Most complaints about immigration are declarative: “Immigrants take our jobs.” “Immigrants abuse the welfare state.” “Immigrants won’t learn English.’ “Immigrants will vote for Sharia.” One complaint, however, is usually phrased as a question: “But don’t people have a right to their culture?” When people so inquire, their tone is usually conciliatory, as if to say, “Surely, even you will accept this.” My considered judgment, however, is that this challenge is a true Trojan Horse. No one, no one, has “a right to their culture.”
Why not? Because culture is… other people! Culture is who other people want to date and marry. Culture is how other people raise their kids. Culture is the movies other people want to see. Culture is the hobbies other people value. Culture is the sports other people play. Culture is the food other people cook and eat. Culture is the religion other people choose to practice. To have a “right to your culture” is to have a right to rule all of these choices – and more. Though I dread hyperbole, the “right to your culture” is literally totalitarian, because you can’t ensure the preservation of your culture without totalitarian rule over the very fabric of life in your society.
Consider my parents. They were both born in the 1930s. During their 80+ years of life, American culture has mutated beyond recognition. The world they remember is all but gone. Just compare movies of the 1940s to movies today; they’re from two different planets. Or consider the change in gender relations, the raising of children, religion, or diet. Question: Do my parents have a right to get their culture back? The only sensible answer is: Absolutely not. They’re free to keep living the Old Ways, but have no right to make anyone else follow in their footsteps. If younger cohorts make radically different choices – as they have – then my parents are obliged to allow their beloved culture to vanish. Sure, they’re free to complain. They’re free to try to persuade us that we’re making a terrible mistake. But if they turn to the government for cultural regulation, they aren’t “defending their rights”; they’re violating the rights of others.
Isn’t there a fundamental difference between the evolution of a culture over time and the destruction of a culture via immigration? That sounds plausible, until you actually look at the last hundred years of cultural history. Question: Do you have more cultural ground in common with your grandparents – or with foreigners of your own generation? As long as you have to think about your answer, you already accept that these two paths of culture change are at least comparably dramatic.
Of course, “You have no right to your culture” does not mean that you’re obliged to sit back and watch your culture slip away. You have every right to compete in the cultural marketplace, to sell others on the value of your way of life. And so does everyone else who keeps the peace.
Can we trust this cultural tournament to yield good cultural results? Any student of history knows that it’s complicated. As a fanboy of cosmopolitan Western culture, however, I have to declare the overall cultural track record of the last century to be relatively tremendous. While our culture could be far better, smart money says that progress will continue. I fear, however, that the doom-saying will persist no matter how glorious our global culture becomes. They’re wrong, but they’re masters of marketing.
READER COMMENTS
Timothy O.
Apr 23 2019 at 2:42pm
The logical progression is that the only cultures that have a right to their culture are those that practice cultural totalitarianism. Western Civilization would then be indeed fragile–of all the cultures it is the only one that cannot, by self-definition, assert a right to exist.
Captain Obvious
Apr 23 2019 at 3:57pm
Right to exist is not same as right to order others around. Literally the point of Bryan’s post. Literally the entire point.
Joel P.
Apr 23 2019 at 4:12pm
A culture doesn’t have rights and can’t assert anything, because it isn’t really one thing at all. It’s the amalgamation of a bunch of people’s preferences and choices.
You seem to suggest that Western culture is fragile because no one is controlling it. As Bryan points out, the opposite is true. In the last several decades, rather than suffering crowding out from totalitarian cultures, Western culture has blossomed and proliferated across the globe. On the other hand, top-down attempts to ossify culture are fraught with problems, and they often fail (e.g. the Soviet Union). I suspect that eastern European teens sing a lot more Western pop songs and watch a lot more American movies than they do Chinese, Russian, or North Korean ones, and it’s not because of government-sponsored Western cultural evangelism.
Sigitas Jakucionis
Apr 25 2019 at 12:40pm
Only if one chooses to ignore dying and dead cultures.
Death of a language: last ever speaker of Livonian passes away aged 103
Timothy O.
Apr 25 2019 at 12:43pm
If culture is indeed an amalgamation of people’s choices and preferences, then it is certainly possible to argue that culture has rights. Similar to how corporations have rights as a collective expression of individual rights, culture could then be the collective exercise of the preferences and choices of past (and in some cultures, future) generations on the present. Western culture would seem to have abandoned that notion during the Enlightenment in favor of a culture of solely the present.
China would seem to be a current counterexample to the evidence of increasing Western hegemony. Totalitarianism fails, as Hayek points out, due to a gross inefficiency in information transfer. China is increasingly solving that issue with a combination of AI and unprecedented surveillance.
Hazel Meade
Apr 25 2019 at 4:18pm
In a hypothetical future in which America was being flooded with Chinese immigrants, those immigrants would no longer be under the control of the totalitarian Chinese state. Which would make it difficult for the Chinese government to force them to continue practicing Chinese culture as mandated by the Chinese government.
Mark Z
Apr 26 2019 at 12:46am
Corporations enjoy only rights derived from those of the individuals who form them voluntarily, be they partners, investors, or employees. Walmart does not have the right to assert that some people are members of Walmart based on some condition (e.g., living within 10 miles of a Walmart), then restrict what they can and cannot do based on this condition, and not permitting them to abdicate their ‘membership’ to Walmart.
That, however, is what those who want to ‘defend’ a culture purport to do: they assert a collective right to defend a condition: a certain fraction of the population speaking a certain language or practicing a certain religion, for example. Those included in the cultural grouping (with or without their consent) are then told they cannot do certain things: they cannot sell their property to ‘outsiders’ or convert to a different religion; people excluded from the grouping are told they can’t move into a certain neighborhood because that would reduce the fraction of people speaking the language or practicing the religion whose proportion you’re trying to preserve.
If you think about it in the context of religion, it becomes clear how totalitarian the notion ‘cultural rights’ is. Imagine a religion called Guelphism (borrowing an irrelevant historical term here). Everyone born into it is a Guelph according to Guelphism. Now, here’s the question: does Guelphism have a right to exist? Does it have a right to defend itself? No. Guelphs surely have a right to exist and to be Guelphs, but thing of what a ‘right to exist’ means for a religion: what if many Guelphs start converting to other religions? Guelphs may violently attack converts to other religions to coerce them back into Guelphism. Or what if Guelphs simply don’t have many children? Guelphs could kidnap other people’s children and raise them as Guelphs, or forcibly convert adults. Coercive means may be necessary to preserve Guelphism. Insisting that Guelphs respect individual rights may doom Guelphism to extinction. Does that violate Guelphism’s ‘right to exist?’
You may say, “we’re not suggesting hard bans on people of different cultures.” Doesn’t matter, it’s the same principle. If the state actively subsidizes and promotes a particular religion with taxpayer money, it’s a violation of separation of Church just as forced conversion would be. It may be a less severe violation than forced conversion, but it’s a violation nonetheless. And the same principles apply to cultures as to religions.
Mark
Apr 24 2019 at 10:28am
Except that other countries have converged towards Western cultures far more than the West has converged to those other countries’ cultures. Westernization is a concept and Easternization is not.
Of course you have extremist groups like Boko Haram that try to hold back the dam, but they will ultimately be unsuccessful.
Ultimately, culture will change according to what people want, and no amount of “cultural totalitarianism” will change that.
Timothy O.
Apr 26 2019 at 12:21pm
Here is the issue with your argument. It does not refute the self-defeating argument about Western Civilization. You argue that based on principles within Western Civilization (i.e. assuming that Western Civilization is objective truth or close to it) that cultures outside of Western Civilization ought to follow the rights based framework within Western Civilization. My argument with this is that cultures outside of Western Civilization (as with your posited Guelphism) would assert that Western Civilization has it wrong and that communicating that their perpetuation or any other aspect of their culture is a categorical imperative (c.f. Kant). I.e. for the good of all humanity, regardless of the cost, practitioners of Guelphism must punch babies in the face (not that they would since the pope might have something to say on the matter). The Chinese have their own categorical imperative. The rights of Western civilization belong to their own categorical imperative.
At the end of the day, Western Civilization cannot do anything other than proselytize–a small comfort when Western Civilization ceases its bright existence after being assimilated into a new Chinese Empire that denies the existence of individual rights.
Thaomas
Apr 23 2019 at 6:57pm
Loss or damage to “culture” is just one more element in what ought to be the calculation of the costs and benefits of marginally more or less immigration of different types. Immigration restrictions are just another kind of regulation of the economy with costs to some people and benefits to others (who may be the same people) and so not well served by denotological arguments about rights. Different people value the different elements in the costs and benefits and that’s what we have politics for.
Doug
Apr 24 2019 at 12:00pm
Culture cannot be lost, only changed.
Weir
Apr 25 2019 at 5:48am
New York, I love you
But you’re bringing me down
New York, you’re safer
And you’re wasting my time
Our records all show
You were filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores
When you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored
Once they’d run out of crime
New York, you’re perfect
Don’t please don’t change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor’s
Now convinced he’s a king
So the boring collect
I mean all disrespect
In the neighborhood bars
I’d once dreamt I would drink
New York, I love you
But you’re freaking me out
vegas
Apr 25 2019 at 12:43pm
Of course culture can be lost. Languages, mythology, art disappear all the time.
Death of a language: last ever speaker of Livonian passes away aged 103
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/death-of-a-language-last-ever-speaker-of-livonian-passes-away-aged-103-8k0rlplv8xj
Weir
Apr 23 2019 at 8:20pm
You’re a girl who loves running. You train every morning for years.
You win some competitions, and you keep getting better and better. But then the culture changes, and you find you’re competing against faster runners with huge muscles and facial hair and Y chromosomes.
You prefer “the older culture” because you weren’t born male. But you don’t use rights talk. You don’t talk about possessing a property right in the culture of women’s sports, whatever that might mean. You just say it’s unfair that girls like you are never going to do better than the silver medal when you’re forced to run against a girl with a boy’s body.
Your complaint has to do with how running used to be fun, and now it’s not. The “culture” changed, and for saying you liked the old culture better, back when women’s sports had rules about who could compete, you get bullied into compliance.
So the insults and the name-calling is also not fun. All the hyperbole from the adults about how you’re just an entitled, whiny girl who thinks she owns running is really irrelevant to what you’ve been saying. Because, as above, rights talk didn’t come into it. The hyperbole from the adults about rights is just rhetoric, just hyperbole, because you specifically said, over and over, that you liked it better before. You aren’t saying anything about “the rights of girls.”
But are the adults going to give up the insults? Not when their bullying works to keep girls like you from protesting. When you know you’re going to cop a lot of abuse for just saying that you liked how running used to be, then what is the point of engaging with the bullies?
From your own point of view there’s a debate with competing values and competing interests, and there’s even value in having a good faith discussion about how the girls with X chromosomes and the girls with Y chromosomes could reach a modus vivendi by listening to each other and reasoning together. But the bullies always argue the same way. Their argument is always that you’re just evil and stupid, which isn’t really a response.
Michael Pettengill
Apr 24 2019 at 5:08pm
Is it the Y chromosome that makes one a man?
Or the SrY gene which might be on any chromosome?
Is a person who looks externally like a girl, but with an SrY gene on a Y chromosome actually a man who must use the mens room?
Or maybe, God makes lots of mistakes, because he’s an old man….
But hey, this is just my culture of “question everything, trust no argument based on antiquity”, from being born in 1947.
Hazel Meade
Apr 25 2019 at 11:30am
Other peoples “insults and name calling” are free speech, and if it cows you into silence, then you are a coward. People don’t have the right to shut up other people’s speech just because their too cowardly to stand up to insults.
Nick
Apr 24 2019 at 1:56am
Alas, this only would be seen as libertarian illusion.
But of course, it makes zero sense for a ‘right to culture’. Any such right necessarily has to override individual freedoms.
It’s sensible to have rights that are based on your person and property. That’s a bitter pill to swallow for many.
Mark
Apr 24 2019 at 10:41am
The cultural marketplace is a good analogy. Cultures ultimately exist to serve individual happiness and have no inherent value on their own. Therefore, just like the best marketplace would be the one with the most selection and convenience, the best society is one where a diversity of cultures exist with few boundaries between them so that individuals have the chance to explore many cultures before deciding which culture or combination of cultures is best for them. Luckily, this is the direction the world is moving in.
Julien Couvreur
Apr 25 2019 at 4:00am
Ironically, this incorrect idea that culture is property (ie. something that can be owned) seems popular both on the Left and the Right.
On the Right, it often takes the form you describe. On the Left, it comes as claims of “cultural appropriation”.
Richard Ebeling
Apr 25 2019 at 9:31am
Brian raises an important challenge not just to “cultural” conservatives who most frequently (though not exclusively) express the views he is questioning. But to classical liberals/libertarians, as well.
Becsuse if we practice what we preach (people may peacefully advocate any social change in ideas and values, people may freely move wherever they desire for whatever personal reason), then we who desire a “culture of liberty” have no guarantee or “right” to it, either.
Do we have a number of personal or social freedoms today that were more restricted in the past? Yes. Is this to the good? Of course.
But I would ask us to recall that F.A. Hayek often argued that to be controlled by the government in your economic affairs means to be, ultimately, controlled by the government in most of everything.
A noticeable majority of Americans and most people around the world do not want freedom, if you include unrestricted economic liberty as an essential component of a free society.
But don’t many leave their home countries to come to America to escape political oppression and for economic opportunities? Yes.
But what I think has become fairly clear is what they want, very often, is not liberty as generally understood by classical liberals/libertarians, but “political paternalism with a human face.” That is, they’d prefer to to live in societies without gulags and concentration camps; they would prefer to not have the uncertainty and consequences of being arrested by a secret police; and they’d prefer to earn a living without having to kiss too many asses and pay too many bribes to those above them in the political power structure.
But when push comes to shove, they only really care about freedom of speech and the press when it concerns the ideas they hold; they give lip service to religious freedom, but they are often intolerant of those who hold religious (or non-religious) ideas different than their own; they want the security of government provided “social safety nets,” but they do not want to pay the full tab of what they get out of them, and at the end of the day they don’t care who is forced to pay for it or how, just as long as they get the full value of their promised entitlement.
And, of course, they want competition for themselves, but not for their competitors.
In other words, what people want, in general, is what Russians told me in Moscow, in the last years of the Soviet Union: food on the shelves, welfare guarantees, but without the KGB knocking on the door in the middle of the night and taking you away, and preferably without the corruption of the Party power structure.
Historically, Americans have been more “individualistic” in their desire and use of economic liberty. But . . . That is the culture of the past.
The culture of the present is regulated opportunity with growing degrees of political paternalism.
The younger generation of Americans and many immigrants have no cultural understanding of liberty: or its required attitudes, or values, or it’s institutions, or its importance.
To try to oppose it, other than with ideas and persuasion, would be against the very foundations of classical liberal and libertarian voluntaristic philosophy.
So we must cherish what remains while we still have degrees of economic freedom, and hope that such a wonderful ideal and vision of a free society as imagined by some of the 18th and 19th century thinkers will have their revival at some point in the 24th or 25th century.
Otherwise, the epoch of liberty will have been a curious small blip in the longer stream of human history — a history of tyranny, terror, and power and privilege.
(Yes, I know, a whole lot of “negative waves.” But sometimes the truth hurts.)
Timothy O.
Apr 25 2019 at 1:04pm
I wonder if the desire for paternalism is innate?
The sheer number of authoritarian societies and the tenuousness of free societies was noted by the founders of our country. They emphasized education to ensure that the values of freedom were transmitted. Since it is often the case that the values of Western Civilization are not taught or even actively denigrated and opposed, it is a small wonder that there is a strong desire for the de facto state of humanity–paternalism.
Terry Hulsey
Apr 25 2019 at 9:54am
Only if government “policy” were “culture-free” would your article have cogency. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The Left-Libertarian land of butterflies and rainbows supposes that the state is an impartial umpire that assures free exchange and happy discussion among perfectly rational parties. This delusion means complete cultural disarmament before a leviathan state which is crusading on a cultural agenda of enslavement – of course flying under the banner of liberation.
Hazel Meade
Apr 25 2019 at 11:40am
They’re coming to enslave us into doing what, precisely?
Timothy O.
Apr 25 2019 at 1:05pm
Utility maximization, of course!
Fred_in_PA
Apr 26 2019 at 6:32pm
Isn’t for “what, precisely” something of a misdirection? Does it matter whether you’re enslaved to raise another man’s cotton, or his tobacco? Isn’t the general condition that the slave shall work and another will collect & enjoy the fruits of that labor?
Somewhere I read that 90% of all income taxes are paid by the top 30% of filers. That 30% approximates the percentage of U.S. adults with a college degree. Now perhaps being in the top 30% by education does not get you into the top 30% by income, but that’s going to be a great disappointment to all those college students who went to college in order to get there. If it does get you into those higher income (and income tax) brackets, then our progressive taxation amounts to taxing the educated in order to subsidize the uneducated.
Your need for groceries will force you to work. And your education will likely force you into that particular type of work. With little choice but to work at a job in your field (cotton, anyone?) leviathan now claims (at least some of) the fruits of your labor and either spends it on himself (bureaucratic overburden) or distributes it to those he thinks more worthy.
Vegas
Apr 27 2019 at 1:25am
Russians sent their colonists into my home country to destroy indigenous culture and to expand their empire. Empires don’t like cultures.
Henry
Apr 25 2019 at 11:09am
Culture is a set of ideas, and ideas can change in ways that you and I may like or dislike. When I was young, the Japanese were considered icky because they ate raw fish; today I live six blocks from an excellent sushi/sashimi joint. When I was young, being gay was a shameful secret; no longer true. Does this have anything to do with immigration? Mexicans are hard working, family oriented people whose Catholic beliefs are pretty conventional in that tradition; the Guadalupe apparition is a replication of similar events in lots of places. Tacos don’t strike me as a major cultural shift for people who eat chow mein and pizza. What actual cultural changes do people fear?
Todd Kreider
Apr 25 2019 at 12:23pm
I live in Wisconsin… Just don’t move my cheese!
Timothy O.
Apr 25 2019 at 12:51pm
While the USDA exerts strict controls on culture, I insist on the cultural freedom to have Swiss Cheese holes predominantly larger than 13/16″
Vegas
Apr 25 2019 at 12:33pm
America is a young nation and did not produce much culture yet so it’s a poor example. Meanwhile loss of a millennia old culture would be a loss to everyone. Mass immigration can quickly wipe out culture hundreds of generations were building.
Mark Z
Apr 26 2019 at 12:58am
Millenia old cultures are constantly dying and being replaced my new ones. Your culture is almost certainly not as static as you might think. Very little of what you do is centuries old. If you were to look at traditional cuisines, recipes often date back only a few generations. Most of what would-be preservers of ancient cultures are trying to preserve has already been lost, and most of what they manage to preserve will be lost in a few generations regardless of immigration. Cultural change is just inevitable. It’s impractical (and immoral) to treat people like exhibits at a museum, to be preserved in their ways at all costs.
When I was in Germany years ago, it occurred to me that there’s a certain absurdity to much of Europeans’ panic over preserving their ancient cultures. Most Germans seem to listen to American pop music (or German pop music that stylistically mimics American pop music), not Bach and Mozart; they dress in modern clothes, as opposed to wearing lederhosen all the time, speak in modern idioms, have family structures that are modern in character, etc. What ancient customs are they preserving? Christianity? That’s certainly an ancient cultural practice, but the idea of the French, Germans, and Dutch preserving Christianity is of course rather laughable, as there’s not much left to preserve in those countries. A French or German Catholic who wants to live in a Catholic culture would be better served to leave his country and move to Malta.
Vegas
Apr 26 2019 at 10:47am
When Germans eliminated Jewish culture in Europe, it was deemed crime against humanity. Because loss of culture is a loss to humankind.
Daniel R. Grayson
Apr 25 2019 at 1:08pm
Re: “Because culture is… other people!”
I’m missing something here: why is culture “other people”? I think of culture as entirely a personal choice: what language I speak; what religion I follow; what books I enjoy reading; how my marriage partner is chosen; etc. Those all seem non-coercive.
Vegas
Apr 25 2019 at 1:24pm
Language, religion, etc. can and frequently are very much coercive.
Most countries force to learn official majority’s language, not officially recognized religions are penalized or outright persecuted.
Fred_in_PA
Apr 25 2019 at 8:04pm
Isn’t it worse than that? Isn’t culture largely learned at your mother’s knee? Such that by the time you’re five, your cultural preferences are largely set. And, as an infant, you had no choice in what languages you heard, what interpersonal values you were taught, what church she took you to. Even “What books you like to read” (or even whether or not to read) were likely strongly biased long before you had any say in the matter.
Gerald
Apr 25 2019 at 2:23pm
The question is not whether we have a right to our culture. The question is whether we will make the effort to defend it.
Hazel Meade
Apr 25 2019 at 4:12pm
If you can’t defend your culture through non-violent means (i.e persuasion, voluntary assimilation), then maybe it isn’t worth defending.
Vegas
Apr 25 2019 at 4:43pm
You don’t think violent defense has its place?
Vegas
Apr 25 2019 at 5:00pm
How well persuasion of immigrants worked for American Indians?
Gerald
Apr 25 2019 at 5:07pm
Who said anything about violence?
Mark Z
Apr 26 2019 at 1:04am
If you’re talking about organizing efforts by members of your culture to promulgate its practices, customs, and values, to form close-knit communities, have more children, educate your children in their heritage, etc. then that’s nonviolent. But that has nothing to with rights. Businesses and churches may do all these things too to survive and expand, and the people who make them up have every right to do such things; but if, despite all these efforts, not enough people want to partake, and the business, church, or culture withers and gradually disappears, no one’s (or nothing’s) rights are violated.
Some people who talk of right to cultural preservation have in mind using coercive state action to preserve their culture. That is violence.
Fred_in_PA
Apr 25 2019 at 8:27pm
Much of this discussion seems to assume that the persistence and/or growing dominance of a culture is (or should be) largely determined by its “worth.” (Worthiness being open to debate.)
But what if persistence / dominance is determined by something else?
My initial thought here was the meme that — following the final nuclear war — the cockroaches are likely to take over the world. They reproduce much faster than we do. They exhibit greater genetic variety than we do — hence, more rapid evolution to meet the new conditions. This perhaps because they’re less complex as organisms than we are.
Shifting to the situation for us humans: It is notable that most or all of those much beloved Western cultures have (or are moving towards) below-replacement birth rates. Yet there are societies/ cultures with much higher birth rates. (Admittedly, theirs’ are falling, too.)
Frightful proposition: Perhaps the “winning” cultures will be those that confine women to producing (large numbers of) tricycle motors.
Vegas
Apr 27 2019 at 1:28am
Can any immigration enthusiast explain what unlimited immigration from Russia means to Estonia?
Russia had 100 times larger population than Estonia.
Russell Seitz
Apr 27 2019 at 6:39pm
If we have no right to our culture, whence comes the right of others to undertake its deliberate alteration?
Nobody asked for the Culture Wars. The were long and louldy declared by a generation woke and stoked on Gramsci , Horkheimer , Marcuse, Fanon and Adorno.
N. Joseph Potts
Apr 27 2019 at 6:42pm
Culture can be, and is, enforced – at least to some extent and for some time. It still bends, morphs, evolves, even from the model sought by the enforcers.
Censorship (i.e., enforcement of bans on such as “hate” speech) are attempts to enforce culture, and they will succeed, at least to some extent, at least for some time.
But they, like all enforcement of culture, are likewise doomed, ultimately. While “the truth” assuredly will not “out,” culture assuredly will – whatever it is and might become.
Kate Jones
Apr 28 2019 at 2:57am
Cultures have no rights. Only individual human beings have rights. A culture is just a catchword for the customs, beliefs, knowledge, habits, rules, values, traditions, practices and laws a group of individuals share by consensus. It is the software that operates human behavior for individuals’ survival, sometimes called a social contract, a code of conduct that benefits all participants. And this software is replicated by association among the members of a family, clan, tribe, society. Kin survival is a force parallel to genetic survival.
This software is what Richard Dawkins has named “memes”, though these days the word meme has taken on a wider meaning, namely notions or fads. Like the genetic forms of life, memes also have evolved and essentially have taken on a life of their own. They will fight to the death to preserve their structure once they have colonized an individual brain. That’s why individuals will disagree, hate, condemn, ostracize, and go to war against those who do not share their beliefs. Never mind which end of an egg to open. Whose ideas and values will dominate? We are seeing meme warfare everywhere we look. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One society’s religious dogma is another’s apostasy. One man’s innovation and productivity is another’s greed.
We set up artificial enmities to justify mutual destruction, when mutual cooperation would meet everyone’s needs at lowest cost. Competition is evolution’s formula for moving towards improvements for greater survivability, greater safety margins. When competition gets to be mutual sabotage instead of admiration for excellence, the memes are seriously diseased.
When relationships, instead of by rational ethics and morals, devolve to assassinations, military conquest, demonizing, sanctions to reduce other countries to starvation, we get what we see in the world today. And like any living thing, it grows like a cancer. Instead of cooperation there is envy and predation.
Somewhere in the back basement of the human race, there is still a spore, a meme, for life-serving ideas–sometimes called the Golden Rule–that may yet be rediscovered. Until then, let us at least cling to the Constitutional protection of individual rights and individual sovereignty, a wisdom arrived at after 100,000 years of trial and error in the human software, from animal instincts to the higher capabilities of rational consciousness. And let’s leave religion and other provocative differences out of the picture. Those tend to pull people into warring factions when our priorities should be the protection of each individual as a sovereign entity: mutual respect for mutual benefit. Perhaps George Carlin’s version of the Ten Commandments could come in handy.
Monte H Woods
Apr 30 2019 at 10:05am
As Americans, we currently enjoy a heritage consisting of, among other things, varying degrees of liberty, freedom, and sovereignty, all of which have been greatly diminished since our founding. And what those of us who are philosophically opposed to open borders and its accompanying multiculturalism fervently object to are the political leanings of the vast majority of immigrants (ie. those predisposed to think of government in socialistic ways), or their vote.
This heritage is an intrinsic part of our culture, to which we have not only a right, but a responsibility to preserve.
Niko Davor
Apr 30 2019 at 10:10am
Tyler Cowen wrote:
Tyler Cowen describes universities as pursuing the opposite of Caplan’s ideals:
– Preserving and maintaining culture is a central purpose of universities such as Harvard. And, the basic institutional structure of Harvard is very similar to GMU.
– Universities preserve their culture by exclusion. They invest lots of effort to keeping their admissions processes secret.
– Universities are primarily organs of government, and they generally don’t operate on the open free buy/sell markets. Universities do have ruthlessly competitive markets for ideas, and research, and prestige, and people work very hard, but at some core level, they receive huge financial support, huge prestige, and social status from government, not from open marketplace activity.
– Universities exist as exclusive social peer group and don’t want the “giant retail warehouse” feel of a free marketplace.
I’ve read Caplan’s Case Against Education: he does argue against some sacred cows there and suggest defunding universities, but he also defends Harvard’s right to exclude whomever they want for whatever reason that they want. Caplan fully supports the student vs non-student designation, he basically says we should have universities exist like they do now with less claim to public support.
John
May 16 2019 at 12:26pm
But it would be OK if a Presidential candidate ran on a platform of limiting most immigration for certain areas in fear of a culture change and the we, the majority vote them in to enact this policy. Obviously we’re not going to get every person in the country to sign something as that isn’t how our government works, and we vote in representatives to act on the majorities behalf
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