Multiculturalism is replacing western civilization with third world thinking — impartiality is a bizarre and fragile Western invention

Multiculturalism is replacing western civilization with third world thinking — impartiality is a bizarre and fragile Western invention. By Jeremy Boering.

This is well worth listening to. It makes the most powerful argument against multiculturalism (the trivialities of cuisine and skin color are of course ignored). He oversimplifies Carl Schmitt, but otherwise nails it.

First the observation that the sneer is now the argument, because we have abandoned the western tradition that separated the west from the rest (1:16):

The internet has changed the way we think, reason, and argue… for the worse.

 

Here is the full version (39:37):

There are two worldviews at war right now — and one of them is losing:

The West’s objective morality and equal standing under the law, and the third-world thinking of tribe over justice and status over integrity.

 

I wasn’t able to find a transcript, but Apple podcasts and ChatGPT capture the essence, which I’ve made into the following mashup.

The West’s distinctive achievement isn’t just democracy, capitalism or technology; it is the replacement of tribal/honor-based ways of deciding truth and justice with impersonal rules.

By way of example, Boreing opens by contrasting two “trials.” One is an actual criminal proceeding, where evidence has to be produced, rules followed, the accused is presumed innocent, and claims can be challenged. The other is the kind of “trial” that now happens on podcasts and social media, where allegations spread through insinuation, gossip and popularity, and where likes and shares effectively become the jury.

Boreing argues that the distance between those two trials is the distance between Western civilization and everything that came before it — and that we are walking backwards across it faster than most people realize.

Cross-cultural researchers distinguish between guilt/innocence cultures and honor/shame cultures:

  • In a guilt/innocence culture (western culture, evolved in the last two millennia), the important question is “Is the claim true? Did this person actually do it?” The same rule is supposed to apply to friend and enemy.
  • In an honor/shame culture (the default human condition, the culture in the third world) the important question becomes “Who is saying it? Is he one of us? Has he insulted us? Who looks strong and who looks humiliated?” Consequently, personal attacks, sneers, mockery and dominance displays aren’t distractions from the argument in an honour culture — they effectively are the argument. “Me and my cousins and my tribe out-muscle you, so we win and you will be cancelled if you persist.” Most of the world runs on honor and shame. Your worth is issued by the people watching and can be revoked by them, and an unanswered insult is a kind of social death.

Obviously, under the influence of the postmodern left who choose power over truth, and third world immigration, American political discourse is increasingly operating as an honor culture. Often now, in American public square, the mob’s verdict has quietly replaced the evidence. The two cultures cannot coexist in the same society, because one inevitably wins out and becomes the monoculture. So choose one, carefully.

We tend to regard things such as fixed prices, contracts, impartial courts, property rights and honest weights and measures as almost natural. They’re not. Historically, patronage, corruption, clan loyalty, confiscation and bargaining with whoever holds power are much closer to the human norm.

Boreing makes the case for how strange the West actually is — starting with the price tag. A fixed price is not natural. Corruption is natural. The haggle is natural.

What the West built instead was impersonal exchange: contracts a court would enforce, property a king couldn’t seize, honest weights and measures commanded by the God of Israel and enforced for centuries by a Church that treated cheating a stranger as a matter for your soul. Nobel-winning economist Douglass North traced the explosion of Western prosperity to that structure.

Western civilisation laboriously developed institutions in which strangers could trust one another without belonging to the same family or tribe. A merchant doesn’t charge you according to whether you’re his cousin; a court can enforce a contract between two strangers; ideally the judge doesn’t care which faction you belong to.

Church restrictions on cousin marriage — weakened extended kinship clans and contributed to unusually individualistic Western societies. That leads to the key sentence lurking underneath the whole monologue:

Western civilisation asks you to put truth above tribe.

His illustration is John Adams defending the British soldiers charged after the Boston Massacre. Adams considered them political enemies, but thought they were nevertheless entitled to a fair trial. Boreing contrasts that with the principle that my brother/my faction/my people must be defended regardless of what they did.

Boreing thinks parts of both the radical Left and the post-liberal Right are abandoning the same Western principle from opposite directions.

The radical Left says supposedly neutral institutions — property, contracts, markets, law — were really mechanisms by which one group oppressed another. Therefore justice means correcting the power imbalance rather than insisting upon formally neutral rules. So in with permanent DEI and out with meritocracy. Your identity group is more important than your individual characteristics.

The post-liberal/tribal Right (e.g. Candace Owens) says neutrality itself is foolish: politics is fundamentally about friends and enemies, so our people should use power to reward friends and punish enemies. Boreing notes Tucker Carlson’s 2015 rule that he (Carlson) would never criticize his brother in public, under any circumstances, even for mass murder. That’s the tribe placed above the truth. Blood over justice. Most of the world would hear it and nod.

And Boreing’s point is that these sound radically different but lead somewhere remarkably similar:

Group identity outranks universal rules.

That, he argues, isn’t some exciting new political philosophy. It is essentially a return to the normal human condition before the peculiar institutional development of the West.

So when he calls it “Third-World thinking,” he isn’t principally making an argument about ethnicity or immigration. He’s referring to a social order where:

  • Who you know matters more than the rule;
  • Who said something matters more than whether it’s true;
  • Loyalty outweighs impartial justice; and
  • Institutions cease to function impersonally.

His concluding point is actually optimistic. Fixed prices, impartial juries, enforceable contracts and parents willing to turn in even their own child weren’t inevitable products of human nature. People built them. Therefore their erosion isn’t inevitable either: societies can consciously choose those norms again.

The thesis is thus that impartiality itself is a bizarre and fragile Western invention. This is why we shouldn’t have multiculturalism.