The thing that is interesting about immigration and group conflict and prejudice isn’t that it was so especially unique or terrible in America, it’s that it’s a universal problem everywhere, for all humans, and continues to be at all levels of socieity and, in all places, among all people, including those who to outsiders appear closely connected or indistinguishable.

There is an open, universal question being addressed. To what degree are we morally obligated to let in any person who wants to come into our territory and exploit it? That question doesn’t have a clear answer. The historical answer across most cultures would be, not much. And countries have a right to protect their borders and people have a right to try to protect their interests, because that’s their living.

With the Chinese thats a particularly interesting problem because they have moved into so many countries themselves around the globe, seeking opportunity, but the official position of the Chinese government on immigration is that non-Chinese people have no right to come into China on any kind of equal footing. Foreigners can ever only exist there in a provisional space, and the government will control every business venture you engage in and never grant you equal status as a citizen. And they’ve been having a lot of success and it’s given them a lot of advantages and bargaining power.

Their answer to the open question I mentioned is that they should be given rights to enter in anywhere, but that no one has those rights but them in China. The Chinese see their duty as protecting the rights and opportu ties of the Chinese. And really, that’s been the historical norm. They’re just perhaps the largest, most successful openly protectionist and totalitarian nation in the modern world. And you can’t just take for granted that the Chinese are wrong in their position., especially if they use their strength and solidarity to exploit the weakness of the European liberal political and economic systems to outperform them and eventually dominate them and supplant them. If their strategy succeeds and liberal western states and their influence crumble, that will be a historical argument in their favor.

America was really a bizzare and highly unusual experiment. The idea of a territory where people from anywhere could just come in and find anything even remotely similar to open and equal opportunity, especially when you’re bringing together all these different groups that can hardly stand their next door neighbors, like the Cornish and Irish, is a crazy and bizzare anamoly of untested experimentation far outside the norm of human experience and political strategy.

The fact that Asians were able to come to America and become the wealthiest and most educated subgroup, along with the Jews, is crazy, whatever difficulties they faced (and they did face many). It’s even crazier that it was possible for both groups to have that result in the same country. The fact that the wealthiest people group of African descent on the planet live in a country to which they were originally brought as slaves is also crazy. The fact that Irish, English, French, German, and so many other nationalities that had been fighting for centuries gave up so much of their identities and just lived together and mixed together when they had spent a thousand years hardly mixing with people from the next county over is crazy.

The crazy thing about America is that it was unique in its comparative lack of interest in the broad, obvious categories of division and identity, such a nationality and ethnicity, and much more interested, comparatively, in what you as an individual could contribute and accomplish. And the West was perhaps the most open frontier for that opportunity that had ever existed in history.

Of course opprtunity creates competition and generates its own unique problems. Being more open than anywhere ever meant you suddenly had all these groups rubbing elbows that had never had to face anything like it before. Never, before America, had anyone tried to build such a society out of such a crazy quilt of mismatched and unfamiliar groups, who had little means to know about or understand one another. And they all wanted a piece of the same unique opportunity and had left the confines of their old homes, that didn’t provide it, to pursue it. The fact that it went as well as it did and hung together at all is an argument in favor of the Ameican experiment.

Covid has been interesting because in many ways it’s a challenge to the system of open travel and unrestricted borders. It’s not clear that, when you let someone in, that you aren’t letting in something potentially dangerous to your own wellbeing. Europe is struggling with that same problem, for different reasons. European countries still maintain strong cultural identities forged out of an immense shared history and culture and genetic similarity. And now they’re trying to absorb very large numbers of radically different groups in a very short time frame (at one point around 3% of their total population in a year) and finding that it isn’t so easy and has a lot of difficult consequences.

You can’t just take for granted that it will all go fine and won’t matter and there won’t be any serious problems of conpatibility in the social ecosystem. People and cultures aren’t just generic. There are meaningful, real differences between cultures that people have legitimate concerns about how they can be integrated and coexist in a shared endeavor.

Cooperation, especially as individual and cultural differences maximize, becomes hard. And the argument “but we’ll all get rich and be prosperous and get opportunities” was a compelling carrot that America used to convince people to go along with it. But especially as (and if) American and Western prosperity fades and as (and if) authoritarian regimes like China succeed, it calls those compromises and that deal into question.

The real genius of Western liberal states is an idea that proceeds from Judeo-Christian religious teaching, that the appropriate level of analysis for a human is the individual, not the identity category. That God cares about the individual contents of the human heart, not where you came from. But that’s not the default or obvious answer, especially for a species that is so hypersocial and has such differing subcultures and strategies; that’s a disruptive answer.

And it’s not obvious that it’s going to be the default position going forward. Extremes of both left and right push away from it and toward a recentering of status based on identity classes. They might pick different classes to favor, but it’s the principle, not the example, that defines the activity. One group might say that it’s unfair and prejudiced to pick out and focus on the bad behaviors of a group, using it to characterize them as a class and assign class guilt. One group might pick blacks and say that you shouldn’t, that it’s morally wrong, point out statistics about criminality or drug or alcohol use or child abandonment, and argue that really most individuals are just people trying to live their lives and protect their interests.

What groups you feel you can’t or can’t do this kind of thing with depends entirely on your sympathies. Because you could do it with anyone. You could argue that most Irish or Chinese or English or Italian people, or white people in general, were just the same. And they shouldn’t be characterized according to this or that and assigned class guilt. Or maybe you think that you have a moral obligation to praise and focus on the positives of a group and ignore the negative aspects.

The higher truth is that there’s more than enough guilt to go around and convict everyone, every group, if we were being fair. And there’s an argument to pardon and ignore the faults of every group. No one really deserves a pass on judgement merely because they were either victors or victims, successful or unsuccessful. And some people are prejudiced toward the winners and some people are prejudiced toward the losers. It’s all fundamentally prejudice, because the arguments work both for and against everyone. If your narrative of sympathy tends toward either, you’ll only see the group you’re not in sympathy with as heroes by class identity and the other group as villains by class identity.

And the argument, “Yes, but we’re actually right about those people,” is exactly what everyone says. And, frankly, everyone is right. There is enough in every culture, in every person, to convict them. And if you’re sympathetic and see whatever group you favor as most proximate to your sympathies, there’s no limit to what you can excuse and ignore and justify.

That’s why class identity as the seat of focus for moral judgements is such an empty game. It assigns both virtues and vice too blindly. It plays a prejudiced game and tries to solve it with another prejudiced game. And conflicts between groups can only be resolved through group conflict and competition, through taking down the other group and pushing your group up. It’s an extremely simple and low-resolution solution to what is actually a complex and high-resolution problem.

Characterizing life and its conflicts according to shallow identities and measures doesn’t help, but rather exacerbates the problem. The world is so big and complex, and our perception and understanding is so limited, even of people quite close to us like people in our family and co-workers and neighbors. It’s not clear that it’s actually possible for most people to have anything but low-resolution pictures of and judgements about the majority of everyone they encounter. And it’s not clear that solving that problem by just assuming that everyone and everything is really the same, with the same generic beliefs and interests, is accurate or helpful.

There’s a real problem to be solved here, because if people really are blank slates and all differences are constructed and artificial, and all people and cultures have equivalent value, then there’s really nothing to be gained from cultural diversity. It’s doesn’t actually exist, it’s illusory, and there is no value other than what you already possess to be gained from anyone. They have nothing, really, to learn from you or you from them. “So why bother welcoming them?” is just as legitimate a question as “why not welcome them?” Reason doesn’t compel you to do so, and there’s nothing to be gained, so why expend the extra effort?

On the other hand, if there is some sort of higher, independent value toward which all people and all cultures aim and each capture more or less, but all inadequately and incompletely, then there might be real value in getting another perspective. But that premise would undermine the equal value premise that undergirds multiculturalism.

In my opinion, the mistake is in thinking that cultural relativism actually promotes rather than undermines multiculturalism. Because if cultural relativism is true then there’s really no external value or reason not to be completely and exclusively vested in your own individual culture. There’s nothing out there other than or better than whatever you already have. It’s only when objectivism and ideas of independent value and truth that transcend and exceed cultural norms rear their ugly, judgemental heads that we are actually forced to consider legitimate criticism of our own assumptions and value in someone else’s.

America, having lost faith in itself and in its ideas, is gradually evolving backward toward pre-liberal stances of tribalism and identitarianism, where the main things about everyone, the most interesting and significant things about them, the most important conflicts they face, are those of class identity, class guilt, class advancement, and class value assignment; tribal identity, rather than the individual.

It might seem like life is becoming more about the individuals, but it really isn’t, and it can’t under a belief system like cultural relativism and critical race theory. It’s just changing which individuals. It’s changing the rules for who gets assigned what, not how. It’s not freedom from prejudice, it’s just a new formula for assigning it. Because there’s isn’t any alternative absent a transcendent standard that judges both.

And since prejudice breeds prejudice and antagonism breeds resistance, you get both sides of the conflict pushing deeper and deeper into defending their tribal territory and “their people” and promoting their heroes and decrying their villains. But since there is no shared, objective neutral ground between them, there can only be blame on one side and self-righteousness on the other. There isn’t a place for the two sides to meet or integrate where they can recognize the shared faults and virtues of both. You just keep beating drum of the stories of class virtue and class villainy.

Ultimately, the question of how open borders (in any sense) should be is an open and ever-changing question, something that recent events have greatly emphasized. Entire civilizations have died because they didn’t recognize the threat they were welcoming into their midst. And others have stagnated and starved because they didn’t avail themselves of the opportunities and gains to be had.

Everyone wants opportunity, and everyone wants security. And it’s not always clear how to balance those needs, or to balance the risks and opportunities that other people present, especially when very different groups suddenly come together in a shared space of potential competition and cooperation. Americans can hardly stand the idea of the other half of America sharing the country with them. What makes them think the rest of the world will be any different? And if the stakes really are high (as people often argue they are, especially in elections and in the news) and you can’t just take for granted that we’ll all be fine and happy and equally successful and secure no matter what, then we all the more cause for real concern. People have good reasons to be very concerned about what they might miss if they don’t or what they might lose if they do or do not.

Those endemic assumptions we all carry, the things that we take for granted that other, different, people wouldn’t, or don’t, or haven’t, are dangerous blind spots. We assume we have answers to questions that aren’t really settled. Even America as an experiment is still very young and may prove untenable and unstable and may fail and crumble back into something else. Liberalism may prove to just be a brief, unstable flirtation that is replaced by something more like the Chinese system. In fact it seems more likely every day.

Communism as a form of totalitarianism was deeply rooted in class identity and judgement according to class. It failed, but its doing so wasn’t an obvious or expected outcome for many. And maybe it was flawed just because it picked the wrong class identities to focus on, an idea of class identity too unstable and vague to really achieve the kind of group solidarity and group opposition necessary to make the revolution take hold. That doesn’t mean it can’t take a new, better, form based on more stable class identities and tribes.

The stories and myths and tales of heroes and monsters of today, the tales of what is interesting and important and significant about people’s lives and identity and value are being written centered solidly around class identities and the oppositions and conflicts between them. That’s the primary level of analysis for humans now. That’s why so many stories seem so political these days. Because we’re returning, possibly most strongly in those areas that propose to be progressing away from it, toward a tribalistic culture of class and identity as the fundamental way to understand and evaluate people and their relationships. From an intellectual standpoint, looking at the underlying philosophies, almost inevitably so. Where else was cultural relativism supposed to go?

But to the average observer it will no doubt appear mystifiying that ideologies such as anti-racism, which sound unquestionably great, seem in practice to be leading to something like a voluntary return to segregation, or why attempts to eliminate sexism seem to be divide the sexes even more, or why attempts to create economic equality often result in even worse inequality.

These outcomes would seem very confusing to anyone who hadn’t studied history sufficiently to actually appreciate what produced many of the previous problems we now look back on, and misunderstand how much we share in those same qualities and strategies ourselves. We genuinely think we’re better or different, but all we do is share different assumptions and prejudices. And it’s not clear, even by our own metrics, that ours are right or better or more accurate or more stable.

For all our wealth, a lot of nations past would be unimpressed by our culture, and it looks like current and future generations and countries are currently losing their appreciation for it and respect for it and are ready to tear it down and try something new. We had a really good postwar period, and we’ve been coasting off it for a long time. But the rise is slowing and even reversing in some places. It’s not clear in what direction things will go. Globalism and liberalism may have reached their limit and begun their natural decay. You can’t take for granted that that isn’t the case. America, as it has been, is a strange experiment, the exception, not the rule. And nothing last forever if it is not nourished and transmitted carefully to the next generation. Perhaps we are simply reaching the long, slow decline of this story.