More thoughts on place

In particular, the midwest

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It’s a common refrain. It has been for longer than we might initially think, but the current airing it’s getting has a particular vigor.

The basic idea certainly sounds inviting: take care of the people you actually know, foster the civic bonds that so impressed Alexis deToqueville, come together with fellow community members to arrive democratically at decisions on how to enhance one’s area’s quality of life.

As an amelioration of what is obvious to anyone minimally astute - that is, the crumbling of a Western civilization built up over millennia - its effectiveness is not a cut-and-dried matter, however.

This is true for a couple of reasons. The forces causing that crumbling have inexorably bled into the local level. More fundamentally, the white-picket-fence patina that’s employed to convey localism’s idyllic appeal doesn’t tell the whole story of what life in small towns and small cities is really like.

That’s how I began the post titled “Place” a little over a year ago (July 31, 2023). It’s time to revisit the subject, for a couple of reasons: One, the search for a restoration of our nation’s spiritual health has become a more urgent matter, and, two, I personally feel the need to make sense of my life decisions here at the end of middle age.

Do read the first post on the subject if you haven’t yet. It 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.

He’s probably best known for his Three Worlds framework for discussing the state of Christianity in contemporary America. He first presented it in a First Things piece in 2022:

Within the story of American secularization, there have been three distinct stages:

• Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positiveview of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.

• Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.

• Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negativeview of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

Lately he has had a lot to say about the pros and cons of choosing to return to the midwest.

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!

Much is written about phones and social media as major drivers of the country’s loneliness epidemic and mental health crisis, but I’m here to tell you, they have their upsides. My online connections are how I have been able to publish pieces at Ordinary Times, Merion West and The Freemen News-letter (and develop a nationwide readership here at Precipice.) My daily perusal of National Review, Commentary, The Dispatch and similar sites keeps me abreast of what’s happening in those “dense intellectual networks.” Twitter (X, if you must) is, to a considerable degree, a sewer, but if your radar is attuned to those with whom you sense affinity, it can provide a certain sense of community.

So why I am I here, some 40 miles south of Indianapolis? I guess it’s come down to scale for me. People - long timers, new arrivals and visitors - always remark how incredibly easy its is to get across town in the small city where I live. My city is no Carmel, but it has an advantage over similar Hoosier municipalities in that it’s home to a Fortune 200 multinational corporation. Consequently, it has a more ethnically varied population. It has a heightened interest in the arts, particularly design (particularly architecture), dance and classical music. But it also has many of the trappings of the communities around it.

But I have to confess, Renn’s recent emphasis on this subject has jarred me. Choices have consequences, and I’m living mine.

This whole subject gets to larger considerations. Just what kind of personal growth is most worthwhile? Ascending to the rarified stratum in which one lives and breathes great ideas, books and debates, possibly even having some impact on world-stage events? Or perhaps fostering the deep, rich, thick bonds that come from staying in one place for generations, and building that place’s civic institutions and immersing oneself in its cultural uniqueness?

I’ll say this: it’s important to impart to people in their early 20s that they are not in fact going to live forever, and that relationships, occupational choices and the extent to which one wishes to cultivate a life of the mind ought to be. taken pretty seriously.

No place is perfect, but deciding where to call home should not be done willy-nilly.