Some thoughts on John Gray's "Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern"

In Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern John Gray makes some excellent points about the naivety of the liberal right in believing that the world can be re-made in a western image.

However, while he acknowledges the cultural distinctiveness of the West he denies westerners the opportunity to protect themselves by limiting immigration.

Gray succinctly states that globalisation is not making the world more uniform:

"As societies throughout the world become more modern, they do not thereby become more similar. Often they move further apart. In these circumstances, we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace."

This is sort of thinking that traditional U.S conservatives have been promoting for the last one hundred years but is a message that Liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to Tony Blair, have been consistently ignoring. Most of the World is not like the West and doesn’t want to be like the West.

In military affairs Gray takes the traditional conservative view that enemies can never be eliminated, only contained:

"There cannot be tolerance so long as terrorism is unchecked. Dealing with it is a precondition of any kind of civilised existence and requires courage, skill and - at times – ruthlessness. Yet in the new kind of conventional war that is now being fought there is no prospect of victory."

The neo-conservative idea that threats like terrorism and drugs can defeated in all out, short-term offensives is another utopian idea with a very short shelf life. Another vital point that Gray makes is the importance of overpopulation in global problems:

"The human prospect is shaped by rising human numbers, mounting competition for natural resources and the spread of weapons of mass destruction …Interacting with historic ethnic and religious enmities, they argur conflicts as destructive as any in the twentieth century."

Unfortunately, on the topic of immigration Gray backs down from his post liberal position and criticises ‘far right’ political parties that seek to promote limited immigration. Surely, if western culture is unique, and is threatened by global overpopulation and terrorism, then the West is perfectly entitled to try and limit immigration from non-western countries.

The eminent scientist Gareth Hardin has made a very strong argument that countries need to be made responsible for their own overpopulation problems and that lack of border controls will set up a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation where countries pass their overpopulation problems onto their neighbours.

If Gray expects to be taken seriously by conservatives then he needs to address Hardin’s hard-headed argument. Furthermore, contrary to what Gray suggests, political parties don’t have to play on ‘racist fears’ of voters to win support for limited immigration policies.

Opinion poles indicate that most people already support limited immigration. The reason we don’t have limited immigration policies in place already is because political parties are deliberately putting big business interests ahead of majority interests.

Gray himself acknowledges that western businesses are a key factor in driving immigration:

"Remember Voltaire’s quip: ‘The comfort of the rich depends on abundant supply of the poor."

In type-casting limited immigration advocates as ignorant populists, Gray alienates the kind of people that are most likely to take his other, more hard-headed, arguments seriously. Its high time self-styled iconoclasts like John Gray stopped squirming around politically sensitive issues like immigration and reveal what they actually think.

New lows for the liberal right

Increasingly exasperated by popular disillusionment over the Iraq conflict and the failure of Bush's immigration amnesty bill in the US, the pro-war, pro-immigration liberal right has decided to blame (wait for it ...) western democracy!

According to Times columnist Gerard Baker, in a recent opinion column, "How paranoid little Napoleons took over the United States," democracy is now passe:

"Democracy, Winston Churchill famously observed, is the worst form of government ever devised -except for all the others, well he was right about the first part."

Having rejected democracy as a workable system of government for America, Baker then has the audacity to use democracy as a rationale for failed neoconservative regime change in Iraq:

"A central tenet of neoconservativism has always been that promoting democracy around the world is not only morally right, but also in the long-term interest of peace and stability."


With the Democrats and old-right Republicans dismissed as irresponsible, anti-democratic populists for wanting to pull out of the unwinnable war in Iraq, Baker decides to attack mainstream America for opposing immigration amnesty:

"President Bush had tried, honourably and rightly, to get a Reform Bill through Congress that would have regularised the status of 12 million illegal immigrants, mostly Latinos, as well as enforcing bordersecurity more effectively."

"The Bill was defeated by a roar of nativist and, at times disguised racist hysteria from the American heartland. Little Napoleons on TV and talk radio strutted and howled, denoucing the President and his supporters for surrendering to a cultural takeover by Mexicans."

A piece of paraphrased advice for Baker - you can insult some of the people, some of the time, but you can't insult all of the people all of the time.

Human directionals

The favourite human interest story on New Zealand television news last Friday night was the new US fad of "sign spinning" - apparently a new twist on the rather depressing human directionals trend noted by Steve Sailer.

Apparently a couple of American college graduates have made a tidy sum of money from teaching the sign-holders to put a "positive spin" on their signs, as the media usually likes to do with stories about wage rates and immigration issues.

Personally, I would have thought sign spinning would be an even harder way to make a few dollars than sign holding. How long can you spin a sign for? (at least in the 30s depression they had easy to hold sandwich boards), and how soon before the novelty wears off among the public?

Yet more service industry insanity coming to a western country near you!

Immigration and emissions

Environmental pollution essentially comes down to two basic variables - population growth and industrialisation. This is something anyone with a little common sense and imagination should be able to grasp.

So it comes as a continual surprise to me how concerned the New Zeland Green party is with defending the rights of prospective third world immigrants.

Third world countries have much lower CO2 emissions levels than developed nations, so from an environmental perspective, third world immigration is bad news for the planet.

New Zealand greens love to advertise the country's anti-nuclear credentials, but seem oblivious to the fact that our renewable power sources will be not be able to cater for a larger population at a first world standard of living.

US Blogger Brent Lane has crunched a few numbers and made a plausible estimation of the impact of illegal immigrants on US emissions levels.

Yet more evidence that pro-immigration Marxism is about as compatible with real environmentalism as bear-baiting is with buddhism.