Ch. 9: U.S. Cultural Patterns
The reason that we’re looking at American culture in this chapter isn’t just because “Oh, it’s America.” The reason we’re looking at American culture is because it’s an interesting case study on how culture is formed, what caused it to be formed in the first place, and then how… the culture views that defined it. And then, if you combine it with yesterday’s class, the way a culture falls apart. So, from the beginning to the end in about 250 years.
Maybe not the end. But from the beginning to the redefining of the culture.
So you could apply this to a lot of different cultures, it’s just in this case we happen to be talking about America. But also, with this week, it seems like… if we’ve got to talk about America, this seems like a good week to do it. So that’s what we’re going to do.
The first thing, it’s just these three quotes. And I suppose in and of themselves they’re not that important, but I do want you to remember that “America” - or at least the “United States” - is a European invention. Right? I mean, it was discovered at a time when European culture was redefining itself. In a couple of different ways. Do you remember when we talked about reality changing? With Galileo and Luther and Darwin and… Right, so that sort of thing. So a couple of fundamental things happened in Europe all around the same time as America was being “discovered” - or whatever the term is you want to use.
One of them was the break with Roman Catholicism. Right? Because up until then, the Church was directly connected to the guy who sat in the chair in Rome. And there was a hierarchy. But after Protestantism, after Martin Luther and after Henry the Eighth and after Calvin and all those guys, basically Christianity became portable. You didn’t need the Vatican anymore. You just needed a bible and you could have your own personal relationship with God. Which also meant that the Church didn’t have authority over you anymore.
And then the second thing is, in England… and not JUST in England, but in England the English Civil War - which is when they cut off Charles the First’s head and they moved to a parliamentary system and all of a sudden there was a government system that had nothing to do with kings and queens. That freed up a lot of people too, because all of a sudden everything wasn’t tied to a guy sitting in a chair in London, either.
There was much more liberal autonomy and freedom once you broke with that centuries-old assumption of “you’re here, but you’re the property of this guy” - and that guy might be the Pope or that guy might be the King - but either way people did not have freedom because people were the property of somebody. So now there was this radical rethinking of it as “Ah, OK. I have freedom and HEY, here’s this big gigantic piece of land on the other side of the ocean where we can practice our new philosophy of ‘liberty’”. And so that’s essentially what America was, a laboratory for this experiment AND a God-given confirmation that this new philosophy was accurate.
So when they talk about America being… You know, they always talk about “Freedom” and “Liberty” they mean “Freedom FROM” the restraints of being the subject of the King. Or whatever. So that’s what happened.
And by the way, I realize that… whenever I’m talking about “freedom” I’m not talking about slaves, I’m not talking about native Americans and I’m not talking about women. Because they didn’t have it, right? I’m talking about a very specific group.
And I won’t talk about these quotes too much, except for this second quote, from this guy Fredrick Jackson Turner, who was an American historian who gave a talk in Chicago in 1893 and he talked about how America defines itself and - not just defines itself, but sort of like the engine in the machine that is America is the idea of constant expansion. And he said, these are the elements that define American character.
“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”
Have you guys ever been to America? OK, a few of you. Have any of you guys ever been to the West Coast? I mean, the point about California is that it’s very far away from New York. Right? I mean, I’ve driven it a couple of times, I’ve driven across the country a couple of times, and it takes… I mean, you CAN do it in four or five days if you don’t sleep at all and you’re with somebody else. I wouldn’t recommend it. But if you’re just driving across the country, it takes about a week to eight days. How long does it take to drive across England? About four hours or something? Ireland, I live in Ireland and it takes me three hours to drive from one side of the country to the other. It takes longer just to drive across Los Angeles. It’s a big country. So when Turner’s talking about “continuous recession” - from a European perspective America was unimaginably huge.
Australia might be bigger than America, I’m not sure.
But anyway, this expansive land that just keeps going. And so land, the advancement of land, and the process of settlement, those are the elements that defined American character and… OK, so let’s start.
Dominant U.S. Patterns
I’m not too concerned about the top category, and I’m not really too concerned about the bottom one, either. I DO think the middle one is interesting, though, because it applies to more than just America. This idea that people in different regions of the country have different perspectives on the role of “community”. So, and maybe this is true in the South of France, too. But in America, in the South, there’s a real emphasis on everybody knowing who everybody is. I’m thinking about Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky… that kind of area. Everybody… it’s important to know who the people around you are. And the reason for that is because it’s an agricultural environment.
Yeah, Miami IS different. Miami’s not really the “South”, it’s really its own thing. Florida’s interesting for that, because… My mom was from Florida and southern Florida is kind of the North, and northern Florida is the South, if you know what I mean. As far as culture goes. And so my mom was from northern Florida, and she regarded people from southern Florida as “Yankees”. Of course, people from southern Florida regarded the people from northern Florida as “crackers” if they regarded them at all.
Anyway, but the South. Everybody kind of talks to everybody and everybody kind of knows everybody because in an agricultural area people tend to stay in one place. Right? So “is that guy from a good family or a bad family or do they have property or…” You know, that kind of thing. Whereas in the North, it’s more reserved and quieter and more industrial because you don’t need to know who your neighbors are. It’s that agricultural/industrial thing that we talked about before.
The other thing is that on the Pacific Coast - and this is from a European perspective, not an Asian perspective, because if you immigrated to America from Asia, you landed on the Pacific Coast in California or in Washington and you went East - but if you were from Europe, you landed on the Atlantic Coast, Boston or New York or whatever, and you went West. And, I don’t know if you remember this or not, but when we talked about “high-context” and “low-context” and subcultures and subgroups and all that, if you were an Irish-American guy who lived in New York and you stayed there, that whole Irish-American identity would be important and everybody would know who your family was and all that sort of stuff. But by the time you get to Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter. The idea of being an Irish-American, that doesn’t mean anything here. Nobody knows who your father is. Nobody CARES who your father is. You know, the promise of America for Europeans was that you could go to America and you could reinvent yourself. And the promise of California for Americans, especially for Americans back East, was that you could go to California and you could reinvent yourself.
I mean it’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that San Francisco, in the 1940s and 1950s, became THE city where gay people moved. Right? And part of the reason they did was because if you were gay in Boston or New York - well, maybe not New York, but - it wasn’t easy. High-context. Everybody knew your family, everybody knew who your dad was, all that sort of stuff. But if you went to San Francisco you could find other people who were from a similar situation, and you could build your own community. That’s the deal. There’s a lot of freedom in California. At the same time, the price of that freedom is you don’t have a lot of support. But again, that was the deal with America in the first place. You have a lot of freedom in America, you don’t necessarily have a lot of support.
A couple of things. Again, sorry, I know this is really kind of specific to America, and a lot of this class depends on how much you already know about America, but you probably know a lot more about America than I know about France. So, there’s that. Cultural near-sightedness, if you remember. We talked about that.
So, uh, every… This is the East Coast of America, right here. This is a map from 1783 to 1803. Up here is Boston, right here, and that’s New York right here, and Washington D.C. and Philadelphia here in the middle, Baltimore. Atlanta, Georgia, is down here. And Miami’s down here, although it wouldn’t be on this map. And this was the United States. It ended there. There was a mountain range and so the United States was basically this stuff here. And the reason people went there, in the 1600s for example, was as much to get away from Europe as it was to go to America. And there were three kinds of distinctive groups that went there.
One of the groups was, uh… they were the guys who ended up in New England. Protestants, right. But they weren’t just protestants. If they were just protestants, they could have just stayed in England. But they were puritan pilgrims. They were basically a cult, or at least that’s how they were thought of in England. They were like the Manson Family of… Well, no, they weren’t the Manson Family, although they DID kill people. As witches. But they just wanted to be left alone, that’s all they wanted. They just wanted to go. They had some money, so they could afford the boat, and they went across and they built their own community and they sat around and they thought about God. And they wrote books and they prayed and occasionally they would kill somebody for being a witch, but essentially it was a philosophical religious culture. Right? And they were all up here outside of Boston. Salem, places like that.
Now, eventually they stopped thinking about God, but they didn’t stop thinking. And this area became sort of the philosophical intellectual headquarters of America. This is where… I don’t know if any of you guys have ever heard of transcendentalism or anything. Emerson, Theroux, those guys. But it’s where American philosophy came from. And it’s also where the universities came from, because they were thinking, and so they were building schools. So, you know, Harvard or Yale or… they’re up here. That’s where people would go to learn things. And it’s also where publishing was. Publishing was in Boston because that’s where people read. So this is the intellectual part of America.
And then down here, from about New York to… I don’t know, Baltimore? Right here, which doesn’t look very big, but this was the powerhouse of the country.
Do you know the term “Second Sons”? Do you know what that means? OK. Do you remember when I talked about the Civil War in England? Where all of a sudden there was a class of people who were not royals, but they had money and they had land and all that? The Parliament and the break with the King? After the English Civil War, for a while there they didn’t have a King, and during that time it was the beginning of the establishment of an aristocratic upper-class in England that wasn’t directly tied to the King. Right? It was just rich people. Rich people who owned land. When the King wasn’t the absolute power anymore. Because AFTER the English Civil War, they reestablished the monarchy, but the King didn’t have the absolute power he had before. There was a class system that was established in England that wasn’t necessarily blood related to royalty anymore.
So there was this whole class of rich people who owned land, and who could pass the land down in their families and all that sort of stuff. If you were a rich guy in England who owned land, when you died that land went to your oldest son. Right? And that son would stay in England and he would take care of the land. The SECOND son - if you weren’t lucky enough to be the first kid, if you were the second kid - you got the education, and you got the money, but you didn’t get the land. Because your brother got the land.
Prince Harry and Prince Andrew? Prince Harry is literally the Second Son.
So the second sons were the ones who moved to America because “Hey, here’s some land! This is great!” So they moved to America and they were also able to have a farm or an estate or whatever, because suddenly there was land in England and there was just as much land - even MORE land - in America. All the freedom and none of the responsibility.
So this is a group, basically, of aristocrats who couldn’t be land-owning aristocrats back home but could be land-owning aristocrats in America. And their main concern was… I mean, these guys up in New England it was all about God and Sin and philosophy and all that. But THESE guys weren’t caring about that at all. These guys cared about money and they cared about government, and they basically wanted to recreate an aristocratic system just like back in England in America. And of course they did, because they were from the ruling class back home and the sooner they could establish a ruling class here, the better.
If you look at the names of these states. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of… I mean, you know New York. Why is “New York” called “New York”? Yeah, because in England there was a “York”. Why is “New Jersey” called “New Jersey”? Well, I’ll give you a hint. There’s an island between France and England called “Jersey” - only part of the U.K. occupied during the Second World War, as a matter of fact - and then you have North and South Carolina, named after Queen Caroline. And you’ve got Georgia, named after King George. And Virginia, named after Queen Elizabeth, who never got married and so she was - AHEM - a virgin. Maybe. Pennsylvania, named after William Penn, who at least actually settled the place. And so all of these places are named after powerful English people. Either Kings or Governors or things like that. So these guys weren’t trying to break away from England. If anything, they were trying to flatter it. Flattering it to keep a secure distance from it, if you know what I mean.
And then finally, down here, this area down here… Did any of you guys ever see “Braveheart”? Mel Gibson movie, “Freedom!” The Scottish guys fighting the English guys? No, you never saw “Braveheart”? What the hell, man? Anyway, it’s basically a Western, but it’s the Scottish - and kind of the Irish - the Scottish and the Irish were pretty much seen as the savages of what’s now Britain. Right? The Anglo-Saxons were the civilized people and the Celts, the people in Scotland and the people in Ireland and the people in Wales, they were seen as basically the Native Americans of Britain. And, kind of like the Native Americans, they had nice land. So before the English went to America, the English went up to Scotland - for an example - or they went to Ireland, and they kicked all the locals out. They either killed them or they sent them to places like America or Australia or Canada and they took the land. The Highland Clearances, which is when MY family was booted off the, well...
So if you were some Scottish guy, some… you know, some illiterate Scottish farmer, and the English kicked you out over here, and suddenly you were in America you were suddenly in this really interesting cultural position. Because you were white, and from what were becoming the “British Islands”, so you were “civilized” but you were also a savage because - in the British Islands you were the lowest on the register of civilization - um, so you were expendable at the same time. You know what I mean? So it’s like, if you’re going to give somebody the really shit work, like “they gotta work on the farm, they gotta deal with the slaves, they gotta dig the coal, they gotta do all that sort of stuff” those were the guys who did it. Which fosters both pride and resentment at the same time. You know?
So do you remember the film that I showed you yesterday, with the people going to get healthcare in the free clinic? The truck driver and the woman with woman who needed glasses and… Well, THOSE guys are THESE guys. They haven’t left. They went from Scotland to places like Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia, and they stayed there. And so they’re the truck drivers and the coal miners and… that kind of thing.
And what I think is interesting is that elements of all three of these foundational cultural roots still exist in America. You still have the New England Ivy League L.L. Bean preppy thing up here, you’ve still got the Brooks Brothers Money and Politics guys in New York and Washington, and you’ve still got the Carhartt working-class Southern white guy thing down here. That’s it - L.L. Bean, Brooks Brothers and Carhartt - and all of those things tie directly back into “Once upon a time in Europe…”
John Locke & “Natural Law”
I won’t talk long about, but… the idea of “Liberty”? The idea of “Freedom” that we talked about before? Do you guys remember John Locke? We talked about him when we talked about Empiricism. And Locke was the guy who said you could only really understand the world - you could only understand the world - by the representations of it in your head? Right? I mean, it kind of tied in with phenomenology? You look at something, you understand that thing, and you create a reality in your head based on what you see or smell or all of that, do you remember that?
OK, right. I’m glad. Cool.
Well, he was also the guy who talked about “liberty”. And he said that, you know… he said that a person has a natural law. A person has a natural liberty that the government can’t tell you what to do. Right? You are the boss of government, the government isn’t the boss of you. Remember, this is coming out from under the shadow of the Civil War and the king being beheaded and all of that sort of stuff. Before the English Civil War, there was this idea that it was all about the King. You are property of the government. After that, it reversed itself. The government is the property of the people. And it is a person’s choice - it’s a person’s decision - how much of their freedom they want to give up in exchange for the security of the group. You understand what I mean by that?
OK, if you remember yesterday, when we talked about Jefferson. And he had a quote where he talked about how the Tree of Liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. You remember that? With the guys with the guys, and they were going to take the governor of Michigan hostage, and the argument was that it’s important that the leaders of a country are kind of afraid of the...? OK, great. So basically what they were saying was that “If the people don’t have guns - for example - if the people don’t have a way of fighting tyranny - then the government can do whatever it wants with the people. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen, people have to have the power to change the government. They can either change it politically or they can change it through violence. Either way. But that’s the only way to have a sustainable freedom. Do you understand what I mean by that?
That’s kind of what Locke says here. In 1689. He says - I won’t read the whole thing - but: “Men are by nature free and equal against claims that God has made all people subject to a monarchy. People have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of a particular society. Men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments.”
Now, what he’s saying there is that people have the RIGHT - but not the obligation - to give up some of their personal freedom so that the government can keep them safe and comfortable. But, at the same time, that is their right, and if they DON’T want to surrender that liberty, and if they don’t want to surrender that freedom, that’s their choice, too.
Here in Dublin…
Dublin was a mediaeval city, surrounded by a wall, and once upon a time if you lived inside the wall you paid tax, but if somebody stole your pig or something, you could go to the police and the courts and get your pig back. There were laws. If you lived OUTSIDE the walls of the city, you lived in an area called “The Liberties” - it’s still there - and it was called “The Liberties” because you were free. No taxes. At the same time, if somebody steals your pig, you’re on your own.
So that’s the trade-off.
“Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people, governments that fail to do so can be resisted or replaced with new governments.” So, before that… I mean, if you were born and there was a King - an all-powerful King - and you were born and you didn’t like the government? Tough shit. It didn’t matter because you had no say over what the government did. This says “No, it’s absolutely the opposite.” The power isn’t with the King, the power is with the people, and if the people aren’t happy with the government… I mean, look. France, 1789. It’s the same thing. Before 1789 the King was all-powerful, and then one day everybody looked around and said “Wait a minute, there’s a lot of us, there’s one of him, and if we don’t feel like the government’s taking care of us, we have every right to change the government.” And if that means kill the King, you kill the King. And if that means vote the guy out, you vote the guy out.
And so, it all kind of depends on how you define “the people”, and who gets to determine that definition.
I mean, now it seems kind of obvious, right? Because this was 1689 and we’ve been living like this for a long time. But up until 1689 - or a century later, in the case of France - up until 1789, this was a radical idea. This was a huge… “Oh! Oh my God! Yeah, we can do this! But WHERE should we do this?”
Oh, I know a place. There’s this place on the other side of the ocean where we can do this! And so when these guys were all sitting around New England thinking about God or those guys were thinking about money and government, the philosophy that said it was OK was John Locke’s philosophy that said “No, you have Natural Law. You have freedom, and you especially have freedom on the other side of an ocean.
OK, this is the John Locke treatise that we just talked about, and this over here… not quite a hundred years later but almost - eighty years later - is the Declaration of Independence, in the United States. By Jefferson and Hamilton and all of those guys. And this is what they said, and see if it sounds familiar. They said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”
It’s pretty damn close. Do you see how it’s basically the same thing, the same argument? OK. Now what I think is actually kind of surprisingly moving about this is that right now, in America - literally right now - you have got thousands of people marching and protesting and counting votes and fighting each other over the idea of “We are not happy with this government, we want to change this government” and other people saying “No, we are going to stay in power as long as we can.” I mean, this is happening… LITERALLY this is happening right now.
OK, so once they found their feet, the American said “England, you know… It was nice while it lasted, but it’s over. And we are going to make our own way based on the philosophies of Locke, based on the idea of freedom and self-governance, and this is us.” Right? And in order to do that, they had to consolidate these three separate cultures. The guys up in Boston, who are thinking about God. The guys in Philadelphia and New York, who are thinking about money and government. The guys in the South who are growing the crops. So together you have philosophy, you have money, and you have food. And combined, what you have is a powerful enough society to fight against the older established European society. You don’t need those guys anymore. “Join or Die”, right?
And that their experiment in liberty and freedom was the right experiment. And so then they said “OK, great. Now that we have won our freedom, our next responsibility is to spread this as far as possible across the world. Because this is the new governing philosophy, this is the right one. We’ve been doing the wrong one in Europe for thousands of years. We are the owners of the new philosophy.”
And so, if you want proof of that, the proof is we won and look at this land we won. And so this guy, John Adams, who later became the president, but he said: “Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind. The experiment is made, and has completely succeeded; it can no longer be called in question, whether authority in magistrates and obedience of citizens can be grounded on reason, morality, and the Christian religion, without the monkery of priests, or the knavery of politicians.”
Manifest Destiny
OK, well now that you have that idea and the justification, you know, because your foundational principle is the right one, it leads to this inevitable idea of “Manifest Destiny”. Have you ever heard of… You’ve probably heard of “Manifest Destiny”, I don’t know. And the thing about… I think for a lot of people when they talk about “Manifest Destiny” they think it’s just shorthand for the American Dream. But it’s not, really. It’s a different thing. Manifest Destiny is like the obligation, almost… The duty and the obligation and, uh… the privilege to spread this new governing philosophy around the world. First you start with America, right?
Well, yeah. Look, if you wanted to know if God was on your side, first of all if he WASN’T on your side - this is the way they thought about it, this isn’t the way I’m thinking - but if God WASN’T on your side, he wouldn’t have given you this amazing new piece of land, right? I know that there were people there before, but, hey. He wouldn’t have given us this new piece of land if he wasn’t endorsing our cause. Secondly, we would not have won the war against the English, and established a new principle of liberty, if God wasn’t behind us on that one, too.
So, yeah, God is on our side on this one. At least that was the thinking. So you can do whatever you want in the cause of… In fact you HAVE to do whatever you need to in the cause of...
Do you remember before when we talked about how if you were colonizing Africa but if you were bringing “civilization” then you could justify the colonizing? Remember that? Well, it’s the same basic idea. I mean, if you’re the custodians of this new philosophy, it’s your obligation. You have to do whatever it takes. You have this amazing new thing, it is the correct thing, and you have all this open land to practice this new thing in. So you have to. So yeah, there IS a Godly obligation on this.
Anyway, so Manifest Destiny. Well, you start here, with these new models of politics and liberty. And then you push west. And then you push further west. And then you push all the way west. And you carve out these states.
This is this famous painting by John Gast, American Progress. Which is supposed to show the benevolence of America’s civilizing principles, right? I mean, it’s great land, but it’s savage, it’s not civilized, and this is civilization and the American frontiersmen are the agents of civilization. That the job of being an American is to be both the carrier of civilization and the person who settles the frontier. Which is great, because you get all the benefits of civilization but you also get all the freedom of the frontier. So you could have both. In fact, it was your job to have both.
The land in the west is hilly and rough, the land in the east is nice and straight. It’s dark over here, it’s nice and bright over there. The sun rises in the East. There are sharp mountains over there and nice pleasant hills over here. There’s a city. There’s a bridge. There’s the Europeanization - almost, not quite - of… You know, you have trains. You have progress. This is the right side of the argument and this over here is the wrong side of the argument. And in 1872, when Gast was painting this, there was no apology for thinking like that.
It’s the same thing, remember when I talked about Africa and the colonizing… this is the same period, right? The “Scramble for Africa” was 1870, when Belgium and Germany and France and England and they were all going into Africa. This is the same idea, and it’s around the same time, except it’s not Europe doing this, going into foreign territory. It’s the people OF this place doing this IN the place where they’re from. You understand what I mean?
Frontier Thesis
OK, so this brings us to this guy. Frederick Turner. Frederick Jackson Turner. Frederick Jackson Turner was this American historian who gave a lecture in Chicago in 1893, where he talked about how the character of America and how the definition of Americans relied on the constant expansion of America. This was the quote, I don’t know if you remember, at the start of the class I started with a quote from this guy. The land, and how the land receded, and how the constant push to the west and that… OK, great. That’s this guy.
And what he said is that every time America expanded west, it became a new and more powerful version of itself. Right? So you go from the Atlantic Ocean to the first set of mountains, you have established a principle of America. So when people got off the boat in New York or wherever, they were essentially Europeans in America, right? By the time they got to the Pacific, they were American. And what does that mean? That’s a new thing, right?
And Turner said, “Well, every time America expands, you go from the East Coast to the mountains, that becomes more America and you become more American.” And then you go from the mountains to the Mississippi River, and it has become even more American. And then you get to the Rocky Mountains, and by now you’re really come up with a definition of America that has nothing to do with Europe anymore. And then by the time you get to the Pacific Ocean, you have a version of America that is uniquely its own thing. It’s completely independent of England or France or Germany or whatever. It is its own self-created culture and idea. Do you understand what I mean by that? I wish I had said that earlier.
And then it’s that push west, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, it’s that push west which, uh… which changes the people from European to American. Right? When they got off the boat in New York or in Boston or wherever, they were European. By the time they got to the Pacific, they were American. And with nothing left to do with, and I mean that’s where American identity comes from. And then America wasn’t depending anymore on Europe for Culture or validation or for money or… it was self-perpetuating. I guess. And the other thing is, the push. Because the push from the Atlantic to the Pacific was hard - I mean, it was - I mean, these were not “refined” people. This was not the aristocratic class that went across the country. These were guys… they weren’t “savage” but they weren’t entirely not. They were on that line between civilized and savage and that alone changed the character of Americans from being sort of elitist East Coast semi-European people to populist American people. If you know what I mean. Right?
I think that there’s a… you know, it’s funny. Like, I think there’s a mutual distrust, in a way, between Americans and Europeans where… A certain type of Europeans will look at Americans and say “Oh, they’re so… not “rude” exactly, but they’re crude. They’re not sophisticated. They’re not refined. They’re not sophisticated people. They’re kind of fat, they’re kind of loud, they’re kind of vulgar. Do you know what I’m talking about? And I think that comes from the fact that… but the same thing in reverse happens when Americans look at Europeans and they go “Oh, they’re so… not delicate, exactly, but snobbish. Refined. These Europeans are so… it’s a joke, or parody, but here’s a question.
Here’s a stupid analogy, but I’m going to do it anyway. Did you ever see… Do you know the actor Will Farrell? The comedian? “Anchorman”? Did you ever see the movie where he’s a race-car driver? It’s called “Talladega Nights”? And he’s like this kind of Southern, kind of All-American kind of race-car driver and the guy that he’s competing against is this French Formula One driver, you ever see this? Because it kind of sums up, I mean the French guy is kind of looking at the American guy like “Oh, my God, what a redneck, what a rube.” And the American guy is looking at the French guy like “What kind of ridiculous person is this?” And neither of them can really recognize each other, because there’s no tradition in America of an “elite class” whereas there is a tradition in Europe of an elitist class. So, like… as an American, if somebody from Europe is like “Oh, my God, you guys are so vulgar” my instinctive response is basically “Yeah, and FUCK YOU - that would be my populist response, you know? And you could go back and do your simpering “OK, fine, if that’s the way you’re going to be” response, which just kind of AFFIRMS my initial reaction. You know what I mean?
OK, this next slide is just about the expansion thing. And we’ve talked about this before, so I probably don’t really need to go into it too much. Can I keep going? I need to change the subject a little bit, but not too much.
So, these guys right here, and let me go back a bit. These guys, right? I mean, this was an idea… it was basically an editorial cartoon that said if we were going to fight the English, we were going to have to fight them together. Right? South Carolina and North Carolina and Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York, and New England. They were going to have to work together if they were going to work at all. If they were going to fight the English. But really - in America, and still if you’re looking at the news today - still in America there’s still a lot of division between the states.
If you go by Texas, and if you’re from Texas at all, you’re from Texas first and then you’re from America. If you’re from Florida, first you’re from Florida and then you’re from America. But increasingly, the idea of a national culture instead of a regional culture kind of took over slowly, and still is, slowly. Um… I don’t know if it was yesterday when I asked if in France there were laws particular to a region or if there were just laws in general to the laws of France? Did I ask you that? I think I did. OK. Right. And I think you guys said in France it’s the same law from one end of the country to the other, right? In America, you can buy a gun in Georgia but you can’t buy a gun in New York. In France - I know it’s not about guns, but it’s - the same laws apply everywhere. Right? I mean, part of the reason this election thing is so interesting right now is that, is because you don’t even have....
Oh, I didn’t even think of that. In France, when you have elections, it’s a national election. I guess. Right? So everybody votes, but it all goes to one central area, in a way? Do you know what I mean? If you’re in Marseilles, or you’re in… I guess it’s a parliamentary system, though, so it’s slightly different. But in America, with the elections, what’s interesting is that you don’t really get a national election, you get fifty state elections, and then you add up the value of those states and then you get the country. So it’s not like you get “Oh, everybody votes for the president.” It’s like everybody votes for the electors of this state, who vote for the president.” So it’s still fractured, if you know what I mean.
But, anyway. To consolidate into one U.S. culture, people have to - collectively - go through a lot of different experiences. Um, the first one is obviously the revolution. Right? We are us because we are not them. We are Americans because we are fighting the English in our little tri-cornered hats and all.
And then you have Lewis and Clark, who were the guys who walked… I don’t know if you know this story or not, but these guys basically just walked to the Pacific Ocean from… After Jefferson bought all this land from France, uh… they didn’t actually know how much land they had. And he didn’t know what he had bought, didn’t have a clue. And so Jefferson hired these two guys, these two… And he said, basically, “Just walk West. Just walk West until you run out of land and then come back and tell me how much land we have.” It was basically the Moon Shot of its time. And so they said “OK” and in St. Louis, they just walked. They just walked across the country, and then they walked back. And for three years, they were just gone. And nobody knew if they were alive, nobody knew what the story was. And then finally they came back and said “Oh yeah, we have a lot of land. Turns out we’re doing OK.”
Um... anyway, and so that’s that. And then the Civil War. The fight between the North and the South over slavery, and the fact that the North won, which makes the Federal Government more important than the state governments, OK?
And then you have Teddy Roosevelt, who we just talked about.
Oh, this one I think is interesting. The passage of the Immigration Restriction Act. I don’t know if you knew this or not, but up until 1924, if you wanted to immigrate to America, all you had to do was get enough money to get on a boat, and not have typhoid or some other horrible disease, and basically if you could do those things you could move to America. But then the demographics started to change, and by the 1920s, it wasn’t really Europeans coming to America anymore, it was people from Asia. And a lot of people already in the U.S. were like “Er, hold on, wait a minute. It was more or less OK when the Europeans were coming, but we’re not so sure about these guys.” So they started passing laws that restricted the number of basically non-white, non-European people who could come to America.
The Great Depression, the Second World War. Uh, the…
The Second World War’s a weird one in America, because the story that America tells itself is that we won the war, right? That everybody was going to lose, but then we showed up and we won the war. And, in a way, we DID win the war, but not in the way that we like to tell ourselves. The Russians lost MILLIONS of people in the Second World War, right? I think in Europe, the Russians lost more people than anybody else. By far. America, not that many people. Right? And France, you guys were invaded and London was bombed and.... But not us. We were fine. So we did “win” the war, but the way we won the war is we made the most money. And how much must THAT suck, if you’re a European fighting over Europe, and the guys who do the best out of it is the spoiled little half-brother who made a fortune over in...
We didn’t get killed. Our cities didn’t get bombed. And we made a lot of money. So I forgot who it was that said it, but somebody said that the two things that won the Second World War were Russian blood and American money. And I think to an extent that’s probably true. Which is why after the war, we were the most powerful… er, society. At least for a while.
OK, and then the Cold War. The development of TV and Radio. And the highway system.
I don’t know if I need to talk about this. We’ve TALKED about this. The Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck… We talked about this YESTERDAY, didn’t we? The “Human Nature” and the “Activity” the… all that? OK, right. OK, great. So just a few… OK, so the last class before that, and probably the last last class before that, because…
“He’s not very organized, and he keeps talking about the same stuff.”
Activity Orientation
OK, a couple of things quickly about the whole “World-view” thing. One of them, the American relationship to nature. Which is basically that, in America, we OWN it. It’s ours, and we can do with it whatever we want. In fact, it would be rude not to. Since God gave us all this oil, we have to use the oil. Right? Since God gave us all this coal, we have to use it.
A strong belief in science and technology. And finally materialism.
Oh yeah, this thing. I don’t know if you remember the Kluckholn and Strodbeck, the “Activity Orientation” thing? What is the value of work and activity? Remember that? Of course you do. Alright, this ties right in to that idea of… have you ever read Max Weber? Did you ever come across him in any of your classes? Or read any of his stuff? Anyway, Max Weber linked Protestantism with Capitalism, right? I mean, look, you know, if you are a religious Christian, and you buy into the whole idea of original sin - that everybody is born a sinner and that the religious journey in your life is to get rid of the sin - you know, in most religions the way you get rid of the sin is you go to church and you pray and you live a good life and all that sort of stuff. But there’s a strong strain in Protestantism is that you believe “OK, well, the way that you get rid of sin is that you work really hard.” That THAT is the root to salvation. And so it doesn’t take much to make the jump from that to the idea that people who work hard are “good” and people who don’t work hard are “bad” and then it’s not hard to make another jump from THAT to the basic structure of Capitalism. So, at least in America, you have this strange overlap between moral success and financial success. Right?
“The Protestant Work Ethic; Theological, Sociological, Historical and Economic belief that stresses hard work, discipline and frugality as a result in the fundamental result of the Protestant faith. A convening of religious values (working against notions of “original sin”) with (Capitalistic) economic values.”
So there’s a real, and from this point of view understandable, suspicion or reluctance or whatever to support the “Welfare State”. It’s a really competitive view of Christianity, but for a lot of people that’s what it is. Good people work and are rewarded for their work. Bad people don’t and deserve what they get. And so, if you go down this way of thinking, the richer you are the better you are.
We talked about the whole “Activity Orientation” thing. Here it is. “Refers to the use of time for self-expression and play, self-improvement and development, and work.” Work becomes central to American identity, especially if America is all about self-definition. It’s not about who your family is, it’s not about where you’re from. If it’s just about who you are, well, how do you show who you are? You work. Who are you? Well, what do you do?
“Getting things done”. Do you remember we talked about monochronic time? Lists? First you do this, then you do that, then you do that? It’s the same impulse. It’s all about efficiency. It’s “boom, boom, boom.” Which was one of the reasons America was really good at industry, for example. Henry Ford, Fordism, all of that sort of stuff.
Individualism
Individualism. We kind of talked about this before with the “Promise of California” but… OK, Self-defined through occupation and not family. You marry who you want to marry. The idea of fixed marriages in America is just very strange. However, at the same time, that leads to weaker family structure because if you don’t want to be married to somebody, there’s no obligation to stay married - no OUTSIDE obligation to stay married - beyond your own happiness, or the other person’s happiness. Self-motivation, the “American Dream”. And then these two things, which I think are…
Class Identity as defined by money, which isn’t the same sense of class - of an INHERITED class - that exists in England, for example. In England, everybody is very class-aware but you can be poor, or at least broke, and still be upper class. Whereas if somebody from some working-class district outside of Manchester makes a lot of money, that might make for some really good TV, but that person’s always going to be working class. And, if they have money, DEFIANTLY working-class, which ironically enough just sort of supports the class system right there.
Anyway, your class is defined by how much money you make.
And then again, this idea of being suspicious of the welfare state, which we talked about. If you’re rich, you’ve earned it, so you’re a good person. And if you’re poor, that means you’re NOT good people. And if they’re not good people, why should you take care of somebody who doesn’t take care of themselves? So the thing about healthcare, for example. Where is there an obligation that you have to take care of somebody who can’t afford a doctor? Right? If they were good people, they could afford a doctor. That’s the logic.
And if you’ve internalized those values and you’re NOT successful, I’d imagine you’d be very reluctant to admit that you’re not successful, because it’s admitting that you’re not a good person. So when people say, when people like me - who are doing alright - say, “Why are they working against their own interests?” Well, nobody’s asking ME to own up to being unsuccessful. Nobody in Brooklyn’s saying to ME “Why don’t you admit you’re poor, you provincial idiot?” And then you go “Huh, where’s all this resentment coming from?”
Industrialization
The rise of industrialization, I don’t know if I have much to say about this. And the rise of American global hegemony because … remember, if America’s based on expansion, then geo-political global expansion of American political and military interests - which brings us right back to that idea that America is “right” because America invented this new school of freedom and put it into practice, and so therefore whatever America (or the CIA or the Army or other agents of that expansion) does is justified by that original John Locke of freedom and Natural Law. Right? And it helps if you can make money doing it - I’m not being sarcastic here, money is a further indication that your actions are justified. Because to make money is to be a success, and it means you’re good. So it’s all a little tangled up.
Materialism
Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of total economic activity. Right. It’s all about what you buy. It’s all about purchase. And you guys aren’t innocent of this, either. People love going to America just to buy things. If you guys go to America, do you bring a list of things you want to buy while you’re there? Oh, Apple. Oh, Abercrombie & Fitch. Oh, they don’t have THIS shop in France. Shoes. I’m not judging. YOU might be judging, but I’m … America is the shopping mall of the world, right? Everybody goes to America to buy something, you wouldn’t necessarily go to other cultures just to buy stuff. You go to other cultures to do other culturally important things - take drugs or swim with dolphins or practice yoga. If you come to Ireland, you drink and you look at the Book of Kells, maybe, but you wouldn’t necessarily buy shoes. In America the culture IS buying shoes. I mean, it’s a lot of other things too, but...
And which is why the Covid thing is freaking everybody out, right? Because if you can’t shop, then the economy is going to die, because the economy is based on people spending money, right? The system encourages people to continuously buy, buying is patriotic. And I’m not being sarcastic or snide or whatever. They do the same thing here, in Ireland. There was a slogan when I moved here, “Save Jobs, Buy Irish”.
On top of that, people are judged by their possessions, what kind of phone do you have? We talked about Pierre Bourdieu a couple of weeks ago, and the whole idea of “Cultural Capital”. And all this consumption encourages high-turnover and disposability and supersizing and all that. AND an underlying discontent with what you have already. You got an IPhone last year but this year you need a new one because suddenly you don’t like the camera on your old one. And that’s both deliberate and necessary, because if you DON’T buy a new IPhone, then the economy tanks.
Comments
Post a Comment