Anybody conversant in Catholic social ethics knows the basic principle of subsidiarity: small is beautiful. Decision and policy-making should be pressed down to the lowest level possible. It ensures both a personalistic touch and that those persons have skin in the game. It enforces accountability and checks aggrandization of power: you have to look those to whom you are responsible in the eyes, and a circumscribed group inherently limits power grabs.
Starting from that premise, I was intrigued by Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods even though, by the time I finished it, I was more disappointed. Kaplan, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, is billed as an “expert on fragile states.” Considering the few fragile states that have become less fragile as a result of external expertise, I’ll admit suspicion to the feasibility of applying the thinking to—or expecting better outcomes from—American neighborhoods.
Kaplan makes good points. We forget that the United States is a huge country: in most parts of the world, its territory would compose multiple countries. What will work in the Bronx is unlikely to work in Berea, Kentucky, for multiple reasons: cultural, geographical, economic, social. Kaplan makes that clear. He notes, for example, the challenges of promoting stay-in-school programs in Appalachia versus Baltimore.
He also notes the importance of neighborhoods scaled to the human. One reason East Lake, an Atlanta neighborhood, suffered the kinds of dysfunction it did is the kinds of towns and cities we have favored, particularly post-World War II: commercial districts here, industrial districts there, shopping over there, living over here, far enough apart to make them unwalkable, even if we built the sidewalks to walk on.
And, like a growing number of contemporary social scientists, he recognizes that marriage is in many ways fundamental to healthy societies. The degree to which marital dysfunction and rearing children outside its confines grows has a clear impact on all sorts of other aspects of social life—a reality even today’s “let a thousand lifestyles bloom” advocates are compelled grudgingly to admit.
He recognizes and discusses the five mediating institutions essential to fixing American society: communities, schools, families, churches, and neighborhoods. (Marriage, curiously, is folded under “churches,” which are presented as a key locus for rescuing marriage. That the state, particularly in the last twenty years, has used its power to enable individuals to redefine marriage to mean whatever they want it to, adapting state structures like no-fault divorce or giving solemnization power to self-made officiants to effectuate those privatized redefinitions, receives no attention).
That Kaplan argues for the need to work “one zip code at a time” already represents significant progress. For a man working inside the DC Beltway to acknowledge that Washington cannot fix American social pathologies regardless of how many new deals build back better to make wars on poverty is important.
But it’s not the end of the story.
As a Catholic theologian, the one thing that struck me after reading this book is that the central and uniting pathology, which ties many of the other pathologies together, is the collapse of the family. In my judgment, that’s not just a problem; it’s the problem.
Take his description of “Thread,” a program targeted at inner-city Baltimore kids to get them through high school and facilitate their entrance into the adult world through higher education and/or work:
Thread identifies children who are underserved and particularly vulnerable, targeting students who are academically in the bottom quarter of their ninth-grade class and then committing to them for ten years. (In contrast, a typical community-based Big Brothers Big Sisters relationship lasts about thirty months). This is enough time to make a real difference, especially given that the time period covers what is arguably the most pivotal time in any child’s transition to adulthood, ages fifteen to twenty-five. Only such a long-term commitment, backed by daily nurturing and practical support, can reconfigure basic expectations about the world, build a web of trusting and caring relationships, and make up for all the years these students have been left behind—both academically and emotionally (p. 106, emphasis added).
One can hardly disagree that a decade should be “enough time to make a real difference.” One can hardly deny that “such a long-term commitment, backed by daily nurturing and practical support, can reconfigure” how somebody looks at the world.
But what Kaplan is speaking of is a family. It is not a social organization that tries to fill in for the absence of a family. It is certainly unrealistic to assume that external actors could replicate such support over that timeframe on the scale needed in America today.
One can argue that these kids lack a family and so such programs are better than nothing. That, in a sense, is true. But only in a sense. Why?
Hopefully, such programs are sufficiently humble to recognize they cannot replace a family. They will not ever provide the “web of trusting and caring relationships … [to] make up for all the years these students have been left behind.” Only a family can do that, a family to which a child is entitled.
Inherent in this vision is a kind of American utilitarian pragmatism: since there’s no such family available, some program might provide the minimum modicum of “nurturing and practical support” that turns some kids around. So, since a teenager is going to have sex, let’s just avoid the biggest consequences by providing contraceptives and condoms; and since the druggie is going to shoot himself up, let’s make sure he has clean needles and the neighborhood strategically deployed naloxone.
(Paradoxically, it’s the same kind of backwards thinking that seems to inform Pope Francis’s vision of “theology”: since everybody is a sinner, let’s start with the existential situation sinners find themselves in and then tailor theology to some pragmatic goals we might then christen as “pastoral.” I call both these secular and religious kinds of thinking “backwards” because instead of recognizing what should be and leading people to it, they start, and often stay, with what is, reducing the unrealized norm to an aspiration that never quite gets made real.)
The constant problem with such “solutions” is that they excel in applying splints and bandages. But, in the end, a healed broken leg is never going to have the strength or resiliency of a leg that was never broken, so prophylaxis—as policymaking or pastoral theology—ultimately hardly serves the human person.
And just as a reset broken limb will really not compete with one never broken, so an external group’s “relationship”–even it could run for a decade and achieve some good outcomes–will never be a substitute for a family.
We run into the same problem here as in the case of Melissa Kearney’s Two Parent Privilege: the axiological choice of not wanting to seem “judgmental” trumps acknowledging the social pathologies we have known—and known for decades–as the cause for that social decay. Not all “families” are created equal.
One would think, after the accumulation of decades of social science data about the deleterious effects of family decay on America and especially on our kids, that policymakers would face the realities staring at them and challenge them. In that sense, I found a lot in Kaplan’s book I’ve heard before. Yes, many modern neighborhoods are dysfunctional not because they are poor but because of how they are built. That’s the basic thesis of the “new urbanism,” a school of urban planning that argues we need to return to communities that have livable and walkable dimensions, parameters that were the norm before the rise of the automobile and the worship of suburbia exploded them.
As a student of the Polish American experience, I can say that the “urban ethnic ghettos” in which many Polish immigrants found themselves were, by objective standards, poor. Yet, when we read the memoirs of first-generation children who grew up in those enclaves, most report they didn’t think of themselves as “poor” nor of their neighborhood as a “ghetto.” They were self-contained communities where work, worship, commerce, and fun were commonplace. Did culture affect kids? Yes: most parents certainly wanted their children to find a secure job, often in the local factory, while fewer might have pushed boys on to higher education (typically in something “practical,” like business). But the difference was that there were families that did that work and, as times changed, familial expectations for the next generation also grew.
Kaplan seems to prove that in writing about his own suburban Maryland neighborhood, detailing how it bonded together during COVID. But he also admits that there was a prior social glue in the neighborhood: a critical mass of people were observant Jews. So, yes, a shared world vision and shared values tends to forge community rather than just people-living-next-to-each-other. How then does one square this with the current penchant to hype cultural differences, promoting all variety of “diversity” as ends in themselves? Human experience seems to document that secular glue rarely has the adhesive power of religion. Obviously, no one is advocating exclusionary neighborhoods, but there seems to be a disconnect between what Kaplan recognizes in his own experience as having worked and the nostrums liberal secular social policy puts its faith in advocating.
Admittedly, this book is written to a wide American audience and, as such, reflects many contemporary social assumptions. Given that broader audience, its recognition of social transformation through micro- (rather than macro-) action is a welcome and sorely overdue response to too long a period of top-down urban/educational/social/community renewal. To the degree that perspective enters the Beltway bloodstream, the book will have served a worthy purpose.
But, as a Catholic American, my takeaway is that while the focus on the local is welcome, the centrality of the family is missing. The fall of the family affects almost every area Kaplan studies: educational attainment, social mobility, crime, poverty, etc. Kaplan’s recognition that neighborhoods also require a critical mass of families—that neighborhoods attract or are affected by how many healthy families are found within it—is also valuable: communities cannot be made by one or even a handful of families.
Tinkering around the edges, hoping that substitutes can somehow make up for academic and emotional deficiencies, can fill in the gaps enough to get us off ground zero, is wishful thinking.
Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time
By Seth D. Kaplan
Little, Brown Spark, 2023
Hardcover, 249 pages
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Thanks for this review.
Tinkering around the edges. That about covers it.
How long are we going to put up with the wilful blindness of the “experts” and the media?
So many of today’s problems point to the destruction of the family unit. Unfortunately this has been one of the products of Big Government. It was promoted, unintentionally by Linden Johnson and his War on Poverty, and continued ever since. While discussing the Catholic principle of Subsidiarity, one need to add limit big Government. Big Government is a proxy for letting high minded intellectuals run other peoples lives thru Government mandated programs, that have vast unintended consequences.
The author of the book cited in this article should read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
We can’t go back to a time that probably never existed except in our memories.
It’s wishful thinking, and unrealistic. Even when Christian/Catholic families decide to go “off the grid”–family moves to a rural area where other “off-the-grid” families are living, Mom, who wears dresses all the time, stays home with the children, who are homeschooled (and the girls wear dresses), and Dad goes to work-and smokes cigars, drinks whiskey, and hunts and fishes on weekends with his other off-the-grid buddies-these families still suffer from child and teen rebellion (including use of drugs and sex), infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, financial crises, health issues (cancer from smoking cigars!), failures of home schooling to provide an adequate education that prepares a young person for the modern world and a viable job/career, and sadly, attrition from organized religion.
I think we need to build strong families in whatever neighborhoods we find ourselves.
Nobody is suggesting “Leave It to Beaver.” But families are not optional extras, either, and families are not whatever you say they are. Families are mothers and fathers married to each other with children. Everything else is fake. That doesn’t necessarily condemn others, but it DOES recognize that — in the name of being “nice” — we can’t say that is fake is not fake.
Badger (“Wind in the Willows” by K, Grayham) saw it was fake but it was a joint effort of a riverbank family of the three, Badger with Mole and Rattie, that restored their true identity to the stoats.
Mrs Sharon,
Seriously, how many unemployed homeschooled folks do you know? What subjects do you believe homeschoolers are deficient in?
Getting a viable job in the modern world or any world involves being sober, dependable and responsible. And not assuming the world owes you a living. Those qualities are harder to find in employees these days and are first learned at home.
Geez, failures of homeschooling to provide an adequate education for the modern world?
How did a local homeschool grad make his way to Princeton? And why did one of mine get accepted to 5 out of the 7 physical therapy graduate programs he applied to? (That’s actually not very common I hear.)
Oh, and what is wrong with wearing dresses all the time? (I’m a skirt girl during the summer months, but still…)
Homeschooling cannot authorise as an exercise of an absolute power requiring applications by consecrated marriage of ensuring procreation role gifts by helpers of the family, church and state, and insuring need of union of identities of spouses.
This reference point of family members of my families of consecrated marriages, male female vowed to God and celibate vowed to man in Christ, as qualitatively equal as well as inseparable, my father Colin Clark and me, was a reference point for Pope Francis in his particular present moment real presence circumstances on 17 June 2021 in the defective Cardinal Vatican state Angelo Becciu + 9 and Italian Parliament “Zan” helper of the family cases.
Nice word salad you got there.
In reviewing this article again, I came across your comments. The comment demeaning home schooling is one of the most ridiculous comments I have read recently. It’s the type of nonsense one may hear on CNN.
Similar to Kaplan’s book, and earlier, is James Howard Kunstler’s “The Geography of Nowhere,” 1994. Much is attributed to the federal policy and funding of the Interstate Highway System (1956…), at the time the largest public works project in the world.
A few more hints from the urban design perspective:
The freeway system drained populations from interconnected cities into the new world of urban sprawl and anonymous suburbia. A prototype for President Johnson’s later fiat-money Great Society with its Catalogue for Federal Domestic Assistance (some 700 programs!). Social scientists attribute much of family breakup (especially in the Black community) to this bromide—welfare programs which essentially rewarded the young for getting pregnant and qualifying for help from Uncle Sam (note: our uncle, not a “father”).
Big Business, too, and Big Banks, and Big land speculators. Big box stores cannibalizing neighborhood vitality, and cookie cutter housing with two car garages and neighbors who don’t even know each other by name. The geographic foundation for Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” 2001.
Families, what families? Much agreement, here, that Big Government has not neglected its compassionate and ham-fisted role in destroying neighborhoods and the entire communal complexity that supports families.
At this late hour, the “walking together” Church might as well bless the wreckage and the symptoms, as in the substitute “community” gay lifestyle, two-by-two.
I haven’t read the book and don’t intend to but, from what you reported, I think that we aren’t facing an either or situation, but a both and. We need both bandages for the wounds (short term) and moral changes (long term) in order to address the problem at hand. We must be flexible in keeping it simple and personal. If we are successful in helping only one, it is one less problem to be solved. We could adopt children and thus hope to provide a home environment. We could include a student in our church and Catholic school communities and provide partial support. We don’t need programs as much as we need commitment and willingness to act. We need to open our hearts and homes.
The problem is the policy makers, not wanting to be “judgmental” about “non-traditional ‘families,'” stop on the palliative solutions and refuse to address the root problems of the destruction of the family. You can put all the bandages you want on an oozing, gangrenous wound, and it may ease things for a day but the limb is rotting off. We have to stop pretending that stopgaps will fix problems that have attained a magnitude the stopgaps themselves cannot really help.
The only remedy of the occult as hidden, incest connected as substitute mate, evil: “… that, in destroying the family reverses the progress of humanisation, heedless of the long-term consequences of so doing” (from address of Pope Francis’ President, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, of his Council for the Family at the UNO, 15 May 2013, the UNO ”The International Day of the Family”) is treating by consecrated marriage, celibate vowed to man in Christ or male female vowed to God as qualitatively equal as well as inseparable in this keeping in uncertainty of belief in present moment real presence as by the consent of Pope Francis in uncertainty of his belief in his particular circumstances to be joined in consecrated celibate marriage on 17 June 2021 by this marriages exercise of an absolute power of its simultaneous authorisations of it ensuring its procreation role gift charity donations and insuring its spouses need of union of their identities out-occulting the occult, incest connected cause as uncontrollable: “… oscillation between persistent forms of regressive ‘familyism’ on the one hand and an affirmation of radical individualism on the other …”.
This “evil” is of grooming by diseased family member ‘familyists’ of their psychologically and or emotionally vulnerable family members with a non-economic, false status inducement of association with “higher vocation” (TTMHS, PCF, 1995, 35; cf. St Paul, 1Cor7:25-34) of consecrated celibate marriage to consecrated male female marriage for economic advantage of their families by tax-exemption embezzlements and lower insurance cost by fraud.
These were the two extreme tensions withstood by simultaneous authorisations by the consecrated celibate marriage of Pope Francis on this reference point of Mary’s consecrated marriages, celibate and male female as qualitatively equal and inseparable, on 17 June 2021
Dr Grondelski, thanks for the superb review. I have looked some Kaplan excerpts and other reviews and commentary, mostly on LinkedIn. I messaged him a similar assertion as yours: marriage is the root problem; he “agreed” but it remains obscured by all that you cite as the weakness of his approach, though it has some merit.
Three current Catholic culture warriors – JP deGance (Communio.org), Mark Regenerous (Austin Family Institute) and Brad Wilcox (Institute for Family Studies at UVA) are speaking at a Symposium at the University of St. Thomas in Houston Jan 25 (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.stthom.edu/Public/getFile.asp?File_Content_ID=128975). It is predicated on some facts about faith and family (https://communio.org/facts/). It will probably be recorded.
DeGance has been doing what I call “triage” work, going into church communities and enriching marriages. In 93 churches between 2016 and 2018, 58,912 people in Jacksonville, FL engaged in skill-based relationship communication programs 4 hour or longer. The divorce rate was lowered by 24%. Further, in a similar study of 10,019 people in 33 churches, there was a 22.9% increase in the average attendance across the churches. Their average weekly giving increased by 28%. (This and other findings are in the book the Endgame.)
I share all this because deGance also reported that 85% of all churches allocate zero % of their annual budget on marriage ministry. St. John Paul in Familiaris consortio (1981) no. 65, called for pastors and church leaders to follow married couples after the wedding along their life stages. 35 years later at the 2nd Synod on the Family, Pope Francis built upon the directive of St. John Paul by calling for his own: establishing a marriage catechumenate (Catechumenal Pathways for Married Life, 2022).
My point: Gaudium et spes (nos 48-52) expressed concern about the domestic church in 1965. Catholicism has the vision, resources, doctrine, and pastoral skills to renew the OTHER Vocation at the Service of Communion (CCC 1534) and thus renew parish life. And maybe even cultivate celibate vocations. True, we badly need priests to confect the Eucharist, but we need sacramental married couples to confect the church. DeGance believes we may be running out of time. I hope he’s wrong.
Except that the “OTHER Vocation”, consecrated marriage, either celibate vowed to man in Christ or male female vowed to God, is neither a sacrament nor a vocation.
Well, one might never know it, based on how often parishes pray for engaged couples at liturgy or for marriage in prayers for Vocations.St. John Paul identifies 4 Tasks of the Mission of the family (Familiaris consortio, nos 17 ff.), and thus illustrates CCC 1534. Mr. Clark, care to expound a little more on your post?
Mr Clark, I’m a little thick. I apologize. I just now re-visited this page. You are correct, that vowed or consecrated life, perhaps since it is part of a Lay state in the Church, is not considered a sacrament, though certainly a calling or vocation, else why embrace it? On a side note, I encountered the Pascal Mystery and the holy Triduum in our infertility and subsequent adoptions. I could make a case that adoption could be a sacrament. Have a blessed 2024.
Those three guys are true wise men. Listen to them.