The Lost Structures of Civility - long read worth it

City Journal ^ | 12.05.16 | Hadley Arkes

[mumblypeg]

100% agree, but are there enough of us who feel this way, who are still young enough to fight?

[nathanbedford]

Is there a point to this or are we merely invited to come along on a nostalgic ramble down memory lane?

Of course there is a point and it is a profound one but the author dare not make it lest he undermine his sinecure at the exquisitely correct Amherst College. The point is the response to the question, what caused the disintegration of the old neighborhood?

[boxlunch]

Good article

[aposiopetic]

what caused the disintegration of the old neighborhood?

Others here will know better than I, but I would guess Professor Emeritus Arkes would (correctly) note that the Natural Law came to be disregarded.

[Billthedrill]

Yes. A month ago I wasn’t sure, but I’m sure now. The answer is yes.

[jobim]

Thank you so much for bringing this lovely, sad, and instructive remembrance to our attention.

My memories run parallel with Mr Arkes's, although I was born in 1951 in Oak Park
as a Catholic, but so much of what he says is what I experienced as well, illustrating
the monolithic moral foundation that undergirded life for most of us. Alas.

[Chickensoup]

by folks without 2000 years of western culture

_____________

boy that’s the key isn’t it?

[Chickensoup]

My stepmother, a roaring liberal, feels that the Constitution is obsolete — it was based on the Judeo-Christian ideology. I said to her, “What do you want to replace it with?”

__________________

did she have an answer?

[Chickensoup]

I spent whole summers with my little brother on our bikes riding into a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I would not now go as an adult without a firearm on my belt. We had a dime each with which we bought a bag of popcorn and a coke at the soda counter at a Woolworth’s and were replete. All gone now, the street and the store and the safety, and the Catchers who would without question step forward to right a bike tire or commiserate a skinned knee. The Catchers have been driven back into the shadows by lawsuit and suspicion and by a savage and violent culture that has been overlain by force on something decent and beautiful. I read yesterday of such a one who was brutally murdered for daring to step forward to help an assaulted woman. You kill more than a hero that way, you kill a culture.

I understand the author’s appreciation of the city architecture that communicates civilization by its very form, but that can only express, it cannot protect. Neglected it is only a sad rebuke - see Detroit for a sense of its decay. What sits atop the Acropolis is magnificent...rubble.

I think that now it is time to oppose the America-haters, for that has grown into a culture all its own, and they are not our friends. The country, the culture that the author celebrates mandated that we give them equal time and consideration. Unfortunately it does not take equal time and resources to build as it does to destroy, which they have done with abandon. When their new utopia fails to rise from the ashes, what we will wind up with is only ashes.
___________________________

Beautifully written. thank you.

[Chickensoup]

Thanks for posting this. I know Hadley well.

___________________

Please tell him how deep a chord this article had struck in me and others.

[Chickensoup]

The answer is yes.

______________

agree.

[Chickensoup]

Community was shattered and the social contracts have been sacrificed on the altars of leftist and corporatist sensibilities and demands.

[joma89]

BUMP.

[Madame Dufarge]

Great read.

We've suffered a grievous loss.

[antidisestablishment]

My childhood was about as far away from this man’s as possible. I grew up in a small town in the middle of the desert in southern California. Our torn had no grand edifices, and the only “lake” we had was one public pool. Even our library lacked the requisite Carnegie moniker. Our two-block downtown was comprised of unsung five-and-dimes and a Sears catalog salesroom—literally a one-room store where you could peruse the catalog to place your order and await the shipment that took weeks or months. Our theater was a one-screen cinema that rarely hosted premieres, but the Saturday matinee was filled every weekend. Hunting and fishing were primary passtimes, and boys carried pocketknives and most recieved their first .22 bolt-action single shot well before their tenth year.

So how is it that an Irish Catholic country boy raised in California can relate to some Chicago elite’s story? The character of a place is not dependent on the glory of its architecture, but on the character of its residents. Two forgotten phrases that were ubiquitous in that time were “common decency” and “don’t make a Federal case out of it.” People from diverse backgrounds melded into a common culture that respected people, property and propriety. Strangers weren’t afraid to call children out when they broke those boundaries, and that public reproof maintained an environment where children weren’t afraid of strangers.

Liberty flourishes only alongside self-restraint. Those boundaries persisted in America long after the courts decided that such values were better called discrimination. Unfortunately, those elites forget that discrimination is a good thing—a person needs nutrition, but should avoid ingesting poison.

[P.O.E.]

Two forgotten phrases that were ubiquitous in that time were “common decency” and “don’t make a Federal case out of it.” People from diverse backgrounds melded into a common culture that respected people, property and propriety

Truer words have never been spoken.