The stupidest article of the last 100 years

In a 3,000 word long article at FrontPage Magazine, Lowell Ponte, speaking through his alter ego, the “Darwinist,” argues that illegal immigration is a Darwinian selection process that is bringing Mexico’s best and brightest here and so improving America. See? All those law-breaking masses protesting in Los Angeles and New York and scores of other cities are actually raising up America and turning us into a Darwinian-selected super-country! And FrontPage published this. I posted a comment on it.

It’s confusing, however, since Ponte, though quoting the Darwinist for 3,000 words and never challenging him, suggested to me in an e-mail that he disagrees with the Darwinist’s “screening-for-better-qualities-via-illegal immigration” idea. Ponte himself believes that any notion of IQ differential is collectivist, as he puts it, because it puts people in groups rather than seeing them as individuals. He replied to my comment to him about the lower IQ of Mestizos by telling me that I was embracing a collectivist view that undermines individual liberty and dignity. He says this is toxic and anti-American.

If that is the case, then Ponte would seem to be even whackier than the long-winded Darwinist, since the Darwinist at least takes seriously the fact that there are differences of ability between people (though he insanely misconstrues their nature), while Ponte metaphysically rejects any notion of group differences in ability, and, in fact, denies that race even exists. The bottom line is that both Ponte and his alter ego the Darwinist think that Mexican mass immigration is improving America.

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Mark D. writes:

People like Lowell Ponte aren’t satisfied with a concrete nation like the United States, with limitations and problems and a history, full of real people with real lives, with responsibility for a real future.

They want to live in a mythical United States of their imagination. Then, they can avoid the reality of a concrete world and, at the same time, feel good about themselves, and identify with the Utopia they have created in their minds.

As a Brit might say, they’re bloody mad.

LA:

Yes—and it is America itself that has created such Americans.

Mark D.:

“Yes—and it is America itself that has created such Americans.”

That hit me like a ton of bricks. But, you’re right. Nobody else did it.

LA:

For the best insight into this, I recommend Joseph Ellis’s indispensable book on Jefferson, American Sphinx. His revealing description of Jefferson’s mind and worldview is very close to what you just said:

“They want to live in a mythical United States of their imagination. Then, they can avoid the reality of a concrete world and, at the same time, feel good about themselves, and identify with the Utopia they have created in their minds.”

One of the things I got from this is how Jefferson’s own vision, however critical of it we may be, is a built-in strand of the American mind, our natural heritage. It is the democratic idea, the Jeffersonian idea that without authority, without real government, people will naturally be good and get along with each other in harmony . This was Jefferson’s vision of an ideal world, which he had formed in his early years and was his lodestar through out his life. While the vision of a naturally virtuous citizenry not needing higher authority is false, there has been enough truth in it in the American experience to convince many people that it is true. And that belief, which goes very deep in the American character, has under modern liberalism or libertarianism morphed from the belief in a society of virtuous yeoman freeholders into a belief in pure individualism unsoiled by any history, any inherited culture, any inborn human imperfections, any determinative racial traits, just the pure individual, unassisted and unhampered by any collective realities, living a virtuous and harmonious and productive life. This neo-Jeffersonian vision is what, in a variety of forms, animates Ponte and many many others.

This is why, whatever we may think of Jefferson, we can’t ignore him, because, for good or ill, he is spiritually central in the American experience.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2006 02:58 PM | Send