We live in an age when the most unobjectionable and necessary ideas for progress can give rise to paranoia and fear. If the most innocuous, unoriginal possible idea can fuel paranoia, how can we hope to have a sensible discussion about the future of our places?
Doesn’t seem like the author really offers any possible reasons for the rights reaction to responsible urban planning, so perhaps I will offer some.
Conservatism isn’t solely a political philosophy that a person decides to adopt. There are personally traits that feed into a person’s susceptibility to right wing thought. People who have low openness tend to be conservative. To paraphrase Buckley, their brains wired up to tell them to stand athwart history and yell STOP.
These people all grew up in a car centric world, where dad commuted in to the city from the suburbs and mom drove them to the school everyday. That, to them is the comfortable, natural order of things. Their psychology begs them to preserve that order at all costs.
Even though that model of planning is really new, only going back about 70 or 80 yrs, to them it is the natural way. Any alternative looks like change and progress, which they are psychologically predisposed to be suspicious of. All change to them, can be reduced to something that is being taken away from them. Something that disrespects their forefathers.
Not all change is good and some conservative thought is useful when a society is planning its future. But, it’s really dangerous when we have made mistakes.
In our modern political landscape, there are charlatans like Peterson and Jones who know how to pick at their audience’s psychology and pull dollars out of it. They cynically use the fears of their audience and package up any “new” ideas as existential threats.
The key when discussing progress with conservatives is to opening them up to the idea that we are going back. In this case specifically, 15min cities sounds scary but “returning to the urban planning ideas that motivated our great grandparents” might sound great. Same change different reaction.
Conservative cruelty cannot be accepted or forgiven but the psychology that drives it must be understood and accounted for when developing communication strategies.
as I’ve grown older, one of the things I’ve realized is that the primary driving force behind a lot of people’s beliefs is, as pratchett put it, ‘the overwhelming desire that tomorrow should be pretty much like yesterday was’. It takes a lot, like a lot Lot LOT, to get people to be willing to risk the unknown. people have this weird ability to look back at all of history, see how much things have grown and changed, and think to themselves “thank god that I live here and now, where things operate in the only possible correct way that was ordained by god. the past is nothing but barbarians dying of infections and the future is a dystopia that no one could possibly want or understand, but the way I grew up with is comfortable and makes sense. it’s the natural order.” this isn’t a terribly unique thought, but the ability to think it without realizing that every generation that came before you also believed that very same thing with as much conviction as you did is…let’s say it’s uniquely human.
