Death Embrace · 8 September 2008

It has been asked: Do rural people really feel hated?

Yes. (Insert a decade of ever more alienated returns home. Also, many painful slips of the tongue on all parts. Cf, when professors say things like religion has no sociological relevance because it’s “atomistic” or that rural America is “empty,” they don’t look smart.)

I think there are two streams of feeling here. The first is straight up fear—the libertarian strain of rural feeling. Giuliani’s sneering use of “cosmopolitan” points to the sensation that rural people have interacting with the cosmopolite: they feel authentic, hardworking and sincere… talking to hypocritical, affected lazyasses. I actually love the critique of hipster-bourgeois consumption (latte-drinking, volvo-driving liberals) that goes along with this.

The second is the desire to be hated for one’s own righteousness, as the New Testament promises—the evangelical strain of rural feeling (for pure distillations of this see Matthew 10:22, Vengeance Rising, etc. etc.). Martyrdom is a really common sentiment all over the place, and (together with anti-conservative haters and liberal snobbishness) it feeds the anti-snob politics that have worked brilliantly for the GOP since Nixon. The GOP’s line that “they won’t like Sarah in Washington but we sure like her” trades on this martyrdom-turned-aggressive vibe. And the thing is, the left keeps feeding it. The too-good-to-hate-you hatred is everywhere. And it’s easy for a progressive to begin to feel it when her own freedoms from sexism, racism and homophobia are being attacked.

I broke down and joined Facebook this summer when I got all sad that my trip home was falling through. The trendy timesuck factor of Facebook always put me off; and the idea of my three main networks coming together made me cringe. But I wanted to feel connected to certain people from high school, and letting those networks intertwine in a single node required a level of self-honesty that was good for me. I don’t want to be particularly available to people, but I also don’t need to hide from them. In the end though, it’s not about who sees me. It’s about who I see with a degree of connectivity. Who I see is SAHM conservative activists, a diesel mechanic, a few people who escaped MT by the one dependable route—joining the military. And the rest who I still remember so sentimentally: they aren’t online. Because they’re working and poor, and don’t live the kind of lives where far-flung global social networks are a reality.

It raises the question: where do we learn about the world? I mostly learn through reading history books, mainstream internet sites, datasets on demographics and public opinion, and making my friends who live really diverse experiences tell me about their lives. How high quality are my data? Why are the people with the best data in the world—American political parties—using it in such different ways? Seriously. I’m asking.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

Comment

1. We have all learned something VISCERAL by direct experience. Walk a mile an other mans shoes and you will KNOW your own life will never be the same.
   But complex. It is hugely complex. And so our first task and only task is to find ourselves, and our destiny, our personal seed for the world.
   In the meantime we can only adopt a level of fairness and outrage since we may just have realised that we are turning into a tree, but yet a sapling. Our roots not yet deep enough and our branches BUT we are not yet big enough to spread out into the world in a big ass way. The deeper we go, and the bigger we grow, the more our own integrity becomes maple hard, and our character willow flexible.
   We learn this by the ‘idea of who we are’ being broken, by seeing anothers perspective first-hand. This break never heals I believe, it is our entry to the connectivity we will attempt to engage in for the rest of our life. First and foremost the connectivity to our own Self, and the ultimate subservience of our ego to our Self. Our potential, the tree of our life, within us. And then the forest is healthy. The whole point of citizenship surely.
   I kind of think that the idea of all this ‘fightin’, is gnashing of teeth, it has no sound basis, and is a black and white argument, which has no relevance. Noam Chomsky is usually right, they all lie. He is so frank, god bless him.
   Speaking of god, I believe the whole idea of our evolution is to live a life more complex but understood, more felt viscerally, and adapt to that, which means we are evolving closer to that most complex of all complexities. God…
   ...um, that was a bit long, maybe my roots are showing! :)

   Posted by: Gregor · Sep 8, 06:26 PM · #

2. That was really nice, Gregor… I have nothing more to add at the moment. Just liked how you put it.

   Posted by: Liz · Sep 8, 07:34 PM · #

3. Thanks Liz. Owl has got me all worked up again, do you see how she does this! haha

   Posted by: Gregor · Sep 9, 04:28 AM · #

4. Oh no…

   It sounds like you may be offering some commentary on this, from I hope an inside (Jungian) – outside (Torontoite) point of view?

   (Gregor’s online location)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 9, 07:41 AM · #

5. Yes, I have now. I think they should rename blogs to blurts. But that is just my sense of irony! :)

   Posted by: Gregor · Sep 9, 10:39 AM · #

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