Cultural Engagement as "Contribution"

Suppose you had definite ideas about city planning and, as your hometown grew, some of the changes you saw struck you as wrong-headed? What could you do about it? You'd have a number of options. First, you could always just learn to live with it. Change is good, right? Why not let go of your own theories and make peace with what's happening around you? That would involve compromising or abandoning your own ideas, though, so your willingness to go along will depend on just how strongly you hold them in the first place.

If assimilation isn't an option, then what choices do you have? One thing you could do is present your case at a city council meeting. If you persuaded enough people, you could pass ordinances that reflect your ideas. People with different theories would find their building efforts thwarted by the powers that be, and they'd have to adapt to your way of doing things. This would ensure that future construction harmonized with your idea of what the city should look like.

Of course, the people you zoned out of commission wouldn't be happy. And building the kind of political consensus necessary to pass the ordinances might be difficult, since a lot of people would fail to see the importance of your measures. After all, how many people really care about such things? To most it is matter of indifference. If anything, your apparent desire for political power would turn the undecided against your agenda.

Another option you would have, if you couldn't sway the votes, would be to leave the city altogether and form your own polis, governed by your own ordinances. This might not save your city, but it would at least allow you to fashion a smaller, purer one that could have the right laws in place from the very get-go, thus saving a lot of headache down the road. In a sense, you'd be re-drawing the boundaries so that your ideas formed a defacto majority. Like assimilation, this would be a test of your commitment -- not to your ideas, but to your city. Some people might love the city too much to abandon it, but if you don't, starting your own municipality saves a lot of trouble. Just keep in mind that your city was probably founded by people just like you, seeking to institute their own vision, and the fact that yours is slipping suggests that a brand-new polis will have a similar trajectory.

But if you love your ideas too much to compromise them and love your city too much to leave it, what then? Passing ordinances isn't your only option. Think about your fundamental problem. New construction is threatening the shape of the city. Legislating it away, you might defend a temporary vacuum, but the fact is, cities want to grow. Your final option might be to build up the city yourself. Get in the construction business and start putting your city planning theories into practice. The resulting skyline won't be entirely of your making, but your views will be represented in the city in a way that assimilation, legislation, and isolation will never accomplish.

If you choose to build up the city yourself, you will be contributing to its general welfare in a way that even the people who don't agree with your ideas can appreciate. Your belief in both your principles and the city itself will shine through in a way that they never would if either one was allowed to remain theoretical. In fact, you may come to find that you never really owned your city planning ideas until the moment you began to build with them.

So much talk of "cultural engagement," while it rejects abandoning conviction, seems to lack a real love of the culture being engaged. The engagement is seen as a battle or siege -- we withdraw, husband our strength, and then unleash war on the city gates. We see ourselves as mere conquerors, not more than conquerors. We can pass laws or we can abandon the city and start a new one, but the Gospel won't leave with us. It will remain, calling its workers -- in whatever field they find themselves in -- to build. To understand cultural engagement, we must think of it as a contribution.

Comments

[Rebecca LuElla Miller]

Mark, I love the analogy. That really makes the point. So is this a sample from the upcoming book?

Becky

[J. Mark Bertrand]

The whole third section of the book is devoted to cultural engagement in various forms, but this isn't a direct excerpt. I've been watching the city council on local television recently, so zoning issues loom a little larger for me than they ordinarily would -- I guess it shows!