"The Prince of Wales is from Richmond. England, not Virginia. He does not have enough relatives to be from Virginia."Several students in "What is Conservatism?" expressed agreement with Russell Kirk's kvetch that "veneration dies on the pavements," and even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Are cities to blame for mobility, rootlessness, impermanence, and every other modern evil? Is city life fundamentally unconservative?
Even if we grant that city life lacks a sense of permanence, it's still not quite right to say that there's no urban parallel to the glowing pride of showing some stranger around your ancestral home. Doesn't Aaron Sorkin say that his favorite thing to do is show New York City to someone who's never been there before? Los Angeles nostalgia is morbid and vaguely nihilistic, but it exists. People still associate the town of Berkeley with radicalism; DC hard-core couldn't have happened anywhere else; blues might have come from the Delta, but soul is entirely a product of Memphis.
Housemate Will points out that while each city does possess a tradition, rural (and potentially even suburban) culture is more conservative because the people who live there don't just feel connected to their location but also to their neighbors, whereas in the city getting to know your neighbors is considered impolite.
Even if it's true that urban conservatism is based on my relationship with the mythic ideal of a city more than my relationship with the actual people who live there, that only means that urban traditionalism is self-conscious instead of unaffected, and mythical rather than communitarian.
Where do I sign?
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