One of America's biggest root problems: Scots-Irish culture

[fifthoffive]

55. The book this article is based on is an attempt to explain southern white rural violence.

Extrapolating a "warlike" culture from 250+ years ago on a different continent (assuming that is even true!) to explain today's complex societal problems in the South is nothing short of bollocks. To use it to explain political motivation is irresponsible ethnic prejudice.

Nisbett and Cohen's thesis is controversial at best, and dead wrong at worst.

http://reason.com/archives/1997/02/01/a-matter-of-respect

If there is, indeed, a culture of honor in the South that lends itself to violence, where did it come from? And why is it uniquely Southern? Here Culture of Honor is rather thin and unpersuasive: "We believe that the southern culture of honor derives from the herding economy brought to the region by the earliest settlers and practiced by them for many decades thereafter." Elsewhere the authors refer to the Scotch-Irish origins of the early South, the hard-scrabble herding economy of the era, and the "worldwide" association between herding economies and "concerns about honor and readiness to commit violence to conserve it."

Nisbett and Cohen call this argument "the weakest part of our thesis," with good reason. The implication is that Yankees of Scotch-Irish origins would be just as prone to violence as Southerners, which is not likely to be the case. This is not to suggest that the herding thesis is wrong, only that it seems rather a stretch as argued here. One would like to see evidence on the origins of the Southern culture of violence that is as persuasive as the evidence of its existence. The evidence assembled here, while certainly intriguing and even fascinating at times, does not rule out alternative explanations for the higher rate of violence in the South--including my favorite, originally proposed by Sheldon Hackney as early as 1970: "In the South, there's just more folks who need killing."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/200904/is-southern-violence-due-culture-honor

Nisbett and colleagues collected a variety of evidence that appeared to back up their theory that the type of agriculture practiced, specifically herding as opposed to farming, promoted a culture of honor leading to violent crime (1).

The problem is that when some of their key evidence was carefully re-evaluated, a very different conclusion was reached (2). Rebecca Chu and others investigated the white non-Hispanic male homicide rates in rural counties in the South as a function of the type of agriculture practiced. They evaluated the prediction that homicide rates would be higher in counties that were arid and hilly and thus more suitable for herding than farming (and therefore conducive to a culture of honor). They concluded:
"Although we analyze similar data and address the same conceptual issues, we find no support for the Nisbett-Reaves hypothesis. Overall, white male homicides in rural counties in the South do not vary as predicted by Nisbett's theory. Moreover, for some estimates of white male homicide rates, when county homicides are adjusted for differences in white poverty, the patterns are directly opposite to the Nisbett-Reaves predictions" (2, p. 972).

The very different conclusions of the two teams of researchers boil down to a mundane statistical technicality about how to deal with the very small number of homicides in some rural counties but the reanalysis is clearly correct.

The tragedy of science, according to Aldous Huxley is when a beautiful theory gets killed off by an ugly fact. Fans of the herding culture of honor theory have either ignored the contradictory evidence or pointed to evidence that Southern whites still have higher violent crime rates than northern whites - even if they move north (3). Oddly, this violent streak skips women and urban residents (4).

So where does that leave us? First, the herding explanation for violent tendencies of Southern white men was clearly falsified in relation to homicides. Second, the higher levels of homicide by whites in rural counties of the South can be fully explained in terms of poverty.