There is a small social experiment one can perform in any large supermarket parking lot, anywhere in the world. The experiment is to stand at the edge of the lot and observe what people do with their shopping carts after they have unloaded them. The observation does not take long. Within twenty minutes, in any reasonably busy lot, a clear pattern becomes visible.
Most people, on the available evidence, leave the cart somewhere in the general vicinity of their car, on the assumption that someone whose job it is to deal with carts will, in due course, deal with it. A meaningful minority, however, walks the cart back to the corral, which is, in most lots, somewhere between fifteen and forty meters away from where the cart was last in active use. The minority does this without any external prompting. Nobody is watching. There is no reward. The walk to the corral takes, on average, about forty seconds. The minority does it anyway.
The cultural register, in classifying the minority, tends to deploy the word “conscientious” and then move on. The word is, on close examination, doing the work of a label rather than the work of an explanation. The conscientiousness is what we are observing. The conscientiousness is not, in itself, an account of what is producing the behavior. The behavior, on closer examination, is more specific than the label suggests, and the specificity is what I want to write about.
What the minority is doing, in the parking lot, is acting on a particular implicit belief that the wider culture has not, in most adult environments, encouraged anyone to articulate. The belief is that the world they are walking around in is, in some real way, partly their responsibility. The belief is not, on close examination, a small one. The belief has, in fact, consequences that extend far beyond the cart and the corral and the small physical inconvenience of the walk.
What the belief actually involves
The belief, in its operating form, is the implicit conviction that the conditions of public space are not, in any meaningful sense, the responsibility of a separate category of people who have been hired to manage them. The conditions are, more accurately, the joint product of everyone who is currently using the space, and each user is, in some small but real way, contributing either to the conditions being better or to the conditions being worse than they would otherwise be. The cart returned is the small private contribution to the better. The cart abandoned is the small private contribution to the worse. The contributor, in either case, is participating in the production of the public condition.
The belief is, on examination, structurally different from two adjacent beliefs that the wider culture also produces, and that look similar from outside but are doing different work underneath.
The first adjacent belief is the belief that one should be a good person. The good-person belief is calibrated to one’s own moral identity. The good-person believer returns the cart in order to be the kind of person who returns the cart. The motivation is, in some real way, internal. The motivation has, on close examination, only a partial relationship to the actual conditions of the parking lot. The good-person believer would return the cart in any parking lot, regardless of whether the wider parking lot was being kept in good condition by other people. The return is, in some structural sense, a self-referential act.
The second adjacent belief is the belief that one should follow rules. The rule-follower returns the cart because the cart is, in some implicit sense, supposed to be returned. The rule-follower is also returning the cart in any parking lot, regardless of conditions, but the motivation is different. The motivation is compliance with the implicit rule. The motivation has, on close examination, very little to do with any active sense of responsibility for the conditions themselves.
The belief I am describing is different from both of these. The belief is, more accurately, an active sense that the parking lot is, in some real way, the believer’s parking lot, in the sense that the conditions of the parking lot are partly produced by the believer’s presence in it, and that the believer is, accordingly, partly responsible for what those conditions look like. The cart is returned not for self-referential moral identity reasons and not for rule-compliance reasons. The cart is returned because the believer is, in some real way, treating the parking lot as a shared environment whose maintenance is a joint project. The believer is participating in the maintenance. The participation is the small contribution to the joint project. The joint project is the parking lot itself.
What this belief produces, beyond the parking lot
The belief, once one starts looking for it, shows up in a great many small daily behaviors that the wider culture tends to classify under the label “conscientiousness” without quite registering what the underlying belief is. The litter picked up in the park. The dishes washed in the shared office kitchen. The seat tucked in at the empty meeting room. The garden weeds pulled from the strip of sidewalk in front of one’s apartment, even though the sidewalk is not, by any legal definition, one’s property. The volunteer hours contributed to the local park cleanup. The small piece of trash carried home from a walk because there was no bin available. Each of these, in itself, is a small act. Each is also, in its own way, the operating-level evidence of the same underlying belief. The world is partly the believer’s responsibility. The believer is, in small ongoing ways, exercising the responsibility.
What is striking, when one looks at this pattern across decades, is that the believers tend to be, on the available evidence, the people whose communities are functioning. The neighborhoods where this behavior is widespread are, in most cases, the neighborhoods where the parks are well-maintained, the public spaces are pleasant, and the social infrastructure has, in some real way, been quietly held up by the small ongoing contributions of the people who live in them. The neighborhoods where the behavior is rare are, in most cases, the neighborhoods where these conditions have not, in fact, been maintained. The correlation is not, on close examination, accidental. The correlation is structural. The conditions are produced by the behavior. The behavior is produced by the underlying belief. The belief is, accordingly, what is doing the actual work.
This is, on close examination, what the political theorists used to call civic virtue. The label has, in recent decades, fallen somewhat out of fashion. The behavior has not, on the available evidence, become more common. The behavior has, more accurately, become rarer, as the wider culture has shifted toward various forms of individualism that treat public space as either someone else’s problem or as nobody’s problem in particular. The shift has been, on close examination, slow. The shift has also been, in its effects on the actually-existing conditions of public space, considerable. The parks are, in most contemporary cities, in worse shape than they were forty years ago. The streets are, in most contemporary cities, slightly dirtier. The shared spaces of various kinds are, in most contemporary contexts, slightly less pleasant than they used to be. The cumulative effect of the slow withdrawal of the underlying belief is, on the available evidence, what is producing the slow deterioration of the spaces.
Why the belief is harder to maintain than it used to be
I want to be honest about why the belief has become harder to maintain, because the wider culture has not, in most cases, done the work of articulating what has changed.
What has changed is, on close examination, the structural relationship between the individual and the public space. The relationship used to be relatively direct. The individual lived in a particular neighborhood. The individual used the parks and streets and public spaces of that neighborhood. The individual had, in some real way, a personal stake in the conditions of those spaces, because the individual was going to be in them again tomorrow. The personal stake produced, by structural necessity, the belief that the conditions were partly one’s responsibility.
The relationship has, in the last several decades, become considerably more diffuse. Many people now live in places they did not grow up in and may not be in five years from now. The personal stake in the long-term conditions of any particular public space has, accordingly, weakened. The weakening has not, in most cases, been accompanied by any cultural mechanism for maintaining the underlying belief in the absence of the personal stake. The belief, accordingly, has had to operate without the structural support that used to hold it up. Without the support, the belief has, in most adults, slowly attenuated. The attenuation is what we are observing in the parking lots.
What I want to suggest, more honestly, is that the people who continue to operate on the belief, in the absence of the structural support, are doing something genuinely difficult. They are not, on close examination, just being conscientious in some bland personality-trait sense. They are, more accurately, maintaining a particular orientation toward public space that the wider culture has stopped supporting and that, in most adult environments, requires deliberate effort to keep operating. The deliberate effort is small. The deliberate effort is also, on close examination, almost the entire substance of what civic virtue, in any honest contemporary accounting, actually consists of.
Why the small acts matter more than they look
The honest acknowledgment is that the small acts the believer performs are not, in themselves, dramatic. The cart returned does not, in any single instance, change the world. The litter picked up does not, by itself, restore the park. The dishes washed in the shared office kitchen do not, by themselves, produce any meaningful improvement in the office culture. The acts are, individually, almost trivially small.
The cumulative effect, however, is not small. The cumulative effect is, in some real way, what most of the functioning of any decent shared environment is structurally produced by. The neighborhoods that function are the neighborhoods where enough people are performing the small acts. The neighborhoods that do not function are the neighborhoods where they are not. The threshold is, on the available evidence, considerably lower than the wider culture might assume. A neighborhood does not need a majority of cart-returners to be a cart-returning neighborhood. A neighborhood needs, more modestly, a sufficient minority of cart-returners to maintain the structural condition that cart-returning is, in fact, what people in this neighborhood do. The sufficient minority is, in most cases, somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of the population.
This means that any individual decision to act on the underlying belief is, in some real way, contributing to a structural condition that is considerably larger than the individual act. The cart returned is not just the cart. The cart is, in some structural sense, a small ongoing vote for the kind of neighborhood the parking lot is part of. The vote is small. The vote, in aggregate with other votes of the same kind, is what produces the conditions that everyone, including the people who do not return their carts, gets to live inside.
The believers know this, on some level. The believers are, in most cases, not articulating it in these terms. The believers are, more accurately, just doing the thing the underlying belief produces, on autopilot, in parking lot after parking lot, across decades of adult life. The doing is the maintenance. The maintenance is the actual civic infrastructure. The infrastructure is, on the available evidence, what is currently being slowly eroded by the wider cultural shift away from the underlying belief.
The cart returners are, in some real way, the small ongoing resistance to the erosion. The resistance is invisible from outside. The resistance is, in some real way, what most of the actually-existing civic functioning of any contemporary developed society is structurally being held up by. The world, in some real way, is partly theirs. The wider culture would, on the available evidence, benefit from acting more like it was partly everyone’s. The acting is what is missing. The acting is, in some real way, the entire substance of what civic virtue, in the absence of dramatic moments, actually consists of. The believers are still acting. The wider culture, on close examination, increasingly, is not.
