Good Neighbors by Rosenblum Nancy L.;

Author:Rosenblum, Nancy L.; [Rosenblum, Nancy L.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691169439
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2016-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

PART III

Holding Our Lives in Their Hands

7

Betrayal

Good neighbor relations depend on trustworthiness, and the stakes of misplaced trust range from trivial to vital. We may feel foolish when the woman next door rebuffs our greeting. A small matter. Or, the confidence we place in our neighbors’ reticence is mistaken, and we suffer the gossip of the neighborhood. A painful matter. Ordinary vices produce more disturbing personal betrayals—infidelity or inexplicable cruelty. I explored larger-scale conditions in Chapter 6 “Live and Let Live”: chronic disorder, vandalism, theft create a diffuse atmosphere of mistrust and escalate the risks of misplaced trust. In some places prejudice undergirds mistrust. And in some place neighbors’ mistrust extends to authorities themselves.

The possibility of sustaining the democracy of everyday life diminishes further, drastically when government officials actively derange life around home by politicizing encounters, using offers and intimidation to get neighbors to turn on one another in frightful ways. Driven by the insatiable desire for information, authoritarian regimes—and democracies at war or in search of internal enemies—create vast systems of surveillance and informing. Denunciation is encouraged. Betrayal is made easy. When authorities exploit neighbors’ proximity and private knowledge as an instrument of political control, the atmosphere around home is suffused with suspicion. The convention of reticence that preserves privacy and commends us to live and let live is assaulted as government converts what we know about our neighbors into a burden and threat. Where officials exercise their power to confiscate, relocate, imprison, or deport, we come to see our neighbors as a source of danger, and we pose a potential danger to them in turn. It is the effective criminalization of minding our own business.

Neighbors’ motives for betrayal arise as well from the history of their personal encounters. Once the structures of reporting are erected, inhibitions on acting out of envy, greed, unsettled disputes, and grudges are weakened. Politicized neighbor relations are also personalized, in short, as neighbors exploit official opportunities for betrayal. “While political actors ‘use’ civilians to collect information … it is also the case that civilians ‘use’ political actors to settle their own private conflicts.” Officials who administer systems of informing and invite denunciations know that they are likely to be overwhelmed by innuendo and false charges. Betrayal and even violence “is often a reflection rather than a transgression of neighborliness,” “though a perverse one.”1

Under these conditions all the elements of the democracy of everyday life are stressed and distorted. Live and let live most clearly: we put ourselves at risk if we refuse to cooperate with official demands to listen in and report on the activities of the people next door. The favor or disfavor in which authorities hold the offensive woman down the hall trims our conduct in other respects too, so that rallying neighbors to speak out against her troublesome behavior loses its spontaneous self-governing character and takes on the color of complicity with or opposition to official policy. A latitudinous embrace of neighbors as “decent folk” is bound to be blunted if neighbors are under suspicion of disloyalty or are targets of officially condoned discrimination.

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