At several points he touches upon the paradoxes of modern urbanism and the tragic ironies of our cultural attitude toward cities: although we now have more individual freedom, technical ability, and, arguably, social equity, we do not live in places as hospitable to human beings as were our cities of the past; we are pragmatists who build shoddily; our current
obsession with historic preservation is the flip side of our
utter lack of confidence in our ability to build well; while cultures with shared ascetic ideals and transcendent orientation built great cities and produced great landscapes, modern culture's expressive ideals, dogmatic public secularism, and privatized religiosity produce
for us, even with our vast wealth, only private luxury, a spoiled countryside, and a public realm that is both venal and incoherent; above all, we simultaneously idolize nature and ruin it.