Heritage

I think heritage is a fascinating thing.  Of course, if you look at my HBD tab, you'll see part of the reason why.  Something on the order of 80% of our behavior is genetic.  That doesn't mean that we can't overcome genetic tendencies and determine our own fate, of course, but it does mean that the form of our natural man is different, maybe, than our neighbors.  Actually, in a normal nation, our neighbors would have similar tendencies, because that's the definition of a nation; a people sharing a common culture, language and genetic heritage.  But our nation would perhaps have a different natural man than your nation, and because the people in one nation would have the same expectations of behavior, communities would be more or less peaceful.  As long as people of other nations lived in the community in small enough numbers that they couldn't upset this community balance, or if they were merely visitors or passing through, then we'd have a path to world peace.  Ironic, isn't it, that segregation is one of the worst bogeymen of the false religion that passes for modern philosophy, yet in reality, segregation is the key to peaceful coexistence between neighboring nations?  Just ask the American Indians what they think of segregation, and if they'd be willing to give up their reservations and assimilate in the name of inclusivity.

The other side of this same coin is that we are told repeatedly the proverb that if only we'd spend more time with other people, we'd understand them better and get along better.  In reality, we've spent too much time together, we understand each other all too well, and rather than causing us to get along, it's caused us to fail to spectacularly.  Up until I went to college, I'd only ever met one person who was an Indian national.  This isn't because I was in some podunk little town, but because the vast wave of H1-B migration hadn't happened yet.  Nobody knew any Indians.  In fact, if you heard the word Indian, you'd be thinking feathered headresses, teepees and peace pipes.  But my exposure to many Indians from India in the years since has not caused me to develop a greater appreciation for their culture. Quite the opposite; I now see hundreds if not thousands of small ways in which we are culturally incompatible due to frequent exposure.  And when the only reason that millions of them are here is because they're acting as foreign, mercenary scabs to take jobs that can and should have gone to Americans, and to depress Americans' wages, then it almost doesn't matter what positive qualities their culture has, because they are not here in good faith providing a benefit to America; they are, in fact, a detriment, deliberately imposed on America.  And they don't even have the benefit of bringing good food with them like the Chinese or the Mexicans.

Now, Indians can practice their culture in India to their hearts' content, and that's great.  I have no problem whatsoever with their behavior in their own country, where for the most part, what they do is peaceful, and their interactions with their own people cause no problems.  But Indians and Americans interacting and pretending that we're one nation and one people with cultural, linguistic and genetic bonds is a farce, and it doesn't cause us to get along better at all.  It's as if I were to invite one of the members of the ward who is significantly different in terms of personality and approach to child-rearing, and everything else to live in my house with me.  While we have our own separate houses, we can be good friends.  But make us live together in the same house, and we'd just get on each others' nerves too much; we wouldn't get along anymore.  We're incompatible for that close of a relationship.

Almost everyone is familiar with this concept from room-mates at college or missionary companions.  People that you get along with great in one setting, maybe even your best friends, often aren't anymore when you live together because of the hundreds, and even thousands of little things that are incompatible between your behavior.

Anyway, I'm thinking about this because I went to another ward yesterday for some stake business and as a favor to the bishop; I'm the merit badge counselor for a merit badge his son is working on, and he wanted to review some stuff with me and get it signed off.  Since I'm also assigned to be the liaison from the stake YM's presidency with that ward (and a couple of others) I thought it convenient to kill two birds with one stone; make a visit, meet with the boy about his merit badge, and talk to the ward YM president about some YM stuff.  Anyhoo, a member of the stake presidency was on the stand.  He's actually from that ward.  When the sacrament meeting talks ended, there were just a few minutes left, so he spoke for a bit.  One of the things he mentioned, and this wasn't the point of what he was saying, but it's what caused me to reflect, was that he and his family had lived in Alabama for a number of years for work before moving here where we live now.  As he was preparing to move, locals would caution him about moving up among those "rude Northern Yankees."  He thought this was odd and wondered if Northern Yankees really are rude, although upon some quick and dirty observation, he did note that Southerners are more overtly and superficially friendly than Northerners—although he noted that by being friendly, he could get the Northerners to become just as garrulous as anyone else.

But, of course, that's only one aspect of the differences between Yankees and Southerners, and a very superficial one at that.  As an ethnic Southerner living here in Yankeeland, I can see the hundreds if not thousands of details that separate us as different nations, and make our current situation of pretending to be "one nation under God" untenable.  Almost weekly I'm surprised at something that some Yankee will say to someone else and expect it to be OK, and this is after nearly twenty years of living here.  By the same token, I'm often shocked by what they don't say.  I've been accused at times of being too blunt, too casual, maybe, and of offending people as well, in ways that don't seem like they'd be an issue to me.  But that's because I'm a Southerner (and in many ways, almost a caricature of one) living among Yankees.  To me, the biggest disconnect, though, is the way in which Yankees perceive only dimly and in theory the concepts of free agency and individual sovereignty.  Yankees have a tendency to expect and even demand community scale conformity in a way that is totalitarian to me; a nannying-busybodyishness that is completely incompatible with the doctrine of free agency as we understand it in the church.  If you can't be made to conform via social pressure, then there are really only two responses: 1) double down on the social pressure, and 2) exclude you from the community.

To me, this is the real source of the perception among Southerners that Northerners are "rude."  Northerners are just too into your business in general, and feel that they have the right (even the obligation!) to tell you what you should be doing all of the time.  They really struggle to just leave you alone, accept your idiosyncrasies, and get along with you just fine in spite of them.  And this carries on with Yankees, even when they move.  One of the things that I've also noticed is that the majority of members of the Church in America are Yankees. (See some of the JayMan links on the HBD tab.)  This shouldn't be surprising; the Church was organized in New England among the descendants of Pilgrims and Puritans, and the core of the membership in America has always been such.  It's actually a better explanation for their failure to make a place for themselves in Missouri and Illinois; it's not so much religious intolerance as it was cultural incompatibility that made them unwelcome.  As immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain came to Deseret, they reinforced and bolstered this cultural founder effect, and the culture of Greater Deseret in the American West is a subset of Yankee culture overall.  Since most people all across the country who are members of the church are recent immigrants to the places they live from this Greater Deseret pioneer heritage gathering, most members of the Church have this Yankee personality and mentality with them.  Against this is the doctrine of free agency, but the two cause an awful lot of cognitive dissonance and friction, in my experience.

Now, I don't mean this to be a Yankee-bashing exercise.  Yankees' sense of community is also what has allowed them to build things that in the South we probably would never have done because we're too individualistic and iconoclastic to ever work together well enough to have done so.  If Yankees are prone via their natural man towards community-scale totalitarianism, the heresy of Babel; thinking that they can build utopian communities on Earth, and frequent moral panics and witch-hunts (and they are; would you really have expected anything else from the descendants of the Puritans?) my people are way too fractious, don't get along very well, have poor impulse control and a lower time preference for decision making in general.  Benjamin Franklin once said of my people that we were "a race of runagates and crackers; equally wild and savage as the Indians."  Another drama that I saw once had one of my people shot in a gunfight; while his mother was bandaging him up, she told him to quit complaining; our people don't die of gun shot wounds, they die of alcoholism and heart disease.  This is the legacy and natural man that I have to overcome.  I'm not very likely to try and make anyone else conform to my vision; in fact quite the opposite; I need to learn better how to lead my family, because my natural tendency is too individualistic; I tend to even think my family should take care of their own problems.  But I'm relatively short-tempered, have poor impulse control, and frequently set the same goals over and over again year after year because my progress towards them has been negligible.  None of those should be surprising to people who understand heritage, HBD and genetics.  Those are among my weaknesses, because it's my genetic heritage to have them as weaknesses, and overcoming the negative aspects of that natural man is my great challenge, whereas some Yankee will probably have as his greatest challenge learning how to respect others and not try and cram them into fitting to his ideal of what society should look like.

As an aside, I should probably point out that there are two completely different behavioral phenotypes in the South, and they conform to two completely different genetic heritages and cultural origins.  When I say that I'm a Southerner, you shouldn't imagine the genteel plantation type and their households.  I'm not Gone With the Wind, I'm more like The Dukes of Hazzard.  My people were fractious border people from the beginning of recorded history, occupying the border country near Hadrian's Wall where barbarism and civilization had their frontier.  After the Romans left, it eventually was raided by the Vikings and became a different border country between the British and the Danelaw.  Later, it was the border between northern England and lowland Scotland.  It was the home of the Border Reivers, who are my people; part English, part Scottish, all anti-authoritarian.  When the border was finally pacified and the Border Reiver way of life started disappearing because a strong enough crown to squash it out finally rose in London, my people came to America because they chafed under the yoke of too much authority and structure.  They immediately headed for the backwoods and the frontiers, and became the second type of southerner; although to be fair, some of them were Northerers too, at least if the Mason Dixon line is any guide.  They were eager to fight in the Revolutionary War because fighting was what they were arguably best at.  They were eager to expand the frontier, and didn't have any problem fighting Indians. Andrew Jackson is the only one of my people that I know of to have ever been elected President.   They sided in the Civil War with whomever they thought was likeliest to leave them alone, because they had little interest in bowing to the yoke of the neo-Puritan Yankees or the elitist plantation owners either one.  My people in West Virginia, for example, famously made the wrong call and sided with the north, only to regret it shortly after the war and side with the south politically, echoes of which still linger today in electoral maps.

Anyway, like I say, this heritage stuff intrigues me greatly.  And, I think it's vital to understanding not only the problems that we have today as a nation (or "nation" as the case really is) but trends of current events and what is likely to happen in the near and middle term future.  People who are ignorant (sometimes deliberately) of this stuff will continue to make the wrong calls, to not understand, and to be surprised by what happens.