The American City: A Social and Cultural History Book

I don’t know about you but I get insulted when an author explicitly uses psychoanalytical analysis approvingly to explain gay and lesbian behavior by stating babble along the lines that lesbians had a relationship of some kind with their dad and that made them lesbians and the feminist movement is made up of patriarchal hating lesbians who think San Francisco is special because after the war sailors came home from Asia. Granted some of the author’s nonsense is quoting others such as when he slams ‘feminist materialist’ but he does open his psycho-babble gay and lesbian section by telling the reader he agrees with those he quotes. I don’t need psycho-babble to explain why I am right handed nor do I need it in understanding why there are gays or lesbians (or trans, or bi). The single biggest sea change that happened after proposition hate (prop 8) in California was passed in 2008 is that people don’t see homosexuality as a behavior (choice) but they started seeing it as people were born that way and were made in God’s (or the universe's) image. This author explains homosexuals as if they are choosing their behavior not as if they are born that way.

All of the author’s analysis of his subgroups and his framing seem quaint today. The author is writing in 1996 and 2004. There’s a tidal wave going on as he’s writing and he fails to put the pieces together. For example, he misfires on religion and what was really happening overall with how faith was being reassessed (or even how they are starting to no longer think that homosexuals are an abomination and are going to hell or are at least slowly start to reassess their judgments against them). He is fixated on global World Trade Organization protests and makes them vital to his narrative in his identity story telling. His feminist story telling bleeds oddly into lesbianism and into the psycho-babble I mentioned in the first paragraph. The author is describing the world within its own terms and doesn’t step out of the given paradigms of his time period. Psychoanalysis is a perfect example for why that is such a dangerous way of seeing the world. It took people to get out of that tautology in order to see its flaw and understand why it was circular, ‘everyone is repressed because they deny their own repression’ (Popper will say that in his excellent book ‘Open Society’).

The author at times did get into clock time, cosmic time and secular verse sacred time and did remind me of the vastly superior book by Charles Taylor ‘Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity’. By all means, if you get the urge to read on this topic I would suggest Taylor’s book as superior in every way and that would save you from the disappointment of this book. Even if I had read this volume II when it first came out, I would have probably blasted it for its faults, but 15 years latter this book is an anachronism and is best left on the library bookshelf next to volume II of Oswald Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’ both books best ignored today.

Overall, this book is a somewhat awful way of getting at his overall theme that our identity is being reshaped by the internet and is weakening the nation and leading to globalism through our identity necessarily reevaluating our values outside of our traditional communal context. Read Charles Taylor’s book instead.