Case Brittain
Dorothy Franklin
EN 101-032
26 November 2012
Cultural Pride In the deep, intelligent discovery novel, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell illustrates the southeastern tip of Kentucky that contained a stretch of Appalachians and a minute, compact town named Harlan that rested in the Cumberland Plateau. The plateau itself started off with a heavy dose of compressed forest enclosing white oaks and birches all entangled in wild grapevine. Bears and mountain lions ran free in these lands and encompassed an assortment of squirrels below the soil surface. Harlan County, established in 1819, by eight British immigrants, began thinly populated with small, hillside farmers who manufactured whiskey. The single route to escape from town was the nine-mile road of Pine Mountain. Harlan might have stayed a culture if the town’s founding families of Howards and Turners could quit from competing over violent, southern pride by clashing and committing cultural lessons taught to their youth. The southern culture definitely influenced William Turner, general store owner, after he once had a storm break a fence down onto his land, allowing a cow to roam free into his yard, and his grandson shot it. The nature of the south is something that is absorbed by the surround environment and attempting to not adapt to its ways of living doesn’t necessarily present as an option. Neighbors were too terrified to contact the authority and abandoned the region immediately. The southern culture of aggressive retaliation did not lie with the neighbors, as they believed in peace and reasonability, which was a powerful trait passed down through their generations and not just something they randomly picked up on. After someone tried to compete stores with the Turners, they had a word with the competitor and he soon fled without any word. Multiple gunshots were exchanged between the Turners and Howards over small disputes and immature arguments. After William Turner had been killed in a brawl, the two families met to declare a truce, to which Mrs. Turner pointed to the soil her son was shot on and replied, “You can’t wipe out that blood” (page 163). The chaos not only continued, but also began to increase heavily in bloodshed with more back and forth killing sprees between the two families, clearly displaying Harlan, Kentucky, as a place where peace and agreement did not exist. These two families did not possess self-control over one another and reacted with nothing but violence. This characteristic was something they viewed growing up and were told that it was the correct way to live. The following paragraph illustrates a paraphrase of a passage from Outliers, displaying the clash of the south.. The Howard/Turner feud oversaw a majority of other disputes that were occurring up and down the Appalachians, which displayed a reoccurring pattern that was caused beyond just simple arguments. The cultural environments indeed played an integral role in the violence, as researchers assumed that farmers were very dependent and did not have to lose sleep over their crops being stolen, given that the crops could not be easily taken. On the other side, a herdsman lived in fear and anxiety, containing constant threat, which requires the herdsman to become a man for himself and display courage and valiancy to survive. This demonstrates an idea of why these violent clashes occurred because these immigrants were all herdsman, and they possessed an independent and aggressive nature to themselves, which led them to their destruction and established their territory as a “culture of honor” (168). It was strongly suggested that the Southerner who could avoid conflict and disagreements was set up for more of a peaceful living. The chaos of the backcountry was for a personal reason and was “fought over your honor” (pg. 169). This known culture was unique to the point that it was technically insane. None of the understandings seemed humane or tolerable. It was unique in a sense where they believed that avenging one’s own personal grudge by murder was tolerable and the jury viewed it as acceptable accuses. These cultures date back to a couple hundred years and influenced the people of the nineteenth century solely on the origin of their ancestors and their initial values. This society and way of living was established at birth and indirectly mandatory to live by. Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett, two psychologists from Michigan looked further in the culture of honor and began experimenting with younger adults from the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, by testing their patience with being insulted and aggravated. The experiment simply asked these men to fill out a questionnaire and drop it off at the end of a narrow hallway. The two men then asked the students a simple story question and analyzed their responses, which consisted of their current emotions due to the previous incident. Half the men were not disturbed, while the other half were given annoying obstacles that truly bothered the men, as their testosterone levels were much higher. It was discovered that these results, in fact, came from the men’s origin, as the northerners were much less hyped up and angered than the southerners. Southerners took what their culture raised them on and provided them with more forward, aggressive characteristics. Another experiment showed the same results and proved that southerners possessed more of an aggressive attitude from receiving threats and insults.
In the northerner’s case, the testing never seemed to even budge them whatsoever. They reacted to the situations with a calm sensitivity about them and avoided a possibly tempting issue that could’ve resulted in utter chaos. Their egos do not tend to overpower their internal pride and they tend to be very fortunate for their power to resist the immature actions that the southerners usually express. The pride and arrogance that was built within the southerners allowed their emotional barriers to be easily set off with the say of a rude and hurtful comment. The southerners portrayed aggressively their “culture of honor” in action, which they take pride in and boast heavily about their known attribute, and displayed the same attitudes and mindsets that Wix Howard and Little Bob Turner possessed in Harlan, Kentucky (pg. 173).
Success and achievements seem to portray a consistent pattern and it originates from the place where one is born, what their parents did, and their events that occurred during their upbringing according to the tremendous amount of time and research that took place in the university. Cultural ideals and expectations have an enormous impact on the personalities of the southern and northern ways of living. The idea was placed out into society in order to set a lesson intact and question those around to look further into and factor whether or not people are achieving success due to their traditional bequests. While these attitudes do not live within each individual literally, everybody is exposed to the culture and the majority tends to take the most common route.