What it means to be an American

How are Americans created?

I recently watched a discussion between Ezra Klein and Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony in which they discussed Hazony’s political ideology called National Conservatism. Hazony has an organic concept of a nation as something built up from more fundamental units: families assemble into a tribe and tribes into a nation. Klein askes Hazony to define what is a nation to which Hazony replies:

a nation is a collection or a group of tribes that are bound together by mutual loyalty and that share certain characteristics. Usually it’s a language, often it’s a religion. In most cases, it’s a common history of joining together against common enemies.

This is pretty close to my conception of how human societies scale up. This direct scale up process only gets you to archaic states. To get to larger, more sophisticated states you need moralistic religions or philosophies like those which appeared during the Axial Age that serve to reduce paramount leader caprice, reducing the incentives for subordinate leaders to revolt. The driver for this, it is theorized, was indeed a joining together against common enemies as Hazony relates.

How Americans are bound together
The core of the issue Klein and Hazony discuss is the nature of the “social glue” that causes the various tribes to cohere into a state. Here is where I would have an issue with Hazony’s thesis. Hazony talks of nation, while I talk of the state. The tribe is a fundamental unit, for both Hazony and me. In response to some external threat various tribes join together under a paramount leader to deal with the threat. Over time the paramount leader may become institutionalized as a king and the union of tribes into a type of state—a kingdom (region ruled over by a king). In its beginning the state is simply the territories of the tribes who acknowledge the king as their overlord. It is not a nation. Large, stable states provide political stability for economic development which creates a demand for uniform rules and a trade language for commerce, which, over time, can result in a state in which the inhabitants speak a common language and follow common customs regarding economic and political interactions. This is a nation. The actual development of Western states in the former provinces of the Roman Empire also involved having a common religion overseen by a supranational authority, and an inheritance of Roman cultural products such as Roman law and Greek philosophy.

The question at the crux of the liberal-conservative disagreement, is related by Hazony as follows:

let me take my old friend Bill Kristol as an example of the other point of view, somebody who will say: Look, if you embrace American ideas, then you’re effectively an American. It’s just a technicality whether we make you a U.S. citizen…I disagree with that completely…the fundamental thing that’s going on is always that most people are loyal to the things that they’ve inherited from their family and their society.

Hazony is a conservative. The assimilation process that converts a group of disparate tribes subordinated under a ruler (a state) into a nation is a messy one he does not want to deal with. Since we had a nation fifty years ago, as he argues, we should just keep it that way. Klein is a progressive. He believes that societies evolve, this is a good thing, and we should have more of it. For progressives, it is incumbent upon them to know how nations are maintained as such in order to avoid collapse. Conservatives, surveying the divisions in American society today, believe progressives do not know what they are doing.

In America the assimilation process is sometimes referred to as the melting pot. People from various places with different cultures merge together over time to become a new thing, an alloy of cultural elements of all these different peoples. As a result, what it is to be American changes over time. But some things must remain the same. These things serve as a “cultural attractor” around which the assimilation process happens. The effects of this “attractor” is what Hazony calls cohesiveness. He sees the rise of political polarization and divisiveness and interprets it in a weakening in this cohesive force. Hazony is difficult to pin down on what this cohesive force is or how it works. He does provide a bit of insight into his thinking here:

I don’t think it’s true that [cohesion between] all identities, all loyalty groups or identity groups, that all of them become stronger under external pressure. There’s a difference between a strong identity and a weak identity. It’s a spectrum, obviously. The reason that I write in terms of [bonds between] family, tribe and nation is because those are very often the kinds of things that, under duress, strengthen.

That family involves strong bonds is obvious. The idea that tribes in the traditional sense of the word exist in modern American society is clearly wrong. When the word tribe is used in an American context, it refers to a set of people who share common affinities or identities. Tribes might be based on such things as ethnicity, occupation, religion, shared military service, fandoms¹ or political party/ideology. Ties between members may be strong or weak depending on the individual. Observers will differ on which relationships they see as strong or weak.

The idea that tribes form strong bonds with each other to form nations is not at all obvious, yet Hazony sees nations as having such ties. It is more likely that the glue holding nations together comes from cross-cutting affinities plus economic relationships. That is, it is really intra-tribal cohesion that bonds together people within one tribe who also belong to other different tribes, exerting an indirect binding effect on those other tribes. For example, people from different ethnic, religious or political tribes were assembled into an overarching warrior tribe whose bonds were strengthened by duress during WW II. Men who served together in combat are often referred to as a band of brothers, implying cohesion as strong as family between soldiers of different ethnicities, religions and political beliefs. Such experiences accelerated the assimilation process. Catholic-Protestant hostility, once common, seems almost quaint today, and the many derogatory terms once routinely used for various ethnicities to emphasize their otherness (e.g. pollack, spic, mick, wop, etc.) have fallen out of use—probably because the differences are no longer salient. There was a sense of camaraderie between Congressmen of opposing parties in the postwar era that has been attributed, to this effect (along with the presence of a secular cycle expansion period).

Sharing a common occupation has similar effects. I worked in manufacturing process improvement for decades during which I worked with people from a mix of ethnic, racial, religious and political identities, who were all technical people, sharing a practical, empirical way of thinking. In such an environment, the esteem in which colleagues are held is based on their demonstrated competence and their personality, that is, characteristics of the individual. This assessment cuts across other tribal differences. For example, I have colleagues who had politics both similar to and different from mine. But the esteem I hold for them is based more on their competence and personal experiences with them over years of interaction than whether they share my political beliefs. And then there are economic relations between businessmen and between customers and small businesses that create connections between people belonging to various tribes.

Each of us has a network of connections that form a mesh binding members of different tribes together. Assimilation is the growth in the density of this mesh over time, leading to the widespread acquisition of cultural attributes associated with Americanness. This acquisition happens through cultural evolution.

Since participation in economic and social interactions with and in collections of people different than oneself is facilitated by sharing a common language, English proficiency is a requirement for American identity. Familiarity with American popular culture is also a factor since people can bond over love of popular culture in fandoms or sports teams. Finally, familiarity with the American creed is important for new citizens because they need to understand the do’s and don’ts in American political culture. Ignorance of the creed is a privilege of established Americans, newcomers need to demonstrate they care enough about America to learn these things, which they must demonstrate when becoming citizens.

Hazony argues there needs to be a center around which the process of nation formation (assimilation) occurs, which I previously referred to as an “attractor.” I believe the core attractor for the US and other Western countries is WEIRDness. As Joseph Henrich argues in his book The WEIRDest People in the World most cultures achieve cohesion through complex kin-based structures that cross-cut other identities. These form the mesh binding people together in traditional societies. Western cultures, particularly the US, display a WEIRD psychology which emerged, Henrich argues, as a result of a church-mandated ban on cousin marriages, which served to break down the kin-based structures that had been present in the Germanic precursors to the modern West. This led to the formation of voluntary associations to replace kinship in the social structure to produce the mesh I described earlier.

Hazony suggests many of the bonds in this mesh are weak ties that do not strengthen under duress. Klein counters than in the aftermath of 911, New Yorkers, who are very diverse, pulled together in a sense of shared threat from and anger against those who had attacked them. A potential issue with WEIRD cohesion is clustering. For example, people who have strong bonds to a church, have a military background, and are Republicans can exist in a cohesive cluster largely separate from those who have strong bonds to professional organizations, academia and the Democratic party. These two clusters can be thought of as two larger tribes at odds with each other. All are part of the same state, but what cross-cutting affinities bind these clusters together into a nation?

Hazony does not provide an answer. He gestures towards the Anglo-Protestant background of the founders and of the ruling class, a fact manifested in the demographics of American presidents. All but one of the 45 American presidents has been a white man of British or Northern European ancestry and all but two of these have been Protestants. Since he rejects “blood and soil” (e.g., an ethnic-identity or a nativist conception of what is a “real American”), it is not clear to me what he is getting at.

Current political divisions did not come from a breakdown in social cohesion
Hazony is wrong in the sense that having a common national identity is sufficient to prevent system breakdown. We had a country in 1860 whose citizenry was something like 99% white, with the vast majority of British ancestry. We were basically as homogeneous as the British who went through the entire Age of Revolutions (1789-1848) without an internal war, yet we had a secession crisis and a civil war. Not only that, but we had a secession crisis and civil war eighty-five years earlier. In 1775 we were British, subjects of the British monarch just as British people are today. This did not prevent us from splitting away from our co-nationals and going our own way. So the validity of Hazony’s thesis that polarization in American society today reflects a lack of an organic national cohesion is questionable.

The answer to this riddle is Hazony misunderstands the cause of the current division (and the others before it). According to cliodynamics, the cause is rising conflict between elite factions reflecting increased competition among rising numbers of elite aspirants for high-level political positions during the secular cycle crisis period. Each faction has gathered together a “political army” of supporters for their cause. Their cause is long term occupation of the seats of power by their faction rather than other. The Civil War was the result of one of these crises, so was the American Revolution. We are in another one today. There was another such crisis in the first half of the 20th century that did not involve civil war or revolution. Here a financial crisis intervened to generate a resolution of the excess elite problem by economic policy changes that reduced the number and power of elites, creating what some called the century of the common man. Reduced numbers of elites reduced polarization and created the world of 1975 which Hazony sees as a time when the cohesive bonds were strong.

How assimilation happens with immigrants from non-Western countries
A core element of Americanness is WEIRD psychology. America has no place for people still operating under traditional kin-based structures. Those who hold on to this ideation will generally not do well in legitimate American society. By simply coming here, immigrants are abandoning many of the kinship obligations in their home country and choosing their own path in life, which is a very WEIRD thing to do. So there is a selection process going on in the initial decision to emigrate. And then there are the realities of life in America which serves as a secondary screening mechanism. For example, one of the Korean scientists at my company back in the 1980’s expressed dismay at the idea that his daughters might marry a man who was not Korean. One of the other Korean scientists told him, “your kids are going to be Americans and they will marry whoever they wish, because that is what Americans do. If it is important to you that your daughter marries a Korean, then you should go back to Korea.” He did just that. Historically nearly 30% of immigrants who came here ended up going home, showing the effect of this screening. Finally, there is the enforcement of WEIRD norms by state power. Those who practice traditional practices like honor killing will receive a response similar to that given by Charles Napier when Hindu priests protested the British ban on sati, the burning of widows alive, explaining this was their custom:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive. we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

State policies of this sort can gradually extinguish behavior out of step with WEIRD psychology. So I see no real deficiency in the American assimilation process. We have a process for converting immigrants (or more likely their children) into WEIRD, English-speaking people familiar with American popular culture and who honor the Anglo-American political tradition that makes America possible.

1. Fandoms include things like sports fans, fans of popular culture, gamers, etc.