It is hard to think of a more powerful meditation on the perils and possibilities of relations among neighbors than Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). As we watch James Stewart’s character, Jeff, grow from passive voyeur to active meddler in the lives of his Greenwich Village neighbors, we are drawn into a master study of the uncomfortable proximity of virtue and vice, and of how seemingly mundane moral failings can result in moral horrors.
Part of Rear Window’s power lies in how Hitchcock uses cinematic language to implicate the viewer in the horrors being depicted. Windows, lenses, and screens are shown in ways that prod the viewer to reflect on what Grace Kelly’s Lisa calls “rear-window ethics:" When does looking out for one’s neighbor become voyeuristic surveillance? When do we speak out about our neighbors’ perceived failings, and when do we live and let live? What do we owe each other as neighbors?
These are the concerns Nancy Rosenblum takes up in Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America. Rosenblum, a professor of government at Harvard University, is a renowned scholar of the ethical challenges posed by late-modern liberal democracy. Here she turns her attention to the quandaries that arise when we relate to each other not as fellow citizens or coworkers, but as those whose homes are in proximity.
She argues that literary reflections on neighborhood politics — in the form of settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives — make explicit three norms in the ethical life of American democratic culture. One is a norm of reciprocity among what she calls “decent folk,” understood as those with whom we can mutually acknowledge our vulnerabilities and entrust our safety. A second is an imperative to speak out when this reciprocity is violated. A third is a disposition to “live and let live” in circumstances when we are inclined, even encouraged, to mistrust one another.
Like Hitchcock, Rosenblum emphasizes how each of these virtuous norms disturbingly resembles a vice. The rhetoric of “decent folk” — those around whom we feel safe when we are vulnerable — can turn vicious when skewed by white supremacist attitudes. Speaking out against violations of neighborhood standards can slide into enforcement of homogeneity and menacing habits of surveillance. The injunction to live and let live can provide easy cover for indifference to the cruelty and suffering in our midst — the opposite of a neighbor-ethic.
Yet for all its perversions and distortions, Rosenblum argues that the neighbor-ethic she distills — which she calls the “democracy of everyday life” — is indispensable. It is not mere sentimental niceness, but rather an indispensable moral “remainder” in circumstances where the more robust protections of political institutions have broken down, particularly in cases of emergency and grave injustice. “Ordinary acts of neighborliness have special significance under extreme conditions,” Rosenblum explains, with reference to the histories of lynching, the internment and displacement of Japanese-Americans, cases of neighbors-turned-informants, and the chaos in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Throughout the book, Rosenblum is at pains to emphasize that this neighbor-ethic is not the same as an ethics of good citizenship. The specific goodness of a good neighbor does not depend on its potential to turn her into a good citizen in the wider public sphere, and neither is her goodness simply that of a virtuous citizen applied to a local scale. “It should be clear,” she argues, “that neighbor relations shaped by the democracy of everyday life are misunderstood if they are seen solely or principally as preparation for civic activism.”
Why does Rosenblum insist on the distinction between the good neighbor and the good citizen? It stems from a desire to do justice to the differing demands of the many roles we occupy in complex modern societies. It is now a commonplace that the institutions of constitutional democracy depend, in various ways, on a democratic culture and civil society for their viability. But this commonplace can be invoked to underwrite an excessive and illiberal demand — that all the spheres of activity that have a claim on our allegiance and attention be made to serve the needs of citizenship in a democratic polity.
Rosenblum pushes back on this demand. Building on a tradition of pluralist liberalism in political theory, Rosenblum argues that neighborhood life is a distinct sphere of activity — one of many in contemporary life — whose connection to citizenship is only contingent and indirect. To demand more from neighborhood life is to misunderstand the nature of this connection.
But what about cases where neighborhood survival does, in fact, demand more than a neighbor-ethic? In neighborhoods across North America, the collapse of reliable employment and institutions like schools, union locals, and churches have left residents at the mercy of employers, gang leaders, developers, predatory lenders, and the police. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in his important book Democracy in Black (Crown, 2016), calls these areas “opportunity deserts.” In these places, only long-lasting, broad-based citizen organizing — in which citizens form organizations, assume specific roles and responsibilities, enter into coalitions, and hold elites and each other accountable — holds out hope for bringing such powers to heel.
In opportunity deserts, the “democracy of everyday life” does not seem like a real option. In the long run, the available alternatives are the demanding work of organizing or death as a community. In post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, there have been broad-based grass-roots citizen organizations meeting real needs, from immediate ones like keeping cellular service active, to the long-term efforts to resist local developers seeking to rebuild New Orleans as a smaller and whiter city. Rosenblum acknowledges this work in passing, but focuses primarily on immediate, spontaneous neighborly aid, in the form of rooftop rescues, and the provision of food and water, emergency medical care, and shelter. Such acts surely deserve praise, but overlooking the importance of citizen organizing in such contexts risks displacing politics altogether.
To what extent is this a weakness in Rosenblum’s view? The answer depends on whether one sees opportunity deserts as exceptional or as becoming the norm. This is a matter of perspective. As Rosenblum herself states, reflections on neighborhood life begin in specific social locations and the unavoidably partial perspectives they shape: “Theoretical activity begins in the private world of inquirers.”
But it is important that such activity not end there. One of the lessons of Rear Window, after all, concerns just how partial our private perspectives can be. The best test of this book will, I suspect, be teaching it in classrooms populated by students from different kinds of neighborhoods, who have their own perspectives to share.
