The reason why it’s funny is because the tired, hungry, greedy masses are just calling Europe’s bluff about universal human rights — which includes universal pensions for everyone, free housing according to the needs of the individual, and complete autonomy in social matters.

Adding to the comedy is that many of the people fleeing are fleeing the consequences of Washington’s haphazard foreign policy in Syria, Egypt, and Libya. The idea was to spread liberal democracy to those places. It seems that, having tasted a little democracy, the people prefer the German variety which provides a big payoff in return for nothing.

It puts state administrators in a difficult position. They can’t say that mere neediness or lack of formal citizenship is not enough of a reason to lavish welfare benefits on someone, because that same principle is what the native citizenry leans on in order to justify their entitlements from the state. Practically, it’s not possible for those states to provide the same level of benefits in perpetuity to everyone in the entire world who manages to hop onto a train in the Schengen area. But it’s important for the moral mythology that binds together post-modern culture to not just pretend that it’s possible, but to do everything to demonstrate that the people believe that the state can be a savior to the world — that it can end not just war but suffering also.

Liberals consider it responsible and humanitarian to say pious things about caring for the wretched masses, even though as individuals none of them bear either the cost or the responsibility for the health of their countries. It costs nothing to say something pious about the refugees, but it’s quite risky — and in some cases illegal — to stand up and say that states can’t provide free lunches to everyone everywhere in perpetuity with no conditions attached.

The other funny part is that Europe’s relative prosperity is entirely temporary. During and after World War II, Europe itself had a European refugee crisis. Without the interest or capacity to maintain and expand a market economy or to defend itself, it won’t be capable of serving its messianic illusions about itself and its ability to rescue all the unhappy people of the world.

The drama isn’t entirely about the refugees themselves and their problems. It’s more about maintaining the culture of radical autonomy and freedom without obligations (apart from high taxes and obedience to every niggling regulation) for the native Europeans. By saying that there is no difference between a German and a Syrian, it liberates the German from the obligations which previously characterized a German — namely the preservation of kinder, kirche, and küche, the obedience to the Christian moral order.

To the state, it’s more important to demonstrate that it doesn’t discriminate between citizens and potential citizens. From its institutional perspective, they’re all just social security numbers that need benefits checks. According to the beautiful models used by the economists, all of those numbers represent rational economic actors who will respond to incentives in a way that can be meaningfully averaged over an enormous population and large periods of time. Even if people don’t really believe this in their everyday lives or through their revealed behavior, it’s more important to act as if they believe, and one way to do that is to insist on swamping the continent with barbarians.

David Millibrand makes this connection directly:

Mr Miliband said there needed to be more “burden-sharing” and said UN rules drawn up after Britain took in thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis should now apply to Africans and Asians, Press Association reports.

Britain was at the forefront of writing the conventions and writing the protocols that established legal rights for refugees. A lot of the legal theory came out of the UK.
“The reasons we did so were good in the the 40s and 50s and they are good today. What applied to Europeans then should apply to Africans and Asians today. We cannot say UN conventions apply to one group of people and not to others.”

Of course, it’s an entirely different situation, and there’s no reason why governments should be bound by broad brush legal analogies. But taking in the refugees is important to these states because it maintains the legitimacy of the United Nations in particular and the new international system in general. Acting to preserve that international system would, itself, undermine the principles that it runs on.

The refugees are just taking Europe to the logical conclusions of its own philosophy. The Europeans say that all people are equal and that everyone deserves dignity delivered in the form of a welfare check. So the refugees show up and demand to be treated well by the Europeans, heedless that it’s impossible, with the Europeans being obligated to act as if they believe in the impossible.

The bureaucrat-heroes of the story believe that they have to stand up to populist rumbling in order to preserve ‘European values’ which only date to the mid-19th century and mostly consists of blue jeans, bad rock & roll, Yugo-style protected manufacture, and welfare checks.

Europeans expect their continent to become a comfortable retirement village dutifully supported by Muslim immigrants. How likely is that?

— Lawrence Auster (@LawrenceAuster) August 11, 2015

What started as a noble dream of universal elevation has turned into a funny spectacle of aging Europeans dreaming of having their adult diapers changed by dutiful Syrians, who will contribute to the market economy — and the state social security system that lives off of it — in a way that they were never able to do in their home countries.

Most European countries are not going to be able to pull themselves out of the current course, in which the right thinking people invite foreigners to sack their own countries while preventing the organization of any defense.

In an egalitarian world in which authority expects everyone to consider themselves the moral equals of everyone else on the planet, what critics call ‘pathological altruism’ is actually entirely rational.

If all people must be treated equally by the laws and their fellow men (except in certain aberrant situations in which the person is ‘sick’ enough to commit a crime that must be treated by the medical-prison complex), then the general population will tend to support humane causes which confer dignity and material support to all people from around the world. Statements like ‘All human life is sacred’ become non-objectionable, even official statements of dogma.

This developed in part due to the terror of World War II. If millions of people could be liquidated by bombs and industrial prison camps — because enemy lives were seen as equally worthless, with the people identified with popular governments — then ‘the people’ came to be rightfully concerned with supporting humane governments in the interest of avoiding retaliatory herd-culling.

So, when modern people participate in anti-war movements supposedly on behalf of oppressed foreigners, they may just be marching to save their own skins. Typical people under popular governments know that foreigners will hold them accountable for the actions of their governments in a way that would have been unimaginable in most periods of history in which there was a clear delineation between rulers and ruled, and war was often a more ceremonial-ritual affair than one of mass war between entire populations.

This leads to an international pacifism which seems a bit crazy in the light of the historical behavior of states. Decolonization as a foreign policy priority became important in part due to fear of direct competition between major states. Even competition between the American and Soviet blocs in the third world was muted for fear of provoking conflicts which could be more destructive than World War II.

The contemporary mass immigration issue in part owes its origins to the pervasive belief in egalitarianism and the desire of statesmen to avoid nuclear war. It becomes very difficult to maintain an official belief that all people are equal while telling billions of foreigners from the third world that they have no right to enter European countries which are themselves run as egalitarian benefit-houses for the general welfare.

The same intellectual classes that must be maintained to create that egalitarian pig-house, like aristocrats hungry for honor in war, have a strong tendency to extend their authority to the rest of the world, especially when they’re not restrained by others with more level heads. If you run out of domestic pigs for your utilitarian pighouse, you have to start importing them from somewhere else to keep the engines humming.

To say that some people are not equal to others is to undermine the entire basis of the postwar state, which uses humanitarianism to justify its right to rule in a similar way that old kings used theories of divine right to justify their authority.

Humanitarianism results from this terror of mass violence which the dream of popular government has always melted into. Attempting to excise this self-defense mechanism from popular government will just result in the usual bloody and pointless consequences. The root of the problem is the identification of the people with the state. When you make that separation, it becomes much easier to avoid such extreme religious commitments to the egalitarian upkeep of all peoples everywhere.

It’s a mistake to call this international altruism ‘crazy’ or a pollutant introduced by foreign agitators. It serves a purpose, the intellectuals who put it into place knew what they were doing, and Westerners tend to support it because it’s much less altruistic than it seems. It serves a self-protective purpose for the populations in question.

One of the top stories at the Washington Post website today is about a rape trial at St. Paul’s, one of the most prestigious boarding high schools in the US. The details of the case don’t really matter — the allegations could either be entirely true or entirely false and it wouldn’t be all that relevant — what’s more interesting is the wave of trepidation that goes through liberals over the experience of co-education in practice as it compares to the grand theories that motivated the gender integration project of the 1960s and 70s.

St. Paul’s only became co-ed in 1971. Before that, it was a single sex institution. Like a lot of factors in American life, the hyper-focus on the events of the present tend to demolish memories of even the recent past.

Rather like civil rights and integration were supposed to bring equality between the races — but they devastated dozens of formerly thriving American cities instead — co-education has degraded countless institutions. The same educational institutions dominated by the left at every level have come to be condemned by that same left as honeycombed with wreckers: white male rapists who are ruining the grand integration project with their schemes.

The failures of co-ed are closely related to mass immigration. Because large parts of the native population decided to push both men and women into the workforce — and managerial elites saw immigration as a way to kill two birds with one stone — plug the gap in population growth while improving diplomatic relations with the newly independent third world nations.

President Truman’s commission on American immigration policy laid the groundwork for the abolition of the national quota system. It made the case to the public less in technocratic terms and more in terms of how it fit with America’s longstanding political-philosophical commitments. There was a broad institutional consensus which was also ecumenical. There was also a (false) scientific consensus at the time which concluded that different human races are not biologically distinct from one another.

The rationale for opening up immigration also had a lot to do with the anticipated needs of the progressive economy. Because wartime central planning required the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs (not by the market process, but through dictatorial fiat), the first stages of mass immigration and mass internal migration (especially of rural blacks to the industrial north) were required to meet the demand shock.

Essentially, progressives created enormous quantities of make-work fake jobs, and then proclaimed there was a labor shortage — which there was, to meet the demand of a less efficient, more centrally planned economy. They then pushed enormous numbers of foreigners and women into an economy overburdened with make-work projects, causing all sorts of economic and social chaos.

The Truman commission also made the funny insinuation that Japan may have been offended into launching the Pearl Harbor attacks due to discriminatory immigration policies. This is doubly funny in the light of Japan’s contemporary exclusive immigration policies, which globalists often criticize even today. It was also believed that opening up American immigration was critical to countering nationalist propaganda in the third world as well as Communist propaganda about the corruption of the West.

Few of those are justifications today which motivate ongoing mass integration project are still relevant, but understanding how it all fits together helps to explain why it still has so much institutional support.

By the time that these policies really began to make themselves felt — the 1970s — industry in the US was already becoming less competitive internationally, and the claims that there was a real ‘labor shortage’ began to become more ridiculous.

Tying this back in to liberals horrified by the implementation of coed in practice while extolling it as necessary in theory, liberals often make persuasive arguments for a new policy on a theoretical, debating-hall basis based on a set of shared assumptions about philosophy. These arguments eventually become institutionalized. When the institutions fail to fulfill the promise set out by the dialectic which spawned them, it doesn’t really matter, because the intellectuals who keep the whole tower of words buzzing care more about keeping the dialectic going than actually checking whether or not their premises were correct and if their predictions about their policies have been accurate.