Hours before the failed insurrection of 6 January, I had finished reading J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, the young author’s absorbing autobiography of growing up in an extended Appalachian family in a failing industrial town in Ohio. Reading it prompted me to consider the unique features of specific cultures and subcultures, deeply rooted factors that make for flourishing and those that obstruct it over the long term. In recent decades we have come to assume that all cultures are equal and that the different ways of doing things that separate distinctive groups of people are equally valid. If one group suffers disproportionately from poverty and social instability, we are generally loathe to examine internal contributing factors for fear of being accused of blaming the victim. Nevertheless, if we take seriously the status of our fellow human beings as responsible agents, we cannot afford to overlook these factors. This has profound public policy implications.
Although I was raised in suburban Chicago and now make my home in Canada, I have hillbilly roots on my mother’s side. My maternal grandmother was born in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, best known as the home of John Fox, Jr., author of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Her frequently absent father moved the family to a farm near Adrian, Michigan, around 1914, to join his mother and her latest husband. My grandmother was married four times, my mother having been fathered by her third husband, a Finnish American from Michigan’s remote upper peninsula. The epidemic of fatherlessness in that line goes back to the middle of the 19th century, as far as we know—something which my generation was mercifully spared.
I have extensively researched that side of the family through an online genealogy site, and I have discovered much that fleshes out the larger story. Most of my relatives have lived in the region where Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky meet west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their lives have often been short, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the marriages or where they were living at any moment. One distant cousin even married a Vance. Our forebears have lived there since the 17th and 18th centuries, descended from the Howards, the Booths, and the Plantagenet monarchs of England. A Hyder ancestor fought in the War of Independence. One line goes back to a certain “Irish” Andrew Culbertson (1694-1746), whose family was originally from Scotland, thus being part of the great wave of Scots-Irish settlers to populate the Appalachian region.
This means that I can legitimately claim hillbilly origins. While the name is often used negatively, it refers to the Ulster Scots who championed “Good King Billy,” that is, the protestant William III and his co-ruler Mary, who defeated her father, the Catholic King James II in 1688. I cannot say that much of this culture has survived in our immediate family, which was more influenced by my father’s Greek Cypriot birth. All the same, given its vestiges in my mother’s upbringing, she hated the 1980s television show, Mama’s Family, because it reminded her too much of her childhood visits to her Appalachian grandparents’ somewhat turbulent home.
Vance gives us a vivid account of the virtues and deficiencies of the subculture in which he was raised. Courtesy and refined etiquette are for wealthy people and city folk, whom they generally mistrust. Fierce loyalty ties families together, while a certain violent streak runs through the subculture, surfacing in ways that elicit the disapproval of outsiders and, at times, the wrath of the law. Hillbillies are intensely religious, yet, as Vance tells us, few actually attend church or are attached to a church community that might provide a measure of stability to their lives. This volatile combination of traits evoked a now infamous comment by Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Of course, Obama was roundly criticized for his insensitivity, but given his position in a more educated urban political establishment, his comments were testimony to the divided nature of the American polity, something that has reached alarming levels over the past four years.
Are some cultures good and others bad? Not exactly. Every culture is both good and bad, as long historical experience should have taught us by now. If we have been instructed not to judge other cultures, this is undoubtedly due to a laudable effort to avoid prejudice and stereotype. Yet it may hamper our ability to evaluate the discrete traditions that form such cultures. No one can sensibly argue that the oppressive traditions of racial segregation did not constitute a genuine dysfunction in southern white culture. Similarly, where father absence has become endemic to a specific subculture, as Vance experienced growing up, one is likely to see more criminal activity among young males, along with a failure to nurture and provide for the next generation. Seething resentments will boil over in ways that affect, not just the families and immediate neighbourhoods, but an entire political community.
The complex interrelations between personal responsibility and external environment have occupied the attentions of social scientists and public policy makers for generations. Is the inner-city gang member a free agent, responsible for his own actions, or is he the unfortunate member of an urban underclass marked by single-parent households, absent fathers, and welfare dependency? Well, the short answer is: both. The long answer is that every choice we make, every deed we do, is conditioned by myriad factors from without. We are not autonomous, choosing our life paths in a vacuum. Our free decisions flow from within ourselves, to be sure, but our very identities have been shaped by parental upbringing, relationships with siblings and other relatives, formal education, church attendance (or lack thereof), and the larger traditions that have shaped the surrounding culture. Our status as persons created in God’s image is by no means reducible to such factors, but we cannot credibly deny the large role they have played in making us who we are.
While Vance is still young and has much more of life ahead of him, I appreciate that he has so early come to recognize the interplay between these factors in his own person. How easily can we connect his observations about his own subculture with the events last week in Washington? I am reluctant to draw too straight a line between what Vance calls hillbilly values and the storming of the Capitol. Nevertheless, if a particular group comes to feel that they have been disenfranchised by “the system,” and if they believe that their legitimate needs and aspirations are being neglected, they will more easily follow someone, reputable or not, claiming to defend their interests.
Here are some questions we need to be asking and discussing:
- How should public policy take into account the interplay between personal responsibility and cultural environment? Throwing money at social problems will not make them go away, yet governments cannot “fix” a dysfunctional culture either.
- How do we help the most needy in our society without inadvertently subsidizing the behaviour that exacerbates the need? How do we assist single-parent families without accidentally encouraging father absence?
- How can we help to preserve and facilitate a culture of respect for the rule of law, constitutional government, and ordinary political processes, especially where a substantial segment of the population has come to doubt that they are doing justice?
- Might electoral reform be in order to dampen the partisan divisions that have hardened into outright polarization? Could some variety of proportional representation end the monopoly of the two major parties, with their evident deficiencies, paving the way for other voices to be heard? If elections were more about just representation than winners and losers, we might see less polarization in the electorate.
- Ought affirmative action policies to be fitted with a sunset clause, recognizing that the group-based unequal treatment they mandate cannot be sustained over the long term without fomenting resentments in other aggrieved groups? Might they be tied to specific feasible aims rather than to a vague and unattainable end goal of equality?
- What ought church congregations to do to address social dysfunctions? Might governments encourage participation in such communities without violating the no establishment clause in the first amendment, recognizing the important role they play in contributing to a flourishing culture? Might the churches themselves be agents of healing and change in a dysfunctional culture?
After the unpleasantness of last week, I believe that Americans need to take ownership of the divisions that have poisoned the nation’s political life in recent years. A place to begin is to set aside the ideological illusions that have contributed to these divisions, reevaluate our own cultural mores, and to begin to listen—genuinely listen—to people with whom we disagree.
Photo: Benjamin and Elizabeth Bentley, c. 1900 (2nd great-grandparents to author)
