Stabilizing Mobility
Notes on the most widespread, and realized, American Dream
The following begins a series of posts I’ve been tinkering with on the role of home in everyday American life. I hope you find them worthwhile. —Jim
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Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
—Bruce Springsteen, “Hungry Heart” (1980)
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At one time or another, everybody wants to go home.
Go home: two little words, a world of tension between them. If you’re going home, it means you’re not home: you’ve traveled some distance from your base. Home, by contrast, connotes stasis, a sense of rootedness. The friction here reflects two (interlocking) American Dreams. Our default notion of the American Dream is one of mobility—a desire to end up somewhere else. Sometimes this mobility is figurative, measured by things like one’s income or social status. But very often it’s also literal, about moving from one physical location to another.
By contrast, the American Dream of home ownership—the most widely realized American Dream—is about staking a claim to a place you can call your own. Not moving up, but settling down. Ironically, such stability is often necessarily the byproduct of mobility: you’ve got to leave home in order to make a home to call your own, and very often what’s required are the fruits of your upward mobility that allow you to make a deposit or down payment, get a loan, or some combination of the above in a process of occupancy.
But a home—owned, rented, inherited, whatever—is never solely an economic proposition. It is, most profoundly, a state of mind, a psychological attachment to a place where familiarity breeds contentment. Sheer repetition of ordinary tasks amid unremarkable days in a specific place forms the foundations of domesticity. Pleasing boredom is its essence.
You can think of home as a set of concentric circles centered on the fixed point where we spend more time than any other: the place where we sleep. It’s here where we find some of the most essential accompaniments of our lives—from medications to romantic partners. Our dwelling radiates outward from our mattresses to include bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms, home offices, and the like. It may also include outdoor property in the form of yards, patios or roofs. Homes come in all shapes and sizes, but always involve walls or boundaries of one form or another. Only through separation can we attain the most prized commodities of human existence: security. Privacy. Comfort. Intimacy.
For most of human history, home was also embedded in a specific geography, like a valley or shoreline. Such geographies are in some sense defining: if they don’t actually shape our personalities (a lifelong craving for the sea; a yen for mountains), they often mark boundaries we strive to cross, like the proverbial case of the restless farm boy who migrates to the big city. Long after we’ve left such places behind, we continue to think of ourselves, and describe ourselves, in terms of the locales, natural and man-made, at which we were born and/or came of age (“I’m a city girl”; “I’m a child of the plains”).
That sense of place can extend more widely to cover a larger ecosystem we think of as a region. New England, the Pacific Northwest, the South: we think of them as having a distinctive character whereby geography shapes character, as in the flintiness of a Down Easter or the sunny disposition of the Southern Californian. There are often sub-regions within these regions—New England is a place of coastlines as well as mountains; the South has its Tidewater and Piedmont; Texas is a diverse world of plains, deserts, and hills—and yet the sense of cohesion is strong enough to attract the psychic loyalty of people who, when asked to describe themselves, will be inclined to give an answer like “Midwestern” or “East Coast.” Though such attachments can sometimes be dismissed as sentimental in a country (or, for that matter, a world) linked by global communications and commerce, they continue to exert pull on our consciousness and remind us that there’s nothing especially cohesive about the congeries of climates and cultures that comprise the multiple landscapes of continental of North America.
But for most us of in the 21st century, the boundaries that in many cases define our lives—our addresses, our school districts, our tax bills—are abstract and invisible: the villages, towns, counties, and states whose contours were fixed long before we arrived and remain fixed long after we’ve left. Cartographers mark such boundaries with what they call “political maps,” which is true in more ways than one. No less—and in some ways a good deal more—than the natural landscape, such features add up to the hand we’ve been dealt: if zip codes don’t actually define us, they reflect a demographic set of features that brand us in the eyes of pollsters, marketers, among a great many others.
As with geographic identity, our sense of man-made boundaries can go wider—Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and Cornhuskers have been cherished identities in our sports culture, even though all three share similar geographic features—reaching its widest ambit with our national identity: home as the United States of America. There’s something downright imperial about considering the boundaries of your home to stretch across thousands of miles (and a sizable stretch of ocean between the Lower 48, Alaska, and Hawaii).
Some might be inclined to go still further when one considers a world in which human beings travel across national boundaries with unprecedented speed and ease, and one where communications systems span the globe with instantaneous transmission. We thus have a large and growing number of people for whom national identity is not an especially meaningful marker. We hear lots of talk of “global citizenship,” though such an idea probably doesn’t stand scrutiny. Indeed, I’ve always regarded it as a contradiction in terms. Again: we need boundaries. You can’t have a door without a wall, and you can’t have a home without either.
Next: the cosmopolitan vs. the provincial.