Modernism Part 8: The Price of Hubris

...for those of you hanging in there, reading this essay in installments. (Please note below the blank that needed filling in!)

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Part 8: UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

Of course, all that hubris and overweening can-do pride led to trouble, as it had to. Political rebellion in the Old South. Social disorientation and a generation gap. Pent-up frustration in the ghetto, suddenly released by hope, flash-boiled into race riots. Modernist architecture proved devastatingly wrongheaded as high-rise “projects” for the poor exacerbated every social ill, instead of helping to ease them. Few superhighways were built to allow for growth or flexibility. Many best-laid schemes spawned unintended consequences.

Likewise, a well-meaning but ill-designed welfare system systematically destroyed families, undermined work and dissolved personal responsibility -- proving that Barry Goldwater could be right-on when it came to detailed criticism, even if he was dead wrong about the dire need to do something vigorous about poverty.

Alas, by that point modernist meddlers were too far gone down the road of arrogant sureness -- so full of their own certainty of what was right that they were incapable of even tweaking or adjusting their plans under intelligent criticism. Le Corbusier in Brasilia and ___ in New York City showed how far architectural pomposity and insolence had gone. When taken to its ultimate extreme, by arrogant geniuses like Frank Lloyd Wright, architectural modernism lost every trace of egalitarian pragmatism and became yet another excuse for bullying by a new class or "wizards". Human occupants were no longer even consulted over their needs, but simply told what those needs were.

(For more on flaws of technological arrogance, see Edward Tenner’s Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Also Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.)

Then, of course, came the ultimate hubris, brought to us under the aegis of that quintessential modernist, Robert MacNamara. Believing we could do anything and everything... or, as JFK put it - “pay any price, bear any burden”... America embarked upon an insane land war in Asia -- exactly what old Ike warned us never to do. (Never let JFK off the hook for this. He expressed modernism in its fullness and pride, all the good and all the bad.) Vietnam reamed much of the spirit out of American society, deeply wounded its economy, and gravely injured belief in our ability as a nation.

(Ask yourself what some enemy would think, looking at America and wondering how to harm us. Is the answer to topple a couple of high rise buildings? Or would you look acorss 50 years for the one mistake that nearly tore apart this nation? How about an unpopular-quagmire, ill-run land war in Asia?)

There are eerie parallels between the MacNamara-JFK brain trust -- on the one hand -- and today’s leading neoconservatives. In both groups we see the same arrogance, elitism, pride, foreign adventurism, and utter, unquestioning belief in the proficient mastery of a core group. Like Alcibiades, during the era when Periclean Athens went off the deep end, their pride is limitless, while their willingness to endure criticism resembles a cranky four-year old.

And yet, despite these common traits, the sixties modernists were completely different than today’s imperious neocons, who exude all of the same hubris while offering none of the modernists’ vision. All of the conceit, accompanied by none of the kindness. The same level of overweening ambition, but all of it funneled into benefiting a narrow kleptocracy, instead of a vast nation and world whose pain and shackled hopes should always inspire eagerness for change.

...on to part 9