Posted on 10/15/2017 3:01:04 PM PDT by TBP
t feels strange writing about this topic, some 25 years after I had it completely settled in my mind. But nothing is ever really settled, I suppose. The claim that I had long ago concluded was a basic historical and economic fallacy is back in a big way. The claim is that society needs homogeneity to be orderly and free. It is a core claim of the alt-right and its sympathizers (and, in a different way, of the alt-left). It is what leads them to reject freedom as a path forward and embrace state control of demographics.
It’s completely wrong. If you have ever been confronted with this claim, I’m writing this article for you.
Here’s the anecdote from my past. Before his death, the now-famous “social nationalist” writer and theorist, and self-proclaimed fascist, Samuel Francis and I were talking at some luncheon. I was prattling on about liberty as usual. And he interrupted me and said, paraphrasing: “Human rights and liberty are slogans we use. Much more fundamental is demographics. You have to have homogeneity for society to be orderly and operate properly. Without that, you can forget about rights and liberties.”
Was Francis Right?
I said nothing because I hadn’t really thought much about that. Was this right? You don’t hear such claims in college. People who talk like this are politically incorrect, and don’t say such things in polite company. This thinking leads to forbidden thoughts, and trends toward the celebration of civic sins like racism, sexism, and xenophobia. So I had never really come to terms with it. I didn’t have to. But that also meant that I was caught off guard. I sat there a bit confused.
It took a few days but I happened upon a realization. Liberty is not the outgrowth of homogeneity. It is the solution to the seeming problem of heterogeneity. Liberty creates institutions like commercial settings, opportunities for trade and exchange, settings for mutually beneficial trade and learning. It is precisely how liberty reconciles differences among people–and creates wealth out of disagreement–that is the very source of its great magic.
Think back to the end of the religious wars. Enlightenment thinkers proposed that the solution to religious difference is not the burning of heretics and the imposition of an official creed. It was to allow people to believe whatever they wanted so long as they didn’t hurt others. And the system worked. How many other ways would this idea of freedom work? Gradually, it came to be rolled out to affect speech, the press, and trade. Eventually it led to broad emancipation of slaves and women. It created a new world, in which the power of the state was restrained and contained, and dismantled the old world of imposed hierarchy.
You don’t have to know history. Visit the bustling commercial district of any major American city and observe the crazy quilt of ethnicity, language, religion, race, and culture, where people are around buying, selling, and associating according to their own lights. Why is there not chaos? Why is there coexistence? Because the presence of commercial freedom allows everyone to pursue his or her own self interest in a way that also benefits others. Here is the beauty of the invisible hand at work.
The claim that liberty is preconditioned on the sameness of the population is to wish away the very problem that liberty is much adept at solving. After all, what is the problem that social order is trying to solve? It seeks to provide a setting in which people thrive as individuals even as the entire group is granted an opportunity for a better life. Differences between people are solved by freedom. This was an insight that changed the world for the better.
In fact, I realized, if you have a small tribe of that same race, language, religion, and cultural norms, the question of liberty does not have to be raised at all. Group coordination happens due to personal knowledge, verbal communication, and shared expectations of other’s similar needs, and it usually features a single leader.
The trouble is that a homogeneous and isolated tribal unit managed from the top will always be poor–mostly living hand to mouth, as small tribes in the Amazon do today–because the model doesn’t permit the expansion of the division of labor. It can work under some rarified conditions. But for the most part, life under imposed homogeneity eventually defaults to what Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature: nasty, brutish, and short.
The Drive to Integrate
Liberty, on the other hand, rewards ever more integration of people of all kinds. It becomes profitable for everyone to do so. You are free to feel bigotry, racism, loathing of all other religious views, of different lifestyles and so. But when it comes to improving your life, you prefer dealing with the Jewish doctor than having a heart attack, grabbing lunch at the Moroccan restaurant, hiring the Mexican immigrant to tile your bathroom, listening to your favorite African-American pop band, and so on. And guess what? Gradually under these conditions, the primitive and tribalist ethos begins to subside.
This is precisely why any regime that seeks to enforce homogeneity must necessarily turn against the market and toward force. Recall that the Nazi Party had at first only encouraged peaceful boycotts of Jewish businesses, protest signs in front of stores, and so on, and laid out explicit instructions that no one be hurt. That didn’t work. The Nurenberg Laws were a desperate measure to address the “problem” that the market wouldn’t work to exclude people.
There is another insight that makes the whole claim about homogeneity a bit silly. As it turns out, no one is the same. And you know this. Think of a friend who shares the same religion, race, language, and sex, and think about your different values. There is always the possibility for conflict because no two people are alike. Your friendships survive despite this because you value your friendship more than being enemies. Expand that model to the whole of the social order and you begin to understand how and why differences lead not to conflict, disorder, and acrimony but rather to friendship, prosperity, and enlightenment.
All this talk of doing away with diversity is a shibboleth. There is no pure race, no truly orthodox religion, no one language without variation, no final unity between any two people in thought, word, or deed. No one acts or thinks as a group or collective. The social world will be, always and forever, a constellation of difference. We need the best possible social system for dealing with and making something beautiful come of it.
The New Realization
I was so pleased to work through the problem in my own mind. As with most intellectual conflict, you end up better off as a result. I came away with a greater appreciation and understanding of what liberty means for the world. Further studies reinforced my conviction that the whole purpose of liberty is to make radical heterogeneity work for everyone.
This is why I became so enraptured by the Convivencia, the 700 period before the High Middle Ages when Islam, Judaism, and Christianity coexisted to their mutual betterment (that all groups benefited from the association is not in dispute, despite the ongoing debate about just how much tolerance for difference there really was).
To understand the awesome power of heterogeneity is to adopt a different outlook on society itself. It is to embrace the core liberal claim: society doesn’t need top-down management because it contains within itself the capacity for its own management. You come to be enraptured by Frederic Bastiat’s emphasis on harmony as the means by which we live better lives.
In contrast, the mental posture that homogeneity is a necessary condition leads to a series of strange obsessions over unending conflicts in society. You begin to exaggerate them in your mind. It seems like you are surrounded by a plethora of intractable wars. There is a war between blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, Christianity and Islam, the abled and disabled, our nation and their nation, and so on. This is the very mindset that the left and right have in common.
And guess what? If you build a large state, these conflicts do indeed appear to be more real than they are, simply because the state pits people against each other. You begin to hate that group because its members didn’t vote for your candidate, it gets more of the tax loot, it favors various forms of imposition on your liberty. Thanks to this interventionist state, you feel as if you are surrounded by enemies and lose track of the possibility for human understanding.
Freedom and Difference
Let’s return to the original claim by Mr. Francis, now widely shared and promoted by the alt-right and its sympathizers. It turns out that this is nothing new. The opponents of liberty have been barking up this tree for some 200 years, as I explain in my new book.
“You have to have homogeneity for society to be orderly and operate properly,” Francis says. This claim amounts to a rejection of liberalism itself. So let’s correct this. You have to have liberty to deal with the inescapable reality of heterogeneity. It’s the longing for sameness that leads to conflict, despotism, and impoverished human lives.
Diversity is weakness, despite what you’ve heard a thousand times by big brother and his minions.
As the author points out, the answer to that is liberty. Let each pursue his own self-interest. Remember what Adam Smith told us:
“It is not to the benevolence of the butcher or baker that we owe our dinner, but to his self-interest.”
Well, let’s see. Homogeneity is quite high in Korea and Japan. Let’s compare their murder rates with those of the US.
In the most recent reporting year, South Korea had a homicide rate of 0.9 per 100,00 and Japan was 0.3 per 100,000. Contrast that with the US homicide rate of 4.8 per 100,000. In other words, the entire country of Japan (pop. 127 million) had fewer murders than the city of Chicago (pop. 2.8 million).
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-violent-crime-is-low-in-Japan-and-South-Korea
Does being less likely to be murdered equate to more liberty? Probably not. But being alive has a certain desirability of its own.
South Korea and Japan are much smaller countries.
>It took a few days but I happened upon a realization. Liberty is not the outgrowth of homogeneity. It is the solution to the seeming problem of heterogeneity. Liberty creates institutions like commercial settings, opportunities for trade and exchange, settings for mutually beneficial trade and learning. It is precisely how liberty reconciles differences among people–and creates wealth out of disagreement–that is the very source of its great magic.
Trade between different cultures tends to be less efficient than trade between homogeneous groups. Jews trade millions in diamonds with other Jews in Amsterdam on the basis of a handshake, why trading outside the group tends to require the threat of force to make sure each side doesn’t cheat each other. Homogenality is very important.
>Think back to the end of the religious wars. Enlightenment thinkers proposed that the solution to religious difference is not the burning of heretics and the imposition of an official creed. It was to allow people to believe whatever they wanted so long as they didn’t hurt others. And the system worked. How many other ways would this idea of freedom work? Gradually, it came to be rolled out to affect speech, the press, and trade. Eventually it led to broad emancipation of slaves and women. It created a new world, in which the power of the state was restrained and contained, and dismantled the old world of imposed hierarchy.
This guy really doesn’t know history. The cause of the religious wars was people of very different beliefs living in close proximity to each trying to destroy each other. The solution was religious separation where the prince of each area picked which religion was practiced and people with different religions were sent away to another state that followed that religion. The US followed this example for many years where people who didn’t fit the religious makeup of a given state were generally driven out of the state to a state that was more of their type(See Mormons and Quakers).
As religion became less import to people this cycle of seperation by religion declined.
So what?
I seem to recall seeing a statistic a while back that the USA white violent crime (not homicide) rate was 9.3 per 100,000 and the USA black violent crime rate was something like 42 per 100,000.
Which might refer directly back to Sam Francis's point about heterogeneity.
Yep.
You need the veneer of homogeneity, but real homogeneity really doesn’t exist. If your country has at least one city and some rural areas you ain’t homogeneous, you might pretend, but it’s fake.
Adam Smith did not envision a government-forced balkanization. Even if every sub-culture that has been injected into our country for the last handful of decades bought into the basic ideas of Western Civilization there is still the lingering question as to why we need to change our culture. Even assuming benign or benevolent motives in achieving a multi-cultural paradise, the end game must be a uni-blend of all into nothingness. Why is it that only white European and European satellites need to “blend?” Where is the push to inject whites into Japan, or India, or Ethiopia?
In the most recent reporting year, South Korea had a homicide rate of 0.9 per 100,00 and Japan was 0.3 per 100,000. Contrast that with the US homicide rate of 4.8 per 100,000.
I seem to recall seeing a statistic a while back that the USA white violent crime (not homicide) rate was 9.3 per 100,000 and the USA black violent crime rate was something like 42 per 100,000.
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Your stat does not line up with the others.
Y
I’ll disagree to this extent. 100 years ago most city-dwellers were still fairly close to the country. Even someone who grew up in New York City in the late 19th century would feel comfortable on the farm, relating to country folk, and identifying with their culture, mores, and ethics.
I’ve made this point repeatedly. Nations that seem determined to maintain their identity seem to be doing just fine. How is that possible if diversity is pure strength?
200 years ago maybe, not 100. Remember 100 years ago is just short of the Roaring 20s, city culture was very well established as being very different than country culture. Even 200 years ago is in the Industrial Revolution which was a major changer for city culture.
Of course their suicide rates are extremely high.
If you compare mostly white geographic areas of America with any nation the homicide rates are similar. Vermont, for instance, has a very low homicide rate and a low minority population. Similarly, you can look at nearly any subset of geographical populations with a low minority footprint and you will find homicide rates comparable to Japan et al. It’s hard to find an American city with a high percentage majority population, therefore it is hard to know if such an urban area would likewise have a low incidence of crime.
I disagree of course. City folks in the roaring twenties did not have supermarkets or television, and most did not own an automobile. They may have been removed from the actual milking of the cow, but they were for the most part only one generation away from the farm.
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