Gladwell Summary

In this section, Gladwell emphasises how cultural legacies operate as strong forces. He starts with the history of the small town situated on the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, called Harlan. It was founded by eight immigrant families from the northern region of British Isles in the early nineteenth century. The first settlers were herders and this region was cut off from the rest of the state because of its tough accessibility. The town was always thinly populated never crossing the population mark of ten thousand people in its early history. What is of note here is that two of the founding families, the Howards and the Turners were involved in a bloody feud which started as a cheating accusation at a poker game. This feud left dozens dead after numerous brutal attacks. This was one of the many feuds occurring all over Kentucky at that same time. Gladwell was quick to recognize it as a pattern.
What prevailed in Kentucky was a “culture of honour.” Such “cultures” tend to take place in high mountainous regions like that of Sicily in Italy or Basque in Spain, both famous for long murderous family feuds.
He explains that people essentially in these regions started out as herders and as such they had to exert his authority and his power. He can’t be seen as weak, any insult cannot go unanswered. The people in the Appalachian Mountains were descendants of herdsmen and they were clannish responding to harshness and turmoil of their environments by forming tight family bonds. Similar is the culture in the South part of USA. Violence there was not for economic gain but for honour.
Gladwell urges that if you want to understand what happened in that region of Kentucky, you have to go back several generations. It is not just where you are from, but where your great great grandparents are, which also
matters.
Then he goes on to present the results of an experiment carried out by two psychologists in 1990s on the culture of honour. They tried to measure the response, both physical and emotional of young men right after they were insulted. It came out that the deciding factor wasn’t whether they were intellectuals or jocks, or they were physically imposing or not. What mattered was where they were from. Southerners were much more likely in response to the stimuli given in the experiment than the Northerners. These students came from affluent families and were nowhere close to the culture their forefathers grew up in. He says that cultural legacies are powerful forces which persist, generation after generation, even though the social and economic conditions which spawned them may have gone away a long while ago. Moving forward, he wants to analyse how traditions and attitudes inherited from our forebears affect our steady accumulation of advantages and play a role in the success we might be destined to achieve or have achieved.
Here started the second part of the book and here Gladwell starts to deduce if inherited culture, traditions and attitudes can bring about the same effect as environment, timing and capabilities do.