Motus Mentis

Readers may have heard, by now, about former President Jimmy Carter’s wise and helpful comment that “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he is African-American.”

In today’s Best of the Web newsletter (second item), James Taranto has found in the Newsweek archives a remark that Mr. Carter made during his 1976 campaign:

The furor began when Carter was asked in Indianapolis to explain his recent statement that there was “nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained” in neighborhoods. Carter replied that he wholeheartedly supports open-housing laws that make it a crime to refuse to sell or rent a house or apartment on the grounds of race, color or creed. But he opposes Government programs “to inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration.” Said he: “I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination.”

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute: did he say “ethnic purity”? That there is a “natural inclination” for people to associate with others who are like themselves? But how can that be? What about the primary obligation and summum bonum of any morally respectable society, which is, I hear, to maximize diversity at any cost?

It’s all so very confusing. If Mr. Carter was right, it could mean that emphasizing cultural diversity over unity, and promoting immigration from all over, might actually be bad for a society — that it might even, in the worst imaginable case, lead to an awful sort of politics based on little more than a kind of tribal identity, where each racial, religious, and ethnic group is just out to get what it can for itself!

We’d better keep an eye out — I’d hate to see anything like that happening here in America.