Laudator Temporis Acti

Donald Davidson, "Sectionalism in the United States," in Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood, edd., The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after I'll Take My Stand (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 51-74 (at 53-54, note omitted):

Whom shall my soul believe? Worn out with abstraction and novelty, plagued with divided counsels, some Americans are saying: I will believe the old folks at home, who have kept alive, through many treacherous outmodings, some good secret of life. Such moderns prefer to grasp the particular. They want what is near to home and capable of understanding, for it engages both their reason and their love. They distrust the advice of John Dewey to "use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activities." The future is not yet; it is unknowable, intangible. But the past was, the present is; of that they can be sure. So they attach themselves — or reattach themselves — to a home-section, one of the sections, great or small, defined in the long conquest of our continental area. They seek spiritual and cultural autonomy.