The Discipline and Illusion of Place
Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen have been lamenting rootlessness, particularly of the young and ambitious, and wondering when we began to consider it natural to abandon one’s home town at adulthood. James joins in, suggesting that going away to college is the salient cause.
James is right to some extent: the stigma we attach to those who stay at home for college is particularly American, and has spread along with the increased availability of college education. But Patrick and Rod are both too quick to wield Berry’s Razor, which declares that any undesirable social or economic phenomenon can be explained by self-indulgence. Here’s Rod:
There have always been people who couldn’t wait to get out of their hometown, for all the usual reasons. But I think the more normal thing was for people, no matter what their intelligence or career aspirations, to assume that they would settle down back home, and ply their trade there. I think the standard changed for a variety of reasons. For one thing, we got used to the idea of mobility not only as necessary to the economy, but as symbolizing American freedom. And post-1950s, we grew into a consumer society that emphasized satisfying wants, not honoring responsibilities. We developed an advertising culture that trained minds to see individual desire as self-validating, and its fulfillment as part of the natural order of things. It’s easy to see, then, how the individual begins to accept the idea that he or she has the natural right to want to leave one’s family and heritage behind to follow one’s dreams.
Mobility was part of the American experience long before marketing colonized our appetites, for many reasons that had nothing to do with dream-following. There was a time when one left one’s hometown in order to “honor responsibility:” if the farm or family business didn’t need another pair of hands, then it was up to you to find work elsewhere. Patrick, especially, should bear in mind that the high-wage manufacturing jobs he eulogizes required massive migrations of laborers from their home communities into industrial belts. We’re stuck with the fact that leaving home is, for many of us, a cultural and familial tradition.
Settling down, though, is a good thing in and of itself. Any genuine conservative should foster an ethos of rooted affinity for home, community, and other settled arrangements. The arbitrary primacy of birthplace, however, is crunchy cant, and those of us who want to see more local, voluntary efforts at creating the Good Life ought to privilege deliberate and reasoned choices of hometown over sticking with one’s childhood home.
For one thing, “roots” require soil, and some people grow up in dismal places where the problem is that too few of them leave for greener pastures. I assume that Rod doesn’t mean to be as condescending as he sounds here:
From a more critical angle, Terry Mattingly, who is an accomplished musician and lover of bluegrass, talks about the heartbreak of teaching college students in Appalachia who wanted nothing more than to get away from their provincial lives, and live out the fantasies fed to them by MTV. Terry could see the beauty and richness of their traditional folk culture, but many of the kids wanted nothing to do with it.
Appalachia is a big area, with some genuinely beautiful places and viable towns. Maybe Mattingly teaches in Asheville, North Carolina, for instance, where folk culture, flaky hippiedom, and modern commercial life maintain a lovely creative tension. But after spending eight years and raising two children in my wife’s Appalachian home town of B. (I love that trick from the Russian novels), I know that there’s more to the exodus of young people than “fantasies fed to them by MTV.”
A large swath of small-town life lacks exactly the sort of community ties that conservatives value. Rod remembers pining for a McDonalds to come to his town, but today, if you are the sort of locally-inclined young person who’d rather buy a burger from an owner you know than from a chain, you might have to move somewhere else, like to a college town. The hollowing-out of local commerce is a response to the preferences of those small-town residents who, unlike Rod, never outgrew their enthusiasm for branded, mainstream products and who, also unlike Rod, stayed put. Those of us who prefer local exchange are, by definition, going to have to live near one another to actually exercise that preference.
Setting aside the extreme case of Appalachia, what’s conservative about returning to the same suburb in which you grew up, if everything about the place is so morally desolate and atomizing? If our suburbs are the howling spiritual wilderness that the Krunchy Korps believe them to be (and I share much of their jaundiced view), why return there to raise a family? Why not choose a community of like-minded souls who, wherever they might have grown up, are committed to sharing and improving a community?
I realize that talk of choosing where to settle undermines the fundamental conservative commitment to playing one’s hand rather than perpetually chasing “commodious living.” Rod and his compatriots (with whom I have more in common than this criticism suggests) are understandably touchy about the matter of choice, since they have to constantly defend themselves against accusations that their “little platoons” are just clubs of like-minded consumers. James addresses this nicely in the end of his post as well as in a lot of his other writing, which discusses how difficult it can get, being self-conscious and tradition-minded at the same time. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. Resolving the problem doesn’t require sending everyone home.
Hear. Hear. I grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, which is Flint, Michigan with a waterfall in the middle. If I stayed “home” I would be just another Puerto Rican kid who never escaped the barrio. It’s not that I don’t appreciate many aspects of the people and culture I grew up with — on the contrary, getting away made it possible to distinguish between what was worthwhile and an essential part of who I am and what was an accident of time and place.
It’s one thing to be nostalgic about a part of your life and times, it’s quite another to be nostalgic about something never experienced first-hand.
— Roberto · Oct 17, 11:12 PM · #
College is part of it, as is putting off marriage and children. Another variable has to be community-type.
Anecdotally, I’m went to high school in a satellite town just north of Nashville. Most in my class went to relatively local colleges (UT Knoxville, MTSU, etc.) and then returned — probably 75%. The ambitious gravitated toward the bigger cities, of course, but they were few and far between. However, I also lived for a while in Detroit, and most of those who went to college never came back.
I went to Vanderbilt for under-grad, though, and only there were the rootless dynamics really noticeable. Most who attended came from afar, and most of those transitioned upon graduation into the primary market streams of Chicago, New York, DC and LA.
I guess my point is that rootlessness, as defined by Rod et al, is not really a controlling dynamic unless a) your community is unattractive for whatever reason, b) you’re not married with children at a young age, and 3) your college is top-tier. And while we’re at it, we might as well throw in familial culture and expectations.
But all in all, in my experience, rootlessness is not a significant phenomenon for the majority.
— John Aristides · Oct 17, 11:17 PM · #
My dad was a Navy chaplain when I was growing up so we moved every two years until I was 18 and I stayed in the city of S-n D—-o (Hangman—it’s what’s missing from Russian novels) for college while my family went off to Guam. My brother, sisters and I share an underlying expectation that residences and friendships are impermanent. We’re committed to spouses, family, and church communities but we wonder if we’ll be picking up and moving on after a year or two in one place—even if that isn’t planned.
What’s this? Paragraphs in the comments section!
I stayed on through and after college, marriage, and children and eventually my parents and grandparents moved here. One day it dawned on me that it’d been 20 years since college and I finally believed I was rooted. It was a marvelous week when I acknowledged that milestone. Since then I’ve picked up books on local history so I can get to know more about my town.
— Joules · Oct 18, 06:34 AM · #
Many of my generation stuck around the big city—often against our personal preferences—simply because we needed to find companies that would interview liberal arts majors for entry-level positions. I’m sure a lot of us would be happy to get back to our roots in Boone (or the boonies, generically) if we could find work there.
— Katherine Philips · Oct 18, 04:26 PM · #
Beckley? Bluefield? Boone? Bristol?
give us a hint…
— dgj · Oct 19, 01:02 AM · #
Excellent discussion. Thank you, Matt and Rod. I have one tangential comment. I’m “from” North Carolina myself, and I lived in Asheville for a little while. Here’s the little tangent that struck me: “…but today, if you are the sort of locally-inclined young person who’d rather buy a burger from an owner you know than from a chain, you might have to move somewhere else, like to a college town.” Insofar as the implication is that the sustainable/local/agrarian consumer life is better pursued by leaving one’s roots, I say hold on to your roots, because the sustainable/local/agrarian consumer life is an oxymoron. Sure, move to Asheville if you want to buy XYZ from a business with a hip image; stay in B. if you want to grow it yourself or buy it from your neighbor (i.e. a truer local economy.) What I’m trying to say is that a focus on buying things (consumerism?) is inconsistent with local economy.
— Eric Brown · Oct 19, 08:46 PM · #
Unfortunately many of us leave home because there’s nothing there for us. The farm barely supported one family and the only jobs in the county were working at the prison or for the railroad … neither of which could hire a full graduating class of 20. I suppose if my parents had died right at the exact moment I graduated then I might have moved into the farm and started a family. More than likely not.
Sometimes you’ve got to go a long way in life to figure out where you would like to be and by the time you get it straight in your head it’s too late to go back.
— Ernie · Oct 19, 08:53 PM · #