“We have the obligation of doing some really serious thinning of the Muslim population.”

I sincerely hope you don’t plan to drag down the honest work of FPR with your ignorance.

Anyway, your last comment on this thread was lovely.

I had to travel far from home to my graduate work – Europe. But I was fortunate in that I was able to work in the state I grew up in and close to family. However, I would not consider moving back to the actual town I grew up in. Everything I valued in my growing up community is gone, the place it is now is utterly strange to me. I think this is something overlooked – the pace of change is so rapid now that communities change too and become unfamilar to even those who stay. How can one feel any sense of connection to such a rapidly changing social and physical landscape?

Your point about go anywhere for a job academics is most apt. As a young woman I would have gone anywhere to get a job at a University. I would have gone far from family with great reluctance but I would have still gone. I would have done this because I loved my work. I loved teaching. I loved the research. I loved my discipline. I still do and if remaining in a home town meant I could not do what I loved, I would be much less of a person.

For many who come from smaller communities or who have working class backgrounds, the day you decide to go to grad school is the day you also decide to leave that past behind. Even if you grew up in a working class neighborhood in Boston and return to teach at Harvard you will still have left the world of your origins behind. Even if you do return to that same home town, you return a very different person, you do not fit the old place the way you once did. And sometimes, the old place doesn’t want this new you.

I do agree heartily that one should not work in a place where you cannot commit fully to the founding mission and the community in which that organization of what ever sort is located. Commit to the place you are in.

So, Aaron, there’s your admission of hypocrisy from the master himself, and there, Patrick, is the company we keep, save that Berry probably does more palpable good on any given day by staying home than we did all last year by going into work. If we were better men, we’d do better work.

Aaron, you’re not going back to Lost Nation to do better work. You’re too talented to do that and also too unskilled. Like Patrick, you’ll decide that whatever good you can do will be done at a price you are willing, however reluctantly, to pay. If, after tenure, your conscience is still working, you will wring your hands over this and, eventually, you’ll get off your own back.

The students in a class you once sporadically attended asked me last week (on Peters Contra Mundum day) whether I thought I could do more good if I left the profession. I don’t really know the answer to that question, but my smart-ass answer was that I could probably do less harm–because you see we sometimes have to think of progress as not letting things get worse.

I’m pretty sure you’re going to try to keep things from getting worse. And part of that project will be to tell your students to go home. Some will; some won’t. More of yours than mine will, but that’s because Reality will be more powerful in your heyday than She has been in mine and Patrick’s. We’re playing John the Baptist to you.

Let me add that it’s pretty ridiculous for us who have shared bourbon to be “communicating” in this way.

Thank you for the considered response.

My rejoinder, offered in a tone not the product of having stewed over the article for most of yesterday, is simply this: surely a love for the particular must amount to a love of home. For if we are to take the notions of generational knowledge and ‘nostalgia’ (in the Lasch/Peters senses) seriously–though admittedly, these were not concepts introduced in your piece–what we love when we love something particular (be it a place or a person) is something we know in a way that we know nothing else, and especially that, in a way, knows us as nothing else knows or can know us. And in regards to places, surely our homes, our origins, fit this description better than any others.

Perhaps, then, you can understand my frustration with the critique of meritocracy and of the flight from the particular. Granted: it hurts particular places, and thus the particular people who, for reasons of ability or circumstance, did not leave, and it reduces such places (and not just rural ones) to prisons of a sort, from which the children of its inhabitants are encouraged to escape. Having lived in the shadow of such assumptions, and having lived my childhood and adolescence with the those assumptions’ effects, I do not take the harm lightly. But if asking your students to love the particular amounts to asking them to love their homes–for surely, this is the only way that the intelligent and talented can be returned to small places–and their homes have become places not conducive to their flourishing as human beings, what then?

And again, I’m hoping this doesn’t sound like a “gotcha” inquisition; this is the real dilemma that many university graduates face. I mean, there really isn’t much demand for the gentleman-farmer-philosopher in Lost Nation, or for the biomedical engineer in Eldridge (the degree with which my friend Cori recently graduated), or for the sacred musician and theologian in Long Grove, or for the political theorist, or for the teacher of English Romantic Poetry, and there can only be so many country lawyers and local authors. If we are to love our homes, we are, by and large, to embrace a life that is not conducive to the practice of an academic discipline, and that would seem to be the case even if the university would become far more racinated than it is today. What, I guess is my question, do you tell your brightest political theory students, who could make important contributions to your discipline and who could also be excellent teachers, when they tell you that they’re from places many hours from any appreciable demand for the profession in which you’re trying to train them?

I was speaking here LESS of an iron-bound requirement that people return to their places of origin than commending a different ethic and set of philosophical assumptions than those that now inform the nation’s top universities, and, more generally, elite institutions. The presumption now is that a successful education results in sifting or sorting to one of several urban settings (not Cleveland or St. Louis, to be sure). The deeper ethic is that one become something of a deracinated free-agent, willing and capable of living everywhere and nowhere in particular. At the heart of the modern education is the effort to liberate us from particular loyalties, but rather, a loyalty to a “cosmopolitan” orientation. Social justice is care or concern for the less fortunate from a distance – where my own investment is shielded by the intermediary of the State. It does not involve my actual presence in any of those places, and allows me to live in a relatively undisturbed way in the cocoon of my privilege.

This ethic is above all one of the primary lessons being taught at our top universities. It is, moreover, an ethic being taught in graduate programs to Ph.D. candidates – what matters above all is not the PLACES or STUDENTS where you teach, but the RESEARCH that you can produce for a placeless cohort of academic colleagues. One’s relative success as an academic is adjudged by one’s research and one’s placement in a pecking order of research universities. One doesn’t aspire to be at Harvard or Princeton because of specific institutional particularities, but because they are the preeminent representatives of an idea of deracinated research. One thing that is generally taught is not to be committed to any particular place – to view academia (like everything) as a “market,” in which institutions have value according to their relative levels of deracination. Liberal arts colleges with particular longstanding traditions and especially religiously-affiliated institutions will rank low – while research universities that have disaffiliated will be ranked higher.

This ethic does not result in a “neutral” view toward institutions, but an outright hostility toward institutions that place an emphasis upon PARTICULAR loyalties and beliefs that constitute the raison d’etre of those institutions. Read, for instance, some of the comments on the generally despicable website “Political Theory Rumor Mill,” in which outright hostility and contempt is displayed toward religiously affiliated institutions (along with tremulous inquiries about whether you can “get by” at those places without having any actual allegiance to those institutional commitments). Most people who now work toward Ph.D.s and eventually teach in the variety of institutions around the country are trained – and seek to advance – a homogeneous view of education, namely a research-dominated model of the modern university. Every institution begins to resemble this model more and more – and at its core, this transformation is informed by the ethic about which I write about here.

Thus, I’m not arguing that everyone must or ought necessarily to return to their place of origin, like salmon, to reproduce and die. This is not to say that it wouldn’t be a good thing if more people weren’t to do just that – that many more of our academic and other institutions ought to encourage just this (thus making many more places good places to live for the educated and accomplished among us). But it is to say that HOW we live in the places where we do end up living will be very different as a result of a different ethic. Will you care about your institution and its students? Will you only accept a position if you can support its founding mission – not try to undermine it from within? Will you seek to make a home in the place where you end up living, striving to live in a neighborhood with other people who have sought (or have been brought up) to believe in the same?

Ironically, as far as academia is concerned, many talented and well-educated people end up back in places they otherwise would not have chose to live in. Yet, often in my experience, I have heard expressions of resentment and condescension about those places from those who view their presence in these places as having lost the job market sweepstakes. Imagine what a different ethic would be needed if those same institutions were minting Ph.D.s who regarded a position in New York or (God forbid) Washington D.C. as at worst a curse, and at best, a burden?

Much more to be said, but I hope that – as you continue your studies – you remain devoted to the possibility of particular loves.

[1] Perhaps. This is, as you state, a problem of humility. But alienation is a status to be ignored at the peril of us all. The point is to obtain and foster community, yes? And community exists in many forms—and at many levels. Diverse connections must exist even in scaled down scenarios.

[2] Absolutely. Again, the intellect is tempered by humility—or should be.

Think of my proposition like this: If community, then intellectual kinship within the same. Not, if intellectual kinship, then community. I meant to merely assert that intellectual kinship is necessary, not sufficient. I’ve seen all kinds of inadequate communities based solely on intellectual kinship (look at the dysfunction within universities, which are supposedly bastions of in-common liberalism).

Communal connections exist, of course, at all kinds of levels—and many levels must be fulfilled to foster stability. – TL

And if any on this site are inclined to respond, I should note how unhelpful and unconvincing I’m beginning to find answers like “I know; it’s a fault” and “I’m trying to get back there” and pithy jokes admitting to your hypocrisy. And this for a simple reason: it surely cannot be so hard to undertake something truly original–and come home. My guess is that you’re not willing simply to live the kind of life you would have to live if you did return–one in which your skills as displaced academicians were in low demand, but in which your abilities to bag groceries or mow lawn might earn you a passable if uncomfortable living. If ‘home’ is so great, a real question: why are you busy telling us about it from the most placeless, meritocratic institutions in the world? At times, what it starts to look like is that, by day, you disdain to your students, your friends, your fellow ‘bloggers,’ and your readers the evils of the golden calf of meritocracy, but by night, though it may trouble your thoughts, you turn around to suckle contentedly at its fat tit.

That may sound more vitriolic than I mean it too–but not much. Another way of putting the point is to say that we admire Wendell Berry, sure, for his writing and his contributions to whatever movement we’re trying to be a part of here, but most of all, we admire him because he has done or has tried to do almost all of the things he’s told us to do. And for his having lived that sort of life–not the one on the farm but the one in which he exemplifies the virtues he extols–he becomes that much easier to take seriously and to believe. My problem with pieces like this one and others, so quick decry the increasing departure of the highly intelligent from small country places is that they are written by those who are, themselves, members of the exodus–indeed, who are benefactors of it.

Now I readily accept the charge of ad hominem, here, and I don’t mean to say that the argument against meritocracy is bad because the people making it are, themselves, meritocrats (or at least live like them). What I mean is that it’s hard to believe that our meritocratic circumstances could be as bad as some on this site have made it sound, given that those very people are themselves willing only to wring their hands toward the problem–and even that, at a distance.

A product of the rather deep inroads feminism has made into American Culture, she combines the wily charms of a winking seductress with the worst animalian instincts of the most mercenary of males. If anyone actually thinks she would go to Washington , do a fine job and leave without stuffing her pockets with as much cash as she can lay her winking hands on, well…….perhaps we can follow that bit of gullibility with a discussion about the mythical Welsh Monk’s bones found on the Rosebud Reservation, clutching the Holy Grail.

She and that other calculating troll Newt have been in New York, agitating all corners, trying to make sure that enough confusion is sown so that one of the oldest continuously republican seats in the country goes democrat. They ought to abandobn the elephant as symbol of the GOP and simply substitute a Crack Pipe made out of an oil can.

If Sarah Palin had not appeared as though a mirage, she would have been ultimately created by a Washington that is nothing more, nor nothing less than a funhouse of mirrors. She is the very definition of politician in America, circa 2009. To imagine her patiently writing any comprehensive legislation..or better yet, actually creating workable schemes for the reduction of the Federal Government is like imagining a bunch of Cargo Cult New Guinea Cannibals opening a nail salon on Fifth Avenue. Picturesque perhaps, but ultimately, a bloody farce

“Nobody wants to be the one alienated individual who returned. The intellect desires community.”

Maybe the problem is the intellects thinking too much of their intellects to the point where they feel themselves alienated from the common people of their local communities and thus needing the company of
their own “kind?” Isn’t it possible to be smart and full of book-learnin’ and yet still feel some kinship with the humbler folk in town?

“And I don’t want to hear from some silly Ayn Rand thinking market-loving fool that we can counter this problem with mere economic incentives for college graduates (although college costs can make an incentive temporarily attractive). People won’t mortgage their souls for a life of small-town loneliness.”

I do agree with this – and this is a spiritual problem at root, but not I think in the way most intellectuals might think it is.

I actually think ASKlein has a good point. Sarah Palin was quickly and unfairly turned into a stereotype by the mass media, but she just as quickly embraced that stereotype, amped it up, using exactly the perverse mirror image which progressive urbanites and cosmopolitans have of traditionalist rural folk to hit back at them, hard. “Real America” and all that; saying that the blue states started it–which, by some measures, they did, dismissing those who fought in the Vietnam war as rednecks, hillbillies, and idiots–doesn’t paper over the fact that there are tens of millions of city-dwelling, meritocracy-shaped Americans out there who don’t care for being accused of being sell-outs, and are happy to have some loud-mouth so-called “populist” makes some lame jokes at them, which just confirms their own worst biases against their enemies.

That sentiment isn’t a myth. I’ve known plenty of people who thought just that. But as someone who went to the University of Michigan I witnessed and experienced a palpable push back in the form of anti-elitism, anti-education, anti-anything forces within the state. Ann Arbor is thought to be a brain trust for spoiled brats who leave the day after graduation, so in turn the “townies” hated us. We were despised — and just look to any UM, OSU or MSU message board in and around college football season and try not to choke on the culture wars. There is very much a sense of “get the hell out of here.”

This, I fear, is very much a chicken-egg conundrum. A very complex (and emotional) cycle of pursuing opportunity and fostering communities. And I feel very much that FPR — and this piece — wonderfully argue these points. But this piece gently ignores the back and forth, especially in the off-hand Sarah Palin reference: “(one need only consider the response of the intelligentsia to Sarah Palin).” What of that response? She came on the scene so bristling with populist, anti-anything associated with liberalism/intellectualism/science/etc/etc that who wouldn’t want to scream back? And as there were those who took criticism of her over the line so we see the same thing all around the spectrum. It is what it is. To take the intelligencia’s reaction to Palin and put it in the vacuum of your particular argument is lazy writing.

I can’t imagine scientists and researchers wanting to work in states that scarcely fund the sciences, let alone teach evolution or safe sex. Nor do I find it at all preferable for tens of thousands of well educated kids duking it out for unpaid internships and Ray-Bans in Brooklyn.

Something has to give. Recognizing the give and take may be a start.