A few weeks ago I did something that’s become unusual for me: I bought a paper book for myself to read. Nearly all of my reading these days is in e-book form, though we still buy a fair number of paper books for the kids. Most of the time I’m in Barnes and Noble, though, I’m just showrooming– looking at the shelves to find things I’ll buy later via their app.

In this case, though, I needed a paper copy, because the book in question was Dignity by Chris Arnade, which has a lot of photographs to go with the text. It’s about several years he spent visiting troubled communities in the US– both “bad neighborhoods” in major cities and rural areas–taking photos and talking to people about their lives.

This is also a slightly awkward book to talk about because Twitter. I actually first encountered Arnade via his Twitter feed, but in the last couple of years he’s become a regular target for dunking-on by people who are otherwise usually sensible. This is largely because a lot of his commentary has been spun as a form of Trump apologism, which is a mischaracterization, but, again, Twitter. So when I end up talking about it, I find myself sort of pre-emptively apologizing, as I’m doing now, to head off the Twitter-caricature version of his argument.

The central theme, which you can find spelled out pretty well in this long interview with Arnade, is a division between “front-row” and “back-row” America. The “front row” in this case is the population of people who operate well in terms of mainstream success: pursuing education, jobs, and money and willing to move around as needed to attend the best schools and get the best jobs. The “back row” on the other hand, is the population of people who, for one reason or another, don’t work that way. Some of them are people who are actively prevented from participating in front-row culture by barriers of race and class, others are back-row for reasons of personality or culture: people who have roots in a particular community that they’re not willing to leave, or who just aren’t temperamentally suited to the front-row life.

This is a distinction I’ve also come to think is really important (partly independently, partly through reading Arnade’s stuff), so obviously I found the worldview of the book congenial, even if the stories are often difficult to read. It also took on a bit of extra resonance because while I was in the middle of reading it, we spent a weekend at my parents’ so I could go to my 30-year high school reunion.

That was very definitely a front-row/back-row sort of experience. I’m very much a front-row person in Arnade’s formulation– went to the best schools, moved around a bunch to pursue opportunities, ended up in a completely different place than I started because that’s where I could get the best available job. I now make my living teaching the next generation of front-row kids.

A lot of my classmates have similar stories, and have ended up spread all over the country. At the same time, there’s a lot of “back row” in the town, and quite a few people who never really left. And Broome County is not exactly the front-row powerhouse of New York State.

Being back in town specifically to re-connect with people from high school (as opposed to just visiting family, which we do fairly regularly) was kind of bittersweet. In a great many ways, I would never have been able to stay there, but it was also a reminder that I’m really not a part of that community any more. Really, I’m not part of any community in as deep as way as most of the people still in town are, and I’m a little sorry to have lost that sense of rootedness.

That’s something that comes up in Arnade’s book, and also a lot of the better discussions of it. This blog post by Matt Shapiro in particular had some sections that really resonate, though unlike that author I was always pretty front-row: my parents both have college degrees, and I was always academically oriented in a way that made moving away inevitable.

That post also has a really good discussion of another of Arnade’s regular themes, namely the problem of treating “back-row” people as a problem to be fixed. That’s pretty clearly sinful in the Granny Weatherwax sense. And in keeping with that quote, there’s also a bit of worrying truth:

There’s a vision of “helping” people that is common in the front row, and it largely amounts to using our money or our abilities to alleviate material problems. We’re constantly asking “What can I do?” because we live in a world in which our effort plus money plus time has solved most of our problems. So we keep laying our blueprint of life and success on top of people whose foundation is simply not ours.

We shouldn’t be adopting her. She wasn’t a child. She wasn’t our project. She’s a person with dignity, however damaged and hurt by this world. It’s not our job to fix her or to bring her into our world. Sometimes just listening, without expectations or judgment, is all we can do.

This is a very consistent message on Arnade’s part (he says a bunch of similar stuff in that interview, as well, hammering on the importance of recognizing the dignity of individuals. And this is one of the frustrating things about the Twitter-dunkings he attracts, as many of the people mocking him will speak passionately and sensitively about the effects of the indignities suffered by groups that they favor, and then turn around and heap contempt upon the rural component of the “back row.” As Shapiro puts it:

Their vision of helping the back row is to let the government give them enough money that they don’t starve and then hopefully they will shut up and let us smart people do our thing. They have very little sympathy for rural culture or values. They don’t see that culture as worthy of dignity on its own terms. There is this sense that the only real way to help them is to give them the opportunity and ability to become more like us. Their values are bad and their culture is bad and they aren’t valuable in and of themselves; they are valuable because they could become us if they just get the right education and resources.

(I might amend that to “they are valuable because their children could become us,” at least for the worst offenders. This is also a problem at the political level, where a lot of the liberal policies supposedly intended to help these communities in fact come off as “we’re going to make it easier for your kids to go to college and move to Seattle,” which is less attractive than their proponents realize.)

At the same time, though, probably because I’m so thorough enmeshed in the “front row,” I can’t help noticing that a lot of the problems Arnade describes so vividly in the book have a large structural component. A recurring theme in virtually every struggling community he visits is the loss of the jobs that in the past were the backbone of those communities. This is a problem not just in the obvious economic sense– no jobs means no money, with clear negative effects– but in terms of personal dignity. Those jobs provided not just income, but a source of meaning, a positive identity. The aimlessness that comes with the loss of jobs-as-identity is almost as corrosive as the loss of income.

While “everybody should be more respectful” works on the level of individual dignity in personal interactions, it really doesn’t scale up in a way that addresses the structural issue. And that structural problem, by its nature, seems to demand some sort of policy change from the front row, at a political level, beyond just being personally nicer.

Of course, it’s frustratingly difficult to say what that ought to be. There’s a bit of low-hanging fruit available in terms of making it harder for the front row to make things worse— a lot of the problems in these communities are caused in no small part by rapacious behavior from Wall Street that could perhaps be reined in. There are also some obvious steps that could be taken to empower labor to improve the conditions of jobs that remain.

But some of that structural piece of the problem does, in fact, defy easy policy solution, in the sense that a lot of manufacturing-type jobs that have been lost just aren’t coming back. Which means finding ways to reshape the way that individuals and communities construct meaning for themselves in ways that respect the needs and desires of the “back row.”

Unfortunately, I really don’t know what that could be. I kind of think there’s something in the general direction of “job guarantee”/”universal basic income” policies, but I think there’s a cultural piece to that that’s a bit tricky– you can’t just pay people to dig holes and fill them in again, as that’s fundamentally pretty undignified, but have to build something meaningful to the community. I suspect it’s doable, but it’ll take a good deal of thought, and also listening to people from those communities in a more serious and sympathetic way than is common in front-row policy circles.

I don’t think, though, that it’s really possible to punt on the question of changing laws and policies to quite the degree that Arnade and Shapiro are saying. Though as a front-rower, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Anyway, that was long and rambling, and I’ll be a little surprised if anybody actually reads it. It’s been nagging at the back of my mind for weeks, though, so maybe this will get it out. If nothing else, you should check out the book, which is very, very good.