How can America be so intensely developed and so violent? Speculation

From an interview by Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney with Steven Pinker at the time of his book, The Better Angels of our Nature.

If you subtract out all the gun homicides in the United States and you just look at the homicides committed with, say ropes, candlesticks, and daggers, we still kill people at a higher rate.

I have made the claim elsewhere that Americans live with a degree of intensity not common in other OECD countries and that that intensity shows up in many ways such as healthcare costs, accident rates, morbidity rates, etc.

Pinker's observation is consistent with that intensity of living argument.

There are many hypotheses surrounding why the US is so violent, primarily focusing on the Second Amendment and access to guns. Pinker's point suggests that the violence is more fundamental than just access to weapons. That perhaps weapons are incidental and that the underlying driver is cultural.

I would make two arguments. First is that while we are a synthesized nation from many cultural roots, those roots are characterized by dramatically different rates of violence. Take, for example, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer identifies four cultures from the British Isles who came to these shores within approximately a hundred years of one another - Quakers, Puritans, Cavaliers, and Border Reivers.

It is not Fischer's primary focus, but it is clear from his book that these four groups, originating from the same isles (though different areas), brought dramatically different attitudes (folkways) with regard to violence, either personal or institutional. From most peaceful to most violent they were Quakers, Puritans, Cavaliers, and Border Reivers as measured by the number of murdered within their own community and mortal violence against outsiders. And that is just from Britain.

The upshot is that the role of violence in America is a product of many cultural influences over time, each of those cultures with widely divergent orientations towards violence. This is Simpson's Paradox in the field of violence. I have discussed this elsewhere in terms of education (here, here, and here.) In international education achievement, Americans from each of the main cultural groups (European, Meso-Hispanic, African-American and Asian) perform better than their peers in each of the origin locations (Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia) but the overall American average is mid-tier because each cultural group has different performance levels. I suspect that in terms of violence, we would find that violence in European-American communities, in African-American communities, in Asian-American communities and in Hispanic communities in the US is better (lower) than in the best countries in the continents of origin (Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia) but that the overall average is worse because there are such different levels of violence in the different cultural groups.

Related to Simpson's paradox of mixed cultural violence levels but, I think, a separate argument, is the fact that the US has had many waves of migration. It is not just the mix that impacts the outcome, it is the constant shocks to the system.
It is hard to sustain steady cultural evolution over time if there are frequent and highly variant exogenous shocks.

There is an argument among anthropologists and sociologists that increasingly complex societies have multiple mechanisms for evolving out tendencies towards lack of self-control and tolerance of violence (by actual death of violent members and thus removal from the gene pool but also via evolution of cultural and legal norms). There is likely merit in the argument but there are innumerable complexities and is probably frequently overstated.

The substance though is that Sweden (as an example) has a lower rate of lethal violence because they have purged the inclination towards violence from their genetic heritage, from their cultural norms, and from their institutional norms.

Perhaps. But what happens when multiple groups are overlaid upon one another, each group with different stage points of accommodation for violence? Upon the seeds of Albion (different as they were from one another), there were later cultural infusions of Germans, Poles, north Italians, Sicilians, Russians, Greeks, Mexicans, Chinese, etc. each with their own cultural base rates of violence.

If the native system of culture is evolving over time, how is the process affected by these later infusions? I suspect it is more complicated than simply averaging the attitudes towards violence. The system itself is disrupted. Perhaps cultural and institutional progress towards lower tolerance of violence is actually reset back to the base when subject to a cultural shock? I have no idea, but I suspect that the American experience of frequent punctuations to the equilibrium of cultural evolution might be more disruptive than we can readily perceive.

And certainly there is evidence for the persistence over time of longstanding cultural heritages. Americans of different heritages have academic scores more similar to their original cultures than to one another. Americans of Scottish heritage save more money than non-Scots Americans. Americans of Scandinavian descent have labor force participation rates more comparable to their distant brethren than to other hyphenated Americans. It would not be surprising to find that there are long degrees of persistence in attitude towards violence as well.

I am guessing that America's proclivity towards economic dynamism and innovation (and intensity of lived experience) is in part a function of the constant infusion of new ideas and attitudes arising from episodic disruptive immigration but that that episodic disruptive infusion of different cultures with differences in attitude toward violence has perhaps curtailed (or destabilized) a steady evolution that enhances self-control and expunges tolerance of violence. Unexamined trade-offs.