Inch-wide and a mile-deep!

Often I have worried that my intellectual preparation has made me a mile-wide and not even an inch-deep.  I might be a flake. A man who knew too little about too many.

And then after a few minutes, that worry eases and I am back to reading, thinking, teaching, and, yes, blogging!

The lack of "depth" is a tradeoff that I systematically made in order to do what I do.  Expertise on the dreaded question of angels dancing on a pin has not ever fascinated me.

Such an approach makes me appreciate life and understand the world.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker on how most rural communities in America stagnate, while a handful survive and prosper.

A wonderful essay all by itself, in which the author writes:

In his 1970 book, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” the economist Albert O. Hirschman described different ways of expressing discontent. You can exit—stop buying a product, leave town. Or you can use voice—complain to the manufacturer, stay and try to change the place you live in. The easier it is to exit, the less likely it is that a problem will be fixed.

I know what the author is writing about.  In fact, you, dear reader, also know that I know; remember this post of mine in which I paid tribute to Hirschman?  In that post, I wrote that they don't make thinkers like Hirschman anymore? And how Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is one of the few books that I bought and retain?  Hirschman's intellect though was a mile-wide and a mile-deep!

Back to the New Yorker essay:

Americans, Hirschman wrote, have always preferred “the neatness of exit over the messiness and heartbreak of voice.” Discontented Europeans staged revolutions; Americans moved on. “The curious conformism of Americans, noted by observers ever since Tocqueville, may also be explained in this fashion,” he continued. “Why raise your voice in contradiction and get yourself into trouble as long as you can always remove yourself entirely from any given environment should it become too unpleasant?”

The fabled mobility of Americans is rapidly changing.  I routinely ask students in my introductory classes whether they would move to places like Alabama or the Dakotas, or Sub-Saharan Africa, if that's where their economic futures might be.  Rare is a student who is ready to move.

But, in a trump America, it will be interesting to see how Americans react.  We now have a solid blue wall along the West Coast, which is certainly bound to annoy quite a few trump toadies.  Will they pack up and exit?  (I hope and pray they will!)  Will frustrated progressives in states like Texas stay back and voice their opposition? (I hope and pray they will!)

This barely-scratching the surface wannabe-polymath will watch with great interest how Hirschman's thesis plays out in trumpistan, er, America.