Following from the previous post – “Word and Flesh” – a thought that has followed me at least since graduate school has made itself known once more. I don’t think I’m ready to develop the thought in full – it might require a book! – but I should at last set the thought down in writing, at least in its rough outlines.
A number of writers who have influenced my thinking hold that a good and meaningful human life is bound up in the particular connections of historical communities in given places: the entire body of Wendell Berry’s written work is one source; Alisdair MacIntyre’s treatment of tradition in After Virtue is another; Nel Noddings’ work on caring makes connections to particular others the central focus of ethics; and even Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone has fed into this particular current of thought.
What haunts me is that, to the extent I have lived a life and pursued a career an pursuit of abstractions, I may have severed myself from the possibility of a grounded life in a given place. In fact, I may already have been severed from that possibility before I was born.
I grew up in the suburbs, in a “subdivision” rather than a neighborhood, already a kind of abstraction: generic dwellings on generic streets, occupied by people with no prior connection one to another, and little or no practical connection to the land we inhabited.
I was raised into what was supposed to be an emerging “mass culture,” which was supposed override all merely local connections and distinctions; my expectations were calibrated to what I saw on television rather than to my local community and its traditions.
I pursued a career in philosophy, a discipline which has long tended toward abstraction. The drive of modern philosophy has been to tear up the roots of particular meaning in favor of an insubstantial foundation: whatever abstract idea is clear and distinct.
In its more radical moods, philosophy disdains tradition, critiques it, interrogates it, subjects it to one kind of dialectic or another, “decenters” it, lines it up against the wall.
I exaggerate a little. I still have connections with people back home; I have some connection to the history of the place I now inhabit. But those connections remain tenuous, and the place I inhabit exists more as a district of cosmopolis than as a community with a shared history, shared practices, shared commitments.
Perhaps, I have often thought, most of us in the present world are in a state of exile from which there is no returning. This is not just nostalgia, not just a reflection that I can’t go home again.
It’s the thought that I may never have been home, at least not in the way Berry is at home in his small patch of northern Kentucky.
So, what then? If we have always been in exile, but if being grounded in tradition is essential for living a meaningful life and engaging in ethical practice, what are we to do?
Can we imagine ethics for exiles?
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