re: #223 freetoken

Cultural viscosity.

That’s the phrase that comes to mind.

Perhaps I’ve mixed apples and oranges, or sociology and physics, but there is much to the resilience to change that any culture embodies.

The mediator of this resilience in American culture is much to do with religion, and perhaps a bit less to do with money.

I’m afraid to say, as I’m now entering my “golden years”, that as we age we don’t want to change.

As I noted last night and Trump winning Florida, there is a very strong correlation between Trump support and age.

And that is true on my Facebook timeline as well.

Greater minds than I have struggled with Americans’ “viscosity of culture,” but I’d list the following causes:

1. Latent anti-intellectualism
2. The rise of Biblical literalism as a feature of Christianity (a subset of #1)
3. Slavery, which took a war to abolish
4. The 19th century belief (shared by the British Empire and others) that white people were the shiznit, and their duty was to “civilize” everyone else
5. The belief that capitalism was the answer to all ills, and socialism was the cause of all ills
6. The relative homogeneity of the US population, aside from city folk

These are no special order, but the first two enable the others to take hold of people’s minds, especially if some charismatic character tells them the right things to believe.

We really have not changed much as a nation since Dickens and de Tocqueville visited the USA in the 1800s. It’s the same mix of optimism and obstinacy those two writers found in their journeys.