How Bad Do You Want It?

Earlier, I blogged about a Front Porch Republic article that examined the ways in which our mobile, meritocratic culture can be harmful to local communities and those whose skills don't match the skills needed in the new society. It's an issue that I've taken up a few times on the blog because I really do think that society can be too impermanent, unnatural and unrooted. But according to Daniel Larson, I might just be full of it.

Key quote where Larison takes up the subject on his American Conservative blog:

The cosmopolites...see many of the advantages of localism but want none of the obligations. They are starved for what it provides, and so wish to escape the confines of their way of life, but they are unwilling to enter into the confines of the local, perhaps because they prefer status rather than happiness or perhaps because they have become so accustomed to the life of the displaced tourist that they cannot imagine being still for any prolonged period of time. The locavore and organic food habits that serve as proof that their way of life is in important ways unsatisfying are themselves a temporary remedy that serves to fill in the gaps and mask the costs of their way of life. The locals, meanwhile, want the products that the world of the cosmopolites can provide, and, as Jeremy argued, many of them want to enter into that world, never fully understanding that their homes will change dramatically and often for the worse as a result of their departure.

In other words, my cosmopolite longing for this old, rooted culture might just be that -- longing. I'm still living on the east coast. As someone who grew up in a dense suburb and has spent his whole life on the east coast among the "cosmopolite" culture, I feel like the grass is greener on the other side, but I'm still not quite ready to jump over. At the same time, the very people who live in middle America might occassionally complain about their way of life being eroded, even as they continue to reap the benefits of the technology and cheap products provided by our mobile, globalized, cosmopolitan economy. We're all complaining about wanting things to get back to how they used to be, without really doing anything about it.

Now maybe, as they say, "we're creating our own communities." Maybe we're having less face to face contact but much more laptop to laptop contact. Maybe we're replacing that communal hole in ways other than sitting on the front porch with a banjo and a lemonade. That's my hope.

But maybe, despite the noises that politicians and writers have made lately about creating a sustainable, local, authentic culture, despite the "new online communities" and the locavore movement, in the grander scheme, we're still allowing our society to become impersonal and inauthentic. If the latter is true, we have to ask ourselves: how badly do we really want it?