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Jan 1, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse

Another very thoughtful essay.

By chance I have Albion’s Seed on my To Be Read pile right now. I am intrigued by any discussion of the lingering effects of British culture on American life. I have long maintained the greatest legacy from the mother country, aside from the language of Keats, Milton and Shakespeare, is English Common Law. It is the latter, for example, that distinguishes the lands to the north and the south of the imaginary line we call the US-Mexican border, and is the primary reason thousands of people attempt to cross that border from the south every year, instead of the other way around.

Yes, I am a confirmed Anglophile, which doesn’t mean I am blind to the historical abuses and injustices of perfidious Albion; but that I also recognize the stunning cultural and legal gifts Britain has bestowed on the entire world, such as the notion that government power should be statutorily curbed to protect the rights of the individual (I believe the first Bill of Rights in history was the English one from 1689). Could there be any more succinct expression of the relations between the state and a free subject or citizen than that of William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham?

“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the KING OF ENGLAND cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”

(If he had still been Prime Minister during the Troubles between Britain and her North American colonies, there would not have been a Revolutionary War, IMHO)

ANYWAY, I was a very active gun rights advocate for about ten or fifteen years (until I gave up when I realized American gun owners were their own worst enemies on the subject: you can’t coherently defend the “right to keep and bear arms” when you don’t actually believe in civil rights). I spent a lot of time looking into homicide rates in different countries and US cities, and arrived at the conclusion long ago that these variances in “acceptable violence” are down to culture and have nothing to do with this or that law attempting to curb it. You reduce violence by getting to work on the culture behind it, and there is no wishing it away by banning this or that contributory behavior (as the utter failure of the War on Drugs makes crystal clear).

One thing that frustrated me was this notion that the US was a particularly violent society when compared to “other countries.” The “other countries” were always European countries (plus Japan and Canada) that had little in common with the historical development of the US. Better comparisons would be with countries that experienced, within generational memory, high levels of immigration; genocide of the indigenous population; civil war; the pushing forward of a wild frontier; and slavery. In short, most of the nations of the Western Hemisphere. And in that regard, the US looks pretty good (Canada looks even better). And again, I submit the essential difference between, say, the US (and Canada) and El Salvador is English Common Law, which among other things provides a moderating influence on inherently violent peoples . . . like the English, Irish and Scottish.

All cultures have their quirks, and compared to Continental Europeans, casual violence has always been more acceptable to Anglo-Saxons and Irish. I lived in the UK for a couple years and saw this first-hand: you are much more likely to get into a bar fight in the UK, if you aren’t careful, than in most of the US, and certainly Continental Europe (I believe this is because Europeans are simply less violent; while American behavior is probably moderated by the very good chance your bar antagonist might be armed). When I returned to the US from the UK and spent a lot of time in Irish bars (which attract British expats as well as Irish and Irish-Americans), I saw much more fighting in the latter than in other bars, partly because most Americans would never expect the sort of escalation that can happen if you casually insult or irritate a drunk Brit or Irishman.

Another fun fact I used to deploy in my criticisms of gun controls: the homicide rate in Britain is (handwaving a little here) four times that of Germany, though both countries have very similar laws regarding weapon ownership. So how do you account for that? Culture. The laws mean nothing.

When you look at the supposedly extremely violent “Old West,” you find that most of the senseless violence between white people was not so much among cowboys of movie legend, but along the railroads, which were built with Irish labor (except for the Central Pacific, which used Chinese). The casual violence and murder was really unbelievable in the mobile labor camps called “Hell on Wheels.”

So what happened to these ultra-violent Scotch-Irish? Somehow, over a period of decades, they were integrated into the broader, less violent American society (there were times and places in US history when it wasn’t even against the law to dispatch a pesky Irishman, so reviled were they). Indeed, by the turn of the 20th century many police forces of large eastern cities were largely Irish-American. It took time.

It’s okay talking about violent Scotch-Irish culture, but for some reason you can’t go there when we have a similar terrible problem in our inner cities. There are two interviews with former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel I’ve seen on YouTube, one early in his, um, reign, and one apparently conducted after he’d already decided not to run again. In both interviews the same question was asked: “Why is there so much killing going on in Chicago?” In the first interview he blamed the (lack of) gun control laws in Indiana (of course the next question out of the mouth of any thoughtful journalist would be, “So how come Indiana doesn’t have anything like Chicago’s level of violence?” but that didn’t happen). Good old Rahm Emmanuel, keeping on message.

In the second interview, he answered the question differently: he suggested (I’m paraphrasing) the culture was broken and needed to be fixed. For this comment he was roundly attacked by the media.

This year Lori Lightfoot was asked the same thing and not only did she blame Indiana, but Michigan and Wisconsin as well. And anyone who disagreed with her was a racist, misogynist and homophobe, so there, case closed. This is a woman who literally does not care how many citizens of her city are murdered every year. But I digress . . .

I have referred to it as “urban black culture” in the past because I couldn’t imagine anyone was stupid enough to believe I or anyone else was suggesting there was a genetic, racial component to it, but as you suggest, there are indeed people that stupid, and lots of them. So referring to it as “street culture” makes a lot more sense (who cares what race the people involved are? I don’t), though that will probably get you attacked for “using white supremacist code.” And are there Scotch-Irish roots to it? Why not? You make a good case. And if any indigenous West African culture remains among urban African-Americans (I doubt it, but anthropologists say some does), well, that’s a part of the world with pretty eye-watering casual violence too.

The late George Macdonald Fraser, in one of his Flashman books, referred to the Scots as “Britain’s own home-grown savages.” He ought to have known; he was of Scottish background himself and was a junior officer in a Highland regiment following the war. He also wrote a book, The Steel Bonnets, about the Scottish Borderlands (which is also on my TBR pile). I recently completed his memoirs of his wartime and postwar military life, and long ago eagerly consumed all his Flashman stories. You might want to check him out.

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"Somehow, over a period of decades, they were integrated into the broader, less violent American society"

I think what happened was that the state become stronger and more centralized, and effectively monopolized the legitimate use of violence. That's what pacified American society, as has happened in every modern nation state. But for that same reason, honor culture still prevails in the many, many neighborhoods in America where the state is effectively broken. Those areas share some of the same conditions of lawlessness of the old English borderlands, where you can't count on the government to protect you so you have to rely on your own reputation for ruthlessness in defense of your rep.

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This reinforces Jill Leovy's thesis in Ghettoside.

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Wonderful book.

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