To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
—Simone Weil
What is humanity’s native soil?
In just what soil does the humanity of the human being take root, that it can grow and flourish without twists and blemishes? Just what is the soil Into which it can sink its roots, to grow strong and tall and bear fruit?
The common view is that there is not just one such native soil, but rather a wide diversity of native soils, one for each people—each “nation,” as we say. So the German soil might be the native soil for Germans, the Russian soil for Russians, the French soil for the French, and so on.
Of course, there are some problematic cases. Take the case of the Jewish people. The conflict over just what soil belongs to the Jewish people still rages, drawing plenty of blood—at least plenty from the Palestinians who were uprooted to provide room for the return of the Jews to Palestine at the end of World War II, with the triumph of Zionism.
Then, too, there is the case of America, where it is not entirely clear just who “the American people” who together constitute “the American nation,” really are. Does that people include the original inhabitants of that land that stretches “from California to the New York islands,” as it is put in the old Woody Guthrie song? Or is it just limited to the descendants of the European colonizers who waged genocidal warfare against the original inhabitants of that land? Just who are “we”—those for whom, according to Guthrie’s song, this land was “made”?*
Consider how many wars have been waged, with what astronomical human cost, over who has the right to occupy what soil as belonging to them as the people or nation in question. Or consider the situation at the southern border of the United States of America today, where refugees who have been uprooted from their own native soil are being herded into concentration camps and denied entry into this land, the one Guthrie sang was “made for you and me.”
Since about 1400, according to contemporary linguistic scholars, the phrase “native soil” has been used to mean the place of one’s “nativity,” that is, the place where one was born. Yet Donald Trump, for one, has argued that just being born in the place called “the United States of America” is not sufficient for being counted as a full-blooded “American,” and that citizenship should be denied to those who are so born to parents who are, as Trump and his ilk like to call them, “illegal immigrants.”
Despite all such problematic cases and issues, however, those who cherish the opinion that there are as many native lands as there are “peoples” or “nations” continue to maintain their position.
Yet in what, we might well ask, is the rich diversity of peoples or nations itself rooted? What is the native soil in which the rich diversification of different native soils itself takes root?
2.
The Need for Roots is the English title given to the book by Simone Weil from which the epigraph at the beginning of this post is taken. The book was written during World War II, but the need at issue, as Weil saw and clearly said, was a universal human one, the same to all people in all historical circumstances. It is not the need as such but the feeling of that need that varies from time to time, being keenly felt in times of general upheaval such as wars, earthquakes, wildfires, and famine, creating as they do waves of migrating refugees seeking asylum.
However, it is not just such refugees, such asylum seekers generated by natural or historical disasters, who have been torn out of such native soil, uprooted from it and cast adrift. We all have been. It is just that most of us remain unaware of our uprooting—an unawareness that actually deepens our very need for roots.
In our contemporary global, digitized, gentrified, condominium culture we are all in one way or another torn out of our native soil and cast adrift. In our destitution, we search for home by joining made-to-order internet groups of self-styled similarly minded individuals. Unfortunately, however, the joining of such self-creating groups** serves only to disjoin us all the more from our common humanity. The harder we search to find somewhere we belong, the more lost and isolated we really become. We no longer even know how to be where we are when we’re there, the glow from our smartphones blinding us to all the lights that surround us in whatever neighborhoods we happen to be at the time.***
We are all indeed in need of roots, and in search for the native soil wherein we can at last root ourselves.
That common search goes on.
* A question that Guthrie’s song itself raises in subsequent verses.
** Such groups are “self-creating” in a double sense: they create themselves by attracting people to join them, but also provide opportunities for those who join them to create “selves”—provide themselves with an “identity”—through self-identification as members of such groups (that’s what gives such groups their attractive power in the first place).
*** A phenomenon at the center of my recent post on this website, “Advertising Diversions and Diverting Advertisements” (https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2019/11/11/advertising-diversions-and-diverting-advertisements).