“We had no warning.”
Superficially it appears that compact towns may be vulnerable to attack. With apologies to those who may have already covered the topic, I offer these thoughts.
A contrary view would be that sprawl is necessary for information age tactics of warfare. Attacks serve the interests of big capitalists by imputing purpose to inefficient profits based social and economic organization, and the interests of anti urban peasant religion in a mutual embrace of mystification. Rather than a holocaust that obliterates the megalopolis entirely, the idea is to create a ripple effect on the whole aggregation by relatively small explosions. You don’t kill your audience. Sprawl cannot defend its vast exposed infrastructure, yet information about small attacks dominates the synthetic-information dependent consciousness completely, a huge cost benefit leverage.
To state the obvious, concentration eliminates the ease of a low tech attack, as the builders of historical cities recognized. The question then becomes more nuanced. Looked at in essence, violent competition has two main reasons other than the Gods’ amusement: genetic competition and an experience of heightened reality. Homer states the motif already ancient in his time: a woman is abducted, or, following Herodotus, a woman (=genetic potential of the tribe) allows herself to be abducted. Or, put another way, the tribe’s ethos to act as genetic vector comes into conflict with resource limitation, as with the settlement of the Americas by Europe’s excess underclass, then the recoloniztion of Europe by Semitic excess underclass. A heavy dose of religion in each case leads to the latter of the two reasons, commingled with the former: trying to experience meaning in the economic and social collapse caused by excess fertility. Violence galvanizes one’s sense of meaning.
Now, the temple states antecedent to the compact towns we propose used the cathartic rites of death to give society its sense of meaning. That should give a clue as to why in a practical sense their own citizens didn’t normally commit violence internally. Regicide was ritualized to renew society, rather than sublimated as assassination and impeachment as in our culture.
But in the figure of 5th century philosopher Socrates of that of 1st century prophet Jesus, we have the archetype of both polis and temple state citizenship: passive acceptance of the communal will on the part of rebels. Contrast the rural nomadic archetype of Mohammed, needing violent conquest to give meaning to his truth.
What we have in our age is a moribund secular civilization represented by cancer-like urban aggregations and utterly sterile digital mental life, faced with tribal nomadic shame and honor blood feud ethos that gives meaning to the global excess underclass of both north and south.
Now, how many people have got the answer to this riddle, and thus the rediscovery of compact towns that offer the security of long term genetic success and an order of magnitude of heightened meaning and even non violent competition? Can you imagine a policeman in one of these towns uttering the words of Scotland Yard, “We had no warning?”
