A Political Companion to Walker Percy

8. Love and Marriage among the Ruins

8 Love and Marriage among the Ruins Richard M. Reinsch II Walker Percy intimated in several addresses and essays his belief that the South was strangely capable of teaching the United States enduring truths of man’s nature and being.1 Separated from the larger country since the 1830s by political rebellion, racial oppression, and economic torpidity, the South of the late twentieth century, Percy argued, was now liberated and needed in a new quest to save the Union. As Percy stated: I come from the Deep South. I mention this only to call your attention to a remarkable event that has occurred in the last year or two, which has the most far-reaching consequences, and which has gone all but unnoticed. It is the fact that for the first time in a hundred and fifty years the South is off the hook and once again free to help save the Union. It’s not that the South has got rid of its ancient stigma and is out of trouble. It’s rather that the rest of the country is now also stigmatized and is in even deeper trouble.2 The maladies of America, Percy observed, went beyond the conventional list of various social, political, and economic inequalities, instead consisting in the “weariness, boredom, and cynicism” that threatened to rob humane democratic life of meaning in the late modern era.3 Of course, these existential problems constantly plague democratic government precisely because democratic authority depends on the human person for legitimacy. However, a democratic age bereft of a solid commitment to transcendental meaning and a belief in reason’s ability to discern certain truths of man’s dignity surely brings these perennial troubles to an acute stage. Stimulating Percy’s historically unorthodox argument was the phenom- 160 Richard M. Reinsch II enon of economic growth and the shattering of de jure segregation in the South.Speakingin1978attheUniversityofGeorgia,Percycannilyobserved: “Undoubtedly then, the lower Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans will become, is already becoming, the American equivalent of the Ruhr Valley. In the year 2000, Peachtree Street may have replaced Madison Avenue. I find these possibilities quite likely but not terribly interesting and certainly not decisive as the real issues of the future are concerned. They represent economic inevitabilities, more or less what was bound to happen once the South with its advantages in climate, resources, and energy got past the historic disaster which befell it.”4 Having retained a closer affinity relative to states in other regions of the country with smaller government, lower taxes, freedom of contract, and general common sense, the South received renewed business investment from corporations across the nation and also the world. However, the deployment of capital, brains, jobs, and the economic progress this represented was not, in Percy’s estimation, the ultimate measure of a changing South. Likewise, the end of segregation, which helped usher much of the continental business activity into the South—the region now safe for democratic capitalism—was not the final word on the region’s progress. This, of course, does not slight these very real achievements of civil rights and higher standards of living. Percy approved of the crushing blow that had been delivered to the cruelty and lawlessness of the South by passage of civil rights legislation. The author noted that the post–civil rights South, replete with air-conditioners and enforced rights for its black citizens, was superior to the political-social order that had preceded it. The practical import for Percy was in desegregation’s closing of the deep separation between the South and the rest of the nation. Percy asserted, “Southern slavery or Southern racial segregation either to defend or attack” would no longer preoccupy the region’s leaders or its detractors.5 The merging of the distinct South with the rest of America was by no means an unqualified moment of approbation for Percy. In coming to look like the rest of America, the South might forget or lose its best qualities while assuming the worst of late twentieth-century America. On this score Percy struck a pessimistic note: “What else to do in a Sunbelt South increasingly informed by a flatulent Christendom and Yankee money-grubbing? For the danger is that we are going to end up with the worst of both worlds, the worst of Southern Christendom—that is, an inflated media Christendom without the old Southern pieties—and the worst of Northern materialism— [3.139.86.56] Project MUSE (2024...