Cultural confidence and the radical cringe

Earlier this week, I was rereading a book from one of my favorite living scholars, and came across this little gem:

 "[A]s the age of the Ottoman Empire's preeminence in military, cultural, and scientific achievements gave way to centuries in which European countries overtook them in all these respects, the confident and cosmopolitan toleration of minorities within the Ottoman Empire gave way to an era of Ottoman anxiety about dangers from without and within, and to xenophobia that greatly restricted and endangered Jews and other minorities."
– Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

Conservatives can boast of few advocates as brilliant as Thomas Sowell and there are few scholars of any ideological persuasion matching his depth and breadth.  I assume, therefore, that that those who seriously support free markets and free peoples must take Sowell's ideas seriously.  What Sowell implies in the excerpt above is that a loss of civilizational confidence may trigger a wave of xenophobia directed at ethnic minorities within one's borders.  He expands on this idea elsewhere in his books, as well as online essays such as this one in which Sowell points out that “When people are confronted with a choice between hating themselves for their stagnation or hating others for their progress, they seldom hate themselves” but rather “become hostile to the newcomers and . . . believe that they [the immigrants] have done something illegitimate to achieve success.”

What, if anything, do these generalizations from an eminent scholar of history and economics tell us about our most recent wave of anti-immigrant hysteria?  Our current mania has resulted in the formation of a citizen militia to keep watch on the southern border, as well as a bevy of state laws designed to make our land less hospitable to the those who cross borders without first consulting with the central bureaucracy in order to get their official papers signed and sealed, not to mention the creation of a woefully unregulated market in human trafficking. 

Perhaps Sowell’s insights are not applicable here.  Maybe anti-immigrant activists and their sympathizers are not generally motivated by the fear that our nation will cease to be incomparably great in military, cultural, economic, and scientific domains.  Maybe, though, Sowell really is on to something here.  Perhaps it is not merely the direct economic threat from the bilingual folks who did my landscaping and my roof, but also the more generalized anxiety that America (like Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs) has gone well past its prime and will never again be as powerful and preeminent as it once was.

 

 

Mulatos, multiculturalism & morals

Two-thirds of a multi-racial nuclear family

Finished both of (soon-be-President) Obama's books over the weekend and I'm more confident than ever that he is the man for the job. I was particularly impressed with Obama’s express understanding of multiple cultures alongside an implicit rejection of multiculturalism. Barack can feign a decent inner-city brogue, as well as a passable Kenyan accent, but he makes it clear that despite (or perhaps because of) his experience with various cultures, he himself affirms distinct moral preferences (e.g. monogamous fatherhood) which may well run counter to those accepted in other cultures.

In the course of both books, you get the sense that Barack Obama has carved out for himself a individual identity in which widely and dearly held ideas of race and culture are subordinated to quintessentially American values which he is willing to defend and expound openly - even at the risk of castration from the Old Guard. It may be that only one with direct blood ties to black and white families can so audaciously hope to transcend race and culture successfully on the national stage.

That is not to say that such ideas are novel. This week, I'm delving even further into difficult questions of race and culture with Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals. From what I've seen thus far, it is going to be an absolute romp compared to his (far drier) books on beginner/intermediate economic theory. Certainly it does not lack insight or originality. The idea that inner-city "ghetto" culture was transplanted from Southern "redneck" culture, which in turn was transplanted from the northern hill country of Britain certainly resonates and no doubt touches nerves on both sides.