Toward the end of an interview with a kid recently, we asked, “who are some of your favorite architects, dead or alive?” with the caveat that there was no right answer. We wanted an understanding or feeling for his point of view, what he valued in his education and work. His response was “hmmm, no one’s ever asked me that question” and he could not answer it. Steve and I thought and did not say: “Really? There is no one you can think of (and really no one has ever asked you)?” His answer would have been, it appeared, a resigned “no.” No need to ask or answer, the sense of defeat was palpable.
A 19th century German philosopher first named such a state of mind, one in which there is nothing of value or to value, nothing to live for, just sustained apathy. He called it “Nihilism” and he was Friedrich Nietzsche. The idea was, like German romanticism, melodramatic, but to not miss his point he was talking not about an individual’s state of mind, but rather a collective state of mind, meaning not individual but shared values. It was possible, he thought, that a group of people (a state or nation) could be made up of individuals with individual values and live in a state of nihilism--no shared values, little to nothing in common to live for, no sustained vitality as a society.
Nietzsche had, he believed, already observed nascent nihilism in late 19th century Europe and predicted that it would go on to permeate the western world throughout the 20th century and into the next. The cause in his view was that western, particularly European cultures, had “exhausted” themselves, that our cultural traditions had burnt out and there was no turning back, only moving forward. It was “the end of history.” Moving forward would require freedom from cultural norms or shared values and greater individual autonomy. Individualism, in other words, was a good thing, our only ticket out. After a century or two of muddling through, when we would rally around a new set of shared values, new culture(s?) would (fantastically and apparently from scratch) emerge.
And who better than the U.S. of A. to lead that charge? Our individualism is world-class. We lead in competitive consumption, eternal entertainment, celebrity fetishization, and the shunning of social institutions. We also win at social inequity and alienation, the proliferation of alienating environments, and environmental annihilation. The threat that Nietzsche saw in exhausted cultures seems to have been replaced by exhausted or at least exhausting (and increasingly unfulfilling) individualism.
As a painter, writer, musician, or actor it’s easier to not worry about such things, to instead live just as Nietzsche (Emerson, Hemingway, Rand, etc.) promoted. Excel as an individual, “live your own truth” and be celebrated for it. But for those architects who see their art as primarily a social one, meaning requiring of a partner in the making of it--that partner being society, this presents a problem. It has forced architects to shun public work and instead pursue private work—rich people’s homes, their businesses, and the “cultural” institutions they support—and to sustain the work, stand out and posture originality at whatever cost (to cities and society).
But while Nietzsche’s prediction was eerily accurate in understanding where America would be in the 21st century, it was not perfectly so. Because Nietzsche was also under the spell of German historicism, a quasi-metaphysical view of history in which everything is predetermined, and we are all merely marching in lockstep with it, his vision was total and without exception. Instead, shared values did and do thrive. Stands and eddies of institutional integrity, committed communities, individuals committed to other individuals have withstood the winds and currents of the individualism of our time. We find such exceptions (and exceptional people) in local governments, schools and school districts, universities, and enclaves of every demographic stripe. For those of us for whom these partners are a part of the art, it is only a matter of seeking them out and, in turn, showing what can be done in partnering with them.
Also, we have not forgotten. We do not believe that history ended a century ago, that there’s nothing pragmatic to be learned from anything before 1920 or since, that we’re supposed to live in a state of eternal amnesia, aimlessness, and cluelessness pretending to conjure our work out of nothing. That kid, who we did hire, demonstrated what Nietzsche perhaps had not expected in his vision of the future: individual nihilism. Not ever having experienced a community of shared values, other than merely technical ones, at school or at work, this intelligent, naturally talented young person had been starved of resources. Had he stayed with us, he may have overcome his malnutrition, he may have learned what resources there are out there if you only you look, and through the looking, thrive as an individual in service to others while loving doing it.