Appalachian Values/American Values: Part III

Appalachian Values/American Values PART III by Jim Wayne Miller IV. APPALACHIAN VALUES AND SOCIOLOGICAL MODELS ". . .we come to a point where we find it hard to distinguish between cause and effect. —Rupert B. Vance The Southern Appalachian region: A Survey The American tendency to locate controls within the individual or group, rather than in external conditions and circumstances has had important conse'quences for the way we view minority groups. The result has often been that, generous, compassionate , and impatient in our faith in the perfectability of man, we locate the reasons for failure in the objects of our concern and compassion, even as we make a great show of kindness. William Ryan describes the process in a book called Blaming the Victim: First, identify a social problem. Second, study those affected by the problem and discover in what ways they are different from the rest of us as a consequence of deprivation and injustice. Third, define the difference as the cause of the social problem itself. Finally, of course, assign a government bureaucrat to invent a humanitarian action program to correct the differences. 1 Here Ryan has enumerated steps of a process which describes many analyses of Appalachian values. The people have been studied and found to be different from other Americans. These differences, consisting of traits and values, have then been viewed as the probable cause of a number of social problems found throughout the Appalachian region. The problems have been located within Appalachians themselves , rather than in political and economic conditions which have often been the result of policies and actions formulated and carried out by people outside the region. Ryan's principal idea, of course, is that the problems of people are more often not the result of their values but of economic and political conditions that can apply irrespective of values. And while his view may be extreme, is might function as a corrective to the approaches that have seen the root of all Appalachian problems in Appalachian values. For all too often, although writers will devote much space to historical antecedents, and to describing political and economic forces, the argument finany deals an unwitting but debilitating blow to the people by locating the difficulty in a collective mentality, a set of traits or complex of values, and by seeing little hope for the people unless they change their ways. The process of blaming the victim is a simple confusion of cause and effect. But we have seen that forces in America have always moved social analysts to confuse 11 the two. The most brilliant minds are capable of lapsing into this confusion. Alexis de Tocqueville, who identified the peculiar set of conditions we have discussed, was capable himself of blaming victims and confusing cause and affect, as when he considered the situation of Negroes in America during the 1840's and found them doomed to slavery because of their servility¡2 Social analysts who blame victims not only identify the inadequate traits and values of the problem group; they also hold up an alternative set of values considered worthy of emulation. These are the values of the majority group, or at least what the analyst considers to be the operative values of the majority. But here, too, a difficulty arises, a difficulty which can be illustrated by an anecdote from John Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. In a discussion of city values and country values, Campbell enumerates the contents of a "mission barrel," i.e., a barrel of clothing sent to the southern mountains by a compassionate ladies group. The barrel included: two pairs of frayed duck trousers, a battered silk hat, and a dress-coat with stains upon the lapel, which indicated that it had not been worn in a prohibition state. There were in that barrel, also, a great many cigarette cards with pictures of battleships, of famous race-horses, and of notorious actresses. Sprinkled as a leaven in this mixture were Bible cards with the injunction to "Remember not thy Creator in the days of thy youth! "3 This grotesque assemblage of miscellaneous items was sent with the thought that they might be of some help "down...