A reductionist view of nationhood

The below comment from a correspondent in an e-mail discussion about immigration in November 2001 shows the materially reductive view of man and society that prevails even among many conservatives today, especially those who take race and genetics seriously. Most people in the modern West have one-track minds. If they take genetics seriously, then they tend to see everything in terms of genetics alone. If they take race seriously, they tend to see everything in terms of race alone. If they take family values seriously, they tend to see everything in terms of family values alone. If they take freedom or free enterprise seriously, they tend to see everything in terms of freedom or free enterprise alone. If they take Christianity seriously, they tend to see everything in terms of Christianity alone (and they will further reduce Christianity to a single passage of the Gospels, such as the command of unlimited self-sacrifice on behalf of the needy in Matthew 25, and turn that into a political command applied to the entire society, mandating open borders and global socialism). But reality is multi-leveled, and so is human society, and so, in particular, is Western Christian society, the most highly articulated society that has ever existed. If the West is to survive its present terrible crisis and be restored to something like its historical form, Westerners must learn to see and appreciate more than one dimension of reality at a time.

The correspondent wrote:

I’ve spent some time looking for a general principle regarding immigration that American citizens would choose from behind the veil of ignorance if they didn’t know which ethnic group or economic class they’d belong to. Here’s what I came up with:

To my mind, the fundamental goal of immigration policy is to maximize the benefit to existing citizens, just as the fundamental goal of a public corporation’s management is to maximize the wealth of its current stockholders, not of people who might buy stock later. Think of the U.S. as an employee-owned corporation like United Airlines. Immigration policy is thus like United’s hiring policy. The goal of United Airline’s hiring policy is to optimize the benefits to the existing stockholder-employees by hiring the new stockholder-employees who have the most to contribute at the lowest cost. Similarly, the goal of America’s immigration policy logically ought to be to brain drain the rest of the world of the people who can contribute the most to the welfare of current American citizens, and to KEEP OUT those who would lower the welfare of current citizens.

If you are an elected official, you have a duty to the current citizens of the U.S. to demand as much as possible in benefits for the current citizenry in return for letting foreigners live in the U.S. It is especially corrupt to sell visas cheap in order to reap votes for yourself and your party in the future, which now appears to be the long-term strategy of both parties.

Maybe working for the benefit of American citizens sounds less noble than setting an immigration policy to benefit the whole world, but of course in reality, any such universalist goal is immediately turned into racial and class warfare.

I replied:

Yes, immigration should be considered from the point of view of how it will help the existing society, not how it will help the immigrants. But it’s the well-being of the society as a whole in its historical existence that should be the criterion, not just the well-being or satisfaction of its current individual members as individuals.

You write “The fundamental goal of immigration policy is to maximize the benefit to existing citizens,” and you compare the citizens of a nation to the stock holders of a corporation. This is falling into the modern liberal reductionist view in which human society is seen as nothing but a collection of individuals, as the sum total of its members’ individual desires, rather than the traditionalist view of society as a corporate, historically continuing entity in which its individual members orient themselves to existence and find the meaning of their lives. It is a mistake to look at a society only in material, individualistic terms. It is a historical, cultural, and spiritual entity as well as a material entity.

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(Note: I initially posted this four-year-old e-mail exchange concealing the identity of my correspondent, who is Steve Sailer. But then I posted a comment in which the commenter, Shrewsbury, revealed Sailer’s identity, and a few hours passed before I realized this had happened, because I had forgotten that Sailer’s identity was concealed in the original entry. I thought of removing the comments. However, since the ideas Sailer expresses in the quoted e-mail have been frequently published by him in the years since then and are very well known (after all, Shrewsbury realized the unnamed correspondent was Sailer), I feel I am not violating his privacy by revealing his identity, so I will leave the following exchange as is.)

Shrewsbury writes:

It’s almost pathetic, in the old sense of the word, that Mr. Sailer, with all his biological, social, and cultural data can’t come up with any other reason than his labored “citizenship” principle as a reason to defend the American nation. Is this all that genetics leaves one to go on—legal status? Which reminds me, a “leader” in yesterday’s Telegraph sneers at the supposedly tiny minority of “blood and soil” nationalists in the electorate. Well, at least blood and soil have actual existence; and I suppose that’s why we’re expected to sneer at them. But if such a genetics-obsessed fellow as Sailer has no use for “blood and soil,” what good is genetics? And is it then that “blood and soil” has a deep meaning beyond mere biology?

LA replies:

Well, that’s Sailer’s thing, as I discussed last year in my posts on Sailer’s bio-centric yuppiedom. He believes genes are all, and he says valuable things about group differences, but his interest in differences relates mainly to relatively immediate, political, or yuppie-type concerns. For the most part he’s not interested in race in its larger, civilizational dimension. Sailer has never exhibited any civilizational consciousness as far as I can tell, whether with regard to race or without regard to race.

For example, at the moment he has a discussion about why blacks don’t like to swim. This could be interesting to readers who are interested in race differences, but is of no political and civilizational significance.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 21, 2006 05:48 PM | Send