Of all possible places, those places we call home are held to be among the most important. But the modern concept of home is a fairly recent one. I’m not talking merely about home in its trivial sense, home as a place of residence, your house or apartment, the place to which you are currently confined under coronavirus house-arrest, but home in its deeper sense as well, home as a place of origin, that quasi-mythical place that forms the cornerstone in the foundation of your self-concept, perhaps also serving as an emotional anchor during trying times like these.
Places that were of formative value and that carry a sense of personal connection and attachment have probably always been part of the human milieu. But home, as a concept, as a place where you belong (be long: a place of long-term occupation) is a product of an agrarian lifestyle, a sedentary lifestyle tied to specific parcels of tended land, to pastures and fields, to villages and permanent dwellings. Home is a product of domestication—a word that itself derives from the Latin for home, domus. The verb domesticate, to tame, comes from a Medieval Latin word that means literally to make a product of the household. The idea of home is at the very core of domestication as a way of life, and part of what distinguishes the civilized from the non-civilized.
What does home mean to a nomadic gatherer-hunter? If there is anything in such a society that corresponds even remotely to the civilized idea of home, it is either something so expansive that it encompasses entire regions of habitation, or it is something that travels with them, something that involves proximity to specific other people as much or more than it does to a specific physical place, something that moves with the person, a perpetually shifting zone that is determined by the active requirements of the moment, a zone that is defined by the center—quite literally “where the heart is.”
Modern city-dwellers have become increasingly nomadic in recent years. But this is nomadism of a different kind from that of a gatherer-hunter. It is a punctate nomadism in which the person moves from one temporary “permanent residence” to another. Modern civilized life is, for many people, a series of dislocations, leading to a perpetual sense of diaspora. Home becomes nostalgia for a permanence of place that in reality rarely exists, a Norman Rockwell painting of a time out of time.
A while back I was in the car on the way home—or the place I currently call home—and listening to an NPR interview with a small business entrepreneur who suggested that people have become dislodged from traditional social groups due to the digital nature of our world, and to the high level of nomadism, moving from job to job, and that because of this we lack the durable objects of attachment that were available in former times. So, we attach to brands, to products, and to celebrities instead of the things that used to serve as the primary material of our self-concepts: place, family, and friends.
From the entrepreneur’s perspective, this was a good thing, something to be exploited. And the conversation drifted into ways to enhance customer loyalty, and thereby increase a business’ odds for long-term viability. But from a human perspective, this can only be seen as part of the accelerating tragedy that is civilization. Fandom, attachment to marketed consumables such as professional sport teams or entertainment franchises or brands of clothing reflects a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness left in the wake of our deepening sense of alienation, the void created from our inability to establish authentic connections to other people and to the physical world around us, from our inability to establish a coherent and internally-defined sense of self.
Rewilding, becoming human again, means abandoning these superficial forms of attachment, and embracing a more expansive and simultaneously more penetrating perspective on the places we occupy right now—a perspective that acknowledges the actual physical space around us and the many other living beings who are there right beside us, a perspective that is defined by the center.
