Lukacs on suburban development
[Caleb Stegall  03/19 11:36 AM]

A reader sends this excerpt from John Lukacs’ history of America in the 20th Century:

The deterioration in the safety of cities had much do with the preference of millions of Americans for the suburbs; but it was not the only factor in their choice. We must keep in mind too, that in the history of Western civilization we have not yet seen a highly developed culture that was not predominantly urban. The adjective urbane suggests this, as does the word citizen. It is still an open question whether a suburban people can develop something resembling a high level of culture.

… By 1970 more Americans lived in suburbs than in their cities or in small towns or on the land. This development was unprecedented in their history, indeed perhaps in that of the world. That this meant the end, indeed, more than the last phase of the urban and bourgeois interlude in the history of United States was or should have been obvious. That it also meant the gradual disappearance of a certain "civilization" (a word first appearing in English in 1601, a term and an idea inseparable from urbanity was less obvious). It did not occur to most people but then few of them knew or even felt that an entire age of history, the so-called modern age, in the midst of which their Republic was born, was coming to its end too.

We have seen that impermanence of residence was now an overall American phenomenon; but restlessness and moving were American habits not entirely new. The enormous scatteration of houses across this vast country, together with the shortness of their occupation by the same people involved a mutation not only of the sense of ownership but perhaps the very sense of home—with long-range consequences that are unforeseeable. In any event, the original meaning of the very word suburb (a sub-city; a secondary city) had become imprecise, because there were now no real boundaries between cities and suburbs, or between suburbs and the countryside. The suburbs, originally meant to be a healthy bridge between city and country, were now devouring both. Also, most suburbs did not really become communities of their own. People were moving out from or actually fleeing the cities had hoped to become part and parcel of some new, sunlit community. But this rarely happened: loneliness in the suburbs (perhaps especially for women) was as endemic as was loneliness in the cities. For a while it seemed that there would be a revival of small towns across America, real communities on an older human scale, where people would live and work and buy and consume. But this did not happen, either: most American small towns lost population, too: around them grew their own suburbs. Meanwhile, the civic problems of the cities, such as crime and drugs, reappeared in the suburbs.

Still, it is difficult to predict what the vast suburbanization of America will mean. What forms will this new kind of civilization acquire (if the very word civilization will remain applicable at all)? Intellectual snobbery notwithstanding, suburban life has not been altogether deplorable, and the manners and morals of suburban men and women have not been altogether inferior or even very different from those of other Americans.

But the seeds of something quite new began to sprout, here and there. Gradually, slowly, more and more Americans, more or less consciously, were becoming uneasy with the once sacrosanct and unquestionable American idea of progress. Such people were perhaps more apparent in the suburbs than elsewhere. Opposition to destructive development, to suburban sprawl, to new highways creating more and more automobile traffic began to appear in various places across the country—not to speak of the ever increasing pollution of air, water, earth. This reaction, especially after 1980, was—largely, though not accurately—in accord with the defense of the environment (a poor word, since nature is not just the environment, but part and parcel of human life and habitation itself).

Such were the first, though multiplying signs of a future deep division among the American people: between people who were still unthinking believers in technology and economic determinism, and people who were not. Or, as the great and good Wendell Berry, an American farmer, writer, and thinker, wrote in 1999: "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."