When I was young man and just getting out into the world, I noticed that the gap between myself and my coevals grew quickly once I ventured outside our shared confines. I had friends in school who had never left the state and did not have much interest in what was beyond their little slice of heaven.
Once I was regularly venturing beyond the perimeter, a gap between myself and them started to grow. At the time, I did not get why they lost interest in me, but I also had my own new interests. I lost touch with them and that was it. Within a year or two, people I talked to every day had become strangers.
Travel changes the traveler in ways the traveler does not notice. When you’re young you don’t know these things, but through travel you begin to figure it out. As I sink into decrepitude, I find that my only close friends are people who have had a fair amount of travel. My trips usually involve meeting these friends somewhere new or possibly visiting them at their new digs.
In a gathering, I can quickly figure out if someone has a lot of miles on them. There’s an aloofness, an otherness, that comes from travel, particularly living in strange places for extended periods. I suspect that it comes from having seen humans in various natural environments and discovering that settled life is mostly the same everywhere. Life in Portland Maine is pretty much the same as life in Portland Oregon.
Once you figure out that your way is not all that special, it is hard to remain a provincial. The heart of provincialism, it seems to me, is the belief that your way is unique, not necessarily better. Once you see that it is not unique some of the ropes tying you to your ancestral lands are cut and you can no longer feel the same way about it.
Saying that, I have know men who have traveled for work, yet lost none of their provincialism. I worked with a guy from Pittsburgh, who got on a plane every Monday going somewhere. He and his family had moved a few times around the country for work. Yet, everything about his professional life was geared toward getting back to Pittsburgh and getting off the travel circuit. He was and would always be a Yinz.
There’s also a gap between people who travel beyond their native lands and those who just travel around their country. I have a friend, one I was visiting with recently, who has lived all over the world. He has a different air about him than friends who have stuck to North America. I think you acquire a sophistication about humanity when you observe foreigners in their native habitat.
I suspect this is why Europeans seem so sophisticated to Americans while the English just feel like funny talking rubes to us. There’s familiarity too. Most Americans know enough about the English to understand something about them. Living in a land where over the next hill live a bunch of weirdos speaking gibberish probably makes provincialism difficult.
I once worked for a company that moved managers around every two years in order to break their provincialism. The theory was that living in a bunch of different places would make them company men rather than “Bostonians” or “Iowans”. Anyone who does not understand the link between corporate ideology and fascism has never worked at a large corporation.
The FBI used to follow this model, but for entirely different reasons. In order to avoid corruption, agents moved from field office to field office every two years, while they were field agents. They wanted fresh eyes, but they also wanted to avoid the possibility of corruption. The “Zip” Connolly story shows why that was a good idea.
Part of what drives the managerial elite’s hatred of the American middle-class is this cosmopolitan – provincial tension. The girl who went off to Holyoke to major in public administration and womyn’s studies was not trained to hate normal people. She acquired it through travel and class solidarity. First she went off to college, then maybe grad school, with internships in DC and NYC in between.
By the time she lands in the bureaucracy somewhere, she looks back on her parents and childhood with a degree of contempt. Those local yokels seem small and stupid to her, because, after all, they have not seen the world. The fact that she may be as dumb as a post only reinforces this dynamic. Her tribe is the vast army of cubicle jockeys in the bureaucracy, naturally at war with the “other”, who happen to be Americans.
With that in mind, it is not hard to see why the Maoists and Khmer Rouge sent these people out to the fields. I’m fond of pointing out that the commies are often pretty good at noticing the problems. It’s their solutions that are criminally insane. The Asian commies really understood the gap between the cosmopolitan and the provincial and how it warped the relationship between the ruled and the rulers.
That and it was probably a lot of fun sending egg heads out to the rice paddies. Who amongst us have not seen a guy like this and thought it would be a good idea to send him out to the mines? But, that’s a topic for another day. I have to unpack.
What I’m hearing is that everyone hates where they’re from until it starts to be changed.
re: Yinz
An arrow through my heart!!!
Born and raised in The Burg until 17 then left never to return except for weddings and funerals. My wife to be at first thought I had a speech impediment but was disabused of that thought when I brought her home to meet the folks and she met them and other Pittsburgers discovering that everyone she met had not a speech impediment but spoke Pittsbughese: an accent and vocabulary unique to people of the region of the three rivers.
Yet I had NO idea of what Yinz meant. I had to look it up.
Dan Kurt
p.s. I have travelled extensively all my adult life including Europe, Middle East, Asia, South and Central America and of course the USA and Canada but I never visited Boston proper for some reason or Africa. I do believe travel is broadening but as I age I know that the USA could be better if the diverse world would remain there instead of coming here. Travel to experience aliens rather than have them transform our country by bringing their problems here.
I have to disagree with many of your basic premises, as I think they are industry specific. Specifically I (and the vast majority of people I work with in tech) have been to dozens of countries and states on various business needs. I have worked for two American, two Korean, and now a European company, and obviously had to spend a lot of time in HQ. My customers have been largely overseas, which required enough time in Korea, Japan, Taiwan or China that I had to keep adding pages to my passport to the point it looks like a paperback novel. On the mfg side most of the Americans I know have done 6-12 month training stints from anywhere in Central America (back in the 80s when there were electronics plants there) to the Philippines, to today the hinterlands of China and Vietnam. Many of these guys take Expat packages to stay on longer, and more than a few come back with overseas brides.
But basically everyone I know comes back with the same universal thought: Most of the world is a shit-hole and the US has (or had) something remarkable. Most everyone I know (especially the ones with the overseas brides) looks at retiring in the region they grew up in the States, or something close to it. Yeah, things look exactly the same on the shopping blvds in Kiev, Seoul, Shanghai, Milan, and so on, but get behind the malls and things are always a lot different. I don’t see aloofness or anything superior, instead I see sadness that instead of pulling the rest of the world up, this country is doing its best to lower itself to the third world standard. Once you experienced the third world (and even “nice places” like Western Europe where the standard of living for the professional class is WAY lower than the average American), you want to get away from it.
You’ve described military brats. I raised six of them here, there and everywhere. They are now all grandparent-age, and all are about as non-provincial as you can get.
My personal experience is that once I had lived for periods of time in other countries, I sort of lost interest in traveling to places for short term holiday vacations. I may as well go to the local zoo, as the experience was just as superficially entertaining, without all the extra expense and figuring out where to sleep for the night. But maybe that is just me.
I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about, and wallowing in, my growing provincialism. With that in mind I’d like to offer you a variation on your comment “The heart of provincialism, it seems to me, is the belief that your way is unique, not necessarily better.”
I counterpropose that the heart of a healthy provincialism should be recognition that your way is a system; perhaps better than most, maybe not as good as the best (we can’t all be Canadians, or Swiss, or Swedes, or whatever), but in any case your way is something to be embraced as a whole rather than eclectically combined with elements drawn from elsewhere.
Uniqueness doesn’t really play into it, nor should it (uniqueness for its own sake is probably a dumb idea).
The errors of cosmopolitanism (there are so many) include prominently among them the conceit of eclecticism, that you can take the parts you like from here and there and make your own patchwork. Not that you can’t actually do it; of course you can; but in so doing you miss out on critical synergies and emergent effects. The cosmopolitan either does not see what they are missing, or they reject it out of hand. Provincialism grows from seeing the whole and wanting in on it.
I know several well off, well educated, well traveled people whose lack of practical skills render them clumsy fools around most skilled trade, blue collar working people.
You are correct, sir! The founders of MN were Yankees, and that Roundheadedness still prevails. It grafted very nicely onto the Scandinavian newcomers. And by hockey problem I assume you mean the Gophers’ 13 year NCAA championship drought (although the gals won last year-SKI-U-MAH!) and/or the Wild’s inability to mount a serious playoff run? 🙂 In fact hockey is interesting in that Minnesotans are VERY provincial about hockey- the assumption in MN (in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary) is that no one else in the USA is really any good, only Minnesotans. We used to think, back in the dark ages of the ’70s, that all the New England players were prep school pretty boys- we did not know really what places like Dorchester and Charlestown, etc. were.
I worked with a guy from Minnesota. He immediately put his kids into hockey and they immediately got beat up. It took them a little while to figure out that Minnesota Nice did not work so well on the Massholes.
I will say, too, that Minnesota seems to occupy a higher status among northeastern goodwhites, then say, Kansas or Iowa – maybe it’s the Garrison Keillor effect?
Minnesota was founded by Yankees, while Iowa and Kansas were mostly Midlanders and a decent number of people from Appalachia. Good Whites (Yankee) can tolerate Midlanders, but they loath Appalachians (bad whites). But, Midlanders will switch sides and back bad whites on issues like guns, crime and religion so they may as well be Hitler as far as Good Whites are concerned.
Yes, I know Minnesota is full of Scandinavians, but the founding culture was Yankee. It’s why Minnesota has the same voting patterns as Massachusetts and a serious hockey problem.
I wouldn’t say I was particularly well traveled. I’ve been to about 35 states and 2 Canadian provinces, and have been to Europe 4 times- never lived there though. I’ve not been to the far east nor the third world. I lived the first 30 years my life in the Upper Midwest, and the second 30 in the Northeast. I find northeasterners, especially Derb’s “goodwhites” (and, mind you, my perspective is skewed by living in latte town) to be WAAY more provincial than, say Minnesotans. I teach high school, and see it as one of my duties to extol the virtues of what my kids think of as the wasteland between the coasts. I won’t even begin to talk about what they think about southerners! I was playing golf the other day here at my home course with a guy who grew up in Tulsa- we both remarked that we often hear well-meaning comments from our goodwhite neighbors that are something like “aren’t you glad to have escaped the hell-hole of your upbringing to be able to live here?” I find that as irritating as people find my “Minnesoata-isms”. While I don’t talk like Marge Gunderson I do say “ruff” instead of “roof” an “d’ya wanna come with?” Of course I do it just to annoy people. I was once voted by the senior class at my school “An entire class period without mentioning the state of Minnesota.”
When I moved to Boston in my youth, I was called “the southern guy” because of my barely noticeable southern accent. People carried on like I stepped out of Gone With The Wind. Hilariously once, a local asked me if I was uncomfortable around people who were accepting of minorities. I nearly burst out laughing. Boston is one of the most racist cities on the planet, but the locals think the opposite.
You are right about Yankee provincialism. It’s a little shocking when you first experience it. I’ve met hillbillies in Boone County more worldly than the typical New Englander.
That guy should work the lunch counter at Mickey D’s.
Then watch his head explode.
That would be beautiful.
I have almost never seen this interesting theory in print, although it has crossed my mind more than once over time. I do remember a remark about “how would someone who has always lived in a flat, square state understand that?” and it resonated when I’d end up in a discussion with one.