One of the biggest challenges the liberal order is facing in the West today arises from opposition to immigration. This opposition is understood, by the powerful for whom immigration provides access to cheap labor, as a sort-of racism that should be explained as an unwillingness to extend to foreign-born others the same rights we enjoy ourselves. Liberalism tends to universalize discussions of rights, so why shouldn't someone born abroad have the same rights as human beings born in America? It's obviously just selfishness on the part of Americans, a desire to continue to enjoy an unfair advantage (argue the masters of the capitalist order, who want these people to pick their vegetables at starvation wages).
That's not really what's driving the objection. The real force of the objection is that mass movement -- immigration or migration within a nation, doesn't matter -- disrupts and destroys communities that are the basis of almost all human meaning. It's not really an objection to the people coming in as if they were inferior people: it's an objection to communities and cultures being destroyed, when those things are where we get almost all of the sense of meaning we derive from human life.
A culture is defined as "a way of life." Ways of life exist among people who live together and share personal connections. You don't know and can't know everyone, but you do know the nice lady at your favorite coffee shop, or library, or bar; you know the people you met at church, or work, or school. You grew up participating in institutions like a church or the Boy Scouts or your town in your home state, with its local sports teams and friends you know from interactions around the place where you live. Together you have built a culture, and it really does depend on the stability of all those things.
While you get a certain amount of your sense of meaning in life from philosophy or your personal engagement with religion, most of your sense of meaning and being important comes from your interactions with other people. Those are the people who are part of your culture, including your family. When the institutions, including the family, are badly disrupted you lose the connections that make your life meaningful and worth living.
Of course human beings object to that. If you want a universalizing explanation a la liberalism, this is a universal human drive that is at work.
You can see just how universal it is by looking at the phenonmenon of objections to gentrification. Now gentrification has clear benefits, just like cheap labor results in cheap vegetables. The gentrifying town is getting nicer. Those who lived there thus have a nicer place to live, with less crime and better shops. They might even get a better job as wages increase and labor is needed by those better shops. Yet gentrification, another localized form of mass movement, is objected to just as strongly as mass migration of any sort. The people objecting to it are often on the other side of the spectrum of economic life, too: it's the poor objecting to rich people moving in, rather than richer people objecting to poorer people. The problem is the same one, though. The gentrification is disrupting the community, forcing people to move out as well as they can't afford the higher taxes and cost of living. Soon the institutions that sustain a meaningful life are broken up, families are dispersed seeking places they can live, churches cease to exist, and individuals are stripped of the relationships that made their lives important and worthwhile.
Liberalism doesn't have the machinery to address this basic drive. As mentioned it responds to objection to migration with charges of racism; it responds to objections to gentrification with a defense of property rights. The richer people bought that land fair and square, and now it's their land to use within the forms of the law.
Meanwhile even positive laws can't be allowed to violate fundamental rights, and both "equality of rights" and "property rights" are fundamental rights. The law might oppose illegal immigration, but you can't stand on the law when people are suffering: that violates their equality. The law might support gentrification, which is an exercise of a fundamental property right, so you can't oppose gentrification without breaking the law.
Part of the reason there's such fear of fascism in spite of an absence of fascism is that the opposition arising from this basic violation of a human need are characterized as fascists. Some of them, indeed, adopt the term for themselves because they also -- being liberals -- lack a conceptual non-liberal way of understanding this drive other than the one they are being charged with by their opponents. So they start chanting Sig Heil, accepting that they must be fascists because they can't walk away from the basic human need that the system is violating.
Mostly people don't do that, though. Mostly they just put up with being miscatergorized, and fight for what they know they need without having a way to explain that need that makes sense to others. Because the liberal order doesn't have a language for this, they can't make themselves understood to their opponents, and ultimately we aren't able to reason together about these problems.
That's too bad. Unless we find a way to transcend that contradiction, as Hegel might say, we're going to end up fighting over it. It's a stupid fight, too, because all human beings really do want the stability that allows for a flourishing community in which they can find meaning and durable relationships. The liberal/capitalist order violates that stability by its nature, because it is always organizing for maximal freedom and maximal economic efficiency. Stability gets in the way of those things, and thus is thrust aside. Literally everyone is less happy as a result, and yet the intellectual framework keeps us from being able to talk with each other about it.
In addition to the support for high immigration by those who benefit financially, there are also people who know their own families' histories of immigration, and hence project that forward: these people and their motivations are just like my ancestors who came here from Russia or Ireland in 1910.
ReplyDeleteA huge difference is that the US had far more cultural self-confidence in 1910 than it does today.
"The liberal/capitalist order violates that stability by its nature, because it is always organizing for maximal freedom and maximal economic efficiency. Stability gets in the way of those things, and thus is thrust aside."
ReplyDelete"The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone."
See dad 29 piece on nominalism
DeleteGreg
Yes, James, good reference.
ReplyDeleteGrim said -
ReplyDelete"This opposition is understood, by the powerful for whom immigration provides access to cheap labor, as a sort-of racism that should be explained as an unwillingness to extend to foreign-born others the same rights we enjoy ourselves. "
And,
"That's not really what's driving the objection. The real force of the objection is that mass movement -- immigration or migration within a nation, doesn't matter -- disrupts and destroys communities that are the basis of almost all human meaning."
What if the core desire among the promoters and enablers of mass migration is not cheap labor, but destroying a culture-AKA middle class America -that represents a political threat? Then the tag "Racism" is a convenient coat of radar absorbent paint, to conceal the true motivation. They have access to cheap labor all over the world, which we have seen with a large amount of our manufacturing going overseas. No matter what, that labor is going to be more expensive in the USA than Bangladesh or Haiti or Indonesia.
Perhaps I am more cynical than most, but I see this as an effort to attack one of the few remaining bastions of resistance to the creeping worldwide sewer of totalitarian statism.
I think a better look at the definition of "culture" begins with its etymology: the word is derived from "cult."
ReplyDeleteIn the West, that "cult" has been Christianity since roughly 300 AD. A vestigial Christian cult remains; as a result, PJBuchanan insisted that the US should NOT import peoples whose cult is not Christian (i.e., Moslems, Hindi, Confucian, et. al.) because they will ultimately form 'different communities' than those already present.
As to Christian-cult migrants, such as those from South and Central America, one must take into account your legitimate concerns about 'flooding the zone.' That's why there are laws which have quotas.
It is correct that both Left and Right potentates intend to crush the middle for their own purposes.
This will not end well if it continues unabated.
What if the core desire among the promoters and enablers of mass migration is not cheap labor, but destroying a culture-AKA middle class America -that represents a political threat?
ReplyDeleteThis is entirely consistent with the Democratic Party's openly avowed goal of destroying America. Obama a few days before he was elected: "We are days away from fundamentally changing America." Biden, in his first State of the Union speech: "We're going to fundamentally change the economy."
It isn't possible to fundamentally change anything without first destroying it. Party's objection to any sort of immigration control, indeed, of any sort of national border, is just one tool in their demolition kit. So, too, is their constant drive to realize John Jay's goal of reducing the several States to the role of counties within those States: simply as convenient subdivisions for enforcing the central government's laws.
Eric Hines
I think a better look at the definition of "culture" begins with its etymology: the word is derived from "cult."
ReplyDeleteI think that's also a Chestertonian point, but the etymology is wrong. Both of our words 'culture' and 'cult' are derived from the Latin for cultivation, as of land for crops.
So if that's what a culture is about, you can bring people in from the outside -- even from outside the faith -- provided that you have the confidence to 'cultivate' them to be part of your way of life. That may mean conversion -- "I will make you fishers of men" -- rather than simply walling off those who are different.
The common root makes sense, by the way, when you look at the Ancient Greek fertility (of the land) festival:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesmophoria
Here animals were sacrified and thrown into pits with seeds, allowed to rot for some time, and then the remains were scooped out and spread on the fields to be sown. Thus, animal sacrifices to the gods (Demeter and Persephone), combined with prayer and ritual but also physical labor to prepare the fields, yielded a fertilized field and a better next harvest.
Thus the cult and the cultivation were joined at the hip, a fact that the Latin root preserves. The fact that the 'cult' can also 'cultivate' a person's character followed later; it wasn't the starting point, but a later insight.
Another difficulty some have with modern liberalism is that the question of "Qui bono?" is often either left unanswered, or obfuscated when policies are put in place. I know of an example of gentrification (not exactly, but close) where the instigators used the argument that removing a large swath of older, small homes was good. They would replace them with "garden apartments" and modern duplexes, and give the former residents of the neighborhood first access to the new homes at a reasonable price, especially the elderly.
ReplyDeleteWhat actually happened was that first the land sat fallow, empty of the old houses and of anything new. Then the authorities and developer erected expensive off-campus housing for college students only, without any of the promised landscaping or space for the former residents. A number of people living around the old neighborhood were very, very unhappy with the change.
Expand that from a local to a state, national, or international scale and it causes greater and greater distrust of even the best ideas of liberalism. Who benefits from mass migration? Not the citizens of the destination country (Germany, France, Britain, Canada ...), and often not the newcomers, even the most well-prepared and well-intentioned.
LittleRed1
Two views of immigration:
ReplyDeletehttps://chicagoboyz.net/archives/49641.html
Ever watch video of US or even UN aid trucks arriving at a disaster site, being violently mobbed by the hungry/thirsty/despairing survivors?
ReplyDeleteEver see video of a similar truck arriving where the survivors line up in an patient, peaceful, orderly queue?
The peaceful and patient become cross with those who "cut in line".
In the US, a form of nationalism toward outsiders and federalism within the nation used to provide answers, but these have at least been undermined over the last 250 years and in some ways effectively erased.
ReplyDeleteNationalism has been demonized, in fact, and some uses of nationalism have been wicked, but simple nationalism just holds that the nation is the right way for communities to organize politically and thus that it is OK to draw a line between the citizen and the foreigner. I wish I had a better word to use because this one has been so demonized.
However, the order established by the Constitution in the US did accept that nations are meaningful political and cultural divisions and federalism was an appropriate way to handle internal divisions.
I don't know that any of the changes that undermined nationalism & federalism were inevitable. We see various factions supporting this undermining because it benefitted them, not necessarily because it flowed logically from liberalism. The admission of unlimited unskilled foreign labor, for example, seems to be much more a cynical importation of new voters than a decision to carry out a rational extension of liberalism.
Similarly, for those who directly benefit financially from this unrestricted immigration, it's just greed. They may claim that they are extending the benefits of liberalism to the oppressed, but I don't believe them.
The SEP entry on Nationalism is relevant reading, I think.
ReplyDeleteHere's a paragraph that suggests what I'm talking about (although an hour ago I'd never heard of liberal nationalism or Tamir):
"Liberal nationalists see liberal-democratic principles and pro-national attitudes as belonging together. One of the main proponents of the view, Yael Tamir, started the debate in her 1993 book and in her recent book talks about the nation-state as “an ideal meeting point between the two” (2019: 6). Of course, some things have to be sacrificed: we must acknowledge that either the meaningfulness of a community or its openness must be sacrificed to some extent as we cannot have them both. (2019: 57). How much of each is to give way is left open, and of course, various liberal nationalists take different views of what precisely the right answer is."
The main problem I see with using the term nationalism is the almost automatic inclusion of ethnicity as an essential component. However, nationalism does not necessarily imply ethnic attachment. Culture and civic norms can replace ethnicity and membership can be voluntary rather than involuntary. This, according to the SEP article, seems to be the route the liberal nationalists take.
Defining "cult"
ReplyDelete1610s, "worship, homage" (a sense now obsolete); 1670s, "a particular form or system of worship;" from French culte (17c.), from Latin cultus "care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," originally "tended, cultivated," past participle of colere "to till"
see: https://www.etymonline.com/word/Cult
It sounds like your source and I are in violent agreement about the origin of the words.
ReplyDeleteYes. But not about 'common parlance,' which B-16 used when insisting that "cult" precedes "culture" which, in turn, precedes politics.
ReplyDeleteIs that what you think he meant? Odd for the Roman Catholic Church — and such a Bishop of Rome as he himself was — to root a concept not on the Latin origin but on 17th century derivatives.
ReplyDeleteJust reflecting a bit on the different forms of nationalism, it occurred to me that one possible way to look at the division between North and South in antebellum America is civic nationalist vs ethno-nationalist. Now, there were a lot of things that went into those divisions and I'm not trying to reduce it all to one thing, but it's an interesting additional perspective.
ReplyDelete