Cultures of Honor and Their Persistence: The Scots-Irish

 The term “culture of honor” can be misleading to the unfamiliar.  It does not imply a society wherein honorable intentions and actions are the standard.  Let us turn to this source for an appropriate definition provided by psychologists. 

“A culture of honor is a culture in which a person (usually a man) feels obliged to protect his or her reputation by answering insults, affronts, and threats, oftentimes through the use of violence. Cultures of honor have been independently invented many times across the world. Three well-known examples of cultures of honor include cultures of honor in parts of the Middle East, the southern United States, and inner-city neighborhoods (of the United States and elsewhere) that are controlled by gangs.”

“Cultures of honor can vary in many ways. Some stress female chastity to an extreme degree, whereas others do not. Some have strong norms for hospitality and politeness toward strangers, whereas others actively encourage aggression against outsiders. What all cultures of honor share, however, is the central importance placed on insult and threat and the necessity of responding to them with violence or the threat of violence.” 

Cultures develop over time.  The sociology of inner-city gangs seems more a business model than a culture.  The cultural attributes referred to in the Middle East developed over millennia and have persisted over millennia up to the present day.  Referring to a “southern” culture of honor is not incorrect, but the term can be misleading and provide little in gaining an understanding of the culture. 

It is universally understood that the roots of this southern behavior pattern are derived from the immigration of what are referred to as the Scots-Irish (alternately as the Scotch-Irish).  We will recognize that the term “scotch” is more appropriately associated with a delightful alcoholic beverage.  Malcolm Gladwell included a chapter on the Scots-Irish in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.  He attributes the best historical account of the southern culture to David Hacker Fischer. 

“David Hacker Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America is the most definitive and convincing treatment of the idea that cultural legacies cast a long historical shadow…In Albion’s Seed, Fischer argues that there were four distinct British migrations to America in its first 150 years: first the Puritans, in the 1630s, who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts; then the Cavaliers and indentured servants, who came from southern England to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century; then the Quakers from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and finally the people of the borderlands to the Appalachian interior in the eighteenth century.  Fischer argues brilliantly that these four cultures—each profoundly different—characterize those four regions of the United States even to this day.”

These people of the borderlands are the Scots-Irish.  The borderlands are the inhospitable and long-contested regions where England and Scotland collide.  These people would acquire the “Irish” label because they would move to Northern Ireland to escape the English only to find more mistreatment by the English in Ulster before finally seeking relief in America.

“The so-called American backcountry states—from the Pennsylvania border south and west through Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina, and the northern end of Alabama and Georgia—were settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from one of the world’s most ferocious cultures of honor.  They were the ‘Scotch-Irish’—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland.”

Former Senator for Virginia Jim Webb, a man proud of his Scots-Irish heritage, heaped praise on these people (and a little criticism) in his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.  He sees much to be admired in the characteristics imported into the US.  We will follow his book for a moment.

His description begins in Roman times when Celtic peoples were driven to what is now Scotland and made a stand in defense of their freedom.  Their social development, or lack thereof, was determined by the centuries of warfare, by the inhospitable environment they found in Scotland, and by the version of Christianity they adopted.

“...while Scotland’s rough topography made it difficult to conquer, it made it equally difficult to rule.....Not unlike Appalachia, Scotland is a land of difficult water barriers, sharp mountains and deep hollows, soggy moors and rough pastures, and of thin, uncultivable soil that lies like a blanket over wide reaches of granite....the settlements of ancient Scotland grew haphazardly and emphasized a rugged form of survival that had links neither to commerce nor to the developing world.  Again we find a cultural evolution and a fundamental lifestyle very much like those that would emerge later in the Appalachian Mountains.”

This is a theme that Webb returns to several times.  These people did not pass through the stages of cultural and political development that have been common to most nations.  The Scots of interest to us left before Scotland became a stable political entity with renowned universities.  By the time they migrated to Northern Ireland they had endured many generations of political turmoil at the national level.  That and their isolated and harsh environment formed character traits and social responses that Webb argues persist to this day.

“Such turbulence at the center of national government not only empowered the local clan leaders, it also demanded that they be strong, both for their own survival and also for the well-being of their extended families.  And again a familiar pattern reinforced itself in what would become the Scots-Irish character: the mistrust of central authority, the reliance on strong tribal rather than national leaders, and the willingness to take the law into one’s own hands rather than waiting for a solution to come down from above.”

Of great significance in understanding these people is the development of their religious beliefs.  The Scots were the beneficiaries of what Webb describes as the most corrupt version of the Catholic Church to be found anywhere.  It seems only natural that they would respond by accepting the most harsh and demanding form of Protestantism based on the teachings of John Calvin. 

“But Scotland ‘developed the Calvinistic doctrine that civil government, though regarded as a necessity, was to be recognized only when it was conducted according to the word of God.’  This meant not only that the Kirk would have the power to organize religious power at the local level, but also that Scots had reserved the right to judge their central government according to the standards they themselves would set from below.” 

Note that at this point you have a people who have never accepted the notion of allegiance to a central government and have lived with the belief that loyalty is to be extended as far as their local clans and churches.  You have a culture whose highest educational goal is to be able to read the Bible.

More on Webb’s book can be found in Born Fighting by Jim Webb.

The Scots-Irish culture would spread from its Appalachian roots and become dominant in the southern states.  It would also undergo one last migration.  It and its effects are described by James N. Gregory, a history professor, in his book The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America.  The migration of Blacks from the South to the cities of the North and West has been referred to as “The Great Migration.”  The migration of whites from the South over the same period was much larger, but much less studied.  Gregory provides this summary of what his investigations demonstrated.

“This book is about what may be the most momentous internal population movement of the twentieth century, the relocation of black and white Americans from the farms and towns of the South to the cities and suburbs of the North and West.  In the decades before the South became the Sun Belt, 20 million southerners left the region.  In doing so, they changed America.  They transformed American religion, spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating evangelical Protestantism, both black and white versions.  They transformed American popular culture, especially music.  The development of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, and hillbilly and country music all depended on the southern migrants.  The Southern Diaspora transformed American racial hierarchies, as black migrants in the great cities of the North and West developed institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement.  The Southern Diaspora also helped reshape American conservatism, contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics.  Indeed, most of the great political realignments of the second half of the twentieth century had something to do with the population movements out of the South.” 

More on Gregory’s work can be found in The Southern Diaspora and the Southernization of America. 

The notion that cultures persist across generations and centuries has been claimed several times.  We return to Gladwell who attempts to provide proof.  He begins with an assessment of backwoods honor culture at work.  A description is made of a dispute between the Howard and Turner families in nineteenth century Harlan County, Kentucky.  An argument began between one member of each family over a poker game.  Before it was resolved many people had to die. 

“The first critical fact about Harlan is that at the same time that the Howards and Turners were killing one another, there were almost identical clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians.  In the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud on the West Virginia-Kentucky border not far from Harlan, several dozen people were killed in a cycle of violence that stretched over twenty years.  In the French-Eversole feud in Perry County, Kentucky, twelve died…The Martin-Tolliver feud, in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the mid-1880s featured three gunfights, three ambushes, and two house attacks, and ended in a two-hour gun battle involving one hundred armed men.  The Baker-Howard feud in Clay County, Kentucky, began in 1806, with an elk-hunting party gone bad, and didn’t end until the 1930s, when a couple of Howards killed three Bakers in an ambush…And these were just the well-known feuds.” 

“The triumph of a culture of honor explains why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive.  Murder rates are higher there than in the rest of the country.  But crimes of property and ‘stranger’ crimes—like muggings—are lower.  As the sociologist John Shelton Reed has written, ‘The homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons both killer and victim understand.’  Reed adds: ‘The statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer.’  In the backcountry, violence was not for economic gain.  It was personal.  You fought over your honor.”

Gladwell describes experiments by psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan.  They set up a situation where a group of male students were asked to fill out a form and then drop it off at the end of a long hallway.  For half the students that was all.  For the other half, it was arranged for the student be bumped into by research associate and called an “asshole.”  In order to assess the effect of having that word directed at them the researchers visually sensed the level of anger, measured strength of handshake, and took saliva tests both before and after to measure cortisol and testosterone levels. 

“The results were unequivocal.  There were clear differences in how the young men responded to being called a bad name.  For some, the insult changed their behavior.  For some it didn’t.  The deciding factor in how they reacted wasn’t how emotionally secure they were, or whether they were intellectuals or jocks, or whether they were physically imposing or not.  What mattered—and I think you can guess where this is headed—was where they were from.  Most of the men from the northern part of the United States treated the incident with amusement.  They laughed it off.  Their handshakes were unchanged.  Their levels of cortisol actually went down as if they were unconsciously trying to diffuse their own anger.”

“But the southerners?  Oh,my.  They were angry.  Their cortisol and testosterone jumped.  Their handshakes got firm.” 

“This study is strange isn’t it?  It is one thing to conclude that groups of people living in circumstances pretty similar to their ancestors’ act a lot like their ancestors.  But those southerners in the hallway study weren’t living in circumstances similar to their British ancestors.  They didn’t necessarily have British ancestors.  They just happened to have grown up in the South….They were living in the late twentieth century not the late nineteenth century.  They were students at the University of Michigan, in one of the northernmost states in America, which meant they were sufficiently cosmopolitan to travel hundreds of miles from the south to go to college.  And none of that mattered.  They still acted like they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan, Kentucky.”

“’Your median student in those studies comes from a family making over a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s in nineteen ninety dollars,’ Cohen says.  ‘The southerners we see this effect with aren’t kids who come from the hills of Appalachia.  They are more likely to be the sons of upper-middle management Coca-Cola executives in Atlanta.”

No matter how counterproductive they may be, cultural attributes can be propagated for centuries—even millennia— long after the conditions that generated them have disappeared.  And cultural attributes matter.  Here the focus was on violent tendencies.  But Webb’s description touches on other cultural factors that are perhaps even more important in our era. They certainly matter in politics.  We cannot deal with political adversaries if we don’t understand why they think and act as they do.  We should also try to consider what cultural legacies are driving us to believe and act as we do.