Over the last few weeks, I have covered some of the broad trends of regional culture and their implications for the political and social divides existing in the United States. While David Hackett-Fischer has provided the most comprehensive study of these regional origins, Thomas Sowell and Theodore Dalrymple have also chronicled some of the shocking successes and failures of various subcultures across the globe and throughout the centuries.
Thomas Sowell has written on this topic for over three decades. His focus has been on disproportionately successful groups such as the Chinese and Jews, studying them in their various social contexts–which were sometimes favorable but often unfavorable–as immigrant groups.
The surprising finding is that despite the massive bouts of persecution they have experienced in many countries, these groups have prospered in almost every instance, while the native groups in those same societies often languished in poverty, notwithstanding government-sponsored preferences for these natives. Consider the cases of the Chinese in Malaysia and the Jews in Poland; their experience varied across time and regime type, but the stubborn tendency of both subgroups to succeed despite encumbrances were widely noted by foreign and domestic observers.
Theodore Dalrymple was a physician in the U.K. for over thirty years, during which time he observed the cultural patterns and beliefs that created the underclass. His patients were predominately white, urban, and poor. Dalrymple observed patterns of arrogance, disdain for education, tendency towards violence on the slightest pretext, and a lack of personal responsibility.
These Britons were not discriminated against nor had a past history of slavery, yet they exhibited many of the same social pathologies that characterized the worst elements of the urban poor in the U.S. Dalrymple found that the attitudes, work patterns, and unique folkways of these people accounted for their situations far better than any commonly used explanation of the Left.
In his work Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell documents how the origin of “rednecks” goes back to the borderland traditions in Northern England, Ulster County Ireland, and Lowland Scotland. Remarkably, Sowell puts forward the thesis that the modern “ghetto” culture of urban blacks stems from this same tide.
The white overseers and workers who ran Southern plantations were most often from this borderland British culture and imparted this same culture to the slaves. Sowell marshals decisive data to warrant his thesis while avoiding casting blame on any of the actors involved. The social historian’s task is to explain the paths through which human traditions travel without heaping moral opprobrium upon the actors in the drama. Recognition of the reality of social history should inform our modern policy prescriptions so that we avoid the failures experienced by would-be social reformers of the past.
