"Luxury is more ruthless than war"

A reader writes a long, thoughtful objection to the Ron Maxwell essay:

I share many of your anxieties about the effects of mass immigration from the Global
South, above all Mexico and Central America, to this country. But reading what I took to be your approving posting of the fellow who wrote disparagingly of those
who support basically open borders as 'present tensers,' indifferent both to history and posterity, permit me to offer a few cautionary remarks.

First, historically and tempermentally, true conservatives (I am not talking about utopian neo-cons, religious millennarians, or the business establishment's toadies and sycophants) have a weakness for 'declinist' narratives, and tend to hark
back to some earlier time as the (relative) ideal from which we have now fallen away. The problem with this notion is that it is fundamentally religious, echoing
the idea of the prelapsarian in secular, historical contexts.

Please be clear: I am not attacking this idea in its CHRISTIAN context (I am not Christopher Hitchens). But as a way of parsing historical events, it is worse
than misleading. As far as the history of immigration goes, as you know, there was virtually unlimited and unrestricted immigration to this country through the
middle of the 19th century and then virtually unlimited and unrestricted immigration from the white world until shortly after the First World War. So in effect, the declinist narrative is an account of less than a century of events.

Second, I would put it to you that, whether any of us like it or not, this is an era of mass migration---perhaps the greatest since the dispersion of the poor of Europe to the New World, Australia, etc., in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
perhaps greater. It is not an American phenomenon but rather one that affects all rish countries (including, increasingly, places like Japan, not to mention the
Gulf States, etc.). It is pure fantasy to imagine that there will be an American exception to this. It can be managed but not stopped.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that people had tried to stop the great European out-migration. You can't because it is such a preposterous counter-factual as to be virtually unimaginagle. Note, I am not speaking of justice here, but rather of
historical reality.

Third, the notion that those who support (or are resigned to, or dare not oppose) basically open-borders are nihilists or 'present tensers' is silly. By what moral measurement? If we want to talk about identity, let's talk about identity. The present era has seen a radical shift in the idea of identity. Epiphenomena of this development include the disappearance of the peasantry in the rich world, the
emancipation of women, the historically unparalleled rise of tolerance of homosexuality, an unheard of degree of mobility, and the collapse of many kinds of
traditional inter-genetational family relations.

In any case, national identity is itself an historical artifact with a specific history. In the eighteenth century, for example, less than half of the people in
France (whose national borders had been largely fixed more than a century earlier) spoke French. Germany was formed in 1871. Etcetera, etcetera.

In other words, if we are talking about what Braudel called 'la longue duree'---the broad sweep of history---nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Whatever else it is, it is not to be confused with tradition in any serious historical
sense of the word. In any case, the reality of economic globalization has hollowed out the nation state. That cannot simply be sneered at as 'present tensism.' Again, we may rue the fact, but it is a fact.

It is true that we are in an era of great flux. But unless we admit that, the conversation won't be serious. Just as it is unserious to discuss immigration without discussing what the US, or any other state is FOR. My own prejudices, obviously, is that states exist to advance the interests of the powerful whether it is the US Chamber of Commerce or the Chinese Communist Party. But then I read a lot of Foucault at an impressionable age. To say this obviously does not mean saying that all states are equal or that some aren't preferable to others.

I hope this advances something. Obviously, it is written from a largely materialist perspective (Weberian rather than Marxist, though I actually think Marx still has much to teach us). But I hope you will not dismiss it out of hand for all that.

My first thought: I wonder what Dan Larison and Spengler make of this?

My second: Speaking for myself, I am less interested in the idea of preserving the "purity" of America as a nation than I am in the idea of the rule of law and responsible self-government. I don't mind immigration in principle. Seriously, I don't. Half the people at my church are immigrants. Every city I've lived in since leaving college -- which is to say, over half my life -- has been profoundly marked by the presence of immigrants: Latino and Asian especially. At the most trivial level, I eat a lot better today than I did growing up, because I eat so much Mexican and Thai food. In the daily life I lead, in this time and place, mass immigration doesn't hurt me, and in fact it provides benefits to me and my family. I'm a cosmopolitan who has traveled overseas quite a bit. I'm comfortable around foreigners and the foreign-born.

But I don't use the public hospital in Dallas for my family's medical care -- the same public hospital that's overrun by illegal immigrants. I don't have my kids in the public schools in my city, many of which are overwhelmed by children who don't speak English. My livelihood is not affected by mass immigration, because unlike working-class Americans, my vocation is in a line of work that illegal workers can't do. For now, my neighborhood is not becoming home to houses full of migrant males who may or may not be legal, but who are breaking codes that the city will not or cannot enforce. And I haven't yet had a car crash with an illegal alien who doesn't have insurance. Point is, it's easy for people like me to wonder why others are so bent out of shape by the illegal immigration problem, because we just don't see it. Moreover, because people like me are pretty well educated, well traveled, and relatively sophisticated, we tend to look with disdain upon people like us who happen to strongly prefer their own particular culture. I can much easier sit down and have a meaningful conversation with a white-collar professional in the Netherlands than I can sit down and have a meaningful conversation with the white mill worker from my own hometown. And I bet many of you readers can too.

We cultural elites are the kind of rootless people who will worry about the disappearance of the native culture in some far off Third World place, and fret about the business interests busy extinguishing that traditional culture. But we will look at people in our own backyard who are facing the same kind of challenge to maintain their own way of life, and condescend to them as backward racists.

The thing is, there's something deeply concerning about the idea that a national border doesn't exist, and cannot be made to exist, and that laws governing who comes into this country are routinely violated -- and moreover, that it is pointless to try to enforce them, because the mass migration is inevitable. Like my correspondent, I believe that states exist in reality to serve the interests of the powerful, and I don't think that's ever going to change. But if the system works to provide a decent modicum of power to the non-rich, I can live with that, as it's vastly better than most people in the world today, or ever, have ever had. What's happening today is that ordinary people who are legitimately concerned about national soveregnty and the rule of law vis-a-vis the immigration crisis are being told time and time again that nothing can be done about it -- and moreover (this is crucial), that to object to them and their presence is tantamount to racism.

[An aside: I visited a wonderful elementary school recently, a church school that serves children of the barrio and ghetto. Several fourth graders gave a presentation to us visitors, in which they spoke of their favorite historical figure. A Hispanic boy explained why he thought Santa Anna was so great. Admittedly, Santa Anna was a great historical figure. But this is Texas, which takes its state history very seriously, and this little Texas boy had just expressed his supreme admiration for the Mexican general who slaughtered the men of the Alamo, and who was in turn defeated by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. You tell an Anglo Texan that to worry about how the Mexicanization of Texas is nothing to worry about. Historical memory is identity, and the identity of Texas is changing rapidly. A Texas in which the Alamo is seen as a tragic defeat that gave the people their sense of identity is not the same Texas in which the Alamo is seen as a great victory.]

So: one is told that not only are you powerless to control your own fate (your property, your job, your livelihood), but that to object in any way to this loss of control is to reveal yourself to be wicked.

This is getting far afield from the reader's point, I fear, so maybe this will bring it back. The reader seems to be saying that the idea that we can protect American identity against this larger sweep of history is a false hope. And, if I'm reading him correctly, it's a false hope for the same reason that trying to maintain any kind of traditional culture is a fool's game in the world today: that global capitalism is cleansing the planet of all rootedness, all tradition. Someone recently pointed me to a 1994 essay by David Rieff , which is an extended riff on the E.M. Cioran quote, "A civilization progresses from agriculture to paradox." What Cioran meant, if I understand him correctly, is that once a civilization progresses beyond agriculture, which made civilization possible to begin with by delivering people from a nomadic existence, it moves into an industrial economy, which abstracts people from the places to which they've been tied, even as it makes them wealthier. The further along this process becomes, the more we return to the nomadic state, though incomparably wealthier.

Rieff makes use of this Cioran observation to talk about how we Americans don't deal well with paradox. For example, he says that for all the contemporary obsession with diversity, we are strikingly homogenous and conformist (cf. the white American yuppie who enjoys the "diversity" of watching a DVD film by the gay Spanish director Almodovar, while eating take-out sushi -- but who can't stand the idea of the NASCAR fan taking the family to Burger Doodle to eat in the car before rushing home to watch "Walker, Texas Ranger" on TiVO; some cultures are more, ahem, diverse than others). Rieff's broader subject is the alleged world hegemony of American culture. Here, for our purposes, is the chief insight of the Rieff essay:

In the end, when we talk about the dominance of one culture, or even, less agonistically, of the globalization of culture, it is important to keep in mind that what is really at issue is the victory of culture that makes money over all other forms, and, particularly, over both folk culture and elite culture. Examples of this are everywhere and, if anything, the tendency toward bottom-line thinking is accelerating. Think of "art" filmmaking, a relatively accessible form when compared to, say, serial music, and how it has become about as relevant to the movie industry as antiquarian bookselling is to the publishing business. And if high culture now exists on life support, the culture of traditional societies, for all the lip service rendered to it by pious academics and political activists, is everywhere in retreat, and, in many parts of the world, on the brink of extinction as a living rather than as an artificially preserved set of forms.

...The essential point is that most people want this consumer culture, however much they may resent its effect on, say, the status of women. And yet such changes come as part of the package, since American consumer culture is corrosive of all traditions and established truths. In any case, the position of people in the Third World, which can be summed up as wanting more of this culture and resenting and fearing its triumph, is finally untenable. In the end, the market simply has more resources than a traditional society incapable of providing prosperity in an era of demographic increase and urbanization.

Rieff goes on to say that American mass culture is so exportable because unlike other nation's mass culture, it is not organic to a particular place. (The pseudonymous columnist Spengler, I think, often makes a similar point about Evangelical Christianity, which is booming among the world's poor). And it's not organic to a particular place because particularity has no strong roots in a country as young as ours. What does it mean, then, to get all anxious about maintaining one's traditions in the face of mass foreign immigrations when our "traditions," such as they are, are so shallow-rooted, and when, in fact, we have created a mass culture that is simultaneously the most efficient generator of wealth the world has ever seen, and the deadliest enemy of traditions, old certainties, venerable loyalties?

I sense that it is in this light that the reader who sent in the initial observation critiques Ron Maxwell. We are all complicit in this consumer culture, and have freely abandoned our cultural traditions as the price of admittance. Why are we only talking about traditions, and rootedness in place, in the face of anxiety over the effective dissolution of the southern border? Isn't there something phony in that? (he seems to be saying).

So: Have we become so accomodated to the condition of material ease that resistance to this tectonic aspect of modernity (the reality of mass immigration) in the name of a long-abandoned sense of tradition really is futile? Are we all really nomads now, with pretenses to the traditions that no longer exist for us, and haven't really done since the agricultural age? If so, Juvenal was right: "Luxury is more ruthless than war."