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The quiet stability revolution

David Brooks says if you really want to know what’s going on in America with regard to our economic lives, don’t look to Occupy Wall Street. Excerpt: While the cameras surround the flamboyant fringes, the rest of the country is on a different mission. Quietly and untelegenically, Americans are trying to repair their economic values…. Quietly […]

David Brooks says if you really want to know what’s going on in America with regard to our economic lives, don’t look to Occupy Wall Street. Excerpt:

While the cameras surround the flamboyant fringes, the rest of the country is on a different mission. Quietly and untelegenically, Americans are trying to repair their economic values…. Quietly but decisively, Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system.

I was particular interested in this observation:

The third norm is that loyalty matters. A few years ago there was a celebration of Free Agent Nation. But now most people, even most young people, would rather work long-term for one company than move around in search of freedom and opportunity.

I’m not sure where he gets this information, but it makes intuitive sense to me. When I was younger, I loved the Free Agent Nation idea, and took advantage of it. In fact, I didn’t even consider not doing it; it was just assumed by all my friends that we would do this if we had the opportunity. I enjoyed it, too. But along the way you marry, you have kids, and then you start to notice that living in Free Agent Nation extracts a lot from you psychologically and emotionally. You may find that to thrive, stability is what you need more than anything else.

This is, I’ve come to recognize, a factor in our recent decision to move to my Louisiana hometown. Since we made the call, I’ve had a few weeks to live with the prospect of leaving a good life in a good neighborhood in a major city to settle in a town of 2,000. I keep thinking I should feel anxious about this, as I would have had I made this decision a decade ago, when the idea that I would be turning my back on nameless Opportunity would have given me the jitters.

The thing is, I’ve exercised that Opportunity, and learned a lot from it. And one of the things I’ve learned in middle age is that taking advantage of that Opportunity has Opportunity Costs that were not visible to me when I was younger — probably because they weren’t really a burden to me as a young man. It’s like this: Julie and I lived in NYC from 1998 through 2003, and it was one of the happiest, most exciting times of our lives. Towards the end, we said that the rush of life in NYC was exhilarating, but we could tell that it would one day get to the point at which we weren’t energized by it, but worn down by it. And that’s the point at which we’d need to move. For other reasons, we moved before we got to that point, but it’s still significant to note that we intuited that the things that excited and enriched us at that point in our lives would one day become exhausting.

I think that’s where I, where we, are now, and it explains to a great extent why the idea of moving to my hometown is so emotionally and psychologically appealing, in a way it wouldn’t have been a few years ago. We have three kids now, aged 12, 7, and 5. Being in St. Francisville for my sister’s funeral, we saw the benefits of these kids growing up around their extended family. Shoot, we thought about those benefits for ourselves, e.g., “We really like these people; why do we live so that we only have the chance to see them once or twice a year, for a short visit?” Plus, my sister’s passing, and watching my mom, dad, brother-in-law, and his kids struggling to deal with that, brought home the lesson that No Man Is An Island, that the time comes in every life when you need community. (What if one of us got sick like Ruthie did — how would we find the resources to cope? I thought.) You need your family around you, and you need good friends to hold you up. And you not only need them, you want them. It’s funny how I knew this theoretically, but I learned it from experience during Ruthie’s cancer struggle, especially in the week after her death. And more: for some reason, seeing and experiencing the life-changing goodness of the community’s altruism made us want to be a part of a place where we could give like they gave to our family in its time of need. Of course one could do that anywhere, I know, but we lived through it happening there, and that made a strong emotional impression on us. We felt that we had a debt to these people, and strangely enough, we felt not burdened by that debt, but rather privileged. 

And we had not seen that coming. Without us realizing what was happening to us, Julie and I experienced the idea of moving to St. Francisville and becoming part of the community where our family already has deep and healthy roots not as a radical leap into the unknown, but the most natural thing in the world.

The pastor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove writes about this kind of thing in his book “The Wisdom of Stability.” My copy is packed away in a box for the move, so I’ll quote from this Books & Culture review:

“In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it.” These words from Abba Anthony are shocking to our ears—radically countercultural. This is a call to stay put, to develop deep roots with all of the accompanying limits and with all of the accompanying nourishment and strength of established ground.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s new book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture, is a call to follow St. Anthony’s advice. It is a call to be incarnate—no Gnostic dreams of cyberspace or of imagined lives lived elsewhere. Wilson-Hartgrove reminds us that as followers of a savior who came to be with a particular people in a particular place, we are called to go and do likewise.

For Wilson-Hartgove, at the root of modern instability is an essential misunderstanding of who we are as people. Our consumer society has tried to convince us, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that we are above all individuals and that it is the pursuit of our particular passions and interests that will fulfill us.

In reality, the pursuit of individualism leads to what we might call the market segmentation of the soul: our desires become scattered. We seek to find an anchor in a community, but having insulated ourselves from the limits and sacrifices that real, proximal community requires, we are drawn to quasi-communities clustered around a brand, a hobby, a style. We become hipster or hip-hop, J. Crew or Armani. Our “style” becomes our place.

Against all this, Wilson-Hartgrove writes, “True stability can never be a product for individuals to consume. Rather, it is an invitation to shared life with particular people in a specific place.” Stability is then a result of true community—of the sort Wilson-Hartgrove has worked to establish through the community house his family is a part of in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina.

Since making our decision to go South, Julie and I have learned how incredibly fortunate we are to have a place like St. Francisville to go to. A number of our friends have said that they wish they had the option of moving to a place like that, but that opportunity has been closed off to them by circumstances, usually the fact that their parents had been so mobile that there was no such thing as home for them. What’s left to them, then, is to try their best to recreate a real community where they live, which means first of all committing to staying in place. Wilson-Hartgrove recently wrote that our current economic situation makes what I’ve called the Benedict Option a creative and sensible opportunity:

The world as we know it is coming to an end. We’re all aching for the world-to-come.

But the question is how to get there. Even if everyone recognizes a problem, that doesn’t guarantee that anyone knows how to fix it. Clearly, those vying for power to shape the world-to-come are legion. And they will inevitably disagree on ways and means in the human struggle that we are facing. But for many of us who believe that another world is already interrupting the status quo, the most important thing isn’t to occupy the centers of power and insist on economic reform. The crucial thing is to carve out spaces where we can begin to create a new society within the shell of the old.

These spaces are being crafted and cultivated by people in co-op movements, in local currency experiments, in cost-sharing health care ministries, and in slow food collectives. In small ways that are admittedly incomplete, some people who are discontent with the world that is are stepping out to begin shaping another world with their daily economic decisions. Not all of them are ‘people of faith,’ but there is a radical faith behind their actions. They are trusting a system other than what they have known and seen. They are believing and living toward a new reality.

More:

Early in the 6th century, when the Roman Empire faced attacks from without and discontent from within, there came a point when most people knew that things had to change but no one was certain what would come next. About that time, a middle-class young Italian named Benedict left his home in Nursia to go to school in Rome only to find that the Empire which had been centered there was almost completely gone. In a moment of clarity, Benedict saw that the system of education which had been designed to prepare him for a world that was passing away could only lead to a dead end. While it could teach what had worked in the past, the system did not have the resources to present a way forward. A different kind of school was needed. Benedict went to a cave, built himself a prayer cell, and so enrolled in the university of the world-to-come.

What came of his studies was a short document called The Rule of Saint Benedict. It was originally written to serve a few communities in Italy and might have easily been lost, as hundreds of documents like it no doubt were. But it wasn’t. Instead, it became a spiritual classic and one of the most important texts in Western civilization.

The power of Benedict’s Rule was this: in a world that was falling apart, it gave structure to small communities of faith that could experiment in a new kind of community. It did not aim to restore Rome to its former glory or even to reform the church. The Rule simply offered people a way to live a vision of life together rooted in service, humility, and love. Throughout the Dark Ages, the Rule guided communities that existed as points of light in a sea of dark despair. By some estimates, it was the monks who saved civilization. At the very least, they established hospitals and sowed the seeds of democracy in Western culture.

In his now classic analysis of Western civilization, After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair McIntyre wrote that ‘we are not waiting for Godot, but for a new and doubtless very different Saint Benedict.’ But maybe it’s time to stop waiting. Maybe we should turn our attention to the small communities of people who believe another world is possible and have invested their whole lives in that conviction. Maybe it’s time to end the occupation and begin living a new economy in the places where we are.

All of that will sound familiar to longtime readers of this blog. For me and my family, the solution to the radical instability with which we’d been living as a result of my own career decisions is to go where my people have been for five generations, and to build on the foundation they provided, and which has been tended by family and friends who remain there. The paradox here is that by radically limiting the opportunity to expand my own choice, I am opening myself to radically deepening the social, emotional, and spiritual structures that provide for authentic human flourishing.

I don’t want to be romantic about this. I recognize that not everybody has that opportunity, and that I wouldn’t have it myself if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been blessed by a job that I can do from anywhere, via wi-fi. Many people move around so much not because they enjoy mobility or take pleasure in climbing the career ladder, but simply because they have to, because there are no jobs for them where they are. And I also recognize that I almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to flourish in my vocation as a writer if I had never moved away. It is possible that my children will all have to move away in order to support themselves, or to fulfill their vocational calling. Maybe part of my mission when I move back home is to find ways I can help build up the economy there so that my children, and everybody’s children, can have a greater chance of sticking around or moving back to raise their own families there.

Still, this is my family’s opportunity now, and however much we grieve the circumstances that awakened us to it, we are grateful for the open door. Walking through it does not require us to march in a protest, but it does require a small, quiet revolution in the way we think about and imagine our lives.

UPDATE: In the comments thread, Roberto observes that Brooks (and, by extension, many other conservative commentators) always praise the dynamism of the American economy, but fail to grasp that that same dynamism requires actual human beings to sever the social bonds that provide for the kind of stability conservatives prize. You can’t have both, or at least not to the same degree. You want to make it easier for people to form stable lives in community? Then you have to put the reins on economic liberty to a certain extent. There is no way to have both, and that’s something American conservatives have yet to think through.

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