The flourishing valley of Phoenix, Arizona is a testament to man’s ability to be the primary driving force in his universe.
Phoenix, Arizona doesn’t strike somebody as a glorious testament to progress or capitalism at first sight. The city is primarily a post-industrial one, defined by finance, transit, and urban sprawl. Despite being one of the largest in the country, Phoenix as a city is more accurately described as a conglomeration of suburbia, a small downtown region, and a major airport.
The heroism of mankind is obviously in some cities — Pittsburgh is the manifestation of man’s ability to rip resources from the Earth and turn them into skyscrapers, Chicago’s towers pierce the sky with former meat-packing plants reinvigorated with nightlife and development just miles away, and Charleston is built around shipping goods from all over the world to central places to be enjoyed by consumers at ease. Heroism can be more subtle in others. The important key is that the modern city is created by man out of nothingness. It is his ability to not only build housing in one place but to build housing hundreds of feet into the air, at levels of great comfort, going against all that nature would rather have him do that makes him a heroic creature. It’s his ability to actually shape and carve his surroundings around his will, not around the indifferent will of nature. It’s his ability to see opportunity where there was once only sure death and failure that makes him heroic.
This is what makes Phoenix one of the best embodiments of mankind’s heroism that you will find in the United States. Phoenix is man’s symbolic gesture to nature that he will live where he wants and flourish wherever he puts himself down.
The Phoenix region was just a searing, dead valley not long ago. Very few things could live there for long periods of time, let alone flourish. The humans who did decide to settle the region had to be the most courageous, risk-taking, and rough-edged people of their day. If the mere journey to the valley didn’t kill them, the surrounding environment probably would.
Today is is the apotheosis of human flourishing. The trek to Sky Harbor International Airport takes 5 hours at the longest from within the United States, and can be done in absolute luxury compared to the trip in the 1880s. A quick hike to one of the mountains jutting out of the Glendale or Scottsdale neighborhoods shows miles of humanity living comfortably. The people of the Phoenix region aren’t scrounging day-to-day for food, worried about the next attack by raiders or natives, or burning away in the summer heat. They are thriving in safe, air-conditioned homes with blooming gardens and access to some of the greatest comforts to ever be presented to humankind. To go even further, they need not spend every day preparing crops, defending their lands, or working in industrial shipyards or manufacturing plants. Instead, the residents of the Phoenix region can make their livings in ways that may not even require them to leave the bounty of their homes.
Phoenix is heroic in this way: mankind took the resources from the earth and wrought them to his needs by creating steel, glass, rubber, silicon chips, power plants, and airplanes as in any other major city. He then went a step further and decided to settle a valley of death and lifelessness and flourish there. What would once be considered madness is now normalcy to the thinking and acting legacy of humankind. Only because of the cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Charleston is the wealth and progress of Phoenix possible.
He then went a step further and decided to settle a valley of death and lifelessness and flourish there.
In the same way that the rise of the Gulf State cities like Abu Dhabi and Dubai are only possible with the technology and wealth currently possessed, Phoenix is only possible as a consequence of the heroism of the 19th century Gilded Age. Phoenix is a place where the human spirit comes alive in recognizing crazy opportunity and making it a reality.