How they taught us to hate home
Susan Matt says that America’s love of rootlessness was taught:
This tendency to denigrate the attachment to home only increased in the twentieth century. Psychologists like John Watson, an influential behaviorist of the 1920s and 30s, suggested that overly affectionate parents ruined their children by making them emotionally dependent and incapable of leaving home. “Mothers just don’t know, when they kiss their children and pick them up and rock them upon their knee, that they are slowly building up a human being totally unprepared to cope with the world it must later live in.” To make children independent, he instructed parents: “[n]ever hug and kiss [children], never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.” Other psychologists advised parents to send their children to visit relatives, in order “to prevent a strong emotional fixation or attachment to the home situation or to any item in it.”
Accompanying such advice were new institutional forces that also pressured Americans to leave home and to do so easily. Emerging bureaucracies required workers to affiliate with them and sever their connections to home. During World War II, the Army told homesick troops that they must overcome their “infantile dependence” on their parents and transfer their loyalties to the military. After the war ended, expanding corporations required employees to relocate if they hoped to advance. A common joke among IBM employees during the 1950s and 1960s was that the company’s name stood for “I’ve Been Moved.” IBM employees were hardly alone, for during the 1950s, roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population moved each year. Employees unwilling to relocate risked stalling their careers or losing their jobs. In The Organization Man, William Whyte reported, “‘We never plan to transfer,’ as one company president explains a bit dryly, ‘and we never make a man move. Of course, he kills his career if he doesn’t. But we never make him do it.’” As an IBM executive explained, such moves were good for corporations, for it “makes our men interchangeable.”
Organizational society required workers to be fungible, mobile – and cheerful about it.
“What I stand for is what I stand on,” says Wendell Berry, a mad farmer who obviously hates America and capitalism.
“What I stand for is what I stand on,” says Wendell Berry, a mad farmer who obviously hates America and capitalism.
I know you’re being facetious, but what’s wrong with hating capitalism? If Soros is right, it may be about to fall just as did Marxism.
Why would an immigrant nation need to be taught that rootlessness is a virtue? We kinda self-selected for that trait.
Careers are overrated – would be better to pursue contentment.
Well, it is corporate capitalism that required this “movable” tendency in us, and modernism gave us choices we never had. Even so, I think we love home, we just want a choice in what/where and with whom we build our home. Thus, we move away, sow our oats, and many of us end up back home where we started. It’s a journey we had to make.
“Why would an immigrant nation need to be taught that rootlessness is a virtue? We kinda self-selected for that trait.”
actually no. my parents are immigrants, and have never forgotten the old country, always called it ‘home’, and visited it as often as their health allowed. my father (gone now) referred to himself throughout his life as an ‘exile’ (an economic one). that’s just one anecdote, but i know many other families of whom it is true.
“I know you’re being facetious, but what’s wrong with hating capitalism? If Soros is right, it may be about to fall just as did Marxism.”
marxism didn’t fail, bolshevism failed (and a good thing too). but agreed, there’s nothing wrong with hating capitalism.
It’s almost a taboo in this society to be ambivelent about capitalism, let alone hate it.
The fetishization of the corporate system is one of the many pecularities of what passes for conservatism in this country.
sal magundi: “actually no. my parents are immigrants, and have never forgotten the old country, always called it ‘home’, and visited it as often as their health allowed. my father (gone now) referred to himself throughout his life as an ‘exile’ (an economic one). that’s just one anecdote, but i know many other families of whom it is true.”
So they never established roots here, traveled as much as they could, and considered themselves exiles? How is that not rootless?
Susan Matt’s “Homesickness” might be my favorite book of 2011.
It’s not altogether fair to blame Watson or his colleagues for detached child-rearing. That goes back to the Middle Ages in Europe, when noble and merchant families sent their children to be raised by other families, fearing that the children would be “spoiled” if raised by people who loved them. More recently, Brits and pseudo-Brits sent their children to boarding school on the same theory. Watson just provided a pseudo-scientific rationale.
We kinda self-selected for that trait.
Well, the voluntary immigrants, anyway…
American rootlessness did not begin yesterday– nor in the 20th century.
It began in fact in Europe, with millions severing ties to family and place and crossing an ocean in hopes of something better (or at least a chance at survival). And their descendants did not lose that urge. One of the chief complaints of the colonists was that King George forbade them to settle west of the Appalachians. And once all those lands were open it took a mere century to dispossess the people living there and fill them with Americans instead. Consider the cherished Little House books: Charles Ingalls uprooted his family and moved them four times, looking for the greener grass. Laura Ingalls’ husband grew up in New York, yet ended up in South Dakota.
I have to wonder if Rod’s ancestors, and those of the Front Porch set, were shanghaied here rather than coming willingly. They seem to have avoided the American restlessness gene.
Canada is an immigrant country. Why aren’t Canadians as rootless as Americans?
Such a person would be rather upset to see today’s homeschool movement. The common complaint about homeschooling, inadequate socialization, is based largely on the notion that children will be unprepared to handle human interaction. We now this voice from the past offers homeschooling parents the means of ensuring children’s socialization: deprive them of the signs of parental love.
As a fourth generation (at least) military veteran, I have no inkling what it is like to have one geographic home. And I rarely feel at a disadvantage for it. To the contrary, five states and Germany all feel a little like home to me. Just don’t ask me where I’m from. I can’t answer that question briefly.
This Washington Post articlemight be of interest:
Among the reasons offered were the economic downturn, homeowners trapped in underwater mortgages, and aging baby boomers staying put.
In any case, I seem to recall David Hackett Fischer (In Albion’s Seed) discussing the phenomenon of “sending out” that New England Puritans engaged in, where they would send their 12-year-old sons to another family to avoid unnecessary emotional attachment. This was actually done in the name of strengthening communal attachments rather than weakening them (I don’t think they were sent out that far). But the New England culture was always very (hyper) communitarian that way.
Without any hard data, I’ve always suspected the accusation of American “rootlessness” has been an exaggeration, and given the fact that many Native American tribes (the Plains, for instance) were nomadic (granted, they moved as a community, but then so did the Puritans and the Mormans), I think it’s a stretch to target modern capitalist societies as being uniquely responsible for this.
Watson’s Behaviorism was very popular when I was studying Psychology ages ago. It appealed to all those suffering from physics envy. By abolishing all consideration of cognition, he was able to take everything human our of the equation. It was clear to me that it was being expounded by Watson at least in strong measure as a heroic theory, flying in the face of lived experience. The more counter-intuitive, the more likely one is to become a world class hero intellectual like Freud.
The best counter argument came from Jacob Bronowski. When asked about Watson’s dismissal of mind he said something like, “I notice that Watson can train ducks to do such and so. But I also notice that he is training the ducks not the other way around. So I must suppose that Watson is the one with the mind.”
Re: Why aren’t Canadians as rootless as Americans?
They aren’t? Growing up in Michigan I knew Canadians who had emigrated across the Detroit River. I recall staying at a B&B in Toronto where there was a guy from Vancouver who was in town looking for a place to live since he was moving there (job-related). One reason Quebec is so uppity with its language laws is because too many English speakers have moved to Montreal and its environs over the years.
I blame this all on the evolution of homo sapiens in Africa. Their restless nature laid the foundation for their migration and displacement of other hominids around the globe.
But now we don’t know when to quit.
Here’s how else they do it Rod:
Loudly and longly lecture Americans about how there is no ‘tribal’ or ethnic component to the American nation. Tell them that America has nothing to do with securing the blessings of liberty to her founders’ (evil white slaveowners) posterity, but an Enlightenment abstraction and, most importantly, a giant shopping mall where everybody on the entire planet is free to enter. Preach to them constantly from birth to death that any conception of America or one of its constituent States as a geographic redoubt for one’s own volk is a hateful, racist tendency that, left unchecked, would result in a second Holocaust.
I could go on.