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Comment by EscapeFromNY | Hacker News Reader

I like to tell people that a US state is the size of a European country, and USA the country is as large as Europe the continent.

"Oh, you're from Europe? What language do they speak in Europe?"

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State to state the US is significantly more similar culturally than Europe is. The distance from my home town to the University I went to is equivalent to London to Jerusalem basically, but the differences between my hometown and the place I went to university are not very significant when compared to the differences between London and Jerusalem.

Yeah, I did not find moving from Massachusetts to California involved a radical reimagining of my behavior, the way I spoke, or in many cases even the places I shopped. The people here are all familiar with the same cultural touchstones, more or less. Distinctive regional accents are harder and harder to hear. US culture might have been more notably diverse in the pre-War period but now basically you're, to put it in vulgar terms, "cosmopolitan" or "hick" and that's about all the differentiation that matters.

FWIW, (Eastern) Massachusetts and (South-Central, Coastal) California are not very different. San Francisco and Boston share a special affinity.

Many of the places in between are more varied.

They’re not but that’s kind of my point. It’s not really that varied, you can go “red” or “blue” and those alternate a lot as you travel around, but the idea of a patchwork of many little very distinctive cultures is on life support.

How much have you actually traveled through the US beyond superficially passing through a few cities? Is “Massachusetts to California” supposed to be satire?

You obviously haven’t met any Cajuns, Appalachians, or any number of American subcultures that are very distinct from your generic metropolitan yuppy. Many of them have dialects and accents thick enough to be practically indecipherable to many Americans. You just won’t find them at your local Trader Joes because they live somewhere else

Yes, I have, but I didn’t think I needed to write my whole life story to make a point. Regional accents (Massachusetts has a couple distinctive ones! While we’re being condescending, surely you are at least vaguely aware of that) are more likely to be used by people middle-aged or older. Regional media is dead. Regional cuisine is far less distinct than it used to be with many specialties gone.

In 1900 it wouldn’t have been common sense that MA and CA are “supposed to be” similar so the fact you’re throwing that in my face is actually making my point.

I think this sort of proves the point that Europe is significantly more varied though. Even if you only travel to major cities in Europe you notice very significant cultural differences between them. Small pockets of distinct cultures are around the US but there are way fewer of them and they are sparsely distributed in a way that most people don't run into them at all.

For example, in Canada the difference between the Haida people, Inuit people, English Canadians are very apparent and obvious, but the vast vast majority of the country (outside of Quebec and northern NB) is small towns where people speak English, play the same few sports, have the same like 8 chain restaurants, and live in broadly similar property styles. Sure culturally BC is different from Ontario slightly, but having traveled to and lived in both for many years, the differences are not very significant unless I were to seek out specific cultural enclaves, and that is a 4500 km difference.

No argument against the idea that the ~continent of Europe is more heterogeneous than the country of the US.

Just that the MA-CA example is vastly underrepresentative of the variation within the US.

Isn’t it a little odd that we can have culturally very similar places 3000 miles apart unless culture has mostly been nationalized in a couple variations?

I mean, superficially odd perhaps, yes. I can think of a dozen reasons why it makes sense.

Regardless, it is not evidence that the culture is homogeneous in the middle.

There is, of course, a national culture. Again I think we might be drawing the line differently. I look for and enjoy the variations. They are there.

But if you want to paint with a broad brush, you can make lots of generalizations too. It's just less interesting.

What forces would we expect to act on the coasts of the United States but not the interior?

Cosmopolitanism- more multicultural cross pollination due to trade and travel. Wealth disparity is another. The coasts are also richer than ‘flyover country.’ There are isolated places in New Mexico, the Deep South, and Appalachia that are grievously poverty stricken, to give some extreme examples.

If we want to get so nitpicky there are poor and isolated areas along the coasts too. And heartland areas outside of major cities are less able to sustain independent media. Modern institutions like the military shuffle people around to and from these less notable areas and many broad trends do not fit the simplistic narrative you're presenting (for instance, many rural areas have large immigrant populations who work in farms, meat-processing facilities, and similar).

(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.

I 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.

To 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.

Like what? I mean what do you think the variations are really going to be? People orient their entire value systems around their political affiliation.

People don't even understand their political affiliation.

Viewing humans through that lens is reductive. I think we've figured out our disagreement here!

Viewing 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Of 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.

It doesn't really seem like you've understood what I've said either, then: I'm saying is that there are essentially two American cultures, the urban one and the non-urban one, and these two parallel national cultures have almost entirely subsumed what were formerly much more varied regional ones. Anyway, you're being glib about how much I must not know about the various other states since CA and MA are "so similar" as if Los Angeles is just like Bakersfield or a California farm town, so it's no less facile.

I moved from non-rural Louisiana to Boston and it involved a radical reimagining of my behavior:

- Understanding how people spoke. There are more, and more different, languages spoken and cultures in Cambridge than even the most diverse parts of Louisiana. I met in Boston for the first time people from, and not just culturally descended from, India, Pakistan, Spain, Israel, Peru, Ethiopia, just off the top of my head. Even if English dominates, it's a very different English, where the same words mean different things, and new words are used that didn't exist in Louisiana.

The kind of English coming out of my mouth, my vocabulary and accent, marked me as a very different kind of person and set first impressions that I didn't want or intend — and it wasn't a "cosmopolitan"/"hick" binary, it was more of a matrix of rich/poor, smart/dumb, educated/not, straight/gay, English first/second, Black/not, local/not ("Worcester"). I confused the hell out of people, both on those dimensions and also with what I was literally saying, if I didn't modulate my speech to be more like theirs. Meanwhile I had some interesting times as a French speaker overhearing conversations about me that were not meant for me, because I didn't look like a French speaker, because most French speakers there were non-white Haitians or from Francophone African nations.

- The places I shopped. Back then Boston had the kinds of stores and markets that I had never actually seen in real life while living in Louisiana. Other than Market Basket, the one true constant in life (except apparently anywhere else in the country).

- The different cultural touchstones. Y'all. "Milkshakes" being liquid, and "frappes" being milkshakes, except at Starbucks. "Regulah" coffee. St. Patrick's Day being a less fun but equally drunk Mardi Gras (and no Mardi Gras despite all the Catholics? Then what's the point of being Catholic?). Baseball — like, we have it, but it's kind of a joke sport people only care about if LSU is good or the Astros were especially bad. Everything that comes from moving from a red state to a blue state — less homophobia, less xenophobia, more classism, more weird and weirdly enforced rules. Candlepin. The whole concept of state-run liquor. Vastly different types and intensities of racism. People in Boston go to live music shows and don't dance. Almost nobody white in Boston knows how to hold a cookout, like a real proper whole-neighborhood meal, and the word "cookout" just means BBQ there.

- How I got around. Public transit! Everyone else is complaining constantly about the MBTA and I'm like, I get to ride a train? Every day??? And if I miss it I can also take one or two buses???? And it might catch on fire??????? Before that I was putting 120 miles a day on my car to commute, almost all of it straight-line highways. I'd never in my life set foot on non-school-bus public transit. It took me a solid month just to understand that I really could get almost anywhere with just walking and transit.

- Conversely, owning a truck is by far the easiest way to make friends in Boston.

- How close everything was. The nearest anything for me in Louisiana was typically 5 to 10 miles away. People in Boston had no concept of distance; transit abstracted it away into minutes. Neighborhoods were walkable; I'd regularly used maybe two or three notable paved sidewalks in my life before I wound up in Boston. Driving the length of my old college commute, which had been almost all highway with little to nothing to even stop for, would send me through a dozen small cities in the NE.

- Snow! Holy shit. Snow!!! My god!!!!! The snow!!!!!!!! Seven feet of snow that doesn't go away! Parking sweeps for snow plows! SNOW PLOWS! Lines out the door to get ice cream when it's a balmy 33 degrees out! Yak Trax! MITTENS

- And in the summer, as the man in the show said, I had to learn to accept that air conditioning was a privilege and not a right.

Lived there three years and it was life-changing. Got married to someone who had travelled far, far more than I had, domestically and abroad, but never to the southeast. Brought them to Louisiana a couple of times and the inverse of all of the above was wild to watch them experience.

I lived a little bit outside of Boston and some of the things you’ve written (things being close, for instance, or diversity, or public transit being a viable option to go places) didn’t really apply at all.

I would guess that most people from outside the states are familiar with the geographical size of the country, and that this frequently comes off as patronising.

Besides, the fact of the matter is that English dominates as the main language in the US to a far greater degree than Europe. I’m not sure that your analogy really highlights anything except that Europe has many more culturally distinct zones than the US.

> I would guess that most people from outside the states are familiar with the geographical size of the country

If they do they don't act like it: my experience has been like the OP's, in that non-Americans tend to assume our society and culture is a lot more homogeneous than it is.

Conversely, as an American, American's tend to assume their culture is a lot more heterogeneous than it really is. Tons of people don't travel outside the country because they think that the US has everything when it doesn't at all.

To be fair, the US doesn't have everything, but it does have a lot, so I can see how you could get this idea if you weren't a particularly imaginative or curious person.

Hmm, but almost everywhere american english is spoken in the US? Also rest assured, travelled quite a bit through the US, and at least the surface view from a tourist is: There are differences (as there are also huge differences as e.g. between Berlin and Bavaria) in culture.. but all the things foreigners find crazy about the US and what I would call "culture" are very similar.

Sure, subcultures exist, but as in every immigrant country. (I would even say that integration works better there, like foreigners wanting to adapt more to the American culture as in other countries).

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