Making the rounds today (hat-tips to, among others, Bill Vallicella and our commenter Whitewall) is a jeremiad by Victor Davis Hanson, who has made these lamentations his métier in recent years. In this one, he mourns in particular the lost virtues of the West: the qualities that made our civilization shine so brightly, that gave it the capacity to create the modern world, and that make it still, even in its advancing senescence, the most attractive place on Earth.
We read (my emphasis):
Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions…
No one claims that such mass immigration into Europe is legal. No one wonders what happened to the fossilized idea of legal immigration, much less the legal immigrant who went through what has now been rendered the pretense of bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe. Germany, which lectures others on law, is lawless…
The same is true in the United States. Millions of foreign nationals from Latin America, and Mexico in particular, simply have crossed the border without even the pretense of legality. They assume Americans not only won’t enforce their own laws, but also will find ways to demonize any who suggest that they should. If there is now no such thing as an “illegal alien,” what in theory prevents anyone from arriving from anywhere at any time and making claims on the American state?
In our previous post, we quoted Montesquieu on the the problems of scale that face republican governments. Here is something else he said:
“…in a popular government when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can come only from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.”
VDH:
In theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly young males from the Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they apparently lack the will. Or is it worse than that? Without confidence in their own values, much less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the guilt over their privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of their own culture?
From another of our recent posts:
What vessel could contain this universal acid?
Read the rest of Professor Hanson’s article here.
One Comment
I immigrated to America along with my parents. I was seven years old at the time. It took my parents about a year of legal processing and a not unreasonable amount of documentation to accomplish this blessed emigration from the American Occupation Zone in defeated Nazi Germany, which was then governed by General Eisenhower.
It was a somewhat burdensome process, but we all sensed that the payoff would be spectacular, which, indeed, it proved to be when we became naturalized American citizens five years later.
In retrospect, though our Americanization took the better part of a decade, what the process ultimately required of us was a sincere desire to meld with our adopted Country.