The Trouble With Home

Almost a year ago I was commissioned to write this piece by a magazine. I sent it in, and realized the other day they never printed it, and that I never heard back from them. It felt harmless to send it out here. It's a year old, so keep that in mind!

I was born in 1991 just as history ended. In the words of Francis Fukuyama, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and later the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked “the end of history,” or at least the end of the historical trajectory that ever since the French Revolution has followed a convoluted imperial path toward “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It is easy to read the end of history idea as a moment of clarity, yet the primary political trend of my time on Earth has been disorientation and dizziness. The way we sense the world around us has changed enormously since the end of history. Space disappears as I stream Premier League soccer from England in Connecticut and follow live tweets from people on the ground at yet another mass shooting. Time has begun to shrink too. As archives are digitized the past has become sensible with a simple CTRL + F. Nature as we sense it via three dimensions of space and one dimension of time has begun not just to shrink, but to warp.

Just as distant places and the distant past have become clearer, the future has become more murky. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union the IPCC published their first report warning dire projections of atmospheric carbon on the future of our global community. Immediately following this first report ExxonMobil shifted from being a leader in climate change research to the champion of climate denial. In other words, at the same moment that according to Fukuyama the historical arc of Western liberal democracy had reached its totalizing end, an antithetical global apocalyptic historical arc was born.

For progressives today, our political metaphysics are being crushed under the vague apocalyptic weight of climate change. The sinister reality of the effect of climate change on progressivism is that while climate change is an existential threat to the middle-class myth that the arc of history bends toward justice, it is a real material threat to the array of poor, indigenous, frontline communities that know all too well that sometimes the world gets worse. For those of us still bought into a progressive politics, the Earth has called us on our bluff of inevitable progress, and in doing so we have lost the ability to tell a coherent story of where exactly society is going.

In this milieu of a receding future progressive utopia is where post-liberal politicians have emerged. Just after the end of history and the first IPCC reports came the “Revolution of 94” in which Newt Gingrich in coalition with a pubescent Fox News handed Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.

What Gingrich realized in the 90s is the same thing that postliberal politicians like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon understand today: that in periods of dizziness and disorientation, when space and time and the nature of work are in flux, people are just searching for a home, for something to hold onto. The 2020s ethnopopulist MAGA backlash to the rapid displacement of community stability by the adolescent “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley echoes the 1920s ethnopopulist Nazi backlash to the rapid expansion of global capital into German echoes the 1820s ethnopopulist Jacksonian backlash to the Market Revolution in the United States.

The simplest way to situate MAGAism, QAnon, and the ever-proliferating set of right-wing trad-prefixes of today—trad-wife, trad-Cath, trad-fem, trad-west—is as religious revivals. Tradition is just one anchor in the dizziness of today. It is easy for those of us on the left to see these movements as racist, patriarchal, and backwards. It's harder for us to see trad-Catholics or the Asatru as constituted by human beings trying to make sense of a world that is being warped around them by a progressivism struggling to articulate a coherent story in the dissonance between its goals of infinite economic growth and technological progress on a planet that is alive and dynamic.

“More equality” in a time of increased suicide, mass shootings, inflation, wildfire, political gridlock, inequality, species extinction, soil loss, corporate consolidation, political polarization, union busting, the cratering of male educational outcomes, and widespread fatalism does not seem good enough. I want to consider the possibility that many that have been sucked into the far-right are there not because of the success or brilliance of fascist organizing, but instead the failures of an inclusive progressive vision for the future.

If we take seriously the possibility that climate change is both an existential threat to the progressive political story of continual progress and a serious material threat to many frontline communities that make up the real progressive political coalition today, we may consider the possibility that, in the words of the late Bruno Latour, “we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center.”

If we are to imagine a politics that not only challenges inequality, but also the notions of infinite economic growth and technological progress then we begin to tread into the perplexing political territory of anti-modernism where we find indigenous groups and white nationalist communities in coalition against the Federal Government and crunchy feminists rapidly becoming altright trad-wives.

To get a sense of why perhaps far-right revivals are proliferating today I will ground our current moment in the political whirlwind of another time when time, space, and labor were also in flux: in the Market Revolution of the early 1800s United States. In turning then toward today the question becomes: How do real people find a home in a period of political dizziness?

As we each find that home—whether it is a sense of home in individual self, a sense of home in community identity or tradition or place, or a sense of home in a diet or literal plot of land—the question today is whether we can at the same time retain our commitment to the Enlightenment values of equality, democracy, and the common good.

Considering climate change this question becomes more specific: can we go back to the land without becoming super racist? For me, this is not rhetorical. It's an open question, and a question that pivots around how we imagine and feel who and what is our home.

One of the most useful periods in American history for understanding the challenges of finding a home in the dizziness of today is the often-overlooked Market Revolution, or Era of Good Feelings (1815-1825), when capitalism exploded into American life. In the simplest form, this period was one of rapid metamorphosis from a local agrarian economy to a modern industrial system. People no longer made goods for themselves and their communities, but instead for the market. The “good feeling” was a sense of progress that was attached to a clear future of economic growth and technological progress.

In the wake of the War of 1812, transportation technology was shifting, communications technology was expanding, and economic growth was rapid on this continent. The steamboat made water transportation ten times faster. Roads, canals, and railroads were strewn suddenly across the continent aided by government subsidy and a nascent Wall Street. With these new means of exchange, space began to disappear.

Along with the railroads came the telegraph which allowed for clear expectations of shipment arrival and the standardization of price points. To aid in the effectiveness of capital exchange, the first product mass produced in the often female-worked factories was the clock, which finally allowed for the regional universalization of time.

At the same time the nature of work was in flux. Until the early 1800s, most material production happened within the domestic sphere, and again, mostly by women. Artisans and farmers worked for a “price” that aligned with the quality and volume of what they produced. As people moved into cities and into factories these people became employees that worked for a “wage,” that was determined by the length of time “on the clock.”

Despite being remembered as an Era of Good Feelings by historians, during this decade there was a clear sense of dizziness amongst intellectuals and the American populace. Herman Melville’s famous Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street was a dark reflection of the labor in America’s emerging financial sector at the time, while his less known Tartarus of Maids was an account of the ghastly working conditions of female laborers at Carson’s Old Red Paper Mill in Massachusetts.

During this widespread disorientation of time and space and labor emerged the popular religious revival we call the Second Great Awakening. In New York’s “burnt-over district” that’d recently been cut in half by the new nation’s beacon of progress, the Erie Canal, religious revivals abound. In Western New York Shakers, Mormons, Millerites, the Oneida Society, and Ebenezer colonies pushed back against the rapid industrialization of what was a decade earlier the American frontier. Elsewhere, Methodist and Baptist movements proliferated. In the Era of Good Feelings, economic growth and technological innovation disrupted the structure of society and the result was an anti-material religious revival.

Alongside the religious revivals, a populist politics emerged that rendered the rich and powerful as synonymous with the progressive materialism that revivalist movements rejected. Over time, this general anti-materialist anti-elitist fervor crystalized into Jacksonian democratic populism with its focus on “the common man” over elites, the expansion of suffrage, and meticulous centering of a national Other in the form of Indian tribes and enslaved Blacks.

The Era of Good Feelings (1815-1825) in the United States was one where the simultaneous expansion of technology and the financial sector led to a disruption in the fabric of society that pushed the common man into religious revival that was subsequently capitalized on by a xenophobic populist named Andrew Jackson who accused his opponents during his first run for the Presidency of rigging the election against him. Nearly two centuries later, within a few weeks of becoming president, Donald Trump decided to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office.

What was at stake then is what is at stake today: In a period of rapid material progress that is destabilizing the fabric of our society, how does a common person find a home?

Formulations of home vary in scale. We may come to a sense of home that grounds us in ourselves, in a place, in a community, or in an ecology. These homes become our anchors and stabilize the narrative of our life.

There is perhaps nothing more American than finding a home in oneself. This type of home was at the center of the American transcendentalist movement that was a reaction to the techno-optimism of the Era of Good Feelings, with Emerson’s Self-Reliance, Whitman’s Song of Myself, and Thoreau’s Walden surviving as the movement’s canon.

Finding a home in oneself is the logic of our myth of rugged individualism that has been codified in the symbol of the cowboy, the frontiersman, and the businessperson. Finding a home in oneself was the goal of mainstream Freudianism of? the mid-1900s, when psychoanalysis was the mainstream way to make sense of social reality. As Elizabeth Lunbeck notes in her book, The Americanization of Narcissism, “To be educated in the 1950s and 1960s was to bandy about Freudian terms and ideas and be understood in doing so.” Today, finding a home in self is the focus of the ever-expanding health and wellness industrial complex that everyday seems to become more synonymous with the novel term “conspirituality”, or the fusing of anti-modern New Age spirituality with right-wing conspiracies.

In seeking a home in self some found a home in a place, perhaps typified best by the localism and wilderness movements of past generations. A home in the wilderness was championed by Romantics like John Muir, who wrote that “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.”

Critics of wilderness ideology like Bill Cronon urged us to realize that for Muir and Thoreau before him, “wild land was not a site for productive labor and not a permanent home; rather, it was a place of recreation.” Cronon urged Americans to come home from the wilderness, back to “the place where finally we make our living” to “the small pond near my house where water bubbles up from limestone springs to feed a series of pools that rarely freeze in winter.” Cronon urged us to return to “the local” to find a home in a place. The tension between care for a place out there versus a place right here is still echoed today between on one hand a mainstream environmental movement focused on the protection of an abstract environment, atmosphere, or wilderness, and on the other hand an environmental justice movement focused on the protection of specific bodies on specific land.

Critics of traditional place-as-home localism like the late Bruno Latour urged us to realize that in a globalized economy it is not the things that surround us in our home that we rely on for life, but instead distant labor and creatures that are rendered invisible by our globalized economy. Latour writes that “coming down to earth does not mean going local…it means being able to encounter the beings we depend on, however far that may be in kilometers.”

He says that “these days, the world we live in only rarely overlaps with the world we live off” and that what local really means is “what is discussed and argued in common. Near does not mean a few kilometers away, but what attacks me or provides for me in a direct way; it’s a measure of commitment and intensity. Distant doesn’t mean far away in kilometers, but whatever you don’t have to worry about straight away because it has no involvement in the things you depend on.” For those frontline communities living nearby radioactive Superfund sites there is no local soil to return to where, in the words of the wistful Cronon, “finally we make our living.”

For Latour, our home is our global ecology, and yet our global ecology is invisible to us. We encounter products via brands and their aesthetics, not the lives behind the products. In this invisibility is a kind of desperate grasping for an impossible relationship that is perhaps best illustrated by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her masterpiece Braiding Sweetgrass in a scene where she is trying to buy pens in a Staples:

I wander next to the pen aisle, or as they call it, “writing instruments.” The choices here are even more numerous and I have no idea at all where they came from, except some petrochemical synthesis. How can I bring honor to this purchase, use my dollars as the currency of honor when the lives behind the product are invisible?

Today in a culture of late-stage capitalism where a sense of self and a sense of place are constantly for sale, a home is illusive. To add to this, even knowing our ecology, Latour’s “world we live off,” is nearly impossible. Pointing to 1920s Germany, Slavoj Zizek asks us to “Imagine an ordinary German citizen…

His situation is, in an abstract way, the same as that of a small child. He’s totally perplexed…What does society want from him? Why is everything going wrong? The way he perceives the situation is that newspapers lie to him. He lost his work because of inflation…He sees moral degradation and so on. So what’s the meaning of this all?...As it was often pointed out, fascism is, at its most elementary, a conservative revolution. Revolution, economic development, modern industry, yes. But a revolution which would nonetheless [in the context of ever-expanding liberation and enfranchisement] maintain or even reassert a traditional hierarchical society.

In a historical moment when the self is for up auction to the highest social media advertisers, when labor demands either an estrangement from place or a dissolution of the workplace, and when our global economy has rendered our ecology and the people and creatures we rely on for life invisible to us, a whole host of conservative quasi-religious revivals have stepped in to sell their particular vision of a fallen traditional past.

On one hand, if the past two-hundred years have taught us anything it is to take the threat of conservative revolutions seriously. On the other hand, there is something sad and naive about performances of 1950s tradwifery on Tik Tok like Estee Williams, of 1920s Romantic traditionalism on Instagram like the Young Traditionalists, and of the entire presidency of Donald Trump. Behind the proto-fascism each of these performances of some bizarre vision of traditional life is a modern money-making apparatus that is sucking dry the pocketbooks of disillusioned populace in the form of rally tickets, vitamin supplements, and NFTs.

I’ve followed the Young Traditionalists on Instagram ever since they emerged a few years ago. In a recent post they set up a dichotomy between the “futuristic” and “future-proof” designs. On the “futuristic” side of the line is short-termism, internationalism, synthetic materials, chaos/equality, and unsustainability. On the “future-proof” side of the line is intergenerational, localism, natural materials, order/hierarchy, and sustainability. Admittedly, to more than just the red-pilled does the “future-proof” side of the spectrum seem at least a bit appealing.

Perhaps when Fukuyama declared “the end of history” he meant not the “universalization of Western liberal democracy,” but instead the universalization of a certain type of global economy that voraciously cheapens all aspects of life on Earth—work, food, and care; self, place, and community; time, space, and change—while simultaneously laying claim to “development.” And yet, today we of course see the rejection of a global solidarity in Hungary, the United States, India, Brazil, and so on.

Years ago, in a conversation with Indian academic Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruno Latour said bluntly what many of us vague progressives do not want to believe: “We will not globalize the Earth.” Our general inability to internalize this fact implicates another older Latour quip: “In practice, we’re all climate deniers.”

The trick today will be for progressives to have an inclusive vision of the future despite climate change without relying on a pretext of economic growth and technological progress. Without a clarified future, we will, all of us, slowly return to the “future-proof” home of tradition.