in defense of the Midwest

Critical Animal, not a Midwesterner himself, sums up the usual outsider’s view of the Midwest as follows (apparently not agreeing with it):

“The midwest usually exists in writing not as an in-itself but as a foil for cultural production. The coasts produce culture; the center produces grain and meat. The center is a means, then, and the coasts are its end. In terms of travel, it is also an area through which one travels, not to which one travels. It is a geographic exemplum of Hegel’s negativity, that zone through which the truth must travel to continue to become itself against the force of history.”

The most devastating counterpunch to this typical attitude is provided by another author who was non-Midwestern, to say the least. I speak of no less a figure than Alfred North Whitehead (from the Dialogues with Lucien Price):

“It often seems to me that European [civilization] was at [its] best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualizing… The early cathedral builders –even the Norman and Romanesque– did not theorize; they built; and the poets went to work much more directly. We of today over-elaborate.

The only place I see where another great flowering of European culture might come is in the American Middle West, where the start could be fresh and from the ground up… Americans must not copy Europe. They must be themselves, must create de novo. These American imitations of Europe will always lack interest and vitality, as all derivations do…

My remark was that the only place I know where European [culture] can still create civilization on the grand scale is in the American Midwest.

Q: Between the Appalachians and the Rockies?

Yes, roughly the Mississippi Basin.

Q: Why not the coastal regions, Atlantic and Pacific?

They are rather transmitters of cultures, and their cultures are likely to be more derivative. In the Midwest, culture, soil, and food –those three preconditions to a flourishing civilization– are favourable…

[The Midwest] has a human soil further favourable to a new civilization: not only is it a self-selected stock; the country people and the people in small towns still hold a favourably large proportion, as compared with the population of cities. Man’s best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such an environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed.”