I’m from Connecticut, now living in Germany. You know how small towns develop strong rivalries with their neighbors? Europeans have been doing that (and making requisite dialect, ritual, and ingredient changes) for centuries longer than Americans have. That’s one way of distinguishing cultures, but others are through different migration or conflict patterns, both of which Europe has also been practicing for centuries. Americans do have European friends, but probably not the ones living in rural communities where things get very different. I met a guy from Germany recently (not Bavaria), and in his village, they playfully beat you with sticks for being unmarried at 30. The group I was with (all also non Bavarian Germans) were more surprised than I was, because that sounded insane to them.
Depending on location, Germans: drink beer or wine; eat sausage or fish; drink tea or coffee (no tea drinkers in the US afaik); are totally cool with nudism or really not; embrace their dialect, try and get rid of it, or insist that it’s the best dialect; are very Catholic, very Protestant, or not really any religion; have been coexisting with immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Turkey for 80 years, or have only
received refugees in the last decade; are very into trendy, liberal foods, are very into guns, beer, and meat in a conservative way, or are very into guns and veganism in a leftist way. I could go on, but I already got carried away.
It really is the case that on a large enough scale (both places are imo large enough), you’ll get the whole range of humans. Give them 1-4 millennia of coexisting with poor communication ability, and they’ll differentiate themselves more than they will in 500 years of relatively good communication. Is it not evidence that European cultures have diverged more than American cultures that the Latin spoken in different areas of Europe got so heavily influenced by different cultures, that it’s now several mutually unintelligible languages? (The difference between a language and a dialect is nebulous, but even though someone from Worcester, MA and someone from New Orleans might not be able to understand each other, they are considered mutually intelligible).
What the US does have going for it in this regard is openness towards other cultures in the tiny things. I have no idea whether xenophobia is a bigger problem here or there in general, but a school in my state recently decided to stop singing Christmas carols in school, because about 25% of their students don’t celebrate Christmas. My in-laws literally didn’t understand why those two things are correlated.
That’s more like Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
I’m from Connecticut, now living in Germany. You know how small towns develop strong rivalries with their neighbors? Europeans have been doing that (and making requisite dialect, ritual, and ingredient changes) for centuries longer than Americans have. That’s one way of distinguishing cultures, but others are through different migration or conflict patterns, both of which Europe has also been practicing for centuries. Americans do have European friends, but probably not the ones living in rural communities where things get very different. I met a guy from Germany recently (not Bavaria), and in his village, they playfully beat you with sticks for being unmarried at 30. The group I was with (all also non Bavarian Germans) were more surprised than I was, because that sounded insane to them.
Depending on location, Germans: drink beer or wine; eat sausage or fish; drink tea or coffee (no tea drinkers in the US afaik); are totally cool with nudism or really not; embrace their dialect, try and get rid of it, or insist that it’s the best dialect; are very Catholic, very Protestant, or not really any religion; have been coexisting with immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Turkey for 80 years, or have only received refugees in the last decade; are very into trendy, liberal foods, are very into guns, beer, and meat in a conservative way, or are very into guns and veganism in a leftist way. I could go on, but I already got carried away.
It really is the case that on a large enough scale (both places are imo large enough), you’ll get the whole range of humans. Give them 1-4 millennia of coexisting with poor communication ability, and they’ll differentiate themselves more than they will in 500 years of relatively good communication. Is it not evidence that European cultures have diverged more than American cultures that the Latin spoken in different areas of Europe got so heavily influenced by different cultures, that it’s now several mutually unintelligible languages? (The difference between a language and a dialect is nebulous, but even though someone from Worcester, MA and someone from New Orleans might not be able to understand each other, they are considered mutually intelligible).
What the US does have going for it in this regard is openness towards other cultures in the tiny things. I have no idea whether xenophobia is a bigger problem here or there in general, but a school in my state recently decided to stop singing Christmas carols in school, because about 25% of their students don’t celebrate Christmas. My in-laws literally didn’t understand why those two things are correlated.