Immigration and Our Cultural Aesthetic

Immigration policy is a poor proxy for what I care about: whether a given wave of immigration enhances or diminishes my aesthetic appreciation of the culture I live in, especially as I shall bequeath it to my daughter and future descendants.

I have already chosen to live in a place whose culture suits me: a small town north of San Francisco. It is a town that is extremely progressive in politics (for example, the town has banned new gas station development); I appreciate much of my fellow citizens' vision for the town's future, while disagreeing with many of the specific approaches to getting there, seeing trade-offs and second-order effects generally ignored.

Each culture tends toward a characteristic level of adult development: a center of gravity, as it were, around which its members cluster.

What I want is a culture that maintains or increases its center of gravity of adult development.

One simple indicator is the characteristic emotion by which adults signal to themselves that they have failed with respect to their order of mind.

The impulsive order of mind, which operates pre-relationally, seeing other people as objects, not relations, is characterized by frustration. Impulses arise from the body, and frustration is about bodily dissatisfaction, even when aimed at people.

The imperial order of mind, which operates as an independent self among others, is marked by anger. Anger is generally relational, aimed at another person or people.

The socialized order of mind, wherein the self arises as part of a social network, feels shame, the feeling of "I am seen as someone who did not do the right thing."

The self-authoring order of mind, the self embedded within one or more social networks but also having coherent values distinct from the social networks, feels guilt, the feeling of "I did not do what I should have done."

The contextualized order of mind, the self embedded within one or more social networks, whose actions are informed by but not determined by a variety of distinct values, feels a loss of integrity, the feeling of "I did not do what would have most served the moment and circumstance."

Note that there are cultural trailing edges and leading edges of the distribution of orders of development. For example, a culture centered in shame may also have much anger (a trailing edge) and some guilt (a leading edge).

Now let us turn to the persistence of developmental center of gravity: cultures have great momentum. For example, "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" by Colin Woodard details how various regions of the United States still bear the imprint of their founding cultures, specific in geography and social class, centuries later.

Nation-states are rarely the right unit of cultural analysis. A large nation may have numerous distinct subcultures. Even a given locality is rarely a useful level of cultural analysis; for example, the socio-economic strata, professional strata, and religious communities within a single city may have distinct cultures.

When groups from one culture migrate into a region where another culture is predominant, John Berry's acculturation model showed four possibilities:

* Assimilation: adopting the host culture

* Separation: maintaining the original culture

* Integration: some mix of assimilation and separation

* Marginalization: losing the original culture without assimilation

When a migrating culture has a less complex developmental center than the host culture, and when separation rather than assimilation occurs, the host culture's center of gravity may be pulled downward.

Our aesthetic preferences as to how we would like our culture to be need no justification. We can empirically observe how different immigrant cultures acculturate, in particular along the axes of assimilation vs. separation, and whether they seem to enhance or diminish our felt sense of cultural life. How this translates into specific policy advocacy is a matter for emergent discovery.