Saturday, March 26, 2016

An Alternative to Liberalism part 2 post 3: Partition, Allotment, and Domain in Greek and Norse Myth

In Part 2, we discussed efforts at a theory of autonomy built on Aristotelian and ecological sources.  In this part, I will tie these together with Norse and Greek myth to flesh them out and develop a fuller theory of freedom.

The main thesis here is that both mythological systems provide for a view of freedom which is domain rather than rights-based.  We are given a lot in life bounded by length and law.  Within that lot we have freedom, but if we step outside, we die.

At one point, I thought that the similarities here were evidence of a common Indo-European framework and while there are some commonalities in the Indo-European world (spinning and fate being closely connected), the overall cosmology is different enough in Indian, Irish, Greek, and Norse systems that these seem not to be genetically related culturally speaking.[1]

Fate in Greek Myth:  Partition, Allotment, and Domain


In his important book, "From Religion to Philosophy," F. M. Cornford embarked on an ambitious project to show the extent to which early Greek philosophers drew from Greek religious models in their basic cosmology.  In order to do so, he embarked on an ambitious analysis of Homer and Hesiod in relation to concepts of fate.

The Greek word for fate, Cornford points out, simply means partition and it exists in relation to a term lachesis, which besides being the name of one of the Fates, is also referred to as a process by which partitions are distributed in Homeric poetry.  Lachesis thus acts as a distributor of pieces of a whole (an example he gives is the use of the term in connection with the domains of the elder gods -- Zeus having domain over the heavens, Poseidon over the seas, and Hades over the underworld). Lachesis is how the gods' kingdoms were distributed.

When one steps out of the allotted domain, one reaches nemesis (which Cornford suggests may be related to nomos or law, and nemeton).  Nemesis thus is the enforcement of the borders of the lot.  Cornford also points out that in some regards, the lot is treated as a debt repaid on death.

The image we get for fate then among the Greeks is not one of predestination but one of a lot in life, loaned by the Fates, and taken back when it is exceeded either in length or limits of action.  Freedom of action and fate are thus nicely woven together in a way we have usually tried to separate them in the West.

Fate in Norse Myth:  Allotment, Primal Debt, and the Spoken Word


The Norse view of fate is often seen as similar enough to the Greek model that people suggest that the Germanic peoples borrowed the idea from the Greeks.  In both cases there are strong formal similarities: three mythological women dispensing fate.  There are also connections to spinning and weaving via etymology.

The Coming of the Norns is worth repeating here in its entirely from Voluspa (with my translation below):

Þaðan koma meyjar,
margs vitandi,
þrjár ór þeim sæ
er und þolli stendr.
Urð hétu eina,
aðra Verðandi,
- skáru á skíði -
Skuld ina þriðju.
Þær lög lögðu,
þær líf kuru
alda börnum,
ørlög seggja. (Eysteinn Björnsson's edition)

Then came maidens
Greatly knowing (i.e. knowing magic)
Three from the well
That under the tree stands
Urdh (Fate) is the name of the first
The next, Verdhandi (Turning/Transforming)

- They carved the staves -
Skuld ('debt') is the third.
They lots alloted
They lives chose
For the sons o men
They uttered primal law. (my translation)


It is worth remembering that the Norns are sometimes portrayed as sorcerers in Scandinavian folklore, and that this interpretation is backed both by fate (ørlög) as spoken, and by the notion that they have great knowledge (also tied to terms for magic in sources like Hrof Kraki's Saga, which also features a sorceress named Skuld for the moral debt of her father).

But the magic/fate connections don't really concern us here.  What does concern us is the etymology of ørlög and related terms in this stanza (Þær lög lögðu).  The word ørlög is a simple compound, ør- meaning primal or primordial and lög meaning lot, law, or layer.  In essence here we have gain an allotment process where the primordial lot has an almost legal aspect to it.  As in the Greek view, the lot is bounded by length and law, and that stepping outside either of these boundaries results in death, as the debt (Skuld) of this lot is returned to the Norns.

Subsidiarity, Domain, and Partition


One key notion in both Greek and Norse notions of life and fate is the concept that one obtains a sort of partition, a lot in which one has domain in one's life.  This lot is not one's body.  It is not one's choices.  Rather it constrains both and it exists in a context of social and primordial law.  But this primordial law is not the same for everyone.  This is somewhat similar to Plato's discussion of the individual in Timaeus (discussed in a previous post in this series) where we have one band of sameness (the fixed stars) and seven bands of difference (the planets).

But partition implies something is partitioned, that we take a whole and split it into ever smaller pieces until we get our individual allotments.

This leads to an alternative to liberalism where freedom emphasizes the -dom suffix, meaning domain or holding.  Social roles, functions, jobs, and the like are domains that we should hold and own, having to a large extent autonomy within them (and yet governed by social and primordial law, duty, and debt).  We are free within our personal domains, and less than free elsewhere.  Moreover in this sense, liberalism, in eroding a place in society for everyone, has eroded real depth of freedom.  We have more breadth but less depth.

End notes:
[1]  When we speak of genetic relations between cultural groups we mean that traits were inherited from a common ancestral culture.  So for example, Spanish and French are genetically related languages, both being daughters of Latin.

Friday, March 25, 2016

The way we talk about abortion in the US

So lets talk about abortion for a moment. This is an area where the more people I talk to with different perspectives from different places, the more challenging perspectives have to be accommodated.

The US is becoming increasingly polarized between two groups. A significant number of my friends on both sides of this issue don't fall into either group but I am noticing more and more people espousing one of these two extreme, individualist positions and that is a bit scary. Those of you who read below and think one or the other is a straw man don't get the fact that I am discussing how I have seen other discussions I have had, and you are welcome to comment on why the extreme viewpoint portrayed below doesn't apply to you.

The first position holds that abortion is really no different from murder, that human life begins at conception and therefore a zygote, embryo, or fetus has a right to life that may not be infringed on. But being individualistic, sees abortion as a personal failing, not a social one, and therefore sees no culpability by employer, boyfriend, school administrator, or the like. Thus one can ponder sending abortion providers to jail, or even the women seeking abortions, but one would not ponder changes to make it easier for women to participate in the economy fully after having children. This position ends up being pro-birth into a heartless world and calling it pro-life.

The second extreme I have seen on the rise is the idea that abortion during any portion of pregnancy is acceptable, and that the government should not put restrict abortion at all In this view, the only question that matters is a woman's right to control her own body, but in many circumstances infants do not stop being dependent on their mother's bodies after birth, so why not allow women to kill breastfeeding infants? Why not trust fathers too and bring back the powers of pater familias under the Twelve Tables? The answer here again is total individualism, and that personhood doesn't apply really until birth.

Those two positions are the extremes of a narrow argument that is waged by people who accept Locke's theories of natural rights and his hierarchy of life over liberty, and liberty over property. Any argument on abortion which assumes personhood is the test effectively falls into that trap, and worse it assumes a universal answer to all questions on the topic.

I often ask pro-choice people in the US to comment on Scandinavian abortion restrictions (Denmark, having the fewest restrictions, limits elective abortion to 20 weeks gestation, while Iceland requires major health or social justification for all abortions, and Noway limits elective abortion to 12 weeks). One thing I almost never see is a discussion local issues. What I either see are discussions of the fact that they are industrialized so we will give them a pass unlike, say, African nations, or else I see an unyielding adherence to position over an ability to listen to any other perspectives. Ask anti-abortion activists about Singapore (an island country with no room to build new houses) and again, one almost never sees discussion of local issues there either. The local issues don't matter to Americans.

The problem is made significantly worse by how we look at the question of social progress in the US. The US is the most liberal country in the world and what we have, really, is a choice between left liberalism (liberal democracy governing business and liberalism governing family law) and right liberalism (liberalism governing business, and liberal devotion to religious liberties governing the family). As de Benoist has put it that is the choice (though he was talking about France), and there is no diversity possible in either side.

So what if we ask about abortion in a functional way instead? That the need for abortion rights in the US comes from the way we effectively foist on women alone the opportunity costs of having and raising children? That for those opposed to abortion the most important thing is to build a more just economic order, and for those who see choice in life path as the more important direction, there is a need to recognize that some trade-offs in this area may be worth it? In other words, with more support for families with children, more restrictions on abortion can be acceptable? The individualistic view on this issue means among other things that we cannot ask questions of duty. What is the duty society to new parents? How should parenthood fit into the economic order? These are the questions which have to be asked and answered.  

Friday, March 4, 2016

An Alternative to Liberalism, Part 2, Post 2: An Alternative View of Autonomy

In the previous post, I discussed the rise of autonomy theory in liberal social philosophy in the early Enlightenment.  This era also gives us the beginnings of modernism also as we saw.  But the Modernist view has proven to have less staaying power than the Aristotelian view before it, or the oral-formulaic view before that.

One basic concept that has been very universal is what anthropologists call an isomorphism, or a basic homological similarity in how we see different things, between the individual, the society, and the world.  This isomorphism is deeply pervasive to the point where it survives, basically, today.  If we think of the individual as basically a complicated machine, we can think about governments and bureaucracies as products of high engineering, and the universe as the greatest machine of all.  This idea, which rose to prominence also during the Enlightenment, displaced an earlier, more organic view of the individual (the zoodiacal man and other Renaissance ideas).

The earlier views tended to be similar in some ways to Plato's model in Timaeus.  Modern astrologers and skeptics of astrology usually misunderstand the logic that astrology had in such a system.  If, as Plato suggested, we are basically the same as the stars, then through this isomorphism we can divine patterns in our own lives by looking at the stars.    This same basic view underlies all traditional methods of divination as well.  The same model applies to all and the state of one model can infer the state of another model.

The problem with the machine metaphor is that while it is useful for scientific inquiry, it doesn't actually match our scientific knowledge very well once one gets to systems more complex than organic chemistry.  Even in molecular biology, "always" means "most of the time" and "laws" are peppered with exceptions.  By the time you get to general biology or ecology things are downright non-mechanistic.

Anthropology outgrew the mechanistic views in the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism but this is also a shift towards a sort of individualism, recognizing that individuals represent a fluid center and creative force that structuralism cannot well address.

In this essay I will suggest a shift in view from seeing these things as as machines to seeing them as ecological communities and the implications from a communications theory/computer science perspective on such a shift.

The Rise of Permacuture and an Ecological Archetype


Permaculture is a growing movement towards reinventinng food productions by leveraging ecological models in place of our farms and gardens.  The basic idea of permaculture is that instead of fighting against ecology when it comes to weeds, insects, and soil nutrition, we can leverage how mature ecosystems work and thus produce a lot more food with a lot fewer chemical and energy inputs.  The animals and plans become productive, mutually supporting pieces of the whole.  Rather than leveraging machinery, we can leverage even pests to produce more and better food more easily.

Permaculture takes a fundamental cultural shift to make work.  traditionally most of our crops are annuals but permaculture leverages perennials to a much greater extent.  Large fields of wheat or tomatoes have to give way to something else (perhaps food forests of fruit and nut trees).  Plants are layered in space and time.  One must think both diachronically (across time) and in terms of mutually supporting roles.

As permiculturalists are keen to remind us, all problems can be solved in a garden.  The ecology becomes the basic archetype, replacing the great machine, and consequently there is a push for a return to a more organic, less energy-intensive, less socially isolating society.

But beyond this, an ecological archetype (i.e. seeing the human, the universe, the society as being basically ecological in shape) is applicable in a variety of fields.  Instead of seeing bacterial infections as mechanical in nature (the mere introduction of a pathogen) we can see them as ecological in nature (a pathogen population blooming because of other ecological factors).  A shift to use of probiotics preventatively is also part of such a shift.

Similarly, while liberal philosophers tended to reduce society to a machine, an ecological model provides a richer ability to arrange the pieces into mutually supporting roles.  Family and organs of local community (religious groups, guilds, and other structures) become fundamental and larger governmental structures become subordinate to these.

The CAP Theorem, Distributed Computing, and Consistency in society


One of the major developments in computer science has been the CAP Theorem in the face of the rise of distributed computing (first in scientific computing and later in other disciplines as well).

The CAP Theorem takes its name from the initials which provide three desirable characteristics of distributed computer networks:  Consistency (all network nodes having access to the same information at the same time), Availability (the system responding to all requests), and Partition Tolerance (the ability to successfully respond to requests in the event of some information not being available).  The CAP Theorem demonstrates that assuring all three is impossible, and that any two are incompatible with the third.

While it has its roots in computing, the CAP Theorem is really about communication and information and thus is applicable to human society as well.  There are naturally differences, also, that must be taken into account -- the CAP Theorem assumes a sort of communication that is impossible for humans to achieve.  While computers communicate precisely and losslessly, humans communicate imprecisely and in a lossy way.  We don't encode and decode information.  We try to reconstruct what the other will think and then communicate in this way, and then when receive communications we try to reconstruct what the other meant.

This is largely because human language is bootstrapped on environmental learning.  All of our native language is learned through inferring what other people probably mean and this means that no two people speak quite the same language.  This process is also responsible for linguistic drift and some other linguistic phenomena.

The lossy nature of human communications has a number of significant implications for the application of the CAP Theorem to human society.  Consistency is fundamentally mechanical and not fundamentally human.  We can approach consistency, or the illusion of it, but the only hard consistency controls possible involve centralizing power in the hands of a single individual (because in CAP terms, an individual cannot be inconsistent with him or herself).

A second point is that human language is a life-long learning process.  We learn how to effectively communicate with people we work with over time and therefore consistency is more readily possible on a small scale than a large scale.

Human civilization thus depends on tolerating inconsistency in CAP terms and this tolerance must increase as the scope of society increases.

The CAP Theorem, in context with a solid understanding of linguistics, thus provides a solid mathematical proof that individual and local autonomy are necessary for productive ventures in human society.  In areas where human society cannot do without (economic production, reproduction, etc) individual and community autonomy are fundamentally needed.

Of course this autonomy must be balanced with other social concerns, such as the need for mutual support (which we would not survive infancy or into old age without).  But we can prove both a need for autonomy and duty and this piece is about the former, which the CAP Theorem gives us.  But viewed from this perspective, autonomy is a functional requirement that human society simply cannot exist without.

Subsidiarity and Autonomy


The final point to add to the mix is the idea of subsidiarity.  Subsidiarity (as Justice Breyer reminds us in many of his interviews) is a European concept, not an American one.  It holds that the best level of society to tackle a problem is the smallest one capable of tackling it..  Subsidiarity is in theory a basic part of the European Union (added after Denmark voted not to join to appease their fears), but in practice more a part of Scandinavian society, where it is called the Nearness Principle, than in Continental Europe.  While the idea was first formulated in a papal encyclical (Rerum Novarum) in the 19th century, the idea expresses something of a general experience of agrarian, rural countries and even the functional efforts at dual sovereignty in the early US.  The idea is more tightly tied to classical philosophy than it is specifically Catholic and this is probably a reason for its general success.

It's worth noting that even Chairman Mao at one point said that China should see the United States as a model for why decentralization of political power is necessary and should not try to emulate a single strongly centralized government.  So the idea of decentralization as good  has ranged from early America to Communist China, to Scandinavia, to the Catholic Church.   I think this reflects a sense by which the CAP Theorem's limits in fact really do come into play.

The rationale in Rerum Novarum is probably the place to start in understanding the idea of decentralization as a moral matter however.  The basic idea is that theft needs not be material to be damaging.  One can rob someone of dignity just as surely as one can rob someone of money.   A key aspect of dignity is an ability to accomplish good things for one's family, community, and society.  Robbing someone of that ability to accomplish things is thus a very deep and serious form of theft.  As anyone who has been told to do a job and then micromanaged in doing it knows, this is a serious problem.  Of course the CAP Theorem shows us that micromanagement not only feels insulting but is actually harmful so it is no exaggeration to call it evil, but this is a more recent development.

The idea then is that it is a serious matter of theft to take a task out of the hands of an individual who is doing the work capably and put it in the hands of another.  This is what I call work ownership, the idea that a task and the accomplishment that comes with it, should be treated as property (how fruits of the labor should be divided is separate however, since one never really accomplishes anything entirely alone).

What applies to an individual also applies to a group.  For a larger group to take over a task a smaller group is capable of accomplishing is itself also a theft.  Therefore there is a moral necessity in keeping this accomplishment as personal as possible and therefore larger levels of social organization (including government) should work to coordinate and harmonize rather than accomplish on their own what the lower levels are capable of doing.

This echoes Aristotle's views on the roots of the polis.  According to Aristotle, individuals get married and have children thus forming households, and households come together to tackle joint problems and thus form the polis or community.  Larger levels of the state exist because smaller levels come together to address joint problems, which is an inversion of the engineered order (where you start with the large and subdivide).

These all form parts of a more organic, comprehensive view of autonomy which affects both individuals and groups.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

An Alternative to Liberalism part 2 post 1: Liberalism and Antisocial Autonomy

Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains.  -- JJ Roussau "On Social Contract"

One of the key selling points of Liberalism is the ideology of autonomy, and the view that other ideologies don't share a concept of autonomy.  The latter is false (though few others phrase autonomy as specific to the individual), and the former deserves careful understanding before we can see both the problems and opportunities for a replacement.  In this post we will take a short journey through the early liberal philosophers, Hobbes, Locke, Roussau, Hume, and Kant and look at the evolving views of autonomy, society, and government that came out of them.

Hobbes and the Need for the State


The beginnings of progressive social theory come from Thomas Hobbes and his book "The Leviathan."  Hobbes introduces a couple of ideas which become the basis of Western liberalism since.  In particular he argues there is no greatest good, that man's behavior can be explained materialistically.  This becomes the basis of what we might call psychological and political materialism.  Hobbes largely denies the idea that man is by nature a social creature and therefore sees man as at his natural state where there is no society.

In such a state, Hobbes reasons, people need protection from people engaging in violent theft, and therefore the state arises for joint protection of this sort.  In this regard he echoes Cicero's claim that there are certain things, such as private property rights, that must be respected for humans to live together in cities.  However where he differs from Cicero, Aristotle, etc is that he saw humanity as by nature isolated, alone, autonomous.

Hobbes thus lays the framework for progressive views of history.  For primitive man, life is nasty, brutish, and short, but with social developments, prosperity is possible.  There is no need to look to religion or to a philosophical notion of the greatest good.  All we need to do is look to avoiding a violent death.

From Hobbes then emerges a concept of right to life and a general right to autonomy.  These get fleshed out in greater form by later thinkers (Locke, Rousseau, and others).

Locke and Universal Rights


The next major thinker in this regard was John Locke, whose works built on Hobbes view of natural rights.  While Locke followed Hobbes in a right to be generally free from violence and to follow one's own desires, he added to this a right to property, largely following Cicero.   He also formulated a hierarchy of rights, with life above liberty, and liberty above property.

One of the most enduring aspects of Lockean thought in the US is the abortion debate.  Both sides of the debate effectively accept a Lockean outlook, where life is greater than liberty, and therefore the only question to discuss is whether a fetus is a person, worthy of a right to life.  This leads to a very narrow abortion debate.  We don't get to discuss the questions of the role in an economy which treats men as normal and women as only normal to the extent they are like men.  We don't get to discuss the way that the social need to recognize shared humanity between mother and fetus.  We don't get to discuss the effects on society or the family.  The only question is personhood.

In my view, this leads to a very impoverished debate.  But it is worth noting two things in defense of Locke.  First, he notes the importance of property, something Hobbes doesn't formulate as well and secondly he treats property rights as not even close to absolute, being limited by their impact on the liberty of others.

Rousseau and the Liberation of the Individual


Rousseau can be seen in "On Social Contract" to be reacting largely to Hobbes.  Rousseau effectively follows Hobbes in the natural rights approach but sought to soften Hobbes assertion that humans are not social creatures.  Rousseau on one hand acknowledges a social nature to humanity, but on the other hand sees society as deeply corrupting.  It is through the influence of society, Rousseau held, that people though by nature good become either evil or enslaved.  Rousseau then accepts both a social nature of humanity, but also treats society as fundamentally suspect and damaging.

Some respects of Rousseau's theories are clearly accurate.  Monarchs can be more authoritarian than democracies and, as Rousseau pointed out, democracies become more oppressive as they cover larger numbers of people.  Rousseau's theories then seem to suggest that the only guaranteed nonoppressive form of government is the local, participatory democracy, but it isnt clear that Rousseau would have liked these much since they are basic manifestations of the society that chains the individual.

Rousseau is universally hated by conservatives and for good reason.  He follows Locke and Hobbes down an antisocial hole and favors liberating individuals from the fundamental units of society, the family and community.  However, he the first of the liberal philosophers to really grapple with humanity as social by nature, and for this reason he cannot be ignored entirely.

Hume and the Nature of Reason


Hume noted that reason is not by nature directed and is therefore amoral in nature.  Of course he was not the first  Aesop's fable of the wolf and the lamb carries with it a similar lesson.  But Hume attempted a solution here based solely on individual experience.  Where Aristotle, Cicero, and others would look to social duties and function Hume looks to the experience of emotion for guidance.   Argument from emotion may be a fallacy, but emotion alone can give reason direction, so reason is always, according to Hume, a slave of the passions, and this is as it should be.

With this view of reason and emotion comes the basic view of human rights being things which one feels strongly about.  Individual emotions thus become seen as the guiding light for society.

The problem of course is that prejudices steer our reasoning and when we cloak these in universality, we turn them into things which go from being functionally protective of community into things which are oppressive of other communities, and even oppressive of our own.

Conclusion


The picture of liberal autonomy that develops is one where society is a corrupting influence on the individual, where the goal is to erode family and community so that chosen relationships are more important than unchosen ones.  Parenthood thus is a one-way duty and children need not have duties towards their elders.  Communities have duties to their members but the members have no duties to communities they did not choose, and so forth.

 But beyond these are a trust in the combination of reason and emotion leading to the visible cult of the personality.  However these are only enabled by worshipping ever more powerful social machines.  We factory farm our food and we factory farm our kids.  We produce our work in factories.  The home becomes nothing more than a place for isolated individuals to hide at night from the inhumanity of the world.

In the next in this series I will look at an alternative way to look at human autonomy from a social function perspective and how computer science of all fields can provide a far more conservative alternative to this sort of autonomy theory.

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Immigration and Europe, Thoughts inspired by Zizek

I have been in Sweden now for a year.  I have watched the immigration crisis unfold.  I have read different viewpoints.  I have seen the crisis steal an hour from my day several times a week.  Like the election in the US which may spell the end of neoliberalism for better or worse, this is an amazing crisis, and I feel privileged to watch history in the making.

So Zizek has written an interesting piece about the social and political dynamics of the refugee crisis.  It is a piece which reaffirms the need of culture and identity, and a piece which confronts obliquely the nature of modernism.  It is worth a read.  Myself, I am both the first to defend refugees as people, and also to defend the fact that there are real concerns about the demographics of this crisis, and that it is unjust to expect Europe to pick up the tab of the human cost the US has been busy accruing.

This being said, as a lover of history, there are some things that are left out of the dimensions of his analysis, dimensions which add answers and more questions to the reason Europe tends to be so fixated on the crisis.  These problems demand solutions and the questions demand further searches for answers.  But Europe's very survival, I think, rests on recognizing two truths, that Europe must embrace far more the refugees Europe does accept, but also that Europe must accept fewer refugees.  My grim assessment is that unless Europe does both these things -- seeking to recover from the refugees what Europe has lost and also limit the flow, that the only future Europe can look forward to is one where the refugees have by force of number dramatically reshaped the political and social order.  We can decide to learn or we can be schooled.  It is our choice.

The story of the rise of Europe is the story of the rise of poverty.  In England, in France, in Germany, as in the US, early industrialization was dependent on the rise of destitution sufficient to get people to give up on anything better than subsistence wages in the factory. The less industrialized portion of Europe, for example in the Balkans and in Scandinavia, tried to industrialize in less unequal ways with only modest success (usually with appropriately proportional rises in poverty and industrialization -- see Scandinavia's efforts to industrialize the fishing industry which caused many small fishermen to lose their businesses in the face of crushing debt).

The way out of poverty becomes a social safety net, a way of ensuring that people do not fear for security for being out of work, but this too becomes something that one has to work beforehand to qualify for, and often (particularly in Scandinavia) banking policies favor the employed to the self-employed.  In this way the chains that bind people to corporate employment in the name of liberating them from family are forged strong.  With this employment-centric economy, the family is no longer productive, and so children are no longer the future of one's own economic endeavors.  Women have fewer children and the population declines.  Capitalism (like state socialism for the same reasons) is cultural suicide.  This is something people intrinsically understand which is the answer to why so many Europeans cling to their sense of identity through hostility to the immigrants.  They know something is wrong.  They know their culture is declining.  They know immigration is connected.  They know the elites are calling the shots.  The hatred and fear they feel regarding immigrants is therefore a proxy for the hatred and fear they feel regarding the bankers, the politicians, the bureaucrats, who claim to do good but instead enslave them.  But this is counterproductive.

When I walk down the street in Landskrona, I see restaurant after restaurant.  I see small corner store after small corner store.  These all fall into one of two categories:  They are either businesses  with a few employees (maybe 5-10) or they are very small family businesses run by first-generation immigrants.  Those who are self-employed are very usually immigrants.  They are not used to the chains that are there to bind them to corporate employment and so they blithely walk around as if those are not there.  They are the free smallholders who have more or less vanished elsewhere.  So the immigrants come to do the jobs that Swedes won't do:  running very small businesses.  And yet it is considered a great success that their children will join the corporate work force.  That fact alone gives me more reason to  be pessimistic about Europe's future than everything else.  It is a "victory" for the engines of assimilation to liberate the children of the smallholding class into the corporate workforce.

I think that the European elites believe that this system can be sustained indefinitely through immigration, that there is nothing inevitably damaging about outsourcing the process of having and raising children.  Why not let Africa and the Middle East bear the costs and Europe reap the benefits?  Moreover if the masses are divided between nativists and immigrationists, then nobody will challenge the power structures at the top.  It is a nearly perfect strategy and one which seems likely to win at least for the short term.  But it is becoming more clear that the system cannot sustain itself on immigration, that falling birth rates present a problem for the whole structure and that trying to bring in refugees can be dangerously unpredictable.  Sweden promised to welcome all refugees that wanted to come, and quickly found out that there were a lot of refugees in line....  That mistake has lead to the reintroduction of border measures that have cascaded across Europe.

The problem is not just that immigration is a problem.  The problem is that immigration is the solution to an economic problem.  If cultural nationalists want to win, they have to help a just economic and social order arise, one which supports families, and leads to a sustainable birth rate.  What we have now is not.  That means starting with those immigrants who have not yet been assimilated and learning from them.  It means learning what economic realities need to change from their point of view.  It means making room at least in the short-run for parallel cultural societies.  And it means working on building an economic order where family and community once again matter.

This is the promise of multiculturalism but multiculturalism never lives up to this promise because it is peddled by people openly hostile to culture, who see culture as an obstacle to rights..  Multiculturalism has great promise but it cannot be fulfilled unless culture is seen as innately valuable, as a matter of function and humanity not mere self-esteem in a commodity marketplace.  The most multicultural places I have lived have also been the most conservative.

Of course the right will have trouble doing this.  The political right is funded by the same elites that are causing the problem on the left.  You won't get careful introspection from any political side because they are not in the business of making policies but selling policies.  And that is the real problem.