You Cannot Beat Nihilism with Nihilism

You cannot heal social ills rooted in organizing people into supposedly immutable categories by doubling down on the practice of organizing people on the basis of supposedly immutable categories.

BY THOMAS HARRINGTON

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Today, Barcelona is today one of the great tourist destinations of the Western world. Fifty years ago, however, it was a somewhat dusty backwater still smarting from the punishments inflicted on it by the Franco regime (1939-1975) for its citizens’ stubborn refusal to abandon their attachment to the Catalan language and culture, and for having served as the nerve center of the defeated Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) eventually won by the Nationalist general.

The city’s dramatic transformation is rooted in actions taken under the leadership of Mayor Pasqual Maragall in the six or so years leading to the city’s hosting of the 1992 Summer Olympics. While the mayor of every Olympic venue promises that the Games will enduringly change his city for the better, this actually occurred in Maragall’s Barcelona, especially in the realm of public infrastructure.

But unlike many big city mayors, Maragall understood that cities don’t emerge into beauty and greatness on the basis of bricks, mortar, and ring roads alone, and that this was especially the case in a place like Barcelona where citizens had been largely stripped of their ability to express themselves in their own linguistic, symbolic, and architectural vernaculars for nearly 40 years.

This awareness led Maragall and his collaborators to undertake a vigorous campaign of culture planning, designed on one hand, to remind citizens of their shared, if long-submerged, Catalan cultural heritage, and on the other, to introduce them to emergent symbolic repertoires from foreign cultural systems long obscured by regime censorship.

At the center of this effort was the concept of the “legible city.”

Maragall believed that the language of architecture and place-making were every bit, if not more powerful, than purely textual communication and hence that the shape and character of the spaces we pass through every day exercise a considerable influence on our patterns of thought, our behaviors, and even on concepts of personal and group identity.

Implied in this approach is the idea that a well-functioning city must, while never striving to impose a deterministic uniformity, nonetheless be able to transmit to its citizens a palpable sense of community and a spatial grammar that facilitates their ability to recognize themselves as sharing concepts of historical and political reality with those around them.

It is an approach that, as the head of Maragall’s architectural brain trust Oriol Bohigas made clear in 1999, runs directly counter to Margaret Thatcher’s idea of cities and nations as a mere grab bags of self-interested individuals.

Is there a risk in this approach? Most certainly. If, for example, the architects of such efforts are not people of balance and restraint, their top-down culture planning can easily devolve into a program of imposed partisan collectivism. And while few leveled this critique at the Barcelona city hall during Maragall’s time in office, it has, I think, often been rightly hurled at the many city officials who have positioned themselves as heirs to his legacy during the last two decades.

In the final analysis, however, critiques such as these ultimately miss the mark. And that’s for a simple reason. No public space is ever free of ideological content imposed, in one degree or another by coercion, by a society’s economic and cultural elites.

For example, today most of us find the classic New England town green to be an elegant and calming place of beauty within our increasingly frenetic lives. This is not to say, however, that it is free of ideological directives. For example, almost all of them have a church, usually from a Protestant denomination, directly adjacent to them. Many also have memorials to those from the town or immediate area who have fallen in wars undertaken by the United States in the course of its history.

While structures such as these do not force anyone to be Protestant or to celebrate wars, at the very least they remind citizens of the historic presence within New England’s decision-making classes of Christian ideals and their belief in the need to sometimes send their young off to wars in defense of what those young are told are the nation’s collective values.

That their basic design is repeated throughout the six New England states shows that they are an integral element of—to use a concept developed by Christopher Alexander—the architectural and spatial “pattern language” of the region, and by extension, the United States as a whole.

One of the rampant horrors of present-day life is the proliferation in our public spaces of what Marc Augé calls Non-Places, which is to say built precincts whose forms do not in any way reference or connect with the human needs of local inhabitants, nor the pattern languages that have guided place-making in that particular region over time.

These sterile and life-sapping spaces are also the result of the decisions of powerful elites who, unlike the shapers and reformers of New England town greens or even Maragall’s still less traditionalist band of architects and city planners, have decided to eschew most if not all esthetic dialogue with the past, and with the general public’s clear preference for harmonious designs that promote the type of casual and spontaneous human interactions that lead to the development of high levels of social trust.

There are many drivers of this proliferation of these Non-Places in our midst. Of these, two come most immediately to mind.

The first is the development (running parallel to similar trends in the visual arts during the second half the 20^th century) of the cult of novelty in architectural design in which the architect’s ability to generate arresting and thus supposedly daring departures from previous ways of creating things came to trump the ideal of generating beauty in the service of communal cohesion and the reinforcement of civic norms and ideals.

The second is the increasing desire of the elites who run our now heavily financialized economic system to pursue the returns on their investments in the most stringent possible ways, regardless of the often-considerable deleterious effects such campaigns of extreme profit maximization might have upon less immediately tangible civic values.

In short, why build a beautiful building or a development that takes the historic vernacular of the place and uses it in creative new ways—thus providing its citizens with an enhanced sense of rootedness, social comity, and optimism about their ability to confront the future with confidence—when you can “fly in” a generic design with no relation to the surrounding reality that can be cheaply and thus more profitably built?

In the course of my lifetime, for example, I have watched the slow liquidation of New England’s extremely rich architectural idiom as companies such as Toll Brothers imposed their generic if also vaguely Mid-Atlantic designs upon the residential construction industry in the region. Another example of the hundred that could be adduced is how mobile homes came to essentially cancel out most efforts to preserve or revitalize traditional forms of rural architecture in eastern North Carolina.

So, where does the extremely rapid, if seldom addressed, proliferation of urban graffiti across the Western world fit into all this?

When I raise the question with young urban dwellers whose intellects I respect, I am told that the markings we now see all over our public spaces are a healthy reaction to precisely the nihilistic and anti-human place-making generated by the novelty-seeking architects and profit-obsessed developers mentioned above.

I am told that by “tagging” public spaces with their art the dispossessed young are not only expressing their wholly justified rage at the current state of society and their refusal to be disappeared by the establishment but also injecting new ideas into long-stultified public debates. In short, urban graffiti is, in their eyes, part of a brave effort to take back the city and begin unraveling the unjust social system in which they find themselves trapped.

It’s a compelling story. And one I might even be inclined to believe were it not for a glaring problem, one that it shares with so much of the contemporary art and architecture that has contributed to the sense of alienation felt by the taggers and their generational fans. It badly fails the “legibility test” as the vast majority of it is unable to transmit any broadly comprehensible symbolic, intellectual, or ideological message to those forced to look at it daily.

It is, rather, the visual equivalent of an endless recorded loop of inarticulate adolescent groans, whines, and inside jokes emanating at high volume from loudspeakers posted at every 50 feet along each of our city blocks.

Do our young urbanite graffiti artists and those who silently accept their interventions in our public spaces really believe that they can fight the materialistically induced nihilism of previous generations with an even more narrow and hermetic nihilism of their own?

If they do, they are sadly mistaken.

I have always opposed affirmative action and its sibling DEI for what to me is a very logical reason, but one that nonetheless seems to vex otherwise intelligent people when I share it with them.

It is this: you cannot heal social ills rooted in the practice of organizing people into supposedly immutable categories that allegedly correspond to varying degrees of essential human value by doubling and tripling down on the practice of organizing people on the basis of supposedly immutable categories attached to supposedly essential quotients of human value. It’s the social equivalent of trying to control someone’s diabetes by putting them on a candy-rich diet.

We can apply the same logic to the process of preserving and revitalizing the life of our cities. You cannot solve the problem of social nihilism with an even more opaque onslaught of social nihilism in the form of graffiti and other anti-civic practices.

Yes, it may be true that older generations deserve much of the blame for the current state of our cities. Driven by their often-headlong pursuit of wealth and besotted with dubious presumptions about the inexorable nature of human progress, Boomers and Generation Xers became openly disdainful of history and the basic lessons on civility and place-making contained in its archives. And this has left many of their children adrift, and with a burning but often suppressed sense of anger at them.

The solution, it would seem, lies in the willingness of younger generations of urbanites to escape the jail of device-induced contemporaneity in which so many of them find themselves and engage mindfully with history.

Were they to do so they find out that they are by no means the first group of young people left to clean up a mess left to them by their forebears, an insight that would immediately release them from their often-intense feelings of victimhood.

The careful study of history would also provide them with examples of how previous generations born into cultural barrenness learned to stop acting out in puerile ways, or tolerating those that do, and got on with the essential task of consciously establishing the parameters of what Ortega y Gasset, looking out on a fast-crumbling Spanish civic culture in 1921, called “a suggestive common project” for their culture.

Hell, if they were to read widely enough, they might even stumble upon, and gain inspiration from, the story of how a dictator in the 20^th century did everything in his power to sever a great Mediterranean city from its proud culture and its thousand-year-old language, and how the children born in the middle of that campaign of erasure brought that rich legacy back into being, not through whining, groaning, and petty acts of defacement, but by clarifying their social ideals and making them available to the broader public through conscious acts of place-making.

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