Leaving home

Patrick Deneen's been teaching government at Georgetown for a couple of years, and has noticed something about the kinds of young conservatives he meets in Washington:

What has struck me in particular is the sheer number of ambitious young conservatives who work at various think tanks, for Republican representatives and Senators, and in the Administration (at least for another 15 months or so). They are invariably well-scrubbed and well-kempt, earnest and eager, studious especially to master arguments that prove the inadequacies of liberals and Democrats. Most acknowledge that they are in Washington because it's where the action is. I gave a lecture a year ago to a group of young conservatives (an occasion called "Conservatism on Tap") and suggested that a conservative might be defined as someone who returned home to give back to the community in return for having fostered and raised him or her as a young person. When I asked how many had returned to their home city of Washington with precisely that ambition in mind, there was a hearty and knowing laugh; two people out of about 150 acknowledged having grown up in the DC suburbs (undoubtedly for parents who worked for the Government).

A question comes to mind: how did it get to be this way? How did it come to be unquestionably natural for young people to abandon their home towns in order to move to the centers of power in order to seek advancement?

It's a good question not only for conservatives, but for all of us (especially for conservatives, though, given what we profess). Berry has written that we have to start educating young people for "homecoming," and that our schools today educate young people for export. I am in the odd position of coming to understand the wisdom of all this at the midpoint of my life, but only after I have slingshotted out of my hometown, and lived in Washington, New York and south Florida, finally settling down in Dallas. Starting to preach homecoming (homegoing?) now strikes me as about as credible as if I discovered the virtues of the military draft, now that I'm well past draft age. Nevertheless, Deneen's question remains: how and when did leaving one's hometown to seek personal advancement become completely natural?

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.

It's also the case that television broadened one's horizons, and created a new set of desires. I remember being a teenage misfit in my rural Southern hometown, and suddenly somebody invented MTV, and I couldn't wait to get to London as soon as I could. My normal teenage anxiety and unhappiness there was exacerbated, and TV told me that there was some place to escape to. Mind you, the geographical cure for unhappiness is overrated, but there really is something to it. If you are a young adult who loves books and movies and clubs and being around other people who do, well, you are going to be a lot happier in a big city than in a small country town. And if you are someone who prefers the outdoors, the quiet life, clean air, and so forth, well, the small town life is for you.

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. When TMatt told me that, I thought about how as a small boy, I believed that there was something wrong with us because our town didn't have a fast-food chain, only local hamburger restaurants. No kidding, it was as if we weren't validated in the eyes of the world. If you didn't have McDonald's or Burger King, you were nothing. Crazy, I know, but I think there's long been a powerful meme in our culture teaching rural and small-town people to hate, or at least devalue, where they're from, and ultimately themselves.

Reading Berry's last essay collection on the flight up, I played with the thought of what would happen if I packed up my family and returned to my Louisiana hometown. Could we do it? Almost certainly not. There's no work for me there, given my vocation. But let's assume I became a writer who could work from anywhere. What then? Well, aside from Dallas being my wife's hometown, we already have roots, however shallow, laid down in Dallas. This is where our church is. This is where our friends are. We've grown accustomed to urban life, even though since having kids the kinds of things that attracted me to life in the big city aren't really a factor in my life. (I pointed out to Julie the other day that our leisure lives now revolve around watching video at home, reading books and cooking -- and thanks to Netflix, Amazon.com and various food websites, you don't have to live in the city to enjoy those things). It would be, in short, awkward and unnatural to uproot my wife and kids and move them to a place they've only visited for a week or less at a time.

For the longest time, I thought my dad was so strange for longing for and expecting me to return home and settle down. But now I'm starting to realize that my point of view is historically anomalous. And I realize too that I desperately want my children to choose to live close to their mother and me. I have no right to expect it, given the life I've lived, but I certainly do desire it. It's becoming clearer to me too that as a conservative, the assumptions I've long lived by -- and that most of us live by -- are hard to reconcile with what I profess to believe as a traditional conservative. I made the break from my family's heritage by moving away, and didn't realize what I was doing, because lots of other people were doing it too, and it seemed like the most normal thing in the world. I can't say that I regret it -- I've had a great life, and am grateful for all the opportunities I've been given -- but I couldn't see the downside of all that freedom to roam until I had kids of my own. And now I think about it a lot.

Anyway, this is a long-winded post, and I'm sorry for that. So, tell me: how do you answer Deneen's question? Why did you leave your hometown? Or, why did you stay? Do you regret your choice? What do you hope for from your kids?