I have a book review in this week’s Catholic Herald of Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism. Professor Scruton is the leading conservative political philosopher of our age... His latest book explains how unscrupulous optimists have brought disaster on the world, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks, Nazis and Eurocrats, but his most controversial assertion is that mass immigration is the latest example of this utopian thinking, and doomed to never realise its unachievable aims
... the optimists are behind two related utopian ideas that dominate their age. The European Union, like Soviet Communism ...
As Scruton notes: “Since the 1960s western countries have adopted policies in the matter of immigration that no person schooled in the elementary truths of pessimism would have endorsed. Anybody who has studied the fate of empires, and the difficulties of establishing territorial jurisdiction over communities that differ in religion, language and marital customs, knows that the task is all but impossible, and threatens constantly to break down in fragmentation, tribalism or civil war.”
Like Communism, mass immigration was based on a denial of human nature, and an inability to distinguish between what might work in individual human relationships and in society as a whole. Just because people of different groups are capable of getting on perfectly well as individuals, becoming friends and falling in love, it does not mean that a multicultural society ... can become a racism-free paradise; anymore than the willingness of people to give money to perfect strangers means Communism can work.
File under: immigration is based on a denial of human nature.
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