Too Cool, Man

It would appear that an international team of astronomers has devloped a way to indirectly map dark matter.

More Muslim Rabble-Rousing

This time in Britain. It would appear that living in a multicultural society also produces contempt for that society.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Apparently not. In a piece for The American Conservative, Steve Sailer reports on Professor Robert Putnam's finding that racial and ethnic diversity erodes social trust and cohesion. That this is the case shouldn't be that surprising. There are two groups* people tend to trust most: their family and their friends. To a lesser extent, we trust those who seem to share certain beliefs with us, value similar things, engage in similar practices, and take part in similar traditions. To a lesser extent, we trust those who something look like us. In short, we tend to trust people with whom we have things in common, and the more we share in common with someone, the more likely we are to trust him. We can identify with these people, see where they're coming from. If we're concerned about being stabbed in the back, we can pick up signs of betrayal the more familiar we are with the person in whom we have placed our trust.

On the other hand, if we have no real experience or common tie with a person or a group, we have no basis for placing or trust in said person or group. Furthermore, absent a necessity of some sort (e.g. having some common task to perform, being in a desperate situation, etc.), there is no reason to attempt to forge the sort of bond that will lead to trusting someone. This is simply human nature, and it's not going to change.

Still, this is not the whole picture. The United States has always been racially and ethnically diverse, yet by and large racial and ethnic minorities (religious ones, as well) have eventually been able to assimilate into American society.** Why is this the case? Sailer offers the following to explain why ethnic minorities have been largely able to assimilate into American society:

The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history’s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.

Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun’s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia’s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria’s border with the Slavs and Magyars.

Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the “long civic generation” that reached its peak in the 1940s and ’50s.

There is a good deal of truth in this, and I don't disagree with it per se, but I think Sailer misses something important (though he does touch on it in a slightly different context). The United States is governed by the rule of law, before which all are equal. Thus, there is built into the very fabric of American culture the notion that good citizenship is determined by adherence to the law and the willingness to defend the American Constitutional order, not by your culture of origin or who your relatives happen to be. The United States is a meritocracy, not a class-based or ethnically-based society. You are defined by what you do, not from whence you came. Thus, Americans have traditionally been culturally conditioned to resist the natural human inclination to mistrust anyone sufficiently different, provided the minimum baseline of acceptance of the traditional American beliefs in meritocracy and the rule of law.

Sailer sets this in direct contrast with the situation in Mexico, where trust does not extend beyond the extended family. This is of pressing concern because of the large numbers of illegal immigrants in the United States who are from Mexico, as well as those who will continue to come across. With as many as 12 million illegal immigrants on the United States today, most of them from Mexico, and living and working in the American Southwest, they have established large enough enclaves where they have little need to interact with Americans outside of work. This separation is reinforced by the language barrier between Americans who speak English primarily and Spanish-speaking Mexicans. Sailer sums up the situation this way:

While no more than 12 percent of L.A.’s whites said they trusted other races “only a little or not at all,” 37 percent of L.A.’s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.

Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinos’ failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos. As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: “In Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.”

Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family, Los Angeles’s millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little contribution to local civic and artistic life. L.A. is awash in underemployed creative talent who occupy their abundant spare time putting on plays, constructing spectacular haunted houses each Halloween, and otherwise trying to attract Jerry Bruckheimer’s attention. Yet there is little overlap between the enormous entertainment industry and the huge Mexican-American community.

In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I found just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While it’s a journalistic cliché to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as “vibrant,” they aren’t.

Some of this lack of social capital is class-related—Miami indeed has a vibrant Hispanic culture, but it’s anomalous because it attracts Latin America’s affluent and educated. In contrast, Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of America’s future because it imports peasants and laborers.

What does this mean? If the Mexican population continues to grow at anything like the rate it has been, it will lead to a bi-cultural society with the Americans and the Mexicans staring tensely at one another across the walls of their cultural enclaves. America's civic culture will decline even faster as trust among her citizens declines still more, and the state will attempt to step in and fill the void that once was filled by America's vibrant civic society. In short, the state will assume massive new powers in an ill-fated attempt to preserve public order. Just like what's happening in Britain, if not quite as bad.

*The two groups need not be mutually exclusive.

**To a large extent, the great exception had been Black Americans. At least in part, this stems from the fact that the same rule of law that enables other racial and ethnic minorities to assimilate into American society was used to prevent Black integration into American society, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow and other similar laws.

From President Bush's Mouth

According to the Associated Press, the government may have the authority to open private mail without a warrant under certain circumstances. According to Andy McCarthy, this has always been the case. As Andy McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor, I'm willing to take his word for it. Still, there's nothing unusual about news outlets blowing stories out of proportion. What is unusual about this story is the mind-boggling stupidity of the opening paragraph.

A signing statement attached to postal legislation by President Bush last month may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. The White House denies any change in policy.

This is ludicrous. A measure becomes law when it is included in a bill passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President, or if passed by a 2/3 majority in each house of Congress following a Presidential veto. Signing statements carry no force of law whatsoever. They never have, and without a Constitutional ammendment, they never will. This is the stuff of School House Rock, and the fact that an error this obvious should slip passed reporters and editors either out of ignorance or out of a desire to make the story read a certain way calls into question the ability of the Associated Press to be a reliable source of news.