Celtic Spirituality

February 01, 2006

Celtic Worship: Introduction, Festivals and Funerals

The United Church of Canada is fortunate to have a remarkable resource for Celtic Worship in the person of Ivan Gregan (Seumas Eoin). One of the strongest worship experiences I can remember occurred in a Celtic Worship led by Ivan in Waterloo, very late one hot night in late Spring a couple of years ago. Ivan is the moderator of the Celtic Worship discussion at The Worship Place [an online community primarily used by UC clergy types]. I thought it might be helpful to include here three of his posts on Celtic Worship – I found them very interesting. I've edited them a bit for inclusion here. If you have a strong interest in Celtic Worship you might be interested in signing up for that part of The Worship Place.

Introduction to Celtic Worship:

Celtic Christian Worship refers to the Praises of those people who inhabited the Celtic Lands of Ireland, Greater Britain, Brittany, and Galicia in Spain during the period after their evangelization until about the 13th Century. Often in writing it is restricted to the lands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales and the period from about 400 - 900 AD.

Distinction must be made between 'modern' and 'authentic' Celtic Praise. "Modern' is a new-age cash-in on a Celtic fad that emphasizes a nature-based, modernist approach to a pan-world theology. It has no roots in the ancient prayers or practices and has no connection to the traditional theology or spirituality of the Celtic Peoples. "Authentic" Celtic praise is derived from very few sources. As far as material we have but a few manuscripts from an early age and then the collection of prayers gathered by Alexander Carmichael during his wanderings in the Gaelic speaking areas of western Scotland during the later 1800's. While some scholars look upon his collection with suspect eye, more receive it gratefully as a tome of work done for generations to come. I find it interesting that some of the prayers he collected in Western Scotland are still in circulation here in Canada in my father's and mother's generation almost 200 years after the Clearances. Therefore I would give those collections a great weight. Even some of the practices of which he wrote were very familiar to me as a boy growing up - when to cut wood, when to plant seed, when to butcher a pig, prayers to the moon - these were all common practices.

Many of the prayers were taught from mothers to their children just as many English speakers were taught "Now I lay me down to sleep." Many of the liturgical pieces were used in homes or around the farms but people were taught that they were not 'good enough' for Church or that they were 'the old ways' and not to be said when in the presence of 'others'. This made a great rift between 'church faith' and 'folk faith' although the 'folk faith' is very liturgical, poetical, useful, and memorizable. It might equate to memorizing a catechism that would never be recited in Church.

Celtic prayers in Gaelic are very rhythmical - easy to memorize. They are laden with several layers of meaning - just like the language itself! It has been said that they are composed with the heartbeat of heaven inside them - I would agree. Part of the poetry is the fact that the language itself is poetical and people who speak it try not just to say something but to phrase it in such a manner that it becomes laden with double meanings. As there is music in the heart of people, so also the Celtic people believe that there are prayers in the hearts of the people and we just have to set them free.

A brief description of the Festivals.

Samhainn (Samhuinn) pronounced like 'salve - ing'. It begins on the rising of Pleiades and falls usually on October 31/ November 01. It was a time when the veil between the other world and this world was tissue thin and the spirits of the dead were(are) believed to be free to wander in this world. Offerings of sweets were presented to honour them. People often dressed up in the clothes of a dead person (or a reasonable facsimile of their clothes) and wandered around the villages gathering the sweets. What we knew as Hallowe'en here in the Maritimes was a continuance of this celebration. Modern day 'Darth Vader' or 'Harry Potter' costumes don't cut it - should be ghosts, goblins, etc.. This was a major celebration In the Celtic Christian tradition, this feast became entwined with the feast of All Saints / All Souls.

Winter Solstice - longest night. Celebrated on December 21. Often greenery was brought into the house - holly, ivy, boughs etc along with pine cones (seeds of new birth) and a festive Yule Log was prepared to be burnt upon the hearth. It was from the Longest Night that in some circles the date for the Nativity of Jesus was set. His birthday was seen as occurring on the night of the New Moon closest to the Longest Night - the darkest time of the Year. It was reasoned that Jesus was born for each of us and to each of us in the darkest time of our lives.

Imbolc - February 1 -2. Feast for rekindling the fires. Various forms of this survive into the modern day. Often at night still in Celtic homes where heating is done by wood or peat, a prayer is said over the fire to safeguard it through the night so that there might be embers present in the morning. IN ancient times the fires would be let to go out during Imbolc and have to be rekindled in the morning to remind us of the preciousness of heat and flame.

On the Holy Weekend, some people would let the fires go out in their homes on Holy Saturday (or even Good Friday) and then make a symbolic lighting of them again on Easter Morning with the accompanying words "Hallelujah He is risen! The Light of God has not gone out".

Spring Equinox - day and night equal. This was a time for envisioning new plantings. From the Spring Equinox the time for Easter was set. In the Celtic tradition, we celebrated Easter on the first Full Moon following the Spring Equinox. In the West it was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. This often led to the Celtic People celebrating the Resurrection in the midst of the Western Church's Holy Week, since for the Celts, Easter could fall on any day of the week!

Beltane - May 01 / 02. Bonfire time! This was the time for the planting of new crops, new ideas, new relationships.

Summer Solstice - June 21-22. Solar zenith Not a big celebration but a marker of time.

Lughnasadh (try and get your tongue around that one!! - "loo - nas - a" is fairly close!) August 1 - 2. First Harvest. This was a party time often celebrated with loaves of bread and fresh fruit.

Fall Equinox - September 21 / 22. This is the time for collecting seeds, finishing off of old business and a special time for giving thanks for the year that was ending. This would correspond to our Thanksgiving. In some places there was and still is a "Thank Offering Service" held in our Churches at this time of the year in which we give thanks for any and many special blessings during the past year. This is a direct carry over of this ancient feast.

The living and the dead & funeral liturgies

The ancient Celtic belief was that there was never a great separation between the living and the dead - we are simply living at the same time in different frequencies.

The belief is that the dead are held by Christ in heaven just as we on earth are held by him. The living and the dead meet on a regular basis at Communion as we share the sacrament together.

Another aspect of Celtic theology is that the dead wait in heaven for an invitation to come and join us in our praises. They sit 'perched on the edge of eternity waiting and wanting to return to comfort (ie. com - with forte- strength) us'. At any worship service if we mention their name, they will return to sit by our side and commune with us, offering us blessings from God, strengthening us, and encouraging us with their spiritual gifts and presence. This is what we would call the 'great cloud of witnesses'.

Among the Celts there is never a great distinction between the living and the dead and we believe that there is constant interaction between the two. Thus we speak of those who died a century ago as if we know them.

There is a wonderful hymn which I believe comes to us in English from the Iona Community although I know similar words in Gaelic. It is called "From the falter of breath, through the silence called death, to the wonder that's breaking beyond...." and it is sung to the "Iona Boat Song" not the Skye Boat Song.

In Scots Gaelic, heaven is called 'an taobh thall' literally - the other side. Often in ancient times, there was a piece of land or a Church, that if a person who was being pursued for any reason made it there, he or she was 'in sanctuary' - like modern refugees in a Church basement. This place was called 'an taobh thall' and was fearfully honoured by all. No weapons were allowed and once there a person was expected to dwell there forever. Only the 'holy ones' (holy men and women, not necessarily in religious orders but deemed by all to be holy) could go over and return. While a person could see the people on 'an taobh thall' and even converse with them, they could not cross over (unless they planned to stay). Thus heaven was never seen as a distant place, up there, beyond us - it was simply 'over there'. The holy men and women went back and forth, bringing messages and good tidings.

The Irish talk about 'tir nan og' -the land of youth - and it is the equivalent to 'an taobh thall'.

There is a wonderful Gaelic poem called 'Circle of the Sea' and it talks about how 'we are all on the sea, steering our courses throughout our lives'. Finally we will set our sails and sail to the Westward to the white sand beaches and there find home.

So, yes, the Celtic people did and do believe in the interaction of the living and the dead. When I was growing up, there were always stories of the dead coming back to comfort us, assure us, or to scare the living daylights out of us.

At the moment of death, we believe that the holy ones, the beings of light, return to comfort the soul of the dying and surround them and comfort them. Often the old people would talk about seeing 'them' standing around the dying. They then knew that the end was very near for the veil between heaven and earth was tissue thin.

The funeral service was a 'bunch of friends accompanying the soul on the last mile of the way', directing him or her into heaven and finally presenting them into God's Hands. In the funeral service they are received by God and welcomed into paradise. A Funeral Service was definitely not a memorial service. The Funeral concentrated on God and had the purpose of directing the soul to God. It is the last good earthly thing we can do for a dead person. They are wonderful events that leave all of us longing for home.

08:50 AM | Permalink

Free Will:
Now You Have it Now You Don't

January 2, 2007

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t

By DENNIS OVERBYE

I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.

The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table. O.K., I can imagine what you’re thinking. There but for the grace of God.

Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.

“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.

“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.

At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.

“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”

People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.

But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words “molten chocolate.”

A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.

That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was “not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will.”

Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspections that humans work that way?

Two Tips of the Iceberg

In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.

Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.

In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn’t have done. Take, for example, the “voodoo experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.

One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.

After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the “magical thinking” that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.

“We made it happen in a lab,” Dr. Wegner said.

Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?

“We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action,” Dr. Wegner said, “and we draw a connection.”

But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.

Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the word “illusion” should be used in describing free will. Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.

In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. “Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders,” he wrote.

But that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.

Good Intentions

Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.

The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.

Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.

“All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.

“We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”

In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. “That’s what makes us moral agents,” Dr. Dennett said. “You don’t need a miracle to have responsibility.”

Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such “freedom.” Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.

These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes. But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as “downward causation.” A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes — it’s physics all the way down. But does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can’t solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?

Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, “There’s nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can’t have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities.”

He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: “If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.”

George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. “A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics,” he explained in an e-mail message. “Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.”

I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.

If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”

Why can’t computers say what they’re going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false. Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.

One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” said: “Gödel says you can’t program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.”

Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation. The only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.

“There are no shortcuts in computation,” Dr. Lloyd said.

That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.

To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still don’t know what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.

That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and I’m always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.

The Magician’s Spell

So what about Hitler?

The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that “people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.” Anything would go.

Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”

He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”

Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.

“It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”

In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, “The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.”

I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!

Jane's Bingo! Award for Most Informative Book of 2006

READ MORE: England, United States, Jane Smiley, Virginia, Washington, George W. Bush, Scotland, Britain, Al Gore, Pennsylvania, Ulster

At the end of a busy year, I am indulging myself in a lengthy analytical post about who we Americans are and how we got that way. I request your patience--the inflammatory meat is at the end!

My only criterion for the Bingo! Award is that, once I have read the book, I think about it every subsequent day, saying to myself--oh!

I understand that (whatever it is) now, because I read blah blah." By this criterion, the only book on my reading list for 2006 that qualifies is Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 1989, 946 pages and everyone of them a pleasure to read. And by the way, the cover is beautiful and intriguing, a reproduction of a picture in the Tate Gallery of two sisters holding their two swaddled babies, entitled "The Cholmondeley Sisters".

Albion's Seed was Fischer's first big book--he has since written Washington's Crossing (Pulitzer Prize 2005) and several other books, including The Great Wave, a compelling page-turner about inflation (I'm not kidding). After Washington's Crossing, Fischer did become a bit of a darling of the Right (interviews in NRO and TNR), but he has been careful to identify himself as an Independent who has never voted for a Republican in a general election, "a little left of center" in his personal views. I think the Right likes him because he's easy to read and he doesn't say bad things about white people. And he is easy to read. What he says about white people, especially WASPs, is that they are interesting to analyse and who they are is pertinent to our current national dilemma. Sorry, TNR, but the news is not good. I think Fischer should be a darling of the Left, especially of the Huffington Post. You should read it; judging by his speeches, James Webb has.

Fischer's thesis, in Albion's Seed, is that the four major emigrations from England to the US came from four distinct regions and cultures in England, set sail at four different periods of English history, and settled in four different US regions. These cultures have remained more or less distinct; they have set up the structures of American political and cultural life; and they have often rendered Americans inexplicable and hostile to one another. What is most important, from my point of view, is that one of these cultures has taken over American life, denigrating and threatening all of the others, and that it was almost inevitable that it do so. Hackett wrote the book in the eighties, when the four cultures seemed to be in balance. My view is that now, fifteen years later, if we don't come to understand how these subcultures work in American life, we will be unable to regain the democracy we have often (but not always) had in the past.

Fischer devotes each of four long sections to each of the cultures. They are:

1. Puritans from East Anglia to New England, 1629-1641. Characteristics in both England and America: Calvinist, family-oriented (the ratio of men to women was 3-2, rather than 4-1, as in Virginia), highly motivated, closely related to one another, intently focused on moral principles and precepts, urban, and generally middle-class and highly literate. Women were not equal, but they were relatively independent agents who entered into the marriage contract, could be divorced, could inherit, and often were powers in the community. Children were considered the responsibility of both parents, and they were required to conform. Fathers were expected to be strict but affectionate. Local government, as we all know, relied heavily on the input of all members of the town, and on the town meeting. Political and religious life was hierarchical, but the hierarchy was short and continuing power for any individual depended continuing exercise of good behavior and responsibility (not so elsewhere, as we shall see). New Englanders had a well-thought-out and organized idea of liberty--groups should free to establish their own rules; certain individuals might be granted "liberties" to do otherwise proscribed things; the individual was free to follow his or her religious obligations (at the time Calvinist); and the individual should be free from want (which meant that members of the community were obliged to help their unfortunate neighbors). Above all, New Englanders were expected to cultivate and act upon their consciences and to work.

2. Cavaliers and Indentured Servants from the south of England to Virginia, 1642-1675. Characteristics in both England and America: Anglican, status- and wealth-based, highly hierachical, focused on familial inheritance rather than community, rural, with an emphasis on large estates. Women were legally possessions rather than agents and often referred to as "breeders", but were prized for beauty and fiery independence. Children were absolutely subject to fathers, but frequently indulged, expected to retain their independence of spirit (sounds like contradictory parenting to me, but way American). Pleasure was encouraged rather than disapproved of, and Virginians had lots of pleasures, many of them blood sports. Government was seen as essentially and properly hierarchical, punishments of offenders were violent, and office- and power-holding were class and family based. Virginian ideas of liberty were hierarchical, also--two categories existed, "freedom" and "slavery". Freedom was when you did what you wanted and caused others to do what you wanted them to, and slavery was when you had to do what someone else wanted. Liberty was specifically reserved for "free-born Englishmen" and their descendants in Virginia (makes you mad, doesn't it?)

3. Quakers from the North Midlands to Pennsylvania and New Jersey, 1675-1725. Characteristics in both England and America: Quakers and Quaker sympathizers were both anti- hierarchical and anti-doctrinal. They believed in a God of love, not punishment, and did away with rituals, sacraments, and professional ministers. Communities of Quakers were ethnically diverse and had strong ties to communities with similar beliefs in Europe; they were welcoming to the large number of German immigrants who came after them, but not welcoming to the next set of English imigrants, the North Borderers (see below). Quakers tended to be working-class, and many of their journeys to America were subsidized by Quaker groups back home. They came from a section of England that was not yet urbanized--still sparsely settled and often frightening to outsiders, home to a culture that in the 17th century still owed a lot to the Norse conquest of the end of the first millennium. People tended to be independent, egalitarian, rural, plain-spoken, and receptive to unorthodox religious ideas. In America, Quaker families were love-oriented rather than rule- or status-oriented, and more child-nurturing than other English cultures; husbands and wives were more or less equal, based on the idea that "in souls there is no sex" (p. 490). One notable aspect of government was that Pennsylvanians slashed the number of death-penalty offenses from 200, as in England, to 2--treason and intentional murder. In prisons, they focused on rehab rather than punishments. Such liberals! You've got a friend in Pensylvania, indeed. And the Quaker idea of liberty of conscience was based, not on rules, but on thought and choice, recognizing that different people could make different choices, and that those choices could still be conscientious. Certainly, this idea grew out of the Quakers' understanding of the facts of life--other religions and ideas were everywhere around them, and, as they had never been dominant, it was likely, if not certain, that they never would be.

4. Scots-Irish "New Light" Protestants from the Border Counties and Ulster to the Appalachian Backcountry, 1717-1775. Characteristics in both Britain and America: Mean as a snake and twice as quick...oh, excuse me. I am losing my judicious tone. Let me begin again. Scots-Irish immigrants from the northern parts of Britain and from Ulster were generally fleeing what was an increasingly archaic, warrior-based society. Most were tenant farmers or the tenants of tenants. As Irishmen and Scots, they had built up years of economic resentment and Celtic pride with regard to their English neighbors and landlords. The social arrangements of the Borders grew out of the constant warfare (1040-1745) between Scotland and England over who owned the borderlands (remember that the Act of Union that made Scotland part of England was only enacted in 1707). Men on both sides of the border were expected to be alert and aggressive, ready to fight at a moment's notice. When the kings of England and Scotland weren't fighting, local warlords were. Tenancy was based on the ability to fight, and the economy was primitive compared to other parts of England. Keywords: poverty and violence. The legal system relied on vengeance and the economic system relied on protection money. Through the 17th century, the Borders were "pacified", which as we all know is actually a process of singling out the most independent warlords and putting them to death as an example to the others (gallows were placed on hilltops, so that the hanging bodies could be see from far and wide). Absentee English landlords also got rid of tenants by means of exorbitant rent increases (rack-renting), land enclosure, construction of new roads, and imposition of new laws. Throughout the 18th century, the Borderers came to America, more or less, as refugees from forced modernization (where have we seen that before?) Their religious beliefs were diverse on the surface, but shared an underlying intensity and tribal character--they were believers, simultaneously, in grace and sectarian conflict. As Fischer writes, "The North Britons brought with them the ancient border habit of belligerence toward other ethnic groups." [p. 632] The Quakers would not allow them to settle nearby, and they moved west in Pennsylvania, then south through the Appalachians. Clannish, suspicious, well-armed, and believers in "bride abduction" (!) as a good method of courtship. In marriage, men dominant, women absolutely subservient, and wife beating considered normal. Rage a typical (if not desired) feature of child-raising; beatings common. Religion--"emotional, evangelical, and personal", deeply informed by superstition as a method of folk wisdom for avoiding ever-present injury and death. You can see what I'm getting at.

One of Fischer's best points is that each of the British emigrations occurred at a different stage of British as well as American history, and grew out of different dissatisfactions with life in the British Isles. By the end of the 18th century, Britain had more or less assimilated the remnants of the groups who had moved out and was evolving toward national consolidation. America, which was much larger, allowed these groups to continue to isolate themselves and cultivate their idiosyncratic qualities. When people or groups didn't get along, they moved apart instead of working out their differences. But Fischer's depiction of each culture is far more detailed and nuanced and entertaining than I have indicated. Each culture shaped the US that we have today in part through migration patterns. Each culture has also changed. But each culture is to a greater or lesser degree not understandable to the other cultures.

Fischer does not slight the contributions of subsequent immigrant groups (in fact, he is currently working on a book about African culture in America), but he believes that we have not thrown off the structures of cultural and political life given us by the British Isles.

One especially fascinating section of Fischer's book is his analysis of four World War II commanders, Patton, Eisenhower, Marshall, and Roosevelt. Patton was a warrior, descendant of Borderers, who literally preceded his troops into furious battle. Eisenhower, descendant of Quakers and German Pietists, preferred to stay in the rear, coordinating and planning. George Marshall, descended from Virginia aristocracy, devised, with what Fischer considers to be characteristic honor and generosity, the Marshall Plan. Roosevelt was the Yankee--he "contributed ...high moral purpose, clarity of vision, tenacity of purpose, flexibility of method and an implacable will to win." [p, 879]. But so what? Well, so this--when the war is a war that all or almost all Americans agree is necessary, that all Americans are asked to contribute to and sacrifice for, the warrior and culture styles of each group will make differing but essential contributions to the effort.

Now for my take on Fischer's material. When Fisher was writing Albion's Seed in the 1980s, it still seemed that the four cultures were more or less in balance. What we have seen since, though, is the ascendancy of culture #4, the Borders/Appalachian culture of hot-blooded and violent populism that is xenophobic, religiously aggressive, fundamentalist, and sectarian, that is supicious of learning, antagonistic towards "elites", and antipathetic to women's autonomy. It defines itself by masculinity and arms-bearing, is belligerent by nature and quick to take offense. Its natural (and historic) enemy is the outgrowth of Quaker culture, liberalism.

After reading Albion's Seed, my take on American history is that each culture has another that is its natural opponent. For the New Englanders, it was the Virginians, and the Civil War constituted the pitting of those two antagonists, with the Virginians being defeated and in many ways routed by the New Englanders--perhaps the Civil War in the US is more akin to the earlier Civil War in England that we usually realize. The Appalachian/Borderers culture, the natural ally of the Virginians, emerged from the Civil War in some sense intact and unscathed, because a) the Confederacy conceived of itself in terms of the slaveholding Virgina culture and b) the Appalachian southerners who fought for the South were in a position to move west after the war, and they did, leaving behind the ruins of a South that they had only been a tangential part of to begin with. It might also be noted that for the Borderers, the American Civil War possibly amounted to just more of the same after seven hundred years of border wars in Britain. The borderers/ Appalachian culture never had the opportunity to fight their natural enemies, really, until now, because they have never been ascendant until now. Their enemies are us, culture #3, the descendants of the Philadephians. They do not understand us and we do not understand them. What we see around us is the inevitable culture war.

It is important to remember that these cultures are no longer inheritance-based or even regionally-based. They have become affinity groups, and Americans define themselves, increasingly, by their allegiances. They also use their cultural allegiances to define "America" and the right and proper form that patriotism must take. For New Englanders, let's say, patriotism is about the history of the Constitution, the slow progress of law and reason as differences that define the US in contrast to other nations with a more haphazard history. For Virginians, patriotism was about having the right to construct one's own way of life without outside interference. For the Quakers and their descendants, patriotism is about toleration, welcome, diversity, rewards rather than punishments. For Borderers and their descendants, patriotism is about passionate loyalty to the group, alert self-defense, and domination in every sphere. To me, this shows, at least in part, why George W. Bush has retained his loyal following for so long, and why his White House staff don't ever seem to cross him or make him angry. As participants in this newly ascendant culture, their loyalty is always to their group rather than to abstract principles or ideas, even ideas that other groups take very seriously, such as the Constitution.

It's also important to note that two of these groups, #2 and #4, are honor-based, and two, #1 and #3, are self-respect based. In violent, status-conscious cultures, insults have to be dealt with because they threaten a loss of status that might be dangerous. In more egalitarian cultures, insults are less dangerous, and one's own conscience is a stronger guide to behavior. Cultures 1 and 3 are less likely to respond aggressively to an insult, because the insult is seen as revealing more about the issuer of the insult than about the recipient of the insult. Cultures 2 and 4 view this equanimity in the face of insult as a weakness and failure of masculinity, and so they perennially underestimate the strength of liberals and their convictions. At the same time, members of cultures 1 and 3 cannot understand why members of cultures 2 and 4 are so hasty to act, and often not in their long term best interest.

If Al Gore had been elected, would we have gone to war in Iraq? Al Gore and George W. Bush, according to Fischer, present an interesting contrast. The Bush family is a Yankee family and the Gore family is Appalachian. But Gore grew up in Washington and went to Harvard, where he enthusiastically took up and was changed by a New England sort of education. Bush grew up in Texas, did not care for a New England sort of education, and had a typical Borderers alcohol addiction/religious conversion. He reacted to 9-11 belligerently. Gore did not, and, by his own testimony, would not have triggered the war machine as Bush has done. Who they seem to be as men reflects their affinities and allegiances rather than their inheritances. Obviously, the Neocons and the military/industrial complex bear much of the blame for the fix we are in in Iraq, but at this point we have to understand that George Bush and the Republican Party originated and persist in this war for their own cultural and psychological reasons.

I could go on. I do think that there are several reasons why culture #4 has risen to prominence. One is that, facing a loss of power in the seventies, the Republican Party (once the party of culture #1, but bumped out of there by Roosevelt) cynically opted to appeal to the worst aspects of culture #4, especially racist anger, in order to use the electoral college to gain office. A second contributing reason, I think, is the rise of pop culture. Culture #4 is the most musical of all the cultures. The rise of rock and roll, bluegrass, and country music has familiarized the whole country with the norms of culture #4, and made them appealing, too. Certainly, a third important reason is that culture #4 is inherently aggressive and resentful. If we accept Fischer's history, then it has taken the Borderers a thousand years to enter the ruling class--or become the ruling class. What better use of their new power than to attempt to disenfranchise the other cultures? And, fifth, guess what, they've been busy reproducing. Evangelical pastors never hesitate to tell their congregations to go forth and multiply. And sixth, as we all know, a culture that was once turned inward has been galvanized in the last generation by social changes that it has found dangerous or intolerable--Civil Rights, the Women's Movement, the acceleration of social and technological change, and increasing secularization of public life. If culture #4 is our conservative warrior culture, it is going to behave like other conservative warrior cultures around the world; these similarities have been noted elsewhere.

For liberals, perhaps this analysis helps to explain why American economic populists are often split and therefore unable to assert themselves against the depredations of the wealthy. Populism based on an idea of "liberty from want" (a New England idea, and a Roosevelt idea), according to which the community has an obligation to help its unfortunate members, is quite different from populism based on self-assertion by self-consciously resentful non-"elite" parts of society. One is a populism based on a sense of social obligation, the other a populism based on injured pride. I would also suggest that arms-bearing economic populists like James Webb and John Tester, who were elected in November, are not especially trustworthy friends for liberals, because they are temperamentally, traditionally, and psychologically very different from us. Just because they want the corporations to disgorge some of their plunder doesn't mean that they understand us or, more importantly, respect us. Our natural allies are descendants of the Puritans, members of culture #1, who may seem to us hard to get to know, not especially welcoming, too legalistic and insular. That's how they have always seemed to other Americans. One thing Fischer points out about Puritan society is that New England congregations made membership difficult to achieve and surrounded it with rules and responsibilities, but even so, most Puritans and their families strove to become members and succeeded, achieving a tremendously high level of social cohesion that looked from the inside like community and from the outside like an intimidating and exclusive club.

As Pennsylvanians, New Englanders, and Virginians, not to mention Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jews, Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch descendants, former Canadians, etc., Americans do not mind sharing our society with the Borderers, but we don't want to cede it to them, either. Christian Reconstructionism, let's say, does not meet the criteria for valid patriotism. Neither does relentlessly impugning the patriotism of every other group, as the warrior party has done for the last six years. Neither, many Americans would agree, do pre-emptive attacks upon sovereign nations and torture of the helpless and hapless. Even the idea of a pre-emptive attack seems more like a warlord idea than a nation idea. Waging war with indifference to the casualties on both sides may be characteristic of a war-ready culture, but it is not generally American, and the rest of America's cultures have been very hard for the war-party to convince on this score.

I do think that the rise of culture #4 puts our democracy in danger, simply because it is an uncompromising culture that has been reluctant to assimilate itself into the larger society for a thousand years, both in Britain and in America. It is a culture that is passionately intense about weapons, social hierarchy, and religion, three things that are in and of themselves threatening to the broader social compact. Perhaps culture #4 cannot be, or won't be assimilated, but can only be reduced, subdued, or dominated. Personally, I have no idea. David Hackett Fischer isn't saying. When he gets interviewed, he always seems in a good mood.

At any rate, fyi, this article is only 175th as long as the book, Albion's Seed. So you should probably get started on it ASAP.