Spaceman Spiff looks at the technocratic dream that we’d all give up on eating meat and instead switch to lab-grown, VC-funded, and Bill-Gates-approved fake meat. It failed utterly, of course, because despite all of the arguments the corporations and the astroturf activists could marshal, nobody wanted it. Vegetarians wouldn’t switch to eating something vaguely kinda-sorta meat-ish, and meat eaters were happy continuing their carnivorous habits. It had no real market, so it was a dud product.
Our technocratic elites have been pushing multiculturalism for even longer than they were pushing fake meat, but just as with fake meat, the more people encounter it, the less willing they are to accept it:
Multiculturalism is the belief many distinct cultures can live together and flourish rather than devolve into conflict.
This is false. It has never worked anywhere.
The world itself is multicultural. The solution that emerged to manage different groups was national borders. Each culture could segregate and live apart from others because they could not successfully live together.
As the failures of multiculturalism become impossible to hide, social engineers reach for ideas to make it work. The latest is civic nationalism. The fake meat of the social governance world.
For all human history we have relied upon the real thing, but now today’s social engineers believe they have discovered a superior recipe, one that avoids the hassle and expense of tradition.
Anyone can become someone like you as long as they conform to an arbitrary list of beliefs, behaviours, laws and customs. We can ignore ethnicity, heritage and history. We can manufacture instant populations with passports and certificates just as we can create synthetic meat by combining the ingredients ourselves.
Like fake meat it looks workable on paper. Not only that, it is presented as self-evidently reasonable. Why has nobody thought of this before? How convenient governments and corporations can import a new workforce and they magically become British, American or Chinese because they “share values” and observe laws.
America was the first to experiment, a necessity after the introduction of non-European immigration in the 1960s. Needless to say they didn’t need it before that.
The country found itself importing people with no historical connection to the American population through heritage or history. Far fewer of them married into the family than previous waves of immigrants from European nations. While importing the world America was becoming the world with its racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.
They convinced themselves they had always been a nation of immigrants and conveniently forgot how long it took even the Irish to assimilate into America despite their ostensible similarity to the founding stock.
Strenuous efforts to make this seem normal, despite its novelty, included the energetic emphasis on shared values or adopted customs since the newcomers were often strikingly different.
Civic nationalism seems to be based on the same faulty reasoning as synthetic meat. We can circumvent the traditional approach using innovation. Why live through centuries of strife for a nation to emerge when you can just hand out certificates and make everyone instantly like you because they claim to respect the law and promise to adopt new customs?
Initially this can seem to work. If a small number of skilled immigrants come they are typically absorbed. Most cultures can do this if the numbers are modest and especially if the newcomers intermarry, or their children do.
Even more so, in traditional societies, including our own until recently, the pressure to adapt was almost universal; no translators, no welfare, no slack whatsoever.
Large numbers of immigrants over short time scales retard the process of assimilation, and generous welfare programmes can derail it completely.
America is also big unlike European nations, so it has taken a while for the full effects to be felt.
Despite the endless hype, people reveal their preferences in their behaviour. They can move. Pro-immigrationists have complained about white flight for decades, one very obvious example of the failure of civic nationalism.
Image from Spaceman Spiff
Just like those inconveniently full supermarket shelves with their synthetic products no one will buy, people run from diversity when they can.
Civic nationalists, like climate zealots, resort to repeating their tired lines about their great intent, how amazing it is all meant to be if people would just get into the spirit of things.
But it is all fantasy. Literal fictions that exist only inside the heads of those who imagine utopia. Real life has its own ideas.
Update: Added missing URL.
Update the second, 24 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
