Cultural Civil Wars Cultural Civil Wars by Glynn Custred Attacks on the Confederate battle flag, the singing of Dixie , the prominence of Confederate monuments, etc., may at first glance appear to be of only regional even superficial concern. They may even seem justified given the use made of the Confederate flag by extremists not only in this country but abroad. Some view all this with little concern, believing that such abstractions as symbols, images and history are of only marginal importance. A shared national identity, therefore, grounded in a vision of history and embodied and transmitted in images and symbols, constitutes an essential, organic part of all modern nations.
National identities are by no means immutable.
Indeed they change in response to the conditions in which people find themselves at different periods of history. Under conditions which prevailed during the first half of the last century the sheer size and geographic diversity of the United States made the country far less cohesive that it is today, thus rendering it prone to serious sectional divisions. What changed all this, beginning in the eighteenth, then building to full force in the nineteenth century, was the transforming processes of modernization that ultimately replaced traditional agrarian societies with modern societies not only in North America but also in an increasingly large portion of the world. Modernization therefore has been a social, cultural, and moral revolution of major importance in world history. In the United States this revolution began in the northeastern corner of the country as a purely sectional phenomenon, and true to form vigorously spread outward to incorporate the rest of the country.