"A History of Violence: Testing the ‘Culture of Honor’ in the US South"
-clip-
Using historical data on early settlers to the United States, this paper tests and confirms the “Culture of Honor” hypothesis by socio-psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett (1994, 1996). This hypothesis argues that the high prevalence of homicides in the US South stems from the fact that it was a frontier region settled by people whose economy was based on herding: the Scotch-Irish.
-clip-
^^^^^^^^
Herding: now that's a historical materialist type explanation; Animal domestication predominant mode of production determines violent superstructural elements. Western cowboys were herders ( of cows) , too. They were also infamously violent. One has to be more violent domesticating animals than domesticating plants; and it slops over to treatment of people (?)
We can even speculate that the original domestication of animals in the era of the origin of agriculture (12,000 years ago) suggested the founding of the slave mode of production, "domestication" of people (women) as slaves, swivilization, male supremacist family, private property and the state. Note the term: "animal _husbandry_; and evidence that the first slaves were women.
John C. Calhoun was Scotch- Irish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Calhoun
Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, the fourth child of Patrick Calhoun and his wife Martha (née Caldwell). His father had joined the Scotch Irish immigration from County Donegal in Ulster to the backcountry of South Carolina, where he married Martha Caldwell.[4]
When his father became ill, the 17-year-old Calhoun quit school to work on the family farm. With his brothers' financial support, he later returned to his studies, earning a degree from Yale College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1804. After studying law at the Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut, Calhoun was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807.[5]
CB; By the way, Nietszche ain't got nothin on John C. Calhoun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Calhoun
Slavery Calhoun was shaped by his own father, Patrick Calhoun, a prosperous backcountry planter who supported the Revolutionary War but opposed ratification of the federal Constitution. The father was a staunch slaveholder who taught his son that one's standing in society depended not merely on one's commitment to the ideal of popular self-government but also on the ownership of a substantial number of slaves. Flourishing in a world in which slaveholding was a badge of civilization, Calhoun saw little reason to question its morality as an adult; he never visited Europe ( Would that Calhoun had seen in his own state how the spread of slavery into the back country improved public morals by ridding the countryside of the shiftless poor whites who had once terrorized the law abiding middle class. Calhoun believed that slavery instilled in the white who remained a code of honor that blunted the disruptive potential of private gain and fostered the civic-mindedness that lay near the core of the republican creed. From such a standpoint, the expansion of slavery into the backcountry decreased the likelihood for social conflict and postponed the declension when money would become the only measure of self worth, as had happened in New England. Calhoun was thus firmly convinced that slavery was the key to the success of the American dream.[27]
On February 6, 1837, John C. Calhoun took the floor of the Senate to declare that slavery was a "positive good." Senator William Rives of Virginia had referred to slavery as an evil that might become a "lesser evil" in some circumstances. Calhoun believed that conceded too much to the abolitionists: "I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good... I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." A year later in the Senate (January 10, 1838), Calhoun repeated this defense of slavery as a "positive good": "Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." Calhoun rejected the belief of Southern moderates such as Henry Clay that all Americans could agree on the "opinion and feeling" that slavery was wrong, although they might disagree on the most practicable way to respond to that great wrong. Calhoun's constitutional ideas acted as a viable conservative alternative to Northern appeals to democracy, majority rule, and natural rights.[28]