We are accustomed to thinking that the suburbs are the solution to the problem of the cities. We need to recognize that in the deepest sense they are the cause of the problem and not the solution. Suburbs institutionalize a false idea of freedom as social mobility, as climbing out of one's class. They dramatize the dangerous freedom that drains talent and wealth and imagination away. To say that our ideal of freedom is above all a suburban ideal is to give it palpable shape; it helps us understand more explicitly than any other image what's wrong with it. It is not only the underclass that is impoverished by this flight to the suburbs. In one way or another it diminishes all of us. The suburb organized around the shopping mall rather than the neighborhood eradicates the last vestiges of reciprocal obligation. It underscores the illusion that the good life consists of unlimited choices unconstrained by any sense that others are in the picture. No less than the drug culture of the ghetto, suburban culture rests on the phantasy of escape. So it is no accident that the suburbs have a drug problem too, or that young people in the suburbs find that nothing holds their attention, that sustained effort is beyond their powers and that nothing seems to justify sustained effort anyway.
'On The Moral Vision of Democracy' [Civic Arts Review #4, Fall 1991]
Use the link below to read the full 1991 interview with North American historian and cultural critic CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932–1994):
https://chamberscreek.net/library/Christopher%20Lasch/car_interview.html
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