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Wednesday, 28 February 2007 16:01 |
 | | Mark West |
The modern age is the age of cities.
There has never been an age, in all of human history, in which the city was so dominant, both economically and socially, in human affairs.
And yet there is clear evidence that the age of the city may be coming to an end.
Jane Jacobs, in her writings, speaks eloquently about the economic and social advantages of the city. By providing a rich network of social and economic interconnections, the city served, Jacobs argued, as a driving force for regional and national economic systems.
Jacobs
was a writer of immense charm and humanity, qualities which served to
help her books become widely popular. But Jacobs didnít acknowledge the
vast changes which have overtaken Western society.
The increasing
dominance of petroleum as the basis for Western economies has meant
that billions of dollars have flowed into states, some of which are
fundamentally inimical to the United States. And the rise of the
followers of Sayyid Qutb and related movements which see fundamentalist
Islam as locked in a death struggle with Western permissive societies
has served to fundamentally destabilize the world. Couple these two
events with the fall of the Soviet Union and the likelihood of the
dispersal of at least some of the atomic weapons, materials and
know-how extant in some of the components of the former U.S.S.R., and
you have an explosive mix which puts the large cities of the world at
terrible risk.
Just one atomic
device could result in the deaths of millions of people if it were
detonated in a major urban center, either here or in Europe. And, as
the adventures of the peripatetic A. Q. Kahn suggest, the knowledge of
how to construct such a device is difficult to keep under wraps.
Can we be
certain that some millions of the billions of dollars we pour into the
oil states of the Persian Gulf are not being diverted to fund the
purchase, or the theft, or the construction of just such a device?
We may be sure
that the people who engineered the destruction of the World Trade
Center, and whose goal in doing that was to persuade the rest of the
Islamic world that revolt against what they saw as an ever encroaching
Western and godless society was not only possible but simple, are still
out there.
They are in madrassas and slums and villages and Internet
cafes, and they are as clever as we, and as well-funded. They need not
succeed today, or tomorrow, in their long-held and grand goal of
delivering a nuclear weapon of some sort to the very heart of Western
civilization, to one of the great cities from which emanates the
culture which they see as so inimical to their own.
We are smart, too, and equally relentless. We, too, have vast sums of money and determination.
But we must succeed every time. They must succeed only once. We must fail only once, for millions to die.
And it is for
that reason that the great cities, in as much as they are anything more
than museums en plein vent, are in the long run doomed. Just as the
technology of the automobile made the buggy-whip no longer a necessity,
so has a technology ó the ever-expanding technology of mass murder and
mayhem ó finally made the concentrations of population and information
in the city too tempting for the terrorist and the madman. Like the
latifundia of the Roman Empire, or the castle of the medieval lord,
they are an artifact of a social order which new technologies and
changing times have doomed.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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