Peripheral Visions

imported styles, the vertical rectangles of office blocks and the horizontal rectangles of wealthy villas. Barkev and I bought a painting by a young painter named Lamberto Hechanova, an abstraction in red and black of a vaguely angelic figure on a square canvas. When I returned some time later to see more of his art, I found a large work made by cutting and hammering tin cans and nailing them to a near-square piece of plywood, all painted gold, a bas-relief mosaic of shacks with the sun rising above them, which Lamberto, a child of Tondo, had titled Exultant Slum —exultant in the gold of sunrise, or perhaps exultant in the survival of an aesthetic sense of rightness that made houses, however they were constructed, into homes. The painting hangs today on our dining-room wall as a glowing reminder of the way human beings create pattern and order even under the most stressful circumstances. Friends tell me that they have learned to look at the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and Brasília as well to see emerging physical and social order as gardens and ornamentation appear.
    The people of Barrio Magsaysay would not have decorated their houses if they did not feel a certain pride and pleasure in them, but they would certainly prefer to live otherwise and at one level would concur with outsiders who see the squatter areas as the expression of social inequity and a seedbed for crime. Squalid. A national shame. We can celebrate the fact that human beings weave pattern and order under terrible circumstances without romanticizing the social systems that put them there. But unless the patterns are recognized, reforms destroy more than they improve. Worse, the effort to help by imposing alien patterns has hidden in it a profound pessimism about human beings. In addition to failure to see emergent order, it is common to see the very behaviors that allow people to adapt and reach for dignity as symptoms of breakdown. Whether in social life or in ecology, the impulse to improve without first understanding is dangerous.
    We are still haunted by the compelling falsehood of Hobbes’s description of the primitive as the war of all against all with “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Many who would no doubt reject the myths of Genesis and disavow a belief in original sin accept Hobbes’s superstition about the state of nature: that the weaving of order is not intrinsic to human beings and so must be imposed. A narrow system of education based on a single set of cultural preferences is then defended as all that stands between us and chaos. It is as if Westerners had achieved the recognition of other members of the species as more or less human without appreciating the web of meaning this everywhere implies. That kind of limited recognition is a license to tinker and disrupt human communities, as technology has disrupted natural ecosystems, also in the name of improvement.
    Carol Stack, in All Our Kin , explored patterns of sharing and fostering in a black urban ghetto in the sixties, under conditions of poverty and vulnerability, as cash, furniture, and even food followed need from house to house, recycled garments gave the thrill of novelty to multiple wearers, and children nested where there was an adult available to care for them. Such patterns are harder to recognize than the geometries of Tondo, since they demand that an observer stay to note daily behaviors, looking and listening instead of administering questionnaires. Unfortunately, the very same adaptive order that Stack described violates the regulations of welfare workers and feeds stereotypes of illegality and fecklessness, slipping like water through the structures imposed by external pressure. Searching for intact nuclear families, the authorities disrupt networks of kin. Bemoaning the lack of a resident father, they may fail to notice the contributions made by a resident grandmother—and impose regulations that force the father to stay away.
    Culture of poverty should have been a useful term for describing what Stack found in the ghetto and what I saw in Tondo, for the very word culture celebrates the human capacity to learn and adapt, something the rest of society should support. However, the term has lost this potentially positive connotation and come to be used to refer to anomie and alienation, to attribute inevitability or even