It may seem that the unquestioning acceptance of current open immigration policy is readily explained by such factors as our immigrant tradition, the heritage of the civil rights movement, our national commitments to compassion, racial equality and opportunity, and so on. But to my mind, these familiar ideas fail to explain our country’s amazing lack of serious concern about this issue. How is it that America can launch itself so casually on these uncharted waters of multiracialism and multiculturalism? What is the source of America’s apparent confidence that a social scheme that has never existed before in history, and that most other countries in the world would try to avoid at all costs, will work here? And what motivates this frenzied rush to transform our country in the absence of any compelling need to do it?

The very nature of these questions indicates that there may be no satisfactory answer. That a free and great people should show such eagerness to allow itself to be undone is a mystery that would seem to defy rational analysis. Perhaps the answer lies not on the historical plane, but within America’s collective psyche. What follows is an attempt to offer some speculative approaches to this problem for those who may be as mystified by it as I am.

Idolizing Ourselves as “A Nation of Immigrants”

Part of the explanation for our present course may lie in the insight that we are indeed not pursuing a practical future goal but rather a chimera from our past. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, speaks of the tendency of a successful society to “rest on its oars” and fail to meet new challenges because it is worshipping its own past success. “A fatuous passivity towards the present,” says Toynbee, “springs from an infatuation with the past, and this infatuation is the sin of idolatry.” Thus ancient Athens was idolizing itself as the “Education of Hellas” at the very moment when its imperial arrogance had brought upon itself the war that would wreck it; similarly, the ancient Greeks’ idolization of their greatest political achievement, the city-state, prevented them from forming a national federation. The city-states then tore each other to pieces in an interminable series of wars until Greece was eventually taken over by Rome.(84)

Toynbee’s idea casts light on our present situation. Just as the ancient Greeks were guilty of the sin of pride regarding their own past accomplishments and so failed to respond in new ways to new conditions, so America, in idolizing its own past self as “a nation of immigrants,” is refusing to recognize new facts that require new responses. In our immigration policy, far from pursuing any rational end, we are merely trying to fulfill a glorified self-image. Like Shakespeare’s Timon, we are vain about our own goodness, and our exercise of that goodness ignores rational self-interest (as well as the real interests of those we think we are helping). To a bemused world that cannot understand our mindless generosity, we say, like Timon,

You mistake my love;
I gave it freely ever, and there’s none
Can truly say he gives, if he receives.

Because America has been so singularly blessed in the past, we have come to regard ourselves as a chosen people. No disaster can befall us. Therefore, we disregard the common-sense precautions that every other country in the world is most careful to take. And, like Timon, we may be headed for a fall, when the very people we have so carelessly benefited shall turn against us and rend us.

Global Moralism and Individual Morality

Robert Nisbet has argued that a streak of moralism in the American character, a tendency to frame both foreign and domestic issues in millenialist imagery and eternal absolutes, has led the nation into unrealistic policies over and over in our history. In foreign relations, President Kennedy’s promise “to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship . . . to assure the success and survival of liberty” led us into the Vietnam quagmire without our forming a realistic strategy or rationale for that war. In domestic race relations, we can see the same moralism at work in the excesses of affirmative action and racial quotas. It didn’t matter that forced school desegregation or open admissions were destroying the very school systems they were meant to improve. The hypnotizing rightness of the cause of equality blinded policy makers and federal judges to all other considerations.

A similar moralistic blindness now informs our public attitudes toward immigration and multiculturalism. As I have said earlier, the idea of our equality and responsibility, not just to our fellow citizens, but to every person and culture in the world, has become a kind of absolute. In the light of that absolute, all other values become irrelevant.

The global conception of morality results, I would argue, in a distortion of morality rather than its fulfillment. Ethics could be defined as a sense of responsibility toward other human beings and the consequent willingness to put restraints on one’s own behavior. As a personal development, a sense of ethics normally originates in the family and among those we are close to and then is extended outward in widening circles to other human beings. The distortion of this natural basis of morality is brought about when it is applied in the abstract to collectivities of human beings, or even to the human race as a whole. Even thoughtful liberals are beginning to realize the impossible burden such an obligation places on human nature. As Christopher Lasch has written:

My study of the family suggested . . . that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they differ.(85)

This sentimental fiction arises, I think, when we take our own personal experience of love or ethical responsibility and say: “Because I feel this for one or a few people, and because this feeling is good, I must feel the same way toward everyone, I must act on the same basis toward the entire human race as a collective whole.” Once people have taken this stand, and especially if they try to convert it into public policy, all rational limits of common sense or self-interest are thrown out the window. Ultimately, this obligation must be imposed by political force, since no one can actually love the whole human race. What starts, then, as a personal sense of compassion and responsibility for individuals ends as a collectivized ethics which compels men to love the foreigner (not just the individual foreigner, but all foreigners) more than their own.

Examples of this manipulation of compassion abound. A 1988 NBC News special on immigration, hosted by Tom Brokaw, told about some citizens of Lowell, Massachusetts, who were so moved by the plight of a recently arrived Cambodian girl that they helped her whole family enter the U.S. and settle in Massachusetts. On the face of it, it was simply the story of a generous, humane response to people in need. But it was, in fact, pure propaganda, enveloping the issue of refugee assistance in a veil of quasi-religious emotions. In this compassion play, the Cambodians were portrayed less as actual human beings than as sacred objects, while the Americans, in the act of helping them, experienced “redemption.” The few locals who expressed unhappiness about the Cambodian influx into Lowell were portrayed as backwoods bigots. The not-so-subtle message was that Americans owe a moral obligation of refuge to everyone in the world—and that anyone who disagrees with that proposition is less than human. Thus the story of a voluntary act of compassion became an exercise in collective moral blackmail.

National Suicide as an Escape from Self-Knowledge

It is here, with this idea of an ill-conceived but powerfully felt and ideologically enforced moral duty, that we may have found part of the answer to our earlier question: where do people get the unquestioning confidence that a scheme which goes against all human experience will work so well here? The truth, I suspect, is that people know deep in their own minds that it will not work; but their moral ideology and the fierce social sanctions supporting it forbid them to think or utter this truth. To admit that their global morality is mistaken would mean admitting that they are, by their own standards, “racist”—the very worst thing that anyone can be by those standards. Consequently they repress the knowledge of the disaster their policies are leading to by, paradoxically, rushing ever more fervently toward it. It is like a man in the grip of an addiction. To abstain and thus face himself would be unbearable, it would cause too much anxiety; so to flee from that anxiety that is the price of self-knowledge and freedom, he plunges with ever more abandon toward the very thing that he knows will destroy him. The only difference is that in America’s case the object of the addiction is not a harmful drug, but a confused morality which tells us that it is “racist” to preserve our own society.

Hybris and Nemesis

This infantile belief that we can somehow save the world (or at least our own souls) by allowing the whole world to move here, this inflated idealism that sees America, much as the French revolutionists saw France, as the “Christ of Nations,” is bound up with a classic flaw in human nature: the unwillingness to accept rational limits. Irving Babbitt’s analysis of this age-old moral failing has profound implication for us today:

Man’s expansive conceit, as the Greeks saw, produces insolent excess (hybris) and this begets blindness (âte) which in turn brings on Nemesis. Expansive conceit tempered by Nemesis—this is a definition of an essential aspect of human nature that finds considerable support in the facts of history. Man never rushes forward so confidently, it would sometimes seem, as when he is on the very brink of the abyss.(86)

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