RUTHFULLY YOURS

James Fenimore Cooper disliked Yankees. They streamed out of New England in the early decades of the 19th century, invading the staid farming communities of Cooper’s beloved upstate New York. In his novels, Cooper portrayed these descendants of the Puritans as restless, grasping, and mercenary, sharp traders out for a quick buck. Theirs was an alien culture to the Dutch gentry of the Hudson River Valley and thereabouts, and their arrival changed that region forever.

History is one long progression of cultural invasions. England was home to the Celtic Britons. Then came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons, then the Norsemen, and then the Normans. Each time, the new arrivals intermixed with the people already there, giving birth in the process to a new, hybrid culture.

Probably most cultural invasions throughout history occurred violently. But liberalism-and I use the term in its original sense to mean “freedom”-makes it possible for such invasions to take place peacefully. A liberal world is characterized by the free movement of ideas, of goods, and of persons. And all three can be hard on the cultures they come into contact with.

In a free country, to protect a local or regional culture against ideas or goods or persons that originated elsewhere within the country, there are things one may do and things one may not. One may argue against ideas, or choose not to buy the books or newspapers that propagate them. But one may not burn down the buildings where those books or newspapers are produced, nor induce the government to censor the offending ideas. One may refuse to buy goods produced elsewhere, but one may not cause the government to restrict their importation. And as for persons relocating to one’s neighborhood from elsewhere, one may (or should be free to) refuse to rent or sell them living accommodations, or refuse to serve them or hire them at one’s place of business. But one may not ride about at night in white hoods terrorizing them, and one certainly may not induce the government to prohibit their moving into one’s neighborhood.

In other words, a citizen of a liberal country like the United States should be free to use any non-violent means to protect his culture from ideas, goods, or persons that originated elsewhere. But he may not use physical force to that end, either his own or his government’s. To employ force would violate the rights of individual Americans.

So we, who value individual liberty, are willing to see our local and regional cultures subjected to all manner of assaults emanating from elsewhere within our country, rather than forcibly to restrict the freedom of Americans to traffic in ideas and goods, or to move about freely. This exposing of our cultures to harmful outside influences is an unavoidable cost of living in a free country.

Note that if one is happy living where one lives, among people who share one’s culture, it is not necessarily irrational or immoral to disapprove of new arrivals possessing a different culture who threaten to change what one loves. Liberalism is hard enough on local and regional cultures as it is. To suggest, as the Left do today, that it is racist or bigoted to resist-by non-violent means-the cultural invasion of one’s neighborhood is to add insult to injury.

Many sincere liberals see the free movement of ideas, goods, and persons that prevails within the borders of the U.S. as an ideal, which they aspire to recreate on an international scale. The free movement of ideas across our international borders is well established. The free movement of goods is less well established and is under assault today. To restrict the importation of ideas or of goods would, as I have said, violate the rights-or what should be the rights-of American citizens.

A free country must welcome as many immigrants as want to enter it, no matter the effect they have on its culture or its political institutions. This is the liberal immigration premise. It is sincerely held by Americans all across the political spectrum. And, as I argued in my last piece, it is false.

Another premise underlying the current push toward open borders in the U.S., this one held mostly by the Left, is the idea that a multicultural society is superior to a culturally homogeneous one. It implies that America would be a better country if its once-unified, English-speaking culture were transformed into a polyglot mosaic by the mass infusion of immigrants. This premise is false for the same reason that the liberal immigration premise is false.

In the history of the world, very few cultures have proven capable of sustaining the kind of freedom we enjoy in the United States. We cannot possibly strengthen, or even hope to maintain, the support that our free political institutions enjoy by continually adding to the voting population large numbers of persons from cultures that afford them little or no knowledge of the ideas necessary to sustain those institutions. This is especially true when multiculturalists urge immigrants not to assimilate, which means that they should not shed their old ideas, ideas which, in many cases, issued in poverty, corruption, and tyranny in their countries of origin.

America is the land of individual rights. Immigrants from tribal cultures, from cultures that place the welfare of the family or the clan above that of the individual, cultures that are socially or economically static, that value the pronouncements of religious leaders over those of secular leaders, or that view women as inferior to men-all must learn new values upon arriving in the U.S. Otherwise, if the immigrants come in sufficient numbers, we must resign themselves to seeing our rights eroded and our free political institutions degraded.

No society ever failed because it was too culturally unified. But a great many have dissolved into violence because they were not. Today Basques want to secede from Spain, Kurds from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Serbs, Armenians, Albanians, and many other cultural minorities seek to establish their own, monocultural countries because the multicultural societies of which they are a part do not work. To transform a culturally unified society into a multicultural one is to introduce a potential for conflict that did not exist before. Imagine a completely Catholic Northern Ireland deciding to improve their country by importing Protestants.

Editor’s note: Peter Wood gave a version of this talk at the Claremont Institute on April 7, 2016, at the event “Safe Spaces or Free Speech?” with Charles Kesler.

A long time ago—in 1994—the ever-provocative Stanley Fish published a book with the memorable title, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Fish wasn’t then thinking about the censorious left—Melissa Click at the University of Missouri, asking for some muscle over here; or Jerelyn Luther, the Yale undergraduate caught on video shrieking profanities at sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, because his wife had the audacity to suggest that students should feel free to wear Halloween costumes of their own choice. Nor was he thinking about sociology professor Patty Adler at the University of Colorado-Boulder threatened with forfeiture of her retirement benefits after students in her course, “Deviance in US Society,” filed a sexual harassment complaint because Adler staged role-playing exercises in which teaching assistants acted out the parts of characters in the global sex trade. Nor did he have in mind film professor Laura Kipnis, who became subject to a Kafka-esque inquisition at Northwestern University after student activists complained that an article she published in the Chronicle of Higher Education constituted sexual harassment. Kipnis had criticized “students’ sense of vulnerability” as “sexual paranoia.”

No such thing as free speech? As an empirical proposition, Fish’s declaration today could be substantiated at nearly all American colleges and universities. The freedom to say things, even manifestly true things, has been curtailed. And the freedom to argue things—to present claims backed by reason and scrupulous use of evidence—has been even more drastically limited.

Free Speech Hypocrisy

I don’t want to spend too much time establishing that these curtailments have, in fact, occurred. Across the political spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that “free speech” is in a kind of free-fall on campus. I cited the Adler and Kipnis cases because they play prominently in the AAUP’s new report, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, which is largely about how the feminist-inspired rule-making of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has somehow come back as a tool for more-radical-than-thou feminists to attack their not-radical-enough sisters. But as the AAUP report has garnered headlines in The New York Times and elsewhere in the liberal media, another story is playing out about the students at Emory University who were made to feel unsafe because someone had chalked “Trump 2016” on steps and sidewalks. Some 40 to 50 students assembled in the quad to protest the chalkings, chanting “You are not listening! Come speak to us; we are in pain!” The president of Emory, James Wagner, however, was listening and issued a sympathetic response about the protesters’ “expression of feelings and concern” rooted in “values regarding diversity and respect.” President Wagner attempted to thread the needle, speaking for “free speech” and anti-free speech in one go.