The Evolution of the Natural Desire for Music

NATURAL DESIRES

In previous posts, I have argued that if the good is the desirable, then human ethics is natural insofar as it satisfies the natural human desires that naturally win social approval as useful or agreeable to oneself or to others.  The satisfaction of these natural desires constitutes a natural standard for judging social life as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular people in particular social circumstances.  

By this standard, the modern bourgeois liberal regime can be recognized as the best regime so far in human history, because no other regime has satisfied those natural desires so well for so many people.  Or, to put it another way, the liberal regime has been more successful than any other regime so far in securing for human beings their equal liberty for the pursuit of happiness.

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have argued that there are at least twenty natural desires: human beings generally desire (1) a complete life, (2) parental care, (3) sexual identify, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social ranking, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) political rule, (10) war, (11) health, (12) beauty, (13) property, (14) speech, (15) practical habituation, (16) practical reasoning, (17) practical arts, (18) aesthetic pleasure, (19) religious transcendence, and (20) intellectual understanding.

I have argued that these twenty natural desires are universally found in all human societies, that they have evolved by natural selection over millions of years of human evolutionary history to become components of the species-specific nature of human beings, that they are rooted in the neurophysiological mechanisms of the brain, that they direct and limit the social variability of human beings as adapted to diverse ecological circumstances, and that different individuals with different temperaments and talents will rank these desires differently.  

Lockean liberal individualism recognizes that there is no single summum bonum or highest good for all human beings because there is no one right way to rank those natural desires.  But each individual will have a summum bonum--a ranking of those natural desires with one being the highest--depending on the propensities and capacities of each individual. A Socrates will rank intellectual understanding as the highest good.  A Saint Augustine will rank religious transcendence as the highest.  An Abraham Lincoln will rank political rule as the highest.  A General George Patton will rank war as the highest.

There is evidence that this pattern of twenty desires developed in the Late Pleistocene environment of our hunting-gathering ancestors, from about 130,000 years ago up to the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago.  This was the evolutionary environment in which human nature was shaped by natural selection.  This is what John Locke called "the state of nature."  The historical record of human civilization since the development of agriculture shows human beings as moved by these twenty desires.

I am now prepared to include the natural desire for music as one of the twenty natural desires--perhaps as belonging to aesthetic pleasure.  I was recently prompted to think more about this when I attended the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra's performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Choral Symphony--indeed, it was the first symphony to include choral singing--which is famous for its "Ode to Joy" chorus in the last movement.

THE MYSTERY OF MUSIC

For Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871), music was a mystery:

As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.  They are present, though in a very rude condition, in men of all races, even the most savage; but so different is the taste of the sever races, that our music give no pleasure to savages, and their music is to us in most cases hideous and unmeaning (2004, 636).

Darwin observed that while the nations of Western Europe were similar in their music, there were cultural differences in the way they interpreted music.  And in the eastern regions of the world, there were very different languages of music.

He saw evidence that our prehistoric human ancestors had music.  Prehistoric flutes made out of the bones and horns of reindeer found in caves together with flint tools was evidence of instrumental music.  The arts of singing and dancing also seemed to be very ancient and practiced today by all human races.  Poetry could be included as an ancient form of music because it arose from singing.

Darwin also saw that the anthropomorphous monkeys and apes use their vocal organs to express strong emotions through musical tones and rhythm--particularly during the season of courtship, when males are trying to attract females for mating and to repulse their male rivals.  For Darwin, this was to be explained as evolving by sexual selection rather than natural selection. 

From all of this evidence, Darwin inferred that "musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex," and that "musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language."  He noted, however, that Herbert Spencer had come to the opposite conclusion--"that the cadences used in emotional speech afford the foundation from which music has been developed" (2004, 638-39).

Darwin thus raised, either explicitly or implicitly, almost all the questions about the evolution of music that evolutionary scientists have debated over the past 150 years.  Is music a single propensity or capacity?  Or does music have many different components, such as rhythm, melody, and harmony, that produce many different forms of music--song, instrumental music, dance, and poetry?  

Is music a universal human instinct?  Or does the cultural diversity of music show that it is not a human universal?  

Did music evolve by natural selection or sexual selection?  Or did it arise only as a by-product of other traits that were selected for--such as language?  

Is music unique to human beings?  Or can we find at least some of the rudimentary components of music in other animals?

Is there any fossil record of prehistoric human music?

If music did arise through some process of evolutionary selection, what was it selected for?  What is its ultimate function?  Or does it potentially serve many different functions?

What is the evolutionary relation between music and language?  Did one come before the other?

Can we identify the neurobiological mechanism for music--perhaps a "music module" in the brain?  Or does music arise from many interconnected networks in the brain?

Although there has been no final resolution of the debates over these questions, it is now possible to plausibly argue for some tentative answers.

EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF MUSIC

We should begin by distinguishing music and musicality, which allows us to see that while musicality is culturally universal, music is culturally variable (Honing 2018; Fitch 2018).  Musicality includes components such as melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic cognition; and it is that part of our biological nature that gives human beings in all cultures the propensity and the capacity to generate and enjoy all forms of music.  But music in all its variety is culturally constructed through the biological power of human musicality.  Music then is like language in its biological universality and cultural diversity.  All human beings normally have a biological instinct for learning and using a language.  But different human beings will learn different languages in different cultures.

There are at least four explanations for how musicality is grounded in human biology.  The first is Darwin's theory of sexual selection in which music evolved as a way of attracting sexual mates and thus increasing reproductive success (Miller 2000; Prum 2017).  This theory often includes Darwin's idea that the neural structures that evolved for musicality were precursors of both music and language.

Another theory is that music originated in the maternal music-like vocalizations to infants, including soothing lullabies, and the dance-like maternal movements with infants that promote parent-infant bonding and the well-being of infants (Dissanayake, 2008, 2021).

A third theory is that music evolved to promote and maintain group cohesion.  Among prehistoric human ancestors, group singing and dancing would have glued people together in large groups (Dunbar, 2010, 2012).

These three theories are adaptationist explanations that see music as an evolutionary adaptation by natural or sexual selection.  But a fourth theory explains the origin of music not as originally an evolutionary adaptation but as an evolutionary by-product of other skills that were adaptive.  Music could have been originally a human invention--like the control of fire and the invention of cooking--that became universal in human societies because it was advantageous for human life, and then through gene-culture coevolution, this could have led to neurophysiological changes that deepened the grounding of music in human biology (Patel, 2010, 2018).

Music as Social Bonding

There is still another theory, however, that can embrace all four of these theories.  Patrick Savage and his colleagues (2021) have argued for the hypothesis that human musicality is a coevolved system for social bonding.  Actually, this can be seen as an expanded version of the "group cohesion" theory.  Let's define the three key terms in this statement

First, as already indicated, musicality denotes the biological capacities of all human beings that allow us to perceive and produce music, while the word "music" denotes the diverse musical systems produced by different cultures.

Second, social bonding refers to all kinds of affiliative connections that bind two or more people into a group.  Such social bonding would have enhanced the survival and reproduction of our prehistoric human ancestors by enhancing protection from predators, cooperative child-rearing, collaborative foraging and hunting, and the expansion and defense of territories (Dunbar, 2012b; Hrdy, 2009).  Music and dance would have promoted such social bonding by synchronizing and harmonizing the emotions, thoughts, and actions of two or more individuals.  This would have strengthened mate bonding, infant care, and group cohesion.

I have written about the natural desire for membership in a society and how such membership requires markers of social identity.  Music and dancing could have provided those markers for our prehistoric ancestors.  We see that today in how singing a national anthem (like America's "Star-Spangled Banner" or "My Country, 'Tis of Thee") can strengthen the emotional bonding of people in a nation.

But while social bonding through music sounds warm and cozy, we should recognize the dark side of this:  in-group social bonding often means hostility toward out-groups--the tribalism of "us" versus "them."  Throughout history, tribalist movements (like the Nazis) have used music to move their supporters to unite in attacking their perceived enemies.

We should also recognize that while social bonding might be the original overarching function of music, that does not mean that this is its only function.  Once music has become part of our evolved human nature, we can use it for purposes other than social bonding.  For example, people enjoy playing or listening to music alone.  Sometimes they do this to evoke memories of some previous social experience of the music--such as the lover who listens to music that he associates with his beloved.  But sometimes people listen to music alone just to regulate their moods.

The third key term in the music as social bonding hypothesis is coevolved.  This means that musicality has evolved through a process of gene-culture coevolution, which has been a topic in previous posts.  It is possible that "musical behavior first arose as a human invention and then had (unanticipated) beneficial effects on social cohesion" (Patel, 2018, 118).  This then created cognitive and social niches in which both biological and cultural selection could favor those particular forms of music that most effectively promoted social bonding.  This is what I have previously identified as symbolic niche construction.

This is all very clever, you are surely thinking, but isn't it just speculative "just-so storytelling" that can't be empirically verified or falsified--particularly since the fossil and archaeological record of prehistoric human evolution offers very little evidence of when and how our ancient ancestors made music and for what purposes?

Well, actually there is some fossil and archaeological evidence, even if limited, for prehistoric music.  And this is only the first of five kinds of evidence that can support the music as social bonding theory.

Five Kinds of Evidence

As we've seen, Darwin considered the discovery of Ice Age bone flutes as clear evidence for the antiquity of music among our earliest human ancestors.  As indicated in a previous post, the earliest bone flutes have been dated to over 35,000 years ago (Conard, Malina, and Munzel, 2009).  This is only a sample of an extensive record of prehistoric musical instruments (Morley, 2013).

The second kind of evidence that music is part of our evolved human nature is the cross-cultural evidence for music as a human universal.  Music, like language, is manifest universally in all known cultures (Brown, 1991).  Moreover, Mehr et al. (2019) found 20 widespread functional contexts in which music was important:  (1) dance, (2) infancy, (3) healing, (4) religious activity, (5) play, (6) procession, (7) mourning, (8) ritual, (9) entertainment, (10) children, (11) mood/emotions, (12) work, (13) storytelling, (14) greeting visitors, (15) war, (16) praise, (17) love, (18) group bonding, (19) marriage/weddings, and (20) art/creation.  Notice that all of these functional contexts relate to social bonding.

Also, Savage et al. (2015) have identified 19 features of musical structure that are widespread in all or most cultures.  Most of these support coordinated music-making:

Throughout the world, humans tend to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple, repetitive music in groups, and this is facilitated by the widespread use of simple-integer pitch and rhythm ratios, scales based on a limited number of discrete pitches (usually no more than 7), and isochronomous beats grouped in multiples of two or three. . . . The widespread use of simple, discrete meters and scales also enables multiple people to memorize and coordinate their performances.  These widespread musical properties have few direct parallels in language.  Group coordination provides a common purpose that unifies the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music (Savage et al., 2021, 8).

This is impressive cross-cultural evidence for the universality of musicality as an evolved instinct of human nature that supports social bonding.

There is also developmental evidence for the early development of the social functions of music in infancy and early childhood (Savage et al., 2021, 9).  Infants respond to songs from their adult caregivers, such as lullabies, with similar, cross-culturally recognizable acoustic features.  Infants respond differently to lullabies as distinguished from play-songs.  Music improves parent-infant social bonding.  Young children also show more sociable behavior when they are engaged in group musical activities.  Music shapes children's social bonds.

A fourth kind of evidence for musicality as promoting social bonding is social psychological evidence.  Social psychologists have conducted behavioral experiments that show how musical behavior enhances social cooperation (Savage et al., 2021, 9-10).  For example, when people dance in synchrony, they feel connected to the group with whom they're dancing.  And people who sing in large choirs develop feelings of social closeness with their fellow singers.

The fifth kind of evidence for music as rooted in evolved human nature has to do with the neurobiological proximate mechanisms for music and social bonding.  There is some evidence "that the dopaminergic reward system interacts with the endogenous opioid system and the release of oxytocin, ultimately providing opportunities for individuals to synchronize their moods, emotions, actions, and/or perspectives through musical engagement," which would serve music's social bonding functions.  Moreover, "people who frequently experience chills when listening to music show high white matter connectivity between auditory, social, and reward-processing areas" (Savage et al., 2021, 10-12; Sachs et al., 2016).

One indirect way to infer how the normally functioning brain supports musicality and social bonding is to study those people with abnormal brains that cause some of them to be unable to "hear" music at all and others to be extraordinarily responsive to music.  This is what Oliver Sacks did in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007).  He described many cases of people with amusia--being unable to recognize or enjoy music.  In some cases, this was congenital (from birth).  In others, it was acquired (from some injury to the brain).  (The Wikipedia article on "Amusia" is a good short survey.)

Sachs tells the story of D.L., a seventy-six-year-old woman who had never heard music.  Although she came from a musical family in which everyone played an instrument, she never liked music because it just sounded like noise to her.  As a little girl, a family friend who was a specialist in teaching music tested her with pitches, but she could not tell if one note was higher than another.

When people asked her what she heard when music was played, she would say, "If you were in my kitchen and threw all the pots and pans on the floor, that's what I hear!"

She couldn't recognize the simplest tune, such as "Happy Birthday to You."  On the other hand, she seemed to have a good sense of rhythm in her body because as a girl she loved to tap dance.

While D.L. was an example of congenital amusia, Sachs also saw cases of acquired amusia.  Professor B. was a gifted musician who had played with the New York Philharmonic.  But after having a stroke, he was suddenly unable to discern a tune.  He perceived pitch and rhythm, but he could not synthesize them into a melody.

While Sacks saw Professor B. as an example of melody deafness, he saw Rachel Y. was an example of harmony deafness.  She had been a talented composer and performer.  But then she was in a car accident where she suffered severe head and spine injuries.  Afterwards, she heard all music as discrete lines but was unable to perceive the harmonic sense of chordal passages.  She could not harmonize different voices and instruments.

In contrast to these cases of musical deafness, Sacks also studied cases of hypermusicality--people who show an extraordinary love of music.  Some of the best cases were people with the congenital disorder known as Williams Syndrome.  They are visibly distinctive because of their elfin-like faces.

Williams syndrome is a rare genetic condition that causes facial characteristics including epicanthal folds at the eyes, large ears, an upturned nose, full cheeks, a wide mouth, a small jaw and small teeth.

Williams Syndrome is caused by the deletion of 26-28 genes on the long arm of chromosome 7.  Individuals with Williams Syndrome typically have mild to moderate intellectual deficits (IQs around 60), cardiovascular disease, and the distinctive facial characteristics just indicated.  Their cognitive profile includes normal language and facial processing skills but deficient visuospatial abilities (Martens, Wilson, and Reutens, 2008).

The personality of Williams Syndrome people is hypersociable: they're unusually friendly and loquacious--longing to connect and bond with others.  They also show a heightened interest in and emotional responsiveness to music and musical activities (Thakur et al., 2018).  Sacks tells the story of Gloria Lenhoff, a woman with Williams Syndrome who could sing over 2,000 operatic arias in more than 30 languages.  But she could not add five plus three.

This seems to confirm Martin Gardner's theory of "multiple intelligences"--that rather than having some kind of general intelligence (perhaps measured by IQ scores), human brains have as many as eight separate kinds of intelligence.  Williams Syndrome people seem to have high social intelligence and musical intelligence but are deficient in logico-mathematical intelligence.

Apparently, this has something to do with the abnormal size and shape of the brain in Williams Syndrome people.  Their brains on average are about twenty percent smaller than normal brains.  And the ratio of frontal lobe volume to combined parietal and occipital lobe volume is abnormally high.

But the primary point here for evolutionary theories of music is that the combination in Williams Syndrome people of hypermusicality and hypersociability seems to support the social bonding theory of the origin of music.  

My next post will be on "The Political History of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."  That post will include a list of bibliographic references.

Open Borders and the Natural Desire for Social Membership

In my recent posts, I have argued that restrictions on immigration are immoral because they violate the natural human rights to freedom of movement and voluntary exchange.  If someone born outside the United States wants to live and work in the United States, and if there are some native Americans who want to employ that immigrant, and others willing to sell him a house or provide rental property where he can live, isn't it wrong for the American government to coercively prohibit these voluntary transactions?

The opponents of immigration will object, however, that it is morally right to prohibit these mutually beneficial transactions between natives and immigrants if they have severely harmful side-effects for other people.  

The most common objections to immigration point to four kinds of harmful side-effects:  immigrants are seen as harming American workers, American taxpayers, American public safety, and American culture.  But I will argue that there is little or no harm in each case; and even if people insist that there is some harm, there are ways to reduce the putative harm that are more moral than restricting immigration.  My thinking here has been shaped by the writings of Bryan Caplan (Caplan and Weinersmith 2019; Caplan 2012), Ilya Somin (2020), Hein de Haas (2023), and Ian Goldin (2024), who have surveyed the empirical research on immigration in America and around the world.

I will conclude by arguing that the free migration of people from one society to another satisfies the evolved natural desire for social membership.

HARMING AMERICAN WORKERS?

The most popular argument for restricting immigration is that this protects American workers from poverty because if the supply of labor (particularly, the low-wage and low-skilled labor of immigrants) increases, this will lower the wages of American workers or drive them into unemployment.

Empirical studies have shown, however, that immigration has little or no effect on unemployment or wage levels.  Although in the short run, low-skilled wages might fall slightly, over the long run, there is almost no decline in wages.  And even moderately educated native workers--high school graduates without college degrees--can show increased wages.  Moreover, while there is some correlation between levels of employment and levels of immigration, the correlation is negative.  Immigration goes up when unemployment goes down.  So, clearly immigrants are not taking away jobs from native workers (Caplan 2012, 7-9; de Haas 2023, 131-144).

The explanation for this, as de Haas says, is that immigrants don't steal jobs, they fill vacancies.  "Immigration is primarily a response to labor shortages caused by a dwindling supply of local workers willing and able to do various manual jobs in agriculture, construction, cleaning, domestic work and various other services" (de Haas, 132).  This is confirmed by what is happening now with Trump's increased detentions and deportations of immigrants.  As immigrants are forced to leave their jobs, their vacancies are not being filled by native American workers.  But if it were true that the immigrants stole the jobs of American workers, then we would have expected that now those unemployed Americans would be rushing to fill the new vacancies.

It is simply not true, as politicians often say, that "we don't need foreign workers."  Because many native workers would rather not work at all than to take the low-level jobs that immigrants are willing and able to fill.

There have been a few "natural experiments" in testing how a sudden massive surge in immigration can affect wages and employment.  The best example of this for the United States is the "Mariel boatlift" of 1980.  In April of 1980, Fidel Castro announced that all Cubans wanting to go to the US were free to board boats landing at the port of Mariel, west of Havana.  Cuban exiles already in Florida rushed to find boats to carry Cubans from Mariel to Miami.  This mass influx of refugees overwhelmed the US Coast Guard.  In October of that year, President Carter negotiated an end to this open migration to the US.  During this six-month period, as many as 125,000 Cubans crossed the sea to Florida, and most of them settled in the Miami area (de Haas, 132-34).

As a consequence of this, the labor force in Miami increased by about 7 percent, and the low-skilled labor force increased by 20 percent.  When labor economists studied the effects of this sudden increase in the labor supply, they found that it had either no effect or very little effect on the wages or unemployment rates of lower-skilled workers.

There have been similar cases elsewhere in the world.  After 1989, almost one million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel, which increased the population of Israel by 12 percent in five years.  At the same time, 2.8 million people migrated from East to West Germany over a period of fifteen years.  Like the Mariel boatlift, these sudden waves of migration had little if any effects on employment and wages.

Actually, immigration can create more jobs and make native workers more productive when the skills of migrants and native workers are complementary, and so they don't compete for the same jobs.

Migrant workers washing dishes, cooking food, waiting tables or delivering food increase the capacity of restaurants to serve more customers, thereby increasing jobs for senior management and income for the owners.  This also allows customers to eat out, or have food delivered for affordable prices, thereby freeing up more time to spend on their own work and be more productive.  Meanwhile, the sufficient supply of support staff like janitors, cleaners and various office workers enables (migrant and non-migrant) higher-skilled workers to concentrate on the work they're best at instead of doing manual tasks themselves.  In this way, all workers can derive mutual benefits from immigration (de Haas, 137).

Immigrants not only fill low-level job shortages, but they also introduce innovative ideas and practice entrepreneurship in ways that promote progress in all fields of human endeavor.  After all, immigrants are exceptional people who were often the most talented, resourceful, and ambitious people in the societies where they originated.  Immigrants to the US are more likely than native Americans to start their own businesses.  They are over-represented among Nobel laureates, National Academy of Science members, patent holders, and Oscar-winning film directors (Goldin, 228-31; de Haas, 138-39).

Nevertheless, there is some evidence, as I've said, that low-skilled native Americans might be a little worse off, at least in the short run, because of immigration.  But even if this is true, that doesn't justify restricting immigration because there are better ways to protect low-skilled Americans from immigration.  For example, as Caplan (2012, 9) has suggested, we could charge immigrants an admission fee or a surtax, which they could pay off by deductions from their earnings in the US; and then we could use that revenue to compensate low-skilled Americans.  Even if this seems unfair to the immigrants, it's not as unfair as denying their entry into the country.

HARMING AMERICAN TAXPAYERS?

Many people fear that immigrants create a burden on taxpayers because immigrants tend to become costly dependents on the welfare, healthcare, and education systems.  As Donald Trump has said, "illegal immigrants are lower skilled workers with less education" who "draw much more out from the system than they can ever possibly pay back" (September 1, 2016).  On the contrary, illegal immigrants on average probably pay more in taxes than they will ever get back in payments from the government because they don't have a valid social security number!  And indeed, it has been found that in general the fiscal benefits of immigrants exceed their costs (de Haas, 145-59).

The reason for this is that recent immigrants tend to be young, employed, healthy, and have no children. and so they are net contributors to public finance.  But then as they marry, have children, and become older, they use public services like schools and healthcare.  And yet, once their children become adults and enter the labor market, these children become taxpayers.

Most of the people who want to migrate to the US want to get a job and become a taxpaying worker--not to live off welfare.  After all, until recently, the US has been the most popular destination for migrants even though the US has the weakest welfare system in the Western world.

But let's say you're not convinced by this argument, and you still believe that immigrants draw more in government benefits than they pay in through taxation.  Even so, this does not justify restricting immigration because there are better ways to solve this putative problem.  You could freely admit immigrants on the condition that they will never be eligible for welfare benefits, but they will still have to pay taxes.  Or you could reduce their benefits.  Or you could say no benefits for 10 years.  Caplan (2012, 11) has suggested these and other similar ways to solve the problem.

HARMING AMERICAN PUBLIC SAFETY?

"They're bringing drugs.  They're bringing crime.  They're rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people."  Immigrant gang members "don't want to use guns, because it's too fast, and it's not painful enough.  So they'll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die.  And these are the animals that we've been protecting for so long."

Was Donald Trump accurate in his description of immigrants as blood-thirsty criminals?  Even if some are "good people," are most of them violent criminals?

Here the evidence is indisputable:  immigrants have much lower crime rates than native Americans, and illegal immigrants have the lowest.  De Haas summarizes one typical study:

Using individual data on arrests from the Texas Department of Public Safety between 2012 and 2018, Light and his colleagues compared crime rates between illegal migrants, legal migrants and native-born US citizens.  Their findings were remarkable.  Illegal immigrants turned out to have the lowest crime rates, legal migrants were somewhere in the middle, while native-born citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for a violent crime compared to undocumented migrants, four times as likely to be arrested for property felony, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crime.  These results were consistent across a broad range of crimes, including homicide, assault, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, theft and arson--undocumented migrants had consistently lower crime rates than native-born citizens.  For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, convictions among illegal immigrants were 50 percent below those of native-born Americans (de Haas, 200-201).

Of course, some immigrants will become violent criminals, and they should be deported.  But the fact that a few immigrants become criminals does not justify restricting the immigration of people with no record of crime.

HARMING AMERICAN CULTURE?

It has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.

        J D Vance's Speech to the Claremont Institute Accepting Claremont's Statesmanship Award

JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India.  Usha met JD at Yale Law School.  They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019.  They have three children.

Hmm.  Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me.  Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?

No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he said at the Claremont Institute about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.  Because he knows that Telugu Indian immigrants--like most immigrants to America--have assimilated into American culture.

We need to remember that beginning in the 19th century, many Americans feared that German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants would threaten the national identity of America by introducing foreign languages, religions, and cultural practices.  But all of those groups have shown the same intergenerational pattern of assimilation that we see today in the new Latino, Asian, and Muslim immigrants to America.  Initially, the first-generation migrants might be inclined to withdraw into ethnic enclaves separated from the mainstream of American culture.  But then the second and third generations show all the signs of socio-cultural integration--mixed marriages, speaking English as their first language, and adopting the social norms of American culture (de Haan, 160-79).

Ultimately, then, native Americans recognize these immigrant Americans and their descendants as full members of American society.  "They" become members of "our" society, and so "they" become "us."

MIGRATION AND SOCIAL MEMBERSHIP

I have argued against the claim made by people like Frank Salter and Stephen Sanderson that there is a natural desire for ethnic nationalism that is part of our evolved human nature.  But I do recognize that there is a natural desire for membership in a society, which arose in the evolutionary state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and that this natural desire for social membership can be satisfied in a multiethnic Lockean liberal nation like the United States, which includes immigrants who have chosen to leave their native-born society to become members of American society.

As indicated in some previous posts, I have found support for these conclusions in Mark Moffett's book The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall.  Moffett is a field biologist who has wondered whether the capacity of invasive Argentine ants to form massive supercolonies might help to explain the human capacity for living in nations with huge populations of people whose society cannot be based on individual recognition of all the members of the society.  An Argentine ant colony is an anonymous society in which membership is marked by the distinctive scent of the colony, which distinguishes us from them, so that individual ants will be accepted into the colony if they carry the colony's scent, but if they carry the scent of a foreign colony, they will be attacked.  Similarly, a human society is an anonymous society with markers of social membership that distinguish those who belong to the society from those who are outsiders; but for a human society the markers of membership are not chemical signals but shared symbols (such as the flag, the language, or the history of a society).

Moffett's brief definition of "society" is "an enduring territorial group whose members recognize each other as belonging" (2019, 3).  He also provides a longer definition:

"A society is a group extending beyond an immediate family, capable of perpetuating its population for generations, whose members ordinarily perceive one another as belonging together and set apart from other groups (notwithstanding transfers between societies, either mutually agreeable or initially forced) and which regulates access to a space or spaces it ultimately controls, across which its members travel with relative impunity" (Moffett 2019, 13).

Societies so defined include prehistoric hunter-gatherer and horticultural groups, modern nation states, and some groups in other species.  Thus, beginning in the evolutionary state of nature, human beings have always lived in societies.  And that suggests to me that a natural desire for membership in a society is part of our evolved human nature.

That natural desire for social membership can motivate many human beings to stay in the society where they were born.  But it can also motivate some human beings to leave the society of their birth and to seek membership in another society that they believe will give them better opportunities to live a flourishing life.  To succeed in doing that, they must show the cultural markers of membership in that new society to persuade the native-born people to recognize that they belong--that "they" have become "us."

Open borders would make that easier for all those people who want to improve their lives through immigration, which will also improve the life of the society that they join.

REFERENCES

Caplan, Bryan. 2012. "Why Should We Restrict Immigration?" Cato Journal 32:5-24.

Caplan, Bryan, and Zach Weinersmith. 2019. Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. New York: First Second.

Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration: When, Why, and How Humans Move--From the Prehistoric Peopling of the Planet to Today and Tomorrow's Migrants. New York: The Experiment.

de Haas, Hein. 2023. How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. New York: Basic Books.

Moffett, Mark. 2019. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. New York: Basic Books.

Somin, Ilya. 2020. Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ruling on the Constitutionality of Trump's Tariffs Will Be a Test of Textualist Originalism on the Supreme Court

Previously, I have written about the unconstitutionality of Trump's tariffs and how this resembles King Charles I's attempt to raise taxes without Parliamentary approval through "ship money."

Those federal judges who claim to be "originalists" or "textualists" in adhering strictly to the original meaning of constitutional or statutory texts will have to rule that Trump's tariffs are unconstitutional.  If they don't, they will show the dishonesty of their profession of originalist jurisprudence because they will show that they are willing to ignore the original meaning of the legal texts if it contradicts their political ideology of Trumpism.

As I indicated in that earlier post, when the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in May that Trump did not have the legal authority to impose tariffs, Trump denounced Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society for giving him bad advice about his judicial appointments.  He sneered that Leo was a "sleazebag" and "bad person" who "probably hates America."

Now we have just had another court ruling that will provoke Trump.  The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has upheld the decision of the Court of International Trade that Trump's tariffs are unconstitutional because Trump's claim to have absolute power to impose tariffs violates both statutory law and constitutional law.  

Trump has appealed to the International Emergency Powers Act of 1977 as authorizing his power over tariffs, but that law does not even mention tariffs; and in the 50 years since the enactment of IEEPA, no president (prior to Trump) has invoked that law as authorizing presidential power over tariffs.

Moreover, the Constitution is clear that only the Congress has the power "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises" (Art. I, Sec. 8).

We now have two federal court decisions making textualist arguments for the unconstitutionality of Trump's tariffs.

But now this latest decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court.  And we will have to see whether the Supreme Court Justices who profess to be jurisprudential originalists are truly committed to that position, or whether they will override the meaning of the legal texts in order to give Trump the ruling that he wants to uphold his dictatorial powers as a king above the law. 

Trump has posted that this latest decision comes from a "Highly Partisan Appeals Court."  This was a 7 to 4 decision.  Of these 11 judges, 8 were appointed by Democratic presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden).  3 were appointed by Republicans (George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush).  Perhaps that's what Trump means by a "highly partisan" court.

But one of the Republican appointees did vote with the majority.  And the 4 dissenters were evenly divided between 2 Republican appointees and 2 Democrat appointees.  Is that a "highly partisan" vote?

This court upheld the decision of the U. S. Court of International Trade that Trump's tariffs were unconstitutional.  This was a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel.  Of the three, two were Republican appointees (Reagan and Trump).  One was a Democratic appointee (Obama).  Obviously, then, this was not a partisan decision by these judges.  After all, one of the three was appointed by Trump himself.

What's most interesting about Trump's criticism of these decisions is that he makes no attempt to refute the argument of the judges that the original meaning of the legal texts--both statutory and constitutional--denies Trump's absolute power over tariffs.  Clearly, originalist or textualist jurisprudence does not favor Trump.  That's why Trump denounced Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society.

ADDENDUM (SEPTEMBER 11)

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to a fast-track review of this case, with arguments before the Court scheduled for early November.