"American Core Value and National Character"

• Core Value: Self-reliance.

• Conflicting Values: Monogamous marriage and freedom, humanitarian mores and monotheistic religion, racism and education.

• Historical Roots: Individualism from the Enlightenment and changes from the Industrial Revolution.

• American Conscience: A unique collective identity shaped by conflicting values.

• Comparative Analysis: Slight differences with UK values due to socialism and hereditary titles.

• Broader Impact: Competitive and insecure nature of American society due to individualism.

What is Hsu’s vision of our values and the contradictions among them?

In 1959 anthropologist Francis L.K. Hsu of Northwestern University summarized in a speech his findings from an ethnography of American society.  He notes that up until then, ethnographers had often discerned many values present in American society and that these values were often in tension with one another, not clearly illuminating on a shared-experience that is the anchor of the self in American society.  Listing off the values fingered in studies by his contemporaries, he notes monogamous marriage and freedom, humanitarian mores and monotheistic religion, and racism and education, for example, as antagonistic or even opposites as well as inconsistent in their efforts to define the ‘collective American conscience’.  In fact, Hsu claims all these ‘conceived’ values of American life that ethnographers had heretofore identified as universal values were in some way opposed, and that only one value, self-reliance, acts as a focus around which these other expressions of the self arise and revolve. They include those mentioned as well as many others, indicative of the American experience then and now, such as achievement, success, activity, and work. 

The core value of self-reliance arose out of the individualism that accompanied Enlightenment thinking, according to Hsu, and it precipitates these conflicting characteristics of the American self because ultimately, humankind is a social species.  Without the deep social ties that members of a less egocentric society may exhibit, Americans are genuinely insecure, competing with one another to participate in status groups, which further their sense of self-reliance.  Per Hsu, totalitarian racial prejudice and democratic equality and freedom will continually advance in lockstep as American society evolves, explaining that this hyper-cognized experience shows both the best and the worst of Americans, implicit in their collective sense of self characterized by self-reliance.

Link each part of Hsu's analysis to the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment in Europe and America.

Hsu noted that people in the United Kingdom vary slightly in their values related to individualism, in that they have incorporate socialism into their society and honor the hereditary title of kings.  In fact, the slight differences in the American and UK sense of self and identity arise from a phenomenon that Evolutionary Psychologist Dr. Jeanette Marie Mageo terms “The Suitcase Self”.  The suitcase self is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.  During the 18th century people began migrating out of rural towns and into large city centers, upending the traditional familial social structure that dominated pre-Enlightenment Western life.  Evangelicalism arose to retain in one’s sense of self moral values, creating the suitcase self, older value systems that were ever-present in earlier, village societies neatly packed into peoples’ sense of self and able to be transported from one community to another.  At the same time Enlightenment thinkers had changed the narrative about what it meant to be an individual force in the world, and people let loose of the old hierarchy of feudal life with hopes of being able to rise to the top and live well themselves.

In America, where Hsu conducted his ethnography, Enlightenment thinking produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, which Dr. Mageo notes are enlightenment manifestos, establishing the rights of individuals over the rights of the group.  Each value that defines American society can be linked back to this establishment of rights, firmly ensconced in the American psyche as self-reliance.  In these ways, Dr.’s Hsu and Mageo present a compelling overview of many of the key aspects of American identity, contrasting it with more sociocentric cultures that hypo-cognize individual experience to place their sense of self firmly within the societal structure.

References

Hsu, F. L. (1961). "American Core Value and National Character". Psychological Anthropology, 209-230. Retrieved February 7, 2017.

Mageo, J. Marie. (2017). The Self in Culture. Lecture 3, “U.S. Culture: It’s Historical Origins,” Washington State University. Retrieved February 7, 2017.