The late Ronald Inhgelheart did for cultures what the inventors of the Big 5 personality inventory did for psychology: identify the underlying dimensions. Inspired by Maslow’s needs he came up with three: traditional-survival values, self-expression values and secular-rational values. The map above shows where the US is located on this map (which should really be a three-dimensional landscape).
Reading Colin Woodard’s 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America makes it clear, however, that such a representation is highly artificial, especially for a huge country like the US. Woodard identifies eleven different nations that merely have partially overlapping cultures and that were at times at odds with each other, which is highly relevant for understanding today’s polarisation. Here are three very different cultures:
Puritans
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.
Southern Gentry
Charleston was a vibrant city, for the planters spent as much time there as possible, leaving the day-to-day management of their estates to hired overseers. They filled their city with distractions: theaters; punch houses; taverns; brothels; cockfighting rings; private clubs for smoking, dining, drinking, and horse racing; and shops stocked with fashionable imports from London. Like the nouveaux riches everywhere, they were fixated on acquiring appropriate status symbols and followed the latest fashions and customs of the English gentry with a dedication that startled visitors. “Their whole lives are one continued race,” one resident wrote, “in which everyone is endeavoring to distance all behind them and to overtake and pass by all before him
Quakers
Quakers spurned the social conventions of the day, refusing to bow or doff their hats to social superiors or to take part in formal religious services of any sort. They rejected the authority of church hierarchies, held women to be spiritually equal to men, and questioned the legitimacy of slavery. From its inception in the 1680s, the Midlands was a tolerant, multicultural, multilingual civilization populated by families of modest means—many of them religious—who desired mostly that their government and leaders leave them in peace.
The Puritans were clearly averse to self-expression and secularity as their values were conformity, authority and tradition, which puts them into the survival-tradition part of the map. The southern gentry was almost the opposite and with high levels of hedonism and status-seeking the clearly belong in the self-expression area of the map. This is where Ingleheart located the USA. Many people would think that the third culture, the one embodied by the Quakers with high levels of tolerance, liberty and egalitarianism is the one that should represent the American spirit most. Despite being highly religious, Quakers represent very much the secular-rational values of the Enlightenment.
The resulting map shows a very polarised picture, with Puritans much closer to Catholic Europe and the Southern Gentry closer to Latin America than Protestant Europe.
Ingelheart believed that the three dimensions stemmed from cultural evolution, such as secular-rational values from industrialization. I think this is only partially true and that they come from our inborn instincts, adaptations to our three past subsistence modes: foraging, farming and pastoralism. Here is how I would represent the three cultures, with their dominant Big 5 characteristics of extraversion (herders), conscientiousness (farmers) and openness (foragers).
This early polarisation would also be responsible for migration patterns to a large extent. Forager and pastoralist types would have been averse to conformism and authority and moved further away from the “civilised” East Coast:
In the early nineteenth century, Friends still sought to separate themselves from the world, and many found it harder and harder to do so on the densely populated eastern seaboard. During the course of the century, a number of Quaker enclaves outside of the Midlands relocated to Ohio and Central Indiana. Disgusted by slavery, century-old Quaker communities abandoned Tidewater and the Deep South.
The culture’s turbulent, highly mobile people were deflected only by the power of the Deep Southern planters and stopped short only upon reaching the treeless, arid prairies they encountered at the edge of the Far West. The culture they laid down—allegedly that of “real Americans”—was very different from that of its neighbors, many of whom found its disorderliness distasteful.
This happened as more and more farmer types came in from Europe, especially from German-speaking areas:
The Germans set the tone, generally buying land with the intent to build lasting family homesteads rather than as speculative investments. They sought a permanent, organic connection to their land, taking unusual care to ensure its long-term productivity through soil and forest conservation measures first perfected on the tiny farm plots of central Europe. Scholars have observed that the Germans insisted on entering the American melting pot collectively, on their own terms, and bearing ingredients they felt the country was lacking. Germans arriving from Europe usually had a higher standard of education, craftsmanship, and farming knowledge than most of their American neighbors, whom they found grasping and uncultured. The Germans avoided assimilating, using their language in schools and newspapers and almost exclusively marrying other Germans as late as the 1880s. In a country rushing madly toward the frontier, the Germans distinguished themselves by their emphasis on stable, permanent, rooted communities, where families would work the same piece of land for generations. This rootedness would be perhaps their most lasting contribution to the culture of the Midlands and, by extension, the American Midwest.
The German settlers showed all the characteristics of early farmers: high in-group solidarity and family values, high stability and low mobility, and high conservatism. These traits are nowadays perhaps best exemplified by the Amish, who despite being an oddity aren’t that far removed culturally from today’s conservative Americans who want to go back to traditional values with fewer self-determination rights for women.
For more on using the forager-farmer framework in analysing cultures check out my book:
The Three Cultures that Create Civilization
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGF5P38J
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