Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  The city’s earthly power, founded upon domination (i.e. upon a power balance), comes up against the spiritual power of Elections. The city interferes in the relationship between man and Yahweh. This interference is embodied by the will to power, the engine that drives the universal struggle from which history stems. Every historical being is necessarily God’s rival, for the former is ever an objectivised being. ‘History is objectivisation’, says Berdyaev.498 The Bible presents the metaphysical meaning of history as a transcending one in relation to the objectivised phenomenal universe. It rejects the notion that human purposes depend on the political, meaning upon man himself.

  The city-entity is cursed. ‘The malediction was uttered at the very beginning. It is part of the very being of the city, having been inscribed into the very fabric of its history. Due to its origin, structure, separation from the rest, and quest for godhood, the city is a cursed place. Through its development, every city inherits this malediction and fosters it; it is one of the fundamental building blocks of any city’.

  All builders are sons of Cain, beginning with Nimrod, the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord’ (Gen. 10:8),499 i.e. the great conqueror. The Scriptures credit him symbolically with the construction of Babylon, Nineveh, Akkad, Calneh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen.

  The city is the embodiment of man’s pride. Nineveh declared: ‘I am unique, and there is none other beside me’ (Zeph. 2:15). On their part, the inhabitants of Babel exclaimed: ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, so that we may make a name for ourselves’.500 That is when Yahweh expresses his hatred for ‘brick burners’ and responds: ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech’ (Gen. 11:6–7).

  The Jews were held in captivity in Babylon. In Egypt, the Pharaoh took advantage of them for the construction of the cities of Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11). Later on, Yahweh would condemn Nineveh, Damascus, Tyre, and Gaza (Amos I). The city of Jericho would be destroyed by means of a miracle, with Babylon becoming the focus of abhorrence. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah would simply be razed to the ground. As for the Apocalypse, it announces the fall of Rome. Each and every time, the cities’ defeat represents the humiliation of the great and the belittlement of the powerful.

  It is considered to be a good and holy deed to condemn cities to ‘the ban’ (Numbers 21:2).501 In Hebrew, the masculine noun used when referring to the ‘city’ also means ‘enemy’ in the spiritual sense of the word.

  ‘The prophets target all cities with doom, in a display of incredible constancy and persistence. There is an abundance of texts on the topic, and the final judgement remains unaltered, regardless of whether the cities are friendly or hostile. If there has ever been any formal unity in the prophecies, this is indeed it! Yet this is a judgement that comes from God, meaning a matter that concerns the relationship between God and the city. […] In order to comprehend the history of cities, one must take into account the malediction that weighs heavily upon them; a malediction which, throughout the Scriptures, is expressed with the following words: “‘I shall destroy’, said the Lord”’.

  Babylon symbolises all cities. ‘All cities are comprised and synthesised in it (Daniel 3 and 4; Apocalypse 14 and 18). It is truly the prime example of a city and the scale by which all other cities are measured. When God’s wrath is unleashed, it is the very first city to be stricken. And when this occurs, all other cities are stricken through it. Everything that is said of Babylon actually concerns cities as a whole. Just like all other cities, Babylon lies at the centre of civilisation. It is to the city’s benefit that commerce is practiced; it is within it that industry is developed; it is to serve its interests that fleets sail the seas; it is within it that both luxury and beauty thrive; and it is there that power arises’.

  The establishment of Yahweh’s reign thus implies the ruin of all proud cities, each of which acts as a challenge defying a jealous god. ‘The city shall no longer be inhabited, and no longer shall it accommodate any men. This sentence is the true leitmotiv of every word uttered in connection to the city. […] It is for all cities to hear that the echo of this severance resounds, a severance that strips the city of all raison d’être and through which man himself is freed of the city (see Jeremiah 50:13 and Isaiah 13:9)’. In the Apocalypse, the fall of Babylon triggers that of ‘the cities of all nations’.

  Our being condemned to city dwelling is part of our being condemned to history. Just as man must live ‘in sin’, he must also inhabit the city. It shall be so until the Day of Judgement, when Yahweh once again says: ‘Come out of Babylon, my people!’

  It is then that shall be established the sole city desired by Yahweh, the ‘Jerusalem of the heavens’, which acts as the antithesis to all other cities and shall witness the return of mankind (or part of it, at least) to pre-Cain Eden. ‘For what God wants is to separate man from the city’, says Mr Jacques Ellul. This separation would involve a return to the nomadic state that preceded the Neolithic revolution.

  ‘Subsequently, it is Abraham — the nomad who abandoned the city (of Ur) — and his descendants that would be entrusted with the mission of denying and rejecting from within every possible form of post-Neolithic civilisation, a civilisation whose very existence perpetuates the memory of a revolt against Yahweh’ (as stated in the previously mentioned article).

  In the ancient Hebraic society, this nomadic vocation would primarily be embodied by the gerim (a term which, incidentally, is used in the Bible to refer to the nomadism of the patriarchs), whose life is a long peregrination (magur).502 It is amongst them that the very first Rechabite sectarians would be recruited during the 9th century BC, at a time when nomadism would no longer be considered a simple way of life, but rather an effective means of safeguarding the principles of the Covenant.

  Among the gerim, one finds the Levites, a caste which, upon returning to Canaan, defined itself as a ‘landless tribe’ and continued to pursue the ideal of detachment and the rejection of a history that seemed to have triumphed once the second Temple had been destroyed.

  As specified by Mr André Neher,503 ‘by refusing to have a land of their own, the Levites simultaneously rejected the Canaanite civilisation, which was essentially sedentary. The economic life of Canaan was founded upon agriculture and commerce. […] However, the Levites did not ‘Canaanise’ themselves. They were the only ones among the Hebrews not to indulge in peasantry, as the other Hebrews had done upon their arrival to Canaan, and the only ones who never indulged in commerce, as the Hebrews would at a later point, once the wealthiest parts of the country had submitted to them as well’ (L’essence du prophétisme,504 Calmann-Lévy, 1972).

  It was Ernest Renan505 who had previously written: ‘The Yahwist feels a kind of hatred for civilisation. In his eyes, every step forward upon the path of what we would term progress constitutes a crime; a crime that is followed by immediate punishment. Our civilisation’s punishment is embodied by labour and the dividedness of mankind. The efforts of the mundane, profane, monumental and artistic culture of Babel is the archetypal crime’ (Histoire du people d’Israël, vol. 1).506

  The Transformation and ‘Production’ of Space

  Thirty-five centuries later, it was Marx’s turn to affirm that ‘the punishment of civilisation is embodied by the labour and dividedness of mankind’; Marxist thought was developed in accordance with a traditional urban model. For the author of the Capital, urban space is that of the archetypal ‘social crime’. He, too, considered the great city to be the setting for man’s essential antagonisms.

  In 1845, Engels wrote: ‘The great cities are the hearths of the workers’ movement. The city is where the workers began pondering their situation and struggle and where the opposition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie first manifested itself’. He then a
dded in his Anti-Dühring (1878): ‘With the great cities, our civilisation has bequeathed to us a legacy that will require a large amount of time and effort to be eliminated. And yet, they must indeed be eliminated, even if this proves to be a long-term endeavour’.

  The projections of the Marxist theory into a rural environment were only made possible through perilous intellectual gymnastics. And the latter cannot be said to have been crowned with success.

  In La pensée marxiste et la ville,507 Mr Henri Lefebvre, a neo-Marxist theoretician himself, examines the ‘urban problematic in the framework of historical materialism’. It is a subject that he is highly familiar with, having published numerous works on the topic, including, in particular, Le droit à la ville508 (Anthropos, 1968), Du rural à l’urbain509 (Anthropos, 1970), and Révolution urbaine510 (Gallimard, 1970). He, likewise, regards the city not only as a historical category in and of itself, but as the very setting of class division and struggle. He writes that the history of the city is, in fact, that of dialectical materialism and the embodiment of history plain and simple.

  What Marx had analysed was, above all, the emerging ‘global cities’; which is why he believed that the revolution would take place in the most industrialised countries, whose urban concentrations were the highest. These hopes of his were belied by the facts. The city has become ‘the headquarters and instrument of neo-capitalism’ (Lefebvre). There is nothing that heralds the ‘withering away of the state’ (not in the sense understood by Marx, at least). The ‘Marxist project’ was not followed, therefore, by any of the desired ‘excesses’, and Mr Lefebvre finds himself wondering why.

  He avoids having to deal with the issue by introducing a new piece of data into the analysis. Productive forces, he says, have reached a point where they ‘produce’ space by transforming it: ‘Space is not just discovered and occupied, but transformed to such an extent that its “source material”, meaning nature, is threatened by this very domination, which is not an appropriation of any kind’, he writes. He claims that unexpected contradictions result from this development, such as the one between globally ‘produced’ space and the latter’s ‘fragmentation as a result of the capitalistic production relations’. Mr Lefebvre considers these discrepancies to be extremely positive and pins all his hopes on them, going as far as to declare that, should he be mistaken, he would be compelled to ‘desist from both Marx and Marxism’.

  Moving on to a different context, the same pattern is encountered with psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, according to whom ‘the history of the city is that of its inhabitants’ egotism’. In his eyes, the modern city is a predominant expression of the ‘instinct of death’.

  Global Cities

  In The Decline of the West (Gallimard, 1948), Oswald Spengler outlined with infinitely greater accuracy the evolution of the city from the smallest of towns to the ‘global city’.

  The difference between small towns and cities is not limited to their sole respective size. A small town is not essentially different from the countryside. Established around the market, it represents the point of intersection between a certain number of rural interests. It has ties to the soil and is dependent on ‘nature’, whose habits and rhythms it adopts.

  As far as the ‘city of culture’ — meaning the traditional type of city — is concerned, nature is, on the contrary, blatantly dominated, both from an economic perspective and from a political one. The city thus transforms into a small, autonomous society, one that is in a state of constant evolution in relation to the prevailing milieu. It turns into the collective subject of its inhabitants’ history. The relationship between the city and the countryside thus becomes analogous to the one between society and ‘nature’. It is in this regard that urban societies are entirely historical, contrasting with rural societies, which are rooted in repetition (with the countryside playing the indispensable role of a potential human reserve destined to modernise itself progressively in cities — while being simultaneously replaced).

  Soon enough, however, the ‘city of culture’ spreads. It blooms in the suburbs, which, little by little, absorb the countryside. People’s relation with nature ceases to be dialectical and becomes, instead, sterilising. The rural world is emptied, not having had enough time to renew itself. In parallel, city governance becomes ever more burdensome and bureaucratic, as organic forms are replaced by geometric and rigid ones. Anonymity becomes the rule, and the individual finds himself stripped of all the means that would allow him to durably define himself in relation to his own environment.

  Thus emerges the ‘global city’, a city which is either subject to the power of the technocrats or that of imperial officials, depending on the era. According to Spengler, its emergence corresponds to the stage of cultural ‘petrification’.

  He writes: ‘Through the concept of the province, these gigantic few cities dispel and smother, in all civilisations, the entire landscape that once gave birth to their culture. […] They become the petrified history of an organism’.

  ‘The global cities of the Han era and those of the Maurya dynasty in ancient India were once endowed with identical geometric shapes. The global cities of the Euro-American civilisation are far from having reached the peak of their evolution. I can already visualise the time when urban cities housing 10 to 20 million inhabitants will be built’, he adds.

  It is this phase that we have now come to.

  All modern states are currently facing the same problem: that of channelling the growth of major cities without generating any harmful effects upon the requirements of social life or their own development. In this field, it is pragmatism and short-sightedness that have thus far prevailed. It is no longer possible for cities to thrive of their own accord these days; and there is no shortage of highly futuristic proposals. The solutions, however, are not merely a matter of technology, planning and ‘balanced metropoles’. On this level, New York’s example is food for thought: the city’s failure is that of a certain method of urban organisation and populisation.

  The Second Industrial Revolution

  Contrary to a widely accepted notion, urbanisation is not solely due to demographic growth, but, above all, to economic mechanisms that are initially implemented within the industry and then as part of increasing tertiary employment and the quest for superior living standards. It is also the result of historical traditions.

  This has been proven true in France, where the Parisian agglomeration enjoys the highest density in all of Europe, while our country’s population is barely more than a third of the combined populations of Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium (ninety-two inhabitants per square kilometre compared to 241).

  The first industrial revolution required a high workforce concentration. As for the second one, it should enable habitat redeployment. In the US, the ‘city centre’ exodus has been ongoing for several decades. The population is experiencing more rapid growth in non-urban zones compared to urban ones. In the latter, the city population is on the decrease, while that of the suburbs is actually rising; and the larger the population of city centres is, the greater this decrease.

  Architect Xavier Arsène-Henry (Notre ville,511 Mame, 1969) acknowledges the fact that ‘the dream of most Frenchmen is to own their own individual house’. In all developed countries, access to individual property has greatly contributed to the ‘de-proletarianisation’ of popular classes. And yet, this does not prevent Mr Bernard Oudin, author of Plaidoyer pour la ville,512 from waging war upon the ‘myth of the single-family home’ and that of a ‘green space at all costs’. He contrasts this ideal with that of the ‘individual cell, which preserves, more efficiently than a flat ever could, each person’s isolation and intimacy, with the understanding that, owing to the narrow space that they share, these cells remain closely interdependent within a collective whole’.

  As an example of this, he mentions the work of Israeli architect Moshe Sadfie and the ‘holiday villages’ of Club Med. This is what some experts
refer to as the ‘neo-Kasbah’ style, he says. A style that is rather easy to resist, I must say.

  In Cities on the Move (Payot, 1972), historian Arnold Toynbee announced the advent of the ‘Oecumenopolis’, which, in his view, will require no more than half a century to spread across most of the inhabited world.

  In the preface to Michel Ragon’s Cités de l’avenir513 (Planète, 1967), Mr Jean Fourastié proclaimed, on the contrary, that ‘Paris must never become a combination of Los Angeles and Notre-Dame, nor Athens a union of Toronto and the Acropolis’. And he was right.

  ***

  Sans feu ni lieu. Signification biblique de la grande ville,514 an essay by Jacques Ellul. Gallimard, 312 pages.

  La pensée marxiste et la ville, an essay by Henri Lefebvre. Casterman, 155 pages.

  Plaidoyer pour la ville, an essay by Bernard Oudin. Laffont, 252 pages.

  L’homme et la ville,515 an essay by Henri Laborit. Flammarion, 215 pages.

  Psychanalyse et urbanisme,516 an essay by Alexander Mitscherlich. Gallimard, 208 pages.

  Nations and Cities, an essay by Lloyd Rodwin. Denoël, 430 pages.

  ***

  The Ambiguities of Ecology

  ‘The earth has become an enormous waste bin.’

  Following Jean Dorst (La nature dénaturée),517 Günther Schwab (Der Tanz mit dem Teufel),518 Barry Commoner (Making Peace with the Planet), and Gordon Rattray Taylor (The Doomsday Book: Can the World Survive?), it is Mr Edouard Bonnefous, the seventy-year-old former minister and member of the Institute, that now sounds the alarm. ‘A humanity severed from nature and deprived of the Earth’s resources could never survive. By systematically defiling his own environment and planet and threatening, through various kinds of aggression, his own natural surroundings, the man of the 20th century acts in a most reckless manner’, he writes.