The lengthy history of the liberalism of urban dwellers
Commenter “CatoRenasci” writes:
Consider that urban areas have been more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ (pick an adjective) since time immemorial – at least as far as we have any sort of reliable history: classical writers, both Greek and (especially) Roman often spoke of rural areas as the source of solid republican virtue and the cities as subject to the mob. In more recent times, many of the Founders worried about the cities and praised the (more or less) self-sufficient yeomanry. And, of course, the French Revolution really was a creature of Paris, not of France as a whole. Similarly, most revolutions…
This seems to me to be a basically true observation, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some exceptions. CatoRenasci further notes:
The American Revolution, and perhaps the Glorious Revolution in England which preceded it, and to which it is related, are among the few exceptions…
I’m not so sure whether the driving forces behind the American Revolution could be characterized as wholly rural or urban; it seems as though there was a mix of both. For example, Jefferson and Washington and Madison come to mind as largely rural, Hamilton and Franklin and Adams as urban—but that’s just off the top of my head; I’m not an expert on the life history of all the Founding Fathers.
Yesterday I noted the historical trend of liberalism in American cities when I wrote that quite a few US cities “are more or less lost to conservatism, and have been for a long long time (probably almost always, in the case of New York City and a few others).”
CatoRenasci continues:
I think part of the problem historically is how disconnected the urban dweller is (and it’s far more true now than ever) from the production of the things necessary for urban life: food, clothing, even technology.
Indeed; exactly that. It’s something that the Czech author Milan Kundera has noted, in a quote I’ve used many times but will offer again here. It’s about something he calls “imagology” in a 1990 book of his entitled Immortality:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
Imagology has almost totally replaced reality for many urban dwellers.
Ridiculous post…
Like watching people who dont know about a subject, trying to fake each other into talking about it..
¯\_(?)_/¯
its completely ignorant of key history, and if they know, they are playing you, but if not, they been played and are passing on the mental defect!!!!!!!!
HOW can you apply terms to a history that is absent them?
Why not write about the computer programs of the Egyptians?
Prior to 1600 or so, Urban was latin, or the name of one of 8 popes
the word didnt have much meaning or use until AFTER the revolution
[“characteristic of city life, pertaining to cities or towns,” 1610s (but rare before 1830s)]
the reason is that the first real apartment building that would have people living together tight enough to start using the word was:
Although multiple-unit tenements were being constructed in the 1830s, these were not considered true apartments because the units did not include a private toilet. The “Stuyvesant,” located at 142 East 18th Street and designed by architect Morris Hunt, is generally regarded as the first upscale apartment building in New York. It was built in 1869-1870.
This is the same as the practice of feminists finding feminsits before feminism
yeah, boudica was a feminist… amazons who didnt exist were feminist… etc
its revisionist
Emigration to the New England colonies after 1640 and the start of the English Civil War decreased to less than 1% (about equal to the death rate) in nearly all years prior to 1845.
The rapid growth of the New England colonies (total population ~700,000 by 1790) was almost entirely due to the high birth rate (>3%) and low death rate (<1%) per year
thats not urban..
tons of other things ‘wrong’ with the articles
but since i dont give a rats arse any more
you figure it out… i already know…
besides, its not fun, and who wants to be disliked for it?
ya aint gonna do a thing about a problem your a part of and dont know it.
[brevety is not the soul of wit, its the soul of lingerie]
Artfldgr:
As I’ve said many times in the past, make your points without all the insults. In the future, I may just unapprove any comment that constitutes a harangue of insults.
It is very possible to make whatever point you are making without the insults. The facts stand for themselves without the insults.
This is NOT just a rule for you. It is a general rule about insults on the blog.
What’s more, your point here is difficult to understand. The distinction between urban and rural (in other words, between city life and country life) is of great antiquity. The word “urban” is irrelevant to that point.
fArtfldgr seems confused.
Is s/he suggesting one cannot write about the ancient world in modern English?
Is s/he suggesting there were no apartment buildings housing the poor before the 1830s? (In ancient Rome, the bulk of the poor population lived in insulae, apartment buildings of up to six or seven stories – the evidence is both archaeological and in descriptions by classical authors)
Back in my commune days I lived in a trailer park. I worked pick-up construction, stoop labor in the fields, and worst of all, poultry farms.
Country living looked like a lot of hard, physical labor. And mostly it is. There’s a beauty to it, but it wasn’t for me. Since then I’ve lived in cities.
But I never forgot the basic realities and the people who attend to them which make city living possible.
Kundera might have slightly better called in “Imagine-logy”; an ideology that celebrates “imagination”. It’s an imagination often completely untethered from reality and even militantly and avowedly so, and conceived of as a, if not the, premier personal and moral virtue; a virtue self-evidently possessed in greatest abundance by the progressives, who uninhibitedly dream their dreams and in so doing reshape human reality – for the better they imagine. Or perhaps for the better for themselves – which being tautologically true, then explains their autistic self-confidence that they know what is good, even if it kills you.
What does a good dreamer really need to know about anything then, if he can imagine, and doesn’t balk at breaking a few social eggs in order to realize his social engineering dreams?
Ha. Reminds me of that great ( as in unconsciously hilarious) scene in either Vanishing or Zabriskie Point – or was it Easy Rider? – where the hippies are seen sowing seed broadcast style in a dried out good for nothing looking field. Grizzly Adams was one of them. Ah, what you could learn from late night TV movie broadcast in the late 1970’s and early eighties.
Ha. Reminds me of that great ( as in unconsciously hilarious) scene in either Vanishing or Zabriskie Point – or was it Easy Rider? – where the hippies are seen sowing seed broadcast style in a dried out good for nothing looking field.
DNW: There was such a scene in “Easy Rider.” It looked hopeless to me even when I was a hippie.
The scene was supposed to be at the New Buffalo commune near Taos, NM but New Buffalo wouldn’t allow filming. New Buffalo couldn’t make it off the land either and eventually was squeezed out economically.
None of the hippie back-to-the-land communes survived. Mine never got off the ground, so to speak, but the commune leader and his wife bought a spread on the outskirts of the Ozarks and did well for themselves.
They have a great garden where they grow much of their vegetables and store what they don’t eat fresh. The leader built a couple of houses on their land, then took what he learned and made close to a million dollars as a contractor. He adhered to the hippie ethos but he wasn’t a typical hippie.
The Mel Lyman hippie commune cult from Boston made their money in construction and remodeling. They lowered their hippie profile, transplanted to SoCal and used their skills and countercultural cred to do quite well for themselves, often working for Hollywood money.
The star of “Zabriskie Point,” Mark Frechette, was a big Mel Lyman follower and was always trying to convert the director, Antonioni, to the Lyman message.
The hippie/counterculture movement started mostly as a libertarian-ish “do your thing” movement. There was a lot of pie-in-the-sky stuff about how if everyone took LSD and loved everyone else, it would all work out, but in practice hippies mostly wanted to be left alone to do their hippie things.
Leary’s “Turn on, tune in and drop out” slogan was apt, if impractical.
Ok Thanks. One for three. Well, you know, long time ago; college age, laying on the couch after the bars closed, snoot full of beer, gazing at the late show.
Neeeeoooo. Correct didn’t work.
DNW: Eh. You got there.
“Zabriskie Point” (director, Antonioni) was the film where at the end the house blows up over and over again in some weird, nihilistic orgasm. I hated that film when I saw it as a hippie.
I watched Antonioni’s “Blowup” again not long ago. It held up well enough. Then I looked it up on the internet and found an interview with one of the actors who said the overblown “what is reality” theme adored by the critics was basically a last-minute save by Antonioni.
Antonioni had blown through his budget on stupid crap like repainting the road to a preferable shade of gray. His backers pulled the plug when Antonioni had only shot half the film. “Blowup,” as we know it, is a hasty re-edit to make do with what was left. Antonioni originally intended a conventional, noirish mystery.