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Dear Friends,
I’ve gotten a late start on this week’s Square Inch Newsletter so I do not have a deep essay on a single theme today. So I will comment on a couple of things I have been thinking about. They have to do with space and time.
First up, space. Or, better, place. My friend Jake Meador, whom I first met when we debated Christians and climate change, (isn’t it refreshing when two people can so vigorously disagree on something but really enjoy each other and be friends?) has an email newsletter he sends out periodically, and I think it is well worth your while. I think it is fair to say that Jake is a very big fan of Wendell Berry, rural and agrarian life, localism, small communities, and that sort of thing, and he took up the themes in his latest newsletter. I’ll preface this by saying I am a fan of most of those things, too, but I do prefer to keep my indoor plumbing. As Jamie Smith once said in a lecture defending classical liberalism: “I like front porches, too.” Meaning, I, too, like close-knit communities and neighborliness.
The question Jake wrestles with is:
The genius of Lewis and Tolkien is that they give us ways in their writing to love our own villages without becoming closed, mistrustful, bigoted, and narrow. They give us ways of loving the small without making ourselves small. They knew that the things we love in our small places are themselves echoes of something universal—the inside is larger than the outside, as Lewis memorably says in The Last Battle.
So how do we have good localism without it curdling into something vicious and narrow in the wrong sense? We can find some help by borrowing a bit first from Wallace Stegner and then borrowing another from Johannes Althusius. Each will give us a key distinction to use in defining what we’re after.
I am very doubtful, however, that the bit from Wallace Stegner—mediated through Wendell Berry—is as helpful as he thinks. Berry puts it this way:
[W]e Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: ‘boomers’ and ‘stickers.’ Boomers, [Stegner] said, are ‘those who pillage and run,’ who want ‘to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,’ whereas stickers are ‘those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.’ ‘Boomer’ names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. ‘Sticker’ names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. James B. Duke was a boomer, if we can extend the definition to include pillage in absentia. He went, or sent, wherever the getting was good, and he got as much as he could take.
Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.
This classification of things just will not do. It doesn’t even work as a generalization. Every “sticker” who settled down in America’s little Berry-esque hamlets got there by being a “boomer.” They “went West,” seeking, well, their fortunes. People who rode wagon trains weren’t on them because they were contented and satisfied sorts of people. That is, they, too, were motivated by ambition. They wanted money, and property, and at least the power to pursue their own dreams. Greed, animus, treating others as obstacles or objects are not the sole possession of a certain “type” or “class” of person. Those vices cut through every human heart.
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