We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In the early hours of Sunday morning (the 19th – last night as I finish this) I watched BBC News 24, although following that link will probably only get you the operation as a whole, not the story I’m about to refer to. Which was: John Simpson talking, in Holland, with a Dutch journalist, who interestingly had just returned to Holland after spending a decade in South Africa. I didn’t see the beginning of the interview and I therefore didn’t catch the name of the Dutchman. Peter something, I think. It was on just before 3 am.
For the time being anyway, democracy is doing its job. There was mass unease in Holland, and the ballot boxes had registered it. In Pim Fortuyn, Holland – indeed I would go further and say Europe – found a major politician who knew how to talk about “multiculturalism” and all that, in a way that does justice to the fears that regular people (by which I mean non-Muslim people) have about it, without being blatantly racist in the manner of the BNP (British National Party), or, if I understand him and his followers correctly, Jean Marie Le Pen.
Simpson mentioned that interview he did with Fortuyn a few days before Fortuyn’s death. He recalled that when he had said that something that Fortuyn had said to him “sounded very like racism”, Fortuyn had got extremely angry, for this was a distinction Fortuyn (unlike Simpson, it would seem) well understood. Islam is not a race, and being hostile to it, as Fortuyn was (and as I – a convinced atheist – also am), is not racism. Islam is a body of ideas, predominantly false and – insofar as Islam has anything to say about the likes of me – aggressively nasty ideas, in my opinion. It is a culture, political as well as religious. I congratulate John Simpson for reporting his conversation with Fortuyn accurately. His own opinions about “racism” are silly, and hit the nail squarely in its surrounding timber. But when Fortuyn told him this he reported Fortuyn’s reaction for the important fact that it is.
Maybe Fortuyn’s answer – stop immigration now – isn’t yet very appealing, and may never be workable in a way that is remotely humane, but his question cannot now be funked. There is, as Fortuyn insisted, a clash of civilisations going on within Europe, never mind between Europe and other places. Muslims now make up forty per cent of the population of the big cities of Holland, and will soon be in a majority in them, or so the Dutch journalist said. If some Muslims then start taking the idea of majority rule seriously, the bad times could begin. At that point democracy may stop working, and become the justification of and provocation of major conflict instead of the means of avoiding it.
For the last few decades, the idea in the West has been that the severe conflicts that have erupted between Islam and the West over the centuries could be made to go away by us all pretending that there was no problem and refusing to talk or even think about it. Since 9-11, and now since the shooting star that was Pim Fortuyn’s political career, that notion is in the process of being junked. Ever since 9-11, the internet has pulsated with infidels analysing Islam, explaining its doctrines, describing its foundation ideas, reflecting upon the career and example of Mohammed himself (not good news in my opinion), gasping with horror at the virulently anti-Semitic grotesqueries of the Middle Eastern press.
Personally I am extremely pessimistic, and see no lower limit to how nasty things may eventually get, down to and including genocide. I further believe that looking such horrors in the face makes them less likely, rather than more likely, to happen, which is why I believe in trading these moderately insulting insults now.
What makes the situation particularly horrible is that there is little that “individual decent Muslims”, of which there are huge numbers, can do about all this. Islam itself, as Fortuyn insisted, is the problem. Individual Muslims, however genuinely decent, and however desperate they may be to escape from the economic stagnation and political nastiness of the Mulsim heartlands and hence desperate to live instead in a country like Holland, are nevertheless the carriers of an inherently antagonistic culture. They seem doomed eventually to destroy the very havens they are now moving to in such numbers, by their very presence in such numbers. Until Islam undergoes fundamental changes, there’ll always be trouble between it and its neighbours.
Or, of course, Western culture could be profoundly altered. We could accept Islam. Let me give a passing nod to political correctness, and temper the savageries in the previous paragraphs by saying that there is, of course, a quite different way of alluding to these same notions. Instead of Islam being blamed, it could equally well be said that we infidels are the basic cause of all the trouble between ourselves and Islam, because of our stubborn refusal to submit to it. Either way, as far as the formerly or still Christian West is concerned, we are talking about two fundamentalisms here, not just one. Something very big has to give between us and Islam if these two now utterly distinct and antagonistic cultures are ever to learn to get along in a state of prolonged and intermingled amicability.
This is the problem that Holland is now squaring up to. Should Muslim newcomers be forced to learn the Dutch language? Should there be some kind of oath of allegiance which all, of all cultures, must swear? Or what?
All this stuff should be and will be of intense interest to us in Britain, because our demographics are heading in a similar direction.
Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance
Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)
The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the ‘classical liberal’ about him.
In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism’s prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called ‘citizen’) and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.
Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn’s overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.
Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as ‘nightwatchman’… if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.
Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one’s friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o’clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of ‘tolerance’ any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.
Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos… and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don’t be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
The BBC‘s John Simpson was shown on last night’s TV news interviewing the late Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn said something along the lines of: “we have guests who are trying to take over the house.” Said Simpson: “That sounds very racist to me.” Replied Fortuyn: “Give me a definition of racist.” At which point the BBC report ended.
I sympathise with Fortuyn on this. If ever there was a word that can mean several different things within the same conversation, or even the same paragraph or sentence, that word is “racist”. David Carr and I had an exchange on Samizdata not long ago in which I said that the number of definitions of “multiculturalism” was two, while he replied that it was zero. Number of definitions of “racist”? Well, let’s see how many we can think of.
- Believing that races differ from each other.
- Believing that races differ from each other in important ways, like intelligence or physical abilities.
- Believing that races differ from each other in important ways, like intelligence or physical abilities, for genetic reasons rather than because of cultural or environmental circumstances.
- Believing that because of such differences, members of different races should have different political rights.
- Believing that a particular group of people who are racially different are also different in their culture.
- Believing that a particular group of people who are racially different are also different in their culture, for genetic rather than historically contingent reasons.
- Not liking the different culture associated with a different race and wanting that culture changed, opposed, corrected, or confronted.
- Because of believing that a member of a different race is likely to be different in a particular way, believing that this particular member of the different race is himself likely to be different in this particular way.
- Believing that this particular member of a different race is different in this way, even when you have got to know him individually and know that it isn’t so.
- Believing that all the members of a particular race should be murdered.
I haven’t polished this list, or tried to make it exhaustive. I’ve listed ten different meanings, but if you took as long doing your version of the list as I have just taken doing mine, it would probably contain a different number of items, and if you took as long as you needed to get yours exactly right, your list would probably be a lot longer (as would mine). But my point here is not to start a “how many meanings and exactly what are they?” debate.
My point is merely the simpler one that according to some definitions of “racist” almost everybody is racist, while according to other definitions, hardly anyone is.
Who does not believe, for example, that races differ from one another? Who but a total ignoramus about the world and its ways sincerely believes that there is no such thing as a cultural difference associated with any racial difference, anywhere?
But, so frightened are we of being called racist that we would sooner deny everything on the list, whoever compiled it, rather than risk being thus labelled. The few brave or perhaps brutal souls who are prepared to admit to “racism”, that is, who tick yes to some of the items on the list, even as they strenuously deny others, demonstrate with their fate why denying everything makes sense.
Yet for the majority of thinking people to be denying everything is also very dangerous, because important truths get neglected in public debate, such as the exact truth about Muslim culture, and the exact things that ought, and ought not, to be done about this truth.
Equally dangerous is that if, under challenge from someone like Mr. Le Pen, any of the items on the list are admitted through clenched teeth to be true, it is then liable to be assumed that therefore the entire racist agenda, racist by any definition, has been acknowledged to be correct, when in fact defensive lines can be dug in between different items, and should be. It is assumed, that is to say, that the one huge defensive line must be drawn this side of “racism” by any definition. But this is to concede that no worthwhile lines can or should be drawn between different items on the list.
It is this latter syndrome that the nastier racists stand ready to exploit, as soon as any of their more obviously true complaints are conceded to have merit. I can see why lots of the people who read things like Samizdata want even quite nasty racists to do well electorally. Few of such readers are themselves nasty racists, but they want some of the more obvious truths about racial matters to be faced rather than funked in public debate. The trouble is that the nasty racists won’t stop there. They’ll use what power they are able to garner with the truth to spread untruths and to do truly nasty things.
For further intelligent thoughts on this subject, see Natalie Solent‘s posting last night. As for what she posted in the morning, let me just say: my sentiments exactly. Thanks Natalie.
I would like to thank Daniel Antal for his lucid and informative observations about Pim Fortuyn and for illustrating the many reasons why it is wrong for me to bracket him in with Jean-Marie Le Pen.
I have no doubt that there are qualitative and ideological differences between all of the so-called ‘far-right’ politicians in Europe but it does occur to me that they have all, to a greater or lesser degree, ridden to power on the back of the anti-immigration tiger. That they are all perceived as racists is due to the fact that the current political-media establishment is unable to grasp the difference between ‘racist’ and ‘culturalist’.
Well, when he is not a fascist… Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist currently visiting London, takes the view that David Carr was wrong to tar Dutchman Pim Fortuyn with the same brush as the neo-fascist Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen
I have to disagree with some of David Carr‘s analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist ‘right-wing’ successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller’s or Fortuyn’s manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement.
Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being ‘unavailable for democratic dialogue’. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the ‘far right’ like Le Pen.
The shocked left-wing, whose ‘multi-cultural’ agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: “Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race.” And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. “If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I’d say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence.” In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment.
Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn’s anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as ‘city apartheid’. However, he gives a ‘right wing’ answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and ‘politically incorrect’ way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization.
I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully.
Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)
Tony Millard writes in from Tuscany in Italy to express his views on Le Pen, multi-culturalism and over-enthusiastic well-diggers
I am now a regular reader of the Samizdata (or the Lib Sam as I like to call it) and enjoy most of the articles. What I find depressing at the moment is that as I raise my gun to shoot a topical bunny I see hundreds more all around me – Le Pen, the UK Budget, Italian politics, NHS, multi-clutch-and-graspism, blah blah. It has taken a while to start shooting them down as I currently have a well-digger on my farm here in Tuscany. Charming chap, though he has a habit of trying to reach magma in order to enhance revenues (they are paid by the foot) so I’m keeping an eye, as they say.
Whilst overseeing the keen well-digger, I heard a number of things on Radio 4 yesterday that disturbed me, to say the least. Most of the afternoon’s bulletins were taken up with a slanted condemnation of Le Pen by an almost constant referral to the “thousands” or, in extremis, “tens of thousands” of protesters on the street. Not one single reference was made to the fact that he did after all garner the votes to oust Jospin from the fight. Odder still was my recollection that by comparison last year’s Countryside Alliance pro-hunting march in London was supposed to have produced in excess of half a million people on the streets. However, the general reporting slant was decidedly unfavourable. Hmm.
I am not exactly sure of Monsieur Le Pen’s precise political destination and would probably find it on the crude side. I am not a supporter by any stretch of the imagination, so no skin off my nose, if he doesn’t win the presidential seat. What I do find shocking though is the childishly obvious suppression of any voice that dissents from the European melting pot theory, and the assumption that any anti-immigration stance implies a shaved head and a tattooed forearm.
The problem does not reside in the shape (or lack) of a haircut or the pattern of a tattoo. We are wasting time arguing about the mode of travelling when the real need is to decide on the destination. What happens if we ‘prove’ that the mass immigration of 40 years ago to date was ‘wrong’? The argument is sterile (and therefore futile) as the situation is with us and cannot be humanely reversed. We might as well argue and debate a meritocracy based on the colour of people’s eyes. On the basis that someone born in Europe is an honorary Caucasian, most of the population is on a level. What we must therefore focus on is the evils of the tiered language and cultural gap currently opening and prompted by the left. Le Pen is gaining support from the Franco-Jewish population (courtesy of Radio 4 news) and why? Buried at around 3.30pm in the yesterday’s programme was a possible answer – they are apparently regular victims of Muslim violence in the Parisian suburbs and have had enough. Allowing a separate ‘nation’ to grow within the EU is societal suicide. I am, in accordance perhaps with the previous Lib Sam articles (see related article links below), a fervent supporter of anti-multiculturalism in its accepted sense – that is I believe it’s a load of rubbish and smacks of left wing appeasement and head-buried-in-the-sand denial of reality.
Realpolitik is that we like our neighbours to be like us and we all, whatever our racial origin, need to face up to this reality. Incidentally, my oldest friend is from Sri Lanka. Unless you saw him, you would not know. He is an Englishman, like Nathan Rothschild aspired to be and in the end considered himself to be. Perhaps, more needs to be done to foster the true concept of Englishness or Frenchness or whatever, and less time should be spent on muddled searches a là: Mr Blair for a sort of crypto-Britishness that is designed to please and appease rather than make sense of cultural and racial diversity.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world.
Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be.
The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it?
The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn.
But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions.
There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?
Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet.
Thanks for the response, David. Here are my corrections.
I just plain disagree that “multiculturalism” has no meaning. I said it has two meanings and I stick to that. Hence the problems I diagnose. If the word meant nothing, it wouldn’t be such a trap. To say that it does mean nothing is to surrender the verbal field to the “multicultural outcome” enemy.
I said: watch out for this word. I did not say (although it sounds as if you think I said): I will go on using this word even though it’s a dodgy word. I favour the search for different and better words, as do you.
However, your suggested alternative word is a bad one. “Monoculturalist” has similar problems to “multiculturalist”, and if anything even worse ones.
Does “monoculturalism” mean re-establishing the white, pre-coloured-immigration “monoculture” that we once had, by chucking lots of coloured people out? Does it perhaps mean keeping the “monoculture” we could now have if we kept the coloured people we’ve got, but shut out any more? Those are both reasonable guesses as to what the word might mean and they’re both racist meanings, especially the first.
Perhaps “monoculturalism” means lots more people coming into Britain, but only from the white Anglo-Saxon world – from white America and the white Commonwealth? Or maybe white folks from anywhere? Again, reasonable guesses, and again, decidedly racist meanings.
And another reasonable guess would be that it means people becoming part of a monoculture when they (from wherever) get here? This is the meaning you attach to the word.
Even more ambiguous. Even worse confusion. Even worse traps to dodge.
Just to be clear about what I want, although I favour a “monocultural” and “British” (in the sense of all this taking place in Britain) outcome, I don’t expect or want this monoculture to be white British folks plus lots of other folks behaving exactly like white British folks. I favour a genuine melting pot with the resulting combined culture containing influences and ingredients from all the new arrivals from the many different feeder cultures.
In my original posting I used the phrase “melting pot”, and this is a much better phrase for what I believe in than “monoculturalism”. “Melting pot” communicates both the extreme diversity of the cultural ingredients I want us and expect us to welcome in, and the unified nature of the combined outcome that I likewise want and expect.
To bring all this down to earth and back to life, when I started writing this last night I was also watching the small-hours-of-Friday-morning repeat of CD UK. After a two year silence, Oasis are playing their new single called, if I heard it right, “Hindu Times”. This is good hard Oasis-rock with a scrawny, bearded Gallagher brother doing high-decibel mid-Atlantic Manchester-Irish whining at the front like it was 1997, but with the backing spiced up with sitars – or maybe sitar-like guitars, I couldn’t tell – twanging and singing away in among the drums and bass. Melting. pot rock. Oasis have been listening to bhangra rock (itself a classic melting pot phenomenon) unless I’m much mistaken. It sounded good to me.
Sometimes, Brian, it can take a lot less than twenty minutes.
Correct me if I am wrong (and you will do so unhesitatingly, I’m sure) but you take the view that you don’t in the least mind foreigners coming to live in Britain so long as they adopt and adapt to a culture which is particularly and identifiably British.
In other words, aren’t you a monoculturalist?
This is an issue that often brings out the divisions amongst libertarians. There are two broad camps on this matter:
Most libertarians take the view that it is just a matter of free association and thus the state has no business preventing people from seeking opportunities wherever they are found. Within this group, most also hold that the new arrivals should not be given access to welfare or other transfer payments, taking the view that such redistributions of wealth are just theft in any case and should not be made to anyone, let alone immigrants.
The other camp of people with more or less libertarian views, such as Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe take the view that unrestricted immigration is actually a facet of statism, not liberty. They argue that as all property should be private, mass immigration only occurs when the state takes a hand to prevent people from excluding the new arrivals from privately owned housing and jobs in the manner they assume existing property owners would naturally choose to pursue.
The two main reasons held up to justify this opposition to open immigration is firstly that of the risk of swamping their freedom loving culture that is evolving towards libertarian understandings… and secondly that new and economically unproductive arrivals often hugely increase demand on social security and welfare systems, thereby leading to an increase in unjustified appropriation by the state of tax monies.
The first argument, to which Hans-Hermann Hoppe addresses at great length has two main strands. Firstly the risk of crime and violence posed by a large underclass of non-assimilated immigrants and secondly the moral right of ‘citizen’ peoples to naturally form communities of cultural affinity and ‘dis-affinity’ (i.e. to accept and reject certain types of people without being coerced by the state).
The argument goes that it is the state which ‘imposes’ immigrants on communities and to make it worse there is little motivation to assimilate but rather to just line up for welfare handouts. Additionally, without the coercion of the state, societies in their natural form have deep genetic, racial and ethnic elements which will militate towards evolving to a series of economically interlinked but spatially separated communities, presumably rather like ancient Greek city-states. Whilst the corrosive effects of welfare are undeniably true, the foundation of both these ideas is, I believe, quite false.
It is only due to active state efforts to prevent assimilation (called ‘multiculturalism’) that the ghettoization of sections of society are more than a passing phase in the immigration process. Unless they are uprooted forcibly (as was the case with the arrival of Africans as slaves in North America), people do not emigrate great distances to a foreign land in this modern era because they are happy with their existing way of life and culture. For an Indian or Chinese family to move to Britain, it does not mean they are completely rejecting their original culture and family ties, but it does mean they are making a value judgement that life and culture is at least in some significant measure superior in their destination of choice. Thus to argue that it is intrinsically rational to reject immigrants from different cultures if natural social forces are allowed to work seems to misunderstand why people become immigrants in the first place.
Some like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have what I believe to be quite incorrect understandings of not just the inevitably fluid nature of society in a modern extended order but have also failed to grasp the dramatic effect of capitalist trade based economics on making societies more dynamic and adaptive when they interact increasingly globally. As a result, Hoppe takes an extremely non-Anglosphere, quintessentially Germanic view of the nature of civil society when viewed separately from the state: at its core he sees a blood and soil Volk, racially, genetically as well as culturally based and therefore leading to self reinforcing communities of ‘like cultures’.
Thus he takes the view that were it not for the imposed integration of the state, whilst people may wish to trade with anyone, they would inevitably not freely wish to live and work in close physical proximity with different cultures, races and lifestyles. Different races, homosexuals, libertines, people who take siestas in the afternoon etc. etc. (i.e. anyone who was not a member of the Volk either racially or culturally) would be either excluded from the community of free property owning citizens all together or at the very least banished to enforced ghettos like medieval Jews. I do not feel I am overstating Hoppe’s position (see ch.9 ‘On Cooperation, Tribe, City, and State’ in ‘Democracy-The God that failed’ (2001, Transaction Publisher)).
Yet I look around at London and see a very different world to that of Hoppe. It is abundantly clear that when the state does not enforce distorting multiculturalism, social values will naturally evolve not to Hoppe’s hypothetical future libertarian neo-tribalism but rather to cosmopolitanism, right here and right now. The only Volk of the future is the Volkswagen. When people of different cultures and races actually interact economically, the inevitable consequence is familiarity, cultural confluence and ultimately miscegenation, not a regression to atavistic tribalism. One only has to walk down the streets of London to see the truth of that.
Sure, areas of minority racial and to a lesser extent cultural concentration can be found in Britain, yet one does not have to look far to see an expanding and entirely British black and Asian population already in the mainstream of cultural and economic life of the country… and not just flipping burgers and digging up roads. In racial flash points, such as Oldham, it is racially ghettoized low income supporters of socialist largess who exchange barrages of bricks and bottles over which community is getting the bigger handout from local government. In less radically separated and far less state dependent majority black communities like Clapham in London, for instance, economics un-mediated by the state lead to a very different and altogether better result.
Ilana Mercer makes several excellent points as to the harmful effects of the welfare state on creating an ‘acculturation’ to largess. In this as in so many things she is manifestly correct. Certainly people who see political favour rather than economic interaction as the means to support ones self are indeed the ‘wrong’ sort of immigrant (not to mention the wrong sort of domestic ‘citizen’) who are little more than muggers-by-proxy. However this is not then an argument against open immigration on economic grounds but rather a self-evident argument against the welfare state and all other forms of democratically sanctioned criminality that falls under the ‘redistribution of wealth’ category.
As far as I am concerned Hans-Hermann and Ilana are free to feel distaste at the idea of the close proximity of alien cultures, races and lifestyles (clearly the case for Hoppe) but for them to then deduce that their sentiments are in fact what would be the ‘natural’ sentiments of the majority if it were not for state enforced integration is not really born out by the evidence.
I share the view that socialist multiculturalism is in fact just an attempt to dismantle Anglosphere civil society with its dynamist adaptive nature and replace it with ‘social’ values more amenable to state centred stasis collectivism. However again this is not an argument against immigration but against state interference in the values of civil society. In reality I am probably much more of a cultural chauvinist than Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are. They fear the ‘other’ out of alarm for the fate of liberty based civil society in the face of more primitive collectivist based social values that they see as inevitably (and often incorrectly) defining Third World newcomers.
However I do not fear the cultural alien at all because it is the anti-culture of collectivism which should be afraid and not Anglosphere civil society. I am so convinced of the seductive, viral nature of the core value of our civil society (severalty, unenumerated rights, free contract, personal choice) that unless the dead hand of the state actively prevents it from spreading (i.e. by enforcing ‘multiculturalism’ legislation), the triumph of liberty’s cultural underpinnings is pretty much just a matter of time. The reason for this is that the modern dynamist technological networked extended order is so much more economically effective than every single one of the collectivist state centred stasis based alternatives… all we have to do to ‘win’ is continue to produce the things other societies want and yet are incapable of actually producing.
Just as Hoppe’s ‘Volk’ based understanding of what lies at the core of society was archaic and false even 100 years ago, it is reduced to complete nonsense by the subversive, dynamic, eclectic and market driven screech of the modem, the convenience of the mobile phone and TV screens filled with The History Channel, Australian Soap Operas, Star Trek, Monty Python and Baywatch (quite possibly dubbed in Urdu) and other irresistible bourgeois banalities. Do not fear the immigrant because freed from the baleful distortions of statism, they wish to be us, only more colourfully so. Let them get on with it and thereby enrich us all.
Let me state that I do not expect a paleo-conservative like Pat Buchannan to actually agree with libertarian views, but what I do expect is that, if he is going to comment on them, that he actually takes the time to figure out what libertarian views actually are before opening his noise making apparatus.
I have had numerous e-mail on his ludicrous article called Does libertarianism lead to statism?. Over on Dodgeblog, there is also a rubbishing of Buchannan that speculates what his real motivation for the remarks might be. The section of Buchannan’s article that best sums up his complete lack of comprehension regarding what libertarians actually do stand for is:
As these immigrants are also far poorer than Americans, they are disproportionate users of social services — i.e., health care, food stamps, rent supplements, legal services and general welfare. Immigrants have become the principal propellants of the growth of the welfare state.
Libertarians to Buchannan: Read this carefully
The state has NO legitimate role in health care, food stamps, rent supplements and ‘general welfare’… Libertarians do not support the very existence of the theft based welfare state! Eliminate that and the only people who will be willing to emigrate to another country under those conditions are self selecting high initiative folks who want to avail themselves of employment and entrepreneurial opportunities…i.e. exactly the sort of people who came through Ellis Island and made the USA the wealthiest nation on earth. I fail to see a problem with that!
So in essence Pat Buchannan’s thesis of genius is that “libertarianism leads to statism because non-libertarians have imposed welfare policies that libertarians regard as both immoral and economically unsound”. D’oh!
Thanks to Virginia, Andrew, Hank, Ann, Anne, Ivan, Jorge, Margarthe, Will and Dieter for also baring their fangs via e-mail regarding the utterly clueless Buchannan article. I have never received so many e-mails that made almost exactly the same points on the same issue!
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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