March 24, 2023
Last week we looked at the city from the perspective of the mythmaking imagination. When we say “city” in the modern period, we think “bright lights, big city,” the megalopolis, as Spengler called it in The Decline of the West, that was an imperialistic power center, like Rome, in older times, and a capitalistic (but still imperialistic) power center now. On the fringes of that power structure are what I called the margins, in which people try to invent a way to live and the arts try to find a way to flourish. Spengler has a cyclical view of history, and regards the megalopolis as the final stage of a civilization before it collapses of its own decadence.
He also says, however, that a culture reaches a zenith of vitality and creativity in an earlier period of what he called culture towns, autonomous towns or small cities on a much smaller, more human scale than the huge urban centers that succeeded them. Spengler was a Nazi sympathizer and frequently an idiot, but he had intuitive gifts enough to become a profound influence on Northrop Frye, and there is definitely something to the idea of a human-scaled unit of living, beginning with Athens and the other Greek city-states in the Classical period, the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, and the London of Shakespeare’s time, all of them coinciding with a high-water mark of their respective cultures in a way that surely cannot be just an accident. The Italian city-states were governed by princes and oligarchies, and London of course was the seat of a monarchy, but the princes, oligarchs, and monarchs often had the capacity to be informed and intelligent patrons of the arts.
More importantly, according to Spengler, the culture town is of a just-right size that makes possible a real sense of organic community, out of which grows the kind of public and yet still individualized art that is a culture’s greatest achievement—the communal and yet not merely collective art represented by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare in drama, by Praxiteles, Michelangelo and Raphael in the visual arts, by Bach and Mozart in music. It is Spengler’s answer as to why supreme genius appears at certain periods in a culture and not in others, provided that we define “supreme genius” as neither anonymously collective, as in medieval art, or atomized and subjective, as in modern. As so often with Spengler, beneath the ideological prejudices lurks something intuitive and suggestive.
Athens demonstrated the possibility of democracy on a small enough scale that everyone basically knows everyone in the community, and knows what the issues are. Thinkers from Shelley to Thomas Jefferson have extolled the small, autonomous community as the basic unit of democracy, resistant to the herd instinct that seizes control of mass populations. Whether culture towns breed democratic individualists can be questioned: Athens executed Socrates in a fit of groupthink, and Jefferson’s rugged rural yeoman seems to exist mostly in his imagination. What small towns typically breed is more often a stifling conventionality summed up in the cliché of the “small town sheriff.” This is true even when the towns have been swallowed up and are at once independent and yet suburbs of a large city, as my own North Royalton is of Cleveland. The MAGA movement is associated with dying coal towns nestled in the hills of places like West Virginia, but that is largely a political ruse. Studies have shown that Trump-style conservatives tend to be middle managers and small business owners who make good money. In 2016, the lawns of North Royalton were a sea of Trump posters, and we have had recurrent difficulty keeping outright wackos off both city council and the school board. Still, the ideal of a direct, participatory democracy, like the old New England town meetings, is not just an illusion. It forms a counter-vision to the kind of stifling bureaucracy, power politics, lobbying, and big money that corrupt larger political structures.
The 15-minute city that I spoke of last week, a kind of city-within-the-city small enough that everything one needs can be obtained by a 15-minute walk or cycle trip, thus dispensing with automobile traffic, seems an attempt to graft a culture town onto the power structure of a megalopolis, satisfying a yearning for a smaller, more decentralized lifestyle in which communal life is more warmly personal and face-to-face. The ideal can be approximated outside the city limits as well. I think it accounts for the mystique of certain college and university towns like Oxford. Or for that matter my own Baldwin Wallace University, located in the quiet, green, almost crime-free suburb of Berea, Ohio, and yet only 20-30 minutes away from all the restaurants, entertainment spots, and cultural institutions of the city of Cleveland. What is manifesting itself here is what we spoke of last week: that in creating a lifestyle, human beings are always trying to reconcile Blakean Contraries, certain conflicting and yet equally important needs, to have their cultural cake and eat it too.
This leads in art to a tension between local roots and urban cosmopolitanism. Literature is rooted in the concrete and particular, and therefore grows out of a particular environment. As Frye used to put it, Faulkner spent a lifetime writing about an unpronounceable county in Mississippi and thereby ended up collecting a Nobel Prize in Sweden. More recently, his Canadian compatriot Alice Munro followed suit, winning the same prize for a lifetime of writing about southwestern Ontario. James Joyce lived the life of an expatriate, but virtually all his work is set in the place he regarded himself as self-exiled from, what he called Dear Dirty Dublin. One of the remarkable and hopeful tendencies of contemporary literature is the opening of an elite and closed literary canon, and the access to publication of literature rooted in the “local”—but “local” can now mean anything from the working class in Kentucky to the educated class in Nepal, from African American gay life in New York City to the life of young urban professionals in Japan. What “cosmopolitan” means, we are beginning to realize, is that all these many lifestyles, individualized according to race, class, gender and sexual orientation, religion, all the varieties of human difference, communicate themselves immediately across all the barriers. It turns out that if you write what you know, out of your own little niche, it may be an international best seller, because there is after all, however sentimental it sounds, something universally human, a bond that links us through the empathic power of the imagination. The differences do not disappear, and do not cease to be problematic, even tragic. And yet we read eagerly about lives that are vastly different from our own. So long as that is true, there is hope for the human race.
In the 1950’s through the 1970’s, there was an exodus from the overcrowding, crime, and decay of American cities to the suburbs. This was also a search for a human-sized community, but one rather different from the culture-town ideal and its modern reincarnations in urban “margins.” The driving motivation was not culture but family. Cities, even cities that are not dysfunctional, are not ideal for raising children. There is a need for a neighborhood, a place that is safe, has backyards for playing and recreational areas nearby for sports and other activities, a place where there are good schools, often so nearby that children could walk to school unaccompanied, as I did, with no need for a school bus. The other need fulfilled by the suburbs is privacy, the privacy of the single-family dwelling. In the suburbs, a man’s home was his castle.
There is also a yard, at least a little bit of green, so much more human than the concrete jungles of the city. It is fashionable at the moment to disapprove of yards as not sustainable, presumably because some people dump a lot of chemicals onto them to get rid of weeds and water them wastefully. Randomly, I just pulled up an article from Psychology Today that says that lawn owners are neurotics who “fend off entropy, exerting totalitarian rule over a couple of vertical inches of vegetation.” Really? I have ranted before about how little the advocates of abolishing lawns have thought through the problems, and will spare you here, pointing out only one consequence, related to the idea that suburbs are, or at least were, family oriented: if you get rid of your yard, either letting it go wild or replacing it with gravel and water-conserving plants, where are your kids going to play? I spent my childhood in backyards, either ours or my friends’. Your kids spend all their time in their rooms on their phones? Maybe they should be shooed into the back yard to play.
The comments on Paul Krugman’s essay on the 15-minute city were filled with contemptuous comments about the suburbs, almost all of them filled with references to strip malls, fast food outlets, and traffic. That is not the suburbs. That is what the suburbs became, after they were taken over by “development,” endless strip-malling as destructive as strip mining, and driven by the same strategy: get in, exploit the area for quick profit, then get out again, leaving the damage behind.
Malls were a necessary supplement to residential suburbs. When I was a child in the 50’s, we went downtown to shop, but when urban rot put an end to downtown retail, the first malls were built close to the residential areas. When the idea arrived of enclosing malls so that shoppers were protected from the weather, and including restaurants, movie theatres, food courts, and eventually video game parlors turned the mall into a little world, malls became hangouts, and not just for teenagers. They were a public space where single families went to enjoy being in a crowd of other people for a little while, fulfilling a communal impulse as markets had in an earlier time. They were easy to be snobbish about because they catered to bourgeois rather than sophisticated needs. The restaurants were family restaurants or chains, the movies in the theatres popular and commercial. If you wanted fine dining or art films, you had to go downtown.
But they were not bad places until capitalist greed pumped them full of its growth hormones. Malls became mega-malls, and then were surrounded with strip malls. Traffic became impossible. Eventually, whole suburbs were taken over by their mall areas. The suburb next to North Royalton is essentially one enormous complex of mall plus interlocking strip malls that goes on for miles. I know people live there somewhere, but I’m honestly not sure where. The same is true where I grew up. Canton, my hometown, used to be the main city; North Canton was its satellite, a sleepy small town whose only distinctive feature was the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company in its old, dark brick 19th-century building. Now, the mall in Canton is a ghost mall, boards nailed over the broken windows of vacant buildings, and it has been that way for years. The sleepy town of North Canton has been replaced by a labyrinth of mall-plus-strip malls that, again, goes on and on. No wonder some people want to try moving back to the city. Those who do not have been saved by the coming of the Internet and online shopping. But the malls were already dying from overbuilding. There are simply too many stores, too many strip malls, and many of them are folding, store by store. It is common enough to see a strip mall with only a couple of open stores in it, the rest of it abandoned. This did not need to happen, but it has made malls in some people’s minds synonymous with unpleasant commercial vulgarity. Cities, even when they were nightmares, produced a rich mythology. The suburbs produced the family sitcoms of the 50’s and 60’s, such as Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. The malls produced, well, Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995).
We have not yet spoken of the Blakean Contrary to the city, the culture town, and the suburb: life in a natural setting, the way the human race began. The problem with a natural lifestyle is that we do not live in paradisal nature as Adam and Eve did. The main action of Shakespeare’s As You Like It takes place in the Forest of Arden, a real forest north of Stratford-upon-Avon, bearing the family name of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. What the characters discover is that it is all too real: this is not Arcadia, the setting of the set of conventions known as the pastoral. Duke Senior tries to make a virtue out of the fact that this is an actual English wood, subject to an English winter, but it is uphill work:
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
'This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.'
Sweet are the uses of adversity… (2.1.1-12)
He has to contradict himself: here, I don’t feel the seasons’ difference because I interpret it as a moral lesson. Nevertheless, he shrinks with cold. The pastoral convention was based on the premise that a simple life in nature furnished only with the essentials, namely, wine, women, and song, is preferable to the corruptions of the city and the court. While what we learn of the court is certainly corrupt enough, the play punctures the sentimental illusions of the privileged about life in nature just as it punctures their sentimental illusions about romantic love. Pastoral poetry as it originated in the Hellenistic Idylls of Theocritus and the Roman Eclogues of Virgil was a sophisticated, artificial form, a kind of elite game of let’s-pretend. Except for the presence of death, the pastoral world mimics the original Golden Age, and its serious point was the contrast with the world that humanity is living in now. When people in pastoral literature swore they would leave the decadent court behind and take up sheepherding, it was mere blowing off steam, like a corporate drone swearing to leave the rat race and become a beachcomber. Humanity cannot live in the pastoral world because it is an imaginative construct: only the poets deliver a golden world says Sidney in An Apology for Poetry. As Shakespeare suggests in The Winter’s Tale, they construct it by improving fallen nature, so that art becomes a kind of “second nature” rather than its mere antithesis. But human identity is cultural, not natural. Only Shakespeare’s villains, like Iago, or Edmund in King Lear, think of human beings in terms of animals—usually savage and predatory animals.
It was the Romantics who created modern mythology by inverting traditional mythology, and in the philosophy of Rousseau and the poetry of Wordsworth, human identity is identified with nature—nature as inward process or life force, not an artificial construct like the pastoral. The same contrast is set up between a good and nurturing nature and a corrupting civilization, but this time a return to a natural life is proposed as a real possibility, and has been haunting the modern imagination ever since. Romantic ideas passed over to America and helped create the myth of the “noble savage,” the Indigenous native whose life in harmony with nature is often contrasted with the greed and murderous aggression of white civilization, a myth still going strong in Avatar: The Way of Water. In James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the white scout and frontiersman Natty Bumppo is self-exiled from white society. His deep friendship with the Native American Chingachgook is based on a sense that they are kindred spirits. Natty can live in the wilderness, however, because he is a survivalist and knows how. In the course of five novels, Natty begins in the forests of the East and dies in Kansas in The Prairie. Although a loner, he follows the movement of the pioneers westward. Despite its humanization by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House on the Prairie novels, the homesteading life on the prairies, portrayed more harshly by Willa Cather, was hard and often dehumanizing. Frank Lloyd Wright founded the Prairie School of architecture with houses that were sometimes set partly into a hillside, not just to be “in harmony with nature” but to protect against extreme weather. As part of his Methodist ministerial training, a young Northrop Frye was actually sent as a circuit rider for a summer, riding to various families too isolated to travel to a church. Film footage from the 1930’s of this lifestyle that were included in a documentary on Frye captured the loneliness of the area. It was called Stone Pile for a reason. Frye wrote in a letter home that if he thought he would have to live his life here, he would kill himself.
In short, if you set out to live a life in harmony with nature, you had best pick a congenial area, as Thoreau did when he chose Walden Pond and wrote the book that made him a prophet of the back-to-nature movement, right up to later nature writers like John Muir and Aldo Leopold, contemporary poets like Gary Snyder and Wendell Barry, and contemporary fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson. The ideal of this tradition is often called the ecotopia. Ernst Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) was the establishing model of this genre, but to my mind the greatest ecotopia is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990), set in the Orange County area of California. In England, the famous natural utopia was William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), set in a post-urban future. Until climate change started to become too insistently destructive to remain in denial about, the whole back-to-nature movement was largely dismissed by what Paul Krugman calls Very Serious People as a treehugger fantasy. It was less than a decade ago that Nancy Pelosi, expressing the view of the neoliberal elite upper echelon of the Democratic Party, made sneering remarks about the naiveté of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
But climate change is in the process of transforming the whole debate. The trajectory of that transformation can be mapped through the career of Kim Stanley Robinson, possibly the greatest environmental novelist of our time, who began with the idyllic, hopeful utopia of Pacific Edge in 1990. He moved on to the Science in the Capitol trilogy in the early to mid-2000’s, preoccupied with speculative efforts to avert climate change. But by 2017 he was writing novels like New York 2140, portraying life in a New York City that is half underwater, submerged by a 50-foot rise in sea level. It is no longer a matter of avoiding but of learning to live in a post-climate-change world. Mind you, hatred of late capitalism, imperialism, multinational corporations, and the megalopolis is deep enough to have inspired a whole genre of post-apocalyptic literature that goes back at least as far as Richard Jeffries’ significantly titled After London (1885). An American counterpart is Earth Abides (1949), by George R. Stewart.
Even those not so radically alienated may need a respite from the nerve wracking pace and alienation of Modern Times, to echo the 1936 Charlie Chaplin classic of that title. If you are affluent, you may have a second home as an escape hatch: one of his respondents pointed out that Paul Krugman has a second home in rural Ulster County. The rest of us make do with parks. Yet another wonderful asset of Cleveland (by now you have surely recognized that I am a Cleveland booster) is its magnificent park system, nicknamed the Emerald Necklace because it runs in a gigantic necklace shape throughout the city. Levies to support the park system are, I think, the only taxes I have never heard a complaint about. People are glad to support it because they recognize how much they need it. When I lived in Buffalo, I used to spend time reading and writing in Forest Lawn Cemetery, designed by Frederick Law Olmste, regarded as the father of landscape architecture in the United States, who also designed Central Park in New York City. This too is a kind of natural utopianism, especially as parks are free and open to everyone.
But for some of us, the occasional respite is not enough. We want to live our lives within nature. A few of Krugman’s respondents echo my own sentiments. One writes:
The major drawback of dense urban areas is the nearly complete isolation from nature. Not being to walk alone through forest or near water, not seeing unobstructed sunrises or sunsets on the horizon changes what it means to be a human being. When is the last time anyone living in NYC saw more than a couple of stars in the night sky or even the moon? Walkable communities exist in some small towns that also offer the benefits of being in close proximity to the real world.
Although I am within the city limits, I live on 3.8 acres ringed by woods, with a creek to one side of a 450-foot driveway. My house is what is known as chalet ranch style: the entire front wall is glass, looking out upon a lawn (yes, unapologetically a lawn) and—the one thing the respondent does not mention—a constant parade of animal life. Deer, squirrels, raccoons, groundhogs, rarely turkeys, and the occasional skunk. And an explosion of birds. It is not unusual to see as many as eight male cardinals ringing one of the two feeders, and in the back a suet feeder draws I would say at least four kinds of woodpeckers, including the gigantic pileated who are perhaps as much as 10 inches tall and hardly fit on the feeder. Baby groundhogs and raccoons play on the deck in the summer, where I rig up a wading pool out of a plastic container. Once in a great while a great blue heron will startle me by lofting gracefully out of the small canyon, created by decades of erosion, where the creek lies. In the summer, with leaves on the trees, I cannot see any of my neighbors. There is a non-working farm across the road, with a huge pond, from which a pair of geese visit every summer. Yet I am anything but isolated. The town square of North Royalton, such as it is, lies two miles up the road. I get to Baldwin Wallace by means of a beautiful 25-minute drive through the Metroparks. I am admittedly exiled to an extent from the Cleveland margins: it is a 50-minute drive to get to the Cedar Lee art theatre, for example. But I am willing to pay the price.
It makes me happy that my dad would have loved this house, had he lived to see it, since it was inheritance money from him that enabled us to buy it. He would have loved to live more naturally himself, but my mother’s hatred of the rural poverty she grew up in precluded anything but suburbia. I am not sure how many people would even want to live such a life—I do have 2.5 acres of lawn to mow and tens of thousands of leaves to blow in the fall, plus a plowing service for the drive. If they did, how could such a lifestyle be made possible for large numbers?
Such a great nerd am I that I still remember a Sunday educational comic strip from when I was about 12 (!) that spoke of the possibility of “mainline cities,” cities built in a line instead of radiating outward from a center. The city itself held the usual industries, businesses, financial institutions, and the like, but radiating at right angles to the city are roads into surrounding green countryside where people might live in nature. This article appeared in the early 60’s, but it seems to me it was ahead of its time. Two recent developments have made a mainline city seem more practical. One is the Internet and work-from-home. The other is the electric car. I think trying to eliminate cars altogether is a waste of effort. Cars are simply necessary for many purposes, and public transportation is inefficient, unpleasant, and sometimes even dangerous. I for one am glad that the flying cars of the Jetsons cartoon never came into existence. First, I am afraid of heights, and, second, people drive like such fools on the ground that I shudder to imagine what they would be like in the air, especially when they were on their cell phones. But electric cars, if battery life can be lengthened and charging time shortened, are clearly our future, and they are a utopian leap of progress.
William Morris imagined a post-industrial way of life in 1885. Perhaps it is a dream whose time is about to come. As I say, I have no real idea how many people might be attracted to a natural life. I only know that I am not unique: in fact, we were inspired 17 years ago by friends Dennis and KC, who have a modernized log cabin on 15 acres outside of Tipp City, which is in turn outside of Dayton. We are all old hippies who have remained true to the dream of getting back to the Garden. A few years ago, a friend and fellow scholar asked me to contribute a long article on “paradise and exile” for an encyclopedia of mythology that so far, like the Golden Age, is still waiting to arrive. He said he felt that, given what I am, this was the right topic for me to write about. Maybe all this hints at what he meant.