Urban Goggles

This paper is an exploration of the modern urban situation, how it differs from the older cities, and the challenges modern urban/suburban civilization poses for Christianity.

All of America, ERH claims, is urbanized by industry, which removes the barriers between city and country. The contrast of factory and suburb has replaced the older contrast of city and village. Though there is no really rural area anymore, “citified humanity” divides time between fast-paced curiosity and slower-paced apathy. These have always been the church’s main opponents: “the hasty, hurried march of time from one blind change to the other, and (2) the tendency to blind repetition, the apathy of mere routine.” Christianity has opposed both “change for the sake of change” and “tradition for the sake of tradition.” In place of these, it has preached a unified time, a single body of time for all men, where God binds times together.

Up to the 19th century, by contrast, the world was divided between the past-oriented, superstitious and repetitive life of the countryside and the faster-paced novelty of city life. These two forms of life balanced each other: “Between sensations of a new character and superstitions of an old type, the old Adam in all of us muddled through. We all are one half the rooted plant and one half the roving animal; for us, the village stressed the vegetative rhythm of the recurrent seasons, the cities procured the acceleration of changes.”

Factory and suburb form a different kind of duality. Suburbs share the more relaxed pace of the older rural world, but the suburb does not have a settled life. Reading habits illustrate: Suburbanites read a lot, but commit themselves to and believe almost nothing of what they read; villagers read only one book, but they believed it thoroughly. Meanwhile, the factory city is no longer a producer of new vital ideas, but is dominated by the profit motive: “Nobody any longer pretends that he is in conscience bound to write as he writes. He eagerly admits that he is going to write what pays.” Publishers provide “every year another creed and another philosophy and another policy.”

Modern urbanized life reverses all the claims of Christianity. ERH illustrates by citing a sentence from Anne Morrow Lindberg (“the flesh had become word”), one from Franz Werfel (“at the end, we shall say that we have created God”) and Huxley’s view that tries to explain the higher (man) by the lower (chemistry). These sentences point to several features of urban culture. First, Lindberg’s sentence goes unprotected, demonstrating that blasphemy has become impossible. Second, each statement reverses the Christian view. Instead of saying that the Word became flesh, Lindberg says that “the human mind is distilled from the body and ascends.” Instead of worshiping God as Creator, we are God’s creators.

Third, each of these statements, he points out, depends on a prior confession of faith. Lindberg’s wit depends on John’s gospel. More, the confessions of faith on which these witty inversions depend are the work of centuries, even millennia. But the wit can invert them in no time: “The exploitation of such gold mines of truth by the city wit takes next to no time” as “the clever mind mints the gold bars of eternal truth into cash.”

Not only does urban culture and urban speech invert Christian faith, but it also denies the reality of singularity. Each of the Christian affirmations is “singular; it has happened once for ever, and if it is true, we all live in this One Word’s Christian Era; if it is not true, there is no hope for peace whatever.” The urban statements are “pluralistic.” This pluralism is safe: “Whenever the human mind has achieved this perversion of direction, it feels safe. From the corner where the lower explains the higher, where flesh becomes the word, where we create God, no orders have to be feared for our free will.” Urban wit dissolves imperatives.

The final result of urban civilization is to form a strange hybrid of the repetitive, superstitious peasant of the countryside and the questing, curious city-dweller: “The new city dweller is a fusion of both these extremes. This city dweller is repetitive like the old peasant and he has brilliant ideas like the former philosophers. The result is that he is a man who repeats sensations. While in former centuries a peasant used to repeat ancient lore and the philosopher created new ideas, the modern city dweller incessantly has one sensation succeed the other in stereotyped repetition. He has the superstition of believing in a breathless chain of daily news.” This, ERH says, is the “superstition of enlightenment.”