Book Review: Chris Arnade’s “Dignity”
Occasionally I read a book that helps me to see things that I knew intuitively to be true, but couldn’t articulate properly, and consequently helps me to have a better understanding of the cultural world that we inhabit.
Chris Arnade’s Dignity is one of those books.
It is partly the stories that he tells.
The stories in this book are poignant – often humorous, and just as often heartbreaking. You cannot read more than a few pages in this book without reading about poverty, or racism, or – most omnipresently - drugs, and the terrible things that addiction has done to people and to the places that they live.
The photos, like the stories, are poignant. Some of them are heartwarming, while, again, others are heartbreaking. All of them are compelling, beautifully composed, and masterfully produced. The complexity and the humanity of the people who are depicted in them comes through in ways that many similar photographs seem unable to capture.
It is partly the writing.
This book is very readable. Arnade is a fluid, crisp, and efficient writer. He is not given over to long expostulations or flowery turns-of-phrase. The writing is a sort of journalism that we seldom encounter nowadays – prosaic, without seeming detached or clinical; sympathetic, without seeming overly-sentimental.
But, more than anything, what has helped me is the framework that this book provides for understanding today’s America.
Before I get into all of that, allow me to briefly describe who Chris Arnade is and how he got to the place where he wrote this book.
After two decades of working on Wall Street as a bond trader, Arnade grew dissatisfied with his line of work, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis:
“I wasn’t in the mood for listening to anyone, especially other bankers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadn’t been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending the company I worked for, Citibank, into a spiral stopped only by a government bailout. I had just seen where our – my own included – hubris had taken us and what it had cost the country. Not that it had actually cost us bankers, or my neighbors, much of anything.”
He began taking long walks from his Brooklyn neighborhood - sometimes as long as 15 miles - to reduce stress, and to explore the parts of New York City that many people describe as dangerous or uninteresting – places like Hunts Point in the South Bronx.
Arnade began to carry his camera on these walks, talking to anyone who would talk to him, and with their permission, would photograph them and their surroundings.
This process of interacting with flesh-and-blood people, rather than flickering images on a computer screen, ultimately caused Arnade to wrestle with who he was and where he was going:
“What I started seeing, and learning, was just how cloistered and privileged my world was and how narrow and selfish I was. Not just in how I lived but in what and how I thought. . .like most successful and well-educated people, especially those in NYC, I considered myself open-minded. . .and reflective about my privilege. I read three papers daily, I watched documentaries on our social problems, and voted for and supported policies that I felt recognized and addressed my privilege. I gave money and time to charities that focused on poverty and injustice. I understood I was selfish, but I rationalized. Aren’t we all selfish? Besides, I am far less selfish than others, look at how I vote (progressive), what I believe in (equality), and who my colleagues are (people of all races from all places).”
Ultimately Arnade quit his job and began driving all over the country – racking up 150,000 miles on his car over a three year period, and visiting a broad and culturally diverse cross-section of this nation.
As he describes in great detail, he saw how messy life is - all too often filled with pain, injustice, and problems too big for any public policy regime to truly address.
But he also saw how resilient people can be, and how community can thrive in the most unlikely of places (like McDonald’s) amidst the pain and poverty. In a word, he found what many people would find most unlikely in stigmatized places full of marginalized people – dignity.
The framework that Chris Arnade articulates through stories, photos, and commentary focuses on three things:
· The front row/back row dynamic
· The enduring importance of place in a spatially-agnostic world
· The power of non-credentialed forms of meaning
I’ll cover the three of them in order:
First, the front-row/back-row dynamic is a powerful lens for viewing our present moment in time. Arnade’s metaphor, as you have probably already guessed, takes us back to grade school – where the high-achievers, go-getters, and social extraverts sat in the front row of the class; while the kids of whom little was expected lingered unnoticed in the back.
The United States has always been a country that has tried its damndest to avoid acknowledging the reality of social class. Our meritocracy (which is both real and imagined) has much to offer, but one of its real shortcomings is an inability to grapple with social class. When we Americans do occasionally think about social class, we always tend to think that it is simply about how much money that one makes.
But class is about far more than that. It’s not just about annual income – it’s also about net worth (and the insulation from sudden financial disaster that comes with it); occupation and profession (do your back or your knees hurt at the end of the workday?); and educational attainment (did you graduate from college; and, if so, where did you go to school?)
Paul Fussell, in his book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, identifies nine social classes: Top Out-of-Sight; Upper; Upper Middle; Middle; High-Proletarian; Mid-Proletarian; Low-Proletarian; Destitute; Bottom Out-of-Sight. The first three are clearly the front row, while the last five are clearly the back row. “Middle” is just that – a way-station between the front row and the back row, and a place that not as many people as we would like to believe pass through.
But beyond income, net worth, occupation, and educational attainment, there is one overriding thing that separates the front row from the back row: cultural power.
Cultural power is the power to define reality. The front row makes the rules. It decides what is important and what is not. It decides who is important and who is not. It decides which places matter, and which ones don’t.
The back row might greatly outnumber the front row, but that doesn’t matter.
The front row has cultural power, and it is a type of power that is self-replicating and self-reinforcing. It is about who sets the agenda, who decides what will be discussed (and on which terms), what is cool or politically correct; and conversely, what is uncool or politically incorrect.
It is the type of power that is wielded by the insiders in both political parties, by the people who run major for-profit and non-profit institutions, by the people who control the media; and by the upper middle and middle class functionaries who serve and/or benefit from the status quo created by those insiders and the organizations that they oversee.
McDonald’s looms quite large in this book, and it is a great example of an institution that (while a corporate creation of the front row) is very much looked down upon by those in the front row, while being simultaneously embraced and beloved by those in the back row.
Like many of us in the front row, Arnade had always thought of McDonald’s as a place to be avoided, or joked about, or perhaps visited to “slum it” just for fun. What he realized time and again on his journeys is that for those in the back row, McDonald’s is a place to socialize; to get satisfying cheap food; to get clean water; to charge a phone; and to get free Wi-Fi.
In short, a place that you and I sitting in the front row might see as a soulless corporation that is part of the problem; many people in the back row see as a low barrier-to-entry community center where they will be accepted, and where they can get simple things that they need without having to follow a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules, or navigating a big, faceless bureaucracy.
Second, Arnade does a wonderful job of explaining the enduring importance of place to a world that is increasingly spatially agnostic, and often actively privileges certain front row places over back row ones.
But, as he points out, even in the centers of front row cultural power like New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, there are plenty of back row places. The South Bronx, Anacostia, and South Central are only a short drive away from the Upper East Side, Capitol Hill, and Brentwood.
And then there are the vast stretches of America where virtually every place is composed of people in the back row – small places like Portsmouth, Ohio; Cairo, Illinois; and Selma, Alabama; as well as larger places like Bakersfield, California; Gary, Indiana; the north side of Milwaukee; and the east side of Cleveland.
Chris Arnade firmly rejects what I call “The U-Haul School of Public Policy”. His writing about place is honest, realistic, and often profound:
“I was part of a global group of lawyers, bankers, business people, and professors who are their profession first and a New Yorker, Brit, or Southerner second. . .
. . .In their minds, staying put is a mistake. If you stay, you limit your career, you limit your wealth, and you limit your intellectual growth. They also don’t fully understand the value of place because like religion, it is hard to measure. What is the value of staying near the family that raised you or in the valley where you were born?
Had I asked those in my hometown when I visited why they stayed, why they were still there, I would have gotten the answer that I heard from Cairo, to Amarillo, to rural Ohio. They would have looked at me like I was crazy, then said, ‘Because it is my home.’
It is an answer that is obvious, because there is value in home. . .The front row doesn’t fully get that because they don’t see that value. . .
When communities and towns are destroyed, partly because of the front row’s policies of globalization, the front row solution is, ‘Well, just move.’ Buffalo is dying, so just leave Buffalo. Or Appalachia or the Rust Belt or Texas or Ohio or wherever they see suffering. It doesn’t matter where people work, where they live, or where they raise a family. If a factory moves and a town dies, then workers can just move.
Never mind that place, family, and friends are often the only network many people have, the only community that provides them a vital role, because what matters is growth at all cost – even if it is brutal – and that requires everyone to always be economic migrants.”
Finally, Arnade discusses what he calls “non-credentialed forms of meaning” – things like family, faith, place, and race. These are all things that you inherit without having to do anything:
“People respond to humiliation in different ways, but the most common response is to find a source of pride wherever possible, even if that means in places the status quo doesn’t approve of. It means trying to find a community or activity that values them. For those in the back row, that means a place that doesn’t demand credentials.
Living in the place that you grew up doesn’t require credentials. It’s a form of meaning that cannot be measured. Family doesn’t require credentials.”
Arnade’s writing about religion, like his writing about place, is moving, and impressed me more than anything else in this book.
He writes about religious faith with a degree of honesty, respect, and authenticity that I almost never encounter in an age where dismissive and infantile rejoinders about “the Flying Spaghetti Monster” are taken by some of the world’s leading intellectuals to be the final word on a philosophical debate about the existence of God that is as old as humanity itself.
He describes faith and religious people in the complex and realistic way that I know them to actually be in real life, not in the two-dimensional caricatures that people in the front row so often use to dismiss them:
“When I walked into Hunts Point, I expected that the people there, those most impacted by the cold ruthlessness that our world can dish out, would share my atheism. Instead, I found a strong belief in the supernatural and faith manifested in almost every form, mostly as a belief in the Bible.”
“Mixed with faith in God is a strong belief in the reality of evil. . .When you’re up against evil, whether the mysterious efforts of demons or all-too-explainable effects of drugs, the front row’s world of science, education, and smart arguments doesn’t do much for you.”
Many of the people that Arnade writes about – homeless people, drug addicts, and prostitutes - are people whose religious beliefs and life experiences are nuanced in ways that many people in the front row would have a difficult time understanding.
They are people whose hardships, trials, and tribulations have helped them to see truths about life that many of us with comfortable lives have trouble seeing.
“Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”
“When I walked into the Bronx I was an atheist, something I was sure about. Standing years later outside the Gospel Lighthouse in Bakersfield I wasn’t so sure. To my educated lifelong friends I might have said I was now agnostic, or still an atheist but one who appreciated religion.
Like most in the front row, I am used to thinking we have all the answers. On Wall Street there were few problems we couldn’t solve with enough smarts, energy, audacity, or money. We even managed to push death into the distance; with enough research and enough resources – eating right, doing the right things, going to the correct medical specialist – the inevitable could be delayed, and mortality could feel distant.
With a great job and a great apartment in a great neighborhood, it is easy to feel we have nothing for which we need to be absolved. The fundamental fallibility of humans seems outdated, distant, and confined to a few distant others. It’s not hard to imagine that you have everything under control.
The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that ‘we don’t and never will have this under control.’ It is far easier to see religion not just as useful but as true.”
Reading Dignity put this often antiquated-sounding passage (with its talk of temples, Pharisees, and tax collectors) from the Gospel of Luke (and one that I’ve read dozens of times) into a fresh, contemporary light:
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”
I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Chris Arnade doesn’t have a six-point plan for fixing what is wrong with America. This book isn’t a white paper describing an innovative new public policy framework. Some reviewers have (quite unfairly) criticized Arnade for this.
But they are missing the point of this book. Thinking that there is "a plan" for fixing this is exactly what someone in the front row would think. I should know, because I'm one of them. We always think there should be a plan. And we always expect someone in the front row like Arnade to come up with one.
Yes, it should go without saying that the economic divergence between people and places is having social and political ramifications that are becoming impossible to ignore. And yes, we need to think, and think hard, about how to fix that.
But the purpose of Dignity is not to offer policy solutions. It is to listen, learn, understand, and document what is happening to back row America.
The listening, learning, and understanding must come before any policy solutions can be proffered.
And whether any of us like it or not, we need to recognize that “policy solutions” may be of limited or little use. Many of the challenges and problems that Arnade is documenting are social, cultural, and even spiritual – and they are deeply complex. They do not easily lend themselves to a tweak of a legislative dial here, or the pull of a policy lever there.
The economic and cultural gutting of Portsmouth, Ohio, or of the east side of Cleveland, was decades in the making, as each fall of a socioeconomic domino knocked down many others.
Data and statistics, important as they often are, never tell the entire story about a place.
If we are to hope to help these places and the people living in them, we first need to get to know them as people.
I have the utmost respect for Chris Arnade. In addition to the pleasure of having read his book, I have had the fortune to interact with him every now and then on Twitter. He is a thoroughly decent person. He was willing and able to acknowledge his own imperfections, and he decided to get out and begin to do something about them.
I have learned a lot from his example. His book has helped me to see my own selfishness and narrowness more clearly, and to think hard about what it might mean for me to be a better person.
I hope that you will take the time to read his book, and to look at his photographs. The people and the places that he depicts are worthy of your consideration.
