Southern Culture WILL Survive (and THRIVE)
The South Will Always Do It Again
The South Will Always Do It Again
(Tom Daniel, Abbeville Institute) - I live in Alabama, and I see what’s happening to the South with my own eyes. Through the Abbeville Institute, I also stay connected with fellow Southern thinkers, so I read about the same things happening elsewhere. We are not experiencing cultural mass hysteria, because what’s happening is real. Institutional erosion, demographic churn, homogenized media, and the steady replacement of lived regional practice with a curated, consumable identity are not imagined pressures. And the forces changing us are not even being sneaky about it anymore. They’re flaunting it. They’re proud of what they’re doing.
Although I am sickeningly optimistic most of the time, even I can’t deny the diagnosis. If we measure survival by institutional continuity, recognizable forms, and stable transmission structures, then the outlook is bleak. I totally agree. I acknowledge the loss, and not abstractly. Specifically, in my own field of music, I see the disappearance of local radio formats, the declining participation in communal music-making, and the replacement of regional sound with national polish. However, as dreary and hopeless as it all looks from where I stand, there’s a long-lost filament of Celtic DNA inside me that refuses to stop twitching. It won’t allow me to give up. As North Carolina author D. J. Molles said, “The only way to destroy an idea is to kill everyone who believes in it. And I’m not dead yet.”
The thing that continues to catch in my throat is the assumption that culture only survives by being kept intact. That’s what bothers me, because in nature, stagnation equals death. Survival has always depended on forward motion, and Southern culture has never been a museum. We are a living, breathing, infuriating culture that refuses to depend on stability, protection, or even continuity in the archival sense. Southern culture has survived precisely because it is carried forward by…