Marriage, Memory, & The Work Of Local Culture
What does throwaway architecture have to do with throwaway marriage? Brandon McGinley waxes Berryan about his native Pittsburgh, and how a place’s sense of itself depends on organic community sharing memories across generations. It’s a great essay, but where it gets really interesting is McGinley’s consideration of how the culture of committed marriage matters to our sense of place. Check this out:
Places are organic. They cannot be created by fiat. A wise developer or government planner can lay out conditions favorable for the emergence and maintenance of interesting and unique places, but the built environment cannot, itself, accomplish this task.
The Southside Works “lifestyle center” takes cues from New Urbanist thinking—mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly (though, unfortunately, not really pedestrian-oriented), etc.—and contains design elements that evoke the land’s industrial past. Not only does this help the continuity of memory that is essential to place-making, but it also may undergird the emergence of this iteration of the built environment as a long-term contributor to the story of this place. But authentic place-making requires more: the natural coming-together of people and the gradual, communal emergence of the consensus that a place is worthwhile and meaningful.
Which is to say: places are dependent upon organic, authentic, intergenerational human communities. As a society becomes more atomized—that is, as the bonds that tie man to man are severed and we conceive of ourselves as balls in a lottery machine, colliding at random and never touching for more than a moment—the lifeblood of places is drained. Individuals may associate idiosyncratic feelings and meanings with a location, but they are not shared and thus they contribute nothing to the communal understanding (based in shared experiences, memories, and lore) on which a place is based. In this situation, meaningful places don’t just die; they never come into being.
The first bonds that tie person to person are those that tie man to woman, and then both of them to their children. The family is the first and most fundamental organic human community. The family naturally bridges generations, permitting the dynamic exchange of stories and memories not just from within the family, but from the larger community of families that make up a neighborhood, a town, or a city. The family provides the structure for the passing on of the community’s legends, insights, and understandings—the raw material from which places are forged.
And the family, of course, is based on the solemn commitment of marriage. A culture that does not value marriage can never be one that values place. If a culture does not value the stable transmission of life itself, can we possibly expect it to value the stable transmission of the more abstract aspects of the human experience? Disinterested in the past and in the future, such a hollow, atomized society can only view places (and other persons) instrumentally, rather than as dynamic and irreplaceable components of being human, together.
Therefore, a revitalization of a culture of place in this or any country can only be achieved alongside a revitalization of a culture of marriage. Places necessarily exist across generations; they connect us to our community’s past, enhance its present, and remind us about its future, which we must tend. They both require and encourage intergenerational responsibility. But the cultural abandonment of marriage is nothing if not the final denial of that responsibility. Abandoning marriage renders intergenerational bonds weak and fleeting; it privileges present individual satisfaction over stable familial and communal infrastructure.
Read the whole thing. I had never quite thought about it this way. I’m still thinking about it.
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