by Amy Chua
Like African Americans, Appalachians have been relentlessly subjected to stereotypes of inferiority—genetic, moral, cultural, intellectual. (It’s far more socially acceptable today to insult and look down on “white trash” than the poor of any other racial group.) These stereotypes are well-known among Appalachians. They’ve been fighting against them for years, often with power and insight, as in bad boy Jim Goad’s Redneck Manifesto:
Our magazines and sitcoms and blockbuster films are crammed with slams of hicks and hayseeds and hillbillies and crackers and trailer scum. . . . Gradually, we come to believe that working-class whites are two-dimensional cartoons—rifle-totin’, booger-eatin’, beer-bellied . . . homo-hatin’, pig-fuckin’, daughter-gropin’ slugs. . . .
America’s hate affair with white trash is, ultimately, self-hatred. Guilt projection. A convenient way for America to demonize itself, or, rather, to exorcise the demon and place it somewhere outside of itself.
One common response to all the redneck jokes, as Kentuckian writer Ann Shelby says, is “just to go along. For every briar hopper joke they tell you, tell them two. ‘Why did they build a bridge across the Ohio River?’ ‘So the hillbillies could swim over in the shade.’ Yuck it up. Pretend not to be all that bright. Manufacture and exaggerate your hillbilly credentials. I have a friend who practices this method and recommends it highly. ‘You’re pulling their leg all the time,’ he says. ‘And they don’t even know it.’” Another response is “anger. . . . It can come across as mere testiness or oversensitivity, but it is the product of a thousand insults, small and large. In this huge and diverse region, it is, perhaps more than anything else, what we have in common.”
In Cincinnati, which has a large Appalachian population, educators have established community schools to “counter the ‘dumb hillbilly’ stereotype.” As the coordinator of one school puts it, “What we have consciously tried to do, and have had some success in doing, is to help people feel and know it is OK to be who they are.” Needless to say, none of this reflects a deep-seated superiority complex.
What about impulse control? The frontier tradition of mountain toughness and indomitable spirit has not disappeared, but something different seems to have settled into rural Appalachian culture. Many observers, perhaps contributing to the stereotypes just mentioned, have described a “defeatism,” “dejection,” or “surrender” prevalent in poor Appalachian communities. In his memoir At Home in the Heart of Appalachia, West Virginia writer John O’Brien described “Appalachian fatalism” as a “profound sense that you are fundamentally inferior and that life is absurd and hopeless.”
Religious attitudes may play a role here. “We’re a religious bunch, Appalachians,” writes Denise Giardina, who grew up in West Virginia’s Black Wolf coal camp. “And so a lot of people in the mountains have adopted this attitude of: ‘Ain’t no use worrying . . . because Jesus is going to come anyway!’ . . . . People pray and get saved and wait for the Lord to fix everything.” Sociologist Kai Erikson says that “the mountaineer” is apt to feel “helpless before the God who reigns over Appalachia, helpless before the crotchety ways of nature, and helpless before the crafty maneuvering of those who come to exploit him and his land.” Others have argued—notwithstanding the fact that many Appalachians are working two and three jobs just to make ends meet—that the once-strong mountain work ethic has been undermined by government welfare.
Whatever the source, the fact is that Appalachia shows disturbing signs of impulse control’s opposite. Obesity is common, and while many factors contribute to obesity, cultural attitudes seem to play a significant role. Author J. D. Vance, whose family is from Breathitt County, Kentucky, writes in his compelling memoir:
As kids, we never learned about portion control, or to otherwise connect what we put into our bodies with any actual consequences. We all made fun of certain types of exercise—“running is for dorks; they don’t even use a ball!”—but celebrated our young kids for finishing four heaping plates of biscuits and gravy at the local breakfast buffet. It was like excess was a cultural value.
Substance abuse is also widespread. Oxycontin is the narcotic of choice; Appalachia’s abuse rates of prescription opioid painkillers are among the highest in the country. So-called “pill mills” can be found throughout Appalachia, giving rise to the new sobriquet “pillbillies.” In one Ohio county in 2010, nearly 1 in 10 newborns tested positive for drugs. The region has some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, perhaps because young women are expected to be mothers rather than breadwinners. In Appalachian Kentucky, the birthrate among fifteen- to nineteen-year-old women in 2009 was almost four times that of New Hampshire (and about 50 percent higher than the nationwide figure).
In short, Appalachian culture is not a Triple Package culture—but that’s not the cause of Appalachian poverty. This point is so important we’re going to repeat it: The absence of the Triple Package did not cause poverty in Appalachia.
Geography, history, tectonic shifts in the economy, and a version of the “resource curse” (with its associated corruption, exploitation of cheap labor, and highly skewed distribution of resource-extraction wealth) were the chief causes of Appalachian poverty. Traditional industry declined. Salt and timber reserves were extracted without a rechanneling of wealth into the region. Coal mining became increasingly mechanized. Mountaintop removal, while enormously profitable for the coal companies, has not only left behind environmental wastelands; it has destroyed jobs. In West Virginia alone, mining jobs have dropped from 120,000 to 15,000. According to one study, the returns on a high school education in Appalachia are falling. As the study’s author concludes, Appalachia is a “double jeopardy” region of low skills and low returns to skill—a recipe for economic stagnation. At the same time, catastrophic industrial accidents in Appalachia, like the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972 or the Martin County sludge spill of 2000, do not provoke the same outcry as similar disasters elsewhere in the country (the Martin County spill was thirty times larger than that of the Exxon Valdez, but it was the latter that became worldwide news), and the victims too often go uncompensated.
In these circumstances, dejection and fatalism are natural, predictable consequences. So is the grabbing of immediate gratification where it can be found.
By now almost everyone knows about the marshmallow test, but one of the most important recent findings has not received enough attention. Many interpret the marshmallow test as a measure of character, identifying the kids with the strongest self-control. But in 2012, researchers reran the test with a new wrinkle: before the children received their first marshmallow, some of the kids had an encounter showing the adults to be unreliable. The adult administering the test would tell the kids, for example, that if they waited a few minutes they would get some “exciting art supplies” to play with, but then wouldn’t follow through. After this kind of encounter, virtually all the kids “failed” the marshmallow test; that is, they gobbled up the first marshmallow instead of holding out for two. (Other kids had the same encounter with the adult, except that the adult did follow through; most of these kids passed the test.) But the kids who “failed” weren’t displaying a lack of self-control. They were responding rationally to the fact that the adults who promised them a second marshmallow had proved themselves untrustworthy.
If people don’t trust the system, if they think society is lying when it tells them that discipline and hard work will be rewarded—if they don’t think that people like them can really make it—they have no incentive to engage in impulse control, sacrificing present satisfactions in hopes of future gain. This is as true in America’s inner cities as in rural Appalachia. Studies have shown that childhood poverty and abuse make people more likely to choose immediate gratification over greater delayed rewards. Just as American society can grind down a group’s superiority narrative, so too can it grind away their impulse control. Thus the same conditions that cause poverty can also suck the Triple Pac
kage out of a culture.
But once that happens, the situation worsens, and poverty becomes more entrenched. Girls who become pregnant as teenagers end up, statistically, with far worse economic outcomes. So do kids who don’t get a higher degree. So do people with drug addictions. The Appalachian Regional Commission recently reported “growing concern that substance abuse is eroding the economic and social fabric of the Appalachian region.” The same is true of many groups all over America, whether white or black, rural or urban. They did not originally fall into poverty because they lacked the Triple Package, but now that they do lack it, their problems are intensified, and the hole they’re in is even harder to climb out of. Under these conditions, it takes much more grit, more resilience—perhaps a more exceptional individual—to escape the cycle.
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A FEW GROUPS IN AMERICA are not upwardly mobile because they don’t want to be. The roughly two hundred thousand Amish living mainly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana are a prime example. The theory of the Triple Package fits very well with such groups; they clearly don’t have it. They also throw a fascinating light on the relationship between the Triple Package and Christianity.
Impulse control is not a problem for the Amish, even if the different orders vary to some degree in austerity. The Renno Amish drive black-topped horse buggies; the Byler Amish, yellow-topped; the rakish Indiana Swiss Amish go topless. The Beachy Amish actually drive cars. At the other extreme, the Swartzentruber Amish live with no modern heating, no indoor plumbing or continuous hot water, no refrigerators, no tractors, and almost no contact with the outside world.
But most Amish children, starting “when they are in diapers,” are taught “complete obedience,” discipline, and unconditional compliance with the strictures of their faith—not just plain clothes and no electricity (obviously no TV or video games), but also no exploring or cavorting around, no questioning authority. Fairy tales, science fiction or fantasy, and stories with talking animals are frowned upon. At age three or four, Amish children begin working around the house or farm. They also have to sit through hours of adult-oriented church services, conducted in “high” German. The difference between Amish and “English” children is striking. As one local orchard owner observed, Amish children who come to pick fruit “usually keep to the task till the parents are satisfied. . . . English children, on the other hand, may enthusiastically pick cherries for five to ten minutes till they get bored and end up in cherry fights, tree climbing, or sulking.”
In other words, the Amish have the third element of the Triple Package in spades. Do they have a superiority complex?
The answer the Amish would give is surely no. Their creed is one of extreme humility; pridefulness is a sin. A favorite biblical passage is “Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; never be conceited.” Unlike Mormons, the Amish view man as infinitely below God, and they are taught to abhor any effort by one individual to rise above others. Indeed, the reason they oppose education beyond eighth grade is that they believe “high school and higher education produce Hochmut, or high-mindedness and pride . . . the antithesis of simplicity and humility.”
Nevertheless, claims of humility can themselves be upside-down superiority stories (the most humble people on earth). Nietzsche—a man with a superiority complex if ever there was one—believed that all of Christianity was founded on a reverse superiority claim of this sort, exalting the poor and pitiable in order to destroy aristocratic civilization, ultimately replacing it with modern democracy and the equality of all mankind. In the Amish case, the truth may be somewhere in between.
According to leading Amish scholar John Hostetler, the Amish “are not highly ethnocentric.” They accept other people “without attempting to judge or convert them.” They don’t even believe they are saved (they hope so, but believing it would be prideful). On the other hand, the Amish implicitly view the rest of America as morally “contaminat[ed].” Comments like “Letting children go unsupervised to watch the trash that comes over the TV every day has to be the greatest form of child abuse” indicate that Amish parents view their way of raising children as better. At some level, consciously or not, most Amish presumably take pride in how unprideful they are and believe that living a simple, frugal, industrious life, seeking no superiority over anyone else—makes them superior, or at least is a superior way to live.
But whether or not the Amish have a superiority complex, there’s one thing they definitely don’t have: Triple Package insecurity.
Insecurity in Triple Package cultures is a discontented, anxious uncertainty about your worth or place in society, a feeling that what you’ve done or what you have is in some fundamental way not good enough. This insecurity is stingingly personal, goading you to constantly compare yourself with others, to crave recognition and respect. This is what creates the hunger to rise, to “show the world.”
It’s barely an exaggeration to say that the entire thrust of Amish culture is to not instill Triple Package insecurity. The Amish teach their members to be indifferent to their place in American society. They reject the idea that their worth is measured by American material values. They aim not to “show the world,” but “to be separate from the world.” They have successfully turned inward, shunning the rest of the country’s judgment, values, and criteria of success.
More than this, the Amish are taught precisely to feel that the few, simple things they have are good enough. They rigorously try to suppress the kind of thinking that leads individuals to strive against one another, to compare themselves against their fellows, to compete over who has accomplished more.
For example, when Amish boys began playing and winning in local softball leagues, Lancaster bishops opposed it. “What if the motive is no longer relaxation and diversion, but a spirit of competition?” one Amish newspaper asked. “What if these teams compete in tournaments and win the state championship in their class, and then go on to the nationals?” Ball games are not per se sinful, but they are to be condemned “when batting and catching a ball becomes more than play—when it becomes serious competition.”
Of course the Amish have their worries—about making ends meet, about their crops, about their kids—but the overwhelming impression described by visitors is one of peacefulness and acceptance. The Amish don’t seem to have any chip on the shoulder. They aren’t stung by “English” perceptions of them. They aren’t worried about proving themselves in America’s eyes at all.
Thus the Amish demonstrate one way a group can avoid the Triple Package: by using religion to stay outside the system altogether. America’s most successful groups, as we’ve said, are all outsiders, but they are outsiders who want in—or, at a minimum, who want success as America defines success. Groups like the Amish, turning their backs on America, find security within their group and within their faith, suppressing the insecurity that makes others crave outward signs of success like money, prestige, and power.
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THE AMISH ALSO HIGHLIGHT how foreign the Triple Package is to the millennia-old strand of Christian teaching that repudiates all striving for worldly success and wealth. (“The love of money is the root of all evil”; “the last shall be first”; “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”) Christianity excelled at teaching the poor to seek security in faith, love, and salvation, not in worldly possessions.
A theological revolution was required to bring the Triple Package into Christianity, and—at least according to Max Weber’s famous account of early Protestantism—precisely such a revolution took place at the time of the Reformation. When it did, those who followed the new Christian faith rose to economic dominance all over the world, including America.
Weber’s classic study of the Puritans and other early Calvinists, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was arguably the first systematic sociological inquiry into disproportionate group success. Tha
t book famously began by documenting, as Weber put it, a “remarkable” fact: that Protestants dominated Catholics economically throughout Europe and the United States. Weber explained this phenomenon by uncovering in early Protestantism an unusual set of cultural traits that, while of course not expressed in the same terms, essentially track what we’re calling the Triple Package.
According to Weber, Protestant sects such as the Puritans, heavily influenced by Calvinist doctrine, viewed themselves as a chosen people, a tiny minority elected by God for salvation while the rest of humanity foundered in darkness and sin. But they also had a whopping case of insecurity. Calvinist doctrine taught that mankind could not know who was saved and who wasn’t. God had already predestined your fate, and nothing you could do—no good deeds, no confession of sins, no magical sacraments—could change His plans. “The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background. And how can I be sure . . . ?”
To make matters worse, doubt about one’s own salvation was evidence of imperfect faith and therefore a sign of damnation. This condition of personal, theological, and epistemological insecurity led to a “doctrine of proof” through worldly success. The purpose of material wealth was not luxury. Rather, the early Protestants believed that men’s occupations were or should be their “calling”—the work God intended them to do on earth. Thus a person could prove his faith and election through relentless hard work, thrift, self-discipline, and ultimately profit. “Above all,” said Weber, a Protestant businessman “could measure his worth not only before men but also before God by success in his occupation.”
