Is demography destiny? The English philosopher R.G. Collingwood might have had one or two things to say about such a sweeping suggestion. He believed that the overall mentality of a people, far more than any accidents separable from mind, determines their fate. “The fact that certain people live on an island,” he wrote, “has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic.” Collingwood thought that, much like geography, demography is not the driver of historical phenomena, but part of the “raw material” upon which our consciousness, the true maker of history, goes to work.
Demography cannot be destiny if Collingwood is right to view it, along with language and geography, as secondary to conscious thought. Some might wish to reconcile the two by connecting demographic facts to mental outlook, but they will find no more than a striking overlap. In 1945, over 70% of British DNA dated back more than 6,000 years on these islands. The demographic composition of my corner of the world, in other words, was all but entirely stagnant for millennia. Yet no one would argue that, on account of these virtually unchanging demographics, our mental habits and attachments have been equally static for thousands of years. Demography conditions much, but it determines nothing. Very little is preordained, and studious attention to demographic trends, while key to churning out good social science, does not a qualified prophet make.
But this is no excuse, and still less a justification, for gambling irreversibly with the fate of our national homes. As a conditioning factor for everything that we value, demography is not only a legitimate field of inquiry but a vital concern for any nation intent on its own survival. This is especially the case in a democratic political order. Democracy, after all, needs a clearly defined demos in order to function, or else the system will descend into the kind of “soft despotism” prophesied by Alexis de Tocqueville: a “tutelary” elite ruling over a fuzzy, incoherent mass of individuals, disengaged from civic life and lacking sufficient ties to one another to redeem the lethargy. Democracies in Western Europe and North America are already well on their way to fulfilling Tocqueville’s prophecy. Unprecedented demographic change is only accelerating this process. Worse still, a congruence of different political and financial interests is determined to demonise anyone who sounds the alarm, particularly if they draw attention to the uniquely bewildering effects of mass immigration.
Whether to court more favourable voting blocs for the cultural Left or to cheapen labour costs for the economic Right, this cohesive demos, necessary in a law-governed democracy, is being swamped by eye-watering levels of immigration. The end result will be a xenos, a society of strangers: not always hostile to each other, though there is that danger as well, but lacking the bonds of allegiance, strengthened by shared history and culture, to keep an inter-generational project going. Wild-eyed experiments with demography are always foolish and potentially suicidal.
In his characteristically thorough and all-surveying way, Aristotle identifies rapid demographic change as one explanation among many for social chaos. He explains in The Politics:
A state is not the growth of a day, neither is it a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, being the more numerous, afterwards expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris.
Aristotle understood that peoples are instinctively groupish and find it difficult, if not impossible, to prioritise vague hymns to universality over their own particular interests as a living entity. The cosmopolitan spirit can only endure if everyone subscribes to it. Not only is this unlikely in principle; there will also develop a temptation on the part of groups with a firmer sense of their own demographic identity to use the complacent cosmopolitanism (bordering on pathological altruism) of other peoples against them. This is already happening in advanced Western democracies. While we busily re-write our own histories, entertain demands for reparations to atone for sins that every civilization has committed, and discard our meritocratic principles in favour of an authoritarian regime of socially engineered diversity, inter-ethnic tension is not neutralised. On the contrary, it grows, for such concessions only legitimise a new blood libel against Western peoples and substantiate further claims against their freedom, culture, and prosperity. Progressive activists and tribalistic, self-appointed ‘leaders’ of minority groups are emboldened to demand even more in the way of extortion and reprisal—at any other point in history the unmistakable signs of an armed conquest. Cosmopolitanism under such conditions, with a power-hungry Left addicted to racial politics and asymmetric rates of ethno-centrism between different groups, is tantamount to a death wish.
But are these sentiments un-Christian? Many will not care. The kind of people whom Eric Kaufmann describes in Whiteshift as “ethno-traditional nationalists” are for the most part non-religious, many of them adopting a Nietzschean view of Christianity’s social effects: a pious obstacle in the way of vitality, resulting in an unhealthy obsession with lowliness and a ‘slave morality’ that mistakes weakness for virtue. Christian thinking, many of the ethno-nationalists conclude, is bound to seal the fate of demographic majorities, riding roughshod over their legitimate group interests.
It does not help that many high-profile Christian thinkers exhibit this very complacency on demographic questions. “Christianity,” according to post-liberal theologian John Milbank, “is totally incompatible with nationalism as a central determining value.” In one sense, this is uncontroversial. The Christian tradition of political philosophy holds that nations, though independent entities with a right to their own distinct ancestral attachments, should not be fragmented along the lines of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), but find their place within the supranational tapestry that we once called Christendom. The nation can wield no supreme authority outside of this larger whole. On this point of basic political theology, Milbank is correct.
Yet when he proceeds to accuse Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism outfit of “racist overtones,” implying that anyone who favours immigration controls for any other reason than logistical concerns (“wage depression” and “social viability”) is hankering after a world of racial purity, he is well wide of the mark. Nazism, it goes without saying, was emphatically and self-consciously anti-Christian. It declared total war against the Gospel teaching of universal brotherhood in Christ and strove violently for a Volksgemeinschaft purged of ‘alien’ elements (Volksfremde). Ostensibly ‘sub-human’ groups were exterminated as intolerable pollutants. This bears no resemblance to a Christian creed which, precisely because it never viewed race as a moral category, has claimed billions of adherents in wildly different parts of the world, from Addis Ababa and Alexandria to Winchester and Wenzhou.
Yet is it “racist” for people in Winchester, out of love for their ancestors who built the city rather than anti-Christian hatred for those who did not, to want the only home they have to remain majority-English? If the inhabitants of Ethiopia are justified in wanting to keep their capital majority-Ethiopian, then it is just as morally permissible for the English Christian to oppose an uninvited influx of foreigners into his homeland. Furthermore, he is justified not simply for logistical reasons to do with housing or wage pressures, but because large-scale immigration risks tipping the demographic balance in a way that dilutes the significance of ancestral ties, such that national loyalty is no longer an emotional fact of intergenerational belonging, but must be taught, painstakingly and with limited chances of success, through wooden, uninspiring civics programmes. Milbank seems to reject this, as is his right. But he is wrong to condemn people who do not wish to see their neighbourhoods descend into a multi-cultural nowhere-land as far-Right, divisive, or somehow anti-Christian. The strength of Christianity in these matters is that it envisions an order of distinct nations and peoples without fetishizing race, or some hierarchy of inimitable Volksgeister, as a point of dogmatic principle.
The Bible does not picture a scattered array of atomized individuals or nomadic anywheres. Its command to evangelise takes as given the fact that human beings both naturally and justly organise themselves into cohesive peoples: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 28:19-20) St. Paul did not knock on every single door in Thessalonica like some kind of proto-Jehovah’s Witness. He addressed his divinely inspired wisdom to the Thessalonians, as he did also to the Romans, the Galatians, the Ephesians, and so on.
In a similar vein, the otherwise compelling Catholic scholar Adrian Vermeule has expressed contempt for the ‘don’t tread on me’ instincts of white working-class Americans: “the tyrannophobic, country-party, low-Anglo culture,” he says, “is irredeemable and can only be eliminated, not baptized.” He has further called for an immigration policy that gives “lexical priority” to Catholics: “This will disproportionately favour immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America … It will in effect require opening the southern border of the United States.” Any opposition, Vermeule concludes, is a “troubling indicator of racism and classism.” The wiser words of St. Paul thus go unheeded: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (Timothy 5:8)
How neatly does this chime with Vermeule’s suggestion that the majority core of the United States must be discarded, rather than redeemed by a Christian revival of the sort that he will otherwise be essential (given his intellectual gifts) to bringing about? A country is much like a family, albeit one that can, at least on a very limited scale, adopt new members. Supplanting a long-established, reasonably homogeneous, ancestral population because they are insufficiently receptive to Vermeule’s own brand of Catholic integralism is only marginally better than the leftist hope that irreversible demographic change will usher in an electorate more likely to vote for draconian, race-based equity. Conservative intellectuals should not give up on their fellow citizens. To do so would be rather like a father walking out on his own ungovernable family because there is a quieter, more attractive alternative down the road. Moreover, mere confessional allegiance is no guarantee of sincere faith. As St. Augustine explains in The City of God, “sons of the Church lie hidden among the ungodly, and there are false Christians within the Church.” Confronted by the existence of unbelievers, he adds, “the pilgrim City of Christ the King … must not think it a fruitless task to bear with their hostility until she finds them confessing the faith.” As lovers of Christ, we are called to evangelise all peoples, not to “eliminate” supposedly “irredeemable” groups to make room for those who are already anointed.
There must also be a continuous cultural core into which immigrants can integrate, such as existed in the mid-20th century United States, which enabled Jewish and Irish diasporas in particular to enter the American family as members indistinguishable from the WASPish elite that had previously been more restrictive. But that cultural core (even when welcoming to newcomers who gradually blend into the demographic majority through assimilation and intermarriage) will always overlap to some extent with ethnicity, because ethnicity is a demographic category, and demography and culture do not vary completely independently of one another. Chinese culture springs from the ever-evolving, yet no less identifiable, ancestral attachments of Chinese people. They live in a country which, in every detail, testifies to the sacrifices of their own forebears. Yet to take pride in this inheritance, bound up as it is with a feeling of ancestral connection, the Chinese are not required to hate outsiders whose ancestry they do not share. And while some Western countries might have evolved slightly broader understandings of who can belong, the spirit of belonging will die altogether if most of the people residing in nations like Britain, France, and the United States are of foreign background, boast no ancestral tie to the place that can inspire allegiance at scale, and care more for the retinue of gods revered in their own homelands than they do for the pieties of the country in which they have chosen to live.
It is also no accident that the most homogeneous parts of the world exhibit higher levels of solidarity and social trust. According to Robert Putnam, the leading social scientist in these matters, “across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and at least in some cases lower investment in public goods.” This inconvenient pattern is overlooked by certain ‘common good’ conservatives, some of whom push admirably for a revival of Catholic social teaching while failing to appreciate the sense of shared identity which makes a culture of mutual support feasible. Patrick Deneen has criticised Douglas Murray for his attacks on the intensifying anti-white racism of Left progressives. He argues that the success of populism will require a multi-racial, working-class coalition of a kind that Murray’s insensitive “anti-woke laments” risk alienating.
Yet, as Kaufmann argues, developing countries serve as a cautionary tale of what the cult of diversity may reap in practice. In ultra-diverse places like Papua New Guinea, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he explains, it is more “difficult for governments to agree on where to build a road or hospital, which goods to tax, or how to distribute wealth and government posts … because [such] decisions alter the distribution of benefits between competing ethnic groups.” The risk is that our own societies, intoxicated with the idea that diversity is a strength, gradually resemble these dysfunctional, tribalistic battlegrounds. Just recently, we saw white primary school students in London denied access to extra-curricular support in the name of racial equity. This is bound to happen when a force-fed diet of multiculturalism conditions people to evaluate public goods in terms of whether their own narrow community interest, rather than the nation as a whole, is well-served—or even worse, equally well-served when measured alongside how others stand to benefit, including other minorities.
Patrick Deneen’s multi-ethnic, working-class coalition is thus unlikely to work. Whatever our Christian ideals, we have to contend with the world as we find it, and the evidence certainly suggests that, as a species, our gift for uncompromising tribalism rather stands in the way. Cohesion appears to require a certain measure of homogeneity. This largely explains the progressive Left’s move away from old labour values towards the cynical fanning of racial grievance, as they treat minorities like dry tinder for a firestorm of identity politics against ‘oppressive’ host populations. (It turns out that groups like ‘the English’ or ‘the French’—so often mocked as mysterious concepts by liberals who feign puzzlement when it suits them—suddenly do exist as definable categories, so long as these peoples are being targeted for the alleged sins of their ancestors.) Supporting further immigration without regard for cultural proximity or the loyalty fostered by ancestral ties makes identity politics an unavoidable temptation for a modern Left otherwise void of purpose. The resulting spiral of inter-ethnic resentment and chaos is all but inevitable. Put bluntly, how is ‘Black Lives Matter’ doing in Japan?
The extraordinary level of immigration into the national homes of peoples who have never expressed any desire for such rapid, irreversible changes to their social life and demographic balance is a grave injustice. Yet it continues apace, helped along by a nasty double standard that forces the ancestral populations of European and North American countries to endure unlimited diversity while every other place in the world is allowed to protect its own distinctive local character. Sir Roger Scruton, in an otherwise magisterial piece about Enoch Powell, misses this point: “The liberal view of rights, as universal possessions which make no reference to history, community, or obedience, has changed [the general meaning of nationhood]. Indigenous people can claim no precedence …” On the contrary, the liberal disregard for ancestral ties is not universal, but applied with a selective malice. The BBC will rightly take notice when China encourages the “mass immigration” of Han Chinese settler colonialists into Tibet, giving rise to understandable fears that the Tibetans’ right to self-determination as a people is threatened. It is only when elites in Western societies impose unprecedented demographic change on their own unwilling populations that the people of countries like Britain and the United States, perhaps because they suffer the disadvantage of being majority white and thus morally compromised, must either celebrate the policy or risk abuse.
At the time of Powell’s notorious rivers of blood speech, a survey found that 74% of British people agreed with his warnings, while just 15% opposed them. Today, there remains an overwhelming majority for restrictionism. According to a YouGov tracker, 61% of Brits feel that immigration is too high, a figure that rises to the mid-80s among 2019 Tory voters. In the Book of Revelation, the new Jerusalem serves as a home for all saved nations. The holy city, “lightened” by the glory of God, is not some heavenly globo-homo situated in the hereafter. “And the nations of them which are saved,” it says, “shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.” There is also the splendid image of the tree of life, its leaves made not for the spiritual succour of scattered individuals, but “the healing of nations.” (Revelation 22:2)
Public concerns around irreversible demographic change are valid for all manner of secular conservative reasons, whether fear of unintended consequences or cautious respect for the cumulative wisdom built into long-established social arrangements. But so long as a feeling of special fellowship with one’s own people does not mutate into racial supremacy or violent hatred for outsiders, the teachings of the Gospel do nothing to make demographic realism any less permissible for Christian conservatives. There is no conflict between loving Christ and preserving the divine gift of a national home, including the fragile conditions of belonging without which it will perish.
