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In the follow-up to his now-classic After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre posed a fundamental set of questions in response to the proliferation of competing visions of the ethical life and its principles, asking “Whose justice? Which rationality?” This tightly connected set of questions was meant to raise the issue of which ethical tradition’s account of the natures of justice and of rationality were the most rationally plausible, and consequently the most ethical. Today, with racial and ethnic tensions at a new high; with the increased alignment of large sectors of American society lined up either behind or against the principles of an “America First” domestic and geopolitics; and with a new mass deportation campaign of illegal immigrants now underway, Americans of all political stripes are increasingly faced with an analogous set of fundamental and intersecting questions. In this case they are, “Whose America? Which identity?”
It is no great secret that every new wave of immigration across America’s history has forced Americans to wrestle with the question of who is and who is not prepared to be considered an American. Various ethnic groups, such as the Irish, Italians, etc., have faced various forms of exclusion or marginalization (e.g., in the “No Irish need apply” signage of the mid-nineteenth century) and their presence represented as an invasion of foreign “undesirables.” Historically, however, such groups eventually gain acceptance and even serve as the new — and often jealous — gatekeepers of American identity in the face of newer waves of immigrants. What is significant in reflecting upon this history, however, is that, even while America came to understand itself through this process under the symbol of the “melting pot,” “assimilation” into America and its national life and culture has nonetheless been a contested idea. Today, this is no more in evidence than in the debates surrounding President Trump’s policy of mass deportation and in the cultural reactions to it that have caught the imagination of American mass culture. The recent furor over an emotional video posted to Instagram by pop singer Selena Gomez is a case in point, reflective of a certain undercurrent within American society which, even apart from the ethical questions concerning immigration and deportation policies themselves, requires an ethical response all its own.
In the now-deleted video, Gomez weeps on camera over the deportation of and attack upon “her people.” Gomez’ cries of anguish sparked a range of responses, such as that of Utah politician Sam Parker, whose post on X (formerly Twitter) proposed that Gomez too should be deported for siding with “illegal immigrants” over Americans. In an article published on The Federalist, Brianna Lyman diagnosed Gomez’s video as a symptom of the “corrosion of American identity,” the chief driver of which, according to Lyman, is “mass immigration.” For Lyman, what is so deeply problematic about Gomez is that, in Gomez’s own words, she does not “understand” why her people are being attacked. She does not understand this, in Lyman’s view, “because, in her eyes, she’s ‘American-Mexican’ — not ‘American’. She views herself as an iteration of ‘American’, someone with a dual allegiance and affinity to an ethnic group.” To be an American, for Lyman, means placing one’s allegiance absolutely and exclusively in being American and in precisely nothing else. It means that “Gomez’s people should, by all accounts, be the American people.” Citing Hamilton as her intellectual inspiration, Lyman understands American peoplehood in the commitment to an America construed as a “sacred place bound together by a commonality, a shared language, and a culture.” The implication here is that the presence of a people which speaks a different language, lives out of a different culture, is animated by a diverse set of experiences, etc., represents, by contrast, a “profane” violation of the sacredness of the space. Indeed, it is a danger to the Republic wherever that people do not or cannot “assimilate” into the linguistic and cultural folkways of American life. But this raises the question, which culture and what language constitute the substance of American life? Obviously, English is our formally official language, though in a material way one may walk the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Dearborn, San Francisco, etc. and hear all the workings of commerce, of a shared life, of a shared experience (which is precisely what unites a polity into a common way of life and thereby into a common, culturally creative people, as the early 20th century philosopher Edith Stein has argued) expressed in Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc. Commonality — as citizens of multi-ethnic states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, knew quite well — does not require a shared language, but only ways of bridging linguistic and ethnic gaps. For that matter, it does not even require a shared culture, but only shared commitments, values, and interests. Lyman, on the other hand, while she briefly acknowledges the importance of shared virtues and values, places the onus upon culture and language, which seem to be the only media, on her view, by which virtues and values may be shared. If English is to be the language that serves as the medium by which our values and virtues are communicated, we must next ask the question, which culture?
Lyman answers this question, developing her argument by way of an appeal to a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, including a parenthetical aside of her own: “‘There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also’ — (looking at you, ‘American-Mexican’ Gomez) —‘isn’t an American at all’.” That, combined with a preceding line from the author, puts the racial and ethnic preoccupation into its actual context for her: “After decades of mass legal immigration, America finds herself a nation in name only, a conglomeration of various ethnic groups who don’t have allegiance to our country, but rather to their ethnicities.” In other words, to the extent that immigrants do not divest themselves of any and all ties to their ethnic culture — or at least those that would create a real solidarity outside the more narrow lives of American life in reaching out to others who share the immigrant’s distinct ethnic and cultural history — and become instead run-of-the-mill exemplars of a national monoculture, they cannot be Americans. Moreover, since it is particularly English and the cultural heritage traceable back to the Founding Fathers that Lyman associates with America’s historical identity, we can presume that the monoculture to which immigrants are ethically obliged to assimilate themselves must be a distinctly Anglo, or at least a broadly European one.
The absurdity of this exclusionary or, better, this reductive view of national identity exemplified in Lyman’s and in Roosevelt’s views might best be noticed if we examine a parallel case wherein a nation had come to ask the question of how to think about the place of ethnic minorities within its culture and national identity. This became a particularly urgent question for Germans in 1933 following the accession of Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship, though it had been a question since the very earliest days of the Weimar Republic, and indeed since the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm I. It was a question which the philosopher Edith Stein felt in a particularly acute way. Stein, who was a patriotic German of Jewish descent and also a convert to Catholicism, who had been active in the nascent German feminist movement, a member of the philosophical and intellectual class of German society, and also eventually a Carmelite nun, existentially embodied the reality that a person can be enmeshed in a multitude of intersecting communities and that one’s identity can therefore meaningfully have more than one significant point of orientation. Stein exemplified this in the fact that, while she had converted to Catholicism, she nonetheless regarded the fate of the Jewish people as also being her fate as well, because they were indeed her people, as she stressed to her sister Rosa as they were arrested from the Carmelite cloister at Echt for deportation to Auschwitz, where she would be executed practically on arrival. At the same time, Stein had ever been a fierce German patriot, a supporter of the German war effort during the First World War — going so far as to put her academic career on hold in order to train and volunteer as a nurse with the Red Cross, serving in a communicable diseases unit close to the Eastern front. She would again put her academics on hold to engage in sustained political activism as a member of the newly founded German Democratic Party following the Kaiser’s abdication and during the formation of the new Weimar Republic. Hers was thus a wealth of personal experience embedded within both multi-ethnic and multi-religious, yet fiercely patriotic communities. Drawing upon her own experience, as soon as Hitler came to power, Stein began composition on her autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family. Her hope in writing this work was that, by telling her life story, she might demonstrate that there was no opposition between her cultural and religious Jewishness and her Germanness, that it was equally possible to be both Jewish and German. Indeed, she had even argued in her public lectures at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, held in the Fall of 1932, that German national identity owed a certain historical debt, mediated through Christianity, to the Jewish tradition. It was that existential reality that partly served to support the claim that there is something intrinsically valuable about each and every ethnic culture, because each culture reflects a unique effort to unfold the intrinsic potentialities of the human essence necessary to bring “humanity” to its fullest perfection. Thus, each and every culture serves a necessary function, not only intrinsic to itself but for drawing out the potentialities that are latent in other cultures as well. In other words, if Germans could not be Germans without the Jews, as a matter of historical fact, then it is also true, for Stein, that Germans would continue to be enriched by the presence of German Jews, and likewise impoverished without them.
Edith Stein’s philosophy of culture and race has something important to teach us about American identity and culture as well. First, Stein undermines the cogency of Roosevelt/Lyman’s views of national identity and allegiance. In fact, it unmasks their not-so-subterranean racism and reductionism. To echo Roosevelt’s claim that, to be American, one must be American and nothing but American necessarily implies that one cannot be both American and Jewish, for instance, because to be a Jew is to exist in a cultural and religious identity with a point of orientation that is essentially and by definition other than allegiance to the American people alone. It is to exist in solidarity with a people who, while existing within America’s borders, also exists beyond it. For that matter, not only does Lyman’s argument easily feed into certain historically significant antisemitic tropes, but it also easily feeds into traditional American anti-Catholicism as well, historically exemplified, for instance, in worries about John F. Kennedy taking his marching orders from Pope Paul VI and American Catholics in general as a sort of fifth column with allegiance to the Pope rather than to the American people. If one can recognize the dangerous absurdity of denying the Americanness of the Jewish-American or of the American Catholic, then it is also very clear how much defending Lyman’s view risks reprising the same attitudes of xenophobia and of white supremacy that were arguably the real undercurrent of Roosevelt’s commentary upon American identity. Moreover, even apart from the racial and religious bigotry that would logically follow from accepting Lyman’s position, one would also have to recognize the implicit totalitarianism involved in the view that to be American is to be American and nothing else. To place allegiance to the American people and its monoculture as the single point of orientation of one’s whole identity is to totalize American culture, tradition, peoplehood, etc. Subsequently, any viewpoint, value, tradition, or even any question that departs from or relativizes that point of orientation necessarily becomes implicitly an act of treason. Selena Gomez’s treason is her Mexican-American identity and her solidarity with “her people,” but so also is any general human solidarity which recognizes one’s tie to every other living human being on earth on account of our shared humanity. After all, recognizing that I am tied together with and therefore responsible before any human being as human being necessarily relativizes the particularism of America and her interests; such a human solidarity would be, in Lyman's view, necessarily also an act of treason. For that matter, if in religion I place God above country, I relativize the claims to allegiance that my country has over me. The final words of St. Thomas Moore — “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first” — are the classic expression of the politics of the homo religiosus. As King Henry recognized, such an expression necessarily makes one a traitor to the state as well so long as the state is to be all in all.
If we can hope to avoid the totalitarianism and bigotry implicit in such an “America First” response to the questions which our present times have posed for us — Whose America? Which identity? — I would propose that Stein offers the most cogent answers. Although, as she writes, “at the time of the awakening of their reason, human beings discover themselves only as members of a more limited community (viz. the family and other cultural and educational communal associations), and they never gain a total and uninhibited perspective of the larger communities (not even of their township and much less of their tribe, nation, race, and humankind as a whole),” this is not where our sense of ethical responsibility for humanity ought to break off. Rather, ethical development requires that we learn to “embrace humanity as a whole and know of…[our] obligations to this whole.” To do this, she continues, “it is of signal importance for us to realize experientially that common bond which links us — notwithstanding all the differences — with peoples and individuals of every age and clime, and to be conscious of the fact that by our contacts with foreign members of the human race our own being is enriched and perfected.” In other words, we must recognize the reality that America is enriched and even in a sense perfected every time it welcomes new waves of immigrants to its shores, not only because we are exposed to new cultures, traditions, and ways of life, but because these immigrants demonstrate to us new possibilities, new ways of being American and new ways of being human. We become, in other words, more American, more ourselves, and more human through the cross-cultural contact that immigration brings with it. We can be open to such possibilities to further unfold our potentiality as a nation, however, if and only if we replace the “America first” commitment to a purely static and totalized American identity with a solidary and open commitment to the human dignity of each and every person who exists beyond our shores, some of whom we might even be blessed to receive among us.
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