by Joel Garreau
The belief in the inevitability of progress, Nisbet believed, took body blows when people representing every conceivable ideology stopped believing one or more of the five premises that were its underpinnings:
• That the past had value. Those who stopped believing this argued that ignoring or eradicating the past was an acceptable, even a desirable, aspect of progress.
• That life itself in all its manifestations, had unerasable value. Those who turned away from this idea were willing to accept the notion that loss of life was an acceptable cost for progress.
• That reason alone, and the scientific knowledge that can be gained from it, was inherently worthy of faith. Those who stopped believing this no longer accepted that the Cartesian method of logic, in isolation, could reveal all important truth.
• That economic and technological flowering was unquestionably worthwhile. People who stopped believing this gave up the faith that if Cartesian logic produced it, and it was turned into a product—for example, mustard gas—it must be good.
• That Western civilization was noble, even superior to its alternatives.
The final, resounding disconnect between the advances of the Machine and the idea of progress came with the atomic bomb. That is the point, Siegfried Giedion noted, from which the technological imperative “If possible, then necessary,” rang hollow. That is the point at which it became ineluctably clear that what we could do was by no means the same thing as what we should do.
Nisbet, in fact, observed that among the “clerisy”—that mar velous word he used for the priesthood of our self-appointed intelligentsia—the idea of progress is now a dead letter. And there is no question that any serious expression of long-term optimism today is obliged to carry some awful asterisk. Such as: assuming there is no nuclear war, no planetary environmental meltdown, no economic debacle, no universal cataclysm.
But while most people are all too aware of these dire possibilities, it is not clear to me that the spirit of progress has been rejected by most Americans. An optimist has been defined as someone who is still engaged in the problem. By that standard, it would appear self-evident that America remains a nation of optimists. We are battling like demons over the most basic ways we should organize our lives. This is not the behavior of people who are resigned to their fate; it is the behavior of people with a touching faith in their enduring ability to change the world—for the better. I think that our most knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling fights are those over competing visions of the Promised Land. That is why the noise is so loud.
The problem, of course, is the way the armies in this millennial battle fail to recognize its outlines in the arguments of their opposition. Return to that unexpected moment when the bulldozer is spied turning the virgin soil, and how various people may react to that sight.
Those who unquestionably see in such technology the progress of civilization are also likely to believe it obvious beyond challenge that “more” is better, that “growth” is good, and that “change” means progress. Their position is a time-honored one. As now we swim in our sea of technology, it is almost impossible to imagine attitudes before. But in 1776, James Boswell described the moment of epiphany when he first understood the Machine. In Soho he visited a factory where a mighty steam engine was in production in all its vastness and intricacy. He wrote that he would never forget the account of its maker, the “iron chieftain”: “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.”
Boswell found the spectacle exhilarating, and Leo Marx noted that in so doing he anticipated America’s response precisely. During the dawn of the Industrial Age here, in the first half of the 1800s, America became the wonder of the world. It doubled and then redoubled its population. Pushing south and west, it quadrupled its territory, settling, annexing, buying, or conquering land claimed by Britain, Spain, France, Mexico, and the Indians. During those fifty years, the gross national product increased sevenfold. No other country could match even one of these boasts. Such growth was seen as intrinsic to the very idea of America; in fact, its Manifest Destiny. It was accepted as an emblem of God’s special favor. The Bible itself seemed to demand this view. Did not the first book of Moses, Genesis, enjoin man to “be fruitful, and multiply,” to “subdue … the earth” and “have dominion … over every living thing”?
What other mandate could you conceivably need?
In this view, land untouched by man was “vacant” or “waste,” and those words came fully loaded. Vacant meant empty, a vessel useless until filled. Waste was immoral. The creation of wealth and jobs and comfort and leisure was not seen as easy or automatic. Growth was progress—though there was more than a little schizophrenia surrounding that. On the one hand, the mantra of the men of the Machine was “You can’t stop progress.” On the other hand, they deep-down feared that might not be true. They worried that if people didn’t pursue material progress totally, the abyss of want and depression did await.
This vision of progress became especially prevalent in the years after World War II, when more and newer homes for all Americans seemed beyond question a social good. When we had the slightest hope of income beyond our needs for food and warmth, what did we instantly spend it on? Those homes which maybe had a little yard, some place for the kids to play. On a quarter acre or so? A place that could be made into—a Garden? What more primal demonstration does one need?
Thus did we start our push out past the old downtowns, out into the landscape we invented to further our pursuit of happiness: that suburbia which is now culminating in Edge City. We lit out once again, in the words of Huckleberry Finn, for the Territory.
And on that very ground across which we sprawled we have met the other great countervailing American idea in what was good: the belief in the primal restorative power of the undefiled land. In that idea, the land has value in and of itself, with no crass calculations of how it may be “used.” It should not all be pro faned; it should not all be “spoiled,” as people use that interesting word, by the works of man.
It’s the battle we fight to this day. The sound of the clash echoes backward and forward for centuries.
Our yearning for a simpler and more natural life can be phrased in the most positive of ways: Americans are looking for a new unity in their lives, a way to bring themselves together, to avoid the fragmentation that they perceive all around them, from drugs, to bad schools, to teenage pregnancy; they seek a connection that brings the American centuries, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first, into some kind of focus.
Yet it seems clear that we are sadly lacking that toward which we so clearly grope—a model that integrates all our apparent contradictions.
The circumstances surrounding the implosion of another nineteenth-century system of thought may be instructive in this regard.
Communism was premised on the belief that the exploitative conditions of industrialism created by early capitalism were hopelessly contradictory—beyond mere reform. But as we look around us in the late twentieth century, we see that, though the social-democratic West may not have achieved nirvana, some forms of capitalism seem attractive to a whole lot of people.
Now comes the question: If industrialism did turn out to be reformable, can we now resolve the contradictions in our new, post-Industrial, Information Age world? Can we now turn to reshaping our new cities?
I think the test of that is going to be how we come to view the land.
There are those in sympathy with Cassandra who I believe are well meant. These are the people who grimly count on a cataclysm that they hope will bring us to our senses before it is too late—a new Great Depression, global warming, the immolation of the Middle East. As prediction—who knows?—betting on calamity may well be the odds-on proposition.
But I have difficulty conjuring up a sequence that forces us onto the path of righteousness. I do not see how we are going to be deflected from our current ways simply for lack of naked power, at least in time to do us any good. With the technologie
s at our command, we can do virtually anything we want, if we’re willing to pay the price. The question is not what we can do. The question is whether we will come to any kind of agreement on what we should do—in our everyday world.
If one believes in progress, as I think most Americans do—if one accepts the notion that humanity is redeemable precisely because we do have the capacity to learn from our astoundingly abundant mistakes—one wonders whether there may not be less drastic ways than Armageddon of arriving at resolutions.
I’ve often thought you can tell a great deal about a civilization by what it protests. You can tell what it believes it has far too much of.
In 1910, five young Italian painters issued a publication that would become known as The Manifesto of the Futurists. It was an emotional, political, cultural, and esthetic document regarded as significant because it proclaimed the sensibility that created modern art.
In part, it read:
We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless, and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues, and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new, and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.
Comrades, we tell you now that the triumphant progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable, changes which are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future.”
It is obvious what the Futurists thought they had too much of. It was the cold dead weight of the past.
It’s odd; now it is their words that sound antique. I’ve often wondered what the Futurists would make of our drive today for historic preservation. I suspect they would think us nuts. Completely out of our minds. But that is the side on which one finds today’s passionate young. They lie in front of the bulldozers to keep old buildings, old trees—keep, even, old battlefields.
What are we to make of that? I think the logical conclusion to be drawn from our protests is that what most people now think we have too much of is the new. Change comes at such a rate that we search for refuge from the impermanence of our lives. We are weary of returning to places we care about and finding them changed beyond recognition. We are weary of the complexity and the chaos and the time pressures of our lives. Maybe the problem is that what we are seeking is a higher sense of order, and what we are mourning, when we think of decline, is our lack of anchors.
We know this is not the way we once lived. We resent it. And we lash out, rebelling particularly against those self-proclaimed and self-congratulatory agents of change whose work is the most flamboyant, the least ignorable, those who bring this change at the highest social and emotional cost—the developers.
If that is where our pursuit of progress—in the most genuine sense—is headed, our pursuit of the future inside ourselves, our American pursuit of happiness, then the question is how these contradictions can ever be resolved.
It seems to me that we can start by striving for an understanding, at the most basic level, of how we value something as fundamental as the land.
If we can do that, perhaps we can graduate to working out what some other words mean in our world—words like community, civilization, and soul.
Full disclosure: The lens through which I personally see and report on the world is not all that rare in the late twentieth century, polls show. It is that of the devout agnostic. While it would surprise me not at all if it turned out that there is a larger force in the universe than man, the organized religions I’ve encountered have served only to unnerve me. I report this only to explain that I am made mightily uncomfortable by any assertions that have words like “reverence” in them.
But Robert Nisbet, the esteemed historian and social theorist, did use such concepts as that of the “sacred” in addressing the outlook for our futures.
“What is the future of the idea of progress in the West?” he asked. “Any answer to that question requires answer to a prior question: what is the future of Judeo-Christianity in the West? For if there is one generalization that can be made confidently about the history of the idea of progress, it is that throughout its history the idea has been closely linked with, has depended upon, religion or upon intellectual constructs derived from religion.”
He based his conclusion on the observation that the single most quoted poem in all of English literature is by William Butler Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”; “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
If we genuinely believe that, of course, there is no hope.
If we quote those lines as a warning to ourselves, however, of a future we know we can avoid—and I think that is what we do—therein might be our salvation.
That is why, after all the miles spent reporting this book, I found Nisbet’s conclusion persuasive; that we are going to resolve our differences and push through to higher ground only if we come to an agreement like this: “Only, it seems evident from the historical record, in the context of a true culture in which the core is a deep and wide sense of the sacred are we likely to regain the vital conditions of progress itself and of faith in progress—past, present, and future.”
If in fact we are approaching a turning point in history—a turning point at least as dramatic as the one of 150 years ago that ushered in the Machine Age—perhaps the place to start in redefining ourselves is with our relationship to the land.
If we are to reunite our fragmented worlds, we might see whether there is room for agreement on so basic an idea as what exactly we believe is hallowed ground.
IV
Pilgrim’s Progress: Boom
For we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
—John Winthrop, on board the Arbella, 1630.
TIL HAZEL’S PARTNER, the developer Milt Peterson, remembers precisely when the earth really did move in the pastures of Northern Virginia. It came with the erection of Melpar.
“It was real early, even before the Beltway,” Peterson recalls. It was 1952. An electronics firm with a name like that of a science-fiction creature, Melpar built its headquarters way, way out into the farmland—past Arlington County, past Falls Church, ten miles out from downtown, all the way to Fairfax County. It was surrounded by fields. The planners and builders and politicians and developers of the day were agog. They had never seen anything like it.
“Melpar sat back about four hundred feet from Route 50,” recalls Peterson of the building that was such a departure from those downtown that it stuck in his mind four decades later. “It bought about three times more land than it needed. It had a little pond on the side that had a willow tree. It had its parking in the back and it had a brick front and a flag. There was a big lawn leading up to it. Melpar, like, became a word. You know how a feeling becomes a word? That became what all development should be—Melpar. Everyone said we want Melpar all over here. I mean that’s the only kind of development we wanted. It became, ‘Where can you get more of that Melpar?’ ”
Melpar was an electronics-warfare contractor, so when it built its headquarters, it took its cue from the Pentagon—in more ways than one. The Pentagon—the actual building—remains the world’s archetypal Edge City structure. With a still-astonishing 3.7 million square feet of office space—equivalent to downtown Fort Lauderdale—it attracts twenty-three thousand employees every day. It has four Zip Codes.
Opened in 1942, it gave form to the idea of bringing the most awesome Machine of all time—the American war machine—into a Garden. The Pentagon is surrounded by a lot of lawn. Light colonels fill its myriad jogging trails. It has a yacht basin, trees, and hanging vines. The courtyard in its center is a nice place to catch some lunch-hour sun. Yet the building
is fully oriented toward the transportation technologies of the late twentieth century. It is encircled by parking lots, freeways, and helicopter pads. When the Pentagon was built, the nearest major structure was National Airport. Four decades later, an underground Metro rail station was added.
But that was not what brought the Pentagon to the epitome of Edge City. That came in the late 1980s, when another mega-structure was built just across Interstate 395. It was—yes—a mall. Very flashy, very upscale, the development was called the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City. The advertising got more than a little weird around Christmas. Some found it tough to deal with the whole peace-on-earth, goodwill-to-men routine in a place called Pentagon City.
Be that as it may, in the early 1950s Melpar located itself just as the Pentagon had a decade before—out in the fields in campuslike splendor on a big open highway, suspended between two magnets. The customer that it emulated was in one direction, toward town. On the opposite bearing were all those wonderful new suburban houses that John Cheever would glorify, in which one could “shout in anger or joy without having someone pound on the radiator for silence.” A whole new world was being born.
Of all the breakthroughs of Melpar, what is remembered as something truly different was the brick. The brick on the façade. What daring! You could work where you could feel the breeze, and be in contact with God’s good ground, but not have to work in a tin warehouse or a barn. You could have the sophistication and urbanity of brick just like that of Capitol Hill. Way out here! That the combination was even possible had never occurred to anybody before. It was no less than a vision of a new and better world.