Suburbia, redux

Tom at Disputations (which, despite our disagreements, I still recommend as a terrific blog-stop) has commented again on my islands and oases reference to Pope Benedict's statement: that "because there is a consumerist culture that wants to block us from living according to the Creator’s plan, we must have the courage to first create islands and oases, and then great landscapes of Catholic culture in which life follows the design of the Creator."

The whole discussion also surrounds my "critique" of suburbia. Since I've sinned against the virtue of brevity too often, let me see if I can summarize the fundamentals of my stance.


1. When I refer to "suburbia" I am manipulating the culturally significant symbol of "the suburbs" for a convenient reference to the dominant ethos of the culture of death as it is typically instantiated in bourgeois America, with all its attendant parts (i.e. particular practices, typical mindsets, media-influenced values and ideals, usual artifacts, etc.). It seems this ethos is easily and generally recognizable. Since "suburbia" is a kind of universal or general label, it does have shortcomings and failures in application. The symbolic reference "suburbia" is itself not so important; what is, is the cultural ethos and its typical instantiation that I think it refers to, what the Pope calls "a consumerist culture". I do not think this ethos is a disparate collection of heterogeneous fragments flowing from conflicting principles; rather I think that "suburbia" makes sense--it is organically ordered moving logically from shared fundamental principles, and that "the suburbs" are one notable (or infamous) conclusion of this logic. If you think that the culture of death just isn't typically defined and instantiated in America, nor organically ordered, then alright, that's what you need to argue.

2. Seperate from point #1, I also think it is arguable that the suburbs, considered rather, just under the formal object of architecture, is something worth criticizing. This would be an architectural-sociological argument, which could in fact be informed by point #1 (although the argument could rest on purely architectual-aesthetic premises). Such arguments are in fact made by new-urbanists and Wendell Berry types, with which I would largely agree.

3. Apposite Disputations's critique of my heroic islands and oasis argument: analogous to the way St. Thomas calls charity the form of the virtues, and the principle which implicitly contains the whole law--although the principle itself transcends the minimal requirements of any law--and which is epitomized in the counsels (themselves not laws), so too would I view that ideal to which human community is ordered to, that is, the People of God. There is no other ideal or pinciple to which human political life is ordered to. An argument that would claim that human community or political life is only ordered to the temporal/natural, while the counsels are ordered to the supernatural/otherworldly interior life of man, would in my opinion contain a basic confusion of the relationship between the natural and supernatural, and seek to reassert the two-storied view of nature and grace with the concomitant thesis of "pure nature". Every human vocation is to be informed by "the spirit of the counsels", even if they cannot fully partake of thier vowed-actuality (Garrigou-Lagrange said as much) right now; and so too human community must conform to the spirit of the People of God, even if it cannot fully conform to its eschatological reality right now. If you claim that political life, human community, and living infrastructure only concerns man's earthly life and vocation--I reply, I know of no such life and vocation: man in this historical order (and furthermore, the entire cosmos) has only one end and life and vocation to which he is called: the life of the Blessed Trinity, the spousal union of Jesus Christ and his Church.

4. I would resist the identification of "normative" with suburban bourgeois America, with the attendent markers of "mini-van," "sitcom television," "Walmart," "central air," "9 to 5 job," etc. I don't know if there really is such a thing as normative here; rather, it seems to me there are typical styles and choices in a mass-produced consumer culture of media and corporate driven homogeneity. I would call the vocation to marriage and family "normative". Until we can separate the two, and realize that what the culture tells us is "normative" for families is really just their (i.e. the culture's) preference, I don't think the creation of islands and oases can happen. I do think there needs to be some radical re-imagining of what communites and towns, households and family-life can be, unshackled from the stifiling efforts of the media-driven illusion of popular culture that chokes the imagination and limits the possibilites for choice. This is why I point to Catholic Worker, The Lord's Ranch, Family Missions Company, the International Theological Institute, etc.: as an exercise in imagination, not nomisitc prescription. Let me repeat: we need a radical re-imagining of what family life and local community can and should look like according to viable modes, taking into account the environment of a culture that is itself inimical to the realization of authentic family life and local community, and actively attacks and prevents such attempts and re-imaginings with a coordinated and calculated cultural assault down to its most minute forms (e.g. the "Happy-Meal"). The reason I have been such an enthusiastic proponent of Crunchy Cons is precisely because I see it as one example of the kind of re-imagining that is seriously needed today.