Detroit: A Slow Fall

There is life after bankruptcy. The demise of the American city of Detroit isn’t the city’s end but a logical step in the process of debt which, despite Michigan’s election of a public administrator with total power, it has not escaped. As spokesperson Bill Nowling explained, “A city is meant to provide services; it cannot be taken apart as a business can, and this is the difference between Chapter 9 and Chapter 11 of the law.*”

So why such anxiety? Why has Detroit’s demise provoked a tidal wave of commentary and worry across the world? Is it because, as one reads here and there, the city was, at the height of its glory, the fourth largest in the United States? Is it because Detroit is setting an upsetting precedent? No: Detroit’s downfall is worrisome because it symbolizes a change in civilization.

A Progressive Dream

No junk bonds, financial crisis — this bad economy, described as capitalism’s infantile sickness — no subprimes here, but the heavy and solid decline of an industry which was the base of the triumphant 20th century. The world of automobiles, with all of its corollaries: the race for oil, greenhouse gases and climate change.

It was in Detroit that all the bigwigs gathered with their progressive dreams during the time of prosperity, whose hidden vices we are discovering today. It was here at Ford that Taylorism and the division of labor were born. Here, too, in the building across the way, General Motors invented consumer credit (and, by extension, household debt). The entire city was constructed like a utopia around this automobile DNA.

Every avenue has eight lanes, highways crossing the city every which way. Of course, one can explain Detroit’s recent desertification — in the last 40 years, residents dropped from 1.8 million to less than 800,000 — with historical events: The race riots in the 1960s pushed the white middle classes toward the suburbs; the economic crisis of the 1980s made the black middle class leave and so on ….

But in this highway network one can also see the exodus’ real reason is in its structure: Every single building (metaphorically) collapsed. Without residents or local taxes, without taxes, there are no public services, police, firemen, education, and without public services, life is not possible in this Babel of emptied skyscrapers.

When wandering the streets of this great American city one thinks of American biologist and geographer Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse,” subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Gallimard, 2009). “Everyone is watching Detroit because everyone wonders if this could happen to them,” Chris Jaszczak smiles sadly.* He is the owner of 1515 Broadway, one of the few downtown cafes, which he lives above.

An Unfathomable Sadness

His Polish, Marxist activist grandfather was killed in Chicago; his father participated in the first strikes in 1933; he called the race riots of 1967 an “insurrection”; he is a Vietnam War veteran and anti-activist whom Occupy Wall Street activists came to defend when he was incapable of paying back the banks which wanted to evict him. He remains one of the last to remember Detroit with a human face.

This is no doubt what stirs in us this abysmal sadness. Detroit, the symbol of our civilization’s grandeur, the symbol of an era we will call “anthropocene,” the era of man, where man became the single geological force responsible for changes not only in the atmosphere, biosphere or hydrosphere, but also in the lithosphere, in the earth: This also marks man’s decrepitude, his limits, the stakes at play in years to come.

We are often too quick to refuse the hypothesis than in accepting our fears, but what is happening in Detroit demands a strong look at the model of society we follow. Will everything end where it once started?

Six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, the first great urban civilization and the first written language were born: The Sumerians developed a sophisticated irrigation system which consecrated the power of knowledge and human skill over nature …. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, the irrigation waters little by little brought mineral salts in the groundwater table to the surface, salinizing the fields and rendering them unworkable.

For failing to understand, nothing remains of this city’s golden era, now deserted like southern Iraq, except for petrified ruins: out of one symbol comes another. “Civilizations die from suicide,” wrote British historian Arnold Toynbee, “not by murder.”

*Editor’s Note: These quotations, accurately translated, could not be verified.