Motus Mentis

My friend Bill Vallicella has posted another interesting item on the idea of America as a “proposition nation”. Bill, who is quite rightly trying to find a middle way between open-borders multiculturalism and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, begins by citing with approval a quote from Patrick Buchanan:

But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.

Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?

Bill responds:

There is none. Most people with a bit of life experience know that one can get along and interact productively with only some people. There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things. For example, there ought to be only one language in the U. S. for all public purposes, English. It was a huge mistake when voting forms were allowed to be published in foreign languages. Only legal immigrants should be allowed in, and assimilation must be demanded of them.

No comity without commonality as one of my aphorisms has it.

Quite right. Bill and I generally agree very closely about all of this. But I must ask: how much commonality is required, and of what sort? Commonality has infinite forms: people may have in common language, race, religion, folklore, history, tradition, food, ritual, music, humor, and a thousand other things. A recently arrived Somali jihadist and an evangelical Christian with a MAGA hat might both enjoy gardening, but such commonality hardly seems sufficient for robust social cohesion.

Given, then, that commonality is necessary, what degree of commonality is sufficient?

Bill ventures an answer:

But I must add, contra certain of the Alt Right, that “one people” should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not a white nationalism. America is of course ‘a proposition nation.’ You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian. If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I’ll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.

He immediately qualifies this, though:

That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups. That is a fact that a sane immigration policy must reflect.

That complicates things a bit. If, as I have argued, variations in the distribution of cognitive and behavioral traits among human groups means that (on average at least) populations vary to a meaningful extent with regard to what sorts of cultures and political systems suit them most naturally, then merely verbal assent to our founding abstracta, given in exchange for settlement, might turn out in practice to be insufficient for robust assimilation and cohesion. In a post last month on this topic (also in response to an item at Bill’s place), I quoted Thomas G. West on the question of whether propositions alone were enough:

In that post I wrote:

In The Political Theory of the American Founding (see more about this book in the series of posts beginning here) Thomas G. West argues, following Aristotle, that the newly founded nation depended for its existence on both its form and matter. The form, he writes, was “its principles: the laws of nature and of nature’s God.’ He continues:

The matter that existed in 1776 was a brute fact, which included the universal features of human nature. But it also included the particular geography, laws, racial stock, popular sentiments, moral habits, and religion of colonial America. The form, the natural rights theory ”¦ determined, more than anything else, which traditions would continue and which would be discarded as the new regime took shape under the ruling guidance of natural rights.

The critical point is that both form and matter are essential, and both limit and determine what sort of nation they can make in combination. The American Founding could not have happened elsewhere: swap out the colonial population of 1776 with a random assortment of people from everywhere on Earth and it would quickly have failed. The particularities of the “matter’ upon which the American propositions were to act were every bit as determining as the “form’ ”” the propositions ”” themselves.

Form alone, then, is not enough: we must pay continuing attention to the matter. (And we are not, to put it mildly, doing a very good job of this just now, even on the mainstream Right.)

Moreover, there is always the question of tribalism and faction. In the latest edition of the Claremont Review Of Books, Thomas Klingenstein wrote:

The more tribes in a given society, the more conflict. Conversely, the fewer the tribes (other things being equal), the closer the friendships among citizens and thereby the greater the opportunity to pursue happiness (the purpose of society). This is because friends themselves contribute to happiness, and because friends are more trustworthy than non-friends: friends are more inclined to sacrifice for each other and a community of friends requires fewer social and political restraints than a community of non-friends. Who can be friends is open to debate, but there should be no debate that not everyone can be a friend. In other words, there is a limit to “diversity.’

Good common sense.

Bill assesses his position:

My view is eminently reasonable and balanced. It navigates between the Scylla of destructive leftist globalist internationalism and the Charybdis of racist identity-political particularism.

I too think there is, somewhere, a narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis, and I’ve been squinting into the fog myself, trying to find it. But as we navigate we must keep in mind at least two things. The first is that the cultural and biological diversity of human groups (which, as noted above, I believe to have some relation to each other), may equip them differently to internalize, and live according to, the philosophical abstractions that constitute our nation’s founding principles. The second is the extent to which they will be drawn away from commonality, and into factional rivalry, by tribalism. Though there may be some variety in the disposition of different human populations to tribalism (“hbd chick” is the scholar to consult on this) it remains a natural and universal impulse — and faction, as Klingenstein notes above, will naturally increase as diversity deepens.

So, as we steer our ship through these treacherous waters, with our children born and yet-unborn on board, we must remember that the survival of our vessel is our highest duty. Should we steer closer to Scylla, or Charybdis? Which of these presents the greatest existential danger? Are the survival of our nation and culture (and, of course, the very propositions we seek to cherish and preserve, which will sink right along with the passengers if the ship goes down) more at risk from an excess of caution regarding indiscriminate immigration, or from globalism, multiculturalism, and open borders?

For my own answer to this question, I refer readers to this post, from 2013. And my questions for Bill are: what does constitute a “sane immigration policy”? How can we know that lip service to our founding propositions, given as a condition for admission at a port of entry, is enough? How close to Charybdis are you willing to sail?