if there is a disagreement!

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Related Reading:

Urbanist Ecumenism

Urbanist Formularies

Gas Half Full

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