Modern life

THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

I am a latecomer to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. I haven’t read any of his books but I have listened to numerous lectures and interviews. A 2018 interview with NYU professor Jonathan Hardt, founder of the Heterodox Academy,  about the causes for the unravelling of the contemporary university touched me close to home. Peterson appeared on the social media battlefield after involving himself in a free speech controversy with the University of Toronto, his employer. Peterson’s views have made him a lightning rod for radical left-wing critics who have trotted out the usual accusations: hate-speech mongerer,

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WHAT’S NEXT

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced plans to remove its statue of George Whitefield, a famous eighteenth-century British preacher, due to his condoning slavery. What was the statue, made by R. Tait McKenzie in 1919, doing at Penn? Whitefield was a lifelong friend of Benjamin Franklin, the founder of the university. Moreover, as the Penn website notes: “Franklin chose the Whitefield meeting house, with its Charity School, to be purchased as the site of the newly formed Academy of Philadelphia which opened in 1751, followed in 1755 with the College of Philadelphia, both the predecessors of the University of Pennsylvania.”

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ANYTHING GOES

It was the great Cole Porter’s birthday on June 9. In 1934 he wrote the musical Anything Goes. 

The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today
And black’s white today
And day’s night today . . .
And though I’m not a great romancer
I know that you’re bound to answer
When I propose
Anything goes

Seems about right.

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AT THE PEARLY GATES

I note that Christo Javacheff passed away recently. I was not a fan of his work. On the occasion of his and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park I wrote in 2005 in Slate: “Jeanne-Claude has been quoted as saying that she thinks that Olmsted would be “very happy” with the installation. My guess is that he would have hated it.”

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THE THIN VENEER

The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unravel. For the first half day, drivers observed traffic light signals, then they started to go through orange lights, and pretty soon they were disregarding red lights altogether. That was only the beginning. According to the CBC, which called it a night of terror: “At first, the strike’s impact was limited to more bank robberies than normal. But as night fell, a taxi drivers’ union seized upon the police absence to violently protest a competitor’s exclusive right to airport  .

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A PRIVATE FUTURE

In 1973, my friend Martin Pawley published The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. According to his  Guardian obituary (he died in 2008) the book “foresaw a society with ever greater technical means of communication becoming paradoxically more insular and dysfunctional.” Here is an extract (which appeared in full on the jacket of the original hardcover): “Alone in a centrally heated, air-conditioned capsule, drugged, fed with music and erotic imagery, the parts of his consciousness separated into components that reach everywhere and nowhere, the private citizen of the future will become one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from action.

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i-BAUHAUS

Nicholas Fox Webber, the author of a biography of Le Corbusier, has recently published iBauhaus. I have not read the book yet, but the subtitle, “The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design,” says it all. There is no doubt that the iPhone is a minimalist, no frills machine and proud of it. It is also a quintessentially Bauhaus example of form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function. The iPhone doesn’t fit the human hand particularly well, certainly not as well as the classic Western Telephone Model 500 handset designed by Henry Dreyfuss in the 1940s.

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POST-PANDEMIC

According to the United Nations Secretary-General, the coronavirus pandemic is the “greatest test” the world has faced since the United Nations was formed in the wake of the Second World War. One of the results of that global war was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, which until then had been a distinctly Bohemian side show of little import. It was not until the postwar 1950s that steel and glass office towers and precast concrete housing blocks appeared—and came to dominate the built environment. One wonders if a post-pandemic world will see a comparable phenomenon. Of course, a plague does not materially lay waste cities,

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