Going off the Grid
David Brooks has been off the grid. He’s a successful columnist, a sought-after
speaker, a well-regarded analyst and thinker and opinion maker. But, if you have been reading him, especially
since he has returned from sabbatical, you get the sense that he’s also a
little lonely and a little at sea. It is
as if he is searching for his community—he believes deeply in community—and the
signs and the guideposts and even the certainties seem blurred and strangely
alien.
I went off the grid in a different way last month. I took my
youngest to college.
I rented a minivan for a ridiculous amount of money, stuffed
it full of clothes and books and hopes, and headed to a small town in the great
Midwest.
Contrary to any pre-game trepidation I might have felt on suck a trek, I found didn’t need to bring survival gear, or provisions for a
month. They do, in fact, have stores in
that part of the country. There is also indoor
plumbing. And cellphone and email
service. But outside of that, there was
a lot of difference between my hyper-urbanized Manhattan and this rather vast
addition that appears to the West.
It’s roughly 500 miles, about 8 plus hours as the
middle-aged father drives, and they are 500 tiring miles. The New Jersey section of Route 80 gets you off
on the wrong foot. There are parts that remind one to roll the windows up. The scenery is an uninspiring landscape of contradictory signs, poured concrete and exit ramps, all as if created
by a gigantic machine to serve even larger machines. New Jersey’s 80 is like an urban
garden turned into a parking lot.
Pennsylvania was more promising. The concrete gave way to the mountains, and
you began to see a different way of life, more rural, more spread out, less
industrial. You know that behind those
mountains are towns and farms and even factories, but here, it’s quiet and
green and the air is clear except for occasional fog. Connecting roads, when
they appear, lead to north into state forests, and south through the bend in
the Appalachians towards the coalmines and rough hills of West Virginia. It’s
the special genius of the Pennsylvania stretch of Route 80 that the rest stops
are exactly that—you can rest, eat at a few picnic tables, use the bathroom,
and a few vending machines. No gas, no
huge plazas, no food courts. For most of
a somewhat hallucinogenic 300 miles, it’s almost as if they have deliberately
cleared away all vestige of both urbanism, and the sweat and grime that
supports it. I kept waiting for someone
to say, “Hear those drums? We’re in Indian Country now.”
By the time I hit Ohio, both the minivan’s gas tank, and
mine were running low, and the topography had changed again. It wasn’t the same kind of rural—more like
longer stretches of flat, sometimes joyless roads, connecting large tracts of
open land with rust-belt cities like Youngstown, Cleveland and Akron. I was wearing down, I felt the weight of my surroundings,
and I started to ruminate.
Very different place I was sending my daughter to. Maybe even one that would be filled with
people who “cling to their guns and religion.”
Drive out on Route 80, and you can see why West Virginia would turn sharply
Republican, you can see why the GOP keeps expecting Pennsylvania to go Red, and
Ohio seems ripe for the plucking. Those
people aren’t more conservative as an affectation—they are more conservative as
a way of life. The urban democracy I
know, the coastal one, places different values on things. They aren’t better or worse, but they are
different. I sometimes think to be a New
Yorker is to be a citizen of every place in the world, except the rest of the
United States.
Of course, this is both profoundly self-absorbed, and
idiotic. My daughter was not at risk for some sort of ideological
indoctrination. Ohioans were uncommonly nice people. And colleges, regardless of where they are set, are cloisters of
like-minded people. She would not be set adrift to wander the countryside, a
stranger in a strange land. Nor were my
wife and I going to be trapped in a Grant Wood reality. We flew back (the long way, through
Nashville) over some of the prettiest country I’d ever seen. “Conservative” doesn’t necessarily mean
“barren wasteland.” There’s obviously more to life than glass and steel.
Yet the whole experience brought Brooks’ unspoken dilemma into
sharper focus. I saw a tiny, tiny piece
of country, and it was very different than what I knew and even somewhat
disorienting. Brooks, I’m sure, sees a
fifty state map in need serious help. If you are a long-time reader of his work
you know that at the very center of his conservatism is a belief in not just
the (traditional) family unit but in the community itself, and the community of
communities. If I can oversimplify
greatly, communities govern themselves largely through upright and enlightened
leadership, group effort, and the soft power of moral suasion. That concept is scalable from the smallest
hamlet all the way to Washington.
So, the ideal adult citizen is self-supporting, guided by a
Judeo-Christian ethic, has served his community and, when called, his country, married
and with children born in wedlock, temperate in his habits, reluctant to
indulge in excess, and so on. In his business dealings, he is fair, honest, and
non-exploitative. He does this, ideally,
because it is hard wired into him and he wants to. But he also does it because he must—because
coarseness, cheating, and general immorality lead to shunning. The leaders of a community, at every level,
exemplify all those qualities, and are educated, farsighted and intellectually brave
as well.
The problem with Brooks’ ideal is that the elites he trusts
often show themselves unworthy and base. And the personal qualities he admires
are never enough for some, and too much for others. Many go by the cafeteria plan of virtues—they
are adamant supporters of the ones they want other people to live by. He knows this, and in a series of Op-Ed pieces
over the last several months, he explores these deficiencies and displays his
alienation. He is off the grid: the
language he speaks is either not heard or not heeded.
Still, it's unfair to define his thesis by its evident shortcomings, or dismiss the overall conception that community and interpersonal
relationships matter. Brooks is a
hopeless idealist, he relies too much on an undefined aristocracy, but he’s
also largely right. In a country as huge
and diverse as ours, with as many faiths and outlooks and priorities as we all
have, there’s really no better alternative.
The challenges that the world offers are too great to be
solved by any one person or any thousand. But they also can’t be solved by all
of us retreating into the hermetic comfort of the closed mind and the closed
heart. You can't go off the grid. It’s just too beautiful a country to give up
on.
September 24, 2014
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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