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(parsing out the prepositions) Agreed, I think: MA-CA are nearly the physically most distant, but perhaps the culturally most similar. But disagreed that the p
by quesera 3y ago
(parsing out the prepositions) Agreed, I think: MA-CA are nearly the physically most distant, but perhaps the culturally most similar.
But disagreed that the places in between are not that varied.
Beyond the superficial veneer of a (mostly) common language and political drama and media and sports teams and retailers, there are deeply different predominant ways of thinking about self and life.
We may just be using different criteria on how to measure the magnitude of cultural variation.
You won't see it from the highways, and yes the Internet is normative, and ultimately yes humans share a fairly predictable psychology.
But the cultural variation between regions seems undeniable to me. Thank goodness! I travel a lot, and spend a lot of time in individual strange places, and this is a large part of the reason why I do so.
- emodendroket 3y agoI would wager that if you sat down people from small, deep-red towns in California, New England, and Texas, they’d agree on much more than they disagreed. And I’d bet you’d get similar results with city dwellers from each region. There are variations on, for instance, how likely people are to strike up a conversation with strangers in an elevator, but to me these are the more superficial differences.
- quesera 3y agoTo use your example: I think you'd be correct for the superficial beginning of the conversation. But this is no different than saying "Metallica fans from ...", or "NASCAR fans from ...". Politics is no longer about what people think. It's a nationalized polemic sport. There are two teams, and an irrelevant number of pretenders. But if you ever got past the "what you think you think" and into the "why you think the things you think", or "how do you live that expresses the way you think" ... the variations would start to come out.
- emodendroket 3y agoLike what? I mean what do you think the variations are really going to be? People orient their entire value systems around their political affiliation.
- quesera 3y agoPeople don't even understand their political affiliation. Viewing humans through that lens is reductive. I think we've figured out our disagreement here!
- emodendroket 3y agoViewing humans through a lens of regional characteristics is also reductive so, so long as you still think that's worthwhile, it's more a question of which reductive categorizations you think are meaningful.
- quesera 3y agoI don't really understand your point. I'm arguing the case against dismissing regional variations. I don't mean to suggest that regions are the last stop on the differentiation train.
- emodendroket 3y agoI could easily take a plausible position that people within the same town have so much difference between them that trying to lump regional characteristics together is meaningless. Since you don’t, apparently you’re OK with some reduction.
- quesera 3y agoOf course. People are people, but Bob is Bob. There's more variation on the street I live on today, than between MA and CA taken as a whole. I'm not sure what I "don't" in your comment above, but clearly my intent is not clear, so I'll restate: (Parts of) MA and CA have a lot of similarities. Some of the places physically between them are very different. You may disagree. If so, you are surely measuring by a different metric than I am, or have not seen the places I've seen. But that's all I intended to say.
- 3y ago