Polite Kid

The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness.
And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.
There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord, its dangerous beauty binding three ages
Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have eclipsed but have never quenched it.
For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery;
But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther, Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind of man.
And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
You did not say "en masse," you said "independence." But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.
Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.
You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar.
But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep the spot sore.
Be great, carve deep your heel-marks. The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury. -Robinson Jeffers

Labels: American Character, Poetry

For what it's worth, "n/a" over at race/history/evolution notes posts some information on 'State-level differences in personality', from a report called "The Geography Of Personality; A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence and Expression of Geographic Variation in Basic Traits".
It's interesting stuff; from what I have read, it seems to tally with my own personal perceptions based on my having lived in and spent time in various states. For instance, guess which states are the highest-scoring states in 'neuroticism'.
NEUROTICISM
Personality traits: Anxious, stressful and impulsive.
Highest-scoring states: West Virginia, Rhode Island, New York, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Arkansas.
Lowest-scoring states: Alaska, Oregon, South Dakota, Colorado, Utah, Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, North Dakota, Nevada.
The first state listed surprises me, but the fact that New York is among the highest-scoring is not surprising to me. No offense to any reader living there, or hailing from there, but New Yorkers do seem to fit the profile listed above as being 'anxious, stressful [sic], and impulsive.'
I guess that's why I never liked the Seinfeld show; it had too much of that neurotic energy about it, like many of the real-life New Yorkers I knew. Where else do you meet 'average' people who have spent years in analysis? It's a hobby, or more accurately, a lifelong project for some people there.
Again, no offense to New Yorkers, but there is something to the stereotypes. And those of us with personality traits which diverge from the norm in a given area are like fish out of water there. It's better to be among people who exhibit similar outlooks and character traits in order to feel most at home.
The state I now live in is one of the lowest-scoring on neuroticism, which again does not surprise me. This state also has a low score on 'extraversion' which is also evident here. People here can be very nice and are very polite, but they are not easy to get close to, nor particularly welcoming to people from other areas -- unless of course, said people are immigrants, in which case they are treated with exaggerated niceness. Still, people here are rather standoffish.
The states that score highest on openness are also for the most part very liberal states. That, too, figures.
The trait of conscientiousness is found more frequently in some Southern states as well as some 'heartland' states. Same with 'agreeableness.'
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
Personality traits: Dutiful, responsible, self-disciplined.
Highest-scoring states: New Mexico, North Carolina, Georgia, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Florida, Arizona, Missouri.
Lowest-scoring states: Wyoming, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maine, Alaska, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York.
But the question is: why do various states exhibit varying levels of these traits, with certain states showing a tendency to have a sort of identifiable persona? Is there something in the air and water that makes people in different states different? Would moving to one of these states make me or anyone else become the 'typical' resident of that state? Maybe -- to a limited extent. I often wondered if staying in that overcrowded multicultural warren that is New York City would turn me into a real New Yorker. No doubt it would have some effect on me if I had stayed there forever, but I don't think it would change my basic traits.
If the people in Washington State manifest different traits than the people in New York (City or state) it would probably be because the people who settled Washington State tended to be people of different ethnic stock than those in New York or Massachusetts. The early pioneers in the West tended to be Anglo-Saxon (New England stock, sometimes via the Midwest) or Scandinavian or German. New York obviously received many more Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans.
It isn't the 'culture' which makes the person or the ethnic group, but vice-versa.
If I were planning to look for a new home, I would seek out the states where people had higher levels of conscientiousness and 'agreeableness' and lower levels of 'openness' and neuroticism.

Labels: American Character, Ethnic Differences, Regional Differences

In the discussion of my earlier post on 'Founding Stock heritage', the question arose: would we be better off today had our colonial English ancestors not seceded, and instead remained under English rule? Or perhaps we would be better off if we had stayed a colony and presumably been granted dominion status like Canada, or been part of some kind of united English North America? (I am paraphrasing and adding a little of my own elaboration, but I think the spirit of the inquiry is intact in my version.)
I did a little ruminating on this question overnight, and a few questions arose in my mind. I suppose we might look at Canada as it exists now, and ask if our history would parallel theirs had we not become independent.
That thought led to the question in my mind: how is it that the Canadians differ in significant ways from Americans? We all are "children of a common mother".
I suppose Canada is the country that, superficially at least, is most like the United States. I have often thought that if I were to live in another country, Canada would be the one that would require the least cultural adjustment. Granted, when I first thought of that, I was quite liberal, and as I've moved rightward, back to the truths of my upbringing, Canada has become even more liberal. So I would not feel as much at home politically there. However, Canadian people, in my experience, are very congenial and polite, though I know many of them resent America's imperial politics and 'gun culture'. At the same time, many right-wing Americans disdain Canada for its liberalism.
But how did the differences between Canadians and Americans come to be? We did start out as English colonies, and we had similar mixes of settlers, from the British Isles as well as from France. So how did it come to be that our colonial ancestors became restive and rebellious and began to resist rule by our cousins in London, while the Canadians retained their allegiance to the Crown, and did not agitate for independence?
I often stress the role of genes in character and behavior. We are not too dissimilar from our Canadian brothers in our ancestral origins -- or we weren't, at first. And we did share a common culture in our British roots and our English language. Yet we seem to have grown apart.
One other commonality between the U.S. and Canada is our history with the 'indigenous peoples'. We share the frontier experience. According to some historians, our experience of the frontier, of the vast open spaces, of the conflict with the Indians -- these things made Americans the people they are, what with our 'rugged individualism' and our attachment to our right to bear arms.
''The Frontier Thesis, also referred to as the Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the American frontier experience. He stressed the process�the moving frontier line�and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. In the thesis, the frontiercreated freedom, by "breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, and calling out new institutions and activities."
Some people are adamant that Americans' fighting spirit comes from our 'Scots-Irish blood', you know, the 'born fighting' image.
Lately, however, it seems that the American 'spirit' of resistance is curiously absent, unless you count the Tea Parties, which is rather sad.
However, we and the Canadians have taken different turns.
This page gives some information on Canada's demographics.
Here, you can see a breakdown by ethnicity.
My impression has always been that Canada has quite a lot of Scottish blood, perhaps more, in proportion to population, than America. And the statistics seem to indicate that.
Why, then, are they not the fighters and the rebels? Canada also has a fair amount of Irish-descended people. Surely all this 'fiery Celtic blood' should have made the Canadians more feisty, but overall we tend to think of Canadians as a very pacific people.
Genetics and culture don't seem to account for much of the difference between us. Or can it be that the stereotypes of the 'Celtic' peoples are not altogether true?
Whatever the reason, America and Canada diverged, culturally and politically. And it seems that the Canadian government is now even more attached to, and enamored of, multiculturalism and diversity than our benighted government.
So paradoxically, though we and Canada diverged, we are becoming similar in our 'diversity' and multicultural, polyglot populations. Isn't it strange how 'diversity' breeds uniformity?
I think it's a little futile to think about how we might have been better off had we stayed under English rule, or how we might have fared had we and Canada been merged into one political unit.
'We' wouldn't have been 'we', then, or would we? Things would have taken a different course. But we will never know, will we? Unless, of course, the globalist overlords openly proclaim the 'North American Union' that they have been engineering for decades. Then both we and Canada will be united in some polyglot mixed-multitude political unit, bearing little to no resemblance to the countries we've known and loved.
Overall, I think it was better that our Founding Fathers won our independence. Being governed by those closer to us, in a smaller-scale government (as existed at the beginning of our Republic) is preferable to being governed by a far-off government which is usually not in touch with the needs or concerns of a group of subjects across the ocean. As H.P. Lovecraft noted in the essay I quoted earlier, there was not any anti-British xenophobia involved in our secession. We were all of the same people; it was not like casting off foreign rule, as some would make it.
It is unfortunate -- no, it's tragic, that our Republic as it was originally founded could not be maintained. I say it could not be maintained, because our Founders were very explicit that the system they set up was not suitable to a rabble or a group of disparate peoples. They said that the system would not be suitable to any but a moral and religious people -- which we have not been for some time now. And most people who give any thought to these things know that a representative government depends on the people being reasonably educated and literate, informed, and responsible. Does this describe our current American electorate?
So our Republic has been gutted from the inside, by a number of factors, and it's to be determined whether it can be salvaged, or whether it is even desirable to salvage it.
It's certainly interesting to ponder over ''what if?'' -- what if we had not become independent? But we can never really know how things would have turned out.
But perhaps thinking about these things -- such as what made America the country it has become? -- will give us opportunity to think about where we are going, and how we can avoid the gross mistakes of the past.
I feel sure that if our colonial fathers could have foreseen what would become of their country, perhaps they would not even have bothered to shed their blood to create it. And that is a bitter realization.

Labels: American Character, American History, American Revolution, Canada, English Heritage

I posted the following (excerpted) article a couple of years ago, but I think it's worth re-posting, for those of you who were not reading this blog when I first posted it. It's from a magazine article of 55 years ago, and it ties in with what I've been writing about our therapeutic, pop-psychology outlook of today, vs. old American common sense.
[All emphasis in the following is mine.]
What Happened to Common Sense?
by Mary Ellen Chase, from Coronet Magazine, May, 1954
Whenever I return to the isolated Maine village where I spend every summer, I am pleasantly surprised by the way in which my neighbors there hold on to certain old terms.
One of these is grit, with its companion, gumption; another is get up and get, which in Maine means to depend on oneself; yet another is common sense. These words describe the human qualities which my neighbors, fishermen and their wives, extoll above all others. For fishing is a hard calling. It demands gumption, or in more polite terms, self-reliance, the power of decision and the determination not to be downed by adverse circumstances.
My neighbors are frankly suspicious of anyone who lacks these old American virtues. They voiced their common judgment of a man who had lost his lobster traps in a northeast gale and had been bewailing his fate with too little reserve.
"Why don't he shut his mouth and pick up his feet?" they said, "You can't set sail straight by takin' time to bawl about bad luck."
They and I stem from the same rural background. In the country school of my childhood, precepts were written on the blackboard, each Monday morning by our "old-fashioned" teachers who knew it to be their duty to instill iron in our souls as well as common fractions in our minds. Through the years those precepts have proved salutary to me in moments of indecision and anxiety. Usually they were in terse prose:
"It takes a live fish to swim upstream, but any old log can float down."
Don't expect others to bear your troubles; they have their own.
Life isn't all you want, but it's all you have; so have it."
Occasionally a rhyme enlivened us. One I recall as a favorite.
The mind of man has no defense
To equal plain, old common sense.
This homely virtue don't despise,
If you would be happy as well as wise.
Parents, too, 50 years ago dealt out such robust aphorisms liberally, sometimes even sternly, in the upbringing of children. I was taught early by both precept and example that a job once undertaken has to be completed whatever the cost, and that no one but the maker of them ought to be expected to pay for mistakes.
[...]During my life as a teacher I have often questioned whether we have discovered any worthy substitutes for those precepts and teachings which, outmoded as they seem, are rooted deeply in our history and our ways of life.
In place of the old sayings we use today new words and terms to describe our states of mind and our meetings of those difficulties and questions which will always beset us. We are now insecure, or ill-adjusted, or frustrated, or made ineffective by a sense of inferiority. These new words lack the optimism of the old. Implicit in them is the notion that we are surrounded by foes difficult to defeat.
The new vocabulary comes into use early. We hesitate to look upon our children as simply ill-mannered or spoiled. We fear that they are problem children who need expert care lest they become neurotics or uncontributive members of society.
In high school and college they are surrounded by advisers on what they would best study, what work in life they are best fitted for. They are too seldom encouraged to face problems by themselves, to make their own decisions and to pay the consequences of their own mistakes.
Nor are adults free from waves of anxiety. Too many of us are looking about for some panacea which will ease the burdens of our past and present errors in judgment and lighten our fears of the future. Something, we feel, is wrong somewhere, and without making any stout attempts on our own to discover what it is, we turn to professional advice which guarantees to show us how to understand ourselves.
Even a cursory reading of such books reveals nothing but what we used to call plain old common sense. They urge upon us a calm and objective weighing of ourselves; a frank and even merciless recognition of our weaknesses and failures, a determination to oust at any cost oversensitiveness, which is but a form of self-indulgence; a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of our families and communities; a fresh start; in short, reliance on our own powers of self-discipline.
No one in his senses would suggest that such books are not often helpful to the anxious mind. But the assumption that most of us have somehow acquired emotional conflicts which we cannot cope with by ourselves surely has its dangers.
We Americans have since our beginnings been known for our self-reliance, for our gumption and common sense. We are, or at least we were, adventurers and our history is the story of a game played against tremendous odds and gloriously won. Why not recall the tough moral fiber which made the winning possible? Isn't it about time that we return as individuals to those values and practices which we have not forgotten so much as neglected?
[...]Life may not be all we want, but it's all we have, as my old school precept said, and it's high time that we have it. We shall not find its secrets or its possible riches in the advice of others, however wise, unless we complete that counsel with our own grit, gumption, and common sense."

Labels: American Character, Aphorisms, Common Sense, New England, Old America, Proverbs, Self-Help, Self-Reliance, Vanishing America