Needless to say, Micha, I’m happy to live in a country in which you’re free to say a thing like that.

However, I’m not sure it’s an adequate statement of your position. I’d be happy to leave you alone if you could work your way up to just being neutral toward your fellow nationals. To at least this observer, however, you seem to actively despise them. And that bothers me. Shouldn’t it?

I suspect you’ll enjoy these moving portraits of “poor undocumented workers just trying to get by.”

Of course, I’m sure they’re just defending their community against “nativist bullies.” Motivated, perhaps, by an unhealthy interest in their butts? I’m afraid your “hint” has left me quite bemused.

Amusingly (ironically?), the ideal autarkic society of the present day conservative xenophobe reminds me an awful lot of the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Hint: It wasn’t all about the butt sex.

Where does the loyalty debt come from?

I think you exaggerate the hostility abroad, or at least its significance. It’s overblown.

our real responsibility is even enhance these differences
Why do I want other countries to become less productive? I view the world in more positive sum terms. The more productive nations also tend to be easier to get along with.

My goodness. To exclude foreigners from our country is no more “imposing a cost on outsiders” than is to exclude strangers from our homes. Our culture and people may or may not be best, but this is entirely beside the point. This is our country.

Will, look, I realize: people who think like me probably cannot persuade people who think like you. My Italian-American Catholic pastor, whom I love, believes that there is basically no such thing as an American, because we are all immigrants. I don’t argue with him because it is not my place in that context to do so, but he would agree with you. My side on the other hand believes that America is an actual nation that holds a proposition, not a proposition with a mythical nation built around it. My side actually believes in Blood and Soil, believes that the pioneers that tamed our land and the heroes that spilled their own blood in our wars did it for their own posterity’s sake. We are that posterity. Loyal immigrants regard themselves as adopted children to that posterity. This matters.

Immigrants of course are part of America, but it is strange and disturbing that many of them should come to regard themselves as the chief or most representative part.

I am really at a loss as to where to take the argument from here. All my premises seem to differ from yours. I am not sure that you and I can even agree to disagree, because I am not sure that you and I are even capable of discussion the same point. I wish however that you would come around to a view of the nation that truly honors the sacrifices and achievements of those that tamed the North American wilderness and carved a great nation out of it.

Howard

At first it sounds like you’re talking about disagreements over the degree of phenotypic canalization, which is something nice and empirical that I can get along with. But I suspect you may have an inadequate appreciation for how even small but consistent genetic biases at the individual level can make a big difference at the level of groups, for things like social organization and economic performance.

Say you’ve got two populations, A and B. Say that A has a slight genetic bias that results in its average IQ being 5 points higher than B’s (or makes them just slightly more hardworking, or more conscientious, or whatever other trait you take to be a big contributor to prosperity). If you picked two individuals at random from the respective populations and compared their productivity you wouldn’t expect them to perform all that differently. But at the population level A could end up vastly outperforming B because these small biases accumulate over many trials to result in a significant effect on total productivity.

So let’s say that, holding these (small but not insignificant) genetic biases constant, you start transplanting people from population B to A. This will tend to cause the rate of increase in prosperity for A to decrease. On average this will be a large win for the transplants, a small loss for the older As, and presumably neutral for the remaining Bs. Maybe this is a change worth making and maybe it isn’t, but it seems clear that there’s a tradeoff in this kind of situation between inclusiveness and rate of economic growth.

The same sort of reasoning applies to social organization too (I’m thinking of your old essay about ethical infrastructure). All you need to presume are relatively small biases in relevant traits that persist across environments and this becomes an issue. I think this is what Moldbug was clumsily getting at when he talked about the US becoming more like Mexico. Maybe it’ll turn out that the tradeoff is morally worth it up to some inflection point, but it’s still a tradeoff.

It’s very hard to get a reliable idea of where the magic balance point of ethical optimality is here because there are so many variables at play. So predictably it turns into a game of “pick your favorite moral intuition and hammer it which as much rhetorical force as you can, and under no circumstances examine your own assumptions as closely as you scrutinize the other guy’s”. Which is pretty much where I lose interest. My policy instincts are to lower transaction costs and let the market sort it out, but unfortunately there’s a lot of non-market factors that keep it from being this simple.

BTW, if you’re looking for a small cudgel with which to beat back Vdare types, check this out.