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A New Age for Daniel McCarthy’s Modern Age

Politics

A New Age for Daniel McCarthy’s Modern Age

State of the Union: Amidst the media deluge, what will Modern Age—the revamped project of a rising star writer—bring to the table?

20231031_ErinGranzow_00098
Photo Credit: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

On Monday, March 4, Modern Age, a journal of conservative thought founded by Russell Kirk, launched its brand new website

Modern Age is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is edited, both in print and online, by Daniel McCarthy, a former editor-in-chief of The American Conservative.

McCarthy spoke to TAC about why Modern Age has chosen this specific point—a very busy election year—to, in a way, relaunch the decades-old periodical. 

“This moment is, you know, the optimal time—precisely because it’s probably the moment of greatest debate and confusion, but also contention, with regard to what conservatism itself is, and what place conservatism has in America,” McCarthy said. 

He continued, discussing the current fractured nature of today’s conservative movement: “There have been very few forums that have brought together these different fragments into a wider conversation and into a whole. And that’s one of the things that Modern Age aims to do—not as just a forum, but as a place that will sort of guide the conversation and raise it to new levels.”

Despite the fresher, sleeker look of the website, McCarthy aims to remain rooted in the “original mission” of the journal set by Kirk so many years ago. He said, “I think the website that we have done now kind of fulfills that original mission. It uses a 21st century medium, in terms of being an internet website, but it still has very much the public spirit that characterized Russell Kirk’s own works and his vision for Modern Age.”

Additionally, the website was intended to make the ideas found in the print editions of Modern Age more accessible and regular. McCarthy is confident that this new website will be successful in this way: “I think that the integration of history, and the sort of depth that you get from a print magazine combined with the immediacy you get on a website…. I really see putting all those things together as being the most exciting thing that can be done with a publication like this.”

The post A New Age for Daniel McCarthy’s Modern Age appeared first on The American Conservative.

Le contrôle de gestion externe, une démarche indispensable pour piloter ses politiques publiques

Syndicats de déchets, associations sportives, sociétés publiques d'aménagement, missions locales... Les satellites contribuent largement aux services publics locaux. Pourtant, peu de collectivités investissent le pilotage et le contrôle de ces acteurs, se privant d'une vision d'ensemble de l'action publique. Tour d'horizon des enjeux et des bonnes pratiques.

Recourir à l'appel à manifestation d'intérêt

Les domaines de prédilection pour l'organisation d'un appel à manifestation d'intérêt sont l'octroi de subventions et les actes liés à la gestion domaniale. L'organisation d'un appel à manifestation d'intérêt est en revanche proscrite en vue d'octroyer un contrat de la commande publique. Rappel des règles applicables en la matière.

Google’s Flagship Gemini AI Model Gets a Major Upgrade

Just two months after Alphabet made its Gemini AI model public, it’s rolling out a new version that can handle several times as much audio, video, and text input as GPT-4.

Suez contre Veolia : trois enseignements du Conseil d'Etat

Dans le cadre du renouvellement de la délégation du service public de l'eau potable d'Ile-de-France, le Syndicat des Eaux d'Ile-de-France (Sedif) […]

Veolia remporte le contrat à 4 milliards du Sedif

Le Sedif a attribué à Veolia son marché de délégation de service public pour la production et la distribution de l'eau potable. Il commencera au 1er janvier 2025 et se terminera fin 2036. Mais avant de le signer, le syndicat attend que le Conseil d'Etat se prononce sur le pourvoi en appel de l'autre soumissionnaire, Suez.

'Modern Family' Star Sofia Vergara Credits Her 'Giant Boobs' for Her Rise to Fame: 'Absurd to Deny'

Par : Paul Bois · Paul Bois
Actress Sofia Vergara, who catapulted to fame on the hit show "Modern Family," has credited her "giant boobs" for her initial rising success.

Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It

Police around the US say they're justified to run DNA-generated 3D models of faces through facial recognition tools to help crack cold cases. Everyone but the cops thinks that’s a bad idea.

Cryptographers Are Getting Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches

Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly. If the process can be streamlined, fully private browsing could be possible.

Marsha Blackburn: Subpoenaing Epstein Estate Should Be Senate Judiciary Committee's 'Very First Act'

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL), calling on Democrats to help reveal who worked with Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring.

Oversight Board Criticizes Meta’s Automated Moderation in Israel-Hamas War

Meta’s automated systems made mistakes in removing sensitive content from the Israel-Hamas war, the company’s Oversight Board has ruled. It called on the company to put more human intervention in place.

L'Afigese préconise « une certification des comptes une à deux fois par mandat »

En réaction aux préconisations du gouvernement sur la certification de comptes qu'elle juge décevantes, l'Afigese publie un mémorandum dans lequel elle défend notamment l'idée de rendre obligatoire la certification aux plus grandes collectivités, sans forcément la mettre en oeuvre chaque année. Marie-Christine Baranger, copilote du groupe de travail qualité des comptes et certification et Pascal Bellemin, président de l'Afigese, livrent le point de vue de l'association.

PHOTOS: First Spanish A.I. Model Earns Nearly $11K Monthly for Agency

Par : Amy Furr · Amy Furr
Aitana is a 25-year-old model from Barcelona who is raking in money for her agency, however, she is not a real person.

Report: Moderna Engaged in Covert Operations to Control Online Criticism of Vaccines

Moderna, known for its mRNA coronavirus vaccine, reportedly engaged in extensive surveillance and influence operations, attempting to remove criticism or pushback against its vaccine from online discourse.

A New Step Forward for Modern Age

Politics

A New Step Forward for Modern Age

State of the Union: Russell Kirk’s brainchild joins the ranks of online conservative publications under the leadership of Dan McCarthy.

Screen Shot 2023-11-08 at 5.01.37 PM

Modern Age is furthering the vision of its founder, the late Russell Kirk, by making a new foray into the digital world this fall. Under the helm of Dan McCarthy, its current editor, the journal has refurbished its website under the aegis of its parent organization, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). To celebrate this step, ISI hosted an in-person debate in Washington, D.C., on October 31, seeking to mimic the insightful give-and-take that takes place in the pages of Modern Age, “the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes.”

The event was moderated by McCarthy himself. His two guests were Henry Olsen, the Washington Post columnist, and Donald Devine, a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies. The questions at hand: Is Reagan’s brand of conservatism fundamentally libertarian or populist? Was he a champion of the working class, and should conservatives apply his example today? Olsen argued that Reagan was more of a populist than people realize; Devine contended that Reagan’s preference for federalist solutions was fundamentally libertarian. Both interlocutors were armed to the teeth with supporting quotations and articles, bringing the idea of “zombie Reaganism” to life in that short hour.

And that is what is so special about Modern Age itself. Like TAC, it is designed to make readers think critically about conservatism’s place in today’s changing world, and gives license to its writers to share their ideas professionally and enthusiastically.

The post A New Step Forward for Modern Age appeared first on The American Conservative.

Obama: 'All of Us Are Complicit to Some Degree' in 'Occupation,' Hamas Terror

Obama told his former staffers on the Pod Save America Saturday that "all of us are complicit to some degree" in the violence in Gaza, as he appeared to describe a moral equivalence between Hamas murdering Israelis and the Israeli "occupation" of Gaza.

Microsoft Does Damage Control With Its New 'Secure Future Initiative'

Following a string of serious security incidents, Microsoft says it has a plan to deal with escalating threats from cybercriminals and state-backed hackers.

Financement participatif : solliciter les habitants pour créer de l'adhésion

Les collectivités peuvent emprunter auprès de leurs administrés via le financement participatif. Ce mode de financement permet aux habitants d'investir leur épargne sur un projet local, avec un taux de rémunération intéressant. Pour la première fois une collecte de fonds vise 1 million d'euros, à Brest Métropole.

Only 2% of Americans Have Gotten Updated Coronavirus Booster Shot

About 7 million Americans have received the updated versions of the coronavirus vaccines, compared to 56.5 million people who received last year's version.

Egalitarian Conservatism? Yes, We Can

Conservatism

Egalitarian Conservatism? Yes, We Can

Contra Matthew McManus’s latest, conservatism is not necessarily a force of arbitrary hierarchy and oppression.

Edmund Burke statue at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland

The Political Right and Equality: Turning the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity, by Matthew McManus. Routledge, 265 pages

In a recent New York Times op-ed, the progressive writer and activist Naomi Klein warned against the “supremacist values” that “pose the greatest threats to our societies.” Not white-supremacist values, mind you, but supremacist values simpliciter. It’s an amusing, and revealing, choice of phrasing. Amusing, because all “values” as such imply valuation or grading and thus admit the possibility of supremacy: good, better, best. And revealing, because Klein’s construction shows how the most committed egalitarians can’t escape the problems of rank and distinction, even at the level of language. To condemn certain values for being supremacist, after all, suggests that there are other values that are, well, better.

The political scientist Matthew McManus is keenly aware of these contradictions. Early on in his important new book, The Political Right and Equality, the University of Michigan political scientist and self-described liberal socialist concedes how some of the most celebrated figures in the radical tradition exploited slaves (Jefferson) or justified imperialism (John Stuart Mill), even as they proclaimed the fundamental equality of humankind. For McManus, though, these were merely accidental failings, not suggestive of deeper flaws in the tradition he celebrates. Liberals who take seriously their own ideals, he thinks, are bound to become socialists—whereas equality is and will remain a permanent stumbling block for the right.

The author’s central argument is that the modernist quest for equality is the thing that called forth the right as a distinct movement or sensibility in Western societies, where hierarchical social orders were once simply taken for granted. All conservatism, one way or another, boils down to a yearning to restore the edifice of hierarchy that was shattered by the birth of the modern. The “political right,” he declares, “is simply more comfortable with the idea that people are unequal, and so should be treated unequally.”

The opposite idea—that human beings are equal by nature and therefore deserving of equal rights and equal access to political institutions—is for McManus a modernist invention, albeit one faintly prefigured in biblical religion. Likewise—and here McManus makes his most interesting moves—conservatism is a modernist phenomenon, notwithstanding the right’s claims to ancient roots: When an Aristotle described an organically hierarchical social order, he was simply describing the classical world as it was, whereas a conservative pining for such an order in A.D. 2023, and citing Aristotle for support, is already conceding that some rupture has taken place, one he struggles to “get back behind of.”

Never mind 2023, this was already the case for, say, a Juan Donoso Cortés (a name only referenced once in McManus’s text): The brilliant reactionary Spanish diplomat, papal adviser, and social commentator no longer believed that right order would or could reconstitute itself over and against modernity’s pressures, not without the application of a reactionary counterpressure that would have been alien to the Christian statesmen of an earlier age.

It is this sense of tragic loss that lends conservatism its aesthetic gravity and, for McManus, generates the movement’s most “exciting” literary contributions, especially in the works of figures like Fyodor Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot. But in the realm of concrete politics, especially in the Anglosphere, wrestling with modernity while pining for organic hierarchy makes for a self-contradictory posture: For example, Edmund Burke’s unbending defense of property, as McManus rightly notes, wasn’t exactly a conservative project, not when capitalism was revolutionizing property relations, enclosing the commons, and brutally dislocating the settled order of things.

That contradictory posture is more or less what mainstream Anglophone conservatism has amounted to for a very long time. The movement’s protagonists lament the demise of meaning and belonging and “little platoons,” while upholding grossly unjust inequalities in economic power that only accelerate the loss. There has always been an ugly alternative path for the right, of course: one that would simply ratify inequality on the basis of racial and/or I.Q.-based hierarchies, or else seek to reconstitute lost organic social order on the basis of racial solidarity, shifting the blame for antagonisms inherent to modern economic relations to ethnic minorities, most notably the Jews. Much of McManus’s book is devoted to exploring these darker paths.   

Is there a third way? I should hope so. It would involve, as I have repeatedly argued in these pages, a politics devoted to taming hierarchies within the framework of the common good. What would be distinctly conservative about such a politics is the recognition, amply borne out by the experience of the bloody 20th century, that attempts to foist total equality on human societies are bound to yield new tyrannies, lorded over by hierarchies made all the more intolerant of dissent by their faith that they have abolished hierarchy once and for all. Likewise, in conservative (and, indeed, Catholic) fashion, such a politics would respect various “estates”—family, church, labor unions, clubs, etc.—whose governance must be left to themselves within a broadly egalitarian order.

At the same time, such a politics would absolutely reject racial hierarchies as artificial and critique economic inequality as the result not of natural or organic aristocracy, but mainly of political choices—choices that can be altered. The classical and Christian ideal of morally conditioning elites to be “better” elites would still have some utility, but the more pertinent lever would be power: the application of law to strengthen the hand of workers and the poor relative to those at the top.

Indeed, this was how the Catholic Church came to reckon with the problem of inequality in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a tradition that McManus sadly elides, beyond vaguely gesturing that Christianity carries some worthwhile egalitarian impulses. Even so, The Political Right and Equality deserves serious engagement from its polemical targets. 

The post Egalitarian Conservatism? Yes, We Can appeared first on The American Conservative.

Community-Based Elder Care is Not Enough

Culture

Community-Based Elder Care is Not Enough

If Americans want a better aging care system, relying exclusively on community-based approaches such as the GUIDE Model will not do.

Nurse,Holding,Hand,Of,Senior,Man,In,Rest,Home

The Biden administration, in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation (CMMI), recently announced a new model program to address elder care. The program, called GUIDE, funds aging-in-place and community-based programs for the elderly. While this approach is fashionable among activists, it fails to address the needs of many aging Americans.

The GUIDE Model overview is long on slogans and short on details. It states that the program will “streamline dementia care, improve efficiency and affordability, and advance health equity,” and claims its implementation will save the government 21 billion dollars over 10 years in related dementia and healthcare costs. It never says where those savings will come from, though, or how many people will lose services as a result.

The administration is responding to a real problem in elder care. The estimated health and long-term care costs associated with Alzheimer’s disease, for example, is $345 billion, not including unpaid caregiver costs. The Biden administration’s solution is pushing more people to stay at home and out of facilities. GUIDE, which stands for “Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience,” proposes the creation of more community-based dementia care teams to provide in-home services for patients.

The administration plans to saddle these teams with onerous regulations, requiring both a GUIDE-trained care coordinator and a clinician with a background in dementia to be part of the care teams. Behavioral health managers and pharmacists can also be part of the teams, but are not required under current protocol.

It is not clear how HHS and CMMI will actually staff these care teams; fewer than 1 percent of physicians have a gerontological certification, and of the 2.5 million nurses in the U.S., fewer than 15,000 are certified in geriatric care. Fewer than 4 percent of social workers have a formal certification in geriatric social work.

Beyond the practical concerns of staffing these teams, moving more services to the community would further destabilize an already floundering aging-care system. America is in the precipice of an aging crisis, as hospitals, nursing homes, and community-based programs are ill-equipped to handle the coming surge of aging adults. Many can hardly manage their current caseloads.

Those facilities and providers will need an estimated 1.2 million workers to address the growing needs of Alzheimer’s patients within the healthcare system. Alzheimer’s accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the nearly 7 million dementia cases, and for those patients, aging-in-place policies like those proposed by the GUIDE program can lead to fragmented and disjointed care. Often, community-services workers hop from house to house, trying to provide care and oversight, ending up overwhelmed.

That problem would not be solved with more staffing and funding for community-based aging programs. The nature of Alzheimer’s is such that it often cannot be managed safely in community-based settings. The physical and mental disorders that can accompany the onset of Alzheimer’s often require both physiological and psychological therapies that can only be provided in the safe and controlled environment of an institution. As the Biden administration has done in its disability and mental-health policy, it seems to be pushing for community-based aging services alone, rather than a combination of community and facility-based care.

The benefits of institutionalized care for Alzheimer’s patients cannot be overstated. These facilities, often memory care units, provide a safe environment and structured routine for those in the later stages of Alzheimer’s. The need for memory care units has doubled over the past decade, and grants overextended and overwhelmed caregivers peace of mind by providing a safe space for their loved one outside of the home. These facilities supplement all aspects of the patients day with activities, consistent meals, and structured routines. These are vital aspects to the care of a severe Alzheimer’s patient, and decrease the risk of falling, boredom, and wandering.

Facilities already face an uphill battle, as Medicaid and Medicare typically do not cover long-term care services in nursing facilities. More than half of Medicaid dollars go towards home- and community-based services, funneling money away from long-term care.

As the community-based aging system expands, more elderly Americans will fall through the cracks. Just as an excessive focus on community-based services failed in the mental health, disability, foster care, and substance abuse arenas, focusing solely on community at the expense of facility-based services in elder care will overwhelm Adult Protective services and other elder care providers. Efforts across our social safety net to rid the landscape of institutions have continuously failed clients and overwhelmed social workers, doctors, nurses, and other care workers.

Assisted living and long-term facilities address the failings of community-based services by offering residents a comprehensive system of care and providing a community of peers. These institutions can work closely with other community-based services and programs, and provide housing, consistent medical care, activities, and meals for elderly patients who may not have reliable family support. Community-based approaches often ignore the needs of those who live at home alone with no family or financial support.

If Americans want a better aging care system, relying exclusively on community-based approaches such as the GUIDE Model will not do. We need to improve, not abolish, long-term-care institutions, and offer the most vulnerable among us a combined approach that blends the best of community and facility-based services.

The post Community-Based Elder Care is Not Enough appeared first on The American Conservative.

Are You Grieving?

Culture

Are You Grieving?

The prayerful poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins embraces a saving romance with the eternal.

G M Hopkins
(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

When the young English Jesuit novitiate Gerard Manley Hopkins submitted his poem The Wreck of the Deutschland to the Jesuit magazine The Month, the editors accepted the unusual thirty-five stanza piece, then reversed their decision. Though Hopkins was later invited to teach Greek and Latin at University College Dublin, he found the experience overwhelming and discouraging, the climate unwelcoming to his frail health. When he died in Ireland of typhoid fever in 1889 at the age of 44, his mature poetry had yet to be published. “I am so happy… I am so happy. I loved my life,” were his last words.

For a technocratic, results-driven age like our own, those words don’t quite compute. Perhaps, we might admit, Hopkins might have taken satisfaction in serving in the halls of academia; but, then, again, he taught Greek and Latin, which, beyond not being particularly “practical,” are now accused of perpetuating white supremacy. Though Hopkins’s corpus is now widely taught in undergraduate poetry programs, he did not live to savor that success. He perished more or less in obscurity, his literary legacy largely rescued by his (non-Catholic) friend Robert Bridges.

The happiness of Hopkins, then, pace our decadent and distracted culture, must have derived from some other source than the pleasure of material comforts, the high esteem of peers, or even a cherished romantic relationship. Instead, his poetry bespeaks a peculiar, transcendent love that is capable of weathering even the greatest catastrophes. A new collection of his works, As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Selected and Annotated Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, helps even the poetically obtuse (such as myself) appreciate his sometimes confounding masterpieces, as well as the remarkable and curious character who penned them.

And that says something about this new collection. For I am one of those hapless souls who really wishes he was into poetry, but usually finds the experience more dumbfounding than elucidating. I once dated a girl who tried (and failed) to help me appreciate the great 17th century metaphysical poet John Donne. Being of half-Polish descent, I attempted to read Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz with my wife shortly after we were married. We lasted less than a week. I do like the Psalms—those count as poetry, right?

I once also ventured (ignorantly) into the strange world of Hopkins but was soon frustrated. Professor and editor Holly Ordway sympathizes with that experience, of which mine is far from unique. “Hopkins’ dynamic and unconventional style was a challenge to contemporary poetic sensibilities,” Ordway explains about the poet’s own Victorian era. That style featured a “sophisticated use of metrical technique,” including what is called “sprung rhythm,” which enables a more flexible and natural sound while still operating within the framework of meter. This meter had a long literary tradition but had fallen into disuse by the Elizabethan age. To add even more complexity, Hopkins sometimes uses both end-rhyme, a French-influenced Middle English innovation, with unrhymed alliterative verse, an Old English tradition.

He also often omits relative pronouns such as that and which, changes the usual sequence of subject-predicate-object, and elides forms of the word “to be,” effectively making the verb inferred. “As a result of this poetic compression, the meaning of a given line or of a whole poem may not be immediately apparent, but it is there,” Ordway assures us. Finally, there is Hopkins’s sheer brilliance, manifested in his erudition, extensive vocabulary, and periodic invention of words.

Ordway acknowledges that we will likely not be able to appreciate Hopkins’s unusual style on the first reading, or even the second. “He does not permit us to have a consumeristic, utilitarian approach to poetry (or prayer). We must slow down; we must try, as much as possible, to give ourselves time to reflect, to make connections, to meditate on the images and phrases of the poem, to see how they challenge.” In other words, at least for Hopkins, poetry is akin to prayer—perhaps my appreciation for the Psalms does approximate an appreciation for verse!

If we are game, the return on investment is substantial. Consider the first half of Spring and Fall:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

There’s the end-rhyme and the invention of a new word (“unleaving”). Pausing to dream of autumn, Hopkins’s words seem the perfect accompaniment to a leisurely stroll through some quiet wood resplendent in reds, oranges, and yellows, the leaves crisp and crackling under your shoes. And simultaneously, the English cleric widens the imaginative aperture, comparing those dead leaves to our own lives, and reminding readers that the cynical passing of years, can, if we are not careful, anesthetize us to the wonders of creation all around us.

Hopkins’s genius is however far more than clever wordplay and arresting reflections on the natural order. The palpable melancholy pulsating through his poems, and his attempts to contemplate and counter that feeling, is deeply relevant for the contemporary Anglophone world, and particularly its youth, suffering unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. In Carrion Comfort, we read:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Though he is tempted to revel in self-pity and spiritual darkness, to despairingly untwist his very person, Hopkins refuses. He can preach truths to his heart that conjure up hope, that repudiate the suicidal temptation “not to be.” We should be distributing copies of Hopkins to euthanasia-friendly Canada!

Of course, given Hopkins’s vocation, religious imagery is embedded in many of his poems. Though, as Ordway observes, these are communicated not via pious platitudes, but through the language of a man well-acquainted with doubts and suffering, yet steadfastly worshipful. In The Windhover, he compares Christ to a beautiful, unpredictable, and even dangerous falcon who possesses “brute beauty and valour and act.” Nondum reflects on a God he praises but who does not reply: “Our prayer seems lost in desert ways; our hymn in the vast silence dies.” 

Though Hopkins struggles in the faith, he endures, and even flourishes. His poetic vision and his clerical calling reinforce each other in a mysterious dance that alternates between the raw and the revelrous. “Both his acceptance of celibacy and his determination to prioritize his religious vocation above his literary one challenge the twenty-first century secular attitude toward self-realization.” We ask, hesitantly, are celibate priests allowed to be so… romantic?

And yet Hopkins’s verse is precisely that, and because his romance is one of body and soul oriented towards the eternal, he is able to evince an exotic wonder from those things the modern materialist is prone to overlook. Consider the opening lines of Hurrahing in Harvest:

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

This sonnet, Hopkins explained in a letter, “was the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy.”

Herein lies the secret to Hopkins’ happiness. Having, in the Gospel of Luke’s words, “chosen that good part,” all was illuminated, enabling the bookish English Jesuit to perceive the enchanting glory of a creation that even in the mundane is capable of speaking sweet, divine comforts. That awareness stayed that fisher of men, even as his own feeble frame failed him. It is why, in the end, it is not difficult to imagine bed-ridden Hopkins returning to his words in Pied Beauty:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

The post Are You Grieving? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Radiant City

Culture

The Radiant City

Le Corbusier’s influential vision of totalitarian architecture has never coexisted with organic human reality.

Le Corbusier
(Photo by Günter Bratke/picture alliance via Getty Images)

No single person—no elected official, designer, planner, architect or style-setter—has had a more profound effect on the built environment worldwide than the Swiss-French architect and city planner Le Corbusier. His buildings litter the covers of books and magazines on architecture. He fathered the concrete-based architectural movement of brutalism and was one of the founders of architectural modernism; the “international style” of architecture is heavily indebted to him. But even more significantly, his ideas about cities have radically reshaped the places we live, especially those American cities built mostly after World War II. And yet most of us have never heard of him. While his many books and articles contain the musings of a visionary, they also provide alarming clues about why so many of the places we have built over the last hundred years are soul-crushing.

When he published his seminal work, The Radiant City, in 1933, Le Corbusier was clear about the scope of his project. He was not just laying out some principles for the organization of modern cities or providing solutions to the problems of industrialization. Rather, his purpose was “a manifestation of the new spirit of our age,” the creation of human happiness through modern technology, analysis, and planning. 

Elsewhere, Le Corbusier had written that “there is a new spirit: it is a spirit of construction and synthesis guided by a clear conception…A GREAT EPOCH HAS BEGUN.” He would usher in this great epoch, in which cities were laid out following rational principles, where people could breathe freely, walk through green open spaces unmolested by vehicle traffic, and feel sunlight in their bedrooms and offices. He believed deeply in the power of human ingenuity, of data and calculations, and of rational design. His was a future based on the success of the American factory, the grain elevator, the automobile, and the steamship. These masterpieces of efficiency were his models for the reorganization of all of society, and he was anxious to begin this work.

In the Radiant City, people would live in “Cartesian skyscraper” towers in the park.

Through his many books and plans, Le Corbusier fleshed out his vision for the city of the future. In contrast to the “organic” cities of the past, whose winding roads and random-seeming arrangement of buildings felt chaotic and pointless, the Radiant City would be laid out on a grid and clearly organized. Following the model of the factory, different uses—residences, industry, commerce, office work, culture, recreation—would occupy completely different sectors of the city. 

In Le Corbusier’s planned cities, people would live in mass-produced inexpensive housing organized into towers that covered only 15 percent of the ground, the rest left for green space full of sports facilities and parks. The towers would be cross-shaped in order to maximize the number of windows and amount of natural light. At home, residents would live in pure leisure, freed from the need to toil by a 24-hour maid service, childcare, and pre-made meals. Travel between home and work would be facilitated by elevated superhighways that moved at incredible speeds, so that even people who lived far from their work would not need to commute for long. “The city that achieves speed,” Le Corbusier writes in Urbanisme, “achieves success.” The superhighways would meet, appropriately, in the very center of the city.

In many of his plans, the center of the city was also occupied by the bureaucrats and planners. Le Corbusier’s was a thoroughly planned vision of society: Every aspect of the city, civic life, and economic activity, would be planned and controlled from above. This would require a powerful and centrally located bureaucracy with the will to act decisively.

Le Corbusier recognized that such a grand vision would require clearing large areas. His famous (never implemented) Plan Voisin proposed that most of central Paris be leveled to make way for new highways and towers. “We must pull things down…” he wrote in The Radiant City, “and throw the corpses onto the garbage heap.”

Like all utopian visions, upon closer scrutiny Le Corbusier’s dream begins to appear dystopian. The Radiant City would be the perfect setting for New London in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The two books, both written in France and published a year apart, predict a near-identical world, although only one author realized he was describing a nightmare. In fact, when Peacock released a new TV adaptation of Brave New World, the New York Times’s review described it as looking “as though Le Corbusier’s studio had taken on a commission for a high-end spa.”  

But the dystopian nature of Le Corbusier’s vision goes beyond aesthetics. As Robert Fishman explained in Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier’s ideal city completely eliminates politics. There is no place in that city for people to guide the course of their society—the “plan” has already provided for that. All that is left to do is implement the plan.

His clearest proposal for the city of the future is laid out in The Radiant City, which is subtitled “elements of a doctrine to be used as the basis of our machine age-civilization.” The title page includes a dedication in the upper left-hand corner, which one could be forgiven for missing: “to authority.” Near the end of the book he includes a caption “Little by little, the world is moving to its destined goal. In Moscow, in Rome, in Berlin, in the USA, vast crowds are collecting round a strong idea.” The text sits below an image of a crowd in Venice’s Piazza San Marco: a rally for fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It is clear what strong idea he had in mind: an authority capable of remaking society.

Le Corbusier wrote in 1929 that for many years he had “been haunted by the ghost of [Jean-Baptiste] Colbert,” the reformer who remade French society under Louis XIV. As Fishman explains in Urban Utopias, Le Corbusier spent his own John the Baptist years wandering in the desert seeking an authority great enough to realize his dream. He went to Moscow several times, but his proposed design for the Palace of the Soviets was rejected. In 1934 he traveled to Italy and was received with enthusiasm by Mussolini. But alas, Il Duce became bored with modern architecture. Le Corbusier’s hatred for democracy—for the madness of people governing themselves—led him to support a French fascist party, and he started publications to promote fascism and syndicalism in France. He wrote an article in 1934 in which he boldly stated, “France needs a Father. It doesn’t matter who.” Finally, when France signed the armistice with the Nazis in 1940, Le Corbusier moved to the southern town of Ozon, where he sought to provide his vision to the collaborationist Vichy regime. After 18 months he left, defeated.

Le Corbusier is often accused of being sympathetic to totalitarianism. This is true; he never saw a totalitarian regime he didn’t like. But it does not go nearly far enough. As Theodore Dalrymple argued in a 2009 article in City Journal, Le Corbusier needed totalitarianism in order to impose his worldview on people. His ideal city intentionally made no space for politics because people, who had to live in the world he sought to create, could not be allowed to change it. Le Corbusier was never able to find a totalitarian regime that would let him realize his vision. Unfortunately, though, he found acolytes including Robert Moses and Oscar Niemeyer who succeeded in spreading large parts of that vision all over the world.

While his Plan Voisin to remake Paris was rejected, Le Corbusier did eventually design a city. When the Indian state of Punjab needed a new capital after the partition of India in 1947, they decided to build the new planned city of Chandigarh, and recruited Le Corbusier to design it. Here he could put his perfect plan into action. The result? He built massive highways and ample parking, split uses into their own sectors, and designed monumental concrete public buildings. But the city is considered by many to be a failure. Indian culture and ways of life were ignored in the design, and have only survived in spite of it. 

“Chandigarh never achieved the cosmopolitanism it craved,” writes Sunil Khilnani in The Idea of India. People are rarely seen on the streets. The distances between buildings are too great. Chandigarh is, as Kenneth Frampton writes in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, “a city designed for automobiles in a country where many, as yet, still lack a bicycle.” There are more cars per capita in Chandigarh than in any other Indian city.

The Plan Voisin served, in the words of Robert Fishman in Urban Utopias, as “the archetype for so many disastrous plans that others subsequently carried out.” Oscar Niemeyer, a disciple of Le Corbusier, designed the planned city of Brasília, the capital of Brazil, which lacks the active streetlife of other Brazilian cities because of its auto-centric design. People drive to work and drive home—so much for the thriving city of the future. This problem is made more difficult to fix by the fact that UNESCO took no time in deeming it a World Heritage Site.

In the United States, Robert Moses set out to rebuild New York under the influence of Le Corbusier. He demolished “blighted” black and immigrant neighborhoods in order to build Corbusian cross-shaped towers in the park—vertical slums, as they turned out to be—such as Stuy Town. Other neighborhoods he bulldozed to make way for over 600 miles of highway. Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful people in the history of New York, despite never having been elected to office. He found the “authority” Le Corbusier could not.

In the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the planning gurus who know “about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and businesses.” She wrote that “when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening  to shatter” their doctrine, “they must shrug reality aside.” Le Corbusier could not have said it better, but he tried. In The Radiant City he wrote:

The problem is to create the Radiant City. The Radiant City already exists on paper. And when once a technological product has been designed on paper (calculations and working drawings), it does exist. It is only for spectators, for gaping bystanders, for the impotent, that the certainty of its existence lies in the execution. The city of light that will dispel the miasmas of anxiety now darkening our lives, that will succeed the twilight of despair we live in at present, exists on paper. We are only waiting for a “yes” from a government with the will and the determination to see it through!

One of these gaping bystanders was Jane Jacobs, who set about observing reality as it actually was rather than as a totalitarian doctrine said it should be. She watched as Robert Moses’s towers in the park separated people’s homes from their necessities, so that they had to walk long distances across dangerous empty lawns to buy a gallon of milk. A keen observer of reality, she saw how the new highways destroyed functioning communities and pushed people into the new auto-oriented suburbs where they were victim to the “great blight of dullness.” And she saw how simple blue-collar neighborhoods like her own Greenwich Village, where people could live near their work, walk to buy groceries or get a beer, and watch their kids play on the street, provided the great joys of city life in safety.

Jacobs is credited with ending Robert Moses’s stranglehold on New York, and with helping Americans begin to wake up from our Corbusian nightmare. Her work was the beginning of a new and truer way of conceiving of cities. There are now many who have taken up her mantle and begun working to reverse the destruction Le Corbusier’s totalitarian vision wreaked. But American cities still have a long way to go.

The post The Radiant City appeared first on The American Conservative.

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