Evil Immigrant BS (and other Philosophical Dilemmas)
As this insane election season has rambled along, I’ve increasingly been reminded of a range of different philosophers. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has certainly been at the forefront, as Trump’s endless list of moral wrongdoing continues to grow…(sexual harassment, inciting an insurrection, too many lies to keep track of, and most recently clownishly proclaiming, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT”—wasn’t it Christ who implored us to “love thine enemies”?). But more recently Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the groundwork for analytical philosophy, has come to mind. Wittgenstein insists that philosophers should act as referees, keeping us in check lest human imagination takes us on flights of fancy we mistake as truth.
One of his followers, Gilbert Ryle, employs this approach in his more accessible work, Dilemmas, in which he seeks to pull the rug out from under a range of “false philosophical beliefs” by underscoring them as fundamentally flawed—perhaps nothing more than simple, mistaken grammatical constructs.
For one of his “dilemmas,” he looks to the notion that human beings are fundamentally selfish. By going back to the origin of the word “selfish,” a word human beings invented to signify when one takes more than required/needed, he argues that we have fooled ourselves into thinking we have discovered a profound philosophical dilemma—that all of us act selfishly all the time.
The problem is that we have taken a word invented to signify a specific circumstance that can be measured in degrees, then reappropriated it as one that describes a universal phenomenon. “Selfishness” was a word we needed to describe those moments when people take more than their share or are unwilling to share what they have with others. By reshaping that word’s original intent into a universal descriptor, it seems as if we are saying something meaningful, even profound. Ryle, however, argues we are merely fooling ourselves into believing a false but seemingly profound moral dilemma, mistakenly attaching the first-order meaning of a word to a much broader situation, a mistake he compares to attaching a bridle to the wrong pony. If all people are always selfish, all the time, you may as well never have invented the word “selfish.” The claim ultimately says nothing more than the tautology, “all people are people.”
When I read Ryle as an undergrad and really started to consider his, and other analytical philosophers’, arguments, I started to see philosophy in much more pragmatic terms. It is the job of philosophers to be referees, in a sense, to toss flags on the playing field when thinking has run afoul. So let me toss a flag….
Donald Trump’s playbook is filled with false dilemmas, far less subtle than Ryle’s explication of the false epiphany that we are all of us always acting selfishly.
Take his primary argument for reelection (if one can even call it an argument)— “illegal immigrant crime.” With “open borders” other countries are emptying their prisons and sending their “worst people” here to commit a range of heinous crimes, including eating our pets. This dilemma is flawed on many fronts—including simply the factual claim that countries are sending us their prisoners on purpose to make their countries safer and our country fall to pieces. There is simply no factual grounding for this claim.
According to Trump/Vance, we are currently being invaded by hordes of barbarians intent on unraveling the very fabric of our society. As with the claim that we are all of us fundamentally selfish, this is surely disturbing, something any rational person would find deeply troubling. But as with the claim of universal selfishness, it only ever exists at a purely abstract level.
I recently helped my daughter move from Chicago to New York City, two places Trump claims are rife with “immigrant crime.” In both cities, on lovely sunlit days, I witnessed citizens going about their ordinary lives in ordinary ways—walking their dogs in parks, posing for photographs in front of landmarks, jogging, eating exceptional food. I’ve walked a lot in both cities, and while you see things in cities I never see on the wild trails behind my Adirondack cabin, what one sees most of the time is the vast majority of their inhabitants exhibiting the normal spectrum of human behavior/emotion—(not frantically trying to cross the street for some bread without getting robbed by an evil immigrant, as Trump would have you believe).
While in Chicago, my daughter and I visited a favorite Mexican supermarket and taco joint, which I’m sure had its fair share of illegal immigrants present. The place exuded a sense of joy, transporting me to so many of the places I love in Mexico itself—the smells of freshly warmed tacos, the umpah-pahing corridos playing through tinny speakers, the colorful racks of spicy Mexican candies. My tacos al pastor on tiny tacos topped with mounds of onions and cilantro washed down with a genuine Mexican Coke (so much better!) sent me reeling….
The MAGA-minions wouldn’t dare to set foot or venture near such a place (especially if they were walking their chihuahuas). In their minds resides the utterly false and fanciful “dilemma” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States of America—this despite the concrete reality that we are a nation of immigrants (not to mention that Trump and Vance are themselves fathers of immigrant children).
The Evil Immigrant Dilemma is nothing more than a fanciful fabrication—one Trump went out of his way to construct by famously blocking a bill that would have dramatically curbed illegal immigration (and its many actual consequences, including the proliferation of fentanyl). Can you find the occasional event to support it. Of course. But the concrete reality is that, statistically, non-immigrant crime (white crime, even) far outpaces,“immigrant crime” as a percentage of their respective populations.
Just as those who would argue that we are fundamentally selfish beings misappropriate the term “selfishness,” the new, proto-fascist Republican Party have tried to wed “crime” and “immigration” in fundamentally flawed ways. Just as the idea that every act is an act of selfishness is deeply alarming but false, so too are Trumpian arguments that immigrants are dangerous criminals. But unlike the purely philosophical ruminations about our essential nature, Trump would enact mass deportations of immigrants at tremendous financial (and moral) cost grounded in his disturbing and racist false dilemma.
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And a consequence of downgrading the humanities and of teaching philosophy as something to know rather than the way you so masterfully reveal it. Many thanks, dear friend last seen at the Dodge Festival❤️