Reihan: Subway Demographics

Rest assured, political blogging will return shortly. For now, more half-asleep reflections.

I recently told a friend that I'd sooner have my eyes scooped out with spoons than be caught reading a book commonly consumed on either the F or L trains in New York, which, as she helpfully pointed out, is kind of idiotic. To this day I haven't read The Corrections, and I don't think I ever will. Indeed, when someone tells me that, "Oh man, it's actually a really great book," I immediately think to myself, "when we're living in a post-apocalyptic 'time of troubles,' this person is not, for the good of humanity, sharing my bunker or my canned peas." The trouble is I quite like Tom Perrotta, so I've already caved. The smart and principled thing to do would be to follow the lead of my good friend GCAW and only read book that are twenty years old or older, to know they've stood the test of time.

Tonight, as I returned home from the wilds of suburban Connecticut, I considered all of the demographic surprises I encountered along the way. Like a lot of city kids, I started placing people in boxes at an early age. Profiling, you might say. Here are the people who get on the subway at this stop. They wear immaculate, enormously large sneakers. And here are the armies of editorial assistants and junior publicists and minor intellectuals. Being able to identify these patterns was a great source of social confidence for me, particularly since I came from a marginal, in-between family, neighborhood, social class, and ethnic group. As underinformed as I really was, I nevertheless entered into all New York social situations with the sense that I at least knew the lay of the land, and that even the toughest or shmanciest people could be pegged on the basis of a few easily identifiable characteristics. What fun! Soon the parlor game got out of control, and I'd make all kinds of guesses as to a person's background and musical preferences, etc., and found that I was right a decent amount of the time. I was sixteen, scrappy, and heading nowhere fast academically speaking, but I had a gift for stereotypes and cliches. Kind of a nightmare, really.

While reading Jeffrey Rosen's The Unwanted Gaze a few years ago, I thought about how corrosive this parlor game really was. My closest friends were often "predictable" in all these ways (beautiful dark-haired girls of my acquaintance often listen to Spank Rock and of Montreal, hipster cads wear expensive sneakers), but they also blew my mind with left-field surprises, and shamed me for being so smug.

So yes, I thought about this on the way home, particularly as my expectations were upended again and again: wait, he's getting off the train here? She's exiting there?

I mean, this has more to do with the changing geography of class in Brooklyn than anything deeper, I suppose, but still, food for thought. It's eerie to sense that you're growing up, and to give up comforting old certainties.

Comments

So does your objection against The Corrections still hold? And does this apply to The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion? I'll concede that it should for much of Strong Motion, but pah-lease, get over yourself.

Posted by Concerned Citizen | September 30, 2007 11:35 AM

Perrotta's book Joe College concerns itself almost exclusively with outlining social demographics of the "wilds of suburban Connecticut" (and those of northern New Jersey). But I'm guessing you've already read it...

Posted by Maureen | September 30, 2007 1:23 PM

Um, I agree with concerned citizen. The Corrections did not reinvent the novel and isn't the new Buddenbrooks, but isn't it kind of interesting to see what Franzen accomplished by trying to write it?

Posted by d | September 30, 2007 7:15 PM

Oh, for goodness' sake. Break down and read the damn _Corrections_.

Not only will you like it, you'll like it more than most. In some ways it was written for you.

Doug M.

Posted by Doug M. | October 1, 2007 5:16 AM

Joe College is a personal favorite. And you know Doug M., I've heard this before. Maybe you're right.

Posted by Reihan | October 1, 2007 8:12 PM

Reading Reihan's other posts, this tendency to categorize is clear (Robbian, ironic and unironic left).

It makes a lot of sense, as Douthat also seemed to have this habit (Brooksian, Sam's club conservatives, use of the phrase "crunchy con").

With all the research in the neurological connections to political orientation, I wonder if there is some pattern. I suppose this would support the idea that conservatives are more structures, and likely to resist ambiguity in data, as that NYU/UCLA paper recently suggested. Then again, Ross and Reihan seem to to be different than many movement conservatives, so my own conclusions may be spurious.

In any case, I really dislike these categorizations, whether they are used as microtrends or stereotypes or whatever, because not only do they make mistakes by produceing false positives and negatives, but they go against basic ideas of fairness. Even if they are correct, forming an opinion of an article by the byline, or viewing a person's actions through the filter of that person's type seems to go against some of the deepest rules on how to treat people fairly.

Personally, that is the greater flaw in typing, in that it goes against ideas of forgiveness and objectivity that seem nicer, even if they are less successful than a cynical prediction of the future.

Posted by Space Monkey | October 2, 2007 12:46 AM