Critique of Everyday Life and Manifest Destiny

In Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, in particular the chapter “What is Possible” I found parallels in the aims of America’s Manifest Destiny and how it was sold to a public as moralizing religiosity all the while the main goal was the economic dominance over Europe and individual profit by the many entrepreneurs who invested in the railroad and other enterprises. While many artists and writers were lured by the romance of the “technological sublime” the underlying motivation of those with the means to make this technology possible was not altruistically linking the east and the west for the glory of god, but for the shear profitability of the railroad to expand a cross-continent market. Lefebrve said, “Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth.”(p. 236)

This comment, however cynical in tone, recalls how notions of the natural sublime developed in the late eighteenth century when Enlightenment individuals looked to wilderness areas of nature as a source of contemplation and spirituality rather than as a feared obstacle to cultivation. Artists and thinkers on the subject were motivated by good intentions, but their thinking is a product of their economic status. For the American sublime, it quickly became appropriated for political and economic gain. How swiftly artists and intellectuals shifted from lamenting the vanishing wilderness to accept the devastation of the wilderness at the hand of the axe and the laying of tracks for the sake of American progress.

By the advent of the railroad in 1826, a shift occurred that enticed a broader spectrum of acceptance of the radical changes in the country, because the promise of transportation to city centers and to link up markets centers offered the potential for more profit to a greater number of people. It made no difference to most people that thousands of Native Americans were massacred in order to lay the tracks criss-crossing the country and to assure peaceful travel of passengers and goods. For profit and personal gain, people lost their humanity because their own greed rose above their humanity—they alienated themselves from their fellow man for what that slaughter would give them in return—land, mining rights, and access to the marketplace. For a brief moment, the railroad was characterized as a vehicle to bring all people together, to alleviate the physical challenges of the vast spaces that separate people, and to provide opportunity to everyone. But the opportunity it mainly provided was to those who profited from the manipulation of the location of the railroad and the industries created as a result of its being.

While the bourgeoisie had the time to contemplate the moral and spiritual associations of untamed nature, marveling at its symbolic power, the average agrarian worker did not have the same sense of discretionary time or context to think of the land as anything other than a formidable opponent to comfort—the land was simply the connection to labor. They did not have the time or resources to engage in the new industry of tourism to sublime landscapes, but before long the general concept of tourism both to national parks and architectural wonders has become common place. But it is still a luxury available primarily to the middle and upper classes. It would be curious to know how many residents from a New York ghetto has ever been to the Grand Canyon or to Niagara Falls—the idea of communing with nature was meant to restore the soul, but this concept only came about with the rise of an industrial society based on a sense of alienation from nature. Lefebvre echoes the romantic construct of being alone in the face of raw nature when he discusses the myth of human solitude (p. 198). Here he discusses how for most people, being alone is a need, but the peasant rarely experiences the joys of solitude. Instead, he calls for a skeptical look at the emphatic needs we have developed in our lives and to concentrate on the art of living as an end in itself rather than a means to another end. As much as I love to get out into nature, go on exotic travels, or to enjoy all my creature comforts from nice restaurants to fine art, Lefebvre reminds me that much of what I desire is instilled in me from outside class influences. Time to stop and smell the roses and marvel in the subtleties of everyday life and to find daily joy instead of the elusive rare moments—especially in these trying economic times. Like the railroad (or in contemporary times, homeownership), we are made to believe that such things are the promise of a radical improvement in our lives, but every such improvement comes with a price.
Julie Sasse