I've been following the ongoing debate about whether the loss of a tie to the place of one's birth is a bad thing, beginning with Patrick Deneen's observation that conservatives interested in politics tend to abandon their communities for D.C., where the power is, through Rod Dreher once, and Rod again.
Now, my conservatism and experience in academia has taught me to be sceptical of most any historical claim, especially when the claim is that we're facing something we haven't seen before. So when Rod says, in the latter post:
"...there have always been with us people who have left their small towns for the big city, or moved to other small towns to make their living, of necessity. But it's my sense that only after the Second World War, and the prosperity and dynamism that arose from it, did the loyalty to place that was once part of one's character begin to be supplanted by loyalty to one's desires. Again, I don't think this is always a bad thing, but I think we should realize that it is a very new thing in human culture, and that we haven't really begun to understand the cultural and political ramifications of this rootlessness."
...the counterpoints come immediately to mind. French 18th century literature is overrun by this plot (off the top of my head: Lost Illusions, Pere Goriot, The Red and the Black, Sentimental Education). And then there's Tocqueville, who, in the Ancien Regime, points to the expansion of Paris as another underlying cause of the French Revolution; similar stories can be told about the rise of London or Manchester, or any number of other industrial centers.
Well, then maybe the claim is that the post-World War II experience represented something fundamentally new in American experience? The history appears difficult on both ends: the early part of last century featured, again, the rise of cities due to immigration and industrialization, in addition to a substantial south-to-north migration (which is why there was a road called the Dixie Highway about an hour south of where I grew up in the middle of Michigan). And it would be difficult (though not impossible) to reconcile the early American expansionist self-conception with a rootedness to place (though one could easily demographically establish that those who did go west were the exception, not the rule).
Allow me to put on my Rawls hat for a moment. I am also with Matt Frost on the following:
"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."
Which is to say: there are a lot of perfectly good reasons to love the place you were born and raised (assuming they are the same place). But all places are not equally good, and some times and locations will be implicated in practices no one should find worthy of reverence or emulation. The trick requires developing the judgment to see those distinctions.
(Incidentally, I think Deneen is right, in his post, that the defining feature of Washington is the desire to accumulate power, and that this is just as true for 'conservatives' as 'liberals.' But again, not surprising--Lucien in Lost Illusions rejects his intellectual-revolutionary friends precisely because he thinks they're never going to get anything done. Part of the Hamiltonian project is just to realize that there are always ambitious people out there who pose a threat, and to design a constitutional structure that can negate that ambition as much as possible. I'm not fond of the way policy moves these days, but I'm also not convinced that there is any alternative political structure which 1. can survive in its intended form for long, given the realities of ambition and 2. produce demonstrably better outcomes enough of the time. I'm prepared to be wrong about that one, though)
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