Category Archives: Americanism

In her essay on Julius Shulman’s photography of Los Angeles (subscribers only), Virginia Postrel, in the November Atlantic Monthly, notes:

Los Angeles, like New York, was and is a “city of ambition,” the title of Alfred Stieglitz’s 1910 photo of a New York waterfront of towers and steam. But ambition takes a different form in California. West Coast ambition is not the upward thrust of a skyscraper, the drive to be the tallest in a small and crowded space. Californians like fame and money as much as anyone, of course. But (Hollywood agents aside) their dearest ambitions, like their architecture, are more horizontal, with room for everyone to erect an individual marker. This ambition may be less cutthroat, but it is, in its very openness, more universally demanding. Opting out of the quest for status or money is easy, even virtuous, compared with saying you don’t care whether your life leaves a mark. The things outsiders find absurd or threatening about California—the self-fashioned spiritual practices, the bodybuilder/action-star governor, the crazy diets, the junk bonds, the endless supply of new fictions, the UCLA- and Palo Alto–born Internet—do share a certain grandiosity, a ridiculous desire to change the world, or at least oneself. Better not to admit such ambitions, or so goes the fable easterners love to repeat: the story of the disillusioned California dreamer. (emphasis mine)

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has a great article (reg required) on the changing role of cities in America. Joel Kotkin argues America now consists of "boutique" cities — Boston, San Francisco, and New York City — which house educated, elite, and wealthy residents at the exclusion of most everyone else. In boutique cities the debate is over where to put the next sushi bar, or if one neighborhood has too many coffee shops, or how condos should be regulated…not how to solve the affordable housing problem.

Spatially, the boutique city can be found in certain locations–Manhattan, Chicago’s "Gold Coast," much of San Francisco, Seattle, and West Los Angeles–but it can best be viewed as an interconnected archipelago of interrelated elite communities. Its fundamental economic power lies not so much in the efficiency of place but in harnessing the influence of the media and financial elites. It depends also on the energies of a steady stream of young, educated workers and legions of poorly paid, often immigrant, service workers.

Boutique cities comprise of the elite and the poor who take care of the kitchens. It’s hard to be a middle class person in San Francisco, one reason why San Francisco’s population is now shrinking and why there are more dogs than kids here. Of course some see this as a good thing — high culture reigns, artists flourish, geeks create million-dollar companies, and every other person you meet has a college degree (SF is the second "smartest" big city).

What boutique cities leave behind, however, is the "incubation of social mobility" that metropolises historically have provided. Houston, Charlotte, Orlando, Phoenix, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis: all these cities are now better "aspirational cities" for middle class people. The problem is they’re all trying (and failing) to become boutique cities by introducing slick cultural ammenities.

Kotkin concludes by asking what the role of cities should be in the 21st century. Are cities as relevant now that an entrepreneur in Bloomington is just as connected to the global economy via the Internet as an entrepreneur in San Jose? Are some cities better served as city-states (Shanghai, London, New York)? Will cities ever return to their roots of being home to a socioeconomically diverse citizenry or will a bifurcation of boutique and aspirational cities continue?

All good questions. But for the moment I gotta get back to fighting for a third sushi bar and fourth coffee shop in my little San Franciso neighborhood!

The new book Pessimism: Philosophy, Spirit, and Ethic has elevated the topic of pessimism to op/ed pages here in a country founded on optimism. The LA Times, New York Times, and Paul Saffo all comment on the trend.

Pick something you’re knowledgeable about and you can probably find a reason to whine, or feel discouraged, or blame others or yourself. It’s easier to seem intelligent during cocktail hour if you’re pessimistic ("ah, an enlightened man he is") instead of optimistic ("a wild-eyed young one not yet tamed by the grim realities he will soon face"). If you want to live an entrepreneurial life — in business, teaching, medicine, law, whatever — resist the urge to cede ground to the pessimists.

Of course, there’s a balance here. Losing one’s idealism is a fundamental part of growing up. The world has some serious problems. But if you can’t get yourself to believe that tomorrow has the potential to be even better than today, life will be very sad indeed.

Excerpt from the NYT:

Pessimism, however, is the most un-American of philosophies. This nation was built on the values of reason and progress, not to mention the ”pursuit of happiness.” Pessimism as philosophy is skeptical of the idea of progress. Pursuing happiness is a fool’s errand. Pessimism is not, as is commonly thought, about being depressed or misanthropic, and it does not hold that humanity is headed for disaster. It simply doubts the most basic liberal principle: that applying human reasoning to the world’s problems will have a positive effect.

The biggest difference between optimists and pessimists, Mr. Dienstag argues, is in how they view time. Optimists see the passing of time as a canvas on which to paint a better world. Pessimists see it as a burden. Time ticks off the physical decline of one’s body toward the inevitability of death, and it separates people from their loved ones. ”All the tragedies which we can imagine,” said Simone Weil, the French philosopher who starved herself to death at age 34, ”return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.”

Optimists see history as the story of civilization’s ascent. Pessimists believe, Mr. Dienstag notes, in the idea that any apparent progress has hidden costs, so that even when the world seems to be improving, ”in fact it is getting worse (or, on the whole, no better).” Polio is cured, but AIDS arrives. Airplanes make travel easy, but they can drop bombs or be crashed into office towers. There is no point in seeking happiness. When joy ”actually makes its appearance, it as a rule comes uninvited and unannounced,” insisted Schopenhauer, the dour German who was pessimism’s leading figure.