One of my favorite short stories is “The Lame Shall Enter First” by Flannery O’Connor. The plot centers on an atheist and widower who takes in a violent teenage orphan and attempts to reform him. Neglecting his own young and motherless son, the father focuses all his love and attention on the delinquent and unappreciative teen, even refusing to acknowledge certain crimes the latter commits.
As is common in O’Connor’s work, the ending is gut-wrenching, with the father realizing his neglectful behavior too late as his own son commits suicide.
This complex morality tale came to mind after reading condemnation after condemnation of the UK’s recently passed legislation that would see the deportation of African asylum-seekers to Rwanda to have their claims heard (which, if successful, would allow them to stay there). A similar measure to what Israel did a few years back, the UK has seen African arrivals from small-boat crossings from France go from zero to over 120,000 in just the past five years.
An obvious deterrent measure and an answer to public anger over questionable “refugee” claims (the Global South has never been wealthier and healthier) and immigration generally being 5 times what it was two decades ago, people like Yasmin Ahmed of Human Rights Watch UK issued a statement focusing on the bill’s supposed “devastating impact on human rights” and on the lives of Africans travelling all the way to the UK (again, through France) “seeking safety” (not Britain’s bountiful welfare benefits).
Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty International UK called it “deeply authoritarian” and a “hatchet to international legal protections for some of the most vulnerable people in the world.”
The Guardian quoted a train of four refugee advocates who called it “inhumane”, “deeply immoral”, “cruel” and “shameful”, respectively. Similarly framed concerns were repeated by the United Nations and the Council of Europe with the former, as well as one nonprofit called Freedom From Torture, even pressuring airlines not to take part.
Contrast this with what the British masses think, which is that the law is certainly a necessary one—Indeed, the deeply unpopular Tories got an approval-rating boost following the bill’s passage. It is as if common people instinctively know that, as Substack-writer “Eugyppius” recently formulated, ‘borders for nations are like the skin of our bodies or the membranes that protect cells… you won’t survive for very long if you can’t control what enters you.’
Numerous critics have pointed to “alternatives” like just letting them all in on special visas so they can avoid the dangerous Channel crossing from France, as if it is the wishes and welfare of the migrant, not the British people, which is the biggest or only concern.
Amnesty International’s Deshmukh further called the law a “national disgrace”; an ironic choice of words perhaps given his likely inability to think in terms of nations and apparent unwillingness to put the interests of his own nation first—While not an indigenous Briton (he’s of South Asian background), Deshmukh was born in London. For types like Deshmukh, putting the rights of fellow citizens before the interests of foreigners discriminates and is thus immoral.
Philosophy professor John Lachs once made an interesting comparison between nations, national boundaries, and the family unit, writing: “One’s own children cannot be told to get in line with all those needing to be fed; the fact that they are ours gives them priority and imposes overriding obligations on us.”
To forgo the nation and put the foreigner ahead of the fellow citizen—as O’Connor’s atheist protagonist did with his own child—is not a supreme virtue, but a diabolical vice. As O’Connor adeptly shows, the father’s perceived humanitarianism was actually rooted in self-aggrandizement and in relieving a sense of guilt he felt toward the orphaned teen. His actions were self-interested, not based on genuine moral, philanthropic considerations.
Various philosophers have tackled the problem of misguided philanthropy and pathological altruism. Michael Novak once described rootless liberalism as being oddly characterized by both an “exaggerated individualism” and “an exaggerated sense of universal community.” “The middle term between these two extremes” he said—that is, “the term pointing to the finite human communities in which individuals live and have their being”—is “precisely the term that the liberal personality disvalues.” By leaping over their own local and national communities and into the Third World when relieving their altruistic urges, it’s as if they perceive philanthropy only in the abstract. Further, they seem compelled by some sort of guilt complex; due, for instance, to the West’s history of Third World colonialism, or to present global wealth disparities.
It is Novak’s “middle term” of community and nation which is ironically so core to the greater, universal humanitarianism pursued by globalists. As was further said by the great Edmund Burke, “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections… it is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”
The late political philosopher George Grant similarly espoused this principle when he wrote:
It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good?
Before stepping out into the global community, one first needs a firm grounding in the global community’s basic unit: the nation. Showing love and dedication to one’s own seems an obvious prerequisite to extending the same to strangers. How, for instance, can one show an understanding for the needs, values, and traditions of other nations when they disregard those of their own?