7. Domestic blitz

If there's one thing that is truly held in common by all those who fall under the heading 'American,' it's the obsession with making and remaking our homes and the landscapes they're embedded in. Building, renovating, decorating and redecorating, planting and mowing – outside of staring at screens, it's what we do (and much of our time staring at screens is spent staring at other people building, renovating, etc., or showing us how to do so). Looking up actual data on the chunk of the national economy that is supported by our houses, yards, and gardens might encroach on the time I need outside today to move some logs around to create a new flower bed, so I'll just assert that the chunk is a big one.

In her 1958 work The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt criticized the devotion people have to cultivating and caring for their home spaces (she singled out the French, but that was probably due to lingering German cultural bias). She saw this devotion as a symptom of the breakdown of the public sphere in the modern West, the arena in which, when properly realized, we not only decide on the rules that we all must follow in order not to get in each other's way in our private lives, but also, and more importantly, recognize each other as citizens. This recognition takes us out of the private sphere, where we live our lives as family members, friends, worshippers, and workers, and, as such, it represents for Arendt a form of self-realization and achievement of freedom that cannot be had in the purely private realm. One might have thought Arendt would have been more sympathetic to the call of the domestic, for she was herself a refugee from Nazi Germany and had experienced directly the loss of house and home, and as a (secular) Jewish intellectual and some-time Zionist, she was fully aware of the history of the homelessness of the Jewish people. But instead, she saw the turning of our energies inward to our houses and gardens as a kind of abnegation of responsibility, a refusal to do the work on the outward world we share, the world of the institutions and infrastructure required for collective political self-determination.

I think Arendt is at least partially right about this. For my own part, I put an immense amount of time and energy into home-related work, making, maintaining, and decorating the private spaces I share with my family and into which I invite my friends. I try to do as much of this I can in world-conscious ways, thinking about environmental and social impacts of choices involved in it. But that world-conscious home-work is limited in what it can accomplish regarding these environmental and social ends, for the choices I face in pursuing it are shaped by a systems that transcend me and what I want. It’s also clear that, no matter how world-conscious, this sort of activity is not political in Arendt's sense of that, for it does not involve me recognizing and being recognized by others as a public citizen. I don't know that Arendt is right that my domestic orientation reflects a frustrated desire for the political, a wish that I would rather be engaged in public activity. But, if I'm being honest with myself, I can see that it does involve a deliberate turning away from it.

Except - except that there are almost no avenues for public, political activity, at least (in the U.S.) ones that aren't just about helping one of the two major parties get their people elected, or pointlessly supporting a third-party alternative. Arendt's sense of the political is of participating in shared governance, not just by voting but through conversation and deliberation, the sort of old-school town hall governance that was present (if imperfectly) in the British colonial towns and their later descendants on the plains and prairies, or the more aristocratic milieus of ancient Athens and the early American Congress. To be sure, there are where I live various city and county commissions one can apply to be on, and you can run for local (or non-local) office, but these opportunities are by nature limited in how many they can involve, and they are optional. I also see a lot of community-oriented activity happening through school-related parent organizations, especially with extra-curricular activities like sports and music, but those tend to be divorced from genuinely public concerns. The political simply isn't institutionalized in a way where participation is universal and expected. And I do wish it were.

That wish is tempered with a degree of caution, however. As a professor, I am in one of the few jobs that carries with it an expectation to help run the institution it is situated within (though I'm writing this at a time where nationally this form of intra-institutional power-sharing is decaying). And I've taken on program-level administrative roles that have shown me I'm competent at the sort of work required for this, but also that I'm temperamentally not well suited for it, at least when it becomes contentious rather than collaborative. The Arendtian model requires one be like Arendt herself, invigorated rather than shut down by dispute, and so those who, like me, tend to be conflict-averse have a hard time when the public sphere becomes a boxing ring. Also, learning how to perform well in these roles has also given me a deep appreciation for the limits of collective self-rule, for it turns out that knowledge makes a huge difference, and even highly educated and (ostensibly) open-minded, critically thoughtful people are subject to all sorts of irrational biases and in-group/out-group dynamics that restrict how well they can do the work of managing an institution that they only know about from one narrow angle. But all systems have embedded irrationality, so this isn't by itself a refutation of the academic one, which does have real virtues, chiefly the deep commitment to it that it instills in its members, and its mode of sharing the work of running it as democratically as is possible.

We've arguably been unmaking the public sphere for some time, a couple of hundred years or more if Arendt is to be believed, but certainly for a few decades in the U.S. The term 'unmaking' suggests we need to remake or make it anew, which we do. But we have to be cautious how we understand that idea. Arendt had a lot to say about how to think of political institutions in relation to the idea of making, and she was surely right that they cannot be fabricated in the same way other things can. To make a nation as if it were raw material being organized according to a fixed design is to view the people of the nation the way one might a stack of boards at the lumber yard: as gradable into good material and bad, with the bad to be given at best hidden supporting roles and, if no such roles are available, consigned to the scrap heap or ground into bits. Plenty of leaders and would-be-leaders are or have been happy enough to view their people in this way. But if we're to have a political society that actually respects our humanity and recognizes our capacity for citizenship, our institutions must be a constant work that we all engage in. This makes the making of the political more like the making of a jazz tune than the building of a building: there's a recognizable structure we all must know and be committed to respecting, and our job is both to keep that structure alive and moving along and to take turns improvising within it.

And this helps us see one thing Arendt missed about our obsession with home and its relation to politics. She was keenly aware of our inherent fractiousness as people, and she knew that part of the job of politics –  and also the built spaces in which it takes place as an activity – was both to express and corral this fractiousness. But what she didn't adequately appreciate, I think, was how our houses, apartments, yards, and gardens are public facing. We don't just make our homes for ourselves, we make them to communicate to others. Their appearance manifests a powerful expressive language that we learn to interpret as we learn to navigate all of the distinctions of class and culture that make up our society (as Alison Lurie nicely details in The Language of Houses). We take joy in admiring homes like ours or whose aesthetics we aspire to and we delight in dissing those we find lacking. While this can simply reflect and reinforce social divisions, it can also, like shared love of football or other sports, help support a functional political system by displacing some of the antagonisms that are unresolvable within that system and giving us a common purpose: that of making the homes we want.

That might also help us, at least a little, to confront the unintended ecological consequences that our domestic blitz is creating by reframing the challenges of climate change and all the rest as ones that are about our shared planetary home and how to protect it. That might not be public-spirited enough for Arendt, but it might resonate with the common national identity we Americans implicitly express ever time we pass through the sliding doors into Lowe's or Home Depot.