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http://scp.sagepub.com The epoch of the secular city

Harvey Cox Social Compass 1968; 15; 5 DOI: 10.1177/003776866801500101 The online version of this article can be found at: http://scp.sagepub.com

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The epoch of the secular city

HARVEY COX

article, qui reprend un exposé donné au Canadian Institute on Public Affairs, lauteur expose deux tendances observables dans le milieu urbain nord-Américain.
Dans cet

de ces tendances est lapparition des urbanistes comme noumaîtres dune science qui sintéresse au milieu urbain dans son ensemble en tant quobjet de recherche scientifique, de planification et de gestion. Laccroissement du nombre de centres qui, dans les universités américaines, se consacrent aux études urbaines symbolise cette tendance qui donne naissance aux technologues urbains.
La

première

veaux

est le ressentiment croissant éprouvé par ceux qui se de la participation à la planification et au pouvoir de privés décision. Ces personnes sorganisent maintenant pour peser sur les décisions qui influenceront leur vie. Une de ces organisations: les Students for a Democratic Society se donne pour but objectif lédification dune société où chacun participe aux décisions qui orienteront son destin et la mise en place des structures nouvelles nécessaires à une telle participation. On peut qualifier ces personnes de participatory democrats (défenseurs de la participation).

Lautre tendance
sont
vus

logique interne des positions respectives de ces deux tendances du milieu urbain actuel les a dressées lune contre lautre: cela pourrait conduire à une catastrophe. Lauteur, en tant que théologien, suggère que lapparition des technologues urbains et des participatory democrats est due, au moins en partie, à linfluence de la tradition religieuse judéochrétienne.
La

Si le

prophétisme est la charge principale de la communauté de la foi judéo-chrétienne le prophétisme consistant à discerner les signes du temps, clarifier les options morales offertes aux êtres humains et mettre lhomme en face de ses responsabilités à la lumière des traditions morales la communauté humaine a maintenant besoin dun prophétisme techniquement compétent. La seconde suggestion concerne le rôle de lEglise dans la société. LEglise a souvent joué le rôle darbitre: prenant parti tantôt pour lun, tantôt pour lautre, mais jamais pour lun contre lautre. Mais là où le pouvoir est distribué de manière si inéquitable, le rôle de lEglise devra être celui de protagoniste dans le conflit qui pèse sur nos cités et aussi sur lorien-

tation de notre civilisation.

*

Address delivered

to

the Canadian Institute

on

Public Affairs.

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I want to talk about two basic tendencies in the modern Northern American urban milieu which, I believe, have a kind of inner logic which may result in a dangerous, if not catastrophic collision. I refer, first of all, to the increased necessity and indeed the practice of applying scientific technology to the planning and designing of our urban environment. It is no longer possible to live in an urban environment in an unplanned, helterskelter, laissez-faire way. If we ever thought that it was, the largest city in North America has discovered during the past wretched year of its history that this was one of the most dangerous myths ever harboured. In the technopolis of Gotham, people learned how to walk six miles to work, to grope through their houses with candles, and to sneak over to the faucet and look over their shoulder every time they wanted to take a drink of water or admit it to no one if they took a bath. However, I am told that the power failure, not the water shortage, is still blamed by certain perverse people in New York on the Canadians.

This first tendency is symbolized by the outcropping in our university of centres of urban studies. We have one at Harvard, called the Harvard MIT Joint Centre for Urban Studies. It really is the emergence of urbanistics as the newest master of science that is envisioning the entire case of urban milieu as an object for scientific scrutiny, planning and management. This has emerged fairly recently in North American life, and it is the first of the major tendencies, producing a group of people who, for short hand, I would like to designate the urban technologists.
The other
I would like to draw your attention to is the increasing the part of those who have been left out of planning and decision making in our cities (I refer especially to the cities in the United States, which of course I am more familiar with) - the cutting out of the deal of people who are economically, racially, ethnically or in some other way, deprived of their voice in the decision makings in the councils of the metropolis. What is happening now is the organization of these people on a scale unprecedented in our recent history, the organization of these people to begin participating in the decisions which will influence their lives.

major tendency
on

resentment

A group in the United States called the Students for a Democratic Society issued statement a year or so ago, called the Fort Huron Statement, which sums up the ethos of this movement, rather well, although it could probably also be designated as the objective of groups like the Industrial Areas Foundation and other comparable groups. The purpose is designated as follows: We seek to forge a society where every individual has a share in making the decisions which shape his destiny, and to make the structural changes needed to bring about this kind of individual participation in the society. Professor Stanton Lynd at Yale calls these people the participatory democrats. Now I would like to designate them in short hand with that phrase if I might. So we have the urban technologists and the participatory democrats as the two emerging quadrants in our urban milieu, and I would like to say a couple of things about these two groups.
a

First, as a theologian, I would like to suggest that both of these tendencies, and therefore both of these groups, owe their emergence at least in part, to the impact of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition on our western civilization. Especially
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in the Puritan period, the period of Puritan democracy, which was enormously influential in the culture of North America, do we see this kind of impact taking place. I will not try to document this, but I will simply suggest that Robert Merton in his famous essay on Puritanism and Science, documents what he calls a value convergence between these two, between Puritanism and Science; and he registers the disproportionately large number of Puritans who were members of the newly established Royal Academy of Science. Now what I am suggesting here is that the emergence of urbanistics, urban planning, is really the most recent stage in the acceleration of the importance of science and technology for urban life, made possible, as I have tried to argue in The secular city, by the disenchantment of nature, by the de-sacrilization of our environment, so that it was open to scientific investigation, management and human dominance.
It would probably take a little more documentation to prove that the participatory democrats also owe their historical origins to the impact of the Judaeo-Christian faith on our society; but I think this could be demonstrated too; in fact a book called The revolution of f the Saints re-tells the story of Cromwells army and tries to point out that the origins of participatory democracy are to be found in Cromwells army, and in the impact on the institutions of English and later North American life, which came from that impact. It argues, for example, that this is the first time in history that a king was removed, not simply by assassination, but by judicial murder. You recall that Charles I in 1648 was not assassinated; rather, he was duly tried and beheaded after the trial. Now I am sure that for Charles I that did not make a lot of difference. However, for the course of later western political history, the fact that monarchy itself was consciously brought out and tried and tested is an enormously important event.

But then something began to happen in Cromwells army. Cromwells army was a citizen army, one of the first in history, and, in this army, there was an enormous emphasis on the stimulation of the people of lowest rank, even the privates, to discuss politics, and to make a faithful response to political issues. There were preachers who went about in Cromwells army exhorting people into this kind of discussion, such that the Cavaliers, in their opposition to Cromwell, could say in a very condescending way that in Cromwells army even tinkers and cobblers are taught to reflect on political issues - even tinkers and cobblers.
moment, I think we can see in the work of the parinner city areas in North America or in Mississippi, the most recent echo of this kind of criticism, the kind of activity criticized by the Cavaliers. Even welfare mothers and tenant fathers are exhorted to participate in the political process. And, frequently, the criticism of this kind of exhortation made by todays cavaliers, has the same kind of patronizing tone as the tracts

Now

jumping ahead for a ticipatory democrats in our

criticizing
There
are

Cromwells army.
other

things that happened then: the first effort to re-write a whole public presentation of demands for change, the formation of groups specifically and deliberately designed to implement those changes. Let me read a brief excerpt from a sermon which was delivered by the Rev. Mr. Thomas Case in 1641 before Commons: Reformation must be universal; reform all places,
Constitution, the
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all persons, all callings; reform the benches of judgment; reform the inferior magistrates; reform the universities; reform the cities; reform the counties; reform the inferior schools of learning; reform the Sabbath; reform the Ordinances; reform the Worship of God. Gentlemen, you have more work to do than I can speak of. For every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. This sounds like a rolling of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Berkeley Rebels all into one lump. Reformation must be universal. A whole society and all of its institutions were now subject to thoughtful change and shaping; and every person, even the tinkers and the cobblers, somehow have a role in the shaping of that society.

This is what I would call the de-mystification of politics. Politics was no longer envisioned as some distant terrifying and mysterious thing; rather, it was a process in which every man was called by God himself to participate. In fact, one can see an interesting switch in the figures used in the preaching of the Puritans from its early period to the late period, beginning with talk about the state as the body politic - a direct ecclesiastical image - and moving slowly to the use of the figure of the ship of state, the reason being, you see, that in the body politic, it is really impossible to have a revolution; a hand does not revolt against a head. But if you are using the figure of the ship of state, as every person who has ever been in the navy knows, it is not only the right but the responsibility of the inferior magistrates and finally even the lowest able-bodied seaman to re-place the captain if he has gone berserk or if he is ill. So that with the figure of the ship of state, participation of everyone became symbolically possible. So I am simply arguing as a theologian this evening, that the impact of the biblical faith has given rise to, or at least has contributed to the rise both of the urban technologist and of the participatory democrats.
Now I want to say - and this is my main thesis - that these two groups of people, these two tendencies, are headed for a collision. The inner logic of their position as they have been worked out in the actuality of the urban milieu, is something which has drawn them into a course against each other which could lead to a

spectacular catastrophe.
us look at the urban technologist for a moment. When you speak with the urban technologist, the urban planners, the urban renewal administrators, researchers in urban affairs, you find a sometimes hidden and sometimes unspoken disillusionment with the possibility of real democratic participation. Frequently it is only admitted in private; sometimes it is admitted openly; but the argument is a convincing one; planning is a science and not a hobby; planning requires sophistication and training and competence. Plans are complex, staged, interrelated, and you cannot decide on the lighting system of Toronto or the school needs of Montreal by popular referendum. Somebody who knows has to make this kind of decision. And technology moves so quickly that, by the time we feed sufficient knowledge for making a decision into a large enough group of people to arrive at a consensus, the technological moment has already been lost. The difficulty is that the political institutions of North America in most respects were not devised by people who foresaw the need to facilitate the inclusion of large numbers of people in technical planning. We can hardly blame them for that.

Let

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our whole structure of representative democracy, and the dividing both of Canada and the United States, not on the basis of urban metropolitan units, but of provinces and states, has resulted in a kind of mish-mash of political institutions in which the genuine participation of those involved in planning for their own destinies is very difficult to facilitate.

But

Among the planners, one sometimes finds a cynicism therefore about democracy, and sometimes even a discernible hankering after aristocracy. If you really want to live in a beautiful urban environment - and which one of us does not want to live in a beautiful city? - you first have to visit the truly beautiful cities of Europe. You go to Leningrad; you go to Prague; you go to Florence; and you discover that all the truly beautiful cities of the world were built by tyrants. That is not an encouraging discovery for a democrat. They were all built by princes and prelates who could not have cared less about what the people wanted. In fact, the reason they suggest that parts of my hometown of Boston are so stately and lovely is that Boston was once ruled by an aristocratic elite which laid out the place the way they wanted to lay it out. No one voted on the route of Commonwealth Avenue. It came as a terrible shock to me, for example, to discover that those beautiful long boulevards in Paris which we all love, were laid out by Hausmann so that the movement of the cannons into Paris to keep those participatory democrats down could be effectuated.
the urban technologist will tell you, we try as much as we can to involve people in planning for their own destiny. But there is a limit which is reached quickly, and we find ourselves largely trying to persuade people about a plan which has already been more or less arrived at.

So,

as

Now let us look at the other side for a moment. Among the participatory democrats, whether they are working with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or the Industrial Areas Foundation, or with the organization of Welfare Mothers in the inner city areas of Chicago, one finds a disillusionment and indeed a darl: suspicion about all planners, all specialists, all sociologists, and everybody connected with the Urban Renewal Authority. In fact, a lot of this comes, I am sure, from the failure of social researchers to notice the destructive side effects of researching people over and over again, without any commitment to change. In fact, I would not recommend to anyone here that he walks through one of the negro areas of an American city with a clip board under his arm and a pencil over his ear. People are rightly suspicious of the intentions of researchers. They have been investigated, weighed, interrogated time and time again, and universities and urban renewal authorities are full of reports about their problems. A lot of people have earned their doctorates and their masters degrees investigating them, and there are probably some in this room who have been involved in that.
Let me document this with a quotation from the negro paper from Harlem: &dquo;Im fed up with researchers in
an

editorial in the American News,

Harlem, because

the average researcher in Harlem

prostitutes the misery of the community and spends three quarters of his time trying to convert that misery into dollars and cents to put into his own pocket.
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Take the Harlem expert, for example; this is a whole new profession which has arisen in America since the War on Poverty. These are people called in at rather good consulting fees to tell various levels of government what to do about Harlem. These folks say to the Harlem expert, What can we do for these people to prevent this? This is what our expert has been waiting for. Now I do not have all the answers, Gentlemen, he says, but I think Im on the right track towards a solution of this problem. With about $ 250,000 I could pull together a research team of eminent social workers, psychologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists and, with all of these men, we could come up with an answer in, let us say, eighteen months. In other words, say the city fathers, you need $ 250,000 to get started; is that right? That is right, says the Harlem expert, whom you dont know and who doesnt know you. And he hops on the A train with a quarter of a million dollars of your money and mine to spend studying you.&dquo;
I do not think 100% of this resentment is justified than most of us realize.

justified,

but I think it is

lot

more

Another source of the suspicion of the urban technologist comes simply in the of language. How much does our language about people and about areas in cities set up areas of conflict and resentment? How would you like to live in an area constantly referred to as a slum, a ghetto, a culturally deprived area or - the worst yet - a target area; or even worse than that in some ways, a grey area? I live in the section of Boston called the grey area by those who live outside it, in what seems to me to be much greyer areas than the area in which I live. There is the resentment against other people planning for you, making decisions that you ought to make, however well motivated, however kind. And there is the resentment about being studied when you cannot prevent yourself from being studied. A sociologist once suggested that the hidden factor in what we study in sociology is the inability of some people to prevent themselves being studied; this is why, for example, we have so many more studies of so called slum dwellers than we have of corporation executives.
use

participatory democrats, what they are striving for is a new kind of politics; but what they notice, with the advent of technology and the urban technologists, is what can only be called the re-mystification of politics. Once again politics has become distant, mysterious and foreboding - the technological remystification of that which the Puritan Fathers de-mystified.
The enormous growth of social welfare services in our urban centres in North America provides a means of social control over those who receive the services. Social control is power, and power is political. So this is a kind of vast political power in the hands of the social welfare establishment. It is political power which is largely unaccounted; for which there is no direct or institutionalized accountability. The person whose home or property or apartment or neighbourhood is involved in urban renewal has no direct way of holding the urban renewal authority accountable of the quality of service given to him, for example, in relocation. The mother on welfare has no way of holding her welfare agency directly accountable for the quality of service provided for her. There is a certain kind of quantitative accountability from those above the social worker level; but there
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For the

is no qualitative accountability from below. This is social control from above without adequate safeguards or accountability from below. It is a kind of taxation without representation, a kind of political power without democratic strength. And this accounts in part at least for the emergence of the image of the hated giver or the hated helper.
The most frequent figure in the American welfare scene today is the social worker who probably went into the business with the highest of idealistic motivation and discovers in five or ten years that he or she is the hated helper, whose clients regard him or her as one to be deceived and overcome by whatever method is possible. Since there are no institutionalized methods for holding these people accountable, other methods naturally emerge.
am afraid that the dynamics of this collision are built in. entirely unavoidable, but not to notice the convergence

I do not think

they

are

of these two growing tendencies in what could be a collision, would be idle as we think of the future of democracy and of popular participation in the North American city.
of the Judaeo-Christian community of need now is a new understanding and a new type of prophecy. Let us say that prophecy, broadly speaking, involves the discernment of the signs of the times, the clarification of the moral options presented to human beings, and the summoning of man to accountability in the light of the moral traditions. If this is what prophecy is, our problem now is that the human issues of the urban environment are clouded and hidden behind the technological screen. Issues deeply involving the lives and destinies of human beings are presented to us as architectural engineering or highway plans. And it is suggested that without sufficient competence in any of these fields, we are unworthy to ask questions or to criticize; unless we have a complete counterplan to offer, then we are invited to keep our mouths shut. What we need is a kind of technologically competent prophecy, a community sufficiently concerned about the whole community so that it can see what the human issues are which are lurking behind every technological and architectural program for any city. If

prophecy

is the

major responsiblity
we

faith, perhaps what

What is the nature of the human community envisioned? What happens to human beings? What happens to the participation of human beings in making decisions about their own lives and their own destiny in such a setting? I do not think that a single prophet can answer this any more - an Amos coming down from Tekoa, thundering on the porch of the temple. This requires a community of concern, competent both in the moral tradition and in the technical skills required. I do not think any particular denomination will be able to do this alone. It is my deepest conviction that unless our new ecumenical concensus moves away from the kind of fascination with religious unity and institutional unity and moves towards prophetic interest in the welfare of the entire community, it is really not worth even talking about. second suggestion about the church relates to the church as protagonist. Our model for the role of the church in our society has frequently been that of an arbiter or an umpire - the marriage counsellor model, talking to one side and the

My

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the other, have begun to facilitating discover in the racial struggle in America that the marriage counsellor model of the churchs place in society is not a fully adequate one. How can you simply be an umpire or an arbiter between the police of Selma and the negroes of Selma? How can you not take sides where power is distributed so inequitably? The same thing is beginning to emerge in the consciousness of church leaders and church people in our urban centres. The poor, the disenfranchised, those cut off from the decision making process, must be supported, must be organized, must be helped to participate at the table. And here the churchs role, regardless of the criticisms made, will, I think, more and more be that not of the arbiter, but of the protagonist - the protagonist of the disaffected and the alienated.

other side of the

dispute,

never

taking

the side of the

one

against

communication, facilitating reconciliation. And yet

we

There will be many criticisms of this; in fact I think it will probably touch off a power struggle within the institution of the church itself, with those who wish the church to continue its role as the marriage counsellor on the one side and, on the other, a growing group of young people within the church who want to see it as an active protagonist in the struggle which is shaping up over our cities.
And the struggle which is shaping up over our cities is the struggle over the whole direction of our civilization, because we live in a time in which the world has become a city, and our cities have become our world; and whether or not we are able to create a human environment within the city will tell the story about whether our whole cosmos can be made over into the cosmos of man; whether the harmonization of the universe that Father Teilhard de Chardin discusses with such provocative eloquence, will actually occur in our time. Is this the epoch in which man now becomes the custodian of the universe and is given responsibility for the next stage in human evolution as Father Chardin suggests? Or is it the time, finally, in which mans machines and his technological devices defeat him, de-humanize him and reduce most of his numbers to dependency and clientelism, while a small cadre of urban or other technologists run the show? This is the question I think we have to face, and for me this is a basically theological question. It is the question which the old theologians of the Early Church referred to as the question of restoratio humani, the restoration of man seeing the whole purpose of God in history as the restoration of man to his manhood ; and the restoration of man to his manhood has to be the restoration of man to community, to polis, to political participation. Man is restored to his manhood by restoring him to participation in his city. This is the challenge, not simply of the church, not simply of our religious institutions, but to all of us.
I argue that the emergence of the

epoch

of the secular

city

in

our

time marks the

greatest possibility for man in the history of his human pilgrimage. It is not an evil; it is not a massive backsliding; it is mans chance to reassert his place as the partner of God in the humanization of the universe. But it will not solve itself.
The

city

has

to

become either
or

metropolis

Zion, the city of death

the

city

or New Jerusalem, either Babylon of life. And which it becomes, depends on

or us.

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