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Places that are hard to love
[Angelo Matera 03/13 11:35 AM]Rod, when you say that “Americans now live in places that they find hard to love, and that make ordinary human community difficult,” I think that has a direct bearing on your question: “Do we all put personal goals ahead of the good of our particular place?”
It’s hard to put the good of a particular place ahead of personal goals if the place itself is hard to love. That’s asking people to act positively on the basis of abstract morality, through a pure act of will.
Consider this statement from the Prospect magazine article you cited: The entrepreneurs of 19th-century Japan could have invested their money more safely on Wall Street than in Japan, but the thought hardly occurred to them. Their governing motive was … a national feeling that joined the Japanese of the day together as a group; each individual identified with this commitment and felt it personally. These men “identified with” and “felt … personally” their commitment to Japan. Their intellects and emotions had been shaped by their culture, and it was the love of that culture that motivated them to do the right thing for their community.
That’s why I think it can be meaningless to ask, in the abstract, whether we should stay in our hometown. What if its population is transient, and there is no sense of community? What if it’s ugly, with no local culture to speak of? What if we have few friends or extended family there? To ask people to commit to such a place, in the name of an abstract ideal, will seem like empty moralism (except, of course, for those with a great love for the principle itself).
Yes, it’s true that a place develops community and culture — becomes loveable — when people commit to it. But in our transient society, where many of us pick a location because of convenience (job, schools, taxes), and where there are fewer and fewer places with a distinctive culture, to commit to the place you happen to live in can seem arbitrary — sort of like committing to an arranged marriage with someone you find unattractive and colorless. There has to be a genuine attraction first from which real bonds can take root.
For many people the first step towards retrieving a sense of rootedness will come from moving to a place where they’ll want to stay put. Absent that, the inclination to be in motion, searching for a place that feels like home, will seem the natural thing to do.
That still leaves the question: Is it realistic to think we can re-create our communities so that we’ll want to put loyalty to them before social mobility? I think that’s a legitimate question for conservatives to debate.
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