So the sewers of New York have begun to disgorge their human contents. It is a scene worthy of Dickens, or perhaps a Roman satire. Men emerging from below the city, filmed by bewildered citizens, and now the police are ‘probing’. One imagines Inspector Bucket, or perhaps a character from Poe, scrutinising such a bizarre tableau. But this is no fiction. This is modern America. And it is a perfect emblem for the intellectual and moral decay of our age.
Let us trace the historical parallels. The Roman sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, was a marvel of engineering: a symbol of civilisation’s triumph over filth. When that system clogged or when the outcasts of society began to dwell in its tunnels, it signalled decay. New York’s sewers have always had their denizens, but the emergence of these men in broad daylight, caught on video, is something new. It suggests a permeability between the underworld and the overworld, a dissolution of boundaries that should not be dissolved.
One might call it a kind of social slumming, but that would be too generous. This is not a lark; it is a symptom. The sewers have become a refuge for the desperate, the criminal, or the merely deranged. And the police, poor dears, are ‘probing’. One can almost hear the sigh of the ancient praetorian guard as the barbarians appear at the gate. But these barbarians come from within. They are our own creation, the detritus of a society that has lost its sense of order, of shame, of what belongs above ground and what must be kept below.
The Victorian era understood the importance of such boundaries. The drawing room, the street, the slum: each had its place. The sewer was a necessary evil, but hidden. Now we have a culture that celebrates the unearthing of every obscenity. We have journalism that turns these sewer-dwellers into viral celebrities. We have a city government that cannot manage its own underground, much less the souls that dwell there.
This is not merely a police matter. It is a cultural matter. The sewers of New York have become a stage for the grotesque, and we are all complicit in the performance. What will happen, I wonder, when the men from the sewers decide to stay above? When the distinction between the subterranean and the surface is erased entirely? We shall have a city of tunnels and towers, with no difference between the two. That is the socialist’s paradise or the anarchist’s dream, depending on your taste.
I propose a different reading. Let us see these men as a metaphor for the intellectual filth that now bubbles up from the academic gutters of our universities, from the cultural sewers of our media. They are the living embodiment of the nonsense that has replaced reason: the rejection of standards, the worship of the primitive, the celebration of the broken. When men live in sewers and then emerge into sunlight, one does not applaud their liberation. One asks why they were there in the first place, and why the society that allowed it is so curiously passive.
The police will ‘probe’. They will find something, I am sure. Perhaps a hidden shelter for the homeless, perhaps a criminal lair. But the larger question will remain unanswered. Why are we so obsessed with what comes from below? Why do we stare at these videos with a mixture of horror and titillation? It is because we have lost faith in the above. We no longer believe in the heights. We have become a race of troglodytes, fascinated by our own caves.
This story will fade. The men from the sewers will be forgotten, or turned into the subject of a documentary. But the image will linger: men crawling out of the earth, blinking in the sun. That is the true portrait of our age. And it is not flattering.
