Persistent Cultural Motifs

(DRAFT)

It's my impression that certain behaviors, attitudes, and moral stances characterize specific cultures. These often give rise to stereotypes, like the volatile Italian, the stolid Dutchman, the tight-fisted Scot. Some of these, of course, are highly situational, especially when immigrant splinter-cultures are concerned: it would be a mistake to assume that every McDougal is stingy, or that Netherlands Dutch are as stiff and rigid as their West Michigan cousins. Such perceived traits are only apparent when they're contrasted with another culture: i.e. the West Michigan second or third generation Reformed Church immigrant Dutch as compared with the descendants of West Michigan's original New York English settlers.

These perceived cultural traits do appear to persist over long periods of time, despite significant other cultural changes and evolutions. Certain of South Florida's non-Hispanics (perhaps mostly among the East Coast immigrants?) consider Mexicans and perhaps most other Central Americans to be unreliable at best, and even downright dishonest. The perception is that a Mexican will promise anything, and accept a down payment, with no intention of delivering; that everything is conditional, and promises are merely good intentions of the moment, not obligations. (The prejudice does not seem to encompass other forms of dishonesty, such as outright theft.)

If one can assume there's a kernel of truth in such perceptions, it's interesting to track down the origins of the behavior itself. I suspect that Mexican and Central American "flexibility," as well as the Islanders', Mexicans', and other Latin cultures' sense of time, which may often be behind the more serious prejudice, all stem from an ancient source: the Middle East.

The sense of honor as obligation, expressed variously as noblesse obligee, the sacredness of one's given word, the inviolability of an oath, the inextricable linkage of power and the obligation to protect, seem, extrapolating from present-day cultures, to be specific to specific branches of the Indo-European tree. It was highly apparent in classical Greece, in Republican Rome, and in the laws and politics of the Western Empire as well, right up to the end, but was not characteristic of Persia or of the Eastern Roman Empire that succeeded it politically, without changing its essentially Oriental nature.

The Semitic conquerors, Mohammed's descendants, superimposed a simplistic nomadic tribal ethic, tribal--but without the key Indo-European sense of reciprocity between leader and led--upon their Byzantine realms, and this evolved into a radically different political philosophy in Damascus, and then Baghdad. Because there was no culture of moral obligation, no internalized sense of political or fiscal right or wrong, no imposition from God to do the right thing, all regulation had to be imposed from above.

Because there was no presumption of any sort of "moral" behavior, corruption was taken for granted, and was viewed without any indignation at all. From Byzantium to (but not, of course, including) Ataturk, officials' salaries were low or nonexistent, because it was assumed they would reward themselves through graft. There was a fine line, barely defined and constantly shifting, between one's just reward for service, and outright theft. Most of the time, it was based on what one could get away with, and that was accepted as a basic premise not only of government but of all relationships.

International relationships were not excepted. Treaty breaking, as much the rule as the exception throughout most of Europe from the beginning of historic times to the present, was nonetheless widely criticized by rulers, popes, and historians, and most European treaty breakers went to great lengths to establish pretexts for the breaking. This was not the case elsewhere, where no breath or ink was wasted on indignation, and treaties were expected to last exactly as long as self-interest determined.

What little documentation we have from Visigothic Spain seems to support the idea that first Celto-Iberians, then Romanized Spaniards, then Visigoths (also of Indo-European descent) were essentially inner-directed--as an aside, I'm reminded of Ruth Benedict's Apollonian/Dionysian division of cultures. But Spain, unlike most of Europe, was conquered by and ruled by non-Western, non Indo-European, non-Roman, non-Christian Muslims or Moors for several hundreds of years, and that set a particular political and moral tone that endured even after the last Muslim departed for Africa or converted to Christianity. Since in most cases only the upper class Muslims could afford to actually move, the lower classes, surely mostly of Celto-Iberian, Roman, or Visigothic blood anyway, remained and were converted.

Even a cursory look at Spanish administrative methods of the 15th and later centuries reveals the close parallel with Byzantine/Muslim methodology. Viewing European cultures on a continuum from entirely inner-to entirely outer-directed, a clear north-south orientation is apparent: those countries that endured the longest time under Muslim rule were (and are?) most outer-directed. Coming in a close second were those states which, not directly ruled by Muslims, had the closest dealings with them: Genoa and Venice, especially, thus engendering the Italian reputation for corrupt dealings and inconsistency as well. Sicilians and Greeks, it goes without saying, have historically had a reputation among more northerly Europeans as shady dealers.

Of course Spanish political culture and the New World reflected that in the old: political appointments with no salary were the rule. Columbus himself was the first beneficiary of the system. One of the first of these "plums" that I've come across was the governorship of Cuba, a position that offered no salary but limitless opportunities for graft. It won't take much reading in the history of "New Spain" for you to get the feel for the nature of Spanish governments yourself, so I won't belabor it here.

It's clear to me that the conflict between the cultures of Mexicans and northern Europeans in South Florida is only a reflection of the conflict between Muslim and European culture everywhere. Even though the Mexicans aren't Muslims, they have strongly "benefited" from their mother country's exposure to Islamic rule.