Wondering on the Moral Frontier
You picture a dad, emerging from a station wagon. You hear him intoning, in that voice available only to Dads moved to reverence by historical markers. “Guys, come look at this,” as the children blink. “Boy, isn’t this something,”
- Phil Christman, Midwest Futures
. . .
I read Phil Christman’s Midwest Futures in a single day. Sat down on my couch and finished it in one sitting. An afternoon really. I read Midwest Futures on June 11 and I remember, because I still have the texts that I sent out to friends immediately after – “you have to read this.”
At the time, I could not tell them exactly why they should. I still struggle to. For a work of only 137 pages, it defies easy categorization. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken so long for me to write about it. Even the title is misleading – more than half the book is an examination of Midwest history, futures unrealized and regional narratives that took their place as opposed to forward-looking statements. Future Nostalgia might be a more appropriate title, had not Dua Lipa already claimed it.
In truth, I’ve binged them both, more times than I care to admit. In a way, it’s because they’re both vibes. Midwest Futures, like any good pop album, is an immersive milieu that makes most sense when it’s consumed all at once, a constantly surprising linkage of important topics. Few of these connections are explored in depth, often briefly asserted (though heavily supported in the index). You get the sense that you agree or disagree, but you’d like to argue about it over beers with the author. You settle for reading the works cited, in a way that is frequent with pop, but may be a first for American letters.
The comparisons stop there, as Dua Lipa admittedly possesses much less disdain for the profit motive, and Christman finds its nefarious fingerprints all over the Midwest’s past and present. From the earliest definition of the region, capitalism plays a role. Thomas Jefferson initially viewed the land as a national “fund” that could be sold to extinguish the country’s debt. In order to sell, the land had to be made liquid – simple, standard, easily bought and sold by people who had never laid eyes on it.
In doing so, Christman affirms and expands Wendell Berry’s framework of “exploiters” versus “nurturers”, and through that lens he examines everything from the removal of the First Nations to the plats that grace the book’s cover to the traditional tropes of “Midwestern normalcy”. Each is framed as liquidity against complexity, with the victor inevitably the most capitalist, the outcome, only a matter of time.
There are many of these waning moments in each plat when I disagree with the assessment of culpability (at times one-sided) and the valuation of bounties gained (always too low). This does not change the fact that the cause-and-effect framework is a useful lens through which to understand the history and the present of the Midwest. In doing so it becomes, for the people that live in the region and who hope to design its future, a reference text of sorts.
Dave Chappelle, another Midwestern gem, recently defined this genre: “If you ask me the right questions, I got all kinds of shit I can tell you.” Before reading Midwest Futures, I had thought about liquidity in terms of financial markets, but never in terms of narratives. Once you see that framework applied to concrete situations, you start to see it everywhere.
I have a lot of questions.
Take this summer, when another, slightly smaller Midwestern anthology appeared. I picked up Notre Dame Magazine’s What is Happening Here?: A reading tour of South Bend and the community beyond campus elated to see the evolving relationship between my alma mater and my city celebrated in front of alumni around the globe.
I set it down, unsatisfied, recognizing relatively little of the richness that I love in South Bend. That’s not to say that writing about a farmer’s market, cheap houses, and Garth Brooks concerts isn’t true. It’s to say that if I had a quarterly-length publication at the nation’s pre-eminent Catholic university, I wouldn’t have spent so much time talking about Notre Dame’s ability to erect real estate or put people on the weekend train to Chicago.
I love this city for the deep sense of ownership and belonging it instills in those that find themselves here by necessity or by choice. We find a way to live together, to sit with messy, decades-long problems around economics, race, spirituality, and citizenship. That’s not a value judgement or a statement that we’ve somehow progressed on these problems more than other cities. It’s just recognition that if a prerequisite to love is knowledge, groups of people in South Bend are, thanks to proximity or longevity or something else, getting to know each other. It brings hope that one day we might achieve more than a livable level of decency in our community.
Christman writes that “there are whole years when it’s the most interesting time of day…when all kinds of new possibilities feel like they might be hovering nearby.” That feeling abounds in South Bend, but beyond Don Wycliff’s writing and that of Mike Schmuhl, the magazine largely ignores the tension, potential, and life that defines our city. What emerges is less a sense that issues and questions and living are happening in the community, and more that living had been done, and the problems solved, and the prosperity restored.
I will readily admit that my version of events is somewhat more complicated than the narrative pitched by What is Happening Here. We may have somewhat different aims. The issue opens with a quiet admission of its commercialism – that in its effort to recruit world-class faculty, the university has sought to improve the city. Apparently, that improvement extends to the page as well. The magazine presents an exceptionally liquid recruitment narrative, which can be cynically distilled to “we’re cheaper than Cambridge, and nicer than New Haven”.
It’s not wrong. It’s just not where I live. It’s not even a full depiction of Notre Dame’s engagement with the city. I shouldn’t really be surprised. As Christman tells us time and again, complicated doesn’t sell. Stories can be true, and stories can be useful – it’s exceedingly rare that they’re both. I have to admit, I’m not sure I’m offended by untruth or just this particular one; I was glad to see my city on the cover of a magazine – am I frustrated with what they’re selling, or with the fact that they’re selling at all?
These are not novel concerns. They have defined the American frontier – both physical and psychological – for the better part of 350 years. With varying levels of elegance and violence, the complexity of the “new” has always been repackaged for sale in other markets. One might argue that some small amount of it is necessary – people have to eat. The question is whether there can be a sustainable balance between the people that build resources from within the community and those that engage with resources outside of it.
Christman might say this selling imperils the moral frontier that is the Midwest. He argues “that we transfer the energy, the excitement that has traditionally surrounded the idea of the frontier (at least for white people) to the project of living generously, peaceably, and inclusively with our neighbors, old and new, human, animal, and plant”. His utopia, based on his assessment of the past, might involve little commercial motives of any kind – simply balance between the residents of a place and the people wandering to the frontier out of a need to live freely.
It’s a beautiful ideology, but every city has its limits. I think often about Bryan Stevenson’s maxim that “the opposite of poverty is not wealth, it’s justice”. This is absolutely true, but in today’s United States, injustice goes looking for certain Americans, and in today’s United States, they need wealth to achieve justice. Is not the same true of a frontier? If resources are needed to protect the best parts of it, to help it thrive, doesn’t someone need to sell something?
I realize that this is an equally fanciful portrait. That you can have the openness and communalism of a moral frontier, and when the roving bandits come to town to raid that year’s harvest, there will be some deified version of the Magnificent 7 waiting to stop them. “We deal in lead, friend.”
Some might say that these fantasies are necessary, that where there is no narrative, there is no progress. And I am inclined to believe them. South Bend should control its own narrative. It does not need to be centralized or simple, but it should be defined – by the voices we elevate, the businesses we support, the spaces that we inhabit together. If we don’t tell a story, we are living live in someone else’s. Midwest Futures shares the stories of those that set out for other frontiers, to build other utopias, in the hopes that we can settle our own a bit better.