Semi-detached humanity
Christopher Booker
Imagine a cartoon film showing the evolution of an idealised European city over the past six hundred years — a kind of animated version of Osbert Lancaster's °rap!' flete Revisited. Stage one shows our city in the late Middle Ages — at its centre, visible from Miles off, a gigantic church or cathedral, rising over a heterogeneous huddle of timber-framed and stone houses, each one different from all the rest, within city walls. Stage two, taking us from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth Century, shows the city still dominated by its. great cathedral — but now surrounded With impressive buildings of a new kind, the palaces of the nobility, the houses of rich merchants, built and laid out in har onious order and proportion — their lines predominantly classical and horizontal (in contrast to the soaring verticals 0f the old Gothic). Stage three shows the City exploding outwards as never before, In a tide of mean brick 'artisan-dwellings' Punctuated by vast new factory buildings an.c1 railway stations — the squalid mess of nineteenth-century industrialism. Stage four, the early twentieth century, sees the line between town and country finally blurred altogether, as endless rows of little suburban boxes string out along the new arterial roads. Stage five, the late twentieth century, sees vast areas of the old inner city razed to the ground, to be replaced by gigantic new lumps in steel, glass and reinforced concrete — office blocks, the vast towers and slabs of the iflew _housing estates, shopping centres, multi-storey car parks, urban motorways — while carefully preserved islands of Older buildings look increasingly toy-like and unreal, memories of another age and a quite different kind of society. Three things may strike us about this Process. The first, as I remarked in my first article last week, is how we may read in the changing image of the city What men, at each stage, have found most 'inPortant to them. From the first stage, We may read that here was a society in which men were ultimately bound together by their colossally powerful ,sense of a transcendent centre to all their lives, symbolised by the aspiring verticals of incomparably the largest building in their city. In the second stage, the dominant power became secular — hori Ofltal — governed by wealth, but a wealth informed by a sublime sense of order, ProPortion, harmony and all those aesthetic and intellectual values which inspired Post-Renaissance Europe. In the third stage, the driving force became desire for wealth of a new kind — that produced by the technological power unleashed by the industrial revolution, whose conscious aim was to make men materially com-fortable on an unprecedented scale, but which less consciously expressed itself firstly in the increasing disharmony of man's 'conquest of nature', and secondly in the boundless misery created by the herding of millions of human beings into the factories and slums which seemed the inescapable price that had to be paid for such progress. Stage four, the dawning of 'the century of the Common Man' and of 'property-owning democracy', was driven by a new kind of individualism in which each citizen should have the same equal right to the same identically individual easy life within the unprecedented privacy of his own suburban box, or behind the front door of his own cell in a block of flats. Stage five, in our own time, has seen the re-emergence of the colossal, in a new, quite different guise — in the architecture of 'mass-man', for a society dedicated to equality and the enjoyment of material ease on a scale which even the Victorians could never have dreamed of. The great anthill office blocks and housing estates, the air-conditioned shopping malls and multi-storey car parks express the ultimate conformity of a society of millions of atomised individuals, held together by little more than their ego-needs and abstract group-loyalties which are in turn only expressions of the collectivised ego. Hardly surprisingly, the predominant visual impression of such a society (one in which, ironically, 'planning' is supposed to have played a larger part than ever before) is that of huge, mechanically-patterned architectural lumps scattered about willy-nilly in a sea of chaos.
A second point I would like to make, particularly for those who may have been following some of my recent articles in these columns, is the way in which the evolution of our idealised city mirrors the Platonic cycle laid out in Book VIII of The Republic. The first stage, in which an organically hierarchical society is flanked round one supreme, transcendent 'centre', corresponds to Plato's 'monarchic state'. The second, postRenaissance stage, in which the dominant values become secular in its highest form (aesthetic and intellectual harmony), and in which the chief buildings are aristocratic and civic in inspiration, corresponds to Plato's 'oligarchic state'. As this becomes corrupted into its later stages, where growing wealth brings a growing desire for purely material comfort, and where the new recruits to the oligarchic class have lost any sense of obligation and become mere ego-driven exploiters, we see the emergence of the ninteenth-century city, a supreme expression of both the grandeur and the horror, the 'light' and the 'dark' sides of capitalistic materialism. The fourth stage, that of suburban 'semi-detached humanity', corresponds architecturally to that Platonic 'democratic state' where every man is to be both individual and equal — that is to say identical (defined in strictly external terms) to everyone else. Stage five, the city after Le Corbusier, represents, as I have argued before, the arrival of the final Platonic stage — 'tyranny' where the now ultimately atomised individual citizens are 're-societised' in vast, anthill agglomerations, whether they be housing estates or office blocks. Appropriately it is only at this stage that the old symbol of organic social unity round a transcendent centre, the cathedral, is finally submerged beneath the new chaotic skyline of skyscrapers.
My third point about this process is that it represents a paradigm of the hierarchy of faculties (or if you like 'levels of consciousness') in the human psyche. At his highest and most 'whole', man finds sovereignty in knowledge of a divine, transcendent 'centre', around which alone can everything else be seen in true perspective and proportion. If he loses his awareness of that centre to his life, he may still for a long time retain the impress of harmony and proportion, through his intellectual and aesthetic' faculties. He may retain his spirit, while losing his soul. But as 'man becomes the measure of all things', so is there an increasing tendency for him to sink down to that material level of consciousness which seeks physical comfort as its highest end, and inevitably separates him increasingly from all around him, including nature. As he discovers his own unique individuality, at the price of losing his sense of the whole, so does he pass ever further under the tyranny of the purely material. There is no transcendent, no eternity, no divine whole — the chief end of man is to enjoy the only life he has, his own. And so we end up with a society which rightly presents to men, through its office blocks, its shopping centres, its television towers and sports stadiums, what have become their highest ends — the getting and spending of money, the enjoyment of leisure and the celebration of the body. It is no accident that the spiritual aspirations of the Socialist world are now almost entirely focused on sport, on the triumphs of the body — not as the celebration of some transcendent whole, but in order to win as many gold medals as possible. The part has finally been set over the whole, in every respect. It cannot be said that our own societies are not going the same way.
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