Over the past two weeks I’ve been driven from the balcony of my one-bedroom apartment on West 123rd Street, and forced to turn all the fans in that bedroom to their highest pitch, because some asshole on West 124th turns up a Spanish-speaking radio station to a decibel level that pierces my ears, drums my head, and roils my skin, from mid-afternoon to midnight. Am I to be designated a rich, privileged, gentrifying white man who might even be called a racist if I call 311 to complain?
Of course, says Xochitl Gonzalez in The Atlantic on August 1. Because, you see, the sound of gentrification is silence. Here’s the lede:
“New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.”
Now I happen to be off to Maine later in August, where I get to share a one-bedroom apartment above a bookstore—it’s free because my roommate will be giving a reading from her recent book—but I can assure you that I’m not rich. I’m pretty sure I’m not a racist, either, although you’d get an argument on this from the white supremacists who complained to Rutgers when I announced at Facebook that “I now officially hate white people, and I am I white people, for God’s sake.”
And, here’s the hard part, I actually like the music the asshole broadcasts throughout the neighborhood as if we’ve all got a way of protecting ourselves from his sonic artillery. Yeah, I said “we,” us involuntary recipients of the harm he does to us by behaving as if we want to hear what he likes, or rather, as if he has the inalienable right to make us miserable, unable to enjoy the meager resources under our control—in my case, a 132 square-foot balcony, for others, the privacy of their own living rooms and conversations, all of us now targets of his daily barrage.
Gonzalez would have you believe that demanding the asshole turn his volume down would be to “exert control” over his very identity, in keeping with her argument that the WASPY undergraduates who policed the sonic landscape of her Ivy League college (Brown) were trying to teach her that “silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be [revered”—and in keeping with the notion that her very identity as a Puerto Rican and a person of color is obviously impaired by any objection to the (level of) sounds she or her friends or her music makes.
I would like you to believe, by contrast, that she is peddling an anachronistic, almost libertarian idea of freedom more suited to Donald Trump’s MAGA crowd than to her favored borough, Brooklyn, where Bernie still rules. In other words, she’s defending what she perceives as a beleaguered ethnic identity by invoking an outmoded concept of individual autonomy, one which excludes any attention to the public or common good.
That anachronistic idea goes like this. I am free only insofar as my will is not subject to an external power, whether to the needs and desires of others as enunciated in inherited tradition, custom, and law, or, more significantly, to the coercive, administrative apparatus of the state. This is the foundational premise of modern liberalism (and its utilitarian armature), which installs the ontological priority of a self unbound by the past and, in a seeming paradox, the correlative notion of civil society, the space between the state and the family where free markets flourish. “Natural rights”—life, liberty, property, rights that can neither be conferred nor abrogated by any power—are the watchwords of individual freedom and civil society so conceived. The supremacy of society over the state is their necessary attendant, the political imperative that accompanies and enforces the liberal imaginary.
The American Revolution was the inaugural political event in the history of modern liberalism as I’ve sketched it here. The “sovereignty of the people” as against the government, or any agent of government, was the vernacular expression of this imperative, the supremacy of society over the state, and the Bill if Rights attached to the Constitution was its formal articulation.
But the revolutionaries were inspired by more than John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. They were intellectual heirs as well to the “Commonwealthmen,” after all, the figures of the English Revolution who had appropriated the idea of freedom embedded in the classical republican tradition.
In that tradition, freedom was a function of citizenship and political action—deliberation in public, for the public—through which you could decipher the difference between your private interests and the common good. Only in this setting could you come to know virtue, the capacity to act upon that difference, and thus know yourself, to become a self-mastering individual. Freedom so defined presupposed your access to and your use of the powers of the state, for only these could allow you to realize your natural talents and acquire the requisite skills to make honest efforts on behalf of yourself and others.
In both the classical republican and the modern liberal traditions, the “man of reason” who could make laws and be the bearer of rights was ideally a self-determining individual because he was a property holder—that is, he owned not just the property in himself but enough productive property (wealth) to employ himself, so that he was not subject to the external authority of a landlord or a boss.
The corporate-liberal variation on the theme of modern liberalism—it’s not to be understood as “corporatism”—dispenses with this ideal, and thus permits proletarians, among others formerly designated as dependents with no will of their own (women, servants, children) to be recognized as self-determining bearers of rights, and even enfranchised as citizens. It also dispenses with the natural right of property, and in doing so, it discovers new “human” rights that start with or derive from bodily autonomy (e.g., privacy) and/or artificial associations (e.g., the “social self” embodied in trade unions, corporations., NGOs, etc.).
This mix of political traditions and ideological positions, which is still percolating in the normal discourse of our time, goes missing in Gonzalez’s impoverished definition of freedom (autonomy/identity) as her right to be loud, and with it any progress in our thinking about freedom since John Stuart Mill—and even he insisted that your rights as an individual did not include the prerogative to inflict harm on others in exercising your rights. By his accounting, the MAGA crowd’s refusal to wear masks would be a gross misunderstanding and misuse of freedom because it quite possibly endangered the lives of those who wandered into range of their angry aerosol output—that is, because both society and the state had interests that could legitimately be served by public health measures. By the same accounting, Gonzalez’s claim that any limit on an individual’s right to be loud is an infringement on his or her freedom (autonomy/identity) is at least curious if not downright ridiculous. At some decibel levels, noise, sound, and music don’t just disturb the peace, they deny unprotected individuals access to the privacy of their own dwellings, and, at certain extremes, they even inflict bodily harm.
The exquisite irony of Gonzalez’s argument, if that’s what it amounts to, resides, then, in the fact that she mobilizes a very quaint, quasi-libertarian, deeply utilitarian idea of individual freedom in the name of a collective ethnic identity that is apparently threatened by quiet WASPY white people bent on gentrifying even the sacred spaces of loud, boisterous Brooklyn. In view of that odd disjuncture, maybe it’s time we rethink the matters of collective identity and individual autonomy, so that they appear as neither the terms of an either/or choice, as per a pre-corporate liberalism, nor random items on an intellectual take-out menu, as per Gonzalez’s incoherent argument.
Thank you . I was annoyed with her conjectures and this was the juice I needed .
The right to selfishness and rudeness, shall not be impinged. It's right there in the Bill of Rights. Oh, wait, no it's not. Good Christ, what an asshole, she is.
Have you been subjected to the predominantly, Dominican tricked out cars with speakers that can be heard across the East River into my neighborhood in Queens? At decibel levels as loud as yours? The cops show up and shut them down, and they just move to another location. The bass line is so pulsating, it makes the house reverberate. I am not kidding you.
Great piece, Jim.