Where is this?
Honestly it could be probably anywhere in the United States, just off a highway exit.
And that’s the point: this is a picture of everywhere at once, but nowhere in particular.
Feel depressed yet?
You might have any number of reasons for this to concern you about the overall state of America, but it probably boils down to something like…
*Deep breathe in*
The spread of chains and corporations drives out all of the local businesses, and this is generally not good because you get an arguable worse service and product that is completely divorced from the environment it has parasitically latched itself onto amounting to an experience that you can get literally anywhere so everywhere has become essentially nowhere, and this not only makes the entire world into something resembling the off-ramp of a highway but it also hurts local economies, local business owners, local flavor, local culture, and the ideal of Localism in general, all of which are preferable to another McDonalds or Taco Bell- but those are both just stand-ins to the cheap, unhealthy corporations running America’s waistlines and wallets.1
Something like that, right?
The Trap: Everywhere is Nowhere, but Somewhere is Not
To ask what we’d prefer to these ubiquitous off-ramps is a ridiculous question: we know exactly what’s preferable to these everywhere but nowhere places.
Something local.
And by local, something unique and tangibly of the land. Something that definitively points to this is what it means to be in this place.
But you start to see the issue: how can we be separate things that honor the others’ differences while still being proud of our version of what’s different, and especially not denigrating other people’s version of what’s different?
And this is a difficulty that lies at the core of this essay’s scope: inclusion without sacrificing being in one place over another. It’s a seeming dichotomy: on the one hand I cannot, in good conscience, say nothing belongs specifically here, because that leads to the negative effects of tribalism, nationalism, xenophobia, prejudice and hate; but on the other hand, I want, and actually need, this place to be its own specific thing that is exclusive to this place.
This all de facto means I have to admit that some things cannot be let into “here” because the current result of letting everything in means everything gets in, so there’s nothing special about being where I am.2
So… do the highway off ramps get to remain or not? What about the local businesses, local culture, and just generally, the ideal of Localism?
But… I mean, c’mon
It’s not actually difficult to say what cities should look like, right?
Local businesses.
Bike lanes.
Walkable.
Street musicians.
Art murals.
River walks and lake fronts.
Boutiques.
Gardens.
Ice cream and mini golf.
Free concerts in the park.
Public amenities: parks, museums.
Whimsical and fun amenities like that one fountain in Italy that spews wine.
Piazzas.
forests (no bugs)
wifi everywhere.
No trash.
It smells good, like bakeries and farmers markets (can’t forget the farmer’s markets- farmers markets everywhere.)
everything is locally sourced and grown.
Preferably with a bit of regionally-specific architectural history thrown in (Spanish moss in Georgia; Red Brick Colonial in NorthernVirginia; white picket fence in the Midwest; Surfboards in California; Pueblo in Arizona/New Mexico; alpine in the Rockies… Like, it’s not hard, read the vibes: they do it in Europe easily.)3
It’s not that hard
*Deep Breathe*
Why can’t everything everywhere be its own thing, but also reflective of the history of the place, (preferably super old (but in a cute way) (but also we have modern conveniences and its all new and shique and everything is cute (and local)) but you don’t need to look at anyone who lives on the streets and mass production, while necessary to achieve the vision we’re going for seemingly doesn’t exist, and is also, let’s be clear, nowhere in sight of these cute, local cities; and everything is locally grown and sourced- but no don’t worry about where all the farms are- and what’s more everyone gets a cute shop and everything in said shops is actually worth buying and not super expensive and everything closes at 4 PM so people can sit on porches and eat ice cream and listen to live music and be local with their local neighborhoods and local city.
Aesthetic Localism vs True Localism
When looking around the town that you live, and down the road you live on, and passing the businesses you frequent, there are three reactions: apathy,4 disdain, or affection.
These three emotional reactions classify the three types of ways one can believe in Localism, and by Localism I mean the belief that what is nearby, what is of the land that I too am a part of, is significant and important not just because it is my home, the place I love, and only partially because it is my home, the very things I am from; but in of itself it is valuable and good for things to be what they are, and for regions to be specifically their own, so that anywhere can be somewhere instead of everywhere being nowhere.
Anywhere can be somewhere instead of everywhere being nowhere.
Apathy
Apathy belongs to those who do not really care about Localism as a virtue. They could exist anywhere, and in a sense exist everywhere/nowhere, because they are entirely unconnected emotionally from the land they live upon. It is a mess of roads to drive, a collection of restaurants to frequent, and a place to let seconds turn to minutes to hours to days pass by without much thought to what space that time goes.
Disdain
Those who disdain the place around them are usually Aesthetic Localists. They do not doubt that what is local is important- in fact no one thinks Localism is as important as the Aesthetic Localist- it’s merely that they want a specific kind of “local.” They want a locality that fits the imagined ideal of “local.”
What is the local aesthetic ideal? You know it: it’s what we said before, characteristic but ubiquitous; rich but accessible; and above all, cute. Preferably comfort colors and comfortable living. Ideally something you can take pictures of to post on the internet to make strangers jealous.
Aesthetic Localism is ultimately a philosophy that is repugnant to what is actually local: it’s a philosophy that will love a place only if that place is something other than what it is. It’s an rating system that will only be satisfied if each and everyone one of the points on its rubric is met. It is an ideology that wants things to be local so badly that they end up looking like every other town that’s local.
Have you ever loved something so much you hated it?
This paradox is at the core of Aesthetic Localism, and it’s not really a paradox: those who love one particular style that’s been labelled ‘local’ will disdain everything that actually is local for the sake of what they wished it would become instead.
And disdain is all that remains for that geographical space and land upon which they conduct their daily affairs.
I knew of people who couldn’t wait to leave the “Bubble” of our hometown when they got older. I don’t think it ever occurred to them that they only ever frequented the same one or two haunts and in reality had no idea where they lived.
And that’s exactly the point: familiarity breeds one of two things, blindness or sight, disdain or affection.
Aesthetic localist are familiar to their settings and they do not see them, because they see only the absence of what they wish was there instead.
True Localism
True Localism is an ideal for how to interact with your land. The very dirt and soil you now tread upon upholds you in a way lost to the industrial world. True Localism ever seeks to know the spirit of a place and to experience as it is for what it is. That spirit may be obfuscated by chains, or those chains may be a part of it. The point is that one who is a True Localist does not love their locality because it fits their tastes, but rather their tastes are for whatever happens to be around, because that’s what it means to be here.
The True Localist says with Physicist Charles Towne, “There are always unturned stones along even well-trod paths.” To live in a place is to know there is always more discovery to be had, more memory to be made. There is more in heaven than is dreamt of in our philosophy to be sure, but let us not forget there is also more in earth.5
The True Localist’s taste is for wherever he or she may be specifically because that is where he or she is located. He or she would like to have everywhere to be different, down to its bones, so that he or she can wander the wide world and discover wild and strange lands only a town over.
Addressing a possible misconception: but there really are landscapes that are ugly and polluted and gross. There really are unpleasant places to exist that, all things being equal, we wish were better. But there is a disdainful improvement - change to be loved- and there is an affectionate improvement - change because you are loved. The former is abusive, the latter divine.
The inevitable question is then the highway off-ramp. The apathetic don’t care one way or another; the aesthetic localists despise it and the true localists? they enjoy it, because it's what’s here.
The true localist is not a bystander as chains take over the world and make them worse, but rather will be happy no matter what is there, knowing that this place truly is different from another, even if it looks like all other places. As Henry David Thoreau said, “There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest yo you in this world in any world.”
Affection
Liking things - that is, being affectionate of them (not necessarily showing affection, but feeling it)- is some part of love. It isn’t its total, and its not the superlative, but it’s not not a part a love. And therefore it matters.6
But isn’t it true that to truly love something you call it to be better than it is? That Aesthetic Localists won’t be satisfied with their crappy town until they have made it better because it would be a disservice (and actually hateful, not loving) to let it remain so terrible?
That’s not always being loving, that’s being pretentious.7
The way to love a thing into being better is to love it as it is. To be even, surprisingly, affectionate of it. Have you ever loved someone so much that they had no idea that you even liked them?
What’s more surprising is that improving the object of one’s love isn’t often the goal of lovers, but possessors, which is opposed to the whole concept of freely loving something or someone else freely.
The focus of pretension and Aesthetic Localism is on what needs to change; the focus of love, affection, and True Localism is what’ true, honorable, just pure, lovely, gracious, excellent and worthy of praise.8
C.S. Lewis had some comments on Affection in his book The Four Loves:
This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating of loves. There are women for whom we can predict few wooers and men who are likely to have few friends. They have nothing to offer. But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There need be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites…
Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar. We can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time. The use of "old" or vieux as a term of Affection is significant. The dog barks at strangers who have never done it any harm and wags its tail for old acquaintances even if they never did it a good turn.
He has much more to say of it, but let these comments suffice for our purposes.
Affection is the key to love of what’s around you, what’s local. It’s a love that loves because it is there, because it is familiar. It’s a love that doesn’t need it to be different because it loves what’s there because it’s there.
Conditional and Unconditional Love
Affection is perfected conditional love.
Already we are up in arms: conditional love is abhorrent; it can be taken away; it can be lost!9
Because all that “unconditional love” we’ve been showing doesn’t seem to have any connection at all to anything in the real world. Those who unconditionally love can fall victim to using that term as a state of mind to allow themselves to feel benevolent and charitable to a world wherein nothing they happen across is pleasing to their eye. The emphasis on unconditional love, with a view to how a thing can be perfected, misses the point of actually loving what’s around you in whatever condition it is in.10
Affection is a love of this particular thing. If it were something else, it would be something else.
Can we conceive of a conditional love that is so perfect that regardless of the condition, it will be loved? Yes, I love this fence, or that crack in the sidewalk; were either patched up or repaired it would be altogether different, but I bet I could learn to love that condition too, simply because it’s there and it’s a part of the land that I love.11
Have you ever, in the name of loving yourself, wanted to improve everything in your life to the point that you hated everything you currently had?
Here’s a test of how affectionate you are of your home: As your knowledge of your town increases, do you feel a sense of deeper connection, or disdain? As you travel around your town, do you feel a sense of pride that this is the place you get to live, or is every place an occasion for disapproval?
Perfect conditional love loves every condition.12
Home
And Affection is where we feel at home (the most local thing there can be!)
Affection knows the odds and ends, insides and outs, and loves them for knowing them. Strangers don’t know your town: they may love it because it’s novel to them, but you alone, with your knowledge, can love it because it’s familiar.
Affection is the least grandiose of the four loves, but it’s the love that makes us feel like we belong.
Everyone would like romance and deep friendships, familial bonds. But Affection is the love for acquaintances, whom you recognize and realize that you know people here and they know you. It’s the love of being a “Regular” at a restaurant (something many people crave.) You attend a place enough for it to be a haunt; they recognize you there, know you there. Maybe it’s not the deepest relationship, but you belong because you know it and it knows you.
We need friends, family and romance; but acquaintances are what connect us to the land. Those individuals that are so integral to a place that to lose them would be to lose a part of your home.
So what do we make of our homes?
Are there better ones out there somewhere?13 Can we ascend to the heights or descend to the depths to find them?
No, they are much harder to find, because they exist not in a space or a time, but in a love that is overlooked and not cherished, because we don’t have the eyes to see beyond our perceptions. To find our true local ideal, we needn’t move across the country, or tear down every highway exit, we need only let familiarity breed affection, to turn sideways and see our homes from a new angle, and not as something we hate because it’s not what we want, but something we love because it’s there.
So growing up I did spend a lot of time at Applebees’ with friends late at night, or after musical performances, but I loved that one specifically because it was mine. And literally, the local Applebee’s I went to the most was decorated with pictures of the local high schools, including a picture of my brother on the wall. It doesn’t get much more local than that.
My family and friends forged lasting memories eating out at restaurants in my hometown, merely a seven minute drive away. Those memories are precious as are the McDonalds that they were made in, like family holidays and YMCA basketball brunches, because it was our local McDonalds.
I could go anywhere else in the world and eat the same donuts from any Dunkin’ Donuts, but it’s not the same as the one which was my Dad’s favorite, that we went to often, because those chains, while they are the same, wouldn’t be the places that I grew up loving, simply because they were there, and they were home.
For the record, I like McDonalds. Their style rebrand where every restaurant now looks like a bad hotel lobby is a major downgrade, in my opinion from, believe it or not, the hard plastic booths and clown decorations they used to have.
This is a problem that is at the very center of what a city is at the most fundamental level.
Deeply established in city and nation founding myths and legends is the idea of killing a monster, or murdering someone, in order to found the city (Cain kills Abel and founds cities; Romulus kills Remus and founds Rome; Beowulf kills Grendel, becomes king; Oedipus kills Sphinx, becomes king; Cadmus kills Dragon, men of Thebes spring up from its teeth in the ground; across Pagan mythologies the world itself is made from the carcass of monsters, God's, dragons and the like.)
A city, or nation, is a single thing of collective things. It’s taking diverse things and collecting them up into one specific thing. To do that means you need to create a boundary where there are things inside the boundary, which are one thing, and things outside the boundary, which are not a part of those things.
From there one can extrapolate two meanings: the first is that a monster, symbolizing all that is deadly, unknown, chaotic - in a phrase, deadly to the order necessary to organize- must be destroyed. Makes sense: if I want to live in peace among other people, a monster eating us makes it hard for that town to last long. Now abstract that, all of the things that threaten us, whether it’s natural disaster, plague, war, etc. - all the things the monster represents- also make it hard for that town to last long.
Here is the second meaning: the monster isn’t always destruction. Abel certainly wasn’t; Romulus certainly wasn’t. Whatever is killed can signify what is not a part of the city. Cain as the progenitor of cities will create a generation (not a single age-span of about 20 years like the Millenials or the Baby Boomers, but rather a line that stems through the eras from one single point of generation) that leads to a world so wicked that the Flood is required to correct everything. Why? Because Abel- that is, right worship and virtue; innocence- is not a part of the cities Cain founds. He draws a boundary of what is allowed in, and murder is a good way to ensure what isn’t allowed in.
A more modern example: The French Revolution - monarchy isn’t allowed in (until it was like twenty years later) but the guillotine is pretty good at slicing off the things you don’t want in your country. Another, more enduring example: American settlement. What is cut off, killed, or removed to draw a boundary? America has been wrestling ever since with how to integrate something so central to its founding: the real experiment is in if it can happen.
But look at less grandiose examples: Ada, MI was founded as a trading settlement at the intersection of two rivers. No real founding myth, just commerce. But it’s a trading settlement, not a mining town. To be something it can’t be something else. And this is the reality we have to face: towns by necessity must not be some things in order to be other things, but what can purposely not be included before it’s bad? And how can you include everything and still maintain a particular identity?
It’s easy to draw that line when the foundation is on casting out/killing innocence/goodness or indigenous/non-white people; it’s harder when it’s my high school vs yours or when it’s urban sprawl vs the suburbs; or global vs. local.
Uniformity disguised as, or in fact(?), variety: “Here you can find X, but if you go there you’ll find Y (which is just their version of X.)” They are the same for each place, but different from one another.
And this is apathy in the neutral “I don’t know, man, I don’t really think too much about where I live. Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s not, I don’t think about it too much” sense, not apathy in the negative sense of not caring which in reality is just disdain.
I did not know this way of living local intuitively: I had to learn it. I learned it when I moved to the Panhandle of Florida, a place that was very different from where I grew up, physically and culturally. It was near a world class beach. I did not want to leave that Pensacola at the end of my stay and have people ask if I frequented the beach all the time while I lived there only to respond “You know, I never went!”
My determination to enjoy that place for what it had which nowhere else had led my to discover what my hometown in Michigan was like when I moved back. I had assumed falsely that life in my hometown was the baseline and everywhere else was fanstical. I soon learned that I had rather taken it for granted and it was just as delightfully different to others as Florida was for me, I had only to learn to be a True Localist.
I have the privilege of living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a marvelous town that has done much to make itself lovely to its inhabitants, from local festivals, to building renovations, to emphasizing art and recreation. And people hate it for about five months out of the year, because of the winter. It becomes a slushy place, on the ground and in the sky, and the lack of the sun eclipses everything there is to see and do in such a marvelous city. People like to complain of the winters (and of construction in the summer.)
The answer is not necessarily to move to a winterless place, though there is no harm at all in seeking out those lands that harmonize with the vibrations of your soul, but rather to ask “What does winter afford us that others do not get?” Bring a Californian to Michigan and they are enraptured by the snow. Those who hate winter in Grand Rapids, how much ice skating, skiing, and hot chocolate has made up your dreary months?
Often in our pursuit of the best, the perfect, or the absolute, the smaller, particular, everyday aspects of a thing, in this case love, can be lost. The ideal/absolute/perfect is important and cannot be done away with, but it does well to remember that the parts of a thing are important with the sum is of the highest importance.
We’d do well to not eschew the small, everyday ways that love is present and pursued: not because they’re more important than Caritas, but because Caritas perfects and lifts up all the other forms of love. Caritas has not come to do away with the natural loves, but to fulfill them.
It is true that Jesus loved people and called them to be more. But when we do it, the “loving people” part feels lacking and the “calling them to be more” part seems arbitrary, self-righteous, and frankly like snake oil considering how unpleasant people like us can be, especially when we claim to be an authority on “more” despite lacking it by seeming all experiential measures.
Philippians 4:8
See footnote six.
That unconditional love is better, so to speak, than conditional love is obvious: the former cannot be lost, the latter can. But does that value statement necessitate doing away with all forms of conditional love? Does that value statement mean we should irrevocably only dwell on unconditional love and never consider how to love in other manners well? Does that value statement mean we have reached the pinnacle of truth pertaining to love and its conditionality, and therefore have no further need of contemplation into how this value statement might manifest itself in our daily lives and therefore continue our growth as more loving beings in a number of multifaceted ways?
No.
From Manalive by G.K. Chesterton:
“I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.’
“‘I dare say,’ I said. ‘What reason?’
“‘Because otherwise,’ he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss, ‘we might worship that.’
“‘What do you mean?’ I demanded.
“‘Eternity,’ he said in his harsh voice, ‘the largest of the idols— the mightiest of the rivals of God.’
“‘You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,’ I suggested.
“‘I mean,’ he said with increasing vehemence, ‘that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.’
Absolutism, Unconditionality, and Perfection: these are all things that are worthwhile, important, and often in need of defense, but it is possible in a paradoxical truth to lean too heavily to one side at the expense of the other.
The counter argument would be that loving every condition that could exists means allowing shoddy, broken, dirty, or bad things to exist. Loving every possible condition can, at best, be permissive of what ought to be changed, like how a place may truly be ugly, to, at worst, actually supportive and continuing what needs to be changed, like the safety of a location.
To that I would say, you’re right. Conditional love is not the best love there is, only one kind of love. And since it’s a kind of love, we should aim to do it well when the conditions are appropriate.
This essay is not submitting a new system for understanding and interacting with the world, but emphasizing one way of perceiving and acting that perhaps is underrepresented and could be added to overall mode of being and doing.
When you love a place because it is a place you love, you love every changeable thing about that place specifically. One might also recognize that this “perfected conditional love” is indistinguishable from unconditional love, wherein the lover loves the beloved for the beloved, not for any merit of the beloved, but because they’re beloved. Why then the insistence on a circuitous route only to reach the same place? The actual reason is rhetorical, in the sense that it has to do with the perception of a thing, in this case unconditional love.
But perhaps we might venture further. Perhaps to highlight that unconditional love can mask utter disdain; perhaps to consider that loving something also means, to some degree, having various degrees of affection for it; or perhaps it is to recall that love craves specificity. Divine Charity is indeed universal, but that does not discount that Charity is also a specific Person, or rather a specific Three Persons, and Charity has a specific name, and was born at a specific time in a specific place.
All this specificity highlights that love, for all of its desire to bring all things (literally) into itself, is exclusive, not in a condemnatory or hateful way, but in the way that all love is exclusive because it is necessarily between two or more parties that can be anything, but must be something. The obsession with unconditionality is an accidental insistence that the specifics that make up anything are not important, and in doing so, undermining the entire enterprise of loving.
Last footnote, I promise. This question calls to mind Manalive by G.K. Chesterton, where a man, Innocent Smith, is charged with a number of heinous crimes, one of which is Desertion, the crime of leaving his family. He is reported to have said,
“I won’t stay here any longer. I’ve got another wife and much better children a long way from here. My other wife’s got redder hair than yours, and my other garden’s got a much finer situation; and I’m going off to them.”
Before he leaves his home and travels around the world. Explaining his ‘desertion,’ Innocent Smith explains,
‘I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.’
“‘It certainly sounds paradoxical,’ I said.
“‘I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the room,’ he continued, ‘and all the time I knew they were walking and talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable. Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a treadmill.’
He left his house, not to find a better house, but to find the house he always wanted in what he had. For that he did not need a change of location, but a change of self- a change of perspective.
I'm curious, was any of this inspired by the recent controversy surrounding Foxtail in GR?