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Bezig met laden... The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues Of Community In Americadoor Alan Ehrenhalt
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Millions of Americans yearn for a lost sense of community, for the days when neighbors looked out for one another and families were stable and secure. The 1950s are regarded as the golden age of community, but 1960s rebellion and 1980s nostalgia have blurred our view of what life was really like back then.In The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt cuts through the fog, immersing us in the sights, sounds, and rhythms of life in America forty years ago. He takes us down the streets and into the homes, schools, and shops of three neighborhoods in one quintessentially American city: Chicago. In St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish on the Southwest Side, we see how the local Catholic church served as the moral and social center of community life. In Bronzeville, the heart of the black South Side, we meet the civic leaders who offered hope and role models to people hemmed in by poverty and segregation. And in Elmhurst, a commuter suburb bursting with new subdivisions, we witness the culture of middle-class conformity and the ways in which children and adults bent to the rules of the majority culture.Through evocative stories and incisive analysis, Ehrenhalt shows that the glue holding each neighborhood together was an unstated social compact under which people accepted limits in their lives and deferred to authority figures to enforce those limits--a compact destroyed by the baby boomers' rejection of authority in the 1960s. Since that time, an entire generation has come to believe that personal choice is the most important of life's values. But Ehrenhalt argues that if we truly wish to balance the demands of modern life with a feeling of community, we have a great deal to learn from the "limited" life of the 1950s. The Lost City reveals the price we must pay to restore community in our lives today and the values that will make such a restoration possible. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)977.311043History and Geography North America Midwestern U.S. Illinois Cook; Chicago ChicagoLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.55)
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The belief that the ’50s were an fairly idyllic time is not simply nostalgia by those adults who lived through it. Despite the nuclear and communist threats, corrupt political bosses, lack of privacy, racial injustice, constrictive roles for women and the dictatorial rules to be found just about everywhere one went, most people felt pretty good about life. The optimism that exudes from the media of the day is tangible.
So why was everyone so damn happy? Ehrenhalt believes it was the social codes that were enforced by church, family, school and society at large that made for a more content populace. Authority, in other words, makes [most] people happy.
Say what?
The concept may sound alien to us in 2015 (or in 1995 when this book was published) but it might not be so far-fetched. In one of his stronger arguments, Ehrenhalt says that while there is always a small group of bright and articulate libertarian-minded people who wish to throw off all the chains that bind, most people are not like this. Most people prefer order and a rulebook and get nuts when they don’t have one or when others don’t follow it. The libertarian fallacy is the belief that everyone deep down wants to be like them.
In what sometimes sounds like a cranky old man telling kids to get off his lawn, Ehrenhalt lays the majority of the blame for this lost community at the feet of the Baby Boomers. It was their teeming masses, he says, that were crammed into too-small suburban houses and too-crowded schools. Was it constrictive architecture that eventually drove the Boomers to clamor so loudly about their need for “personal space” and to whip off anything that looked remotely like a shackle?
In the 1950s, privacy, choice and space were in short supply. By the time the Boomers matured, if they knew nothing else, this generation knew they wanted lots of all of these things. In their drive for abolition of rules of almost any sort, the relative calm that was known in 1950s America was seemingly swept away like a rushing river had burst through Mayberry. In its wake, today we have 25 types of toothpaste and over 300 TV channels to choose between. While this might make the libertarians among us rejoice, what about the majority of people who are intimidated by these things and prefer things to be less overwhelming?
As Ehrenhalt says: “It is not the place of the historian or social critic to mock the comforts of ordinary people.”
If the anchors that made for a more stable society will one day be restored, Ehrenhalt believes it will have to come from a future generation who are not so averse to limitations, who welcome a bit more authoritative control, who will gladly exchange a little less freedom for a far less-chaotic world.
Overall, the different areas of Chicago (Parish, Ghetto and Suburb) that are the focus of the book, are well-evoked. The book is a bit less effective at selling the arguments presented as there is little hard evidence given to support them. Nonetheless, Lost City was a thought-provoking read and is worth picking up if you ever wondered how we went from sock hops to Twitter feeds.
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