Frontier and Metropolis

I would like to open up a new topic on my blog and I am going to call it “Frontier and Metropolis.” I am borrowing this title from a book of lectures that were delivered by a great Canadian historian J.M.S. (Maurice) Careless under that heading. I like the construction of frontier and city because I think it explains much about Canada but also because it helps us talk about a modern predicament and that is the unending frontier.

The unending frontier, as I am coming to understand it, can be anything from the ever expanding suburbs of large cities to the relentless expansion of technology, markets and cultural change associated with modernization. I think that the expansion of cities, the growth of technology and the increased commodification of modern life from the market place are all closely related.

But what I want to speak about is a dilemma that is old, so old in fact that you can trace it back to ancient Greece. I am talking about the notion of the city as the centre for culture, as the place of philosophy. Right now, I would like to position myself outside of the city and on the “frontier.” But I don’t like the term frontier so much because it implies colonization and conquest. I want to situate in the “country”, in the bucolic splendor of farms, forests and fields where people might live by natural cycles.

My love of the organic, the local and the natural has put me at odds with my chosen profession. I am studying to become a historian and the “payoff” of my labour is the doctor of philosophy degree or PhD that will be awarded to me after I complete my dissertation. As I pursue my research I also must teach and do research for others in order to earn a living. Research and teaching place me squarely within the modern urban-technological-market place/juggernaut because that is where the work is. The academic world is in “the city” and if I choose to pursue an academic career, the metropole is where I will stay.

Except I do not want to live in the metropole. I want to take the education and the cultural knowledge that I have worked for and carry it with me into the country.  I am choosing to go to the rural because I believe that a man or woman should be able to live a life of both mind and body in a small town setting. Small towns and villages should not be places we flee but places where we stay and settle, places where we can work the land and nurture it, not subdivide it, commodify it and sell it off like shares in a business.

How is this done? Today I am looking for work in small schools in the United States (private schools, in fact). In Canada there are very few of these whereas in my native land there are so very many and in New England in particular there are excellent schools in small towns throughout the region. I did not appreciate just how great a gift small, private institutions were until I came to Canada and realized that to be an educator means to be essentially confined to large public institutions that are concentrated in urban centres. Certainly I could try and teach in the public schools here but that would require I follow a provincially mandated curriculum and that I go to teacher’s college on top of my many years of graduate school. I don’t want to do that; I prefer small classes, a rigorous intellectual programme and the freedom to challenge students and be challenged by them in an intimate and privately-directed environment. I am idealistic, I know. But I also have a dream.

I have been reading Wendell Berry of late and one theme of which he writes so eloquently is the way in which the United States has been the home of two competing traditions of landholding: the nurturing tradition of care and generality and the exploiting tradition of specialization and commodification. If you read American history you know right away which has been the dominant practice.

There is an exploitive tradition in the United States (and across North America) which diminishes place; it looks down at those who have remained behind to make a living or to maintain a familial plot. The farmer, Berry’s protagonist, has been especially victimized by a mechanized, bureaucratized agriculture and the loss of small farms and the rise of agribusiness has only encouraged the erosion of small proprietors and the emptying of farming communities across the country. Berry laments this arguing that small communities in the United States should not be stripped of their institutions, intellectual capital and economic and cultural resources. Life in other words should not be somewhere else, it should be where people choose to find it and make it. In modern America it is hard to make your life in one place; you typically must follow work somewhere else.

This is precisely the plight (and I believe it is a plight) of the academic. I have friends in the academic game who, when you ask them where they would like to live, will tell you that it does not matter. They simply do not have that option open to them. And what is worse, debt is part-and-parcel to the life of the aspiring academic; it is quite common for people in Canada and the United States to come out of graduate school tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Worse, they come out facing large liabilities all the while not knowing where their next job is going to turn up. And most academic jobs today are low-paying and temporary (the political economy of higher education mirrors other worlds of low wage labour). Apparently the price of acquiring knowledge is debt and it carries with it a forfeiture of the option of choosing where to call home.

The academic market reminds me, to a certain degree, of the fabled Canadian resource town. When the market is booming everyone moves in and tries to cash in on the bonanza. Canada is full of these towns where gold, nickel, oil and timber are mined and harvested and this has been a feature for much of the country’s history post-Confederation. In the academic market, when you are trying to make your name and hopefully acquire one of the few permanent spots, you follow the money and when it is no longer there, away you go.

I reject this. I also reject the notion that intellectual life must happen in “the city.” Thinking on this condition I am reminded of something Socrates said in Plato’s Phaedrus:

“Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me -only the people in the city can do that.”

Surely the pitfalls of a mindset that ignores the land and feels it can learn nothing outside of the city is readily available to the eye. I wonder; are we fated to live by these Socratic words as though they were a dictum on culture for all time? True, the city has historically been the centre of intellectual life dating back to ancient times; it was the place of kings, courts and markets and to ensure that arts, commerce and politics flourished within its gates, palisades were built to protect that inner world from the marauders of the wilderness. But must modern learning remain confined to the cité libre?

I have a dream of living in a rural community or small town where I might teach in a small school and share my education with others. I want a place where I may set my life by the rhythm of the seasons like a farmer might and exchange knowledges with my neighbours. I want to own land and to enjoy the labour land demands. I want to be a steward and a nurturer in a community of the like-minded.

I do not mean to present a simplistic or prejudicial view of rural life. Nor do I want to be seen as suggesting that rural life, land ownership and escape from the city is the answer.  What I have realized is that academic life demands a price that is steep. By becoming an academic, especially in Canada, you are drawn into the city and must draw your water there. You must set your life by the vagaries of the rationalized market place and you must forgo the choice of home and community in the pursuit of wages. This, it seems to me, is not at all the way life should be.