Is it true that cities and suburbs are isolating places since they are too large for a local community to form. Is this a modern phenomenon or did ancient cities also see this destruction on "tribal(used very loosely) identity.
>>900766
. Modern civilization has pushed man onward; it has generated in him the need for an increasingly greater number of things; it has made him more and more insufficient to himself and powerless. Thus, every new invention and technological discovery, rather than a conquest, really represents a defeat and a new whiplash in an ever faster race blindly taking place within a system of conditionings that are increasingly serious and irreversible and that for the most part go unnoticed. This is how the various paths converge: technological civilization, the dominant role of the economy, and the civilization of production and consumption all complement the exaltation of becoming and progress; in other words, they contribute to the manifestation of the "demonic" element in the modern world.
This present "civilization", starting from Western hotbeds, has extended the contagion to every land that was still healthy and has brought to all strata of society and all races the following "gifts": restlessness, dissatisfaction, resentment, the need to go further and faster, and the inability to posses one's life in simplicity, independence, and balance.
Even the relationship of the modern economy to the machines is significant with regard to the arousal of forces that surpass the plans of those who initially evoked them and carry everything along them. Once all interest for anything superior and transcendent was either lost or laughed at, the only reference point remaining was man's need, in a purely material and animal sense. Moreover, the traditional principle of the limitation of one's need within the context of a normal economy (a balanced economy based on consumption) was replaced with the principle of acceptance and multiplication of need.
>>900791
>Even the relationship of the modern economy to the machines is significant with regard to the arousal of forces that surpass the plans of those who initially evoked them and carry everything along them.
lol
>>900791
Sounds like Unabomber but that aint Unabomber. So who is it?
>>900766
There is this idea known as scalar stress theory, wherein population growth forces organizational complexity, developing such things as hierarchy and a wider cultural identity in order for the society not to collapse or fission.
I don't think many Americans feel any sense of combined identity, when people argue for exceptionalism they are called nationalistic ractist etc. So the thing holding America and a sense of americaness is politics and the ideologies associated with it, however many of these have become so polarized that average people can't relate with them, leaving them with no connection to, or an active disdain towards, the people around them, or at least the organizational structures that build our society, leading to feelings of dis attachment.
>>900766
>Is it true that cities and suburbs are isolating places since they are too large for a local community to form.
Smaller communities up to about 160 people could form on the basis of everyone knowing and trusting everyone.
Any communities bigger than that required abstract ideas to make everyone be able to 'know and trust' everyone, which is where common culture, religion, language and law come into play. It's what prevents people from having to otherwise kill each other or risk being killed themselves.
>>900766
>Is this a modern phenomenon or did ancient cities also see this destruction on "tribal(used very loosely) identity.
>Ancient/Medieval cities
>Have 0 identity and belonging
Nigger, modern nationalism was based on Classical and Medieval European City States and their ideals. Just where do you think the concept of "citizenship" came from?
People who lived in Free Cities (in Holy Roman Empire) or Italian City States looked down on Feudal Peasantry whom they viewed as people closer to slavery than freemen that they were supposed to be.
Citizens had more civic rights than peasants. Their vote had a say in the Burgher Council/Senate, either directly or through their representatives they elected in their guilds and associations. Their charters and laws are different than that of the Feudal Peasant. In war, they defended theirfuckingselves in an Urban Militia with the weapons that they owned while the peasant ran to his knight/feudal lord for protection.
Urban communities in medieval Europe were justifiably more proud and more community based than some Feudal Peasant whose village is a lord's property. They don't feel isolated at all, or alienated at all, they felt that they were part of a huge community wherein they got a say in what happens and belonged to a great undertaking.
Read of people from Medieval City States and Free Cities accounts is like reading something anachronistic: they talked of their cities as they were sovereign nation-states, of identifying themselves a collective. Compare this to peasants whose chief method of identity was their liege lords. Citizens saw themselves as a race apart from Feudal Peasants (even if they were of the same race, like in Germany).
Civic pride and belonging was even greater during Classical Greek Cities.
>>901529
>even if they were of the same race, like in Germany
>Germany wasn't a thing until the late 18th century
>Germans are a race
I'm not sure about any of the bull shit you're posting at all.
When we think of modern nationalism then you have a broad topic. I think you're referring to civic nationalism not ethnic nationalism and even then Nationalism is hardly a marker of community in as much a definition of identity.
>>901558
Still doesnt shake the fact of that ethnic nationalism of later centuries took shitloads off ideas from city state society
They say that in Mediterranean cities in the Ancient world up til the end of the Renaissance that were no serial killers because you knew everyone in your neighbourhood rather intimately. There was also less room and cause to be lonely in those societies.
>>900766
I'm on my phone right now, but look up gemeinschaft and gesellschaft and see where that takes you. I think it's what you're after!
it's only white people that feel isolated in cities and suburbs. that's why there is so much controversy over gentrification. white people move into these long-standing close-knit black or latino communities
>>901992
Why do you think that is
>>901992
What about Italians and the Irish in the early 20th century America?
They've also formed these close-knit urban communities
>>902389
The Irish and Italians weren't originally considered white.
>>901558
Germany as a federation wasn't a thing, but Germans still had ethnic and linguistic ties. You could both be 'a German' and belong to two different principalities. Even if a lot of German identity was "we're not French, fuck 'em."
>>902365
Probably because they have smaller families and their culture just doesn't promote frequent contact with relatives
>>902365
cuz dem crackaz be raysiss n sheeit
>>900766
Not every city is like that. Many are really several local communities who have formed a federated union. The particular kind of community that are isolating and seen in those mega suburbs in American and Britain are ones where people commute long distances between their homes, their place of work, and their markets and other vendors. Considering such commuting habits are only possible with modern transportation technology and infrastructure, it's a pretty modern phenomenon.
However, there could be some relation between modern cities/suburbs and imperial metropoles of the past like Ancient Rome, Constantinople, or Baghdad, where the city functioned as a form of welfare state supporting its massive population than a community that naturally grew out of a common market or church.
>>901464
>Smaller communities up to about 160 people
Interesting, how did you you settle on that number?
>>902365
They're leaving whatever community they came from to be closer to some economic opportunity, generally some company with its own isolated property in another part of the city, rather than looking for a job in some local shop.
>>900839
probably a radical imam piece of shit.
>>900766
It's true, alright.
Which is also why communism doesn't work on a big scale.
Spengler wrote about this extensively
Basically they're the last extension of caesarean civilization before the collapse of civilization takes place
This is why it's important to always place a huge emphasis on ruralism and delocalized agrarianism if you want your civilization to truly last for many centuries or millenia even
>>905038
Oswald Spengler is pseudoscience, not taken seriously by academic historians.
His works can, and should be, placed in a position of esteem alongside Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for being exquisitely written works of romantic poetry, not factual history up the standards of modern academic rigor.
Spengler (and Gibbon) was writing in the days before Big Data would allow analysts to study economies at its broadest levels, before the concept of deflation and inflation were well understood phenomenon and economics was still a developing science (it still is, technically). Spengler saw something teleological about the ebb and flow of history because he didn't fully understand the ecological/economic forces that were influencing these societies.
For example we know now from studying the Roman archaeological record that one of the reasons for Nero's widespread unpopularity was his unsuccessful attempts to stave off economic deflation. 1,500 years before the concept of economics would be invented by priests at the University of Salamaca, Nero's government was at a loss for what to do about it except scapegoat Christians. It wasn't moral decay, we find archaeological evidence of Romans bitching about moral decay in 200 BCE and in 200 CE. Literally every generation of Roman bitched about moral decay and elected leaders who promised to crack down and punish them for it, even as aristocrats were (often literally) getting away with murder.
>>905038
>This is why it's important to always place a huge emphasis on ruralism and delocalized agrarianism if you want your civilization to truly last for many centuries or millenia even
China has been a centralized empire for over 2,000 years. When an old regime declared bankruptcy, a new regime swept into the machinery and picked up where the old dynasty left off.
And the longest lasting society in history, the 3,000 year run by Pharaonic Egypt, was a bountiful Oasis surrounded by brutal wasteland in three directions (provided them with no need for defense in most places and an enviable expansion zone for ambitious Pharaohs), whose isolation allowed them to maintain a perpetual centralized hydralic despotism centered around trade and agriculture of the Nile river valley.
And Romans placed a MASSIVE emphasis on ruralism, despite the massive city itself the overwhelming number of Roman citizens lived in tiny agricultural villages. In fact they placed so much emphasis on ruralism that they eventually made it legally binding to be a farmer, preventing them from leaving their farms, setting the stage for later feudalism. And this emphasis on land-owning farmers left the central Roman economy in a state of perpetual deflation, only buoyed by occasional economic stimuli of foreign conquest.
The only reason why the west would go on to invent colonialism and industrialism first is because European terrain is not conducive to the tactics of Mongolian pony archers. Literally every other great society on Eurasia was burned to the ground and all the brain drain was pointed in the direction of Italy, aka the birthplace of the European renaissance. Ruralism has nothing to do with it, it's being lucky enough to be born on broken, rocky terrain with water on multiple borders that is way more defensible than the fertile, cosmopolitan drainage basins of the Himalayan glacier, which could support truly massive societies but was hugely exposed in every direction.
