re: Move back to your dying hometown. Unless you can’t.

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cis


What does this mean?

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Michele Anderson, who is a white cis woman,

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Bawcomville

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Americans have always had a contentious relationship with permanence. Mobility, both social and geographic, is in the American DNA. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, “In the United States, a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on;…he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.” While this sort of mobility has now spread across the globe, it was a novel trait to the 19th century Frenchman, and stood in stark contrast to the Old World Europe that Tocqueville knew. Indeed, his very surname belies the rootedness to place that defined European aristocracy: he was Alexis of Tocqueville, a particular place with a particular history.

There are, of course, profound political implications of American mobility. The meritocratic nature of American democracy encourages the most talented to pursue career opportunities without regard to place. This has helped create Charles Murray’s “superzips” and contributed to the “brain drain” that has so devastated Middle America and the inner cities. The meritocratic sorting of American society is much to blame for our severe political polarization, whereby educated, predominately liberal elites congregate in urban areas on the coast, leaving the large swaths of flyover country from whence they came.

But even beyond political homogenization and polarization, mobility weakens civil society by lessening our obligations to our neighbors. Tocqueville, contrasting Old World aristocracy to American democracy, observed, “Aristocratic families maintain the same station for centuries, and often live in the same place. So…[a man] freely does his duty by both ancestors and descendants and often sacrifices personal pleasures for the sake of beings who are no longer alive or are not yet born.” Permanence, that sense of rootedness to place, provides a constant reminder of our familial and neighborly obligations, absent which the incentive to invest in civil society is greatly diminished. It’s no surprise, then, that more and more Americans are “bowling alone”. Why invest in the difficult work of forming associations when one could move across the country—or world—at any time?

Fortunately, the perils of mobility have not gone unrecognized. Those who care about place, permanence, and civil society have taken up the argument for remaining in one’s hometown. Justin Hannegan, writing in The Imaginative Conservative, presents a compelling case for hometown living, urging Americans to consider that “perhaps permanence—the guardian of family, tradition, practical wisdom, environment, and culture—is worth it.”

Bill Kauffman, in his address at TAC’s September event on revitalizing Main Street in Jackson, Michigan (and subsequently published in this space), made a similar appeal to the value of permanence:

And if we are disloyal to our place, to the place our ancestors made, then why should our children show any loyalty to us? If the city in which they grow up is stripped clean of its landmarks—and I don’t mean just the homes of great men, of presidents and thieves—I mean the corner groceries and baseball fields and the front-porched homes that make a neighborhood—well, why should young people choose to stay in such a self-disrespecting place? Why not just move to a manicured suburb with high average SAT scores—say, Columbine, Colorado, where all your dreams can come true?

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I guess I should move back to Bogalusa

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cis


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