Simone Weil’s rootedness

The philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a fascinating character. (If you’re interested in hearing more, BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time” did an episode on her: “Simone Weil”. So did Vox Media’s Sean Illing for his show “The Gray Area”: “Simone Weil’s radical philosophy”. I’m sure there are many more episodes out there not to mention articles!) Her book, The Need for Roots, is one that I’ve been reading through slowly. At some point, I want to write a few posts on what Weil considers to be the “vital needs of the human soul”. They’re sort of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for our psycho-spiritual condition. But here I’m meditating on just one—the one that inspired the title of the book: our need for rootedness.

I’ve been thinking about rootedness for about fifteen years without always having a word for it. This is because fifteen years ago, I left my home in Northern California. I planned to return as soon as I could. First, I went to Portland, Oregon, which was delightful in many ways. I think I could’ve settled there though the constant drizzle that helps make Portland so beautiful can also be quite depressing. When my wife and I had been there three years, we prepared to move back to California but the opportunity that I thought would take me back home disappeared, and we had mentally and emotionally committed to leaving Oregon, so we made the fateful decision to go to where my wife was born and raised: San Antonio, TX.

I felt out of place from day 1. I’ve been here twelve years now, and I’ll admit, I continue to feel out of place. I feel like a visitor. And while I don’t want to speak for my wife here, just so the rest of what I have to say doesn’t sound too whiney, I know she feels about Northern California just as I do. But I must say that hardly a day passes where my mind doesn’t flash an image of Napa, or Sonoma, or Marin, or somewhere along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, or San Francisco. I spent my first twenty-seven years there and while I know I had to venture out, sometimes I wonder if it was the right thing to do, especially as it seems more and more unlikely that I’ll have an opportunity to return.

For some readers, I know this sounds like it reeks of privilege, as I complain about not being in the hoity-toity Napa Valley of my youth. I’ll concede that. But it doesn’t make the feeling go away. When you see yourself as a plant who has been pulled from the soil in which you grew, only to be replanted where you feel like nothing is familiar, it doesn’t matter where the original soil is. And I think Weil gives me philosophical justification for this feeling.

This is what she wrote about rootedness (p. 33):

Rootedness is perhaps the most important and least known human spiritual need. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being is rooted through their real, active or natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. The participation is natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them. Every humans being needs to have multiple roots to derive all their moral, intellectual and spiritual life from the environment to which they naturally belong.”

For Weil, to belong to a people in a place is a good thing because you share with those people a commitment to that place, to keeping “alive treasures of the past and…aspirations for the future.” I admit, I’m more concerned with what happens in Northern California, whether it be politically, ecologically, etc., than I am South Texas. I’m invested in that place thriving whereas the place that I live feels distant. Yes, I work here. I vote here. But every time I see a billboard that says, “Don’t California My Texas!”, I know I don’t belong here. Whenever I see the legislative priorities of Texas politicians, I know that I have little place in keeping alive such treasures. I’m a long time visitor.

Weil says that this rootedness is “natural”. I feel this. When I get off the plane at San Francisco International Airport, the sun hits differently, the world feels and smells better. Again, it’s like a root returned to native soil: it feels right.

Now, in a sense, my workplace was become a place of rootedness. In fact, it’s the only reason I’m in Texas. I know that as much as work should not bear too much of our life’s meaningfulness, that if I worked a job that I did find meaningless, even in California, it would impact my emotional wellbeing. So, because I find value in my job, I haven’t been willing to risk that to go home. Whether or not this is reasonable, it’s why in twelve years from now I might be in Texas still, continuing to feel out of place but oddly fulfilled where it really matters.

Though, of course, I doubt myself when I think of what “really matters”. Now that I’m a father, I have this strong desire to offer my son what was offered to me. I’m not necessarily saying what my nuclear family had to offer me. That’s a complicated story. But what my rootedness had to offer me: drives through the vineyards of the Napa Valley, summer trips to Stinson Beach, the majesty of wandering through San Francisco, a game at Oracle Park, but also the culture and values of everything Northern California, save Silicon Valley which I despise. These things are me. I’m an extension of that environment. Will the day come when I say to myself, “Those realities matter more than my 9-5!” Maybe. The tug is always there.

When someone is unrooted, whether traumatically or not, it changes everything. Weil claims, “Every military conquest results in uprootedness.” This isn’t just because a people may be removed from their home but because their home is irreversibly altered into something different. For Weil, every “milieu” of rootedness “should receive external influences not as an addition, but as a stimulus that makes its own life more intense.” In other words, “external influences” can “nourish” a people but it shouldn’t alter what it is that they share. Because of this, it doesn’t take a military invasion. As she says, “…money and economic domination can be such a powerful foreign influence that it results in the disease of uprootedness.” My mind goes to what Silicon Valley did to San Francisco. In many ways, it’s financed San Francisco into becoming one of the most amazing cities in the world; in other ways, the San Francisco that I knew even in the 2000s, and all that it stood for, seems to have mostly disappeared. The Napa Valley where I was raised is almost completely unaffordable for the working class. I guess this is what makes gentrification so disheartening for those who experience it.

The changes that Mammon has wrought on Northern California create a tension when I think of what I want to offer my son. In Texas, I can afford a home for him to grow up in. I can model for him fulfillment in a meaningful vocation. But Texas is, well, Texas. A man like Greg Abbott is Governor. Men like Ted Cruz and John Cornyn are our Senators. Our politicians demonize immigrants. They make the lives of women more and more restrictive to the point where we’re one of the “top 5 worst states” for women. It’s not a safe state for the LGBTQIA+ community. I have no pride in Texas. There are good people here. There are good Texans. I hope they reshape the state into their image but it’s hard to feel committed to this cause because I don’t feel like I’m part of it nor can I ever really be. I’m just one of those dangerous people who might “California” their Texas.

Again, as I said, I might be here in twelve years, working the same job, feeling the same feelings. But Weil is right that having a sense of rootedness is a serious spiritual (however we may use that word) matter. I hope if I stay, it offers my son more opportunities so that I can justify the decision. I hope that I’m not being selfish in needing to work a job that I find meaningful. We humans are complex. Adulthood is just a series is decisions where we can’t know if we’re making the right one. This weighs on me. Will I regret sidelining the spiritual nourishment of rootedness, if I don’t prioritize it?