Non-Discrimination, Private and Public

In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that “the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” Are we Americans paying for the crimes of our ancestors with the decline and imminent ruin of our beloved country? Maybe, but if so, what exactly was the crime? Taking the land from the Indians? Slavery? These are the obvious answers, but I cannot think that the evils we suffer today represent any kind of just punishment or karmic retribution for those events. We have long since done what we could to remedy the inequalities that they supposedly caused.

Perhaps the true answer is the opposite of what we conventionally think: our crime – or, at least, our profound error – is not discrimination, but non-discrimination. We started out feeling that it was not decent, or moral, to “discriminate” against minorities, meaning, mainly, black people; and the principle of non-discrimination gradually took over every functional institution of our society, until these institutions became actively harmful to the interests of the very people they were supposed to serve.

I certainly believed in non-discrimination for most of my life. For a personal example, which is almost amusing to me now, I once went on some dates through the classified ads (this was back when they were commonly printed in the free “alternative” weekly city papers, something I imagine has been supplanted by eHarmony). The ads would often specify the race of the person desired, e.g., SWF seeking SWM. I am a white man, but it offended me that so many white women were specifically seeking white men. I didn’t want to go out with someone who would say that! Also in the spirit of non-discrimination, I went out with a black woman or two. One lady was quite nice – clearly interested in white men (she was a lover of books and culture, and apparently couldn’t find many black men with compatible interests), but the instant I saw her I knew that I could not be attracted to her. It didn’t occur to me that preferring one’s own race might be a natural and healthy thing, or that, at least, people have the right to discriminate in the most personal of relationships, even if they believe in equal treatment in the public sphere. (It didn’t occur to me, either, that a white woman with an interest in black men might not be the best potential partner for me!) To give another example, I remember commenting to a female friend about a certain female acquaintance, that I didn’t think I could date her because she belonged to the Baha’i religion. The friend told me that she knew lots of wonderful Baha’i followers and that my comment made her “angry.” Here, at least, I stuck to my guns, insisting that religious differences were real, not something that could be overcome by niceness and kindness.

Non-discrimination is thought by its practitioners to be a virtue – perhaps the highest and most essential one of all. Yet it seems to be the code of non-discrimination that allows the worst evils to enter and flourish in our society, especially as a foundation for legal processes and decisions. The most egregious examples are probably immigration-related. (In a way, this entire blog is a reaction to mass non-Western immigration, though I usually approach the issue indirectly, by thinking about who we – the non-immigrants – are.) Outrage after outrage takes place, and nothing ever changes. Genetic testing reveals that the vast majority of Somalis brought here for family unification are actually not related to the people bringing them in. Investigations show that the vast majority of Chinese students in the United States faked their transcripts and essays. Vast numbers of Hispanics use stolen Social Security numbers. Is a commonsense decision ever made to put an end to the fraud by simply stopping taking in so many people from the particular countries involved? No, it is not. (The Somali reunification was halted, but apparently is slated to be resumed.) Somehow, the system itself cannot accept a sensible act of discrimination in that most personal – and most publicly important! – of choices, that of who to admit into one’s national family. We end up with a sick perversion of the American Dream, where lying and greed are rewarded and become the foundation of new citizenship. Is this moral? Is this virtue?

Ayn Rand, whose works I admire only very selectively, said that one must never fail to pronounce moral judgment. Laura Wood says that we must not fail to discriminate – in this article, she is referring to “economic discrimination in favor of men” in the workplace, but the statement applies to every aspect of society. Failure to judge and discriminate unleashes evil and mayhem. Even worse is the aggressive, coercive enforcement of non-discrimination through grievances and lawsuits. The great challenge for traditionalists and conservatives is to find a way to rebuild a society that judges and discriminates as it should.

Post-1880 Cliches on Immigration – Still With Us

An examination of my copy of Russell Blankenship’s 1937 textbook American Literature reveals that exaggerated veneration of immigrants is not a new phenomenon in America. It was apparently common among liberals in the 1920s and 1930s, and, like today, promoted especially earnestly by those who were themselves immigrants or from recent immigrant stock. Although it is not true that we are a “land of immigrants  – even Americans with significant post-1880s European immigrant ancestry can probably trace their ancestors’ presence here at least a century – mass immigration has taken place throughout enough of our history to have become planted in our consciousness as a normal thing.

For instance, consider this stanza from “Scum o’ the Earth,” by Robert Haven Shauffler (1879-1964), born to American parents in Austria. He clearly felt a moral burden in belonging to the host nation to a diverse mass of European immigrants:

Countrymen, bend and invoke
Mercy for us blasphemers,
For that we spat on these marvelous folk,
Nations of darers and dreamers,
Scions of singers and seers,
Our peers, and more than our peers.
“Rabble and refuse”, we name them
And “scum o’ the earth”, to shame them.
Mercy for us of the few, young years,
Of the culture so callow and crude,
Of the hands so grasping and rude,
The lips so ready for sneers
At the sons of our ancient more-than-peers.
Mercy for us who dare despise
Men in whose loins our Homer lies;
Mothers of men who shall bring to us
The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss;
Children in whose frail arms shall rest
Prophets and singers and saints of the West.
Newcomers all from the eastern seas,
Help us incarnate dreams like these.
Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong.
Help us to father a nation, strong
In the comradeship of an equal birth,
In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth.

The sentiment draws one in. But wait a minute! Because people who came to America for a better life (i.e., to make money) experience poor treatment from some of the natives, the entire nation is guilty and can only purge its guilt through the forgiveness of those same immigrants, and taking them and their stock into the national body?

Wouldn’t this make one want to reconsider inviting the immigrants at all?

Or this passage by Albert Léon Guérard (1880-1959), who arrived from France in his twenties:

We have given up our native speech; the picturesque garb of ancient villages has been discarded; titles and dynastic allegiance have been left, as undesirable, at the gateway of Ellis Island, and our very habits of thought have undergone a radical change. But do you believe that we have dropped like a burden all the immemorial traditions of our home lands? We have not, and it would be a thousand pities if we had. For the primal glory of the American spirit is that it is a blend of all subnationalities under the Stars and Stripes….Let us pool our ancestors, let us all be heirs to all! The greatest privilege is just that blending of traditions! I feel now as if my two grandfathers had bravely fought against each other at Gettysburg; I know it was partly for me that Washington displayed his quiet heroism and his serene wisdom.

It is heartening to read of Guérard’s whole-hearted identification with the entire American tradition, and when he simultaneously asserts that he and other immigrants assuredly do not cast away their native traditions when they become American citizens, he is only speaking a truth that should be, but often is not at all, obvious to Americans. But then he, an educated Frenchman, was eminently capable of assimilating himself to his new country. It should not be assumed that the same is true of our immigrants today. The notion of America as a giant blending of traditions felt good to him, and to many Americans, but if it is nothing but a blending then it is not a nation at all, and indeed the people with the deepest roots there are precisely those whose particular way of life must be sacrificed to the great blending project.

Immigration is inherently a traumatic experience. It requires the immigrant, not, indeed, to obliterate his past and his identity, but to give up forever residence in his native land to live among people who will never fully understand who he is, and to see his children grow up outside of that land and culture. It also requires the people of the land receiving the immigrant to make a myriad of efforts, large and small, to understand him and take care of his needs. The burden of the transition is by no means felt by the immigrant alone.

A normal, healthy country should not take in more than a very small number of immigrants from year to year. Nor, in view of the profound sacrifice which every immigrant must make to properly adjust to his new society, should average people all over the world be encouraged to emigrate. An immigrant should be that rare person who is actually prepared to do better in a foreign society that he could in his own. He should probably come from a society racially and culturally akin to the one he wishes to join. (It should go without saying that he should not expect to find a transplanted colony from his own society in the new country.) A normal, healthy country cultivates its own doctors, gas station owners, gardeners, meat packers, and athletes; it does not rely on immigrants to fill these roles. Foreign languages should be learned for purposes of trade and travel. Foreign visitors, workers, and students should be expected to return home after completing their business in their host country.

These facts should be so obvious as to require no argument or justification. And they are, in every country outside of Europe and America. Are we ever going to get back to common sense on this matter so we can once again experience a little control over our destiny?

Two Views of Citizenship: Roosevelt and Wilson

One of the Heritage American’s secret sources is a 1937 textbook and anthology entitled Our Literary Heritage: American Literature, edited by Russell Blankenship et al. (1) Collections like this are precious because they introduce the whole range of our tradition as it stood before it was ravaged by the anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-military, multicultural, and – well, anti-American movements. It is not that we can’t get hold of our pre-PC literature if we look for it, and quite a bit of it is still in print, but it’s hard to know where to begin when no one alive teaches our history or literature as a tradition. Groups like the Conservative Book Club can help, but I prefer to start with older collections like American Literature, which are more than adequate to set one on an unending journey of reading and discovery.

American Literature seems to be aimed at male high school students, and one point that it emphasizes is the concept of citizenship. The idea seems to be that American literature can help to instill in young readers a sense of national identity and patriotism. A noble enough purpose, although it does raise the question of what the cause was of the lack of patriotism that obviously concerned educators at the time. In any event, one section that caught my eye presents two selections on the topic of “citizenship.” The first is by Theodore Roosevelt, published in 1910 in the first Handbook of the Boy Scouts of America and quoted here. The other is a 1915 speech by Woodrow Wilson to newly naturalized citizens, reproduced in its entirety here. The textbook asks students to compare and contrast the conceptions of citizenship held by each man, and asks “Which of the two selections is more likely to live? Why?” I thought I would try to turn in a response some 70 years later.

Roosevelt writes that the Boy Scout movement is “in its essence a practical scheme through which to impart a proper standard of ethical conduct, proper standards of fair play and consideration for others, and courage and decency, to boys who have never been reached and never will be reached by the ordinary type of preaching, lay or clerical.” After discussing the excellent service rendered by boy scouts in the Philippines after a major fire, he explains that “The [Boy Scout] movement is one for efficiency and patriotism. It does not try to make soldiers of boy scouts, but to make boys who will turn out as men to be fine citizens and who will, if their country needs them, make better soldiers for having been scouts.” Honing in on the idea of citizenship, he writes:

No one can be a good American unless he is a good citizen, and every boy ought to train himself so that as a man he will be able to do his full duty to the community. I want to see the boy scouts not merely utter fine sentiments, but act on them; not merely sing, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” but act in a way that will give them a country to be proud of. No man is a good citizen unless he so acts as to show that he actually uses the Ten Commandments, and translates the Golden Rule into his life conduct – and I don’t mean by this in exceptional cases under spectacular circumstances, but I mean applying the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule in the ordinary affairs of every-day life.
Roosevelt elaborates several things he would like boy scouts to learn, such as taking care of their neighborhood parks and not permitting a “gang of toughs” to ruin them; exercising self-control; and treating girls and women well.

I was a boy scout; and although in reality boy scouts are not so squeaky clean, cussing, talking about girls, and playing cards, I have many fond memories of camping, sailing, ushering at football games, and other activities I could never have experienced otherwise. And I do think that the all-male environment, with good supervision, is good for boys. By the way, the idea that such a movement could function with openly homosexual scoutmasters is beneath contempt, too ridiculous for words.

I think one can detect in Roosevelt’s moral exhortations a sense of social and moral crisis brought on by urbanization and immigration. Why should there be a movement with such an explicit emphasis on parks and the outdoors, unless there were the perception that the boys of the day were being harmed by their urban environment? And who were the “gangs of toughs” who needed to be driven from the parks? In any event, this dear man sees the solution to various social problems in personal responsibility and morality.

Woodrow Wilson’s speech is entirely different. Speaking to newly naturalized citizens, one might expect him to discuss what it means to be American, and he does so. And knowing Wilson, one might expect a touch of utopianism and one-world idealism. However, I was not prepared to see, in this 95-year-old speech, today’s neoconservative “proposition nation” ideology and simpering adoration of immigrants in such perfected form. George Bush and John McCain and the other politicians who drone on about how we are a “nation of immigrants” are saying nothing new at all; they are merely calling for the final, full implementation of Wilson’s ideals.

Wilson declares that

This is the only country in the world which experiences this constant and repeated rebirth. Other countries depend upon the multiplication of their own native people. This country is constantly drinking strength out of new sources by the voluntary association with it of great bodies of strong men and forward-looking women out of other lands. And so by the gift of the free will of independent people it is being constantly renewed from generation to generation by the same process by which it was originally created. It is as if humanity had determined to see to it that this great nation, founded for the benefit of humanity, should not lack for the allegiance of the people of the world.

Is this American exceptionalism, that sees America as so special that those immigrants self-selected by their desire to come here are by definition good and enriching to our society, not beginning to look like a vain conceit at the beginning of the 21st century? Thank you very much, but I’d rather be an ordinary country. Of course, Wilson was thinking of Italians, Slavs, and Jews; the segregation-minded Southerner would not have dreamed of the type of immigration that now has America in a death-grip. But having defined America as “founded for the benefit of humanity” one hardly has any grounds to exclude any particular part of humanity from membership.

Today, anyone who has a “dream” of coming here to have a “better life” seems by that fact to be consecrated as morally superior, more entitled to the country than its native citizens. Wilson’s use of the word to express an almost boundless reverence for desire of immigrants to come here, foretells that usage:

No doubt what you found here did not seem touched for you, after all, with the complete beauty of the ideal which you had conceived beforehand. But remember this: If we had grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you, at any rate, imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief. That is the reason I, for one, make you welcome. If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for, I will thank God if you will remind me. I was born in America. You dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and I hope you brought the dreams with you….

Assuming President Obama was actually born in America, he might find this speech a useful reference for when he is called upon to swear in some “new Americans.” However, I must give Wilson credit. He did at least want the new Americans to assimilate:

I certainly would not be one even to suggest that a man cease to love the home of his birth and the nation of his origin – these things are very sacred and ought not to be put out of our hearts – but it is one thing to love the place where you were born and it is another thing to dedicate yourself to the place to which you go…. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American, and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worth son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

And:

You have come to this great nation voluntarily seeking something that we have to give, and all that we have to give is this: We cannot exempt you from work. No man is exempt from work anywhere in the world. We cannot exempt you from the strife and the heartbreaking burden of the struggle of the day – that is common to mankind everywhere; we cannot exempt you from the loads that you must carry. We can only make them light by the spirit in which they are carried. That is the spirit of hope, it is the spirit of liberty, it is the spirit of justice.

Darn right on both counts. And I’ll give Wilson credit for this, too: he was sincere in his love for his country, and wanted others to share its blessings. But as for me, I’ll take Roosevelt and the Boy Scouts. Programs like that will not save the world, but they can do some real good. Words like Wilson’s, beautifully conceived, can be the seeds of deadly delusion. And once you have given that precious gift, citizenship, to an outsider, it is a little late to begin telling him what you expect.

Finally, a bigger question looms up as we think of these earlier ideas of citizenship: what would being a good American citizen mean today? When the major institutions of our society work against the well-being of Americans, one thing a good citizen needs to do is resist the status quo. We can give Roosevelt the last word on that matter:

The man who tears down and criticizes and scolds may be a good citizen, but only in a negative sense; and if he never does anything else he is apt not to be a good citizen at all. The man who counts, and the boy who counts are the man and boy who steadily endeavor to build up, to improve, to better living conditions everywhere and all about them.

Notes

(1) Blankenship, Russell, Rollo Lyman, and Howard Hill, eds., Our Literary Heritage: American Literature, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937.