Home is Where the Social Mobility Isn’t
The yin and the yang of modern narratives are the question for liberation on the one hand, for authenticity on the other. We want to break free of the shackles imposed on us by community, but we want to belong. We want our choices to be completely untethered, but we want to feel connected. We don’t want to be beholden to anyone, but we don’t want to be alone. We seek to make our own lives and our own meanings, but yearn for something rooted, something solid. In no context is this tension more palpable than in the comfort of where you grew up as opposed to the opportunities that can be found by leaving.
A piece on LeBron James’ decision to return to Cleveland took a tour of the popular notion, canonized by Heidegger and his intellectual brood, that the very opportunities modernity provides comes at the cost of authenticity and meaning. These latter values are provided by the structured, time-honored roles that traditional communities confer on their members. Deirdre McCloskey has taken a sledgehammer to this school of thought, arguing that modern bourgeois life is ethically thick and provides us with excellent tools in the quest for meaning and value beyond the material. Virginia Postrel, I think, concurs:
.@adamgurri @ThePublicSquare My view is exact opposite. I’m a Californian with absolutely no inclination to return to the Carolinas.
— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) July 18, 2014
Yet we need not go so far as Heidegger to recognize a real tension as well as a deep-seated fear. This is best described by an Onion piece that punches its implied audience very hard below the belt: “Unambitious Loser With Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives In Hometown”. I think there is a fear shared by many of us who have moved away from where we grew up in order to seek opportunity and fulfillment. That fear is that no matter how successful we are where we end up, we’ve paid a high cost in uprooting ourselves. As the son of an immigrant on one side, and the grandson of people who made the opposite cross-city journey that I did, it’s hard for me to put too much stock in that fear. But especially when you are still new to a place, the feeling of rootlessness can be very palpable.
The other fear, a little more hidden in the Onion piece but still there, is that of being trapped. Trapped in a place without opportunity, trapped with people whose expectations have shaped your entire life, trapped in a place without the vibrant cultural life of a big city. Trapped in other people’s image of who you are rather than free to pursue who you want to become. In this context, the narrative of liberation has a clear appeal. The trapped seek the liberation to pursue self-reliance, to find your own meaning, to choose your own path, to fit into your own image of who you’d like to be.
The school of authenticity would have you believe that a business run by the same family across generations is more meaningful to its employees than a more contingent employer-employee relationship. I am not denying that it can be more meaningful, but it can also be more suffocating, consuming more of your overall life. And the freedom to move around between employers can become a process of discovering what you are capable of, what sort of work is even a possibility and what jobs fit best into a good life overall.
The Onion piece speaks to something that we do all seek, and that many who have moved fear that they have left behind. But few people I know have lived their adult lives more deeply embedded in the ethically thick space of community than my grandparents have in their chosen town. And America’s immigrant communities have found meaningful lives while making their widely appreciated marks on the character of the great American cities. What is New York without its Italian-American heritage?
The tension, in short, is not between opportunity and meaning. There is simply a trade-off in the pursuit of both when you are choosing where to live. There is no reason to begrudge the Onion caricature his happiness in his hometown, nor to doubt that people are able to find happiness in the new homes that they make.