Article from The American Enterprise

Fall 1997

A Virtual Public Realm
Is not Good Enough

by James Howard Kunstler

For years now, William Bennett and like-minded conservatives have been criss-crossing the nation hollering about civic virtue. Unfortunately, the favorite place of conservative Republicans is the American automobile utopia known as the suburbs. That is their natural habitat. That's where they spawn and replicate. And suburbia is profoundly uncivic and uncivil in its nature. It is inherently unsuited to be the dwelling place of civilization (or of a restored civic virtue). The biggest losers in suburbia, of course, are children.
    The reason civilization cannot dwell in suburbia is that the public realm of suburbia is impoverished. The public realm is that portion of the everday environment that belongs to everyone and to which everyone ought to have equitable access. The American drive-in utopia has a magnificent private realm. Nobody builds more luxurious private houses than we do, with more bathrooms per inhabitant than any other place on earth. But the public realm of suburbia is composed of parking lots, berms, planting strips, highway medians, and little else in the way of consciously embellished civic property. This is a problem because the public realm is the setting for our civic life, and where it exists in impoverished form, civic life suffers accordingly. The public realm is also the physical manifestation of the common good, and when you degrade and devalue it, as we do in suburbia, than you impair the ability of a group of people incorporated as a community to even think about the common good, with tragic implications for the future of our culture.
    I think the eminent Jungian psychologist James Hillman is right when he asserts that, despite all our lip-service to "family values," Americans actually hate their children. In suburbia, where most Americans now live, children can't use an everyday environment that has been constructed solely for the convenience of motorists -- at least not without the assistance of Soccer Mom. By the way, in arranging things this way, we manage to deprive children of a terribly important stage of their development: the period between, say, eight and fifteen when they need to a acquire a sense of their personal sovereignty and how it operates within the context of the everyday environment.
    Children over seven years old need more than a safe place to ride their bikes. They need at least as much as adults. They need places to shop. They need honorable gathering places -- not just the scraps left over from the commercial developers, the berms and parking lots. They need cultural institutions, libraries, theaters, museums. And they need access to all these things on their own without the assistance of Soccer Mom. As things stand today, the public realm for children in suburbia is the psychotic principality of TV. Instead of seeing the full spectrum of society in normal operation (including honorably occupied adults who are not their parents) all they get are the antics of Marilyn Manson, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Beavis and Butthead. These are their models for adulthood.
    One of the more insidious ideas of the Electronic Age is the notion that the virtual is an adequate substitute for the authentic. A virtual pet is as good as a puppy. A virtual friend on the internet is as good as a real friend. A group of hobbyists constitutes a "community. This idea is false. The artificial public realm of TV is not an adequate substitute for authentic civic life, and at some level most people who are not completely insane recognize this. For instance, where adults are concerned, an emotional involvement with soap opera characters is not the same as having relationships with real people in the real world -- though I daresay there are plenty of adults in this country who might be confused about this today. That's how psychotic our culture has become. And, of course, Barney the Dinosaur is a poor excuse for a childhood chum. He's not even a very good artificial imaginary companion. He isn't equal to the average child's innate imaginative ability (which is precisely why Barney is so sickening to intelligent parents.)
    We are fortunate that the power of the virtual is self-limiting in the face of the authentic. Right now TV is in the process of destroying itself even as a fabulous time-wasting medium. The more channels we add, the more frantically uninteresting everything gets. The obvious destiny of TV is 500 channels of infomercials. By the same token, I predict that the internet will prove to be the AM radio of the future. Gresham's Law of economics also applies to culture: bad currency drives out the good. When depreciated, debased, or mutilated currency is in circulation with stuff of precious value, the precious stuff disappears from circulation.
    Among the great issues of the 21st century will be the mess that we have made of our everyday world, and especially the deleterious effect it has had on children. In the midst of the enormous tides of cultural sewage overflowing our national life, there is the growing recognition that we desperately need something better, starting with authentic places that are truly worthy of the human spirit.