Lukacs in context
[Caleb Stegall  03/21 06:05 PM]

Well, prompted by Nick's question and my own curiosity, I pulled Lukacs's End of the Modern Age and found this. Looks like my reading of that line was the correct one:

[T]he main question of the twenty-first century, the main problem, perhaps especially for Americans: the necessity to rethink the entire meaning of "progress." ... Our "conservatives" care not for the conservation of the country, and of the American land. Yet: more than tax policy, more than education policy, more than national security policy, more even than the painful abortion issue, this is where the main division is beginning to occur. So it is in my township. It is the division between people who want to develop, to build up, to pour more concrete and cement on the land, and those who wish to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where they live. (Landscape, not wilderness. The propagation of wilderness, the exaltation of "nature" against all human presence, is the fatal shortcoming of many American environmentalists.) Beneath that division I sometimes detect the division between a true love of one's country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless "growth."