I was thinking again today, as I sometimes do, about mythologizing and mythbusting, and how it relates to the formation and deconstruction of group identity.
I know some people from the Upland South, especially from the state of West Virginia, Appalachian coal country at large, or various leftist communities, who say that the origin of the term Redneck is in the red bandanas worn by coalminers in the Mine Wars of the 1910s and 1920s; and others – especially who claim Ulster Irish descent – who claim that the ‘Billy’ in ‘Hillbilly’ is derived from the William in William of Orange.
I’ve also met Black folks who claim that the raised-fist salute of international leftism was created by and for the Black Panthers; and Gaels who insist that the Gaelic phrase ‘Is math sin’ (That’s good!) is the origin of the aristocratic English exclamation ‘smashing!’.
None of these etymologies or origin stories are literally true.
The first recorded instance of ‘Redneck’ occurred among Scottish Covenanters in the 1600s, and its first recorded instance in North America was in South Carolina in around 1830 – long before the Appalachian Mine Wars.
The Billy in hillbilly most likely originated in the same way that the names ‘John Smith’ and ‘John Bull’ came to denote the stereotypical Englishman, ‘Jock’ came to denote the stereotypical Lowland Scot, and ‘Paddy’ came to denote the stereotypical Irishman: Billy was a common enough name among backwoods Southerners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, likely with no special thanks to William of Orange, and the ‘hill’ prefix was added to show that the imagined Billy in question lived specifically in the hills.
The leftist salute was likely a product of the First Internationale, and was in documented use by anarchist and communist Freedom Fighters in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The Black Panthers adopted it decades later in solidarity with these fallen heroes, because they, too, were fighting fascism.
‘Is math sin’, although certainly much older than ‘smashing’, likely didn’t influence it: the Anglophone British cultural elite aren’t famous for their uptake of Gaelic cultural norms, linguistically or otherwise.
Even so, I don’t usually correct these narratives directly when I encounter them – usually because they’re the result of people trying to bolster marginalized identities.
‘Redneck’ and ‘Hillbilly’ are often used as terms of disparagement. If people who get insulted by means of those words want to etymologize them in ways that connect them to known and prestigious historical people and events, I don’t want to correct them over-forcefully, in a way that undermines that prestige.
Similarly, if modern-day Black activists want to locate the history of the raised-fist salute in Black Leftism only, then, although not historically accurate, that’s an assertion that should be contested carefully if at all. Black people have historically been denied a lot of things that were rightfully theirs; in light of that, it’s not necessarily just, even in service to the truth, to flippantly take something they’ve claimed away from them.
The same is true of ‘Is math sin’. Native speakers of the three Goidelic languages have been driven almost to oblivion by the encroachment of Anglophone cultural norms – often assisted by the encroachment of Anglophone laws and law enforcement. If their belief that they can exert an influence, however small, on the upper echelons of the society of their historic oppressors gives them hope, or satisfaction, then it’s possible to do a great injustice in trying to take that away.
That having been said, I do think it would be easier if people could maintain a cognitive distinction between emotionally validating and socially unifying truths, and empirical truths.
I believe, for instance, in the existence of a God, and that that God is either absolutely or ultimately good – and that, as such, the universe is unfolding as it should, and that we will eventually be recompensed for any suffering we are made to endure in this life and arrive at a situation of perfect love and understanding. I am not alone in this belief: it is the foundation of many social networks to which I belong, and gives the members of those networks great comfort, and a common framework through which to understand their connections to one another and the world.
There is, however, no empirical evidence for these beliefs, and in all probability there never will be: the observable world is a fundamentally unjust place, in which bad things can and do happen at random without compensation, and in which people don’t always get their moral desserts.
I can accept both of these things as true: the mytho-poeic truth of the world as an inherently purposeful and just place created and sustained by a loving universal consciousness, the story of which will have a happy ending; and, conversely, the empirical truth of a world seemingly devoid of inherent meaning, in which horrible things can happen to anyone irrespective of their ethics, and in which there seems to be no narrative to speak of at all – just an endless succession of events, few if any of which we can control or even meaningfully influence, and which no one else seems to be directing for our benefit.
The fundamental difficulty arises, I find, when people believe that mythic and empirical truths have to uniformly agree – and that, if they don’t, one or the other must be discarded. This framework is, in my opinion, foolish and unnecessary.
If it’s essential to some people’s self conception to believe in the mythic truth that a Redneck is exclusively a communist from the coal camps, that a Hillbilly is exclusively a Williamite, that the leftist salute is exclusively Black, and that ‘smashing’ is a Gaelic victory over the English aristocracy, there’s nothing wrong with that – but I do believe it would be better for such people, and for the world, if they could simultaneously allow that the literal truth holds otherwise.
This is not least of all because it is a recipe for conflict. The metaphysical worlds human beings can inhabit – the dwelling places of our myths – are infinite and endlessly varied, but the physical world is finite. The world of literal truth, although largely devoid, independently, of the potential for emotional satisfaction or for community building, is the only world that communities with different mythic systems can simultaneously inhabit. Mythic worlds are specific to peoples – indeed, are what define peoples – but, as such, cannot easily be simultaneously inhabited by multiple peoples at once.
If we insisted on the abolition of mythic reality in favour of literal reality, we would ultimately lose the cultural distinctions of the various peoples of the world, and end up with a universal and universally emotionally unfulfilling monoculture. If, instead, we attempted to substitute literal reality with mythic reality, we would both disconnect ourselves from empiricism, and deny people from different cultural backgrounds the ability to inhabit the same reality without divesting themselves of their cultural identities. We should instead strive to be fluent in the mythic languages of our own cultural communities, while still allowing non-mythic reality and its norms to act as a sort of existential lingua franca for interacting with other communities. The people who confuse their own mythic language with objective reality inevitably seek to impose it on other peoples who would rather speak their own.
To the extent that capitalist industrial modernity is called soulless, it is because it has tried to jettison mythic reality, and rely exclusively on literal truths – thus rendering itself at once cold and unfeeling, at its core, and unable to accept as mythic the many mythic elements with which its adherents have imbued its periphery when, inevitably, they have turned to myth for the emotional nourishment it lacks. As such, it at once decries as irrational and subjective the sanctification of nature, community, human dignity, and the potential for utopian social arrangements; and, yet, at the same time, it upholds as rational and objective the sanctity of private property, and the existence of an ‘invisible hand’ that will ensure economic balance while economies expand infinitely in a finite world. Similarly, to the extent that Christianity is a tool of oppression, it is because so many Christians have tried to substitute their mythic truth for objective reality – at the expense of both literal truth, and the mythic truths underpinning non-Christian communities and their worldviews. If logic and empiricism seem to contradict Christian teachings, then, in the minds of many a Christian, reason and evidence-based thinking themselves must somehow be invalid.
All this confusion could be avoided if we distinguished the mythic truth from the literal truth.
So, no – Rednecks are not literally the product of the Mine Wars, Hillbillies are not literally Williamite, the leftist salute is not literally a Black invention, and ‘smashing’ is not literally a Gaelic intrusion into the Anglophone world. Even so, I respect that there are communities for whom these assertions *are* true – I just wish that they could accept that there is a difference between those subjective truths (which give their specific groups emotional satisfaction and internal cohesion) and objective facts made rigid by the constraints of the temporal world (truths that don’t emotionally satisfy or meaningfully unite people, but which, with their concrete groundedness in time and space, provide a framework within which different communities of belief should be able to comfortably exist).
SPLANG! Gàidhlig ann an Ceanndachaidh | SPLANG! Scottish Gaelic in Kentucky 