A head to head on ethics and legal authority, which may be of interest in light of recent squabbles. Dr. Paul: We’re often reminded that…
]]>Wasn’t this the meaning of the old anti-counterculture motto “America: love it or leave it?” Doesn’t persecuting immigrants for not conforming suggest a good reason for persecuting natives for not conforming? Doesn’t the attitude of conservatives to today’s cultural left as ‘un-American’ suggest a poorly hidden desire to do just that? Isn’t this what policies such as the drug war are really all about?
]]>Quite right. Assimilationists like to claim that what they’re really concerned with is how far people are willing to understand and responsibly participate in the political process, respect the laws, etc., but (whatever the merits or demerits of that may be) what they actually fixate on in practice are a bunch of ethno-linguistic trappings (language, holidays, theo-nationalist flag rituals, etc.) that clearly mark out members of different ethnicities, but are completely irrelevant to the assimilationists’ stated political goals. Sometimes you’ll get a specious argument to the effect that people couldn’t possibly participate in the political process if they don’t all speak the same language. You know, like how they do in Switzerland or Belgium.
Of course, one thing we need to do here is separate out a couple questions. First, the ethical question about assimilation needs to be separated from the political question (since even if immigrants ought to assimilate,
in some respect or another, the government hasn’t got any right to force them to). And the ethical question needs to be broken down into a bunch of questions about specific cases. Should immigrants be expected to adopt the norm that you can’t kill female relatives who dishonor
the family? Yes, of course. Should they be expected to learn English? No, not really, although many will themselves decide that it would be useful enough to justify the trouble. Should they be expected to vote, or write their legislators, or read the newspaper, or celebrate Flag Day? Jesus, who cares?
About the only things that it’s reasonable to expect people to assimilate
to are (1) demands of morality that you have independent reasons to expect them to conform to (thus having nothing essentially to do with assimilation
or immigrant status), and (2) reasonable demands of local etiquette (which it only makes sense to expect them to conform to in certain contexts, and which it’s not worth making that big a fuss about, anyway). The idea that ethno-linguistic homogenization is a compelling ethical interest, let alone a compelling state interest, is, as you say, a bunch of collectivist rot.
The idea of a homogenous nation, all speaking the officially standardized dialect of the national tongue within a set of lines on a map, is an artifact of the modern absolute state. It’s so messy to have Greeks in Anatolia, Wends in Germany, Provencals in France, and so on. Or Americans who don’t speak homogenized Midwest-Californish, or Brits who don’t speak BBC Standard. Really embarassing from the standpoint of fatherland-worship.
]]>They don’t.
Weren’t Ron Pauls’s heroes lawbreakers?
You cannot base a moral argument against someone on the fact that they broke a law.
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