A delightful reflection on the value of cities to our community memory, common heritage, and future sense of ourselves; ideas lending themselves well to our dear city so rich in history, which though of fairly short duration, truly marked the world.
Why Conservatives Should Care About Cities
By Wilfred M. McClay
Wednesday, November 14, 2007, 7:42 AM
It is not only conservatives but Americans in general who have had a hard time reconciling what they think of as characteristically American aspirations with the actual life of modern American cities. It’s a certain disharmony between the way we think and the way we live. Our fierce attachment to ideals of individualism, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and closeness to nature do not always seem, for many Americans, to comport with the conditions of modern urban life. Perhaps that is because America, as historian Richard Hofstadter quipped, is a nation that was born in the country and has moved to the city but has never entirely adapted its mentality. Or, to put it another way, altering a famous saying about the British Empire, we became an urban civilization in a fit of absence of mind, having never fully adjusted our ideas about ourselves to the conditions in which we find ourselves actually living.
This outlook stands in marked contrast to that of many Europeans, who have a more robust urban ideal, taking pride in their great cities as centerpieces of their civilizations and “naturalizing” their urbanism with the pleasant concept of rus in urbe. Not so Americans, who more often than not resist seeing urban life per se as a worthy ideal, instead preferring to see America symbolized by its natural beauty—Grand Canyons and Rocky Mountains, redwood forests and gulfstream waters. Suburban life is embraced as a second-best form of country living, a form of urbs in rure that, at its best, has the conveniences of city life without the disadvantages. Something similar can be said about our passion for “country” music, which is actually a thoroughly urban and commercial music suffused with nostalgia for the lost virtues of country ways.
This American resistance to an urban identity goes back to the very beginnings of American history. Consider these words of Dr. Benjamin Rush, in a letter written in 1800 to his friend Thomas Jefferson: “I consider [cities] in the same light that I do abscesses on the human body, viz., as reservoirs of all the impurities of a community.” Needless to say, the agrarian-minded Jefferson, who famously asserted that “those who labor in the earth” are the “chosen people of God,” was likely to agree completely, even if it meant putting out of mind his own memorable experiences in the sublime precincts of Paris.
Yet there has long been something wrongheaded about this anti-urban disposition, and there is no reason why it has to continue forever. In fact, there is every good reason why American conservatives in particular should be the ones to look most skeptically at it. One should, to begin with, set aside the idea that conservatism is at bottom merely a timeless philosophy of landed elites and fixed social structures. For the idea of conservatism, far from being anti-urban, has always been inextricably bound up in the history and experience of great cities. When Russell Kirk wrote his celebrated book The Roots of American Order , he ingeniously built it around the central cities of the history of the West: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and London (and arguably also Philadelphia). Each city was taken to exemplify a foundational stage in the development of American liberty and American order. This was not merely a literary conceit, like a metonym. Such developments could only occur in cities. The civilization that conservatives wish to conserve is rooted in them. It is no accident that the Book of Revelation at the conclusion of the Christian Bible aims at the creation of the New Jerusalem, not the New Tara Plantation or the New Grover’s Corners.
