Patrick Deneen asks an important question, whether modern suburban life and the commerce that sustains it is subversive to the good life. In particular he asks whether it is reconcilable with Catholic thought. It's a long post, but read the whole thing. In short, Dr. Pat argues that suburban life undermines community, social cohesion, and perpetuates inequality. Here's a taste:
Suburbs not only segregate families from one another - and increasingly, family members from one another - but segregate our life-activities from one another. Zoning regulations forbid the intermingling of commerce and "living," and hence few suburban settings allow for the possibility of enacting commercial transactions in or near the places where one lives. Compare the current suburban enclave - where one must drive significant distances to purchase a distantly produced gallon of milk or loaf of Wonder Bread (R)- to many older American towns and cities (take, for example, the town where I live, Alexandria, Virginia) or most European communities where families still live above their shops and stores, where one's shopping can be done by walking through one's town.
I commented at length on Dr. Pat's site, taking a comment by Joe Knippenberg as my starting point. Let me reproduce that comment here: Let me build on Joe K.'s comments. Living in an isolated small town struggling to survive, and surrounded by even smaller towns fading from existence, one sees that small town life can be idealized to the extent it blurs reality. As Joe sugggests, at this point most small towns are small because no one wants to live there. In my town there are plenty of jobs, but not very many "white collar" jobs. So most kids, including the college kids I teach, must look elsewhere for their career (or, if you will, vocation). Indeed, in South Dakota , out migration of young people is a major problem. In most small towns, unless you want to farm or work as a clerk at the gas station, there are no jobs for you.
I share Patrick's discomfort with modern life, with its consumerism, frivolity, and isolating tendencies. But the alternative picture he paints will certainly make us poorer than we otherwise would be, and that's a problem. Does Patrick deny the efficiency created by the modern economy, with its division of labor and economies of scale? This has created massive amounts of wealth allowing Americans to live in unbelievable comfort.
Now that comfort may also be hollowing out our souls. It may produce countless gadgets with which to distract ourselves (physician heal thyself!), a nihilistic popular culture that thrives on vulgarity, and the reduction of all questions to ones of either comfort or economic calculus. But, that same economy has produced untold wealth that allows us to, say, treat childhood cancer patients so they have a chance to live. Allows older people to get artificial joints so they can lead lives free of constant pain. Creates the MRI machines that allow us to do to see into the body in ways that used to be done through invasive surgery. Allows the common man to travel the world with relative ease to see things our grandparents only dreamed of. These kinds of innovations do not come about in rustic, self-sufficient, quaint neighborhoods and economies. This is why, for example, in most of the world clean drinking water is still a dream.
It may be that at the heart of the American (and perhaps the modern) experiment lies a contradiction, indeed a tragedy. The desire for Progress, indeed an almost religious faith in Progress, comes from a very human desire to live a life of comfort, liberating one's self from back breaking labor and conquering disease. That same faith in Progress also neglects another part of the human soul that longs for community, that seeks to know the infinite, that wants to pass on a certain way of life to ones posterity in addition to passing on wealth and comfort. This, I think, is at the heart of Tocqueville's discussion of religion along side the "perfectibility of man." There is a war in the American soul, and I think it is clear which side has won. I am with Dr. Pat in lamenting that, but I think we should recognize the very reasonable basis for the modern commercial life Dr. Pat deplores and the undoubted good that it has produced.
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