1: Something significant occurred 350 years ago.
When the English arrived in America, they settled in “clumps,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed, as referenced by David Brooks in his book How to Know a Person.
“People from eastern England tended to settle in New England,” David writes, “people from southern England went to Virginia, people from the English Midlands went to Pennsylvania, and the people from northern England went to Appalachia.”
Each group brought their culture with them—”a way of speaking, a way of building a home, a way of raising children, playing sports, cooking food,” he observes, “as well as attitudes about time, attitudes about social order, power, and freedom. . .
“The eastern English who settled New England, David Fischer writes, were highly moralistic, had an acute awareness of social sin, strongly valued education, were very industrious, were highly time conscious, were emotionally buttoned up, valued town halls, and were active in civic life.”
Which is still an accurate description of New England today.
“Those from southern England who went to Virginia were more aristocratic,” he writes. “They built, when they could afford it, palatial homes, and had extended patriarchal families. They liked showy and frilly clothing, were more comfortable with class differences, and were less obsessed about staying on the clock.
“Those who moved from northern England to Appalachia favored a more militant Christianity and ascribed to an honor culture. They were more violent and put a greater emphasis on clan and kin. Their child-rearing techniques fostered a fierce pride that celebrated courage and independence. They cultivated a strong warrior ethic.
“Sure enough,” David writes, “even today people from Appalachia make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. military.”
The bigger point? Much has changed. “But the effects of these early settlement patterns were still evident when David Fischer was writing in the 1980s,” David Brooks notes. “The murder rate in Massachusetts was much lower than the murder rate in Appalachia. In 1980, the high school graduation rate was 90 percent in New England but 74 percent in Virginia.
“New Englanders tolerated much higher tax rates than people in the mid-Atlantic or Appalachian states. New England remains more communal and statist and Appalachia and the South more clannish and combative, with a culture of ‘we take care of ourselves.'”
When it comes to voting, the New England states and the Appalachian states have tended to vote the opposite way.
“The electoral map of 1896 looks very much like the electoral map of 2020 (Drew’s note: and 2024!). The populist candidates did very well in the southern and midwestern states in both elections,” David writes. “The only difference was that in 1896 William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat and in 2020 Donald Trump was a Republican.
“The parties had switched places, but the combative populist ethos stayed the same. The seeds of this behavior were planted over three centuries ago, and many of the people who live them out today are not even aware of where they come from.”
2: To know a person, we will want to understand how their ancestors are showing up in their lives.
David writes: “I recently came across a passage from the twentieth-century psychoanalyst therapist Theodor Reik that I could relate to: ‘I am an infidel Jew. I can scarcely read Hebrew any longer; I have only a smattering of Jewish history, literature, and religion. Yet I know that I am a Jew in every fiber of my personality. It is as silly and as useless to emphasize it as it is to disavow it. The only possible attitude toward it is to acknowledge it as a fact.’
“I, too, am an infidel Jew,” he observes, “maybe even more so than Reik. My faith journey has taken me in unexpected directions. I don’t go to synagogue anymore; I go to church. I don’t speak Hebrew, and I no longer keep kosher.
“Yet I, too, am a Jew down to the very fiber of my being. There’s no escape. It shows up in the obvious ways Jewish culture is often described. I have a deep reverence for the written word. For Jews, argument is a form of prayer, and I went into a disputation business. Jews put intense focus on education and achievement, and so did my family. . .
“But there are subtler ways my ancestors show up in me. . . Jewish life has always been insecure. Through the long centuries of exile Jews developed an awareness that everybody needs some place in the world they can call home. I think that insecurity never goes away. You’re always, to some small degree, a stranger in a strange land, with an affinity for all the other strangers.”
“But do you want to know the biggest way I think my ancestors show up in my life? Thousands of years ago Jews were a small, insignificant people living in a marginal part of the world. And yet they believed that God had centered history around them. It was an audacious conviction!
“And that notion has come down to us in the form of a related conviction: that life is an audacious moral journey. Life asks a moral question: Have you lived up to the covenant?
“This, in turn, raises further questions,” He suggests: “Have you taken your Exodus journey? Are you striving to be good and repair the world? It’s a pressure-packed demand to grow and be better, and it’s one that lives in me.”
3: To really see another person, we are wise to be curious about their deep source of self.
We can ask, David suggests: “Where’s home? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between culture?”
This approach, this mindset, pushes us beyond the “shallow stereotypes and the judgments people might lazily rely on,” he observes.
It’s how we come to know the whole person.
“You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours,” the novelist Robert Penn Warren writes, “but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours…What you are in an expression of history.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where’s home? How do the dead show up in my life? How do I embrace or reject my culture? How do I create and contribute to my culture? How do I rebel against my culture?
Action: Discuss with a family member or friend.
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