social contract salad

the underpinnings of civilization: why melting pots work and salad bowls don't

the history of civilization is far less top down than what is taught in the tiresome tutelage of kings and conquests. mostly, it’s a bottoms up phenomenon of “trying things, seeing what works, and retaining that knowledge in useful forms.” if one were seeking a definition for “culture” you could certainly do a lot worse than that. the meaningful history of a people emerges from the people. it comes to determine the underlying salients and presumptions by which we may interact with and relate to one another.

if we posit the idea of the social contract not as a literal thing but rather as a metaphor for the evolved and emergent societal systems and mores coalescing out of the sort of positive law substrate that comes to underpin the expected relationships of groups of people through their repeated, successful interaction, then we must rapidly come to some interesting conclusions about the impossibility of such emergence without a certain degree of convergence in attitude and belief.

it is for this reason that i will argue that of the two competing theories of societal structure, melting pot and salad, that only the former is really capable of supporting an actual and functional social contract and that as we have moved from the flourishing former to the “multi-culti melange” of salad speak that we have become rudderless in our lack of shared metaphor and expectation and therefore lose our ability to live with one another in productive fashion or perhaps, increasingly, at all.

we have taken the cohesive and broken it into warring tribes and taken our shared dreams and polestars and rendered them squalid negative-sum scuffles for regulated prominence. we have taken our contract and replaced it with angry babble and empty, indoctrination driven legalism. and if we would restore our civilization, this is what we must remedy.

the cat-chew of liberty

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

ocne this was the beacon, the unifying societal axle about which american dream spun:

come and seek. pursue your happiness free to breathe and strive and attain. it was not perfect in application or absent struggle and opposition, but the vision itself was pure and potent and the potential for the pursuit of happiness and a “land of opportunity” drew many and invigorated those already there in spite or perhaps even because of the struggles and nasty nativism evidenced in the rise of the “know nothing” party (native american party) and their intense and often violent attacks on germans, irish, and catholics to say nothing of the intense discrimination and segregation against the chinese. the 1800’s were a hotbed of “mine, not yours” defense of local privilege long before the end of slavery set off another chapter of jim crow and protectionist law to keep those who were here and free before from having to compete with anyone new. it was really all a bit of a piece and it was nasty stuff to many people and riddled with prejudice and polemic.

but it also had an intense agreement underpinning it about “the american dream” and an underlying american ethos of self sufficiency, hard work, standing and striving on your own, and of the ability to pursue and catch one’s happiness by applying oneself and getting with the program. people may have fought over who they wanted to have access to this dream and of course “those that have” often wage rearguard actions against those who would like to get some too, but the basic dream over which we wrestled was the same, no one denied it, and this allowed for a society that was cohesive in aspiration and in which the contenting groups, even if they did not like one another, could understand one another and because their goals and polestars were the same.

these people were americans and ingrained in them was the american ethos. this was the melting pot: unity not of skin or gender or food or holidays, but a unity of expectation on behavior and a right to pursue happiness but not to catch it; a faith in the individual and to a collective presumption of how interactions and lives are supposed to go and of the dream of which all may partake.

this pot cooked down its ingredients into a rich and savory gumbo teeming with potential and aspiration that in turn attracted more like minded folks whose goal was to similarly acculturate and thus build and bolster a social contract founded in striving and perhaps more importantly in the lionization of striving that each and all may come and try their hand at freedom and success and that everyone loved a winner who made it by dint of being clever and by working hard and that the entitled and torpid were to be scorned. and this drove a scruffy frontier into a great nation, for a dream need not be perfect in its application to provide the basis for an inexorable march toward the better.

but dreams untended may die or turn dark, and such sickness may destroy the fertile soil of civilization. and so we enter the “salad days” of our society, days not of green youth but blackened decline split apart by ideas of “that’s not society, that’s other” placed where our unifiers once were and ideas that “if others have and you do not it must be because they cheated.”

the so called “salad” of multi-culturalism where we do not have “americans” but rather “hyphenated-americans” as disparate pieces or perhaps no americans at all is the death of the social contract because it destroys the unity of belief required for such a contract to stand. you cannot dictate such a grand bargain from the top, it must be woven warp and weft into the hearts and minds of we the people that we chose and chase and believe it of our own free will as the internalized integument of a way of life accepted as a path to a better day.

such values are repudiated at direst peril.

no government can make people good. only their dreams can.

and these dreams are dying.

this is not wholesome

the idea of “us” has been effaced and replaced with ideas of warring tribes striving not to breathe free but to demand free stuff from others who are alleged to have aggrieved them. this is not a culture of progress but one of decline, not a positive sum collaboration but a negative sum squabble. it’s how the sort of aristocracy abhorred by our founders entrenches itself by teaching “the people” to enrage and attack one another and to gather power into “noble” hands that they may play the adjudicator of argument and allocator of reparations and opportunity.

a salad cannot stand together against such depredations whereas a melting pot simply dissolves them. the salad is a divided and powerless thing that fights itself and cannot recognize its actual enemies. perhaps this is why the statists so love it. (or perhaps statists with such leanings just happen to thrive better in a form of power selection)

some of you have likely seen these outlandish posters from The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

they are an unusually distilled and pure version of this “the american dream is not your dream” propaganda that proves so destructive for even if it possesses some truth, it’s still poison for there is no prison more inescapable than a prison of low expectations and such incarceration is lifelong and offers niether parole nor commutation.

and this sort of slant has become pervasive in schools and is increasingly worked into every crack and crevice of racial, gender, and sexual difference that it might shatter the foundations of our nation. and america cannot survive it.

individualism, family, autonomy, hard work. these are hardly obscure values practiced by a few odd ducks to no seeming purpose. these were and remain the backbone of civilization and progress. and the attestation that rationality and “cause and effect relationships” are somehow a “white” idea honestly strikes me as not only nastily racist against africans but outright bizarre. what even is the alternative to believing in cause and effect? “stuff just happens”? “we can have no idea what effect an action will have”? how would one subscribing to such a view even function, much less thrive? i struggle to see how anyone could get through a day much less a life living like that.

“hard work leads to success” is a deeply damaging idea to abandon as some sort of “toxic whiteness.” could there be a surer tenet to inculcate failure than “don’t strive” or “don’t plan for the future”?

the rest of this poster seems an oddly racist screed about “white values” and the odd aspersions to denigrate and degrade, but mostly, it seems intended to divide. it’s teaching groups to relish being incomprehensible to one another and to separate rather than integrate. it’s different orientation, morality, expectation. and this makes social contract impossible. it makes a republic impossible. and it harms those fooled by it most of all for this is not aid, it’s interference. it’s not an awakening, it’s being concussed from consciousness. it’s an invitation to domination and dependence.

“this dream is not your dream” is a vicious form of sabotage by calumny that stands second in perniciousness only to “this dream is not your dream because they stole it from you.”

the former is an invitation to self-doubt and subjugation, but the latter is blood libel invitation to war. it’s societal breakage and incompatibility egged ever onward by the failures it engenders. it’s an ideology that will knock you down then blame someone someone else for your fall and urge you to attack them. it’s where dreams go to die and it affects everyone because once the fighting starts, no one gets to stay out of the fray and and each additional conflict makes the next one more inevitable. the tomatoes fight the lettuce and the carrots assault the croutons and everybody gangs up on the anchovies that few liked anyhow and the salad war is on while society dissolves because we have no common ground, no common expectation, no common aspiration or measure of virtue. cultural relativism is civilizational ruin. it’s poisoned babble from which meaning and progress can no longer emerge. it’s not progress, it’s decline. if you want to know why DEI destroys everything it touches so rapidly, that’s why. it’s cultural substrate solvent. so everything around it comes unglued.

punctuality was once the politeness of princes. now it’s “toxic whiteness.” science, keeping your word, respecting rights of others that yours might be respected as well. these are underpinnings of civilization, of agency, of functional social contract.

the poor and huddled masses came here yearning to be free and they got with the program. group after group succeeded and thrived. irish, chinese, indians, africans, jamaicans. they sought integration, not hyphenation. they wanted to be americans. it was an aspiration, not a dirty word or something to apologize for. the immigrants in many of these groups outperform the native born. perhaps it’s some sort of motivation selector, but perhaps as well it’s because they came looking to join the melting pot instead of being a spiky and inedible part of the salad.

some interesting work has been done here, especially on west indians who seem to come to america and far outperform not only their racial peers, but the american average as well. first generation tends to earn around 94% of the US average. second generation vaults to 115%. this seems to cast some doubts on the idea that “race or skin color” is the core problem and perhaps points in directions more like motivation and indoctrination into the ideologies and sense of self that alienates and excludes one from the social contract.

this would imply that the fix is not “more affirmative action and race war” but less. the evidence against the “great society” programs as having been one of the worst impediments to the progress of the black community is stark.

we’re going to face these sorts of issues all over america and the rest of the west. US immigration from the south has become massive to the point where spanish has become a language you hear nearly every day in many places and salsa sales outstrip ketchup (a welcome fact to my mind, ketchup is gross). how this plays out depends on what dreams we can share, and we need to figure that out because there is no un-ringing this bell and we have a lot of people that we can either integrate or alienate.

there is a fearsome ongoing lesson from non-digestible groups in EU who came and have no interest in joining societies. they have no interest in a contract that respects women or allows secularism. they are young, alienated, angry, and increasingly violent. they pose a no joke threat to the continuation of the societies they live next to but not really within and a severe challenge to societal mores and expectations and the contracts that underpin and ability to live together. societies need not be homogeneous in race or religion or gender or foods or how you dance or what holidays you celebrate. all these variances add richness to the broth. but they do need a homogeneity of ideals and vision or they will tear themselves apart.

and if we want to retain an “american way” then we must return to the american past of melting pots, not multi-culti mess. we must invite into the dream those who live here, not seek to keep them from it and we must once more place the values of individualism, self-sufficiency, striving, and square dealing at the fore of the land of opportunity or opportunity shall be no more. there is simply no other way. a culture that would share laws and rules and civilization must first share a dream that provides the touchstones of social interaction and social contract.

government cannot unify us, only we may unify ourselves.

we must share aims and aspirations, values, and expectations and we can coalesce into a race to the top or divide into a race war to the bottom.

the history here is not subtle and divided societies do not thrive.

it’s melt and progress or divide and war.

it’s social contract or social upheaval.

and it must come from the bottom up, never the top down.

so this is on us.

so let’s get cooking.