Introduction
Jacob Riis begins his book How the Other Half Lives with a remark about how the “other half lives,” highlighting the enormous wealth gap in New York. He sees his book as a documentary account that both describes the status of lower-class housing in the city and suggests various paths toward improvements. In doing so, he intentionally appeals to readers without experience living in such conditions, synthesizing their disingenuousness and ignorance into a call to action.
Jacob Riis’ Book in Terms of Hegel’s Dialectic
Disingenuousness
The main concepts of the book are briefly highlighted in Riis’s introduction. First, he suggests that the terrible circumstances people face in poverty result from simple greed. For instance, Riis describes the incident involving the fire at the home on Mott Street, when ten families were forced to cohabitate in a unit intended for two (11). This implies that while landlords can provide proper accommodation, they have opted to squeeze as many renters as possible into as few available flats as possible, which can be considered highly disingenuous.
Ignorance
As such, disingenuousness implies knowledge and deliberate inaction in a given situation. In this context, one might assume that the ignorance mentioned above refers to the artificial ignorance that these landlords feign to justify their incest. However, if Riis only intended to highlight and antagonize this ignorance, he would not include the potential solutions for the problem (Janssen et al. 2). In this context, ignorance, synonymous with disingenuousness, receives a chance to transform into an understanding of how to address the existing problem.
Conclusion
To simply generalize all landlords and other wealthy people in New York as willingly ignorant would be inappropriate, since the appeal would remain unheard of if that were the case. For instance, Riis does not allow himself to overgeneralize the poor as victims due to the presence of criminals and the deliberately unemployed (2). Therefore, How the Other Half Lives is efficient in reaching its goal because it covers both types of ignorance: disingenuous and sincere.
Work Cited
Riis, Jacob. “How the Other Half Lives.” Project Gutenberg, 2014. Web.
Janssen, Céline, et al. How the Other Half Lives: Coronavirus, Housing and Justice. Delft University of Technology, 2020.