From the beginning of history, bringing the stranger into the tribe’s firelit circle has been one of the most difficult and dangerous of tasks. Yet people have managed with varying degrees of success to do it. To understand how extraordinary this is, one must realize that multiculturalism — as typically understood in human societies — does not exist in nature. Only humanity, so far as we can tell, has, against all odds, achieved it.
It is fairly well established that animal culture exists. Chimpanzees have developed distinct tool-use (e.g., termite fishing techniques, grooming styles, and hunting methods), which they pass down socially. Orcas have dialects, hunting methods, and social norms that they are at pains to maintain, and they largely avoid intermingling or interbreeding, maintaining distinct "cultures." The fact that animals opted to keep the tribe intact is telling. For them, multi-culti is too risky. There are too many things to go wrong. Humanity alone has admitted the stranger to the hearth; mostly, it must be granted, to steal his secrets for the tribe’s own benefit. Human cultural evolution advances through processes by which behaviors, ideas, technologies, norms, and knowledge are acquired socially (via imitation, teaching, language). We need to know what others have invented.
At some point, humans realized that the benefits of learning from others justified calculated risks to the integrity of the tribe. So they mingled. That was the ulterior motive of primitive multiculturalism: to get information we might not discover if left only to ourselves. Probably it was from the stranger that tribes learned of monstrous megafauna in the next valley before encountering it. Multiculturalism can be thought of as a kind of information exchange. But this worked best when the transaction was safe, and there was mutual benefit. Even today, recalling the halcyon days of the ‘90s, multiculturalism went smoothly where there was a universal sense of security and enough confidence for component cultures for each to venture from the familiar confines to explore the mind of the other.
But these conditions are often unstable. Things rapidly become toxic when danger, treachery, and perfidy are introduced. Examining the tragic aftermath of events in Belfast, it is easy to detect a transaction gone terribly wrong and not hard to figure out why. The Irish were told they would be enriched. Instead, they met an influx of people with little to offer, demanding benefits from a working-class population with little to give. The wonder is not that it went bad, but that it took so long to happen.
Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves why politicians expected a situation where people scurry home before nightfall and trip over unmentionable things on the sidewalk; who cast fearful glances over their shoulders as they nervously fit the key into the front door lock, would spread goodwill and mutual understanding. It was far more likely to spread hatred and enmity. But the politicians did not realize this. The great error of the progressive social engineers was in being wilfully ignorant of the risk profile of whom they invited to the firelight.
In throwing open the tribal borders, they acted as if the absorptive capacity of the West was effectively infinite, possibly because, as politicians, they never knew more than how to take from the taxpayer stash. Thus blinded, they let the downside get too high without a statistically compensating upside. Disaster ensued. Now they can't unload their cherished guests, even those who commit crimes, because no one will take them. Western countries have tried to bribe Third World nations to take what has become too toxic to hold. But the latter, having more common sense, have balked. Now they have to carry around this inventory, and as events in Belfast show, even the functional, law-abiding, and productive strangers get caught up in the fury of the blowback that social engineers have unleashed. When a transaction fails, even the successful steps get rolled back.
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But it didn't have to be this way. A little due diligence and a dose of common sense – once common among cavemen but now absent in the hyper-educated woke – could have avoided the worst effects. But the social engineers, possessed by magical thinking, embarked on a difficult project in the most incompetent way, with a song in their heart and rocks in their head. In the animal kingdom and perhaps among human beings, tribalism is a powerful survival trait. It is ingrained deeply in the animal genetic code by millions of years of evolutionary survival. Humanity, seemingly alone, has in many cases successfully transcended the limits of tribalism to learn from others what and what not to do. But in taking the risk, one had to be careful. Cultural exchange can be a positive thing, but it has always been, as Rudyard Kipling notes, a fraught transaction.
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
