I had exquisite timing this summer, was well prepared to think in a rational, fact-based way about Europe’s crisis with immigrants as well as with the slower moving crisis in the United States. For the umpteenth time, I was also reminded of one of my high school history teachers: a somewhat eccentric man who was the best sort of teacher in his devotion to his subject as well as to some vague process of `teaching’. Once a student began to pronounce his opinions on some political matter—don’t remember exactly but it was 1971, so guess if you will. Mr Bousquet came to stand in front of the row where the student was seated and stood there quietly until the student grew confused and then quiet. Mr Bousquet then said, “You have no right to an opinion until you’ve learned some facts about the matter,” and then returned to the blackboard to teach as if nothing had happened.
If only the likes of American politicians and public-policy (pseudo-)intellectuals and Catholic bishops would have enough moral character to realize the truth in that admonishment: “You have no right to an opinion until you’ve learned some facts about the matter.”
My good timing this summer was in reading several books dealing primarily or in part with immigrations in the context of early human history and human prehistory, most importantly: Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe by Peter J Heather and also The Fall of Rome: and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. These aren’t books likely to be found in prominent spots at your average Barn of Books. (Actually, I once made some prime purchases out of the loft of a barn—three volumes from a collection of Nathaniel Hawthorne works, circa 1870. Not in good enough condition to be valuable but some of the pages hadn’t even been cut—a claim probably confusing to many who are under the age of 100 or so unless they’ve read a history of books.)
These large-scale movements into Roman territory involved a mixture of peoples looking to steal or otherwise obtain the goods of a civilization they didn’t understand, couldn’t have—and didn’t—maintain, and which they could easily destroy. The Germanic and other barbarians who came across the borders into a Rome which had moved much of their best and most loyal troops to fight the Sassanian Empire. Some of those top-notch troops were themselves Germans from earlier waves of tightly controlled immigrations into the prosperous regions of the Roman Empire. Some were Gauls (or Celts or Keltoi) who were pretty much fully Romanized; those Gauls were the ancestors of the modern French peoples, some of the Spanish, and maybe some of the westernmost Germans.
In those books mentioned in the above paragraph, we learn that Rome fell, and Europe suffered during centuries of true darkness. The European population was substantially reduced as the economy was disrupted and supportive communities were weakened or destroyed. Living standards for the survivors didn’t recover until the 12th or 13th century. There was something for every couch-potato barbarian to enjoy—modern day political leaders and Christian leaders alike: poverty and ignorance and violence and famine and wars. Some of these things might not seem to be so righteously exciting once they hit London and Kansas City rather than just Baghdad and Damascus.
This somewhat indeterminate dark period (use the period 500AD-1000AD as a guide) was often hell on earth and never really reached the high levels of prosperity or the low levels of personal violence of the years of the Roman Peace.
Those historians and archaeologists and geneticists and evolutionary theorists and physicists/chemists who are producing a scaffolding, bare and not yet fully trustworthy, for an understanding of the story of modern mankind tell us that we should value these periods of civil peace because rates of death by violent acts of other men are higher outside of organized states, such as the Roman Empire or the pre-imperial United States. If you wish to be humorously skeptical, you can adopt the language of some historians: the stationary bandits protect the taxable sheep against the nomadic bandits. Yet, you have to face up to those high death-rates of nomadic or other pre-state peoples. To speak in a dramatic but true way: those Amerindians in the Amazon and those peoples in the South Pacific, all glorified as so `peaceful’ by Margaret Mead and others, had or even still have higher rates of death by human-inflicted violence than Europe had in the 20th century with two great wars and a host of smaller wars.
Bottom-line: the destruction of the states, in general—of the settled communities, of Europe will almost certainly lead to a long period of violence and chaos. Women will retreat from the public areas for reasons of safety. Slavery will return. Literacy and economic productivity will shrink to low levels. Europe won’t become a multi-cultural paradise—it will repeat the Dark Ages in perhaps a more modern form as the warlords fight it out to see who will be the prosperous stationary bandits of the next stage of European history. That stage might have such horrors as Nazism and Leninism—or maybe not. It might be prosperous and be conducive to the freedom of individuals and the communities inside the territories of the stationary bandits—or maybe not.
As for the opening of the borders in the United States? It’s a grand and dangerous experiment at best. The situation in the United States and the context of the Americas are far different from anything Europe has known, but any wise man or woman would be fearing for the worse and maybe the worst. So far, we don’t have too much reason to believe that these immigrants from Africa and Southwest Asia will either assimilate to European-American ways of life or perhaps build compatible ways of life in separate communities. We can’t even assimilate Amerindians to the extent of drawing them into ghettos in the mainstream of American life and even Mexican immigrants are said to de-assimilate themselves after—perhaps—a generation of promising achievement. I’m not sure that there will ever be a true merging of European-American and Chinese/Japanese/Indian communities—nor that there should be such a merging. Yet, we are perhaps creating a situation where—at least—the west coast of North America might become part of Chinese civilization, not by conquest but simply by of a peaceful takeover by hardworking peoples. A people who treat educational systems as excuses for dances and football games and pep rallies should be more cautious about the immigration of such hardworking and disciplined and serious peoples as the Chinese and the Japanese and some of the peoples of southern Asia.
We live in interesting times indeed and have made these times far more interesting by engaging in a variety of unwise experiments upon human beings—individuals and communities. We Americans love to destabilize countries which were potentially chaotic regions—and known to be such by historians and diplomats and various analysts in the intelligence communities of this world, civilian and military alike. We have even allowed our ruling classes to destabilize our own countries. In the case of Europe, we have the example of the fall of the western regions of the Roman Empire when, according to recent historical analyses, that region of Romanized Europe was still a going venture. And, yet, American leaders through their lapdogs in Europe, and with the cheers of the likes of Pope Francis, have allowed conditions in Europe to approach the disastrous conditions of the sixth century in Italy and in the Romanized Celtic regions (France and Switzerland and Spain and the Western Germanic countries). And those same American leaders are conducting very dangerous experiments with their own country.
We are indeed blessed with interesting times and we seem determined to make them still more interesting and we do so by acts of fraudulent charity which will strip our children’s countries of prosperity without doing any long-term good for the immigrants from the countries we’ve destroyed in Southwest Asia or North Africa and from the sub-Saharan countries where the residents refuse to moderate their own reproduction or that of their animals during the good years of the monsoon cycle and then start trying to get to Europe during the bad years.