“You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is ... when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centres of economic life."

-Joseph Campbell, American literature professor and author, 1904-1987

This quote is from Campbell’s 1988 work The Power of Myth, which was originally a television series that was subsequently turned into a book. It’s the first part of a longer quote, which goes like this:

“It takes me back to a time when these spiritual principles informed the society. You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.

If you go to Salt Lake City, you see the whole thing illustrated right in front of your face. First the temple was built, right in the center of the city. This is the proper organization because the temple is the spiritual center from which everything flows in all directions. Then the political building, the Capitol, was built beside it, and it’s taller than the temple. And now the tallest thing is the office building that takes care of the affairs of both the temple and political building. That’s the history of Western civilization. From the Gothic through the princely periods of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, to this economic world that we’re in now.”[1]

[1]: Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. 118-119.