The Three Cultures that made America (original) (raw)

The late Ronald Inhgelheart did for cultures what the inventors of the Big 5 personality inventory did for psychology: identify the underlying dimensions. Inspired by Maslow's needs he came up with three: traditional-survival values, self-expression values and secular-rational values. The map above shows where the US is located on this map (which should really be a three-dimensional landscape). Reading Colin Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America makes it clear, however, that such a representation is highly artificial, especially for a huge country like the US. Woodard identifies eleven different nations that merely have partially overlapping cultures and that were at times at odds with each other, which is highly relevant for understanding today's polarisation. Here are three very different cultures: Puritans While other colonies welcomed all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for "heretic." Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion.

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