The US is nicknamed the “Land of the Free”. However, its early history presents a very different picture with different cultures differing in their degrees of freedom. I learned in school that the first American settlers came to seek freedom from the oppressive European regimes they fled. Of course, this is true to some extent, however, the US was also characterized by slavery, feudalism, high levels of conformism and authoritarianism and it took America a long time to become truly a land of the free and perhaps it’s not an overstatement to claim that the only truly free people in American had been the native foragers before the arrival of the Europeans.
Nowadays we see the US polarised to an extent that is reminiscent of the Civil War. However, seeing America as Red vs Blue states only is a gross oversimplification. Colin Woodard traces eleven different, often opposing, “nations” and cultures in his 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (see map above). The eleven cultures had very different origins to begin with:
While Tidewater was settled largely by young, unskilled male servants, New England’s colonists were skilled craftsmen, lawyers, doctors, and yeoman farmers; none of them was an indentured servant. Rather than having fled poverty in search of better lives, the early Yankees had traded a comfortable existence at home for the uncertainties of the wilderness. Seventy percent came as part of an established family, giving early Yankeedom far more typical gender and age ratios than those of the other nations.
While the culture of origin would be passed on to the next generations, I would go further and claim that the differences between the eleven nations weren’t merely cultural, but also partially genetic. Each culture is made up of people and geneticists in the past decade discovered that a population tends to be made up of three ancestral populations that had very distinct environmental and social adaptations: hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders.
Shalom Schwartz has analysed cultures according to universal human values. I have argued that his system has a high correspondence with values created by foraging, farming and herding, respectively.
Using these values we can see the US north, the Yankeedom was dominated by hunter-gatherer values, whereas the south was more dominated by herder-farmer values. Of course, this is only a rough approximation and counterexamples can be given.
According to a central myth of American history, the founders of Yankeedom were champions of religious freedom fleeing persecution at home. While there is some truth to this in regard to the Pilgrims—a few hundred English Calvinists who settled Cape Cod in 1620—it is entirely false in regard to the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, who would soon bring Plymouth and the other colonies of New England under their control. The Puritans left England en masse in the 1630s—25,000 in just twelve short years—because of their unwillingness to compromise on matters of religious policy. While other colonies welcomed all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for “heretic.” Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion. They fined farmers who tended their cows, raked hay, or hunted birds on the Sabbath.
From our circle of values, we can see that authority and conformism are farmer values, which are moreover in direct conflict with the forager and herder values of self-direction and freedom as well as with hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. Herder types, while valuing their own freedom often aren’t this egalitarian when it comes to outgroups. This is an attitude we find in the Tidewater aristocrats, which is not surprising for someone who values achieving social status above all:
While they were passionate in defending their liberties, it would never have occurred to them that those liberties might be shared with their subjects. “I am an aristocrat,” Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”
Herder types can be associated with colonialism, often establishing feudalism, aristocracy/oligarchy, slavery and a caste system, which did actually exist in the El Norte region (whites vs indigenous people), but had to be abandoned due to high genetic intermixture. Herder types are also the ones who would avoid being dominated and therefore also state-integration and who are often borderlanders. This is clearly the case with the last of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia
A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those nations’ monopoly control over colonial governments, the use of force, and relations with the Native Americans. Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society to the present day.
While I can’t discuss all eleven cultures here, it should have become clear why the US has never really become a single unified culture. Cultural identity can change more easily than genetic identity. In this sense, the US has never been united and probably never will be and if the US wants to remain a single country there is a lot of work and compromise ahead for it.
I am indebted to Stephen Y. for pointing out the relevance of Woodward’s book for the forager-farmer framework.
For more on the forager-farmer framework check out my book
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