What types of people should be allowed into our open society?
Immigration and a culture of criticism
People don’t choose where they’re born. That includes a world where we don’t know everything, yet we can figure anything out.
It’s more of a gift than a curse. Not knowing everything mandates a sense of humility and curiosity; mistakes are inevitable but we endeavor to improve our understanding of the world and how we ought to live. The only way we know how to improve is by challenging the best of what we already know. We then discard those now-known bad ideas and adopt better ones.
But how do we know which ideas are worth discarding and which to adopt (for the time being)? How do we know we’re making real progress? By challenging all cultural practices, regardless of how cherished; meaning no tradition is shielded from scrutiny or replacement.
This is optimism! Knowing change happens is one thing; changing for the better requires a mindset that you can. And to improve, one must reject what they previously thought was the best—and possibly only—option.
Fully embracing this optimistic way of thinking throughout our culture is what sets a dynamic, open society apart from a static, closed one. Closed societies resist change and use violence—thus fear—to enforce tradition.
Despite how agreeable these epistemic principles I’ve laid out may seem to most readers, they are not universally embraced: open societies remain rare in much of the world. If people don’t choose where they’re born, do open societies have an obligation to those with worse luck? Is there a duty to support and welcome those coming from closed societies?
As the news of further ICE raids around the United States and prominent debates on immigrants in Europe becomes ever more potent, I’ve noticed that the West has yet to accept what immigration should look like; and by that, I mean what types of people we should let into our open societies.
So, how do we embrace those born into closed societies seeking what we possess while preserving the security needed to prevent static ideas from spreading within?
We start by screening for that shared optimism.
Arrested change
Though the word inclusive has become politically corrupted, open societies thrive on it. Anyone willing to participate in the endeavor to improve our society using reason and consent should be welcomed. Using reason includes subjecting ideas to criticism and creatively explaining how things ought to be. Consent is the liberty to choose to participate—or not—without threat from others; the freedom to disagree and do something else.
But it’s one thing to be inclusive of those willing to participate in the dynamism open societies provide, and another to maintain the cultural traditions that constitute open societies.
Some may be thinking: how can something that’s maintained, change? It requires a tradition of criticism. The stability—tradition—is change.
The most evident threat to that cultural tradition is importing too many individuals who do not accept criticism of even some things. Immigration debates should begin with the idea that we should not be accepting people who do not share an affinity for change, for improvement, for knowledge—for criticism.
Members of an open society must not only have a culture of criticism, they must be intolerant of those who do not share and do not aspire to be part of that cultural tradition. Closed societies are intolerant to criticism; they exclude those who disagree. We must be intolerant of intolerance, thus we become overwhelmed by those seeking to destroy our inclusive culture.
Screening for a culture of criticism
Some cultures are objectively better than others. A culture of criticism—cultures that protect and encourage change—is better than one that claims certainty, authority, and rigidity. Traditions of critical inquiry are superior to traditions that protect ideas from change and thus improvement.
The danger of a closed society isn’t people from other cultures per se; it’s in importing bad ideas—and more specifically, anti-rational ideas that are acted on and then replicated by others.
These anti-rational ‘memes’ act as protection from criticism through behaviors that encourage violence and repress dissent; ensuring no resistance from others and of oneself. Individuals of such cultures don’t merely reject change, they are structured to resist it—to inoculate themselves against reform.
It’s those possessing anti-rational ideas that should not be allowed in an open society.
Many on the American right seem to think immigration is just a numbers game—how many people and how fast. Those on the American left ostensibly carry a golf-tee leveled bar for those seeking entry. Neither get it right.
We should do our best to accommodate as many people who share our cultural tradition of criticism, as quickly as possible. The right would be wrong to deny immigrants from Hong Kong fighting for an open society in totalitarian China. The left would be wrong to accept immigrants from Venezuela who do not feel the same desire for individual liberty as the Afghans clinging to U.S. planes in August 2021.
People from all over the world are doing their best to arrive safely in open societies and some bring with them ideas and cultures that are antagonistic to such societies—those anti-rational memes. If someone thinks criticism of their country or religion or culture or anything else shouldn’t be allowed, they should not be granted permission to enter.
Assimilation, multiculturalism, and borders
In closed societies, people are often born into the class, race, gender, etc. that will determine where they’ll end up.
Implementing the institutions that could change (and improve) those aspects of life for them—free speech, free expression, free press, free markets, and free and fair elections—relies on not just participation but widespread acceptance of a cultural commitment to criticism.
Laws are created to protect the cultural tradition from each other, the government, and importantly, those from the outside. The tradition of criticism is meant to enforce ideological borders; effective immigration policy protects those upholding the tradition by enforcing physical borders.
Borders exist to protect dynamic societies from those who would undermine them by importing and acting on ideas pushing stagnation.
Republicans have been talking a lot for years about assimilation. It often receives a bit of backlash, but Republicans today get the concept mostly correct: we shouldn’t be accepting people into the country who do not share the most important aspect of our culture. Their arguments falter when it comes to explaining exactly what culture we’re seeking to maintain.
Democrats, conversely, give many arguments based on multiculturalism. But they too veer off when cornered on what exactly this diversity entails. A culture that doesn’t include a permissibility to criticize any aspect of itself shouldn’t make the cut.
Anti-rational cultures make people wary of discussing anything that might even tangentially relate to that tradition by silencing direct discussion and, often out of fear, forcing people to avoid criticizing a broad range of related topics lest they unintentionally cross a line.
We must protect our societies—and our minds—from the influence of such cultures.
Historical examples of static cultures
The hallmark of many static societies is that the creative ability of our minds is not used to create something new but instead to keep in place the existing practices, whether that be institutions of religion, politics, economics, science, etc.
A quite well-known example of how these types of cultures can repress the prospects of progress is the story of Galileo, who faced condemnation by the Catholic Church for his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In 1616, the Church warned him to abandon the theory. Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy. The Church banned his findings from being published and placing him on house arrest until his death. It would be almost another two centuries until they lifted the ban.
Another example is found in the dramatized retelling of the story of physicist Robert Oppenheimer during the early stages of the Manhattan Project in WWII. When asked by General Leslie Groves what advantage the U.S. had over Germany in the development of the atomic weapon, even though the Nazis possessed renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg, Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy’s) response was clear: “Anti-semitism. Hitler called quantum physics a ‘Jewish science’—said it right to Einstein’s face. Our one hope is that Hitler is so blinded by hate that he’s denied Heisenberg proper resources.”
We have numerous historical examples of how closed societies operate in the realm of economics too: the Soviet Union’s man-made famine in the 1930’s in Ukraine, The Holodomor, forced farmers to give up their land and join state-controlled collective farms killing up to five million people in less than two years.
Religious examples may be the simplest to recall. Think of the Danish cartoon controversy where a publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in September 2005 was met with protests across the world. Some of these demonstrations escalated into violence, resulting in more than 250 reported deaths, attacks on Christians and churches, and multiple attempted assassination and terrorist attacks.
All these problems weren’t necessarily about hate or racism or classism or anything like that. It was about the anti-rational memes, the static cultures each example represented: an individual like Hitler, an extreme religious group like Jihadists, or rulers like the communist Soviet Union, rejecting a tradition of criticism.
Why would an open society want large groups of people among them who seek to impose that same destruction—knowingly or not, upon their culture? They shouldn’t.
How we should think about immigration
The extreme ends of the immigration debate over the last ten years have focused on whether the United States—and now Europe—should have open or closed borders:
Those on the left often believe that an open society should welcome anyone who wants to come and work, as long as they aren’t committing serious crimes. They see an open society as just that—open.
The right tends to favor a more restrictive border policy, where immigrants must prove they fear for their lives and must endure a years- or decades-long legal process. They often advocate admitting only the “best and brightest.” For some members on the right, that seems to mean white people; for others, it means only people from certain countries. And recently, some factions have turned against immigration altogether, advocating for total isolation.
Again, they both get it wrong.
The American left is too lenient, largely out of fear of being labeled racist, xenophobic, a supremacist of some kind, or generally unsympathetic to those seeking refuge.
The American right is too harsh. The question about who we admit into our open society shouldn't just be about the number of people arriving, their country of origin, or their economic contributions.
The left’s embrace of multiculturalism sometimes excuses the admission of individuals who support preserving culture rather than changing it for the better. Meanwhile, the right fails to offer a welcoming environment to immigrants who do share our tradition of open criticism, and who genuinely aspire to be part of that culture.
We should not only want more people who embrace these values—we should be glad they're here, rather than trapped in closed societies where such participation in progress is impossible. Including more individuals in our most significant cultural tradition should be the aim of those who belong to open societies and seek to share it with the rest of humanity. And to do that we must preserve change.