Strangers in Their Own Land

Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild

Strangers in Their Own Land documents a journey that we quickly realized we could not have made ourselves. Hochschild, a highly accomplished sociologist from U California Berkeley, uses her professional skills to penetrate small and culturally closed communities in southwestern Louisiana. Sheri, Joan, Margie, Annie, Mary Lib, Libby, and Mary (just back from 5 months in Mexico) gathered at Saran’s house on 25 April for an active and wide-ranging discussion of Hochschild’s accomplishments and the people she describes. The author weaves together a ‘great paradox,’ the keyhole issue of environmental pollution, the construction and dissolution of empathy walls, and the powerful metaphor of waiting in line to assemble – over countless cups of coffee, pieces of cake, and tours through small towns – the deep stories that define the local residents and their loyalty to the Tea Party.  Her understanding ultimately rests on the loss of honor and status among members of communities as the basis for their deep disrespect for our federal government, their reliance on religion, and their hatred of taxes. Hochschild is able to ask neutral questions, to listen, and to engage these closed communities in conversation. We all found her results both surprising and provocative.

The following highlights of our discussion are not arranged in any logical order, in large part because our comments and thoughts weren’t either. We all agreed with Libby on the power of history as a revealing way to view a region and its culture. The forgotten white residents of southwestern Louisiana today descended from poor sharecroppers in the 1860s. They were products of the Civil War who saw themselves as potential planters and mill barons. They looked up, aspiring to wealthier lifestyles, and they still do – aspiring to better jobs and renewed respect, and envious of businessmen like Donald Trump.

At least a third of the book focuses on Hochschild’s keyhole issue, environmental pollution. Our deep concerns about the environment made this section painful – the wanton pollution, rejection of any sort of regulation, and the disregard for the legacy these communities leave to their children clash so severely with our own webs of belief that the divide Hochschild tries to tackle turned into an ever-widening gulf. Many of us found it hard to scale empathy walls or understand the deep stories presented following the horrible stories of pollution presented.

We all shared the hope that we would, by the end of the book, understand what motivates Tea Party enthusiasts. Not one of us thought that we got to that point for as clearly as the deep stories were presented or as much as Hochschild counted her interviewees as friends. The deep stories are helpful; both Margie and Annie noted that it always helps to understand a difficult issue if it has a human face. That said, these stories didn’t convince us that the federal government is the cause of all evil – poverty, pollution, loss of honor, moral laxity, and cultural disintegration. Tea Party members describe the entire American culture as polluted, unclean, harmful.

We all have our own deep stories or webs of belief that, in reference to TS Eliot, consist of a chain of events that elicit a particular emotion when confronted by facts. Each of us develops a web of beliefs and we accept or reject a fact or a belief based on how well it fits into this web. Philosophers have long known this; psychologists recognize it as confirmation bias. It is painfully clear from Hochschild’s stories that if individuals gave up their webs of belief or narratives, their lives would come apart. They clearly reject some facts, accept others, listen to Fox News and not CNN- all to maintain their own deep story or web of belief. But we do the same, protecting our own deep stories, living privileged lives in like-minded communities. Annie asked: if we could all understand our own deep stories, would we be more accepting of others?

Hochschild develops her deep stories, as Sheri noted, using the powerful metaphor of standing or waiting in line. As the rural south waits patiently in line for better status or recognition, newly-important groups cut ahead of them. They are moving backward instead of forward, and they begrudge new groups the achievements they have been denied. Here is surprising insight into wild Tea Party enthusiasm over Trump’s rejection of political correctness. The people Hochschild interviewed don’t want to feel responsibility or empathy for blacks, immigrants, or homosexuals. As they praise Trump for ‘telling it like it is,’ however, they make clear a complete absence of a national or community-based vision of the common good and social responsibility.

Annie raised the important point that education and its importance are not mentioned in any interviews, conversations, or the author’s conclusions. The local community, the church, and a common rejection of government (except when it is needed) bind Tea Party members together. The church, the Bible, and God explain their hardships and assure their ultimate release from them. Joan posed the most provocative question of the day: are members of the Tea Party, who base their decisions and principles on religion, any different from the Taliban or other fundamentalist groups trying to overtake the world? We found the importance of the church to people who don’t practice the basic Christian concern for those who are less fortunate or downtrodden to be one of several surprising paradoxes in the book.

Our own deep stories would be different had we never left the small towns in which we were raised. If Joan had remained in Eads, or Mary Lib in Terre Haute, or I in Saranac Lake, we probably would not be struggling as much to understand the rural south. Our own escape through travel and education facilitated an evolution of our deep stories to appreciate and incorporate diversity. We talked about the broader experiences, particularly in college, that provide opportunities to evaluate and alter our webs of belief; this becomes harder as we get older. From this perspective, the cultural isolation and demise in southwestern Louisiana seems destined to continue: few people leave, they don’t seek education, and broader opportunities will not arise.

Hochschild claims, by the end of the book, that pre-existing empathy walls have dissolved; the teasing and good-hearted acceptance of her by the people she met crumbled those walls. Perhaps there is hope for bipartisanship after all. Yet we didn’t agree that the population of southwestern Louisiana had knocked down any of their walls or that they understood the morally depraved North or Democrats any better than ever. Sheri described a very conservative friend of Tom’s who calls, and talks, and rants, but also never seems to broaden his views.

So has the US become too large, too diverse, and too disconnected to avoid collapsing into isolated local communities that reject any common goals or values? Annie posed this question, and we found no answer. Increased polarization seems to be common throughout the world, and not just in the US. We are all strangers in our own land, and we are all in this collective mess together. If we were each dedicated enough, and as skilled as Arlie Russell Hochschild, could we engage our radical opposites in conversation, break down some walls, become more empathic, and solve some of today’s problems? We ended the afternoon worried that we wouldn’t make much progress for as much as we felt re-educated by the book.