Their Heads in the Sand and the Sand in Their Heads

When the reality contradicts with Islam, it is not allowed to interpret Islam so as to agree with reality, because this would be a distortion of Islam; instead the duty requires changing the reality so as to agree with Islam.
—Hizb al-Tahrir

When David Putnam waited five years to release his now widely disseminated study on the socially divisive nature of racial diversity, he explained that it would have been "irresponsible" to publish before crafting a suitable political accompaniment with which to blunt the anticipated effect of his findings. That he wasn't accused of irresponsibility for withholding the study (and called on the irony of his language) may have to do with the fact that the work was his own, but it seems more likely that he's been given a pass because so many of his fellows share his near panic at the study's revelations.

And what was the product of Putnam's half-decade of deliberation? That rather than attempting the old assimilationist model, forging Americans out of immigrants (as this seems no longer possible) America needs to change itself, into a "new us." How this is anything more than a succinct statement of increasingly discredited (ironically, by the very study it seeks to mitigate) multicultural orthodoxy is beyond me.
What I find striking about this assertion is that it seems even less desirable than it is possible. But it is widely held sentiment among those who make policy and fabricate consensus for power. What on earth, one must ask, is so very wrong with us that so many well-intended elites think nothing of tossing "us" over the side to make room for a "new us", whoever that might be? And why can't they bring themselves to allow that something other than rank bigotry might be behind resistance to the acceleration of this loss of identity promised by open borders? But this is what it has come to, by silent, unminded, gradual abnegation: no sacrifice is too great to avoid the unpleasantness of race.

In those rare instances that the problems inherent in mass immigration are begrudgingly acknowledged by the elite the single most obvious and sensible answer doesn't merely get short shrift, it goes unmentioned: an immigration policy that lets in fewer, weighted by skills and education.
We have reached the point where a majority of those in the respectable media and the political class have transformed their denial of these problems, perhaps by virtue of having held and enforced it upon the mass for so long, into a quasi-religious faith in the superiority of egalitarian sentiment over reality. It becomes harder and harder not to conclude they've decided no hardship can be too great to endure defending the faith, the faith being the utterly discredited doctrine of the Blank Slate.

Thus we will sacrifice not our lives, which anyway become increasingly disconnected from any communal whole and benumbed by electronic amusement as part of the whole process, but merely anything that gives them meaning, or that differentiates them from the great churning mass of humanity in thrall to the global economy.
We're surrendering the one thing humans have instinctively given their lives for as long as they have been recognizably human: our culture; we do this rather than come clean that diversity is more of a challenge to be met than a benefit to be pursued with zeal above all else, rather than recognizing the importance of culture, the existence of racial differences, and the impact of IQ and its uneven distribution. Rather than expose ourselves as heretics. It is a durable faith indeed.

Witness today's Christian Science Monitor article on the continuing decline in literacy inversely proportionate to its increasing necessity in our economy. The article rather unblushingly attributes the decline to unskilled, mostly Hispanic immigration, yet then not only refuses to note the relevance this might have to the immigration debate but in fact performs the requisite genuflection to the altar of diversity by citing the study's authors, who can only find fault with what's left of our marginal enforcement of immigration law:

"Many immigrants enter [the US] without being able to read or speak English," says Mr. Landgraf. "Instead of forcing people to hide from the government infrastructure, we should be finding ways to include them in our society and help them bridge the language gap."

The faith demands that none can fail to adopt to society; only society can fail to adopt to an ever growing diversity of languages, cultures, and demands. There can be no limit on requirements placed upon the host society to continually assimilate to a perpetually morphing population. Stretched and contorted, eventually society disappears entirely. All that is left is the state, the corporation, and amusements.
Going unmentioned, or rather unmentionable, in the article above, is the idea of basing immigration on skills and education. Even more glaring an omission, so deeply buried beneath orthodoxy that it no longer occurs to many, is the stark contrast between immigrants from East Asia and those from Latin America. That the former exist at the high end of educational achievement and wealth from the latter, despite having to travel a far greater distance, not just geographically but culturally and linguistically, refutes a host of liberal pieties, most notably that of racism blunting minority achievement and the hollow yet persistent refrain that we merely need to "fix" our educational system to finally reach the long promised nirvana of an America both multicultural and egalitarian.

It might be a good truism that if you want to find the cause of a seemingly intractible problem you merely look for those possibilites disallowed for reasons of sentiment.

In the same vein, Carter of Across Difficult Country passes along this pdf of a New Yorker article on the tribulations of a perpetually failing Colorado school with a predominantly Hispanic population. The school superintendent Michael Bennet, a wealthy and successful man who took on the job out of a sense of altruism only to endure the predictable charges of racism from minority parents when he moved to close down a failing school, comes from just the sort of background and has the sort of personal history that belies the hoary sentiment of the Blank Slate.
The article is case study in the contortions necessitated by the faith of egalitarianism, as both the author and her subject will not allow even the possibility that the Hispanic kids they are legitimately concerned about might be better served if they weren't treated as if they were all equally capable of becoming mathematicians and heart surgeons. After describing the lineage of Bennet and his impressive, seemingly inevitable success, we get this remarkable example of how stubbornly these intelligent people resist reality (boldface mine):

Such a lineage exposed a boy to certain possibilities, and Michael had done well by them. Now, applying himself to children who had self-perpetuating birthrights of their own, he was undaunted by the fact that more experienced superintendents had failed at reforms less ambitious than his. "Well, one of these days someone's going to pull it off," Bennet said to me last spring. "Besides, I really don't see how you can hold both propositions to be true: that these urban public schools aren't fixable and that the America of a decade or two from now is going to be a place where any of
us would want to live."

Indeed. But urban schools have resisted "fixing" as Bennet imagines it for at least a generation. Still, "education" is invoked, mantra-like, as the antidote to burgeoning numbers of American children and children of illegal aliens who show less and less ability to benefit from it, as one of the pale stock responses to any suggestion of a sensible immigration policy.

Those with the most to benefit from the re-imposition of sanity are the same minority kids that Bennet and his ilk are essentially experimenting with. It's hard not to admire Bennet's effort and sacrifice, but one wonders how much better these kids would be served if they were provided with more realistic options and not forced to attempt to learn calculus and the canon. Bennet's story is the story of a generation of baby boomers, bravely and futilely attempting to will the ship of nurture around the shoals of nature. What a long, strange trip it's been.

We could seek a realistic definition of "fixable", recognizing that the difference between a brain surgeon and a plumber is not primarily a quality high school. Perhaps conceding this reality will allow us to better serve the average and the exceptional alike, by tailoring their educations accordingly. We are currently spending our resources (that is the federal government; individuals who can afford private schools for their kids or to segregate in wealthier communities is another story) as if each child draws precisely the same benefit from the same educational model. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify the waste of it.

And of course today's New York Times publishes one of its enthusiastic cheers (gimme an "I", gimme an "M"...) that's little more than passing along a piece from an advocacy think tank called The Center for an Urban Future.
"Immigrant Entrepreneurs Shape a New Economy" is a somewhat ironic title for a piece profiling a handful of food wholesalers (and one manufacturer of cheap souvenirs). It's as if the bronx cheers from the more attentive nether-regions of the media regarding their previous efforts to bundle low skilled immigration from Latin America in with the entrepreneurs coming out of Asia have actually reached the commanding heights of facile opinion. If only.

So in the new economy we can look forward to an America that is a good deal dumber, more factionalized, and fatter. A "new us"? No, merely a lesser us. But you will be able to find a decent arepa when the mood strikes.