"Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors
greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also
startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us,
they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The
moral principles prescribed for friendship, civil society, and
democratic public life apply imperfectly to life around home, where
we interact day to day without the formal institutions, rules of
conduct, and means of enforcement that guide us in other settings.
In Good Neighbors, Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among
neighbors create a democracy of everyday life, which has been with
us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in
settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry,
and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the
democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who
improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to
betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned
during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching
of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of
neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The
elements of the democracy of everyday life--reciprocity, speaking
out, and "live and let live"--comprise a democratic ideal not
reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it
is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum
argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be
its saving remnant.
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