Geographic Flexibility
While the topic of a culture’s tolerance for change is philosophically boring, it can have enormous macro scale consequences. Because nearly all residents of the United States (except for African Americans and Native Americans) are descended from—or are themselves—people who voluntarily chose to leave their homeland, Americans can often underestimate how strongly some cultures feel attached to a specific region (even cultures we often don’t think of in that respect).
Consider the Irish Potato famine. It is hard to overstate just how horrifying the event was. People reported walking into towns completely devoid of life, filled with nothing but corpses strewn beside buildings, only to see those corpses’ eyes tracking their movements and realize many were still barely clinging to life. Just as many people don’t know how bad the potato famine was, what many also don’t know is that many of the people who starved had the option to leave.
The feudal lords who owned property on which many starving people lived were concerned about not being able to feed all their tenants. Even if it didn’t lead to a revolt, negligence could get them and their families killed (there was a rash of landlord murders at the time, so people were terrified).[[17]](#_ftn17) At the very least it was clear to land owners that if their crops failed and they could only feed a quarter of the serfs or tenants on their lands, they were much better off getting three-quarters to leave and feeding that final quarter instead of just letting the entire lot starve to death.
As such, land owners sometimes (maybe even frequently—we could not find exact reports of the percentage that did this) offered to pay for tenants to emigrate to the Americas to lower the population (to clarify, the passage purchased for these tenants was on “coffin ships” where the passengers acted as the ship’s ballast and sometimes entire crews would die).[[18]](#_ftn18) While many accepted these offers, the majority turned them down. They may not have known just how bad things were going to get when making that decision, but the cultural impetus is clear: To some people, death is preferable to leaving their land.
We suspect this instinct evolved culturally as earlier humans might logically underestimate how hard it would be to find a good new place to live that was not already occupied by an entrenched group. In the world’s current sociographic and geopolitical environment—and in any future environment—we can imagine it is a terrible strategy to stay geographically tethered as a culture.
It is much easier for a culture to maintain a thriving, engaged membership once members reach a certain critical mass within their surrounding population. As such, while moving may make cultural sense, it seems wisest to move with at least one other culturally aligned family. For example, when we moved to rural Pennsylvania, my (Malcolm’s) brother, his wife, and their children all moved into a nearby house. (Note: This only applies to adults with kids; relocation to a city is practically mandatory when searching for a partner.)