Community and purpose

The latter is indispensable to the former

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A number of tomes have come along over the past seventy-plus years that have made pretty decisive cases for the notion that the West has run out of cultural steam: The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom by Robert Nisbet, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat.

Anyone who absorbs the common argument resonating throughout these works will surely at least have his or her sunny outlook tempered. Beyond whatever circle of community one has fashioned for oneself, the disjointedness of overall society is palpable.

As the fact that life has stages bears on me with particular impact in recent months (most recently in my decision to undergo my third bionic rodeo next month, with my left knee to go the way of my right shoulder and hip), I find myself with a few crotchety-Boomer habits. One is the local evening news on television. I realize that my demographic is about all those programs have left for an audience. It’s kind of ironic, because the reporters and even anchors are ever younger and more fresh-faced, while late summer turns to autumn for the viewers.

But the fact that it’s live, and therefore constitutes real-time interaction, even though it’s one-way, gives a certain regularity and connection to the five o’clock hour.

My wife and I usually dine together, and we like to socialize. But, as I said above, beyond that ring of frequency seen friends, there’s an undeniable sense that structure ain’t what it used to be.

Today at his Substack, Marvin Olasky interviews Douthat and the two flesh out what I’m striving to get across here:

The Decadent Society is probably the most depressing public policy book ever. Not wrong, just depressing.

It’s a bit depressing, yes, but I try to be reassuring at the same time. Liberals are panicked constantly about Donald Trump and my fellow conservatives are panicked constantly about progressivism taking over, so I’m trying to tell both sides that we’re not poised for dictatorship or fascism, but rather that we’re stuck in these repetitive cycles where we make the same superhero movies and have the same culture fights over and over again. A sense of futility and even despair hangs over Western civilization, even though the West has never been richer or more prosperous.

This ironic scenario is the backdrop for my certain-stage-of-life entertaining of questions about satisfaction and regret, legacy and dying to self, and that aloneness that hovers. I’ve reflected on making my peace with having lived where I have in a couple of posts here, one titled “Place,” and one titled “More Thoughts on Place.”

In the second one, I wrestle with an observation Aaron Renn had made about the country’s regions and and one’s life choices:

[T]he first post on the subject . . . sets the table for the thoughts I’ll be working out here. I bring in such looks at small-community mid-America as Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom of Speech,” the 1927 sociological study of Muncie, Indiana titled Middletown: A Study in American Culture, and Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt.

Now I want to turn to the recent observations of Aaron Renn. He’s a native Hoosier who lived in New York for a while when he was a scholar with the Manhattan Institute. He’s since moved back to Indiana, to Carmel, the fastest-growing of the Indianapolis suburbs . . .

In a recent post at his Substack titled “How To Pick a Place to Live,” he lists the following considerations for making that decision: organic connection, economic opportunity, amenities, cost, politics, personal considerations, and genuine affinity.

In the section on politics, he makes the interesting admission that Indy “is not really a great environment for someone like me these days.” He moved there, as he says in the section on personal considerations, because the great availability of services for his special-needs son was a major factor in his decision.

In the genuine affinity section, he warns that visiting a place and living there are two different critters:

A lot of people fall in love with the idea of a place, say a quaint small town in Vermont or even Austin, Texas or Miami, but then discover the reality of it is different than they thought. The cult classic film Funny Farm with Chevy Chase is a hilarious take on this expectations mismatch.

The experience of visiting a place is often very different from living there. You can visit a small town and love it. But if you moved there, you might discover that you exhaust its charms quickly. You’ll probably always be something of an outsider, even if you live there the rest of your life. You might discover that the culture is more stifling and conformist than you thought. (In a small town, simply doing something different from what everybody else does can be viewed as uppity, and be interpreted as you thinking you are too good for them). You might miss the amenities of a big city more than you think.

Similarly, you might like the idea of having a homestead farm type property, but radically underestimate how difficult it is simply to maintain your house and acreage, much less grow anything.

Cities too are like this. The experience of living in New York is completely different than the experience of visiting it.

You might also think you want to live somewhere that’s very aligned with your politics, is cheap, etc. For the conservative, a place like the Indianapolis suburbs checks a lot of the boxes. But if you are someone who’s used to being part of dense intellectual networks in DC, you might feel like you moved to a backwater. There’s a reason the majority of the conservative intellectual class lives in deep blue areas like New York or Washington.

Sometimes you don’t really know if you’ll fall in love with a place until you take the plunge and move somewhere. So you should be cautious and at least think about the possibility that you will hate it if you move to a place where you have no history, no organic connection, no network, etc. You might be falling in love with the idea of a place rather than the place itself. Or with the visitor experience of a place rather than the resident one.

For us, fortunately we love living in Carmel, though there are things we definitely miss about New York. In my ideal world, we’d have both our house here in Carmel and our old apartment back on the Upper West Side, and split time between them. This would be the perfect mix, as the cities are ideal complements for each other. But even if we had the money to do that, with a six year old, it’s not the right time to try to be enjoying New York City, so I’m very glad we are rooted here. If you follow me on X, you’ll see that I’m always posting about how great Carmel is. We don’t have any plans to leave and are acting like this is our long term home, though you never know where life takes you some time.

Here’s where, as a Boomer who is probably not up for any more moves for the foreseeable future, I have some peace-making to do with how things have turned out. I know in my gut I would have thrived better and been generally happier in a place with the “dense intellectual networks” of which he writes.

(For a while in the 1980s, the Hudson Institute had its headquarters in Indianapolis. At the time, I was president of the Indiana Council on World Affairs, and sometimes Hudson would host luncheons for the monthly guest speakers I lined up. Alas, Hudson eventually saw the need to have its main base of operations back on the east coast.)

Renn’s candor got more brutal in a tweet he posted yesterday:

People don’t move to these places because a) they are in the “Old North”, which is uniformly demographically weak (a hard and maybe insurmountable problem), and b) the culture repels people.

Places like Indiana and Ohio have incredible potential - but will probably never realize it because the people who live there like things they way they are. Indiana is actively supressive of the pursuit of excellence. If you want to be anything but mediocre - except in sports - it’s a tough social environment. Try to say that you want to improve your community to make it one of the nation’s best, and watch the naysayers come out. There’s remarkable little difference in terms of size, quality of built environment, and amenities between Indianapolis and Nashville, or to some extent Austin too. But the state of mind and the culture are completely different, at both the rank and file and elite level.

I get huge flack for saying, correctly, that Chicago’s biggest problem is that it attracts “B” tier talent vs the “A” talent on the coasts. Chicago is a quality of life city, not a where it happens city.

Go to Indiana and Ohio and you are now at tier “C.” These places are your basic middle America. You are definitely in the minor leagues. Most people want to live in more dynamic, growing, high opportunity, more forward looking places. Like Chicago, we have some of that (albeit less than the Windy City), but it’s not the norm. Yes, there are small towns where a group of people could move, buy up a bunch of houses and buildings, fix them up, start businesses, etc. and turn the place around and create a conservative community like the one in Moscow, Idaho. But it hasn’t happened, and it probably won’t happen. Because nobody here has that kind of ambition or drive. They don’t see or pursue possibilities. Big thinking is out of fashion - and is seen as out of line when someone dares do it.

Indiana is a bottom 10 state for educational attainment. And it’s one of the top 10 states for falling even further behind the country in education. It has cut education spending significantly, and is in the process of watering down its high school diploma standards. It’s far below national average incomes, and has been falling further behind. It’s a bottom ten state for health.

There’s no escaping this reality. And the cold, hard truth is that the people who live here like things they way they are. The top priority of the average Hoosier is probably to cut taxes some more rather than fixing any real problem in the state, much less trying to do something to make the place great.

There’s a lot I love about Indiana and its people. I don’t plan to leave it, but we have to face reality here. There’s no reason to think things are much different in Ohio.

One reason I like living in Carmel is that it’s a sort of exception case in the state. It’s a community where there’s been a vision to be great, ambitious leadership, etc. And where seeking to achieve things at the national or global level is welcomed. But, again, there’s a reason every other community around here says, “We don’t want to be like Carmel” as a sort of ritual incantation before their leaders propose a roundabout or some other improvement. Heaven forbid Indiana have more nice towns in the state. We wouldn’t want that!

I feel seen.

But today, Douthat offers a slightly different angle, saying that sometimes one is better off not wanting to be in some hub of raw ambition:

What opportunities are available for the have-nots?

The good news is that America is still a big sprawling, diverse country. It is still possible to work and live in a middle-sized or small American city instead of moving into a tiny apartment in San Francisco or New York and working incredibly long hours and knowing you’ll never have room or space to raise a family. But the search for power and influence pulls people to the Bay Area and the New York–Washington corridor. Once there, they scramble for influence and promotion and success in a world where those things are held by older generations that don’t want to give them up.

Maybe flyover country’s attractiveness lies in its having not forgotten to grapple with an essential question: Why is community important for human thriving?

Let me venture a possible answer: it’s only in community that we find purpose, and flyover country has done a better job of maintaining community.

I think it’s possible that Renn underestimates the number of interesting people (interesting by whatever one’s own criteria are) to be found in “third tier” locales. I play guitar in the local mandolin orchestra. We play dance tunes from the Renaissance, a Puccini piece, and some comtemporary classical mandolin pieces. There’s an old-books-and-wine emporium downtown owned by a couple I’m friends with that is a big draw. One can spend hours perusing their shelves. For years I taught jazz history and rock & roll history at our community college. Ethnic restaurants abound.

Is there a case that the atmosphere here is stultifying and that the city has an outsized notion of itself? Certainly, but that’s where individual agency comes in. I could have passed on the invitation to join the mandolin orchestra. Ditto some community theater I’ve done.

It seems to be kind of a back-and-forth cycle between enriching oneself (read, America!) and enriching the place where one lives.

The backdrop to our daily lives isn’t a pretty picture. But there’s still the opportunity to look at purpose.

It seems to me we’re here to become more human. Face it, if your fundamental impetus is anything else, you’re going to wind up a self-gratification machine, a closed circuit of onanistic energy. And, as C.S. Lewis puts it, you’ll be grumbling for all eternity.

Our Creator is all about connection between His creatures. He wants us to regard each other the same way He regards us. We are of infinite worth.

That means we have to connect or spiritually starve.