There’s this word: deracinated.
What a glorious word. It sounds so fancy. Ooo la la. It actually comes from the French word “déraciner” meaning to uproot, root out, or extirpate. It literally refers to tearing a plant out by its roots, but is frequently used to describe displacing people from their native environment or, figuratively, to eradicate habits, vices, or beliefs.
Now, the reason that I find this so interesting is because it seems we are all being uprooted at the moment — to one extent or another.
Whether it’s technology that has pulled us away from our communities. From our families. From our friends. From our traditions. Or the governmental antics that overturn our lives in so many ways.
One thing is certain; we are all feeling uprooted to some degree. Probably to a great degree, truth be told.
I suppose, there is a certain segment of society that feels like they are becoming more deeply rooted in this tragic comedy that is our current situation. A certain segment of society that feels like their long-awaited dreams, wet or otherwise, are finally being fulfilled. But I think for most of us, we just have the sense that our lives are being torn up by the roots.
Simone Weil spoke profoundly about the subject of losing one’s roots. She felt that rootedness was an essential component of a healthy society; and when a society, or a people, began to lose their roots, they lost touch with who they really are and who they really should be. She said that “roots are what quietly tell a person: who they are, where they come from, what they owe, and what they are responsible for.”
Weil defines a root as:
“A real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”
Without that, Weil believed, people don’t become “free” — they become fragile. She went so far as to say that uprootedness was one of the defining pathologies of modern society. People become uprooted when:
- Work is reduced to abstract labor
- Communities are dissolved into markets or bureaucracies
- Tradition is mocked or flattened
- Mobility replaces belonging
- Or identity is detached from place, craft, or responsibility
She suggested that an uprooted person may still function, even appear successful, but inwardly they suffer from:
- meaninglessness
- resentment
- susceptibility to propaganda
- and hunger for mass movements or strong authority
This is why Weil believed uprooted people are easily captured by unhealthy ideologies. When you have no roots, anything that offers identity feels like oxygen. One of Weil’s most countercultural claims is that roots are a human need, just like food or shelter. Not a right in the modern legal sense, but a need that society is morally obligated to protect. She would likely say — of our current times — we are not suffering from too much freedom; but from too little rooted responsibility. And that much of modern anxiety isn’t personal failure, but structural uprooting masquerading as progress.
Weil, if here, would probably leave us with this unsettling charge: A society that cannot give its people roots will eventually give them distractions, ideologies, or enemies instead.
Roots don’t make life easy. But they do make life livable.
Let’s find our roots again.
Cheers, friends. Let’s keep discovering together.