Much of my life is concerned with the question of whether to keep something or throw it away. This conflict is also the story of America. We left behind the “old countries” where people held on to old traditions, old things. Good riddance, we said. Later, we lit out for the Territories. Back east, they are holding onto civilization, to all the habits and institutions people have built up over time; but out on the frontier, free from the tyranny of human ties, we feel we can forget the past and start over.
So, that’s the grand scheme of things, and it gets played out at my house on a small scale. I’m Old Europe, I’m the Northeastern cities, and my wife is doing all she can to reach the frontier. I save stuff. She throws things away. To maintain the balance of power, I have to watch to make sure she doesn’t get rid of something truly valuable, and she has to keep an eye on me so that I don’t accumulate too many useless things.
Admittedly, I push things to the point of absurdity sometimes. In our refrigerator, my half-eaten food can pile up and get lost in the rubble of old jars and packages. Food often reaches that in-between state where, in my view, it’s too late to eat it but too soon to throw it away. Periodically my wife lights a metaphorical match to my refuse heap – and not only does she experience an immediate sense of liberation, but so do I. I’m the same way with clothing. I have one closet full of shirts and pants I still wear and another full of stuff I used to wear that, you know, in theory, I could wear again someday. On my computer I keep thousands and thousands of old files. I carry my archive forward from one machine to the next. Loose change piles up in great heaps on my dresser. Left to their own devices, my books overflow the shelves, seizing more and more territory across the floor and over chairs and tables. I need my wife.
I like to think that she needs me. She needs the things and the traditions that I preserve. The photos, the cards and letters, the sentimental knickknacks that cheer us up when we look at them again. Even the papers, the financial records, can come in handy at rare but critical moments. I have the patience for these collections. I care for these traditions. She cares, too. Ultimately, the health of our marriage depends on our mutual appreciation for talents and perspectives that only one or the other of us has mastered.
That’s how America works too. The nation needs its genuine conservatives – collectors of culture, teachers, builders of institutions, farmers, unionists, and public servants – people who busy themselves, often at public expense, in the forming and maintenance of connections, coalitions, and families. Most of us, especially so-called liberals, are conservative in this sense. Our nation also needs its radicals – visionaries, entrepreneurs, simplifiers, those who eradicate traditions to clear space for new ideas. But there’s no guarantee these two types will understand and appreciate one another. The traditionalist threatens the visionary with stagnation; and the visionary threatens the traditionalist with mere destruction and loss. Satisfied traditionalists may stop learning and growing. Visionaries who know too little about the value of tradition are even more dangerous. In their zeal, they may destroy the communal good along with the bad, and create nothing worth keeping.
In our world it’s actually impossible to light out for the Territories, because the frontier is always here at home, in Indiana or Michigan or Wisconsin, where even the most radical Tea Partyist has to learn to live with the rest of us.