I recently occasioned on another three day stint with my Tory pals, and I have to say that it will likely be my last. I had a nice run, I suppose. They’re not fond of disagreement, and I’m not fond of watching two people out of twenty debate minutiae while the rest of the group masks their embarrassed ignorance with a pose of educated dispassion. Out. Standing.
Today I take issue with one of their favorite complaints – that of the Interstate Highway System. In Toryland, things were better before the mobile society, Wal-Mart, globalization, airplanes, telephones, and electricity. While they do love to beat on Wal-Mart (and who doesn’t), they seem to hold the Interstate Highway System in a special and almost rabid sort of contempt. How dare we make it easier for people to travel from place to place? Worse yet, “haven’t we lost something?”
“Haven’t we lost something?” This from a Georgetown U. professor of political theory. He advocates a return to the agrarian lifestyle, where we lived in small towns in New England, surrounded by nice large trees to keep the world away, and thought about how great it was to live in small towns in New England, where the trees kept everything away.
But have we really lost anything? America, unlike Continental countries, has always been characterized by a nearly inexhaustible supply of land and a shortage of people to use it. Our Fathers had lots of children, and when the land around the Fathers filled with other Fathers, the children pitched their homesteads on the frontier. We are a nation of eternal frontiers – any given piece of land in America was once the frontier. We never stayed indolent and ignorant in our New England villages. That simply isn’t what Americans do. We’re the most mobile society in the world, and have been since Jamestown.
I believe that place is special. I hold a spot in my heart for my hometown that I could never feel for another place. But the suggestion that we lost something by building the Interstate Highway System, that it has altered our culture for the worse, is nothing more than fallacious fuedalist revision.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: ISI, small towns, Tory
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I would agree that it might be a bit inconsistent for a Georgetown University prof. to suggest that the agrarian lifestyle is preferable while teaching at an institution with an endowment of $964 million–largely provided by the free market which drops manna in the way of starved people–while the agrarian life is open to all willing to convert to the Anabaptist (Amish) faith. That being said, the Tories might have a legitimate point when they question whether or not conservatives ought to be welcoming of a system that is based on cosmopolitan presumptions. It may be argued that the free market rewards uniqueness and creates intercultural communication, but, because this interaction is consumption–rather than production–oriented and requires cooperation where understanding is lacking, the international marketplace also has a tendency to water-down differences and re-acculturate (I don’t think that’s a word, but it should be) market goods to the point where they are no longer culturally unique (see Taco Time and the Olive Garden). Of course, the worst solution to this phenomenon is government intervention. Government is indifferent to culture most of the time, and, when it is not, it only serves to discredit the culture further (as was demonstrated by the brief career of Idaho’s political hack, Bill Sali, who managed to deliver an Idaho congressional seat to a Democrat for the first time in more than a decade.) All this is to say that there is no real solution; people have to be free to follow their consumption desires. But just because we like where we are doesn’t mean that we are where we should be.