“There is no accounting for taste.” An AI generated response to that statement reads: “The phrase … means that people’s preferences and opinions about things like art, food, or music can vary widely and are often difficult to understand. It suggests that disagreements about taste cannot be resolved objectively.”
Peoples’ feelings about what constitutes a pleasing landscape can vary just as widely and be just as difficult to resolve. What becomes problematic is when one person’s standard for a pleasing landscape is imposed on another’s use of their own property. Municipal regulations can be seen as an example of a collective imposition of such standards. “Accumulated or scattered junk, trash, debris, scrap materials or any other objectionable objects…” are regulated under the heading of “Public Nuisances.” Another aphorism that comes to mind is that “one person’s trash, is another person’s treasure.”
Such conflicts are squarely within the realm of “first world problems.” When people are living in squalor, due to poor living standards, poverty, and political and economic oppression, such arguments over taste are academic at best. People should be grateful when they can contest such trivial things when two thirds of the world struggles with matters of consequence to their very survival.
As a high school teacher for three decades, one of my regular roles was mediating between conflicting notions of personal rights. I believed students deserved my best efforts at providing them with an environment free from threats to their comfort and self-respect. I was unable to provide that for every student at all times. Sometimes one student’s concept of personal enjoyment was finding something to needle another with. When confronted with their misbehavior, the guilty one would often say it was the other person’s problem they were so sensitive.
I would respond that a proper application of the Golden Rule didn’t mean that we are free to subject others to conditions we could easily tolerate ourselves and that it is somehow the other person’s weakness in the face of conditions that are tolerable to us, that absolves us from any guilt in causing them distress. Instead it was their level of discomfort we should be responding to, irrespective of our sense of the relative lack of harm being caused. None of us like to be made uncomfortable, whatever the cause. We should conduct ourselves to keep others feeling as comfortable and as pleased with life as we ourselves would like to be.
A challenge I posed to my Environmental Science students was what happens when a person’s discomfort is caused by an activity that we all agree is necessary for society’s sustainability? I would mention this in the context of NIMBYism. Again the AI generator helps explain that this is: “… the opposition of residents to new developments, particularly housing projects, in their local area. This attitude often stems from concerns about property values, increased traffic, and changes to the neighborhood’s character, leading to resistance against necessary growth and development.” Besides housing developments there is also the infrastructure necessary for recycling and energy production that become targets of this opposition.
I would move them on to consideration of a related concept, and first cousin to NIMBYism, which is environmental justice. “…[which] aims to address the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on marginalized communities, particularly those of color and low-income populations.”
The concerns of some collide with the interests of society in general in the first case and the solution to the threat they present to the “property values, increased traffic, and changes to the neighborhood’s character…” of wealthier neighborhoods has historically been to shift such development to more marginalized, less politically influential, poorer ones.
I told my students it was a problem that required a solution worthy of Solomon. How should we divide the baby to reveal if there is a more deserving one of the two parties? The feelings of the well-to-do homeowner, who desires an unchanged quality of life, deserve to be respected, just as much as those of the poorer individual living in a less pleasant part of town to whom, it is argued, the objectionable infrastructure would not cause such a glaring impact on the aesthetics of the surroundings.
Perhaps examining the level of each party’s concern for the other’s feelings, could help us in dividing this baby. Ideally, if both sides looked to make the other as comfortable as possible, as the Golden Rule teaches us, and honestly examined the advantages of their own living situation in light of the other’s, and sought to act through empathy and concern for those not provided with an equal amount of advantage, the result might be that the wealthier individuals would temper their aesthetic ideals in order to make the lot of the poorer ones a bit better by sharing, to a greater degree, some of the burden for meeting society’s needs. Is that the baby, rightly divided? I left it up to my students to decide.
Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.