Renewal doesn’t mean starting over, and it doesn’t mean standing still. It means neither overthrowing what we have nor being satisfied with the status quo. Renewal means bringing our longstanding traditions to bear on new challenges, and so reinvigorating those traditions and better meeting those challenges. It means approaching what is distinct about this moment with what is always true about this world, and so allowing our culture to be new and old at the same time, and to get the best of both.
...the work of cultural renewal involves especially answering two kinds of threats to continuity. One is from those who oppose cultural continuity and want a sharp break from tradition, often in the name of the impulse to revolution. And the other is from the cultural decay and disintegration that always threaten to bring down what has been built up through our traditions. ...
Answering the first threat requires fighting for our traditions in the public square, and defending them from people who attack them. Answering the second requires constant building and rebuilding upon the foundations of those traditions—in our own lives, in our communities, and in the larger society.
...[Deconstructionists] do that because they tend to begin from different premises than traditionalists do about the nature of the human person and the good society. Rather than seeing our inherited institutions as long-evolved means of forming flawed yet dignified human beings toward moral improvement, they see those institutions as built to keep some people down for the benefit of others. They therefore look at what we have inherited and see only oppression and injustice. The purpose of their political and cultural work is to reject that inheritance and to liberate its victims. They don’t think about progress in terms of renewal, but in terms of radical transformation.
And they are very aggressive in that cause. They work to radicalize the content of our children’s education and of the cultural products that we all consume, to transform them into tools to alienate us from the society into which we have been born. They work to inject into the work of institutions like universities, the media, and major corporations an ideology of hostility to the American political tradition and to the Western religious tradition.
They are at war with precisely what we are trying to renew, and so there is no alternative to conflict....
[A] second threat involves the danger not of hostile assault from without but of decay and degradation from within. It is the danger of forgetting and being distracted from the good; the danger of losing sight of what we’re fighting for, and what we’re trying to defend. It is the danger of corruption and decadence, rooted in a variety of political, cultural, and economic idolatries that arise in every generation.
This is the bigger challenge, because it is in fact the reason why renewal is always necessary in the first place. It is simply not the case that the American way of life, or the Jewish way of life, was always on firm ground until the modern left came to attack it. Our way of life requires constant tending and renewal, now and always, because it is not what comes naturally to men and women....
That fact itself is an essential teaching of our highest traditions: human beings are prone to sin and vice yet we possess the capacity for righteousness and virtue. Genesis tells us that “the imagination of man is evil from his youth,” yet Genesis also tells us that men and women were created in the image of God and possess the potential to live up to that image.
This gap between what we are to begin with and what we could become means that every human person requires moral formation to reach his potential. We need to be made into something that we do not start out being. And that work of making us into human beings more fully capable of flourishing is the work of our society’s core institutions. It is the work of the family, first and foremost, and of religion, school, work, and even politics at its best.
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
...He didn’t create a simple division of labor between the builders and the fighters; instead, each of his men was sent to the wall with both a tool of construction and a weapon of war. Working at renewal doesn’t mean that some of us get to be fighters without needing to build and some of us get to be builders without needing to fight. Each person must do both.
To fight without building can deform our soul and make us forget why we fight. It can focus us too sharply on what we oppose, what we hate and hates us, while forgetting what we affirm and what we love in the world. And yet, to see only the work of cultural construction is to forget what it requires, and to lose sight of the need to be practical, realistic, courageous, and strategic in a hostile world. To let others handle the fighting while pretending you’re too good for it yourself is to mistake cowardice for high-mindedness, and to ignore the moral and intellectual substance of the culture we are working to renew.
These two risks—the danger of becoming too hard and the danger of becoming too soft—are two sides of the same coin. They both involve moral deformation that can result from ignoring the real character of our situation. To address them both requires us to be truly well-rounded, at once cold-eyed and warm-hearted, intellectual and practical, courageous and sagacious.
The ethos I’m describing, the ethos of the fighting scholar and the thinker with dirt under his fingernails, is very much the ethos of Israel. It is the notion that everybody fights, and everybody works, and everybody reads, and everybody thinks.
"Modernism’s enduring appeal derives from the strength of its ideals, its promise of a secular paradise that, like communism, has proved impervious to all failures in reality. It survives on its potential, on those brief shining moments when each building or development is new and perfect, the glass clean, the concrete fresh, and the ravages of time and disorder have yet to make their appearance."
"In practical terms, Krier’s approach creates a city in which the groceries you need aren’t a long trek or a traffic jam away, in which it doesn’t take an hour or two to get to school or to work. Everything from a loaf of bread to a box of nails is within a short stroll. Eating out doesn’t require you to pass up the pleasure of a drink, because there will be restaurants within walking distance. You meet your neighbors often enough to get to know them. Corbusier sought to split us into parts; Krier is trying to put us back together again.
He described his ideal as the “15-minute city,” a place in which everything you need on a daily basis can be found within a 15-minute walk. This ideal describes every city you visit on holiday: Rome, Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and the archetypal small towns of Europe and New England. The term “15-minute city” has become controversial since being invoked in Oxford’s heavy-handed attack on car use. But Krier’s original concept is much more humane, seeking to reduce the need for cars rather than limit the use of them by diktat."
"Krier had to allow room for both cars and people, without the one crowding out the other. His solution was to keep the streets narrow and often pedestrianized, and to keep parking in functional courts behind the houses. A different solution, employed by Christopher Alexander, is to thread a parallel network of pedestrian walkways between the houses, like those surviving in small English towns such as Bruton or Tisbury. Yet another approach, when existing street patterns are hard to alter, is to develop the inside of large city blocks with smaller houses around a public green or court. Even with traditional American urban spacing, building houses with front porches is an excellent way to foster informal interactions, as explored by Patrick Deneen in his essay “A Republic of Front Porches.”"
