The Taproot Podcast - 🏛️📿🙏The Spirituality of Urban Planning With Will Selman

Starting point is 00:00:00 glass and concrete and stone it is just a house not a home sure i'm here with will selman who is a urban planner and are you an architect too uh urban planner urban planner um and uh he has written a book on dub psychology and urban planning which is kind of a funny that he found us because they're uh we i don't know i don't say that i don't want to say we're the only blog but i haven't seen a whole lot of people interested in infusing the study of jung and architecture but we'd written a little bit about that so we're excited to have him he has a new book um teninnitus am i saying that right temenos that's correct okay my greek is a little rusty that's greek right mine is non-existent but okay i know that it's uh it it's a term derived from ancient greece um imagine the plaza in front

Starting point is 00:01:01 of an ancient temple that is while a temple was built on sacred ground, the Temenos basically extends that sacred space out into the city. So that's what a Temenos is. So the sacred space that spills out from the interior of the temple. Yeah, it's that protected holy space. So would that be kind of like a liminal space that it's a fusion of our world and another one overlapping just like an Irish thin place or something that it's part of the city, but also part of the temple? Yeah. And the idea of the book is that both in our civilizational, the point in which we find ourselves in history, as well as urbanistically, we need to start thinking of the entire city in those terms, not just a special place reserved, but take as much care and respect for the city as we always have for nature.

Starting point is 00:02:00 It sounds like what you're saying is that the city should be viewed as not just kind of a utilitarian or practical thing but uh a fusion of the practical and the spiritual you know that we should be mindful and and view it as an extension of ourselves yeah and we can see the results of not having done so um for uh probably 500 years of this long, slow decline since the advent of science, really. And just a whole complete shift in the fundamentals from which we operate has changed the places we build, not just as we think. And that's a theme that runs through the entire book is that the places we build reflect the values we hold. And that's not working anymore. Those values don't operate well anymore.

Starting point is 00:03:01 I wonder, I don't know if you had seen the last blog article video that would put out, but it's funny what you're saying. Like one of them was about the design of furniture and specifically mid-century modern furniture. And the other one was about architecture, what Frank Lloyd Wright's process was, that he wasn't quite a classicist, wasn't quite a modernist. But the argument in it is that we used to think of these things as something that was intentional and beautiful and meant to last and a part of ourself and kind of a spiritual thing. And then at some point it just became this practical necessity that we throw it away. And that was to our detriment. You know, even if we have more stuff, even if we have more ability to hoard, it meant that we meant less. And what you had just said, the stuff that we, I forget exactly what the,

Starting point is 00:03:46 I need to rewind. But the last line that you said is almost exactly the title of the article, except with the word chair, because it was, um, you may address the chair, how, where we sit tells us where we stand. Yeah. The places we build reflect the values we hold. Um, and like you're saying, this is an odd combination of subjects to try and tackle and i have not until the book was completely written and i had sent it off to a publisher

Starting point is 00:04:15 did i come up with a good 30 second elevator speech for what this is all about uh and it's more like 45 seconds instead of 30 but i think intuitives don't always know what they're writing until it's done you know like you kind of know you need to write it and then later you back up whereas that's the you know the the more sensing and thinking types do not operate that way they have a blueprint and a plan and then they execute and a lot of times intuitives feel called to create this thing and then later you can be like oh wow that's what i was doing okay yeah i did see this thing assembled itself and i was just a tool very much i could i could see that as it happened i was led in various directions that really had

Starting point is 00:04:57 no connection but they all resolved in the end and And right up front, I state there's a most urban designers, urban planners, I hope, know of a book called The Art of Building Cities by Camillo Sitton. He was writing in the 1880s. And he was lamenting the fact that things were not going well back in the 1880s he thought that there were serious problems in in what he was seeing in the way that uh he was uh from vienna i believe um and in that book fairly close to the beginning, he says something like this. We can no longer build a beautiful work of art way a city is designed, operates, it's just a symptom of a much, much larger problem that we're experiencing now and have for hundreds of years. We've gotten to a breaking point and there has to be some sort of a shift, not in the way we design. We'll keep designing in all sorts of secondary ways until we gain some sort of larger vision of what it means to be human.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Well, and I think that that's always a work in progress right you know trying to figure out who we are what we are um but we're not even trying anymore you know we've kind of given and that's what's sad i mean so i'm kind of i butt heads with people um because you know i'm i do depth psychology and yungi and stuff and so there's some people who are you know very practical they take that in their evo psych and you know dna archetypes and whatever and then there's other people that are kind of new age spiritual but you lose the psychology of it it's just kind of too woo woo and well i guess everything that i won't think at any point is true and this crystal will cure my scrofula and you know it's it becomes too unscientific you know what you're saying that so you should be spiritual, it's like, you know, people kind of laugh because it's a trope about like Marie Kondo, you know, basically Jung's idea of ensoulment, you know, that we should have Martin Buber, the mystic Martin Buber who wrote I Am Now, and that you should have a very personal, it should be something that you know i love this chair because it is beautiful and it matches this thing and i love this because

Starting point is 00:08:08 you know something that you think about and um like so when you're talking about a lot of people kind of make fun that marie frondeau saying you know hold each thing in your house and say does this spark joy and if it doesn't spark joy throw it away you know there's something that you know you are happier when you have less stuff you You are happier when you're more intentional, but also the kind of the spiritual component of this stuff can be kind of grating or overdone. And so something like the Parthenon, you know, that's an attempt to find a culture of what this group of people is, the ancient Greeks. And yeah, it's beautiful and it's held the test of time and influenced, you know, so

Starting point is 00:08:42 much stuff. But also, you know, it's kind of propaganda, right? You know, like the Persians are coming, and you're getting kind of nervous about the scary stuff in the East. And so they, you know, it's a huge expense. It wasn't like they just had the money lying around. They chose to do this, you know, basically to control the population and to give it a vision of self.

Starting point is 00:09:03 And so a lot of them, we're not going to go through the whole Parthenon, but the biggest motif there is this, you know, ordered civilization overcoming a barbaric chaotic enemy, you know, and their war against the Amazons is what is, you know, on the outside of it. And then, you know, the Titans overthrowing the gods at certain, or the gods overthrowing the Titans and creating this new order. But it's very much what they were trying to give the people

Starting point is 00:09:27 a vision of who they were because it was a time of crisis. The Peloponnesian War is dragging on a little bit long. There's some plagues going on. The climate is changing. We're not really sure if we're going to be in charge of all this stuff anymore. We had all these great ideas but now the blank edges of the map are getting filled in and oh, there's other philosophies.

Starting point is 00:09:43 We're not the only camp in town anymore right right and and it's an attempt you know so it is gorgeous and this attempt to provide a spiritual blueprint of this is who we are this is our identity but it's also kind of propaganda by the people being like yeah come on look this is who we are you know so you know both of the practical and the spiritual are part of these things. Yeah, and it's, you mentioned the sort of tension between, you know, traditional Jungian thinking and the side of it that goes a little bit more on the woo-woo, touchy-feely side. And I sort of touch on that a little bit. So the first, the book is divided up into four sections. In the first section,

Starting point is 00:10:30 I focus really on an attempt, maybe just for myself, to explain what it is, what is my personal vision. Because a lot of your biography is in the book too. I mean, you talk about concept relevant to architecture and design, but then you talk about how you dealt with that concept personally, you know, in your life. Oh yeah. I was raised for several years as a small child in Paris. And so I got the opportunity to have that experience of walking down particular streets embedded in me very early. And then after that I grew up for a number of years on a small beach cottage on Chesapeake Bay, isolated by salt marshes. So the most intense urbanism and complete wild untamed nature back to back and so that that has

Starting point is 00:11:28 given me a particular um understanding i think that is that i find very valuable but that sort of speaks in a way to the the tension that i see between spirituality and religion. In the spiritual world these days, not just in the secular world, but the spiritual community generally, the new age world, there seems to be just an absolute total lack of respect for religion. Religion is false, it's fake, it's a front, but I'm spiritual. I've got the real thing. Which is, of course, what every cult leader says. Right, right. It's a great tool in the way that you can manipulate control for better or worse. I think that there are, that can be helpful and useful. You just better make sure you've got the right leader.

Starting point is 00:12:36 I think you look for the people who have a monopoly. That becomes the problem is when I just have to, I really want you to have this great thing. It's just, you know, I'm really the only one that can do it. It's the only way that's going to work. Everything else is. And after 50,000 years. I'm going to hire you when you hear that.

Starting point is 00:12:56 None of the other things work. It's the only thing. Yeah, for $1,500 a session, I'll take care of you. Yeah. But we've been at this for, you know, depending on the source material that you choose. There's an archaeologist, anthropologist named von Petzinger, and she has done just amazing work on cave art specifically. And her understanding is that a sort of a great awakening took place in the evolution of the species. A couple of points, roughly 200,000 years ago, and I think that's right.

Starting point is 00:13:43 Check me on that and then again about 50,000 years ago humans started being involved in activities that had no practical purpose talking about like the Venus of Elendorf and the Venus figurines those all those sorts of things art in in general, music started to appear, things that weren't practical necessities of life, but apparently were really, really important to our ancient ancestors. And so there is I, I imagine that this is the memory that we have of, um, the source material for the garden of Adam and Eve. You know, when we woke up at some point in history, um, enough consciousness developed in us out of our animal instinct. And we looked around and said, oh my God, what am I?

Starting point is 00:14:50 What's going on? What am I supposed to be doing? And the whole story of mythology, religion, poetry, ritual is a process over the past 50,000 years and more of figuring out that question, who we are, what we're meant to be doing here. And the idea of the book is to imagine the city is the classroom in which that exploration can take place. Because the natural world, that's been our home since forever. But more and more, the world is urbanizing. I don't have that daily experience with wild nature, but I do have a daily experience with concrete

Starting point is 00:15:42 and asphalt and buildings and so forth um how can we infuse those settings with the same sort of intentionality and do it on a conscious intentional level at this point so that's what that's what i'm trying to get at so um i mean i think that does a pretty good job of explaining how are you, what is urban planning, what do you do, and then what is kind of Jungian depth psychology, and what do those have to do with each other?

Starting point is 00:16:14 That probably gives the audience a good primer of, without being super specific about what an urban planner does, how is somebody operating with the lens of depth psychology, what that is, and then how those two things could could inform each other um you know how much have you ever seen adam curtis's documentaries like all watched over by machines of love and grace any of those i don't know that name at all it's interesting um they're very loose

Starting point is 00:16:40 the thesis is very loose and implied you know there's no over there's never like oh we set out to discover this and then but we what we found was even more you know it's very just like weird clips of culture and this overlapping of anthropology design philosophy um psychology and and the way that those kind of inform each other but you know how much of the destruction of what you're saying you know that intentionality being taken out comes from i don't even hesitate to even say where it comes from but you have culture that kind of moved everything away to like a consumed experience that was the smallest part of what we do or the least of what we do it's like okay i live in a house that i hate so and i won't buy the stuff that i want so that

Starting point is 00:17:18 i can go on a cruise or you know i'll go into an office that I spend 90 percent of my time and that's awful because I want to be able to afford to go on vacation to this other place. That's nice. You know that I'll be in for this teeny tiny fraction of my life. But it's almost like the point of life became not a routine, not what we do from 90 percent of our time. You know, in this strange way, it became about these experiences elsewhere. Yeah, it's like we we we have such low expectations of our immediate surroundings um and there's there's such a um disparity between what we see every day and what we can find as advertised in a beautiful cruise to little seaside towns on the coast of Italy or something like that. Our ancestors did things so much better than we did.

Starting point is 00:18:15 And it's because of the things that we hold as being more important. What would you say that is now? What is the thing that we hold to be more important than our our self, our intentionality our soul, what's the altar? well in a two different directions to go with that, one is very

Starting point is 00:18:36 specific and I'll say it's the car the car gives you freedom right, you can go anywhere because I've got a car um but we spend so much time and effort making sure that the car gets everything it needs so we can go anywhere that we don't create a plan to go there's no place to go as a part of annual you know expenditure by families and it's probably about the same you know poorer people drive a cheaper car but it's

Starting point is 00:19:03 the same percentage of income as the richer person driving the nicer car. But it becomes this thing that you have to have. I think the I saw somewhere that car ownership is equivalent to a $50,000 a year mortgage. You want a nicer house, get rid of one of your cars. I'm car free now. I had a three hour a day commute for several years. Um, and every year I got rear ended at a stoplight. And the last time was by a drunk driver doing 45 miles an hour. Three cars were totaled. One guy was, uh, in rehab for two years. Um, and I decided not to replace the car. My intention in moving back here to Washington, DC was to be car free.

Starting point is 00:19:51 It's the Metro, my bicycle, my feet. And if I need to, I can rent a zip car. So we've created a mindset of mobility to the point where we've completely forgotten that, you forgotten that there ought to be a place to go to. That's part of a larger story that I guess Jung would speak to. And that's basically the transition from a, I don't know what the traditional mindset to the modern scientific mindset, which basically arose. And what, 15, 1600s, basically, when science started to take over. And you can sort of see this in the history of Western civilization as a whole, but alchemy specifically. Alchemy goes back 2,000, 3,000 years, and it was always basically a spiritual practice, an effort to understand the spiritual realm by the processes

Starting point is 00:21:09 of the physical realm. And somewhere around the 15, 1600s, 1600s definitely, that became the precursor to what we know now as chemistry, a very, very different way of thinking. And you can see the decline of alchemy coinciding with the rise of science. And so now nothing... And just to kind of parse what you're saying for the audience there, you know, if you're not familiar, because even people who like Jung, you know, alchemy famously ended his affair with Tony Wolfe. Jung had him on J-12 for a while. He got to alchemy and it ended. A lot of people have a hard time following Jung there or they don't know what it is. And so basically, you know, you have pre-scientific, you know, evidence based practice.

Starting point is 00:22:03 You have people basically personifying nature. They assume that this stuff works like us, you know, well, the moon's not a planet. This is something about me in relationship to me because I need it. And so the projection of our own psychology into science, basically assuming that, you know, lead would turn into gold and that chemistry and mineral mineralogy would work based on the way our own psyche works, you know, it's, it's this projection so people are kind of telling on themselves so when you look at alchemy there's all this stuff about you take the thing that's not very good but then you purify and this is a gross oversimplification but then

Starting point is 00:22:33 you purify it and it goes through trials and it gets stronger and it gets harder and then you get the unique good center and the gold is extracted from the chaff and there's this idea of psychological growth and spiritual development that we were sort of assuming science worked like, because that's how we work before we had science. And then chemistry comes and says, actually, these things don't care about you at all. And they have nothing to do with you. You know, there's their neutrons and electrons. And this stuff is just completely random and arbitrary.

Starting point is 00:22:59 And you are unimportant. And you've got to memorize all these numbers if you want to do anything, which has a place. And so that's kind of what you're saying, is that we took ourselves out of the world, or we took, you know, our spirituality out of the world a little bit too much, and I don't want to speak for you, but just to clarify people that may not be familiar with some of those terms. No, that's a great summation, and so when you make that sort of transition, you're dropping off, you know, there's 50,000, 200,000 years of human experience that you're starting to ignore for the sake of something that's really what? It's 500 years old, maybe. A very, very dramatic shift in thinking. And science and the technology that grows out of it

Starting point is 00:23:56 have done absolute wonders. But it's come to a point where maybe the harm is starting to outweigh the benefit. And what's really interesting is that subatomic physics, particle physics, is getting to the point where it's about as esoteric as any ancient philosophy in the theory there you know the point at which energy transitions to matter and so forth or that something can duly be a particle a wave and an energy that is partly present in this galaxy but also disappearing so maybe it's going another place i mean these are what these i'm not a scientist but this is what theoretical physics is saying which is sort of the best operating assumption we have right now.

Starting point is 00:24:45 One thing that I think is related to you kind of talking about the spiritual and the scientific is, I'm playing with my webcam here because it's starting to fall, is there's two places where I think another author puts Jung better than he puts himself. Like Jung is trying to say something and then he's not able because he's a pretty brilliant articulate guy one of them is easy to read though no not easy to read um one one is ego and archetype i think edinger when he comes in and says there's two parts of self there's this existential objective thing that is only what we create and then there is this completely subjective you know kind of myopic spiritual oneness you know and they don't know how to be in the same head um that kind of existential the intersection of existentialism and mysticism i think edgar stone rises better than you and the other one is tasty and edge of the sacred he says you know that what yung is saying is that there's these three different

Starting point is 00:25:40 levels to us and we haven't quite culturally and we haven't really gotten to the next one yet but we need it because if we're going to be saved that's the thing that saves us and the first one is just mythology projection we assume that everything is about us and we project our psychology onto the world and we live in this kind of spiritual myopic place and then science is the second one that develops and says no actually none actually, none of this is real. You're totally unimportant. That's all silly. It's not logical and it's not objective. So it's not real.

Starting point is 00:26:11 And science gives us these things, but ultimately it rings kind of hollow when you're trying to build a society based on the assumption that humans are not important or needed or special or, you know, anything, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:26 and that the third layer that he has, that he kind of wanted you, that he thought that you wanted us to attain was this idea that you have, you do have science that you can operate with an objectivity and a logic, but that you have to be willing to not make that everything and say that there's still an openness to things that we do not understand and a spiritual realm and that there is an openness to uh and it's kind of hard to articulate that the third lens because you know he's saying like science is important we need it but also we're not really existential creatures we're kind of we're beings, and we need to have a relationship with that.

Starting point is 00:27:08 And one of the ways Jung thought that that would happen was through theoretical physics. He drinks a lot of red did of Pauli and his world clock. And yeah, Jung was very much a shaman in that sense of, in fact, he related his clinical methodology to shamanic or not shamanic, I'm sorry, all chemical processes, seven steps and so forth, five steps. But I think that's what is needed in a civilizational sense right now, that bringing together of those opposites.

Starting point is 00:28:07 And so in thinking about cities, our cities look like infrastructure now, because that's what you think of them as. You know, the overhead wiring, the electrical transformers we see on telephone poles, you just think if your house was built that way with wires running across the living room and so forth. No, we hide that sort of thing in conduits behind the walls because it's not attractive. But out in the public realm, we don't think about that at all because it's just stuff. And to bring back that sort of soulful, artistic valuation of place.

Starting point is 00:28:57 I mean, just the idea that we could bury power lines. You don't have to just be looking at wires and crap and fans. This stuff could just be under the ground if we wanted to spend the money to value that you know more um i think one of the big examples for me is like um where we send our kids to school you know american high schools and middle schools they're built like prisons they're black windowless you know or not maybe not black but they're windowless cinder blocks surrounded by fences and i mean sometimes barbed wire and it's just like what are you teaching your children you know right right right and i i don't know i just i feel like one of the one of the idea that

Starting point is 00:29:37 you're talking about is kind of scary to people because i mean when you look at the public sphere like one of the fastest ways to get people to just have this emotional reaction to you and hate you and attack you is if you just say nicely you know um hey could we just dare to maybe imagine that the world could be a little bit better than it is now you know if you just say hey this thing that everyone agrees is really bad and sucks could we maybe just work on it it's like you know you but you see people who just gently say that and it's like left and right and you know people are like oh yeah you're a democratic pedophile or you're a trump mega what i don't know like the guy's just saying that like our life is

Starting point is 00:30:14 not great and it's going in a bad direction and maybe we could make a baby step to a thing that was a little bit better i enjoyed enjoyed your interview with Duwane some time ago. He's the only person I've ever seen. I've worked with him on a few occasions. As an urban planning consultant for

Starting point is 00:30:37 30 years now, I've been in enough public settings where I've been attacked as a communist and a Nazi in the same meeting, which was lots of fun. And then the third political party in America that nobody talks about, or I call them like the radical centrists, you know, it's like the people who they're like, well, the truth always has to be between two bad ideas. And you're like, well, I mean, does it? I mean, this is maybe like, it's like they're too, they don't want to be seen as like extreme or bad or anything. And so they don't stand for anything. And they just have to compromise with whatever. And

Starting point is 00:31:18 both of them do it, both kind of parties do it. But you know, you'll just see these things where somebody was like, look, you have to make a decision. Do you want to pull out of the war do you want to do this and there were just a lot of times where obama would be like what if we just send half the amount of troops and do nothing and it's like man like you know or you know and you see you know romney and people do the same thing where it's like they're just too afraid to be like yeah this is the right direction i'm going to go there and i mean that's probably a bigger voter base those being offensive is the worst crime you can commit now I think they're believing in something you know it's yeah but what's interesting I was going to mention Duani he's the only individual I've ever seen um in a public setting to be able to look an audience in the eye and say,

Starting point is 00:32:06 what you're doing sucks. This is pathetically bad. And there are so many ways to improve and you're too stupid to do something about it. He will literally use those terms and people love him for it. And I think that's why you get innovators in America kind of have this trickster energy, know like this because they were so um i know we have such a weird relationship to like the messiah complex and you know but like because the culture really likes the status quo doesn't want things to change

Starting point is 00:32:40 you know you somebody could never come in like dwani and say hey you know paris does this and this works better and why don't he has to be like no screw y'all this blows like do that no no but like and um and you get innovators do that i mean i i see that in psychology because i don't think therapy as a whole is in a great place um you know we basically you know over relied on cognitive therapy which meant that, which cognitive therapy is fine for some things, but it meant that we only study therapy that we can turn into a number. And I mean, the therapy modalities that you can turn into an objective number suck. They don't have the intuition of the clinician. They don't have the intuition of the

Starting point is 00:33:17 patient. They don't make room for a relationship, frankly, and they don't treat trauma, you know, because they're only talking about behavior and behavior is the last step in trauma. But you see that in all these fields. These people have to kind of come in with it takes somebody with enough energy to kind of blow something up in order for there to be change. I mean, it doesn't seem like other countries, other cultures work like that. I think we are sort of at the the the cutting tip, the cutting edge. When I think of the long, slow decline of Western civilization, Jung said that the scariest place on Earth was the United States. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:03 I think he was scared of it too you know of the us because of our incredibly powerful tools that we have and the naive way we think about them and it was such a new country and such a big country and becoming such a powerful country i mean this other stuff it had gone through these experiments you know early on and the us was just the wild west i mean this other stuff it had gone through these experiments you know early on and the u.s was just the wild west i mean yeah it's like well we actually do this now but it's like giving an ar-15 or whatever they are uh to a 12 year old um you know here's this here's this big thing i can do anything with it but there's's not the life experience and the wisdom to make good use of it. So how do you go about starting to change that? And I don't think that you do.

Starting point is 00:34:54 In one sense, I'm pretty pessimistic. You know, it's like when ancient rome started to collapse there was um a real loss of respect for its traditional religions um you know jupiter and minerva yeah yeah yeah they're they're all these ancient gods and but they're they're silly and shallow and they have all these domestic fights amongst themselves and there's just nothing there anymore. And what the Romans would do 2,000 years ago is take pilgrimage to ancient Egypt. Because there, you know, the ancient religion was even older and it was mysterious. There were all sorts of

Starting point is 00:35:40 strange rituals and the gods were different and that was somehow respected um because the old was collapsing and the new which eventually became christianity had not yet arrived and i think that's sort of what's happening here now christianity in a sense has run its cycle through history. And it's, I think I would be willing to say it's as great a source of wisdom as the world has ever seen, but we suck the juices out of it. And it has devolved into a cultural dinosaur,

Starting point is 00:36:23 in a sense. The life has gone out of it, and I think that's kind of a natural cycle. These things never quite die. They put on new clothes, but you have a language you cling to for a while, and it becomes irrelevant, and then you rediscover the same thing with a new language. Different language, different symbols, and so forth, but we're in that in between time and that hasn't happened yet and so we're we're going off in all sorts of odd directions whether it's um new age spirituality

Starting point is 00:36:57 or manga or whatever it is we're looking for anything um until we settle on something new. And my sense is that the city can be a point at which that something new can be the soil in which that something new, that new vision can take hold. And it would be great to prepare for that in some way. By designing a container for souls to come into. Which in the past was what we did. It was a container. We're kind of mixing metaphors here, but the metaphor does work as a

Starting point is 00:37:44 microcosm or macrocosm. You know, Jung saw religion as this thing that sort of contains the unconscious so that you have, until you're ready to hold it, you have something telling you how to live. And then the goal isn't just to be a slave to that forever. The goal is to have it protect you, you know, like a mother protects a child until they're ready to take on more responsibility. And then you start to understand these things with a little bit more nuance and you start to be able to do them but the city sort of does the same thing you know we don't have cities that like protect people we don't have cities that provide a nice space um and i mean i would be surprised if most people in america even know what an urban planner is or that it exists i mean i think we have this kind

Starting point is 00:38:22 of libertarian attitude that i buy this box of land and then I build my stuff in that box. And if you want to build something, then you put it here. The idea that there's like a central vision that says like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if there was a park in the middle of the city? Wouldn't it be nice if there were bike paths that cross this so that we don't get people killed by cars, but you can also ride a bike? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a pedestrian walkway that went over here so that you couldn't just walk one street, you can walk across the whole city and you know i don't think people know you know in your in your world they do but i don't think the average person knows that that's something that happened no they're they're often shocked when they walk into the planning office to get a zoning permit

Starting point is 00:38:59 what do you mean their rules and regulations and then they get angry you know and then getting well and then they get angry and then getting well and then they get angry if somebody takes the next door property and wants to build a coal refinery or something next to them you know if i get to do anything i want then so does he and that doesn't that doesn't accrue to um civilization are you are you familiar with James Hellman, the Jungian analyst and writer? I don't even know if he was a Jungian analyst

Starting point is 00:39:32 by the end of his life. What was the name again? James Hellman. Oh, good Lord, I've got him. A lot of this book started after I read City and Soul. But that's pretty much all I read city and soul. So, but that's pretty much. He's interesting to me.

Starting point is 00:39:47 Cause he is like, you take, uh, well, I mean, Hillen's career is interesting. I mean, he,

Starting point is 00:39:53 he's brilliant and he has a lot of really good ideas. And then he also is kind of a crank in a lot of areas and like really loud about it. Um, and you know, he, he like a lot of male, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:03 get analyst kind of goes into the woods by the end of his life. Um to me there's always like he was that he was that those are all very american archetypes like he took yung's ideas and brought him to america and kind of got eaten by its own thing i mean there's like he's a little bit of a hustler you know he grew up in atlantic city like here's the people you know calling on the boardwalk, and there's, he's kind of talking about spirituality and union things in that way that, you know, there's something to it, but it's also a little bit of a grift, you know. Yeah, I always got the sense that nothing ever satisfied Hillman. He was never satisfied, and I got the sense it was because he was from one of those early generations right after young. And he felt that he should come up with some grand, some great new thing.

Starting point is 00:40:57 And it never quite happened. He's got lots of little gems scattered all around, but they don't ever coalesce into the full-formed. A lot of his books are kind of like J.J. Abrams movies, where it's like line by line, they work shot by shot, and then you back up and you're trying to sit with the argument. It's like, wait a minute, if you're going to shoot the missiles at the Star Trek ship, then why would you put the people in it if you thought that... None of it works. It's just a compelling scene to see these things open, you know, and Hellman kind of writes like that, but when I talk to Leon Krier, it's funny, because I've always been kind of afraid, I've always kind of related to Hellman, and felt like my own worst impulses that i needed to check were ones that he over indulged and you know you you feel that energy when i talked to leon career he was

Starting point is 00:41:51 like oh i met this guy a long time ago in syria it's a lot like you james hillman do you know and told him career told me that hillman said um to him you know america you go to europe and the buildings are supposed to pull your eye upward so that you're always in communication with the divine you're always contemplating heaven and the lines go up and you go into american buildings and we put a drop ceiling and we put fluorescent lights to make you not look up to make you stare down into hell perfect perfect yeah yeah yeah Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there are, you know, with that, it's really hard to find good models here. And the last third of the book, I guess, I focus on where I am now, Washington, D.C. What LaFont did in his design for Washington, D.C. was very much a political and spiritual metaphor.

Starting point is 00:43:00 And we don't see that anymore. We don't know about that. And partly that was because LaFont didn't tell people what he was up to. But the whole story of LaFont and the way he designed Washington, he and George Washington very much held a vision of the United States becoming the grand global empire built on ideals. And so the, well, Novus Ordo Seclorum, a new world order.

Starting point is 00:43:35 And so many conspiracy folks now are worried about, you know, this new world order that's coming. Well, it was there from the beginning. That was the whole point. On the top of the Washington Monument washington monument right yeah there it is and well the washington monument has an amazing story by itself um but what lafont was doing he didn't just lay out the streets uh what he started off by doing was creating what i call a trellis. Just like in your backyard, you build a wire trellis so that vines can grow up and life

Starting point is 00:44:11 can flourish. He created a geometric trellis out of which the street system grew and the location of buildings were placed. And it was based um on what we now know as sacred geometry which again is sort of getting over there into the woo-woo side of things but they were into that though they didn't see that there yeah we study them but we don't study their assumptions you know right right we we love what they did but we don't respect their their methodology and you're saying that

Starting point is 00:44:45 people don't know that about dc i would argue that design is something that we don't see we feel right and so a ton of people have these emotional reactions to this stuff because it works but you start explaining it to them and they're like no no i didn't know that so that's not why i like dc and it's like so many people that have lived there you say oh i'm going to dc to see my sister or something they're like oh washington Washington live there and then the cherry blossom and you know, it's like they have this relationship to it Because it's different but they don't they don't know it. I mean, it's our capital We don't even know what it looks like you watch movies and they're always like the snipers up there and the Jason Bourne or whatever And they're like Washington DC and they fly over it and it's like New Yorkork or toronto there's like these right right like 73 buildings

Starting point is 00:45:27 and it's like dc is flat like it's it's intentionally like it's not you can't build that it doesn't we don't even know what it looks like you know you're able to substitute this wild stuff in movies and people don't recognize it who who have been there or live there you know i i hear uh tourists on the subway all the time um out, okay, over there's the Capitol. No, that's the White House, the power of the Capitol, symbolically using the meaning behind ancient geometry. So in the ancient world, the number five represented the earth and its people. Can you say a little bit about why that is or what that assumption is? So,

Starting point is 00:46:30 in the ancient world, numbers and shapes had meaning. There were certain things ascribed to it. So, for instance, the Jewish flag, the Israeli flag has the six pointed star on it. Those are actually two triangles, one facing up, one facing down, which is essentially meaning the earth reaching up to heaven and the heavens reaching down to earth so those sort of symbols were built in uh everywhere so or even the seal that kind of like a lot of schools and institutions there's that lemon-shaped seal like that and i went to swanee that's the overlap of two spheres

Starting point is 00:47:21 right it's like the version of the yin yang symbol it's two circles and and their edges touch each other's center it's called a vetric of piscis it's the reconciliation of opposites um and in fact l'enfant used that um in his uh creating the trellis for Washington. So with the number five representing the earth and its people, the number six represented the gods in heaven, wherever this came from back in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. And so what Lafon did, you'll often see people saying the masons were designing secret symbols in the streets of washington the masons were assuming everyone thought that at the time because they

Starting point is 00:48:12 they did all the educated people kind of were operating on that on those yeah what lafont was doing was not some secret masonic and they weren't seen in conflict with christianity like they're like people feel now if you explain it to them. All architects, all artists knew of these principles back then. It was common knowledge. It's only secret now because we dispense with it. We don't believe it. We forgot it, so it's a secret.

Starting point is 00:48:37 We forgot it, so it's a secret. But the number six is represented by Connecticut and Vermont avenues reaching out from the White House, forming an equilateral triangle above the White House. The number five surrounding the Capitol building, so for instance, Pennsylvania Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue Avenue form the sides of five-sided stars. Locke didn't design the entire star, but parts of them are there. The metaphor is the tension between the gods in heaven, the president, the king, with number six, and the earth and its people at the Capitol building, earth and heaven, how do you reconcile those two intentions? Earthly politics, dirty, crappy methodology, compromises, all that with your heavenly aspirations.

Starting point is 00:49:42 How do you reconcile those two, both in yourself, your personal life, and as a nation, as a culture, as a civilization? How do you balance those two? That's the metaphor that he built into the city. And it required this new design language because when you had Europe, the king is the king and the nobility or the nobility because they have land and the land that is handed down by god to them

Starting point is 00:50:11 means that they are different from you and that was a pretty easy social order that you have peasants and you have nobles and that's that you know right you're landed you're a person and if you're not you're less than a person and then they the british bring that system to america and then it doesn't work because you have this guy on the other end of the world being like hey i have some land in england so i'm actually better than you and you need to do what i say and george washington i got fields i got a bunch of land who are you get out of here yeah not happening anymore and so there is this the architect you know when he's, the urban planners, you see that in a lot of American architecture. They're like, well, we can't just say, you know, church, castle, and is the architecture anymore.

Starting point is 00:50:55 It has to be more for the people. I mean, yes, the president is here and there are, you know, nobles in America. But then how do we make the number six talk to the number five you know how do we make the earth and its people be in communion with and and all of a sudden you get this and i mean it's for lack of a better word it's democratic it's not just like well the church is beautiful everything else is a peon hovel with rats you know it's like you can't that design language fails you know of nobles live in a castle and you live in a thatched hut you know because we how do you so i'm kind of failing to put this succinctly but

Starting point is 00:51:32 they needed a new language for design and a lot of dc is a struggle to find that well yeah la font one of the reasons that i think he didn't really tell people what he was up to, this was all unknown. There was an Englishman named Nicholas Mann who wrote a book on La Font's design for DC. And he sort of reverse engineered the whole process and discovered what La Font was up to. So La Font didn't tell anybody about this trellis and i think largely because of what you were saying it was very old world it was kind of too highfalutin for america in a sense were much more um leveled and what he was up to was too spiritual and intellectual perhaps for this this newly liberated democratic nation just wasn't thinking in those terms but I think what something that you alluded to earlier,

Starting point is 00:52:48 that sort of the third phase of what we need to do of bringing the two sides back together, it's like with the scientific revolution being this second phase of human experience. It's like being a teenager, in a sense, being a 13-year-old and experimenting. And you've got to rebel against your parents in order to create your own autonomy,

Starting point is 00:53:18 which is sort of intellectually what science has done. We've broken away from the past. But you can't stay in that stage forever. You've got to mature into wholeness eventually. So how do you take what Lafont was trying to do in making the city a metaphor in language and in form that the 21st century scientific community can understand and learn from. So that's what I'm trying to figure out. Well, and I think in the same way in Jungian psychology, the self isn't a destination. It's this process of kind of remembering where you come from but you can't hold everything and then coming back to an ego but still you know keeping in contact with a more spiritual center but when you can't live in you know architecture is kind

Starting point is 00:54:14 of that too and in the article i had about frank lloyd right i said what i liked about wright's design that made him i think not just a modernist like frank gary that's throwing out everything i mean i i feel like with frank gary that's throwing out everything i mean i feel like with frank gary you could go to him on different days and ask for the same design and you would get a different structure you know he would wad off a piece of paper differently in autocad um somebody like like right you know you would have even if you wiped his memory he would have designed almost the same structure because this process was pretty consistent he said i want to look at the natural world i want to look at the function of the building how do these people actually live i'm

Starting point is 00:54:47 going to study what they're doing and then i'm going to look at a greater spiritual purpose of the space which is always a guess and sometimes he got it wrong i mean writes i mean but he put those things together you know this is the pattern in the natural world around it and that's going to ripple through the building this is the way that the people use the structure i'm going to make that pattern fuse with the nature and then what is a greater spiritual ideal that i can infuse with this and you know the buildings are kind of like altars in that way um yeah but uh and and that makes him yeah he threw out all of the you know uh art nouveau or not our new what's the word though arts you know classes classical detail but he also wasn't totally a modernist

Starting point is 00:55:26 because he was adhering to this kind of pretty timeless structure. Well, that generation could do that because while they were creating a modernist sensibility, they were trained in that old Beaux Arts manner. Now, that's been gone for a hundred years nobody knows how to draw a circle anymore or a curve it's just straight lines and um uh yeah that the the past has been so completely dismissed that my understanding of I went to architecture school but I was in the urban

Starting point is 00:56:07 planning program so no no design training in that sense but what I see coming out of architecture school is not only does your design have to be different but every time your process is going to be different as well because you have to create a new one-time language and process to create this one-time building everything it's almost like um a really severe form of of jazz theory you know every piece of music has to be played differently every time you play it, or you're just compromising. Yeah, it's interesting you said that people are expected to reinvent a new process every time. In architecture school, I haven't been in architecture school, so I don't know trends in that in that field at least

Starting point is 00:57:05 you know i know them from the 70s vernacular architecture and stuff but right right after that yeah well it's um it it's a a really difficult thing that i think um to try and overcome because when you're in a mindset that discounts everything except itself um you know i i think it takes a civilizational collapse um i'm not sure that it's something that can be reformed incrementally well it's like craftsmen in architecture you know wr right could come in and say i kind of want this pattern to repeat and trust the tradesmen that were skilled enough to do that but we don't have any skilled labor left in this country we outsourced everything in the 80s you know but get tail end of industry got sent overseas we don't make anything and um we we

Starting point is 00:57:59 don't eat that knowledge is institutional it's like um people were talking about you know the spacex and boeing all these companies are trying to build these big rockets to lift cargo they were like we were building the saturn v you know we had the heavy lifter rock you know i'm not terribly into rocket science but they're like we had all this stuff in the 70s and 80s why this is 1950s designs you know built in the 60s and 70s like right why can't you just go back and do it? You already did it. And people were like, none of the infrastructure is there. None of the people are there. There are people who knew just how to make that ring. There were whole supply chains to get this type of mineral to be, you know, and all of that's gone. You have to restart with the ability to build that you have. And we have less ability to build now in 2023 than we had in 1950.

Starting point is 00:58:42 My, it just makes me think my think my ex-father-in-law was an aeronautical engineer with Pratt & Whitney. All he did for his 35-year career was design fan blades for jet engines. That's it. That's all he did. How long, what's the angle of the curve, what metal do you use? That's all he did.

Starting point is 00:59:08 And so with this sort of specialization. It's a lifetime of experience that you can't just read a book or plug in a formula into a computer program and then get that expertise back. It's half art, half science, even in the hard sciences. Yeah. And that's just counted. Yeah. hard sciences yeah and that's just counted yeah well you know i know uh a lot of people the decline in architecture and urban planning and cities you're talking about you know is written about in 1880 but a lot of the things people tie that to or i've heard people make a case for is is um about planned obsolescence and the american family's access to debt. What happens is that you have

Starting point is 00:59:46 this precious cameo that came from England with your family or whatever, and it stays in the family and these things are special and they kind of define the family. And we would build a chair to be taken apart and sanded down and last a lifetime. You're not building things that are disposable. And then all of a sudden, these companies figure out that you can make more money if you make the person buy the thing every year. But the problem is they don't have enough money to do it. So you sell in the future and you say, okay, well, go ahead and get the washing machine today and then pay it off over two years and it'll break in a year and you'll need another one. And that changes the way that we live. And this way where we stop trying to, we just start trying to survive, you know, and get the thing that we have to have not the thing that we want or that is Beautiful or that enriches our lives, but just okay

Starting point is 01:00:27 I have to have a car have to have a washing machine have to have a dishwasher have to have a garbage disposal have to Have this and then they're breaking and that process of maintenance and all that becomes something that yeah, and the time and psychic energy involved You know. I'm quite well educated. I've got a master's degree and a number of postgraduate training. I'm not the smartest one on the bus, but by no means a dummy and it's overwhelming. You know we have to choose our trash hauler and where we get our electricity from and who we're going to get our

Starting point is 01:01:18 telephone service from and on and on and all these choices and you have to do research and it's it's just overwhelmed just like like you said surviving rather than flourishing uh is is a full-time effort and i can understand why there's a generational shift um in so i spent a lot of time with 30-somethings, 20-somethings on a regular basis. And there's this attitude that, yeah, whatever. I'll buy the $20 IKEA chair instead of the $100 better one. Because it's not going to be around. I'm going to move anyway.

Starting point is 01:02:06 Everything is disposable now that was like ikea's ad in sweden was like a lamp on the curb and it had this sad music and then it was like don't feel bad for the lamp that's in the trash and the guy's carrying a new lamp and that's it that was the original yeah it was like, no real bad to throw all this stuff away. Yeah. You can get a new one. We do it to ourselves now. Yeah. You know, we bought into it and it's just, it's just easier to go along.

Starting point is 01:02:35 Well, in a lot of modernism, you know, like AI or something, it's like, people are like, Hey, this is kind of a bad idea,

Starting point is 01:02:40 but we can't quit doing it because this is the way it's going. And if I quit doing it, I'm behind, you know, right. There's not, no one knows how to stop it, but they do agree that it's not a good idea to do the thing that we're doing today and we'll continue to do more tomorrow. I'm not sure what problem AI is intended to solve. What are we going to be able to do in the future that we've never been able to do before?

Starting point is 01:03:06 Well, nothing I've been told. The microcosm of American access to debt affecting all this stuff also spills out 20 years later into economy. And so it's like nobody wants to just say, all right, I'm going to go to the factory and make the thing and then go home and have this life. And we can have a middle class. Everybody is like, we'll throw 80% of the country into poverty to try and gamble that maybe you'll be one of the ones that gets to be a billionaire. You know, and there's this strange thing where it's like, you can have a company that makes a really good product that works really well. And nobody wants to fund it and it doesn't work. But you can be a country that's a company that says well i'm going to be a monopoly and

Starting point is 01:03:50 every we're just chasing this monopoly you know like amazon was a company that sold books and then they turned into this company that wanted to sell you every single thing that existed and they're not even like a great bookstore anymore like that's forgotten you know just being a bookstore is not enough you know twitter was this thing that worked pretty well like people were sharing information and everything and it wasn't rewarded you know it didn't make money it had to be oh we have to have some crazy pipe dream vision but they never really pay off i mean netflix you know borrowed all this money and made all this stuff now they're going bankrupt and trying to figure out how to make money. People don't realize none of these companies

Starting point is 01:04:27 make money. They're still burning through venture capital. That's where we are. Spotify loses money. Pandora loses money. Uber loses. They lose billions of dollars because everyone's hoping, well, maybe when Uber is a complete monopoly, then the self-driving car will mean we don't have to pay the driver and then that will be a model to profitability. But that's a pipe dream of a guest, depending on AI being able to do certain things. I don't even know what the pitch for Spotify being profitable is. I mean, they lose a million dollars a day. But all of these things are based on this fantasy of the future that's going to be huge.

Starting point is 01:05:02 And there's not just, I want to do a job. I'm going to go in and do this thing well that isn't rewarded anymore well this is a a result of the mindset that started back in the 1600s so that that scientific revolution um you know when when you're not connected to something larger in a cosmological sense this is the result um or the alternative would be what what uh uh the french revolution the communist revolution uh provided uh which is the death of tens of millions of people. So there has to be, as little as we understand or respect the spiritual value of religion,

Starting point is 01:05:53 if it's not there, the results are not to be surprising. This is just what happens. Well, I mean, maybe another way of saying that is that if there's no higher spiritual principle, if there's no higher aspiration or ability to transcend our base instincts, then all life is is just this competition that is pretty soulless and pretty

Starting point is 01:06:19 depersonalizing. That's what Nietzsche said, and most people misunderstand his quote, God is dead. People today think that was a call to liberation, and he saw that very much as a disaster. Society losing its center. Society losing its center. Society loses its center.

Starting point is 01:06:48 It's going to fall apart and explode. And yeah, World War I, World War II, the entire 20th century, following his prediction, saw how many tens, hundreds of millions of people slaughtered. And we're in a point of relative peace right now. And they couldn't tell you why. You know, we're looking at the world and it's like, what did we do? Why did we do that?

Starting point is 01:07:14 Yeah. Yeah. Well, for the same reasons that you personally, you, me, everyone else, all of us as individuals commit small little mistakes, errors, so on and so forth. Anything that you see going wrong in society is going wrong in you as well. And so one of the things I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. There's a little bit of a lag. Sometimes I'll start talking and then I hear like the middle of a word and the, I think it was counseling is shaving off the beginning and the ends of the.

Starting point is 01:07:52 You're right. Talking sometimes. That's all right. Go ahead. But I was curious, I mean, one of the things that, yeah, the Venus of Willendorf is a pretty big one where you, and for those who aren't familiar, like one of the earliest, they, they call them like the earliest religious artifacts or something.

Starting point is 01:08:08 And the reason is, you know, when mankind's evolving and the things that you find, you can find some tools and things, but they're practical. They're a knife or a stabber or a, you know, scraper or something.

Starting point is 01:08:18 And then all of a sudden you see these things that are just for beauty. And that it's telling you that people are kind of trying to figure out a deeper spiritual or artistic function, that they're not just worried about that people are kind of trying to figure out a deeper spiritual or artistic function that they're not just worried about surviving they're also trying to figure out you know what makes them alive or how to be alive or there's some question about identity and so the first figures and largely caves around france are these um like very round very rotund women figures that they're guessing were about fertility and you know the the fattest woman makes is the most healthy and versed the most babies and it was some kind of uh you know uh maybe the supernatural blessing of fertility or just a honoring of fertility or something but the

Starting point is 01:08:58 venus of villendorf is one of the most famous i don't think it's the oldest but it's maybe one of the first found um and that's a big place where humanity is looking at itself and they're not. The brain has developed precuneus. And so it's able to perceive itself as this thing outside of the world around it. And no longer is it just processing information. It's actually perceiving it. And part of that perception is self-perception. And then we wonder what we are.

Starting point is 01:09:22 It creates this anxiety and all these problems. What's the joke is, you know, God took a perfectly good monkey and gave it anxiety um and but another kind of big formative thing i think is the first cities like we always assumed because it's the way modern society works that when people came together to build these cities and it happened a couple different places it wasn't just like one spot that they did. We did it because it was more safe or that we would be able to have more food or the quality of life was better. And that, you know,

Starting point is 01:09:52 more people kind of doing work. Well, that's a pretty industrial revolution idea. Really. When you go and you look at these cities that people are coming together to build, the quality of life went down. People had less access to food.

Starting point is 01:10:04 They had to work more. They lived less long, yet they still did it. We're called to build some kind of project there. And I always thought that was an interesting idea. Yeah, that's the usual, I don't know about the usual, but quite often you'll hear that cities are simply that artifact of the patriarchy in which leaders could control the masses. So cities and religion have that negative

Starting point is 01:10:37 connotation because they're all about control. And I think what you said about being called to do something. Yeah, we're we evolutionarily we grew out of our our monkey background. We still have the monkey brain that the Buddhists talk about. The brain is way back here and it's still jumping around. But that process of psychological awakening seems to provoke us to do, to create in ways that no other species does. Lots of other species will. Prairie dogs make prairie dog towns and bees make hives and lots of animals make homes for themselves birds in their nests but humans go in a different direction that isn't necessarily practical we do things for metaphorical reasons there's some concept or idea that doesn't help us survive,

Starting point is 01:11:49 but we think makes life better somehow. And that's one of the strongest drives we have. And you, you, you just can't deny it. It's like the, the writing of this book for me, I was impelled to do that

Starting point is 01:12:07 it wasn't something I was planning on doing or had always hoped to do I was in a sense I was sort of forced to do it so there's something that's trying to burst out from the unconscious and make itself real and for me the greatest that's trying to burst out from the unconscious and make itself real. And for me, the greatest, certainly the largest thing that we build physically is a city. It's the largest manifestation of human desire. And we've really done it very, badly for three four hundred years at least a hundred years here in the United States

Starting point is 01:12:51 how do you reorient that so I think LaFont was pointing the way LaFont did not have any particular personal spiritual attitude. I don't think he was a particularly thoughtful person. We would probably call him, oh, he'd be somewhere on the autistic spectrum today. Yeah. Maybe something of a narcissist. Oh, he'd be somewhere on the autistic spectrum today. Yeah. Maybe something of a narcissist. Well, I think a lot of obsessive creatives, maybe they're not all on the spectrum.

Starting point is 01:13:36 Some of them are, but they have that similar type, you know, Steve Jobs, the whatever. They see this vision and they're forcing it to be worn. And the people who have that impulse a little less lightly maybe don't get that project done you know they don't ram it through yeah well he was he was not well liked um why was he selected what was it that made them select him washington deeply respected him knew that he was kind of, again, today we would at a minimum call him a jerk. But so L'Enfant's story, he was the son of a court architect, a court artist under Louis XIV. His father painted all the grand artwork for the king. And so L'Enfant was raised in Versailles and the courts of the king and so on and so forth. So he had that classic Baroque understanding of art and design. And he was well placed to end up in a very socially upward movement

Starting point is 01:15:07 professionally and socially. But when he was 20 years old or something he came to america to fight in the revolution i think he was very much um passionate about glory and all that sort of thing you know it wasn't going to be a war in france during his lifetime he needed to find one he went and found one um and he was he And he served under Washington, Valley Forge. He met Hamilton and all the and was wounded during the war and ended up as an architect in New York and his major project there was two first was converting city hall in New York to the continental congressional hall where congress meet. And he did a fine job there. He was hired to design some of the early coins and medallions and so forth for the nation. And he designed the first inauguration for George Washington, put together the whole

Starting point is 01:16:24 big event. And then it came time to select the location for the new Capitol. And that's really, really what LaFont had hoped to do. And he wrote to Washington specifically asking for that job and Washington gave it to him. So they had that personal connection, and Washington knew of his skill. I don't really know much about Washington's design taste. I mean, it was what I guess you'd call that colonial architecture at that point, and he had an ovular room in a house that he liked, and so the white

Starting point is 01:17:05 house architect kind of all i know about his architectural taste is that he liked oval rooms or at least the architect thought that um that may be thomas jefferson um there's an oval room in monticello i thought um the white house design was um yeah that, that was James Hoban, I believe, who designed the White House. LaFont had designed buildings for both the White House and the President. I don't mean LaFont designing the White House. I just was saying I knew that when Washington was choosing the White House plan, that that was what the architect... I don't remember the name of the architect of the White House,

Starting point is 01:17:43 but that he had done a bunch of oval rooms because he thought that washington liked one from his house that's all i know about his architectural taste what about washington other than the friend connection would make him choose lafonce designs well he really did um so what's interesting washington and and jeff had two very, very different mindsets. Jefferson despised cities. And Jefferson had come up with a design for the city that was like 10 square blocks along. He wanted like rural agrarian kingdoms, like all these farmsteads surrounded by farm you know farmland basically like the house as the city but then the thing that was so silly about that is it's like who are you selling the product

Starting point is 01:18:31 to if everyone is living on a farm there is nobody who is buying your stuff so you can drink all this french wine that's right you know but jefferson wasn't really well he he wasn't that great at you know finances or economics as we you know had some good ideas about metaphor and government, but he dies penniless. Library of Congress exists just because they threw him up by buying his library so he couldn't afford to eat. I mean, he just really sat back on his farm talking about how cities were bad. Everyone should live on a farm. Ordering luxurious products from France and Italy into going into debt from cities in Europe, writing about how he hated cities.

Starting point is 01:19:13 I mean, so silly. There's no farm without a city and there's no city without a farm. So that was a real tension early on. But Washington was very much more of an empire builder. Although, interestingly, it was Jefferson who completed the Louisiana Purchase. In fact, the reason that our Midwest today is so spread out and gridded. Jefferson basically laid out the entire area of the Louisiana Purchase, what we now know as Midwest. How many states? 10, 15 states, whatever it is, in 160 acre plots in a grid.

Starting point is 01:20:05 And yeah, he thought that we should all be yeoman farmers and that would be heaven on earth. But Washington was very different. He understood that the United States had the potential to become a global superpower, not just economically or politically, but philosophically. He felt like the old order was dying and he was ushering in a new one with birthing this nation that was ultimately going to be the model of all nations.

Starting point is 01:20:40 And the whole point was democracy, spreading democracy. That's always been what the U.S. has been about. And in order to in people's minds infuse a lot of hope and desire and understanding of this, he and LaFont both agreed that the capital city should be absolutely magnificent and reflect that level of value in its design. It's designed almost like a garden. Like you look at the layout, it looks like the gardens at Versailles or something, the way it kind of unfolds and is bifurcated with streets.

Starting point is 01:21:23 I mean, it's not designed the way that European cities were. Well, in fact, Laffont grew up with spending time in Versailles. And a lot of people will, a lot, some authors have pointed to that as the source of Laffont's inspiration, but Laffont did something different. In Versailles, the angled pathways and streets all converge in one particular place, the king's bedroom. That's where all, visually, all the paths lead to the king's bedroom. That's where all the power lay. What LaFont was doing was something much more dispersed. The power was in three places. He placed the Capitol building at the center of the people, not the White House.

Starting point is 01:22:17 The Capitol is the centerpiece. The White House also, the streets, both for the Capitol and the White House, the streets don't terminate on the center of the building. They terminate in the doorways. So when you look at a map, you'll see, for instance, Pennsylvania Avenue going through in front of the White House. But it's actually kind of offset because the streets don't intersect in the middle of the building they arrive at the doorways people are welcome here that's the idea um so lafont had um and washington both shared this this vision a very, very different political order. So Novus Ordo Seclorum was, you know, that new world order was very much what they were all about.

Starting point is 01:23:19 Well, and I think that was something that Washington saw too, because of what we were talking about in the beginning, that idea of land that he saw, this country had land that went on and on like it sort of threw a wrench in every america's infinite seemingly infinite resources sort of threw a wrench in everyone's um every european philosopher's plans you know even marx was like i don't you know like what do i do labor theory doesn't really work if land is free, but eventually they'll run out of it. I will, you'll see, you know, and Jung, Jung was afraid of America. He saw the, um, capacity for, um, the kind of charismatic religious movements and, um, just power. Um, but I think Washington, when he, it wasn't that he was in this disagreement where he was like, well, I want to leave Britain and they're taxing us or something in the way that Franklin and some of the other ones were.

Starting point is 01:24:12 And I think he really saw this old order that says that your power is handed down by God because you have a plot of land in England does not work anymore. There's all this land, man. Like, you're not going to get to tell me or these people what to do. And he, it wasn't as personal for him i think he felt like it was an inevitability if he didn't do it it would be done by someone else well it was just there was a breaking away that was going to happen and that all of the european order was based on that so america had to represent this new thing um that was the the next thing that they couldn't see there yet. And I think that took some time for the founding fathers, certainly a certain group of them,

Starting point is 01:24:50 because they were the American equivalent of the aristocracy. They were all the big wealthy landowners. And what they were doing was creating a system in which their legacy personally wasn't going to continue. Most of the founding fathers at the beginning of the war, I don't think, wanted to leave. They didn't want to break away. They simply wanted more autonomy. But they loved their connection to England and so forth. But over the course of time, the relationship with England got so bad.

Starting point is 01:25:32 It's just goofy little things like the Boston Tea Party. What caused that? Interesting story there um from what i understand the mogul empire in india had collapsed and england uh through the east india company basically took over and for a variety of economic reasons all of a a sudden the tea trade was in an uproar. And they had all this tea and there was no place to ship it. So they decided to bring a whole lot of tea to the Americas. And what they ended up doing was actually lowering the price of tea but adding a tax to it

Starting point is 01:26:29 so let's say before all of this happened t cost a dollar a pound whatever it was um after when after the east india company uh took on uh control when the Mobile Empire collapsed. Tea was down to 90 cents a pound, but the British added a 5 cent tax to it. So tea was actually cheaper, but there was now a tax. What a stupid thing to rebel against. We're giving you something cheaper. Everyone wins. But it was just this,

Starting point is 01:27:08 it was one of those Jungian moments where the archetype breaks in and it's time for a large change. This is how we're going to make it happen. Well, I think that is one of those kind of very American archetypes is freedom for the lack of a better word, but it's a rebellious freedom. Like, we have the right to do this, even though it's the wrong thing to do.

Starting point is 01:27:31 It's a fight that we have over and over again. It's like, yeah, I guess. I'm going to hurt myself on principle just to show you. Yeah, you do get that. There is that kind of trickster archetype. Yeah. And that's what Gibbons was afraid of with America. There's just so much power and capability in a very, very psychologically immature as a culture.

Starting point is 01:28:01 Yeah, I think he saw it as a teenage country. It was starting to act up and rebel against dad. It's mineral deposits were just coming in and going through an awkward growth spurt. Yeah, but I think it was necessary. You know, when you think about Jung and his reconciliation of opposites, well, there has to be an opposite to reconcile. In a sense, we had to go through, at least up to this point, 500 years of the scientific revolution and this technological, bureaucratic way of thinking in order to have something to integrate and bring that together. Well, and other countries had an anchored identity much hundreds of years before the

Starting point is 01:28:49 scientific revolution. So they sort of had more of an anchor, even though that changed a lot of things. America was one of the first countries built solely on it. Right. So it's going to be, where would we say we are now? You know, the frat boy is graduated from college and has to get a grown-up job now, so to speak. Well, and I think that's one of the things that gets lost in American history, too, is it's like in the middle of the Industrial Revolution is the main growth of America. And so some of the reasons so much industry came here was that you couldn't reinvent the same thing in Europe, but you could steal patents in America because they were going to extradite you.

Starting point is 01:29:31 So you could just memorize the way that this patengin worked or this stamping factory and then draw it on a napkin and sail to America and become a millionaire with this brand new technology. Yeah, that's exact. Well, that's how tea got to India. There was no tea in India. It was purely Chinese and they controlled it very tightly. The English sent a spy to

Starting point is 01:30:01 somewhere in China, stole a bunch of seeds and took them to Darjeeling in India and started the Indian, because the Chinese were starting to tax too much or something like that. So, yeah, this is how the world works. Yeah. Well, it's interesting stuff.

Starting point is 01:30:23 I mean, I guess maybe to wrap up, like if somebody, you know, says, okay, you're talking about all these highfalutin ideas that you should have spirituality in your bricks and mortar and under your streets, but what does that look like? Specifically, what are you advocating for us to do differently? You know, somebody like Krier wants us to go back to the American, the early European city, wants to turn all the buildings back into Greek temples and to have a pedestrian-oriented society instead of a car-oriented society. And he goes as far as to say that no one should be able to use any building materials made

Starting point is 01:30:55 out of petroleum. They should be natural. And, you know, Duany is very much in the walkable city, and the city should be used the way that we should think used the way that um they should we should think about their function i mean what what are your you know rules for the lack of a better word what is what is your thesis about what we need to do it's interesting you mentioned um career's perspective on you know going back to some ancient way my understanding is that hillman's real desire was for us to all go back and worship Aphrodite.

Starting point is 01:31:28 That was the one question he couldn't answer. There's a famous, I mean, you never see Hillman speechless. I mean, he never shut up. And somebody from Canada, I think professor said, you know, you keep saying that we need to go back to polytheism. We need to go back to Greek. I think if you let Hillman go, he would have gone back to the mother cult. I mean, he wanted to totally regress into the unconscious and i mean he would have kept going but the guy

Starting point is 01:31:48 said you keep talking about polytheism and the greeks and all this stuff why should we do that they abandoned that way for monotheism like greek the greeks gave all of that up to convert to christianity which is why there's so much greek of it. So why, if they did that, why should we go back? And Hillman's like, uh, uh, I don't know. He doesn't have an answer. Hadn't thought that one through yet. Um, what I would, so the book is in large part, uh, sort of an exposition of my perspective on what we've been talking about, the history

Starting point is 01:32:28 of human psychological awakening. But I also discuss the process of building a city from a design perspective. And in that, I basically through the um design elements that you'll find in uh the congress for new urbanism the charter of the new urbanism and i get into there's actually a chapter on finance um how we finance the places we build. So what's the old adage? Form follows function. And from a developer's perspective, form follows finance. And so a lot of issues that we have now as far as an individual building and public infrastructure have to do with the way we finance things and the way that

Starting point is 01:33:25 we simply can't do certain things because of the way that the money flows. And the money flows in certain ways because of the value that they place on it. It's an end in itself rather than a tool. As far as the specific design elements, one of the things that I did was to take, so the issues that we're faced with now, global warming, climate change, the death of shopping malls and office parks, and so on and so forth. There's a real shift physically. Nationwide we are vastly over retailed.

Starting point is 01:34:22 And now brick and mortar stores are going away in favor of online shopping. So we have all these abandoned Walmarts we're converting into megachurches and all of these abandoned strip malls that we're converting into, you know, vape stores. Right. Yeah. So what do you do with that stuff? And title loan stores do. And so I conducted an experiment years ago. I was the chairman of the city planning commission in lancaster pennsylvania and their big shopping mall in town off to the side um more recently um they have lost something like 60 of their their stores

Starting point is 01:35:04 and they're struggling just like hundreds of other malls across the country so I decided to do a little personal experiment and use something akin to LaFonce methodology to turn this what was 160 acre shopping mall 200 acre shopping mall into a walkable neighborhood. Uh, and so I created that sort of an underlying trellis, geometric trellis on the property, um, and out of that grew a street pattern of a new traditional neighborhood, um, that is comparable to the downtown of the old historic city. And the points and lines and angles of that geometric trellis

Starting point is 01:35:53 form the location of the entrance to a park, a children's playground, a library, a city hall. In other words, it creates a network of sort of like a dispersed civic commons so that you're walking from one place to another, but you're always a part of the community. So I was raised Episcopalian, not Catholic, but we also, like the Catholics, had the Stations of the Cross in a church where the interior of the church... I grew up Episcopalian, too.

Starting point is 01:36:29 We used to call it Catholic light because... Okay. I remember a confirmation class was like, it'd be like, this is what Baptists believe, this is what Catholics believe. We don't really tell you. You can pick, you know, a new one. But yeah, there was nothing that confirmation of this wasn't really

Starting point is 01:36:46 anything. So in the interior of a church, there will be a series of works of art, statuary paintings and so forth, tapestries that depict the last days of Christ's life before the crucifixion. So they're like these little stations of learning. And so perhaps the idea is to expand those stations of the cross out throughout the entire city so that there are points of inspiration and learning on a path that you can create throughout the entire city so this might be connections

Starting point is 01:37:36 from open space to another um civic structures like city hall or the library or the school, what have you, community garden, and link these things thematically so that together they tell a story and provoke in you questions through the urban design and also the elements of design that are placed in there. So one of the things that LaFont failed to do was basically tell people what he was doing. So it was not clear that these two points

Starting point is 01:38:15 of the Capitol and the White House represented something larger. We have some vague notion, but what I think we need now is something clear and specific. Maybe a good wrap-up is we see what Jung would have designed as an architect because he put a lot of thought into Bollingen, and he built as much of Bollingen by hand as he could. So we kind of see what his architectural

Starting point is 01:38:51 ideal was. But if Jung was to build a city, if he was to be an urban planner, I mean, how do you think he would have thought? How would he have laid out something like that? He left a little bit of a legacy like that. I guess it's in the Red Book, I think. It came out of his Liverpool dream, right, where he had that dream of the tree and the lamppost on an island in the middle of the city. and there's a beautiful little rendition of that given his background and history and so forth that has a very much a medieval look. If you know the Italian military town, Palmanova shaped like a star with a moat around it that probably influenced what Young did with his Liverpool dream,

Starting point is 01:39:50 something like that. So there are a lot of possibilities to do a lot of different things on these old abandoned sites like shopping malls and so forth. Existing towns, that's going to be a really, really much more difficult sort of effort, I think, to sort of retrofit this concept into existing places. I think it's necessary when we look at maps of sea level rise, for instance. In the coming decades, New York is at risk. My home area of Tidewater, Virginia. They're building anything in Miami. It's just so unreal to me.

Starting point is 01:40:36 Miami is... Millions of dollars of new construction in Miami. It's going to be too big underwater in years. No, they already are. You can see photographs of Miami Beach under six inches of water on a regular basis now. So all of those people are going to have to decant somewhere. And we're starting to see after Katrina, half of New Orleans ended up in Houston. So how do these sort of receiver cities prepare themselves for an influx of refugees?

Starting point is 01:41:09 So by real estate in the Midwest, is that what you're saying? Actually, there's been a map made of areas which are most likely to be able to receive an influx of new people. I think the safest place is something like the center of Michigan, something like that, where no floods, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, temperature is going to be okay. So communities, if we simply respond to this sort of environmental crisis in sort of a panic mode, we've got to build more stuff quickly because people are coming. So just get it done like an engineering project. We're going to be creating future slums. So this sort of transition has to be done thoughtfully and I think for the first time in history humanity has

Starting point is 01:42:09 the opportunity to sort of look ahead and see major global changes coming not just environmentally but cosmologically the way we think about ourselves and the world is changing

Starting point is 01:42:24 and we have the opportunity to prepare for that The way we think about ourselves and the world is changing. We have the opportunity to prepare for that. Do you have faith that we will? Eventually, but I really don't think... Churchill said Americans will always do the right thing after they've tried everything else. And I think we will fight tooth and nail to hang on to the status quo until we're forced to change our ways. So, yeah, it won't be pretty. Well, I really appreciate you coming on. I would love if people want to buy the book.

Starting point is 01:43:04 Is there a way that you prefer them to do that uh do you make more money if they buy it directly um yeah i i actually um if i hand you a book by hand it's uh it's best but uh most sales will be through amazon you're gonna do an audiobook version? So many of my younger people, just everybody under 30, that's how they consume all their books. There is an e-book for $9.99. The hard copy from Amazon is, I think, $35. Barnes & Noble and three or four other outlets as well.

Starting point is 01:43:45 There's a lot of, most cities have like, or states have like a young society or whatever, and they do, you know, talks once a week or whatever. But they, Jungians like Jungian thought, you know, spilling into other areas. And that may be a good marketing thing if you make a... They'll email their group or let you come talk. I know there's one here. Atlanta's is a lot bigger than Birmingham's. You probably want to go to the bigger cities. Chicago's incredibly active too.

Starting point is 01:44:16 Chicago, very definitely. I did give a lecture at the Young Society here in Washington two years ago, I think, and met James Hollis through that process, and fabulous guy, yeah, so yeah, I'm wide open for, in fact, I've got one lecture to my professional New urbanist group here in town and looking for more. Well, great. That sounds wonderful. Well, good luck to you. And is there anything that you'd

Starting point is 01:44:54 like to add or a website we can check out, anything that helps you other than people getting a book on Amazon? Well, I am in the process of starting a nonprofit and an associated website, the Institute for Symbolic Urbanism. Okay. And that is in process, and it will be basically the ground on which I will try to refine some of these ideas into something workable for the future. If you have an interest in young and place, psychological growth and urbanism, it would be great to be able to put the two together into sort of a new way of thinking about and doing urbanism. You didn't want to go for the new, new urbanism, the Congress for the new, new urbanism?

Starting point is 01:45:51 A friend of mine, Kevin Klinkenberg, has a really great podcast where he's questioning the viability of the Congress for New Urbanism. It may be spreading out into other groups. There's the Strong Towns Movement, all those. I don't think they all agree on the philosophy anymore like they did in the beginning. It's starting to have new hypotheses about what the best path forward is. Well, that's kind of a good thing. After COVID and what's happened with downtown office space, for instance, there's a lot of rethinking that has to be done. New urbanism started out

Starting point is 01:46:39 as a way of doing better suburbia. Maybe that's that has been rethought quite a bit. And it may not need to be the focus anymore. Well, that makes sense. I appreciate your time.

Starting point is 01:46:58 And I guess, do you have the name of the website? Can you say that? I think it's just isu.org. Okay just ISU.org. Okay. ISU.org. Oh,

Starting point is 01:47:09 I'm sorry. Um, symbolic urbanism.org. Okay. Symbolic urbanism.org. Yeah. And it'll be up in, Oh Lord,

Starting point is 01:47:17 maybe six weeks, September. Okay. You want us to hold the episode until it's live or go ahead and put it, put it out. Um, you can hold it for a couple of weeks. That would be fine. Well, it's totally up to you. Whatever's more helpful. I'd enough. You want us to hold the episode until it's live or go ahead and put it out? You can hold it for a couple of weeks. That would be fine.

Starting point is 01:47:26 Well, it's totally up to you. Whatever is more helpful and if the book's for sale, you know, sometimes the Amazon algorithm likes more. If you have more out the gate, then it keeps it up there longer. Yeah, you know what? Go ahead and do it as you will. No need to wait. Because I'm actually going to bring in some professional help. What I've done so far on the website is kind of amateurish.

Starting point is 01:48:01 So it might be a couple more months than I anticipate. So go ahead. Okay. Yeah, we'll have you go ahead and get that live. And thank you for sitting down with us. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording. And be sure and check out Will's website and other projects as they come available. It's glass and concrete and stone It is just a house

Starting point is 01:48:29 not a home

The Taproot Podcast - 🏛️📿🙏The Spirituality of Urban Planning With Will Selman

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