Clocks may always tick forward, but human social and cultural constructions can and do sometimes devolve. Not infrequently, a civilization will retrogress because an instrumental minority came to a wistful, wishful and naive belief that grandpappy’s life, or some vague previous iteration of “us” was so much more honorable and admirable than this one. Grandpappy’s life and society were more hidebound, ignorant, unjust and bigoted, of course, but those aspects are discounted when one desperately desires an esteem that is waning, or appears to especially wane in the context of current vulnerability, economic instability, and/or emotional vexation.
A quarter century ago, I read a scholarly analysis of several great civilizations and how they came to be. And the author of that now-forgotten book pointed out that there is a timeless formula for enduring puissant empire: incorporate. When the writer looked at the most lasting and influential civilizations going back over 3,000 years, he found something very instructive: nations that lasted and gained in power found ways to bring in other peoples, tribes and civilizations, sometimes as mere allies, but often too as full citizens.
Of all civilizations in all history, Ancient Rome offers perhaps the most instructive example. Dozens of foreign peoples from the borders of the Empire, most of which did not speak the language or share the same culture with the Romans of the Italian peninsula, were brought into the Roman system of governance and administration. The Roman policy employed both carrot and stick: incorporated peoples were prodded by threats and punitive measures while they were also offered many advantages that followed from acceding to Roman entreaties and insistencies.
And this tactic of offering substantial “carrots” to potential friends has been picked up by many modern nations. In addition to its military and political power, America has long enjoyed what the political scientist Joseph Nye has called “soft power.” It is no secret that the United States of America is “a nation of immigrants.” For over two centuries the United States has welcomed into its nurturing fold scholarly, financial, cultural and technological contributions from other parts of the world. Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, George Soros and Elon Musk are prominent individual examples of this enlightened political policy. Other countries may suffer a “brain drain,” but America benefits.
But benefits that endure through centuries, and are detected and fully understood and appreciated only through scholarly analyses, can sometimes be forsaken by a daft, unnerved populace that feels itself compelled to proactively respond to degradation or threat. And minorities have been the scapegoats for all that ails a polity… and yes, this through millennia.
Think about this hypothetical: What if there were a vast, albeit indistinct them, hundreds of thousands of ideologically-allied militant radicals in the world? For our (fictional, of course) purposes here, let’s call them errorists. In our hypothetical, these errorists believe in using violence indiscriminately against civilians, and this wantonness for the political purpose of gaining politically by (potentially) destabilizing strongly-established and extremely powerful nations with different (more liberal) political and cultural traditions.
Continuing: The leaders of both the errorists and their enemies – the powerful liberal polities – know about the huge advantage the powerful enjoy. But the errorists have one aspect of enormous benefit to them: they’ve got all the time in the world; they are happy to slowly engage their massive and powerful enemy over centuries if necessary, and with a religious fervor. Over time, the errorists estimate that they will eventually influence a putatively democratic entity such as the United States to bend to the errorists will. Eventually, they think, the self-styled “democrats” will have to change their policies and their politics, because they (the errorists) can attack anywhere, in any way they (the errorists) choose, and with all the time in the world to wait for the right opportunity to strike.
Well, eventually, the vulnerable, especially with extensive and emotionally-packed news coverage of atrocities from not-too-culturally distant places – like the “City of Lights” suddenly dumbstruck by errorist darkness – putatively democratic people become increasingly unnerved. (And is there any accurate metric for nervous unease in a population?) To address their unease, the democrats would then be likely to begin to stigmatize or alienate groups that seem to represent or support the errorists; they cast their vote to forbid the immigration of the revolting, foreign and threatening, and foreign and threatening become conflated in the unsettled mind and nervous system. They vote democratically to cordon themselves off in various ways from “them”. And “them” eventually mutates into not only errorists, but all those who seem religiously, ideologically or politically aligned with the errorists, however imprecisely, however speculatively, however imputatively.
Continuing our fiction: The vulnerable, nervous and anxious citizens who comprise a democratic polity do not reason out and consider the pitfalls in letting their emotional unease and irritation contaminate and infect their politics; they do not apprehend that their nation has become great and powerful not because of some mysterious Oz, nor from Divine Providence, but from the practical auspiciousness that inheres in political and cultural incorporation. Having nothing concise and strictly demarcated to militarily or economically target the errorists themselves, the erstwhile democrats of the incrementally-more-illiberal democracy seek to vulgarize, stigmatize, and anathematize that which is larger and more visible and countable and accountable: the whole party, or the whole nation, the whole ethnicity, the whole culture, or the whole religion. Ultimately, the people who feel threatened and indignant stigmatize the whole world, having moved steadily more into the mindset and temperament of the xenophobe.
And, as they themselves are assuredly no Einsteins, they do not grasp that they fight the errorists in a flailing, inefficient and counterproductive way, dealing an horrific blow to their own esteemed, providential political ethos and their own largess: in their errancy, the “democrats” renounce the fundamentals of incorporation that have made them so very powerful in the first place. America wants to be powerful. To gain in that direction, they bring in tens of millions of immigrants from all over the world, some of them with tremendous ingenuity and creativity. America then becomes the envy of the whole world because of its successes and its affluence – and all got consequent to a policy of incorporation. And then, coming into the green-eyed and demonic crosshairs of the errorists, the Americans suffer many violent episodes. The violent episodes are very well known, as they are covered ad nauseam by the news media. As a direct result, Americans become increasingly – and invisibly, because, as I remarked above, there is no employable metric – xenophobic. This eventuality plays directly into the errorists’ hands, as they want their disingenuously democratic enemy to unwind and undo its own prosperity. What a boon for just the cost of a couple of barrels of explosive, or a few Russian assault rifles!!
The errorists ultimately want their enemy’s xenophobia to extend to large swaths of the globe. The logic of the errorists is that America will target a wider “them” and ultimately bring those they target into a stronger alliance against the Americans, and into league with the errorists generally. American targeting of a global religion would be nice, but it would be still nicer (from the errorists’ perspective) if Americans became in their politics disdainful of all things foreign, no matter how hopeless and imbecilic such a bigoted, xenophobic political policy is or might become.
A vile, unintelligent misanthrope was elected president of the United States in 2016. He promised in his presidential campaign in to target “aliens” of every sort, and even to build a multi-billion dollar monument to caveman xenophobia along the southern U.S. border with Mexico. And, to cleverly (rhetorically) prove that the aliens are evil villains and must pay for their evil villainy, the Mexican government, it was promised, would be forced to pay for the monument. The whole idea was so delightful to the unsettled nervous systems of erstwhile American democrats that they ate it up entire and called their vacuous Commander in Chief “God”.
And now, in September 1017, we come to the point where the politician has to cow-tow to the constituency that elected him; no matter how daft and misguided the agenda, if they wanted their federal government to target anyone without U.S. citizenship, that must be accomplished. There has been for many years now (putatively since 2001), a legislative bill called “the Dream Act.” Its purpose was to identify those undocumented “aliens” who first arrived in the United States before the age of 18 and bring them fully into the American fold (as it is persuasively argued that children are not to be held to account for the transgressions of their parents). The Dream Act became closely associated with a sister policy called DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) in 2012. Then-President Obama was fully supportive of DACA.
His successor was not.
Let us hope we never see anything remotely like the errorists!! If we ever experienced anything like that, my guess is we’d probably be in a mess politically, with people supporting various xenophobic measures against more visible (and quite vulnerable) minorities, instead of precisely directing our ire at the much more difficult to target, evanescent, whack-a-mole, now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t errorists. Unwittingly renouncing the integrals of veritable greatness inherent in inclusion and incorporation, we would probably devolve and revert politically to an acivilizational cave.
(1) The title of this post has been borrowed, verbatim, from a critically-acclaimed 2011 documentary about Chauvet Cave in France.