On Culture: Part 1

Borders & Bloodlines

Culture: the customs, arts, institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.

Culture at one point in time was strictly localist or nationalist. A dish from a particular region of a nation is a dish that inot only displays the creative prowess of that people, but reflects the land and its available resources.

Culture was as identifiable as the lines on maps that marked a region or a nation.

To know Basque culture was to know harri-jasotzea (stone lifting) that originated in working in quarries and to know chipirons a la plancha is to know the squid dish created from the fishing spoils of the Basque sailing traditions on the Bay of Biscay.

Different regions of the United Kingdom are more or less inclined to identify with nationalist sentiments. Scotland has been dancing with the fantasy of independence, yet the East Midlands only increased in national pride throughout the 2010s. The man from Nottingham wears the British badge of honor with far more pride than the man from Edinburgh.

Nationalism is, in some ways, a recent development and in some instances, a spirit that has emerged in great empires, states, and peoples that have existed throughout history.

Italy and Germany were mere grand ideas of the combined power and influence of the states of Genoa and Venice, or Bavaria and Prussia, respectively. The blood that runs in those regions has the same origin that made such an idea possible:  unification as opposed to blatant conquest.

Giuseppe Garibaldi and Otto von Bismarck were just facilitators of a seizure of power for blood brothers in their unifications of these recent states.

The creation of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, however, saw a Germanic and Finno-Uralic rule over and predominantly Slavic people, and growing war tensions with each newly acquired Balkan acquisition. Within this empire was little shared blood between the overlords and its common folk, and this manifested in the form of common culture limited to its military traditions. One needs only to open up a history book to know how this empire came to its end.

Nazi Germany deployed the most ambitious policy for the national unification of all Germanic peoples  that included long term plans of expanding as far east as the Crimea, south to Croatia, and as far North as Sami territories of Scandinavia and Karelia. Adolf Hitler saw any European territory that possessed Germanic peoples or “Teutons” as vital for unifying in order to preserve, strengthen, and expand their bloodlines and culture, thought to be carried in the blood.

The displacement of any other peoples—typically Slavic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and in some cases, Arab was a necessary measure for the German people’s “space to grow.” This was less of a case of unification and more of a case of forcible military expansion with a deep rooted justification of shared blood, and it was the aspired fulfillment of the old German Empire’s dream of “Middle Europe,” that envisioned the Germanic people’s unification in a super state from the Alps to the Arctic Ocean. No longer would Germans leave the motherland for America. On the contrary, Swedes, Norwegians, and Dutch immigrants would fill in the likes of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Balkans in the new frontiers of a greater “Germania.” Unification and expansion proved to be a force pairing that displayed a powerful threat to the balances of Europe and the world, only extinguished by the combined forces of the United States, British Empire, and Soviet Union. The vision of a grand Germanic empire demanded the death of millions for both its growth and defeat.

Of the efforts that have attempted to unite national cultures, races, and decentralized local subcultures, the most successful effort in recent memory has been that of the United States, although this has not been without its pitfalls. The United States has certainly exercised its “right to gain space to grow,” for the sake of benefitting both its founding stock and immigrant stock, but the lands conquered saw decimation of native lations which avoided the tensions experienced in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Nazi Germany.

The United States is a culture that has been in some ways formless, in some ways localist, in some ways nationalist, and in some ways, at war with itself.

The United States was founded on the ideals of the Bible, the Enlightenment,” and the philosophy of John Locke in the hands of an Anglo-Saxon elite. This Anglo-Saxon founding stock was in control of the country for the first near 150 years of its existence until 1913. The Constitution itself, however, did not found the United States based on ethnos but on proposition. These propositions in the Constitution and its amendments which were at least on paper, applied to all naturalized citizens whether descended from slavery or descended from immigrants.

Fragmented, distinct local subculture gives rise to regionalism. At the height of its differences, it led to the war that tore the country apart. Despite the end of the armed conflict, the core division of industrial North and agricultural South live to this day. In the current era, the local divides are many, and several shifts are taking place.

The old guard WASP strongholds of New England and classic New York, the pre-Revolution plantation owners of the Deep South, the Mid-Atlantic contingent, and the original mountain-dwellers of Appalachia are now joined by cultures of Great Lake industrial states, “fly-over” country states of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain wilderness, the Southwestern deserts, Southern California, Bay Area Silicon Valley, and Cascadia. 

A new clear divide is making itself known within each of these regions: that between rural and urban. In the 1920s, the population of cities surpassed the population of rural America, and rapid decay occurred over the past century. To be from Austin, Texas is to have a near opposite identity to the remainder of the state. A stone’s throw away from one’s home could be a family of a different race, upbringing, religion, value system, and political inclination. While there is a near equal political divide of the states, the granularity of belief and culture is increasing. Marxist Boise is as bewildering to the legacy Idahoan as reddening San Diego is to the nearby Los Angeles horde. The recent pandemic only intensified this growing localism, as remote working’s normalization allowed a mass exodus out of San Francisco and New York to the American interior.

Nationalism in America is strongest in matters of circumstance. External, existential threats were seldom known after the War of 1812 solidified American independence. While December 7th can be argued as the result of American baiting the Axis into striking first, the attack on Pearl Harbor was an attack on American soil nonetheless. This galvanized an the nation to give birth to a national identity rooted in a common enemy overseas and the most grandiose collective effort towards a common goal that thrusted the country into global hegemony. Such a unified American identity had only been known in one other instance: Westward and overseas expansion.

The spoils of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and the Oregon Treaty in the 1840s laid the groundwork for a “Manifest Destiny” culture that lasted for over 100 years. The healing of North and South was postulated to be found in the joining of East and West, and the end of the Civil War marked a rush to the West Coast that fulfilled the original promise of America: a clean slate in the world beyond. As the West became increasingly settled, the truth of this promise began to erode in the final wave towards the Pacific with the Sun belt migration of the 1950s, and on cue, the 1960s dealt a crippling blow to American culture and nationalism with the polarization of the Vietnam War assisting in eroding force. A pride in American values as a nation has only been known in expansion or against an external existential threat, and the victor of the Cold War remains questionable.

One of the roots in American culture is the act of resistance itself. The willingness to fight and impose one’s will for the sake of an idea is both a limitless power source and an ongoing internal threat.

When this root of American culture plays in unison toward an grand objective, it’s the most powerful national spirit in human recorded history, but when it is harnessed by opposition entities within the nation’s borders, the only recognizable common culture is conflict and chaos.