In his essay in the new book Why Place Matters, Notre Dame architecture professor Philip Bess offers a theory about why we don’t know how to build traditional buildings, and construct traditional urban spaces: “because a precondition of making them is a shared metaphysical realist view of the world embodied and transmitted by institutions — and this is precisely what is lacking in modernity.”

What does Bess mean by “metaphysical realism”? He sums up:

1. The world is real, and reality is what it is and is fundamentally sacred;

2. It is possible for human beings to have true knowledge of the world, with this qualification: that all true human knowledge is necessarily partial, individually and collectively perspectival, and mediated to us through narrative tradition; and

3. Human beings can only flourish by conforming ourselves to reality, but again with a qualification: that as artisans, human beings order found reality into a specific human reality that, so long as it accords with and participates in the larger reality of which human beings are a part, enables us to flourish both individually and collectively.

Bess says that all pre-modern cultures lived by these principles, but we began losing them about 130 years ago. He goes on:

I think the recovery of good human communities generally and good towns and neighborhoods in particular may prove much harder than many of us imagine [because of] a too-little-considered distinctive feature of modern life: In a way unprecedented in human history, modernity has sharply divided public life from private life. … The modern creation of a private realm is thus both a consequence and a further precipitating cause of the breakdown of religion as a shared teleological understanding of the cosmos encompassing both is and ought, facts and values; and the modern relegation of “values” to the private realm both engenders an reinforces pluralism, relativism, and individualism, especially in morals, religion, and the arts.