Genetically Modified As an Effect of the Technology of Our Apelike Ancestors
Stuart K. Hayashi
Photo by Wolfgang Sauber; courtesy Wikimedia Commons
In the near future, human couples might use in-vitro fertilization and then, while it is still an embryo, alter the DNA of their future child to edit out particular DNA sequences that would otehrwise predispose the child to hereditary diseases. This is formally calledgermline genetic engineering and derided with the pejorative label of “designer babies.” People fear the idea of technology altering the DNA of humans. They fret that this will bring about an unprecedented level of horror as depicted in such classic science-fiction dystopias as Brave New World and Gattaca. But the truth is that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been a GMO from the start. Our species was genetically modified and outwardly physiologically altered as a consequence of the technology of our ancestors, ancestral species as recent as Homo erectus and possibly something as far back in the past as the much-hairier Australopithecus afarensis (as shown in the Wikimedia Commons photo on the left).
As of this writing, there have been no fewer than two proposed courses through which Stone-Age technology has produced, at least indirectly, revisions in the genetic makeup of the first Homo sapiens sapiens — yes, the sapiens is listed twice in our species’s official name. One route has do to with fire: that gift from that premodern Frankenstein, Prometheus. When meat is raw, the meat-eater has to expend a lot of calories to chew and digest it. When Homo erectus began cooking meat, it was a way for Homo erectus to complete part of the digestion process even before the meat entered anyone’s mouth. In this respect, a cooking fire or stove’s burner can be thought of as a “stomach external to the human body.” When the meat was cooked, it reduced the number of calories that Homo erectus had to expend on chewing the meat.
The paleo-anthropologist Richard Wrangham theorizes that the calories left over then went to expanding the brains of the Homo erectus. Our ancestral environment “selected” for individuals who were genetically predisposed to have their brains grow larger in response to the leftover calories. Hence, someone whose genes had predisposed her brain to enlarge from the leftover calories was one who was likelier to transmit this trait to successive generations. I thank the cultural commentator Scott A. Corbitt for pointing this out to me on the social medium Threads.
However, yet another avenue of Stone-Age technology altering our gene pool goes back even further in time. This one has to do with our ancestors dynamic with stone tools, as observed by cognitive archaeologist Natalie T. Uomini. Our two-legged ancestors would sharpen their stone tools. This was practiced even by species that predated the genus Homo; archaeologists have uncovered evidence of this practice being performed by the hairier, more-apelike Australopithecus afarensis. This practice would involve holding one stone still with one hand, usually the left, and scraping yet another stone against it using the other hand, usually the right hand. Anthropologists refer to this as “flintknapping” or “stone-knapping.”
In these activities, it was advantageous for a man to have one hand be more dexterous than the other. This practice “selected for” the men who were genetically predisposed to have a dominant hand. Men with a dominant hand were more likely than ambidextrous men to have children and then raise those children into adulthood. (I first learned of this explanation from Michael C. Corballis’s bookThe Lopsided Ape.) Additionally, Alastair Key and Chris Dunmore have found that this flintknapping also “selected” for thumbs to be more robust. Both of these physiological changes were already noticeable in Homo habilis, which pre-dates fire-making Homo erectus.
As our predecessors Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus already applied their conceptual faculties to restructuring objects from the wild to suit their own purrposes, it follows that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has never been without technology. But, more than that, our own species was already genetically altered, albeit unknowingly, by the technology of our ancestors going back at least as far as the chimp-faced Australopithecus.
Even the ancestors who altered us — Homo erectus or a similar contemporary — were genetically modified as a result of the technology of other hominin species that begat them. Homo erectus having genes for thick thumbs and a dominant hand was a byproduct of the technology of the predecessor Homo habilis or some contemporary to Homo habilis. Homo habilis, in turn, inherited the genes for those traits from Australopithecus or something closely related to it. The uses of particular technologies were customs that were ultimately chosen volitionally, and yet these choices influenced which genetically-caused traits were transmitted to successive generations and which were not. The conterminous transmission of chosen customs and unchosen inborn genetics is what ethologists Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson dubbed gene-culture co-evolution.
This ancient pattern of technological transformation educing a corresponding transformation in the human genome and visible physiological traits had continued into the Bronze Age, at least in the region stretching from Europe to Asia. The new development was the switch from hunter-gathering to the farming of grains now being the primary method of obtaining food. In words written by Doug James, Nicky Thomas, and Ben G. Thomas for Seven Days of Science, this is how presenter Emilia Evans paraphrases this discovery of Ali Akbari and David Reich of Harvard and the rest of their team:
...the rate of human evolution has accelerated over the last 10,000 years. ...cattle-herding populations from the Steppes of Eurasia moved into western Europe, bringing with them Bronze-Age technologies. ...cities have been constructed... ...farming and different ways of living seemed to have had profound effects on the human genome. Hundreds of versions of particular genes have become either more or less common over the past 10,000 years, indicating that these accelerating societal and cultural changes have, in turn, driven the acceleration of the evolution of the human genome. ...[Quoting lead author Ali Akbari,] “Everything has changed in the way we live, and that’s reflected in our genome and how it’s trying to catch up.”
Ali Akbari, David Reich, and the rest of their team have identified particular physiological traits that became more prevalent as a ramification of these trends. Such traits included red hair and lighter skin. They were accompanied, strangely enough, by a reduction in the prevalence of male-pattern baldness.
There is a lesson in this for those who abhor technological alteration as some unnatural tampering with biology. Stone-Age humans were the original ones to conduct genetic engineering on themselves and subsequent human generations, including us. That happened millennia prior to any technician going into a laboratory, placing a cell in a petri dish, and employing chemical methods to splice a foreign DNA segment into that cell.
Ridley Scott’s confusing Prometheus — his prequel to Sigourney Weaver’s Alien movies — portrays humans as having been engineered into existence by extraterrestrials through technologies far beyond what we have today. It turns out that aspects of that story may well be true, except that our technological creator was from Earth and that the technology employed in this endeavor didn’t even need to be as complex as ours.
There are at least two options in how we can interpret this. Should we think of Australopithecus as being in a category separate from ourselves, then, inasmuch as we have descended from Australopithecus or something like it, this Australopithecus was a mad scientist and we humans are his Creation. However, if we include Australopithecus and Homo habilis in the category of “us,” then, insofar as technological restructuring is a form of creativity, this process is an instance of autopoiesis: modern man is indeed self-made.
Ultimately it is not the angels but we humans who are, in the words of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, “self-begot, self-raised...”
The technologies employed by our ancient ancestors — flintknapping, fire-making, and farming — were consciously chosen, but their lasting influence on changes to our genetic code were a byproduct that was not consciously chosen. Our Stone-Age ancestors didn’t even know of these effects. By contrast, when future couples engage in more-direct editing of the genetic codes of their children, those edits will indeed be consciously intended choices. For that to happen, these people will have in mind which specific DNA sequences to isolate in order to alter the very specific traits they are targeting. That is an important distinction between the technology-caused gene modificatoin of the near future versus the Pliocene past. But what has remained the consistent pattern since the prehistoric origin of our species is the presence of technology to influence the genetic codes of descendants.
We would be best off giving up any aversion to GMOs-as-such. Our family lineage had become technologically-created GMOs in the Stone Age prior even to our becoming Homo sapiens sapiens. Far from technological innovation being some sort of deviation from our naturalness, the employment of technological innovation is inherent to human nature itself. Artifice does not refer necessarily to fakery; etymologically it means craftsmanship, being the root of artisan and artwork. And in the present and in the Stone Age, such crafting of both one’s surroundings and one’s own genetic makeup has been the way of the human. Thus, to be artificial is to be natural. It has always been our Stone-Age adaptation as an organism.
If some sardonic bully from an internet meme kept stopping Tiktaalik from crawling onto land — ostensibly because of something about modern life being so horrible that staying simpler and poorer in the water would have been preferable — I think Tiktaalik would try once again to make it onto land. I have decided I should be like Tiktaalik.
Dec. 31, 2019 was the first time I uploaded this image, hoping for a Happy Stu Year. Then in 2020, COVID conquered the world. I uploaded it again for Dec. 31, 2020. Twelve days after that, and my mother died suddenly and undexpectedly. Twelve days in, and 2021 was already the worst year of my life. I uploaded the image again for Dec. 31, 2021. In 2022, my father died. I uploaded it again for Dec. 31, 2022. The year 2023 was when I was threatened with something horrible and life-changing in its horribleness and cruelty. I uploaded the image yet again for Dec. 31, 2023. All throughout 2024, I lived in fear of that threat. I uploaded the image again for Dec. 31, 2024. In 2025, the life-changing threat against me was finally acted upon.
If I were still as superstitious as I was raised to be, I would think this image is cursed. But no, I am uploading it again. I think that’s what Tiktaalik would want of me. Here is hoping that in 2026, I will finally have a Happy Stu Year.
In the United States, MAGA nationalists have gotten sick of hearing the fact that the Statue of Liberty 🗽 delivers a clear invitation to immigrants. These MAGA nationalists are immediately reminded of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the statue’s base where it welcomes the world’s tired and poor huddled masses. These MAGA nationalists recite their stock reply that the poem was only added seventeen years subsequent to the statue’s opening ceremony. They then proclaim that this means that the Statue of Liberty did not originally represent the freedom of immigration.
Donald Trump’s presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who is in charge of ICE’s cruel infractions, is among those who provide this revisionist history about the Statue. In 2017, he sniveled, “...the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later [and] is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
That same year, the same opinion came from the late Rush Limbaugh. On the radio, Limbaugh pontificated,
...the Statue of Liberty and the Emma Lazarus poem is a great illustration of how immigration policy and the United States/Statue of Liberty has become bastardized. “Give us your tired, your poor” and so forth literally has nothing to do with the purpose of the United States.
In fact, it’s never been on the Statue. It is inside the pedestal. It was only put there when they put a museum in there. It was not part of the original Statue of Liberty. It was not part of the design. The statue was a gift to the United States from the people of France as a beacon of freedom and liberty. It’s a testament to our Founding and our Founding Fathers, and this Emma Lazarus poem had nothing to do with it. It had nothing whatsoever to do with it!
The poem was put in the pedestal museum because it was used as part of the fundraising for the pedestal. It’s been co-opted by immigration activists and leftists to actually [split infinitive 😣] now represent U.S. immigration policy, which it isn’t.
Actually, the Statue was associated with immigration at least as early as its opening ceremony in 1886 — seventeen years prior to the addition of Emma Lazarus’s poem. At the ceremony, the U.S. President of the time, Grover Cleveland, gave a speech to dedicate it. In the dedication, he alluded to immigration. And the term that the man used is noteworthy.
Anti-immigrationists frequently employ the term open borders as a pejorative. Yet President Cleveland spoke glowingly of how the Statue of Liberty stands before “the open gates of America.”
We know that Cleveland is here consciously alluding to immigration, as it was a topic on which he commented publicly throughout his presidential terms. He had generally wanted to favor immigrants from everywhere, but he was not completely consistent. When gangs of white-supremacists engaged in vigilante actions against Chinese immigrants, Cleveland properly condemned the violence. Yet, sadly, he ultimately capitulated to pressure from the racists and said that ultimately whites and those of East Asian descent could not coexist in the same neighborhoods. He thus relented to calls for restrictions on Chinese immigration.
Cleveland comes across better when it comes to the nativist clamor against other sets of immigrants they hated. At the time, those from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were not considered white. They were darker-skinned and darker-haired and mostly were Catholic or Jewish, castigated as racially distinct from the lighter-skinned Protestant majority. As most of these immigrants were impecunious and not fluent in English, legislation to discriminate against them involved Congressional bills allowing immigration only from those who could write in English. Fortunately, Cleveland successfully vetoed those bills, explaining to Congress and the wider public,
It is said...that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens. . . .
I cannot believe that we would be protected against ...evils by limiting immigration to those who can read and write... In my opinion, it is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work...
It is Cleveland’s position on this matter that informs his mention of the open gates of America — gates that, naturally, also should have been open to those from East Asia.
I also appreciate how President Cleveland praised Liberty as the USA’s own pagan goddess, a much better object of worship. Thus, in his public speech at the inauguration for the Statue of Liberty, President Cleveland orates,
We are not here to day to bow before the representation of a fierce and war-like god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead, our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America, and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.
We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East [France]. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until liberty enlightens the world [boldface added].
Yes, Liberty has always stood for the application of her principles, foremost of which is the liberty to seek new opportunities in new lands. She stood for liberalized immigration at her opening ceremony. May she continue to stand for it today.
Sorry, MAGA Racists: The USA Was Indeed Founded on Active Intellectual Engagement With Philosophic Ideas, Ideas Which in Logic Ultimately Lead to Acceptance of the Rights of Nonwhite Immigrants
Stuart K. Hayashi
This Time magazine special edition commemorating the
founding’s 250th anniversary admits that the American Revolution was and is a “Revolution
of Ideas”
You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you. . . . I don’t know. —Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof
Introduction
I notice an internal contradiction in what is said by MAGA white nationalists. MAGA white nationalists shriek that nonwhites, such as engineers from India, are ruining the West by immigrating to it, and therefore they should be barred from entry. In reply, free-enterprisers point out that the MAGA white nationalists are contradicting the Declaration of Independence and the very philosophy upon which the American republic was founded. Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, has turned out to be surprisingly articulate in explaining this position. He began as a conventional leftwinger blaming capitalism for the world’s problems. But, as he says in a speech to Georgetown University, he came to realize that political-economic liberalization is actually the strongest remedy for the Third World’s poverty. And in holding up the liberalizing philosophy of the USA’s founding as his case study, Bono praises the republic as an idea. To quote his own words,
...America is an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in human history, right up there with the Renaissance... right up there with crop rotation... ....that idea, the America idea, it’s an idea, the idea is that you and me are created equal...
The idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we can do the rest. ...
This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it, because these aren’t just American ideas anymore. ... You’ve brought them into the world. . . . I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do. The family tree has a lot of branches. But the thing is… the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths — your truths — they are self-evident in us.
In 1983, Leonard Peikoff as well made this explicit. The USA, he ascertained, “at root is an ideology. . . . The Founding Fathers explicitly championed a certain philosophy, which they made the basis of America’s distinctive political institutions and national character, and that philosophy to some extent survives among the citizens to this day.” And we free-enterprisers have repeatedly emphasized that this philosophy refutes everything spewed by the MAGA white nationalists.
Hence, the MAGA white nationalists have a rejoinder to us free-enterprisers. MAGA white nationalists stamp their feet and cry out that the USA “is not a collection of ideas.” That’s how failed comedian turned white supremacist Sam Hyde phrases it. In his viral Twitter video with over 21 million views and over 29 thousand retweets, he moans, “There is this disturbing idea...that America is just a collection of ideas.” No, “You have to fight for not...the notion of ‘America as this collection of ideas.’ That’s not what it is.” He dismisses the Declaration and other founding documents as an empty set of words. “You’re not fighting for a paragraph” (emphasis his). J. D. Vance, the vice president under Donald Trump, similarly sneers, “People will not fight for [philosophic] abstractions...”
Rather, MAGA white nationalists such as Hyde and Vance maintain that America consists of two other objects. “America is not just an ‘idea,’” J. D. Vance continues. “It is a group of people with a shared history.” — shared ethnic history. “. . . It is, in short, a nation,” with nation here having a meaning similar to ethnic tribe, such as in how the Huns, Vandals, Angles, Franks, and Biblical Moabites were a “nation.” These are all euphemisms for blood. And Vance would have that although Americans will not fight for “abstractions,...they will fight for their home” — in effect, the soil. Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance would have it that the USA is all about blood and soil. But when they don’t want to admit so explicitly that it’s all about race for them, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists say the USA is not about “ideas” but traditions (translation: only the traditions associated with those of their own skin color) — what J. D. Vance euphemizes as white Americans’ “shared history.”
As a case study in tradition, Hyde pontificates, “Nothing significant that gets built, gets built on an individualistic scale. The greatest things that get built: cathedrals — and, if you disagree with this, you’re just wrong . . . — cathedrals are built over hundreds of years. They’re built not just by the army of stone masons who build them but by the towns who pay for it.” And he continues, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. . . . It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
And in showing a complete lack of understanding of what culture entails, Sam Hyde adds, “This is not learned stuff.”
This denigration of the Founding philosophy — denying America’s status as an idea — is a new low from the political Right, especially its members who claim to be American. Prior to Donald Trump’s initial run for President in late 2015, the USA’s political conservatives frequently gave lip service to the Founding Fathers. These political conservatives were never consistent. They conveniently evaded the fact that their efforts to unite church and State directly contradicted the words and spirit of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Joel Barlow. But these MAGA white nationalists have given up this old pretense of respecting the Founders. And, I suppose, it is best that they do. It exposes MAGA white nationalists in their fundamental anti-Americanism.
Of special interest to me here is the internal contradiction in proclaiming that rather than “ideas,” America is about “culture” and traditions (“culture” and traditions of white people, apparently). The fact is that culture and traditions are, by definition, learned. More to the point: culture and traditions are expressions of ideas, and therefore traditions ultimately come down to ideas. But these “traditions” that the white nationalists uphold are ideas and abstractions to which they want Americans to pledge passively and unthinkingly. When they deride “ideas,” philosophy, and “abstractions,” what Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance really mean is that they reject the active engagement with ideas that was practiced by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the other Founders.
All Traditions Are Customs, But a Tradition Has a Symbolic Meaning That Goes Beyond the Custom Itself
To understand what is meant, we can do something that Sam Hyde has neglected to do: we can bother to consider what is the definition of tradition. Traditions are customs practiced in particular types of settings and on particular occasions, and these customs have become long-established in their respective societies. So far, Sam Hyde and the other MAGA white nationalists would agree. But there is a second part of the definition that they omit. All traditions are customs, but not all customs are traditions. For a custom to be a tradition, there must be an additional component. What else makes an action a tradition is that is a gesture. Culture consists of actions considered important not only in and of themselves but also as symbolic representations of something else important to that society. And all symbolic gestures exist in the realm of ideas.
Consider a traditional Western wedding ceremony. Absent of any formal marriage ceremony, people can form pair bonds. They can form a unit where people live together, pool their assets, and have sex. These can be considered common-law marriages, and the marriage ceremony is not needed for that. Rather, the nuptials are a formalized ritual to codify the pair bond that already exists. The wedding ceremony, like all traditional ceremonies, is a ritual in which people express their appreciation for a set of actions — the pair-bond and all it entails — and is not the actual set of actions being celebrated. The wedding ceremony is not the pair bond but a symbol expressing appreciation for lifelong commitment to the pair bond in question. To phrase it differently, the wedding ceremony is not the marriage but a supplemental performance of the idea of the marriage.
Within this larger symbol are smaller symbols. The bride wears white as a gesture to represent her relative chastity prior to the marriage. The throwing of the bouquet is a ritual symbolizing the idea that other wedding attendants, too, will soon be able to enjoy what the bride and groom get to have.
Eating particular types of food has practical value, and need not have tradition attached to it. But sometimes eating a particular food on a particular occasions is said to have cultural value and be a tradition. When that happens, that particular dish is no longer valued only for the directly practical values of nourishment, nutrition, and the pleasure of taste. Indeed, the dish becomes a symbol of something — something of value in that society — other than the dish itself. And ideas are involved there as well.
The is seen, and tasted, with the tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving. Many Americans could prepare a turkey feast almost any other day of the year. But eating this bird on Thanksgiving is a ritual for family members to represent their gratitude for what everything good in their lives, including each other. Hence, the feast itself is not about the turkey as much as it is about the values the ritual represents — again, specific ideas.
Eating any particular cuisine at least in part due to its ethnic history is about ideas. The Japanese diet originally formed because of geographic isolation. Japan is an archipelago surrounded by sea animals, and therefore seafood figures prominently in the Japanese diet. Historically, it was easier to be a fisherman than to try to be like the Steppes peoples and raise livestock. Originally, then, Japanese people ate seafood only for practical reasons.
But with global trade, a rich person in Japan now can theoretically go for long periods of time eating food not caught from the ocean. Often, people eat traditional Japanese food not only for the taste. Those of Japanese descent want to experience something that their ancestors did, such as eat the same food. When non-Japanese people try Japanese cuisine, it has a lot to do with wanting to experience other cultures — the idea is to be exploratory. Eating food from other cultures is an expression of one’s openness to new experiences and new kinds of people. Accordingly, in the modern world the tradition of eating “ethnic food” has a lot to do with ideas.
(As Murray Rothbard-influenced, patent-hating anarcho-“capitalists” often make common cause with white nationalists, some might interject here. In trying to stigmatize intellectual property rights as some form of protectionism and monopolism, this is the point where I have heard them say in their usual churlishness, But a patent or copyright claims you own an idea. If a tradition is an idea, you want a corporation to patent your ethnic traditions? That is a false conflation on their part. Customs and traditions are generalized ideas, as are entire product categories. By contrast, patents and copyrights recognize your ownership over a very specific configuration of your own origination. I have written of that difference here and here and here and here.)
An apologist from the Intellectual Dark Web might chime in, “Yes, ideas are important. But what we object to, is people talking only about ideas that are pie-in-the-sky and not focusing on the actual actions taken to help the American people.” As Sam Hyde says in his viewed-21-million-times tirade, “...America’s not a collection of ideas; America is a people [a race]: Americans.” But for the Intellectual Dark Web to say that its criticism of America-as-an-idea is not about practicability is for the Intellectual Dark Web to whack at a straw man. No free-enterpriser who stresses the importance of ideas does so at the expense of concrete action. The point of ideas is to implement them. A plan — a complex set of ideas — to buy a home is made for the purpose of buying the home. A schematic explaining an invention is drafted to produce units of that invention.
In turn, the Founders drafted the Declaration not to muse idly in a parlor, but to put such ideas into practice. Hence, they produced a social system freer than what it had existed before. And to the extent that such a social system was successful, it was not due to, but in spite of, political collectivists such as Sam Hyde.
Sam Hyde’s cry that “you’re not fighting for a paragraph,” as is J. D. Vance’s pronouncement that people “will not fight for abstractions,” is belied by the very oath required of those serving in the federal government. The President of the United States and personnel of the armed forces do not take an oath to serve and defend Sam Hyde’s white race — “a people.” Nor is the oath for the white people’s “shared history” of which J. D. Vance speaks. Instead, they take an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution — every “paragraph” of it. More specifically, it is that insofar as the U.S. military is employed wisely against genuine threats, the U.S. military fights to defend the sort of civilian life that the “paragraph” describes.
The Choice Is Not Traditions Versus Ideas, But Respectively of Passive Conformity to Some Ideas Versus Active Intellectual Engagement With Evidence
And, of course, even the MAGA white nationalists’ use of the term tradition is a red herring. They don’t value “traditions” in general. They disparage Islamic traditions. Even MAGA white nationalists who are Catholic are unfriendly toward the Catholic traditions of Latinos. The white nationalists only like “traditions” that they associate with their own skin color. And their skin color is just something unchosen that they just have. That is apparent in Sam Hyde’s conflation of skin color with “culture.” To revisit the quotation from earlier, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. This is not learned stuff. It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
Notice Sam Hyde’s equivocation of “culture” with “genetic memory” and that which is innate, “hardwired.” Culture and traditions consist of sets of actions that people enact voluntarily. By definition, they are not “hardwired.” But in the warped (mis)interpretation of Sam Hyde and his many white-nationalist fans, such human actions are as innate and involuntary as skin color. Hence Sam Hyde says nonsensically, “This is not learned stuff.”
To test Sam Hyde’s assertion, you can look at differences in traditions among people who are of the same racial heritage but who live in different parts of the globe. Persons of Korean descent in the USA often behave with different customs — different ideas on what is, or is not, socially appropriate — than do people in North Korea. In the USA, rap music is considered “Black culture.” But rap music was not associated with Black people in the 1940s or 1970s, prior to rap music being invented. Rap music is not as popular among Black people in West Africa as it is in the USA. That is because culture is indeed something that is not hardwired. Culture consists of customs. Every custom had to be invented by some individual. Afterward, other people adopted that custom — to wit, they learned it.
Every tradition began as an untraditional innovation and was therefore adopted for reasons other than “It’s a tradition.” As white nationalists frequently invoke the fall of Rome in misleading ways, a particular historic account from ancient Rome is instructive. Yes, MAGA white nationalists say that the Western Roman Empire fell from being to open to outsiders — (white-skinned) Germanic barbarians — and the modern West will destroy itself through similar openness. By contrast, in an actual ancient Roman debate about openness to foreigners, the emperor Claudius made an important observation about traditions which these same MAGA white nationalists prefer to evade. Tacitus quotes the emperor as saying, “Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity [tradition], was once new. . . .This [new] practice [with regard to openness to outsiders] too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”
This, and every other tradition, was something learned. A tradition might have begun as a practice done squarely for practical value. That was the case of Japanese people mostly eating seafood. But the custom might have begun, from the start, as a symbolic gesture. In either case, what is now called a tradition is called such — rather than only a custom or practice — because it is a gesture representing some value other than itself. Traditions are ideas.
But there are two different approaches we can take to traditions and all other ideas that have ingrained themselves into the culture. We can take a passive-and-uncritical approach to them. Conversely, we can engage with traditions and other long-cherished ideas, which means being critical and selective about them, which requires actual thought.
The passive-and-uncritical approach is to accept a tradition unthinkingly. The insinuation is that the tradition was good enough for my family, and so I should practice it, and there is no more to consider. That is the approach taken by those who say, “You should follow a tradition because it’s our tradition, and that’s that.” A variant that is only slightly more thoughtful, and which was popular among twentieth-century European political conservatives who cite Edmund Burke, is one that goes, The fact that the tradition has lasted so long, into our own day, is already proof that the tradition is time-tested and has served us well. So the fact that the custom has earned the status of ‘tradition,’ means the custom is worthy. In that respect, I am justified in saying ‘That a particular custom is a tradition is justification enough to practice it.’
And, of course, that unthinking approach is lazy. For millennia, slavery was traditional. Slavery was a tradition not merely because of its ostensive practical benefits for the slave masters, but because it represented particular ideas that were convenient for the politically-influential in general. It embodied their larger assumption that those in power have every rightful authority to domineer over others by force. In some Mesoamerican Empires, such as that of the Aztecs, ritual human sacrifice was considered an indispensable tradition. The traditional sermons delivered in the very cathedrals that Sam Hyde extols are all about ideas. And, contrary to Sam Hyde, the ideas in such sermons are due for critical reexamining. That a custom is a tradition, is indeed not justification enough. That brings us to the second approach to traditions.
The second and contrasting approach is to recognize that traditions themselves must be subject to judgment and scrutiny other than “It’s a tradition.” It means embracing the realization that some traditions are good and worth preserving, whereas others are inadequate and due for abandonment, replacement, or at least modification. And that is a major role of Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy calls upon us to examine our traditions and select the good from the bad.
Since the founding of the republic, reading Enlightenment philosophy has itself become a tradition. The fact that the free-enterprise philosophy of the Founders and the rest of the Enlightenment has become a tradition in America is frequently cited by pretentious anti-capitalists as proof that such free-enterprise philosophy is conservative, stodgy, and obsolete. These pretentious people then tout their tired old Socialism and Progressivism as the hip new innovation on the cutting edge, omitting how their verbiage is broadly a repackaging of the political-economic collectivism of medieval guilds that Enlightenment liberal free-enterprise philosophy supplanted.
Contrary to those pretentious anti-capitalists, it is the case that Enlightenment philosophy and Founders such as Thomas Jefferson have told us that free-enterprise philosophy becoming a tradition is not a basis good enough to embrace it. Once again, even these — the best of ideas — must be justified by some other, more-objective standard rather than appealing to “tradition.”
Anticipating our century’s nonsense about tradition-for-tradition’s-sake, Thomas Jefferson elucidated, “...institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, ...new truths disclosed, ... institutions must advance also...” Those who uphold tradition unthinkingly “might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” And in terms of actually yielding equitable results, his free-enterprise philosophy has held up very well. The free-enterprise philosophy of the Enlightenment, enshrined in the USA’s Founding documents — what Sam Hyde denigrates as just a “paragraph” — is indeed a great American tradition. But, contrary to Friedrich August von Hayek, it is not great on account of being a tradition.
Consider a well-publicized contrast. The MAGA white nationalists’ appeal to American traditions not out of any appreciation for what those traditions represent but out of demand that everyone conform to the norms of the white Christian majority. That is why they throw tantrums about American football players kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality but simultaneously deny that the republic was founded upon “ideas” and denigrate the founding documents as just some “paragraph.”
This is self-contradiction comparable to how similar American rightwingers — there is overlap between they and MAGA — prioritize the American flag over free speech. The American flag symbolizes freedom, including freedom of speech. That includes the right to be on the land of a willing landholder as you burn, in protest, a U.S. flag that is your own rightful possession. Those who would outlaw flag-burning are expressing not appreciation for what the flag represents but instead turning it into a fetish — an expression not of reverence for the American flag’s meaning but as an artifact of mindless idolatry. That is fitting, as mindless idolatry is the most consistent manifestation of MAGA. Thomas Jefferson would shake his head in dismay.
That brings to mind the MAGA white nationalists’ self-contradiction and hypocrisy over free speech and the First Amendment themselves. As numerous private parties were peaceably avoiding them, these MAGA people mischaracterized such avoidance as “censorship,” branding themselves “free-speech absolutists.” That these demagogues denigrate the fact of the republic’s founding in abstract philosophy demonstrates they do not understand or care about the freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
The First Amendment exists exactly because of the American republic being founded upon active engagement with philosophic ideas. The Declaration of Independence invoked the liberal republican Enlightenment-philosophy ideas of John Locke and “Levelers” like Richard Overton that throughout the prior century the Crown had tried to squelch. In the name of such ideas and their further development, the Founders established the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech, contrary to Sam Hyde’s cohorts and to Donald Trump, is not about the visceral ejaculation of every prejudice on whim. Rather, freedom of speech is the processing and exchanging of ideas, a facet of the larger freedom of thought, which is what the First Amendment is supremely about. Among the amendments to the Constitution, this one is the first exactly because the freedom of thought is the one of prime importance — freedom of thought, as we have discussed earlier, gives rise to the freedom of action that is freedom in general. In deriding the USA’s founding upon philosophic ideas, the MAGA nationalists minimize the very basis of the First Amendment that they pretend to cherish.
For a long time, I was under the misapprehension that the opposite of bigotry from white nationalists was: the policy of being open to new ideas. But simply keeping oneself open is too passive. It is too passive to wait for new ideas to come along. The true opposite of bigotry is curiosity. This means proactively pursuing one’s own curiosity — like babies and the Biblical Eve —out of one’s own selfish desire to know. That results in exactly what Sam Hyde fears: engagement with ideas, so much so that an entire republic can be founded upon innovative philosophy. Speaking of Sam Hyde’s precious centuries-long construction projects, the play Inherit the Windputs it very well: “An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.”
Conclusion: The Nation of the Enlightenment
Ayn Rand has observed the exceptionalism here of the USA’s founding. Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalists wail that white people have no ethno-state of their own. The reality is that almost all white-majority countries are ethno-states founded by a single tribe. It’s called England because it was founded by the tribe after which it was named, the Angles. Yet another well-known nation is called France because it was founded by the Franks. Inasmuch as these tribes founded a country to maintain their traditions, the founding was based on ideas. But as far as it was about “tradition” per se, it was from an uncritical acceptance of those ideas — of accepting them from one’s elders without question.
What makes America exceptional was not only that it was founded by ideas, but by very conscious examination of, and grappling with, such ideas. Upon separation from England, Americans could have set up a new monarchy because that was the tradition of the people from whom they descended. But upon examining that form of government and comparing it against others, the Founders decided to go with institutions previously tried by the ancient Athenians and the Romans but with the aid of the newest philosophic ideas to make these institutions more liberal than what their Mediterranean forebears had conceived. Ayn Rand notes that whereas these other Western societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, were a result of “historical accident,” the American republic was from “philosophical design.”
Leonard Peikoff, too, observes, “America is the only country in history created not by meaningless warfare” nor some “geographical accident” in which some tribe like the Angles found itself, “but deliberately, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas.”
Thomas Paine understood how the founding of America was more about innovation than incurious adherence to tradition. In Common Sense, the very pamphlet instrumental to inspiring the American Revolution, he reminded readers, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And that is what the Founders did.
Migo: “But you want to . . . what? Tear down everything our world is built on?”
Meechee: “It’s not just about tearing down old ideas. It’s about finding new ones.” —Smallfoot
Enlightenment philosophy’s celebration of such curiosity is so vital to the USA’s founding that it is enshrined in our Constitution. A major impetus for the founding document’s codification of the rights to copyright and patent is that, as accurately noted in the document itself, these intellectual property rights reward and thereby “promote the progress of science and the useful arts...” The search for new developments is our American tradition but the new developments themselves, of course, begin as something that is definitionally the opposite of tradition.
Bono is right about America. America never could have become a global leader had it been only a set of traditions and, as Sam Hyde also puts it, “a people” (a tribe). As noted in a very American movie,
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do it as Bruce Wayne. As a man [and as just “a people” —S.H.] I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.
Ah, but Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying their hardest to corrupt it. The fact that America is an idea is the source of what has made it so important and so powerful for over two centuries, prior to MAGA finally being able to threaten it. As a symbol — an idea — America carries an influence that goes beyond the sum total of its human population, those who are white and otherwise. It is as a symbol — an idea — that America inspires people the world over who are yearning for greater freedom, the exact people whom Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying to shut out. That is what the historian James Truslow Adams meant when he coined the American dream. The expression the American dream is just another way of iterating that America is a great philosophic idea. And America is a great symbol and great idea because it is not a symbol and idea only, but enacts its own founding philosophic values to the extent that it finally allows for the liberty of all. It is not those of Latin or Middle Eastern descent, but the ugliness of Sam Hyde and Stephen Miller that needs to be deported.
Both approaches to tradition — the incurious approach of Sam Hyde and the other Great-Replacement white nationalists versus the curious approach of the Founders — involve ideas. But note that the latter involves much more thinking and, hence, ideas play a much more active role. As Ayn Rand noted, the USA was founded not only upon ideas, but upon very conscious engagement with them. And that is why this latter approach to tradition is anathema to Sam Hyde and other white nationalists screeching about a “Great Replacement.”
Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists, of course, would have us embrace their racism unthinkingly, going as far as conflating customs and traditions and culture as being as inherent as skin color — “This is not learned stuff.” Bothering to examine the facts about culture, tradition, and the learned-versus-unlearned is what immunizes someone against Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists. In that respect, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists are correct to hate the fact that America was founded upon “ideas.” The fact that some people still bother to think is a fact that prevents Sam Hyde and other white nationalists from winning over the rest of the population, white-skinned and otherwise. And, on at least some implicit level, Same Hyde and the other white nationalists notice this.
It is not mere random coincide that MAGA denigrates the USA’s founding on philosophic “ideas” and also demands that exclusion of persons of other “races.” The first is in service to the second. To recognize that USA’s founding upon “ideas” would lead to renewed attention on what those specific ideas were and are — that, though far from being applied as consistently as they should have been, both back then and now, they were always about cognizance of the equal rights of all human beings to liberty. And this is the liberty that MAGA is denying to dark-skinned people, such as engineers from India, in denying them entry. To acknowledge (1) the USA’s founding upon the ideas of Enlightenment liberty is ultimately to acknowledge (2) the rights of dark-skinned people. MAGA is trying to kill both.
And note that for most of its history, that acknowledgment of the equal right to liberty for all “races” has not been part of the history of white people or the Judo-Christian religious tradition. It was only subsequent to the rise of Enlightenment liberty philosophy, as promulgated by secularists like Josiah Wedgwood, Adam Smith, and Denis Diderot, that particular Christian sects — mostly the Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians — took a strong interest in abolishing chattel slavery. When Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists uphold most white-people traditions but conspicuously not the Enlightenment-liberal philosophy one, they are able to uphold most white-people traditions while excluding the one aspect of Western Civilization that was singly most responsible for enfranchising all of the nonwhite denizens of that culture.
That, despite the past codification of racial discrimination into the USA’s laws, the Founding philosophy ultimately requires the abolition of such discrimination, is acknowledged implicitly in Sam Hyde’s diatribe. In the diatribe, he proclaims that if many engineers from India migrated to Japan, you would be wrong to think that this could “turn an Indian person into a Japanese person...”, and this also applies to engineers from India moving to the United States. Hyde is still cowardly to say directly that he conflates “American” with “white,” and that their non-whiteness precludes anyone from India from being American. That cowardice is why Sam Hyde instead makes the insipid analogy about how someone from India can never truly be a Japanese national. But Sam Hyde does say directly that immigrants from India “are being used” — by whom exactly, Sam Hyde does not specify — “to replace white people.”
But American independence from Great Britain was not about the racial anxieties mouthed by Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance. The Declaration of Independence did not say that the American colonists had come to interpret themselves as being a different ethnicity or race from those of English metropole, and that, as a separate ethnicity or “race,” they wanted the new republic as an independent ethnostate. No. The American colonists separated themselves from the British government based not on race — not on them being a separate “people” — but on a difference in governing philosophy, on their having different ideas on how the colonies should be governed. J. D. Vance’s assertion that Americans “will not fight for abstractions” would have been news to those who fought in the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was chock-full of philosophic abstractions.
I have heard similar white nationalists pronounce that the observation that the USA is a “nation of immigrants” is not from the Founding period but only gained currency in the year 1959 when Ted Sorensen and Jules Davids ghostwrote for John F. Kennedy, Sr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning book with that title. As these white nationalists uphold white people’s “traditions” as inherently good, their insinuation is that the recognition of the USA is a nation of immigrants is diminished if the recognition turns out to be relatively new and not-so-traditional after all. That goes along with these same white nationalists lamenting that the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, largely championed by John F.’s younger brother Ted Kennedy, created the USA’s “open border.” As I have written before (1, 2, 3), the Hart-Celler Act did not do that, and, though it liberalized immigration in some aspects, the same bill made immigration more difficult in others.
But the truth is that a good idea is good on its own merits regardless of whether it is old or new. The celebration of America’s immigrants would be worthwhile even if the idea came from 1959 rather than the Founding period.
Yet the reality, as usual, is that these white nationalists are incorrect about American history. The observation that the USA is a nation of an increasingly diverse set of immigrants is one that goes back at least as far as John Adams, the USA’s second president and the brains behind American independence. And in the same observation, Adams acknowledged how the founding had been about active engagement with ideas. Writing in the year 1818, and looking back on how, decades earlier, American colonists were initially reluctant to separate from British rule, Adams commented on how it was active engagement with philosophic ideas that eventually united the diversity in the immigrant populations in this cause. As he verbalized it,
This radical change in the principles, opinions sentiments and affection of the people, was the real American Revolution. . . . The Colonies had grown up under...so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance...that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprize. The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.
Adams said it himself — that rigorous philosophizing by a diversity of peoples was “the real American Revolution.” America, at her best, is an idea. And she will remain a great idea to the extent that we uphold and defend this idea against Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Sam Hyde, and other racist illiberals like them.
On Saturday, January 17, 2026, I added the point about the First Amendment and the quotations from J. D. Vance. On Sunday, January 18, 2026, I added the quotation from John Adams about the American colonies being a collection of diverse immigrant groups. On Saturday, May 9, 2026, I changed the thumbnail photo of this post to my April 8, 2026 photo of me holding the Time magazine special issue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Americsan foudning and noting that the U.S. founding was and is a “Revolution of Ideas.”
Reading the local newspaper, I have been troubled, but not surprised, to see letters to the editor trying to whitewash Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and their abuses of individual rights. One especially creepy letter came at the end of February in 2024 by one Lane Yoder. Mr. Yoder has had a role in the Libertarian Party of Hawaii. I met him face-to-face years ago. Although it is clearly a self-contradiction for a self-proclaimed advocate of liberty to whitewash someone such as Donald Trump, I found it consistent with how Mr. Yoder has behaved in the past.
I wrote a letter in response, which the Honolulu Star-Advertiser published on March 4. First I will show the version the newspaper printed. Below that I will provide the version I sent to the newspaper.
A recent letter poses, “After railing against Donald Trump as a compulsive liar, those with Trump derangement syndrome are lecturing us to ‘take him literally’ when he says he will encourage Vladimir Putin to attack countries that are delinquent in their NATO payments” (“Make up your mind on Trump’s credibility,” Star-Advertiser, Feb. 22).
Far from what the author insinuates, there is no internal contradiction there. When someone who has shown himself to be both dangerous and wishy-washy issues threats, erring on the side of caution means still having to take those threats seriously.
It is not advisable to cave in to Trump’s extortion. And the actual “Trump derangement” is not a legitimate concern about his dangerous actions, but the insistence on excusing them.
Stuart K. Hayashi
Mililani
____________
What I sent to the newspaper:
In his Feb. 22 letter, Lane Yoder poses, “After railing against Donald Trump as a compulsive liar, those with Trump derangement syndrome are lecturing us to ‘take him literally’ when he says he will encourage Vladimir Putin to attack countries that are delinquent in their NATO payments.” Far from what Mr. Yoder insinuates, there is no internal contradiction there. When someone who has shown himself to be both dangerous and wishy-washy issues threats, erring on the side of caution means still having to take those threats seriously.
Mr. Yoder then challenges, “If they really believe Trump’s word has somehow become gospel, why aren’t they devoting their energies to warning delinquent NATO countries to pay up?” Simple. It is not advisable to cave in to Trump’s extortion.
And the actual “Trump derangement” is not our legitimate concern about his dangerous actions, but this insistence on excusing them.
It seems that a mystery that nagged at me since childhood might be solved. Many collectors of Godzilla toys are familiar with the Hong Kong company Imperial. It made the Godzilla action figure with the red lips. The action figure has a strange silver blotch on its chest because the people at Imperial copied that feature from the Godzilla action figure that Bandai made in Japan years earlier. Imperial also made King Kong.
Pertinent here is that Imperial made a googly-eyed Tyrannosaurus with unique features: it has thin-but-wide plates going down its chest. It has osteoderms (little spikes) running down its back similar to a crocodile’s. And it is yellow. It was made in 1985. While many toy collectors know of this toy, they seem not to know that this toy’s design features — the chest plates and dorsal spikes — are based on another toy company’s design.
I learned of this because of my cousin. Years ago, he gave me many toys of Godzilla and Ultraman monsters made by Bullmark, not Bandai. Likewise, he gave me some thick paperback books, full of thick pages, profiling Ultraman. He gave me yet another book from the same publishing house that was about dinosaurs. And the book heavily featured a sculpture that closely resembled the 1985 Imperial toy, with the dorsal spikes and chest plates. But this sculpture had much more realistic eyes and was overall fancier. It also was not yellow. This book was published in 1981. I cannot read the kanji, and neither could my cousin. I always wondered if this sculpture was some model kit released in Japan in 1981 or earlier.
It seems I now have some answers. As you can see above, I took photos of the pages of the Japanese book. I then ran a Google image search. It appears that the sculpture was photographed by Top Trumps in 1979 for its card game called Prehistoric Monsters. And the sculpture has an earlier appearance still. It is in the 1977 book Purnell’s Book of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Mammals. This is profiled on the blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus. One of the commenters says, “Since these models were featured in the London museum, I theorize that they were sculpted by a British paleontologist named Arthur Hayward — he had sculpted dinos for Ray Harryhausen [for One Million Years B.C. starring Raquel Welch].”
Important design features of Imperial’s Godzilla toy were copied from Bandai’s. Likewise, it seems Imperial copied the design of its 1985 Tyrannosaurus from a sculpture that Arthur Hayward made at least as early as 1977.
My Letter to the Editor in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Stuart K. Hayashi
My letter to the editor was published in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser of Monday, May 15, 2023, page A10, year 142, no. 104. It is about how laws are ultimately underpinned by the threat of physical coercion — violence — from police. First I will provide the version I sent to the newspaper. Then I will show what the newspaper printed. Then I will provide further explanation of what I meant by the letter.
What I Sent
This is what I sent to the newspaper.
I’m grateful to UH scholars for studying police uses of force (May 10, 2023) and for the country’s wider conversation on it. There is great inequity in such force being applied disproportionately against socially marginalized people, which reforms must address. But even with reforms, the ability of police to escalate their application of force against stubbornly non-compliant citizens will remain.
Even if the initial penalty is a small civil fine, never-ending refusal to pay it will land someone “in criminal contempt of court” and require police action. Inherently, laws are ultimately enforced by the threat of violence by police. Otherwise, laws could not be enforced.
Therefore, when people demand a new statute to punish or compel certain actions, especially nonviolent ones like drag shows, we should ask ourselves if enforcing the proposed statute is worth the risk of creating more situations that can escalate into violent confrontations with police.
I’m grateful to the University of Hawaii scholars for studying police uses of force and for the country’s wider conversation on it (“Focusing on police use of force on Oahu,”Star-Advertiser, May 10). There is great inequity in such force being applied disproportionately against socially marginalized people, which reforms must address.
But even with reforms, the ability of police to escalate their application of force against stubbornly non-compliant citizens will remain.
Even if the initial penalty is a small civil fine, never-ending refusal to pay it will land someone in criminal contempt of court and require police action. Inherently, laws are ultimately enforced by the threat of violence by police. Otherwise, laws could not be enforced.
Therefore, when people demand a new statute to punish or compel certain actions, especially nonviolent ones like drag shows, we should ask ourselves if enforcing the proposed statute is worth the risk of creating more situations that can escalate into violent confrontations with police.
Since the letter had to be fewer than 150 words, I could not elaborate further.
If I could say more, I would add that when private citizens engage in murder, battery, rape, or poisoning, or show carelessness in transmitting life-threatening pathogens to others, that is the private citizens starting the physical coercion. I also consider it dangerous force when private citizens partake in theft, property damage, intellectual property infringement, fraud, and contract breach. Hence, when police intervene against those actions, the police are merely using violence in retaliation in order to neutralize the parties that started the violence.
But when the law is to punish nonviolent actions, such as people putting on drag shows, it is the law itself that is starting the violence. The same applies if you are minding your own business peaceably and then the law compels particular actions, such as the law forcing you to enlist in the military. When the law punishes nonviolent people or coerces them into particular actions, it is very morally troubling.
Evert time I point this out, Democrats and Republicans go through the same routine. These people indignantly shout at me no, there is no coercion or imposition. They declare that we live in a representative democracy, and there is a Social Contract. According to this Social Contract, by being born and interacting with anyone else, I implicitly commit myself to a Social Contract in which I consent to every single statute and ordinance that exists. I have refuted that rhetoric over here. In reality, for me to be held to any real contract, I would have had to have had the option of rejecting the deal before I had, in any sense, committed myself to it.
None of the rhetoric about representative democracy and social contracts directly addresses that the law is enforced at gunpoint. Hence, the rhetoric is what I call the “Social Contract” Song-and-Dance.
In the end, I want people to understand that when they say there ought to be a law to address some social issue, in practice this means condoning the potentially lethal use of force against those who stubbornly disobey that law.
I see that the title that the newspaper gave my letter was “Too Much Enforcement Can Be Dangerous.” That makes me worry that my letter put too much emphasis on the word “enforcement.” I do not want to create the impression that I believe that it is OK if we have many statutes and just do not enforce them. The point is that when a statute punishes nonviolent people or compels action from them, the statute’s very existence is the problem. What is dangerous is that there are too many laws themselves — in particular, those that penalize nonviolent people or compel actions from them. I should have ended the letter with “we should ask ourselves if the proposed statute is worth the risk of creating more situations that can escalate into violent confrontations with police.”
Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).
The following is adapted from my longer essay, “The War on Illegal Migrants: A Repeat of the War on Illegal Drugs.” The longest version of that essay is here. A shorter version of that essay can be read here.
Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R–Tx) and his fellow writers of the Ludwig von Mises Institute blabber about the need for the U.S. federal government to get tough with guarding the USA’s southern border. They don’t want undocumented immigrants getting through. And Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also gnash their teeth about the evils of the U.S. federal government sending agents to intervene in foreign countries, including those of Latin America.
Yet such intervention is actually integral to enforcing the USA’s southern border. The leftwing journalist Todd Miller writes of how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has vast operations within Latin America, and their purpose is to do exactly the border enforcement that Ron Paul and the Mises Institute scream that they want. These U.S. agents spy on those they suspect of being smugglers or their clients. Then, when they judge appropriate, these agents apply armed force in order to preempt the smugglers and clients from reaching the border in the first place.
Todd Miller notes that, by blocking undocumented immigration in this manner, the USA is establishing, unofficially but in practice, a border that is even farther south than the official one north of Mexico. The border enforcers are, de facto, lowering the USA’s southern border further southward. As Todd Miller phrases it,
The United States has been purposely pushing out its borders, meaning that the border doesn’t end at the US-Mexico southern border. For example, in Puerto Rico, the Ramey sector of the U.S. Border Patrol can patrol a thousand miles to the south of the U.S. mainland. This allows Border Patrol agents, and effectively the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, to patrol around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So what happened in the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, one of the first U.S. responses was to send sixteen Coast Guard cutters that were right around the coast line of Haiti; they sent an airplane over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador, who was speaking Creole, but asking people not to leave the island while they were digging themselves out of their homes after they collapsed.
So, all of the sudden, the U.S. border isn’t where you think it is. It expands and goes all the way up to the coast of Haiti. [When some Haitians did try to migrate, there were already] detention facilities at Guantanamo to intercept them. Everything’s in preparation.
Here, fans of Ron Paul and the Mises Institute are wont to say, “No, instead of messing around in other countries, the agents should be focused on the U.S. southern border, and the border only.” According to arguments put forth by the Mises Institute itself about other government agencies, nothing about that demand is realistic. Calling for a beef-up in border enforcement only causes more of the international meddling. It is unrealistic to expect that if a federal agency’s authority is enlarged in just one specific area, it will stick only to that one specific area. That enlargement of authority in that one area allows for administrators to rationalize their expansion into various other affairs that, to taxpayers, seem only tenuously related to what the agency’s original task was.
After all, by expanding their reach and jurisdiction, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Homeland Security Department they work under can all further justify their existence and budgets. It helps them look even busier and more important, which places pressure on the Congressmen holding the purse strings to renew their budgets. With renewed or expanded budgets, there is a reduced risk of layoffs within the departments. The agents maintain job security. But one would think that this would already be known by Mises-Institute libertarians so savvy about how the Drug War and other federal programs engage in “mission creep.”
Besides, to the degree that the federal government is serious about stopping illegal entries into the USA — something that those in the Mises Institute orbit demand quite zealously — it makes sense to meddle in the countries of the south. Agents can be more effectual in stopping border-crossings by going on the offensive against the smugglers within their countries of origin.
White nationalists try to conjure up the image of impoverished, nonwhite immigrants being a barbarian horde overwhelming an understaffed and underfunded Border Patrol. The reality is that the fervency of the anti-immigrationists has given the USA’s border-enforcement agencies another excuse to introduce upon foreign soil.
Ron Paul and the Mises Institute go on demanding both a closing of the USA’s southern border and that the USA stops intervening in other countries. But as Todd Miller shows, intensified enforcement of the USA’s southern border always leads to more U.S. intervention south of that border.
Fans of the Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also like to say, “You can have open borders or a welfare state. You can’t have both.” Evidence from academic studies happens to suggest otherwise. Here is a much more realistic binary choice: Either you can have the USA’s southern border closed, or the USA can stop intervening in other countries. You can’t have both.
