New Prospects for the Cultural Mission of Cities
by Ron Lowe

Historian George Marsden notes that “Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, the story of the self-made man, eventually became paradigmatic of the American ideal, but at least before the Civil War, Edwards’ Brainerd, the self-renouncing man, offered a major alternative.”       

The shift toward pietism and anti-intellectualism in middle- and late-19^th century America was a departure from this tradition, with debilitating results. In some ways, our educational and religious institutions have yet to recover. As the twentieth century began, the attempt of modernity to formulate an enduring, uplifting cultural mission for humanity proved to be naively optimistic, mechanistic, reductionist, de-personalizing, and ultimately corrosive in the life of communities.

The good news is that brighter prospects are at hand. I challenge students to think about how privileged we are, in our unique position within the span of human history, to have lived through the turn of a millennium. Very few are afforded this opportunity.

In the years leading up to the turn of the second millennium, there was a notable sense of dread in the culture. It was based on a profusion of doomsday forecasts. “What if the world ends when all the nines turn to zeros and the giant, mirrorized ball drops?,” they must have wondered.

There was a bit of this in the final decades of the 20^th century in the West.  There was the Y2K scare. There was the Cold War. There were dystopian novels and films. And, of course, there were various stripes of millenarian religion and its ability to arouse all manner of apocalyptic fear.

These resignations to a short future were made manifest in the arts and other expressions of cultural life. Their non-religious expressions included deconstructionism in philosophy and other academic fields.

In geo-political terms, you see it in Europe’s 20^th century end-game totalitarian regimes, the face-offs of mutually assured destruction in the nuclear arms race, and the nationalistic “take no prisoners” approach to ethnic warfare and technologically-driven mass destruction. Winston Churchill observed that the forms of nationalism which had arisen hearkened back to Europe’s pre-Christian, pagan tradition of tribalism and the nurturing of centuries-long blood-feuds.

In urban life, our disdain of historical perspective is typified most visibly in modernist architecture, the decay of urban neighborhoods, and retreat from our cities to the “safe havens” of strip malls, fast food, and assorted “big box” consumerist wastelands. In personal terms, it meant all sorts of collective cries of desperation and their attendant self-destructive behavior.

In the Western zeitgeist, modernity accentuated the idea that reality is essentially fragmented, and thus alienation is normative. The heightened value placed on individualism took the form of extreme isolation. The rigid privatization and sequestering of religion from public life has not only added fuel to the fiery rhetoric of the culture wars, it has also aroused suspicion and resentment of the West in regions where incursions of such a restrictive outlook were felt. In developing societies, Western secularism continues to be seen as far more threatening than missionary religions.

But while many of these issues continue to raise serious concerns, our computers didn’t crash. The Berlin Wall came down. And nuclear holocaust was avoided for much longer than most had predicted. Our problems, of course, are far from over. Some of the recent ones are at least as troubling as those which I have mentioned.

Yet, there is also an almost imperceptible collective sigh of relief. The world didn’t end in 2000. In the 1990s, one author predicted what he called “the coming age of cathedrals.”  He referred to a flourishing of cultural investments made in European cities following the turn of the second millennium.

It included, but was not limited to, the rise of ever-taller, increasingly complex and innovative, beautiful structures for worship. It also witnessed the rise of the world’s first universities and the liberal arts curriculum (which many institutions are unfortunately abandoning). The subsequent resurgence of long-enduring cultural activity reflected a renewed sense of cultural mission.

Will the vision of our own cultural mission rise to the occasion? Are we ready to begin constructing foundations and buildings that outlive us and our children – an age in which we don’t stop with efficiency and functionality (key modernist values), but also give attention to form and beauty? Will we recover a willingness to gain insight from the wisdom and achievements of even the distant past.

The greatest generation may not be one that has already passed. It could be this generation or the next one, or one that lives thousands of years from now. With this in mind, we must cast aside our nostalgic focus on the past and our narcissistic obsession with the present.

When the greatest generation comes into view, it will be a generation that picks up and carries the torch that we, too often, have fumbled or dropped. It will be a generation that cultivates and nurtures our collective cultural memory (that is, our history). It will be a generation that begins to live for something bigger than themselves.

Sometimes it seems that we are moving farther and farther away from this reality. But occasionally you see young adults making conscious decisions to defer gratification, to reject the easy routes of moralism and a sense of entitlement, or to open and read a good book, even when it is not assigned. In all but a few of those cases, they have been around older adults whom they see making such decisions and engaging in self-respecting courses of action.

The Center for Renaissance and Reformation is convinced that the cultivation of civility, historical perspective, and service to those in need is a cultural mission that renews and invigorates cities for the long haul. We invite others to join in this mission.

* George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, A Life. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)