Perhaps my title needs a question mark: Civic Virtue? Or even reformulation as an actual interrogative sentence? Is there even such a thing as civic virtue? Now, obviously there are virtues that can be deployed to the benefit of the community and of one’s neighbors in particular: paying your taxes promptly, supporting local charitable and service organizations, contributing to or participating in joint civic activities. There is a certain civic virtue perhaps in keeping the exterior of your grounds in a reasonably tidy condition. You can cut your lawn grass in a timely manner and refrain from throwing your empty beer bottles into your yard. Try to keep from having more than two jalopies up on cinder blocks in the driveway at any one time. That sort of thing. But is there such a thing as civic virtue as relates to cities themselves? Can a city ever be said to be “virtuous”?
These questions arise in my mind
attendant upon a book review I have been asked to write. Its title is Florence and the Idea of
Jerusalem, a title with the increasingly uncommon virtue of telling you
what the book is actually going to be about.
The time period covered is often referred to by historians as early modernity. Several of the religions of the world have
the concept of “holy places,” many of which are cities said to be sacred. In medieval and Renaissance Italy the
powerful city-state of Florence liked to think of itself as a “new
Jerusalem”. One can say only “Join the
club!” In fact I doubt that there was
any conurbation of even moderate size that in one way or another didn’t exhibit
signs of a kind of Jerusalem-envy. But Florence, as with most things, did Hierosulamism with a flair.
A city can be virtuous by law. I spent a good deal of my early life in a
little place in north-central Arkansas, Baxter County. The county seat was a quite small town—a good
deal larger now, though still small, called Mountain Home. During all the years of my youth Baxter
County was “dry”—meaning that the trading in or consumption of alcohol was
prohibited by law. Between 1920 and 1933
the whole country was by law in theory “dry”. I
stress the “in theory” part, because violations (bootlegging) were rife and created
organized crime on a vast scale. Because
of the rampant criminality and gangsterism that followed in its wake, enforced
prohibition eventually came to be generally regarded as a disastrous failure
and was repealed. (I might add that lots of Americans really liked to drink.) Prohibition had been
imposed by the ponderous device of constitutional amendment, and it was
repealed by the same means. But prohibitionists
could not be repealed, and there were still a lot of them around too,
especially in the rural south. So by a
system called “local option” still operating in many southern states in my
youth the residents of a county could choose to be either wet or dry as they
pleased. There are, I believe, still
some dry counties in Arkansas. An unpremeditated
alliance of bootleggers (of whom there were a few) and Baptists (of whom there
were not a few) perpetuated the system. Motivation
and implementation are seldom in perfect alignment. The nearest places to get loaded were a group
of dubious but busy establishments just over the Missouri state line about
fifteen miles due north of Mountain Home.
Getting back to Renaissance Florence, it was a pretty lively place, quite apart from all the humanists walking around with copies of Cicero in their pockets. The place was overbriming with professional religious—in its nominal rather than its adjectival meaning of "members of religious orders"--rapacious noblemen, armed bravos, prostitutes, pickpockets, beggars and conmen. I say nothing of the common cutthroats and cut-purses publicly executed on a regular basis. Lorenzo de’ Medici was more or less a strict contemporary of Dominican reformer, Girolamo Savonarola. Perhaps I should say “would-be reformer”. Savonarola had major ambitions to turn the city into a kind of giant monastery. His ambitions along these lines enjoyed some early promise and a famous bonfire of vanities; but his progress was definitively when he was hanged and burned alive in a public square. The secular powers were, shall we say, very secular. Concerning all this I can recommend George Eliot’s underappreciated historical novel Romola. If you don’t have time for that, as you probably don’t, at least read “Minever Cheevey”, a delightful little poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson. “Minever loved the Medici, Albeit he has never seen one. He would have sinned incessantly, Could he have been one.”
The aspirations to civic sanctity among Renaissance humanists have given us some interesting episodes. The monastic and the ascetic might seem to be antithetical to the civic and the secular. But here we find a cultural heavyweight like Erasmus asking the following strange question: “What else is a city, I ask you, but a large monastery?” One can probably think of a number of other things else; but of course Erasmus was hinting at the proto-Protestant idea that the aspiration to “religious life” was an option for all Christians, not exclusively those in religious orders. Florence certainly offered some options. Yet the attempt to infuse civic government with high-minded religious or ethical ambition began in ancient times and in my own lifetime has been the motive of action for idealists in many lands. John Calvin did his best to sanctify the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century. Our own American history is replete with the communal search for social righteousness as expressed in social experiments like the Brook Farm community of the 1840s. The many “communes” of the 1960s are still fresh in my own mind.
In many respects our county’s seventeenth-century Puritan origins have lived on, though sometimes only in echoes and shadows. We hear repeated endlessly the phrase attributed to the Puritan preacher John Winthrop that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Virtue is to be displayed, as so also once was vice. It is probably fortunate that we have abandoned scarlet letters, prominently placed town stocks and pillories, and public executions; but there are still means of conveying social disapprobation. Every few years the public reaction to some unfortunate incident in the New York subways gains special notoriety and puts on display our unresolved attitudes concerning the nature, limitations, or dangers of demonstrating civic virtue, or perhaps even of defining it.
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