Persistent Regionalism: Problems of Cause

Why have regional cultures persisted for so long a period in Anglo-America? How does any culture persist? This problem has long been neglected by historians and social scientists. Barrington Moore observes:

There is a widespread assumption in modern social science that social continuity requires no explanation. Supposedly it is not problematical. Change is what requires explanation. … The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering.¹⁶

Cultural persistence is not the same as stasis. Many things must happen if a culture is to be transmitted from one generation to the next. Whenever its continuance is challenged by events as large as a revolution, or as small as the birth of a child, some very complex cultural machinery instantly begins to operate.

This process of cultural persistence may be studied from many different perspectives. One obvious approach centers on the ways in which individual people learn their social roles. Some of the most important instruments of cultural persistence operate within schools, churches and families, where children learn to do what is expected of them. Other institutions continue the socializing process through every stage of life. Each of the four cultural regions of British America, as we have seen, kept its own customs of enculturation for many generations.

A second and very different perspective on persistence centers on the functional interdependence of a culture’s various parts. Material and ethical structures, for example, tend to be mutually reinforcing. To change a culture in any fundamental way, one must transform many things at once—no easy task, as many a reformer has learned. Social institutions tend to perpetuate themselves, and have their own means of doing so. These institutional imperatives are powerful instruments of continuity in a cultural system.

Yet another perspective on cultural persistence focuses on the conduct of elites. There is a cultural equivalent of the iron law of oligarchy; small groups dominate every cultural system. They tend to do so by controlling institutions and processes, so that they become the “governors” of a culture in both a political and a mechanical sense.

This iron law of cultural elites is an historical constant, but the relation between elites and other cultural groups is highly variable. Every culture might be seen as a system of bargaining, in which elites maintain their hegemony by concessions to other groups. These bargaining processes worked differently in the four regions of British America. New England’s town system, for example, gave each community a high degree of autonomy and also a common interest in supporting the system itself, Pennsylvania’s system of reciprocal liberty became a basis for bargaining among different groups. In the back settlements, the idea of natural liberty functioned in the same way. These bargaining processes became exceptionally complex in the Chesapeake colonies; historian Allan Kulikoff has brilliantly described the social transactions between gentry and yeomen, gentry and poor whites, and gentry and slaves.¹⁷

Finally, when all else fails, the ultimate instrument of cultural persistence is physical force, which every culture must sometimes use to maintain itself. Even the Quakers were compelled to use force against criminals and pirates in the Delaware Bay. Every other culture frequently resorted to violence against aliens and dissenters.

These various perspectives on cultural persistence—enculturation, institutional structures, elite solidarity, intergroup bargaining and physical force, are not alternative to one another. They are different ways of looking at a single cultural process of high complexity.