[T]he main question of the twenty-first century, the main problem, perhaps especially for Americans: the necessity to rethink the entire meaning of “progress.” … Our “conservatives” care not for the conservation of the country, and of the American land. Yet: more than tax policy, more than education policy, more than national security policy, more even than the painful abortion issue, this is where the main division is beginning to occur. So it is in my township. It is the division between people who want to develop, to build up, to pour more concrete and cement on the land, and those who wish to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where they live. (Landscape, not wilderness. The propagation of wilderness, the exaltation of “nature” against all human presence, is the fatal shortcoming of many American environmentalists.) Beneath that division I sometimes detect the division between a true love of one’s country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless “growth.”
The "near-nomadic life" is something we've all come to accept as an inevitable part of life in the modern economy. Again, going back to a theme in our California discussion, is this nomadism a liberation, or a prison? When I was in California visiting with P., we talked about how our fathers could barely conceive of leaving their hometowns behind ... and yet both of us couldn't wait to do so. It was liberation for us to be free to follow our own dreams of career, of personal fulfillment, and so forth. And yet, what have we (that is, we Americans) lost in the process? Is it possible to regain it? Are we prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to regain it? Or is that even possible? That is, has the economy been built on a nomadic culture, such that many Americans have no choice but to be a nomad if they want to stay gainfully employed?
Who is the real conservative: the person who figures out a way to dig in and stay, or the person who leaves in search of opportunity (financial or otherwise)? And whether they vote Democratic or Republican, does that ultimately matter?
I talked to a colleague this morning, also a non-Texan by birth, who said that most of his friends aren't Dallas natives, and that very few of them have an abiding interest in what goes on in this city beyond their own narrow circles. He was talking about this as a modern condition for more and more of us. We aren't encouraged to think about the wider community, or to set down roots, because either we look forward to the next job that will cause us to uproot ourselves, or we work in a sector of the economy that will probably force us to uproot ourselves and move on as the economy shifts.
This colleague, who is non-religious, pointed to how in the northern Dallas suburbs, all these rootless folks are gravitating to their churches for a sense of community. Which is normal, and natural. And, if you think about it, Benedictine. But it doesn't bode well for the future of communities and communitarianism, at least in the way we've understood them till now.
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Is it sensible to complain about the rootlessness of modern Dallas inhabitants when the city itself is less than 175 years old?
Have we as Americans lost something with their moving from wherever they came from to Dallas? Well, did we lose something when the city's original inhabitants do the exact same thing in the 1850's?
Have we lost something twice?
Or did the city of Dallas become a community after those original "nomads" built those connections and relationships on which communities depend? That particular form of community may have been lost with the advent of the car and the telephone, and with the subsequent arrival of new settlers, but that doesn't mean that a new form of community is henceforth impossible.
Let us not so fetishize the old that we think of the old as the eternal, and the new as the uniquely ethereal. The old community in Dallas was once quite new, and the new community may one day become its own old community.>
One thing I think that Rod is missing in his observations about the West Coast is while it may seem that we are less rooted out here, we also have a much less well delineated class structure compared to back East. I'm not saying that there isn't a class structure but it is far less visible than say somewhere like New York or even Texas.>
Check out todays surprising editorial in the NY Times about the dimished role of the Local Banker. Great stuff.>
In many ways, Rod, the concept of America is one of uprooting the connectedness. Leaving the Old World to make a new one for one's children. Violently cutting ties to the mother country. To what extent is that ethos, which undergirds much of American society, consistent with crunchiness? Is your concept of coherent, consistent crunchiness possible in a nation whose founding principles include severing ties with its roots?>
Is your concept of coherent, consistent crunchiness possible in a nation whose founding principles include severing ties with its roots?
I often wonder the same thing. It seems that Rod and his likeminded friends seem to reject a lot about modernity, but I wonder where precisely they draw the line between what was good and what is now bad.
Surely that line precedes the postwar growth of suburbia. Does it also precede the industrial revolution? It seems to precede even the enlightenment; does that mean it even precedes things like the movable-type printing press, that helped lead to the enlightenment?
If the reactionary agrarians reject the Reformation that informed the motives for many of this country's first settlers, the mobility that shaped its culture of individualism, and the Enlightenment that shaped its politics, in what way are they -- to borrow from the original subtitle in Rod's book -- attempting to save America?
They may be loyal to the ground beneath our feet, but it seems like the oppose the foundational ideas at the heart of this country. By an apparent rejection of things like the Enlightenment and the Reformation, they urge a return to Europe's roots, not ours.>
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