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Against cities
(2)Yesterday, not long after I made my post about Berry’s Farming: A Hand Book, I sat down to read in Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (Oxford Univ Press, 1964). Marx was discussing a lecture given by Emerson in 1844. Titled “The Young American,” it laid out a pastoral vision that could be almost a gloss on some of Berry’s work. Except that Emerson saw “[t]he industrial revolution as a railway journey in the direction of nature” whereas Berry has the wisdom of hindsight.
Certain large features of the society Emerson envisages become apparent when he turns, a moment later, from praise of machines to the denunciation of cities. The new technology is welcome, but cities would come between Americans and the other major source of the rising national spirit, the “bountiful continent,” the land itself. He refers to the New World as “our garden,” a hemisphere Columbus was encouraged to seek, he says, because the “harmony of nature” required its existence. But what has become of that initial yearning for harmony? As compared with Europe, Emerson is forced to admit, the American scene in 1844 is not pleasing to the eye. It includes few beautiful gardens, either public or private, and the countryside as a whole — land and buildings regarded as one — looks poverty-stricken, plain, and poor. . . . concerned about the . . . disturbing fact, contends that the cities are at fault. Cities, he tells the audience of Bostonians, drain the country of the flower of youth, the best part of the population, and leave the countryside (in the absence of a landed aristocracy) to be cultivated by an inferior, irresponsible class. He therefore would arrest the growth of cities, and he urges support of “whatever events,” as he puts it, “shall go to disgust men with cities and infuse into them the passion for country life and country pleasures . . . .” One such desirable “event,” strangely enough, is the development of machine power. Like Thomas Jefferson, Emerson is confident that under native conditions science and technology can be made to serve a rural idea. [Marx, pp. 235-236]
My apologies for not quoting the direct source, that is Emerson. You can read the lecture at this link.
Leo Marx
2 Responses to “Against cities”
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Shalom Sherry,
These are issues I wrestle with.
I admire Berry for both his writing and is choice to live the life of the gentleman farmer, even if he grows tobacco.
I admire Barbara Kingsolver for both her writing and her decision to live a local life as chronicled in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
I’ve never lived or worked full-time on a farm, but I have lived in farm country and I can’t even get enthusiastic about cutting the grass. In many ways I’m an urban dweller who needs his city, or at least a life where I get to shop for, rather than grow, the food I eat.
I get the disconnect there, and I do ponder why it exists in me, but it is there.
I think the problem is not one of rural vs. urban, but rather the much simpler challenge of too many us. If we were to reduce the population of the United States by a factor of 10 — a population of 30 million instead of 300 million — much of our environmental and societal problems associated with urban life, just would exist.
If we were to reduce the population of the World by the same factor — from 7 billion to 700,000,000 — many of the same problems would be similarly reduced.
We are the virus infecting the planet Earth.
B’shalom,
Jeff
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sherry May 11th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Hey Jeff — thank you for serious thought on this question and for sharing it here. The whole of Leo Marx’s book deals with this duality in American mythology — the belief, as Jefferson said, that all morality lies with those who work the earth and that somehow our new continent was going to be the salvation of the old European cities, especially the newly industrialized ones, over against this great enthusiasm for machines and technology.
The duality is still with us.
I love cities. The very word civilization derives from the Latin cives for citizen, a member of the city. I love museums and universities and good book stores and good restaurants and theater.
I also love the country. I like having space and quiet and a garden. But I don’t look to my farmer neighbors for art and literature.
I try to buy locally and be a good local citizen and live sustainably but I’m afraid globalization is a genie we’ll not put back in the bottle. And I’m not sure how much we should want to.
I agree with Berry that we should get away from screens and experience the place where we live directly but I also don’t want to give up my computer and the internet.
In the end, much as I love Berry’s poetry, I think he is a preacher not a seeker.
Emerson, too.
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