But over time, the view of homesickness as something natural and even inevitable changed. Toward the end of the 19^th century, Matt writes, as the modern industrial economy developed, homesickness came to be something Americans—and men especially—didn’t admit to, a sign of weakness and provincialism. Social Darwinists theorized that it was connected with savagery, and that “civilized” whites were less likely to suffer from it. From the 1920s onward, parenting experts picked up the thread. They cautioned against the scourge of coddling, sometimes called “momism”; they warned parents not to send their children gushy notes at summer camp; they even told mothers to avoid kissing and hugging their kids for fear of provoking too much attachment. Somewhere along the way, homesickness became the province of the youngest and neediest. The rest of us might miss our parents when we left for college or for a job in a new city, but we’d get over it. Leaving home was a rite of passage.

This machismo about leaving home is still pervasive. You hear it in the disdainful way some college-educated people refer to “townies.” According to this view of things, those who remain where they grew up must lack curiosity or ambition. But while leaving home may be an American legacy, it’s not human nature. For the bulk of human history young people didn’t leave friends and family and everything they knew to set up different lives hundreds or thousands of miles away. Is homesickness really something we should aspire to overcome? If you love your home, why bother to re-create it elsewhere?

Copeland continues:

 And maybe, as more of us settle down near our childhood homes, rootedness may come to be viewed not as a sign of emotional stuntedness but as an expression of a basic human craving: continuity with the past.

Boy, does that ever resonate with me. Ten years ago, I wrote the following column for the Wall Street Journal. I paste the whole thing in here because it’s now behind the paper’s paywall:

Pawpaw’s World
What is manly virtue? Are you embarrassed to ask? He doesn’t have to.
by ROD DREHER
Friday, June 15, 2001 12:01 A.M. EDT
At bedtime, as night falls over Brooklyn and my toddler Matthew has said goodnight to Moon for the umpteenth time, I turn off the bedside lamp and tell him it’s time to sleep. Then I turn the light off, he rolls into the crook of my arm, cranes his head so he can whisper in my ear, and says, “Pawpaw.”
This is my cue to tell my 20-month-old son stories of his grandfather, my own dad, who lives with my mom (“Mammy” to Matthew) in Starhill, a south Louisiana enclave where the only sounds at night are crickets and bullfrogs, not sirens on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Matthew’s grandparents visited a couple of months ago, and he fell hard for them. Especially Pawpaw, who shares the boy’s enthusiasm for graders and forklifts and things that go. After they went home to Starhill, Matthew kept asking for them (“Mammy! Pawpaw! See more!”) and at bedtime wanted me to tell him real-life stories about Pawpaw.
So that first week after Matthew’s grandparents left, we followed Pawpaw’s adventures hunting squirrels so his family would have enough to eat during the Depression. We joined him in the rodeo, riding bucking bulls and wrassling steers. We followed Pawpaw into the Coast Guard, and rode out a hurricane in Mobile Bay lashed to the wheel of his 40-foot cutter. Then Pawpaw piloted a dinghy in rough seas, outmaneuvering a shark to complete a mission to change a buoy’s light bulb.
Then I told Matthew about the things Pawpaw did when I was little. Once I saw Pawpaw catch an egg-stealing chicken snake by the tail and crack him like a whip, snapping the varmint’s head off. I told my boy about the hunts, when Pawpaw took me into the swamp and showed me how to stalk whitetail bucks and other game. I told him about how when the Mississippi River flooded, Pawpaw would set lines in the backwater for catfish but often snared snapping turtles, alligator gars and fat black water snakes instead.
You can imagine how thrilling this is to a little Brooklyn boy. But the other night, when Matthew’s deep breathing told me he was asleep, it struck me that I hadn’t thought about these things in years. Here I was rediscovering my father’s life through telling stories about him to my own son (a startling number of which end with the cooking and eating of a wild animal). As a child, none of this seemed extraordinary to me at all. It’s how most men lived in West Feliciana Parish, and indeed some version of this rural saga is how a great number of Americans lived until a moment ago.

Truth is, it’s more pleasurable to me in the telling than it was in the living. I was a bookish kid who longed for the big city. Though I idolized my dad for his courage and omnicompetence, I always knew I would find the meaning of my life and vocation elsewhere. But telling these stories to my son about my Southern boyhood, I’m discovering a poetry of place I hadn’t noticed before, or at least resisted.
Admittedly, this is nostalgia for a world that has largely gone. West Feliciana Parish is rapidly becoming a suburb of Baton Rouge, with domiciles for Dixie-fried bobos springing up like mushrooms in erstwhile cow pastures. Cable television monoculture is everywhere, as is the same social breakdown you see in big cities (do you suppose there’s a connection?). Sic transit gloria mundi, y’all.
So why do I keep thinking about the South these days? “Lanterns on the Levee” romanticism has never appealed to me, yet as I think about the childhood my son will have here, I can’t help reconsidering the good in what I rejected.
It bothers me that Matthew won’t have his Pawpaw around to be a friend to him. He won’t have taken in the smell of tobacco, bourbon and dried gumbo mud flaking off hunting boots that is my father’s aroma. He won’t know what it feels like to stand in a duck blind, chilled to the bone and anxious to the fingertips, waiting for the mallards to swoop in.
More important, it troubles me that Matthew won’t have Pawpaw as an example. As a new father, I am grasping for a way to articulate manly virtue for my boy in a way that doesn’t feel phony. It’s impossible to imagine speaking of “manliness” or “virtue” in the world I inhabit now, filled with well-meaning, highly educated men and women who would have to put ironic quotation marks around those words or die of embarrassment.
Am I this way too? I worry about that. My dad never does. Those words mean something to him. More Stoic than Christian, in the classic Southern tradition, he is neither a soft man nor a decadent one.
By “soft,” I mean men like–well, men like me, who make our livings from our minds, not our backs, and who are shielded by our very urbanity (or suburbanity) from the rigors of life that rural people cannot avoid. There comes with that hardness a certain realistic moral stance toward the world and what it owes one–and what one owes it.
By “decadent,” I mean ironic detachment and radical doubt masquerading as sophistication, a cast of mind that cannot produce righteousness because it doesn’t believe righteousness exists. As C.S. Lewis said, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.”
I am to raise my son in an urban culture dominated–indeed, in my social and professional milieu, overrun–by men without chests. Well, my Louisiana dad has a chest, and the habits of the heart that beats beneath his breastbone are ones I want to instill in my boy.
Matthew will learn what it means to be brave and true from his father, to be sure, but the experience seems attenuated for a city kid. And he will be immersed in a permissive culture that corrodes the moral structure his mother and I will try to build. For all the drawbacks of the rural South, a man can raise a family there knowing the seeds of faith and virtue he plants in his children’s hearts will have a less hostile environment in which to grow.
And there’s one other thing. The other night, as Matthew lay sleeping next to me, I wondered where his life’s journey would take him. Please God, I prayed, never let him live too far from his daddy. Please let me be a part of his life. Then it hit me: That has been my father’s prayer every night since I left home for school 18 years ago, then went on to a career in the East.
“Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh where have you been, my darling young one?” I used to hear Bob Dylan sing those mournful lines years ago, while in college. Years later, with my own baby boy nestled in my arms and thoughts of my own faraway father, aging and in declining health, heavy in my heart, I finally knew what they meant.

I was thinking the other day about this column in light of our decision now, a decade later, to move to West Feliciana and open Pawpaw’s World to my children. While much of that world has, as I noted at the time, passed into history, what I can give those children is historical continuity with it, and with the virtues that came out of it. Besides, as I mention above, I am at best halfway through my journey of life, and my sister’s death compelled me to ask myself how I want to spend the rest of it.

As I keep saying whenever I write about this theme, I recognize that I am in an incredibly fortunate place right now, in that I have the freedom to make this choice, given that I can do my job online. An excellent point that Steve Sailer brings up in his review of Matt’s book is that our economic order depends on alienating people from their places, and from natural human attachments. Excerpt:

But Matt’s most valuable contribution might be this point: that modern institutions try to bully Americans into becoming as fungible as individual humans can be.

This can explain a number of conundrums of contemporary ideology.

Yep. Berry goes deeper into this idea from a different angle in an essay about conserving community. I am tempted to post lots of it here, but this post is already way too long. I encourage you to read the whole thing. He’s talking in particular about rural communities, but his insights apply to the general ideology that teaches young people the purpose of educating themselves is to prepare to leave the communities they come from, and that nurtured them. Here is part of it:

I am talking here about the common experience, the common fate, of rural communities in our country for a long time. It has also been, and it will increasingly be, the common fate of rural communities in other countries. The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by “creating jobs.” They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in “job creation” only so long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They are not interested in the good health-economic or natural or human-of any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, “the buck never stops.” The buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to “the shareholders,” who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere. The message to country people, in other words, is this: Don’t expect favors from your enemies.

And that message has a corollary that is just as plain and just as much ignored: The governmental and educational institutions from which rural people should by right have received help have not helped. Rather than striving to preserve the rural communities and economies and an adequate rural population, these institutions have consistently aided, abetted, and justified the destruction of every part of rural life. They have eagerly served the superstition that all technological innovation is good. They have said repeatedly that the failure of farm families, rural businesses, and rural communities is merely the result of progress and efficiency and is good for everybody.

We are now pretty obviously facing the possibility of a world that the supranational corporations, and the governments and educational systems that serve them, will control entirely for their own enrichment-and, incidentally and inescapably, for the impoverishment of all the rest of us This will be a world in which the cultures that preserve nature and rural life will simply be disallowed. It will be, as our experience already suggests, a postagricultural world. But as we now begin to see, you cannot have a postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic, postreligious, postnatural-in other words, it will be posthuman, contrary to the best that we have meant by “humanity.”

In their dealings with the countryside and its people, the promotors of the so-called global economy are following a set of principles that can be stated as follows. They believe that a farm or a forest is or ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally necessary in the use of the land; that affection is not necessary at all; that for all practical purposes a machine is as good as a human; that the industrial standards of production, efficiency, and profitability are the only standards that are necessary; that the topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely replaceable by soil chemistry; that the nature or ecology of any given place is irrelevant to the use of it; that there is no value in human community or neighborhood; and that technological innovation will produce only benign results.

These people see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world. They believe that knowledge is property and is power, and that it ought to be. They believe that education is job training. They think that the summit of human achievement is a high-paying job that involves no work. Their public boast is that they are making a society in which everybody will be a “winner”-but their private aim has been to reduce radically the number of people who, by the measure of our historical ideals, might be thought successful: the independent, the self-employed, the owners of small businesses or small usable properties, those who work at home.

Had enough yet? Read Berry’s 2007 commencement address to college students. Excerpt:

I am here to say that if you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the many others, all over our country and the world, who already are resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary. Of the possibility of effective resistance there is a large, ever-growing catalogue of proofs: of projects undertaken by local people, without official permission or instruction, that work to reduce the toxicity, the violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization. The resistance I am recommending will involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning, the curriculum of which will be defined by questions such as these:

What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?

Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.

You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.

You will have to understand that the logic of success is radically different from the logic of vocation. The logic of what our society means by “success” supposedly leads you ever upward to any higher-paying job that can be done sitting down. The logic of vocation holds that there is an indispensable justice, to yourself and to others, in doing well the work that you are “called” or prepared by your talents to do.

And so you must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is an adequate context for a life. The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But I can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. I can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.

That right there is my apologia for moving back home. It’s where my responsibilities are. It’s where my life is.