Dear Friends,
It seems to me, if I were to move to another country, I would strive to adopt their language and culture. That’s not only common sense, but also simple courtesy, and human heartedness. The same paradigm applies when moving from one state to another. One should adopt the local customs as much as possible. A Roman philosopher (Cato?) said, In matters of dress follow the fashion, but in matters of morality follow tradition. In other words, who cares how you dress, but where ethics or morality are concerned, everyone cares how you act. So when someone acts like a local, they get treated like a local, and when they act like a foreigner, they get treated as such. Moreover, even if you have lived in a place not of your birth for many years, you will always be a newcomer.
There’s an old Yankee adage, “If my cat had kittens in the oven… I wouldn’t call ’em biscuits.” The meaning is that culture of a place goes deeper than one generation. Attitudes, ways of being, and thinking get ingrained from decades of accumulation. Even the “terroir” seeps into our DNA through epigenetic means. As we eat locally grown food, drink local water, and breathe local air, the place we and our grandparents grow up in, shapes us. This happens whether we know it, want it, or not. The upshot is that local people even have epigenetic similarities that help them live in the locality. People who live high in the Andes and Himalayas have similar abilities to breathe the diminished air. This is despite the distance and genetic dissimilarities.
This makes it all the more important to follow the local customs. Cooking outside is a great custom in a warm climate, but probably not the best plan when it’s ten below zero in a blizzard. Local customs are utilitarian in that way. They tend to conform to the locality. To an outsider, however, many may look absurd. So the foreigner will kick down Chesterton’s fence with glee. Then stand amazed at the disastrous results. They will argue, who could have predicted removing that fence would allow the sheep to scatter? That’s not to say that all local customs are wise, smart, or effective. This is to say that before scoffing at the locals, it’s best to find out why they do what they do. Just as the famous impressionists mastered how to paint classically, before experimenting.
I went to the Museum of fine arts in Montreal Quebec one time. There had been a huge snowstorm and the snowbanks were ten feet high. We pulled up to a guy who was shoveling his car out and I asked, “Excusez-moi pour vous déranger monsieur, y a-t-il un parking pour la voiture, pres d’ici?” He replied, “I don’t speak French.” So I asked, Where can I paak the caa?” He told me. It was a lovely visit. The point of the story, however, is that he had moved to a french speaking area and demanded the locals speak in his language. How would you like to be forced to learn another language to interact with a newcomer? That’s not fair to expect all the locals to learn all the languages of all the people who live among them. That is modern Babylon. The same can be said of customs and culture.
The reason the US has flourished by taking in immigrants isn’t because the US adopted their customs, but that immigrants to the US wanted to be Americans. Indeed many of the most patriotic people are immigrants. In a few generations their very epigenetics will be sculpted by the terroir of America. Such people rejuvenate a place. They don’t kick down Chesterton’s fence. Once they fit in and understand what it is to be a local, their old customs can meld into American ones. The EU has gone a different route, though. It’s run by globalist progressives. To the globalists, the less the newcomers fit in the better. It eliminates regional differences. So a double standard is created to allow them to not fit in. The result is that instead of rejuvenating Europe, immigration creates chaos, poverty, and crime.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
