On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 12:38 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Doug H:
>
> "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]
>
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319