A Simple Defense of National Identity

Time to post about the current thing

I wasn’t paying much attention to the Internet over Christmas, but I caught glimpses of people referencing some sort of giant brouhaha involving Elon Musk. I wrongly assumed he must have done something to trigger the leftoids again. No, not at all! This time he actually did the opposite and upset his new friends on the right. I don’t know what triggered this or even what his initial tweet (Xeet?) was, and frankly I can’t be bothered to go back and look. The broad outline is that he said H1-B visa immigration is good and then everyone lost their minds, Joker-style.

For this Joker it really is all about money, it seems

And so we dive into another Current Thing cycle. Just like Luigi Mangione sparked a brief period of discussion about healthcare policy, now we’re on to talking about immigration policy. This one is more significant than usual because it’s finally brought the issue of “skilled immigration” out into the open for the right to properly brawl it out, instead of the endless hiding behind “well we’re just against ILLEGAL immigration, we’re totally fine with being replaced so long as it’s done LEGALLY.” Now people finally have to put their chips on the table. It’s about time!

Speaking of timeliness, I wrote about this subject less than a month ago. In that post, I compared immigration to a fundamental violation of contract—akin to two roommates forcing a third roommate to accept a fourth person squatting in their apartment, simply because they have him “outvoted” two to one. The current H1-B debate implicitly asks the question of whether this situation becomes acceptable so long as the squatter is of sufficiently high “human capital.”

The narrative put forward by the Elon Musk, pro-H1-B side is that “skilled immigration” is good because it allows us to bring in workers who are, to put it bluntly, better than the native population, and thus make the nation as a whole better. If we translate this into the roommate example, we can speculate that perhaps the fourth roommate who wants to move in will pay half of the rent all by himself, leaving the remaining half to be split among all three original roommates.

That’s a considerable financial boon, so one can obviously understand if two roommates want to take that deal. But what if the third guy still doesn’t, because he just doesn’t like this new interloper, money be damned? After all, no matter how much of the rent this guy pays, you still have to, y’know, actually live with him. That’s a factor too! In any sane assessment of the situation, the third roommate would retain the right to veto this arrangement, even if all other parties involved think that he is being unreasonable.

I think this is a pretty solid model for how to think about “skilled immigration” and if this was all I had to say maybe I just would’ve made it a note. I want to expand on it a bit here by discussing the concept of national identity from another angle, one which I briefly alluded to in the roommates post. When we speak of mere “roommates,” the connotation is of random people who are living together essentially out of convenience. Perhaps they are friends, but ultimately they are relatively interchangeable in each others’ lives. There is no fundamental connection requiring that they all remain together under the same roof, should their interests come into conflict with one another.

National identity is not like this, although those who support mass immigration—including mass “skilled” immigration!—seem to think that it is. Either that, or they just don’t care and don’t think national identity matters at all. But the point is, national identity isn’t something you can just casually switch out in the same way that you can move out of one apartment and into another. If you were born and raised in a particular nation and its culture, you can never go back in time and re-do all those formative experiences in a different nation with a different culture. You only get to do that once, for better or for worse.

In this way, your national identity is similar to your family, and indeed it seems obvious that the entire concept of a “nation” is an outgrowth of the family, in the sense that family scales up to tribe, then to village, then to people, and etc., until eventually arriving at its final evolution as the modern nation-state. Nearly all nations today—perhaps not literally all, I am too lazy to check all 190 something of them—are still fundamentally ethnic in origin, especially when their borders are self-determined as opposed to being drawn arbitrarily by external actors.

In the same way that you don’t get any easy do-overs with your national identity, nor do you get any such free re-rolls of your family. Your mother and brother and siblings and all the rest are bound to you by blood, creating tangible relations and obligations that exist and matter independently of other circumstances. Yes, you can be adopted, and people can be disowned by their family members, but that only serves to make my point—these things are never done lightly, because they are obvious exceptions made necessary only by extenuating circumstances. They are not things that are ever done casually, and certainly not just so that one can make more money. Someone who disowns a family member merely for the sake of acquiring more wealth would be universally seen as nefarious.

I doubt that Elon Musk or any of his allies would attempt to pretend that familial relations somehow don’t exist or matter—Elon himself has cited the transing of one of his children as an experience that contributed to his political shift. So why then do these people take an implicit stance that national identity doesn’t exist or matter? Well, I think they simply don’t make the connection that national identity is an extension of one’s family. On the surface, you can see why they might make that mistake.

After all, in nations that consist of millions, I will never meet or speak with the vast majority of my fellow national “family” members. Every day, many of them will die, and new ones will be born, without me ever knowing or caring. No matter how outgoing and social I am, I can only personally know and interact with an extremely tiny and limited slice of such a large extended “family.” So why should I care so much about their interests and feel such loyalty to them?

The simple reason that I do is that a shared national identity serves to expand my tribal in-group preference far beyond the limits of who I can know and interact with personally. This is a radical cultural technology without which the world as we know it today wouldn’t be possible. Could there even be a United States if I was unable to recognize or feel any connection to my fellow American citizens? No, certainly not. Instead this landmass would still be what it was before the white man arrived—mostly empty, populated only by tiny roving bands who struggled to ever develop this sort of affinity for peoples beyond those that they knew personally.

Or, more likely, it would just be a different nation entirely—because it’s both predictable and inevitable that a people with no solidarity towards anyone will be replaced and subjugated by a people who do have a collective will, backed by shared solidarity. That’s the entire history of war and conquest for the most part. All of the smaller tribes must submit to the biggest tribe around, or perhaps simply be assimilated into it. That’s how we got kings and empires in the first place, back when farming was still cutting-edge technology.

The tempting cope here would be to say “well sure but that hasn’t happened to the United States YET so maybe ur wrong lol!” This is an extremely short-sighted way to view the threat, as it’s obvious that by the time a society falls victim to this, it will be far too late to do anything about it. By the time the barbarians were at the gates of Rome, the empire’s integrity had been crumbling for centuries. Until someone invents a time machine that lets us redo generations of history, there is no retroactive fix for a collapse in social trust. The only remedy is to pro-actively guard against it with as much vigilance as possible. Thus, it is a case where one would do well to respect Chesterton’s fence and play the field very conservatively.

I’d like to close by challenging the notion that national identity has no inherent value, even putting aside the points made above about its role in enabling high-trust societies and cohesive social structures. Once again, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to make a serious case that family has no inherent value. We all recognize the immense value of having responsible parents, the irreplaceable support provided by a caring extended family. Everyone immediately recognizes orphans as the victims of incredible tragedy.

Likewise, most people can extend this understanding to national identity, even leftists—when the national identity in question is non-white. Consider the plight of Native American Indians, or the Maori people of New Zealand. Small, conquered natives who must find a way to co-exist with white majorities in a liberal order that has totally consumed their homelands. No one can blame them for clinging to their cultural heritage and wanting to keep their old ways alive, again, not even the wokest of the woke.

Why don’t people like Elon Musk clamor for the Maori to reject their obviously inferior culture and leave their dead old customs behind? Shouldn’t Native Americans move off their reservations already and get with the times? They’d probably make more money, after all! It’s the logical thing to do! And what about those wacky Jews and their obsession with a little strip of land in the Middle East? Don’t those silly billies know that national identity is fake and gay, why are they fighting so hard to protect something so abstract and transient? Maybe they should just—oh, whoops, might have gone a bit off the rails there boys! Let’s just forget all about that last part and pretend I never wrote it, okay?

Until next time!