Open Borders

I am so happy this website exists: http://openborders.info/

From the site's self-description:

This website is dedicated to making the case for open borders. The term “open borders” is used to describe a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances.
The goal of the website is to make the arguments for open borders, and also to explicitly discuss many arguments against open borders, evaluate their validity, and determine ways to tackle the objections.

Living abroad has made this issue more and more personal to me, but I know my experience overall hasn't been too bad. There are millions of people who are not so fortunate.

We need more people who are actually willing to say, "I support open borders." In the Western world, there are far too many intellectual forces which breed prejudice against free immigration, and they often come from what we think of as opposite sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand, you have nationalism, which comes in many forms. Some argue that the state should be obliged first to the economic well-being of its own citizens, and that any disadvantage caused by immigration should be a concern to the state. Others argue that every nation has the right to preserve a certain culture, language, or intellectual or spiritual tradition, and that free immigration would deny this right. Still others argue that it is simply too impractical to allow a pure "melting pot" experiment, in which people from different cultures all try to get along under on state. I call all of these arguments generally "nationalist," even though they may be more or less so.

On the other hand, you have social democracy, which can indeed get in the way of free immigration. If the state has the responsibility to care for the general well-being of all of its citizens, it is naturally going to be difficult to accept a large mass of new citizens. You end up with the paradoxical and sometimes overwhelming tension of a society so compassionate that it can't accept any more strangers.

I think it would be a great moral victory to see the world embrace open borders. I suspect it will happen (if it ever does) more gradually than other moral victories such as the illegalization of slavery.

Morality needs to take a central role in the debate. I am frankly always pessimistic about the average person's ability to understand the economics involved, and even if the whole world were well-informed on economics, maximizing utility functions is hardly an inspiring argument for changing laws. For some on the left, the case for open borders might come down to a sort of cultural relativism in which there really shouldn't be any national distinctions. I don't find this especially convincing, myself. Rather, I think adopting open borders would be the best expression of the values our Western civilization has cultivated over the ages (in particular our Christian values), and I don't think we should be ashamed to say so. We should welcome the stranger, not because cultural differences don't matter, but precisely because our civilization is capable of welcoming others to adopt our way of life. Of course, to invite the stranger is to invite cultural evolution, but there is no ultimate danger in this if one has enduring beliefs that inspire admiration in all. In particular, there is no reason to be shy about saying that all people long to be free, and we should welcome others to share in the freedom for which our ancestors fought hard.

Again, I'm excited this web site exists. Note that it includes every kind of argument you could possibly want: libertarian, egalitarian, utilitarian, conservative, and so on. We live in exciting times, for anyone aware of the intellectual movements going on.

First impressions on reading Democracy in America

I've always wanted to read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and now I'm taking advantage of my new-found French speaking ability to read the book in French. I haven't gotten very far, but I already have some pretty striking impressions. Here they are.

• Despite claims to the contrary, it seems pretty legitimate after all to say America is in some sense a Christian nation. Sure, you can point to the theology of the Founding Fathers and say, "Hey, it's all just deism," but Tocqueville is more concerned with the angloamericans who founded places like New England. You can't look at the early settlements without seeing an explicit reference to Christian beliefs in both their goals and even their laws. If "the founders" are people like Washington and Jefferson, then okay, maybe we're just a deist nation. But if "the founders" are the Anglo-Saxons who first came to America, then we are definitely a Christian nation.
• Tocqueville's general comments on religion strike me as true today just as they were during the Enlightenment: religion was originally the friend of freedom and equality, then it became an ironic enemy, but in many ways it is still a friend and should be more so. The narrative he tells is something like this: Christian beliefs gave people access to a higher power than political power and a belief in inherent human dignity that transcends culture. This was the first step toward defeating tyranny. The next step is democracy, which Tocqueville seems to be best displayed in America, particularly New England.
• Freedom is not the ability to whatever you want, but rather the ability to do what is right. Tocqueville thus speaks highly of the strong (and religiously motivated) emphasis on education, which he says fosters freedom in the new republic.
• Townships are the nexus of democracy. Americans in the eyes of Tocqueville are successful in democracy because they build it from the ground up. In fact, Tocqueville marvels precisely at how active the local government is in the life of the people, in contrast to his own French government.
• Tocqueville gives one of the best descriptions of the modern libertarian ideal you can find. America is founded on allowing individuals to be sovereign in all things which pertain only to them, and likewise for all levels of the federal structure (towns, cities, states, and finally the federal government). Thus there is as little intervention from the top as possible.
• At the same time, Tocqueville praises townships for having governments which provide an ever-expanding array of services. It may or may not be difficult to reconcile this with modern libertarianism. (Does the growth of federal government actually get in the way of healthy, active local government?)
• Equality is practically synonymous with freedom. Tocqueville insists that there is probably no group of people on earth that has ever achieved more equality of circumstances than the Anglo-Americans. Yet he also claims that they would be the last people on earth to claim that equality of wealth is a goal worth pursuing. Equality of results is, for him, an outgrowth of freedom, but it's also more than that. In some sense, it is freedom, by definition. Freedom means that no one has any special authority given from above, which is the same as equality.
• From the very beginning there was a large difference between the North and the South. A lot of people talk about "America's" guilt in tolerating slavery, but as time goes on we seem to get less and less clear on how striking the regional differences actually were. New England, for example, never had slavery. You have to wonder if we weren't asking for a Civil War just by uniting north and south under one Constitution. (None of this is to say racism didn't exist in the North.)
• Tocqueville is highly critical of slavery, not just because of its consequences for slaves (which is the obvious criticism), but also because of its consequences for society in general. It creates a society which is less free and less progressive for everyone, not just for the enslaved. I believe he says that it makes the society less industrious, which is almost certainly correct.

Some of these impressions might be off base, who knows. What I'm mostly left with is a desire to see more of the vibrant local civic life that Tocqueville seems to love so well in young America. But how do you pull that off in an increasingly transient and mobile society? How do you unite people together by common values? And is there still room in the modern world for communities formed by common religious beliefs?

How do we keep our own language?

Recently I listened to a debate (in French) on Réplique, a radio program on FranceCulture hosted by Alain Finkielkraut, on the place of English in the French university. The trend is clear: universities want to teach more classes in English so as to attract more foreign students and professors. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has read or listened to a bit of Finkielkraut, his reaction to this general trend was less than favorable. "La langue, c'est l'âme d'un peuple" (the language is the soul of a people) one might say. If we lose our language, do we not also lose our soul?

As an American, I found the whole debate somewhat embarrassing. It is undeniable that English has become the lingua franca of the modern world, and it is not hard to see this as part of a general trend of American cultural dominance (leaving aside the British colonialism that defined a previous era). So it makes me blush when I hear a French intellectual argue (against Finkielkraut) that in order for France to remain in a prominent position, it must learn to speak two languages fluently: the language of its soul (French) and the language of the world (English).

But before anyone (Americans included) jumps on the USA for imposing its culture and its language on others, it might be wise to think about how Americans also imposed this language on themselves. Cultural traditions, especially languages, have often gone to die in the United States. Most Americans only speak one language, but it is hardly the language of their ancestors. Very few of us have bloodlines which are all English. Our ancestors learned English in order to become part of a new people and construct a new nation state. (In recent years in Europe one often sees the opposite happening: nations splitting apart countries in order to preserve their separate peoples.)

If there really is international desire to become one global community (and at least to some limited extent, there genuinely is) it is only natural that there should be a language uniting us. There is simply nothing more fundamental than language when it comes to human coexistence.

Then again, I understand perfectly well the desire to guard one's own language. There is something beautiful about having a plurality of languages and traditions, to one who is motivated enough to learn or at least observe them. For each people, it is difficult to let go of its soul--that is, the language. So if the desire to adopt a new language simply isn't there, it seems rather arrogant or cruel to insist on it.

Yet there is something naïve about this portrait of culture. Take French as an example. To suggest that the French people ought to guard their language as something which is theirs by the purely organic process of cultural transmission would fly in the face of actual history. No, French people speak French because there is a French government which designates in its Constitution that the official language is French, and which insists that in all the schools in France the classes will be taught in French. There exist even today languages and dialects in France that are slowly dying, simply because there do not exist the same kinds of institutions backing them. And that is not to speak of the French language itself, which is the product of a long series of mutations and transformations of various European tongues. Neither have I mentioned the large amount of immigration into France in recent years, which further problematizes the notion of "French people" and calls into question how much the French language truly unifies the country. So to act as if the French people have a "right" to guard what is "theirs" seems a little strange, in a lot of ways.

But if a nation is to exist, it must have a language, right? Indeed, and so anyone seeking to unite as one nation must be willing to learn its language and its culture. Therein lies the paradox for me: we join together with others in forming a nation, so that the nation can in turn form us. This is either the most beautiful of life's paradoxes, or a very cruel irony.

From my point of view, the paradox of language (and culture) can only be beautiful if we refuse to accept the myth of modernity that we construct the world as we choose. There are certain errors committed by progressives and conservatives which are, so to speak, equal and opposite, and which have as their origin the false notion that history is a test of human will. Thus progressives, on the one hand, believe that by leaving old things behind, we can arrive at a new Eden of human flourishing, while conservatives believe that we will accomplish the same thing by instead keeping those things which we are at risk of losing. I believe, on the contrary, that we must accept that most things in history will be lost, whether we wish it or not, and that at the same time most new ideas are bad ideas, which will only be weeded out with the passage of more time and thoughtful criticism. A language neither can nor should be perfectly preserved, and neither can it be invented from scratch (as proved by the dazzling failure of Esperanto to become an international language).

The best we can do politically is, in my estimation, to ensure that people have as much freedom as possible, both to benefit from the culture of their own ancestors and to learn the culture of others'. The United States has, in particular, never had an official language at the level of a constitutional requirement. I have absolutely no sympathy for "English only" movements within the US, which seems to me to run counter to everything that the American experience proves (or may hope to prove) about human beings--that we can, by some miracle, albeit not without pain, unite dozens of cultures in one place and under one system of laws. As for France, I would recommend giving freedom a try, as well. It is not necessary for all students to take classes in English, and the fact that English is fashionable is no reason to push for it in more universities. On the other hand, neither does it make sense to deny a university the right to teach more classes in English (or any other language which might one day be useful internationally).

For God's sake, the French language gave us the phrase "laissez faire." I've never understood why the French themselves are so bad at doing that. But that's a whole other story, I suppose.

Libertarian realism

Libertarians are often accused these days of being utopians. Sure, the free market would work in a perfect world, but in the real world there are predatory businesses and other such monsters crawling under every bed. We need the government to look out for the little guy, or else who knows what will happen to society?

But while libertarians may on occasion speak too highly of the virtues of spontaneous order, I think the reality is that conservatives and liberals buy into a vision of government which is naive in one extreme or another. On the one hand, conservatives talk often as if we get the government we "deserve," as if somehow if we were just more true to our traditional values we would have an ever-thriving society. On the other hand, liberals seem to think we need to "take back" the government, as if we, together, united, can change society for the better.

I think the libertarian critique is the most profoundly realistic vision of government you can have. On the one hand, no, we don't necessarily have the government we deserve (for better or for worse), because we have not nearly as much control over government's formation as our democratic institutions would suggest. On the other hand, there is no way to collectively take charge of government--such massive collective action simply doesn't exist in the real world.

Don't get me wrong. Values matter, and social movements make a difference. They just don't make the difference we expect. Libertarians instinctively believe that government should always be reformed, and we also expect that no matter how much reform takes place it will still never be perfect. The role of the individual in politics is not so much to take responsibility for government as it is to take responsibility for his own beliefs, his own actions, his own civic ties, and his own vote. If the government turns out bigger or worse than it ought to be, it's not the fault of the individual. But it is the fault of the individual if he takes the defeatest attitude of one so victimized by the system that he fails even to better his own situation.

I've been accused of being an idealist before, but I think that's because people underestimate how dangerous the real idealists are. The real idealists are the megalomaniacs in Washington who actually believe they're doing what's best for the country. God save us from the idealists.

Partisanship and authoritarianism

I saw a fascinating and disturbing excerpt today from a new book entitled, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. Here's a passage that caught my eye:

The political reaction to the Occupy crackdowns was interesting to watch. In the 1990s, it had been the right wing—particularly the far right—that was up in arms over police militarization. Recall the outrage on the right over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the raid to seize Elián González. The left had largely either remained silent or even defended the government’s tactics in those cases. But the right-wing diatribes against jackbooted thugs and federal storm-troopers all died down once the Clinton administration left office, and they were virtually nonexistent after September 11, 2001. By the time cops started cracking heads at the Occupy protests, some conservatives were downright gleeful. The militarization of federal law enforcement certainly didn’t stop, but the 9/11 attacks and a friendly administration seemed to quell the conservatives’ concerns. So long as law enforcement was targeting hippie protesters, undocumented immigrants, suspected drug offenders, and alleged terrorist sympathizers, they were back to being heroes.

That sounds familiar, actually. As noted at the NYT, a majority of Americans are okay with NSA wiretapping, as long as it's their party in charge:

In 2006, when George W. Bush was president, just 37 percent of Democrats said the N.S.A. surveillance program was acceptable, while 61 percent said it was not. Now those numbers are 64 percent and 34 percent respectively.

Republicans appear to be fair-weather fans as well. In 2006, 75 percent said the program was acceptable, and 23 percent said it was not. Now 52 percent find it acceptable, and 47 percent unacceptable.

Blatant partisanship, it seems, is slowly yielding to more and more authoritarian government in America. When one half of the country refuses to stand up for the rights of the other half--and this is reciprocated--the rule of law slowly erodes.

Learning French

It's now been one year since I moved to France. Which makes one year that I've been speaking (or trying to speak) French in my everyday life.

I started learning the language through Rosetta Stone, which is a great program for beginners of any language. The main advantage of learning a language on the computer is the repetition. Most humans are simply not willing to repeat everything to you a thousand times until you get it. Except, of course, your parents when you were first learning to talk. That's kind of the theory behind the program: you need to learn your new language the way you learned your first one, through repetition and through association. You learn the entire language through immersion--no translation. This happens through a combination of pictures and sounds and text to guide you through. Not only is this time-saving--if you don't need to translate, you don't waste time repeating two words instead of one--but it also helps you to constantly hear the language the way it ought to be pronounced. I hate to make this sound like a commercial, but there really is no better way to start a new language than this program.

On the other hand, it doesn't get you very far. There are five levels in an entire Rosetta Stone language program, and I burned through all five levels in French in three or four months. Granted, I spent a lot of time on it when I first started, but still. Relatively basic phrases were simply not covered--I had honestly never heard the verb "falloir" before arriving in France. But with the ability that I had acquired to speak basic phrases at a reasonable speed, I was on the right track from the moment I stepped off the plane in Paris.

After Rosetta Stone had exhausted itself, I tried some google searches to see what other resources I found. The most impressive one was a web site called "Français Authentique," a site run entirely by one guy who had an ambitious idea. I listened to his introductory podcasts where he explained his philosophy, plus a few more podcasts where he explained some common French expressions. I didn't end up sticking with the program, but I so admired his basic philosophy that I simply adopted it in my own way.

The philosophy: listen.

I remember there were six other elements to the philosophy after that, but this was number one and clearly the most important. I think it's true: listening is by far the most important part of learning a language. Another key point was to listen to only those things which one can understand, at least 90%. That's because listening to anything in a new language is at first very draining. As anyone who has lived abroad learning a new language can tell you, you tend to sleep a lot more when listening to speakers of a foreign language. Just like working out to get in shape, at first it's going to be exhausting. The only way to get better is to keep doing it.

So I listened incessantly to whatever I could find on the Internet (for free, of course). Since getting to work took a significant amount of time (waiting for the train, climbing the enormous staircase at Lozère, walking through the forest) I could always use the time to listen to something rather substantial. Being a told nerd in any language, I gravitated to things which were pretty heady, such as FranceCulture. I figured, while I'm learning to understand the language, I might as well learn some real vocabulary as well as the current intellectual trends in France. It turns out there's another advantage to this approach: more heady, intellectual stuff tends to be spoken a bit more slowly than stuff on TV.

Searching TV shows on the Internet had limited use for me. Some of it is that, sorry to say, there aren't a whole lot of good French series (although I did find one show somewhat amusing) but most of the problem is simply the speed. It gets tiring and boring to repeat the same line over and over until you figure out what it says, and sometimes that doesn't even work (you might have to ask a native speaker, who knows what is said because, well, he just knows). One thing that helped a bit was watching an American series I knew quite well (Scrubs, in my case) in French. That was mostly to help me work on understanding fast speech. In terms of vocabulary, a TV series is pretty limited, especially one that's translated. The sole advantage is that it's entertaining, whether or not you learn very much.

All of that started to work for me, and by about six months into my stay I was speaking French with a bit more confidence. I still got stuck a lot, occasionally having to resort back to English when I knew someone could bail me out with a quick translation. Honestly, I found myself often not talking as much as I used to. I'm not exactly a chatterbox by nature, but there really is something psychologically difficult about feeling the desire to talk restricted by one's confidence in speaking the language. That was a fairly difficult time in my life. Any move is difficult and can sometimes be isolating. To feel isolated by a language is still worse.

Indeed, there's no more fundamental aspect of social life than language. Aided by personal experience, I've reflected on this a lot since moving to France. It is, of course, possible to incorporate a foreigner into one's society using extra-linguistic communication (as when I was first invited to have dinner at the home of a very lovely French family--I didn't get most of what I said, but I happily ate what was set before me!). But it hardly follows that one can actually have a society without language, and to be fully incoporated into that society seems to imply speaking the language of the people. Loneliness was thus very natural for me during my first few months in France. I felt that even with people who could speak English (with varying ability) it would be hard to feel at home in France unless I finally got the hang of speaking French.

Of course, it's important to put these things in their full context. I don't do just any kind of work in France. I'm a researcher, and that means language is a rather awkward issue for me in Europe. You see, English is my native language (although the Brits my disagree). But in academia, English is the lingua franca (ironically enough!) as it is these days in pretty much all commerce. That means all of my work is in English--almost every known academic journal publishes mainly in English. When I go to conferences, English is the language of all presentations. It has already happened to me many times that I am the only native English speaker among a group of mathematicians whose only common language is English.

This is awkward for two reasons. One is that I'm in France trying to learn the language, but the mere fact that I am American can often be an obstacle. Don't get me wrong: the French would rather speak their own language if possible. But the French, like most western Europeans, are instinctually wired to believe that Americans only speak English, and that the presence of an American means something in between a chance to practice English and a burdensome moment where one has to speak English (you know, for my sake). This point is all the more awkward in France, where the French themselves have a complex about foreign languages. Everyone in Europe knows the French don't speak foreign languages well--but at least they're not as bad as the Americans. More on this a little later.

The second reason is, I confess, that it is slightly embrassing to hear my own language butchered. True as it is that hearing English mangled does not require leaving the U.S., I find certain linguistic errors repeated so often by fellow scholars in Europe I start to wonder whether they are now accepted as correct English among non-native speakers. The problem is that I am a mathematician, and it always seemed to me like correct English is a fairly trivial part of my work. Thus I don't feel I have any right to intervene, even when I see or hear rather painful errors. But I digress.

When I arrive in Paris, I expected to find the French very proud of their language and simply unwilling to learn foreign languages. I quickly found this stereotype is not very accurate, although I can speculate about where it comes from. Most French people I've met do not find their own language especially exciting, much to the likely chagrin of French intellectuals, who take great pride in their literature and the spoken word. Indeed, this is a place where you can find a "Festival of the Word" and where many programs on RadioFrance are devoted to language and literature. But there is a difference between having a strong intellectual tradition and having a general populace who appreciates such things. When I've asked French people about their language, I've found that many have never even thought about the sound or structure of their own language.

One time I even heard someone say that she (or he, I don't remember) thought the French accent was ugly, which sounded simply unthinkable to me. The French language always had to me a sort of elegance about it, its sounds very exquisite and difficult to reproduce. On the other hand, it's true that while living in France, one quickly discovers how ugly it can sound (as any language can) in the mouth of someone who wants to sound obnoxious or doesn't care about how he speaks. I still maintain that French is one of the most beautiful languages in the world (rivaled in my opinion by Italian), but I admit that this is more in its idealized rather than its real form.

I haven't had much opportunity to write in French, and I have no idea if I have sufficient command of the language to write an article of any length or substance. But I find that normal conversation is no longer a problem, and though I still frequently ask what certain words or idiomatic expressions mean, these are typically not essential. It feels good to get complimented on my French, but truth be told, I'm just happy to not feel so isolated by my linguistic inability.

I've tried to learn two other languages so far: Spanish and Italian. I used Rosetta Stone for Italian, as well, which is why I knew it was a good program. I remember getting pretty far with it, but the fact that I never lived there made me lose pretty much all of what I had, and as I mentioned above, what you get from Rosetta Stone is hardly sufficient to gain fluency. Spanish, on the other hand, was the language I learned in school for years. Putting together what little I did in elementary school, middle school, and high school, and one semester at the university, I studied Spanish for around seven or eight years total. But none of it stuck, except for a few phrases.

The lesson in all of that is that language requires repetition, consistency, and, most of all, usefulness. This may make certain intellectual types cringe, but I honestly do not feel that anyone should feel he is missing something if he only speaks one language fluently. I speak French because I'm in France. I don't feel the slightest amount of embarrassment at having never been able to speak any other language fluently, because there are plenty of other ways to spend one's intellectual energies than to learn new languages for the fun of it. When it comes to Spanish, I do happen to feel some level of regret just because it is fairly useful, not only abroad but increasingly in the United States. But if you ask me, as a matter of principle, whether it is important to speak a foreign language fluently as a matter of personal well-roundedness, I will simply say flat out, "No."

On the other hand, living in a foreign country can be exciting. Especially when it's France. There is quite a lot of culture to which this language is forever attached, and it's a good feeling to have access to that. I'm not a strong believer in the theory that something is always lost in translation, but it's fairly obvious that being able to comprehend the original versions of great works is advantageous. But the most important thing for me is to be able to communicate effectively with the people around me. I sometimes joke that my initial problem with the French was figuring out what they were saying, but now I have to figure out why they are saying it. And that's the best part of language: once you have the medium of communication, you stop thinking about the medium and go straight to the person at the other end to discover beliefs and values and desires and dreams that you never knew before.

That's not all there is to my story, but I think that's a good summary of this first year of speaking French.

On being proud to be an American

CNN writes about a Gallup poll asking Americans how proud they are to be American.

According to the poll, 57% of adult Americans are "extremely proud" and 28% are "very proud." In addition, 10% say they are "moderately proud," with 3% saying they are "only a little proud" and a mere 1% saying they are "not at all proud."

I suppose it's a bit like asking people how often they go to church, or if they believe in God. It's a way to track something about the national pulse.

The comparison really isn't far off, if you think about it historically. Peoples and nations have always been tied to their religions, whether they had one or many gods. The Roman Empire sought to unite a whole host of peoples with their many different religions. That was fine, so long as they bowed the emperor; thus God was replaced by Caesar.

We do the same thing today. Every nation is basically a religion, complete with its own mythology. I've become especially aware of this living in Europe, where national identity is a rather touchy issue, and constructing a European identity seems to be happening slowly with lots of bumps in the road. Each country needs a national mythology if they're going to unite the people together. You can't teach American history in American schools unless there's such a thing as the American people. Sure, you can always acknowledge division where it existed, as long as you don't break the basic rhythm of the story: one nation, one people.

America is unique in that we created a nation. Our creation myth is one in which our founding fathers--mere mortals!--are the creators. It's a little bit like Rome. You can worship whatever you want, as long as you're happy with what those guys built.

Still, I'm happy we don't have to bow to anyone. That is a real difference. Americans may have a cult of presidential worship, and we may often be patriotic to a fault, but we know we're not supposed to bow before another human being. I think that's a good thing.

I'm happy to be an American. If I had to answer one of those silly Gallup questions, I would even say I'm "very proud." But I rest very certain that nationalism should be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, we need to recognize that "I am proud to be an American" has many traits in common with a religious refrain: we are taught to repeat it regularly, we feel joy because of it, it instills confidence, it unites us in a common purpose, and so on. And I guess all of that is okay, I'm just not quite ready to sing, "Praise America from whom all blessings flow."

Americans probably need to be reminded more than anyone else that the value of a nation is all relative. Nations continue to come and go, or at the very least evolve. Ours isn't any different. Perhaps what makes American nationalism so strong is that from an occidental perspective, we are perhaps the oldest "modern republic." There's something to be said for that. Then again, maybe the age of the modern republic won't last forever.

I'm thinking very, very long term, of course. Still, in the short run, it would probably help us to act more morally if we toned down some of our national pride. I think in particular about our foreign policy and some of the immigration issues we have, and I think a lot could be fixed by changing our stance toward politics from one of trying to save America (or the world through America) to a simple, humble search for justice. Whether it's our respect for individuals rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" or the belief in "liberté, égalité, fraternité," every nation knows deep down what are the basic principles of justice. Perserving the United States of America at all costs is not one of those fundamental principles common to all humankind.

Happy Independence Day.