Category: Philosophy

The Duty to Receive the Stranger

In the United States, discussions of immigration start from the assumption that a nation has a sovereign right to refuse admittance to anyone, and that admittance is at its discretion. Such a stance fails to recognize that all migrants, regardless of legal status, are rights-bearing humans. The only legal concession that the United States makes to this reality is that those who are present in the United States are entitled to Due Process and First Amendment rights. Even this has not been explicitly confirmed by Supreme Court decision, though it is a widely held opinion, professed publicly even by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Lately, even this modicum of decency has been discarded by the current regime, which actively seeks to deny due process and persecute speech, even in defiance of court orders.

In fact, due process does not adequately encompass the international rights that all humans bear. The first exponent of what we now call international rights was Francisco de Vitoria (c 1483-1546). This Spanish theologian notably opposed absolute sovereignty, holding that even sovereigns must respect the law of nations and human right. A sovereign cannot wage war whenever he pleases, but must have a cause that is just, not merely in his own eyes, but in the consideration of many wise men, and that is defensive. A mere difference in religion is not a just cause, nor is the desire for territory or the glory of a prince. A sovereign is also obligated to treat his subjects well. If he denies them their basic right and becomes a tyrant, other nations may and should wage a just war on behalf of his subjects against him.

Vitoria started from the position that humans have a natural right of society and communication, from which he derived a social solidarity of humankind. This solidarity does not permit that any one group should have absolute rights over others. Nor does the division of the world into particular polities and private holdings abrogate this natural right of society. Thus even sovereigns are bound to permit people of all nations to navigate the seas and rivers, to grant the use of ports necessary to such navigation, and to permit people to trade with those of any nation. People also have the right to travel or migrate anywhere in the world. This natural right, which antecedes the existence of nations and indeed gave birth to them, cannot be limited unless some positive harm results from it. Note that the default assumption is that the sovereign must permit migration. Some reason must be given for limiting it. The right of the people to migrate is primary.

This change in perspective also requires a change in attitude toward the dignity of those of other nations. They are not some second-degree humans pleading for admission. They are fully equal in dignity, and have a right that must be respected. Thus Vitoria famously considered that the chieftains of the Indies had sovereign rights equal to those of European princes, and were true lords of their territories before the arrival of the Spanish. They remained rights-bearing subjects even after the conquest, and were owed good treatment and respect for their persons and property. These were, needless to say, controversial positions at the time, but incredibly they prevailed to the extent that slavery was abolished in New Spain. Vitoria reminded the Spaniards that they were the migrants to another country, and just as they had been admitted, so too must they respect the rights of others.

An analogous situation appears in the southwestern United States, a territory where southerners first entered Mexico as migrants, and eventually took over by conquest. Now they should respect the rights of those who remained in the new territories, as well as any new inhabitants who should migrate. Vitoria says that the sovereign is obligated not merely to admit foreigners, but to receive them well, as a precept of natural law. They must be treated humanely, and should not exile guests who have committed no crime.

The universality of the ancient right of hospitality in the civilized ecumene is well attested, and likely familiar to many through Biblical stories. The sacredness of this right, which includes providing food and shelter to the wayfarer, is based on a sense of human solidarity and the need to travel freely across the land to seek subsistence. Humans have always migrated when their homelands are scarce in resources; indeed our very physiology is designed for long-distance travel. It is a monstrous fiction, only lately developed by some countries in the nineteenth-century, that migration without legal approval is itself a crime meriting exile.

Making this adjustment in thinking would require a humiliation of American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. should bow to no principle outside its own traditions. Early on, the American judiciary decided that there was no common law binding at the federal level, and that international law could provide no guidance for internal affairs, though the law of nations was indeed respected in matters of commerce and navigation, as well as the law of comity. This generally inward-looking attitude, recognizing no wisdom to be received from without, may seem ironic since our so-called “American” traditions are mostly derived from European culture. Yet we ourselves are in a self-imposed exile from Europe, deliberately cutting ourselves off in many ways in order to set out on our own course. In the last half century, an increasingly integrated world no longer permits this isolation, and those who try to revert to it must resort to ever more brutal measures, even against fellow citizens. The biggest irony is that most of these isolationists profess to be Christians, yet humility is furthest from their hearts and they have forgotten the Biblical precept of treating “strangers” (i.e., foreigners) with compassion and as fellow natives since we were once strangers. (Lev. 19:33-34)

If it was wrong for monarchs to claim absolute sovereignty, subject to no higher moral principle, it is no less wrong for a republic to do so. The American error of claiming absolute sovereignty makes us vulnerable to a moral blindness that can prevent us from seeing tyranny, and even make us welcome it. Such a claim may have seemed alarmist until very recently, but so many of the dictators of the twentieth century claimed to be acting for the good of the people or the nation that we should have alarms sound whenever someone repeats this nativist nonsense.

The Aesthetics of Psychics

Is there such a thing as being psychic? After a century of failure to validate any claims of telepathy, clairvoyance, fortune-telling, and the like, it might seem daft even to raise the question. Yet this would be to ignore the reality from which the modern notion of “being psychic” emerged. There have always been people who are acutely sensitive to nature and to other people. They may pick up on nearly imperceptible signals and are attentive to the spiritual or mental states of others, or even that of nature, being raised to ecstasy or troubled with pain. Though there might not be anything properly supernatural about this, it is far from an ordinary ability. This is something real, like having rhythm, but there is a temptation to make this into something intelligible, thereby falsifying it.

When you try to make “being psychic” something intelligible, like telepathically receiving words or images, you take whatever was real about such sensitivity and turn it to something false. The modern notion of “being psychic” incoherently flounders between nature and supernature. Is it a natural power? If so, then it would be something intelligible under our notions of physics and biology. It would be something measurable, testable, with some genetic or molecular basis. Is it something beyond our nature? In that case, there is no sense in speaking of someone “being psychic,” as the supernatural phenomenon belongs to something other than the person. When you try to make it something intelligible, following a fixed rule, you make it into something that will be proven false, since you have denied what was real about it.

Do the empirical falsifications of psychic claims mean there is no such thing as psychics? Only in the sense of having determinate powers following some fixed rules. If we return to the original conception of someone who is sensitive or in rapport with his fellow creatures, or with the reality that underlies them, we can no more say that this is unreal than that there is no such thing as having rhythm. A person who “has rhythm” goes by feel, knowing when to speed up, slow down, hesitate, or keep two times at once. If he were to try to write this in musical notation, or to turn his gift for improvisation into a fixed set of rules, he thereby would falsify the gift, producing something other than his art.

Ancient cultures recognized that certain people had a sensitivity to nature, a rapport with the fundament of reality. This was manifested as a sense of harmony, balance or peace. In cultures with more ethical conceptions of the Divinity underlying nature, those who had a rapport with goodness, wisdom (not intelligence) or justice might be trusted to speak for God. Again, attempting to render this intelligible falsifies it. We intuitively apprehend, for example, that it is good and beautiful to save life, while it is evil and ugly to murder. If you try to rationalize it, saying that it is to your biological advantage or in your enlightened self-interest to abstain from murder or to prefer a society where people aren’t allowed to go around killing each other, you have taken the virtue out of virtue. You are saying that the only reason you don’t kill is because it is not expedient to kill, which is hardly distinguishable from the soul of a murderer. The assumption that reality is always improved by making it more intelligible is repeatedly falsified in art, morality and religion. Those who are wedded to this assumption will have a low appreciation of these aspects of human existence.

Psychics represent a segment of the population who are not ashamed of their subjectivity, and recognize it as a basic reality that needs no extrinsic justification. They go astray, however, in modern society, starting in the nineteenth century, when some psychics thought they needed to make their abilities into something objective, in order to be respectable. This naturally failed. If we are surprised at why psychics persist in their self-belief even after empirical falsification (setting aside the shameless charlatans), we must recognize that they still retain some sense of subjectivity as a value in itself. Indeed, without such self-belief, their aesthetic sensibility would be impossible. An artist must have confidence in every stroke, every beat, or his work will lose the quality of art, making it something too labored, too constructed. Those who lack the ability to feel a Negro spiritual well enough to sing it are incompetent to judge this area of existence. Instead of looking down upon the lack of technique or understanding, they should look up to the noble genius that reveals a glimpse of deepest reality, if only as a flash to be seen, not understood.

Some will dismiss this as obscurantism, but even the most plodding intellectual endeavors in science and philosophy are subservient to this aesthetic desire for insight. Without this, no one could take any joy from his work. Scientists themselves do not criticize the idea that Truth is a positive value to be sought. The worthiness and nobility of their endeavor is something presupposed, and any attempts to justify science in terms of expedience, i.e., for its technological and economic benefits, reduce it to something unspeakably profane and bourgeois. No one could revere a science for such mundane reasons. If it is shameful and falsifying to rationalize scientific pursuits, let us not rationalize the overtly aesthetic.

Everything Is Impossible

Suppose I described a tree to someone who had never seen anything like it. I might say it was a giant creature with countless sprawling arms that never moved, and its body was full of intricate vessels that extracted water from the ground imperceptibly. Most fantastic of all, it had the power to transform light and air into its food, and grew to its great size without taking its bulk from the earth or any other solid thing. Nonetheless, its body was rigid, pound-for-pound stronger than steel, yet lighter than water.

The person being told this might be forgiven for taking this as a tall tale or myth, and the same is true for any natural object. Everything seems impossible or fantastic if we never experienced anything similar. If you saw nothing but cosmic dust, you might never imagine that there could be such a thing as a star. If you saw a barren planet, you might never guess that there could be such a thing as life. If you saw only bacteria, you might never deduce the possibility of more complex organisms. We are able to explain the complex in terms of the simple only after the fact. We have a poor record of determining in advance what is possible or impossible.

If all you knew was physics, you likely would not be able to derive much chemistry. Anything beyond the hydrogen atom is computationally problematic. The few unknown things we have been able to predict are mostly simple structureless entities like fundamental particles and black holes. Everything else comes as a surprise to us. No cosmologist or astronomer anticipated the existence of quasars or pulsars. As with most new things, we first observe them and then try to explain them.

After a long history of discovering things thought to be impossible, if they were ever imagined at all, we should realize how unreliable it is to claim that something is impossible simply because it is outside of our experience. Everything is impossible when abstracted from experience. It is only familiarity that makes these impossible things no longer fantastic.