Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Erickson

A civilization built to look down from somewhere high: Erickson’s line reads like an architect diagnosing a culture by its skyline. As a modernist who watched North American cities harden into glass-and-concrete statements, he’s not praising “Western achievement” so much as naming its operating system: control, display, hierarchy. The “thread” metaphor is telling. He’s arguing that what appears as a grand tapestry of progress is, structurally, one repeating fiber - an obsession with outward command.

“Outward” does double work. It points to conquest and administration, but also to image: the West’s need to externalize power into institutions, borders, and, yes, buildings that broadcast dominance. “Command” is an engineer’s word, a planner’s word. It implies legibility, order, the measurable. Against that stands everything messy, relational, ecological - the interior life of a place or a people. Erickson’s critique lands because it’s not abstract moralizing; it’s tactile. You can feel “outward command” in the straightened river, the cleared forest, the gridded city, the corporate tower that turns a skyline into a leaderboard.

The sting is in “sense of superiority,” delivered almost clinically. He’s treating supremacy not as an occasional political pathology but as a design principle, a self-justifying myth that makes command feel like destiny. Coming from an architect, the subtext is uncomfortable: Western civilization doesn’t just think this way; it pours this worldview into concrete, then calls it culture.