A friend of mine posted a spectacular quote from Edward Abbey yesterday, and it reminded me of a peculiarly American problem: How do we distinguish between our individual selves and ourselves as participants in society?
For those of you who’ve never read him, Abbey was a Wild West environmentalist, misanthrope, romantic and occasional park ranger. I’ve only read two of his books (“The Monkeywrench Gang,” the novel that inspired the creation of EarthFirst!, and “Desert Solitare,” a collection of essays), but they went a long way.
I love the kind of man Abbey seemed to be: Principled about some values, acerbically transgressive toward others. He wasn’t born in the West, but on some level it seemed like he became the West. He was a gun-toting enviro-anarchist who appeared to offer roughly equal helpings of scorn to the developers destroying his beloved landscape and the do-gooders attempting to protect it.
Therein lies the rub. Abbey drew a red line under the biggest conflict I will always have with liberalism. It’s also the primary problem liberalism will always have in some American places. I’m talking about the experience of life in cities, and the vastly different experience of life on the fringes. Both share a common civilization, but there are times when we seem to share little else.
America is now a nation of city-dwellers, yet roughly half of us still fancy ourselves cowboys: More than 80 percent of us live in urban areas, but our narratives sputter because our national identity remains bound up in the cultural memory of frontier and wilderness.
Charles Mann, the author of “1491,” argues that our cowboy archetype — quiet, laconic, poetic, self-reliant — is itself the ghost of the Native American cultures Europeans encountered on the frontier. The deeper we Europeans pushed into North America, the more it penetrated us.
Abbey wrote from that perspective. He lived on the fringes, appreciated the mystical beauty of wild places and distrusted civilization even as he benefited from much of what it had to offer.
Today he’s a cultural Rorschach Test: Conservatives — who consider themselves the robust heirs of the European pioneers — see themselves in his individualism and his deep mistrust of government. Liberals — who believe that unfettered capitalism is destroying Nature — see themselves in his environmentalism and opposition.
I see Abbey as a gifted romantic whose brilliant purity obscures his fundamental incoherence. Abbey loved being in nature on his own terms, but offered little thought or consideration for the civilization that put him there. He writes about the experience of wildness, both inward and outward. But describing a personal experience isn’t the same thing as understanding what creates, shapes or threatens it. Archetypes influence culture, but they break down the moment they cross a society’s threshold.
Like most of us, I was raised in or near urban areas: Chicago, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee, Greensboro, El Paso, Charleston. I spent a few years in rural settings and small towns, but even those were well within the “urban experience.” If you can drive to a store in 10 minutes, or drink “city water,” or hook up to Broadband Internet by landline, it doesn’t really matter if there are woods and fields around you: You’re living an urban, civilized experience.
You might listen to country music, drive a pickup, and think of yourself as continuing some rural tradition. But if you’re living in a suburb and working at a salaried job, you’re disconnected from the truth of your experience. That’s a huge source of cognitive dissonance for millions of white, semi-urban Americans.
If you live in a big city with millions of other people, the full reality of the urban experience overtly shapes your thinking. You may dream of “escaping to the country,” but you understand how interconnected things — and people — truly are. There are other theories about this, but I think this explains why big cities tend to produce liberal politics.
I remember spending about a week in Manhattan long ago, and being absolutely fascinated by the tiny parking lot I could watch from my window. In a standard Southern town, it would have held no more than 10 cars, and would have been governed by meters or left free. This lot packed in dozens of vehicles — three high at the back, on hydraulic lifts — with mere inches between them. A braying native ran the place, aided by two to three hustling immigrants. They seemed to know each customer by name, or more to the point, by schedule. A day’s parking cost about $50, and its frantic choreography was more intricate and precise than a Busby Berkeley musical number. A mundane miracle.
That lot became my model for understanding New York and other great cities. It’s a series of compromises, adaptations, attitudes and ideas that interconnect to keep the city working. That’s liberalism.
These days I live in a trailer with a view of woods and fields. It’s the illusion of wildness — the tract is surrounded on all sides by an encroaching suburban reality, and I can be at a grocery in five minutes or in the center of a booming city in less than 20.
But the experience of life here — of days when I go without speaking to a soul besides my wife, of growing food while fending off deer, rabbits, cabbage worms, bugs, etc. — certainly offers the feeling of something wilder. I’m getting to know birds and animals on an individual basis, and I notice little things in new ways. It’s changing me.
I’ve also lived out West. I’ve driven hundreds of miles at a stretch without crossing a single paved road. I have experienced true solitude and deep wilderness, those mystical mixtures of profound beauty and unspoken terror. I understand how such things can become romanticized, packaged, and marketed to us as perversions of the real thing. When we love the ideas of wilderness and self-reliance, yet never choose to seek them out, our minds enter a dangerous dissonance.
I am not a liberal because I love liberalism. I support liberal policies because they address justice, reflect complicated realities, and attempt to do the work required for millions of people to live close to each other in peace and prosperity. Liberalism is based on the idea of compromise, and when it works properly, it bends over time toward fairness, equality and mutual respect.
But it’s also annoying, in the same way that people are annoying. I don’t like dealing with government on any level — whether its the local water district or the IRS. I’m glad my wife and I have health care thanks to Democrats, but frankly it’s a pain in the ass to deal with insurance companies. And banks. And don’t get me started about phone plans.
Like Abbey, I’ve reached the age where I prefer simple things over complicated ones. But that’s a personal preference, not a manifesto. I never forget that I’m reaching you because a federal entity called DARPA developed a thing called The Internet which was extended into something called the World Wide Web, which is administered from Europe and which created the opportunity for a corporation to grow this monstrosity called Facebook. Even as I celebrate simplicity, I have to acknowledge the complexity in which I live.
As liberals, we tend to think our intentions define us as ultimately good or bad. They don’t. As Americans, we tend to think we’re all Cowboys. We aren’t. As individuals we tend to rationalize our compromises. As a society, we tend to celebrate disconnected archetypes that are often powerfully misleading. We are, individually and collectively, a stew of conflicting, incoherent beliefs. But blaming that solely on the ignorance of “the other” misses the universal point: Experience shapes perspective.
Liberalism will never make much sense personally to the 15 percent of Americans who live in the big empty places out West, or in the forgotten places of Appalachia, or in the flat flyover states where every field is defined by four right-angles and walking to your neighbor’s house can take hours. Those places all benefit from the civilization that liberalism sustains, but the people who live there don’t experience life that way.
It’s a long way from those places to that bustling little Manhattan car lot. I suspect that’s the journey we have to make as a people, if we want to remain a people. Ultimately, Edward Abbey didn’t care. I suppose I still do.
Originally posted to Facebook on June 27, 2017.