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First up, some personal news: I got laid off! Yes, I know these essays read as if they’re my full-time job to create, and obviously the cult I’ve built with them has showered me with riches, but it’s true — I was, until yesterday, a working stiff. And now I’m not. For the moment, I’m trying to figure out what to do next. Obviously, I’ll keep writing Trying!, and if you want to help me with that, you can always upgrade to a paid subscription. And if you happen to know of a media company that needs someone who deeply understands every part of the business, from newsletters and analytics to e-commerce and AI, I would probably like to be that someone. (Here’s my LinkedIn.) Anyway, on with the essay!

There’s a guy who lives across the street from me who I’ve always considered to be kind of a dick. He’s young, probably in his early 20s, and he walks around our block with the kind of “I’m cool” swagger that I find deeply annoying. Naturally, he owns a gorgeous, white, late-model Mercedes, an unnecessary flex when you’re parking it on the street among RAV4s, Priuses¹, Subarus, dented vans, and a maroon mid-’90s Honda Accord held together with duct tape.

To be clear, this guy, whose name I still don’t know so let’s call him Mr. G, has never done anything bad to me, or to anyone I know. But on our relatively tight-knit Brooklyn block, Mr. G’s attitude appeared out of place — he wouldn’t be the first of my neighbors, many of whose names I do know, that I’d turn to in a pinch. All this despite the fact that he and I had never even spoken.

Until, that is, a little over a month ago.

It was during alternate-side parking, that fabled New York City tradition where, once or twice a week, we car owners are required to move our vehicles aside for 60 to 90 minutes so that a Sanitation Department street-sweeper machine can come along and suck up all the trash and detritus tossed aside by Uber drivers, sloppy teens, and willfully shedding trees. The rules of ASP are: You can drive around aimlessly or you can double-park, and once the street sweeper has gone by, you can re-park, provided you stay in the car until about five minutes before the alternate-side period is over. Our block has ASP from 9:30 to 11 a.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays (one side for each day), and I typically use the time to tap away on my laptop in peace and quiet, often parked close enough to access my home Wifi. In some quarters, I believe, this is referred to as “work.”

On this Wednesday, the street-sweeper vehicle arrived early, well before 10 a.m. As soon as it had shuffled past, I folded my laptop and eased my car across the street, right to where it had been parked less than 30 minutes earlier, behind a car that hadn’t budged at all. I opened the computer back up, made sure the Wifi was still connected, and turned my attention back to work.

But almost immediately, there was a knock at my passenger-side window. A traffic cop. I rolled the window down, and he ordered me back across the street. I was confused. The street-sweeper had come and gone already, I explained.

Still, he said, I had to move, not because he thought the sweeper hadn’t yet passed by but because, he said, I’d been parked in this spot the whole time, and hadn’t moved for it. If I didn’t move, I’d get a ticket.

I was even more confused. How could I prove I’d been double-parked until just minutes ago? And if I did move, when could I return to this spot (since the sweeper had already gone be)? How do you tell someone with authority that they are flat-out wrong in their observations and beliefs?

While I was figuring out how to respond, Mr. G appeared from the other side of the street. He called out to the traffic cop: Yo! This guy was double-parked — he just moved over now. I see him every week at parking, he’s good!

Mr. G went on, describing my conscientiousness, my attentiveness to the unwritten ASP rules, in what started as an argument with the cop but quickly turned into a conversation. I couldn’t hear it all, because as they talked they walked down the block a bit, and I kept waiting and waiting for the cop to return, to either tell me to move or tell me all was okay, but he never did. Nor did my savior Mr. G, the neighbor I’d misjudged, the neighbor whose name I didn’t know, the neighbor who had my back precisely when I needed it.

I fucking love my block. Here we are, a few hundred people living in small buildings sandwiched between NYCHA housing projects at either end of the street, on the border between a historic brownstone neighborhood and an industrial zone rapidly reinventing itself as a waterfront paradise for renters. Our block is a low-traffic island where we know one another by face if not by name, and we pay attention to what’s going on, and take action when necessary. Jane Jacobs would be proud. I love my block, and I love my neighbors. What’s more, I trust them — just as, in general, I want to trust everyone. I want to believe, maybe I really do believe, that people are good, even if I don’t agree with their choice of automobile or personal styling.

But in this, {{first_name|my friends}}, I am increasingly alone. According to this brand-new Pew survey, 53% of Americans say that other Americans — their neighbors, their fellow citizens — are, well, bad.

More after the ad…

The survey, conducted across 25 countries, from Brazil to Kenya to Sweden to Indonesia, looked generally at attitudes about morality. That is, do people consider certain behaviors morally good or morally bad? Among those behaviors: gambling, marijuana use, divorce, extramarital affairs, abortion, and homosexuality.

Some of the results are unsurprising. Germans and Swedes don’t see homosexuality as bad; it’s the opposite in Nigeria and Indonesia. Christians in almost all countries tend to have the most negative views of abortion. Women are more likely to condemn pornography use as unacceptable. Older people are more judgmental than younger people. And in every country, extramarital affairs are seen by the majority as morally bad (though in France it’s a mere 53%).

A few correlations are surprising, at least to me. Apparently, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to see marijuana use as morally bad. And there seems to be a big split between Argentina’s Protestants and Catholics on the moral acceptability of abortion (the Protestants don’t like it).

What sticks out to me, however, is not what the people of each country accept or condemn but what they think of their fellow citizens: Are they saints or monsters, or somewhere in between? Well, in these United States, 53% of us consider our fellow Americans to be either somewhat bad or very bad people. That’s the worst of 25 countries — worse than South Africa, Hungary, and even the Netherlands, which as we all know is filled to the brim with serial killers, scam artists, child traffickers, and D.J.’s. We are the only country where a majority thinks everyone else is awful.

Want to guess which country is the rosiest, where 92% of people think their fellow citizens are good? Scroll to the bottom of the chart:

While the survey looked at a number of demographic factors — age, sex, religion, political affiliation, etc. — one they did not report on is “Metropolitan status,” or whether respondents live in cities, towns, or in rural areas. They do seem to have collected this data, but it’s not reflected in the report, which I find frustrating because I think it’s a key to understanding this country right now.

It should come as no surprise that we have an urban-rural divide in America right now. In a lot of ways, we always have, but the split is more noticeable and more significant now as 67 of the 100 biggest cities, across both blue and red states, have Democratic mayors, while much of rural America votes Republican. Suburban voters, meanwhile, tend to split nearly evenly, with the leader by a few points tending to change every few years. So what I want to know is: Who considers who morally bad? Do city dwellers sneer at country bumpkins, or vice-versa? Do we all just hate on the suburbanites? Or are the attitudes lopsided in some way, revealing who is more judgmental?

And more than that, I want to know how much being morally good or bad matters to the respondents. In other words, I may think you’re evil because you condemn homosexuality and abortion, but what does that mean in reality? Would I treat you differently? Could we be neighbors?

That’s where I think the urban-rural-suburban segmentation becomes really important. Because here in cities, we are surrounded by people with whom we do not agree, on subjects ranging from taxation and school choice to the proper volume to blast reggaetón from your apartment window and whether you should wear flip-flops in the subway². Anyone who disagrees with me is, obviously, morally bad. Yet I tolerate them, as they tolerate me (which is easy because I am delightful). And because I can tolerate them, I am over time less likely to consider them irredeemably evil, and more just really annoying. And really annoying I can live with, because at least it’s not really, really annoying. Besides, what could I do about it? Harass them? Fight them? Kill them? But I can’t, I won’t, because if I had the right to do that to them, then they could do it to me, too, and the city — this ridiculously dense place we all happen to call home — would cease to function. Once upon a time, from the 1970s into the ‘90s, it did cease to function, but since then I feel like we’ve all made the conscious choice to shrug off the foibles of our neighbors, both intentional and accidental, in the hope that they’ll shrug off ours. And now this city more or less works, as do most of the cities in this country.

And out there, in the spacious suburbs and raw, sprawling, half-empty farmlands and back country, how does that work? Am I too harsh to imagine that without close neighbors, it’s easy to imagine that your own point of view is the only one that matters? This is not to say there is no neighborliness outside of cities, but there is a fundamental difference between having people live down the road and being surrounded by people on all sides: above, below, next door, everywhere. In a city, you’re constantly aware that your behavior, both at home and in public, has immediate effects on the world, and if you want to survive, you adjust accordingly. But out there [waves hands wildly], why bother?

There’s surely some chicken-egg going on here. We choose to live in rural, urban, or suburban situations not just because we want a particular level of interaction but also because we want that preference reinforced by the environment. We know going into our lives that the city will make us more tolerant or that countryside solitude will enable our solipsism.

I’m trying very hard not to disparage those who choose not to live in cities³. But I think the urban-rural divide in this country goes beyond simple tolerance to something even more basic: Do you like people? Or, really: Do you want to like people?

If your answer to those questions is no, then I guess I’m going to be judgmental. For as crabby and cynical and dark as I can be, in my heart I not only like people but think it’s important for our collective future for us to want to like one another. Misanthropy can be entertaining, can even be a just response to the world, but it’s not a sustainable worldview.

The rise of widespread misanthropy today, as evidenced in the Pew survey, echoes the circumstances surrounding the rise of the original misanthropist, Timon of Athens. As you no doubt recall, or as I learned was reminded on page one of the 2017 book Misanthropy, by the literary theorist Andrew Gibson, Timon appeared in three plays in the late fifth century B.C.E., and of course was the subject of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. His story is a classic: Timon was a wealthy man who showered his friends with generosity, but when he lost his fortune, they abandoned him. Then, when he was eking out an existence working the fields, he discovered gold and was rich again. His friends, naturally, came back to him — and his response was to throw clods of dirt at them and curse all of humanity:

The Greek plays featuring Timon were written between 414 and 411 B.C.E., and as Gibson explains, these were dark times for Athens. Sparta had trounced the city-state in battle, the Athenian general Alcibiades defected, Sparta allied itself with the enemy Persian Empire, and in 411 Athens’ democracy was overthrown by a military coup. “It is precisely at this time that Timon begins to loom large in the Athenian imagination,” Gibson writes.

So perhaps our current national misanthropy is inevitable, the result of years or decades of disappointment and defeat. As a coping mechanism, I get it. Who doesn’t want to stand at the window right now and scream, Fuck all y’all!? But misanthropy is not a philosophy, or at least not a viable one. It encourages a retreat from society, from cooperation, from tolerance — the attitudes that, in sunnier times, enabled us to reach the heights from which we now feel ourselves tumbling. It feels good, but so (I’m told) does heroin.

But as natural as it may feel, misanthropy is still a choice. Faced with the shitshow that is the 21st century, we can either pull back from the world and condemn our fellow citizens for their misguided and idiotic beliefs, or we can decide to bear them, and in bearing them show those fools that they can bear us, and our own stupidities, as well. In times like these, “Love thy neighbor” is more than anyone can ask of you. But “Like thy neighbor”? That, I think, we can handle. 🪨🪨🪨