At the moment, for example, we are all of us much exercised about the quality of life in our American urban civilization. I have no intention, at this time, of analyzing the numerous problems which make up what we familiarly call the “crisis of our cities.” Instead, I should like to focus on the apparent incapacity of our democratic and urban civilization to come to grips with these problems. In other words, if it is proper to say that we experience the crisis of our cities, it is equally proper to say that we are the urban crisis. And what I want to suggest further is that one of the main reasons we are so problematic to ourselves is the fact that we are creating a democratic, urban civilization while stubbornly refusing to think clearly about the relation of urbanity to democracy.
And here, I think, we have at last come to what I would consider the heart of the matter. For the overwhelming fact of American life today, whether this life be lived in a central city or a suburb or a small city—or even in those rural areas where something like a third of our population still resides—is that it is life in an urban civilization. In terms of the quality of American life, the United States is now one vast metropolis. Cities are nothing new; the problems of cities are nothing new; but an urban civilization is very new indeed, and the problems of an urban civilization are without precedent in human history.
It was because the founding fathers did not see how such a population could be capable of self-government that they took so dim a view of large cities. The “mob,” as it was then to be seen in London and Paris, and even incipiently in New York or Boston, seemed to them the very antithesis of a democratic citizenry: a citizenry self-reliant, self-determining, and at least firmly touched by, if not thoroughly infused with, republican morality. It takes a transcendental-populist faith of truly enormous dimensions to find in this attitude a mere “agrarian bias.” The founding fathers were philosophic men, of no such populist faith, and they had no qualms about insisting that popular government was sustained by “a people” as distinct from a mob.
For something very odd and unexpected has, in the past decade, been happening to the bourgeois masses who inhabit our new urban civilization. Though bourgeois in condition and lifestyle, they have become less bourgeois in ethos, and strikingly more mob-like in action. Perhaps this has something to do with a change in the economic character of our bourgeois civilization. Many critics have noted the shift from a producer’s ethic (the so-called Protestant ethic) to a consumer’s ethic, and go on to affirm that a bourgeois society of widespread affluence is in its essence radically different from a bourgeois society where scarcity automatically imposes a rigorous discipline of its own. This explanation is all the more plausible in that it echoes, in an academic way, the wisdom of the ages as to the corrupting effects of material prosperity upon the social order.
The ways in which various strata of our citizenry—from the relatively poor to the relatively affluent—are beginning to behave like a bourgeois urban mob are familiar to anyone who reads his newspaper, and I do not propose to elaborate upon them. The interesting consideration is the extent to which a mob is not simply a physical presence but also, and above everything else, a state of mind. It is, to be precise, that state of mind which lacks all of those qualities that, in the opinion of the founding fathers, added up to republican morality: steadiness of character, deliberativeness of mind, and a mild predisposition to subordinate one’s own special interests to the public interest. Since the founding fathers could not envisage a nation of bourgeois—a nation of urbanized, prosperous, and strongly acquisitive citizens—they located republican morality in the agrarian sector of American life. We, in this century, have relocated it in the suburban and small-city sector of American life—our contemporary version of America’s “grass roots.” And it now appears that our anticipations may be treated as roughly by history as were those of the founding fathers.
It is this startling absence of values that represents the authentic “urban crisis” of our democratic, urban nation. The fact that the word “urbanity” applies both to a condition of urban things and a state of urban mind may be an accident of philology—but if so it is a happy accident, for it reminds us of the interdependence of mind and thing. That same interdependence is to be found in the word, “democracy,” referring as it does simultaneously to a political system and to the spirit—the idea—that animates this system. The challenge to our urban democracy is to evolve a set of values and a conception of democracy that can function as the equivalent of the “republican morality” of yesteryear. This is our fundamental urban problem. Or, in the immortal words of Pogo: “I have seen the enemy and he is us.”
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/a...s-discontents/
Re: On US Isolationism, Expectations for the Post-US World Order
Originally Posted by Legio_Italica
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