Loyalty & Place
“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” – GK Chesterton
I despise moving and wince whenever I think how many times I’ve done in my adult life. The good news is that I’m done with all that, God-willing. Two weeks ago I made what I hope will be the final move of my life. And it was a coup: I moved to a superior house in the same neighborhood as some of my closest friends, including one of my very closest next door. Blessed are those who live in the same city as their friends, their family, their people—and even more blessed are those who live on the same street. So this move was a good one which genuinely increases my chances at flourishing, and now it’s officially time to stop moving and get to the business of establishing roots.
It gets me thinking about moral and spiritual implications: the virtues made possible by rootedness and the personal flimsiness and vulnerability cultivated by transience. The particular virtue of interest is loyalty. Commitment to place is a crucial element of loyalty to people.
JRR Tolkien once remarked to his friend CS Lewis that “the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations.” People were really of a place when their bodies were nourished by food grown locally and “the strength of the hills” was theirs. He added that this kind of connection between family and soil might have had something to do with sightings of the nymphs and dryads of the place, as the old stories tell about. These creatures, rather than being the fancies of pre-scientific people, were part of the deeper layers of reality that escape the notice of renters and passersby and can only to be seen by the intensely rooted. Sounds fanciful, but it’s undeniable that truth reveals itself more fully when you live a certain way.
Even for those of us in democratic times who won’t be heirs to ancestral homes and who eat produce from everywhere and nowhere, the elementary effects of rootedness can still change our lives.
Sweat equity comes to mind. My previous digs were the first where I had taken a stab at improving the place: clearing the untended chaos in the backyard, and planting a garden, berry patches, bushes, grapevines, trees. No nymphs were sighted, but I did notice that the transformation of the property also transformed me. At the very least, a man grows in affection toward the things he has toiled and sweated for—a deep contrast from my detachment toward the sterile apartments in which I had previously dwelled.
Everything looks different in the light cast by our own effort. It actually changes the quality of time, too, as trees grow and gardens yield and the seasons are marked by real development. Some permaculturalists speak of their work in terms of harvesting actual time so that it doesn’t just pass by, but grows richer with the passing of every year. Something similar goes for improvements to the inside of a house. The work pays you back. In consequence, it becomes far more difficult to sell and move on from something you’ve invested so much into. Those who never put in this work will never understand.
The way one sees his neighbors also alters—people who are part of the place you love, especially the ones doing similar work on their own properties.1 These efforts benefit all: the neighborhood becomes a better place to live when everyone puts love into it, creating the kind of place that others can love as well. If I were an economist or a calculating fellow, I might mention how this not coincidentally increases property values—because local affections have economic realities—but I’m not. Either way, friendly bonds increase the value of everything. On a larger level these personal bonds lead us toward cooperation in political projects and solidarity, toward endeavors in pursuit of the common good of the neighborhood and the city. A good neighbor becomes a fellow soldier.
So there’s no big mystery as to why the cult of rootlessness is promoted so hard by the enemies of our flourishing. Rootlessness stifles affection, and those without local affection will not put up much of a fight when oligarchs attempt to raid their city and then remake it in the image and likeness of Globoville.
Rather than love of place, we are encouraged to cultivate oikophobia. Greek for “fear of one’s own,” this trait flashes every time the cosmopolitan bugman proclaims himself a “citizen of the world” rather than a citizen of an actual place, every time he sides with foreign abstractions over his neighbors. To be of everywhere is to be of nowhere. Cosmopolitans disgust is performative and targeted, as he declares his heritage to be uniquely backwards (though people with ties outside of the West are not encouraged to develop the same shame). Oikophobia at its core is a shallow attempt at elevating one’s own status, something possible only in a civilization that has succeeded in rising above its rivals and enemies; without a foreign threat to unite against, the more enlightened ones turn to hating their less sophisticated countrymen. It’s a pathology of decadence.2
Without rootedness, loyalty to other people becomes far more unlikely—not exactly impossible, but certainly less likely (if only because loyalty takes time to grow). The unrooted tend to be spiritual mercenaries, always on the lookout for a better offer and ready to bail. Any friends we had in the places we left then become memories or glorified penpals.3 It’s not working for us or our country. But it is working very well for the oligarchs who feast on our collective weakness, our lack of loyalty to our homes and each others.
So I plan to live very differently from here on out. Aimless wandering is out. Radical commitment is in. My friends and I are going to take full advantages: common projects, coordinated scheming, spontaneous gatherings, aid during tough times, defense networks, political operations, and so on.
1 Local affection is a prerequisite for true noblesse oblige. Once upon a time, noble bloodlines were tied to properties, and they bore their homes as surnames: Godfrey of Bouillon, Simon de Montfort, Ulrich von Liechtenstein. When dealing with one’s own people—families that your own had known for generations—there was far more cause for nobility and generosity. Even in practical terms, it just made sense to be good to those who weren’t going anywhere—because you’d be encountering them for years to come. This is not the case when everyone is a stranger passing through.
2 Oikophobia smoldered in the popular culture of my formative years. A continual theme—going back at least to Star Wars—was the lameness of home. Like Luke Skywalker, anyone with talent or ambition had to flee to greener pastures and bigger metroplexes, places where the opportunities supposedly were. I saw it in my own extended family of farmers who were encouraged to leave the farm and try to “make something of themselves”—as if co-managing a Wells Fargo branch in the big city is superior to raising animals and growing crops on the family’s land.
3 Pointing the finger at myself here.